#meta: production

[addictedtostorytelling]

team graveyard gsr reveal reactions: preface

@camilaar85 asked what exactly might go through the minds of grissom and sara's teammates—including not just the other csis but hodges, wendy, doc robbins, super dave, brass, sofia, and ecklie, too—when they learn the truth of grissom and sara's relationship during the events of episodes 07x24 "living doll" and 08x01 "dead doll."

since tumblr now has this shitty 4096-character limit per post, i've had to break up my response into several parts, which you will be able to find here, once they're all posted.

so i've talked about this issue at more length here, but the way the show treats the team’s reaction to grissom and sara’s “coming out” is, frankly, weird.

for a full season, the writers have their fun playing narrative games involving grissom and sara’s secret relationship—letting the fans in on what’s happening in episode 06x24 “way to go,” long before anyone on team graveyard also learns the truth, and then proceeding to tease the issue for the duration of s7.

from the season premiere on, they repeatedly float the possibility someone at the lab could find out grissom and sara are together, sometimes to comedic effect (such as when ecklie scares grissom and sara half to death with his “too close to home” insinuations in episode 07x01 “built to kill” pt. i) and other times much more dramatically (such as when the events of episode 07x13 “redrum” put sara on edge about how her teammates might react once they eventually learn of her and grissom’s grand deception).

here and there, they pepper in clues as to how various members on team graveyard might potentially respond when finally everything comes to light, hinting not everyone will likely be accepting either of the relationship itself OR of how grissom and sara have chosen to go about conducting it—having, for example, warrick ominously warn sara he hates being lied to (see episode 07x13 “redrum”) and nick express incredulity relationships between coworkers can ever thrive (see episode 07x22 “leapin’ lizards”).

this protracted writerly game of “will or won’t the other characters figure out the gsr secret?” finally comes to a head in episode 07x24 “living doll,” when after sara is abducted by the miniature killer, grissom blurts out to the team she is the “only person [he] ever loved,” at long last opening the door for them to have the same information the audience has already known about for the last twenty-four episodes.

but for all of the narrative build-up to this occasion, the strange thing is how much of a non-occasion it ultimately turns out to be.

after twenty-four episodes of teasing, with countless close calls and run-ins, heaps of foregrounding, and heaps more of innuendo, we are treated to a grand total of nine seconds’ worth of wordless immediate reaction from the team to grissom’s revelation in episode 07x24 “living doll,” then a single benign “what did you know about them?” conversation between nick and greg and some administrative probing from ecklie in episode 08x02 “a la cart,” and, thereafter, the issue of grissom and sara having kept their relationship a secret from their friends is never spoken of in-universe again.

while of course it is reasonable team graveyard wouldn’t put a pause on their investigative efforts to find sara during the events of episode 07x24 “living doll” in order to have some kind of formal conversation regarding the news of grissom and sara’s relationship the moment grissom makes his declaration, the notion they never seem to have any kind of conversation—either formal or otherwise—about the news subsequently, even after sara is safe and sound, is, honestly, a bit unbelievable.

are we really to understand all the more discussion which ever takes place surrounding this issue is just some lighthearted “hey, did you have any idea this relationship was going on before grissom told everyone about it? no? well, shucks! me, neither” breeze-shooting between nick and greg (and four and a half months after the fact, to boot)? shouldn’t gossip of this magnitude be more of a talking point around the lab? and shouldn’t we get to see more of that talking happen on-screen, for all it was foregrounded throughout s7?

that we never get to see/hear the team really respond to the relationship or the deception either amongst themselves or to grissom and/or sara after the big reveal is weird, and what’s weirder still is no one on the team is shown to have any kind of personal reaction to learning about either thing.

no one’s relationship with grissom and/or sara seems to change at all after they “come out.”

emphasis on at all.

for all of the show’s previous hinting various team members might have complicated feelings about being lied to or even just having two coworkers dating each other contrary to departmental policy, none of that foregrounding amounts to anything, as no one on the team has any measurable reaction to the news of grissom and sara’s relationship whatsoever.

no one really seems all that happy for them.

no one really seems all that put off by them.

they’re all just completely neutral.

i mean, they barely even acknowledge what by all accounts should be a truly massive revelation to them.

of course, some of this weird nonreaction on the part of the team could in theory be attributable to the four and a half-month in-universe time jump between the events of episodes 08x01 “dead doll” and 08x02 “a la cart.”

like.

maybe we could chalk up everyone’s nonchalance to the passage of time within the universe of the show—assuming people do have their reactions, only we just don’t get to see them happen on-screen, because presumably they take place during the off-screen interval between sara’s rescue and her return to work.

but the thing is, if such reactions do happen off-screen, then there is absolutely no fucking trace of them ever having happened once the events of episode 08x02 “a la cart” transpire, to the point where, functionally, they may as well never have taken place at all, insofar as we as the audience are concerned.

for all intents and purposes, there is no “new normal.”

the boys have not developed a habit of teasing sara about being in a relationship with the bug man. hodges isn’t constantly trying to pry into grissom’s love life. brass never rolls his eyes after catching grissom and sara giving moony looks to each other in the hall. even when the issue of graveyard shift being shorthanded without sara comes up, catherine never once says anything, either smug or conciliatory, about the consequences of “fishing off the company pier.”

the show outright refuses to acknowledge anyone’s feelings about grissom and sara might have changed, either for better or for worse, in the wake of them “coming out” and starting to live openly as a couple. there is just a total dearth of in-text response to this sea change.

—all of which is to say:

in attempting to answer your question, i have to operate in a strange space between what we actually see in canon—which is across the board neutral acceptance—vs. what i think we should have seen in canon, given the characters’ internal values, relationships with grissom and sara (both individually and as a couple), feelings regarding deception, relative faithfulness or unfaithfulness to departmental rules, etc.

next up, some actual analysis in part i.

[endomentendo]

IT IS A SPOOKY MONTH!

[lazylittledragon]

just realised i never posted any of the stuff i did for the alternative steddie dads au

[empty-movement]

JadeSabre nabbed this incredible piece of production material, the key cel douga and accompanying individual frames of Anthy's eyes as she stabs Utena in episode 38. They're in beautiful condition and Jade was kind enough to get them scanned. I made this GIF to show them off, and you can check out the gorgeous originals below! Thanks so much @jadedofmara!

[goldkirk]

I get that everyone wants TikTok back but do we understand how bad it is that it’s happening the way it’s happening. Like we do understand how much of a horrifically choreographed process this is to boost and benefit Trump right. Can we all take a second to pause and go “hey wow something’s been getting fucked up and fishy for days now with Trump being turned into the hero about this even by the TikTok company themselves all of a sudden”?? (more chatter in the tags re tech companies and authoritarian autocrats)

[irregulord]

✨️ Happy Halloween 2024! ✨️

My entry for the Glitch inn discord halloween banner contest that got me an honorable mention. It took me almost 19 hours and it was super fun! 🖤

[galedekarios]

so. tara was supposed to be at camp at one point and have idle banter with gale:

edited to clarify: this appears to be cut content

[hellotailor]

"This apartment initially suggests a familiar brand of modern wealth, echoing the ominous minimalism of American Psycho or Leigh Whannell’s Invisible Man. As an avowed capitalist, the 145-year-old former pimp Louis has reshaped himself into a 21st century business tycoon. With its boxy black couches and acreage of smooth, empty floors, his living room has all the warmth of an aircraft hangar.

Yet the more time we spend here, the more juicy details we begin to notice. Production designer Mara LePere-Schloop has spoken about her desire to disrupt the “generic” minimalism of the super-rich, creating a home that speaks to different facets of Louis and Armand’s shared life.

Certain rooms are windowless and tomb-like, reflecting the couple’s undead nature and sensitivity to sunlight. Meanwhile the airy corridors and layered archways combine the architecture of ancient Dubai with the confusion of an Escher drawing."

I published an analysis of IWTV's Dubai penthouse, exploring what its architecture and furnishings say about Louis and Armand's relationship. Some of this material is probably familiar to fans who have spent a lot of discussing the show's production design (or have read some of my previous design posts), but I figured I should share this here anyway!

[ddwhaleshark]

now that the contest has ended i wanted to show yall my entry !

I'm glad to have made it to honorable mention! :D and ga dam there were some amazing pieces of art !!!

also rhis is what they said about it and im aaaaaaaa so happ

[aquaproductions]

SMG4 Characters Part 1~

[trapsanchez1]

All of the Glitch Protagonists in Chronological order! (II being taller than Meggy was my mistake)

[addictedtostorytelling]

Hi! I love your meta and how beautifully you write about GSR, I would like to know what you think about this, do you think Grissom and Sara would have been good parents? Why do you think the show didn’t allowed them to have a geek baby?

hi, anon!

thank you for your kind words!

i have got a big, ol' meta that covers my thoughts on potential gsr parenthood here, if you're interested.

i also have another big, ol' meta that specifically covers my thoughts on how they would have reacted to experiencing an unplanned pregnancy during their "secret dating" phase in s5-s6 here, if you're interested in that one, as well.

the tl;dr version is that while i think grissom and sara would be kickass parents were that particular life choice one they ever decided to make together, i also don't think they would necessarily ever be likely to make that particular life choice together, just given their respective characters and backgrounds.

grissom is—prior to his retirement—highly career-driven, meaning he might not want to put his focus on parenthood rather than work. he likewise has some pretty sizeable hang-ups regarding his own capacity to nurture and be unselfish, his age, his social deficits, etc., all of which might cause him to question his potential fitness as a father.

there's a line from another show i love from a character facing down the prospect of first-time fatherhood that i can absolutely see grissom saying (in so many words): "if, for nine months, you're hearing how this is gonna change your life, and ‘you've never loved anything like this’ and ‘my god, the love!’ and ‘nothing is gonna be important anymore’—it just never felt to me like i was someone who had the capacity for those feelings. plus, you know, i-i like what's important to me. i want it to stay important. i wanna be able to do it well."

meanwhile, sara has her own considerable hang-ups regarding how she was raised, her family and personal history of mental illness, her social deficits, etc. that might cause her to feel similarly unequipped for motherhood. she is also in her twenties and thirties—i.e., prime childbearing years—very career-minded, like grissom, so she might not be inclined to step away (even temporarily) to have a kid.

maybe if grissom and sara were to experience an unplanned pregnancy at some point, they would (under very specific circumstances) consider the possibility of having a child. ditto for maybe a one-in-a-million type scenario where they encountered a kid in the system who needed fostering or adopting.

however, i think nine times out of ten, they'd opt not to have a kid—and especially not if "nature never came to bear" or if one was never put directly into their paths.

that said, since i personally find the idea of them as parents very intriguing—the issue is one that pushes a lot of fun character buttons for both of them, butting up against their hopes and fears and senses of self in some very complicated and interesting ways—i have written a big, ol' geek!baby fic, where they find themselves dealing with an unplanned pregnancy in an au version of s8.

i call it the happy accidentsverse, and if you're interested, you can read that fic series here.

as for the issue of why the show never pursued a "grissom and sara have a kid" storyline in canon, i think there are probably multiple reasons why they didn't.

more discussion after the "keep reading," if you're interested.

__

to my mind, probably the biggest reason why we never saw a "grissom and sara have a kid" storyline in canon is that, particularly in the earlier seasons of the show, the showrunners tried not to focus too much on the characters' home lives.

though they would show the occasional "off the clock" scene here or there or every once in a while toss in some kind of love interest- or family-centric story beat, anthony zuiker and co. wanted the majority of the show's focus to be on the job—on the cases the csis investigated, the goings-on at the lab and in the field, the team's interactions with each other as colleagues, the team's interactions with other law enforcement professionals and people they met in connection to their cases, in the politics of the department, etc.

they were much stricter about this policy even than other procedurals of the time.

that's why we saw so little of grissom and sara's romantic relationship actually play out on screen—because tptb never intended to offer us anything more than just a small window into their personal lives outside of their careers.

and while of course grissom and sara having a kid (whether through sara getting pregnant or them deciding to foster and/or adopt) would definitely affect their working lives and could allow for some interesting storylines centered around the lab and in the field—for example, how might sara deal with the physical and emotional requirements of her incredibly demanding job while pregnant?, how might grissom and sara have to change their workaholic habits if they were to try to become foster or adoptive parents?, how might having a kid in the mix affect both grissom and sara's willingness to face the dangers inherent in their profession?, would becoming parents change the way they responded to certain cases?, etc.—that kind of storyline, just by its nature, would also probably require the show to spend more time at home with grissom and sara than the showrunners and writers ever really intended to.

narratively speaking, catherine having a school-aged kid to start out the show is one thing, while grissom and sara having a newborn or a brand new foster kid and becoming first-time parents would be something else entirely.

in catherine's case, her being a mom to an older kid from the get-go is a much more lowkey deal, not only because a kid at that age can mostly exist in an off-screen capacity except for in episodes where her presence is plot-relevant but also because it's an already-established fact.

catherine is a mother—and an experienced mother, at that—from the very first time we meet her; it's part of both her personal and professional identities from day #1. the baseline is there. there are no questions about it. no big blanks to fill in. she's already made the life-changing decisions. she's already entrenched in that role.

the same would not be true if grissom and sara were to have a kid.

because they were "first timers" (and especially because they had seemingly never aspired to parenthood previously), the show would have to answer questions with them—depict grissom and sara making the huge, life-altering decisions; reckoning with big emotions; figuring stuff out; working through their fears and hang-ups; adjusting to a monumental change in their lives; drawing together in new ways; changing and developing as characters and as a couple; establishing new patterns; etc.

the groundwork would need to be laid where the audience could see it being laid in real time, you know?

and laying that groundwork would require showing lots of private conversations between grissom and sara, trips to the ob's office or talks with the social worker, painting the nursery or putting up a swing set, making childcare arrangements, changing their lifestyle, etc.

my sense is that tptb never really wanted to go there.

that much focus on grissom and sara's home life would have been too distracting—too much of a serialized personal storyline that required attention in every episode, regardless of the "case of the day"—for their tastes.

now.

in theory, the "keep the focus on the job, not the home" rule is one tptb could have considered breaking, had they really wanted to.

after all, it was just a production choice, not actually any kind of hard and fast rule, so if they'd decided they wanted to go the "grissom and sara have a kid" route, they could have done so.

there's always the old flannery o'connor maxim: "it's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. you can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much."

however, another reason why i think they never chose to go the geek!baby route, beyond the "it goes against our sense of what our show is actually about" thing, is that, frankly, within the universe of the show itself, the timing for grissom and sara was never right.

grissom and sara don't even get together as a committed couple until s5/s6, so, barring a major deviation from what is now canon, they likely could not have had a child at any point prior to 2005/2006, just to start out with.

then their relationship remains a secret until the end of s7/beginning of s8, meaning that between 2006-2007, they're definitely not looking to have a kid and probably would be pretty averse to having one even were they to experience an unplanned pregnancy, just given the potential fallout where their jobs are concerned.

they would have to "come out" as a couple, and one or both of them might end up getting fired over it.

fast forward, and between s8 and s9, sara experiences a mental health crisis that eventually culminates with her moving away from vegas for the better part of two years from 2008 to 2009 while grissom remains behind—and by the time she's stable and moves back to vegas circa 2009/2010, grissom is then living abroad, and they're only seeing each other once a month via transatlantic commute.

back in the day, when sara first turned up in s10, i know there was some internet scuttlebutt that maybe at some point it would be revealed that in-between the events of episode 09x10 "one to go" (when last we'd seen them) and episode 10x01 "family affair" (when sara returns to vegas to "temp"), grissom and sara had had a "secret honeymoon baby."

however, such a revelation was never made—timeline-wise, it would have been a tight fit anyhow, as, within the universe of the show, episode 09x10 "one to go" takes place in january '09 and episode 10x01 "family affair" takes place in september '09—and neither did grissom and sara ever have a kid at any subsequent point.

with sara living in the states and grissom not, the likelihood that they would ever decide to expand their family steadily diminished as s10, s11, and s12 rolled on, both because they were getting older and because their marriage eventually ended up on the rocks.

cue the whole divorce debacle of s13, a few solid years of misery and loneliness in the interim, and by the time grissom and sara get back together/remarried in 2015, sara is forty-four years old and probably peri- or even full-on menopausal, and she and grissom are living a nomadic seafaring lifestyle, so the likelihood of them either having a biological child or fostering/adopting is incredibly low.

again, there was some speculation among fans—based on previous comments from showrunner anthony zuiker regarding his ideas for grissom and sara's post-"immortality" life at sea—that when the reboot rolled around, we would eventually get a "in the six years since we last saw them, grissom and sara have had a kid" reveal.

no dice, though.

s1 of csi: vegas ran its course with no secret boat babies anywhere.

all of the above being the case, there just weren't even that many points during the show's run when it would have made logistical sense for grissom and sara to have children together.

they were always either in a state of having to keep their relationship a secret for the sake of their careers or else of living apart from each other, and by the time they finally got all their shit together and were living in the same place on a full-time basis, sara was nearing the end of her prime childbearing years and they were living the kind of lifestyle where fostering/adoption would be next to impossible.

narratively-speaking, parenthood just was never in the cards for them.

of course, it's worth stating, the writers could have maybe swung a geek!baby storyline in the later seasons had they wanted to if they had just made the choice to move grissom back to vegas along with sara between s10 and s15. he wouldn't even have had to appear on-screen. sara would have just needed to reference him occasionally in dialogue and be shown to take phone calls from him at times, a "i'm meeting grissom for our first ultrasound appointment" here, a "he's been at home painting the nursery all morning. he put little ladybugs up the walls" there. they could have done a whole pregnancy storyline that way, and it would have given sara something to do during seasons when she is otherwise criminally underutilized. then maybe if they were lucky, they could have gotten billy to come back for a guest spot when it came time for the baby to be born. but, alas, such a storyline would have required them to imply depth, which is something they had no idea how to do.

—which brings us to the last big reason why i think the showrunners never had grissom and sara have children:

because, ultimately, they just never felt it was right for the characters.

as stated above, both grissom and sara have plenty of reasons, both individually and as a couple, based on their backgrounds and predilections and development, why they might never choose to pursue parenthood.

while there are certain very particular scenarios were i can imagine they might set those reasons aside, overcome their hang-ups and fears, and decide to "go for it" re: having kids, i also think it would take a lot of narrative work to get them there—that thread would be something the writers would have had to really develop, requiring more than a few "acts of god" and major plot interventions to make the idea seem feasible.

they could have done it if they really wanted to.

but in the end, i think they didn't feel any compelling need.

grissom and sara have been an unconventional couple from the get-go, and their development has been circuitous and unstraightforward. there have been many setbacks for them along the way and strange turns. they've definitely not done everything "by the book."

for them to have a somewhat "untraditional" happy ending—at least by primetime, network early 00s flagship couple tv standards—makes a good amount of sense.

they're not the "white picket fence, 2.5 kids, and a dog" norman rockwell family, and i think tptb are very okay with that outcome.

they like the image of this middle-aged couple that found immense fulfillment in each other and in their shared work (whether as csis or conservationists) and never felt the need to look outside of those things in order to be happy.

that's not to say they might not have written things differently had some of the production realities of the show been different along the way—like, say jorja fox had never left the show during s8 and grissom and sara had been able to get married in vegas as planned while both still working at the lab or that billy had come back to the show with jorja between s10 and s15; maybe in those cases, they might have eventually decided to go for the geek!baby storyline after all—however, all things as they were, i think they were generally pretty comfortable with how things ended up in regards to grissom and sara remaining childless.

they had explored the notion of "csis as parents" as much as they cared to with catherine, warrick, and russell.

they didn't want to go there with grissom and sara.

and who knows? maybe there were other outside factors that influenced their decision to that end, like actor preferences or the difficulty of including infant actors in a complicated production such as theirs, etc.

suffice it to say, i think the showrunners' decision to keep grissom and sara childless was probably a multifaceted one.

the good news is, regardless of how things turned out in canon, we as fans can always play around with the geek!baby concept as much as we want to and in as many different permutations as we like.

i certainly have a lot of fun in my accidentsverse, imagining grissom and sara facing both the challenges and rewards of parenthood, and i know a lot of other fan authors who have their own takes on that idea, as well.

anyway.

rambling now.

thanks for the question! please feel welcome to send another any time.

[endomentendo]

Could we get a speedpaint of one of your drawings? :D

!¡SPEED PAINT TIME YIPPEE¡!

[vaguely-concerned]

do you ever think about how, when we get lucanis' ossuary mind note on what he was thinking during the fireplace scene at the end of his recruitment mission... what's implied to be his instinctive internal reaction as he's saying "you'd have to kill me" out loud sure isn't 'and I don't want to die'. it's '(and spite would die)'. do you think spite's gremlin-y candle-hungering give-me-FIRE! >:D presence has maybe saved that guy's life even more times and in more ways than are immediately obvious at a glance. do you ever. cry.

it's also very. him that the thing that would stay his hand on killing himself partially might be that he just isn't willing to visit the same cruelty or harm on spite as zara, even when accepting his passenger spirit as collateral damage would at least offer a chance to put an end to his own pain, which at that point he seems unable to see any other way of truly escaping or find real relief from than to die. there's so much resentment and fear and other understandable fraught emotions in spite and lucanis' relationship early on, but it's just as clear that deep down lucanis conceptualizes spite as fundamentally innocent in what's happened here -- perhaps, indeed, more innocent than he manages to conceptualize himself until someone else can help him get in there and start to untangle it with him. he's protective of spite in some subtle ways right from the start, taking pains to point out several times on the jog through the ossuary that the spirits here were just as much victims in what was done to them as anyone else. when spite acts out during the fireplace scene... how much of lucanis brushing it off the way he does is about the '*actively bleeding from the eyes* don't worry about me' avoidant side of it all, and how much is him trying to shelter spite from the eyes of people he does not know well enough yet to predict how they’ll react in response — towards himself or spite. (additional idea to really bring on the heartache: do you think he has maybe intervened in pretty much the same way between illario and caterina over the years and that’s how he does it so smoothly and automatically; it’s basically psychological muscle memory. Haha. ow.) 

Between that and the pretty consistent language he uses that frames spite as child-like, even when he means that in frustration/enfant terrible flavoured terms lol, you get the sense that regardless of how much Lucanis is aware of this on the surface, there is a deep instinctive protectiveness in him for spite. I think that even comes across in the scene where lucanis tells you he’ll continue to pursue a way to separate him and spite on the minrathous route. So I was kind of picking up on/working with that already subconsciously, but when I found that note it hit me like a sledgehammer that clearly in some part at least, the reason lucanis is still here is that he knows now that spite would die with him and doesn’t find that price acceptable. Spite thinks that lucanis mentally locking himself in his (torture :() room and refusing to speak to him is an act of rejection or trickery, but to my eyes taken with everything else we know about how lucanis’ brain tends to work… as much as it’s an expression of avoidance and fear and overwhelm and trying to get away from the voice pushing him towards action when the mere prospect of action fills you with despair to even contemplate (“There’s nowhere to go”), I think it’s also a mark of lucanis’ affection and protectiveness of spite. The guards along the way make it very clear that more so than to keep the outside world from coming in, this place is for protecting people from what might break out. 

And that’s why I think this is also such a good case study to look at lucanis' internal freeze logic and why it has been so adaptive for him up until now when faced with completely impossible emotional situations to which there are no good answers or causes of actions available, even though it's inherently and unavoidably one of those 'what's worse, the medicine or the disease' solutions a brain cooks up. lucanis by the point of inner demons is facing this conundrum: 1) I can't live like this, it hurts too much. I've been in pain so long I’ve got screams where my blood should be and it just keeps getting louder, and nothing really touches or helps that. 2) I can't die to escape this, because that would also kill spite (and also I've got a job to do I guess *working 9-5 slowed with reverb and with underwater sound distortion effects is playing in the background*). those are of course not actually his only options, but in the state he's in they are the only options he can conceive of. (that's not infrequently how it works, when the suffering is that intense and unrelenting. Nothing gives you tunnel sight quite like ‘I just need this to stop’ agony that has gone on long enough to add sheer soul exhaustion to the mix)

so what happens in the end? his freeze brain -- honed, I'm sure, through many long years of attachment trauma and abuse and loss for exactly this kind of 'uh-oh. Incoming FUBAR situation alert let’s go' -- kicks into action and makes him do nothing except what's externally required of him, so he can stay just functional and momentarily distracted by a plethora of avoidance behaviours enough to get through his daily life, if like not particularly happily so... and otherwise, as it were, locking himself in his room deep inside where nothing can touch him, where nothing gets in and nothing gets out, no harm allowed to either escape from within nor allowed to pierce through and get inside. numbness isn't actually a cure for that kind of suffering, but it's the closest thing you're likely to get with any immediacy and if you’re desperate enough by god you take those. It’s how he survived his upbringing, and it’s how he survived the ossuary — as he tells Davrin straight out, the trick to just shut down every part of his soul he can to get through intolerable pain, loss or helplessness. I don’t think that mechanism came to him in the ossuary the first time, I think that blueprint was deeply embedded in his neurons and went ‘ah. My time again. Not to worry I’m a bit of an expert at this I’ll get us through this yet (though you may not thank me for it by the end of it all)’. 

In that state he's unable to himself reach out and meaningfully ask for help (and also like... why would his inner world have any framework for that as even being on the table? this has never been an option before in his life, not in any safe or consistent way; he's fucked up the way he is because the same things/people that should have been and partially, comparatively, were the sources of help and relief and safety growing up are also the sources of pain and abuse, that eternal irreconcilable ambivalence, the double edged sword of unpredictable insecure attachment), but it also keeps him from doing anything uh drastic the other way too, on acting impulsively in ways that can’t be taken back. (that seems to be more illario’s role/dubious privilege in the family lol.) at many points in his life and especially growing up, freezing and going numb around the pain is as close to having control of anything as there was any hope of. 'harm will be inflicted on me unpredictably, but fuck you I don't have to truly feel it as long as I shut all this other stuff down as well, that's what I can control' nervous system logic. (it'll get you every time.) for what it’s worth I’m not so sure his nervous system judged that one incorrectly, I think that is the kind of rebellion you would have to cling to while being raised by someone like caterina, because look at illario if you want to know how much she respects and rewards anything more overt or active. (I mean, if you don’t succeed, at least. swing at Grandma Dellamorte you’d better not miss or you’ll meet that cane swinging at you the other way and she will not miss)

I say all this because I think it's as easy to demonize the freeze response as it is to demonize anger, to conceptualize it only as an obstructive force that, as bellara puts it, is one of the purest forms of a heart not seeming to want to let you be happy, or a mindless byproduct of trauma. But in my experience, the brain doesn’t generally come up with ‘stupid’ defense mechanisms. Even in the most maladaptive of coping mechanisms, there is at the core of it some part of you that once meant to save your life, no matter what trouble it is wreaking for you today. when you look at the setup of Lucanis’ soul, as it were, you can see the dual and in some ways genuinely noble and even tender qualities this response has in him, however misguided: it does imprison, but it also protects, and it means to protect; for all the pain along the way it has sheltered all the parts of his soul that are most precious and breakable, the most vulnerable parts that want to live and so so importantly love completely and freely. Lucanis thinks he’s protecting not even primarily himself but everyone he loves by staying where he is. (“It would be better for me to stay here than to risk losing you”) A child’s logic, to be sure, but logic of a kind and clearly one that caterina has encouraged in him because that’s a conception of love it’s been very useful for her for him to have. Freeze looks like utter hopelessness on the surface, but in some ways I think it’s the utmost triumph of hope — a spare and unrelenting winter that exists because it thinks one day spring might still come, and the things too precious and fragile to thrive in your life as it is now might bloom then. 

He is an adult now, and Caterina no longer controls his entire world, physically and emotionally. There’s finally room for other things, other people, himself, in his life, without everything having to defer to the gravitational force of what Caterina wants from him at the end of the day. And while I think her jumpscaring him with the First Talon position is partly her attempt to wrangle him back into the status quo of control she once had, I’m not sure it’s going to work quite the way she might hope — at least in the Treviso saved route, there are just too many fresh spring shoots in his life at that point that could grow into something new, it’s too late to trample all the saplings growing up through the cracks in time (and indeed some of them might also fight back). (The outlook on the Minrathous saved route is um. Perhaps less convincingly immediately hopeful to me and the prospect of actually getting around to healing further down the road, but I refuse to give up on him that’s my little guy and he’s above all incredibly smart and stubborn and not a quitter and all the rest of this still remains true beneath it all, just like. Give him a moment here.) His hopes and dreams have diversified while she had her back turned lmao he suddenly keeps them with so many more people than just her and Iillario now. She doesn’t hold the monopoly of meaning and connection in his life the way she used to. And whether out of love (you know. Hope is every man’s prerogative I suppose) at seeing him really happy for perhaps the first time or sheer pragmatism, I think she’s going to have to accept that and adapt her ways of doing things with him accordingly, or else have him drift even further away from her.

Spite is the urgent impatient voice that starts to break through to go ‘that moment is now it HAS to be now. We need to shake off the shackles and illusions and face what’s actually here so we can learn to properly live now, or this winter will starve us to death as surely as anything Zara could do to us’. And he is right! As crucial as this soul-starvation landscape has been in survival, it has clearly reached the end of its sustainability, you can’t survive permanently on frost alone. I just also want to recognize the credit Lucanis (and his fucked up but valiant nervous system <3 pour one out for a real one) also deserves for stubbornly holding on in any way he had to until Spite’s true escape project is even an option for either of them. Especially since Lucanis seems to harbour a lot of self-loathing and frustration over his own propensity for freeze — “You know him. You can open the door, but he won’t walk through it”  (still one of the saddest most painful things I’ve ever heard. In case you were wondering. He knows. He knows what he’s like, and he despairs of it, he thinks it means it’s his own fault he still feels like this. Augh.) The real point at the end of the day is not that spite saved lucanis or vice versa, but that as traumatic as it was to get there and against all cultural expectations, it is ultimately their enmeshed condition, their togetherness, that saved them both. (which, again, when you consider the cultural narrative of possession and spirits most andrastian nations are working with…what a radical conclusion to come away with haha. Not unprecedented at all, if you look at Wynne and her spirit, but on a deeper and more psychological plane than ever and even more impactful for it, to me.)

[empty-movement]

OLD SCHOOL ANIMATION NERDS, I SUMMON THEE TO ASSIST

Hey! Vanna here! So I recently, in a rage at the loss of the end-of-series lot of production materials, bought a cheaper lot I had been curious about, and I kinda struck animation history gold with it! Try as I might to pull the whole context together, I need y'alls help accurately naming and identifying what I have!!! There are MANY MORE of these, all from the same episode, an Utena one, a LOT of Nanami, and a group shot even, all following this similar formula. But let's be honest, Vanna and Yasha wanted that sweet Touga smugness. Analysis and questions below the cut! These aren't ALL the sheets, there are ones for the face shape and sleeve also but to demonstrate. Also, fucking amazingly, I also have the storyboards for this episode, so I can even tell you the shot number is 287 ISNT THAT COOL

So Utena fans. You may or may not know, but episodes 6 and 8 had very chaotic productions, and did end up getting swapped in the end. Per Ikuhara's directory commentary in the Nozomi Blu-ray:

He makes explicit reference here to Akemi Hayashi, credited as the animation director for the episode. I can't recall where I saw it now, but I know the difficulty of drawing Touga on model is mentioned somewhere in all the production stuff I have.

Now. Here's the problem. I DON'T FUCKING KNOW WHAT THEISIWEUGWEYGF what do I callll these. My understanding is the the douga is the final line art, transferred onto the cel, and that is the only thing that you call a douga. A douga is the 1:1 match to its cels in a sequence. With an anime like Utena, it's pretty often going to be included with the cel, if you obtain one. These are douga, the final line art that creates the animation, scans donated by JadeSabre and edited into sequence. The frames are numbered in the top right, and there are no notes or anything drawn on the sheets.

Now. That is NOT what I have above. So none of these materials are douga, they are...genga? Help? (This will get wild with Nanami, where I even have a green sketch that is clearly like, VERY FIRST draft of the shot...)

What I have are the key frames, to my understanding. Meaning these represent a point much earlier in the production process. On first glance, the white sheets are significantly cleaner, but they are also so far off model they're flying along with the Voyager probes in interstellar space. They're very capably drawn, don't get me wrong, but they're clearly done by someone who is not on the Dorito face bandwagon. This is apparently pretty common? You get your initial key frame sketches (genga??) made, and then the animation direction (Hayashi??) grades your work by making messier, but more on model versions of the shots. These are the yellow 'correction' genga?

The douga of this shot are likely with the cels. There are 11 distinct cels of Touga's face (others for the sleeve), guided by the 4 key frame sketches I have here. Looked at individually, I can even see where the filled in frames struggle a bit more to be on model than the key ones, even in the final product.

So clearly, what I have are some pretty early process materials where there was a bit of a back and forth about how to draw the characters. The others I have are similar corrections, but this is the absolute most drastic one. It's like they said 'just do it like kinda shoujo and we'll iron it out later.'

The question I have is...can I safely assume these yellow correction sheets are actually Akemi Hayashi originals? Or would there have been another person in this process doing this correction work instead? Would there be a way to know who drew the original ?genga? That may not be possible to ascertain, but it would be really cool to try, since this episode was a Chaos Production, since I have the actual storyboard for it, since I now have a neat piece of context about what the Chaos might have meant. This shot always stuck out to me in the first arc, because it's true that for a lot of the first arc, Touga and Saionji look....far more like the first drafts here. The strict adherence to the Hasegawa style gets enforced later in the series, but this is an example of the exchange that needed to occur to get folks on board with what was a pretty unique art style.

PS. This is torture, the shape of these means I actually need to make two scans of each one and stitch them together, which is nervewracking when you want them to overlap properly and also you don't want to wreck your toilet paper ass production materials pressing them into the scanner bed. Also several are fucking taped together and lemme tell you, 25 year old 'clear tape' don't stay clear and don't stay sticky.

Basically, any context or knowledge anyone can impart I would appreciate a lot! I know I've got something really cool here, but I am struggling to get much clear information about it, because Google is broken.

[kara-akaane]

You know sometimes I think too long about where the fuck the Kaminoians got millions of clone uniforms and armor sets and I start having some real question about how the hell the clones were a complete secret for over a decade