#others he inherited from his Lesser Halves

[sinclairsolutions]

literally could not think of a more fitting shirt for Dan (though admittedly, he's only half wannabe motherfucker)

Text-free version under the cut:

[weregreatatcrime]

I'm sick and rereading Two Halves and I know I leave a lot (A LOT) of stuff in the end notes but there's actually lots of stuff I still never mention or talk about so here's a long sick (midday) ramble about things I didn't get the chance to talk about but wanted to (in somewhat of an order reminded by rereading) or at least just some lines I particularly enjoyed

It's time for chapter 7 while I fight off the sick urge to Nap. Warning for VERY dark content including suicidal ideation and Murder

I really enjoyed this chapter because I got to fully embrace and showcase some of Karai’s sadistic, bloodthirsty nature that I just hadn't been able to show yet. She's a changeling and a raised and trained assassin who hates humans. She can get NASTY when she's given the opportunity to, and the fic hadn't allowed that before this chapter. Finally I got to write my true murder girl 🧡

The very secret game between Shredder and Karai over what Foot ninja are loyal to whom. Some genuinely would rather follow Karai than him, while others just see her as a lesser of two evils. Of course this isn't all very up front- Shredder is in charge first and foremost, so of course, they all obey him. Some just... prefer to listen to the heir, when given the chance...

Shredder allows the heresy only because it's something of a game between father and daughter :) Plus she'll inherit the clan anyways, it's good to have men who will be immediately loyal to her when she does. The majority are still loyal to Him.

Even ninjas forget to look Up sometimes. Especially in their super secure throne room that shouldn't be Capable of having spies around

"Prime indicator that [Shredder] was smug about something that probably violated the Geneva Convention."

Xever was my FAVORITE villain in 2k12 as a kid. Nowadays it's Stockman, but I still have a lot of fondness for the evil murder fish

Changeling Karai makes a game of tormenting her father's Lieutenants, and Xever is her favorite toy. He's thoroughly petrified of her. He's one of the few who knows even a bit of just how far her sadistic nature goes

Karai’s first reaction to hearing she'd been *seen* while doing a secret mission was to launch herself headfirst off the roof and I wish I could say that's hyperbole, but uh, nope, that's quite literally her greatest fear and can result in her death so suicide can potentially be a better way to go than risking being hunted down by the Order

Xever thoroughly believes Karai is just manipulating the turtles so she can get in close and stab em where it hurts. From his experience, this is absolutely what she would do, and Karai has never proved him wrong about her malicious streak before

Xever equally as terrified of the Shredder because of the fact that she CLEARLY got it from him

Karai WISHES she could blow everything up on the way out like Stockman, but she can't risk the Order sticking their noses in before she's done. So she's gotta settle with dropping a metaphorical bomb instead

Karai, maybe leaving Shinigami on read is actually the WORSE option than not leaving her any sign at all

While thinking of what Karai would make into her changeling key, it didn't take me very long to think of something she would frequently have on her that would be inconspicuous. Eyeliner. That red is fire

Changelings have a LOT of backups and backups for backups

"Xever was fond of severing fingers, and she didn’t want to have to cauterize anything mid rescue."

The entire rescue scene just makes me happy. This is Karai in her element. Killing people right in plain sight without being caught, disappearing with their corpses before they're seen. This is changeling Karai doing what she was trained her whole life to do and she is GOOD at it.

Donnie was in fact drugged a second time to keep him down for a bit

Karai personally when picking a hostage turtle would've picked either Mikey or Leo, but she doesn't know about Shredder’s own plan for Donnie, so she's a bit puzzled

Personally, if Karai had designed it, rather than a bomb she would've used a biochemical agent that could've been pumped right into his bloodstream on either a programmed signal or upon someone attempting to remove it. What that agent would be would entirely depend on how much she hated the person in question

Karai has a real love for poisons that doesn't get a lot of time to shine, but it DOES pop in here and there

Despite her fucking with him, Karai did always respect Xever more than a lot of other Lieutenants. He's a lot more cunning and willing to use underhanded tactics which of course appeals to her

Ngl tempted to write a whump one-shot of what would've happened if Karai HAD shown up a bit later for the rescue

I ranted enough about fish biology in the end notes, I don't need to go on about it again here

Karai paralyzed Xever with he sword through the neck, but he WAS still alive. Just completely unable to do anything about it. Hence why she initially assumed he was dead. Sword through the skull was enough to end it though

Actually sending a sword through his thick skull required a lot of muscle, hence why she needed to put some oomph into it. Her changeling form would've managed fine but human form is a lot weaker

Imagine the scene they walked into later. Two dead foot ninja, Xever dead with Karai’s sword placed dramatically through the top of his head, the turtle missing, NONE of the cameras working, and the ONLY thing they have is a few clips of Karai sneaking in and one single shot of her dragging Donatello out of the lab while flipping off the camera. Fucking amazing

Yes, I play dnd. Sometimes when writing I use a d20 to make decisions when I can't decide because all my options are tempting. It's a great writing hack- especially because if you REALLY hate your roll, you discover that you actually did have a preferred option

[autisticunibot]

Our world and a world of magic have collided, causing chaos in both. They form a sort of ven-diagram where there are three pieces. Half of our world, half of their world, and the mess that is both other halves meshes together. Both sides blame the other for this natural disaster (nobody is responsible) and go to war. The MC is a death row inmate for murder of 38 armed guards and one corrupt billionaire (eat the rich type shit). He is saved from execution by the Collision, and seeks to start a new life in the Meshes area while avoiding both worlds. He starts by digging out a small underground area and eventually finds a half-buried Fae queen. Nearly dead, she asks that he allow her to possess him. Naturally he refuses. She explains that he will inherit her powers, rather than let some mage steal them when they find her. He eventually agrees because the surviving plan is not going to well.

Fae work like insects. The queen produces offspring who server her with their life. Only the queen can PREFORM magic (which the mc didn’t inherit). However, he CAN create lesser fae at will to do his bidding. They have will, but since they’re connected to him, when their bodies die they simply return to his mind and wait for a new body. Fae look identical to fairies but have antennae. Some fae have wings and can fly. They are significantly weaker, as all the magic in their body goes towards helping them fly, rather than physical boosts like a non-flying fae.

The MC uses his fae to dig out a large area which he converts into a nest. Making a fae body needs energy, and thus food. He slowly creates a hidden fae kingdom, while fending off threats from his world, the Magic world, and scum who raid the Meshed lands. Eventually he can create a body strong enough to hold the Queen he found. Since he doesn’t know magic, he has to make her slightly larger than human size (around 7 feet tall) to withstand her power. She proclaims him her Fae King, which he decides is fine because he has come to love the Fae as his subjects. She teaches him magic, which he has a great aptitude for, since his body has adjusted to having fae power within him.

The end of the first “season” is when the two worlds (with enlisted raiders on both sides) meet for a battle right on top of his cave system. In this battle, several things happen. First, the raiders, who have come together under one tyrant, plan to betray both sides. Additionally, all four “Champions” are present. These are the Top Fighters from each side. One biomechanicaly enhanced super soldier, one hyper-powerful Spellblade, and two from the raiders (a mech-crazed mechanic and an insane artificer, both pretending to be hired mercenaries for the sides they would fit into best, along with the rest of the raiders). After the Raiders turn on both armies, the destruction forces the MC to show up with all his magic and fae. He annihilates all three armies with a grand display of magic and strategic strength, which is amplified by being able to telekinetically communicate with the Fae Generals. The Four Champions (who have slaughtered many, many Fae bodies) team up to try and take him down. They manage to take him down and are about to finish him off when the Fae Queen shows up and drives the weakened Champions away to their respective leaders. When the MC wakes up, he decides to move far away.

The MC was badly injured during his fight, losing his left (non-dominant) hand and his right eye. He cannot fight, and must rely on the fae to move him to a far away place in the Meshed Lands.

Additionally, when the MC begins learning magic, he mixes it with what he knows about science from our world to teach himself how to do magic other than the created spells. It’s freeform magic, and is more tiring than just reciting an incantation and casting a spell.

In an attempt to start getting over my Trust Issues, I’m going to start writing even more of my ideas down in here.

[incarnationsf]

Lament, Trust, Pray, Strive

By the Rev. Darren Miner

 This is only the second Sunday in Lent, but I am already longing for Easter, for that glorious celebration of the Resurrection. But that is in the future, and for now, I find myself lamenting. I lament not just my own sins, which are many, but the brokenness of this world. The news coming out of New Zealand about a mass murder weighs heavily on my soul. Such evil is a mystery, and it is hard to live with mysteries, with things we just can’t explain or understand. But, if the truth be known, evil is a lesser mystery. Fortunately for us, there is a greater Mystery, a countervailing Mystery, a triumphant Mystery, whom we call God.

We encounter that Mystery in the first reading from Genesis. Abraham, who has not yet received his new name from God and is known as Abram at this point, is the recipient of a divine vision. God promises Abraham a great reward. But Abraham laments to God that no reward has any meaning to him since he has no children. God responds by promising Abraham offspring, despite the fact that Abraham and Sarah are both far too old to expect children. And God further promises that, from his offspring, he will have as many descendants as there are stars in the sky. To his great credit, Abraham believes the Lord.

What happens next seems bizarre to us. God commands Abraham to collect five animals and to cut three of them in half! Why? Well, this is where a little knowledge of ancient Near Eastern customs comes in handy. What is being proposed is a solemn oath-taking. In the ancient Near East, one way a person might make a solemn oath was to cut an animal in two and then to walk between the two halves while making the oath. The idea, whether spoken or left unspoken, was that the person passing through the cloven animal was accepting a curse upon himself should he fail to fulfill the oath: “May I die like these animals if I forswear myself.”

So, the cutting up of the animals is not all that strange after all. What is strange is that it is not Abraham who passes through the cloven animals and takes the solemn oath. It is God! At sundown, Abraham falls into a deep trance, and in that altered state of consciousness, he witnesses a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch being carried through the midst of the slaughtered animals by an invisible figure. A voice then declares this oath: “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.”

God kept his oath to Abraham. He had children. And they had children. And some of their descendants did indeed inherit the Promised Land. Nowadays, we have DNA tests that you can take at home and mail in. And I suppose that it would be possible to try to trace one’s ancestry back to Abraham. But that would be missing one important point. Not only did Abraham have many descendants according to the flesh. He had even more descendants according to the spirit.

Three world religions claim Abraham as their spiritual forefather: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. That’s why they are often called the Abrahamic faiths. And all combined, there are billions of us, as many as there are stars in the sky!

In a sense, the followers of these three faiths are family, spiritual descendants of a single ancestor; even so, we kill one another! Muslim extremists from the so-called Islamic State behead Christians in the Name of God. In Israel, the very land promised to the descendants of Abraham, Jews oppress their brother Muslims and Christians. Muslims kill Jews in revenge. And all the while, evangelical Christians from the United States spend money to maintain the status quo. The so-called Holy Land is, in fact, an unholy mess!

And then we come to the story of the massacre in New Zealand, in a city called Christchurch, named for the followers of the Prince of Peace; there fifty Muslims were murdered while at prayer. Although little is currently known about the murderer, he claims to have sought the blessing of a secret group of Christian Crusaders before he began his attack, and in his manifesto, he quotes Pope Urban the Second, the man responsible for the First Crusade. In other words, this evil and deluded man thinks he is on a mission from God to save Western culture from Islam.

And so I lament. We all lament. Like Abraham who lamented that he had no children, like Jesus who lamented that the city he loved had rejected God’s messengers, we lament the sad state of this world. But we need to do more than just lament. We need to stand firm in the Lord, trusting in God’s faithfulness, as did Abraham, even as we suffer. We need to pray for our enemies, and to forgive them. And we need to strive for justice and peace among all people. And so that we may have the strength to endure the struggle, we gather at this Holy Table week by week; we give thanks to the Lord; and we share in the sacred mystery of Christ’s Body and Blood. Then fed with spiritual food, we go back into the world to do the work God has given us to do, preparing for the Day when Christ returns and all the descendants of Abraham sing with one voice, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”

 © 2019 by Darren Miner. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

[bwlgeo]

Tales from the HUCU: Harvest Love Review

Disclaimer: This review is done from memory after a single viewing.  There are likely factual errors and misinterpretations abound.

    My mother is a huge fan of Hallmark movies.  When I say she’s a huge fan, I mean that as she sits, doing clerical work for her job and talking to my sister from halfway across the country, she will absentmindedly leave the Hallmark channel on in between sporadic marathons of Law & Order and Matlock and watch the original films Hallmark has managed to secrete.  Now I love my mother, so one day I decided to join her on one of these watching sessions.

    So, the two of us sat together and slogged through the Fall Harvest Hallmark original movie marathon.  The first indication that this would be no petty feat was that this marathon ran from seven in the morning to eleven at night (at which point it was promptly euthanized by a two hour block of Golden Girls).  What this means is that Hallmark channel had, to that point, created enough two hour long movies themed specifically around the Fall Harvest to fill a sixteen hour block.  That is eight films, all with different characters, actors, settings, and “plots,” that all focus very pointedly and unflinchingly on the Fall Harvest.  Luckily, I was spared from the labyrinthine sprawl of the entire marathon, and sat down to begin watching around three in the afternoon.  I was thrown in about twenty minutes into an absolute glorious gem of a film titled Harvest Love.

    So first let’s talk about the cast.  I had my predictions about Hallmark movie casts, and they were absolutely one hundred percent correct.  All of the protagonists are women, all of these women are in their late thirties to early forties, and all of them are tall, attractive white women.  There is always, and there always will be, a “best friend character.”  The best friend is perpetually and unflinchingly: younger, homelier, shorter, with darker hair, and maybe, maybe, if the stars align and the ancients decree it, they can be a minority (oh we’ll get to that, don’t worry).  There is a beautiful juxtaposition in costume design between the leads and their parasitic lesser halves wherein the leads are dressed in the manner of an early two-thousands Macy’s magazine model, all suit jackets and jeans, and the subspecies’ clothing resembles that of a nineteen sixties chemistry professor, a sea of faded cardigans.  This, as I have indicated by my vernacular, is to demonstrate the clear antiquated “alpha > beta” setup of these relationships.  These best friend characters’ lives do not matter.  They receive no characterization, no development, and no focus.  The only purpose of the best friend character in these films is to give a target to our protagonist’s lazy and lengthy exposition.  In fact, the best friend characters are rarely able to get a word in edgewise.  The best friend characters are inevitably either single, or in a completely blatant, uncharacterized marriage with a blatant, uncharacterized man.  This brings us to the second part of the cast: the men.

    Hoo boy, the men in these movies.  If someone had pitched Hallmark channel original films to me as spinoffs of the Westworld franchise in which women can pay absurd sums of money to spend painfully scripted romantic halcyon days with woefully boring attractive synthetic men, it would be very difficult to then prove to me that this summary was not true.  These leading men are synonymous, symmetrical, and all unfathomably, infallibly, detestably boring.  I actually began to feel simultaneously sorry for and angry with the casting director, whose job must be either immensely boring, or take place in a cloning laboratory.  There is one slight (read: not enough) saving grace to the male leads when compared to the female leads, and that is that they are allowed to be ever-so-slightly ethnic in appearance.  This is not to say that there are any African American or Asian leading men, GOD no, that would be RIDICULOUS, right?  No, but every so often you’ll have a leading man with a smoldering tan (I tend to defer to the adjective “smoldering” when describing these men because if these movies cannot be bothered to diversify their cast then I cannot be bothered to diversify my vocabulary).  Sure, these men are as attractive as Greek statues, but they contain equal parts personality.  Oh, and there sure are a whole fucking lot of single father doctor/farmer/lawyer/all around demigods with no personality in the bizarre Hallmark Universe Cinematic Universe (the HUCU for short).

    I’ve talked a bit about the diversity in these films, so let’s focus on that for a while, shall we?  Fuck.  Me.  Throughout the four films I watched, the eight hours of time I spent in a hideous Sisyphean trap, unable to pull myself away from the screen, I saw: one southeast Asian character, and three African American characters.  That’s it.  There are two leads per movie, one best friend per movie, one “boyfriend” in three of the movies (we’ll talk about these poor bastards in another review), four children characters across the films (we will also talk about these poor bastards later), and, on average, four extra side characters per movie.  That is thirty-five total characters across my night, and four of those characters are people of color.  Of those people of color, only one manages to make billing on the film for playing the oh-so-dynamic and nuanced role of “Asian best friend” in Love Struck Cafe.  OH BUT FUCKING WAIT.  She’s not the REAL best friend character, she is the red herring work best friend.  Once the lead gets out into the country she meets her REAL and WHITE best friend.  OF COURSE, HOW SILLY OF ME.  But this review is not about Love Struck Cafe, it is about Harvest Love, so let’s try to stay on topic.

    Harvest Love is a post-apocalyptic film about a single mother fighting tooth and nail to protect her son from the psychotic brigands in neighboring areas to the small area of farmland where she has managed to scrounge together a group of pear trees (I wrote this sentence as a joke, but now I really want this to be the real summary).  No, Harvest Love is about a single mother named Luna inheriting a massive pear farm estate out in the middle of fuck you because fuck you.  Anyway, she and her son, still grieving the loss of her husband, move out to this pear farm to get away from her job as the BEST FUCKING SURGEON her hospital has ever seen.  We know her husband has died because it is told to us explicitly and repeatedly.  Any chance to infer this loss from context or acting is annihilated by the fact that the actress could not be bothered to show a single sign of grief.  We also learn pretty early on that this mother is real negligent of her son (Again, we only know this because the characters tell us this).  She misses baseball games, and recitals, and blah blah blah.  But again, the movie doesn’t show us any of this.  Instead, they have our protagonist explain multiple times to her son how sorry she is that she misses all of these events.

    These scenes, which I hypothesize are supposed to be emotional, fall flat for two reasons.  The first reason is that this child is a blank mask of paper mache, and the second reason is that someone, be it the director, the screenwriter, or the actress playing Luna herself, decided that Luna should never, ever, ever stop smiling.  I swear, should the very ground open up beneath her feet, should her love interest be revealed to be a serial murderer (we’ll get to that), should the stars literally crash into the Earth, Luna would be floating in the vacuum of space, alone and breathless, smile carved into her face, baring her obnoxiously perfect teeth to the whole universe.  This isn’t to say the actress portraying Luna is bad.  No, Jen Lilley puts in an absolutely mediocre performance adequately showing the spectrum of emotions from happy to blissful throughout the film.  It can at least be said that she puts forth the effort to act.

    The same cannot be said of her alternate half, Ryan Paevey.  First, let me say that I literally had to look up the name of his character because the film had given me neither reason nor indication to remember anything about this man other than the fact that he, too, is a genius scientist stuck out in the middle of fuck you for reasons that are fuck you.  Of all of the men I encountered that night, good old Ryan is by far the most boring.  The male lead of Falling for Vermont is a serial murderer straight out of Dexter, the lead in Love Struck Cafe is at least a Walmart brand American Thomas Kretschmann, and, in turn, the male lead of Harvest Wedding looked so strained and furious that he could snap any second.  Poor Ryan doesn’t have the luxury (or more likely the talent) to display such depth.  No, our lead love interest’s facial expressions range from smoldering confused face to smoldering face that isn’t supposed to be confused but looks confused anyway.  Maybe at a few points he manages to snap his ceramic face into a smile, but otherwise, he simply smolders his way through the movie as he denies and decries our heroic stalker for three fourths of the movie’s run time.

    This brings me to my next focus point: OH YEAH, Luna manages to win Will’s heart simply by BEING EVERYWHERE HE IS ALWAYS.  Will works on their pear farm.  I guess.  Honestly I missed that part.  But he lives in the shed.  I guess.  Again, I was fighting to stay conscious during this film.  But he goes out and does the actual work while Luna stays in her house and laments how much she hates her job (smile never fading) and apologizes to her son for being a terrible parent (again, always smiling).  Luna almost immediately forgets her dead husband and starts trying to jump Will’s bones, namely by following him out into the fields, following him out into town, stealing his ATV and following him into the fields again, breaking into the shed to spy on what he is doing (this last one we can forgive because it’s important to the plot.  Sort of).  Then, after an HOUR AND A HALF of “I just don’t think I’m ready for a relationship,” and scenes in which the director mistook “blankly staring at each other’s blank faces” for “sexual tension,” Luna finally manages to Stockholm the fuck out of Will into loving her.

    Mmkay let’s talk about plot now.  All of the events in this film are leading up to the Fall Harvest festival (OF COURSE, OF-FUCKING-COURSE), where there is a contest to see which farm can bring in the most pears, judged by a panel of renowned no seriously I’m not joking this is all true.  The protagonist’s farm has been failing for these last few years, and there is supposed to be tension built up around whether or not our protagonist will succeed.  There is a problem with this tension.  The conflict is introduced in the form of Ronnie.  Like all other men in these movies that aren’t protagonists, Ronnie is short, homely, whiney, and pitiable.  This movie attempts to make Ronnie appear to be a villainous character.  He shows up when Luna is happily describing to her son how sorry she is that she is a terrible fucking parent and he gloats about the festival.  Luna states that, in the past, her farm has always won.  Ronnie remarks that these last few years have been different.  Luna says some other shit that I couldn’t care any less about and Ronnie walks away all dejected.

    HOLY FUCK.  Ronnie says to Luna that her farm has started to fail as a burn.  Sure, maybe Ronnie doesn’t know what the fuck is up, but we, the audience, know that Luna’s farm is failing because her husband, the man who previously ran the farm, IS FUCKING DEAD.  Normally this would be a completely devastating faux pas; it certainly stopped me in my tracks.  But that’s right, Luna doesn’t give two shits about her dead husband now that she’s met her sexy scientist neighbor guy, it doesn’t even occur to either character that Ronnie just accidentally used Luna’s husband’s untimely death as a petty insult.

    The movie then proceeds to give us more and more reasons to sympathize with Ronnie and DESPISE Luna.  There is, of course, her general disregard for her son, her general disregard for her husband’s death, her general disregard for Will’s personal space, her general disregard for the law, her general disregard for her job (it has been two weeks since she abandoned her hospital, ignoring all of their calls), and her general disregard for anything resembling emotion, but there’s also the fact that every tidbit of information we receive about Luna and Ronnie’s past as childhood rivals indicates that Luna was a huge piece of shit to Ronnie.  This isn’t the story of the little girl who got bullied getting back at the asshole who pulled her pigtails, this is the story of a malevolent psychopath returning to her hometown to finish the devastation she started on the town punching bag.  Let’s talk about how she finishes this poor fucker off.

    Like I’ve mentioned, Luna’s farm is failing.  They can’t seem to grow pears efficiently.  There’s a brief scene in which we are led to believe that Will is hiding something when he sneaks into the shed at night.  The shed he owns.  He goes into his own shed at night.  For some baffling fucking reason, Luna finds this suspicious enough to BREAK INTO HIS SHED.  She finds apples and beakers and shit.  OH YEAH FUCK ME HOW COULD I FORGET-

-When Will first shows up, Luna tells her son “Oh yeah, why don’t you go with this complete stranger we’ve met once before and go explore these pear fields?”  The little victim follows Will, thankfully doesn’t get kidnapped and eaten, and Will gives him an apple.  This is confusing to Luna.  An apple.  Because “We don’t have any apple trees here.”  So thus, there is no way he could have procured an apple.  All of us simple folk tricked into watching this excuse for a movie are using basic level logic and presuming that he just, I don’t know, bought some fucking apples.  BUT OF COURSE, WE ARE THE SIMPLE ONES-

After finding his apple meth lab, Luna confronts Will and he reveals that he has been working on secret hybrid pear-apples while tending the farm.  Hybrid.  Pear.  Apples.  So, when the harvest festival comes around, Luna tricks the whole town into helping her pick pears, Will cheats and brings  shitton of people from out of town from some stupid fucking subplot about buying a new farm or something I forgot and his stupid fucking sci-fi pearapples, and they all cheer and laugh in Ronnie’s stupid ugly face.  Haha, take that, Ronnie!  Wait, why are we glad she beat Ronnie?  She cheated and was all around a piece of shit to him and her son and her love interest and her husband’s memory.  What the fuck is this Twilight Zone-ass world?

    Let’s close off this wonderful and joyous review by talking about the single minority in this film.  I would use this time to talk about the best friend and her husband characters, but they are so absolutely underdeveloped and underutilized that I can’t even remember what they look like (other than the fact that they are white and probably blonde).  There is an elderly black man in the film, he lives somewhere and does something (I tried to remember, I really tried).  His entire purpose in this film is to sit down with our protagonist on rocking chairs outside of their pear farm and exposit.  No seriously.  Luna asks this old man about her new sexy smoldering slightly-but-not-really ethnic neighbor and this old man proceeds to read off the character biography for Will that’s in the script’s liner notes.  We, the audience, are granted an entire minute and a half long speech describing this faceless boring stupid sexy man’s backstory thanks to this film’s single person of color.  So I’d like to dedicate this review to that poor man: Tom Pickett.  In my eyes, Tom is the true hero of this film.  Certainly not fucking Luna, not her dumb son whose name I forgot, not Will and his stupid sexy boring scientist face, not even Ronnie, whose misunderstanding of social conventions was endearing in a sociopathic murderer sort of way.  No, Tom is the hero.  For sitting there and mustering every ounce of his strength and willpower to slog through this film’s garbage fucking exposition even though all of the information he tells us is shit we could have easily surmised from context.  Thanks Tom.