#said that the sharks were trying to escape 'THE BLOB'

[things-that-make-sa-happy]

Jeremiah Fisher | tsitp 1.04

[sophie-jen]

water lilies and tadpoles

read on ao3

James rolled onto his back. He looked up at the sun, shining joyfully in the cloudless sky, then immediately groaned, and rolled back onto his stomach.

"You look like a beached whale, honey."

James groaned again. "S'hot," he mumbled. 

"Why don't you go down to the lake and take a swim?"

James did not dignify this question with a response. His mother had been trying to kick him out all morning. She clearly didn’t want him in her way as she pranced around in her sunhat, gardening tools in hand. James was too miserable to care. He just groaned louder and rolled over again. But this was the wrong move, he realized belatedly, as he felt the crunch of his mother's favorite lilies being crushed under his weight. 

Five minutes later and a shovel shaped dent in his skull found James making his way toward the stupid lake. As he pushed his way valiantly through swarms of mosquitoes, he considered the very real possibility that he would drown in his own sweat before he ever reached water. 

The suffocating heat made everything hazy. Overhead, branches swayed. Leaves rustled. Underfoot, twigs crunched. Moss whispered. Streams of light danced around him. Birds croaked. Frogs chirped. A mushroom tipped its cap to him. 

Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, it occurred to James that he might be lost. Just as the beginnings of panic started brewing in his stomach, his foot caught in a root and he went toppling down a hill. He rolled to a stop next to a small glittering lake, and groaned. This was definitely not the lake his mother had been referring to. He hadn’t known there even was another lake in this area. It really was quite small, resembling more of an oversized pond.

There was something emphatically off about the happy twinkle of the water and the ethereal glow that bathed everything in a golden light. He also couldn’t help but notice that the water lilies were eyeing him suspiciously. To their left, a large, judgmental looking trout poked its face out of the water, took a good look at him, and with a disappointed shake of its head, went back down to report what it had seen. And sat on an outcrop not three feet away, looking straight at him while her fingers combed through her long tendrils of red hair, was a mermaid. This was a little much for poor James to take, and mercifully, after one last groan for good measure, consciousness fled and everything faded to black. 

                                                      *

James gasped awake. He lay in the dark for a few seconds, contemplating the strange dream he had been having, before sitting up. As he did, something cold and slimy slid off his eyes and down his face, taking his glasses with it. He felt around for the glasses, slid them back onto his nose, looked at the lily pad that had dropped into his lap, and felt his stomach drop with it. 

"I thought it might help cool you off."

He looked over at the girl who sat not far away. She was looking at him with an expression of mingled apprehension and curiosity. And sure enough, when James looked down, he saw curled under her a long gray tail, scales shimmering in the sunlight. He had to make a considerable effort not to faint again. 

"I’ve found lily pads are really refreshing. I was afraid you had heat exhaustion or something,” the girl said. 

“Oh. Thank you.” James didn’t know how to explain to her that it most likely wasn’t the heat exhaustion that had caused him to swoon. 

“I'm Lily, by the way."

James considered her for a moment. Considered at what point between rolling onto his mother’s lilies and meeting a mermaid named Lily he had lost his mind. Considered the lily pad laying limply in his lap. Made a decision. 

"I'm James."

                                                      *

“So, uh…” James kept his eyes on the small blue fish eating out of the mermaid’s hand. He was trying not to stare at her webbed fingers. “You live here? In the lake?”

“No, I actually prefer to perch on tree branches.” She gave James such a deadpan look as she spoke that he was inclined to believe her. At this point, he was inclined to believe just about anything. 

“Yes, of course I live in the lake,” she continued after a moment. She turned back to the fish, which was stretching as far as it could out of the water, vying for her attention. 

“Ah. Right.” James mulled this over for a moment. “But where do you-” he paused, trying to think of the best way to ask the question. “Well, where do you, you know, live?” Well said. “I mean, have you got a bed at the bottom of the lake or something?”

“Yep. I even splurged on a water mattress recently.”

To James’ surprise, a snort of amusement escaped him. Lily smiled as she stroked the fish, which flapped its tiny fins happily. 

“Honestly, I mostly sleep on land. I like looking at the stars.” She gave the fish a final pat, before leaning back onto her arms, her tail stretched out in front of her, and tilting her face towards the sun. “I couldn’t really do that much back home.”

“Back home?” 

“I live in the ocean.”

“What are you doing here?” 

“I got caught in a storm and washed up in a river somewhere, so I swam up here.” She leaned over and lifted a clump of moss off the end of her tail, where a large translucent fin lay. The left portion of the fin was in tatters, and an angry looking rip spanned almost the entirety of it. "I can't swim properly with my tail in that state." 

"So, what, you're just stuck here?" 

"Until it heals and I can try finding my way home. But I honestly don't mind. I grew up surrounded by angelfish and dolphins, so lake trout and tadpoles have been a nice change of pace.“ 

Despite her lighthearted tone, she didn’t look particularly thrilled as she said it. James immediately felt compelled to do something, though what that something was, or why he even felt compelled to do it, were beyond him. Instead, his mouth moved of its own accord. "Oh, so you're usually surrounded by a much more so-fish-ticated crowd, then," he said, placing emphasis on the “fish”. He regretted it immediately.

“Did you just-” She looked at him incredulously, but James was thrilled to hear the laughter in her voice. “That doesn’t even make sense!”

“Yeah, my bad, won’t happen again.”

“Unbelievable,” she said through a giggle. 

Not wanting to push his luck, he stayed quiet, and they sat in silence together. The fish, realizing it wouldn’t be getting anything more from Lily, swam up to James and gave a hopeful wiggle. He stroked it distractedly as the mermaid next to him sighed and readjusted the moss covering her fin. James only hoped she couldn't hear the frantic whirring of cogs as he tried to make sense of the pretty redhead and her tail, quietly soaking up the sun beside him. 

                                                      *

"Stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop looking at my tail."

"It looked at me first."

"It's impolite to stare."

"Social norms don't apply when your cousin is a guppy."

A lily pad thwacked James across the face.

                                                      *

The sun was beating down mercilessly. James sat at the edge of the water with his feet dipped in up to his ankles. He watched as Lily resurfaced, yet another trinket in her hands, and swam closer to add it to the row of eclectic objects she had set out on the sand. She called them her treasures, although they looked more like what a demented three-year-old might drag home from the playground. 

While she fiddled with what looked like a vaguely heart-shaped ball of algae, he examined one of the rocks. She had said it reminded her of the hammerhead shark that would dig up her garden in search of crabs. It was oblong and one of the ends was slightly flat. To James, the resemblances ended there, but Lily had been thrilled at the discovery, so he had smiled and praised how hammerheaded the rock looked. 

He set the rock back down and checked to see what Lily was doing. She was still poking at the green blob. Her hair looked darker now that it was wet, pooling like blood in her collarbones and trickling down her back in rivulets. He looked away as soon as she turned toward him, and stared intently at a chipped snail shell. 

“I know, it’s not very impressive.”

“What? No...” 

She raised her eyebrows in skeptical amusement. “I wish you could see the collection I have at home. I’ve got this gorgeous pocket watch I found with all these flowers carved on the back. It doesn’t tell the time anymore though.”

“Where’d you find it?” asked James. He slid into the water and made his way towards a water lily he had spotted. 

Lily hadn’t seemed to notice, focused on smoothing out the wrinkles of the snake skin she had laid out. “We collect them from shipwrecks,” she explained.

“That’s morbid.” He snapped the flower off the stem and waded back over to Lily and her treasures. 

“Is it? I remember when I was little, my sister and I used to go looking for sunken ships and scare the octopuses living in them.”

“Here, add this to your collection.” Lily turned toward him, and he handed her the water lily he had picked. 

“I can’t add that. It’ll start wilting soon.” She took the flower from him, her fingers brushing his as she delicately held the white petals. He dipped his fingers in the water to quell the tingles. 

“Oh. I just thought it was pretty.”

She studied the flower for a moment, before placing it in her hair and securing the stem behind her ear. He watched as she fussed with it, trying to get it wedged properly. “There. That way we can enjoy it while it lasts.”

“I can get you another when it turns brown,” James offered. 

“No, I like this one,” she said. “I don’t want to replace it. Some things are meant to be temporary anyway.”

                                                      *

"GAAAHHhhbrrggllslg..."

"Pipe down, you'll scare the fish."

James came back to the surface, spluttering and coughing. “This clearly isn’t working,” he wheezed. 

“Really? I thought we were making great progress.” 

“Funny, ‘cause I thought that’s the third time you’ve nearly drowned me.” James rubbed his eyes a final time and opened them. Lily floated next to him, her hair like a pool of blood around her. He pulled a piece of it out of his mouth. 

She rolled her eyes and ran her fingers through her hair, picking out a snail that had gotten tangled in the strands. “You’re being dramatic.”

“Well excuse me for having a sense of self-preservation.”

“You’re acting like I’m trying to kill you!”

“Lily, I don’t have gills! You can’t just push me underwater without warning!”

She looked surprised at his outburst, her green eyes were wide with worry, and James immediately felt bad. 

“Listen, it’s fine. I just got freaked out for a moment,” he backpedaled. 

Lily wasn’t listening. “Maybe we should stop.” 

“No, really, it’s fine! I’ll just make sure to plug my nose next time!” 

But she was already swimming away, and with a flick of her tail, she had disappeared to a place where he couldn’t reach her. 

                                                      *

The bite was oozing. Oozing what, he didn’t know. Didn’t really want to know. He had never thought he would be having to deal with fish bites. Hadn’t realized such small fish even had teeth. Evil little bastards. Always sweet and cuddly when Lily was around. But this was apparently a summer of firsts. 

He poked at the angry looking marks, and hissed. Lily would know how to take care of this. Fix it. He had no idea where she was. She hadn’t yet resurfaced. 

Not knowing what to do, he climbed onto the outcrop where he had seen her for the first time, and stretched out. Warmth enveloped him on all sides, immediately making him drowsy. As he drifted off, he thought about how unbothered he was. Everything was fine. He let himself be pulled under, into the depths of sleep, not worried in the slightest. She would turn up. She always did. 

                                                      *

He’s sinking deeper into dark blue depths. His legs keep up a frantic pace as he kicks, trying to propel himself forward. All he can see is her: her long, slender fingers, her wrists, her collarbones, glowing in the murky water as she hovers, ethereal. All he wants is to go to her, but with a laugh she turns and swims further down, engulfed by the darkness. 

He can just make out her tail undulating as she moves inexorably on, never slowing down. As he follows her, going ever lower, several jellyfish zoom by, their tentacles tangling together to form a billowing cloud of exhaust. Somewhere to the side, a school of clownfish float in a large reef together, studying. A preoccupied looking manatee comes out of a dense wall of seaweed and almost bumps into James, muttering an apology as it hurries away. 

James is undeterred, his focus only on the mermaid in front of him. She turns to face him, curls one finger in a beckoning motion, and her smile is a hook that snags him, reeling him in, pulling him closer to her. Her lips are moving. He can tell she’s saying something, something important, but he can’t understand her. The water is filling his ears, muting everything, and he strains to hear her, to make out something, anything. Panic rises in his throat as her face grows troubled, panic so thick it’s suffocating. He can’t breathe, and she’s floating further into the murky shadows, and he hates the greedy gloom taking her away from him with every fiber of his being. As she grows ever more distant, his panic grows, and he’s never felt so lost, so helpless. He has to reach her, to stop her, and she’s screaming, screaming his name, over and over and-

                                                      *

“James!” He opened his eyes, gasping for air. After several steadying breaths, the darkness began receding. He blinked while the world came back into focus. The panic he had felt so acutely was already fading, dripping through his fingers, leaking out of his ears. It was replaced by the feeling of solid rock under his back, the sun wrapping him in warmth, and Lily’s hands cupping his cheeks. Her face was right over his, her hair forming a curtain around them. 

“Here.” He felt his glasses being placed gingerly over his eyes. “You alright?” 

Lily’s voice was laced with concern, her eyebrows knitted so close together they were almost touching. Her face was so close to his that he could see every individual hair in her eyebrows. He focused on one hair that lay slightly askew, pointing towards a freckle on her eyelid, as he finished catching his breath. 

“Yeah. I’m fine. Just had a weird dream.”

“Oh. Sure. I have those all the time.”

“Really?”

“Oh, definitely. The other day, I dreamed that I had climbed up a tree, and I couldn’t get down. And you were in the water, and I kept calling you, and asking you to help. But you insisted that you couldn’t, because you had to practice your underwater somersaults. And I was so angry that I started picking crabs off the tree and pelting them at you. But you kept catching them in your mouth and eating them. And you were laughing the whole time. And then you said, ‘Look, Tulip!’ and did a backwards somersault with so much force that you created a huge wave that knocked me off the tree. And then I woke up.”

“Sorry about that.” James was trying very hard to keep a straight face. 

“I can’t believe you called me ‘Tulip’,” Lily said with a frown.  

She looked so genuinely offended that James immediately felt compelled to comfort her. “Like I would ever forget your name!” 

“What was your dream?” she said quickly. 

“Oh, I was just drowning.”

“Well that’s not bad. Why do you get to have normal dreams?”

“Probably because I know how to do backward somersaults.”

                                                      *

James stared at the water intently, looking for any disturbances in the smooth surface. In his hand, he held a freshwater mussel the size of a large baseball. Lily had dug it up from the bed of the lake for the game she had devised. She had informed him that the mussels' name was Petunia, mentioning something about the mussel reminding her of someone. 

He tightened his hold on Petunia, causing her to give an indignant shake in response. James had discovered that a firm grip was necessary when handling the mussel. She had a tendency to clamp down on his fingers when he wasn’t paying enough attention, and getting her to let go required threats of feeding her to the snapping turtle that lived nearby. 

A sudden ripple drew James’ attention to a spot on his left. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the flash of a tail flicking above the water. As he scanned the green surface, he spotted a smudge of red. Raising Petunia above his head, his eyes following the billowing of crimson under the water, he took a steadying breath, and aimed. He exhaled. Petunia went flying. 

“Fucking ow!” 

The cry told him he had hit his mark. The proud victor had only a moment to celebrate his success before a wave of water was flung in his direction, drenching him entirely. 

“Bit of a sore loser, aren’t you?” James smiled as the top of Lily’s head surfaced. Her eyes narrowed and the green flashed somewhat dangerously, but he took no heed. He was on a roll. “Seems I’ve o-fish-ially won!” 

His laugh was followed closely by a scream as Lily pulled him into the water, and he felt his nose being pinched shut as he went under, smothered by a wave of red tendrils. 

                                                      *

"You know I can't stay here." 

"Can't you? What's so great about the ocean, anyway? So it’s got dolphins. Did you know dolphins are actually vicious? I read that they kill porpoises just for fun."

“James-”

“And they’ve been known to attack people.”

“Are you honestly trying to slander dolphins?”

“I’m just saying, it’s a cruel world out there. But it’s safe here. I can guarantee you’ll never be attacked by a toad.”

“The other day, I woke up with a tadpole up my nose."

“Small price to pay.”

“Small price to pay for not being viciously attacked by a dolphin? Do you hear yourself?”

“I just don’t get why you have to leave right now. How could it possibly be safe? Your tail isn’t even fully healed yet!”

“It will be soon.”

Quiet settled over the little lake again. She broke the silence first. 

"Mermaids can live for up to 300 years."

"My dad is turning sixty next month."

“I want to go home, James. You can go home any time you want. You can be sure that you’ll be able to celebrate your dad's birthday with him. What about me? All I've got here are the tadpoles.”

"You've got me."

"What?"

"You've got me, haven't you? Or do I not count?"

"Of course you count, you idiot. You count so much, you have no idea." 

James' heart must have swollen so big it cut off the oxygen going to his brain because all he could come up with was, "I'm actually terrible at maths." 

She sighed. “I will miss you. But I can’t stay here forever, hoping you’ll visit me occasionally.”

“That’s not-”

“It is.”

                                                      *

The heat had somehow worsened. The pair floated in the cool lake water together, incapable of anything requiring any more energy. He could sense her presence, sensed it constantly, incessantly, tugging on his consciousness whenever he was around her. 

They floated in silence, the only sound coming from two particularly loud swallows. The birds were having it out over a spider they each felt entitled to. The angry chirping hadn’t ceased for at least the last ten minutes. 

James felt a ripple and saw Lily shift over and look up at the birds. She rolled her eyes and smiled at him. He felt the sudden urge to bottle up her smile and keep it stashed away, to take out and enjoy on special occasions. Instead, he dunked his head in the water and pretended with all his might that his heart wasn’t being constricted so tight it would shrink to the size of a marble and roll out of his mouth when he was sleeping. 

                                                      *

And then she was gone. Just like that, the lake was empty. James sat on the outcrop, and watched as a wilting water lily floated by serenely. A small blue fish poked its head out of the water. The fish looked around and then stared at James for a few moments, as though wanting to ask something, before diving back under with a small splash.

Here’s a painting that I think looks just like Lily

[return-of-a-space-cowboy]

The otherworld pt4

You sat in shock, Diavolo would simply discard one of his creations like that, however you couldn't dwell on it for long as his liquidated remains began to bubble up then. The mixture of blood, flesh and muscle thickened and swelled up. You could feel the small amount of it on you skin rapidly growing.

You quickly flicked it of and began to slowly walk back to the stairs. Somehow this blob had noticed this and move forward rapidly and latched onto your leg. You grabbed onto the rails of the staircase and tried to flick it off but to no effect. You quickly dragged yourself up the railing and slammed the door shut. The goo on you legs sliding off with ease.

You slid down the door as a large sigh escaped your lips. This was no game... It was a trial that Diavolo was attempting to make impossible. You couldn't just let him win. You needed to prevail, not just for yourself but all the other tormented souls he had taken.

You stood up and took a big breath in before marching out of the house, you need to show him you weren't afraid and that you were going to take everything he threw at you with a brave face.

🌌🌌🌌

You looked down at the door below you, the lights brightly blinking, tempting you to walk inside and enjoy the show but you knew this wasn't going to be some fun little theatre show. It was going to be another trial, possibly harder then the previous.

You opened the door with cation and treaded carefully through the house section of the building before entering the theatre area which you now questioned how such an area could fit under the house.

The theatre was cold and dark, a soft orchestral lull that played that made the place eerie and unsettling. It felt like you were the next unsuspecting victim in a slasher film. As you continued to walk you stepped on something and you tried to grab it through the darkness. Once you grabbed the cylinder shaped object you pressed a button and a sudden light blinded you.

You let your eyes adjust and point the light of the torch away from you. The theatre was empty and the stage looked no different to the the last time, or at least until you got closer and the smell of fish entered you nose making you want to puke.

The cutout fish that were hung up before were now the skeletal remains of real fish as well the freshly eaten fish remains that littered the ground, the stage was covered in real sand and the small glass bobbles that were supposed to be bubbles were smashed up, small shards of glass shone amongst the sand.

As you finally got on stage the large oyster opened to reveal two sleeping creatures intertwined in each other's embrace, the creatures were a mere shadow of their former selves. One that's skin was grey and rough like sand paper, fins decorated his arms and back. The only thing recognisable was his redish hair. The other had red, slimy skin. The inner side of his arms and legs were covered in suction cups and tentacles interlaced in the strands of his long platinum hair.

You quickly grabbed your pendant and looked through it to see the two eyes on-top of Tiziano's hand. You put the pendant and looked at the pearl ring that rested on his hand. You cautiously you reached in and attempted to grab the ring before a grey webbed hand latched onto yours. You looked at the grey skinned male in horror as his lustrous blue buttons gleamed in the flash of the spotlight. You mentally prepared yourself for the worst as his pursed lips opened, revealing his razor sharp teeth.

"Oh (Y/n) you finally came!" the red haired creature said with enthusiasm in his voice. The other male stirred before getting up.

"Oh we've been waiting for you for so long" Tiziano sung as the tentacles loosely rested around your neck as he pulled you into a hug. Your body tensed up as you felt the slimy appendages pull you closer to him before he stepped back a bit to inspect your body.

"You look like you've been dragged through a forest!" He remarked.

"Well your not to far off..." You muttered to the male.

"Oh dear, let us clean you up" he hummed as he grabbed your arm and tried to drag you back stage, you could feel the suction cups on his hand pulling up your skin.

"No, I'm fine" you said before his tentacles reached for your arm.

"No I insist" he said, his typically soft and calm voice had an unusual touch of anger in it making such an innocent sentence become slightly unsettling.

"We can't have you looking any less the your best, right Squalo?" He said while looking back at his shark like companion who gave a smile that showed off his razor sharp teeth once more.

"Of course" he said while grabbing your other arm before sitting you down into a chair.

As Squalo opened a wardrobe full of outfits and costumes while Tiziano grabbed a hair brush and began to brush your damp hair with one of his tendrils and another pushed your chin up while he grabbed a pair of scissors with his actual hand before he began to snip at the ends of your hair.

"Just stay still" he said in a soft tone, like a mother lulling their child to sleep as a soft, pleasant aroma filled your nostrils. It was something you could only explain as sweet yet spicy, like an old woman's light perfume mixed with cinnamon and incense.

You were confused. Why weren't they attacking you? Surely the point of the other puppets was to scare you into giving up, but these two were doing anything but. But you slowly started to calm down. This felt like how the world use to be, one of happiness that you never wanted to leave and that was all part of their plan, all part of Diavolo's. You were completely oblivious of the timer that loomed above you, slowly counting down your demise

You let out a sigh as your muscles eased and your nerves dispersed. You slumped back, falling into a trance like state. you didn't even fell more of his tentacles latched onto you and removed your clothes as Squalo brought other another set of clothes. Your mind was in another world and your body simply followed every signal the gave while redressing you whispering such sweet nothings to you.

"We'd do anything for you (Y/N), and we really mean it"

"If you want us to perform for you until we drop dead then we would"

"All we want to do is entertain you"

"Your happiness means everything to us" their words seemed to ring in your head like a singing bowl until the lustrous gleam of Tiziano's pearl ring brought you back to reality and reminded you what you had to do.

"Tiziano can I look at your ring please?" You asked as you got close to him.

"Sure" he replied as he held his hand up for you. You took his hand and pretended to inspect it before placing your hand on the ring. He quickly flicked his hand away as one of his tentacles pulled your hand away and tightly wrapped around it.

"You want this ring, don't you?" He scoffed before pulling his partner closer.

"If you want one, then you'll need a man first" he said teasingly as he kissed his boyfriend on the cheek while waving his hand.

"I'm sure Diavolo will be more then willing to get you such an extravagant gift" he continued.

"No, I'm not going to let that cruel man have me!" You said as you realised the sick game they were playing. You kicked Tiziano in the stomach, causing him to fall back. In retaliation Squalo lunged onto you. You held up your arms in defence against him as you fell down. You screamed out in pain as his teeth sunk into your skin. You quickly kicked him off of you with your bare feet before standing up.

"We can't... just let you leave (Y/n)" Squalo huffed as he was hunched over, obviously winded.

"Without you we're nothing" Tiziano said in a stone cold tone as he got to his feet before charging towards you.

You quickly ran back to the stage  in an attempt to escape but he was too fast, managing to tackle you down into the sand. The coarse sand grazed your skin and several shards of glass punctured your skin.

With little hesitation the male wrapped his tentacles around your throat while holding you down as you thrashed against his grip.

"You'll never leave! It's only a matter of time before the countdown reaches zero" he said in a slightly maniacal tone.

Your eye's widened in shock as you heard his words. A time limit was never discussed between you and Diavolo. Anxiety grew as you began to wonder how long it had been, how much time was there? How much time had been wasted?

You felt the life being choked out of you before a loud screech emitting from above. You looked up in fear as you saw the beam of lights fall. You closed your eyes in  waiting to be crushed under the beams.

The ground shook and the clang and crash of metal however you weren't crushed. You felt a warm liquid dripping onto you and that's when you opened your eyes.

Broken beams had lodged themselves into Tiziano and were only centimetres from piercing through you. He choked out a few inaudible gargles followed with a few coughs off blood before he died.

You heard a gasp from Squalo as he rushed over. He practically dragged you like a doll and tossed you to the side as he pulled his lover's corpse out of the wreckage.

"No, no, no" he sobbed before looking at you.

"You... You..." he muttered as he cradled his body.

"YOU DID THIS!" he screamed as he put his body down before charging at you and tackling you down once more. You pushed him back from you as best as you could as his razor teeth snapped in front of you, desperately trying to catch you in them.

You felt your head become light as the blood steadily trickle down your arm from the previous bite. You were loading your strength, you knew another bite would be fatal but you just didn't have the energy to keep pushing the shark like beast in front of you for much longer.

Diavolo watched through one of his many eyes and saw your predicament. As much as he enjoyed watching your struggle he knew that he no longer had control of Squalo, in this world accidents were still a common occurrence and an accident like that was to be expected at some stage.

If he didn't interfere soon you would surely die, and that was a very unfavorable circumstance. He had debated whether to wait for you to give up or forfeit the second pair of eyes to you since the conflict originally erupted. He tapped his finger and bit his lip in frustion as had finally made up his mind.

[sharkchunks]

Design Analysis: The Alien Films

Giger’s original alien design is fairly well recognized as the pinnacle of the art, so sequel decay was inevitable. Once you have something perfect, anything you add to that perfection will alter it and by definition make it imperfect. The further the Alien films diverge from the design above, the worse the designs get, sometimes by fractions, sometimes by great leaps. This is not a comprehensive list of all changes made to the design over the years, but a look at the directions other artists took. Essentially, a brief Fall of the Roman Empire for alien design.

Giger’s only “hands-on” involvement with the series to make the final cut was on the first film. His most impressive creation for that movie is, in my opinion, the Space Jockey, the truest fusion of flesh and machine, literally grown into the ship despite what unbelievably horrible ideas future movies would try to retcon into the series. But the alien itself is the most enduring work. The elongated head, the inner toothed tongue, the mechanical components within the meat of the creature, its ribs, its inexplicable back-pipes, it all manifests as a symphony of disturbing elements that, when combined into a humanoid figure, speak of pain, wounds, death, cruelty and danger. This is widely known.

What fewer people (including future creature designers) realize is that one of the most critical features of the alien is that it is aesthetically displeasing. It is not sleek. It is not cool. It is ugly. It doesn’t fit together right. It is not streamlined not conventional in color or form. Where Giger designed the Space Jockey to be oddly beautiful, he went for something in the alien itself that makes it hard to look at. Some consider this “cheap” or “incomplete.” I’d argue that it was not only intentional but one of the most critical features of the design.

The original alien was never meant to appeal to us. It was made to scare and disgust us. The original film is the only time it did so successfully. Commentaries on the series suggest that the repetition of the design in further movies made it less impressive, that it was done to death. This is not true because the original design only appeared in one film. Though that design too is demystified by now, the films did not need to suffer from any inevitable decrease in horror. That decrease is intentional.

James Cameron didn’t want to make a horror film, he wanted to make an action thriller with some horror elements. His alteration of Giger’s designs helps elucidate this. The design of the aliens from Aliens is close to Giger’s with three critical embellishments: The arms now have bony protrusions at the elbows, the dome has been removed revealing the ridged head, and the design has been normalized and streamlined. The alien is no longer grotesque, it is awesome.

The original alien looks dirty and ragged by comparison. This was not a mistake by any means. Aliens is not about hurting the audience like its predecessor, it’s an action movie and the turn from horror to action was extremely successful.

Cameron then took Giger’s aesthetic, more or less, and designed his own super-alien, the Queen. Little attempt at horror remains, if any. This is an epic beast made to appeal to the eye with smooth curved structures and spines that follow the form naturally and elegantly. It has less of a mechanical influence, and no sign at all of Giger’s ugliness. Its use in the film is similarly unhorrifying, it’s an intense escape followed by one of the greatest fight scenes in movie history. Cameron diverged from Giger and Scott, but what he made was a new expansion of the universe that was all his own, and in typical fashion for the director, it amazed audiences and proved highly influential ever after.

Giger was invited back to design a new iteration of the alien for the third film. He set out to perfect his original design, and did so artistically but not cinematically. His new design introduced an even more horrifying tongue that would enter the victim’s throat, and with shark-tooth-like barbs, come back out bringing their guts with it. It had a visible, moving brain under its dome, and it lost the back tubes in favor of a more animal-like structure. It also had new artsy elements that brought it further into Giger’s developing aesthetic. The filmmakers elected not to use it.

Tom Woodruff Jr. and Alec Gillis took over. Students of Stan Winston who had implemented Cameron’s concepts, they redesigned the alien into a near-fully organic beast. The only remainder of its mechanical elements are the repeated flutes on the side of the head. The rest is all animal, with inhuman legs and feet. Its cheeks are no longer messes of visible mechanisms, but rumpled skin. And it is sleek. It’s streamlined. It is, in essence, what the alien would look like had it been originally designed by someone other than Giger.

Alien 3 attempted to bring the series back to horror. That might have been a mistake but we can give the creators the benefit of the doubt and instead of criticizing the aspects of the film that have already been criticized ad nauseam, focus only on the design. Basically, it’s meatier and meaner and although it has lost Giger’s surface, it does retain his basic concepts and yields an appropriate movie monster for a very dark film. It would be brilliant had it not followed such vastly superior works.

Gillis and Woodruff returned for the fourth film and further organicized the creature. They took the Alien 3 design and regained the tubes, and made the back of the head a little less round. While the alien from 3 was alternately red or black depending on the lighting, the Resurrection beasts were generally greenish-brown or grey depending on whether they were computer generated.

But look at its cheeks and neck. The region on the sides behind its mouth. The clumpy skin of the third alien is now a total ugly mess, and not ugly in Giger’s way. Just a mess of blotchy crud. Its arm has little trace of the underlying tubes and mechanics, it’s just a bumpy human arm. Alien 3 took the creature into animalistic design, but 4 began to turn it into a mess.

The newborn has no mechanical elements whatsoever, or even any trace of them. It bears only the slightest resemblance to Giger’s design and that’s okay. It had a new purpose- To be gross. Not grotesque, necessarily, but icky. There it succeeded. Its face was also more expressive, at times almost human. Its sunken eyes, its bat-nose, the bloated filigree on the sides of its head, all contribute to something appropriate to the film this creature was designed for.

Notably, the creature was designed with genitals, which were censored from the film for being too much, the director said, “even for a Frenchman.” The Newborn represents the end of the series. The alien has gone everywhere it can go, and retains nothing of what made the original what it was. Evolution is inevitable but I can’t help but wonder what might have happened had the ADI team that handled the latter two films honored Giger’s new designs, or kept his originals, or designed new works of their own along his guidelines instead of simply making the aliens closer and closer to blobby animals.

Prometheus provides another succinct view of what happened- Giger’s original derelict ship was a misshapen bony surrealist sculpture. It had no visible means of flight, it had nothing to even compare to any vehicle ever designed. It made no sense. It hurt the brain to think of as a spaceship. Prometheus featured a similar ship- But made it work. It was streamlined and curved naturally instead of bent and ugly, it was a mechanical ship and not something that might have been grown. That’s what happened to the alien over the years. It was cleaned up, made sense of, and turned into something normal. But the final insult was yet to come.

That’s the finale of Prometheus. Look at it.

Now look at the original:

Now back to deacon:

How did anyone, especially Ridley freaking Scott, think this was acceptable? It’s a god damn cartoon. I mean literally! It’s what Gary Larson spoofed the aliens into!

It has no surface detail, just some bumps like what a child might push into a lump of clay. Its pointy head is a joke. And its inner jaw is based on the goblin shark’s:

The goblin shark is notable in two ways- One, its jaws are horrifying. Good. Reason two- It looks like Jerry Lewis.

It’s goofy! It’s silly! The prominent upper maxilla looks absurd and funny despite its sharp spiny teeth. The goblin shark is certainly bizarre and bizarre is often good, but in this case it turned the iconic alien, the greatest design in the history of creature effects, into an absolute total JOKE.

Never mind the squid. Never mind the plain white tentacled blob that replaced the chestburster. Never mind the idea that the brilliant concept of a pilot grown into its ship was made into a white guy in a suit. Never mind the dull serpents or the atrocious uncreative bumpy makeup on Fifield. Ignore all the problems with Prometheus because this is about the design of the adult form alien. Look what they did to it.

Resurrection ended the alien’s tenure as the greatest monster. But it did not make it into a joke. The deacon is a poorly sculpted, plainly painted, uncreatively applied, horribly conceived, silly, pathetic, absolute low point of creature design in cinema. That’s where the alien ended up.

This is one of the greatest plummets in art. From the pinnacle to the nadir. So what comes next? Alien: Covenant, appears from its trailer, to be even more of a remake of the original than Prometheus. The same plot, slightly different specifics. Of its true story and creatures, only time will tell. But I have the lowest expectations. I expect the worst, for the alien to go from joke to insult. Or further insult, all things considered.

The trend in cinema (among other things) right now is to take whatever was good once and ram it into the ground as hard as possible. I don’t know what more they can do to the alien after the pointy headed atrocity above, but I have a feeling we’ll find out.

But I also have hope. Worst expectations but a glimmer of hope that we’ll see the redemption of this creature. Giger is dead, and the world is poorer for it. I hope Scott has found someone new, an unknown artist as Giger was in the 70s to come to fame as the next great surrealist. I hope we’ll see the birth of a new form of horror cinema. I hope a great many things every time an alien movie comes out.

My mother was pregnant with me when she saw Alien. I drew it over and over as a child. I studied it above all other films and designs as an adult. I grew up with the alien on every level. I don’t know what will come next, and I will go in with an open mind.

But I can’t help but feel that the iconic monster has hit rock bottom, and it’s about to crash through the stones down into hell.

[palliddata]

Game Of Insert Pun Here

By Elizabeth “Esquilax” Lavenza

This isn’t just an article about Season 7. Game of Thrones has had plenty of enduring problems since its inception, and the roots that fully sprouted this year have been festering for quite some time. The series’ obsession with rape isn’t new, for example. And if you’re the type of person who’s mentally rolling out all the justifications for why the show needs to regularly show explicit rape scenes, please remind yourself that the show doesn’t feel the need to show us hideous period-accurate pseudomedieval teeth, so the “they need all the rape because gritty realism!” defense doesn’t hold up. And since I can’t find a good place to slot in the racism issue in the rest of this article, I’m bringing it up here, because it’s yet another gaping wound on the show. The fact that non-white people almost exclusively show up in Game of Thrones to be liberated by the hyperaryan Daenerys is...well, do I even have to go into it? Part of the problem is the show’s overburdened nature: juggling plotlines on two separate continents isn’t easy, and Essos typically ended up left in the lurch, its residents and societies and cultures left unfleshed as essentially Pokémon gyms for Daenerys to beat on her way back home. Since I’m trying to keep this article focused on season seven, I’m not even going to get into the abominable, interminable Dorne story arc, which has been torn apart in plenty of other pieces.

If I had to pick one point where the show jumped the shark, it would have to be when Jon Snow became Jesus. Snow has always been the closest thing to a traditional fantasy hero in the story: handsome, martially and tactically skilled, partially noble, dramatic, and intermittently flawed but overall morally decent. So, if the show was to earn its reputation as dark, subversive, and merciless, knocking him down from this position would have been an obvious place to start, a move that would have shocked the audience in the same manner as Ned Stark’s death. Kill him, take him out of action, reveal him as a hypocrite, there were many options. The writers magically brought him back to life instead, and in doing so they perfectly set the tone of the coming seasons: Jon was The Hero, and even death could not stop him from assuming his place as the heroic savior of a world that we were led to believe was no place for heroic saviors. Even revealing that he secretly isn’t a bastard, and is therefore even more noble-blooded than we assumed (“secret noble heir” being such a contrived and hackneyed fantasy trope that critics were already tearing into it decades ago) couldn’t match up to the betrayal of any sense of actual grittiness or ruthlessness or subversion that was The Resurrection Of Jon. And since then, the show hasn’t exactly kept to its promise of ruthlessness. Sam cured Jorah’s greyscale. Jamie charges towards an angry dragon and comes out more or less unscathed. Jon and his pals embark on a pointless, ill-conceived zombie wrangling mission, and the only casualty is one of three mostly interchangeable dragons (and that doesn’t even get into how badly the “capture a zombie to prove they’re real” subplot abuses time and space to allow characters to teleport around Westeros at speeds dictated solely by the needs of the sloppy writing).

Jon’s messianic turn feeds into the central problem with what Game of Thrones became. Now, the most cliched and simplistic sorts of fantasy tend to present morality and conflict in rather simple terms. A hero or group of heroes, usually of noble birth and gifted with great power by virtue of their noble birth or purity of heart, rise to oppose a generally un-nuanced and uniformly fiendish villain, cheating death and conquering improbable odds to persevere. This was exactly the kind of story Game of Thrones wanted us to think it wasn’t, what with all the gore and sex and corruption and intrigue and major characters dying. But where are we in this season? Jon, Daenerys, and Tyrion are together on Team Good Guy, Cersei has gathered the scum of Westeros on Team Bad Guy (and Jamie has finally left her side, depriving Team Bad Guy of one of its few sympathetic, nuance-providing members), while Scowls McCorpse and his frozen pals round out the conflict with Team Pointless Zombie Murder. Dear god, the zombies. Dany vs. Cersei is a fairly cut and dried “good army vs bad army” brawl, but they can at least add some depth with the tragic factor of the inevitable deaths of the innocent soldiers who just happened, through accident of birth or fortune, to end up on Cersei’s side. The same can’t exactly be said for the zombie conflict, since GoT’s zombies don’t deviate much from the usual fantasy template of mindless monsters the heroes can guiltlessly hack up. Even Sauron, Morgoth, and their orc armies had more motivation than the scowling White Walkers, and they were capable of exercising their power in much more subtle and memorable ways. I genuinely do not understand why “inexplicably evil zombie army” was chosen to be Westeros’ encroaching doom. Surely there were less banal cataclysmic threats than an evil zombie army. It isn’t even a creative zombie army, as indicated by the fact that its most interesting asset, a zombie dragon, is something that Dungeons and Dragons players have been hacking up for decades by now.

Those are some of the major overarching issues, but the show has so many more, all intertwined with each other like an incestuous mangrove of creative laziness. The show’s reluctance to kill off major characters combined with its sexism has given us yet more interminable character focus on Theon, an unlikable, uncompelling sorrow-blob who seems to exists solely to steal narrative attention from more interesting female characters, his toxic presence depriving the genuinely likable Yara of her own character arc just so he can dramatically redeem himself by proclaiming he’ll rescue her after she ends up being needlessly damseled. The union of bad writing and bad acting made Littlefinger’s presence in the seventh season agonizing. Aidan Gillen plays him as Slick McSleaze, World’s Shiftiest Man, to the degree that you have to wonder why literally anyone in Westeros trusts him any more. The show’s terrible writing and plotting sends him into probably his most ridiculous scheme yet, trying to turn the Stark sisters against each other...for no clear benefit that would make it worthwhile for him to antagonize two very powerful, dangerous people who already hate and distrust him. And Tormund, fucking Tormund, living embodiment of the show’s decision to jettison creative merit for GIF-worthy scenelets. Tormund, who shows up at least once an episode so the writers can remind us HEY HE REALLY WANTS TO FUCK BRIENNE, who has turned Brienne’s primary role in the story into “woman who Tormund wants to fuck”, and who magically escapes death by zombie army so he can continually remind us how much he wants to fuck Brienne. The season ends with his fate uncertain, but I do not trust the show’s writers to do the decent thing and kill him off offscreen. Game of Thrones isn’t really doing anything right, other than a few visually spectacular scenes. It’s given up on being in any way a mature and subversive approach to the fantasy genre, but it isn’t even particularly good at being cliched, because even if we accept it as a standard “good vs evil” plot, it remains riddled with bad writing, bad decisions, and myriad plot holes. If you told me a few years ago that the future would see people talking seriously about a big-budget show involving dragons, I would have been cautiously optimistic. I guess the ultimate moral of Game of Thrones is that fantasy fans have to be careful what they wish for.