#my picture roll is so full of just screenshots of characters i think look cool | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

loopy777 · 4 years ago

Note

RE: WIPs game: do I even want to know what Dicebenders is is it another scam how many times are the Gaang gonna get arrested for scamming

No, this time it's me scamming people. XD The dice in question are the RPG Dungeons & Dragons kind.

For a while I was doing a screencap webcomic in the style of "DM of the Rings" and "Darths & Droids" with another creative fan named Captain Boomerang. I was the scriptwriter and selected the screenshots for each panel, and Capt-BA would assemble the comics and improve my scripts (a process that did frustrate me a little, as I felt locked out of the revision process, but I did like the results. I just felt like I wasn't holding up my end of the partnership a bit). I wrote a story bible explaining the characters and storytelling rules, planned out the adaptation of the entire AtLA premiere, and had less detailed plans for the rest of the series, but we only got 6 comics in before Capt-BA went on a trip and never returned to the internet. I did manage to re-establish contact with her long enough to get permission to continue the comic, but the problem is that I have no image-editing skills whatsoever.

If I could find comic-making software that I know would do what I want and be easy to use, I wouldn't mind dropping some money on it, but everything I've looked at is trying to do lots of things I don't need. I only want a way to import existing pictures into comic grids, and then easily add dialogue bubbles. That's it. But the stuff I've found is more about image-editing than comic assembly, and it takes me an hour to put together a dialogue bubble that looks good. So I have 3 scripts that were never produced, which along with the planning docs are what's in that WIP folder, and I don't ever see myself going beyond that.

Besides, someone else already managed to complete something like this, and while I'm not a fan, I don't need to be. At this point, Dicebenders is dead. I'm glad I tried it, and it's a shame it didn't work out, but I'm happy with the other projects I've done instead.

I am squatting on an empty Tumblr for it, though.

Anyway, to share something new, here's the first section of the Story Bible I wrote to make sure Capt-BA and I were on the same page in terms of characterization. The rest of the bible details the plotlines for full series.

AVATAR: THE LAST DICEBENDER

BIBLE

Premise- A small group of players attempt to run a fantasy martial arts RPG that winds up essentially becoming the Avatar saga, or something very close. The main point of the series is comedy, based mostly on ridiculous links between Avatar and RPG's. Sometimes the humor will be in the vast difference between what happens in the comic, and what happens in the cartoon with the same screenshots. Other times, the funny will come from the unexpected ways they converge.

SPIRITUAL PREDECESSORS

DM of the Rings- The original, and my personal favorite. It's a good showcase of how to run a single quest together, while using narrative jumps to skip to the good bits.

Darths & Droids- A similar project, this stands out from its predecessor in two main ways. The players and GM are more friendly with each other, and are more or less having fun with each other. There is also a running, coherent storyline in both the game and in the lives of the players.

Benders & Brawlers- This is actually an existing attempt to do Darths & Droids with Avatar. This is helpful as an example of what we DON'T want to do, retell the Avatar story in a completely straightforward manner, with RPG players behind the characters.

CHARACTERS

None of the characters will be given real names. The players shall always be referred to by their character names, although this can be done in a teasing, ironic manner. When the characters are speaking, their dialogue bubble must always be attached to an image of the character.

The Gamemaster- The GM is a female in her early teens. She is a geek, and a bit of a social outcast for it. Nevertheless, she's trying to make that work for her, although she's not quite mature enough to make it happen yet. She has just discovered RPG's, and in her enthusiasm has gone all out in starting her own campaign. The only problem is that she doesn't know how to recruit players, so she ropes her best friend and little brother into playing with her. This is the GM's first campaign, so she'll a little in over her head. She knows the mechanics of play, and what she's supposed to be doing as GM, but doesn't have the fine skill in crafting an engaging RPG experience. Still, she wants to do her best, is willing to learn, and has a positive attitude about the whole thing. The GM has a strong crush on the Sokka player, but the only way she can express it is by having all the female NPC's flirt with the Sokka character.

Katara- Female in early teens, and the GM's best friend. Katara's player was friends with the GM from when they were both in grammar school, so while they have grown up into wildly different personality types, they are fully loyal to each other. Katara is popular, and outgoing, and doesn't care or know about geek stuff at all. She's only playing the game because the GM begged her to. At first, Katara is clueless about RPG's, and frequently questions or ridicules the mechanics of the game. She never quite gets into the idea of role-playing, but quickly takes to the idea of meta-gaming. She'll have her character act like a righteous do-gooder, because completing missions and fighting bad guys earns XP. She hoards items that will boost her stats. She'll advocate abandoning a mission/plot if it doesn't pay out enough rewards. Katara's player also can tend towards trying to Mary Sue her character, but this is inconsistent and usually shot down by everyone else.

Aang- Male in junior high, and the GM's little brother. He plays simply because his sister has cajoled him into it, and there are hints that he's getting some kind of reward or payment for it. He abuses his position by forcing the GM to give him what he wants in the game, even if it breaks the rules- access to the restricted Airbender class, the ability to bend all four elements, overloaded stats, an Avatar State that protects him from dying, a magic super flying cow ride, etc. However, it's important to note that Aang's player isn't a jerk. He's just immature, and like all kids, just always goes for what he wants via the easiest path, and doesn't realize that he may be causing trouble or hurting feelings. He's enthusiastic about trying out this RPG thing, but he has trouble coming up with any action beyond attacking or retreating. He's also hyper aware that the GM and Katara are girls. He is too old for cootie concerns, but thinks that girls are fundamentally different creatures with their own incomprehensible concerns. Having a big sister, he doesn't find this a big deal, just part of life. Aang's player is too young to be a geek. He likes cartoons and sports and fantasy and school-dramas. He also tends to follow whatever his sister likes.

Sokka- Male in late teens. This guy is your quintessential RPG player. He has is own top-quality dice, he's played campaigns and systems of all kinds, and knows the tropes of the hobby cold. He's a huge geek for all things geeky, but roleplay is easily his favorite. He's a social outcast, but he's made friends among his fellow geeks, and thinks life is just fine. Sokka's player joins when he meets the GM at the comic/games shop they both frequent. The GM was buying some sourcebooks and material to support the fantasy martial arts game she's running, and Sokka noticed, asked about it, liked what he heard, and got permission to join the game. What Sokka doesn't realize, because he is a geek and neither has experience with it or realizes it's even possible, is that the GM is sweet on him. This manifests in the character Sokka's canon luck with the ladies, only kicked up a notch. *Every single* female NPC flirts with him, whether it's appropriate or not. Sometimes player Sokka notices and tries to roleplay it, and sometimes he's just plain confused. Sokka has a few quirks. His best set of dice are his Lucky Red Dice, which always roll high when he needs it, but have been tested and proven to be fair dice. He also mandates that every character he plays use a boomerang; he was turned into a geek by the first video game he ever played, a Legend of Zelda title, and his favorite weapon from those games are the boomerang. Each of his characters has a unique, named boomerang.

Zuko- The GM's favorite NPC. She created him to be a compelling, dramatic character, with a complicated back story, moral struggles, badass loner personality, angst about his existence, a darkly noble quality, and a cool scar. The GM intended Katara to get to know Zuko, for her to try to woo him away from the side of evil, and perhaps to even have a romance with him. The PC's, however, couldn't care less about him. To them, he's just another mini-boss, and the fact that most of his character development is happening "off screen" means they don't realize that he's recruitable. A frequent gag is Zuko delivering a stirring monologue while no one pays attention.

Iroh- Background NPC. The GM tries to use him to give (ignored) hints to the players.

Toph- (tentative) A male munchkin gamer who picked a long list of weaknesses in order to get superbending. Toph's player is a friend of Sokka's player, brought in after an "incident" with his old group, and causes some initial resentment in the group when tries to show the n00bs how its done. Cowing Toph's player is a major victory for the GM.

Momo- NPC, but maybe make him a talking sidekick who gives the players hints when the GM is really exasperated?

Azula- the GM's best favorite villain. Azula is the GM unleashed, letting her take out frustrations on the players in both combat and harsh taunting. Eventually the GM comes to like the character so much, she retcons mental health issues into the character's backstory, and has her pet NPC, Zuko, spare her.

#dicbender #avatarpg

8 notes · View notes

culturechroniclesblog-blog · 5 years ago

Text

Neon Genesis Evangelion & Making Arthouse Work

There is a lot of arthouse media out there. Anime certainly has its fair share, and who hasn't watched a Lynch or Jodowrosky film solely to lord your cultural sophistication over your inferiors? Most of them share a common thread of being “art for art’s sake��: impressive on an aesthetic or thematic level while a little lacking in character and narrative, which leaves its wider appeal, ah, limited at best.

Neon Genesis Evangelion is a show that cannot escape its ending. The show’s final stretch is totalizing in the popular discourse - everyone knows it "goes off the rails" in its latter half. Evangelion becomes an arthouse show, throwing reality to the curb in exchange for an assault of abstract and introspective setpieces. At age fourteen when you inevitably first see it, your mind is blown by it all, which is fair if it’s your first taste of the genre. However, coming back to it over a decade later like I did, having seen way more avant-style media than is probably healthy, I expected to enjoy the show but also see it just-another-entry into the genre.

Instead it held up masterfully. Evangelion is replete with flaws if you look at its whole picture, but in the execution of its arthouse appeal I saw it soaring past its competition in so many ways. In hindsight it had to - why else would an entire generation of fans trumpet it as one of the most successful shows of all time despite all those rails it went off? Evangelion, through undoubtedly sheer luck and insanity, stumbled on a way to make arthouse work for audiences beyond its niche, and I think that is the key to what makes the show as a whole function so well.

A World Without Uncertainty

As previously mentioned, most avant animation & film privileges aesthetics first in its visuals. The goal is to evoke a mood or feeling, and whether or not it really connects to the narrative is pretty secondary. I am certainly not bashing that - the way this challenges the viewer creates a unique experience. But even I will admit that sometimes it makes it, well, a bit hard to care about what’s happening on the screen.

Evangelion dodges this problem pretty much completely by making so many of its visual elements extremely direct. Honestly if you look at the majority of the more out-there sections of the show sequence by sequence, they would barely qualify as out of the ordinary! To choose one, take one of my favourite moments from Episode 26:

This sequence is not a mind-boggling piece of animation, at all. The concept of an outer frame that contains fast-moving images that reflect the nature of that frame is not new - ever seen this before?

--- It even has a red background, the hacks! ---

Not exactly the peak of avant-garde cinema here. Evangelion adds to the directness because this sequence is playing to illustrate that, literally, Shinji's identity is composed of the people in his life, and his desires are shaped by how they see him. It’s one of the core themes of the show - other people's conceptions of you are, in a way, just as much "you" as your own conception of you. What better way to illustrate that concept visually than having those people flashing through the frame of your body? While still an abstract animation sequence, it is not at all "art for the sake of art". It’s tied directly to the narrative, with a clear meaning - there is even dialogue partially explaining it.

This clarity exists for most of the more out-there sequences in Evangelion. The show's real "challenge" to the audience comes in how it strings sequences like these together, often at a breakneck pace. While in isolation they are only borderline abstract, when thrown together you are pounded down by the mix of themes and aesthetics. Look at Asuka's breakdown in Episode 22:

The scene has a cool visual design with the color contrast, to heighten the faceless crowd vibe - which it should, because Asuka is constantly fighting to not drown in a sea of anonymity, to stand out from the crowd and be the best pilot, to rely on no one but herself - and yet she constantly fears she is doomed to fail. This pretty-clear sequence, though, jumps quickly into this:

Then goes into this:

--- Eat your seizure-warning heart out, Pokemon ---

And in 20 seconds the show has thrown a half dozen thematic ideas at you via abstract representation. The viewer is absolutely overwhelmed on their first viewing from this, it becomes an aesthetic and you get that unique “arthouse experience”. But almost none of it is art for art's sake - you are watching a plot, a narrative, it almost all has dialogue explaining it. If you slowed it down you could get almost all of these scenes on the first watch, and on a rewatch you will probably pick it up fully. It’s this merging of abstraction and concreteness that elevates Evangelion above most other arthouse animation I've seen; you are constantly challenged, but never so much as to surrender and give up.

(Note: When I say that these scenes are “direct: or “clear”, I don’t mean that they have only one meaning, or that everyone will agree on the meaning. Their meaning is based on many other scenes, each with their own ambiguities and layers, and those differences will multiply out over the course of the show to result in varied interpretations. That process is different, however, from scenes having only aesthetic content, with no or little inherent narrative grounding.)

Realizing the Obvious Over and Over

Okay, the art itself walks the clarity/abstraction line, but even if it is connected to the narrative, why do this? Why would an audience want something that was a "typical" show to move in this direction? A lot of viewers have commented on the severity of the "shift" in the later episodes of Evangelion (generally starting around episode 16), a disconnect the fandom has not failed to capitalize on:

This split has its own meta-narrative, based on the production history of the show. Anno's growing mental illness - always present from the beginning - and huge production woes involving having to scrap already-complete episodes, caused a "breaking point" around this time where he threw caution to the wind and let capital-D Depression take the wheel. While there is some truth to this in the meta-sense, I have never liked the idea that the show itself has such a split. I instead see the more arthouse final stretch as more-or-less a natural outgrowth of the narrative, not a meta-split. In particular, the arthouse second "half" only functions as a reflection of and continuation of the more traditional first half, and without that first half it would fall on its face.

To show why that is the case, I want to explain a type of narrative arc that really hits my personal aesthetic in long form media that I am calling now and forever more the "Multifaceted Character Arc". Essentially, these are when characters have a core arc, and over the course of events they resolve this arc - but the show or book or what-have-you is only halfway done. They could just have a second, different arc, but instead the resolution of their previous arc proceeds to be undermined, picked apart, and exposed as a partial lie, and the character realizes they haven't resolved anything yet; and so the same arc continues, but from a different angle.

Evangelion embodies this trope on turn-it-up-to-eleven steroids. Episode 16 might be the "split" point in the meta-sense, but I always looked at Episode 12 as the narrative split-point, where the first half "ends". Episode 12 wraps up with Shinji, Misato, Asuka, and Rei having a ramen dinner together after beating an Angel, and so many of their previous arcs are "resolved". Shinji has opened up, comfortable with his surrogate family and no longer pushing them away, Asuka is letting her guard down and actually thought about Misato when choosing where to eat, something early-Asuka wouldn’t be caught dead doing, Rei is socializing, and so on. Shinji even admits why he wants to pilot the Eva (praise from his father), which has been one of his "arc" question up until this point, and he seems to have finally figured things out.

--- This might actually be the last happy expression Shinji has till the finale ---

Of course, the directing will have none of that, because this is a false peace. Misato, who is wise to the wider narrative, knows exactly on how shaky a ground this is all built on, and gives Shinji the side-eye to prove it.

--- The “we call those daddy issues, Shinji” face ---

Episode 13 is a Ritsuko side-story, and episode 14 is a recap episode....look, I never said Evangelion was perfect, okay? But once episode 15 rolls around all of this narrative build-up starts being completely undone: Shinji and Asuka's stable-ish friendship gains some very-unstable romantic overtones, Misato has a full-on emotional breakdown, and we are off to the races in episode 16 as Shinji's newfound confidence and masculine need to wave his dick around for Asuka's benefit results in one-way ticket to psycho-analysis mind-screw station:

I could go into how these themes develop from here, but that isn’t the focus of this essay. My point with all this build is instead to focus on two core narrative elements: justification, and engagement. All of the out-there elements and pyscho-analytic themes of the second half of Evangelion are present in the first half, and were presented in a typical way - character interactions, dialogue, plot events, and so on. Remember that scene I mentioned before from Asuka's breakdown, of her being swamped by ghostly forms, and how it referred to Asuka’s desire stand alone from the crowd through her skills as a pilot? I know what it meant thematically, cause here is Asuka, implying to you, in dialogue, what that scene is going to mean 8 episodes earlier (“it” is “pilot the Eva”):

And this isn’t even the first scene this theme has come up in, I could pull up a number of screenshots if I needed to of her either implying or directly stating this desire, its conflicts, and having resolutions around them.

The avant latter half of Evangelion can throw half a dozen themes at you in sequences of abstract animation because you have already spent half a season thinking about these issues in normal terms. It’s the multifaceted character arc - they have been continually struggling with these issues and exploring different solutions to them, solutions that seem to fail. On this backdrop, to repeat these themes again using traditional narrative tools would be, well, boring. Evangelion isn’t an essay, it’s a visual medium; the show has set the stage with the regular visual tricks of the trade for exploring these arcs, but in the latter half of the show it pushes what that visual medium can do. With that grounding, unlike in so much avant work, you can fully follow along with it. Essentially, Evangelion made you do your homework before the test.

The Ones You Love Mean More Than Anything

This groundwork is true on an intellectual/comprehension level, but it is also true on an emotional level; not only do you understand better these abstract elements, you also care about them, because they are not just referring back to factual elements but human moments. To take an example, Shinji and Asuka have several fight scenes that occur in abstract-head-space, and in one of them Asuka (wanna guess who my favourite character is?) is ripping into Shinji for how he fails to reach out to her, to make her feel wanted, and she mentions this:

The image here is one of many flashing across the screen at the time, but it’s a flashback to the aftermath of their kiss in episode 15. The “hold” here isn’t metaphorical; it’s a direct reference to how he didn’t hold her during the kiss. If you didn’t think it was clear, look back at the actual episode 15 footage - how the kiss scene focuses entirely on Shinji's hand in all its not-holding-Asuka glory. Like, really:

--- This shot is held for over 15 seconds, with only Shinji’s hand moving. Also a penguin walks by, don’t ask. ---

This is a really impactful call-back, part of the multi-faceted arc, as Asuka continually tries to figure out her feelings for Shinji and fails. Except, the scene being referenced here is not shot as a dramatic relationship moment, it’s a comedy scene. Its honestly hilarious, one of the worst first kisses ever on screen, to the point where Shinji almost suffocates to death because he is such a wuss and Asuka is such a tsundere. And at the end of the show they take this moment and transform it into part of Asuka and Shinji's relationship implosion.

Which means that you care about it! Because you are going to care about two kids’ fumbling attempts at romance far more than an essay on isolation and connection, for all the reasons those narratives traditionally work. Real people never have endless strings of introspection - introspection is something you do on a life that you have otherwise been living, with moments of seriousness and moments of hilarity and dumbness. Evangelion can show that, because it isn’t drama 24/7. Its first 15 episodes have comedy, action, slice-of-life, the works.

I think this is the element that really makes Evangelion stand out - that it can push what is happening onscreen to the limits of abstraction, and you are not only going to understand it, but also remember the human beings it is all happening to. It not only put in the time to make these characters fully-fleshed out, but connects back its new later elements to the moments that made them so fleshed out. It justifies going as far as it does through its arcs, and engages you emotionally as it escalates, while so many attempts at arthouse media either fail or don’t bother with either of those key elements. Evangelion is a show that starts as a highly traditional narrative, ends as an arthouse film, and by binding it all together so tightly makes you think it couldn’t have gone any other way. Which, it turns out, is a pretty good way to make the arthouse elements actually work.

....

Oh yeah, so Neon Genesis Evangelion: 10/10. Like the score? We are supposed to do that, right? That’s my score.

-Tim

---------

Final Notes: I have a bunch of other thoughts on Evangelion, and so while I imagine a lot of the shows we watch are going to get one cohesive essay, I will almost definitely have some follow-up posts - this post is just the main one that connects so many of my biggest takeaways together. I definitely want to write a few on the plot issues and their (non)relevance, the ways Shinji’s arc is perceived by fandom, and some other topics, but I do want to put up a few essays on other anime so we don’t have a massive Evangelion dump starting out the project. Hopefully I will get some inspiration on more topics from all the great ~discourse~ going on around Evangelion right now, and we will see what gets written.

#evangelion #neon genesis evangelion #art house #avantgarde

72 notes · View notes

kaoru-takaida · 5 years ago

Text

Lost In Translation Fanfiction

DISCLAIMER: I do not own any of the characters mentioned or portrayed in this fanfiction. (Except for “E”.) Please support Jjolee and their amazing works including the Lost In Translation Webtoon on the Webtoon app and follow them on their social media. Thank you.

Chapter One: The Wyld Incident...

Jaewon yawns and opens his eyes, rolling over in his bed. It’s been a week and the anonymous texter hasn’t responded to his “Who are you?” text he sent after the short picture message that was sent to him. He looks at his cellphone and sighs, not seeing the unknown number in any of his recent texts. Jaewon sits up, standing straight. He raises his hands yawning again and stretching. As he does, there’s a ding from his cellphone, as if on cue. Jaewon chokes, stopping mid-stretch. He quickly slides over to the side of his bed and eagerly opens the new text message. Low and behold, it was from the same number. “I’m sorry I didn’t respond right away. You must have been anxious.” Jaewon cocks an eyebrow. They were worried about him? They weren’t some stalker, were they? “I’m sure you want an answer, but I can’t tell you who I am or how I know everything I do.”

Jaewon scowls. “Why?” He texts back. “How did you get that photo? And why tell me you have it?”

Elsewhere, a mysterious hooded person frowns. They look up at their computer. They begin typing. “As to how I got the photo. I can’t tell you.” Jaewon tsks seeing this. When his phone dings again he glances down and his jaw drops. “But I’m telling you because I want to help you. Like you helped me.” Jaewon’s eyes lit up… He helped this person at one point? He rubs his head, tussling his deep red hair, puzzled at who this could be. “I promise to try my hardest to help you out of this without making Mayhem suffer.” Jaewon gasps. He stares at the message in awe. An admiration crept in him over that message. That was all he cared about in this. The reason he was worried about this person knowing the truth. He purses his eyebrows.

“What’s your name?” He texts them.

The person messaging back inhales sharply. It was so tempting to tell Jaewon everything. Why they were doing this. What their name is. What Jaewon means to them. They exhale a long breath and begin typing. "Call me E."

Jaewon cocks an eyebrow at the letter name. "'E'🤨??" He texts back. "But I need more than a letter…" He says aloud. He doesn't type it and instead, texts something back. "What's your favorite animal?"

E stands straight and stares at the monitor. "Huuuuuh?!" "My favorite animal? Why?"

"Just tell me."

They tsk before typing in their answer. "Don't laugh. My favorite animal is a mouse." Jaewon smiles before laughing a little.

"Mouse, huh?" He says to himself. He texts back. "Mice are cool.😎"

"You laughed, didn't you?😑"

"Yeah. A little,😁 lol." He then clicks on the cellphone number. He taps "save as contact" and he saves the contact as "E🐭". He screenshots it and sends it to E. He doesn't know why, but he felt he could really trust them. Although he desperately wonders why they're bothering to even help him. Jaewon hears the phone ding.

"Lol I like it." Jaewon smiles.

E smiles now, too. They sigh and then scowl, flipping tabs on their monitor screen and pulling up a CCTV view. It's inside High Class Entertainment HQ. And in the CEO's office no less. (Mr. Park… )They think to themselves. (You'll get what's coming to you… I swear it.)

The next day…

E stares at the photo on Twitter. (This picture… was taken inside Jaewon's apartment! How?!) They swallow hard, tabbing out and opening up Twitter. They click on the profile. It's set to private. Of course. E searches for more results on the internet. There was nothing. Just the many pictures of Jaewon as Wyld, fancams, and Wyld focus videos at Mayhem's concerts. They pull up their Messenger. “Jaewon, that picture is suspicious.” E texts. “Please text me.” An hour passes and E grows restless. "Jaewon, are you ok?" There's no response. E frowns. Another hour passes. "Hello? Jaewon?"

E readjusts the black medical face mask on their face, fussing with their hood. They watch as D.Min helps Jaewon into a sleek black car. No doubt belonging to Kang Dongho himself. A patrol officer is there, seeing them off. As D. Min gets into the car, the officer waves. When the car pulls out of sight, E strides up to catch the officer.

He was about to enter his vehicle when he noticed E. "Woah! I have a friend who lives in this building. What happened here?" E asks. The patrol officer cocks an eyebrow at E.

He glances at the young lady, handcuffed in the back of his cruiser, sobbing. "Wyld~~~!" She shrills. E scowls, pulling the face mask from their face. When the officer sees this, he softens his expression.

"A piece of work, this one. She broke in and kidnapped one of the tenants here." He says. "I can't tell you the full details. But if I were you, I'd make sure your friend is safe.” E’s eyes widen. “Make sure you tell your friend to be more careful from now on.” E gives a slight bow. “Thank you, officer.” When the cruiser drives away, E looks over to the doorway of the apartment complex. E walks over to the door of the apartment complex. They look around to make sure no one was around, before dialing the code in. The door unlocks. E opens the door and walks in.

Jaewon sighs, slumping down into the covers D.Min lent him. He frowns, turning on his side and hugging his pillow. He then glances at his cell phone. “That’s right…” He says to himself. “I turned it off after everything that stuff happened…” He hits the power button. After a few seconds, the phone lights up. And as soon as it does, the multiple dings scare him. He swipes the phone open and sees how many messages he has from a certain someone. “What?! Fifteen text messages?!” He scrolls through the texts with a surprised expression stuck to his face.

“Jaewon, that picture is suspicious.”

“Please text me.”

“Jaewon, are you ok?”

“Hello? Jaewon?”

“Pls tell me ur ok!”

“Jaewon. Someone might be in your apartment!”

“Pls txt me!”

Jaewon blinks wide eyed at the concerned messages. Then the final text makes him sit up quickly. “What the-?!”

He stares at the text. A bead of sweat rolls down his cheek. “I’m on my way over! Please be okay!” E was on their way over?! But this was an hour ago… They could be gone by now. Jaewon looks around to see if D.Min or his butler was anywhere near. He swallows hard before inhaling sharply. “E. I’m okay now. I’m sorry I didn’t see your texts.”

E sighs a big sigh in relief, walking home. They lean against the wall of a building. The worry melts into relief and they slide down the wall to squat a little, texting back. “OMG! THANK GOD AND ANY OTHER GODS THAT EXIST!” They text back in all caps. “Jaewon, are you hurt?! Nothing happened, did it?” Jaewon felt his breath catch in his throat. The thought of what happened makes his heart beat faster. His body trembles and he purses his eyebrows. E takes the silence as a bad sign. “You don’t have to tell me.” Jaewon is surprised at that. “I’m just happy you’re okay.”

Jaewon stifles a trembling inhale. “Me too.” Jaewon texts back. “Can I call you?” E chokes. They stare at the message. (He… wants to call me?) E begins to text. Before they could respond with their response of “not a good idea” the cell phone dings again. “Please?” E closes their eyes. They sigh and open up an application on their phone. They click on Jaewon’s number and swipe “call”.

Jaewon hears the cell phone ring and quickly answers. “Ah… hello?”

There was a long silence that made Jaewon a bit anxious. And then… “J-Jaewon…” Jaewon’s eyes widen a little. He felt a familiarity in the voice. He swears he’s heard this voice before. “Are you… sure you’re okay?” Jaewon chokes a bit, a trembling sob slipping from his lips.

“N-No…” He says, tears welling into his eyes. He’d tried to hold it back. But hearing someone else other than D.Min ask him that after everything had happened… It made him overflow with emotion. E gasps at the sound of Jaewon’s sniffles. “I… was so scared…” E frowns and purses their eyebrows.

“I’m so sorry you had to go through that…”

“I…” He sobs quietly, trying to avoid having D.Min or his butler hear. But E can still hear him. “I’m sorry.”

E sits down on the pavement. “Why are you apologizing, Jaewon?”

He wipes his eyes gently with his hoodie’s sleeve. “I don’t know.” Jaewon says.They both don’t say anything for a few moments while Jaewon collects himself. “There was a fan that found their way into my apartment.” E scowls. (WHAT?! That’s crazy!) E thinks. “She put a tracker in a gift she gave me at one of Mayhem’s Fansignings to find out where I live. And then she installed a camera to get the keycode to my apartment.” Jaewon hears E breathing unsteady on the other side. (I should have known this could happen.) “She ambushed me and tied me up threatening me with a knife from the kitchen.” E closes their eyes.

“I’m sorry that happened.” E says. Jaewan can tell the voice was familiar, but can’t place whether the voice was male or female. The voice was very androgynous, and despite Jaewon trying to focus on their tones, he can’t place the voice with a gender or a face. But he knew without a doubt he’d heard this voice before. But where? (At a fansigning or meet and greet for Mayhem? I can’t be sure… )“I… will try to prevent that from happening again…” Jaewon scowls a bit.

“Because you know where I live, right?” Jaewon asks. E freezes and can’t help but feel a bit nervous. How is Jaewon reacting to this? Was he mad? Skeptical? Suspicious? E stammers a bit. Jaewon sighs, letting it go for now. Call it exhaustion, or just his gut feeling that E wasn’t a threat, but he didn’t feel like pursuing this any further at the moment. “Are you still there?”

E stands up from their seat on the pavement. “Ah… no.” E replies. “I-I’m not. But I promise I didn’t go into your apartment. I just wanted to see if it was secure.”

“It’s fine.” Jaewon says. He pauses now. “E, can I ask you something?”

“Mm?”

“Why won’t you call me Wyld?” Jaewon asks. E bites their lip a little, tempted to answer. “You’ve only ever called me by my real name. You never use my Stage name. Why?” E doesn’t say anything. But Jaewon still waits for an answer. When E doesn’t answer Jaewon sighs again. “I get it… You can’t answer.” E looks down at their sneakers. Jaewon smiles, though he knows they can’t see it. “Please, be safe…”

E chuckles. “I should be saying that to you, Jaewon.” E says, fussing with their hood. Jaewon ends the call. He tiredly slumps back into the covers. He hugs the pillow next to him and wraps himself in the comforter. He scowls, frowning. He buries his face into the pillow his head was on and tries to sleep. Just around the corner, leaning against the wall of the hallway outside, D.Min puts a hand to his chin, deep in thought.

He’d heard the entire conversation… (Wyld can’t go back to his apartment. Not with everything that had happened.) D.Min thinks. (But… who was this “E” he was talking with just now? Do they know about what happened? They seem to know a great deal about him and then some.) D.Min cocks an eyebrow, peeking into the room through the doorway to see Wyld finally falling asleep. The most D.Min can see is his bright red hair poking from beneath the soft heap of comforter. It rises and falls slowly, relaxed with Wyld’s breathing. (Is it possible E knows all about the scandals he told me were “misunderstandings”? Are they trying to help him?) D.Min crosses his arms, a scowl on his brows. (Or are they just pretending so they can get close to him?)

Author’s Note:

Hi hi, lovelies! So I know it’s taken a while. But with COVID-19 and my lack of work and rollercoaster health concerns, I hope you all understand. So I took extra care to make sure this chapter was airtight and nicely done.

First things first, about this mysterious “E”, I am addressing them as “they” to keep the identity a secret. They are the original character I’ve hinted at previously and there will be more information about this character in the coming chapters. You’ll be learning about this character as the other characters do. I won’t be giving any hints or answers on said character. But if there are questions about this fanfiction anyone has, just let me know in the comments and I will work on answering them the best I can. I hope you enjoyed it and look forward to my future chapters ^.^

Jjolee’s twitter: https://twitter.com/_jjolee

Lost In Translation Webtoon: https://www.webtoons.com/en/drama/lost-in-translation/list?title_no=1882

#d.min #lost in translation webtoon #lost in translation webtoon fanfiction #mayhem wyld #mayhem minsoo #mayhem daehyun #mayhem d.min #mayhem jaewan #kang dongho #lee minsoo #kim daehyun

1 note · View note

ryouverua · 6 years ago

Text

Trial 6 - Oh, I am one yet many (5)

The above inspirational picture was taken seconds before disaster.

Trial: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

Tsumugi is not the one-trick pony we thought she was ABORT MISSION, ABORT MISSION!!!!

NO YOU AIN’T! NO YOU AIN’T I DID NOT SIGN UP TO BE HAJIMEMED, NO SIR I DID NOT!

i mentioned it during the text hellstorm I unleashed when I was mid-playthrough but the way Shuichi says ‘cosplaying’ here is ADORABLE. I love his VA she is so good -

also

oh no

o h n o

I can’t just... express how deeply that feeling of ‘oh no’ pervaded my being. My soul.

“THIS IS JUST COSPLAY“ SHE SAYS - AND GOD, THE MUSIC, THE MUSIC IS SO WACKY LIKE THESE ARE JUST SOME NORMAL FTE ANTICS -

wait no this is the ‘let’s start the killing game music’ -

ah that’s why I’m lowkey terrified right now

W-What in the world are those white smears across Hagakure’s eyes??? And oh god the first game too???

WHAT THE HELL TSUMUGI YOU’VE REALLY BEEN HOLDING OUT ON US TELL ME HOW YOU’RE DOING THIS I-I mean oh no, how dare you, this is so awful...

SHE’S TAKEN FULL OWNERSHIP OF JUNKO!PERSONA

AJSLKDF

TSUMUGI

HOLY SHIT

TSUMUGI

IS THIS YOUR FINAL FORM

ironically this got me thinking ‘this would be a really cool cosplay + prop’ once I got over the sheer terror of the situation and I starting thinking, oh, wouldn’t it be cool if you even had a sort of pinwheel mechanism (with the main body of it being hidden by her long hair) that rotated all of these pieces, and have you ever realized that there is a small piece of you that is the monster

also I just realized... she kept putting her glasses on as Junko. But I’m assuming she won’t ever wear them as Hajime. So it’s true - the moment she actually took off her glasses, we really did get to see her final form..

IS THAT KOMAEDA’S HAIR

ALL OF THESE THINGS, I RECOGNIZE ALL OF THEM OMG

This............ this is terrible, terrifying, and also really, really good

don’t say you’re jealous don’t say you’re jealous don’t say you’re jealous okay I’m a bit jealous FFU --

SHUICHI I THINK THIS IS ONE OF THE TIMES WHERE YOU DON’T WANT TO PURSUE THE TRUTH I HAVE A TERRIBLE, AWFUL FEELING -

oh no oh no

here I was doing mental gymnastics to justify why she’d be able to cosplay as Junko, a real person

but I was over-complicating things as usual

even the egg has been compromised for her nefarious scheme this truly is the worst timeline

What is with me and stumbling into series that just bloody smash their fourth wall until there’s nothing but broken pieces left

thank you for having twogami right after togami it’s not something I realized I needed and among all this heartbreak is a blessing

THIS IS NOT YOUR CUE TO START PLAYING THE CREDITS MONOKUMA

I am only making it through this trial by sheer force of will and the power of Sweetcheeks’ adorable voice.

Dangan.... ronpa....?

oh god she said ‘we’ she said ‘WE’ THIS IS REALLY NOT GOOD

‘Don’t get too whacky with your theories,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to sound like a total crackpot,’ I said. DAMN YOU SELF I SHOULD HAVE LET MYSELF GO ABSOLUTELY WILD AFTER ALL

So this was invented completely from nothing??? My initial theory had them seeing themselves in someone else’s actual memories as themselves, and having their own brains play tricks on them that way - but all those scenes with them being interviewed by Makoto, of applying to Hope’s Peak, and possibly everything else about them - oh god - how powerful are these lights? How much detail was crammed into them? Can this all be done with a mere flash of a light???

‘We.’ Her use of ‘we’ is interesting, here. It really does feel like Tsumugi sees all of her cosplay personas as actual people that she can channel to ‘help her’ as opposed to just mere characters. Like entities fighting along side of her, not just through her...

also hello ibuki I forgot how much I enjoyed your VA they make me hear seagulls in the distance

aaaaaaw look at how much the art style has improved from the first game!!!

Y.......... YES.......?????? wait actually as someone who is lowkey interested in props and set design - BUT NO WAIT STILL THIS IS WAY BEYOND THAT -

How... the hell... do you cosplay the world?! The entire world?!?!

Is that possible?? If the entire world isn’t real - if it’s all being propped up by you - then -

Who - who are we playing this game for then??? Why make us play it??? Who is watching the game???

I KNEW IT

I AND PROBABLY HALF OF THE PEOPLE PLAYING WERE JUST WAITING FOR YOU TO SHOW UP

......

Did. Did you just say it takes place in the real world.

Oh no -

It... It’s real fiction... because they’ve kidnapped actual people... and brainwashed them... and then trapped them in a situation where they were forced to kill each other to get out?? For things that didn’t exist??? For reasons that weren’t ever real???

Wait - so that means they can get out and it’ll be fine?! That’s..... t-that’s not as bad as I thought, but...

‘STAFF’ OH THAT WORD IS SO OUT OF PLACE -

...............................

There are. There are people backstage. It’s not just Tsumugi. This. This is super not good.

insert inappropriately-timed comment about how I love this VA

Okay. This actually took me by surprise. And I’m kinda terrified to ask.

W.... Why not? Is - Is this actually a space separated from reality? Can they physically.... not go back....???

no wait -

what are you doing

PUT THAT KEY BACK RIGHT NOW

OH UNCANNY VALLEY-LEVELS OF COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

NO DON’T THROW REAL FACES UP THERE -

IS THIS A BLOODY COMMENT BOARD

I mean I know in my head that this is a niconico parody but the fact is they have to translate the comments to suit an english audience so -

omfg no I cannot believe what is coming out of the screen right now

wait wait

Kyoko is my waifu

My husbando Shuichi

first

Sakura is my muscle waifu good taste anon

Bring on the spoilers

LOL are you watching?

I feel like I’m participating too!

she’s shaking

Aaaw, Himiko is still alive.

Wow it’s on? LOL!

this is what the creepy kid at the beginning of the chapter was about

this was who that Makoto kid was

WHERE IS HIS CREEPY-ASS FACE I KNOW YOU’RE THERE MAKOTO

Is this the everyone... the real everyone Tsumugi says she represents, then??? That she’s fighting for? Omg was Kirumi’s motive/trial foreshadowing all along -

Anyway, damn Tsumugi is proud of her viewership.

#humblebrag #musclewaifu

EVERYONE???? LITERALLY EVERYONE?!?!?!

SURELY... SURELY THAT IS THE CONCEITED TALK OF A MANAGER TRYING TO TALK UP THEIR ‘BABY’.... SURELY...

I appreciate the use of Celes here. This is.... damn dark. They’ve achieved such a peaceful world that the have to manufacture darkness and blood-sport for people to get their kicks???

STIMULATION?!

first of all where’s miu when you need her

SECOND OF ALL ARE YOU SURE HUMANITY WAS BEAUTIFUL, KOREKIYO??? ARE YOU SURE?

“It’s simple economics.”

THERE YOU ARE MAKOTO YOU CREEP

oh no he was... literally... using this game to cope with his problems.... and he said that one day he wanted to be a part of it... oh no.....

..... D... Did one of the comments say that it had been years? That they had been waiting for a few years for the sequel?

Does - does that mean something, or is it just a throwaway audience comment? Why years? If Rantaro was in the last one, why would it have been years for this one to happen??? How old is Rantaro? How old is Tsumugi?!?!

FML I had been wondering how ‘Monokuma’ could exist without Junko existing since they’re inextricably linked. FML.

MONOKUMA CAN YOU STOP ROLLING THE CREDITS, THE MUSIC AND THE TITLE CARDS FOR A MINUTE PLEASE I AM BEGGING YOU

Because I don’t enjoy having Saioinji’s terrifying eyes trained on me while she questions my intelligence, so I’ll sum up the next question - what season of this gameshow from hell are we apparently on?

I mean, considering Junko’s title... well...

..... yeah it looks better with a V.

the real answer to why they used V3 even though it’s technically not the correct way to say ‘53′ - it’s the aesthetic.

FFFF

I actually screenshot all the parody!title cards and they’re amazing. I’ll post them just once a bit later when it shows up again because this post is entirely too long, but needless to say, whoever designed them had fun. And the titles of the games, too - Birth of Despair? Dream Danganronpa? Sign me tf up! oh no does this make me part of the problem I’M SORRY SWEETCHEEKS

I can’t believe I was bitching about Junko being the mastermind for the third game when apparently audience members have had to sit through 53 Junkos

You couldn’t have changed it up??? Not even once??? Like, one led by Mukuro as a prologue idea or??? quietly denies the existence of the anime

Oh, speaking of which, I do like the excuse they came up with as to why the drv3 creators didn’t create new characters from the supposed other games why Tsumugi didn’t cosplay anyone outside the first two games - it’s for the class’s benefit, since they only knew those two casts, and y’know. She cares. about shock value

DON’T YOU PASS THE BUCK, GIRL

Ah, so that ‘staff’ you mentioned earlier...

why is this so funny to me

T-Tsumugi, do you have a tumultuous relationship with your managers or something

why are you airing out your dirty laundry on live television

is it all the incest plotlines

I feel like at this point it’s less ‘Tsumugi is trying to rub into the students how completely and absolutely they are boned’ and more ‘okay, it’s time to give a shout-out to everyone who put this production together! Perfect time to slap on that logo, guys!‘

oh my god that was supposed to be a trailer in-meta too alsd;kfj i’m losing it

AND AGAIN, THOSE TITLE CARDS - THEY ARE AMAZING.

SHE IS SHE’S TOTALLY ADVERTISING MID-SHOW

TSUMUGI STOP BEING A CORPORATE SELL-OUT

"NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR YOUR CRAPPY SHOEHORNED ADVERTISING!!!”

oh god oh no

who’s going to tell him -

MONOKUMA DON’T YOU DARE

i’m having an existential crisis alongside sweetcheeks ngl

there are so many layers

....

we need to go deeper

So, just to clarify, there are three layers right now:

There’s us, the players. In a sense, we could be considered ‘equal but different than the tier’, but we do still operate on a plane separate from the metafiction of Tsumugi’s ‘everyone in the world’.

There’s the ‘audience’, the outside world. This is the space that’s been breached at this point. And this... this is the level where the students are from, too - aka the reason I think we and the audience should exist as separate entities.

And there’s the domain of the Killing Game, a space created to play out this story, using real people - a place separated from reality... how? If Tsumugi is talking about a set, it could easily be the real world, which means they’ve been isolated somewhere. At the same time though, when they managed to reach the end of the escape tunnel and saw the outside world, they all started to choke and suffocate. So... could this be VR still? Or no? Can these existences known as Shuichi Saihara, the Ultimate Detective, Maki Harukawa, the Ultimate Assassin, Himiko Yumeno, the Ultimate Robot, K1-b0, the Ultimate Robot, and even Tsumugi Shirogane, the Ultimate Cosplayer, leave this space in any way, shape or form... or not at all? Is them suffocating ^ like that a sign that they literally cannot exist outside of this space?

She is literally throwing the same question back in Shuichi’s face ghdfkgh

NO I’M ON SHUICHI’S SIDE I COULDN’T HELP IT I HAD TO CHOOSE REAL PEOPLE

no!!! no!!!! NO!!!!

no seriously I still chose real people because I am stubborn

sweetcheeks et al. do not deserve any of this

Of course they brought out despair!Mikan for this. Of course.

I have to say, I do like these little character touches - the decisions that have been made as to which ‘cosplay’ says what. I mean, it’s supposed to also act as a way to throw our known and loved favourites in our face too, but having Celes comment on how boring ‘peace’ is? Having Ibuki smashing through the fourth wall to speak directly to the audience, Gundham remarking on their abnormal existence and Leon commenting on how cool the ‘aesthetic’ of the title card is? It’s such a nice touch. also horrifying. butalsonice

Oh we really are addressing the prologue now??? And - I’m assuming Tsumugi is referring to Hajime when she says ‘me’, but is there a chance she isn’t?

Just as I initially suspected, though - they really were normal when they got in. So how did they decide who got what personality/talent, or was that random? I mean, that might be the case - it was potentially hinted by the motive video switch of Chapter 2..

............. Huh.

But..... in what sense? Like the 16 talents were stored in those lights and they were ‘picked up’ by the most suited participant? How could you make sure there were no doubles? Or - and this is possible because of the vague language - did the talents build on what the student knew already? In which case, how would they know what the talents would end up being and plan the labs around them?

No, it would... have to be... the first one. Talents had its own selection in the flashback creating machine, though without verifying what the subcategories are it’s hard to confirm or deny anything... but I also can’t shake what Maki said at the beginning of the game? How it felt like their talents were given at random?

So... so they’re not only back where they started - completely isolated with everyone they’ve ever known and the world they knew completely out of reach (in this sense, dead/not actually existing are functionally the same), but they get a helping of a totally warranted existential crisis on top of that.

And... their bodies are real, so everyone else really is dead. No happy sdr2 ending. Well, unless I mental-gymnastics that to read ‘they have physical bodies to return to, but as manufactured personas it’s pointless.’

Me too, Sweetcheeks.

We can’t go 5 minutes without a WHAM line.

B-But they were kidnapped weren’t they -?!

fujisaki does not deserve this slander

Return of the hat!!!

..... is it bad that I miss his hat. I. I really liked his hat. I know that it was representative of the way he held back and used it to hide himself, but - but I liked his original portrait. And I liked the way it was incorporated into his sprites and all the movements he makes with it and without it, like it‘s a phantom limb. okayI’llstop

Why... are we not getting a name here? Was Shuichi Saihara a made-up name too?

oh -

oh no

D: A... Anything...

H-He’s.... a complete fanboy too.................... holy shit. cute but terrifying he looks like much more of a schoolboy super!fan than real Shuichi

S-So wait, it’s not even autosuggestion then - he asked for it? How - how does this work with the flashback lights? It can be targeted like that??? god I’m going to have so many questions after this is all over

I think this may be the death knell for his psyche oTL I certainly wouldn’t be able to take this if I was in his position.

LOOK I KNOW I GET EXCITED ABOUT CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT TOO

but this is a bit much c-can you please keep that drool in -

asdfkjlsdf w h a t

was

was this omitted or something

I - I swear they were kidnapped they seemed a lot more freaked out?!

Even Rantaro, who seemed to know more than he let on at the time - ?!

I... I think I really need to go back and replay the prologue.

ME NEITHER K1-B0 I FEEL LIKE I’M BEING GASLIT

d-did

did you use it on me too

That... that I can believe. No matter who they were before - if they were consenting or not - it might not even matter, if they can’t return to how they were. In a sense, the Gopher Project story was practically preparing them for it - the idea that everything they knew and loved were gone, and would never come back. Oh... oh that’s bad....

TSUMUGI IS ACTUALLY TERRIFYING

SHUT UP NAEGI

wait why is seeing him say that worse than seeing Junko say her normal despair stuff

it’s the insincerity, probably...

YOU NERFED KAITO?!?!?!

YOU NERFED KAITO!!!!!!!

okay I take back what I said Maki you have my enthusiastic blessing to recklessly murder as necessary

RIP Tsumugi and all of her new depth

“I’m also the one that kept sneaking all of the death flags into his room while you were out training every night!”

Y O O O

YOU NERFED HER CHARACTER TOO?!?!?! YOU GOTTA LET THAT HAPPEN ORGANICALLY!!!

LMAO

Souda will never show this much awareness in his actual every day fictional life and that makes this 100% funnier

Everything has a writing credit.... every single thing? Every bit of development?

Even Kokichi’s coup and Kaito’s cooperation? And Kokichi manipulating Gonta? You just seemed so - so angry about that after the trial. Surely those, if nothing else...

At this point they’re just kicking a sad, beaten-down puppy. What more could you possibly do at this point - ?!

oH GOD I DON’T WANT TO SEE THIS

WHAT THE HELL WHO EVEN SAYS SOMETHING LIKE THAT

nNOOO

NO LET ME REMEMBER HIM THE WAY HE WAS

DON’T YOU CROSS THIS BRIGHT RED LINE SHIROGANE

NO THIS IS ILLEGAL I’M CALLING THE POLICE HE LOOKS ABSOLUTELY MAD -

GHGHGGHGHGHGH

GHGHghghghghhh

ghghgh

sdkflj

n o o o o oooo o o o o o o o

gggkghk

I-It’s not a lie! Even if it was manufactured, even if it was coded into them - their feelings were real to them! It might be by design, but - oh this sounds so hollow. It’s one thing to talk about ‘fate’ and ‘this was the work of a higher power’, but having it brought down on you in such a trivial way must be absolutely soul-crushing.

this is the saddest iteration of hangover!Shuichi that I have laid my eyes on in the entire game

nihilism.

tbh I never found Izuru that intimidating as a final villain in the last game - but here? Terrifying. Maybe it’s in contrast to Junko here, who has the overbearing destructive personality of a tornado, but the quiet emptiness and lack of a higher purpose, of absolute futility that he stands for here - that scares me a lot. Maybe it’s just because it seems to bring the concept of DR’s despair to a place that I can personally understand?

I keep saying ‘this is terrifying!’ but I mean, to be fair... it... kind of is. as always, fantastic use of text DRV3!

also can someone please shut up the peanut gallery for five minutes

well damn Monokuma that one felt aimed right at me

It reminds me of what Komaeda would say about his own motivation: it was watching everyone struggle with adversity, or the ‘despair of the killing game’, with the end goal of them ‘reaching hope’ - of seeing them overcome and grow stronger for it, that drove him forward. From the outside that makes sense; seeing other people overcome struggles, even ones so terrible, give us the mental strength to overcome our own problems. But for someone on the inside looking out... how perverse would that feel, to think that your suffering is basically being used as inspiration!p0rn? Knowing that there were voyeurs getting a kick out of your struggle?

What happens to game pieces after the game board is closed and put away?

Do they go into stasis? Do they just... exist, outside of time? Frozen forever, until they’re taken out to be ‘played with’ again; left to rot?

If they ‘win’.... they have no future. There’s nothing for them to move forward to reach. A piece learning that they’re a piece, and knowing their dreams after their trials will always stay just out of reach... how can anyone move foward like that?

“love that reaction” OH SHUT UP LUDENBERGxLUVER37

Fight for yourself! They fought to get you this far - Kaito and Kokichi died to give you this chance, even if they are a ‘lie”!

But Shuichi has never been able to fight for himself, only for the others...

Tsumugi, after spending the last hour verbally beating them down and shredding his and everyone’s sense of self to shreds: wow lol what a weakling

Everything is terrible and yet her saying this still got a laugh out of me, damn it.

S-SHUICHI? SHUICHI?

I-IS HE EMOTIONALLY SHUTTING DOWN -

OH GOD

HIS

H-HIS POV - IS GONE -

And nothing but despair left...

Did - did we just lose Shuichi...?

SWEETCHEEKS!!! SWEETCHEEKS, NO!!!

SWEETCHEEKS I’M SO SORRY!!!!

#Ryou plays drv3 #Shuichi Saihara #Kiibo #Keebo #Tsumugi Shirogane #spoilers #drv3 spoilers #most of the post was ready but my computer being in the shop meant it got super delayed #feelsbadman.jpg

36 notes · View notes

theonyxpath · 7 years ago

Link

It’s that time for a brief (riiight) look at just why we even have Monday Meeting Notes in order to have this blog. As we tighten up and re-purpose this and our other blogs, as you may have noticed these past few months, let me fill you in on just what this one, in particular, is all about.

Really, it’s an extension of the basic idea of starting the week off with a situation report that looks back at the last week to see what was accomplished, and looks forward to the coming week and what needs doin’. Full disclosure, I stole the idea from my head of Creative Services back in my TV days, and grafted it to the company-wide lunch meetings we had in the first months of White Wolf way back in the day.

Back then, I used the meeting to see if the production team had hit their goals from the meeting before, re-evaluate those goals based on why they were missed, and if they were met we set new ones at the meeting. They were individual goals, mostly, and such things as “Finish Mage splat character pencils”, or “Get half of Wraith laid out”, or “Get quotes from three different printers for the Aeon plastic book”.

By doing this during the meeting, the whole department was aware of both the challenges and the status of the various parts of the creation of the books. Sam needed Josh to finish those Mage splat drawings so he could get the initial layout done, for example. I’d also share the info I had learned during the previous Friday’s X-Meeting, which was the name for the WW weekly managers’ meeting. So long as the info was not top secret, I’d share it so that our team had the best information to base their decisions on.

It was a good system, and we had fewer left hands not knowing what the right hands were doing. I even heard rumors that the developer boyfriend of one of our designers would ask her for notes on the info to share with the devs at their meeting.

So naturally, I incorporated a Monday Lunch Meeting when I started Onyx Path. Putting the notes up in this blog was also based on a previous incarnation, this time with notes that started informal but turned into a formal weekly thing years later at WW after we had internet venues to post them to. With our belief in community and transparency, it just made sense to use this blog format to provide a regular reporting on how things stand at Onyx.

They Came From Beneath the Sea! art by Aaron Riley

Plus, for me, this was the modern equivalent of Stan Lee’s Soapbox, a “column” that appeared in the news page of Marvel comics way back in the day that enabled the lead guy at Marvel to continue to talk right to the reader, even if he wasn’t working on every book like he had been.

Love him or hate him, Stan succeeded in making readers feel that there were actual people involved in the making of the comics. At least young Rich Thomas did as he pored over the new X-Men – isn’t that Wolverine from Hulk? – and all the other 20 and 25 cent comics.

As for the meeting itself, we’ve actually put together a pretty organized routine at this point. We start the meeting with any big-picture, company-wide news. Then, Eddy, Matthew, and Dixie go through the status of the upcoming projects they have oversight over, then Mirthful Mike goes over where the projects are in art direction and layout. We discuss all news about the projects, with special emphasis on any roadblocks they are having.

Then Mighty Matt McElroy goes over any Operations news – which is basically things like conventions, sales and sales venues, business opportunities, etc. If there’s anything not covered previously, like vacations or the like, we wrap up with that.

Using their reports, which are also written out and updated each week, I then update the project progress parts of this blog, and then pick through the jokes and banter to get to several topics that the gang discussed in more detail that I think you folks will be interested in.

Which is really a huge part of the point of this blog. Where once, Monday Lunch Meetings allowed our staff to be aware of what everybody was working on, now the Monday Meeting Notes blog is set up so all of you erudite blog readers can look right into what we’re up to, and how, each week.

Cover art for Wraith20’s Handbook for the Recently Deceased by Michael Gaydos

And with that, here are a few highlights from the meeting today:

We’re excited to announce that we’re partnering with Fabricate, LLC to provide Scarred Lands adventures for Expedition!

Expedition is a light RPG using cards and a smartphone or tablet. Whether you’re new to the genre or a D&D veteran, whether you’re playing alone, with a group of friends, your spouse or with your kids – anyone can learn to play in less than 5 minutes! There are new quests and adventures every week, and the Expedition community can even create their own adventures and share them with others. With this new license, Scarred Lands-specific content will be available as booster cards and through the app. The team are really excited about this, so don’t be surprised if you see them posting in our Scarred Lands forums soon as well! If you want to learn more about Expedition, you can look them up here: https://expeditiongame.com/

Gen Con 2018 is only a month away, and we’ve been busy with new brochures (one with all of our lines, and one just for Storypath System games), pins, card hand-outs, signage, all that con stuff we do. We’ll be announcing at least one new license, new projects, and two separate “What’s Up With the Onyx Path?” panels (Thursday and Saturday) which will pretty much cover the same info although the panelists may differ. It’s an experiment to see if we can open up more time for everybody, not jamming folks in to one session. There’s also a freelancing panel and a developer boot-camp session for those creators wanting to get into the biz.

The Onyx Pathcast audience continues to grow, and last week the Trio of Terror interviewed writer and developer Steffie de Vaan and talked a lot about Promethean. This Friday’s Pathcast is all about freelancing in general, since they all do that, and freelancing for Onyx Path specifically. Plus, we’re making plans for some Onyx Pathcast broadcasting at/from Gen Con. More on that when we know more.

We went over the Fetch Quest Kickstarter a bit, just reaffirming that it did well for its audience, but didn’t break out into the larger card game audience. It would have been nice, but we funded and more than tripled that amount, so it will be great to have it in stores. Card games are still something that we’ll do when a cool idea comes our way, and we’ll continue demoing Fetch Quest and Prince’s Gambit, and see where that kind of exposure leads.

Next, we have prepped most of the material for the Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition Kickstarter, and are audaciously planning on putting it live on Monday, July 2nd at 12 noon EDT. We think that the audiences for this and Fetch Quest are significantly different, so there shouldn’t be much KS fatigue, and so we can run this before Gen Con. If, for some reason, we can’t make that happen, we’ll run it over Gen Con – but I’m trying to give our guys a break by letting them enjoy the con and any August vacations they so rightfully deserve without worrying about an ongoing Kickstarter.

So, like we end with every week, you know:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

KICKSTARTER:

Thanks, everyone who backed Fetch Quest and helped us bring it to stores!

Next up, Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition Kickstarter…we’re aiming at starting this Kickstarter at 12 noon EDT on Monday July 2nd…if we can!

ELECTRONIC GAMING:

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is now live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is both rolling and rocking!

Here are the links for the Apple and Android versions:

http://theappstore.site/app/1296692067/onyx-dice

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onyxpathpublishing.onyxdice&hl=en

Three different screenshots, above.

ON AMAZON AND BARNES & NOBLE:

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue you bought it from. Reviews really, really help us with getting folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these fiction books:

Vampire: The Masquerade: The Endless Ages Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Rites of Renown: When Will You Rage II (Kindle, Nook)

Mage: The Ascension: Truth Beyond Paradox (Kindle, Nook)

Chronicles of Darkness: The God-Machine Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Mummy: The Curse: Curse of the Blue Nile (Kindle, Nook)

Beast: The Primordial: The Primordial Feast Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Masquerade: Of Predators and Prey: The Hunters Hunted II Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: The Poison Tree (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Songs of the Sun and Moon: Tales of the Changing Breeds (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Requiem: The Strix Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Forsaken: The Idigam Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Mage: The Awakening: The Fallen World Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Masquerade: The Beast Within Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: W20 Cookbook (Kindle, Nook)

Exalted: Tales from the Age of Sorrows (Kindle, Nook)

Chronicles of Darkness: Tales of the Dark Eras (Kindle, Nook)

Promethean: The Created: The Firestorm Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)

Demon: The Descent: Demon: Interface (Kindle, Nook)

Scarred Lands: Death in the Walled Warren (Kindle, Nook)

V20 Dark Ages: Cainite Conspiracies (Kindle, Nook)

Chronicles of Darkness: Strangeness in the Proportion (Kindle, Nook)

Vampire: The Requiem: Silent Knife (Kindle, Nook)

Mummy: The Curse: Dawn of Heresies (Kindle, Nook)

OUR SALES PARTNERS:

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the Screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there!

https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

Here’s the link to the press release we put out about how Onyx Path is now selling through Indie Press Revolution: http://theonyxpath.com/press-release-onyx-path-limited-editions-now-available-through-indie-press-revolution/

And you can now order Pugmire: the book, the screen, and the dice! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/manufacturers.php?manufacturerid=296

DRIVETHRURPG.COM:

This Wednesday is a veritable Sword and Sorcery Day, with the DriveThruRPG releases of the PoD version of the Scarred Land‘s adventure the Dagger Of Spiragos, and the PDF and PoD versions of the third of the Scarred Lands adventures: the Ring of Spiragos!

Along with the Gauntlet of Spiragos, these three adventures provide an outstanding way to first get into the epic fantasy Scarred Lands setting – available in both 5e and Pathfinder versions.

As if that wasn’t enough, it is the last Wednesday of the month – so here are our Monthly Exalted 3rd PDF downloads:

For Hundred Devils Night Parade, we have Susurrus and Lodestar, and for Adversaries of the Righteous, we have Fivefold Mask & Lies.

CONVENTIONS!

Prep is seriously underway for Gen Con 2018 in the first week of August, which takes place in Indianapolis. In addition to our booth presence, be sure to check out the games and panels in the Gen Con Event Schedule.

From Fast Eddy Webb, we have these:

Eddy will be speaking at Broadleaf Writers Conference (September 22-23) in Decatur, GA. He’ll be there to talk about writing for interactive fiction, and hanging out with other writers who have far more illustrious careers. http://broadleafwriters.com/3rd-annual-broadleaf-writers-conference/3rd-annual-broadleaf-writers-conference-speakers/

Eddy will also be a featured guest at Save Against Fear (October 12-14) in Harrisburg, PA. He’ll be running some Pugmire games, be available for autographs, and will sometimes accept free drinks. http://www.thebodhanagroup.org/about-the-convention

If you are going and want to meet up, let us know!

And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM FAST EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

M20 Book of the Fallen (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

C20 Novel (Jackie Cassada) (Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

CofD Dark Eras 2 (Chronicles of Darkness)

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Tales of Excellent Cats (Monarchies of Mau)

Adventures for Curious Cats (Monarchies of Mau)

Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

Changeling: The Lost 2nd Companion (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

Changeling: The Lost 2nd Jumpstart (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Witch-Queen of the Shadowed Citadel (Cavaliers of Mars)

Redlines

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Spilled Blood (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition)

In Media Res (Trinity Continuum: Core)

Wr20 Book of Oblivion (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)

Second Draft

WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)

Tales of Good Dogs – Pugmire Fiction Anthology (Pugmire)

Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon (Werewolf: The Forsaken 2nd Edition)

Dog and Cat Ready Made Characters (Monarchies of Mau)

Aeon Aexpansion (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

C20 Players’ Guide (Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition)

Development

Signs of Sorcery (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Hunter: the Vigil 2e core (Hunter: the Vigil 2nd Edition)

Fetch Quest (Pugmire)

They Came From Beneath the Sea! Rulebook (TCFBtS!)

CofD Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Dystopia Rising: Evolution (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

Manuscript Approval:

Editing:

Guide to the Night (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition)

Post-Editing Development:

Scion: Hero (Scion 2nd Edition)

Trinity Continuum Core Rulebook (The Trinity Continuum)

Trinity Continuum: Aeon Rulebook (The Trinity Continuum)

Ex Novel 2 (Aaron Rosenberg) (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Exalted 3rd Novel by Matt Forbeck (Exalted 3rd Edition)

GtS Geist 2e core (Geist: the Sin-Eaters Second Edition)

M20 Gods and Monsters (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Night Horrors: The Tormented (Promethean: The Created 2nd Edition)

Indexing:

Wraith 20

Cavaliers of Mars

Monarchies of Mau (Monarchies of Mau)

ART DIRECTION FROM MIRTHFUL MIKE:

In Art Direction

Ex3 Monthly Stuff

Scion Hero – Stuff is progressing…slowly, but progressing.

Trinity Continuum

Geist 2e – KS artwork continues.

The Realm

M20 Gods and Monsters

Ex3 Dragon Blooded – More sketches coming in.

Promethean Night Horrors: The Tormented – Sketches and finals coming in.

VtR – Guide to the Night – Sam is doing the fulls and cover.

Marketing Stuff

Posters and Displays

Gen Con Cards

In Layout

Fetch Quest – Playtest decks uploaded.

Proofing

Scion Origin – Onyx review.

Changeling: the Lost 2 – Josh is working on the interior fixing.

Storyteller System Brochure

At Press

V20 Beckett’s Jyhad Diary & Beckett Screen & V20 Dice – KS backer rewards shipping.

Scion Dice – At fulfillment shipper.

Monarchies of Mau – In Indexing.

Monarchies of Mau Screen – Files sent to printer.

Cavaliers of Mars Screen – Files sent to printer.

Wr20 Guide for Newly Departed – PoD uploaded.

Gen Con Buttons – At press.

WoD and CofD reroll cards – At press.

FQ and PG Gen Con cards – At press.

Wraith 20 Screen – Files sent to printer.

GenCon Brochure – Files sent to printer.

TODAY’S REASON TO CELEBRATE: Although the one-year anniversary of his passing was last week, here’s to the creative work and legacy of my friend, and co-founder of White Wolf, Stewart Wieck. A year? Really? Doesn’t seem real.

#Onyx Path Publishing

6 notes · View notes

protagonistheavy · 4 years ago

Text

Shitblast about the Pokemon Presentation incoming:

That sucked the life out of me to be totally, un-exaggeratedly honest. It sucked pretty much any care I could have about Pokemon for a good couple of years at least. The downward slant of the franchise is just ridiculously obvious, and genuinely I don’t think I want to buy into the series anymore -- I’ve gotten burned enough times to not even try and get hyped for anything as ugly as the DP remakes or Legends.

Before I even get into the games they talked about, I just want to rag on that opening video thing. The huge montage of all the different things the pokemon franchise has, uh, infected I guess. Am I the only one that was really, really put-off by this? It just seemed like such a huge ass pat for themselves, like, “woo-hoo, look at our millions of dollars we spent on NOT the video games.” And it’s not even structured in some kind of catchy song, it’s just people chanting out hashtags that pop up on screen. It’s so cheaply made and they do shit like this pretty much every fucking year, I’m sorry but I just found this whole thing to be a waste of time. It didn’t get me hyped for anything to come, that’s for sure, it just reminded me that I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for Pokemon to actually progress itself and catch up with a modern market.

Pokemon Snap was the only cool thing from the presentation, and that’s a game we’ve already known about and is honestly too simple to fail. They would have to REALLY fuck up a game as straightforward as Snap. And this presentation didn’t bring any exciting new light to the game, just confirming that yes, yes you will indeed be taking pictures of pokemon, and then sharing those pictures with friends. Everything they’ve talked about is just the natural modernizations I’d expect from any game claiming to be about photography and made in 2021. The most exciting thing they could show off was the illumination item thing, which is just sorta, okay I guess.

The DP remake was disheartening. I honestly wish they didn’t even bother, and just ported the game as-it-was to the Switch.

I hate these graphics. And no, no it’s not some “style.” This isn’t a stylistic choice, this isn’t a “theme,” whatever this toddler’s toy aesthetic is supposed to be. It isn’t. It’s a budget constraint -- it’s a compromise. And I honestly hate that people are trying to defend it as some sort of art style, when I know 100% they would never defend another game like this nearly as hard. They would look at ANY game with graphics this shit and call it out.

There’s this excuse that it’s an art style theme, akin to Link’s Awakening remake on the Switch. Except, did people forget that Link’s Awakening actually looked good? Because it was actually designed to look like everything was a miniature. They used proper shading and texturing to sell that aesthetic, to make it look pleasing to the eye. Link’s Awakening is proud of its graphics and it does as much as it can visually to lean on that aesthetic. These DP remakes? There’s no heart put into this “art direction” at all. The textures are all plastic and flat and even downright muddy -- compare any screenshot of the remake to an original location and you’ll see how awful the colors are now, and how vague some of the models are after having been transformed from sprites. There’s no intent at all from the devs to actually include the polish necessary to make this style work -- it’s not an art style decision, it’s a budget constraint. They chose this design for the game because it would be easy to make, even easier to animate, and they could then justify slapping both of these games with $60 price tags. And yeah I get it -- “we don’t know how much these games are going to be!” -- no we do, it’s going to be fucking $60 like anything else released on the Switch, but if you seriously think this is worth $50 or even $40, then whatever, spend your damn money.

And yeah I am bitter that this is against precedent of the previous remakes. Every other remake before this had the time taken to update the graphics and direction to modern standards, and every remake was better because of it. It was refreshing to revisit these older worlds with modern sensibilities and an updated perspective -- the whole appeal of updating these older games is to give them the love and depth that technology at the time wouldn’t allow. At least that’s the appeal for me, I guess there’s a LOT of people out there whose appeal to Pokemon as a franchise is just buying whatever fucking comes out next and just mashing that A button into a state of satisfaction. This bums me out so bad that instead of getting something with passion and care, we get the absolute cheapest output; a remake that doesn’t promise anything new or exciting, burdened with absolute shit graphics.

And again, this style just sucks. It isn’t cute lol. I guess some people are gonna be into it, that’s fine I guess, but wow I don’t believe a single person that claims “this is what I imagined DP to be like.” No you didn’t, fuck the shut up? You’re really going to tell me that, in your most immersed state of playing this game, you imagined everything to be these fucking toddler toys? Okay you’re just on your own for that one -- I and every other normal human did not think of the DP world as some chibi fantasyland full of lego people. I hate that this is even excused as being some sort of “hark back” to the older art style -- the older art style wasn’t toy-themed or plastic-themed! What the fuck are people trying to pull here? It’s such a shame that DP had amazing sprite work and a wonderful world and an enticing story, but its remake is just going to underplay all of that, abandon it all just so it can have some gimmicky art style -- at best it’s a gimmicky art style riding the coattails of Link’s Awakening, and at worst it’s a budget cut done to make the game as cheap as possible to shit out.

I’m so disappointed in this. I was really looking forward to experiencing DP as a remake, I’ve never played this generation before. I wanted to play the remakes because I didn’t want to adapt to the older logic of the games, and I wanted to be able to bring in my own pokemon, have my own adventure. I wanted another experience like ORAS or HGSS. I didn’t want to go through the work of trying to play the original in a reasonable way. But since this is the direction of the remake, to make it look cheap as hell and totally heartless, then I’m just forced to play the original, and that sucks on a lot of layers.

And then Legends of Arceus or whatever.

Look. I want to like this game. And realistically I do like the idea of this game. But just like the DP remake, it looks like it’s the absolute cheapest response to what fans have been asking for, and it looks like it just wants to ride off the success of another, better franchise. I’ll make a wish now that I hope this game proves to be so much better than it looks in this presentation.

But wow, wow. I don’t think that’s going to happen. This looks like full-on garbage.

I wanted a BotW-like Pokemon game ever since, well, BotW. I think an open-world format would do wonders for the Pokemon formula, and SwSh had potential with its Wild Areas. But again, all the cheapest choices have been made. This game reeks of developers being told that fans want a BotW-styled Pokemon game, and then responding by just inserting pokemon assets into a beta test world of BotW. They didn’t show anything that looked promising for Pokemon gameplay, they just showed elements that are enough to convince an audience, “trust us, this is an open-world, with open-world mechanics -- like stealth! Rolling into bushes! Isn’t that cool? Isn’t this how you want to catch pokemon?”

It’s heartless. The developers clearly don’t care about making an open-world pokemon game; they’re interested in making pokemon an open-world game, the difference being that they don’t care about actually organically mixing the two. It’s just going to be a slop of open-world mechanics, set in an open-world that has no reason to be explored and is ugly as sin to look at, with mechanics designed to slow you down and fill in that 40-60 hour expectation. And I say this with as much confidence as I do because if they did have anything interesting to mention about Legends, they would have fucking said it -- they would have highlighted where pokemon gameplay intercepts open-world gameplay in a meaningful way, they would have brought attention to new mechanics that could only work in an open-world pokemon game.

They didn’t. They showed off a player character rolling into some bushes, and manually throwing a pokeball.

And that’s just the gameplay. Can’t we all agree this game is visual vomit? Just utterly fucking terrible to look at? There are literally fangames with SUCH better graphics. And there’s no excuse here like “oh it doesn’t LOOK like shit, looking-like-shit is its aesthetic!” No it just looks terrible on every level. The textures are so fucking muddy and stretched. The terrain is cobbled together and without inspiration; flat fields, angular hills, and randomly placed trees and bushes, all of which are rendered so badly that you can always see how 2D they are. The player models are uncomfortably stiff and expressionless. And the pokemon? The fucking pokemon?

Why do the pokemon look so fucking ugly? What’s the goddamn excuse? We see pokemon in the overworld, moving around and prancing about -- and they’re animated at like ten frames per second. That’s being generous! These pokemon look like they had three frames of animation to swap between! What the fuck is this?! Sword and Shield have overworld pokemon running around, and those didn’t need significant frame cuts! So how the hell did they manage to stumble so far backwards?! Why is this even a fucking challenge...?!?! Why do I have to be gaslit to believe that video games can’t do more than this? There are so many games doing so much, so much fucking more in even just one second of gameplay. So many games with intense graphics, explosive effects, tons of enemies and players on-screen, all this happening at once... sometimes online... and yet Pokemon still can’t even animate a fucking monkey dancing around in an empty field. What the fuck is the excuse here? How can they honestly show off this gameplay footage and feel proud of their work, without at least saying something like, “This is early-as-fuck test footage of the game, this is like one week into development, this is why it looks so ugly and unpolished.”

You know those throwaway junk games on Steam? That sell for like three or five dollars, and it’s just a really terrible FPS set in a generic wasteland environment? Yeah THOSE games look ten times better than this shit. There are so many pokemon fangames that exist that do this exact concept but DON’T look like utter garbage on the eyes at the same time. It’s baffling -- why is it so difficult for them to not make an ugly-as-sin game? Why does it have to be this way? How can the Switch host a game like BotW or Mario Odyssey but it can’t fucking handle Pokemon?

And this idea doesn’t even sound fun, the concept of being in the “ancient past” of the Sinnoh region just isn’t what I wanted. When I wanted an open-world Pokemon game, I expected it to be... you know, pokemon! I expected gyms or some kind of equivalent, I imagined it having modern sensibilities... But instead it’s this really gimmicky concept, because I guess the devs can’t possibly imagine the normal pokemon world even possibly engaging with something new and different -- no, we have to go to effectively a whole other planet just to let players have pokemon in an open world.

Ultimately these games are fucking disgusting to look at and it’s so disappointing to see them in this state. The DP remakes chose a cheap art style not because they thought it complemented Sinnoh or its story, but because it was the bare minimum to making the game and justifying a $60 price tag. Legends of Arceus has potential, but it’s showing right off the bat that it doesn’t have the manpower or passion behind it to actually live up to it, making it just another cash grab that relies on chasing the coattails of a more successful franchise. And both seem like insulting cheap answers to the two things die-hard pokemon fans have been asking for, making this situation all the worse.

The Pokemon Company doesn’t care, and neither do I anymore. I genuinely don’t see myself playing another pokemon game. It’s so sad because these games are full of potential, and a long-term commitment is obviously one of its appeals. But if this is the direction of the franchise, then fuck me. I don’t want to support ugly-as-hell spinoffs that exist only to shut up the fanbase, I hate how Sword and Shield came out and I hated how scummy the DLC was to add onto it. This series is blatantly trying to rob players by producing as absolute little as possible, they want to make money out of nothing, and I’m not coughing up that money anymore. This is ridiculous. Sword and Shield being so disappointing was one thing... the DLC being cashgrabs for material that should’ve just been post-game content was mind-numbing... but these two games looking like total garbage is on another level. It’s beyond disappointing; it’s insulting that they would even bother making these games with as little heart as they are, so clearly and obviously making games that they know players will shell out cash for regardless of its quality.

I hope the fanbase really matures and wisens up to this because that’s why we’re in this mess. You’re allowed to enjoy this “art style” of the DP remakes, you’re allowed to be hyped for the new gameplay of Legends... but please, for the love of god, have some higher standards than this. Please look at what other game companies can do with their games, and how much they charge, and how much fulfillment and content is in those games. We need to expect more from the literal most-profitable franchise of all time -- they have the resources, they have the capabilities, they choose to be lazy so that they can get as much money out of us as possible. It’s got to be put to an end. Please ask for more from these games. Please don’t settle for these games “because at least they’re still pokemon,” “because at least the pokemon battles are the same,” “because at least the older games are still technically playable.”

After all this, I just don’t believe Pokemon anymore when it tries to sell itself “to everybody.” That’s just plain not true. Their core audience is the dumbest of 10 year-olds and the dumbest of die-hard fans. They don’t care about their community any deeper than their wallets.

0 notes

buzzfeedwheeze · 7 years ago

Text

The New Teacher - Shyan AU

CHAPTER 2

Shane watched as Andrew made his way through his second bowl of cereal with milk. Only kids like that, my ass! He was beaming. It just felt so right to sit by his son’s side and enjoy a nice breakfast before leaving for work. Unfortunately, the familiarity of it brought back memories that he wish would’ve stayed buried on the depths of his mind.

He and Sara used to make pancakes of the new characters of Disney that they had been working on at the studio and Andrew would happily munch at them after pointing out mistakes in anatomy or color. The first time he did it, they were so surprised that they thought they had hurt his feelings and perhaps shut down their child, but the next time they tried to subtly make him comment it worked out fine. It should’ve been expected, after all, he was their kid and art was always a big part of their lives so it obviously would attract little Andrew. Shane remembered when they had just adopted Andrew, they were trying to figure out how to make the small 8 year-old interact with them so Sara suggested painting palm trees’ leaves on the living room wall and Andrew sat on the floor and started to make small coconuts. Even though it was sort of painful to revisit the memories, he would always have a fond smile as the mental image of a smaller Andrew with his brows furrowed as he mixed the colors to get the perfect green popped in his mind.

He sighed.

There was no use trying to hold back those memories. Watching Andrew eating his cereal while simultaneously trying to tweet just reminded him other mornings. After Andrew’s second day in high school, he wouldn’t shut up during breakfast about the art class and how the other students loved his style and of course, it was when he met the transfer student from Malaysia, Steven Lim, who even asked to keep one of his drawings.

“Dad, are you in there?” Andrew was waving a hand in front of him. “Earth to dad!”

Shane gave him a tiny nod and went back to staring at his now cold pancakes and coffee. Andrew’s voice was weak when he asked. “Are you thinking about mom again? It’s just that you have that look…”

This time Shane actually made an effort and fought back the urge to hide his emotions from the world. “I… No. Not really. Not now.” he pinched the bridge of his nose. “I wasn’t thinking about her per se and I’m definitely not in love with her anymore, kiddo. I know you might think that I am..”

“It’s not that dad…” Shane made a gesture to stop him.

“It’s just hard to sort of filter my memories. Most of my happy memories with or without you are full of your mom’s presence and it’s tough to get over the fact that I was the happiest when we were together, probably the happiest I’ll ever be. I don’t think I can find someone that will make me feel like that again.” Andrew was looking at him with a concerned expression. “No! It’s not that I am unhappy. I mean, I have you! Andrew, you are the one thing in life that matters, the one thing that makes me wake up in the morning and actually thank god that I’m alive. For you being the way that you are, I’ll forever be grateful. I still can’t believe you chose us, that you chose me.”

“Dad, cut the sentimental crap!” he shouted, but he was visibly taken aback by his dad’s declaration. “You’ll find someone better for you, someone that deserves you. You and mom were okay, but okay doesn’t mean right, you get it?”

“So…” Shane didn’t want to discuss this any further, so he did what he was good at. He changed the focus of the conversation and with a teasing smile playing on his lips he continued. “Are you and Steven right, right?”

“Ugh, you are insufferable!” he snapped as he got up and stormed off to his room, leaving a very amused Shane and his very dirty bowl to be cleaned. As Shane washed the bowl he allowed himself to wonder if maybe his son was right. What if there is someone waiting for me? Nah, that’s bullshit.

XxXxXxXxX

“Have a great day, kiddo!” Shane handed Andrew his backpack and leaned on the side of the car. “Remember to give that Bergara dude hell.”

Andrew rolled his eyes and managed to give his dad a nod before turning around and going in the direction of Steven, who waved at Shane with as much energy as puppy. He watched them holding hands and disappearing inside the school building. It was the perfect image to have in his mind before jumping inside his car and going back to his eight hour shift at the Disney Studio where he would be trying keep sanity as he worked on a new animation project. But life had other plans. As he was about to turn away he noticed a cool Jeep pulling over at the teacher’s parking lot. Shane gritted his teeth as he saw the small guy hopping off the car.

Begara noticed him and as he walked in the direction of the school staring at Shane the whole time in what was supposed to be a menacing way. The staring match didn’t last much since when Ryan was about to climb the stairs to the building he tripped on his own foot and fell. Shane’s laughed was the only thing heard on the area. The other man quickly got up and stuck his middle finger to Shane which would’ve been offensive if he wasn’t blushing like a small kid. Shane chuckled again when he heard the main door of school being slammed.

“What a lovely day.” he said between giggles.

When Shane arrived at the studio there was, indeed, a pile of things to be done, but he was on such a big mood that he actually started to whistle some Disney songs. He turned his computer on and started to work on the animation, trying to make everything in sync and all the transitions smooth to facilitate the job of the Keith, the dude responsible for checking his progress and corrected small details.

The morning passed really fast. So fast Shane didn’t notice it was time to have his lunch break and got startled when Eugene touched his shoulder.

“Jesus, Madej. It’s break time. Stop working.”

Shane got up from his chair and stretched his body, lazily. He pocketed his phone and wallet and was about to leave when he decided to go back and take his sketchbook too. Today he was feeling creative. He decided to go to the Subway near the studio where he wouldn’t have to socialize with his co-workers and where people wouldn’t be asking questions about his doodles.

The place was almost empty, there was only a family of tourists with their ridiculously big Mickey Mouse Ears hats and faces full of sunscreen. Shane ordered a sandwich and chose a more reserved booth. He settled the sketchbook on the table and picked his favorite pencil, which was really small and was completely dented from falls and nervous teeth biting into it.

He gave a tentative bite on the sandwich and moaned slightly as he tasted the unique artificial flavors that only a fast-food chain restaurant could have. No wonder everyone called him a raccoon, he’d consider almost any food delicious. Or at least edible.

Shane started to sketch and after eating half of the food and finishing the face he realized he had drawn the fucking crazy teacher. Ryan Bergara. He ripped the page off and crunched the paper. Why would he draw that guy? He decided to keep the drawing though. It was fine art. So he got the little ball of paper and placed it on his jacket’s pocket.

There was still some time left before he had to go back to work, so he decided to get a nice ice cream cone. Shane bought one with two flavors ,vanilla and cookie though, of Mr. Tinsley a cool older guy that used to work as a detective or something like that in the 70s. Since it wasn’t a hot day, but the sun wouldn’t help the case of his ice cream, he found a nice bench underneath a tree.

He got his phone out and began to browse through Instagram. Then he stopped at a new photo of Steven. In the photo Steven was wearing a tinfoil hat, which wasn’t something so unusual, but the caption of the picture was the problem.

“What the fuck!” Shane perked up on the bench and gripped the ice cream cone harder. “‘@ryanbergara lended his cool hat to me, best teacher ever :)’”

It was impossible to ignore the urge to click on the username. In fact, Shane didn’t even try to hold back. He was bombarded by a series of photos of a Mr. Bergara at Disney and Universal Studios, puppies, Lakers and mirror selfies. He sucked in a breath. If the dude wasn’t bat shit crazy he would totally be my type. His bisexual senses were tingling so he decided to close the app. Nope.

I wonder if he has a twitter account? Maybe I could fight him. Shane clicked on the blue icon on his screen and typed bergara and there it was a @ryansbergara. Shane had a devilish smile as he analised the profile. The fucking profile picture was a photo of him wearing a tinfoil hat and his header was a screenshot of the X-files opening. Not surprising at all but that made Shane itchy to annoy the guy. That was practically begging to receive some of the old skeptic treatment that his family perfect through the generations.

Shane Madej - @shalexandej 01:39 PM

@ryansbergara hey dude nice hat. going to teach the kids how to do one… oh wait you already did!

He watched as a notification pop-up appeared on his screen only a few minutes later.

Ryan Bergara - @ryansbergara 01:42 PM

@shalexandej ha ha ha very funny stalker, i didnt teach them that!! i talked about how it is useless and actually applied some scientific concepts [GIF]

Shane Madej - @shalexandej 01:43 PM

@ryansbergara THANK GOD YOU DID THAT but i’ll have you know that i instructed my kid to make your life hell

Ryan Bergara - @ryansbergara 01:45 PM

@shalexandej oh really? Cause he actually helped in class

Shane Madej - @shalexandej 01:45 PM

@ryansbergara [GIF] NOOOOOO NOT MY KID BERGARA YOU ARE A CULT LEADER

Ryan Bergara - @ryansbergara 01:46 PM

@shalexandej hahahahahhahahsahs maybe ;)

Ryan Bergara - @ryansbergara 01:46 PM

@shalexandej i have to go prepare for my next class, see ya stalker [GIF]

Shane was about to reply when he receiver another type of notification. Ryan had just followed him. Well Bergara, this might be your downfall. He clicked on the follow button and he unconsciously knew how big of mistake that decision was.

#fanfic #shyan fanfic #buzzfeed unsolved #buzzfeed worth it #shane madej #ryan bergara #steven lim #andrew ilnyckyj #mine #my fic

36 notes · View notes

dcbicki · 7 years ago

Text

“You’re Gonna See it Someday; It’s Affection Always” - Chapter 4

Fandom: Veep Characters: Dan Egan, Amy Brookheimer Pairing: Dan/Amy Rating: Explicit content In which Amy’s pregnant, and Dan already has a plan mapped out for them.

If she’s in this for the long haul then he will be, too. If she’s keeping this baby (his baby), then he’s keeping her close by.

If she’s ready for this, for change, for restless nights and shitty diapers at two o'clock in the fucking morning, then he’ll join her.

They fucked, and now they’re fucked.

Chapter 1: x | x Chapter 2: x | x Chapter 3: x | x

“Can you please get off your fucking phone?” Amy nudges his elbow, nods over to a poster glued on the wall opposite them, “Can’t you read?”

Dan rolls his eyes, dodges her glare and continues to type away on his cell for a moment before he shuts it off and slips it into his coat pocket.

“There’s like one poster in here, Amy.” He grumbles, scratches at his chin, holds back a yawn, “It’s not like I’m the only one doing it. It’s New York for fuck’s sake. Everyone is on their phone.”

He shoots a look over to the blonde couple sat beside the reception desk, the guy on a call, the heavily pregnant girl quite clearly texting someone.

“I’m not.”

“Remind me to get you a medal for that, by the way. This is probably the first time I’ve ever seen you holding something other than your phone.”

There’s a pamphlet in her hands, and she’s been scanning it front-to-back for like twenty minutes now.

“It’s informative. And I’ve told everyone I’m unavailable right now anyway, so…”

“Really? You told Selina you were unavailable?” Dan perks a brow, turns to look down at her, knee brushing against her leg and Amy flinches, shifts.

She pulls a face, “Surprisingly, she’s not being as big of a cunt about this as you’d imagine. “Besides,” she clears her throat, “it’s you she hates.”

“She doesn’t hate me.” He frowns, shakes his head in that cocky way she hates, “She needs me.”

“She needs your mediocre bullshitting skills, not your actual bullshit.” Amy shrugs, smiles softly, “And she blames you for this.

Dan sighs, huffs, uncrosses his legs and leans forward in his (squeaky) seat, rests his elbows on his knees, “Whatever. She probably just wants you to be better at this than she was. Lord fuckin’ knows Catherine wasn’t exactly raised by sane parents.”

Amy snorts, “You think we’re sane? Dan, we’ve had more breakdowns between the both of us than the whole patient list of a mental asylum. I’d be surprised if the kid didn’t come out in a fucking straitjacket.”

“Well, we can blame your dysfunctional family for those batshit genes, can’t we, Ames?”

“Oh, fuck you. You think you’re normal? I’ve seen you eat coffee.”

“It’s not my fault Gary didn’t fill up the machine-”

“Miss Brookheimer?”

“Yes.”

She’s picking up her bag before Dan can get another word in, but he stands to follow her anyway, stopping dead in his tracks when she does the same.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“In there.” He points behind her, back toward the room her doctor just emerged from and disappeared to, and then he smirks. “Let’s go.”

“No, no. You’re waiting here.”

She wags her finger, glances around the waiting room, “I invited you out of courtesy, not so you could get all hysterical and start crying and shit. Because, let’s be honest, we all know you will.”

“Amy,” Dan begins, steps closer, “I’m coming in there with you, just as I did in you last night.”

Her face flushes and she’s seriously considering slapping him in the face right in front of all of these people.

He grabs her elbows then, spins her around and walks her forward, carefully trailing at her heels.

“How are we feeling today?” Her doctor’s chipper (more than Amy would like, mind you). She’s about fifty, has long red hair pulled into a braid, glasses perched on the end of her nose. And she smiles, all white teeth and pink lips, and Amy loathes her.

“I’d rather die than be here.” Amy mumbles, feigns the smallest of smiles. She thrusts her bag into Dan’s chest, grits her teeth, “You can sit.”

He places her bag down on the floor beside the chair - has to bite his tongue first, of course - and licks his lips, “I think I’ll stand, thanks.”

“Are you the husband?”

“Husband?” There’s a snort - a choke, almost - and Amy is laughing then, “Husband, no. Fuck no.” She can feel Dan’s (annoyed) eyes on her, and it only amuses her more, “He’s just the sperm donor.”

“Can’t say I’ve ever had a donor tag along to a scan, but, hey - who am I to judge? There’s a first time for everything.” She’s smiling, all honest and true, and Dan just purses his lips, nods once or twice.

She’s facing Amy now, holding up a tube of something in her gloved hand, “Okay. Are you settled?”

The blonde on the bed adjusts slightly, tensing her shoulders as she pulls on her blouse, draws it up from under her skirt until it gathers below her breasts so her stomach is bare.

“All right.” The doctor - something Jones, maybe? - approaches then, “This might feel a little cool at first.” She flicks her hand holding the tube then, squirting some clear liquid onto Amy’s pale stomach.

She twitches, and Dan grins when she bites her bottom lip at the cold sensation.

There’s a chair pulled around then, and the older woman sits down beside Amy’s legs. She reaches over to one side, pulls the transducer out of its place and smoothes it over her patient’s belly, in circles and stripes, creating a pattern.

“I see you have a full bladder.”

“I was told it’d be clearer that way.” Amy clears her throat, avoids Dan’s curious stare as she moves one arm to rest behind her head, propping herself up.

Their doctor - Amy’s doctor - nods, smiles (again!), and she makes a strange noise as she continues to stare at the monitor.

“Yep.” She’s moving her head, craning her neck as though she’s looking for something.

Dan only notices because he’d been watching Amy watch her, watching as her body stiffened at the woman’s silence.

“What?”

He isn’t panicking, and he isn’t losing his cool - mainly because this isn’t his area of expertise and really doesn’t know shit when it comes to medical care or pregnancies or abnormalities, so he has next to no idea if something is even wrong or not.

But Amy seems concerned (well, only slightly), so he’s concerned for her (well, a little bit).

“Is there-”

“No. Sorry,” She shoots Dan a blank look, then proceeds to talk to Amy, “Just took me a moment to find the little nugget.”

Little nugget? Really?

Amy’s eyes are wide, though less than they had been a second ago, and she crinkles her nose, “Is it… healthy?”

Despite himself, Dan finds his hand reaching for her side. Not for her hand, not for her arm. But he fingers the waistband of her skirt, taps one finger along her skin.

“Everything looks good. Hang on just a sec.”

She swivels back around in her stool, clicks on some keys on the machine that make the monitor almost freeze-frame, and then she’s looking over at them again, “And… there’s your baby.”

Shit.

“Fuck.”

“Agreed.”

She holds one finger up to the screen, points at something that looks about the size of a whole fucking fig.

And then the doctor’s standing up, brushing her hands down her white coat, “I’ll give you a moment.”

Dan waits until she’s at least halfway out the door before he speaks, breaks the awkward silence, “You can see it, right?”

Amy nods, squints, “It’s so fucking… tiny.”

He shrugs at that, moves his eyes from her face to the screen again, “Takes after you, then.”

“Oh, shut up. It’s supposed to be that small.”

“Not gonna lie, it does look like you just ingested a whole fruit.”

Amy smirks, leans forward and drops her hands to her lap, carefully avoiding the goo on her stomach. “How the fuck am I gonna carry that thing around when it gets bigger?”

It’s a little surreal, in all seriousness, Dan thinks. He made that. They made that. They made a person.

“Are you gonna start crying like a little bitch now?” She jokes, jabs a finger into his ribcage, and Dan rolls his eyes, swats her hand away.

“Fuck off. It’s just… weird.”

“Put yourself in my shoes. I’m gonna have to put up with two of you now.” Amy says, raising her eyebrows, “I thought one of you was bad.”

“Oh, please, you love me.”

“Correction, I can stand you. Sometimes. On occasion.” She swallows, shifts blue eyes from his own to his chin, “Can you bring her back in here so we can get the scan and leave?”

She’s closed off suddenly, it seems, and Dan has half a mind to strap her to the bed and get her to talk to him. But he won’t, because he has other plans.

“Yeah, you know what, that’s a good idea. I think I’m losing testosterone just being in this fuckin’ building.”

The fucking scan picture doesn’t fit in her purse so she has to rely on Dan to keep it safe in his wallet.

He’s folded the screenshot in half, shoved it inside the right sleeve of his wallet, and forced that into his trousers’ back pocket.

Thankfully, there’d been a bathroom in the clinic so she could empty her bladder before he’d practically dragged her out of the building - hand around her wrist (not too tightly, just comfortably so) - and headed off towards a book store down at the end of the street.

It’s almost like he’d planned ahead, the asshole.

“I don’t have time to read you a bedtime story, Dan. I’ve got work to do.”

She’s shrugging him off when they’re past the doorway, the smell of fresh books encasing them, “As do you, by the way. In case you’ve forgotten, we have a former President to elect as president.”

“Look, I’m only doing this for your benefit,” she’s following him down aisles now, stopping at a section filled with childcare books and manuals.

“Really?” Amy groans, “I don’t have time to read up on this kind of shit. That’s what the internet was invented for. And phones. So that when I need information, I can just look it up, and I don’t have to rely on ‘Mary Sue’s Tip for the Perky Pregnancy’.”

She reads off the title, printed in big bold letters on a book behind Dan, and he shifts to pick it up and wave it in her face.

“You know what? Maybe Mary Sue could teach you some stuff.” He places the book down in her hands, much to Amy’s chagrin. And then another, and another.

It’s like he already knew which books-

“Jesus fucking Christ, is this where you were last night?” Her face is the picture of utter disbelief, mixed in with some glee for good measure, “You’re a fucking pussy, you know what?”

“What?”

“What? Ever since I fucking told you I was pregnant, you haven’t stopped, not once. It’s all ‘Oh, Amy, read this forum’ and ‘Oh, Amy, be careful’.”

She shakes her head, shoves the five books in her hands back over to him, forcing them into his chest. “I’m starting to think you’re actually excited.”

“You think I’d be acting like this if you were anybody else?”

“I don’t know, Dan. I don’t even know why you’re acting like this with me. It’s not like I’m going anywhere.”

He groans, readjusts the books so they’re all weighing in one arm, “Can’t you just be fuckin’ grateful and move on?”

“No.” Amy folds her arms over her chest, blinks once, twice, “No, because you’re being weird, and nice, and caring, and it’s fucking scary.”

He smirks then, shrugs his empty arm, “Maybe I’m just enjoying having some control over you.”

“Is that what you think this is? I let you be involved and suddenly I need you to take care of me, to watch me?” She fakes a shudder, starts to walk towards the exit. “You can’t control me, you idiot.”

“Maybe not. But it’s not like you can get rid of me, Ames.” He nods, pointedly, “It’s not like you want to.”

“I want to.”

“Fine, maybe you do. But the point is, is that now you can’t. I’m here, and I’m gonna be there, and I’m gonna be everywhere from now on. I’m gonna be right beside you whether you still want me to be or not. I’m gonna be standing right here, with you, even if you tell me to leave. Because you asked. Because you let me.”

Amy only stares up at him, all tense and heavy breaths, “You’re a fucking prick.”

“Yeah, well, you’re no picnic, sweetheart.” He informs her, one corner of his mouth turning upward, “And you chose this prick.”

“Believe me, I’ve never regretted anything more.”

“More than agreeing to move in with me?”

She doesn’t understand him. She doesn’t understand this him. And she doesn’t think she wants to.

Original Dan was already complex enough.

Asshole.

“Look, I’m gonna go pay, and then we can go. All right? Will you be happy then?” He’s talking to her as though she’s a child, and she really fucking hates it.

“I don’t think you could ever make me happy.”

“I don’t think it’s happiness you want, Amy. I think it’s comfort.”

He’s brushed past her, making his way towards the cashiers.

“Oh, and you’re gonna make me comfortable?”

The five - no, six - books slide across the counter and Dan is already pulling his card from his wallet, and Amy makes a note of avoiding looking at the picture hidden in a slot.

“I mean, it’s not gonna be a bed of roses or anything, but at least we like each other. At least we fuck pretty well.”

“So romantic.” She keeps her arms crossed, closed off, “Honestly, you’re such a fucking charmer.”

“I’m sorry, Amy, I don’t turn on the charm until the third month of dating. And we’re no there yet.”

“Trust me, it’ll be a miracle if you even survive long enough to turn it on. You have no charm. You’re just one of Satan’s little helpers dressed in a nice suit, with mediocre looks.”

The cashier has been watching them for a moment, amused, scanning the books as slowly as humanly possible, and Amy is peeved.

“Can you fucking hurry up? I’m gotta go home and slit my wrists.”

“Funny.” Dan glares, faking a smile over at the till girl. “My wife’s a little on edge.”

“Don’t you fucking dare-”

“You’d think being married to me would be comforting but, nope, she’s still just a raging bitch.”

“I swear to fuck-”

“A raging bitch with the sex drive of a retired pervert on viagra.” He can feel Amy glaring, fuming beside him, and Dan smirks wider, winks at the cashier girl, “Honestly, it’s just been fucking, and fucking, and I think she’s a little dick-crazy at this point. I mean fuck!” Dan exclaims, throwing up his hands, making a scene, watching as Amy squirms, “

The girl - no more than nineteen years old - just blinks, stares, and her cheeks flush as she chews at her bottom lip. “Okay.”

“D'you know what I mean? Of course you do, you’re fuckable.” He shrugs (with no charm, no suave).

“Would you like to sign up for our new newsletter? It’s, uh, aimed at expectant parents?”

“Yes!”

Slap him! Pull his fucking hair out, right now!

“No.”

He proceeds to give the young woman his email adress, and his phone number even though she doesn’t ask, and when his total is amounted, he pays in silence.

And, by the time they’ve left the store, by the time they’re back in her apartment, Amy is done.

She whacks his chest, beats fists against him, damn near tears his head from his shoulders. <(If she wasn’t so much shorter, she probably could have done it.)

“Can you calm the fuck down?”

“Can you die?”

Dan chuckles, tosses the heavy bag on the floor behind the door, slipping his coat for his shoulders when she’s finally stopped hitting him.

“Why are you here?”

“Because it’s late as fuck and I’m exhausted? Because you have a bed, a pretty fucking comfortable one I imagine?”

“No. No, no, no. If you’re sleeping here, you’re sleeping in here.” She points a finger down at the couch, “And I don’t have any extra pillows so you’re just gonna have to figure it out.”

“Are you fuckin’ serious?” He looks pissed, unimpressed as all hell, and Amy is fucking glowing.

She walks away then, brushing past his shoulder, heading down the small corridor to her bedroom.

Once her door has slammed shut, she makes a point of opening it again just to say, “Goodnight, douchebag.”

“Fuck you.”

He doesn’t sleep.

How the fuck is he supposed to get a good night’s rest on her sofa when it’s not even a fucking pullout?

And it seems she hasn’t slept much either because, when he gets up at three in the morning to take a leak, her bedroom door is open and she’s sat indian style on her bed, legs crossed, a book in her lap.

When the hell had she come into the living room and snatched one of those?

He goes for a piss first, carefully avoiding any floorboards that looks even remotely creaky. But then the water of the tap runs when he washes his hands, and on his walk back, she pulls him up.

“Did you know I have to gain weight?”

Dan leans in the doorway, one shoulder pressed into the wood, and he smiles (faintly), “Like that’s ever been a problem.”

“Fuck off, I’m being serious.” She looks at him (briefly, barely), and then she’s bag to reading, one hand running along her forehead. “There’s so much shit I don’t know.”

He’s really not in the mood for a heart-to-fucking-heart at three o'clock in the morning - or, well, ever - but she looks seriously unnerved and terrified, and he isn’t sure he likes it, likes watching her in pain.

Get a grip, Egan.

“Hey,”

He nears her then, walks closer until he’s at the foot of her bed, and Dan reaches a hand out to grab her leg, wrapping his palm around her ankle, “You’ll be fine.” He squeezes, and Amy holds her breath for a moment, lifting her gaze to meet his own.

“Easy for you to say, you don’t give a shit about anything.”

“That’s not true.” He frowns - for some strange reason - and he sits down beside her legs, hands still cradling her skin, still touching her smooth edges. “You know that’s not true.”

“No, I don’t. You don’t give a shit about your work, not really. You jump from one job to another and it barely even phases you. You’re a fucking snake. You shed your skin like one, anyway. I’m not like that. I don’t adjust… I can’t adjust to this.”

“Ames, come on.” He tries a smile (at least), but he’s only half-sincere because he’s sleep-deprived and also really fucking not in the mood for this kind of chitchat.

“And, let’s be honest, you don’t give a shit about your relationships either, I mean- Christ, do you even have friends or just people that you occasionally fuck or screw over?”

She sighs, heavily, and it’s so un-Amy that he hates the sound of her breath.

“Are you gonna give a crap about this kid?”

“Amy.”

“Seriously.” She nods, mostly to herself, and she plucks his hand off of her leg, holds his wrist between her fingers, “I’m not fucking around. Like, I get that you’re gonna be a dick, and I get that you’re all proud that your dick worked wonders, and I get that you think that you have some kind of weird ownership over me. I get it. I get that you’re a asshole, and there’s nothing I can do to change that.”

She lets go of him, almost as though something, as though his touch, burns her skin, “I fucking hate it, and I fucking hate you most of the time, but what I don’t get is why you’re acting like you give a shit?”

To his own surprise - or maybe it’s intentional - he crawls over the bed, all long limbs and crinkled shirt, and he knits dark brows with a sigh, and she hates the sound because it’s so unlike him.

“I’m not good at this kinda shit, Amy. You know that, probably better than anyone given no one else has ever stuck around long enough.” He almost sounds pained, pitiful , “I’m just- I don’t like not having you around.”

It’s honest, and probably the truest thing he’s ever said to her. But it’s not news.

She already knows how much he likes, enjoys her company. She already knows he likes having her around to keep him busy, on his toes. She already knows that he enjoys messing with her, using her.

“That’s not a reason.”

“What the fuck do you want me to say? Fuck.” Dan gulps, and she watches his throat, watches his façade crack, eyes wide.

He looks childlike, innocent, and it amuses her in some twisted way she isn’t sure she likes, “I’m not this fuckin’ guy, alright? But I’m trying.”

“Why the fuck are you trying?” Amy rasps, “I know you. I know you. I asked you for help. I asked the Dan Egan who calls me an uptight bitch at least once a day to help me. I didn’t ask for this… fucking… Ken doll?”

It’s bad, and she knows it.

Amy closes her eyes, close the book, “I want you to be an asshole, okay? I need you to be an asshole, because this is creeping me the fuck out. We’re not playing house.”

“I know.”

“Look, we fucked, and now we’re fucked. That’s all this is. I don’t want you to buy me dinners or show me off. I’m not a fucking prize. Take me off the fucking pregnancy pedestal. Stop giving a shit. We aren’t those people.”

“I do give a shit.”

“Then give less of a shit.” Amy shrugs, watches as he rolls his eyes, bites his bottom lip. “It’s not like I’m asking a lot of you.”

You have no idea.

He grabs her ankle again (in one hand), and rests his other hand on her knee, “Amy, I don’t give a shit about you.”

I give two shits. I give five shits. I give many shits.

Jesus fucking wept, I give all the shits.

“See?” She smirks, genuinely, and pats the hand on her knee, “There’s my asshole.” She tries to avoid letting her touch linger over his knuckles. But it’s hard, and he catches her fingers in his grasp before she can pull her hand away.

“Does this mean I can sleep with other people now?”

“No.”

“God, you’re a bitch.”

“Maybe try something other than ‘bitch’ now that I’m actually carrying your child?”

Dan’s face lightens up then, and he runs his hand up from her knuckles to her forearm, “Like a pet name?”

“No.”

“You mean you don’t want me to call you pumpkin?” He grins, and pearly whites and transparent charm, “Darling?”

“Fuck, no.”

She goes to pull her hand away - because, honestly, this is a whole lot more time than she’s usually willing to spend letting somebody touch her.

But he doesn’t let go, and she holds her breath until resignation sets it. When it does, she grabs the book on her legs and places it in his lap, randomly settling on a page to read. He lets her, doesn’t oppose.

“Sweetie? Sweetheart? Sweet thing?”

Please be joking.

“You could just call me by my name?”

“Brookheimer?” Dan grimaces, “Baby?”

“Seriously, I’m gonna puke on you if you don’t shut your mouth in the next five seconds.”

“How about I keep my mouth open, but I stop talking?”

He moves the baby book from his lap, watches as her eyes drift over the closed cover. “You can’t be serious.”

“You don’t even have to do anything, just lie there.” His hands fly around the air then, and he’s pulling on her legs again, lying her down flat on her back against the mattress, her head propped up by her pillows, “And, you know, enjoy it.”

“Can I fake it?” Amy squirms when he draws her t-shirt up her belly, scrunching the cloth up below her breasts, warm breath dancing along her stomach.

“No.”

He shakes his head, and she can feel his hair against her abdomen, feel his nose brush against her clothed pelvis, his hands slipping below the waistline of her pyjama shorts.

“Hurry the fuck up then. I’m gonna fall asleep soon.”

Dan laughs (short, cut off), and he wraps his hands around the curves of her waist instead of pulling her shorts down, “You fall asleep on me and I’ll fucking kill you.”

“Then you won’t get your fucked-up little mini-me.”

“True. Maybe I’ll just torture you a little bit.”

“Oh, and how exactly would you do that?”

“I have my ways.”

Amy’s eyes drift to a close when he starts kissing her stomach, from her chest to her navel, “Dan, you suck at foreplay. I doubt you could even get a horny nun wet.”

“Don’t underestimate me, Amy. You’ll live to regret it.”

She can feel his hand slip below the bottom of her shorts, pushing the crotch of her underwear aside to smooth his fingers along her slickness.

“Fine.”

It would have been fine if her phone hadn’t buzzed right at that moment, if Dan’s hadn’t done the same only seconds later.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

He’s up before she can even collect herself, phone pressed to his ear, talking shit down his end. It’s Ben, she figures, given Kent is calling her.

“What?”

She sounds aggravated, she knows, but honestly she has zero fucks left to give at this point. Just as she was getting into things-

“We’re gonna need you to come down to the office… right now. Selina is… how do you say… having a meltdown the size of Washington? State, not capital.”

Of fucking course.

Amy doesn’t think she’s ever gone into work looking so… tired?

Fuck, she looks and feels like hell but it’s not even four o'clock in the fucking morning so, really, who gives a flying fuck?

And Selina is wearing silky pyjama pants, for fuck’s sake.

“Ma'am?”

Her voice is low, and her phone is tight in her hand, Dan is right behind her (as per fucking usual).

“Amy! Yes.” Selina starts, walking over to the blonde, patting her on both shoulders, “I figured it out.”

“You figured what out, ma'am?”

“The perfect campaign strategy.”

Sure you did.

She can practically Dan think as much.

“You’re gonna marry Dan, and we’re gonna get Wendy - Mike whatever’s girlfriend - to write a nice little piece about the two of you, and how you’re coping with this… situation. Okay?”

Yeah, because Dan hasn’t already thought of that or anything.

Yeah, because Wendy would definitely write a little piece about two people working for the boss who fired her husband?

Sure.

“Ma'am, believe me I’ve already proposed-”

“Oh, mazel tov, then.” Ben shrugs, half-assed and careless from his seat on the conference room sofa.

His feet are propped up and he’s holding that giant mug as though it’s his golden ticket to the chocolate factory.

“No.” Amy trails off, disapproving frown evident on her face, “No. I’m not marrying him, and I’m not gonna do any fucking interviews. I’m sorry, but-”

“Amy, I have never doubted you.” Well, that’s some serious bullshit. “You have been my right hand woman since day fucking one and, right now, I need you to do this small,” Selina pinches two fingers, “small thing for me. Okay?”

Sweet fuck, send help.

“People like pregnant people. It’s not my fault you opted out of an abortion. Lord knows I would’ve fucking gotten rid of it because, let’s be honest, your baby daddy’s no prince but, hey, this is where we’re at.”

She holds up both hands innocently, palms facing Amy, and then she’s walking around the room, poking a finger at Kent’s shoulder.

“Give her some stats or something.”

He looks confused, or really rather just baffled, so Dan takes this moment to pipe up, rounding Amy’s side and clearing his throat.

“We could say that we’re engaged,” he starts off, all cunning and smart, and Amy wants to strangle him and his fucking ideas, “right? We get a ring, we get a place, we get a… crib and shit?” He spins around to face the blonde woman then, brows raised, face proud. “Yeah?”

That’s already kind of our plan, genius. It’s not like you weren’t already scanning through apartments earlier.

She breathes out deeply, feels the bones of her neck creak, muscles tightening with discomfort, “We could, theoretically.”

Selina seems intrigued, “And you’d be on board with this, Ame?”

“Can’t be any worse than actually marrying him, ma'am.” She mumbles through gritted teeth.

“Well, you’ve got a real fucking valid point there.” She agrees, clicking her tongue, squinting her eyes in Leon’s direction. “What do you think?”

Where the fuck- Who told him?

“I think if I wasn’t involved in this shit show, I’d be trying to uncover the truth behind the whole thing.”

Definitely a creeper.

“That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?” Dan pulls a face, “It’s not like it’s a fucking assassination plot or anything.” He points out.

“Realistically, Dan, if word did get out that you were fake fucking then it would be an assassination, of character. Your candidate’s.”

Selina points a finger at him, stares at Amy with wide eyes, “He has a point.”

She scratches the side of her face, sniffles.

“You fuckers better, I don’t know, grope each other in public or some shit because I’m not having my campaign fall apart when people find out you’re not really together.”

Well, it’s not all fake… The fucking is real, at least.

“Ame? You’re gonna have to let him fondle your tit over a candlelit dinner or something, okay?” Selina eyes her, “Blow him in the back of an Uber if you have to, I don’t really care.”

This is just an abso-fucking-lute disaster.

“Sure thing, ma'am.”

“You,” she turns to face Dan, allows Amy the room to breathe and walk over to the water dispenser, “You need to buy a ring. Pronto, buddy.”

“Yeah,” Ben nods, head leaning over the arm of the sofa, eyes closed, “And Amy’s a nice girl, so she needs a big rock.” His adds in his casually monotone voice.

Dan rolls his eyes, stares off at a wall with a blank expression, “Right.”

“Don’t you sass me, Danny Boy.”

“Jesus Christ, do you wanna just pick the fuckin’ ring for me?”

“Boys!” Selina shouts, slamming her hands on the table, startling Gary (half-asleep, dreaming), “Can we not do this right now? I’d like to go home soon. Some of us are exhausted.”

Amy coughs at that, at the sheer hypocrisy of Selina’s comment.

“Well, some of us we’re otherwise preoccupied, but, whatever.” Dan retorts, pulling a pissed-off face, head tilting to the side. He regrets it as soon as Selina as focuses her attention on him.

“Really, Dan?” She glares over at him, raising a brow when he slips his hands in his pocket, walks closer to Amy, closer to the exit. “It’s the middle of the goddamn night and you’re worried about your fucking blue balls?”

Don’t.

“To be honest, it was more about giving than receiving.”

Please.

“Yeah, you know what? I figured you were a giver when Amy walked in here with her legs pressed so tightly together that it looked like she was trying to walk with something shoved up her snatch.”

Fuck.

“Go home. Fuck her. Fix her.” She waves a hand over at Amy, and the younger woman is seriously gonna burst any second. “Ame? If he doesn’t get you to come, you tell me and I’ll happily castrate him for you.”

Amy only hums in reply, picks up her abandoned purse from the table, and turns to face Dan with a serious look. He seems to get the gist because he reaches for his coat and leads the way out of the office.

“She’s insane.”

“She knew you were all hot and bothered, at least.”

“Is that really all you can think about?”

“You closing your legs so tight you’d practically be smothering my dick if it was up there?” Dan shrugs, presses the button to the elevator, “Not gonna lie, that’s pretty fuckin’ hot.”

“I’m not doing that.”

“We’ll see.”

#veep #dan x amy #amy brookheimer #dan egan #veep fic #fic*#ship: dan x amy #ch: amy brookheimer #ch: dan egan #iaa*

6 notes · View notes

bluriginals · 8 years ago

Text

Blu Blogs: First Thoughts on OK K.O.!: Let's Be Heroes

So after a long day of highs and lows, I arrive home at around 5:40 pm with little expectation for anything big. I'd already heard about the teaser picture of Metal's leg and how Smash is totally, maybe (stay-tuned-for-more-news-because-this-is-how-Nintendo-rolls), coming to Switch . At best I was expecting the highlight for the new content to be some cute new thing related to NEO-KOSMOS (even though we just got a new update the day prior). But no. We got something big, something unexpected. We got...

STEVEN UNIVERSE: SAVE THE LIGHT (A SEQUEL TO THE 2015 APP ATTACK THE LIGHT) WHICH IS A FULL FLEDGED CONSOLE RPG WITH PAPER MARIO GAMEPLAY, 4 PLAYABLE PARTY MEMEBERS BEYOND THE 4 MAIN CRYSTAL GEMS AND A NEW STORY WRITTEN BY REBECCA SUGAR YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES

But that isn't what we're here for today. Today we're here to talk about the long-awaited show 3+ years in the making: Lakewood Plaza Turb--

Oh.

So I log onto tumblr and the first thing I see is this:

So my eye is immediately drawn to the girl because girls are cute she's in the foreground, and I just don't recognize her. I look at the other characters and think "wait is that rad and k.o. what the HELL is going on". So logically, that means the girl is enid, ergo something is going on relating to Lakewood Plaza Turbo. I read the comment below that said "woooo OK KO! theshow i’ve been boarding on for over a year is finally announced!!!!"

I immediately have SO. MANY. QUESTIONS. Is the series getting another app? More shorts? A game? What's going on?! And as I scroll down the truth comes alll the more clear:

Lakewood Plaza Turbo is finally becoming a show.

REDEMPTIOOON SOOOOOOOONG

But not without some changes (ala Steven U). The artstyle, name of the show, and theme were all changed and just like Steven U my kneejerk reaction was "what the fuuuuck IIIIIIIIIIIIIIS this shit?". And also like Steven U it quickly grew on me and I accepted that this was the righteous path. Well, the artstyle and theme anyway, I'm still a bit iffy on the name. But enough context, let's talk about the show!

ok i lied, more context. so part of what contributed to my kneejerk reaction was the fact that Lakewood Plaza Turbo was in development purgatory for 3 years and in that time we got the app/shorts, but also in that time shows that had been in circulation for less time like We Bare Bears and Magiswords had gotten onto CN without seemingly as much struggle. I'd just given up hope for the series becoming a show and on top of that I'd even begun to lose my liking for the pilot, but then again Early Installment Weirdness is my Achilles heel of Tropes so make of what what you will. So when I saw the show come back in such a different form I was instantly turned off. Just from how it looked I was getting Teen Titans Go! & PPG16 vibes: a loss of the show's soul.

The artstyle looked so rudimentary and basic and the theme/intro wasn't doing it any favors, with its lyrics being very non-infortmative to the premise of the show: all fluff no substances. I had come to really like Lakewood Plaza Turbo's theme because its lyrics just felt as though they encompassed the tone and subject matter of the show: stupid(in a good way)ly-awesome with a video game/anime flare). But this was just....a non-event. And once again, the simplistic artstyle is so lame! Until I began to think of it another way...

Lakewood Plaza Turbo/OK K.O.! are clearly rooted deeply in gaming/anime culture and in some ways the new theme, title, and artstyle reflect this. Starting with the new theme, check out the opening shot of it panning from space all the way down to the plaza and the shot of K.O. staring down Lord Box Man with the opposing sides behind them.

Not only is this shot really badass, but it just REEKS of anime influence! And that extends to the theme! The simplistic subject matter and referenec to being friends/heroes feels very reminiscent of 90's anime with Engrish lyrics that have a very simple, positive vibe. It fits! The subtitle "Let's Be Heroes" also reflects it but I'm not as fond of it. You know it's going to be akin to "Adventure Time with Finn and Jake", "The Amazing World of Gumball, "The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack" and "The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius": extra parts of the title that'll all be abandoned in advertising and common discussion in a year. Regardless, the title/opening grew on me. And the artstyle? Awesome! While initially reluctant I came to realize that Lakewood's artstyle wasn't all that impressive. I never really liked K.O. and Enid's noses so the cute little square Elmo/Stan Pines gumdrop is cute.

Precious.

And in general, Lakewood sort've had a generic 2010s base artstyle. It definitely had defining features such as the eyes, aforementioned noses, and character designs but the colors used along with the thin lines didn't do much to set it apart. The new proportions, radically unique way of drawing things, and scraggly crayon-like lines should help. I initially thought the style was too squishy and inconsistent but not in the good, Ren and Stimpy/Steven Universe way. But after I got addicted to the visuals in the opening, I began to really enjoy the style and see the merits of it. Especially in this shot.

It looks SO cool.

I have no idea what this artstyle resembles but the closest I can attribute it too is Sonic CD/Mega Drive and Mega Man which I LOVE.

Also forgot one thing! Both Mega Drive and OK K.O.! have scraggy outlines

It does wonders for K.O., Carol, Lord Box Man (especially Lord Box Man, the way his mouth is drawn all muppet like gives him a real sense of dimension and it's great),

Perfection.

and the other tertiary/background characters but Enid, Rad, and Mr. Gar...

Umm....

Yeaaaaah. Now granted, that opening shot of them isn't doing many favors since admittedly they look REALLY bad (mostly Enid), but even without it they still look a bit. The simple geometrics really makes Gar and Rad's muscles look not very good due to how, well, simple they are. Enid on the other hand suffers an almost opposite issue—her legs are sometimes drawn with definition/shape (like with the black and white photo storyboarder's picture from the beginning of the Blog) which makes sense considering she's probably based on Chun-Li. Other times, like the picture just above this paragraph, and this one:

Her legs are basically parallel lines that bend. Even worse is that shot above seems to be from an actual episode, meaning Enid will likely look like that a lot. In general, I think I don't think I'm happy with the new design choices for Enid. Not only is there the leg thing, but her ponytail and bandaged torso from Lakewood were a lot more appealing.

Even so it's not impossible to make any of these design choices look great. Just check out the official poster and you'll see all of them, especially the 3 we've been talking about for the past while look great.

One last thing to note on Rad/Gar/Enid's proportions: The strange Garnet-esque chest proportions on Enid and Rad's shirts despite their lower torsos indicating that there's nothing under said shirts.

Enid is a bit more understandable, as nothing about her lower torso indicates that something should be up there but this man Rad is /shredded/. You should definitely be able to see his biceps leading into the shirt, as made evident by Mr. Gar. These don't necessarily detract from the excitement of the show, but they're worth note and could become problematic if made out to be very obnoxious out of proportion in show.

Two more design changes to note before we wrap up: K.O. has a darker skin tone (which I like) and now has buttface.

Buttface, along with flat simplistic colors and thin lines will go down as the defining aesthetic traits of the 2010s.

And also Rad's antenna have gone from being on the front of his forehead to in the middle of the top of his head, which looks a lot less awkward tbh. Overall good choice.

Despite the many issues it has, the artstyle still looks pretty different from everything else we have atm, and the simple way the characters are drawn should be beneficial as with said simple characters action scenes will be a lot easier to make and thus we'll be able to get higher quality, well-animated fight scenes. Despite the bad initial reaction, I have high hopes for OK K.O. Long as they keep the tone and spirit of Lakewood Plaza Turbo alive we could be looking at the next big show. Oh, and great on Ian for percerviering and becoming the second African American to create a CN original. Can't wait to see the young K.O. rise up to greatness just like his creator.

p.s. for being the defensive teammate, steven's hp sure is garbage in that screenshot of attack the light

#The Bluriginals Blogs #OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes #OK K.O.#Lakewood Plaza Turbo

2 notes · View notes

drink-n-watch · 5 years ago

Text

Genre : Science Fiction, music, wish fulfillment, parody

Episodes: 13

Studio: AIC, A.P.P.P.

Oji, I mean Gabriel, is not having fun! One minute he was a lean mean rock god at the night if his glory and then he blinked and it was all gone. Now he’s just another middle-aged salary man shlub working way too many hours at a boring desk job just to keep his modest lifestyle. His wife doesn’t get it. She’s throwing out his guitars to make room for appliances. His son doesn’t get it, all he cares about is his silly power rangers like show. His friends don’t get it, they’re all old suddenly. But deep down there’s a passion still burning in Gabriel’s soul and it might just save the galaxy.

When I saw this older series (1999 – whoa) pop up on Crunchyroll, I was intrigued how that title matched up to the unassuming man in a tie, obviously not enjoying whatever he was typing on a computer that as pictured on the thumbnail. I read up on the synopsis. A washed-up metal guitarist turned salaryman has to fight an interstellar battle through his rock! Sounded delightfully oddball. I had to give it a watch.

you don’t need to take notes…well, if you insist

I am a staunch defender of the quality of contemporary anime and the importance of visuals to the medium. So it might surprise you to hear that I really enjoyed the classic look of this show. Don’t get me wrong, it looks old, retro even. You get a super strong 80s vibe from everything (despite being released almost 2 decades later) that was so popular 2 years ago. (I like to pretend I actually know what the 80s looked like. I don’t. I’m assuming…)

I suppose the visuals didn’t bother me because they must have been fairly impressive at the time. The designs are old fashioned but good and realistic enough to not look stupid. An odd thing for what is essentially a parody. There are occasional stylish touches added to backgrounds or scenes edited to look like old school hair rock heavy metal videos, both of which added a lot of visual interest in my opinion. And the unpretentious voice acting only made the production more charming.

Don’t get me wrong. It shows its age. There is very little movement. Still shots and reused scenes are both very frequent and of course, the aspect ratio is the old 4:6 letterbox which made me have to play with me screenshot settings every time. None of this matters much until you get to the space battles. There, the repetitive imagery and lack of dynamic animation really brought down the action. But otherwise, the production fits the narrative well.

what more can you ask for

The tag line of The Legend of Black Heaven is “Hard rock save the space” isn’t that awesome! It’s not quite up to the glory of “all your bases are belong to us” but it’s in the same vein. And it fills me with joy. Weirdly enough there are a few scenes that take place in the US with English speaking characters and it’s maybe the best English I’ve ever heard in an anime. They could have just let that voice actor proofread the tag line. Or maybe it’s that way on purpose to which I would have to tip my hat!

That’s a bit of a running theme through the series. Either because I’m not familiar enough with classic space fighting anime or 80s metal bands but I was never really sure of what’s funny on purpose and what was funny just to me. In the end, it doesn’t matter all that much but I still felt like some things were getting lost in translation. Speaking of which, the Crunchyroll subtitles did explain the silly Japanese wordplay which I thought was a nice touch.

Generally speaking, the story is pretty much what you think it is. The official synopsis really sums it up well. And the characters are quite realistic if a bit one-note. Note…get it… Cause music. One thing I should say, it often looks like a middle-aged dude’s fantasy in anime form. Oji is bored and disillusioned with his run of the mill life, annoyed by the responsibilities of having a family and a full-time job. And he’s not particularly devoted to either. Then all a sudden he can save the world through his sweet guitar riffs. He is very selfish in this new endeavour, ignoring his wife, blowing off work and even putting his son’s life in danger in the process. And the consequences are, having beautiful women throwing themselves at him. Having his poor wife (he puts her through a lot) appreciate him more because he’s in a better mood, earning the admiration of his son and all those around him. It’s pretty funny in a way but also a little sad at times. Gabe/Oji is fun enough to watch but I couldn’t help but think that it must be awful to have to put up with a guy like him in real life.

I’m sorry

I should say that this show didn’t really speak much to my sensibilities. It purposefully chose themes and topics I just have no connection to. Moreover, there isn’t all that much to the story. The space fights and music scenes are all the same so it did get a bit boring and the middle drags at times. As such, the fact that I still had fun with it speaks to its quality and I’m glad to have watched it.

If you are into the retro vibe, old school heavy metal or old school space battles (although that’s a rather underused element) you might want to give the Legend of Black Heaven a try. If nothing else, you can live your midlife crisis vicariously through anime and get it out of the way. Efficient!

to be honest, I’m not sure which is which

Favourite character: Eriko

What this anime taught me: Your partner will probably forgive just about anything as long as you look cool doing it

A drunkard is like a whisky bottle, all neck and belly and no head

Suggested drink: Black Heaven (ooohhh yeeeaaahhh)

Every time we hear the word “dream” – take a sip

Every time Oji’s family ruins everything – roll your eyes

Every time ladies be gossipy – sigh

Every time the three stooges show up – raise your glass

Every time Oji has bedhead – take a sip

Every time there’s a concert flashback – light your lighter (don’t have one? take a sip then!)

Every time we see or hear about the “Flying V” – take a sip

Every time Oji’s wife gets mad – agree

Every time we see the guitar store – take a sip

Every time Yuki wears green lipstick – take a sip

Every time we see the food cart – get a snack!

Every time we see the city lights at night – take a sip

Every time Oji gets drunk – join him

I love Bones’ visuals. They really speak to me. So once again I uploaded a whole bunch of screencaps to Pinterest and Imgur.

The Legend of Black Heaven and The Power of Midlife Crisis Genre : Science Fiction, music, wish fulfillment, parody Episodes: 13 Studio: AIC, A.P.P.P. Oji, I mean Gabriel, is not having fun!

#anime #comedy #parody #sci fi #The Legend of Black Heaven

0 notes

toonatic92 · 6 years ago

Photo

[Image description: A series of fake screenshots of the game Hiveswap Friendsim, featuring my fan troll Deonia Elenys, a short fat female troll with very long dark hair, green eyes, sickle shaped horns, acne and visible arm hair. She is wearing a straw sunhat decorated with red poppies, a green overcoat with the sleeves rolled up, a chewing necklace shaped like a green ringed planet, a dark grey T shirt with the astrological symbol for Ceres, a brown leather satchel, light brown cargo pants and various badges related to the paranormal pinned to her lapel and bag. The background is a screengrab from the game, depicting a troll suburb at night with various houses, a road, a grassy bank and mountain crags in the background. Deo is talking to the player character, her dialogue boxes are in green and the player character's are in white. Deo's typing quirk is replacing the letter 's' with '5' and capitalising the letter 'c', as well as occasionally using personalised emoticons. The player character's thoughts and actions are described with second-person perspective. 1. Deo is excited and leaning close to the player with sparkles in her eyes and a happy expression. Deo: YOU'VE HEARD OF THE LUNACRACY?! (surprised emoticon) 2. Deo is excited and flapping her hands. Deo: They control EVERYTHING. They put mind-control chemicals in our drinking water and leave chemtrails in the sky and they've replaced our world leaders with snake-people or 'sneeple' as I call them... 3. Deo is embarrassed and is blushing and scratching her arm nervously. Deo: Or... so I'm told. It's not like I actually believe in that stuff or anything... 4. Deo is determined. She is posing dramatically, her fist over her heart and there is a spotlight above her. Deo: I just investigate it. It is my duty to seek the truth, no matter what. 5. Deo is nervous and sweating. She is gesturing to the player and nervously chewing on her necklace. Deo: To that end, um... Do you wanna, like, go cryptid-hunting with me, sometime? Like, right now. 6. Same as before, except the player is talking. There are two choices for the player, but they are both the same. Player: (thinking) You highly doubt the veracity of her claims that there's a 'lunacracy' controlling everything, run by snake-people or 'sneeple', but there's a look in her eyes that suggests that if you turned her down, it would absolutely devastate her. It doesn't feel as though you have much of a choice... Options: Humour her by going cryptid-hunting. 7. Deo is happy and determined. She is posing dramatically, her arm raised pointing upwards at the sky and the spotlight is back. Deo: Cool. Well, let's go then! The truth is out there! (happy emoticon)] To cheer myself up after losing my cat Bonnie, I started working on some fake Hiveswap Friendsim screenshots featuring my fan troll Deo. I may do this for my other fan trolls as well at some point. This was also good comic, dialogue and expressions practice as well. I haven't really explored Deo's full personality much in my other drawings, but this mockup is a good illustration of her enthusiasm for the paranormal, her dedication to the truth and her vulnerability and desire to make friends despite her social awkwardness. These are the key parts of her personality and it's good to be able to depict them, finally. It was also good to finally make her autism clear with the hand flapping and chewing necklace displayed in the picture. It's difficult to see the badges she's wearing, but here's links to them anyway:

Link

Background is a screengrab from the game, provided by XxSunsetShimmer23xX Photoshop CS4

Alt. version without the dialogue boxes:

Link

Links:

DeviantART

Twitter

Instagram

#my art #fake screenshot #hiveswap #hiveswap friendsim #fantroll #homestuck fantroll #disabled character #alien character #autistic character #full circle

0 notes

lorrainecparker · 7 years ago

Text

ART OF THE CUT with Billy Fox, ACE on “Only the Brave”

Billy Fox, ACE, last spoke to Art of the Cut after he cut Straight Outta Compton. Fox’s other feature film work includes Hustle and Flow, Low Riders, Footloose and Black Snake Moan. His TV work is also notable, including the critically acclaimed and Emmy-nominated work on Band of Brothers and Emmy-winning editing on Law and Order.

(This interview was transcribed with SpeedScriber. The entire interview was transcribed within 15 minutes of completing the Skype call. Thanks to Martin Baker at Digital Heaven)

HULLFISH: I went to go see the movie last night. It really flies by for a movie that’s two fifteen in length.

FOX: Goes by very quickly. The scenes are all kind of shortish which creates a kind of momentum.

HULLFISH: Do you remember how many scenes it is?

FOX: I wanna say it’s 150.

HULLFISH: You’ve done a bunch of movies with strong music in them — pop, rock, rap — and this movie is not a music movie, but there are some nice strong musical montages to rock tracks.

FOX: I find the shots that I basically want to use and I string them together without music, but at a certain point I attach the music to it and start tweaking based on the music. And adjusting the editing of the music, depending on how recognizable the song is. When I was doing my editor’s cut I was playing with a lot of temp music, and at some point Joe (director, Joe Kosinsky) and I felt, “Let’s lose ALL of the music.” We want to make sure the scenes are playing without music. And if they play well without music, then ideally, they’ll get better with music. We came to the realization, particularly at the end, that so much of it played better dry. It plays more emotionally when it’s dry. Music can sometimes be a support system. You feel more comfortable with music sometimes, and the fact that you would normally have music at this given point and you don’t makes you even more uncomfortable.

HULLFISH: Can you think of a specific scene that you played dry?

FOX: We did an experiment with the producers where we ran the whole movie dry. Obviously the scene in the bar had music because it’s part of the scene. It played really well and it allowed you to focus on the movie itself. It was very interesting.

HULLFISH: If you add music, the music sometimes gives things away.

The Granite Mountain Hoteshots overlook a fire in Columbia Pictures’ ONLY THE BRAVE.

FOX: That’s a big deal for me. Certainly the choice of music track is important, but even more important is where the music STARTS. I have a constant struggle dealing with composers who want the music to start too early. Basically, I feel that the scene needs to establish that it NEEDS music. Sometimes a composer will give you that extra music at the top, and the composer’s intent isn’t necessarily for it to start where he starts it, but so that you can bring it in early if you feel like you need it. But when you’re on the dub stage, sometimes mixers will bring up the music as soon as it’s available.

HULLFISH: In an early firefighting scene, you leave the action for a while to show two druggies doing drugs on a couch. What was the thought process of that choice to bring that scene in at that time?… one of the druggies ends up being a central character in the movie — Miles Teller’s character, Donut.

FOX: It’s interesting because that was a scene that moved around a little bit. There were versions of the cut where the fire came to its conclusion before we went to the drug scene. But in testing, people felt that the movie got better when Miles Teller was on the screen and we felt that was a logical place to open up that fire. We didn’t move a lot of scenes around.

HULLFISH: That happens a lot with movies where the audience, or just you as an editor, realize that you need to get to a certain person or event earlier in the film. It’s not a question of shortening the whole film, but tightening between specific story beats.

FOX: In Straight Outta Compton, that whole concert sequence, which is about 40 minutes long… before that, there were other concerts, varying venues and little vignettes. Even the writers knew that where they were placed in the script was not really where they would probably end up. Those moved around continually. But in Only the Brave, not so much… a little bit of movement.

HULLFISH: I’ve had conversations — pro and con — about pre-lapping dialogue. You definitely did it several times in this movie.

FOX: Pre-lapping inside of a scene or between scenes?

Helicopter Hueys arrive to pick up crew at Chiricahua Mtn.

HULLFISH: Both, but I really mean between scenes — hearing someone speak from the next scene before you cut to the picture of that scene.

FOX: I like it. I think you have to be careful. What you have to be careful of is killing the moment of the outgoing scene. You have to give it enough breath. But if used well and the timing is right and if not overdone, it pulls you in. I know that there are editors that don’t like it. I think it would be easy to not do it, I just think it connects things up. In the old days, before digital projection and digital editing, it used to make it really complicated for reel changes but now it doesn’t really matter.

Screenshot from Adobe Premiere Pro of the “Only the Brave” timeline. (right-click on the image to open it at full resolution in another browser window.)

HULLFISH: Another show that’s using Premiere is Mindhunter. Do you want to talk about how Premiere worked for you?

FOX: I’m always watching out for better systems. In between projects, I’m always looking for what can make my next show better. And sometimes it’s as simple as just the speakers or the video monitors or my control surface. I’m always tweaking stuff. Of course, the NLE is something I’m always looking at. I’m always looking at systems that are better. I have pictures of me using a LaserEdit, CMX6000, LightWorks, Final Cut, Avid and Adobe Premiere The list keeps going. I’m always moving along.

I was keeping my eye on Premiere, like I was keeping my eye on Final Cut. For years and years I was watching and it wasn’t quite ready. And eventually it got to a point where I had to take a serious look at it. Adobe and I finally had a nice long chat and I said, “I think you have a very interesting system, but I don’t know why I want to use it. I have to be able to sell the decision to other people. I have to sell it to the head of post-production. I have to sell it to the director.” We talked for two hours and we never even turned on a system. Van Bedient of Adobe demonstrated a number of features that he thought were very cool. So then I talked to Joe about it and he was very into it.

Crew 7 in the burnt forest including Brendan McDonough (Miles Teller), Jesse Steed (James Badge Dale),Chris MacKenzie (Taylor Kitsch),Grant McKee (Sam Quinn),Andrew Ashcraft (Alex Russell), Clayton Whitted (Scott Haze), Garret Zuppiger (Brandon Bunch), Travis Carter (Scott Foxx), Anthony Rose (Jake Picking), Robert Caldwell (Dylan Kenin), Travis Turbyfill (Geoff Stults) in Columbia Pictures’ ONLY THE BRAVE.

Then I had a long chat with a team of about six people from Adobe: the product manager and marketing and myself. And I said, “I’m thinking of using your system. But I’m not interested in you just handing me a piece of software. I need your support. I need your support on a daily basis. I need bodies available to us.” And they gave us all of that. And I also said, “I have to have shared projects.” I had dealt with Final Cut without shared projects for many years and I know how to do it and you can do it and it’s fine. It’s just frustrating. It’s kind of a pain. I came up with this philosophy that I don’t buy a car without reverse. And as far as I’m concerned your editing system has to have shared projects. They said, “Well, funny you should mentioned that. We are developing shared projects.” They said we wouldn’t have it for the editors cut, which is fine, because I’m pretty independent at that point, but they said they would have shared projects for me by the director’s cut. It came right down to it and they delivered. The first version we had for the first couple of days had a couple of things we didn’t like and they fixed it immediately and it worked great.

If you compare it to the shared projects in Avid, it’s not as robust as Avid’s but that was version 1. Now at version 3, it is pretty great. It’s pretty amazing. Like any editing system, there are things you want to scream at, but largely it was fantastic. We had a great time with it. My assistant had never worked on Adobe Premiere before. He adapted very quickly and he loved it. For me it was straight-forwardish because it’s cousins to Final Cut. Once I got the philosophy locked in then I thought it was fantastic.

HULLFISH: What are you missing on Avid that you loved in Premiere?

FOX: A lot of different stuff. But probably the biggest one is that Avid is the world of constant stopping. Everything you do in Avid, you’re constantly stopping. In Final Cut – and Premiere’s even better – you’re in a world of constant rolling. You’re trimming while your cut is going. You have this momentum, and certainly you save time just because of that. I figure the time it saves me is roughly 40 minutes a day. More important than the time is the momentum. I’m adjusting this, I’m trimming this, and it just keeps on playing. So that’s probably the biggest. I’d have to think about it. There are things I really like about Avid. I think its trimming functions are very powerful. Premiere’s are actually very good, so it’s debatable which is really better. Avid is a really solid, powerful, beloved tool.

HULLFISH: I’d be interested in your take on Resolve, because it’s also very similar to Final Cut.

FOX: I know, because, as I said, I keep my eye on systems. I’ve been very impressed with it. Paul Saccone showed it to me and boy does he do a great demo. I wanna continue to learn. I’ve played with it just a little, but I know very little about it other than the demo. It seems great. I love some of the stuff. I spend so much time in audio,so Fairlight would be great. So I want to see how Fairlight interfaces. One of Resolve’s strongest things, of course, is its color correction. I love color correction and I very much like to do it. I love that process.

But on an editorial level and a sound level and even a visual effects level, I never have time for color correction. And what really intrigues me about Resolve is its collaboration and having multiple people in the same sequence at the same time. That would really be great for me to be cutting in my room, then an assistant’s in another room doing color correction and another is working on audio. That’s really powerful. Competition is good.

“Supe” Eric Marsh (Josh Brolin) and Amanda Marsh (Jennifer Connelly)

HULLFISH: Amen. Jennifer Connely’s character gets into a huge fight with Josh Brolin’s character at the horse stables of their house and the whole scene is played in a wide silhouette. It’s the kind of thing a lot of people would play — because of the intense emotion — on close ups. I loved it. Tell me about that decision.

FOX: I don’t think there’s any coverage on that and there are only two takes. Both takes are really good, but the one that’s in there? The lightning in that shot is real! I was in Santa Fe, where they shot, for about a week, and the lightning was just beautiful.

HULLFISH: There’s a follow shot of a truck that has some amazing lightning in the movie too.

FOX: Oh yeah. Most of that is real. A couple are VFX. Our visual effects editor was with us, John Carr, who was on After Effects, and he was working with ILM. So he would send plates and he would do temp versions. It was a great working relationship. Having After Effects and having ILM and being able to do Dynamic Linking, which was particularly powerful, and not have to comp the files or do anything crazy.

HULLFISH: Let’s talk a little about all those fire VFX. It looked like the plate provided you with a good sense of the shot and then the fire was layered on top.

FOX: The very end with the big, big fire where the fire was getting closer and closer and coming at them? There was a lot of natural fire there. Surprisingly a lot. But there was tremendously more in the VFX. In the scene in Yarnell where Donut is stranded behind the dozer, there were a medium number of real fires going on around him. But the interesting thing is that you can’t just take a bush and add fire to it, because part of what fire is all about is the wind. The wind just goes racing through the valleys. You can’t add fire to a natural stationary bush, because the bush should be absolutely going nuts. So they had to replace all of the bushes. All of those are CG bushes. So we’d have to decide for each shot how fast the wind was going. So first they’d have to get the movement of the bush to match the wind speed, then they’d add fire on top of that.

HULLFISH: So on something like a drone or helicopter shot of a landscape that has no fire in it, does it at least help that you have the movement and the geography of the drone plate? And all you had to do was imagine where the fire would be?

FOX: A lot of times I thought there would be fire out on the horizon or further away from camera, and I didn’t know that we’d actually be traveling WITH the fire.

I wanna backtrack a bit. When I finished the editor’s cut and Joe and I started working, I threw something out as a suggestion. The bulk of the visual effects were in that final reel, so I suggested that we start with the last reel of the movie. Let’s cut the big fire. What that does is it gives ILM a start. Get’s them started maybe a month or two early. More importantly, that’s the peak of the movie. Let’s get that done. It kind of takes the pressure off. And it worked out great. It didn’t change a lot from that original first cut that Joe and I did.

HULLFISH: That’s fascinating that you cut the last reel first. Did that inform the editing of the previous — what? six reels? seven?

FOX: Seven. Yes. It definitely informed the earlier reels. It’s also really nice to know that you don’t have this giant monster waiting for you. I like to do that actually. Get the big thing out of the way. Also, you’re starting to learn the techniques of the movie and what the language is. Every show I do, there’s a language. There’s also getting to know a character better.

Working on this, I used the same template that I used when I worked on Band of Brothers. Which is, in this case, the war and the battle, or in this case the fire, are ultimately boring. But what’s more important is the characters and the connection and the camaraderie between the individuals. On Band of Brothers, there were scenes that I had to go back and re-edit, because I now know that character better. I now understand what makes them tick.

HULLFISH: So that’s really interesting for this movie because since you’ve edited reel seven already and — for example — the character of Donut is a totally different person in reel seven than in reel one, and knowing him like you do in reel seven would give you a different perspective on that character… The subtext becomes different.

Josh Brolin and Director Joseph Kosinski on the set of Columbia Pictures’ ONLY THE BRAVE.

FOX: Yeah. Correct. I’ve always wanted to sit with a director and go over the script and talk it through. “Let’s look at this scene. What’s the importance of it. What’s really happening.” I have my own interpretation, but they’ve been living with it for so long. So I’m coming in a week or two or three before they start shooting. They’ve been living with it for a year. They know the characters. I don’t. So I’m always playing catch up.

HULLFISH: Another complicated scene to cut must have been the bar scene with all of those people and the band and the stuff going on… the music.

FOX: Like any music scene where you’ve got a song going on. You got the song going on and if you make a trim, what do you do with the music? You want the music to end at a certain place, or you want to make a transition to where you’ve got Jeff Bridges back on camera when he’s performing. So sometimes you want to cut something, but you can’t because then you won’t be able to come back at the right time. It was a very difficult scene to cut. I almost spent more time on that scene than anything. It was hard.

HULLFISH: There’s a lot of people in the scene. There’s the geography of the bar and there’s the music going on the whole time.

FOX: You’re flying around the room. You’re telling different stories. You know there’s that scene in there with Taylor Kitsch’s character ‘Mac’ and the two girls? I thought, “I wonder if this scenes gonna last?” So we discussed it at a certain point, but there’s not a lot of girls in this movie, so we were like, “No, no, no. We’ve got to keep that.” Amanda’s character: Eric’s wife was such an important character and so pivotal to the movie’s success.

HULLFISH: You were talking about matching back the mix sound to the iso tracks. That’s kind of a pain in Avid.

FOX: My assistant sets it up in a way that’s the same way that I do it on Avid. You matchframe. Your source comes back to the mix and it pops out to six tracks. It’s definitely not as elegant as how FCP-X does it.

This is the first show that I’ve done in 5.1. Adobe has a little work to do on their 5.1. I think Avid is a little more advanced. FCP-X is a little more advanced as well. At the present time, in Premiere, I run 24 tracks.

I spend a lot of time with my sound. I would say 49 percent of my time. And dealing with music and dealing with SFX. My process is that I start out by dealing with pure dialogue and picture, nothing but dialogue and picture. At a certain point — almost to clear my head a little bit — I go into sound effects world. I just build a bed. Something simple. It lets me look at the scene, but I’m actually working on something else. I come back into dialogue and I go into trimming and at a certain point I go back to sound effects and start getting more specific. More hard effects. I’m continually playing this constant game of going from editing picture and editing story to sound and music and they’re getting better and better and they’re going back and forth

HULLFISH: And the sound and picture are informing each other.

FOX: They are definitely informing each other. Both sound and picture is completely checkerboarded, so that I can easily slice underneath. My dialogue is always tight, tight, tightly cleaned. So you can play dialogue only and it sounds great. I base the mix on the dialogue. I have my dialogue living about minus ten db, and then I mix music and effects to meet that. I love using a control surface for audio. I use this Avid mixer on Avid and on Final Cut and on Premiere, and it’s the best. It just makes all the difference in the world. And I use a Tangent Devices Ripple for color correction with Premiere. I don’t have a lot of time for color correction, but the way that the Ripple works with Premiere, with 20 seconds of work, I’m done and I move on. It’s just very elegant.

HULLFISH: And having grades that match from shot to shot makes the edits appear to be cleaner, right?

FOX: Yeah. It was nice, because I didn’t have to carry a color correction stem, which I hate. And when it came time to do the DI, Joe had spent so much time dealing with the color correction that he knew what he wanted. The colorist, Mike Soa, a great colorist,. Joe said, “Here. Take the output of Premiere, and this is what I want. We’ll make it better, but for the most part, this is the look. These are the tones. All those decisions were made.

HULLFISH: I’m assuming you weren’t cutting with camera original media.

FOX: We transcoded to ProRes. For dailies, we used NextLab from FotoKem, They took all of our raw files and made editorial files and made our output files and our distribution files. NextLab is a really great box. If you haven’t gotten a demo on it, you should really check it out. Worked fabulous.

It’s how we always worked, but I’ve always been frustrated by it because ultimately when you start getting effects back from ILM, they’ve been handed the LOG plates, the uncorrected plates, When you get in the visual effect, it doesn’t have the same color correction as the footage. Joe has corrected our dailies, so that look doesn’t exist anywhere. So you’re chasing a color correction and it’s a very time consuming pain in the butt.

So on our next project, the editing system will have the LOG files only. No color correction. We will add the LUT and the CDL (color decision list) not in the timeline, but through metadata, so when you’re color correcting, your color correcting through the LUT and through the CDL. So when you get the VFX in from ILM, you just put it in the timeline with the same LUT. We were receiving 20 or 30 shots every couple of days, so that was a lot of work to have to do manually.

HULLFISH: There’s a scene in the movie during the bar scene where Donut goes out to talk on the street and in the middle of that conversation, you cut back inside the bar for a moment — kind of through a window. (We are conducting the interview on Skype and I can see Billy makes a face.) What was that face for?

Director Joseph Kosinski on the set of Columbia Pictures’ ONLY THE BRAVE.

FOX: I always had a problem with that. I know it’s done all the time in other movies. But what do you do with the music? What do you do with the sound? I’m too close to it. For me, it just doesn’t feel real.

HULLFISH: So the purpose of the shots back into the bar was to see that there’s parallel action inside the bar with Jennifer Connelly that we need to understand when we come back later?

FOX: Yes. It was setting up that when Miles and Josh come back into the bar, Jennifer would be dancing with Steinbreck. It also helps you see that she’s worrying about her husband. It also helps to set up the scene in the car right after. It just keeps her alive. I completely get the need for it. For me it bumps a little.

HULLFISH: I’m not trying to point out a bump, but as a fellow editor, it was a place where I just thought that there must have been a discussion between you and the director or whether that was scripted. And if it was scripted, sometimes you have some latitude to decide exactly where in the scene it goes — though it has to be in a pretty linear story order.

FOX: That was scripted. Originally there were actually two shots back to the bar and we simplified it a bit.

HULLFISH: I don’t want to do any spoilers, so I won’t mention the reason or situation, but there’s some really powerful cross cutting when Donut is listening to his crew over the radio, that must’ve been very difficult and complicated: When to cut to him. When to cut back to the crew.

FOX: For example, when he hears the news of the crew going into the tents, he drops his head and I had that drop of the head in another place. There was some discussion of where exactly to put it. Hearing it through his eyes. The strange thing is that we have the real audio recordings from that real event. You can go on the internet and actually hear that radio call yourself. You can hear the dispatch guy saying, “We’ve got a plane coming around…it’s looking for you…” We built that whole thing based on the real deal.

At the BBQ at the Hotshots’ HQ, “Supe” Eric Marsh (Josh Brolin)

HULLFISH: You also have to deal with making the decision of the sound through the radio and the sound live from the people on the other side of the radio.

FOX: At a certain point, we couldn’t cut back any more. So from a certain point it all had to be on Donut. I looked at a lot of different coverage of Miles and it was most powerful to stay on him and not do a lot of cuts. Especially the last bit. I think the whole thing is 30 or 40 seconds and there might be one cut. From the original cut it changed a little, but it didn’t change a lot.

HULLFISH: Anything specifically that you want to talk about from a technical standpoint?

FOX: There were a couple of things. We used OpenDrive. Have you ever used that?

HULLFISH: No.

FOX: OpenDrive is an SSD RAID solution. My understanding is that it was developed through David Fincher’s company. I cut a lot of films right here in my house, so we put the OpenDrive in the guest room. It’s in a rack. All these solid state drives. 24 terabytes and it’s loud and it needs a lot of air-conditioning, so we had to bring in a special air-conditioner. It’s really fast. I’m not sure that in our particular case that we needed that kind of speed. We were just pushing around 2K files. Adobe just finished a movie called Six Below and they were editing in 6K Raw.

HULLFISH: That’s Vashi Nedomansky, right?

FOX: Yeah. He taught me Premiere right here. He came in on three separate Saturdays and we had a great time. It was fun. OpenDrive was really a cool device. You should look into it. It was a good solution. And NextLab was particularly great. They built special edit rooms for us over at Margarita Mix in Santa Monica. We edited here at my house while they were shooting, then we moved to Margarita mix for the director’s cut and on. Very nice facility five minutes from my house.

Brendan McDonough (Miles Teller) in Columbia Pictures’ ONLY THE BRAVE.

HULLFISH: Talk to me a little about your relationship with the director. You talked a little how you wanted to be able to sit down and discuss scene objectives but that never really happened.

FOX: I didn’t know Joe. My agent got me the interview. Oblivion is one of my wife’s and my favorite movies. We watch it all the time. We love the film. So I had an interview with Joe, and we hit it off. Joe is a very very mellow and incredibly bright guy. He likes that we don’t talk a lot about it because he wants me to just interpret it however I want to interpret it. I looked at the material in a different way. I came at it from a different angle. He likes to have a fresh eye on it. Fresh Perspective.

When you have an interview with somebody, discussing the film is only part of it. You may like that person and that person may like you, but you really don’t know their sensibilities until you start working together. In Joe’s case, we locked in pretty good. We’d both see something on the screen and I could see his head turn. And I’d just say, “Yeah. See it. Got it.” We wouldn’t even have to write down a note. Life would be good if I just kept working with Joe. Sometimes directors can be complicated. Mostly I’ve worked with really nice, bright, mellow guys.

HULLFISH: What was your method of collaborating during the director’s cut?

FOX: We didn’t look at individual scenes. We pretty much would go over a reel. We would look at a large chunk of the film. I would take notes and then he would just take off. His office was next door and he’d just go there and do other stuff. Sometimes while I worked, he would go re-examine dailies. And he would come in with a list of takes he wanted to try. Sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn’t. Mostly it would. But I would work on my own for a while, then call him and say, “Ready for you. Come on back.” That was kind of the groove.

HULLFISH: Tell me your approach to a scene.

FOX: For me it’s important to have a point of view. I can’t cut a scene without having an understanding of what the scene is about. What’s the key objective? – even though it may be my interpreted key objective. What do we want to communicate or what do we want to say here? I can’t just cut something even if I have the script in front of me and there’s the dialogue. It has to be grounded in something.

As much as I absolutely love editing, the one thing I don’t love is building a first cut. For me I don’t spend too much time killing myself trying to find the right take. I look at a couple takes and if I can find one with no real mistakes and it’s good, I just do it, because at this point all I’m trying to do is build a scene with a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s there. It’s the whole body.

At that moment, whenever I edit that last chunk in, everything changes. I start molding. And I start working with the footage and I start listening to the dialogue and working with the energies. Where people are looking. Everything has to be very carefully motivated.

Once it’s feeling better’ish, I go back into dailies again. I start re-looking at raw footage and they take on a whole new color. I start seeing real subtleties. Little performances. Little things that I didn’t really see before. Now I see them because I’m now into the dynamics of the scene.

There was a day where I would spend a tremendous amount of time doing what I call a performance cut. I would string out every single line from every take and every setup. I don’t do that anymore. Very time consuming to do it. And I just feel that this process works better. I just mold it into the refined takes.

What I also do is I create a thing called my Golden Moments cut, which is not really performance-based. It’s a templated sequence I have which has leader. Everything is based on leader. Everything works with leader for me because it’s all timing and it’s all musical. And the leader sets up the rhythm. So everything I do, every little sequence or reel has its leader at the top because it sets me up, but I’ll do a Golden Moments where I have these little two second slates that say, one two three four, scattered onto the sequence. Then I go back and I start looking at the dailies. And I look for great moments. I see a great little thing and I see that it’s supposed to be at the end so I’ll move it all the way down to number 9. Or this is for the beginning so I’ll move it to number one. I find all these little little teeny tiny things that I would love to get into this cut. Maybe there’s 20 things in there or 30 things.

Now I try and see what I can put into the cut. And the thing I find fascinating is that these are all GREAT moments, but when I try to fit them into the cut, I’ll find that it’s stronger just to be on the person. And of the 30 really good moments that I’ve put in my Golden Moments, I’m lucky if I put in five. I couldn’t find a home for them. “Oh my God! That’s such an amazing shot!” Great. Let’s find a home for it.” And then the director sees why it’s not in. Sometimes you can see it in another editor’s work where they forced in all of the great little moments. I think the key thing that makes a really good editor is not what you edit in, but it’s what you leave out.

HULLFISH: I would worry about showing that Golden Selects reel to the director because they probably want to see all those shots in.

FOX: Oh, and they do. And I let them try. “Come on. Let’s do it together. Let’s try this one. Let’s try to put it in.” And they see, “Oh, right. You’d have to cut away from this shot and it’s so much stronger to just stay on that person.” So it’s a process. It’s a process of fine tuning. I work on it. I go off and do some sound. I can feel it’s getting closer and it’s getting closer. And the thing that’s the greatest is that you take one edit, one little thing and you trim it by one frame and the whole scene just goes (BOOM). It’s no longer a series of shots, it’s a window of reality. I keep drilling on it until I get to that place.

HULLFISH: That takes some faith in your skills that you can just knock out an initial cut that may not be great, but to understand that it’s a process and that eventually you will get it there. But not to be so discouraged by the first pass… to have patience and to understand that the first cut is only part of the process. Sometimes if you let an assistant cut a scene, they kind of freak out about those early decisions. But you have to realize that that first cut is only one small step in a larger process.

FOX: Exactly. It’s part of the magic When you do your job well, it’s the invisible art. It just looks natural. It looks like nothing.

HULLFISH: So many people think that that invisibility happens the first time you put a scene together.

FOX: Wouldn’t that be nice. I am incredibly neurotic in that — even down to cutting a oner — I start to think, “This is the scene I won’t be able to figure out.” But even at the rough cut stage when I see that it’s not pretty at all, there’s something in there, where I say to myself, “This scene will work. I know I can get it there. This will be great.”

HULLFISH: I saw a quote from the fantastic Carol Littleton saying the same thing. That she’s never sure that she’s going to be able to get some scene done… but of course she does. Thank you so much for your time and I really appreciate your generosity and wisdom. Have a great time with your project.

FOX: Thank you. Bye bye.

To read more interviews in the Art of the Cut series, check out THIS LINK and follow me on Twitter @stevehullfish

The first 50 interviews in the series provided the material for the book, “Art of the Cut: Conversations with Film and TV Editors.” This is a unique book that breaks down interviews with many of the world’s best editors and organizes it into a virtual roundtable discussion centering on the topics editors care about. It is a powerful tool for experienced and aspiring editors alike. Cinemontage and CinemaEditor magazine both gave it rave reviews. No other book provides the breadth of opinion and experience. Combined, the editors featured in the book have edited for over 1,000 years on many of the most iconic, critically acclaimed and biggest box office hits in the history of cinema.

The post ART OF THE CUT with Billy Fox, ACE on “Only the Brave” appeared first on ProVideo Coalition.

First Found At: ART OF THE CUT with Billy Fox, ACE on “Only the Brave”

#viddy find

0 notes