#reconceives

[dickggansey]

mi mamá se cruzó con la madre de mi mejor amiga de la secundaria y la señora todavia se acuerda de mí por nombre y apellido 💀

[dandanjean]

La sagesse de l'herbe

Être là, enfin. Au présent. Quand s’abolissent les frontières qui me séparent du monde. Quand reflue ma conscience, ne laissant que l’instant jaillir comme une source. Être là comme un brin d’herbe parmi les autres brins d’herbe, malmené par l’hiver, bruni par la neige, secoué par le vent. Être là, sans plus de quand ni de pourquoi. M’échapper à moi-même. * Il n’est pas forcément nécessaire…

[faewrenbird]

Okay, hold up, you know what? Since I’m at it, I also want to talk about the other big Elden Ring twt fandom discourse that makes absolutely zero sense in the context of the game other than the Good/Evil Miquella/Mohg debate, and that’s the Miquella x Radahn debate da da dummm

I want to preface by saying this is neither an anti nor pro miq/rad ship post. On the contrary, it’s a “it doesn’t even make sense to argue about it at all” post

Every time I see discourse or infighting about this topic (and there’s been a lot. Whole twt communities have cannibalized each other over it), I’m again floored that people think it warrants a debate. Like, genuinely and sincerely perplexed, and this is why:

The basis for the discourse relies on the premise that romantic and familial relationships, sex, and societal expectations in the Lands Between, necessarily mirror those things in reality. And…that entire premise is just…completely flawed and has been emphatically disproven by the source material.

Hot take, but I’m actually hard-pressed to believe that the act of sex even exists in the universe.

Here’s what the game tells us. It asserts that romantic love exists through the tale of Radagon and Rennala. It asserts that marriage exists, and that through marital union, children are conceived. This is where the similarities to reality ends. If we only had these facts to go on, the assumption that the mechanics mirror reality would be a reasonable one to make. But then the game goes all over the place and completely overturns our presumptions.

Let’s see, we have marital union that conceives children. Good. Okay, but also marital union between two selves in one body that conceives children… Oh, and also the conception of children that does not come from marital union at all, rather from the rotted battlefields of war between a brother and sister. Hm. We have a woman who sleeps with the dead, but “sleeping with” might not mean sex, oh, and she can also have a union with a corpse in game that conceives a child. Oh, but she also needs you and a bunch of other people to help conceive the child, which can later be placed over/in(?) the womb(?) of its grandmother/grandfather’s combined body, which then reconceives its father.

Can you see where I’m going with this? Depending on what angle you look at the game from, you could say it’s fraught with incest, selfcest, and necrophilia (also whatever the fuck is going on with Count Ymir). But this interpretation lacks soooo much nuance.

The thing of it is that we just don’t know how the demigods work. We don’t know the how, why, or even the if they have sexual relationships with each other in the way we’re familiar with. Your personal interpretation can be whatever you want and you literally cannot be proven wrong (or right!).

So why the hell do entire friendships get broken over whether you think twinkella wanted his brother’s gravity sword? Who knows? Who cares? You can headcanon anything you want.

People being morally performative over it is also just completely bizarre for the same reason. The relationship dynamics are between fictional gods, they literally and physically cannot be held to the same real life morals as you and I. The whole entire thing is the biggest nothingburger discourse of the fandom, and I bet the devs spent no more than five seconds considering that western fandom might be sending death threats over whether or not you like a little spice in your cosmic-god-rot-infested-golden-soup

[rescue-ram]

Okay, if I could hop in the time machine and hold the MASH writer's room at gunpoint and force them to reconceive the core of the show as a comedic trio of Hawkeye/Trapper/Oliver rather than a comedic duo of Hawkeye(and Trapper)...

Collectively, their role in the comedy is essentially the same as in canon, which is straight-men-driven-to-lunacy in playing off the military.

In the book, it's only briefly touched on, but Oliver espouses this kind of Booker T Washington racial uplift ideology and has bootstrapped his way from son of a sharecropper to member of the black elite. He's got a bit of a chip on his shoulder, and while he takes a lot of tasteless jokes on the chin with some clap backs, if he feels genuinely disrespected That Means War. Just like Hawkeye has a giant Rolodex of lunatics he's met over the years, I think playing with the dynamic that Oliver is both richer and better connected than either Trapper or Hawkeye could open up some fun avenues in stories. It could also be interesting for his character to code switch between talking to a black enlisted man and talking with like a famous surgical consultant or someone high up in the media and show his social fluidity.

Within the trio, comparing and contrasting them so they can be played off each other...

I like Oliver and Trapper both being a little older, family men, and a little more conventionally masculine in contrast to Hawkeye. In Oliver's few canon appearances you do get the sense that he and Trapper are hanging out and doing stuff with each other separately from Hawkeye. I think there's also potentially a fun geographic contrast, with them being more urban (Boston and San Francisco) and Hawkeye more of a small town bumpkin. While the scant mentions in canon actually suggest Trapper's background is more upper middle class than anything, I like the fanon that he's Boston Irish working class, and I think that could also be a fun commonality for them to have, both working their way up from impoverished backgrounds, while Hawkeye is not cash rich but a little more stable. Them being a little more grounded and playing the straight man to Hawkeye's wild card could be one end of the dynamic.

Then with Oliver and Hawkeye, you could have both of them being a little more self-interested or cagy, while Trapper is more straightforward or principled. We see a couple points in canon where Hawkeye gets a bit cynical about the system or is willing to game it, and Oliver would have a lot of experience working within a corrupt system and finding ways to turn it to his advantage. And while Hawkeye is never money motivated in the same way Frank and Charles are, his most frequent complaint is the shitty pay and multiple episodes deal with him attempting to extract more money from the army by hook or by crook, and I like to imagine Oliver, as a former football pro and current chief of neurosurgery, is an extremely ambitious guy used to being well-compensated for his talents as well. It only comes up a handful of times, but Trapper is contrasted with Hawkeye in immediately or impulsively doing the right thing, being revolted by corruption, and having a strong sense of right and wrong. Some fun potential for Hawkeye and Oliver to team up in a scheme that Trapper balks at or wants to find a different way to approach.

Then finally you get Trapper and Hawkeye bonding over being merry pranksters and silly geese, while Oliver does not want to play the fool. He'll cover for their shenanigans but is reluctant to take part because he doesn't want to be laughed at- which would also heighten the impact when he does join in. I think Trapper being Delighted by Hawkeye, while Oliver is maybe a little more Tolerant Of, could be fun and lead to good contrasting reactions to his nonsense, and maybe also set up scenarios where Trapper is torn between going along with Hawkeye or Oliver because he likes them both.

[kyouka-supremacy]

A little, not very polished ramble on Fukuchi and political theory, initially meant to be the answer to an ask questioning what I thought of the last chapter but posting separately because it ended up having little to do with the actual chapter.

This arc is good. I mean, the politics dilemmas it tackles are real and relevant (or maybe it's just me and loving politics discussion, that's a real chance too). Themes and interrogatives such as whether the eradication of states is possible; the critic to democracy in favour of a single authoritarian leader as the optimal solution for citizens' wellbeing; the utilitarian reasoning behind the justification of sacrificing a few in order to ensure the greatest good to the most; the trolley problem– would you be willing to sacrifice five hundred in order to save two-hundred and ten million; the general interrogatives on why war happens; those are all real questions that political scientists try to give an answer to. I feel like bsd still hasn't cleared up where it stands in relation to these interrogatives– a lot of it is going to be determined on what Fukuzawa is going to do with his role of Army of Mankind's leader, whether he's going to accept it or something else. But I'm EXTREMELY curious to find out how the author will answer them and the worldview bsd is going to propose accordingly.

So far, bsd has seemed to me to propose a nihilistic-political realist-nationalist worldview: good and evil are meaningless binomials (Oda in his last speech to Dazai), every man acts in their own interest and the strongest prevails (Teruko in chapter 76), a strong sentiment of pride for own country that often translates in denigration of foreigners (the way all characters from other countries are villains, a somewhat reverence for military police (though other people have interpreted it being exactly the opposite))¹. Such reading of bsd is reinforced by Fukuchi's speech in chapter 85, with Fukuchi's character being made overall unsympathetic to the reader. At that point, I was like “Ah! Of course! The nationalist-realist manga makes of the anarchist an unsympathetic terrorist!” (and I'm quite confident I'm not misinterpreting by saying he was framed unsympathetically, at least as far as his ideals go. A lot of emphasis is put on his role of torturer, and the story protagonist looks very upset by it, which feels like inducing the reader to be as well).

But perhaps I was mistaken? Maybe I really jumped to the conclusion by believing this arc would have turned in an anti-anarchism morale. And even though it's still too soon to say it won't, in the arc conclusion we saw so far anarchism was at least framed in much more favourable lenses. Episode 5x11 and the last chapters have vastly subverted the lenses the reader is called to see Fukuchi under, and it's been SO interesting to see. Because Fukuchi isn't made unsympathetic, and as consequence his anarchist ideals aren't being framed as the senseless ravings of the villain anymore. Which I didn't see coming, and was pleasantly surprised by!! Fukuchi's desire to stop war by erasing all states, if not feasible, is now at least being framed as sensate and even noble; which is quite silly given that it's the same ideals he was carrying on in chapter 85, just with more details on political theory and positive lenses. Moreover, the world integration and creation of a single-state is framed as being a natural and unavoidable progression of history, which is CRAZY to me. I mean, it's crazy because it wholly contradicts the nationalist worldviews I found previously quite solidly established in this manga (which, again, might be just a big misreading on my side but. Wow.). Double crazy because there's about one million political scientists who would disagree with it… I don't think it's that much of an affirmed theory anywhere? If anything, because it's got some pretty strong historical negations: I'd like to ask Fukuchi how the gradual disgregation of states reconciles with the dissolution of the ussr and the objective difficulty to maintain wide pieces of land unified, the equally objective difficulty to concretize the goal of European integration, the new wave of nationalism in the world and new countries actively seeking independence rather than cohesion. In the end, Fukuchi seems to propose this insane hybrid of anarchism and authoritarianism with the negation of all states and a single leader detaining all the power (aka no separation of powers, the most rudimental basis to democracy), which sounds absolutely insane to any sensate person but I suppose can even make sense in the bsd world where there's no end to craziness.

I'm very very curious to see how the army of mankind's leader thing is going to be solved. Because if Fukuzawa accepts it, that's quite affirming that the best outcome for society is an authoritarian, antidemocratic regime. And although Fukuzawa himself was shown to be critic of that much (“Even if war did cease to exist, what would remain in that world is a single leader– a dictator. History has shown time and time again that dictatorships only rot.”, chapter 112), him being cornered to ultimately accept the role would seem to suggest that THAT is the only possible answer. Which is an odd subtle not-so-subtle authoritarian agenda which would be… Interesting to see affirmed? but at least that one *is* coherent with the previous signs of nationalism. That said, again, Fukuzawa was critical of it, so I'm not sure he will be willing to follow through (and I find it hard to image a new bsd where world order has been changed. And with Fukuzawa on top of the world, for the matter.) But Fukuzawa did not crush One Order… And overall the narrative seems to have trapped him into yielding to take on the role… Aaaahh, I'm just very curious from a political theory standpoint to see how the author is going to untangle the dilemma!!!

¹ In parenthesis I'm only bringing up the most notable indicators, but those doctrines are an underlying pattern of the whole manga and several events can lead back to these beliefs; for example, how Atsushi's abuse by the hand of the orphanage director is not morally condamned and even implied to have made him stronger, the emphasis on the great power of Japan (here emblematically represented by Yokohama) as a small country / city able to stand up against several evil foreign powers that make repeated attempts to destroy it, and more.

[werecat1234]

Multiverse Madness Chapter Nine

After traveling to a few different AUs, getting Dust more and more willing to steal in the process, Horror had obtained a decent amount of stuff for his room, and he was finished for the time being. Killer had grabbed an absurd amount of fluffy blankets and pillows with horror movie characters on them for Horror, and Dust had grabbed a blade sharpening kit for him as well. Nightmare also wasn't surprised to see Killer grabbing different items when he thought Nightmare wasn't looking. If Nightmare didn't know better, he'd think Killer was hiding something from him, but he did know better, and the only thing Killer was hiding from him were things he thought Nightmare would like, and Killer would be giving them to him later.

Upon arriving back at the castle, Horror went into his room, Killer and Dust briefly going to their own rooms to deposit the things they'd grabbed for themselves before heading to help Horror. Nightmare knew he could also help, but he decided against it for a few moments, instead fixating on the small pile of things Killer had dropped off in his office at some point without Nightmare noticing. Nightmare sat down in his chair, looking over the items curiously. There was, of course, the pen from the desolate Underfell AU, and then there were refills for the pen.

There was an ink container in the shape of a coiled up black snake, it's head a part of the flip up ornate lid, it's fangs biting into the lid like it's venom was the ink inside. Another object was a black blanket with teal tassels on the end, another was a clear black bowl with black octopus tentacles crawling up the sides, holding the glass bowl within. The last object was strange, an odd one out of the other things Killer had grabbed for him, and Nightmare tilted his skull at it for a moment, trying to understand what it was.

It seemed like a sort of staff, made of black wood with designs along the sides, and the top had a button on the it. Nightmare pressed it, and the staff separated, revealing... . . . Was this a sword? Nightmare pulled the handle away from the casing, and it was indeed a hidden sword. Why in the multiverse Killer had grabbed this for him was beyond Nightmare, but it was interesting, he'd admit that.

Nightmare heard a tinkling sound of something small and hard hitting the terracotta floors of his office, seeing a small black bat with teal gem eyes, it seemingly hidden within the sword's hidden compartment. Nightmare would never cease to be amused by the things Killer brought him, and he proceeded to place the objects in plain sight. He put the pen on his desk, the ink container next to it, he put the bowl on one of the shelves with plans to put something inside it once he thought of what, he places the reconcealed sword against a bookshelf, and he put the small bat nestled under a slanted book on a shelf.

Nightmare smirked slightly at the sight of his office, viewing each of the objects as trophies demonstrating Killer's allegiance to him, which he'd earned quite successfully. Nightmare headed out of his office, going to Horror's room three doors down and stepping inside. He saw Horror attaching weapon mounts to the walls, Killer holding a few weapons while Dust sorted blankets and pillows into a bin that slid under Horror's bed.

The three looked up at his entrance, and Nightmare questioned, "is there anything you need help with in here?"

"uh.... yeah, actually. if you could hold up this mount to the wall, that'd be great." Horror replied, and Nightmare nodded, two tentacles extending to hold it up for Horror to attach to the wall.

"hey! why didn't you ask me or dust bunny to do that?" Killer asked, sounding insulted, but the emotion, as usual, wasn't present.

"you two are too short, and i don't feel like you guys making a mess or trying to piggy back on me trying to hold it up." Horror rolled his eyelight.

". . . fair." Killer sighed, handing Horror an axe once the mount was attached to the wall, Nightmare grabbing another one with his tentacles, waiting to see where Horror wanted it.

Nightmare was not one for taking orders or doing as told, but this was about helping Horror get comfortable here, and that meant helping him place things where he wanted them to go. This was Horror's home, everything in this room was his. Well, except for Horror himself, but that was another thing entirely. 

"oh, and killer?" Nightmare spoke up, gaining the skeleton's attention, "thank you for the gifts. i did need a new pen, and i'm surprised you noticed."

Killer smirked a bit, the strange feeling Nightmare had sensed back in the Underfell AU surfacing a bit before Killer replied, "thanks, boss. figured you'd like it."

Nightmare needed to figure out what the feeling was, as faint and brief as it was. It wasn't negative, and it was towards him, but it didn't fit what the others felt either. He'd figure it out eventually, Nightmare was certain of that, but in the mean time he was left to ponder. Ponder and hold up shelves for Horror to store his weapons, acting like he genuinely wanted to help him like the other two. 

The four of them spent some time working on the room, at least two hours, before the clock struck noon; lunch time. Horror's 'stomach' had been growling a bit before that, but he'd held off eating up until this time, when he smirked upon seeing the clock. The trio headed to the kitchen, Horror in the lead before pausing and wanting Nightmare to follow him.

"horror, i don't need to physically eat food." Nightmare told him.

"yeah, the boss survives on negativity in the multiverse, so every time we do our jobs, he gets fed." Killer added.

"oh..." Horror muttered, before asking, "when do i get to do that?"

"well, for me and dust we got used to this place for like two weeks, got familiar with it and with each other before heading out. like a way of trusting each other or somethin'. after that, then you get to start having fun." Killer answered, "it's also when the bad dreams settle down. i think it's because the boss's aura temporarily gives ya bad dreams before you get used to it, and from there it's smooth sailing. mostly. they flare up naturally, sure, but not as bad or as often."

"gotcha. is that true?" Horror questioned, looking over at Nightmare.

"yes, i believe so. i'm not completely certain, given how no one before you three have stayed here other than me." Nightmare lied, at least, about the first part.

"what about bill?" Dust asked.

"immune. he's a dream demon, and he doesn't sleep. if he did, it likely wouldn't effect him." Nightmare replied.

That was also a lie, but they didn't need to know that, or the truth about their nightmares. That was for him to enjoy and use.

Horror nodded, and the three went to the kitchen, Bill teleporting next to Nightmare once they were out of earshot and saying, "Awwww, you kept my secret~"

"i told you i would keep things between us, cipher. i wasn't lying to you." Nightmare sighed, looking over to see him standing there with his hands behind his back, smirking at him.

"I know, but still, didn't expect you to keep your word." Bill replied.

"i trust you. it's only fair i'd want you to trust me, and for me to prove that you could." Nightmare said.

"Well, thank you. Also, I didn't see you as the type to lend a helping hand... or tentacle." Bill smirked.

"how long were you watching?" Nightmare asked.

"A while. I can see through anything similar to my true form, which also includes a triangular gap in the cobblestone wall." Bill informed.

"well, i'm sure they'll be happy for more help." Nightmare smirked at Bill.

"Not a chance." Bill shot him down.

"would it really wound you so fatally to help? i'm dealing with it." Nightmare questioned.

"Yes, it would kill me." Bill responded, joking.

"i'll dig the grave. now, i suggest heading to the kitchen, horror has an obsession with making sure everyone eats, and you, if memory serves, require food." Nightmare smirked.

"Ugh, fiiiiine. I'm going. Oh, and there's something you should probably know." Bill said.

"about your little trip to a past undertale timeline to mess with sci?" Nightmare guessed.

"Killer told you?" Bill asked.

"of course he did." Nightmare smirked.

Bill sighed, "Thought so. I've been pestering him for a while, trying to get him to help me track down the rift, but he can't. I figured he could because he reminds me of a certain someone from my multiverse, but unfortunately for me, notta. No clue on where it is or how to find it, and, to make things worse, the Star Sanses showed up."

Nightmare's eye socket widened a bit, "what were they doing there?"

"No clue, wouldn't say. Sci pointed out I was there, though, and there was almost a fight. Almost. There wasn't, and they still don't know about our little team up." Bill answered.

Nightmare sighed, "super. now they probably know you're after the rift and will guard it under lock and key."

"It was already guarded under lock and key! That's why I teamed up with you! Either way, if they know I'm after it, it still doesn't change much. They don't know why, and they know I don't know where it is, so not much changes."

"i suppose at least nothing bad came of it. just... if you find out where it is, don't go for it. i will, but only because there could be a defense mechanism against you. i'm not even supposed to be aware such a thing exists, and i'll hand the rift over to you once i get it." Nightmare told him.

"You don't even have to do that! Just break it once you find it, easy peasy. You just gotta be careful not to crack it, though. If it doesn't shatter, it'll repair itself and it'll open a wormhole to an alternate multiverse when it does. No idea what could come through or from where, or how to send it, back, so you gotta do it right." Bill explained, Nightmare nodding before Bill headed down the hallway, heading to the kitchen.

Later after the three ate and returned to working on Horror's room, Bill surprisingly joining in with the help, and the room was finished relatively quickly. From there the group headed to the living room, and since Horror had grabbed a collection of horror movies, the rest of the day was spent with them watching them. Nightmare partook in the event, seated on a couch with Killer next to him on his left, Horror and Dust on another couch with a large bowl of popcorn between them, and Bill in a recliner, leaning back in it to watch the TV with his arms behind his head. Nightmare was surprised when, three or four movies in, he felt a weight on his shoulder, and a faint sizzling sound.

He looked over to see Killer asleep, slumped against him and breathing evenly. Nightmare saw a camera flash, looking over to see Bill holding his phone up, a smirk on his face, and Nightmare held up his right hand to give a certain gesture to Bill which nearly made the dream demon burst into a fit of laughter. Nightmare carefully adjusted Killer's hood to be up, letting lay against him again without any potential pain, not that Killer could feel it. Once the movie ended, Nightmare gathered Killer into his tentacles, and Horror turned the TV off. Nightmare took Killer to his room, covering him up with the blanket he usually uses, and he heard Dust and Horror going to bed too, their doors softly clicking shut. 

That night, another nightmare greeted Horror, this one aimed to ensure Horror would become protective of his teammates, and so was the one the next night, and the next, and then the next. Nightmare made sure to grind it into Horror's mind, haunting him with nightmares of impossible probabilities of Dust and Killer being hurt or killed because Horror wasn't fast enough to aid them, or he wasn't there during a fight. It also made Horror more anxious to help them, often pacing a hole into the floor when Dust and Killer went out during fights. Bill stayed back to watch Horror while Nightmare went with the duo, and Bill told him how much Horror worried himself into stress eating.

Not that Bill needed to tell Nightmare that, he could sense it from the AU the three of them were terrorizing. Nightmare settled down the frequency of the nightmares after a bit over a week had passed, and sure enough, the moment Horror slept uninterrupted through the night, he jumped at the first chance he got to help Dust and Killer during a mission. Like this one, for example, in a Birdtale timeline, starting in Snowdin. The mission was going quite smoothly, starting off with the sans of this au exploding spontaneously, the pieces of him turning to dust as they fell from the sky. That alone was enough to start off a massive burst of panic, and Nightmare watched from the shadows as the three of them rapidly caused a surge in negativity. It only took a few minutes for Dream, Ink, and Blue to appear in the AU.

"woah, that's a new one! is... is that a horrortale?" Ink muttered, mostly to himself.

"looks like it... if nightmare keeps this up we'll be the ones getting outnumbered..." Dream sighed.

"HIS SKULL... THAT LOOKS PAINFUL..." Blue frowned.

"not as painful as his tailbone will be after we kick it!" Ink grinned.

Nightmare smirked from his hiding spot before teleporting next to Killer, saying, "they're here, so be ready. i'm trusting you can handle this?"

"of course i can. dust! any plans?" Killer called out as Dust purposely narrowly missed a fleeing monster with a Gaster Blaster, causing them to yelp and hurry away.

"horror gets ink, killer you've got blue, and i'll handle dream!" Dust replied, receiving nods.

"nightmare! cease this at once!" Dream called out, him, Ink, and Blue reaching the four of them, and he paused, "what... are you wearing?"

Nightmare smirked at him, turning fully to face him, "oh, this? do you like it? i figured if you could have a crown, i could have one as well."

Dream's eye sockets narrowed a bit in a glare, summoning his bow, only for blue magic to seize his soul and fling him through a building, Dust attacking him.

"DREAM!" Blue yelped, Killer targeting him a moment later as Horror and Nightmare ganged up on Ink.

Horror sent bone attacks at Ink as he dodged out of the way of Nightmare's tentacles, and Nightmare could see him trying to use blue magic, only for it to fail as Ink had no soul to target. Nightmare could see Horror keeping a close eye on both Dust and Killer, making sure they were safe and summoning attacks aimed at Dream and Blue when he wasn't attacking Ink. Nightmare smirked, seeing the three heroes not doing well in the battle, Killer landing a hit on Blue when Horror used blue magic on his soul, the Underswap Sans being knocked unconscious.

"blue!" Dream and Ink called out, Killer quickly moving to help Dust with Dream, making that already difficult battle that much harder. 

The two didn't stick around much longer than that, Dream grabbing Blue and teleporting them out of Birdtale, Ink right behind him.

Nightmare, Horror, Dust, and Killer stood there for a few moments, processing what just happened before Killer asked, "wait... did we just win?"

"looks like it! normally we're the ones who have to retreat!" Dust replied to Killer, the two of them exchanging a high five. 

"well, that is quite pleasant. well done you three." Nightmare smirked, and he looked around the AU, "it looks like everyone's in hiding; scared. you three, i want you each to take an area. dust, you have hotland, killer, snowdin, and horror, waterfall. once you've scared anyone you could find, meet up with me here. i'll be in the ruins, but i shouldn't take long there."

The three of them nodded, spreading out to spread negativity without the threat of being attacked by the heroes, at least for the time being. Once he went to the Ruins, Nightmare spread his aura out across the whole area, ensuring a lasting effect and terrorizing them half to death before leaving, going back to Snowdin and waiting for the other three to arrive. After ten more minutes, they returned, Dust with a bit more of his namesake on him since the last time Nightmare had seen them, and Killer and Horror didn't seem to be in that bad of moods either.

"have fun?" Nightmare asked with a smirk on his face.

"yeah, it's nice without waiting for the stupid stars to ruin the fun." Killer smirked back, tossing Nightmare a permafrosted rock in the shape of a crescent moon, and Nightmare's smirk grew upon receiving it.

"it is. now, let's go home, celebrate a bit." Nightmare said, and he perked up as he sensed negativity in the AU he'd been keeping an eye on, "actually, i'm sending you three back. something requires my attention, but i'll be back once it's settled."

"alright. you need help?" Killer asked, and Nightmare shook his head no. 

"no, but thank you. i'll see you three in a bit. don't break anything, alright?" Nightmare responded.

"it was one time..." Killer grumbled, and Nightmare teleported them back without another word, teleporting to the AU he'd been waiting so long to try to recruit the only remaining monster of: XTale.

Dream made it to the Omega Timeline with Blue in his arms, running past the residents to get to an open area under a tree where he could heal Blue. That fight had been a bad one, especially with their new member. Nightmare's numbers were growing, and he wasn't recruiting weak Sanses either. He also wasn't hesitating to rub salt in a wound, especially with the crescent moon insignia he'd stolen from who had once been Dream's brother.

Dream's fists clenched a bit, before he forced the anger down. Now wasn't the time to get upset; Blue needed help. Dream set him down, focusing his magic to his hands and pressing them against Blue's wounds, healing him. The process was a bit slow due to Dream's already low magic levels, but Dream still wasn't giving up.

Dream looked up as he heard movement next to him, seeing Core Frisk walking over before kneeling next to the two. They had light gray, almost white skin, dark gray hair that went down to their shoulders, and they had bangs that ended right over their circle, void-like eyes. They were wearing a gray sweater with light gray stripes, black shorts, white socks, and black shoes. They stopped in front of Dream and Blue before they kneeled down, hands on their knees as they looked from Blue to Dream, concern growing on their features and in their soul.

"What happened?" Core asked, their void-like eyes looking down at Blue again.

"there was another fight, and this was one we didn't win..." Dream sighed, "nightmare added another member to his team; a horrortale sans. he and nightmare were fighting ink while i fought dust and blue fought killer, and umm... the horrortale sans was helping dust and killer in between his attacks on ink, and blue got hit..."

"Blue fought Killer on his own? I thought Killer usually went for Ink?" Core asked.

"he usually does, but nightmare and the horrortale sans were fighting ink, and dust... he always fights me as soon as he sees me. i can sense such... such hatred in his soul towards me, but i don't understand why..." Dream mumbled.

"Hmm... Could Nightmare have done something to him?" Core questioned.

"i don't know... if he did, he made it difficult, if not impossible to sense. i... i don't know what to do. nightmare will keep recruiting, and if fights keep going like this, we won't stand a chance..." Dream told them, fists clenching a bit in frustration.

"Then what if you evened the odds?" Core suggested, getting Dream's attention.

"how?" Dream asked.

Dream wasn't keen on getting anyone else involved when they didn't need to be, as Blue was only there because he refused to take no for an answer on joining, and Dream and Ink had made their alliance years ago. Dream had to admit having help was nice, but fighting Nightmare was supposed to be his responsibility. He didn't want to do like he was and use others to fight his battles, having Blue as involved as he was was already worrying, but there was nothing Dream could do about it. 

"Well, I know someone here who might be willing to help you guys against Nightmare. He has a tragic past and feels horrible about what he did, and he wants to make up for it. His timeline was destroyed by Error before the truce him and Ink made, and I rescued him while he was unconscious. He... was rather displeased when he woke up, thinking he should've gone down with it, but I was able to calm him down overtime. He's been.... He needs someone to fight, Dream. He needs to have some form of purpose or something to do, otherwise he's just wasting away... He would probably jump at the opportunity to try making up for his past, even if he thinks it won't work, but Dusttale Sanses always end up blaming themselves to harshly for things they had little choice over." Core replied.

"you... want someone from the same type of au as dust to help us?" Dream asked, caught off guard and looking at Core with wide eye sockets.

"He's different. He's not as strong, but he's also not as crazy. Besides, I think he could really help you. I can take you to him, if you want?" Core offered, and Dream looked down at Blue, who was as healed as Dream could get him at the moment.

"i... ok..." Dream relented, getting up from his spot on the ground and following Core as they stood up and walked away.

"I wouldn't suggest this unless I thought it was a good idea, and I think it would be good for everyone. Well, everyone on our side, at least. Nightmare won't be happy." Core said, not sounding regretful at all.

"i still don't understand... their emotions, they all genuinely care about nightmare and each other, even dust and killer care about each other, and while the horrortale isn't happy about their pasts, he cares for them too. their emotions aren't being influenced from what i can sense, and they don't seem upset with what they're doing, especially not killer... i... i don't understand how he's doing this." Dream muttered, trying to think of how it's possible.

"Maybe Nightmare is trying something different?" Core shrugged.

"that doesn't explain how he's allowing them to feel positivity, or how a dusttale and a something new sans aren't trying to rip each others' throats out." Dream sighed, "they actually seem to get along with each other..."

"That... is weird..." Core mused, "He would've had to recruit them from a specific timeline; a glitched one where a Dusttale, a Something New, and a Horrortale timeline all intersected with an Undertale timeline, and their bond there transferred back to the timelines that intersected with it. That's what he had to have done."

"but why would he care if they worked together?" Dream questioned, "wouldn't he just make them work together?"

"But what guarantees they'd work together and wouldn't turn on each other or on him?" Core asked.

Realization hit, and Dream's eye sockets widened as he said, "i think i get it... nightmare wants them to get along. he wants them to be their most dangerous, and they're most dangerous..."

"Together." Dream and Core finished together, before Core continued, "Exactly. When they work together, they're much stronger than on their own. They have no reason not to work together if they get along, but then that goes to why they're working for him. In the Undertale timeline, they aren't villainous. Dust wouldn't do this, Horror wouldn't, and Killer might but not if Dust didn't, so he wouldn't. So what could he be doing to them to get them to want to work for him, because if he was forcing it, you'd know, right?"

"right. i don't sense that here." Dream replied, before sighing, "this just doesn't make any sense..."

"I'm sure we'll figure it out eventually. In the mean time..." Core trailed off, approaching a house reminiscent to Sans and Papyrus's house in a classic Undertale timeline, on the outskirts of the timeline, away from most of the residents, "Hopefully he can help you."

Core knocked on the door, waiting for a moment before it opened, a Sans with his hood pulled up standing in the doorway, with dark marks under his eye sockets. He looked like a regular Sans did, with the blue jacket with a gray hood, a gray sweater, black shorts with a stipe on either side, and white socks and fluffy pink slippers. The only difference was the light coating of dust that covered his clothes and stained some of his bones. He looked between the two of them with tired white eyelights, before resting his gaze on Core, curious.

"Murder, I want you to meet someone. This is Dream, my friend I told you about. Dream, this is Murder." Core introduced.

"don't mind the name. i'm retired, don't worry." Murder attempted to joke, and Dream smiled a bit.

"i know. umm... core said you could help me and my friends with something?" Dream asked.

"nightmare, right?" Murder guessed, and Dream looked at him in surprise.

"how'd you know?" Dream asked him.

"a guess. besides, you're the guardian of positivity, and i'm the strategic combat guy. i'm not one for cheering up someone, so i figured it was probably a fight, and the only one you'd need help fighting is nightmare." Murder explained.

". . . fair." Dream said, and Murder nodded.

Murder thought for a moment before stepping out of the way of the doorway, letting Dream and Core inside and closing the door behind them.

The inside wasn't very clean, but there was a lot of books on the shelves. There was a faint smell of cigarettes in the house, a few ashtrays around the area, and Dream could see liquor bottles in the kitchen, along with shot glasses out in the open for easy access.

"Have you been working on cutting back on drinking like we talked about?" Core questioned.

"kind of..." Murder replied, looking off to the side, and Core sighed.

"you drink? i couldn't tell." Dream attempted to joke, and Murder cracked a smile.

"heh, yeah. numbs the pain a bit." Murder informed as Core and Dream reached the green couch, Murder sitting down on a dusty purple recliner across from them.

"oh... there's other ways of coping, you know?" Dream brought up.

"but that's not why you're here. you're here because you need help with nightmare, and i want to know how." Murder said, changing the subject, and Dream sighed.

"he's recruiting other sanses, including another variation of yourself. me, ink and blue... we're getting outnumbered. nightmare has three sanses working for him so far, and his numbers are growing. blue was knocked unconscious this time, and me and ink took a beating. we... we need help." Dream told him.

"you want me to help you fight them?" Murder summed up.

"yeah, core said you might be up for it." Dream nodded, "there's a something new, a horrortale, and another dusttale sans like yourself working for him."

". . . tell me more about these allies of his. strengths, weaknesses, etc." Murder instructed, leaning forward in his seat.

Murder's eyelights briefly flashed red and cyan as he leaned forward, a purple vapor trail exiting from his left eyelight before they returned to normal, his eye sockets slightly narrowed in a calculating and attentive manner. Dream then explained what he knew about the trio, Murder listening intently, grabbing a lighter from his pocket and smoking a cigarette mid conversation, but still listening closely. Dream and Core weren't too happy with him smoking, but they didn't say anything, and monster cigarette smoke wasn't exactly harmful like humans' were.

"- and that's all i know." Dream said after he told Murder everything he knew.

Murder blew out a bit of smoke through his mouth, finishing the cigarette and dropping it at his feet, snuffing it out on a fireproof mat that had evidence on it that this wasn't the first time he'd done this.

"alright, count me in." Murder decided.

Discord server: https://discord.gg/wQfvxyEuvj

[kolajmag]

FROM THE ARTIST DIRECTORY

Between the Everyday and the Surreal

Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. Bordering between the everyday and the surreal, JP Wenner uncovers the internalized struggles of daily life through the amalgamated images of his digital collages. What began as a passion for the experimental realms of film evolved into a desire to reconceive the way we perceive the world around us through images. With a keen eye and instinctual hand, he began manipulating fragmented images, people, places, and objects in an organic manner. Similar to the sensation when the pieces of a puzzle perfectly interlock, he masterfully arranges his compositions until they reveal a feeling of cohesion. Read More

*****************************

Kolaj Magazine, a full color, print magazine, exists to show how the world of collage is rich, layered, and thick with complexity. By remixing history and culture, collage artists forge new thinking. To understand collage is to reshape one's thinking of art history and redefine the canon of visual culture that informs the present.

SUBSCRIBE | CURRENT ISSUE | GET A COPY

SIGN UP TO GET EMAILS

[mariacallous]

The title card that opens 1979’s original Mad Max places the action in a very near future, looming just “a few years from now.” George Miller’s cult action-thriller captured the edginess of a world teetering on the brink. The film depicts a not-quite-postapocalyptic Australia, where gangs of high-octane galoots rove the roadways on motorbikes and souped-up muscle cars, attempting to outrun the last of the lead-footed policemen: Mel Gibson’s Max Rockatanksy. Revisiting the film is exceptionally rewarding—and not just because of the grit, oddball humor, and verve of Miller’s directing. It reflects something of the ambient tensions of a world of potentially perilous fuel shortages, which threatened the whole petrol-and-plastic framework of our modern world.

Miller recalls this era with no particular fondness. He remembers, in the mid-’70s, all of the gas stations in Melbourne shutting down. Save for one. The mood was sour. The tension was thick. “It only took 10 days,” Miller says, “in this very peaceful, benign city for the first gunshot to be fired. Someone got ahead of a long queue, that went on city blocks, to get fuel. If that could happen in just 10 days, what would happen in 100 days?”

Across five films, including the new Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Miller’s franchise tracks this decline. In the original picture, the world is still fairly intact. There are diners and hospitals and happy families. People even dress more or less normally. It can feel a bit like our world: one which is collapsing but hasn’t yet totally buckled. By the time of 1982’s Mad Max 2 (released in the US as The Road Warrior), any vestiges of civilization have been blown away by an accelerated period of resource warring, nuclear conflict, and ecocide. Humanity survives in clans and roving bands, dressed in feathers and dusty leathers.

By 1985’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, civilization relies on bartering for commerce, harvesting pig shit for methane, and conflict resolution by way of gladiatorial combat. In the smash hit 2015 long-gap sequel, Mad Max: Fury Road (which recast Rockatanksy, putting Tom Hardy in the lead), things were almost cartoonishly bad: Fertile women were ferried across vast wastelands in tanker trucks, access to fresh water was hoarded by tyrannical dictators in skeleton half-masks, and all of humanity seemed to exist in a state of berserk, whooping madness. If that first film was warning—against the fetish for speed and power, against excessively extracting precious riches from a planet that could scarcely afford to give them up—the newer pictures feel not so much prescient as present: sado-comic visions of our own maddening, resource-starved world.

The Mad Max films are driven by a guiding incoherence. They offer a critique of car culture, resource scarcity, and the very things that may well have our world motoring toward its own demise, no matter how many EVs we buy. Denizens of the desolate wastelands exalt automobiles, motorbikes, engines, and especially gasoline as fetish objects. But at the same time, the films’ pleasures are guilty of this same exaltation. The thrills derive from high-octane racing, dangerous automobile maneuvers, body-mangling crashes, and the whole vroom-vroom of it all. They’re like war movies that ask us to thrill at the violence and daring of combat, while all the while muttering, “This is actually really awful, you know.” There is no effort to reconceive a world doomed by its pathological obsession with machines chugging on crude oil. Rather, the apocalyptic backdrop only furnishes fantasies of further decline.

Perhaps it’s a mistake to take films with characters called “Pig Killer,” “Rictus Erectus,” and “Pissboy” too seriously. But the Mad Max pictures underscore a deeper absurdity that undergirds the genre of postapocalyptic, ostensibly environmentalist (or at least environmentally sympathetic) entertainments that are often referred to as eco-fictions, or cli-fi, for “climate fiction.” “The climate crisis and grotesque climate inequalities are things that we are really struggling to process,” says Hunter Vaughan, an environmental media scholar at Cambridge University. “These films are touching on our collective inability to adapt to this crisis.”

Vaughan is the author of Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret: The Hidden Environmental Cost of the Movies. His text analyzes the environmental impact of the film industry, from early Hollywood to the present. Understanding the industry as inherently (and devastatingly) resource-reliant, he has come to view the very idea of “environmentalist movies” as a bit of an absurdity. “Films like Mad Max and Avatar,” he explains, “are just doing what Hollywood has always done, which is rely on choreographed violence and the enticement of spectacle. But they get to offset that to some degree by coming across as having some sort of environmentalist message.”

The whole notion of “cli-fi” as a genre suggests something a bit ominous: that the well-meaning parables of early climate fiction have now become subservient to the demands of the genre. Take Denis Villeneuve’s Dune pictures. While perfectly competent as pricey pieces of blockbuster cinema, they barely engage with the novel’s ecological concerns. Author Frank Herbert was originally inspired by the historical ability of certain indigenous civilizations to live in harmony in even the harshest environments—a noble idea that, in the Hollywood version, takes a backseat to woolly ideas around interstellar jihad and the sheer pageantry of the proceedings. Likewise, Mad Max's original warning siren has waned a bit, as the films developed their own generic language. The collapsing world is now just a canvas across which (wildly entertaining) action scenes unfold.

However absurd it may seem to scholars, Miller seems to come by his environmentalist sympathies honestly. Even outside of the Mad Max movies, many of his pictures touch resonant themes about global warming (Happy Feet), vegetarianism (Babe and its sequel), and the essential destructiveness of the modern world (Three Thousand Years of Longing). These realities have directly impacted his films. Fury Road’s production was long delayed, in part, because the Australian desert where Miller planned to film was suddenly swamped—a direct result of unpredictable climate patterns. “I see it myself,” the director says of climate change. “It’s all around us. I’ve seen both the hard statistics, and just in my own experience. So it can’t help but seep into the story.”

Furiosa is unique among the Mad Max films in that it offers an alternative to the arid, violent, boiling wastelands that dominate the franchise’s topography. The origin story of Charlize Theron’s fierce road warrior from Fury Road, the film opens in “the Green Place”: an Edenic garden governed by a tribe of warrior-women, which stands out as a lush oasis in the desert. For Miller, Furiosa offered an opportunity to one-up himself. Fury Road proved he could make a hit Mad Max movie without Mel Gibson. Now, he hopes to show he can make another without Max (though he does appear, very briefly). “If you just do the same thing again and again, there’s hardly any point,” he says. “There’s an inherent cynicism to it.”

Snatched from safety, Furiosa (played by Ayla Browne as a child and Anya Taylor-Joy as an adult) is raised among a motorcycle death cult, led by the madman-prophet Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, sporting an impressive prosthetic schnoz). In time, she’s traded away to Immortan Joe, Fury Road’s big bad, and learns to survive and thrive among his clan of face-painted, aerosol-huffing cultists. Building out the world of Fury Road, Furiosa traces the fragile trade dynamics between three strongman leaders, each hoarding a key resource: fresh water, fuel, and bullets. As Furiosa navigates these violent trade routes, she hatches her own plan to avenge herself on Dementus and burn rubber back to the Green Place.

In actually bothering to imagine what some alternative to the wasteland might look like, Furiosa moves past the typically narrow horizons of most cli-fi. Nicole Seymour, who teaches environmental literature at California State University, Fullerton, notes that most environmentalist narratives stop short of actually conceiving of what a new, better world might look like. “I think that would require you to do more implicating, and more work,” she says, “which no one wants to do.” She notes that most utopian environmentalist literature tends to buck the mainstream, foregrounding more diverse characters. “Do they want to make a movie about a Puerto Rican transgender person who time-travels?” she asks. “I would watch that!”

There’s a shopworn quote attributed to the late critic and theorist Mark Fisher, about how “it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Certainly, in the Mad Max movies, the basic systems that led to our destruction—resource hoarding, the primacy of tribal violence, the fetish for power and speed—remain intact. The sinister logic imparted to the audience is that, well, ecocide is inevitable, and so there’s little left to do than revel, laughing mad, in the explosive spectacle of our own destruction. To which an admirer of these films (like this writer) may sensibly, or cynically, respond: OK, sure … but what a spectacle.

For his part, Miller maintains that there’s a deep humanism at the core of these films, buried beneath the scrap heaps of twisted metal. “I’ve been to places where there is a lot of trauma and poverty,” he says. “I’m always impressed by the ability for survival. This is about our survival.”

[dandanjean]

Vivre l’amour

L’amour est un simple mot. Il est aussi ce que le cœur lui donne. Il est en soi le véhicule qui peut transporter une vie vers des gens et des lieux merveilleux, il peut aussi devenir une sorte de prison sur roues pour la personne qui n’est pas capable de sortir de soi et qui cherche à tout posséder. La première vertu de l’amour est l’acceptation de l’autre tel qu’il est, peu importe la forme de…

[obsessivelollipoplalala]

Whoever the author of this piece is, I am kissing them on the mouth. We movie defenders are correct and in alignment with Sondheim lol:

Steven Spielberg once referred to himself as a “frustrated musical director.” He’s chased the possibility of making one since the 1980s. On the journey down that road, he specifically mentioned the original film of West Side Story as an example of the “old-fashioned, conservative” style of musical he wanted to do. Come December 10th, through a fresh production of West Side Story, Spielberg’s ambition will be fulfilled. The film has picked up at least one fan already: lyricist Stephen Sondheim. “It’s really terrific,” he’s said. “It’s really first-grade, and movie musicals are hard to do.” And harder still to please a man like Sondheim. Though the 1961 West Side Story is considered among the greatest movie musicals ever produced, Sondheim doesn’t enjoy it. As a matter of fact, despite being a self-described film buff, musicals are the one film genre he didn’t take to growing up. His reasoning was expressed in relation to West Side Story in a Q&A at the National Theater: “I don’t think West Side Story is a good movie at all, because it’s not a movie – it’s a photograph of the stage.” Live theater and film may be related, but a “chasm” exists between them in technique and in their relationship to the audience. Many elements that work beautifully on stage will not work in movies, Sondheim argues, and too many film adaptations of stage musicals do not reconceive the material to suit the medium of cinema. Almost none of the films made from Sondheim’s work have done so to his satisfaction. But in the same National Theater interview, he named one exception: Tim Burton’s 2007 production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Sondheim referred to Sweeney Todd as “a movie for the stage” in his book Finishing the Hat, so perhaps it’s naturally a better fit for film. But Tim Burton is not a musical director, frustrated or otherwise. His former partner Helena Bonham Carter has said that he hates musicals; if you ask Burton, he might mention that he loved the 1955 Guys and Dolls, but “people singing is campy by nature,” and he isn’t a fan of camp. But the blood-soaked, emotionally charged, blackly comic Sweeney Todd was right up his alley, and he entertained the idea of making a film for decades before taking over from Sam Mendes. Helming any live action musical would have been new territory for Burton; he complicated the task for himself by taking on one of the most musically complex works in Sondheim’s repertoire with a cast of non-professional singers. The results didn’t set the box office on fire – very few R-rated musicals about serial killers and cannibalism would – but the take was respectable, and the critical praise was near unanimous. It’s my favorite movie musical. And in Sondheim’s estimation, it was the first time that “[a] movie made from a stage musical [is] a real movie musical…I happen to like it, but even if I didn’t like it, it’s a real film.”

Turning Sweeney Todd into a “real film” involved significant alterations, not the least of them being the length. A full production of the stage musical runs nearly three hours, but Burton’s film clocks in at 116 minutes. Much of the reduction came from the decision to cut out virtually every instance of choral singing. Music dominates Sweeney Todd; the ratio of singing to dialogue is so titled toward the former that it is sometimes referred to as an operetta or even an opera. Much of the storytelling is done through music in the film as well. But Burton’s concept for the songs was that they were the expressions of the main characters’ internal emotional state. Under that framework, singing extras wouldn’t make sense. Entire numbers, such as “City on Fire,” were thus easily excised, while others (“Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir,” “God That’s Good”) were cut down to only that material sung by the main cast. Even under this framework, Burton still initially planned to include “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” the opening number that reprises throughout the play, and he had cast a small group of “gentleman ghosts” that included Christopher Lee to perform it. The ballad was recorded, but after a delay in filming, Burton had second thoughts. “It works well on stage, but I don’t want to hear what we’re seeing,” he ultimately decided. “It’s a very simple melodrama, so it just didn’t feel right…it would’ve undermined…the privacy and the internalization [of the main characters].” (Sadly, the cut recordings have never been released.) Instead, the ballad became underscore – an appropriate compromise, given that Sondheim was inspired by the film music of Bernard Hermann while composing. Prioritizing visual expression is a hallmark of Burton’s work. The design of Sweeney Todd was dictated by the broken, deadened soul of its lead character, devoid of almost any color except for the copious amounts of blood that offer Sweeney some measure of release. But relying on pictorial elements led to other adjustments to the score. Act II of the play has “The Wigmaker Sequence,” an interweaving of various recurring musical strains loaded with expository lyrics. Within the number, Sweeney and the young sailor Anthony put together a scheme to free Sweeney’s daughter Johanna from an asylum; Anthony learns the basics of the wig making trade to affect the plan; Sweeney crafts a letter to lure his nemesis Judge Turpin to his parlor with Johanna as the bait; and a reprise of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” describes his triumphant mental state. It’s an effective bit of stagecraft and a chilling musical sequence, but try and picture how it would look on film. Translated literally, you would have two men standing in a tonsorial parlor, possibly with gentleman ghosts who address the audience; one of the men would eventually leave, leaving the other at a writing desk. On film, holding on a number for almost four minutes in a single location could easily get tedious. A musical sequence like “Wigmaker” also isn’t needed to convey a passage of time in film. Instead of “Wigmaker,” Burton and screenwriter John Logan wrote a short nonmusical sequence that conveyed all of the same necessary information. Sweeney still hatches his plan to free Johanna, and he gets a letter sent to Judge Turpin. But the business of training Anthony is discarded, implied to be done off-screen at a later time. The letter is already written when it finally appears on camera, and the shot lingers just long enough for the audience to register what it says. The sequence ends with Sweeney restlessly pacing before his window, an ominous section of underscore driving along underneath as a simple lighting shift indicates the passing of many hours.

There were also moments in the musical that couldn’t be replicated on film, even had Burton been so inclined. The pivotal number of Act I is “Epiphany,” the moment where Sweeney’s already unhinged mind snaps. His bloodlust leaps from a desire for vengeance against Judge Turpin to a damnation of all mankind. “Not one man,” Sweeney sings, “no, nor ten men/Nor a hundred can assuage me!” Traditionally, “Epiphany” sees him clamor down from the set to aim his tirade directly into the audience. No film could capture the energy that comes from that direct interaction between viewer and performer. Burton and Logan’s solution tied into the conceit of the numbers as an internal state: Sweeney disappears into his own mind as it breaks to imagine himself prowling the streets of London as an unseen specter of death. The rush of humanity weaves around him as he laments the loss of his daughter while reveling in the “joy” of his new bloody mission. Reconceiving “Epiphany” in this way, with an expanded orchestra, the number retains all its mad power while making sense in Burton’s interpretation. Sondheim considered it the high point of the adaptation. The ferocity of Sweeney’s rage in the “Epiphany” is emphasized through such basic film techniques as the close-up. The ability to change the frame is the most immediate visual distinction between theater and film, and it can affect how actors perform. Since the first talkies, when a large contingent of stage actors were brought to Hollywood, there has been a tension between the need to perform “to the back row” so that everything will register to the farthest member of the audience, and the fixed vantage point a viewer has while watching a film. There, any change in perspective is dictated by the camera and by editing. A broad performance with a fully projected voice isn’t necessary in a close-up, and often comes across as unnatural, comical, or intimidating when viewed from such an angle.

It’s in his direction of performances that Burton was most effective in adapting his source material, and it’s what makes Sweeney Todd more successful than any film of a stage musical to date. The story may be a melodrama, the characters may have the wardrobe and make-up of a silent horror movie, the London they inhabit is drained and bloodstained, and the music packs a hefty emotional punch. Yet all the performances, even Sacha Baron Cohen’s as the flamboyant charlatan Pirelli, are subdued, not quite naturalistic but very much playing against overt theatricality. This wasn’t an easy or a natural way of working for some of the cast; Helena Bonham Carter struggled as an “East End extrovert” to hold back so much, particularly in the physically active part of Mrs. Lovett. Burton explained to her that “because you’re singing, and you’re already in a big environment…you’ve got to counteract that with a very restrained performance.” If restraint took some work for Mrs. Lovett, it seems a perfect fit for Sweeney Todd himself. A reprise of the ballad gives a picture of him in the stage show: “His voice was soft, his manner mild/He seldom laughed, but he often smiled.” Those qualities aren’t always conveyed well in the theater; Broadway’s original Sweeney Len Cariou managed well enough, but George Hearn screamed and cackled his way through the national tour. Camera placement and sound recording let Johnny Depp drop almost into a whisper when he spoke, which was seldom. Depp and Burton conceived of Sweeney as a walking dead man, driven onward only by thoughts of vengeance. The character isn’t terribly verbose in the musical to begin with, but his dialogue was pared back to the bare minimum, and Depp kept all his delivery in a quiet, hollow range. The singing is where his Sweeney comes alive, still with restraint in physicality and facial expression but infused by the music with all the sorrow and rage within his soul. Critics who assessed Depp’s singing noted a lack of “heft and power,” and summed his performance up as “harsh and thin, but amazingly forceful.” But the lack of proper technique didn’t bother Burton, or Sondheim for that matter. “I generally prefer actors who can sing rather than a singer who can act,” he once said, “because I’m much more interested with telling the story than I am with the enjoyment of the singing.” When he directed a workshop of several of his songs, including “My Friends” from Sweeney Todd, the notes he gave the student were more concerned with acting the number rather than singing. It's interesting to compare Sondheim’s directions with Depp’s final performance in the movie. Whether Sondheim passed on notes or consulted with Burton, I don’t know. But as does the film as a whole, that number conveys all the colors intended for it, channeled through careful editing and camera movement to best present the material as a piece of cinema.

[mymanreedus]

"The change with Melissa not going into the spin-off happened pretty late in the game. So we'd always planned that the two of them were going to ride off together. In the original version, they would've gone on the bike and pointed west and then would've gotten sidetracked. And then when we were running the finale, we were like, 'Okay, let's reconceive how they end.' So it becomes, he rides off, and she's there to support him because there's no anger or anything between them about it. It's just he's going to go off on a mission, and she has a different mission right now."

Angela Kang, Entertainment Weekly

[bbcphile]

For the fic writers ask meme: 17 and/or 37

Thanks for the asks, @the-surreptitious-albatross , and sorry it has taken me some time to respond!

17. Do you write your story from start to finish, or do you write the scenes out of order?

I usually write the scenes in order, from start to finish. The closest I come to doing things out of order is that sometimes I will jump ahead and do a detailed outline of a later chapter if I think of ways I want it to be in conversation with an earlier one (eg. if there are interesting parallelism, or thematic commonalities), and often my outlines start with bullet points and then end up basically being very rough drafts, complete with pages of dialogue and the emotional beats or notes on where to add descriptions. And I guess with my current long MLC fic, I wrote a few drafts of the first few chapters, then did 15k of outlines/incredibly rough drafts for later chapters, and then the other day realized what was bugging me about how I had written the first chapter, so I went back and completely rewrote it. So I guess in that regard, I jump around, because I might go back and totally reconceive of a chapter based on something I want to do with character development later. (This is why I don’t post fics on AO3 until they’re done; I do a truly absurd amount of rewriting.)

37: Talk about your current wips.

I’m honored that you want to hear about it! I actually have 4 for Mysterious Lotus Casebook fics (3 with absurdly detailed outlines, but only one that I’m actively drafting), so for now, I’ll just talk about the one I’ve worked the most on. 

Post-canon (OT3) Beach fic:

tw/cw: suicide attempt, off-page non-consensual medical procedure

When Li Lianhua’s shiniang tried and failed to sacrifice herself to save Li Lianhua against his will, he fled to the Donghai beach, intending to die before she could catch up with him because he can’t endure the idea that someone else he cared about might die for him. Di Feisheng and Fang Duobing find him first and save his life for the moment, but are horrified to discover the truth that Li Lianhua can’t lie his way out of: that the damage from the survivor’s guilt of everything he’s been through is just as dangerous as the damage from Bicha poisoning. With each of them reeling from the traumas of the past year (Li Lianhua from Shan Gudao’s betrayal and now medical PTSD from his shiniang’s procedure, Fang Duobing from almost losing Li Lianhua and being terrified to let him out of his sight in case he goes straight back to the water, and Di Feisheng from the abuse at the hands of Jiao Liqiao), they have to figure out how to face everything they pushed aside to save the country, and in the process, learn that the hardest battles aren’t fought with swords.

To read an excerpt, follow this link: (x)

I was going to write up synopses for the others, but I’m out of energy (and don’t want to sit on this ask for another week or so to write them out), so I’ll just do quick teaser/keyword summaries for the others:

Missing Scene Fic: Di Feisheng’s first night in Lotus Tower (featuring him finding the Yinzhou armor being used as a potholder, his feelings on having his meridians and qi blocked, and helping LLH after a nightmare so it doesn’t wake up FDB and give away his identity.)

Pre-Canon: Yinzhou armor backstory, Sigu sect waterfall spars, and LXY/DFS first time; set the evening after Shan Gudao resigned from the Sigu Sect

5+1: FDB and DFS sharing the Lotus Tower guest bed (from FDB’s POV, covering the entire show + post canon)

[popclture]

Nicolas Cage testing the Superman costume (1997)

Kevin Smith, whose scripted was titled Superman Lives, suggested Tim Burton to direct the film & Burton signed on with a pay-or-play contract of $5 million. Nicolas Cage, a comic book fan, signed on as Superman with a $20 million pay-or-play contract, believing he could "reconceive the character". Burton said Cage's casting would be "the first time you would believe that nobody could recognize Clark Kent as Superman, Cage could physically change his persona"

In April 1998, Warner Bros ultimately chose to put the film on hold.

[fandomworld9728]

Letters to Emily - Chapter 6:

"Thank you for the tea, Sera."

"Of course. It is nice to have these moments with you. Now then, you were ready to move onto the next letter?"

Eyes lighting up, Emily eagerly grabbed the next letter to read. She was so happy that Sera was taking an interest in this now. "Let's see here... Oh! Well, Adam seems to be settling to the hotel okay. But it says he keeps getting into fights with Charlie's business partner over... Lucifer's attention? Huh. I wonder why."

Sera was mid-sip when she heard that. Coughing, tea had gone everywhere in her shock. Her cup lay forgotten on the ground as she tried to reassure Emily that she was okay and clean herself up. How and why did this always happen with Lucifer?

Up in Heaven he had angels fighting over him and it only got worse once he stepped foot in Eden. She could still recall the exact moment that Adam and Lilith decided that instead of sharing the Archangel they wanted him all to themselves. That decision doomed both relationships from the start. Sighing, Sera rubbed her temples. She could already feel the headache forming.

"Yes. That indeed tracks..."

~

"Gabriel. Are you sure about this?"

"Yes." Sliding the box over to Michael, he tried to keep his anger under control. How could she do this? Completely cutting Lucifer off from them. Sure, the fall had been horrible and left them all with trauma. Lucifer more than anyone else.

But how were they supposed to heal and reconceal if they were cut off from communicating? It was obvious from the number of letters from the fallen angel that he had wanted that. Or at the least to keep them updated on his life even if he hated them.

"Were you able to break the seal?"

"Not yet. I believe this is more in your area of expertise, brother."

"Very well." Before Michael could reach out for the box, the doors to the meeting room burst open, a distraught looking Sera hurried into the room. "What is the meaning of this?"

"It's Lucifer. He's been badly injured by some of the other angels."

< Previous

Next >

[the-drokainian]

2 Corinthians 5:20 ESV

[20] Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

[narcissistpsychopath-abuse]

Free Sam Vaknin Seminar in Zagreb

The Power of Intention Center organizes a free seminar by Professor Sam Vaknin. More details below, and you can sign up on this link: https://snaganamjere.com/sam-vaknin/

LECTURER

Sam Vaknin, PhD

Professor of Clinical Psychology and Management Studies in CIAPS (Commonwealth Institute of Advanced Professional Studies), Cambridge and Birmingham, UK; Ontario, Canada; and Lagos, Nigeria;

Visiting Professor Of Psychology and of Economics in South East European University (SEEU), North Macedonia

Former Visiting Professor of Psychology, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia (2017-22).

SEMINAR

Cost: FREE

Length: 7 hours with 4 breaks of 15 minutes each.

Title: “Cluster B Personality Disorders: Recent Advances in Diagnosis and Treatment”

Audience: organized by Intention Power Center

Venue: Hotel "Antunović", Zagreb, 102 Zagreb Avenue, Croatia

Timing: 8th December 2024, 10.00 a.m.- 5.00 p.m.

Language: English (no translation)

Synopsis:

The field of personality disorders is at an impasse, reflected in the competing diagnostic models in the DSM 5-TR (the categorical lists of diagnostic criteria imported verbatim from the DSM-IV-TR vs. the dimensional, descriptive alternative models, relegated to the appendices).

We need to reconceive of cluster B personality disorders as post-traumatic dissociative conditions involving self-states (subpersonalities with pseudoidentities). This seems to be the most clinically rigorous way to rid ourselves of excessive comorbidities and polythetic diagnoses.

Recasting cluster B personality disorders as post-traumatic conditions which involve dissociation goes a long way towards resolving these outstanding conundrums and provides for hitherto absent efficacious treatment modalities.