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our-wargame · 4 years ago

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when you say nothing at all

Summary: Dazai isn't called a genius for nothing. No one can self-sabotage better than he can.

Relationships: Dazai Osamu/Oda Sakunosuke (Bungou Stray Dogs) Characters: Dazai Osamu (Bungou Stray Dogs), Oda Sakunosuke (Bungou Stray Dogs), Minor Characters, Sakaguchi Ango (Bungou Stray Dogs) Rating: M (to be safe. In reality it’s T except for the swearing and references to sexual stuff but there’s no actual sexual content) Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Additional Tags: Dazai Osamu is a Mess (Bungou Stray Dogs), Developing Relationship, Trust Issues, Slice of Life, Friends With Benefits, Light Angst, Self-Worth Issues, References of Sexual Content, As in 0 sex happening, although not for lack of trying on Dazai's part, That's Also His Biggest Mistake, I HATE THAT TAG BUT THAT IS THE FIC, Dazai's pretty trash but his greatest accomplishment, was getting Odasaku to love him Word Count: 2500 Notes:

co-written with SwordintheThrone (they have some ridiculously good shit, check em out.).

can be read on ao3

reblogs are appreciated ty

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It's a shame that he has commitment issues, Dazai muses to himself. Because Odasaku isn't just the best fuck of his life, Odasaku is good to him.

Too good to him.

That's most of the problem. Odasaku will look at him, expression so gentle, so brilliantly sweet and patient and trusting, as if he doesn't think Dazai will rip him apart at the first sign he sees that as necessary. (Still, sometimes Dazai can stand it. Sometimes he even gives into it and the peace that comes with it hurts like a hell he could learn to adore.)

Is this self-sabotage? He doesn't know. And he's still fucking trash for pushing the issue away and ignoring it as he sends Odasaku a text to ask him if he's still not busy tonight.

Odasaku replies within the hour. I'm not, he confirms. Can I come over?

Dazai tries not to laugh, self-deprecatingly amused rather than annoyed at Odasaku's attempt to save him face. He's not that proud, he really isn't.

He imagines if Odasaku were here, he'd tell Dazai that it has nothing to do with that. That Odasaku really does just want to spend time with him, and that's why during their last encounter, Odasaku casually, lightly mentioned the fact that he was free for the next week. Should they want to do anything.

It is self-sabotage, Dazai comes to decide. Because no matter what Odasaku's intents were, Odasaku is going to end up in Dazai's bed, because Dazai desires it. And then Dazai won't be able to fool himself into either deciding the reason for this outcome is because Odasaku thinks Dazai knows himself well enough to make the right decision, or that Odasaku wants to give Dazai the choice to make bad ones.

Both options are better than thinking Odasaku just wants to fuck him. If he minded, which he doesn't, it'd be his own fault too. Everyone knows that you start texts with can we talk and not are you busy unless you want to bang.

Dazai closes his eyes, already tired of himself, even without having to pretend around Odasaku. He thinks about calling it off but that's rude and it'd make him look weak and it's all a lot more troublesome than going through with what he has so far. It's freezing but somehow, the heater is the one thing he doesn't have the energy to bother with as heg gets off his ass to fix up the apartment. He turns the TV on, keeps the volume nice and low on that channel that only replays old movies. Neither of them are wine people but that's what you're supposed to have for these kinds of occasions, aren't you? So he leaves a half empty bottle of sake on the coffee table. Lounges on the couch as he sips from his glass.

How classy is he.

A knock at the door. Odasaku knows it's already open and only does it to alert Dazai. But he still waits outside until Dazai calls, "Come in." It's so unnecessarily considerate of him, Dazai shivers. And hates Odasaku a little bit, even as he thinks about pushing Odasaku against the door and kissing the gentleman right out of him.

"Hey," Odasaku says as he closes the door behind him gently. He smells like takeout. Looks as rugged and handsome as ever. Dazai wants him so badly.

He moves his eyes to the TV as he puts down his glass so he can refill it. His hands are shaking, fuck. "Day go okay?"

"Yeah." Dazai listens for the sound of fabric shifting, Odasaku hanging his coat up on the hat rack. Soft steps signal Odasaku having taken off his shoes and switched them for slippers, walking light out of habit so they don't clack against the tiled floor. "And yours?"

Dazai's half-distracted with trying to remember the last time they had sex for fun instead of thinking he needed Oda's body to make his own shut up. "It went okay," he replies to Odasaku, and it's a miracle he doesn't add, 'it's about to get better, I think.'

That would just be tacky.

He shifts on the couch, still a little chilly, but trying to signal Odasaku should come closer.

"I brought you curry. And soup in case it's too spicy. Can I put it in the microwave?"

Dazai blinks. His mouth starts curving up. "Odasaku, has anyone told you you're too polite."

"You probably haven't eaten." Odasaku easily ignores his teasing jab, placing the takeout on the kitchen counter but not quite walking behind it. "It's crab soup."

He hasn't eaten and yeah, he's a little hungry, and of course Odasaku knows all of this and brought him his favorite. But he doesn't like to eat before sex. It just makes him feel bloated and a little repulsed by himself.

Crab doesn't go with sake, he could try, only it does. He could try 'not in the mood for curry or crab', only Odasaku will probably ask him if it's okay to take a look at his fridge and make him something.

"I'm not hungry." He sips at his glass again. Isn't alcohol supposed to make you feel warmer? "Can I have a kiss?" He wants Oda's tongue burning up his mouth, wants Oda pinning him down and chasing the darkness out of him. It's a stupid thought. He humors it and waits for a reaction from underneath his lashes.

Odasaku's surprise is practically audible in the silence. Dazai starts to move over so the length of his gangly body stretches across the couch, then puts his elbows on the armrest and props his head up to watch Odasaku. Please?

Odasaku closes in slowly, but Dazai finds himself holding his breath, nervous anyways. He can feel his heart in his throat, feels it pulse when Odasaku bends down, warm hand sliding up Dazai's face, cupping his chin. Dazai tilts it up as his eyes fall closed.

And then his breath catches, when Odasaku kisses his forehead instead.

He blinks and Odasaku's already straightening. Retreating to give Dazai space.

"Odasaku...." That's not what he wanted, but-

Odasaku prods his elbow and Dazai takes the cue, pulling his limbs back and sitting up straight. Odasaku takes a seat besides him, their shoulders a couple of inches from touching. Looks at the TV as he says, "Can I hold you for a bit?"

He has to think about this one. Says, "okay," even as he thinks about how he doesn't really want to be touched, at least not if it isn't Odasaku pushing Dazai onto his back.

Odasaku shifts his weight forwards so he's sitting on the edge of the couch and able to comfortably reach for the coffee table. He pushes Dazai's glass inwards- farther from Dazai- and then picks up the remote. When he readjusts his sitting position again, he's still sitting a few meaningful inches away from Dazai. And now he's left his arm stretching over the top of the couch.

It's such a date move, except it's them. Odasaku is doing this for Dazai.

He hates Odasaku a little more in the moment. He hates feeling inconvenient, because it's a reminder he cares about what Odasaku thinks. The desperation of his attachment- he's so fucking weak, it's pathetic. God, he disgusts himself.

"Are you getting enough sleep?" Odasaku asks. Dazai is still leaning away from his arm, but he's not breathing as hard and so he supposes, this is good.

"No." He hasn't. Before they started their arrangement, Dazai would have answered that with a smirk, an 'is Odasaku coming on to me or am I still daydreaming?'

The stunt actors throwing themselves across the TV screen are alright. If this were also back then, Dazai would poke Odasaku, tease and bet that he could do it better. Oda would consider it in his seriousness and Ango would scold them both into the next year. Everything's different now and he's not sure if he likes it or loathes it, even though having to ask himself which one it is, is pretty determining.

Five minutes is how long it takes for him to finally calm down, enough to shift and holds himself against Odasaku's side. Odasaku radiates warmth. The rise and fall of his chest is steady. Dazai tries to ignore it. His neck prickles.

Some more minutes trickle by before Odasaku murmurs, "Can I take you to bed?"

"No," Dazai blurts out immediately, because he understands what Oda is saying, but the answer is no because it'd stress him out, be even worse than the little fiasco going on right now. He'd have to try and force himself to sleep around someone who should be a source of comfort and failing that would just be gloriously useless of him-

"Okay." Odasaku says, gentle. "No worries." A pause. "Would it help to invite Ango over?"

Dazai breathes. It would. He can put on a front if it's for people, if it's for friends. It's harder to put on a show if it's for individual people; he has to make sure their gears mesh together but they're so damn complicated. Odasaku more so, than most.

"We should drag him out of the house a little more."

Dazai opens his mouth. It's not you, he wants to say, urgent, needy for someone else to know what he does. Odasaku, you're not the one making me uncomfortable, it's me.

"Maybe you can teach us how to make hot pot?"

Dazai wants to yell. Fall apart out loud for a change. They're monsters, not shadow puppets on the wall, and they don't go away when the sun comes up or what their parents say it's bedtime, for real this time. Oda's trying too hard, and it aggravates him.

Odasaku can't wrap his arms around him and make him okay. That's never going to be him. He's afraid that Odasaku still doesn't know that, and he doesn't know what Odasaku will do when he really, really understands this. Even if Odasaku doesn't leave, Dazai can't stand the thought of Odasaku suddenly thinking less of him. It'll be just like losing him.

"Dazai?"

He shakes himself out of it. "Yeah. Call him." He pauses. "Can I have the crab soup after all?" He's still not completely ready to hug it out with the idea of eating, but it'll give him something to do.

Oda rises. Dazai stares at the grace, the strength in the lovely curve of his back. He feels cold all over again.

Oda glances over and holds his hand out. Dazai stares at it for a second before he lets Oda lead them away, carrying the two empty glasses with him in his free hand. Dazai pulls away to work on transferring the takeout into bowls to send them off to the microwave while Oda runs the glasses under tap water, swishing the residue round and round before drinking it down and then washing them clean.

The smell of reheated curry overpowers the room. Oda watches Dazai drop into a chair and then watches Dazai plop spoonfuls of curry rice into his soup, stirring this way and that.

"Did you know," Odasaku says, and Dazai looks up at him. "You have happy-cat face."

Dazai sputters. "I'm sorry, I have what?"

"Happy-cat face."

"Odasaku," He purses his lips, but he can't stop his shoulders from shaking. "Odasaku, that's not a thing."

Odasaku keeps his gaze, the slightest rise of his eyebrow explaining yes it is because you have it.

"You're so silly. Did you know that?"

Odasaku hums. When he dials Ango, he places his phone on the dinner table. Dazai's eyes gleam as he shouts like he's from the next city over.

"Oh my god," Ango's voice is very grumbly. "Odasaku-san, please remove me, I think he broke my ear."

Oda turns off loudspeaker and brings the phone against his ear. "So when are you coming over?"

"Ugh, give a man twenty-minutes. I still have work to do."

Dazai throws himself into Oda's side, squashing his face against Oda's other cheek as he chirps, "Tell him all work and no play makes Ango grouchy. And that he has old-man energy."

"Tell Dazai-kun, I think his Brat Card should have an expiration date."

"Tell Ango, there isn't an expiration date on fun~"

"Tell Dazai-kun-"

Oda disentangles himself from his executive, passing him the phone and letting them go at it. Dazai sits back down, adjusting himself so he can bring his knees up to his chest and leave his feet on the chair seat. Even as he chatters away, he keeps his eyes on Oda, who moves to wash out the takeout containers. He reuses everything because he's an environmental dork. Dazai would be more of one if he wasn't interested in dying before the planet. Still, watching Oda so patient, quietly determined to withstand the overpowering...it makes Dazai soften.

"Hey, is Odasaku-san still there?"

"Nope." Dazai says, popping the p. "Odasaku is busy. Being perfect."

"Yeah, yeah. Why don't you two just get married already? Make it official and everything."

He doesn't recover as quickly as he'd have liked. "Ango, weddings are not good places to pick-up women. They're all crazy. And non-sober. And crazy. We'll find you your little lady elsewhere, don't you worry." He watches Odasaku shake off the excess water into the sink, wiping the counter dry and putting the containers to the side. Then he dries his hands, he drifts over to the living room and picks up the remote.

"Ha. Not that I wouldn't reject your delightful request to be your best-man, but are two groomsmen allowed to be each other's best man? I think so."

"Has anyone ever tell you not to drink on the job, Ango?"

"Speaking of which, you'll have alcohol waiting for me, right? I had to train a new accountant today. If it was there, you would have fainted from the painfulness."

"Delightful. So. How much longer?" He'd really like for there to be someone other than Odasaku around him.

"That depends. I don't want to walk in on you two fucking."

Dazai sighs into the receiver. "It's not my fault. Odasaku has a really nice dick."

He can practically hear Ango roll his eyes. "Don't expect me anytime soon then."

"So. Fifteen minutes?"

"Yeah, alright. See you dumbasses then."

There's no immediate beep! Ango is waiting, letting him end the call. Dazai shakes his head. His friends are really something.

Odasaku keeps flicking through the TV channels, only looking up when Dazai leans over the couch from behind, gently resting his chin on the top of Odasaku's head.

"Hi."

"Odasaku's hair is really soft."

"Thank you."

"Odasaku smells very nice. Like mango-watermelon. And curry."

"Thank you." Oda sits very still so he can hand Dazai the remote without jolting him. "What do you want to watch?"

Dazai breathes. In, out. "Anything is fine."

#odazai #my writing

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hellklein · 4 years ago

Photo

[ HELENA KLEIN. 29. FEMALE. SHE/HER] is here! They’ve lived in Silver Lake for [ 10 YEARS ] and are originally from [ NEW YORK ]. They are an [ ASPIRING ACTRESS / CLERK AT FUNKYTOWN THRIFT ] and in their downtime love [ ROLLERSKATING ] and [ COLLECTING VINYL ]. They look a lot like [ TESSA THOMPSON ] and live [ IN OASIS APTS ]

LINKS

stats

wanted connections

musings

playlist

ABOUT HELENA

sexuality:

bisexual

astrology:

leo ☀, taurus ☾, virgo ↑

traits:

charismatic, down to earth, insecure, old-soul, nurturing, hard-headed, sensitive, persistent, strong, jealous, mature, fun spirited, passionate, idealistic

aesthetic:

roller-skates, old vinyls, disco balls, funky fashion, hollywood dreams, pink lemonade, responsibly irresponsible, vintage taste, dreams before day jobs, messy hair, dead devotion, bruised legs, starry eyes

BIOGRAPHY

[ tw: death mention ]

born & raised in nyc, helena trinity klein grew up as an only child with her two loving parents. her mother was a botanist and her father was an astronomer - two scientists with brilliant minds. her father always called helena his “little star”

helena had a close relationship with her grandmother who was once a popular lounge singer and actress back in the day in nyc. the woman shared music, musicals, and classic films with helena throughout her life. helena would dress up and perform scenes with her grandmother, causing a passion and obsession to begin.

helena took her father’s nickname a little too literally, because it didn’t take long for her to realize she wanted nothing more than to be a star. helena’s parents were supportive of her endeavors, but only because they assumed it was a phase.

it was clear from a very young age that helena was quite brilliant just like her parents, and it had always been expected she’d become a scientist as well. helena even attended a technical high school dedicated to science for a year until she convinced her parents to transfer her back to her regular high school where her friends were.

in high school, helena performed in every musical produced by the theater program and often landed prominent roles. she possessed her grandmother’s singing voice and the acting chops to match. she surrounded herself with like-minded people - all those who loved the arts. her best friend was an outstanding dancer, and together, they had big dreams.

helena often bonded with her father over older music. she later discovered that he once had a dream of being a musician like his mother, but never chased that dream due to his fear. it was that day she realized she could no longer pretend to her parents that she wanted to be a scientist. she wanted to be an actor, no matter how terrifying or foolish that was.

although there was clear disappointment from both of her parents, they didn’t stand in her way of chasing her dreams. all she ever wanted was for them to believe in her, though that seems unlikely even to this day. it often made her feel so small, especially when her own parents seemed to support her best friend’s dream of being a dancer more than their daughter’s own dreams. helena knew she wouldn’t be able to get the life she wanted in nyc, so she set sails for the west.

helena went to college at UCLA and lived with her cousin who lived in the area. helena promised to do her parents one last favor - get a degree in physics as a backup plan if the acting career never comes through. although she felt pressured to do it, she did it on their behalf and never once spoke about how awful it felt that her parents already envisioned her failing. she could tell they were coming from a good place, and so with that, she went to school for physics while doing everything she could to get her name out there.

modeling, acting in commercials, student films, and more. she did everything she could in college to work towards a career in acting.

when she wasn’t busting her ass between auditions and science projects, helena spent time with friends trying her best to have a life out there in california. she had ways of dealing with all her stress - going out with friends, listening to music, roller skating, and eventually even roller derby. skating had been something she’d done her whole life. being good on wheels even allowed her to be in a handful of music videos as a roller girl.

her grandmother passed away while she was in school, and the death came with a great toll on helena. she was heartbroken, because in her eyes, her only true supporter of her dreams were gone. that woman was the reason she lived and breathed the things she did. helena owed her everything, and she owed her everything to never give up.

once she graduated from school, helena didn’t stop chasing her dream of being an actor. she moved in the silver lake area with her friend from college, valentina, and got a job at a thrift store she always frequented heavily.

other than a handful of small guest appearances on tv shows, background extras, and a few viral tik toks with her roommate - she didn’t quite become the star she envisioned becoming. now on the brink of her thirties, she’s beginning to wonder if it’s time to hang up the acting hat. but for now, she pushes on and continues to go to audition after audition even when their answers are always no.

HEADCANONS

helena is seriously way too good at roller skating and you can catch her always skating to work. she’ll even skate around the store when her manager lets her.

she's on a roller derby team and has been on and off for years now since college. her derby name is 'helen de-stroy', a play on words of helen of troy.

she likes to stay active - when she’s not roller skating, she’s boxinng/kickboxing, doing yoga, and hiking.

though she loves to have fun and go out, helena is perpetually the responsible ‘mom’ friend of the group. she’s the one making sure you drink water and holding your hair back when you puke at the end of the night.

she’s been in only one serious relationship. she goes on the occasional date, but she’s all about having a meaningful connection with people.

helena collects vinyls and plays a lot of them while she’s working.

she’s very into fashion, though her looks have been deemed funky and thrifty. she likes bolds colors, chunky jewelry, you name it.

to be added ....

#reposting !!#ignore meeee <3 #slintro

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miyu-hyperfixates · 5 years ago

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The Untamed and MDZS appreciation and recommendation post

Okay so fair warning to my small amount of followers, this blog will probably be full of MXTX contents starting from now, because I’ve fallen into MXTX’s hell and I don’t see myself climbing out any time soon.

I’m not even kidding in the span of three months, I’ve watched CQL (like 4 times), watched the special edition, watch the MDZS donghua, read the novel, read the manhua, read a fair amount of fics, discovered the SVSSS’s characters through a few crossover fanfics, started to read SVSSS, then TGCF (as well as their respective manhua up to the last translated chapters) and well generally immersed myself into the fandoms. And I LOVE it! And I have so, so many feelings and thoughts about the characters, the plots, the relationships, everything, that I don’t even know where to start!

Okay so for those who don’t know what the hell I’ve talking about. MXTX stands for Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù who is the author of three amazing novels: Mo Dao Zu Shi (MDZS) [also called Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation], The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System (SVSSS) and Tian Guan Ci Fu (TGCF) [Heaven Official’s Blessing]. The Untamed or Chen Qing Ling (CQL) is the chinese drama adaptation of her most well known (as of now) novel MDZS.

I am going to talk about CQL/The Untamed and MDZS (novel version) in this post... But it will probably be followed by posts about TGCF and SVSSS too.

I’ve tried to be pretty vague on several points so that should keep the spoilers at minimum, in case you didn’t watch CQL yet.

[More under the cut]

Okay so as someone of Asian descent who was born and raised in an European country and spent her formative years watching wuxia and xianxia, The Untamed/CQL is the kind of representation that I really didn’t know I needed and I am so, so glad that I gave it a chance. (Big, big thanks to @shit-happens-bitchachos for reblogging so much CQL contents that the frequent presence of it on my dash got me curious enough to start watching it).

Watching The Untamed for the first time feels like coming back to a home that you once thought would be frigid but actually became very warm and welcoming without you noticing because you have been away for so long. And it feels both nostalgic and new, in the best possible way. It’s a wonderful feeling, really.

Where to find it?

You can watch the drama english sub version on Netflix, Viki or Youtube, just typed “The Untamed” and you should find the episodes easily.

To be honest, though I am very thankful for the existence of such platform, I have a slight [read huge] dislike of Netflix’s choice of translation for any Asian movie/tv shows. I mean I’m not going to go off on a debate about official translation vs fan translation, nor westernization and how doing so not only take off a huge layer of subtle/or not so subtle communication but also participate to erase part of the culture. [Because I have opinions about this and I am still very much so cringing about all the “Yanli”s, it is really not the point I’m trying to make right now. ]

So out of the three version, I’d lean more on the Viki version. To be clear though this choice isn’t based on the accuracy of the translation, but strictly on the choice of naming and title convention.

As for the novel, you can find here a complete english translation made by the Exiled Rebels Scanlations group.

The plot

I’m not going to go into detail about the plot, because I’m sure a lot of people out there managed to do so in a way more articulate way that I ever could.

So basically CQL is about Wei Wuxian, aka the Yiling Patriarch. The Yiling Patriarch is like this huge urban legend that everyone warns their children about, except he actually existed. Why such a reputation? Well, in a Cultivation society where people used spiritual energy to fight and exorcise creatures full of resentful energy (such as ghost, ghouls and other things), the Yiling Patriarch is actually the guy who decided that he was going to use resentful energy to fight resentful energy. What he is doing is called “demonic cultivation” and if you want a western equivalent it would be quite close to using necromancy. And if you want an idea of how blasphemous such method of cultivation is deemed, it would be the equivalent of going to a Christian exorcist organization and yelling loud and clear to all the people there that you’re gonna desecrate the tombs of all holy people and use their corpses to fight ghost and other dark creatures.

So the legend/story of the Yiling Patriarch goes as follow: The Yiling Patriarch and his army of corpses were actually quite useful to turn over the tide of a war that shook the foundations of the Cultivation World, annihilating the strongest Sect of the five Great Cultivation Sects (that lorded over the cultivation society). But some time afterwards the Yiling Patriarch revealed his true colors, and killed more than 3000 cultivators (among them his elder sister and her husband - orphaning their one month old son) before finally ended up being killed by his own little brother.

And now sixteen (or thirteen in the novel) years later, Wei Wuxian’s soul got called back because of a dark ritual. The ritual involved giving up their own soul and offering their body to summon up the soul of a dead, evil, person. The soul summoned would have to accomplish the task the summoner wished for, or the soul would be forever destroyed without being able to ever reincarnate. And so, Wei Wuxian woke up in the body of Mo Xuanyu, a young man who was abused by his family and wished for revenge. While trying to work out what he is supposed to do, Wei Wuxian quickly realized that the Mo family is actually being targeted by fierce corpses that are acting way more aggressively than they should. Turns out that it was because of a possessed spirit sword [a cut out arm in the novel].

Afterwards he encounters Lan Wangji, an esteemed cultivator, one of the strongest of his generation, coming from one of the most righteous Cultivation Sect. And the thing is, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji appear to have quite a complicated history that dates back to their teenage years. And CQL/MDZS is not only about how they decided to investigate the mystery of the possessed sword/arm (which ended up digging up a lot of secrets and conspiracy ), but also about Wei Wuxian’s past, starting from when he was 15 and meeting Lan Wangji for the first time.

The few things that you’re probably going to feel/think while watching the few first episodes

Confusion I think I’m not even kidding when I say you’re supposed to be in a state of perpetual confusion for the first two episodes... There’s this huge info dump, in the first five minutes of episode 1, then you’ll have to navigate this new world feeling as confused as dead-for-sixteen years Wei Wuxian... You’ll meet dozens of characters and if you can’t remember their names or who they are it’s normal don’t worry. Each character has a birth name (Wei Ying, Lan Zhan) and a courtesy name that (Wuxian, Wangji)... And so if you see Wei Ying or Wei Wuxian just know that it refers to the same person. And to complicate things further some characters also have a title (Yiling Patriarch, Hanguang-Jun) other people might use to refer to them. So really, if you want to understand what is going on, you might want to note the name, title and relationship down... But it’s kinda tedious? I promise it is unnecessary as those characters will all be introduced properly in the flash-back starting at the end of episode 2, and you’ll fully be able to get used to them and keep track of them. Of course, if you managed to remember a few names, once the character is being introduced in the past, you’ll get a “ Oh so at some point, this is going to happen to them” sort foreshadowing/foreknowledge, which is neat, I guess. [I recommend going back to watch the first two episodes, once the flash-back is over, to fully grasp what was going on there].

What the hell am I even watching? Okay so this one might only just be me but I was pretty hooked by the story by episode 3... and then I reached episode 8 and 9 and I kid you not, I went “Oh boy... that’s.... yeah okay... *cover face with hands*”... So I was cringing pretty hard for those two episodes out of second-hand embarrassment at the extras actors acting level... Like woah... It was supposed to be scary and threatening and all but I couldn’t just take them seriously? (You’ll know what I’m talking about when you get there)... That with some plot points made me seriously consider stopping right there.... But thankfully I didn’t. So you really just need to pass the first two episodes [which are really good] and cringe your way through the two most abyssal episodes in the show (in my opinion) and everything will go smoothly afterwards. Though to be fair, it might be explained by the fact that no one expected that CQL would have the highest number of reviews of Chinese drama, nor that it would be the highest earning drama of 2019 and certainly not that it would accumulate 8 billions views on Tennent by May 2020. Where am I going with this? Well it was certainly no Game of thrones in terms of budget... That’s what I’m trying to say. It had a low budget production... and well in a fantasy world where everyone and their grandma use supernatural power to fight each other and demonic creatures, special effects are a must. Choices had had to be made [and while I am very thankful for the aspects they decided to use the money on] the special effects were very touch and go.

Okay but are they going to be together or is this another case of queerbaiting? So if what you’re asking is “will we ever get a kiss, a love confession or definite proof of their relationship?”. The very short answer is “No.” You’ll never see any of those on screen for the very simple and good reason that there are censorship laws in China regarding queer relationship on screen. “So it’s basically queerbaiting?” Again no. CQL was adapted from a BL chinese novel. In the novel there is absolutely no room for doubts that they are together. But because of the censorship the producer teams had to remove all definite and obvious proof of romance, but it also means that they had to be creative and anything in the subtext or subtle areas was a go. Like really they crammed more homoerotic text (like at this point is this even subtext) in the show than in all other kinds of adaptations (including the novel, where we get kissing, sex and eloping). It got the point that contrarily to the novel, donghua and manhua where the whole Cultivation world thought Lan Wangji hated Wei Wuxian and that they couldn’t stand each other,in the show everybody and their dogs knew that the two were very close. Also, while I absolutely hate that those censor law exist and am very disappointed that such homophobic mentality still exist and that we won’t get a full adaptation and explicit of their love story, I must say that because of this my demisexual ass absolutely love the depiction of their love in the show. I mean, when you don’t have the “easy way out” of kissing and sex and so all to show that they is definitively romance material going on here... You have to get creative, you have to convey it with all other gestures... touching, gazing at each other and so on... And it creates such a soft but intense and intimate environment around them...By the way I’m not trying to negate their sexual relationship in the novel (#LetWangxianFreelyExpressTheirSexualLives)... I’m just saying that I’m not sure the producing teams would have gotten to such a length in the show if they could just have adapted the explicit romance scenes. Now if somehow they’d had managed to keep the same level of intense subtext and be able to adapt the romance scenes too, that would have been the best, but well...

The reasons you should still absolutely watch/read it?

The plot

The way all those character journeys and stories are interwoven in such a cohesive picture is nothing short of amazing. And the way that Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji unravel events that happened more than a decade ago piece by piece [or rather body part by body part] is so very well done. And of course half way through, you think that you’ve got the full pictures, and you’re sort of gloating all the while because you see it coming from miles away and how can the cast be that stupid... And well you are not wrong. Watch out for the canary though. The show chose to move a few things in term of timeline (character appearing and events happening way before they were supposed to... )... They also added a few original plot points in the past.... So as a results it feels slightly less cohesive and coherent than in the novel. Anyway I won’t go into details here because I’ve got this super long post planned where I’d detailed all the differences between the novel and the show and why some things worked in my opinion but not other. CQL and MDZS are what a properly balanced plot-driven and character-driven show/novel look like.

The relationships

Of course, Wangxian (Wei Wuxian/Lan Wangji) should absolutely be mentioned. Because throughout the story in the past, you watch as young, wild, ingenious, thinking-out-of-box Wei Wuxian meet an equally young seemingly inflexible, impassive, following 3000+ rules in his daily lives Lan Wangji, you watch how their personality clashes before finally acknowledging each other skills, you watch how they hurt during the war, how quickly they had to grew up, you watch how one of them had to watch the other walking down a quickly crumbling path, being alienated by the world without being able to help, you watch how they lost each other, before finally finding each other again after sixteen/thirteen years. And then you can finally watch how soft they are with each other, how in-sync they are, the trust, the devotion, the willingness to stand by each other against the whole fucking world. And as I already mentioned before, because of the censure law in China, you’ll never can’t and will never get to see Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian say “I love you” to each other on the show. It still manages to convey “I love you” in every other possible way without having them actually say the words. I mean at this point it can’t even be considered subtext... It’s plain text written in bold underlined font that can be read in every single one of their interactions, and sometimes even when the other isn't even there, [It's basically subtitles! Hah! Okay getting out of there].

It helps that the chemistry between the two actors is absolutely mind-blowing. And the acting is nothing short of amazing. If you’ve been in the spn fandom then you might know that Jensen is king of the micro-expressions ... well I’m afraid that he has been dethroned by Wang Yibo (Lan Wangji’s actor) in my mind.

But really, wangxian is not the only relationship worth mentioning in CQL/MDZS. One of the other huge highlight in my opinion is the several siblings dynamics. There are about seven sets of siblings among the whole cast and because shitty, shittier and shittiest parents were apparently the norm for their generation, we get to see the trope of “eldest child basically raised their younger siblings” in five different flavors. Of course the main focus is on Wei Wuxian and his siblings, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t see the sheer care and protectiveness oozing out of the other four sets of siblings. As someone who loves family bonding (and especially found families), I really appreciate the fact that among those sets of siblings, there are some that are related by blood, some who are half-siblings and some who are not related biologically but consider themselves siblings regardless. And while all their relationships are different - because they are different people - they all do share the same love for their siblings. “How far are you willing to go for your siblings?” “How much are you ready to sacrifice for them?” The show answers those two questions in various all throughout the story in a more or less oblique way, and right there lies the motivation behind a lot of the characters’ actions, good or bad. Their relationship with their siblings is actually one of the major driving force of the characters (Wei Wuxian among them). And I love it, because it shows that love comes in a many, many forms.

The overarching themes

“What’s right, what’s wrong? Who’s good, who’s evil? Who’s strong, who’s weak?”

In such an elitist society who will judge you at the drop of a hat (especially if you have the bad taste of coming from a more unfortunate lineage), how can you define the difference between “right” and “wrong”? Wherein the midst and the aftermath of a blood thirsty war, the distinction between “good” and “evil” more often than only lies on where you were born and/or your family name rather than where you actually stood or what you did in the war. This right here is the very huge underlying theme that is being woven throughout the show/novel. Not only are we, the viewer/reader, invited to think/judge for ourselves based on the actions of the characters... But our main character, Wei Wuxian verbalizes those doubts and questions explicitly a few times and implicitly in the stand and choices that he decided to take. And due to Wei Wuxian’s influence, Lan Wangji who is used to follow his 3000+ rules on a daily life basis without ever questioning them, starts to do so. (“Do not befriend evil.”, “Be righteous.” ) What does it mean to be righteous? Must the notion of righteousness always align with general opinion? How do you define the ‘evil’ that you are not supposed to befriend? Is my definition the same as yours? Is my definition the same as the rest of the world? And if it is not the case, does it necessarily means that I’m in the wrong? And the very obvious answer to those questions is “No, there is no visible line between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ or ‘evil’... Nor is there any universally agreed on way to act in order to fit in one category or the other...” And this answer is illustrated in all the ways those numerous characters are depicted: their love, their hatred, their fear, their pain, their joys, their tears, their motivations, their frustrations, their shortcomings, their hidden or not so hidden agenda, their flaws... All of them are depicted in such an awesome and wholesome human way. They are not fully good or fully bad, they are human, with all that it entails... Main characters and main villains included (or rather, I’d say especially them) [Though the show tended smooth and cover this aspect a little bit more than the novel in my opinion]

“Don't you understand? When you’re standing on their side, you’re the bizarre genius, the miraculous hero, the force of the rebellion, the flower that blooms alone. But the second your voice differs from theirs, you’ve lost your mind, you’ve ignored morality, you’ve walked the crooked path.” (Jiang Cheng)

Another theme that is strongly address here is the matter of “Public Opinion”. Despite (or rather because of) how fickle it is, public opinion, rumors (no matter how unfounded) could so easily ruins your reputation, your standing. And if you loose their favors than all your previous actions (no matter how praised it had been in the past) would be seen with a blackened lens. I remember feeling as frustrated as Wei Wuxian at the lack of logic, the rhetoric employed and the sheer hypocrisy that had been portrayed by the mass. I think that there is one character that can be easily recognized as the pure personification of “Public Opinion”, he is without a doubt meant to be the “voice of the mass, of the bystanders whose opinions shouldn’t really matter but actually does a lot”. I won’t tell who it is, it’s pretty obvious if you watch the show... And I think that we are meant to feel annoyed at such characters. I think we are meant to be as frustrated as that one character who at a mass gathering tried to make a stand, tried to do the right thing, but was quickly shut down with dubious rhetoric and blatant disregard because their voice didn’t carry enough power. And last but not least, the show/novel broaches the issue of how social standing is considered very, very much dependent on your circumstance of birth. Like I said before the cultivation world in CQL/MDZS is inherently elitist. In order to be able to cultivate you must learn the proper techniques and at a quite young age. But it is not something that you could do on your own unless you’re some kind of genius or prodigy. Which means that you must attract the attention of a nearby sects or begs them to take you in as a disciple. It means though that you’ll probably start a little later than the disciples that were born directly within the sect [inner disciples], meaning you’ll probably end being weaker. However even if by some truly dedication and perseverance you manage to the same level as the inner disciples, you’ll still only be seen as an outer disciples, nothing more than cannon fodder in the eyes of society. In all the major sects, there is a distinctive mark, objects that only disciples coming from the sect family line are allowed to carry, as an irrevocable sign of their high standing in society and their inherent privileges. There are some exceptional circumstances though where someone of low birth status might reach this elitist sphere. But no matter how high they reach, how outstanding they are, in some way they will always be reminded (sometimes behind their backs, sometimes subtly, sometimes right in their face) of the stigma of their birth. There are three characters in particular, whose journeys mirror and foil each other a lot. And I think it is very interesting to see this “son of a prostitute” or “son of a servant” or “street rat” or “bastard” advanced through society. They all received very different upbringings, despite all starting more or less at a low point. And I liked that the way they decided to live later on and how they tackle/handle the cultivation world is very much reflected and influenced by their upbringings rather than the circumstances of their birth. It brings up this very strong message that, if they are the way they are it is not because of who their parents are, but rather how the people around them reacted to them. The way they are right now is not the fruit of their birth but a direct consequences of the rejection/acceptance of society. And so when you look at them, you can’t help but see their journeys as a three forking road paths reflecting the other like twisted mirrors. You look at their actions now, then back their different circumstances and you can’t help but think “Ah, that is what might happened if things were different.” [There is a reason that canon-divergence and time travel fix-it are my favorite tropes... my bias is really showing here... haha] And it really, really hammers on the importance of kindness in the face of misery and discrimination. Kindness and acceptance at the right moment, no matter how small can change everything. Sometimes, something even as small as a candy.

The movie sets and props So I mentioned before that the budget of CQL really wasn’t that high and they had to make choices. And I could only applaud their choices, because really, wah! Just look at the main sects locations, the scenery, the backgrounds. It’s so beautiful!! [Had I had any gifing talent I would have included them so that you could get the full mind-blowing experience... so I’ll just send you to @gusucloud blog, where all the gifs and edits are amazing, (Cloud Recesses here and Lotus Pier here) and in this post have my lame-ass screenshots instead.]

The fine details, the workmanship in most of the props in the background, the swords!!! *Incoherent flailing*

[I didn’t manage to get any close-up of the swords... but believe me, they are piece of arts!]

The music

The soundtrack of the show is absolutely amazing and beautiful.

You know how in movies and tv shows couples always seem to have “a song”... like “Oh! Look our song is playing!”... Weeeeeell...

Wangxian do too and it’s literally their song, as in their actors are singing it. You can of course hear it in the ending, but... but! I think the way it was used within the episode was very striking. It’s one of the many ways the producer teams managed to convey the romantic aspect of their relationship. And it was very well done.

Wuji, by Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo

Wuji, instrumental piano + flute + Zither version

Just imagine, dude just resurrected from his 16 years of deadness and you see him moping at night by playing this beautiful tune with a freaking leaf... just because he saw some cultivators wearing the same uniform as Lan Wangji... So at this point you know that this song might means something but well, you don’t really get it...

The second time you hear this tune, we are on a mountain, and it’s through a bamboo flute that Wei Wuxian used to appease and calm down an agitated corpse [who he apparently knows]... He is luring ‘it’ out to a safe place, so he is playing the song while slowly moving back one step at a time. Then his back suddenly bumps into someone... This person catches his hand. The flute playing abruptly stops and the full instrumental version with piano+flute is suddenly blaring out in the background. And then it’s as if the whole world stops as they gaze at each other, while the music keeps playing. And really, you might fully understand the weight of their gazes, or their history, but you know that it’s there... That’s the moment where you look at them looking at each other, grasping at each other wrist, where you can still hear their song in the background... and can only go “Oh. Oh.” [Then of course a purple ball of pure anger just had to come and interrupt them. Excuse you, they were quickly having a moment there. Kidding aside, It was such a nice scene, it’s hand down one of my favorite scene of the whole show, and the music played a really huge part in my opinion.]

And if it wasn’t enough to hammer it down. The third times will definitively do it. So both of them are fifteen years and meet each other for the first time, when Wei Wuxian goes to study at Lan Wangji’s sect. Of course there first impression of each other is disastrous, what’s with Wei Wuxian insisting to come inside despite having lost his invitation and Lan Wangji clearly stating that no one is allowed without invitation. Of course it doesn’t help that after running back to fetch his lost invitation, Wei Wuxian snuck in after curfew (breaking a protective ward on his way), while smuggling two jar of alcohol. All of the above are forbidden in Cloud Recess, by the way. So our boy just casually broke three rules and then who catch him, right when he is climbing over the wall? Lan Wangji, who’s on patrol, of course. [Like I said, disastrous first impression]...And so after frostily listing all the rules Wei Wuxian broke not even five minutes in , Lan Wangji tries to bring Wei Wuxian to be disciplined. Wei Wuxian, of fucking course, resists. And the two proceed to fight (sword and all).

Cue their song playing as they cross swords on the rooftop of Cloud recesses, under the light of a full moon night.

If that is not a meet-cute I don’t know what it is.

Anyway this song is played many, many more times in the show and I’m not talking about them because I don’t want to spoil anyone.

Also as an aside, they don’t appear in the show... But there are character songs that have been recorded. Some of them sung by the actual actors and other not. And while all of them are really good, if there is absolutely one that you must listen to, it’s “Bu Wang” by Wang Yibo the actor of Lan Wangji. Make sure to watch the official MV only after watching the whole show (because it’s spoilery) and to activate the cc for the lyrics translation. It’s such a beautiful and painful song; and a very insightful reflection of Lan Wangji’s character. I love it.

Lan Sizhui and A-Yuan

No argument or explanation needed, you’ll see when you get there. I dare you not to like those small fluffy cinnamon rolls!

The Junior Quartet

Okay those ducklings deserve a whole sub-section on their own. Not only because they are all amazing kids but because of what they represent.

What is really great here is that since the story takes place over the span of 16/13 years, you get to see three different generations at various stage of their development. In the past you get to see the parents generation at their sum-up while there child, the following generation [Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji etc] from their teenage years to young adulthood. Then in the present you see the teenagers reaching the age their parents were (more or less, probably slightly younger) and the next generation (the ducklings) about the same age as Wei Wuxian’s generation were at the beginning. And the juxtaposition between the two pictures is just so, so very telling because the differences are glaring.

I’m going to borrow the words from qrbat who wrote this wonderful fanfiction, “tell some storm” on ao3.

The parents generation was a generation of Pride and Greed, it was a generation that lauded standing your ground no matter what and refusing outsider help. They were the generation which raised their children as a “generation of War”. A war that they started and that their children, teenagers, had to fight and end for them. And in comparison the junior generation seems so unexperienced so soft... and that’s a good thing, because it means that those children hadn’t had to experience the hardship of war, hadn’t had to grow up so fast because they basically didn’t have any decent parental figures to help them. Instead of perpetuating the cycle of hate and war started by their elders, the generation of War raised the next generation as a generation of peace, as a “generation of Love” and acceptance.

And it is amazing because the juniors, simply by being who they are, are embodying this message from Wei Wuxian’s generations to their parents “See? This is what it means to parent. I had to sacrifice my childhood and innocence to fight your war and I still managed to raise such amazing and kind children, what was your freaking excuse? I will not be like you. Times are changing and they are changing for the better.”

*Look at length of the post* *snort* Right. Okay, would you believe me, if I told you that in the beginning this post was supposed to be an appreciation post for all three of MXTX’s works and not just MDZS because I was afraid it would be too short? Yup so turned out I had a lot more things to say than I thought. Please feel free to react or just message me about anything MXTX’s fandom related... I am desperately in need of friends to discuss with about MXTX’s stuff!

#mo dao zu shi #mdzs #mdzs appreciation #cql #cql appreciation #the untamed #mxtx #wei wuxian #lan wangji #wangxian #mine

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brightly-painted-canvas · 6 years ago

Note

I’m so happy you’re writing again! Your fics are so cute and happy! For a new prompt, maybe something about Rami and Joe meeting each other’s families for the first time?

Thank you for your kind words, anon! It’s good to be back ;DHere’s a fill for your request, even though I twisted it a bit and it became a ‘their families meeting Rami and Joe’ LOL hope you don’t mind!This, as you may notice, doesn’t follow a specific timeline as the logical order of meetings is mixed up.I also don’t know much about some members of Rami and Joe’s families but as I said before, I won’t dig too deep into their private lives just for fiction purpose, it doesn’t sound nice. I’m keeping my knowledge Imdb/Wikipedia-based and that’s enough :)

This is the One - Mazlek

Sami meets Joe for the first time after Rami gets back from Australia and one day decides to hold a small party at their parents’ house.

Some other actors from The Pacific are invited, but Sami is mostly interested in meeting Joe Mazzello, not only because he has been a Jurassic Park enthusiast since forever and really wants to get his old VHS signed (shut up Rami, what’s the point of you becoming an actor if I can’t get autographs from famous people you work with!?), but also because he feels that something is going on between his twin brother and that kid and he has to investigate.

Most importantly, if his intuitions are right (they always are, when Rami is concerned) and his brother is getting romantically involved with his (admittedly cute) co-star, he needs to take a proper look at this Joe, analyse him and figure out if he passes the ‘Twin Test’ and he can allow this relationship.You know, standard brotherhood administration.

So he steps outside his parents’ house while Rami finishes the preparation for the party and waits for this young fella to show up, ready to snatch him away before Rami can intervene and prevent him for having ‘just a friendly chat’ before lunch (a conversation that could be considered friendly if he hadn’t been used by now to add death threats at the end of it. But to be fair, it had been working out greatly in the past, scaring off some real douchebag trying to date his brother for not nice reasons).

A black car stops right in front of the house at some point and out of it comes a nervous-looking redhead holding a crate of what look like bottles of wine.

Sami patiently waits for him to climb the few steps from the lane to the house when he notices the guy tripping and losing his grip on the crate, that falls on the ground with a horrendous loud sound of broken glass.

“Fuck!” is Joe’s desperate comment, as he rushes to pick up the box and ascertain the damage.

One bottle is shattered and leaking read wine all over the porch’s floor, but the others look intact, except for one which has its neck cut abruptly in half, although the content of the bottle is still miraculously inside.

Sami gets closer to help him and that is the moment when Joe notices him and does a double take, his mind for sure going from ‘who’s there’ to ‘fuck Rami saw me being a clumsy idiot’ to ‘wait this is not Rami’ and finally to ‘ah the famous twin, at last’.

“So, this is a goner,” he sighs, carefully picking up the broken pieces of the lost bottle: “But this one we can keep for ourselves.” he says, extracting the damaged bottle from the box and lifting his gaze to smile mischievously at Sami, who smiles back.

“You drink the first half, I’ll take the second.” he says back and he really doesn’t know why he’s already acting so chummy with this Joe kid, but his smile is infectious and his clumsiness is endearing and he suddenly understands why Rami seems so smitten with him.

Joe laughs at Sami’s suggestion and nods: “I’m gonna need it if I’m meeting the rest of the family as well.” he comments.

“Oh no, just me today.” shrugs Sami: “And I’m the most dangerous one so you are really, really lucky.” he adds, just to have a bit of fun with him.

Joe gulps and nods again and Sami thinks he has passed the Test.

He’s a good one he thinks, helping Joe getting up and calling for his twin brother to come help them clean up.

John meets Rami for the first time when he’s been ringing the doorbell to Joe’s apartment for minutes and he’s about to give up, but then someone opens the door and that someone isn’t his brother.

“Oh. Hi.” he stutters, confused.

The stranger looks tired and sleepy and like he’s been woken up by John’s insistent ringing but he still smiles apologetically and asks: “Joe is gone grocery shopping. Do you wanna come in?” and John says ‘yes’ and steps inside looking around like he’s never been before.

Joe’s house looks the same and it’s clear that this young man is not just a friend crashing on his brother’s couch because said couch is tidy and empty of blankets while the stranger is still in his pajamas.

“Do you want coffee? I should make some.” asks suddenly the guy and John nods, lost in the paradox of being treated as a guest by someone he doesn’t know in his very own brother’s house.

The guy smiles and extend his hand and says: “I’m Rami, by the way. You must be John?” and John’s mind suddenly gets swallowed into a very specific memory of a phone call some days prior in which Joe was talking about some fellow actor staying over for a few weeks and so he goes: “Ah. Yeah, that’s me. So you’ve been…” but for some reason doesn’t end the sentence.

“Dating your brother, yes.” concludes for him Rami and John’s mind gets blown away for the third time in the span of a few minutes.

That’s exactly when Joe decides to get home. As he opens the door and sees the both of them standing between the living room and the kitchen he smiles and exclaims: “You’ve meet my brother!” and then to John: “You’ve meet Rami!”.

“We did meet.” smiles Rami and he looks happy to see Joe, which seems so strange to John considering they’ve probably been living together (and oh my God don’t think about other things they may have been doing together in this very house) for the past few days.

But then he gets distracted by Joe hugging him and asking him to stay for a late breakfast and they sit on the couch chatting about this and that until Rami is serving them coffee and toasts. Joe looks horrified by having left his friend (boyfriend? Partner? Lover?) do all the work in the kitchen but Rami just shrugs and tells him to keep catching up with his brother and gracefully leaves them alone.

John catches Joe’s lingering gaze as Rami disappears into Joe’s bedroom to get changed and he’s stunned by the look of utter love and adoration he sees in his brother’s eyes.

He must be a good one he thinks, still bewildered.

Yasmine meets Joe for the first time when she gets a text from her mom that says Rami hasn’t been feeling well for a few days and asks her to stop by her brothers’ flat to check on him.

The ride from the hospital to the apartment is not a long one and she’s relieved she still has the keys to the front door in her bag, so she can step inside without bothering his sick brother.

When she gets into the living room she’s surprised to see two people sleeping on the couch as the television is transmitting the looped music of a neglected dvd’s main menu.

Rami is tucked under the chin of a redheaded man, sprawled on top of him and almost completely hidden under a blanket, slow breath coming out in difficult puffs from his congested nose.

The other guy seems to be sleeping more relaxedly, holding Rami close with their legs entangled and one arm slung around Rami’s shoulders, protectively.

Yasmine stills and take a proper look at them and, after the initial shock, she smiles at the sight.

She soon will be needing to wake them up to check on Rami’s health, but for a moment she just waits, busying herself with quietly turning the tv off and tidying up the coffee table in front of it, full of half empty cups of tea and used tissues.

She doesn’t know when and how Joe (because this must be The Joe) managed to arrive before she did to take care of Rami, but she’s glad he’s here for her brother.

I hope this is the one she thinks, getting closer to gently shake Rami’s shoulder and wait for him to wake up and explain his symptoms to his doctor sister.

Mary meets Rami for the first time when she asks Joe to babysit the kids but when she meets him at their favourite park he’s with someone else.

The guy politely introduces himself as Rami and Mary thinks ‘oh, right’ as he looks amusedly at Joe’s nephews already playing on the park’s swings.

“Will you be fine with keeping them for a few hours?” she asks Joe and he nods confidently: “Yeah, we’re good. Rami is exceptional with kids, he’s been so excited to meet them he couldn’t sleep.” he confesses with an amused look as they witness Mary’s younger son already confident enough to ask Rami for a push to his swing.

“Wow, Joe! Don’t let this one run away, he seems like a catch!” she jokes lightly.

“Yeah.” is the sincere reply that catches her off guard. Like Joe knows, like he has thought about this already and he came to the same conclusion, but in complete seriousness.

“You got it bad, uh?” she asks, quieter this time.

“So bad.” he replies in a whisper, earnestly.

This feels like the one she thinks, as she says bye to the boys (all four of them) and leaves them having their fun.

Nelly and Virginia meet their son’s significant others the same day they meet each other, at the The Pacific’s premiere. It’s not the first Hollywood event they attend of course, but it’s a big premiere with a red carpet to walk and both Joe and Rami are swept right and left for photo calls and interviews.

As guests and mothers of two of the stars of the show, they hold their distance from the commotion but keep a keen eye on their boys, striding with confidence on the carpet, smiling at the cameras, shaking hands, looking very happy.

And as they catch Joe and Rami finding each other’s eyes amid the crowd, smiling secretly at each other and sharing a silent conversation with just one look, they both understand what that means.

The two mothers just give each other a knowing look and nod, without a need for words.

At some point Rami and Joe excuses themselves with the interviewers to get near them, introduce one another with a ‘mom this is Joe’ and a ‘here’s Rami’. Virginia smiles and hugs Rami close the same way Nelly does with Joe.

This is the One they think of each other’s son, and they’re sure about it.

#fanfiction #prompt fill #anon request #mazlek #rami malek #joe mazzello #the maleks #the mazzellos #meeting the family

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spaceorphan18 · 6 years ago

Text

Finding Kurt Hummel: The Back-Up Plan

Masterpost

5x18: The Back-Up Plan

And we’re continuing on with another great New York Arc episode. Kurt, however, is not in this episode as much as I remembered -- though I suppose it’s quality over quantity. I’m also slightly eye-rolly with the June stuff since it ultimately doesn’t really go anywhere. But these last few episodes of season 5 are a lot of fun. So, here we go....

June Dolloway

Okay - had to get a side shot for all of you guys to appreciate the entire outfit here. There’s a reason he’s holding his jacket -- those are some very tight pants there.

Alright - so I’m going to be honest about something. I’m not a big fan of this scene. Really, its...just a bad scene. The writing is horrible -- and it feels like Chris is having an awkward time saying it. Meanwhile, Darren feels like he’s just reciting lines. I’m not going to speculate on production values here - there are just very few times when things don’t seem to work between Kurt and Blaine (Chris and Darren) and this is one of them. (Though - I mainly blame the weird writing.)

And really, it’s the opening few beats. And Kurt’s ridiculous expository monologue about June where he sounds like Ryan Murphy and not Kurt. When they get to normal chatting, things come together after that. I don’t know...

Anyway - (I can’t still this scene, Kurt won’t stand still) - the gist is that socialite June Dolloway is around and Kurt’s going to sing for her, and enlists Blaine to help. Because they’re getting married and should do everything together.

What?

This is one of those weird show things where their idea of marriage is being joined at the hip. C’mon, show, what are you doing? At least they get points for remembering Klaine is engaged.

And for it being an outside scene. One nice aspect of the NYC arc is that they were able to open it up more, and it felt like a real world instead of everything happening on one school set.

Kurt’s happy at the end of this scene. Let’s let that be the take away from this one.

Moral Integrity

Kurt’s getting ready for his evening of singing in front of June Dolloway. But is this scene about Kurt? Nope! This scene is about Rachel.

I mean, it’s not unreasonable for Rachel to take a night off. It’s really not - that is why they have understudies. Her producer is kind of a dick about it. But -- yeah, it’s been a month and Rachel’s already getting bored of her dream job? Seriously?

Anyway - Rachel tries to validate her reasons for going off to Hollywood to book a TV show - and Kurt’s playing the role he always play -- moral compass, good angel, Jiminy Cricket - whatever you get the idea. He’s as irritated as the rest of us at her fickleness -- and points out that lying to her producer about auditioning for a TV pilot is kind of a dick move.

Kurt is so done with Rachel at this point. I’m now back to wondering why they are friends because every scene they have is again about Rachel, and Kurt’s beyond annoyed. I suppose this might be some set up for Old Dogs, New Tricks, but idk...

Story of My Life

I’m kind of laughing that they named the dance hall after June -- because NYADA apparently only has one room - and it’s the dance hall. Man.

Anyway - look at these cuties in complementary outfits. Kurt’s jazzed to meet June, but I’m still not entirely sure why.

Alright - let’s break this down a little, because I have some things to say.

So - this scene is supposed to be reminiscent of when they did Animal way back in season 2. Kurt’s an awkward little goober while Blaine is suave and charming. On one level, I get it. June’s a celebrity, and when Kurt tries too hard, he ends up falling on his face time and time again. (It’s also supposed to be funny - but I find Kurt’s actions cringe worthy, and I don’t come back to this performance - ever.)

At the same time, Kurt’s not 16 anymore, and has had all this training at NYADA -- that’s got to count for something. On top of that, I’m getting tired of a narrative that says because Kurt’s not charming in the way Blaine is that he’s not able to be professional about -- whatever. It kind of goes back to the dialogue of early season 3, but not necessarily about passing or not passing but about how good a performer you are.

And -- my thing is -- Kurt’s voice is incredible in this number, and until they start the ridiculous choreography, Kurt’s actually pretty wonderful. So, I wish they hadn’t hammed it up, tbh, because the June being dismissive of Kurt would be more because of those early season 3 passing/not passing conversations instead of Kurt just failing at his performance.

(I mean - how would have Kurt been picked in the first place if he wasn’t good at performance?)

Anyway - the scene just doesn’t work for me, though I get it’s necessity due to plot reasons.

There isn’t much more I’d like to comment on the song either. Other than the lines about ‘her’ not feeling it in her bones being a clue about June’s feelings towards Kurt, I think this is the most impersonal duet they ever do.

I may be alone in this opinion - idk, I haven’t discussed it with anyone -- but I think the whole shifty eye thing June does to confuse who she’s talking to is a weird way of doing it. It just makes Shirley MacClaine look awkward.

I do appreciate Blaine’s honest-to-god support of Kurt when they both think it’s about Kurt, though. And excited Kurt remains a goober. I say you lucked out though, kid, June is kind of the worst and you’re better off not being her lump of coal - as Blaine’s going to find out.

Old Marrieds

This is, perhaps, my favorite scene in the episode - and one of the best Klaine scenes we ever get. Because unlike that awful first scene, this is really where the actors shine, and Kurt and Blaine feel like a couple who’s been together for a very long time. There’s a nice sense of familiarity and connection in the scene that does make them feel like they’ve been married for twenty-five years. I love it. I wish they had more scenes like this together in the second half of the series.

So, Blaine’s getting ready for his evening with June - and Kurt’s helping him get ready. There’s a slight tension here, as Blaine’s concerned about Kurt and his well being. And I love that Kurt’s pretty honest about it. He’s disappointed, and slightly jealous, but has no resentment towards Blaine about it. He’s being supportive, and cares about Blaine’s well being, too. Kurt’s often touted as a selfish character - but it’s moment like these that I’d argue he’s really, really not.

I kind of love that Kurt’s back to being pragmatic about June and the situation in whole. It’s a good opportunity for Blaine to move forward in his career, but she’s not a friend - and no, she really doesn’t have his best interest at heart, and Kurt’s probably more aware of that than Blaine.

I kind of love the other little touches in this scene -- Kurt doesn’t want Blaine to worry about him, reminds him that they’re in this together - so even if Kurt’s not there -- he’s still there spiritually, calls him handsome, and gives him a nothing kiss (which is fantastic! because we don’t get nothing kisses between the two of them -- something that’s a nice touch that establishes, uh, yeah, these two are intimate with each other on a regular basis, but don’t need to be swallowing each other whole every time they touch lips).

It’s a great scene.

And it ends with this little moment of sadness for Kurt. Yeah - he is proud of Blaine, he’s sincere in his words. But kind of like with the whole Tony/West Side Story thing - Kurt’s struggle with making it in the real world is a lot harder than Blaine’s (though Blaine definitely has some of his own issues to work through). And this little moment acknowledges that. It’s a nice touch.

While Kurt’s not in any of the Blaine/June scenes, Blaine does talk about Kurt quite a bit. And one thing that most definitely comes up is the show’s weird dichotomy that you can either have love or a career. They pulled this with Finchel back in season 3 (though I think it makes more sense then). I think it’s fine here as a bit of drama, I can see someone like June wanting to mold Blaine into something of her own - and while being completely dismissive of Kurt based on one awkward performance, if they had any extended interaction - I could see her not liking him because he’s too headstrong to let June be in control.

While I don’t think it’s out of nowhere that someone ‘in charge’ would ask Blaine to break it off with Kurt because reasons, this is going to stop being an external conflict and more internal when Blaine lies about the whole thing. Idk - maybe it might have been interesting to see how they deal with Blaine getting a break but not wanting Kurt - but the two of them figuring out how to navigate it together. I get why they went the route they did -- still, the whole June thing seems a little, idk, lacking at the end of the day.

Helping Rachel

I don’t know why - but they’re (idk who they are in this scenario) really bad with the engagement ring continuity. Two close ups of Kurt talking to Rachel, and in one of them, there’s not a ring. Step it up guys, really.

Anyway - Rachel’s stuck in LA and can’t get back for her show, and the understudy fell down stairs or something, so... now it’s Kurt’s issue? Ug.

So - Kurt frantically tries to reach Mercedes and Santana, who are busy being awesome friends. Kurt ends up finding them at the diner - and says that they should do a bomb threat, or bedbug scare, or claim Barbra’s doing a free show in Central Park to stop the show -- which, agreed, are all horrible ideas. Though Chris’s comedy is top notch in this scene. Again, I don’t know why Kurt is so stressed out about it -- why not let Rachel have some consequences for her actions for once. But -- Maybe cause Mercedes’s good friend juice is wearing on her, Santana says she’ll step up and play Fanny for a night.

Couch Time

I kind of like that they show Kurt and Blaine at the brownstone instead of the loft -- nice to show that they hang out in both places instead of just the loft. Tbh, I think Blaine’s place looks way more comfortable, and has way less Rachel in it.

But -- as Kurt says, he and Blaine haven’t been spending a lot of time together lately cause Blaine’s spending all of this time with June lately. Kurt’s interested in the details (though - god, all the name dropping again, this doesn’t really sound like Kurt, but some middle-aged dude who cares about these people), but the point is Kurt wants some alone Blaine time, and not just because gossip.

It’s also brought up, again, that a win for one of them is a win for both of them. While I do think there’s some value in being happy for your partner, I think the whole joined at the hip angle is weird in general. This show is just...weird when it comes to relationships of any kind some times.

Kurt is genuinely happy to hear that Blaine’s getting a showcase, and would have been 100% supportive fiance if it rested there (and he is a few episodes from now.) But Blaine lies, I think cause he wants to spare Kurt’s feelings? Cause he doesn’t want Kurt to go nuclear on June? (I would have loved to have seen that!) Blaine’s own insecurities about the whole thing? Plot?

The point is - Blaine says Kurt has a part when he doesn’t -- which means instead of just being normally ecstatic, Kurt’s over the moon ecstatic. And Blaine finds himself in a self-made pickle.

As an aside, I also kinda love that Kurt does have some boundaries. He is not up for any kind of weird cougar-ish behavior June might be trying out on Blaine. You can do a lot of things, Blaine, but the only sexy times you’ll be having is with me. (And Blaine is totally cool with that.)

And even though Blaine’s already feeling guilty about the whole lie thing - I’m pretty sure they’re gonna skip the movie and go straight to sexy times. I mean, Mercedes and Sam have already used the couch for sexy times. I think Kurt and Blaine should get a chance, too. :)

And that’s it! Yeah - not a whole lot of Kurt in this one. But, I mean, at least there are some really great moments in here.

#finding kh #kurt hummel

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bettydraperlookingpissed · 7 years ago

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Matthew Weiner, The Art of Screenwriting No. 4

Born in 1965, Matthew Weiner is barely old enough to remember the period with which his television series Mad Men has now become almost synonymous. His office is exactly what one might hope for the creator of Don Draper: a stylish mixture of midcentury modern furniture, with a cabinet full of top-shelf liquor. But it turns out that the furniture came with the building, which was designed in 1955, and the liquor, mostly gifts, is wasted on Weiner, who hardly drinks at all.

(Copy and pasted cuz TPR charges and I got your back, man. Or maybe you’re made of money and can afford that kind of thing. It’s long in case ya wanna save it. Good Sunday night reading.)

Weiner’s sensibility reveals itself on closer inspection. A framed still from the set is shot from behind the actors’ heads, showing the crew. There’s a black-and-white photograph of Groucho Marx, Alice Cooper, and Marvin Hamlisch in conversation. There’s a homemade Father’s Day card by one of Weiner’s four sons, reading “Dad Men” in red and black crayon. There’s a picture of Stedman (Oprah’s boyfriend), because when Vanity Fair photographed Weiner’s desk soon after Oprah’s, he asked what she’d had on hers. His bookshelf overflows with fiction, essays, and poetry—from Diaries of Old Manhattan to Billy Collins to Moby-Dick.

A former Jeopardy! champion who once, rather than give notes, jumped up and danced to “Zou Bisou Bisou” for Jessica PareÌ (Megan Draper on the show), Weiner seems never to sleep. Our interview took place in four sessions that spanned almost eighteen months—real months, that is. More time than that passed on the show during the same period, but to say exactly how much would be, in Weiner’s universe, a spoiler. We spoke late into the night after he had spent full days in preproduction meetings, in editing, in sound-mixing sessions, on set, and in the writers’ room—and we could only sit down to talk on the rare nights when he didn’t have to write. Even with this schedule, he comes in every morning inspired by a movie he’s seen, an article he’s read, or a poem he’s remembered. (I’m lucky to be a writer on the show.) Weiner begins every season by rereading John Cheever’s preface to his Collected Stories: “A writer can be seen clumsily learning to walk, to tie his necktie, to make love, and to eat his peas off a fork. He appears much alone and determined to instruct himself.” The life of a showrunner leaves him almost no time to be alone, but Weiner seems always to be instructing himself.

WEINER

You know, I got a subscription to The Paris Review when I was fourteen or fifteen years old. I read those interviews all the time. They were really helpful.

INTERVIEWER

How did they help you?

WEINER

There were people talking about writing like it was a job, first of all. And then saying “I don’t know” a lot. It’s helpful, when you’re a kid, to hear someone saying “I don’t know.” Also, they were asking questions that I would’ve asked, only I’d have been embarrassed to ask them. Like, What time of day do you write?

INTERVIEWER

What time of day do you write?

WEINER

I write at night on this job because I have to, except Sundays when I write all day and all night. Left to my own devices I will always end up writing late at night, because I’m a procrastinator. But if there’s a deadline, I will write round the clock.

INTERVIEWER

Did you know when you were a kid that writing was the job you wanted?

WEINER

I wanted to be a writer, but the way my family thought of writers, that would have been like saying, I want to be quarterback of the football team or president of the United States. My parents had the books every Jewish family had—My Name Is Asher Lev, QB VII, O Jerusalem!—but they were also really into Joseph Heller, and my dad took Swann’s Way on every vacation. I always thought I would be a novelist, like the people whose books I saw lying around the house.

INTERVIEWER

Did you read those books?

WEINER

Not really. I read very slowly. I’m a good listener. If they’d had books on tape back then, I would be the best-read person in the world. When I had to do a report on Measure for Measure, I went and got the records, and I listened to John Gielgud do it. My dad read Mark Twain to us at night. I loved “The Stolen White Elephant” and “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” And The Prince and the Pauper, oh my God, did I love that. I read Mad magazine and stuff, but my parents were always yelling at me, You need to read more! Crack a book already! I was not really a reader until I left college. My favorite form of writing is still the short story. Winesburg, Ohio was the first book that I read where I recognized the people in it. I knew the teacher who was sort of gay and couldn’t control his hands. I recognized everybody in there. And then, with John Cheever, I recognized myself in the voice of the narrator. His voice sounds like the voice in my head—or what I wish it sounded like.

INTERVIEWER

Who are your favorite writers?

WEINER

I don’t make lists or rank writers. I can only say which ones are relevant to me. Salinger holds my attention, Yates holds my attention. John O’Hara doesn’t, I don’t know why—it’s the same environment, but he doesn’t. Cheever holds my attention more than any other writer. He is in every aspect of Mad Men, starting with the fact that Don lives in Ossining on Bullet Park Road—the children are ignored, people have talents they can’t capitalize on, everyone is selfish to some degree or in some kind of delusion. I have to say, Cheever’s stories work like TV episodes, where you don’t get to repeat information about the characters. He grabs you from the beginning.

Poems have always held my attention, but they’re denser and smaller. It’s funny because poetry is considered harder to read. It wasn’t harder for me. Close reading, that is. Milton, Chaucer, Dante—I could handle those for some reason, but not fiction. From ninth grade on, I wrote poetry compulsively, and pushed myself to do iambic pentameter and rhymes because free verse was cheating—anybody could do that. But I was such a terrible student. I couldn’t sustain anything.

INTERVIEWER

What pointed you toward drama?

WEINER

Actually, I think it has something to do with my not being a great reader. When a play’s put up, it’s all there in front of you. When you’re a little kid who has trouble with long books, it’s a very literary experience to go see Eugene O’Neill. During high school, I wrote skits, I did improv, I was a performer. My senior year in high school I was elected by my class to give a speech at graduation. It was seven or eight minutes of stand-up comedy, including a salute to the bottom fifth of the class, of which I was part. The dad of a classmate of mine, a guy named Allan Burns, who created The Mary Tyler Moore Show, came up to me afterward. He said, Have you ever thought about writing for TV? You could do that.

INTERVIEWER

Had you thought about it?

WEINER

I had been raised more or less without TV. I loved it, my parents loved it—but we weren’t allowed to watch it. And yet what was on TV during those years? M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Carol Burnett and Bob Newhart. TV was very bad before that, and got very bad after that, but at the time it was really very good. The thing is, I took what Allan Burns said seriously just because it was the first time someone said I might be able to do anything. But my parents hated show business. It’s part of living in Los Angeles.

There was one other formative experience. One of our English teachers, Ms. Moser, had a poet come to visit our school—W.S. Merwin. The honor society got to have dinner with him. Even though I made bad grades, I edited the literary magazine, and the teacher made sure I was allowed to go, too. She had even told him about me, because when we met he said, Tell me your name again, I want to remember it. In my yearbook, Ms. Moser wrote to me, Keep doing what you’re doing, and stick to poetry and starve.

INTERVIEWER

Which you did not do.

WEINER

I tried. At Wesleyan I could not get into any writing classes. I applied to everything and got rejected. You’re laughing now, you should have heard my parents. Six hundred students, all that money, and you can’t get into class!? An older student, who was studying with the famous professor Frank Reeve, told me I should go and ask, personally, to take a tutorial with him. Franklin D’Olier Reeve. This Vermont Yankee, log-splitting son of a bitch. He had gone with Robert Frost to Russia. Incredibly handsome and charismatic—in fact, he was Christopher Reeve’s father. I imagined he was in the CIA. So I went to his office and brought my poems with me. He shredded them. I had some line that was like, “Where does it hide?”—this is sophomore poetry, right?—“Where does it hide to gently squeeze the pitch of morning into orange whispers of dusk, squeeze the pitch of dusk into orange whispers of morning,” and he said, Lose the split infinitive and juice squeezer. It was brutal. Then he said, When do we start?

I spent three semesters studying with Professor Reeve, writing poems and delivering one or two of them to him every week. I also took a lot of poetry classes. There were a couple years there where The Waste Land was the most interesting thing in the world to me. I loved that it was so personal and grimy and gross and epic at the same time. Two women talking about getting an abortion in a bar at closing time right next to a story about Greek gods and the Fisher King. The high and the low together. It is so important to my life as a writer, there’s so much dialogue, so much rhythm that I have tried to emulate. That’s still my idea of what a poetic sentence sounds like. My senior thesis was in creative writing, was poetry.

INTERVIEWER

What were your poems like?

WEINER

Pretty funny, a lot of them, in an ironic way. And very confessional. A lot like what I do on Mad Men, actually—I don’t think people always realize the show is super personal, even though it’s set in the past. It was as if the admission of uncomfortable thoughts had already become my business on some level. I love awkwardness. Reeve compared my poems to cartoons. He had me read “Mac Flecknoe,” Dryden’s satire on the poet Thomas Shadwell, because he knew I had a sense of humor and was interested in celebrities. He also told me that I had to be as interesting as my work, which terrified me. I was like, Forget it, dude. I’m a very conventional person. I’m middle-class. My father’s a physician. I had no personality to speak of. I kept wishing I had grown up interesting so I could be a great writer.

INTERVIEWER

Maybe Reeve turned you into a TV writer by giving you a weekly deadline.

WEINER

I’ve always said TV writing is for people who hate being alone more than they hate writing. Even then I needed to talk about what I was doing. Once I knew that my writing would be read right away, even if it was judged—and once I knew that it would be shot right away—that was all I cared about.

INTERVIEWER

Did you figure this out in film school?

WEINER

No. I didn’t go to film school for writing, but I realized that if you could write, you could have complete control. All these people I admired—Woody Allen, Jim Brooks, Preston Sturges—directed and wrote. When directors would come to the school and talk about their movies, eventually they’d have to talk about the fact that someone else had written it. To me that was like the dirty secret.

Then I graduated from film school and was stuck in a hole by myself for three years, writing. Linda, my wife, was supporting us, but that was awful. I was not made for that. I am not the writer who wants to live in the woods. Plus, half my time was spent trying to get into show business, which is demoralizing and somehow futile without finished work, but easier than writing.

INTERVIEWER

What were you writing during that time?

WEINER

Screenplays. I finished a screenplay that I’d started at USC. Then I wrote another screenplay about paparazzi. Then I started working on a Big Movie. After film school, I read everything that had been assigned to me in college. I mean, everything. I read Mein Kampf. I read all the time instead of writing. And I read a lot of biographies and became interested in this kind of American picaresque character. By picaresque I don’t mean like Candide. I don’t mean a guy who shit’s happening to. I mean a guy who is making his own future because he has no other options. I mean Tom Jones. So I was writing this movie following a guy’s life from 1930 to the millennium. And I got to page 80 of the thing, and I abandoned it.

Then I decided I was going to make a movie, an improvised movie that I was going to be in. Kind of a comedy Cassavetes movie—people improvising, but in a story. This was around the time of Clerks. I saw Clerks and felt the way many people did. It wasn’t like hearing the Beatles for the first time. It was a ten-thousand-dollar amateur black-and-white movie. It was inspiring in the way only something crude and peculiar can be inspiring.

And because I had gone to film school, I knew what commercial filmmaking was and knew I didn’t like it. In the nineties there was a stranglehold of formula on the movies. People would point to great movies like Chinatown as examples of how structure generates great works. But I always felt that these structures were derived from great works. The individual stories are organic, they come out of people’s heads. To say that the story of Jesus and the story of Moses are the same story is a horrible mistake. Are they both heroic? Yes. Do they both have inauspicious beginnings and unmarked graves? Yes. That does not make them the same story. But the studios were trying to consolidate films into a bulletproof system, they were trying to reverse engineer a hit—which, of course, is insane. In entertainment you’re a fool to try that.

One of the big things was, everybody hated “episodic structure,” as they used to call it.

INTERVIEWER

Meaning what?

WEINER

They were uncomfortable with a movie like The Godfather or a story like the Odyssey, where the only thing holding the events together is the characters. Now, there’s this monster, this obstacle, but there’s no real progression—the hero just keeps trying to get home. Sure, Michael Corleone starts off as a young war hero and ends up as the godfather, but the wedding takes up the first half hour of the movie. People liked to talk about “act breaks” and “rising action” leading to a climax, but what about Apocalypse Now? Someone’s on a journey, and sure, we’re heading toward a climax, but there are so many digressions. To me, those digressions are the story.

People would say to me, What’s holding this together? Or, How is this moment related to the opening scene, or the problem you set up on page 15? I don’t know. That’s where the character went. That’s the story. So many movies in the seventies are told this way, episodically, and they feel more like real life because you don’t see the story clicking. Movies like Days of Heaven—big movies that take time out to show the locusts. Do you need the crop duster in North by Northwest? No, but it is the most memorable part of the movie. It has no essential function in the story. Cary Grant has already been pursued. They’ve already tried to kill him. They’ve drugged him. They’ve poured booze down his throat. Remember how Cary Grant goes back to the house where the bad guys got him at the beginning of the movie and poured booze down his throat? He comes back the next day and says, This is where I was, they poured booze down my throat. Remember how he goes into the room where they poured the booze into him and they’ve changed the couch?

INTERVIEWER

Even now the hair on my neck is standing up.

WEINER

They’re so evil. They changed the couch! It’s preposterous, but delightful. Of course, anything that is epic is episodic in structure, whether it’s Lawrence of Arabia or The Godfather, which was already being treated like an art movie—the most successful commercial movie in the world treated like an art-house movie.

I liked episodic structure and I thought it worked. I still think it works. At the time I was especially interested in Billy Wilder and Fellini. I liked their grasp of tone, the way the movies are both funny and dark. You’re always scared and laughing and on the verge of tears somewhere in the middle of these movies. I could watch Sunset Boulevard and 8 1⁄2 over and over again. Everything you need to know about writing is in those two movies. How to tell a story, where to start the story, whose point of view it’s from, at what point you leave their point of view, when you should see a character in a scene by himself or herself—all this shit that drives you nuts when you’re trying to structure something. And then, the fact that there are no rules. That’s what both movies are saying—there are no rules, the audience is not as rigid as you think, and certainly not as rigid as the people paying for the movies to get made.

Anyway, once I got out of film school I said, They will not let me fly the plane. So I’m going to build my own airport. I shot my first movie, What Do You Do All Day?, in twelve days, in 1995. It cost twelve thousand dollars. Anybody can raise twelve thousand dollars—now it would probably be even cheaper, because there was no digital then.

Around that time, my friend Daisy von Scherler Mayer called me up and said, I sold this sitcom. Come in and sit at the table. We’re going to run through the script and you’ll just pitch jokes. The show was called Party Girl. And I drove onto the Warner Brothers lot and sat down at the table with all these professional writers and had no trouble talking and telling jokes. Not just because I’m an extrovert, but because I’d just made this movie and I knew it was funny. You’ve never heard of What Do You Do All Day? and it never went anywhere, but I still say it changed my life. Making that movie took me from being a frustrated, bitter person with no control over his life to a delusional, grandiose person with no control over his life. I was so high on the idea of having a job and writing jokes and going down to the stage and seeing the actors saying them and getting laughs. I couldn’t believe it.

INTERVIEWER

So none of the screenplays you’d been writing before that period were made?

WEINER

Well, remember the eighty-page picaresque thing I threw away? That turned out to be the basis for Mad Men.

INTERVIEWER

Really?

WEINER

Four years after I’d started working in TV, I wrote the pilot for Mad Men. Three years after that, AMC wanted to make it. They asked me, What’s the next episode about? So I went looking through my notes. Now, imagine this. At this point it’s 2004—I’m writing for The Sopranos—and I go back to look at my notes from 1999 ... but then I find this unfinished screenplay from 1995, and on the last page it says “Ossining, 1960.” Five years after I’d abandoned that other screenplay, I’d started writing it again without even knowing it. Don Draper was the adult version of the hero in the movie. And there were all of these things in the movie that became part of the show—Don’s past, his rural poverty, the story I was telling about the United States, about who these people were. And when I say “these people,” I mean people like Lee Iacocca and Sam Walton, even Bill Clinton to some degree. I realized that these people who ran the country were all from these very dark backgrounds, which they had hidden, and that the self-transforming American hero, the Jay Gatsby or the talented Mr. Ripley, still existed. I once worked at a job where there was a guy who said he went to Harvard. Someone finally said, You did not go to Harvard—that guy didn’t go to Harvard! And everyone was like, Who cares? That went into the show.

How could it not matter, when everyone was fighting so hard to get into Harvard and it was supposed to change your life? And you could just lie about it? Guess what—in America, we say, Good for him! Good for him, for figuring it out.

INTERVIEWER

I’m struck by the irony that Don Draper has become an icon of the 1960s Establishment when the character himself feels like such an outsider.

WEINER

Everyone loves the Horatio Alger version of life. What they don’t realize is that these transformations begin in shame, because poverty feels shameful. It shouldn’t, but everyone who’s experienced it confirms this. Sometimes people say, I didn’t know we were poor—Don Draper knows he’s poor, very much in the model of Iacocca or Walton, who came out of the Great Depression, out of really humble beginnings. Or like Conrad Hilton, on the show. These men don’t take no for an answer, they build these big businesses, these empires, but really it’s all based on failure, insecurity, and an identity modeled on some abstract ideal of white power. I’ve always said this is a show about becoming white. That’s the definition of success in America—becoming a WASP. A WASP male.

The driving question for the series is, Who are we? When we talk about “we,” who is that? In the pilot, Pete Campbell has this line, “Adding money and education doesn’t take the rude edge out of people.” Sophisticated anti-Semitism. I overheard that line when I was a schoolteacher. The person, of course, didn’t know they were in the presence of a Jew. I was a ghost. Certain male artists like to show that they’re feminists as a way to get girls. That’s always seemed pimpy to me. I sympathize with feminism the same way I identify with gay people and with people of color, because I know what it’s like to look over the side of the fence and then to climb over the fence and to feel like you don’t belong, or be reminded at the worst moment that you don’t belong.

Take Rachel Menken, the department-store heiress in the first season of Mad Men. She’s part of what I call the nose-job generation. She’s assimilated. She probably doesn’t observe the Sabbath or any of these other things that her parents did. That generation had a hard time because they were trying desperately to be buttoned-down and preppy and—this is my parent’s generation—white as could be. They were embarrassed by their parents. This is the story of America, this assimilation. Because guess what, this guy Don has the same problems. He’s hiding his identity, too. That’s why Rachel Menken understands Don, because they’re both trying desperately to be white American males.

Of all of them, Peggy is my favorite. I identify with her struggle. She is so earnest and self-righteous and talented and smart, but dumb about personal things. She thinks she’s living the life of “we.” But she’s not. And every time she turns a corner, someone says, “You’re not part of ‘we.’ ” “But you all said ‘we’ the other day.” “Yes, we meant, ‘we white men.’ ”

INTERVIEWER

It’s strange that you wrote the hour-long drama Mad Men just when you were succeeding as a half-hour sitcom writer.

WEINER

I didn’t see a future in situation comedy. There wasn’t room anymore for something like M*A*S*H*, where they would have sentimental moments and episodes that could sneak up on you and make you cry.

When I started out, there were few dramas on TV. They were out of style. There were four news magazines a week, and there was Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?, or whatever, and the procedurals and the game shows. Reality TV hadn’t happened yet. Then, while I was doing it, situation comedy went from being the most lucrative and exciting place to be in television to disappearing. All the things that people hate about network TV were starting to fail economically, and still the networks were asking, How do we re-create Friends? By the time I wrote the Mad Menpilot, the syndication market had dried up. Survivor happened when I was writing on the sitcom Becker. Survivor, The Sopranos, and Lost all happened within a few years of each other. By then, drama had become really big. And then David Chase hired me for The Sopranos based on my script for Mad Men.

INTERVIEWER

You worked on three seasons of The Sopranos before you went back to your Mad Men pilot. Did that change your conception of your show?

WEINER

Mad Men would have been some sort of crisp, soapy version of The West Wing if not for The Sopranos. Peggy would have been a climber. All the things that people thought were going to happen would have happened. Even though the pilot itself has a dark, strange quality, I didn’t know that that was what was good about it. I just wanted an excuse to exorcise my demons, to write a story about somebody who’s thirty-five years old, who has everything, and who is miserable.

The important thing, for me, was hearing the way David Chase indulged the subconscious. I learned not to question its communicative power. When you see somebody walking down a dark hallway, you know that they’re scared. We don’t have to explain that it’s scary. Why is this person walking down a dark hallway when he’s on his way to his kids’ school? Because he’s scared about someone telling him something bad about his kids. He’s worried about hearing something that will reflect badly on the way he’s raised his kids, which goes back to his own childhood. All that explanatory stuff, we never even talked about it. And I try not to talk about it here. Why did that happen? Why do you think? You can’t cheat and tell people what’s going on, because then they won’t enjoy it, even if they say they want it that way.

You know how sometimes I give you a note that says, Why don’t you do X? and you say, That’s the thing I wanted to do? That’s what I learned at The Sopranos. That’s the note I try to give to everyone who writes here. Take the risk of doing the extreme thing, the embarrassing thing, the thing that’s in your subconscious. Before The Sopranos, when someone said, Make it deeper, I didn’t know what they meant. Or really, I knew in my gut—but I also knew that it was the one thing that crossed my mind that I wasn’t going to do. To have Peggy come into Don’s office after he’s had the baby and ask for a raise and be rejected, and look at the baby presents, so we know she’s thinking about her own baby that she gave away, and then to have her tell Don, “You have everything and so much of it.” There is something embarrassing about that. A scene that was really just about her getting turned down for a raise became a scene about her whole life. That was the sort of thing I learned from working with David Chase.

Another thing that happened when I began writing on The Sopranos was I noticed that people were always telling me anecdotes. They would throw out a line of dialogue they’d heard somebody say or that someone had said to them—and that was the story. I did not know how important that shit was. There’s an episode where Beansie and Paulie are reminiscing and Tony dismissively says, “‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.” And it’s devastating. David Chase had witnessed that actual statement. Now I have a ton of stuff like that I’ve saved, things people have said to me that are concise and devastating and sum up some moment in their lives. When I’m talking to some woman on an airplane, and she says, I like being bad and going home and being good, that is very useful.

INTERVIEWER

Did you cultivate your memory for those moments?

WEINER

I always had that kind of memory, I just didn’t know there was any value in it. One time we were doing a research call at The Sopranos. It was a two-hour conference call with a guy talking about emergency medicine. At the end of it, the writer’s assistant, who was taking notes, had a bunch of medical facts, but all of us writers had written down the same two ideas. All of us. Just those same two ideas in two hours.

INTERVIEWER

What were they?

WEINER

He said that everyone with insurance is a VIP. And he used the expression “wallet biopsy.” I think they’re self-explanatory. But that’s what being a writer is. I don’t know what makes something a story, but I know one when I hear it. Mad Men was a show I wanted to see. I really wanted to tell a story about that period. I thought it was sexy. I wanted to live in it a little bit, and I wanted to remind people that they have a misconception about the past, any past.

INTERVIEWER

What sort of misconception?

WEINER

You know in Reds, when they’re interviewing the witnesses, and Henry Miller says, People today think they invented fucking? That kind of thing. The old people you’re looking at, they may have been more carnal than we are—drunker, less responsible, more violent. So many of those film noirs are about how soldiers reintegrate themselves into society. The private detective is haunted by the shadow of having killed people in the war. Don’t even get me started on The Best Years of Our Lives. The move to the suburbs, the privacy, the conservatism of the fifties—that’s all being driven by guys who, for two years, had not gone to the bathroom in privacy. I’m not the first TV person to be puzzled and fascinated by the fifties. The two biggest shows of the seventies are M*A*S*H* and Happy Days. Obviously that moment is some sort of touchstone for culture. Is Hawkeye not related to Don Draper? He’s an alcoholic Boy Scout who behaves badly all the time. I just wanted to go back and look again.

So I spent a lot of money buying videotapes to watch movies from the period. I hired somebody to do research for me. Then, because I was working all day, I stumbled on the idea of dictating. I found that I was constantly thinking of dialogue and couldn’t write it down fast enough. I heard that Billy Wilder did it, too. He walked around with a riding crop while his writing partners would type. Joseph Conrad did it. So did Henry James. I’ve since kept track because some of my writer friends think it’s cheating. And it’s hard to believe you can be as eloquent as your characters, but you can be if you have the topic and you’re channeling them. Then you get to fix it afterward. It’s way better than sitting there and procrastinating while you write a new piece of description and try to perfect the sentence.

INTERVIEWER

Will you describe how you write the show now?

WEINER

At the beginning of the season I dictate a lot of notes about the stories I’m interested in. Then for each episode, we start with a group-written story, an outline. When I read the outline, I rarely get a sense of what the story is. It has to be told to me. Then I go into a room with an assistant and I dictate the scenes, the entire script, page by page.

INTERVIEWER

I’ve seen you do whole scenes without pausing.

WEINER

I can see it in my head. And I don’t look at the dictation. I try and keep it in my head. That’s why the fatigue gets so bad. And why it’s crucial to have the right assistant. It requires the chemistry, it requires them reading my mind a little bit so they know when I’m moving back to an earlier person who’s talking or which person is saying it—because sometimes I stop identifying the speakers. After a while I’ll talk in different voices. I don’t even know what I’m doing when I walk around making up those scenes. But I wrote my play the same way, and my second movie, You Are Here. If you compose that way, it means the dialogue can all be said. John Slattery and I had an argument about something in the second episode, where there was a bit of a tongue twister. He was supposed to say, “Coop is going to want a carbon with your hand-picked team for Nixon on it. And I warn you right now, it includes Pete Campbell.” He said it was impossible to say, but I knew it could be said because I’d said it. I rattled it right off to him. Then he smiled and performed it and everything else I wrote for him. I started writing more tongue twisters for John. My favorite was, “He knows what that nut means to Utz and what Utz means to us.”

INTERVIEWER

What’s the main difference between writing for someone else’s show and writing for your own?

WEINER

It’s one thing to hear Tony Soprano say your dialogue. That is ridiculous. That’s a totally surreal experience. It’s another thing to create an entire environment and walk onto the set of this fake office from a different era and see Peggy in her ponytail and bangs and Joan looking like Joan. It was better than I could have imagined. I am a controlling person. I’m at odds with the world, and like most people I don’t have any control over what’s going to happen—I only have wishes and dreams. But to be in this environment where you actually control how things are going to work out, and who’s going to win, and what they’re going to learn, and who kisses who...

INTERVIEWER

And then you have the challenge of doing episode after episode, season after season. You once said to me, “I’ve written hundreds and hundreds of scenes with two people in them. You have to know what kind of scene it is.” What did you mean?

WEINER

When I was just starting out, a writer explained to me the meat and potatoes of situation comedy. For instance, a scene where one guy thinks he’s talking about one thing and the other guy thinks they’re talking about something else sounds like a big clicheÌ. But guess what? That’s comedy. The question is, Can you do it well? I’ve personally written some of the most clicheÌd comedy scenes on Mad Men.

INTERVIEWER

Like what?

WEINER

Like the first season, when Pete goes to return that chip-and-dip at the store. He tries to hit on the officious clerk and she rejects him, then that other guy comes in and hits on her, and she loves it. That could be a scene on any situation comedy in the world, right down to waiting in line. To me, waiting in line is one of the funniest things in the world.

Or think of the premiere of season 3 of Mad Men, where Ken and Pete both get promoted to head of accounts. I put them in the elevator so that each of them can magnanimously congratulate the loser. I wanted to see how long we could sustain the dramatic irony. When I got to The Sopranos, I realized that I hated it when one character would just help another character through the scene. “I got something to tell you.” “Well, uh, what have you got to tell me?” “It’s kind of hard to say, Ron.” “Well, I’m listening.” I don’t know about everybody else, but I find that whenever I really want to say something, there’s a huge obstacle. Except in this interview.

INTERVIEWER

What about all the scenes you do with four or five or six people? Or more? You have all those status meetings, all those partners’ meetings.

WEINER

Those are tough, and the hardest part of my job is dealing with exposition. So populating those meetings with a lot of characters gives you a chance to bury it. But I find that giving each of the characters their own goal in the scene helps them talk in my head. And that’s usually the place for the most drama. Characters go in the story from having a private problem to having a public problem, even if they just lie about it. Which I guess is some convoluted definition of dramatic irony. Take the meeting in the episode “Hands and Knees.” Don has almost been caught by the government. Pete has to turn down North American Aviation and lie for Don or Don will go to jail. Pete also knows that Don is sleeping with Dr. Faye. Lane has been beaten by his father with a cane. Roger has lost their biggest account and sent Joan alone to get an abortion. Joan has not gotten an abortion. And Cooper is just there—he doesn’t know anything. So there are six secrets in the room, and when I was writing that scene, the hardest part was forcing the characters to talk about anything. Luckily we had the structure of another dumb meeting. The audience has so much information, and the characters don’t have any.

In addition to writing, I happen to go to a lot of meetings, and I find them hilarious—the rules of order, old business, new business, it’s not just from the Marx Brothers. But you know, every scene is comic to me.

INTERVIEWER

The first time I walked onto the set, I saw a stack of mail sitting on a secretary’s desk. Every single letter was addressed to a character on the show, from a client they have in the show, stamped and postmarked 1965. How do you make it so real, so detailed?

WEINER

Well, I have a bunch of people who delight in re-creating that physical reality. But as for the writing, I don’t make any special effort to write “period.” I try to be realistic, but the characters are smarter and more eloquent than regular people. It’s part of why I have them talk so slowly—or, really, listen so much—because I didn’t want the dialogue to be repetitive and snappy and sound phony. I wanted there to be real things like people saying, What? when they didn’t understand something, and coughing—things like that. The director of the pilot wanted it to look “1950s.” He actually wanted to do it in black and white. Then he wanted it to be spoken faster. But if you speak that fast, you’ll have to keep repeating the information. I did not want to do that. I didn’t even have the characters address each other by name because it felt phony. And after two seasons of the show, Roger Sterling was known as “the white-haired guy.”

One thing we did agree on was that we were looking for a commercial cinematographic style. We were very interested in the ceilings, in the low angles. The cinematographer, director, production designer, and I all shared a point of reference in North by Northwest, which is a story about an advertising man. Even though it’s very stylized and it’s a thriller and it’s Cary Grant, it was made in 1958, a couple years before the pilot took place, and we were influenced photographically by that.

A lot of these things were decided, like so many good decisions, by financial necessity. In the pilot, I wrote an overhead shot of men coming into the Sterling Cooper building, because I knew that was the cheapest angle to make period. Looking straight down, you have the side of the building—and the buildings hadn’t aged much—and you have the tops of people’s hats, which might not require full costumes, and some cars, and you get the sensation of period. When we did the flashbacks, our first glimpse of Dick Whitman’s childhood, I remembered how, in Death of a Salesman, they had staged the flashbacks in the regular sets, and I thought, Why don’t we just put this in Don’s dining room? We’ll stage it in a sort of theatrical limbo.

INTERVIEWER

Often you’ll say, That just doesn’t sound period. And someone will go research it and discover that you’re right. How are you so connected to a period that you experienced only as a small child?

WEINER

I cut out any slang that I didn’t know organically. Even as a kid, you hear certain expressions and then you stop hearing them. I had heard people say, “Make a hash of it.” They don’t say it anymore. Also, I intuitively cast actors who had a certain formality to them. It turned out they were almost all from the Midwest. They have old-fashioned manners.

But you know, these questions of verisimilitude have a lot to do with the framing and the editing. The original director, Alan Taylor, is a huge fan of Wong Kar-wai, and so am I. What Wong Kar-wai does is let scenes develop in front of your eyes. In a conversation, the point-of-view shots will include parts of people’s shoulders and heads. He has a shot design that appreciates the space, puts the people in the space, puts the audience in the space. Music and mise-en-sceÌ€ne are part of it, but the editorial style was most important of all. We don’t use overlapping dialogue. Usually, when you cut a scene between two people talking, you keep cutting to the person who’s listening. It allows you to use material from different performances. It’s also supposed to keep the audience in the scene. But I felt that, since these actors were so good and they pulled off these transitions in front of our eyes, why cut away? So I’d stay with their performance. They would do the entire speech, and then there would be a pause on one side or the other for the other character to respond. That, to me, magically creates a first-person experience, though none of this was intellectual. That’s kind of the way I experience the world. It feels normal to me.

INTERVIEWER

Once you had directed the show, did it change the way you wrote for it?

WEINER

I try now to write every script as if I would have to direct it. I do not leave vagaries of position or gesture. I do not have vagaries about the set. I try to specify who the characters are. It’s a blueprint. I will always give visual clues. I’m not talking about the props only, but a visual motif. People sitting or standing. I will write those things in. Where they are in the room, I write that in the script. You don’t have to do that, and I used to not write that. Betty has a seat in the kitchen. That’s one of my things. Your mom has a place where she sits, if she sits. Directing has made me not write impossible crap like somebody “plops into a chair” or “turns beet red” or “rolls their eyes.” That means that there’s no cheating in the stage directions—“He’s never felt this way before.” “He reminds her of her father.” You can’t write how someone feels, you have to show it in the scene.

The miracle of writing Jon Hamm sitting on the steps at the end of the first season and, as the camera pulled away, seeing his face physically change in a way that . . . It was exhilarating. So much emotion. I’m too embarrassed a person to ever do that job. I don’t know how actors do it.

INTERVIEWER

On the level of the scene, you’re always searching for a surprising way into a moment, or a way that a moment can turn into something you don’t expect.

WEINER

You know that scene in Rebecca when Joan Fontaine is exploring the room where everything is monogrammed “Rebecca,” and George Sanders just appears in the window? It’s a ground-floor room, and he’s sitting in the window. He just slides his leg over the sash and walks into the room. You’re like, That guy could’ve come in through the front door, but I know so much about him because he came in the window. We all love moments like that.

How many people say at the beginning of a story that the character is bored, and they start telling all these things about how he’s bored—he does this, and he goes to his mom’s house, and she’s talking, and he’s staring off, and then you go to his job and it’s the same every day. But actually, it only takes one shot to explain to the audience that the character is bored, and I mean bored with everything in their whole life. They did it on The Sopranos. When Tony was supposed to be laying low, they had a shot of him on the escalator in the mall.

The story is not, We built this great bridge, let’s watch people go across the bridge. The story is, The bridge is out, the bridge is broken, I’m going to try to build one. And then it gets blown up right before I finish it.

INTERVIEWER

Do you read any of the commentary on Mad Men?

WEINER

I stay off the Internet.

INTERVIEWER

Now you do.

WEINER

Yeah, I couldn’t take it. It’s like being on trial for a crime you didn’t commit and having to listen to the testimony with a gag in your mouth. I did learn, though, that what I intended something to mean is not always what it means. That’s okay. It’s actually kind of amazing.

INTERVIEWER

You directed a movie last year. You write plays and poetry. How do you feel about being labeled a “TV writer”?

WEINER

I don’t even understand what that is. That’s going to be a big joke to everyone in ten years because everyone’s going to watch things on the same screen. The movie industry is clinging to its perceived role as the dominant form in the culture, but you know, I was just reading an interview with Stanley Kubrick from the late fifties where he talks about how movies, if they want to have any impact, have to start being more like television, or better. He was talking about the artists in TV at that time—among them, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, Neil Simon, Rod Serling, Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose—and the directors who went with them—John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, Delbert Mann. In the next ten years, they all went into the movies. The movies took that business away. But really, the fifties was the golden age of television.

INTERVIEWER

What made the fifties a golden age?

WEINER

Social consciousness and a respect for the audience. This was the same moment as the blacklist, so there was so much subversion. There’s poetry, there’s great speeches, there’s incredible eloquence in those early made-for-TV dramas, but they are derived from real life. There are actors in them who are unattractive. There are recognizable milieus, like automats. Before the 1950s, something like 12 Angry Men wouldn’t have seemed like a promising subject for a Hollywood movie. It had to be a ninety-minute TV show first. But that’s how it goes. Americans are subversive and they depend on their entertainment to express it. So thankfully, all subversive entertainment eventually succeeds.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever worry about losing your touch?

WEINER

In show business, careers are always seen in terms of hot or cold. Hot and cold doesn’t interest me. That’s dependent on the world. Are you in style or are you not in style? My kids have no Faulkner on their reading list. Thomas Wolfe—completely gone. You never know what’s going to go and what will stay. But on the creative side, you’re either wet or dry. That’s what a writer asks himself. Am I going to dry up? The repetition is the hardest part. You know—you deal with it every day. You witness me trying not to get caught with my pants down doing something I’ve already done. Remember Allan Burns, from my high school graduation? Well, I had lunch with him after my freshman year of college. I asked him, How do you write? He said, My rule is quit when I’m hot. When I’m in the middle of something and it’s good and I know where it’s going to go, that’s where I stop, so when I get back tomorrow I can get back on it. Underneath this was obviously the fear that he could wake up tomorrow and not be able to write. That terrifies me, too.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have other superstitions about your work?

WEINER

I have a pen I use to check off numbers on the outline. I’ve been using that pen since Becker. I will borrow other people’s superstitions. But I’m most superstitious about hubris. I am terrified about having things taken away from me because I finally relax. When I wrote the pilot of Mad Men, I was saying, I’m already successful, why am I not happy? Now it’s become, You didn’t even know what success was. What if your dreams came true?

#Don Draper #Jon Hamm #Matthew Weiner #Mad Men #this is loooooong #hopefully some of you are into this #also if some of you versed in law tell me if this is legal? i give credit so i should be good right #right??

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isagrimorie · 7 years ago

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[initial reactions] Justice League

TLDR version: I liked it. I liked it a lot. It had its problems-- pointed look at the camera-- but considering all it had to contend with? I really liked the finished product.

I can actually see myself watching a three hour director's cut of this.

Going through point by point of the movie, Good points and some nitpicks and some ugly, but bringing it all together with the Happy.

This is going to be a surprise but for the few people who know me, I actually wasn't impressed with Avengers. I thought the visuals were so-so, and it brought home what I thought when I first watched Serenity. Joss Whedon is not a good movie director. He can do a passable job on TV but he is no Jonathan Nolan nor is he a JJ Abrams. He doesn't have the visual eye for it, and he tends to go back to his old stand-bys.

(I mentioned it in my initial reactions of Thor: Ragnarok, Joss Whedon wishes he was Taika Waititi but he's not even close.)

Zach Snyder on the other hand? Despite my issues with his other movies, no one can deny that Snyder paints a fantastic visual picture. It is his strongest suit. In this movie he delivered in spades.

This is a really, really great getting the band together movie and the thing that made this work a lot: the characters. They sparked off each other, and you can tell they were having a lot of fun making this movie.

We got to see the Amazons be awesome!

We got to see a lot more of Hippolyta doing action stuff and it was awesome and wonderful! For anyone who wished they saw Queen Hippolyta fight more, we see that! A lot and it's so awesome!

And then she sends out a flare and it was such a heartwarming moment because she knows only one person in the outside world will understand and her whispering as in prayer: 'Hear me, Diana.'

It broke my heart a little because Diana hasn't seen her mother and amazons in a while and then she had to hear from Steppenwolf that a lot of Amazons died. Also, this gives credence to my theory that in BvS, when she decided to help, she was actually on her way to find a way back to Themyscira.

Okay, so the elephant in the room is the treatment of Diana, Amazons, and Lois Lane terrible. Wellllll.... it's not as bad as reported but after watching Wonder Woman, I cringed in a lot of scenes.

The controversial new revealing costumes where there. I don't know why they needed to, and when I saw them standing next to Amazons who are in regular armor costumes, they stand out.

Then the unnecessary camera angles, especially when Diana is standing in front of the camera. It's like a study of male gaze directing vs someone who consciously works against it. I cringed everytime there was butt shot and an upskirt shot. It wasn't a lot but there were enough that coming from watching Wonder Woman, it was bad.

I didn't really need to see that gag about Barry falling on top of Diana and accidentally grabbing her boobs. I did not need to see that. It had Whedon's fingerprints all over it and just NO. NO NO NO NO.

Then there's Arthur Curry loudly telling Diana she was beautiful etc., and then revealing he's actually sitting on the Lasso. They didn't need that and the only important thing we got there that once upon a time the Amazons and Atlanteans were at war. You can practically see Whedon's work there.

Going back to the happy: Danny Elfman to score the movie was the best move ever, and that's one positive cookie points for Whedon. Because the iconic Batman score is there and strains of the iconic Superman march too! Honestly, there is a reason why those were iconic. Star Wars kept to its musical score with other composers just expanded on John Williams work.

Although, I wish there was a Justice League score too. I was waiting for it, actually.

WB really should've let Snyder direct a solo Batman movie because I can practically feel how much he loves Batman everytime he was on screen. This is not a knock by the way, because I would like to watch Snyder's translating Batman graphic novel on the big screen like he did with Watchmen.

I love Diana's relationship with Victor and I love that she keeps wanting to reach and support him. I love how she was mentoring him.

I love how this is about Victor accepting his gifts (as Diana called it) and being the right person to stop the Mother Boxes. He upgraded machinery when needed and found information they needed in time. I still wish for a Cyborg movie, though.

Arthur Curry was advertised but I don't have a lot to say yet I feel that Aquaman will answer a lot of questions but Mera was awesome and he was able to hold off Steppenwolf which is a feat in itself.

Barry Allen was funny and so very young with his own issues, he was like a kid in a candy store when he arrived in the bat cave and his crush on Diana was cute and I don't begrudge him that (the moment with Arthur though, that I wanted to cut out).

Bruce is working over time to get a team started out, and clearly doing this to work off his guilt, Diana calls him on it. And dammit, I'm weak but I ship Bruce and Diana. I can't help it! It's Justice League and JL animated has primed me for shipping Diana and Bruce together, okay?

They never got together in animated but I love that they're playing this as a frisson of tension between them, and that it's mostly Bruce who is kind of pining/crushing over her, in his Bruce way.

But I am also not about Bruce being an asshole to Diana, throwing Steve to her face to 'push her' or whatever. I'm glad that Barry was all: if she murders you, we'll hide the body for her.

I did love the conversation between Bruce and Diana after, and it cleared up the century of not doing anything thing BvS tacked on. I love that Diana revealed that she might not have been visible but she's been fighting for all that time just not leading. 'Because leaders get people killed.'

There's a story there which I hope we can get in her next solo movie, also: Diana casually strolling into Bruce's heavily secured building and in BvS one-upping him in a Spy vs Spy game--- Agent Diana Prince in her next movie Y/Y??????

The CGI. I really try very hard not to notice the CGI but I can't help notice the CGI. All Sci-fi/Superhero movies have this problem, particularly when it comes to the CGI villain. I see no reason why they couldn't used make-up and light CGI, because even the actor had a hard time bringing his villain to life. There's a reason why I liked Hela as a villain, because that was Cate Blanchett acting and not a CGI version of Hela. Even Zod and the other Kryptonians with him were easier because they were not CGI villain.

Someone should put a moratorium on CGI villains.

Unfortunately, there's even a more egregious use of CGI and that's the mustache gate. I do not get why they didn't go with bearded Clark instead of.. waves hand that.

I like Clark in this! I've always thought that Man of Steel 2 should've gone first than BvS, watching BvS then this just kind of solidified it. There were moments in MoS that I loved and thought would continue but Snyder just doubled down on the other part I disliked with BvS but JL felt like it was continuing on with the the tone of the parts I loved in MoS.

I was honestly surprised how they went about the resurrection. There's no fortress of solitude so there was no regeneration matrix but there is the Kryptonian ship and the Mother Box.

Clark's resurrection seem to give a second wind and a happiness that was missing in BvS but had more in common with in the final moments of MoS. I wish though, that Lois had more to do.

And how is it Lois and Diana have never shared a scene together??? This is the second time she mentioned her devotion to the truth, I mean, Diana is all about the truth. Truth is her province. It's where she lives! LOIS AND DIANA NEEDS TO BE FRIENDS DAMMIT.

I liked that Diana was the voice of reason, and even Arthur came around to her way of thinking, in a way that feels like he has experience about people coming back wrong.

Full disclosure: I was afraid they were going to make Diana that wet blanket friend who breaks every body's fun but she had a point which Arthur came around to. They've seen their fair share of things like these going pear shaped.

Fortunately, after the mandatory fighting against the newly awakened Clark things turned out for the better.

Seriously though, Diana taking Clark's headbutt and giving one of her own. AMAZING. He only won that round because he had the advantage of getting more force behind his headbutt via flying. Headbutts are an Amazonian Hello.

Not a fan of Diana being Worf'd just to show how super extra powerful he is, I'm just consoling myself that she either has most of her powers locked away (like in the comic, removing the vambraces would unlock her full potential as a demigod).

I do like that even though Clark had the brute strength, Diana had experience on her side, she fought Steppenwolf like a warrior. Seasoned and skillful.

Also: 'On my lead.' Diana led the team on the ground! I AM HAPPY ABOUT THAT.

I love the final fight there were so many iconic moments and its stitched together really well, one of the biggest issues I had with BvS was how Snyder painted a beautiful picture but it's a moment divorced from the flow of the story. Here it came together pretty well. The iconic moments were iconic without taking away from the story.

I like that they took note of what people had issues with and worked with that feedback, bringing in more color and lightness to the movie while still maintaining the gravity of the situation.

Do you know what else I love? That the final blow was Diana's with an assist from Clark. Because she lives up to her name -- Godkiller.

other moments I liked:

The Superman and Flash race, I love it. It is universal law, a Super and a Flash must always race.

Diana lasso-ing the bank robbers and then greeting a crowd of little girls.

Diana handling the artefact with revenance.

Victor openly working with his dad in the Star Labs

Barry pushing the sword to Diana.

Diana with the red robe over her armor. I love it.

Speaking off, Hippolyta's Helmet!

Luthor finally acting like Luthor and not like an evil Mark Zuckerberg. Also, he freaked out about Clark, what about Diana, who is an actual demigod?

Speaking of demigods, the guy throwing lighting bolts young Zeus or Ares? And when is Diana going to handle lightning? She's the last survivor of the Pantheon, she must inherit it too, right?

WAS THAT ATHENA OR ARTEMIS??? IN ANY CASE I AM HAPPY TO SEE A GODDESS.

#initial reactions #film: justice league #justice league spoilers

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takaraphoenix · 7 years ago

Note

Has anyone asked you about Dr Who yet?

First of all, let me apologize for just how fucking long this has been laying around. But I have expected it to take… A While to answer. So, sorry for the wait.

I’m a Whovian. Which people who avidly read my PJatO fics probably know because I love to slip it in there.

Doctor Who ranks fourth on my fop five of all-time favorite TV shows.

I’ve only seen New Who though, to make that clear. I just… I dunno? I like color? I tried Classic Who, but I just really can’t go through the black and white - and the New Who does work so well on its own too, even though it factors in Classic Who.

So I will be only talking about New Who here.

I started to watch Doctor Who when it made its way into the Saturday morning program. It really didn’t impress me at all. Literally the only thing that stuck was Jack Harkness - back then, we only did get the first two series, mind you.

So when it just… stopped airing, I didn’t particularly care too much. Because they had written Jack out of the show a series ago and I was more than miffled by the concept of them constantly replacing the main characters. After all, it’s only been two series but I already had two Doctors. And? What? No. What? As a teen, I so did not have the patience for a show that changed main actors more often than some people change their socks.

So I put that out of my mind and actually kind of forgot about it. After all, it had stopped airing in Germany too, so, well, it was canned and done.

But then series 3 ended and I heard that Captain Jack actually made a return to the show. And that coincided with me getting invested in learning how to English. Literally, at the time I sucked. I only brought home 4s, 5s and 6s - Ds, Es and Fs. I copied all my homework from my half-American friend and couldn’t give less of a shit about that language. What would I even need it for? I live in Germany, we speak German, for heaven’s sake.

But I really liked Jack and I had been trying to better my English somehow. So, why not by watching this British TV show with German sub-titles? I started rewatching series 1 and 2 and then watched series 3.

I fell in love with Doctor Who with series 3. It is, to date, a masterpiece to me.

The main reason is the removal of Doctor Who’s most unlikable character. Rose. Good heavens above, I hate Rose Tyler.

Yes, she was a brilliant companion for the Doctor. Yes, she saved the world and galaxy and whatever. Yes, she was the companion the Doctor needed at the time.

But she was a shitty human being.

She was a good companion, because the Doctor was literally the only thing that mattered to this girl. And that’s a good quality in a companion. It’s a crappy quality in a girlfriend and daughter though.

The way she kept stringing Mickey along, even having the audacity to be jealous when he tries to move on but she goes out into the universe with a total stranger, was just petty.

But the one thing that I will never forgive her for and the main reason why I hate her is the way she literally disappeared for an entire year Earth-time - her boyfriend and mother and everyone believing her to be dead, Mickey even being accused of having killed her. And she just up and disappears again.

She didn’t take the time to go to the officials to clear Mickey’s name.

She didn’t even take the time to stay for one lousy dinner, or to say goodbye. Her mom believed her to be dead for an entire year and she can’t even stay one fucking evening to eat dinner with her mother? Or at the very least give her a proper, heartfelt goodbye? No, as long as I can run after the Doctor, I’m happy! I don’t need anyone else!

Not to mention that she’s a barely legal gal being shipped off with a 900 year old alien. It’s just creepy, is what it is. The fact that the Doctor and Rose were never explicitely together is one of my biggest blessings on this show. That he never even said the words had me cheering in my seat, to be honest. Because, no, Doctor, you do not need to fall in love with a 19 year old human, no. Just no.

So yeah, I fell in love with the show after Rose left.

Martha Jones is also my favorite companion. Yes, she is also in love with the Doctor - but she never turned her back on her family, she always had her priorities straight. And she was one-sided in love with him. If he had returned her feelings? Yeah, I’d be creeped out by that too then.

Not just Martha and the return of Jack though, also the plots are what made me fall in love with it.

I have to admit, the Bad Wolf plot of the first series was ,when I rewatched it, really cool. But the second series… still feels more like a filler-series, really. The plot was just so… meh. And the single episodes too - I consider “The Idiot’s Lantern” and “Fear Her” to be two of the show’s weakest episodes.

Martha brought something fresh to the table and I actually love the plots of most of her episodes. “Daleks in Manhattan” and “Evolution of the Daleks” was so cool. “Human Nature” and “The Family of Blood” are, to date, probably the creepiest episodes to me.

“Blink” is literally the most perfect episode of all in this entire show.

And I’ve rewatched just the three-parter of “Utopia”, “The Sound of Drums” and “Last of the Time Lords” more often than I care to admit or remember.

It introduces the Master to New Who and the Master is brilliant. A brilliant enemy.

I hate that Martha only stayed for one series, but her successor sure was worthy, because Donna Noble is my second favorite companion.

Her dynamic with the Doctor is probably the best dynamic written so far in New Who. They’re just friends, in a beautifully uncomplicated way where both of them are deeply aware of the pain in the other.

Not too many outstanding episodes, aside from “The Sontaran Stratagem”, “The Poison Sky” and “The Doctor’s Daughter”, but the pure dynamic of 10 and Donna totally made even the weird plots work well.

Not to mention Donna’s grandpa, who yes. All the yes for him. He was an amazing half-companion (never really know what to call the “male character who only tags along due to the female companion”),

And then the “Journey’s End”. It was such a pay-off. The way it brought everything of the past four series together was just intensely awesome. To unite all of his companions from those four series, to have even Sarah Jane back - I love Sarah Jane, I consider The Sarah Jane Adventures the best of the three Doctor Who spin-offs and her character is amazing. I didn’t even mind the return of Rose, because she was an important part of that life.

And then the entire show changed, because Russell T Davies was replaced by Steven Moffat.

Part of me was over the moon about Moffat at first, because he created Captain Jack Harkness, who is literally why I found my way to the show. And he wrote some of the best episodes of Doctor Who - “The Empty Child”, “The Doctor Dances” and “Blink”.

I have a deeply seated hatred for Moffat at this point, fyi.

I consider “The Girl in the Fireplace” to be the first warning-sign of things, really. Moffat’s intense need to ship people off. To ship the Doctor off.

I do not want my over a thousand year old alien to be shipped off with humans? Honestly, I don’t want him shipped off with anyone, at all, because I watch this show for the SciFi extravaganza and the scales, not the fucking romance.

River Song, close second after Rose on my list of characters I don’t like. Though I’ll get back to that later on when we discuss 12, because she’s currently being re-evaluated by me.

I didn’t like the 12/River plot that Moffat was hyping so hard, because… it completely hijacked the show.

Though, strike that, I didn’t like the River plot in total.

It was way too complicated. And I’m not just saying that because it was “a bit confusing”. I’m saying that because it all only fully fell into place after literally five years. That’s too long.

I do like a complex plot. I like when a plotline stretches out over a course of more than just one season. But if your plot is a messy knot of something that no one can quite figure out where it begins and makes sense until five years later, that’s just… a mess.

“Silence in the Library” aired in 2008 and the real pay-off for the River Song plotline and where it was coming from and going only aired in 2013 with “The Time of the Doctor”. I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t compute for me.

With the first four series, each of them could stand beautifully on their own too, even though in the end all four spanned together and had one pay-off.

Series 5 didn’t make a lick of sense, even after rewatching it two times. It started making a bit more sense with series 6, and then a little more sense with series 7, but come on, if you have to wait three years and then watch three series in one go to make actual sense of stuff you watched three years ago, that just can’t be it for a TV show. That’s ridiculous.

Getting a bit more into details instead of just critizing the overlaying plot, because for its sub-plots, I really did like 12′s arc.

Amy Pond is… an okay companion. She ranks among the six main companions New Who had so far - Rose, Martha, Donna, Amy, Clara, Bill - on a solid four. But the literal best thing Amy Pond did for Doctor Who was introduce Rory Williams to us.

Rory Williams is a national treasure and needs to be cherished.

Seriously, if there’s one thing I’m really-really hyping about 12, it’s Rory. He was so adorable, relatable, sweet, cute, caring, amazing. He was the best. I will forever live to regret that Rory and Jack never met, because the idea of Jack hitting on a totally confused Rory while Amy goes protective lioness over her husband is just beautifully hilarious.

Though, for me series 5 also marks the point of oversatuation on Daleks and Cybermen.

Daleks started out, in series 1, as those great enemies who were extinct and look there is only one left. And then there’s a fleet in the next series and it’s a shocker and really effective.

At this point, it has become an obligatory thing. “Ah, there’s this series’ Dalek-episode. Can cross that off my Doctor Who bingo then”. And, honestly, the Daleks are not that great as enemies? Like, they’re great foes, but they don’t do for the most intriguing plotlines because they literally just want to exterminate. An enemy with an actual goal and motivation makes for far better story-telling.

And while I understand that they are the most iconic Who villains and that we can’t get rid fo them entirely… Can we like, reduce them? Maybe have them not appear for one whole series? Because they stopped bringing something new to the table a while ago.

And this series also marks when Cybermen and even the Weeping Angels also just become… bingo-marks, really. It becomes obligatory from here on out that we have to have at least one episode featuring those particular villains. And that just becomes… so predictable.

Now that I complained again, let me return to the praising.

“Vincent and the Doctor” is one of the more emotional episodes of this show and I love it. I’ll never not cry during it.

But “The Lodger” is just plain awesome. “The Lodger” and “Closing Time” are my two favorite episodes for 12, because he had a brilliant dynamic with Craig and I also loved that Craig did get to return for a second episode. I’d love to see him again some time, maybe now that Stormageddon is older. It’d be amazing.

Series 6 was, aside from “The Lodger”, quite the let-down for me personally. I greatly did not care for “The Rebel Flesh”, “The Almost People”, “Night Terrors”, “The Girl Who Waited” or “The God Complex”. And that’s nearly half the series.

Series 7 was better again. Though I still feel conflicted about changing companions mid-series, to be honest.

Clara Oswald is a companion I have… conflicting feelings about.

I really liked her at first, but she definitely overstayed her welcome.

In series 7, she was very much welcomed. She was a nice change of pace, she was witty and I really liked the mystery of “How is Oswin still alive?”. The plot was cool; the pay-off of that was a bit ridiculous, but hey.

Oh, before I forget to mention it! I love Madame Vastra, Jenny and Strax! And they deserve a spin-off so much. Honestly. I still don’t get why they green-lit the boring-ass premise of Class over a spin-off about that trio (note: Class is far better than its boring-ass premise and I enjoyed the show very much while it lasted, but that they got a show with such a lame premise green-lit over a more substantial spin-off is completely beyond me).

We gotta talk about “The Day of the Doctor”, of course.

John Hurt as the War Doctor was amazing, but I still hate that Christopher Eccleston didn’t return for that role. It think it would have weighted so much different if he did and if the plot could have continued as intended. But the War Doctor was a great way to fix the lack of 9.

And 10 and 11 playing off of each other will forever be the singularly best thing on this show, hands down.

The only real problem is that it was just Clara. This was so huge. The scales of it were so great and it was the damn anniversary. We managed to team up all the former companions for the series 4 ending, how did we not get a single additional companion for this huge-ass anniversary special? How did Captain Jack and Torchwood not show up? How did freelancer alien-hunters Mickey and Martha not help them? At the very least. That Rose and Donna and Sarah Jane and Amy and Rory couldn’t, yeah, obvious, but… At least some of the former companions should have been honored in this anniversary special.

I want to say that the pay-off for that was great, but… Honestly, it wasn’t so much a pay-off as more of a “tease for something that still hasn’t been cashed in four years later”. Gallifrey stays… but we kinda accidentally misplaced it.

Danny Pink and series 8 was what really ruined Clara as a companion.

She should have been written out with “The Name of the Doctor”, or at the latest after the anniversary episode considering that it’d have been troublesome to introduce a new companion there.

But when she started to prioritize her boyfriend over the Doctor and literally tried to murder the Doctor, that was just when her character needed to go.

Also, not to forget, series 8 features the singularly dumbest and worst episode of the entire New Who. “The Moon”. Fuck this episode, fuck it hard and square. The moon is an egg and it hatches and immediately lays a new “moon egg”. And literally everyone saw it but opted to immediately forget it. Fuck you. Just… really, were you drunk when you wrote this episode and high when you green-lit it?

And 12 did not make a good first impression in his first series either.

I saw a lot of memes of Classic Who fans pointing out how “other Doctors needed an adjustment phase too”. I get that. Yeah. 11 had that for one episode of finding himself and adjusting. But two entire series can not be the way to do it.

He had zero emotions and was thus zero relatable. 10 and 11 felt so much and so strongly, that is what made you grow attached to them. 12 couldn’t even grasp the most basic of human emotions and it wasn’t even in a funny running-gag kind of way either. It was just annoying and disorienting.

However, the pay-off for series 8 was good. The Master returning as Missy was awesome. Time Lords regenerating into Time Ladies too is awesome and also makes me think that maybe their race is called Time Lords because they are all primarily male and only have occasional female regenerations for reproduction purposes, but not as primary, designated genders. But that’s just me.

I feel similarly let down by series 9. Honestly, I can’t even really distinguish series 8 and 9. They both have the 12th Doctor who is unable to know how to human and Clara, who is growing more and more unlikable and unnecesary by the minute.

Granted, series 9 was a bit of a redemption arc for Clara, but she still felt… rather pointless, because by now she literally finished two story-arcs in this show. First through her original plot and then with the Danny plot.

I don’t like their solution for the “Three Peter Capaldis in this universe” that they came up with that series though. The whole “The face is a reminder” thing is just utter bullshit. I mean. He rescued so many people at this point of whom so many had more emotional value than Caecilius. Why the heck his face?

Honestly, if they’d just retconned it into “12 took a trip to Pompeii and was missing with 10″ it would have been a better solution that would have been more fun…

And I genuinely don’t know how I feel about Arya Stark. Her plotline is kind of intriguing, but she feels like another Captain Jack Harkness. That is to say; another immortal created by the Doctor who then gets abandoned by the Doctor and will be randomly forgotten at one point. Not to mention the cock-teasing of “There could be a spin-off about Me and Clara”, about which I still haven’t decided how I feel.

I adore Osgood. I do have to say that though and I love seeing her back, even though I’d still have loved for her to become an actual companion.

Now.

Now is the time to get back to River Song. Because the Christmas special “The Husbands of River Song” was actually the first time I truly liked River.

And it made me realize why I normally dislike her. She’s a badass and awesome, actually, but that has always been overshadowed by her school-girl crush on the Doctor and the way she’d bat her eyelashes at him and urgh, it was so annoying. In this special, she didn’t know he was the Doctor for half the time and her behavior was awesome. She was awesome. Until she realized he was the Doctor and went back to her school-girl-crush behavior and I went urgh again.

Not to mention - and this is my hardest knock on River Song and her plotline - you can’t keep writing heartfelt goodbyes. They lose all meaning.

“Forest of the Dead” had this grand, epic finale to her plotline before she was even properly introduced and that really pays off when rewatching it.

Then she was introduced.

Then we got a really heartfelt goodbye in “The Wedding of River Song” in series 6, where you thought “Wow, that’s it”.

Then you got a really heartfelt goodbye in “The Angels Take Manhattan” in series 7, where you weeped additional tears for Rory and Amy, but you’re kinda sure that this must be it now, right?

But it happens again at the end of series 7 with “The Name of the Doctor” - and this has to be it, right? It’s like the biggest goodbye yet and it has to be the final.

But oh no, look. Another heartfelt goodbye episode in the Christmas special “The Husbands of River Song”. And at that point, them saying goodbye really just made me roll my eyes.

You just… You can’t make epic goodbye episodes if you don’t plan on fucking finally writing the character off. Either stop pretending to say goodbye, or stop bringing her back, but you can’t do both, it’s just ridiculous and quite frankly also sad.

Now, moving on to series 10.

Series 10 made me fall in love with the 12th Doctor. Finally he was THE Doctor. Finally he started caring and being properly there, instead of requiring his companion as an emotional crutch. This series makes me mad that Peter is already leaving again. He barely to to actually be the Doctor as he ought to and now he’s already being replaced. Urgh.

Bill was actually a really cool companion. I didn’t undestand a single word she said for the first two episodes before I got used to her way of speaking, but after that, I fast grew attached to her.

Heck, I even grew attached to Nardole, and Nardole was the thing I hated most about “The Husbands of River Song”. But he had great character development over this one series.

I’m not sure how I feel about Missy, to be honest. Because I don’t want a redemption arc for the Doctor’s greatest foe. It was fun, but also really weird.

Now, before I wrap this up, I guess it’s impossible not to talk about the 13th Doctor.

I couldn’t give less of a rat’s ass about the casting. Literally.

I mean, as long as the actor does a good job and does the Doctor justice - not like Peter did in two out of three of his series - I couldn’t care less if the Doctor is male, female, white, black, Asian, for all I care they could have the Doctor regenerate into an agender green alien considering he doesn’t have to be human looking but humanoid. I just want an actor who captures the essence of the Doctor.

For that, of course, the actor is not the only one responsible.

The writing is too.

If they go an overly “We now have a female Doctor!!” route and start treating the Doctor different just because he is now a she, I will go batshit crazy.

If the Doctor now, all of a sudden starts actively persuading a male romantic interest (and I use the term “actively” here because the Doctor not limiting himself to females has been canon for a long time), just to keep things “straight looking”, I’ll be mad. How about we leave the romance just out? Something I’ve been pleading for for years now.

If the Doctor now, all of a sudden will for the first time in New Who take a male companion just to “keep it even”, I will also be mad. Because so far, the Doctor only took male companions as add-ons to his female primary companion. Have her take two companions, one male and one female, okay. That is what works best anyway, in my opinion.

But if the Doctor now takes a male companion and will require to be saved by The Man, then I’ll just be disappointed.

And I wish I wouldn’t have to worry about this, but I feel like… replacing Moffat and the Doctor and the companion all at once… Might change New Who completely and there’s no telling into what direction it’ll go.

So, for now, I’ll just be anxiously awaiting the new series and praying that the female Doctor will do the role justice, both as an actress and as its written part.

#Doctor Who #Ask me a show and I shall rant #TV Rants #Fandom Rants

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atarimcgregor · 7 years ago

Text

Thoughts on The Last Jedi

I‘ve written something like this about the last two Star Wars movies, and The Last Jedi is just about the most talked about, controversial one yet, so, of course I‘m going to have some thoughts on it. (And there are spoilers).

The good

While I didn‘t completely hate the „remake-ness“ of TFA, I‘m very happy that it didn‘t continue with this one. The Last Jedi has a lot of elements based on ESB and RotJ but it‘s more like echoes than repetition – there are always twists to it. I think The Last Jedi actually even strengthens TFA through this. It’s a natural evolution of the series’ themes. TFA was all about the new standing in the shadow of the (glorious) old – and the repetition and nostalgia worked in service of that. And The Last Jedi is all about rising out of that shadow – and the twists on the familiar there are similarly in service of that. It‘s very meta. And pretty smart. Thematically speaking, The Last Jedi is probably the strongest movie of the franchise – though it isn‘t flawless in that regard (it has some mixed messages).

Some characters were notably improved. With introductions out of the way, they were able to dive deeper into some of them. Luke was a standout. Mark Hamill finally got to really prove himself as an actor. Leia was a badass… even though that space scene could have been done better. Poe was improved and got nice flaws and character growth. With Rey, I actually did kind of buy that Mary Sue argument in TFA but thought she was much better in this one. She didn‘t really have any real flaws in TFA but The Last Jedi revealed a depth to her that I now see in retrospect was already there in TFA. And I love her origin. I completely disagree with anyone who’s upset about it. It makes her character better and it makes the universe better.

I loved the use of color. That salt planet was probably the most beautiful location in the series’ history.

I didn’t mind the humor. I actually thought it worked better than it did in TFA.

The bad

The Finn story was definitely the weakest one. I don‘t agree that it was pointless, though. It had character development and fit in with the themes. But it definitely dragged. Had some corny parts as well.

The Yoda part had me thinking: „Am I watching fan-fiction right now?“

What I probably disliked the most was Snoke. I thought Snoke was a bad character in TFA because he was too much like the Emperor, but I was very open to the idea that they’d redeem him through something interesting they had planned for the next movies. But now it’s obvious that he was never anything more than a plot device. They just needed an “Emperor 2” to throw out the window. And I think it’s frankly inexcusable that they didn’t give any explanation for him. I’ve seen a lot of people justifying it with “Hey, we didn’t know anything about the Emperor either” and that’s… bullshit. Star Wars was largely a blank slate then. Since then, the world’s been pretty well fleshed out. We now know there were a thousand years of peace before the movies and that the Sith (which we can assume are the only skilled dark side users) were only ever two at a time. The Sith got wiped out and then this ancient, powerful, evil force user shows up and it’s not clear who he is, where he comes from or why he’s showing up now. And then, poof, he’s gone forever. It seems completely obvious to me that this character demands an explanation. This is a gigantic, unignorable plot hole, as far as I’m concerned.

Continuing from Snoke: The same basically goes for the First Order. It’s very unbelievable, even by Star Wars standards, that this terrorist cell would have the resources they do. I let it go in the last one because I was hoping there’d be some explanation for it in the sequels, but no. The government has at least thousands of planets worth of tax money and are still easily crushed by them. This does actually take me somewhat out of these movies. A few lines of explanation would have done wonders.

Perhaps the most important negative aspect I can think of, though, which I’m seriously grappling with right now, is that I’m not sure this movie should exist. The Last Jedi is such a viciously iconoclastic movie. A kick in the gut of the fans of the original ones. It’s the most downer epilogue possible for what is probably the most beloved film franchise of all time. Why do it? I know it works thematically, but I’m still not sure those artistic reasons are sufficient enough. Why does the past actually need to be killed? If it was so important to raise the new Star Wars out of the shadow of the originals, another way to do it would have been to just tell a completely unrelated story. Have it take place 100 years after RotJ, for example. But, of course, people want to see the original characters returning. And if that’s the decision they went with, can they allow themselves to treat them this way? A lot of this seems needlessly cruel. I’m very unsure whether the existence of these new movies is - as overly dramatic as it sounds - morally defensible.

Other thoughts

I somehow managed to completely avoid anything about the movie until the screening. I mean I literally didn’t see a single trailer or TV spot, promotional pictures or anything. I saw like five stills online which told me nothing. It was hard work and I doubt I’ll be able to repeat it for the next one. In the days before seeing the movie I tried to think of what I could reasonably expect to happen in it based on what I knew and all I got was “Rey and Luke will be on that island for probably at least the first third and she’ll probably get trained by him.”

I‘m sort of a prequel apologist and genuinely like the expansion of the universe the prequels brought with them. When watching the sequels, knowing the filmmakers are likely only basing them on the original trilogy, I‘m always looking to see if there’s also something there from the prequels. So far it’s been very, very little. In The Last Jedi, it’s mostly tiny things, such as Luke referring to the Emperor as „Darth Sidious.“ The biggest thing that might be inspired by the prequels is the idea of the Jedi being worthless failures. That seems like a logical continuation of ideas introduced in the prequels.

A horrifying thought that went through my mind while watching the movie was: “Oh, my god. Is… is Reylo canon?” I’ve been pretty vocal with my dislike of that ship, but now I almost feel like apologizing. I didn’t think in a million years there was anything actually to it.

Elaborating on my Reylo hate: I feel like a lot of people, both in real life and the characters in the movies, fail to recognize just how bad Kylo Ren is. He’s basically a genocidal mass murderer. He’s responsible for at least millions of deaths, possibly billions. He might be worse than any people in our actual history. I think it’s actually kind of hilarious that the characters in the movies are always trying to “save him” or believe he can be “redeemed.” If there was any logic to it, then even if he went over to the good side, he’d rightfully be tried in the Star Wars equivalent of the Hague court for crimes against humanity (for lack of a better word) and given just about the maximum sentence.

A lot of people have been complaining about the force being too powerful in this one, and not in line with what we’ve seen before. That’s probably correct, but it didn’t bother me at all for a specific reason. I’m likely completely wrong about it, because no one else seems to have understood it that way, but while watching it I thought the island was a force enhancing location. I figured the Jedi chose it for their temple because it… amplified things. And that was also the reason that dark hole was there. I thought Luke had Rey sit on that rock because it was a particularly force sensitive spot. It’s at least a nice way to ignore a plot hole.

Any fan theories about the kid at the end are dumb. It‘s just a thematic thing.

On that note: I‘m pretty sure J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson have very different ideas about storytelling which probably don‘t mesh all that well together. Abrams seems to be all about the big questions and mysteries. Johnson seems much more focused on the actual closed work and the emotion within it. That seems to have created some plot discrepancy which will hopefully somehow come together in a satisfying way in Episode IX.

Characters I’d like to see show up in the next one: 1) Lando. But I don’t see it happening. Why would he wait so long to join the Resistence? He could probably only logically have appeared in the first two movies. Though I completely understand why that didn’t happen, it would have been too many characters demanding attention. 2) Phasma. Just because of how ridiculous it would be. 3) The Raid guys from TFA. Because they were criminally underused. And I think we didn’t actually see most of them getting killed, sooo…

#Star Wars #Star Wars: The Last Jedi #The Last Jedi #Star Wars: Episode VIII The Last Jedi #Thoughts

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word-bug · 8 years ago

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Of Dates And Misunderstandings

Happy Birthday Sarah ( @lifeinahole27 ) <3

Here’s a little something for you. I am so glad that this time I got something out for your birthday. And I didn’t forget to tag you. It should have been up at your midnight but I will assume there is still somewhere when it’s just the beginning of your birthday.

Special thanks to @ladyciaramiggles and @space-whales for beta reading. Thank you so much. <3

Of Dates & Misunderstandings (T-rated) AO3

Emma’s leg started jittering as she waited for her laptop to power on. She missed the comfort of her bed but with the wine she had already drank she was reluctant to get too relaxed, lest her mind wandered to less than innocent territories that she wasn’t ready for yet. She still believed that online dating sites were a farce, especially ones with the cliched names like - Happy Endings. But, drunk Emma made questionable decisions and signing up to an online dating site at Ruby’s prodding was one of them. She signed in and carefully made her visibility selective. She didn’t want the entire world to know she was online and having to fend off sleazy come-ons that would put her perps to shame.

No, Emma was interested in only one - therealkillianjones.

Emma was intimately aware of the nitty gritty of an online dating website, she had used them too many times to lure in her perps. Men were predictable that way. Act a little coy, laugh, or in this case, send a winky emoji on their crass pick up line and -boom- you had a date. She had fake profiles set up on many of these platforms but Ruby raved about the advantages of finding dates through them, gushing about the men and women she had met. So one day, Emma sat with her friend after sharing a bottle of wine between them and proceeded to set up her profile. Though drunk, they had created her profile including as much information as they could without revealing ��too much. It was fun while it lasted. Together they had vetted potential suitors and fended off some sleazy ones - a nice way to blow off some steam. So, she was surprised to get a direct message from someone named therealkillianjones.

therealkillianjones - Oh My God! I love that quote and the book. It’s one of my favorites.

Emma was tempted to ignore it. Many people used celebrity names or a mixture of random words not wanting to give away their privacy. Emma respected that but Killian Jones was an actor that she really didn’t like. He wasn’t bad looking, on the contrary, the man was sex on legs, but he was overhyped, and Emma hated overhyped things. Every street corner had vendors selling magazines with his face plastered and what’s the saying - too much of a good thing is bad for you? Killian Jones was that good thing for her. It didn’t help that all the movies that he did were trashy flicks with a manic pixie girl as their protagonist. Emma hated those movies with a passion. So, hatred for Killian Jones was an acquired trait for her and it would take a lot for her to change her mind.

But for the first time, someone had actually gone through her profile, rather than just see her profile picture and send a pick up line. So she figured it couldn’t hurt to reply back and it wasn’t like her username, theswanprincess, was highly original. She figured, if the guy got too clingy, she could just shut the conversation down.

theswanprincess - Me too. The Princess Bride is my all time favorite. And the movie adaptation does it justice.

therealkillianjones - Aye. I agree. I am partial to the book, for obvious reasons. But the movie has a permanent place in my collection. I’m Killian by the way.

Emma scoffed, this guy was taking the charade way too seriously. She had been scrolling through his profile. He seemed nice on paper at least. All the fields of the profile were carefully filled with all the proper grammatical conventions. The profile picture was that of a pirate, she waited for it to download. When it became clearer she didn’t know whether she wanted to laugh or cry. The picture was of Killian Jones, the actor, in the whole pirate regalia. She remembered seeing it on a magazine cover for his upcoming TV series or movie, she couldn’t remember. She was about to call him out on it when she saw the dots jumping, indicating he was typing.

therealkillianjones - Which house are you in? I was sorted into Gryffindor but in my heart I recognize myself as a Ravenclaw. My brother teases me that I am a Hufflepuff but he doesn’t realize that being sorted into Hufflepuff would be an honour, a fact the movies failed to capture.

All her thoughts to call him out on his choice of name and profile picture flew out the window as Emma launched into a full throttle response to his question .

theswanprincess - I feel you. Some of my friends are the same. Though I was sorted into Hufflepuff and I wear the badge with the honour. Tough luck!

Emma bit her lip resisting her temptation to add a wink at the end. She didn’t want to come on too strong but she was enjoying the conversation and prayed that he wasn’t a douchebag or something worse.

therealkillianjones - Touche, Swan! Rubbing my face in it. So tell me about yourself.

Emma was startled to see him address her with her last name. She hadn’t made her name public so she started working herself up about it, when it struck her that he was calling her by her chosen username. He did tell her that his name was Killian but she wasn’t sure whether it was his real name or not, so she decided an alternate way to find out.

theswanprincess - If you’re gonna call me by Swan, what should I call you? ;)

This time she let the wink remain to maintain the playful tone of the conversation. If he read too much into it, then what was the harm? She was here, after all, to date.

therealkillianjones - As I said before love, Killian will do. ;)

Emma learned over the course of month that he was English but had moved to the States after the death of his parents when he was a teenager. Currently, he was in Ireland for some work and their conversations would be cut short due to the time difference. Emma loved the time when she was on a stakeout the entire night and he had no work the following day. They talked the entire night and she loved it. After a while, she found herself constantly smiling. Ruby had nudged her for that very reason but Emma had waved her teasing aside saying it was just nice days at work. Thankfully, Ruby had forgotten about the dating profile so all was smooth sailing.

She and her online date hadn’t gone beyond the medium of the website to communicate, but no topic other than the specifics about their professional life, remained untouched between them - from past troubles to lost loves, from emotional scars to physical injuries. They talked everything out, she found the anonymity of a dating website helped her open up. He didn’t press her for more, not even a photograph, the one she had used as her profile picture hid some part of her face so no one could outright recognize her. She never did call him out on his username choice, figuring that it could be his real name. It did have an English ring to it, too. So they remained in the bubble. She had almost forgotten about his actor namesake until she came across the trailer for his new show. It was a modern retelling of Peter Pan but with Captain Hook as the lead. The actor Killian Jones was playing it and he looked nice. She was just reeling in what she had seen when the message from her Killian popped up. She didn’t even notice her use of the possessive pronoun when thinking about him.

therealkillianjones - Hey Swan! How is it going there?

theswanprincess - The same old. Nothing exciting. I finally did see the trailer of this new show. I think so it’s called Neverlanders? Neveravengers?

therealkillianjones - The Neverland Rangers?

theswanprincess - Yeah... The show in which the actor you is acting.

therealkillianjones - Did you like it?

theswanprincess - Surprisingly, yeah.

therealkillianjones - Surprisingly?

theswanprincess - Yeah… I mean I see this face on every newspaper stand and I am just so done. It’s just so obvious that the acting choices have been made to cash in on the dashing looks nothing else. I am really glad that this time it was on content matter rather than just looks. I hate people like that, no offense.

therealkillianjones - None taken. Glad to know what you actually think. Swan…. They’re calling me. I’ll get back to you. I had to ask you something.

Emma looked at the clock, confused as to why he was leaving so early when she saw the time. It was almost two. It must be around seven in Ireland, she mentally calculated the time. She was about to close her laptop when another message popped up.

therealkillianjones - Goodbye love. xoxo.

Emma knew what it meant but she didn’t know what to make of it. They had spent the last month talking and never even once had they sent a parting greeting. That was surely crossing a line, right? It was too intimate. But they were on an online dating website so wasn’t that what was expected to come out of a conversation in the end? She went to bed thinking about it and sleep soon engulfed her and, for the first time, she dreamt about her Killian Jones.

The next day, she made conscious effort to not sign in wanting to distance herself and test the waters. She didn’t know what he wanted to ask her so her mind was conjuring weird scenarios. Would he ask her something personal? Or for a photograph? Did it matter? Weren’t they already more intimate than they could physically ever be? So what he could possibly ask her?

The following day proceeded the same way,albeit, Emma was calmer than before. A day away from him had helped her put things into perspective. She realized it didn’t matter what he asked of her. She knew if she said no he would take a step back immediately. He respected her and she him. Suddenly, she wanted to know him, wanted to have a face to go with his name and it didn’t scare her. So when she went back home, she switched on her laptop and logged in, certain a message would be waiting for her. She waited in anticipation but her excitement crashed down on her when there was none. Emma glanced at the time. It was five. Maybe he hadn’t logged in yesterday? So she waited for him. His last activity was in the morning so he had come online but she didn’t understand why he hadn’t sent a message. There hadn’t ever been a day when there wasn’t a message waiting for her. She sat there, browsing aimlessly on the net waiting for a message to come but it never did. She didn’t know when she had drifted off, waking in the morning to find her laptop’s battery had died. She was tempted to switch it back on but decided against it.

When Emma returned home that night, she delayed going online for as long as she could but she knew it was inevitable, it was too much of a habit. She watched some random video and went to check her profile only when she was ready to sleep, not wanting to get excited about nothing. There was one unread message and Emma couldn’t manage to contain her excitement. She opened it but there sat a message from someone named wizardofoz.

wizardofoz - so ur a princess? Want me to use my wand and hv sm wicked ways with you?

Emma scowled seeing the message. It wasn’t from whom she was expecting and it was the worst written message she’d ever seen. She blocked wizardofoz when another message popped up.

therealkillianjones - I don’t know when you’ll get this as the connection is a bit problematic here. I am going back to New York tomorrow and I would really like to meet you. Here’s my number. I am sure I’ll be jetlagged so I won’t be able to message you straight away. Sorry for that. I’m hoping you would like to meet me, too, or we could stay as strangers. Though, I’d rather go forward than backward. Hope you’ll call.

And sure enough there was a New York number attached. If Emma let out a squeal seeing the number, no one would ever know. She really wanted to meet him. Emma glanced at the time. It was around eleven. Would he still be sleeping? She wanted to wait but she couldn’t contain her excitement. Double checking the number, she saved it and opened whatsapp to message him.

The contact list updated and she let out a snort seeing his display picture. Yet again, it was that of the actor Killian Jones but it was only his face with his hook resting near his chin. She had to admit he was kind of cute but she was sure he wouldn’t hold a candle against her Killian. Emma bit her lip, smiling like a schoolgirl with crush, she typed a simple greeting.

“Hey… Swan here.” - E

Emma wasn’t expecting a response. Sure there were double ticks but there weren’t blue ticks so he probably hadn’t seen it and forgotten to switch off his net. She was about to switch to another conversation, when his status changed to online and blue ticks appeared. Before she could process what was happening, her phone started ringing.

“Hello...”

“Hey… love...” came his husky voice and Emma lost her breath for just a moment. He was really English, his accent heavy in his voice. Emma bit her lips but then realized, hitting her forehead against her phone, she was behaving like a teenager.

“Hey… love you there?” His voice came again and Emma realized she still hadn’t replied.

“So you’re really English, huh?” Emma mentally berated herself. Smooth Emma. Real Smooth.

He let out a booming laugh and Emma decided that she really liked his laugh.

“Aye... love. I told you, didn’t I?”

“Yeah… yeah you… did.”

“I can’t believe that we’re really talking.”

“Yeah me too.” She whispered. They remained quiet, words failing them in the moment. Emma didn’t know what to say. They knew each other so well but she didn’t know how to talk to him like this. Suddenly, he was real and not just some stranger on the net. She wanted to say something but he beat her to the punch.

“So… I was wondering… I mean... shit I’m not normally this bad with words. I don’t even know your first name….”

“It’s Emma.”

“Emma….” It seemed he was testing it and Emma really liked hearing it from his mouth.

“Emma… Emma Swan… It’s…. It’s a beautiful name.”

“Thank you.” She whispered back and the silence returned. She wanted to see him. She wanted to meet him but she didn’t know how to broach the subject.

“Uh… Emma… Swan… I was wondering… would you like to go on a date with me? I mean… like not a date… but like would you like to… uh… meet me. I would love to put a complete face to your name.”

“I would too.” Emma answered. She wanted to know what he really looked like.

“Huh?”

“I mean… I would love to go out with you.”

“Ohh.. great. Tomorrow at 7 at the Eleven Madison Park?”

“Yeah… sure… text me the address.”

“Yeah… sure. Bloody hell. I can’t believe this is happening.” He laughed nervously. He was adorable.

“Can’t wait to meet you.”

“Aye… me too, love.”

Killian had texted her the address as soon as they said their farewell. Emma was excited to finally meet him and put a face to his name. Seeing his profile picture for so long, she had started imagining him as the actor Killian Jones and it unsettled her because this Killian was a real person and she didn’t want to give him someone else’s face. When she had looked up the address she was surprised to see the grandeur of restaurant. She started thinking of the dresses that would match the place. Emma really wanted to call Ruby, knowing her friend had dress for literally every occasion but this thing with Killian was so fragile and she really wanted to keep it to herself for the time being.

In the end she went shopping for a new dress. She had her eye on a black and bronze number for so long but couldn’t muster enough strength to buy it - because there was no one she wanted to wear it for and she really didn’t want to wear it for a fake date with a perp. The dress was too beautiful for that. It was a one shoulder dress with a black upper bodice and minimal embellishments. The lower portion of the dress was in complete contrast, it had a flowing bronze skirt, finishing just above her knees with delicate embroidery that caught the light depending on the angle. Emma had paired it with black pumps that made her legs look shapely. She had gone with minimal makeup but had carefully curled her hair in perfect ringlets that weren’t too tight and flowed freely. She had forgone jewellery save for a set of diamond drop earrings that she had bought on her last birthday. She looked and felt beautiful.

When she reached the restaurant, she was, yet again, taken with the beauty of the place. It was elegantly lit with artificial candles that looked like diamonds floating in the sky.

When she reached the reception, she was guided to a more private dining area. It was intimate, with tables kept far away to offer privacy to the patrons, quite a contrast to the outer seating area of the restaurant. It was currently empty and she was glad there wasn’t anyone to witness their first meeting. She saw the fire crackling in the fireplace and got lost in the movements of the flame when she heard her someone speak.

“You’re way more beautiful in person.”

Emma turned around startled at his sudden entry.

“Fuck… you scared me….” her hand went to her chest trying to calm her breathing. She looked up but her eyes widened as she saw him. “Holy shit you’re Killian Jones.” The face that had haunted her for the last week was standing in front of her and she didn’t know what to make of it. He just looked confused as if she was being absurd.

“Yeah… and you’re Emma Swan. Are you okay, love?”

“Are you… are you insane? You’re Killian Jones. THE freaking Killian Jones. Star of Neverengers.”

“Neverland Rangers.”

“Yeah… The same. I am sorry. I think the maitre’d misdirected me. I was about to meet someone who, oddly, is also called Killian Jones. I think they mixed it up. I’ll just leave.” As she started walking, he came behind her catching her arm.

“They didn’t mix it up Swan. You’re here to meet Killian Jones. And I am Killian Jones.”

“You’re not my Killian.” Emma spoke exasperated that the actor couldn’t see reason. Was he just a pretty face? How could he be so dumb?

“Your Killian…” His eyebrows waggled hearing her call him that.

“Yeah… Now if you would please…”

“Swan… Wait...” he took her hand again, “I really am your Killian. You’ve seen my picture on my profile.”

“No I saw your picture...” she spoke pointing at him, it was getting exhausting, she really had to leave lest her Killian believed she had ditched him, “on my Killian’s profile who is a fan of yours.”

“What are you talking about? That was me. Why would anyone use someone else’s picture on a dating website? That’s insane.”

“Yeah exactly… This is insane. I am leaving.” For the third time that night, she was stopped from leaving.

“Swan… would you just wait? Who did you think I was? You really had no idea that it was me?”

“I mean… yeah obviously I had no idea. I mean why would you need a online dating profile? This just doesn’t make sense.”

“You love cinnamon on hot chocolate. It always warms you up and makes you feel secure and happy. ‘Your Killian’ has a ship named Jolly Roger that he wanted to take and sail towards the horizon. ‘Killian Jones the actor’ aka me should make better career choices and not rely on my good looks. Though, I was flattered to know that you find me dashing.”

“Yeah… well I’m not blind,” but Emma realised she was getting carried away. She also realized that she had criticized his career choices to his face.

“Shit… I called your career choices rubbish.” Emma covered her mouth in horror and Killian guffawed seeing her like that. She threw a venomous look towards him but that didn’t perturb him.

“Yeah… admittedly that was a little strange but then you said things I felt myself so I let it slide. Love… no one finds my career choices more rubbish than myself. But I needed to find my footing in the industry before taking riskier projects.” His voice then took a softer note, “you really didn’t know it was me? I thought you knew.”

“I swear I didn’t know it was you. I thought you were a fan and then you started talking about books and it was long forgotten. And why on earth would you need a online dating profile?” Emma asked wondering what he was doing on the portal in the first place.

“Too much drinking leads to questionable things in life. And the sort of anonymity that it provides… I don’t find that much in real life. Why do you have a dating profile? I can’t believe a lady like you needs to resort to these means.” Emma blushed under his appreciating gaze and Killian smirked seeing his effect on her. They were standing closer than before and he could smell her perfume and it was the sweetest thing.

“Well… When you go on too many fake dates to apprehend people who skip their bail, your dating pool gets kind of shallow.”

“So you’re a bail bonds person? That’s hot, no offense.” Killian spoke making Emma smirk. They slipped into silence, neither knowing what to do. Now that Killian knew she had no idea it was him who she was talking to, he couldn’t help wonder whether she wanted to go out with him or not. When they had started talking he had been happy because he had been connecting with a person who knew who he was but had chosen to talk to him for who he really was. But now things were different and he didn’t know what to do with the information.

“Uhh… well you’re welcome to join me for dinner. I mean you were expecting someone else and I mean I will understand if you want to go home,” he spoke hurriedly.

It took sometime for his words to register with Emma and she was touched that he was giving her the option to back out . She hadn’t imagined that she would be meeting a celebrity with the intention of going on a date with him. If she was to date him, her life wouldn’t remain the same. But she had been his friend for more than a month and it had been amazing. If he had been just Killian, she would have jumped on the chance to date him. Did it change if he wasn’t just Killian rather The Killian Jones? There was only one way to find out.

“Yeah… let’s have dinner,” she said, a grin covering her face and the smile she got in return rivalled the sun.

In the end, she didn’t just decide to stay for the date, she also kissed him and went on a second date with him. He had joked during the dinner that she should help him in vetting new scripts and few weeks later, she was doing just that, in his shirt, on his bed with him bringing her her hot chocolate and spooning her as they read one of the scenes together.

Happy Birthday Once Again, Love! Have a long and happy life <3

#cs ff #cs fic #Captain Swan #Emma Swan #Killian Jones #Of Dates and Misunderstandings #Vaish Writes #Happy Birthday Sarah #Finally Have Something #For you

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coppicefics · 4 years ago

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Masked Omens: Week Eight, Part Two

[Image Description: Image 1 - A simple rendition of the Masked Singer UK logo, a golden mask with colourful fragments flying off of it. The mask has a golden halo and a golden devil tail protruding from either side. Below, gold text reads ‘Masked Omens’.

Image 2 - A page from the Celebrity section of the Capital Herald, dated 13th February 2021. Full image description and transcript below the cut. End ID.]

The Capital Herald, Saturday 13th February 2021 Celebrity section, page 19 Top story: Pepper Moonchild: “Women have been especially important to me” Presenter and interview expert kicks off our series on the women who’ve shaped the stars’ lives Pepper Moonchild is the sort of person who makes interviewing anyone from an entertainer to an astrophysicist seem effortless; she's known for her incisive questions and her flawless instincts. When it comes to asking her questions, then, I find myself surprisingly nervous. But, as all good interviewers can, she soon sets me at ease. “Mary Hodges. Here, I promised you my top secret hot chocolate recipe. How's the family?” Of course, Pepper practically is a member of the Capital Herald family, and she promised me that recipe at the Christmas party. With the pleasantries thus dispensed with, we settle down to get to the topic at hand; talking about Pepper. “Oh, I don't know if I like being on this side of things. I'm usually asking the questions! But of course I'm happy to answer them - go on, I'm just being dramatic.” Pepper is currently a judge on ITV's hit show, The Masked Singer UK, where she's now approaching the end of her second series on the panel. It's an import from South Korea, via the US - had Pepper watched any episodes before she signed up for the task? “No, not at all. Honestly, they started explaining the concept to me and I thought, 'what? How does this work? How does anybody not know when the most famous faces in showbiz are performing in front of them?' Then we started filming series one and it became 'how are any of us supposed to guess?' I'd like to think we're getting better at it, but who knows? It's always fun, regardless.” And the judges really don't have any inside information? “If anything, I think we know less than the audience - we can't exactly hop on our phones and look things up, the way people do at home. And - in case anyone was wondering - we don't do any research between the live shows, either. That would just ruin the fun. We do listen to theories from friends and family, though!” Pepper - or, to give her her full name, Pippin Galadriel Moonchild - is a woman of many talents. Her first television appearance came at just ten years old with her turn on Junior Mastermind (specialist subject: the Pendle Witch trials). While she didn't win, she made a real impression on viewers, and later went on to co-host children's talent show Showstarters alongside Michael Banner - a show that helped launch the TV careers of numerous young comedians, musicians and actors, including those of every member of the current Masked Singer UK panel. “I was so excited when I heard we were all going to be doing the show together,” Pepper confesses. “We all met on Showstarters when we were about thirteen years old, and kept in touch, but this is the first chance we've had to really work together since then. And who doesn't want to work with their friends?” Banner, having made the jump from presenting to production several years ago, is also involved in The Masked Singer UK.“Yes - she's so high up in the production hierarchy that we don't see a lot of her, but it's good to know she's there. She's always been a great example to me, an example of how you can start in one place and then sort of find your way to the job you really want. I think I've done all right at that, so far!” Banner is one of Pepper's role models, but she's far from alone. “There are loads of women - and other people, but I think the women have been especially important to me personally - who've really shown me that I can do anything the boys can do. I once did a whole presentation at school about Greta Kleinschmidt.” Kleinschmidt, as some readers may remember, was briefly the glamorous assistant of The Amazing Mr Fell before her very public return to The Harmony & Glozier Show back in her native Germany. Much was made of it in the press at the time, with speculation rife that she had broken Fell's heart and taken his secrets back with her to Harmony & Glozier. “I always thought she got a bit of a raw deal,” Pepper remembers, “I hated that the press were so focused on how she'd supposedly done an unforgivable wrong to this rising-star magician, and not the fact that she'd been really struggling with being so far from home. Besides, even the magician she'd been working with said she'd done nothing wrong and he wished her all the best. It was all very unfair, and I thought it was really brave of her to realise something wasn't working and change it like that.” Pepper can talk for days about the women she admires, it seems. “You see some really ugly attitudes towards successful women, even in this day and age,” she muses, “like Anathema, for example. What a voice that woman has, and yet she's constantly battling for people to take her seriously. But what I really admire is that she doesn't let that stop her. And look at the results - Narrative Devices has been at the top of the charts for weeks now.” Working on The Masked Singer has also allowed her to actually meet some of her heroes. “Agnes Nutter, for example, she's always been a big role model of mine. I've been practically devouring everything she writes since I was probably too young to be reading it! And Carmine Zugiber is one of the people who made me want to work on my interview skills; I love how she doesn't compromise on anything.”But, Pepper assures me, there's one woman who's done more than anyone to make her the woman she is today.“Carmine made me want to interview people, but it's my Mum (Tina Moon, a Capital Herald columnist) who got me started with everything in the first place. And she taught me to stand up and be counted, to follow my dreams, and always to reach out and help others up when I can. I do my best, I really do. I hope she's even half as proud of me as I am of her.” MARY HODGES This interview is part of a series called Me And The Women That Made Me, which will be running here on Saturday and Sunday every week until Mothering Sunday, which falls this year on the 14th of March. Next week, we’ll be talking to Jane Adams, star scorer of the England Women’s Rugby Team. To find more information, please visit our website at www.capitalherald.com/women-that-made-me.

Centre left: Celebrity news in brief: our weekly round-up Misrepresented? Brian Thames changes agent Brian Thames, comedian and The Masked Singer UK panellist, has split with his representatives at MetteTalent and signed with the independent B.Z. Agency, informally known in the industry as BuzzTalent. Reports vary on the reason for the change; a spokesperson for MetteTalent said, “Contracts end, and industry relationships are always changing. There is no suggestion that Mr Thames was unhappy with the service he received at MetteTalent; he has simply chosen to go in a different direction and, naturally, we wish him every success in the future. Thames' blog post on the subject, however, is a little more ambiguous. “I've been with MetteTalent since the moment I won Showstarters – they were partnered with the show and also offered representation to many of the other acts after the series ended. I signed with them when I was very young and, for many years, simply renewed our agreement every time it expired. However, I've since gained more industry experience, and I feel that Buzz – that's B.Z. Agency – is a better fit for me at this point in my life and career.” Thames continues, “My friend Warlock (Dowling, who hosts The Masked Singer UK) is already with them, and with many of the Showstarters contracts due for renewal soon, I may not be the only one to make a change. I am grateful to MetteTalent for taking me on at the start of my career, and look forward to new opportunities for all concerned.” Rumours abound that there is some deeper reason for this change in representation, with many speculating that the child stars of Showstarters may have been forced into unfair or even predatory contracts, lacking the industry knowledge to make better choices. Since then, however, Thames has had plenty of time to change agency, and hasn’t done so until now. It’s likely that any reasons Thames might have for changing agency will stay under wraps. There is no confirmation yet of any other stars leaving or planning to leave MetteTalent. Out and proud West End darling Gertrude Johnson has come out as a transgender woman. Speaking on Friday, Johnson told fans on Instagram, “I've wanted to tell you all this for a while, but I think now it's time. Hi, my name is Gertrude – but you can still call me Gert – and my pronouns are she/her.” A later video thanked fans for their support, and reminded them not to be too harsh on fellow fans who 'slipped up'. “To those of you leaving less supportive messages, I'd just like to say this. Each of us has the choice, every day, to be kind or to be cruel. I try to be kind whenever I can. If you call yourself a fan of mine, please try to do the same.” Gertrude’s second video also explained that she had already discussed her gender identity and pronouns with close friends and family. “When I said I was going to go public, my mates threw me a gender reveal at my parents’ house - balloons and everything,” she said, “so if you saw the words ‘she/her’ floating away over Tadfield last weekend, that’s why!”

Centre right: THE RUMOUR MILL Curated by Scuzz Fisher A MEETING OF MINDS: A doctor, a rapper and a journalist met with an unknown figure in a dark corner of a Kensington restaurant last week. What could they be planning...? MYSTERIOUS VISIT: A high-profile fashion designer was seen lurking in the vicinity of a biographer's home late on Monday night. Is a book in the offing...? SILVER SURFER: An astrologer of renown recently registered a new account on YouTube, a source tells us, and so far has yet to upload anything. But who's getting all those likes...? TEARING UP THE TOWN: Six young stars of stage and screen were seen staggering down an Oxfordshire village high street last Saturday night. The group were quite tipsy, according to one observer, and one was carrying a balloon that said ‘It’s A Girl!’. “Never mind, you’ve still got one,” one of the others was overheard reassuring the balloon-carrier. But one of what...? We rely on your observation skills to fill the Capital Herald’s celebrity pages. If you see or hear something about a celebrity that you think our readers would be interested in, please let us know. You can get in touch via our website at www.capitalherald.co.uk or email us at [email protected] Don’t worry if you have limited information to give us - if we can’t substantiate a claim or develop it into a full article, we’ll anonymise it and publish it here. We cannot guarantee publication of any sort as some verification is required - but all information and tips are kept completely confidential. We never reveal our sources! Correction: The Tadfield Arms has asked us to clarify that there was no fight in the bar on the night stated in this column two weeks ago, and as the only pub in Tadfield they feel they were unfairly identified. We apologise for this mistake.

Bottom left, ad: [Image Description: A picture of Madame Tracy, eyes closed, sitting behind a lit candle and a crystal ball. The photo is credited to QuiteUnlikely.net. The following text is superimposed over the image in an informal handwriting script. A star shape reads ‘As seen on TV!’ End ID.] Madame Tracy's Psychic Hotline 09098 79 06 66 As seen on TV! [Image Description: The following text is in small print at the bottom of the ad.] Calls cost 80p/minute plus network charge from a landline. Calls from a mobile network may cost more. Calls not guaranteed to be taken by Madame Tracy personally. You will be put through to one of Madame Tracy’s trusted assistants and may be asked to hold the line. Madame Tracy’s Psychic Hotline cannot dispense medical, legal or financial advice; please contact the appropriate accredited professional instead. Madame Tracy’s Psychic Hotline is not liable for the consequences of any advice or predictions given.

[End Transcript]

#very much fake news #masked omens #mo week eight part two #good omens fic #masked singer au #mine

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jordoalejandro · 6 years ago

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The Second Annual List of TV Shows I Saw the Past Year

A few things before jumping in.

One, I built the list from scratch, so certain shows may have made big jumps either up or down the list. This isn’t meant to reflect huge changes in the quality of the show or how I view it, but it’s just how the cards fell this year. Plus, some shows get cancelled. Some new shows appear. Things fluctuate. You get it.

Two, this list was, thankfully, much easier to write this year. Mostly because I’m not combining a year and a half’s worth of shows into one list so I was able to cut it down from 61 entries to 47, but also because I’m not going to re-review a handful of these, especially ones that remained fairly consistent in quality. I’ve already sort of said everything that needed to be said about MacGyver last year.

Okay, that’s about it. Let’s get to the list.

47. Inhumans (Season 1 - 2017, ABC) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - This show was surprisingly amateurish, from the writing, to the directing, to the editing, to the music, to the acting. Just top to bottom. And I don’t know why. It seems like there was a budget. I know there are professionals working behind the scenes. And I’ve seen some of these actors turn in good performances before. But absolutely nothing was working here. Nothing happened, nothing made sense, the plot was forced, the dialogue was stilted and awkward, and the tone was all over the place, drifting from soap opera melodramatic to super cheesy to weirdly offbeat attempts at humor that kept falling flat. It was like a master’s course in how not to put together a show.

46. Hit the Road (Season 1 - 2017, Audience) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - This was a real miss for me. It's about a family folk band traveling around in a bus, and even though there’s enough awareness that jokes are made about the band being antiquated and uncool, it’s still not able to save the premise of the show as a whole from feeling really dated. Worse, the characters were all broad and clichéd: the scheming dad, the overbearing mother, the slutty teenage daughter, the horny druggy teenage son, the nerdy teenage son, and the precocious youngest daughter. Look, I don't hate clichés -- lots of shows deal in them -- but if you aren't going to do something interesting with the characters, you have to bring it in the writing, and this show didn't. It wasn't particularly funny, often going dirty rather than being clever, and it too often felt like it was being forced into standard sitcom tropes. They're at a county fair this week. First two minutes: every character states what they're going to do at the fair. None of it is particularly surprising, and then the characters go and have pretty much the exact storyline you expect. Episode over. They're performing at a college next episode. Rinse and repeat.

45. Rise (Season 1 - 2018, NBC) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - This was a really strange show. It felt like it was simultaneously moving too fast and too slow. Story wise, nothing seemed to happen. Episodes would end and I would think back and try to remember what went down in the episode and come up empty. I could rarely tell you how the plots filled 60 minutes of airtime. And yet, timeline wise, things moved really fast. Weeks would pass between episodes and characters and relationships often seemed to do a lot of off-screen growth. I remember thinking on more than one occasion, “Oh, when did that happen? That might’ve been more interesting to see more of on-screen than what we actually saw.” Especially because what we actually saw on-screen was an alcoholism plot that seemed to go on forever and a ton of play rehearsals that covered very similar ground over and over. Also, the main character, Mr. Mazzu, was so dull and very hard to root for. He had near zero personality and seemed to care only really about specifically putting on a school production of Spring Awakening for reasons that never felt strong enough to justify how crazed he was behaving. Like, he was nuts about putting on that play. It was destroying him personally and professionally but he still insisted. Weird show.

44. MacGyver (Season 2 - 2017-2018, CBS) (Last year’s ranking: 52) - It is what it is. Stupid, entertaining background noise. I feel no need to defend myself.

43. The Last Man on Earth (Season 4 - 2017-2018, FOX) (Last year’s ranking: 44) - I had the same problems with this show this season as I've always with it: there were about three episodes of growth and movement and a bunch of filler in between. Intermittent laughs between hours and hours of way too silly fart humor and awkward moments between characters who should’ve been able to move beyond that by this point. (Seriously, these are the last six people on Earth. They've survived awful stuff together for a while. Why can no one talk to one other? Why can't they have the adult conversations with each other that I could've had with my close friends when I was 12?) The show's cancellation saves me because I likely would’ve kept watching it and kept being upset.

42. Me, Myself & I (Season 1 - 2017-2018, CBS) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - This was a sweet show, with an interesting concept and a good cast. Unfortunately, it wasn't really funny. The childhood era stuff probably worked the best, with the present day era being more hit and miss, and the future era getting the least amount of laughs. It felt like a nice show to watch though. I wasn't miserable at the end of 30 minutes. I guess there's something to be said for a show that makes you feel happy, but I (and I guess most audiences, as the show got cancelled) generally want more. Brian Unger was far and away the best part of this.

41. Splitting Up Together (Season 1 - 2018, ABC) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - I’m on the fence about this one. It has some good moments, but it’s not incredibly funny or surprising. It feels sort of like the plot of a romantic comedy film being stretched out over several episodes of a TV show. I’ll probably check out season 2, but I might bail if I start to feel like it’s just killing time.

40. The Orville (Season 1 - 2017, FOX) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - More Star Trek than I’d been hoping for, which is fine but not really my wheelhouse. And it's not like there aren't already a lot of shows doing pretty straightforward sci-fi drama, so it sort of leaves me wondering: why not go a wildly different route? There are a few good sci-fi stories here that make you think, but the show tends to telegraph its turns too much. I honestly don’t try that hard to get ahead of plots -- I try to stay in the moment and let the show go where it's going -- but even I was guessing where the story was heading too often. I'll watch season 2, but I might not stick with it if it continues to play like old episodes of Star Trek with just an occasional joke thrown in.

39. The Gifted (Season 1 - 2017-2018, FOX) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - This show started out interesting but it sort of fizzled as it went on. A lot of the most interesting parts of the story happened in the pilot and many of the plots after started feeling repetitive: the good guys try to sabotage the bad guys, the bad guys try to capture the good guys, back and forth, back and forth. The deeper into the season I got, the more I started to wonder: what are we doing here? What’s the end goal? This is another one I'm on the fence with for season 2. I need more of an indication it's heading somewhere.

38. The Flash (Season 4 - 2017-2018, CW) (Last year’s ranking: 32) - It seemed like not a lot was working for me this season. The big bad never felt particularly threatening or interesting (though there were some good individual beats in the overall story). The show also tried to be funny and whimsical way too much this season and I thought that was a big mistake. They introduced the Elongated Man as a side character and used him for a lot of really broad, really bad body humor comedy (the actor was even doing what seemed to be an early 90s Jim Carrey impression). They brought on Katee Sackhoff for several episodes and let her act nuts and do a crazy over-the-top British accent. They did multiple episodes where Tom Cavanagh played various versions of his character with a bunch of different accents for not a whole lot of payoff. I'm sure all this stuff seemed fun on set at the time, but just watching from home, it felt like they didn't have anybody at the helm to say no and reel them back in. There were quite a lot of cringe-inducing moments. Not that this show should be grimdark -- it should be light and fun -- but it shouldn’t be bad stand-up comedian type stuff either. There’s a middle ground.

37. Riverdale (Season 2 - 2017-2018, CW) (Last year’s ranking: 39) - Almost all the characters are insufferable. Nothing ever stays consistent. People are mad at each other one week, then friends again, then mad at each other. Characters make the worst decisions every single time. This is a stupid show. But... it’s also enjoyable. Its stupidity works for it, like when they did a musical episode based on Carrie and one of the character's moms was cast in the high school play for whatever reason. Or the time when a character went to go find her long lost brother and brought him home to live with her family and then, within like an episode, decided he was evil and hated him for living with her family. (By the way, he was ultimately evil, of course, or at least kind of troublesome, so later, the first character felt justified in sicking a masked serial killer on him.) Or when one of the characters got sent to a straight conversion camp run by evil nuns and a couple of other characters staged a breakout and they got chased through sewers by old nuns. Also, that character they broke out later became an archer or something, and she shot an arrow into the masked serial killer that was terrorizing the town for somewhat vague reasons. They have a vicious gang on the show that's constantly getting into serious trouble, but all the characters in the gang are named like, Burgerface and Hula Hoop. Everything's dumb. Nothing makes sense. Entertaining, though.

36. Arrow (Season 6 - 2017-2018, CW) (Last year’s ranking: 31) - Arrow had a down season as well. It wasn't bad, per se, just somewhat dull. In lieu of one big bad, they threw a lot of villains at the wall, but none of them stuck. They had Michael Emerson for half the season, but they misused him. He's very good at the offbeat, creepy type, but they made him a sort of humdrum evil computer hacker. The villain in the back half was a strange choice, too. He was like your basic run-of-the-mill criminal except for some reason, he had enough money to bribe like three-quarters of this major city's police force and elected officials. It's a weird master plan. It's even weirder when you consider there have been several villains of means on this show before who all could've probably done the same thing. I guess they never bothered to check.

35. Wrecked (Season 3 - 2018, TBS) (Last year’s ranking: 51) - This season did an interesting story that's at least somewhat different from the first two seasons and feels a little fresher, but it's still not an amazing show overall. It's good for some laughs and the fun occasional twist, but it isn't appointment viewing.

34. Corporate (Season 1 - 2018, Comedy Central) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - I liked this show most when it got weird and dark. That was its wheelhouse, and it went there well a few times, but I also felt too many episodes seemed to rely on just hitting the “Corporations are bad” theme over and over without actually attempting jokes. It’s coming back for a second season, so I hope they really lean into that weirdness more.

33. The Blacklist (Season 5 - 2017-2018, NBC) (Last year’s ranking: 34) - The Blacklist had a decent season. It was more fun at the start, when they took everything away from James Spader’s Red and forced him to get creative in rebuilding his empire. The end of the season focused a lot more on the yearlong mystery arc, which was kind of a meh -- all the characters chasing after a fairly uninteresting McGuffin. Whatever the payoff to the mystery is, it isn't going to be enough to warrant how much time they spent on it. They're 111 episodes into the show now, you can only change everything so many times. Whatever revelation comes from it should be weighed against the fact these characters have now spent something like five years working together and growing their relationships. I mean, it won’t be. But it should. There were enough good standalone episodes otherwise, though.

32. Nobodies (Season 2 - 2018, TV Land) (Last year’s ranking: 40) - A really enjoyable comedy. The three leads' chemistry and ability to banter with one another was the constant highlight.

31. Legends of Tomorrow (Season 3 - 2017-2018, CW) (Last year’s ranking: 41) - Legends of Tomorrow never shies away from going silly, even if, at times, that leads it to go to almost eye-rollingly silly levels. Still, when it really embraces that type of storytelling, it can lead to amazing episodes, like this season's finale, which featured one of the most unique big bad season ending battles I've ever seen. The show knows what it is and smartly rolls with it.

30. The Detour (Season 3 - 2018, TBS) (Last year’s ranking: 29) - This is still a funny show -- good physical comedy, not afraid to get weird -- but I honestly don’t even know what it’s about anymore. It’s wandered so far outside of its original premise of "a family takes a disastrous vacation." That's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just that the show had a more unique hook at one point and now it's just sort of a dirty family comedy.

29. Life in Pieces (Season 3 - 2017-2018, CBS) (Last year’s ranking: 46) - I found myself enjoying this season more than the last one. The laughs felt more solid and consistent.

28. The Last O.G. (Season 1 - 2018, TBS) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - It’s not hilarious, but it’s got some laughs. More than anything, this show was sweeter than I thought it might be. I was expecting a lot of jokes about hipsters and technology -- and there are some -- but really it's a show about family, empathy, and second chances. Tracy Morgan is great in this.

27. The Walking Dead (Season 8 - 2017-2018, AMC) (Last year’s ranking: 15) - The Walking Dead still provides some thrills and some great episodes, but it is certainly suffering from a bit of drag at this point. Too many filler episodes and too many draws between warring factions meant to just push the conclusion further down the road. Also, the show, while good at zombie action, is pretty bad at doing people vs. people action, which this past season featured a lot of. I think the show would be better served getting away from the comics a little, creating new stories to explore rather than stretching the plot of 16 episodes to match them.

26. The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story (Season 2 - 2018, FX) (Last year’s ranking: 1) - A dark, tragic story, though much more contained than the first season's story and, ultimately, less interesting. The O.J. Simpson season, while generally more entertaining, also had some interesting things to say about celebrity and race. This season had some stuff to say about the sort of quiet prejudice gays faced in the 90s (don't ask, don't tell; police detectives having to treat gay victims of murder with professional respect while trying to hide that they're personally somewhat grossed out by their lives; older gays living semi-closeted or double lives for fear of shame) but it’s mostly about watching Andrew Cunanan, a psychopath, behave like one. You spend a lot of time with him and most of it isn't pleasant. The story structure of the season is interesting choice. It's bookended by the assassination and manhunt, but in the middle, it tells everything that happened leading up to the assassination in reverse order. It's done well enough that the truly tragic figures of the story (the murder victims) have their stories unfold in this fascinating, heartbreaking, slow train wreck sort of way, but it also leads to attempts to (possibly?) humanize Cunanan near the end of the season falling flat, given that we know he does. By the time the season is coming to an end, you're ready for it to happen.

25. Archer (Season 9 - 2018, FXX) (Last year’s ranking: 13) - I do enjoy the ever shifting time periods and places on this show. They're an interesting way to keep things fresh and it's especially fun in the earlier parts of the season when you're seeing how all the familiar characters appear in their new setting. Unfortunately, the show has shifted to a sort of serialized storytelling and it often feels like there isn’t enough plot to stretch over all the episodes. You do sometimes get the sense they're stalling to meet their episode order. Still, the banter between the characters is quality as always, and that's really most of what you come for anyway.

24. Brockmire (Season 2 - 2018, IFC) (Last year’s ranking: 27) - This got less about baseball this year and instead started diving deep into addiction, and, in the process, became so, so dark. I still found it funny, mostly because of Hank Azaria’s fantastic performance, but there were quite a few times this season where this was not an easy watch.

23. Modern Family (Season 9 - 2017-2018, ABC) (Last year’s ranking: 37) - I find Modern Family to still be a good watch. It sort of runs like a Simpsons-esque machine now, churning out mostly decent quality episodes and a few plus episodes but nothing too surprising.

22. The Simpsons (Season 29 - 2017-2018, FOX) (Last year’s ranking: 21) - Speaking of a Simpsons-esque machine that churns out mostly decent quality episodes with a few plus episodes each season...

21. Bob’s Burgers (Season 8 - 2017-2018, FOX) (Last year’s ranking: 26) - Bob's Burgers is like that, too.

20. Family Guy (Season 16 - 2017-2018, FOX) (Last year’s ranking: 18) - Also, Family Guy. Though Family Guy tends to swing bigger. It leads to more misses, but bigger hits, like some of my favorite episodes from this season: “Emmy-Winning Episode” and “Follow the Money”.

19. Champions (Season 1 - 2018, NBC) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - I thought this was pretty good. It had some snappy dialogue and was decently funny. It's another one of those family comedies you think might skew mean, but actually manages to surprise you with how sweet it is.

18. Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Season 5 - 2017-2018, FOX) (Last year’s ranking: 23) - Brooklyn Nine-Nine had another good season, but I still find myself emotionally cold about the whole thing. I honestly wasn’t entirely broken up by the cancellation, either, definitely a symptom of liking the show while watching but not caring about it otherwise. But, you know, it was saved and is coming back, so I'll set my DVR and watch it. And I'm sure I'll enjoy it, too. I've just never been less excited about a show I really liked getting saved from cancellation.

17. Ghosted (Season 1 - 2017-2018, FOX) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - I thought the first half of this show's inaugural (and only) season was decent. It was a sort of comedic X-Files that was entertaining enough. It wasn't hilarious, but Adam Scott and Craig Robinson had good chemistry together and it made it an easy enough watch. But then they went on hiatus and brought in a new showrunner (Paul Lieberstein, of The Office), who basically retooled the show and turned it into The Office, if in The Office, except instead of selling paper, they hunted the paranormal. And I actually really liked it! I thought the show became legitimately funny. I thought it found its footing. It introduced some great new characters and, smartly, flipped the success and quality of the agency. Instead of being this winning group who were actually finding and solving paranormal crimes, it made them underdogs -- a scrappy group of government agents basically forgotten about, left alone, looked down upon by the more important, serious suits, struggling to find a reason for their agency to exist. Aside from just being a funnier way to approach things -- failure generally works better for comedy than success -- it allowed me to connect with the characters more. I began to like them more. I began to care about them. And then, when near the end of the season, they actually turned things around, I was happy for them. It's a shame Fox burned off these better, later episodes on a handful of weekends in the middle of Summer, when the only people who were watching were people who were really committed... and me, who rarely if ever gives up on a show mid-season. (And, of course, the majority of those people who stuck around were fans of the way the show was originally, so they didn't take kindly to the change. Again, not me. I'll watch a show I'm not in love with. And sometimes they'll change a show I'm watching and I'll go, "Hmmm, this is actually a better show than the one I'd been watching." But, see, the problem is, I don't think a lot of people watch shows like I do. Most people only watch shows they like.) I think if they had gone this route from the beginning... the show would still have probably been too weird and likely not found an audience and would have gotten cancelled after one season. But I would've enjoyed it even more, so there's that at least.

16. The Alienist (Season 1 - 2018, TNT) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - My only gripe with this show was that it moved a bit slow at times, but other than that it was pretty good. It had a great creepy vibe to it. It looked great. Acting was solid. And it told a very dark, enthralling story, especially for basic cable.

15. A.P. Bio (Season 1 - 2018, NBC) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - I'll admit this felt a little retread-y. It's your basic "Bad Teacher" stuff for the most part (though there were a few glimpses this season of something potentially more than that) but it has a great cast that does well with the material. I don't know if it'll ever ascend from its sort of stock premise, but I enjoy it. (I sort of hope it will, though.)

14. Trial & Error (Season 2 - 2018, NBC) (Last year’s ranking: 28) - Very enjoyable, like season 1, with some good twists and turns and some good jokes. The characters and setting remain the highlights, with basically each episode revealing some crazy tradition or quirk about one or the other.

13. Timeless (Season 2 - 2018, NBC) (Last year’s ranking: 30) - I found this show to still be a lot of fun in its second go-around. They have a good time playing with history and they manage to squeeze in some solid action sequences and a couple of decent love stories, too. I do think, given how hard the battle was just to get this second season, the producers should’ve known the possibility they’d get cancelled a second, permanent time was pretty high. I said last year, I’d hoped they’d take this opportunity to really let loose on the way out the door. They didn’t quite do that, which is a little disappointing but not a deal breaker. What they did do, though, is left the season on cliffhanger, which was a tremendous mistake. It’s shocking to me the producers thought a third season was so guaranteed they could leave their fans (the ones who really fought to bring the show back) hanging like that. They absolutely should've planned for this season's finale to work as a series finale. They, and the fans, lucked out, though, as there’s going to be a TV movie to wrap up the show. Here's to hoping it pays off.

12. Fear the Walking Dead (Season 4 - 2018, AMC) (Last year’s ranking: 16) - Remember what I said in the Ghosted review about watching I show I don’t really love and being happy with big changes to it? Fear the Walking Dead switched showrunners leading into this season. If you ask many of the old fans of the show, this was a horrible decision that ruined the show. Of course, many of these fans will tell you season 3 of the show was better than the mothership show and probably the best season of any zombie show in years. They're wrong on both counts. And I say that as someone who liked the show. But the decision to switch showrunners was good, and season 3 wasn’t God’s gift to zombie-based television storytelling. Fear the Walking Dead was an often frustrating show mostly filled with characters I could not begin to care about. This season did something this show has struggled with for its entire duration: it's given me characters to be interested in. Likeable characters. My favorite episode this season, “Laura,” was basically a fantastic, two character play, featuring two people I'd only know for a few episodes. And I cared more about them than I cared for the characters that had been on this show for the 3 seasons prior. Don't get me wrong, this show can still be frustrating at times, but it's much easier to watch and enjoy when you don't hate more than half the people on screen at any given moment.

11. The Mick (Season 2 - 2017-2018, FOX) (Last year’s ranking: 33) - This show continued to deliver some great physical comedy, some great dirty comedy, and some great performances. It's a shame it got cancelled because it felt like there was a lot of gas left in the tank.

10. At Home with Amy Sedaris (Season 1 - 2017, truTV) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - I really loved this. It's has this great (as could be expected) Strangers with Candy vibe -- weird, dark, and often hilarious. Amy Sedaris is severely underrated.

9. American Dad! (Season 15A - 2017-2018, TBS) (Last year’s ranking: 17) - Another show that's at its best when it's weird and dark. TBS has sort of strange scheduling, and so, according to Wikipedia, I might not have seen all of season 15 yet. I'm judging this based on the 13 episodes that aired in season 15A, I guess. Still, they were a 13 great episodes, the highlight for me being “Shell Game”.

8. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Season 5 - 2017-2018, ABC) (Last year’s ranking: 7) - I do think this season didn’t quite accomplish what last season did. It felt like there was less money in the show and it sort of showed a bit (like having to do a lot more episodes in the same places to save money on sets). But the show is still one of my favorites to watch. The action is top notch. The storytelling is fun and creative. And, I think most importantly, this is one of the few shows I believe I've ever watched where I legitimately care about all the main characters. They're so well crafted. They're rounded, flawed, vulnerable, loveable. They have different viewpoints. They have great chemistry together. I want to spend more time with them. I’m glad the show’s getting another season, even a shortened one.

7. Arrested Development (Season 5A - 2018, Netflix) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - It doesn't quite reach its peak levels from the earlier seasons, but I think that might be too high a bar to set for it. It's still very snappy and clever and has some of the best running gags on television. Plus, it just feels great to watch the cast get together and play off one another.

6. Animal Kingdom (Season 3 - 2018, TNT) (Last year’s ranking: 5) - I still really love this show -- it's currently my favorite drama on television -- but I do think it took a slight step back from the quality of season 2. They wrote one main character off the show and kept another very main character separate from the rest of the cast for the first half of the season. These aren't inherently bad moves, but here I think it hurt the show a bit. They introduced some new characters to try and add drama and they were more or less successful in doing so, but it just felt like, overall, the show was looking for traction in the early half of the season. Things then shift about halfway through the season and really pick up and get great again, but by then, you only have a handful of episodes left. The show took some risks, they didn't really pay off, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit.

5. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Season 4A - 2018, Netflix) (Last year’s ranking: 4) - Even though there were only six episodes in this season (or half season? Show scheduling has gotten weird. I don't have to think about this stuff when I make my movies list), they were a great six episodes. The show is incredibly funny. The actors turn in amazing comedic performances. I'll take however many episodes I can get.

4. The Good Place (Season 2 - 2017-2018, NBC) (Last year’s ranking: 8) - The show hasn’t lost a step. It builds on season 1 in new and surprising ways while maintaining an engaging story and staying hilarious. It ended on a super intriguing note, too, making me excited to see where it heads in season 3.

3. Great News (Season 2 - 2017-2018, NBC) (Last year’s ranking: 22) - This is the cancellation that hurts me the most this year. The writing really kicked into gear in the 2nd season and started becoming the 30 Rock type comedy I'd hoped for. It was very sharp and very funny. The cast was gelling. The show was putting out quality episodes every week. And... no one was watching, unfortunately. R.I.P.

2. Superstore (Season 3 - 2017-2018, NBC) (Last year’s ranking: 9) - I've really come to love this show. It's a basic concept but it just executes on such a high level week in and week out (for 22 episodes, no less). The writing is excellent and the cast it truly impressive -- it runs maybe 10-12 deep of unique characters that can all get laughs with single lines of dialogue. There were a lot of fantastic episodes this season, but “Sal’s Dead” and “Video Game Release” stand out as among the highlights.

1. American Vandal - (Season 1 - 2017, Netflix) (Last year’s ranking: N/A) - This was just genius. To call this a mockumentary is to do it a disservice. This is a crime documentary. It's just that none of the things in it actually happened and none of the people are real. It's a biting satire of the genre that's handled with such an amazing sense of authenticity, from the way it's shot, to the editing, to the score, you feel like it really could be a precocious, film-loving 16 year old's genuine attempt at a crime doc. The characters, acting, and dialogue all feel grounded and true, and both the comedy and drama of the show are derived naturally from the scenarios -- it never feels forced, and it manages to have some surprising depth at the same time. On top of it all, the central mystery, despite how ridiculous it is, is incredibly captivating. The stakes are real for the characters, so it's very easy to buy in. Amazing work all around.

There you have it.

It was interesting (to me, at least) how some of the shows jumped around the list and other shows stayed in almost the exact same place. Maybe I’m in a different mindset now than I was a year ago. Maybe I’ve grown and matured.

Or maybe I’m just running wild, placing shows based on feeling and seeing what happens.

But isn’t acknowledging being impulsive and careless a sign of maturity?

No. No it isn’t.

Thanks for reading.

- - - - -

Annual Lists of TV Shows I Saw the Past Year

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Beauty queen: how Pat McGrath revolutionised makeup | Fashion

In 20 years of interviewing actors, musicians, designers and artists, my audience with Pat McGrath has been the most difficult. Not because she’s chilly or aloof (she’s tactile, warm, prone to outbursts of laughter and the lavish use of “darling”), but because not a minute goes by without a passerby interrupting to tell her how much they admire her, and to my frustration, she spends much of our precious allotted time indulging them.

“You look beautiful, darling,” she purrs to one beauty blogger, as worried publicists look on impatiently. “Let me get someone from my team to do your makeup! It’ll be gorgeous on you,” she says to another. She stops again to pose for a photograph with actor Olivia Palermo (who seems under no illusion that she might be the main attraction here), then again to reel off some social media content and to check an assistant has her trainers. By then our “intimate chat”, in a bustling Parisian penthouse, is rather up against it, because McGrath is due to get on a motorbike to the Ritz, where an unnamed celebrity is waiting to be made up for the red carpet.

She promises a follow-up within days, and so begins almost a fortnight of postponements, briefing calls, time-zone complications and several profuse apologies as beauty’s biggest hitter paints, dusts and blends her way across dozens of faces and two continents. Truly, I have interviewed more accessible Oscar winners.

‘I just love cosmetics’ … Pat McGrath. Photograph: Ben Hassett

The reason I’ve been granted this extremely rare face time with the world’s most influential makeup artist is that she’s just launched her eponymous makeup line, Pat McGrath Labs, in Europe. The brand has already smashed the US, where McGrath lives in two New York West Village apartments, one above the other, though she is barely ever in either. She’s mostly on the road, working on magazine covers for the likes of Vogue, Harpers and W, the faces of celebrities such as Rihanna and Kim Kardashian, on advertising campaigns for Versace, Prada, Louis Vuitton and Gucci, and designing the makeup looks for around 80 major fashion shows per year (she is widely acknowledged as the most prolific catwalk makeup artist of all time). She travels from one fashion capital to another with dozens of makeup cases and a huge team of between 25 and 90 devoted artists to carry them all. “The most we’ve ever taken is 87 trunks,” she tells me. “I’ve collected everything for about 25 years. I’d go into a department store now and buy everything. It’s who I am. I just love cosmetics.”

McGrath qualifies this by telling me that she has filled 4,000 square feet of storage with products and says “You couldn’t get anyone more makeup addicted than me”, perhaps because she knows her passion for face paint isn’t immediately apparent. Much like the most celebrated fashion experts wear only black (she does, too – today she’s in a long black skirt, matching shirt and her signature wide black headband), the world’s top makeup artist doesn’t appear to be wearing the stuff herself. “I wear very natural makeup but it’s made up out of five foundations to make that perfect skin and my lipstick might be three different lipsticks mixed together, so it’s a kind of obsession in a different way,” she laughs.

If beauty is McGrath’s addiction, her single mother was her pusher. McGrath was raised in Northampton by Jean, whose love of God was matched only by an extraordinary fascination with everything fashion and beauty. From as early as McGrath can remember, working class, Jamaican-born, Jehovah’s Witness Jean was schooling her in advanced aesthetic awareness. “My mother was obsessed with makeup,” she says. “She would stand in front of the TV and we’d have to guess what she’d done differently with her eyes. I’d think: ‘Get out of the way!’ But she wouldn’t move until I’d told her.” Together they would analyse the makeup looks of Old Hollywood film stars, identifying which had inspired fashion designers that season.

Jean encouraged McGrath to be creative with makeup, mixing pigments from scratch to get exactly the right colour, adding heat to the skin with her fingertips to give it a healthier glow and soften the look of foundation. She explains: “She always put on a full face of makeup then got in the bath to get that dewy finish. It was next level, but this is where I got my makeup tips from – at seven years old!” Together, Jean (a talented dressmaker) and McGrath would go and look at Vogue patterns, then off to the market, where all the fabric buyers sold their remnants, before deciding which makeup would best go with the clothes.

A model with makeup by McGrath at Christian Dior show, 2008. Photograph: Penske Media/REX/Shutterstock

Whether they could find makeup to suit their skin colour was another matter entirely. To say women of colour were under-served by beauty brands in 70s and 80s Britain is a woeful understatement. “There was no makeup for women of colour,” she reminds me. “NOTHING. That’s what my mother’s search was all about. When we were out shopping we were always looking for a product that, probably by accident rather than design, worked for us. Where there was no ashiness, no ‘white cast’ [an effect commonly caused by talc in caucasian-skewed makeup], probably from some makeup line that had either discontinued it or gone bust.”

She concedes that this may be why she initially became known for colourful and avant-garde makeup, rather than for the “nude” shades that were so popular in the late 80s. Back then the dominant makeup look was matte and flat textured, created with products that had insufficient pigment for darker skins, which gave skin a sculpted but almost lifelike quality. Then, as sometimes even today, the word “nude” was commonly used as a euphemism for tones present in caucasian skin.

The teenage McGrath was drawn to looks that were a little leftfield, and got her big break “while stalking Spandau Ballet outside Radio 1”, wearing new romantic garb and bold lipstick on her eyes, cheeks and lips. She was spotted by presenter Janice Long, who pointed at McGrath’s face and asked: “Will you do that on me?” She recalls: “I didn’t even know that was a job. She said it was, so I went home that night knowing what I was going to do with my life.” She later moved to London and through the club scene, got her break doing makeup for Soul II Soul, who appeared frequently in the credible fashion press. Soon she was working for the Face and i-D, where 18-year-old stylist Edward Enninful had just been made the industry’s youngest ever fashion director. The two became close. Her bold makeup translated well into his striking photo shoots and stood out during the 1990s grunge era, when makeup was often downplayed to the point of non-existence.

It proved to be just one of many hugely creative and influential collaborations in McGrath’s career (she has been the go-to makeup artist for designer Miuccia Prada and photographer Steven Meisel for years), but is the longest and perhaps the most personal one. Both Enninful and McGrath describe the other as their “best friend”, and a few days after we meet, it’s announced that she is to be beauty editor-at-large at British Vogue, where he took the helm last week (the first man, and first person of colour, to do so). This explains why she remains so tight-lipped when I ask what she thinks he might change at Vogue, only assuring me that he will do great things. “Of course he’ll do amazingly!” she almost bellows. “He’s lovely. I remember when I first met him, when he had just started working at i-D, and he was so shy. He’s so quiet when he speaks, but now he says: ‘I’ve become loud because I’m with you’,” she laughs, before adding, more seriously: “I’m so proud of him, it’s amazing to see.”

McGrath with Edward Enninful, 2009. Photograph: Patrick McMullan/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

The appointment of Enninful, a British Ghanaian, is seen by many as a sign that mainstream fashion media – where black cover stars and senior staff members are still exceptional – is finally becoming more inclusive. McGrath is cautiously optimistic. “I think you always want things to get better and that’s been my view ever since I’ve been in this industry. So it’s great to see there’s more diversity, but it could always get better.”

She concedes that her side of the industry is as culpable. “It’s the same with the beauty companies because there is a whole planet out there. How can you not address the whole world – what are you thinking?” She is determined that no one should have to do what she and her mother (who died in 1992, as her daughter’s career was taking off) had to, and mix their own colours to match. For Pat McGrath Labs, she explains: “I was working all the time with pigments to make sure they work on all skin tones, particularly to make sure dark skin doesn’t become ashy, pigments that are so rich they work on everybody. Because a lot of the time when you buy a normal shadow, it doesn’t always work on every skin tone – it’s chalky or too light – so that’s my main aim, to bring makeup for all skin tones to the fore.”

She’s interested in diversity in colour, but also in shape, size, gender classification, and for her own brand, has made a point of using models of different types. “It’s about pushing boundaries. I believe absolutely, the world wants something different, people want back their individuality.” Despite working with mainstream stars such as Cara Delevingne, Bella Hadid and longtime friend and collaborator, Naomi Campbell, McGrath’s public approbation has made stars of African-American writer, model and “plus-size” body-positive pioneer Paloma Elsesser; Jason Dardo, the American drag queen and burlesque dancer (otherwise known as Violet Chachki), and gender fluid model, former RuPaul drag race contestant and makeup artist Kurtis Dam-Mikkelsen – all of whom she discovered while browsing Instagram.

Beauty is quite technical, quite nerdy now. So it’s my time, because I am that woman

All of them stretch the beauty industry’s notoriously narrow perimeters. She’s proud of all her young collaborators. “I remember when I first saw Paloma on Instagram. I reached out to her and she became one of our muses and now that she’s working for so many brands, it’s so inspiring. I’m just so happy that all of my girls, and my boys as well, are doing so well. I’m watching what’s happened with Miss Fame (alter-ego of Dam-Mikkelsen) getting a contract (with L’Oreal) – these genius young people who started out with me and now they’re fronting beauty campaigns, or getting tons of editorial work, and it’s amazing to see how well they’re all doing, it’s brilliant”.Social media was a turning point for McGrath. It’s fair to say Instagram and YouTube have done for makeup artistry what MySpace did for music, giving young beauty talent a global showcase, as well daily access to, and inspiration from, the world’s biggest established artists. Thanks to the photo-sharing app (on which she currently has 1.4 million followers, a number matched only by fellow British artist Charlotte Tilbury), McGrath’s appeal has expanded way beyond the once insular world of high fashion. Does she mind that nowadays, seemingly everyone on Instagram wants to be a makeup artist? “No, I think it’s amazing”. She follows upcoming artists obsessively, reposting their images, even asking them to join her team. “They encourage me, I encourage them. A lot of my team met through social media. We had a contest called Backstage with Pat McGrath, which had 30,000 entrants and we chose 40 people to come and experience what’s it’s like on the road when we’re doing shows, and they just loved it. I met some brilliant people.”

Pat McGrath Labs taps into what beauty conglomerates are only just realising: the power of the online beauty geek. These makeup obsessives – men, women, young, old, black or white – reside in the sparkliest corner of the internet and revere beauty as high art. These are the fans who wait at their computers for a big product launch to “drop” at 6am, and who can, in all likelihood, namecheck studio system makeup artists, forgotten 1930s burlesque stars and the exact shade of Marilyn Monroe’s hair colorant (Dirty Pillow Slip, since you ask).

Christian Dior 2007. Photograph: Penske Media/REX/Shutterstock

Everything about McGrath’s launch was geared towards this community of anoraks, and capitalises on the internet’s ability to take what would constitute an unworkable niche in local territories, and make it a hugely successful global concern. McGrath’s first, and for several months, only product, was Gold 001 – a single, dry, metallic pigment that liquified with a special mixing solution. Launched on limited, numbered release and advertised only through McGrath’s social media accounts, it sold out in six minutes. “I was so overwhelmed,” she says. “I had only planned to do it as a one-off for fun, for the makeup addicted fans. Suddenly I was getting phone calls from around the world.”

Now, four times a year, another new professional-grade product – a holographic eye gloss, almost neon blue shadow, a balm stick and nude pigment for achieving McGrath’s signature “hyper-real skin” (formerly achieved by layering several different consumer products), is launched to similar frenzy. Each is encased in simple plastic factory packaging (“No weights, no metals,” she says, “the jewel is the product itself”) to keep down the already high price (from £55 in the UK, $40 in the US). Neither seems to put buyers off – in fact, many apparently never open their sequin-stuffed ziplock bags to fish out the product itself, preferring to keep their precious collector’s item pristine.

In this Instagram age, says McGrath, the number of beauty obsessives is vast. “People don’t want to be bored any more. They really do want to try new things. I know from talking to my girlfriends who aren’t even in the industry, the way women speak about makeup is no longer: “Ooh, look at this lovely mascara.” They talk to me as though I’m in a lab, using a thousand words to describe it. It is actually quite technical, and I do believe people love what they see at the fashion shows and editorial, and want to try it. It’s now a nerdy approach. And so it’s my time, because I am that woman. Now, ‘the makeup obsessed’ is everybody. An air stewardess recently told me her eight-year-old daughter watches complex how-tos on YouTube.”

Many of McGrath’s most outlandish catwalk looks have quickly become crossover hits. Dense, glittery eyelids with thick black brows for John Galliano, opaque gold lips at Prada, chunky, stick-on face jewels for Givenchy, metallic highlighter everywhere from Dior to Versace – all were copied by high street brands, and adopted widely.

But while the beauty industry was happy to copy McGrath’s looks (or even engage her as a consultant – she has helped to create products for Giorgio Armani, Max Factor, Dolce & Gabbana and Cover Girl Cosmetics), most weren’t confident in selling the real thing. “I spoke to makeup executives about my own line for the past 15 years and they’d say: ‘You know, nobody knows you, nobody really wants the kind of stuff you do in shows in real life.’ And then I joined social media and all I’d hear from thousands and thousands of people was that they did.”

She has no time for industry snobbery over social media beauty trends, such as contouring and dark, painted-on eyebrows. “Just the fact that people love makeup is wonderful. If you want to be out there in a thick, black brow, then go there, girl! But at the same time, people love it when they’re shown exactly how to do it well. Not everyone’s going to do things perfectly but the fact that people are trying, and are excited by cosmetics, always means something to me.” She’s all for clearing the smoke and mirrors of the fashion world. “When I remember how much joy the fashion industry brought to me, how I’d watch the 50 seconds of catwalk footage, twice a year at the end of News at Ten, and get goosebumps, well, it was life-changing. Imagine as a young kid now getting to see everything they’re seeing? It must be so inspiring.”

Christian Dior, 2011/2012. Photograph: Michel Dufour/WireImage

Nowadays, she finds inspiration by obsessively studying films, art history and photography. She insists she enjoys the pressure of having to come up with 80 or more entirely new concepts annually for the shows. “I love to be challenged. I can spend a good hour or two (in makeup trials) trying to make some concept a reality. But that’s what I enjoy the most, I love it.”

Isn’t it exhausting? “I always lose my voice by the end of show season,” she says, “but this is something I’m obsessed with, something I’ve always wanted to do. It brings me joy. When you’re at shows, there’s a nervous energy. You want to make everything that you do perfect because can you imagine seeing the clothing I get to see on a daily basis? It’s exquisite, so the last thing you want to do is have the makeup let that whole collection down. It’s pressure, but I love it”.

Back in Hotel Shangri-La, McGrath is now more than an hour late for her celebrity appointment and as she promises me another chat, we are interrupted yet again, by a young woman wearing red lipstick newly daubed in dense, sparkly glitter from Pat McGrath Labs. Her mouth looks like Dorothy’s ruby slippers, her eyes are almost tearful with happiness at meeting her idol. McGrath grabs her warmly by the shoulders and squeezes. “Oh my God, look at that lip! Isn’t it gorgeous? Wait till you go in daylight, it’ll be amazing!”

Pat McGrath Labs is available now, exclusively at Net-a-Porter.

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