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michyreadsthenwrites · 3 years ago

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Plain Bad Heroines - Let Me Give You My Thoughts On This (Character Analysis)

**major maaaaajor spoilers ahead**

(Here we begin with the handful of characters from Danforth’s sophomore novel that have found their way into my heart and apparently, this Word document. It didn’t hurt that they were all women that love women. And I mean, they really loved women.)

· Merritt Emmons is easily my favorite character. She’s got that dry, sarcastic humor and air around her that makes it really easy to love her and hate her guts all at the same time. (If she were here, she’d tell us that this was a talent, not a flaw.) I felt personally affronted when characters in PBH didn’t like Merritt, like they were overlooking the diamond in the rough right in front of their faces. Then, like most things, it became pretty clear: Merritt Emmons could be one hell of a bitch at times. But it really only made me love her more. I realized that I identified with her. Yes, about being a queer woman that really fucking loves other women, but also because she was a writer that wanted her writing to stay true to how she wrote it, especially with so many people traipsing all over it and trying to make it into something it’s not. That was where I realized I loved her early on; when she pitched a genuine fit over who was to play Clara Broward. It was something so petty and childish, something so very me to throw a fit in a packed room of professionals when you have no idea about that kind of world and what it demands. But she fought for what she believed in, alright. Until she didn’t. This made me love her some more, incidentally. We got to see Merritt’s character development throughout the novel, and more specifically, we got to watch her bounce back and forth between the person she was too scared to be but wanted more than she could ever admit, and the person she spent twenty long years being; the person she was oh-so-tired of introducing to people. This constant shift between new-Merritt and old, crabby, prickly-Merritt was a very raw and vulnerable thing for us to experience as an audience. Merritt was certainly a lot more refreshing than every one of the overdone-Hollywood-types we became acquainted with within the book. She was mean and arrogant and wildly insecure, yet somehow confident and sure of herself, when it came to her work or her knowledge or anything that had to do with any book written, ever. A walking paradox, that one. Merritt was a good way to remember that real people, not built-and-put-together-by-Hollywood-people don’t always have their shit together, and they can’t always get it together by the end of a novel, albeit a long, six-hundred-page one. I think I’ll cut myself off here, friends. Not that I want to, but I feel we have a lot to get to in these pages, and Merritt Emmons can’t be the star of all of them (lord knows I’d let her, though). To sum it up: Merritt Emmons was the star of this book, for me at least. And I hope for you too. (This means go get your ass over to your closest B&N and buy the damn thing).

· Harper Harper is somewhat of a mystery to me. She was a major character in the story, as well as one of our three protagonists, our three heroines, and yet I have trouble finding her as authentic and outlandish as she tries to come across. What I’m still having trouble deciphering is if this is an intentional character flaw created by our Miss Danforth, or if Harper Harper really has nothing to her besides being completely reinvented and marketed by Hollywood. Even in saying this, I know I have to give Harper credit where it’s due. She’s a proud queer woman in the movie industry, as well as openly queer online and really with just anyone and everyone she meets. She’s known for various flings and love-interests of the week, which is still a gross misrepresentation and stereotype of (masc?) lesbians and how they’re emotionally unavailable and unfaithful, which again is a possibility of the author’s intentional writing, something that we can leave for further discussion. We do get a bit of a glimpse into Harper’s life – her real-life – about how her mother is struggling with her sobriety, how her little brother seems to be caught in the middle of her mother’s messy relationships, and how she really has mixed feelings about how she fits into her new movie-star life. That’s about all we get from Harper, though. And it really is almost enough realness to take away from the fact that everyone else in the world sees Harper as the face of Hollywood, as this thing of beauty and money and badassery instead of a real person. But still not enough. And I could be wrong, friends. I could be pulling all of this out of my ass because Harper Harper is a badass queer woman that took over the movie industry with barely any experience under her belt. Harper Harper took every room she walked into by storm, and she made everybody pay attention to her, and she became the character we had a little crush on, simply because she was that big of a deal. But nothing of substance, not really. Not ever. But perhaps she had been her most real self with Merritt Emmons, in between the quiet pages that we didn’t get to read entirely. Merritt, our dry and arrogant and favorite heroine, had been Harper’s favorite, too. The most credit that I find myself giving Harper is her aid in Merritt’s character development. She brought Merritt out of her shell in a massive way, though at times she did have a hand in driving her back into the said shell. It was flawed, their relationship, which is another authentic Harper Harper insight we saw, as little of it there was. They were hot and cold, on and off, but always so enthralled with each other. And while Harper seemed to have had an impact on Merritt (among other factors), it doesn’t seem like Merritt had the same effect on Harper. I could be wrong and do feel free to correct me, friends, but Harper Harper did not come out the other end of PBH a changed woman. She was not burdened with the weight of a life-changing revelation. She was Harper Harper, as she always was, floating and untouchable, the kind of woman you wished to know, maybe to be, but also the kind you see right through. They’re transparent, friends, that’s what I’m trying to get at here. And they tend to stay that way. And I realize as I’m nearing the end of this, that I sound harsh in my critiques and analysis of Harper. I don’t mean to come off that way, friends, I really don’t. The truth is I love Harper, she’s everything we wish we could be. She’s gorgeous and sought after, can land any girl she wants with the bat of her eyelashes and a lazy smile. But you have to remember, she’s everything we’re not. I can only speak for myself, friends, and I encourage you to speak for yourselves if you find you have anything to add. I never related with Harper the way I did with Merritt’s character, but that doesn’t mean that Harper isn’t a beautiful enigma waiting to be unwrapped. I just don’t happen to be the kind of reader that would know where to begin unwrapping her, if that makes sense. And because I’m afraid it doesn’t, I do believe it’s time to stop with the metaphors and wrap this up nicely for you, friends: Harper Harper is number two on my list of favorite characters from PBH, and that is not something done lightly or by accident. She was one of our three heroines, after all. And a proper heroine she was, friends. Don’t you ever forget it.

· Libbie Packard broke my heart more times than I count, friends. You’ll notice I have kept her maiden name, then. This is intentional, friends, for our Libbie never wanted to be a Brookhants, not really. It wasn’t towards the end of PBH that we learned much of what we now know about Libbie, and how it came about that she had been married (to a man no less!), as well as the very young principal of an all-girls school. Throughout their chapters in the book, Libbie and Alex, her Alex, were seemingly at each other’s throats constantly. There seemed to be a mysterious tension that we as an audience weren’t privy to – but it didn’t stop us from speculating. I found myself drawn to Libbie more than I did her counterpart, and I still can’t point my finger as to why. Libbie seemed sad, right from our first introduction, and Alex always seemed angry and cynical (as a queer woman in 1902, is there any other way to seem?). This might serve as a dual character analysis yet, friends. I’m not sure how much I’ll have to say about our Alexandra Trills, but Libbie Packard deserves a long sentence, or two. You know when something finally clicks into place and you can’t help but just let out a long “ooohhhhhhh”? That’s a recreation of how I looked when I read the explanation of how Libbie Packard became Libbie Brookhants. Learning that she had become pregnant with a baby she didn’t want was mind-blowing enough, and it filled in the blanks of how young, gorgeous Libbie had become the wife of a rich, old, old man. Libbie gave up her child was because she didn’t want to be a mother, and she had originally rejected Harold Brookhants offer of marriage because she didn’t want to be a wife, regardless of false the marriage was. And for a while, Libbie’s new life was amazing; she got to live with her Alex in a beautiful house and became the principal of a promising school. This was the life she’d always wanted. Or was that just what we wanted to believe, friends? Only at the end did we learn that Libbie had rejected Harold Brookhants offer (to live a quiet, queer life with her lover and without the child she clearly didn’t want) because she didn’t want to be tied down; not to Harold, not to anyone. If you think about it, friends, this was exactly the life that she had been living for years to come now. The tension with Alex had much to do with the circumstances surrounding them at Brookhants and the evil that was unfolding before them, but it seemingly had even more to do with the fact that Libbie Packard felt smothered. She was hiding secrets from Alex, secrets that she felt could destroy this already fragile relationship that they had between them. How vastly different it was to read and experience their relationship at the beginning of their love; playful and full of joy, both women giddy with the promise of something new and exciting. To compare that kind of love to the broken, tight-lipped, empty vessel of the relationship they now pretend to have is heartbreaking. And yet, completely understandable. Alex had fallen in love with the Libbie she wanted her to be, not the Libbie she was. Our Libbie wanted to be eternally young; playful and happy, bouncing from city to city with Sara Dahlgren in a sea of eligible bachelors (and bachelorettes!). It was almost a shock to discover that this life Libbie tried so hard to defend and protect was not a life she had ever wanted for herself. Despite this, she loved her Alex and her students, and devoted her life to them. There was that whole business with cheating on Alex with Adelaide the housemaid (don’t even get me started on that broad) but I’d like to extend to you, friends, the fact that I won’t comment on this. Queer relationships in 1902 are definitely not what they are now, complete with century-old curses and dead schoolgirls. Libbie Packard became the 1902-lesbian-headmistress version of our stereotypical bored housewife, stuck in a marriage that she secretly wishes she could be free from. And my heart broke for her, friends, it really did. But she was a heroine all on her own. A deeply intelligent and remarkable woman. Make no mistake, friends. Libbie Packard and Libbie Brookhants differ by more than just a surname. Our young, vivacious Libbie disappeared the moment she accepted Harold Brookhants’ offer, and this is indeed the sad truth of it, friends: Libbie Packard was gone before she could ever find herself. But Libbie Brookhants was our gorgeous, brilliant, queer heroine that never got what she deserved. So, friends, let’s all have a moment of silence for our dearly departed Libbie Brookhants… wherever she is.

· Alexandra Trills is a character that I don’t know where to begin with. Her end is not one that I saw coming, at least not in the gruesome and deranged circumstances that came to surround it. Or maybe, friends, I just didn’t want to acknowledge the clear downwards spiral that our Miss Trills had seemed to be heading towards. Her steadfast and growing obsession with the death of Florence Hartshorn and Clara Broward was apparent in every page we turned, and the following death of Eleanor Faderman did not aid in absolving Alex of her obsession with the one, single copy of a book they had all possessed at one point: The Story of Mary McLane. Alex grew hysterical in her investigation of the novel and whatever evil she believed it had brought to the students of her school. I remember feeling a bit hysterical myself at times, following along with Alex’s scrambled train of thought that never seemed to find a place to stop. She was right, you know, my friends. And now what does she have to show for it? A gruesome death and an eternity of haunting the same grounds, day in and day out? I may not have liked her, and felt like she had been the reason Libbie was so unhappy and stuck in a life that she did not want, but the way Alex’s story had ended really did take me by surprise and break my heart. She deserved a better ending than what she got; she deserved to reconcile and fix her strained relationship with Libbie. Damn it, they deserved to live quiet, happy lives with each other. Neither of them got the endings that they deserved, and God, did they deserve plenty. This, friends, is the hill I choose to die on tonight.

Alright, friends, this is it for my character analysis of Emily Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines! I have a special place in my heart for book characters that you can relate with (or characters that just really make you love them). The way that Emily Danforth brought our heroines to life was remarkable and highly impressive (I say this because it’s decidedly been a while since any book character(s) have weaseled their fictional way into my little heart). It’s rare that I give a book five stars (check out my Goodreads reviews) (oh god, please don’t), and yet halfway through PBH, I knew that this book deserved it. Good book characters are the ones that stick with you long after you’ve closed the book on them, and our heroines are stuck with me. And believe me, friends, I’m certainly not complaining.

#plain bad heroines #emily danforth #book review #book reviews #character analysis #books #literature #lgbtq #wlw #queer #writing blog

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p4nd0ran-punk · 4 years ago

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Meet The OC: Victoria the Siren

Got inspired by @border-spam to put more effort forth in providing info and details on my OC! Here’s a better look at my siren OC, bio and other info is below the cut.

(The first and second artworks are by me, the third was made by the awesome and lovely @lazulizard ! The title card above was made in Pixlr E, and the font used is Aberus.)

CHARACTER INFORMATION

NAME: Victoria

AGE: 18

BIRTHDAY: October 26th

HOMEWORLD: Olympianas

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE

» HAIR: Black (With purple and pink ombre dye at the tips). Victoria almost always wears her hair shortly cropped, usually in a pixie cut or an asymmetrical bob. She rarely (if ever) wears her hair longer than neck length.

» EYES: Light Blue. But they turn pink whenever she uses her powers.

» SKIN: Very fair, but she can get a decent tan on the right day.

» HEIGHT: Victoria is 4’10” out of her platform boots, and she’s 5’4” while she’s wearing her boots. Victoria has a bit of a height complex, and hates it whenever people bring her height up. Her height (and bust size) have been the subject of jokes (even to the point where some people nickname her “titget”).

» PHYSICAL BUILD: Victoria’s overweight, with a curvaceous figure. She’s quite content with her shape, and likes to flaunt it whenever she can.

» STYLE: Victoria often mixes corporate and gothic aesthetics in her dress style. Back when she was more associated with Hyperion, she couldn’t exactly dress how she wanted to. So Victoria would sneak in punk and gothic elements into her dress style.

BACKSTORY:

Victoria was born on the Eridian homeworld of Olympianas, and she inherited her siren powers shortly after birth. She was trained and raised by a cult known as the Enlightened Sisterhood, to become the next siren queen of Olympianas. Growing up, Victoria spent most of childhood locked away from the outside world, only being allowed to leave with strict supervision. The Enlightened Sisterhood convinced Victoria that they were keeping her locked away for her own “safety”. But they were actually keeping her locked away to fulfill their own selfish motives.

Once Victoria became of age, the Sisterhood planned to have her open Olympianas’ vault. But unfortunately for the Sisterhood, their plans would never come to fruition. Victoria had no interest in becoming Olympiana’s next queen, and became increasingly fed up with her strict lifestyle.So one day while Victoria was going for a walk around town, she siphoned her supervisor. And then she ran into a crowd of tourists, to keep herself being noticed by members of the Sisterhood. After successfully getting lost within the crowd, Victoria hitched a ride on a Dahl tourist shuttle to Pandora.

After a certain period of time of being on Pandora, Victoria was found and adopted by a Hyperion Engineer. At this time Handsome Jack was still the CEO of Hyperion, so Victoria’s guardian went to great lengths to hide that she was a siren. After the fall of Jack and Hyperion, Victoria would stop hiding her tattoos, but she still faced problems socially. People were either afraid of her, wanted to profit off other powers, or treated her with prejudice.

Grew up being known for her child prodigy status. Being trapped in a tower for most of her early childhood came with one benefit. It gave her a lot of time to become well-studied, especially with how strict the Sisterhood was with education. She graduated from high school early, and was in college until she became bored with her rather mundane life.

Shortly after starting college, father randomly went missing. It’s suspected that the Enlightened Sisterhood might have something to do with his disappearance.

Speaking of Victoria’s education, she followed in her adoptive guardian’s footsteps, and was studying to become an engineer for Hyperion. She quit college at 16 to become a Vault Hunter, find her adoptive father, and to regain a childhood that she never had.

PERSONALITY:

Victoria is an adventurous young woman known for her rebellious and unlady-like behavior. She appears to be a “lone-wolf” having a more cynical outlook on life in general, and never really goes out her way to do good unless it comes with personal benefit. Victoria’s a bit of a misanthrope, and generally doesn’t have much faith in people, especially the ones on Pandora.

She also hides behind a sort of “bad girl” persona, as a way of protecting herself from being seen as weak or vulnerable by those around her. This also means that she has a tendency of hiding how she truly feels, making her appear too cold, even at times where showing emotion is appropriate.

Her “bad girl” persona fades away with time, when she’s around friends, or when someone has gained her trust.

TRAITS:

✓ POSITIVE Traits

Undying Loyalty:

From first appearances Victoria seems to be an “every man for himself” kind of gal. But once someone has gained Victoria’s trust, she’ll never turn her back on them. She will even go as far as getting herself injured or killed, if it means protecting those who she cares about.

Diligence:

Victoria is not the type of person to half-ass any sort of job given to her, whether she likes the job or not. She likes the rewards, and sense of accomplishment that come from a job well done.

Assertiveness:

Victoria doesn’t take anyone’s bullshit, period. Whether it’s someone bossing around or insulting, Victoria or her friends, she will stand her ground to make sure that person knows their place.

Adaptability:

Victoria’s gotten used to abrupt changes in her life at this point, mainly because she’s had no option but to. Pandora’s a tough planet to live on, so you either adapt and get used to the craziness or you die.

Resilience:

Despite everything that’s occurred in her life so far, she’s managed to keep herself together. She rarely breaks under pressure, and tends to handle traumatic experiences well enough.

x Negative Traits

Insatiable Greed:

Victoria has a love for money that borders on obsession. No amount of money is ever enough for her, and there’s no such thing as “too much” when it comes to the finer things in life for Victoria. Her greed for money is almost immeasurable, and she’ll do just about anything to get it, as long as it doesn’t involve humiliation or sex.

Pridefulness:

For the most part, Victoria mainly works to achieve her own goals, very rarely putting others before herself. She can be impatient and cold to those who she considers to be a waste of her time. Victoria also has a hard time acknowledging her own faults.

Stubbornness:

One thing that Victoria hates most is being told what to do. She doesn’t take being bossed around lightly, and will often do the opposite of what she’s told to do. She also has no respect for authority figures, and this has gotten her in trouble with the law.

Recklessness:

Tends to be carelessness and recklessness with her own life. She suffers silently with passive suicidal ideation, and generally hates that she has to take Eridium to live.

Arrogance:

Acts like a bit a know-it-all due to status as a siren and child prodigy. Nobody can control Victoria, and very few can tell her what to do, due to her inflated sense of self-worth.

Likes:

Money.

Being treated like a normal person.

Makeup.

Rock and Metal music.

Alcohol. Victoria likes it… Maybe a little too much at times.

Bunkers and Badasses.

LARPing.

Dislikes:

Being a siren.

Rude nicknames, especially the ones directed towards her height, weight, or bust size.

Tight spaces. Victoria is moderately claustrophobic.

Being treated like a child. Victoria’s 18, and because of that some people try to baby her.

People. Not all, but most.

Being seen as a “nerd”. She’s secretly nerdy, but she prefers that everyone sees her as a badass.

#victoria the siren #7th siren #borderlands 3 #borderlands oc #my art #lazulizard's art #my headcanons #pre-cov info #original character #oc bio #victoria the seventh siren

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imaginedcreaderinsert · 5 years ago

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Am I really that unlovable? — Jason Todd x Reader (x Dick Grayson)

WORD COUNT: 2129 +/-

WARNINGS: mixed feelings (idea of cheating?); light angst and comfort, slight fluff.

You know it’s not the right thing to do. You should probably go to Dick – should probably bury your head in his chest and cry, while he murmurs sweet nothings and kisses your hair from time to time. It would be the right and correct thing to do, but he wouldn’t understand. He wouldn’t get it. It hurts you sometimes how perfect he is – how shiny he is in comparison to your darkness; how broken you feel a lot of nights.

Gotham is cruel and has taken a toll in a lot of civilians, their minds; you being one of them. Dick doesn’t know, he wasn’t the one that saved you after all, but he was the one that took care of you when you couldn’t even lift yourself. He was the one strong enough to lift you when others couldn’t, when others wouldn’t dare. He loved you and protected you, numbed you enough from your life that the only worry you have as of now is that of breathing and reliving the trauma of that terrifying three hours trapped in debris and blood, darkness and death-

—Hey kitty, you there? I got your-

You run into his arms, his very comfortable and safe arms. Red Hood, Jason Todd was the first face in the light that you saw, the first one to rescue and protect you in his arms, awkwardly reassuring you that everything was over and that you were fine and very much alive. Maybe it’s something a notion that you connect now with him, that of safety and security with his scent, his heart beating.

The Wayne’s made sure you were fully accommodated, that you wouldn’t have to worry about your living anymore, or jobs; that’s how you got closer to Dick, he being the messenger and being kind enough to assist you the first nights when you couldn’t sleep a wink, and you passed from exhaustion. Slowly his kisses healed you, and you were finally able to go to sleep at a reasonable hour (for them, at least, 3AM was as good as one could get).

Even when your bond with Dick was stronger, you thought at times he was the love of your life, you were both meant to be, Jason was the hard one to crack, the interesting one with whom you’ve gotten close without really trying, the one you started to miss – few were the people that could keep up with your reading habits, and now with little else to occupy your mind with, it seemed natural that you two spent at least one or two days every two weeks commenting on last readings, short particularly interesting stories… Did your heart yearned for him? No, not really. Your lips searched Dick’s like it was natural, they were magnetic; and it was not about lust. You knew early of the concept, and you quickly discovered it didn’t mean anything if it wasn’t with someone you loved, you wanted – but the urge didn’t come, the need to have him wasn’t something that particularly called you. Dick had tried, but you had always told him the limits, and he has been complying enough, understanding enough.

He makes you feel broken. You become aware of it when you have been at least three months together: you are a doll trapped in a house of fragile crystals, a very delicate empire of cards; and he is perfect, the golden boy, the perfect smirk, looks, naturally good character, charming enough. You weren’t. Jason didn’t make you feel broken or less; he made you feel enough, and you liked him maybe even more because of that.

You confided in him about your very difficult relationship with your family, from which you have been cut off. Being a writer! What nonsense, they had thought – and were they right? You had published short stories which had gained the attention of the public, but every time you sat in front of a blank page now, you got blocked. It was pure anxiety, pressure; something similar to a PTSD, you suppose, because every time the only thing you see, is an enormous building falling inevitably over you, about to crush you, end your existence, and the rush of everything, the powerlessness you feel is similar to the shouts of your mother. You see it like an enormous wave about to engulf you – it will try to drown you down, and you will fight it, just like you had tried to fight off your mother in public, in private, with sarcastic and cynical comments about your writing experience, life, what you want to pursue.

Your most famous publications, the ones that gained the most attention, were the ones on your family. Your mom divorced your dad at an early age, and you have been feeling the pressure since then; he was a cruel man, he often made the attempt to hit her when he was too enraged, he couldn’t think clearly, and she shouted enough to bring him back, make you try and camouflage in the wall of your bedroom. Do you miss him?, Jason one night asks. No, you answer with a sad smile. There’s no one to miss when there has been no one to fill the place.

—You only care about yourself!—. She shouts, stomping the magazine against the crystal of her new coffee table. You close your eyes, flinch in surprise – and of course you knew her reaction would be just that, but you still can’t deal with the shouting, can’t deal with her hovering over you with all of her power in her voice—. I always knew you were determined, but you are heartless, just like your father. Unlovable.

She spits the word out, and you know you should go. You cry on the metro, but no one says anything; everyone is dealing with their own demons, and yours just happened to come out publicly today. You almost have to thank them, even if you haven’t stop when you reach your house, your door.

And yes, Dick should be the one you should be texting, but it’s Todd the one you end up going for. The makeup you hide behind has almost come off, and you look a bit like a raccoon; cleaning is easy enough, and it helps you calm yourself down, relax and breathe a couple of times before you start the process.

. . .

She looks nice enough to look like one of those noisy reporters, but her eyes are full of silence, her mouth twitches when she attempts to speak but ends up awkwardly smiling. He likes her – likes her company, her comforting presence, the nursing abilities she unknowingly presents when she holds him dear in the sofa of her apartment, the bed – it’s innocent enough, so there’s no questions raised, no one says anything and surely Dick never heard of it. But does he know? Does he consider him, Jason Todd, innocent enough to not worry?

Honestly, he is not a womanizer. He is awkward, hates small talk, and is impatient. He can’t be bothered most of the time with flirty pick-up lines, hates the strong smell of perfume and the hellish complements that women call heels. He doesn’t like them trying hard, trying to achieve or take something out of him – it makes him feel used, like an object, a figure or icon they just want to fuck. It’s stupid, truly, and anyone that listens to his rants might just complain about “how hard” he has it, but he is truly terrified of coming close to anyone else. Roy is the only exception, and it might just be because the suicidal tendencies, the recklessness that ties them both, he jokes one day before turning to her very sad face, a pity one. And hell, he was about to complain and say it was all a big fat joke, that he was a virgin or some other shit, lie, but instead she hugs him enough: and truly, really, all he wants to do for a second is cry. Of course, he holds himself back just as he hugs her enough to hurt, to complain.

He gets close enough to kiss those lips, that mouth he has been dreaming of for some time now, but ultimately stops. Jason has been good, is making progress – he won’t fuck it up.

. . .

You tell him everything that she has ever shouted, that has destroyed you over the years. He listens in silence, in your bed while you snuggle close to his chest. You hate crying with other people around because your eyes get puffy, your voice broken and most of all you are vulnerable. You got to know Him - presence like that of a God you tried to believe on for a couple of years - a bit, and everything that stuck of him in you was that “the weak must go” and you didn’t want him to go, not ever – but it might be the reason why you can’t stop at times, you feel the need to be perfect, comply with that imposed social norm that doesn’t or has ever pressured you. But to your mother it matters, mattered – which is why you did it.

—And I can’t. I hate when people shout, and can’t stand people leaving. Why does everyone do so? Is there something really wrong in me, something broken and insufferable? I know-I know how I am, how difficult I can get to be, but I try. I truly do, even when it comes out wrong-I-I try to make up for it! But… But they still leave. It may take months or weeks, but they just do and I just don’t know if I am too intense or too cold. I can’t seem to grasp the middle ground, and I’m afraid I will… I will just be forever alone.

There are tears in your eyes that don’t fall, that Jason takes with his fingers soft enough to make you cry more. He touches you sometimes like you are a precious metal, and no one has ever treated you like that. Dick is suffocating, but you love him – can’t or won’t live without him because he is the one that has truly seen you for who you are. He has hugged you for hours in your bed, has kissed you for days when you weren’t strong enough to get up and has tried everything and more to make you happy. And you are… Most of the time. He says so at least: “It’s okay to not be okay all the time”. He tries his best; you can be the worst but-but he loves you. Undeniably. And you love him back, you probably will always do, which is the main reason why you never attempt to kiss Jason, get close enough.

You cry in his arms and he takes comfort in your warmth, but that’s it. Only one night when you are truly exhausted in his arms, have fallen sleep just like that, you make the attempt to brush his lips with the fingertips of your hands: he is the one that treats you like you are a precious marble, but asleep, he looks like he could be shattered with a blow. You trace his nose, his perfect nose, and then again his lips, his gorgeous lips until he frowns and the dreams die behind his eyelids: it’s beautiful, you’ve never seen anything like it, and thus you hold it close like a treasure to your chest.

And in the morning, when the rays bathe your face, you find he is gone, long gone probably – but then you hear the coffee machine and almost jump out of bed.

(And no, you are not wearing his shirt, anything of his; just your very ridiculous and fluffy green pajamas that are slightly big on the hips and tight on your waist).

—Hey, Jaybird.

—Do you know you are in the cover?—. It’s the first thing he does: shoot the magazine at you, which you incredibly catch even with your horrible morning reflexes—. Fuck, (Y/N), you are doing it! It’s actually really good. A bit chilling, can relate more than I should, but it’s perfect. Congrats, truly, little wing.

And even when you know that your name is in there, on the cover among other titles, you still feign you are surprised – you told him almost everything. Of course, the story is about your family; and your mother, a past editor of the famous “U” magazine had been presented the first copy the night before. And she got incredibly angry, she made you cry, but now, under the rays of sun and light…

You think you will be okay.

—Don’t add so much sugar, please! It’s disgusting—. You put, before laughing at the pout he mimics back.

—But I like it sweet!

Casually, me too.

#jason todd #jason todd fanfic #jason todd x reader #reader insert #dcu #dcu x reader #red hood x reader #dick grayson #dick Grayson x reader #light angst #fluff and comfort #light fluff

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maddie-grove · 5 years ago

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My Top Ten Victorian (Ish) Romance Novels

Notes: Queen Victoria’s reign lasted from 1837 to 1901, but I learned in a literature class that sometimes the Victorian era is defined as lasting from 1832 (when the First Reform Act was passed) to 1901 (when Victoria died). When it comes to historical romance novels, I think the second definition works better; a romance set in 1831 usually comes at the tail end of a series or universe beginning in the 1810s/1820s and still has a Regency flavor, while a romance set 1832-1836 has a decidedly non-Regency feel. Incidentally, I’ve noticed that 1830s-set Harlequin Historicals are labeled “1830s,” rather than “Regency” or “Victorian.” No one knows what to do with the 1830s! Also, many of these novels are set in the USA. Three are specifically set in Chicago, which is kind of weird!

1. The Heiress Effect by Courtney Milan (2013)

Exact Setting: 1860s England.

Premise: Politician Oliver Marshall has ambitions of enacting egalitarian laws, including the proposed Second Reform Bill, but his illegitimate birth and non-aristocratic upbringing make that an uphill battle. Then a marquess makes him a peculiar offer: in exchange for supporting the Second Reform Bill, he wants Oliver to publicly humiliate Jane Fairfield, an heiress who is despised by high society for her bad taste and oblivious rudeness. Oliver, too often the object of aristocratic bullying, has no desire to harm Jane, but he doesn’t feel that he can refuse the marquess outright. Then he realizes that Jane isn’t what she seems; instead, she’s a brave, clever, lonely woman who’s putting on an act so she can stay unmarried and continue protecting her younger sister. Also, he likes her and finds her wildly attractive, despite her nightmarish fashion sense.

Why I Like It: This is my favorite romance EVER. Jane is an all-time-great heroine: intelligent enough to engineer a complicated marriage-repellent scheme (and change it when circumstances require), strong enough to expose herself to ridicule out in the world (and come home to an uncle who thinks she’s inherently a bad person), and vulnerable enough to break your heart. Oliver, a bruised idealist who must reassess his go-along-to-get-along approach, is nearly as compelling. Their romance is full of top-notch banter and solidarity in the face of a world that wants them to be enemies. And there are almost too many excellent subplots to count: Jane’s sister’s secret romance with an Indian student at Cambridge, Oliver’s younger sister’s foray into activism, and Jane’s brittle frenemy-ship with the Johnson twins, to name a few.

Favorite Scene: The first time Jane drops her act in front of Oliver, or the defeat of the marquess.

2. A Hope Divided by Alyssa Cole (2017)

Exact Setting: North Carolina, USA, during the Civil War.

Premise: Marlie Lynch's life has always been complicated. The daughter of a free Afro-Caribbean root worker, she spent half her childhood with her mother before being sent to live with her white paternal relatives. Now she works for two different secret organizations: the Underground Railroad (with the help and approval of her white abolitionist sister) and the black-Unionist-run spying organization the Loyal League (with the knowledge of no one). When she’s not doing that, she’s pursuing her scientific interests while still honoring and using her late mother’s rootworking practices. Her situation becomes even more fraught when she agrees to harbor Ewan McCall, an escaped Union POW, in a secret chamber behind her bedroom wall. They bond over their shared intellectual interests, but is there any time for romance when Marlie’s home is being overrun by loathsome Confederates?

Why I Like It: Many historical romances have good love stories but don’t do much with the setting, while a few excel at portraying the past but fail at creating a compelling central relationship. Alyssa Cole’s Loyal League novels are the total package, and the Southern-Gothic-tinged A Hope Divided is the standout among them. Marlie and Ewan’s courtship is portrayed with tenderness, intelligence, and delicacy. Cole brings just as much sharpness and nuance to her portrayal of the time and place, representing groups of people who tend to disappear in popular discussions about the Civil War. I also really appreciate Ewan as a character. His mind works differently from most people’s (in that he would probably now be considered to be on the autism spectrum), and he worries that he’s a bad person because he doesn’t feel a lot of angst about some morally complicated decisions he made in the past. The narrative does a good job of showing that Ewan is no better or worse than anyone else for using tools other than empathy in his moral reasoning. Also, Marlie is a top-tier Gothic heroine.

Favorite Scene: Marlie reflects on the villain’s oh-so-convenient conception of Southern womanhood. I’m also a big fan of the entirety of the bedroom-wall courtship.

3. The Suffragette Scandal by Courtney Milan (2014)

Exact Setting: 1870s England.

Premise: After his hateful father and self-serving brother abandoned him to a grisly fate in war-torn Strasbourg, Edward Delacey narrowly survived, with his faith in himself and the world around him shattered. Now he’s back in England, and his younger brother stands to inherit the viscountcy that legally belongs to him. He’s not interested in the title; however, he does feel compelled to stop his brother from ruining the life of Frederica Marshall, a daring investigative reporter who writes about discrimination against women. As he lends his (jaded, reluctant) assistance, Frederica’s optimism begins to infect him...and that’s not the only reason he wants to stay around her.

Why I Like It: I love Frederica as Oliver’s little sister in The Heiress Effect, and she’s even better as the cocksure firebrand heroine of her own story. It’s rare that a heroine is allowed to be so successful in her chosen field at the beginning of a romance novel, but Milan accomplishes this while still giving Frederica enough vulnerabilities and flaws to make her interesting. Yet Edward, a wounded cynic who chooses to do good despite believing that he’s a garbage bag and the world is a shit-pile, is what really pushes the novel to all-time-great status. Their story is a wonderful illustration of the best things that love can do; his faith in the world is revived by her ideals, and her worst impulses are tempered by hearing about the lessons he’s learned in his darkest moments. Plus, they have some really funny banter.

Favorite Scene: Edward explains why torture is ineffective and wrong. (I put years of hard work into getting my torture degree at torture college! Fuck off!)

4. After the Wedding by Courtney Milan (2018)

Exact Setting: 1860s England.

Premise: After her father was accused of treason and committed suicide, Lady Camilla Worth was passed from home to increasingly shabby home, eventually fading into obscurity as Camilla Winters, a housemaid in a corrupt clergyman’s home. Adrian Hunter, the son of a black abolitionist activist and a white duke’s daughter, is visiting the clergyman in disguise to gather information when he and Camilla fall victim to a dastardly plot. Force to wed at literal gunpoint and thrown out of the house, they must work together to annul their marriage and get to the bottom of the clergyman’s sinister doings.

Why I Like It: Camilla is the first bisexual heroine I ever encountered in romance, so I was already primed to love her, but it would’ve happened regardless of her orientation. Desperate for any kind of affection after losing her family in a particularly cruel way, her struggle to find love while trying to protect herself is extremely moving. Adrian also has an affecting arc, in which he learns how to let go of family members who don’t really care about him and acknowledge his grief for his brothers who died in the Civil War. Finally, the conspiracy plot is absolutely explosive.

Favorite Scene: Camilla deals with trauma through legal research.

5. An Unconditional Freedom by Alyssa Cole (2019)

Exact Setting: USA (mainly Illinois and Mississippi) during the Civil War.

Premise: Daniel Cumberland once believed that freedom and justice would prevail for black people in America, but then he was kidnapped and enslaved for several months. Now free, he works for the Loyal League, fueled not by hope but by pure rage. Janeta Sanchez, a mixed-race Cuban-Floridian lady from a wealthy Confederate family, is also working for the Loyal League...as a double agent, because she believes that’s the only way to save her father. Paired with Daniel to gather intelligence about possible European aid, she begins to question her loyalties as she sees more of the world and gets to know the people her hypocritical white family has kept her away from. Daniel, meanwhile, begins to see a way of coping with his trauma and an uncertain future.

Why I Like It: Historical romance often shies away from the worst parts of history, or at least frames them as remaining firmly in the past. Alyssa Cole not only starkly portrays the horrors of American slavery, but also confronts head-on the terrifying realization that things do not inevitably improve over time. Yet Cole’s frankness doesn’t reduce the novel to a horror show; there is plenty of joy and kindness and hard-won hope between Daniel and Janeta. Deceived and guilted by her family into supporting an appalling cause that hurts her, Janeta is a complex heroine who develops wonderfully throughout the novel. Daniel is also one of the best-written heroes in romance. Finally, as in A Hope Divided, Cole sheds light on an aspect of the Civil War (the involvement of Europe) that doesn’t get a lot of attention in popular culture.

Favorite Scene: Janeta and Daniel talk alone for the first time.

6. Wild at Heart by Patricia Gaffney (1997)

Exact Setting: 1890s USA (Chicago, Illinois).

Premise: Lost as a child and raised by wolves in the wilds of Canada, the Lost Man has been discovered by “civilized” people and forced to “live” with a Chicago anthropologist for study. (Really, he’s being held captive.) Only Sydney Darrow, the anthropologist’s widowed daughter, has the sense/compassion to say, “Hey, maybe we should treat this man like a person and not keep him locked in a glorified cell where a disgruntled employee can taunt him.” She gently introduces the Lost Man back into human society, and the two find themselves getting along better and better. But can the Lost Man ever truly adjust to the human world? Or will he forever express his love by giving dead fish to people? Or is okay, sometimes, to express you love with dead fish?

Why I Like It: This is one of the most bizarre romances I’ve ever read. It sounds like a romance that someone made up for a sitcom. It sounds like a fever dream. It’s absolutely brilliant, too, because Gaffney commits. The Lost Man thinks of everything in animal terms; he accurately identifies Sydney’s aunt as the “dominant female” of the household, he has decided opinions about which animals are neat and which ones are pains in the ass, and he shows his love with a beautiful, freshly caught fish. There’s a real sense of loss in his arc; it’s necessary for him to transition into human society, but he’s also lost a beautiful, meaningful world. His romance with Sydney is also a great version of the Monster Boyfriend story; she’s the one who sees his humanity and recognizes many of his more “animal” traits as positive. The backdrop of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition is also charming.

Favorite Scene: Michael reflects on who’s hot (otters) and who’s not (wolverines) in the animal kingdom.

7. To Love and to Cherish by Patricia Gaffney (1995)

Exact Setting: 1850s England.

Premise: Jaded Anne Verlaine moves to the tiny village of Wyckerly after her wildly unhappy and unpleasant husband Geoffrey inherits a viscountcy. They’re greeted by Christian “Christy” Morrell, the local vicar and Geoffrey’s childhood best friend. Christy is dismayed to see the man Geoffrey has become, but he’s even more disconcerted by the attraction he feels for Anne...who returns his feelings.

Why I Like It: Although she stopped writing historical romance in the late nineties, Patricia Gaffney remains one of the most stylistically inventive and emotionally intense authors in the sub-genre. Anne, a warm and witty bohemian atheist, is a wonderfully unique heroine, while the sweet and scrupulous Christy is a similarly refreshing hero (and, really, an ideal clergyman, with high standards for himself and hardly a judgmental thought towards others). Despite the (delicious) angst involved in their relationship, they’re one of the most convincingly happy couples I’ve seen in romance; they don’t just grow close because of sexual chemistry or their shared complicated feelings about Geoffrey, but also because of their shared interests, oddly compatible senses of humor, and respect for each others’ differences. The village of Wyckerly is vividly portrayed, plus Gaffney makes great use of Anne’s writings and correspondence with Christy to shape the narrative.

Favorite Scene: Anne gets angry with Christy for being so good in the face of Geoffrey’s bullshit.

8. Silk Is for Seduction by Loretta Chase (2011)

Exact Setting: Mid-1830s England and France.

Premise: After emigrating from Paris to London, Marcelline Noirot and her two younger sisters started a dress shop catering to newly rich and middle-class women. Thanks to Marcelline’s innovative designs and her sisters’ sales/accounting skills, they now stand a chance to be the favorite shop of the entire aristocracy...but first they need an early adopter. Help comes in the form of Lady Clara Fairfax, a beautiful but dowdily dressed girl who’s starting to have doubts about her perfect-on-paper betrothed, the Duke of Clevedon. As Marcelline devises a new wardrobe for Clara and spends more time with Clevedon, it becomes more and more clear that Clevedon is perfect...for Marcelline.

Why I Like It: I’m a simple woman; I like elaborate descriptions of over-the-top 1830s fashion. What’s more, I love Marcelline. She’s a fully realized character with interests, talents, and history that have nothing to do with Clevedon; she misses the sweet husband she lost to an epidemic, is anxious to build a future for her young daughter and her sisters, and spends a lot of the book demonstrating her talents in gorgeous detail. Just like the massive gigot sleeves on her dresses, she takes up space. Overall, the romance resembles a really good 1930s romantic comedy; Clevedon is a great straight man, the love triangle is elegantly resolved, and everything just feels beautiful.

Favorite Scene: In one of the best sex scenes in romance, Marcelline tells Clevedon that she loves him, knows they don’t have a future, and wants him for one last night just the same.

9. The Hostage by Susan Wiggs (2000)

Exact Setting: 1870s USA (Chicago, Illinois and Isle Royale, Michigan)

Premise: Beautiful new-money heiress Deborah Sinclair has always done what’s expected of her. When her aristocratic betrothed shows his true colors, though, she works up the courage to tell her dad that she wants out. Unfortunately, Mr. Sinclair is not receptive...and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 is literally happening around them...and this random dude just showed up to kidnap her in all the chaos! Before she knows it, she’s on a boat to remote Isle Royale with Tom Silver, a rugged frontiersman who lost many of his friends and his adopted son in a mining accident caused by Mr. Sinclair’s negligence. Because Mr. Sinclair was found not legally liable, Tom has resorted to holding Deborah for ransom. Although he has no desire to harm her, he’s prepared to hate the daughter of his greatest enemy; she’s also not too fond of him, given that he kidnapped her and all. As they wait for Mr. Sinclair’s reply on Isle Royale, however, they get to know each other better.

Why I Like It: I never thought I’d love a kidnapping romance that wasn’t Beauty and the Beast, but Susan Wiggs can sell me on pretty much anything. (It helps that Tom has excellent motives, yet isn’t validated by the narrative for choosing to kidnap Deborah.) This is one of the best adventure-romances that I’ve ever read; much of the first act is an incredibly tense, complicated chase sequence through the flaming inferno of Chicago, while the later chapters consist of their trying to survive together on Isle Royale in the depths of winter. The emotional journeys of the characters are just as compelling as their physical ones. One of my favorite romance tropes is when one protagonist feels like they should hate the other one, but instead ends up going “wow, this person is obviously not doing okay...wait, am I worried? Should I help them? Actually, I kind of admire them now???” The Hostage has this trope in abundance.

Favorite Scene: The entire part where they’re trapped on Isle Royale together. So many survival details! So cathartic!

10. The Firebrand by Susan Wiggs (2001)

Exact Setting: 1870s USA (Chicago, Illinois)

Premise: Outspoken and awkward, Lucy Hathaway (Deborah Sinclair’s BFF) is a failure at being a lady, but she’s far too passionate about women’s suffrage and dress reform to care (much) about society’s scorn. On the night of the Great Chicago Fire, her world is upended in two ways: her family loses most of their money, and she catches a baby who got thrown out of a burning hotel window. Years later, she’s a kick-ass activist and single mom running a proto-feminist bookstore. Then she learns that her daughter’s father, banker Randall Higgins, is still alive. Once a proud, thoroughly conventional family man, Rand has been a practical recluse since the fire that scarred his face, ended his marriage, and (he thought) killed his daughter. He’s overjoyed to have his daughter back, but now he and Lucy must figure out a way to raise the child that they both love so much.

Why I Like It: I was worried when I began this novel, because Rand starts out as a smug, boring sexist who thinks that a woman’s place is in the home. I would probably hate the book if Rand didn’t end up completely changing his worldview, agreeing with Lucy’s parenting methods, and risking the wrath of his bank colleagues by joining Lucy at a protest. As it is, Rand’s character development is incredibly satisfying, particularly because it’s emotionally realistic. (Instead of being swayed entirely by romantic love or overwhelmed by Lucy’s vast superiority, he learns to see things from her perspective and recognizes that her actions make the world a better place.) Lucy, for her part, is probably one of my top ten heroines. She’s an active, thoroughly engaged progressive who listens to people more marginalized than her without making a big show of it; she’s a thoughtful mom who genuinely likes her weird kid; and she’s got massive insecurities and a stubborn streak that keep her from being too perfect.

Favorite Scene: Rand sees Lucy’s ideals reflected in their daughter’s response to his kind-of-messed-up face.

Further Note: Is Victorianish my favorite type of historical romance? I think it is!

#romance novels #books #reading #the heiress effect #a hope divided #the suffragette scandal #after the wedding #an unconditional freedom #wild at heart #to love and to cherish #silk is for seduction #the hostage #the firebrand #courtney milan #alyssa cole #patricia gaffney #loretta chase #susan wiggs

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bigskydreaming · 5 years ago

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kai06leaf replied to your post:

Ended up all night, with sleep derailed by a RUDE...

Um I had asked for a link for your batman related works?:)

Oh score, this is actually weirdly timely then! FlashinthePan is my Batfam pseudonym (https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlashInThePan/works), its just it hasn’t been useful for much other than to use my bookmarks page there as a fics rec list. Since the only other things still up on it are the YJ WIP I haven’t updated in a couple years and an elephant’s graveyard collection for the random ficlets I often write on here while forgetting they’re usually long enough to be actual one-shots...and that I then forget to actually add to that one, that I created for the specific purpose of putting all those in one place. My mind. Its just....*staggers at the Legend of it all*

I’ve been on a pretty committed “No more posting unfinished WIPs kick” for the past couple years but am finally at a point where I have stuff to post without cheating, so that streak officially ends today, when I finish my read-through of the first fic* in question and hit publish. “The Requiem Rites of Robins,” the ten chapter first story in an AU Battle For the Cowl fix-it series, “A Legacy of Robins,” with TRRoR being roughly 40K, focuses on Dick and Jason and their issues with each other and Bruce’s believed death, picking up and going AU at an indeterminate time not long after the end of BFTC.

Specific goals of focus with this particular fic were addressing Bruce’s bullshit last will and testament to Jason (ugh), the eternally unremarked upon moment that was Dick watching his brother refuse to take his hand and instead fall to what at the time must have seemed very likely to be Jason’s second death, in a pretty fucked up parallel to his parents’ death (ugh), various other unaddressed issues between the brothers that kept them making like they were Cain and Abel instead of two people who loved each other and very much could use each other while grieving for their father or even just pretending they weren’t....and also steadfastly jumping their combined train of events well off the tracks before Morrison’s whole...��Jason” thing ever happened at all (ugh).

Just a headsup for readers for whom certain characterizations of Bruce are a dealbreaker - full disclosure, this fic and its sequels do consider various less pleasant moments between Bruce and his two eldest to be in character and canon, with NTT #55 and the ending to UTRH the most touched upon and relevant. For what its worth, my intention there (and hopefully my execution of things) was not to vilify or bash Bruce, or to make it at all a question of whether or not both really loved Bruce and he them.

To be clear...I do categorize Bruce’s actions towards Dick and Jason at those times/specific others as abusive, but a huge part of my reason for even writing this particular fic was to explore and examine the reality of loving a parent even despite a history of actually abusive behavior on their parts. Of how to mourn for someone you loved at some times and hated at others, who was both the person who made you feel whole again and the one who made you at other times feel the most broken.

Especially when you’re two people who pride themselves on being heroes, who are ‘supposed to know’ that there’s no defense, no excuse for some of the things their father did, but that doesn’t always change or erase how much they want to. And who are both looking for an answer in the other, as to how they’re supposed to live with the fact that deep down, there’s a part of them that will always still be those ten and twelve year old orphan boys who came to believe their father was a man who could literally do the impossible...even mend what was broken, make things right with them and the world as they knew it just like he’d managed once before, when he’d first come into their lives and they’d been just as certain then that there were no more happy moments in their futures at all.

And with the both of them still, even after everything, having held onto that secret hope that someday he was going to find the secret loophole, the magic words that let them forgive him, that let them let the past all just be in the past and the future all that really mattered, that their best days as a family weren’t all behind them yet and there was still time for things to be different, for him to be different....because their dad wasn’t like other ordinary dads, their dad was the Batman, he was a superhero.....

....who was also still just a man, and sometimes men die with their most important deeds still left incomplete.

This first story is centered firmly on just Dick and Jason, because I have a tendency to let things get too widespread and expansive plot-wise the more characters I focus on, and because this first story, about mourning Bruce and finding a way to move on, needed to be just Dick and Jason, although Cass and Tim and Damian, as well as Steph and Babs and Alfred all have things in the wake of his believed death that IMO they needed explored, and that were never explored in canon. But Dick and Jason had to be the first two and a solo act except for each other, especially as this series is still geared towards Bruce’s eventual return, and just to a much different status quo....because the thing about Dick and Jason at this specific point in time, is that they were quite possibly the only two people in the world who would ever have the relationship with Bruce that they did, to see him the way they both at times did, and nobody else ever fully grasped.

They knew him at his highest and his lowest points, the best parts of him and the worst, the center of their whole universes and the destroyer of them....and for them, at this place and time, its about being forced to realize that for as much as come between them over the years, they each are the only ones who will ever fully be able to speak to the entirety of their father as not just Bruce Wayne, the Batman, the myth and the legend, but Bruce the man, the flawed father who was supposed to be better than his worst mistakes with them, because he was supposed to be a hero.

Even as close as others were to Bruce, there were specific slants to the light they saw him in....for Alfred, even when making his worst mistakes, he was still his son, for Cass he was still the father who fought her personal demon not because of what he wanted her to be but so that she could be who she wanted to be, for Tim, he was imperfect but still larger than life, the hero he’d still first only come to know through the lens of a camera from a great distance, a perspective he’d yet to entirely shake, and for Damian he was still largely a figure of make believe, a bed time story he’d been told all his life.

There’s an inherent goodness, a nobleness around the idea of Bruce for most others in his life, that defies coming face to face with the realities his failings could be.....which only Dick and Jason could ultimately attest to, as losing the ability to keep sight of that innate shine was why they’d found themselves so disillusioned by their father at the lowest points between them. And so in a lot of ways, the ultimate goal of writing this fic was trying to get Dick and Jason to a point where they could share their full, messy, complicated as hell feelings about their father with each other, but simultaneously feel a need to preserve the way each of their siblings still saw him, because the truth is that if there’d been someone who could have preserved that shine for their own eyes, to keep their memories of him clear and unobstructed by complication....they would have been glad to have been left just missing Bruce their father, and not the mess of feelings forever tied up in a Gordian knot upon by his death.

So yeah. LOL. That’s the link to my Batfam works, though there hasn’t been much on their for ages, but stay tuned for Chapter One of The Requiem Rites of Robins, later today.

“In the wild, a group of robins is called a round. But Gotham’s birds have always been of a different sort, something entirely unique. And the only proper plural for them, I’ve found, is a legacy.”

An investigation leads the newly minted Batman to London, alone and without Robin’s back-up for the trip. In the past couple months, Dick Grayson has barely found time to breathe, let alone to grieve for his father and come to terms with his new role as the Dark Knight’s successor. But his distracted state leaves him vulnerable, and when a new villain’s one-man war threatens to make a casualty of him too, he’s left with no alternative but to work side by side with his rescuer - at other times better known as his brother, his successor, and a couple times his would-be killer.

(Their family always has been one of over-achievers. And if you’re going to pick a pair of brothers to play compare and contrast against with that in mind, its hard to go wrong with something biblical.)

But Dick seeming no more happy about it than he is, doesn’t do much to pick up Jason’s mood. He’s come to London for his own reasons, and no, he’s still not inclined to share. Curiosity killed the cat, but he’s sure Selina wouldn’t mind if innate nosiness knocked off a few birds here and there as well. Well-earned paranoia aside, however, secrets and cynicism can only carry them so far when the two are forced to rely on each other to fight their way free of a city turned death-trap. Both are keenly aware that the last time they’d fought side by side like this, they’d been all the way back on the other side of Jason’s first untimely death. And as far as potential omens go, that one’s about as shitty as they come.

But a mixed curse and blessing are nothing new for them, and so that’s not just a painful reminder, but also proof that things were different once. That the brothers they’ve become were not always the brothers they were supposed to be. It was time and pain and bloody loss that weighed them both down so much further than the altitudes that came most naturally....not fate, or destiny, or even them. And as their new enemy forces them deeper and deeper below ground, it becomes all the more clear there’s only one skill in either of the brothers’ arsenals that will see them through to the other side of all this:

And only if they can not just remember, but rediscover, how to shed all of that and finally fly free again.

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listoriented · 5 years ago

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Cibele

: a discussion.

Cibele is a game by Star Maid Games/ Nina Freeman [Nina’s website], and released in 2015. Feeling that my friends had more interesting things to say about Cibele than I did, I decided to get their thoughts on the record. Thus was born the first ever List Oriented podcast.

Sian Campbell edits Scum Mag and once baked a very good cake. Xanthea O’Connor [twitter] is a writer, performance-artist, audio tech person and a million other things.

Xanthea also made the podcast theme song and helped with recording and EQ. Interlude music was excerpted from the Cibele soundtrack by Decky Coss [bandcamp].

Hit the "read more" button at the bottom there to see the transcript.

Some topics we discussed include: - representations of early/online relationships - is Ichi a creep? - the framing of the ending - to what extent claims to autobiography matter

Some other books and games mentioned: - The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America by Michelle Tea - Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang - Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson - I Love Dick by Chris Kraus - Emily is Away by Kyle Seeley

Finally, many interesting things have already been said about Cibele. Suriel Vasquez and Kate Grey both made arguments that Cibele is one of the few games to get sex right. Brendan Keogh notes how Cibele makes players aware that "both the players and creators of videogames never stop being fleshy, meaty bodies in actual space." Lena LeRay compared the depictions of online intimacy in Cibele and Emily is Away. G. Christopher Williams read the game's ending through the similarly cynical lens that we did.

next is Cities in Motion

Podcast transcript

Sian: There needs to be a theme song. [Singing] Welcome to List Oriented. *Finger Clicks*.

Xanthea: I think that’s great.

Sian: Nailed it. Hashtag, nailed it.

Xanthea: We’ll doodle a ukulele over it.

Connor: Can you put some beats in?

Xanthea: Yeah I’ll put some beats.

Connor: Maybe I should just make it so that just pops up automatically when the blog starts.

Sian: Noooo…haha. Like Myspace circa 2006…

[Podcast theme plays]

Connor: So I’d like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which we meet today, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and pay my respects to their elders past, present, and emerging.

Hey!

Xanthea: Hi

Connor: Hi

Sian: Hello.

C: Welcome to the first and possibly only edition of the List Oriented podcast, which is…a decision I have made to do a podcast instead of a blogpost for this game, Cibele. Cibele was made by Star Maid Games, which is the vehicle of Nina Freeman. It came out in 2015. To discuss it with me today I have some friends and experts.

X: [Laughs] That’s us!

S: Don’t fact check that.

C: Uh…Sian Campbell, editor of Scum Magazine, researcher extraordinaire…

S: Animal Crossing expert…and Connor’s housemate! Yay.

X: Correct.

C: Aaaand in the other corner… Xanthea O’Connor. Writer, performer…

X: Sims video expert…

C: …Connoisseur.

X: Mhm, mhm.

S: You’ve kind of made it sound like we’re gonna fight.

C: Yeah I mean…that’s probably not going to happen but…

S: Well we don’t know.

X: We’ve got the whiskey out…drinking coffee and whiskey at the same time.

C: Whiskey is a fighting drink. I have a friend who won’t drink whiskey because he says it makes him too angry.

X: That’s why I don’t drink tequila.

C: Oh! Cos it makes you too angry?

X: Mhm, yeah.

S: I don’t drink tequila because I end up with girls in bathrooms.

[All laugh]

C: So Cibele… or “Sybil” depending on who you are, uhm, is a game, which, kind of, is a bit different from other games, it is…uh. It has you play as Nina, the main character, uhm, who you see introduced at the start of the game in a like, full motion video when she sits down at the computer. And then the next thing we have access to Nina’s desktop so we are - kind of - Nina but we’re kind of also not-Nina. Uhm, and we can rifle through her pictures and her archived blog posts, uhm, and then eventually we get to open up this game called Valtameri which is sort of a Final Fantasy parody type thing, and we play Valtameri with this guy called Ichi, or Blake, uhm…

X: Spoiler he’s a creep.

C: Well. Arguably he’s a creep. Uhm. And we just talk to him. Aaaand… our other friends are messaging us while we’re playing but we’re not that interested, uhm. And we kind of have this cycle a few times where we play the game, and then we maybe send photos to Ichi or…maybe…I dunno what else happens but anyway there’s like three phases of the game and it takes place over a few months and then… that’s kind of… it. That’s the end of the game. I dunno. Anything to add?

X: Should we give a spoiler that at the end he lives in another state and he comes to see her, at the end…

C: Or us…

X: Or us… and then… they Have Sexxx. And then, the last bit of the game is him saying that it was a mistake, over the internet, and you see the last image of her at the computer looking very isolated and then it’s just the end of the game. Is that alright to say? The spoiler?

C: Yeah we’re not going to be able to talk about the game without saying that, so.

X: Yeah we need to say there’s unresolved tension at the end. Uhm…yes. That there’s no way to resolve.

C: Uhmmm yeah so it’s unusual, I mean, like I suppose some people at the time made a point about it’s not being a game you “play” so much as experience because you can’t really have any influence on it, it’s more just about exploring…the life that is presented to you.

X: And whatever influence that you do have, doesn’t really affect the main narrative. So you can do small little actions, like you can choose text that you say to people, but it doesn’t actually change anything that happens.

C: Yeah. You can’t make meaningful choices.

S: I did like that you can engage with, or not engage with, the background media as much as you wanted to. Because it’s got the interface of her desktop where you can look in her desktop folders, look at her selfies, pull up chatlogs all that kind of stuff. And you don’t have to in order to experience the game. And I liked that element of it because it was, I guess, immersive and, yeah. Again, it didn’t really influence the gameplay in any way. And you could safely assume that people would look at everything, because that’s kind of how most people play games. But, yeah, I thought that achieved the goal, which was to make it feel like you were her, on her computer.

X: Whereas for me I felt like, maybe as someone who doesn’t game quite as much – calling myself out here - but, the idea of going through those things maybe wasn’t as exciting for me so maybe I did speed through the game a bit more occupying Myself rather than the character of Nina. Maybe because I found looking through photos that were similar to photos I would have taken in 2008 deeply frustrating uhm, yeah. But it’s just different experiences I guess.

S: I found interesting in terms of, like, obviously this is a creative work that she’s made, so I came at it from the point of view of wondering about the inclusion of certain things. Like, why that photo as opposed to – I’m sure she has hundreds of photos of that time – like what does this photo or poem say about that time in her life that another photo taken in the same photo session didn’t? Or something like that, I mean, obviously everything that was included in the desktop interface was a deliberated choice and so I found that aspect interesting.

C: Hmm yeah, like someone else had made the point which wasn’t something that I’d picked up on but, that some of the photos were intentionally bad photos that were included, which I guess when we’re talking about the choice of presentation uhm. And her poetry and chatlogs and it’s this idea of airing your dirty laundry…

X: Well it’s still curated.

C: Yeah, very much so.

X: But, it’s very clear that there’s the intention there that it is a little bit more vulnerable than what you might just put online it’s like, yeah it’s more the sort of stuff you might just keep in a file somewhere on desktop, I guess there’s that vulnerability that you don’t normally get on a blog or Instagram or something like that.

S: And I guess that by being vulnerable she signposts to us as player or consumer in some ways that we should trust this as a confessional work.

X: Mhm. It does feel very much like rifling through someone’s diary, or…yeah that feeling of you’re totally not meant to look at someone’s phone, but there’s occasionally that impulse to do so, and it definitely feels like you’re doing something that’s…it’s kind of not okay, but within the game context…

S: Yeah. And so I find that interesting coz it’s kind of her giving us the phone and wiping everything on the phone other than the things that are on it, but the things that are on it are kind of not necessarily things that make her look the best, so I, yeah. It’s interesting from a curatorial point of view.

X: Mhm. Yeah it’s definitely curated from someone looking back at that self and being really honest. Which I find really interesting. And I haven’t really… again, not a huge gamer but I haven’t seen that in a game before, that really confessional, like, autobiographical…

C: Yeah. I mean it definitely comes from a place of there being not much autobiography in games and certainly not with this, uhm, mix of mediums that it’s sort of used where you’ve got this, like, video of the character which is played by the person who made the game who’s named the character after themselves and so it’s like…they’re acting as themselves, and then using bits from their life, and there’s a game element to it, and a movie element to it…and all these things are sort of slipping over. Whereas I think other autobiographical games have been more text based or uhm… traditional, in air quotes…

[Music plays: excerpt from “turn on” by Decky Coss]

X: So do you want to talk about…do we want to talk about what we did like and didn’t like…now?

C: Yeah. I find it — I guess I find it a really interesting game. And it’s almost like, for me, because it’s so unusual in so many ways it almost like …avoids the question, for me, as to whether or not it’s something “I like”. I guess what I liked about it is it’s something I haven’t really experienced elsewhere, uhm, it’s a very novel game to me. Like I do think it has identifiable shortcomings which I guess we’ll come to later, but, uhm…

X: So you like the experimentation of it?

C: Yeah. I do like the experimentation of it. I like the way it, uhm, mixes these things together and the way it plays with autobiography, which is another thing I’m sure we’ll talk more about it. I like it’s sound and visual kind of…the desktop artwork, it’s design. I have a basic appreciation of that I suppose.

X: She’s got a really strong aesthetic. I think that can be fully agreed upon. Sian, what about you?

S: I’ve never played online collaborative gaming like the kind of gaming this game is about and referencing, and that the game-inside-the-game is meant to, I guess, be a play on or be an example of. I… I found the game kind of rudimentary and not that enjoyable to play. As in the game “Valtameri”, uhm.

X: Also, I don’t think you even had to actually play it because Ichi was playing it…

S: Mhm, I couldn’t tell, I thought you did.

C: Yeah, I feel like if you did nothing it wouldn’t go forward at all…

S: Yeah I agree. But. I feel like it did what intended to do which was immerse you in the idea of being a person playing a game while listening to the audio of a story which is of people talking while playing a game, so it was effective in its aim in that sense, but it just wasn’t an enjoyable experience to actually play it. I found it boring and clunky.

X: I think I was beginning to dread having to go in there and do it, too.

S: Me too.

X: It’s almost like a meditative means to an end within the game. But the actual game itself is like…ugh. Just like, clicking. Like Diablo but…with worse monsters.

C: Yeah.

X: Does that make me sound really stupid?

C: No. I mean that’s what it is.

X: I think if…I think if there had been a little bit more, like, difference, so if it was a different kind of game, or if it was simple it was so simple it mirrored a game like Diablo or games like that…if it didn’t mirror a game like that it might be more interesting but I found myself clicking and just “oh I don’t want to play… I want to play an actual good game” and uhmm yeah

S: Yeah. I found it tedious and I found… I don’t know if it was just my Mac I was playing it on but I found it soooo clunky and awkward and like, to actually navigate inside the game was just a nightmare and so I was the same, I was dreading it every time I had to do that part.

C: Yeah I wonder like, uhm… if they had built Valtameri to be more interesting it would have detracted from the point of it which was I guess, uhm, the paying attention to the conversation or…

X: Well you’re forced to coz it’s so monotonous.

C: Yeah.

S: I was thinking the same thing. And I’m wondering if there was…I mean, there would be, there would be a way of having it simplistic in terms of goals and fighting and all that while also… not being as boring and annoying. But, yeah. I was also thinking the same thing in that because it was so straightforward it did give you that space to absorb the story better.

C: Yeah.

X: Mhm.

S: In terms of, like, bigger picture, I just didn’t really like the framing at the end. Which was, kind of the game ends and it leaves you with this message that… this is an experience of what first love is which I felt was, uhm, again a bit clunky and didn’t feel honest to me. Which I thought was interesting because the game itself is quite a vulnerable, confessional, honest game.

X: Yeah, it was very good at interrogating Nina, and very good at doing a lot of showing not telling but still interrogating the character of Ichi, but then… interrogating the relationship itself felt, like…yeah, when it said it was about first love… not… I dunno. Was it?

S: Yeeeah, you’re talking about a relationship that never was with someone you were never really with. Uhm, it was very unclear, I guess. And it was interesting – and I think most people have had relationships like this, online – where you’re communicating with someone primarily online and forming this relationship and this bond but also but kind of on one level… I guess, unsure as to where that relationship fits outside the box that is your computer.

X: Yeah, and I found that, actually, the whole premise of the game for me – as, like, someone who has left their early twenties, thankfully – of knowing that environment and knowing those people and that sort of relationship that gets built online, and as soon as we’re introduced to Ichi the character I wanted to just shut it down.

S: Mhm.

X: It was like “eurgh I know what’s going to happen, I… don’t want to be there for that”. And so there was that… again, I don’t know if it’s something I necessarily liked or disliked, I just found it a very confronting part of the game, that, I wasn’t sure… whether it was for me necessarily, or what the point of it would be for me to play.

C: Yeah, right. I feel like, that was really interesting for me actually, playing it this time, because I have played it once before back after it came out…I played it not long after… and I think my experience this time, it seemed a lot more like… obvious how, Ichi, the things he said seemed quite… bad. And I didn’t remember it being quite so bad. Like I felt like his actions were always questionable. But just the whole…like all of his dialogue…is

X: It’s very well done.

C: Oh it’s very well done. It seems very real.

X: But that’s the thing. If you’ve never been groomed online before. I dunno. Can I say he was grooming? I feel like it was kind of…

S: It wasn’t *not* grooming, it was…[sighs] it’s hard to tell, I mean, I guess. And that’s part of what’s interesting is that it’s her memories of how it happened and what their conversations were like, then portrayed by somebody else. So of course, we can only go on what we actually see but it’s referencing something that happened and probably what we’re listening to is quite different from what actually was being said, so that line is quite murky and unclear. I found it hard to tell exactly to what extent he knew what he was doing or even if he was doing anything other than just enjoying playing a game with someone who was showing him that kind of positive attention, like, a girl who was showing him that kind of attention. It was kind of unclear to me where he wanted it to go or even if he wanted it to go anywhere. She was kind of the one pushing them meeting up and things like that. I felt like he was toying with her, very much so. I don’t know whether I would say he was….hmm, I would say he was grooming her but I don’t know whether it was…

X: …a premeditated sort of predatory…

S: Yeah. Yeah.

X: Yeah, I think it’s quite interesting, thinking about that and where you are upon reflection making this dialogue, I guess as the maker of the game, as Nina did, it reminds me of…after we’d played the game, uhm, and I opened up my laptop and I got all my 2007 emails spat at me and, heaps of emails from old friends, and lots of guy friends talking about girl stuff, like putting in, like copy-pasting msn messenger chat things they’d had with girls like “I don’t know what this means, can you help?” And I was reading through, and it was very similar like baiting sort-of situations where someone’s like “well I’m not very good” and you’re like “no, you’re great!”. And like… very similar dialogue, where I’m sure these friends of mine were not predatory they were just, like, trying to get some affection, just being like – they must have been sixteen, seventeen at the time, like – really trying to figure out how to broach a like a sexual or romantically intimate relationship with somebody, and there’s just a lot of like, neediness in those conversations, that I forgot was a thing, until I got all those emails being like… oh we were so… like, if we now, in our late twenties to thirties messaged something like that, we’d be like… “you’re a freak”, like. You wouldn’t be able to say what we were saying back then. So yeah, I think it’s kind of interesting…what you’re saying, is that we assume that it’s predatory because as older people now, because that’s what it signifies but… when you’re younger…sometimes it can just be, like…

S: Yeah, on one level I felt like he was…just confused and out of his depth. Like this girl, that he’s obviously attracted to, and very much enjoying having the attention of, is then suddenly starting to push the line of, “well are we gonna meet up”, and he’s kind of thinking “Oh. She wants to meet up with me. I hadn’t actually thought…”. Like, it seemed like he’s just enjoying the online experience, and she’s the one who wanted to solidify things and meet up. From my memory I mean, I played it a couple of months ago. And then he’s kind of, it seemed maybe, internally wrestling with the idea of “do I want that? If I want that, it’ll obviously be beneficial for me in those certain ways”, but it’s obviously… most people, or at least most girls who have been through that wringer at least would be able to tell going into it that he didn’t actually…that there was not going to be a relationship, that he uhm… when he came to New York that wasn’t going to be a love story coming to fruition.

X: Yeah, totally.

S: But obviously she was engaging in these like fishing tactics too that we all did when you’re young and you try and feel out what’s actually happening: “Does this person like me? Do they not like me? Oh I’m ugly, I’m sure, oh…” you know, all that kind of bashful…

X: And, that as well, because you can see how vulnerable she is on her desktop, like you can see all those photos, and you can see the development of her sexualisation as well within the game because…it’s in three parts right? Where it goes, like, the first time, and then it’s a few months later, a few months later. And you can see every time the desktop refreshes she is like more sexualised, you can see her search history of things she’s looking through, you can see where it’s heading in her own mind. And there is those fishing tactics from both sides. It’d be really interesting to see, like, Ichi’s desktop as well. Like, I would love the other side of, what he’s looking at.

S: Yeah.

X: Because, for me, I can look at Nina’s desktop as long as I want – like, I get it. But I would love to know what he’s doing. And like, his intentions. Obviously, Nina doing that would be disingenuous. But it would be really interesting to have a game, of like, a 17-year-old boy’s desktop, and understanding where that headspace is.

S: I thought there were some interesting context clues, in the game, that were interesting on a few different levels, hinting at the idea that this was something he did with girls, that he kind of…played with them, that he was only interested in playing games with girls, obviously enjoying this attention. That was something that was I think said by at least one person she talked to, and possibly multiple people that she talked to was, oh. I kind of got the sense that she was new girl that he was “playing with”, in multiple senses.

X: And those things like, burned out, sort of.

S: Yeah. I kind of thought that context was interesting. Because, if you’ve been through this relationship, you have the ability to see what’s happening, which is why you and I both have a stronger feeling that this guy is in some ways… not necessarily predatory, but, in some ways manipulative and, just bad news. Just not… uncomfortable.

X: We’re playing through a pattern of behaviour that isn’t going to be healthy for either them…

S: Yeah, uhm, and so we can recognise that, it feels like we’re meant to recognise that, it feels like those clues are…they’re not even clues, it’s part of the dialogue, we can hear it, we can interpret it. And those context clues of other people referencing the fact that this has happened with other girls… well it seemed like what those other people were referencing.

C: Mhm.

S: Those were deliberate things put in the game by Nina, which is interesting when you think about the way that she then frames the game at the end as “this is just a story about first love.”

X: Mhm. It’s…yeah, it’s confusing, definitely, because it’s kind of undermining like what you think she’s setting out to achieve, and almost like… is that just meant to be…a joke? How intentional is that? Did she not know how to wrap it up? Wrap up the story to resolve it all…

S: Yeah that’s what I was unclear of. It did almost feel like she felt it needed one final, like, “and this is what the game is” flagging. Whereas I thought it would be more powerful and interesting if she just left it the way it was but without that kind of final message.

X: Mhm.

S: And so in some ways I felt frustrated by that messaging because I’d interpreted it so differently, and I was then being told that my experiences were incorrect, I guess? That maybe I’d interpreted it wrong. It also made me sad for her that she was interpreting it in that first love sense. And it made me feel guilty for feeling sad for her [laughs] like it was…it was an interesting choice for her to kind of….in such a cerebral, experimental game, where you have the power to experience it the way you want, for then for her to tell you how it should be read was… an interesting choice.

X: Mhm, yeah, totally. Coz it almost makes you second guess, like oh was she not upset? Did he not just do something that was, like, not loving?

C: Yeah, I though that was… uhm, like, a weird bit of the author coming to then tell you what the game is about. But at the same time it reminded me of – I recently read a memoir by Michelle Tea, Passionate Mistakes – and in it she talks about… there’s a scene where she says one of her early boyfriends, she says, that telling him “I love you” was like, a code for “we can have sex now”. And I thought that like, in the context of this game being kind of, like… I think Nina does the same thing in Act 2, she says “I love you”, like, “I think I love you”, and then it’s… it’s part of the development of the relationship and it’s like heading towards having sex for the first time. Uhm, and that kind of being framed as…maybe that’s more of an American thing? Like, a code, I dunno.

X: Nooo, it’s not.

[Laughter]

X: It’s not an American code. Unless I am American.

C: Or is it a teenage code?

X: It’s definitely, I dunno for me it’s definitely a teenage code.

C: Sure.

X: I think it was, another book that I was reading recently, and talked about constantly while I was reading it…was it Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson? Yeah. That’s the one.

C: I guess we can edit in the correct title later.

[Laughter]

X: And she…it’s like a beat memoir of a women during the beat era, and she dated Jack Kerouac, and it’s saying that…during that era, and I mean still it holds true, but like, women, or young girls are taught to safe guard their virginity, and boys are taught to safeguard themselves, and that idea of love being… like, giving, giving way to something that you can lose yourself to. And I think that it 100% feels like that, like when women say - when girls say - “I love you”, it’s like, very much about that idea of safeguarding their bodies.

C: Right.

X: And, yeah, I don’t know where else to go from there. But it’s very…it’s not just American, I think it’s like, across the board. In like, early relationships.

C: Okay.

S: Mhm.

X: What do you think, Sian?

S: I dunno, it was… I don’t necessarily have any opinion about the sexual element to it. I guess I feel like I got the sense that she wanted to have sex, like that was something she wanted to do, she was ready for and thinking about, and thinking was kind of her way of accessing that, in some ways. Uhm. Mhm. I was sort of…was very unclear of his… thinking, I guess, and what he was thinking about, where he was coming from, who he was as a character. Just, I didn’t get a sense specifically of who he was. Like I feel like I’ve probably met gamer guys like him… it… She gave us some ideas but I also… I think what you were saying in wanting to see his desktop was interesting because we got such a clear idea of who she was but we didn’t get any of that from the actual audio, from the actual in-game experience of them chatting. They didn’t talk about their life, pretty much at all. So, everything we learnt of her we got from her desktop. So, we didn’t get that same chance to learn who this guy was. What he did outside this game. Where he lived, who he lived with, what he studied. We didn’t get any of that. And I think, hmm, I agree with you – I don’t think she could have added that, I think it would have been disingenuous and it would have been against the point of what the game actually was as experimental memoir basically.

X: Hmm. But I also think with so many gamer guys as, uh, as a woman who has dated a lot of gamer guys, I think that…especially during that time when you’re just going into university, you are like plumbing for depth, like emotional depth in people that you’re dating, and often it’s just not developed yet, like, I dunno. From experience I think that, this guy I honestly just think – like I know I said his behaviour felt like it was grooming, but – he just, maybe, as well, had no idea what he was doing.

S: I kind of – yeah, I got that sense as well. I mean, I think he knew what he was doing in terms of fostering her attention, but in the larger picture I don’t think he was a particularly deep or interesting person.

[Laughter]

X: I remember… I dated this guy – anecdote! We can cut this out – uhm, but I dated this guy when I was like 17, and it was my first year of uni, I met him in my maths class – shoutout, you know who you are! Uhm… and he… I remember like in the first week of us dating he said that he missed his bus stop because he was thinking, and I was like “oh my god, he’s so deep, he like missed his bus because he was Thinking” and I, like, “I wonder what he was thinking about, probably me, how amazing I am”.

[Laughter]

X: And then maybe a month later or like two months later, he was like “oh yeah I missed my bus stop again”, and I was like “oh what were you thinking about?”. And he was like “oh you know, just what everyone said during the day”. [Laughs]. Like he was just, no further reflection. Just what everyone said in sequential order, and it was just that moment of like, oh… you weren’t, it wasn’t… there was no depth to the thought, you were just daydreaming about the sequence of events during the day, uhm. And that moment of, like, disillusionment was quite… upsetting.

S: Mhm.

X: But yeah I feel like that’s what we could have done during this game, is that we’ve turned him into this guy that’s like…. well, for me, definitely I’ve like, in my head while I was playing it, I was like “what a piece of trash”, like. But he probably just logs off and twiddles his thumbs, and, I don’t know… plays Fortnite.

S: Yeah it’s kind of like that, I don’t know. I was gonna say meme. I feel like there’s tik-toks about it where girls are like “urr I wonder what he’s thinking or why he’s not messaging me back” and he’s literally just playing games or asleep or just…outside! And there’s no greater mystery to it, it’s just that he’s not currently texting you, coz he’s a boy, and they’re boring!

[Laughter]

X: Mhm, yeah.

S: But yeah I totally agree that uhm…of having had so many times that experience of having had so many times that experience of just assuming people must be thinking these larger internalised thoughts like there’s this whole world of them we’re not accessing and that felt…I felt like that as well while playing this game. Or I felt her feeling that, while playing this game.

X: Totally, coz there’s so much of her planning in there. So much of her planning flights and looking at prices of flights and things like that. And it’s like, she’s putting so much energy into, and like I’m sure he had not even googled a flight until…

S: I don’t even think he was thinking about them meeting up really until she kind of…started, felt like she was…not pushing it but…

X: She was giving ultimatums kind of…

S: Yeah.

C: Which I mean, fair enough.

X: Yeah.

[Music interlude: excerpt from “what would happen if we met” by Decky Coss]

C: So…uhm, we sort of touched on it before but like, “who is this game for?” is a question that Xanthea you suggested we should talk about.

X: Yep.

C: Possibly because you didn’t think – not to put words in your mouth –

X: Put ‘em in.

C: - but you weren’t sure, like, you weren’t sure if this game had a target, or that if there was a particular set of people that should be playing this, or like. I dunno, what were your thoughts?

X: Yeah I dunno, I just felt like, especially by the end of it when it was…or even as I started it, and hearing the dialogue, I knew what was going to happen. And I felt that…like sitting and playing – I wouldn’t have finished playing if I wasn’t playing with you, Connor, because…I was like “I know what’s going to happen…”

C: Yeah.

X: “and it’s going to be annoying”…like “it’s going to irritate me”. So…yeah. I think that it’s… you don’t go into playing this game for like, excellent gameplay, or like…I, I dunno. I think it’s an experiment, and it’s a worthy and valid experiment of a game, uhm. But as a standalone, I’m not sure… if I’m like “cool I feel entirely satisfied, as a, as a consumer of this game”. Like I want there…coz it is that experiment, now I want something else to come out that’s inspired by it…

S: Mhm.

X: Does that make sense?

S: I sort of felt like… uh, I guess as wanky as it might sound, I sort of felt that it’s just a piece of art, and it didn’t need or even have a specific target audience, it was just created for art’s sake. And I guess if I had to say who it was for, I guess, people who enjoy immersive, experimental gameplay but… yeah I’m kind of the same mind in that I’m excited by it as a starting off point, in terms of gaming.

X: Unless we sell it to the government and they lock teenage boys in rooms and make them play it.

C: Do you think there’s like an educational element where teenage boys should play it and understand, that like…?

X: I dunno that girls are real people? Maybe.

[Laughter]

X: That’s another – okay, another boyfriend that i had, once, two months into dating the next boyfriend - everyone goes to take a drink - he said, uhh, “I didn’t realise that girls had feelings until I started dating you”, which was, like, the most –

S: Did you break up with him immediately?

X: No, we dated for a year and a half.

S: But he didn’t know women were…he didn’t know girls were people.

X: I know!

S: That’s scary!

X: And he dated a lot of women before me. Uhm…and yeah! But maybe I’m coming at it from a radicalised point of view, given my dating history.

[Laughter]

X: But yeah, I think that this game for like, Sian and I – and Connor as well I guess – is like, preaching to the converted that these relationships, these early relationships being fraught and problematic and, like… very difficult to navigate. Yeah, so, as you said, it does feel more as a piece of artwork acknowledging all those issues. But at the same time, I think it does have a message that feels…interesting. I just don’t think a young boy would pick it up and be like “I can’t wait to play this game!”

S: Mhm. I think I would love to have a conversation with a bunch of girls at different points in their life, like a fifteen-year-old girl and a seventeen-year-old girl and a nineteen-year-old girl. Like find out what someone thinks when they’re in the middle of these kind of relationships, playing this game, like…do they recognise it? Do they have thoughts about as being manipulative, or uhm, that kind of fishing idea that they’re both doing, engaging in that kind of fishing behaviour… I’d be really interested to know what I would have said about the game, when I was eighteen.

X: Yeah. I think if I was playing it at eighteen I would have a lot more internalised misogyny, of just being like “oh she was just super needy and”…

S: Mhm. And I think… it’s so hard to say, like, would…would I have felt more impacted by it? Would I have felt more called out by it? Would I have felt more seen, or…would I have wanted to… I think I probably would have read it the same way that Nina is now telling us to read it, which is as a love story, because…that’s kind of…I would have been closer to Nina’s, I guess, idea of who she was when she was…when we are Nina in this game. I think that’s what I would have…would have been my experience as an eighteen-year-old.

X: Hmm…

S: So it’s kind of interesting, I think I would have… shipped them. As it were.

X: Totally.

C: Yeah right?

X: And would have focussed a lot more on him being like, he’s so like…he’s so cute, or like… kind of getting really into that idea that’s like oh yeah… and like, actively shipping, as you say.

S: Mhm, picking up on things he said that indicated he was interested, as opposed to now, when your bullshit meter is just going Off The Charts.

X: Totally! Every, every bit…like literally the first game you play it’s like “ew, go away.”

[Laughter]

X: “Where is the option to never play with this guy ever again? Oh wait, it doesn’t exist. It’s the whole game. How horrible for you Nina”.

C: Yeah I remember you saying that you felt almost like a bit trapped by it, by the fact that you can’t get out of it, like you have to experience this…not, not that it’s necessarily trauma, but like-

X: Yeah it’s traumatic! And you…I mean, every line that he was saying was like ugh, it felt so close to…things…I’ve heard online because I was quite a vulnerable teenager, who was constantly fishing for things online – call myself out, hundred percent. And yeah, it’s very challenging to go back and look at somebody doing that and not being able to, within gameplay, do anything about that.

S: Mhm.

X: Like sit her down and be like. “Nina. We need to have a talk about this. You’re fine. Chill out. Go for a walk. This guy’s…not good.” Like, yeah, I dunno I think, uhm…coz you yeah I dunno I think I very much… immediately saw that and it frustrated me.

C: Yeah. That’s fair.

X: But, I mean, if it’s a work of art that’s okay! It’s allowed to frustrate.

S: I think that feeling of being trapped is interesting coz I had that same sense of being locked in, uhm, but at the same time I think that feeling is an effective one in making you feel immersed in this person’s life. Like it really…because I guess, you are locked in and because of the desktop element and because of the kind of immersing gameplay it really felt like you were experiencing this person’s life in a way that…I’m not sure whether it would have been as effective if you could kind of pause and click out and stop.

[music interlude: “cibele” by Decky Coss]

C: Uhm, I guess one final thing we can talk about is, this idea of it being autobiographical or not? Or where it kind of sits on that spectrum – I suppose because this isn’t something that’s been done so much in games uhm… we were kind of looking at the idea of it being “autofictional” because it’s taking the idea of, the intentional blending of something that happened in the life of the creator so it’s sort of like memoir, but it’s also an intentional, uhm, saying that it is not totally autobiographical because it’s not using certain elements, or it’s recreating certain elements. Uhm, so I dunno – Sian, because you are the autofiction expert in the room, what was your kind of idea about how it was positioning itself?

S: Uhm, I would say…on one level I would be inclined to say it didn’t read as autofiction to me because it just felt like it was a retelling of something that happened, it didn’t feel like we were meant to suspend our disbelief or that we were meant to uhm, assume that anything that happened didn’t happen exactly as it happened – I got the sense that it was almost in some ways quite literal. I dunno. I think I would have to think a lot harder about this. I think autofiction’s interesting because a lot of the time it relies on what you already know about the creator…

C: Yeah right.

S: …which is an interesting kind of thing to have to consider as a reader, and also as a writer of autofiction is…when you’re flagging something as inherently false, how is your reader or player or consumer meant to pick up that it is inherently false, if they don’t happen to know you? If they don’t know what actually happened, how do they know that this is you playing with the truth? Will they assume this is true? I’m not sure she put anything in there that we were meant to assume didn’t happen. I’m not sure she was playing with the truth – I think she was trying to get at the truth. But without knowing more about her I suppose it’s really hard to make that call.

X: Was it ever acknowledged to be based on true events at the beginning?

S: I think it was.

C: Yeah I think so and maybe not in the game specifically except for that author’s note at the end where it’s kind of like, suddenly not Nina the character speaking to you, it’s Nina who made the game – I think that’s the only time in the game where it acknowledges that the game was based on true events. But uhm, like, outside the game there have been interviews and articles that have been “this is a game about my first experience of like, hooking up with someone from the internet.”

X: Yeah coz it kind of feels like – who’s that author who wrote Sour Heart?

S: Oh, Jenny Zhang?

X: Yeah, Jenny Zhang, when she came to Australia and did an interview at Wheeler Centre she was talking about how frustrated she is that all of her fiction – even though it’s definitely fiction – is always assumed to be autobiographical…

S: Mhm.

X: Just coz she’s writing about, like, a demographic of her own experience it’s just assumed… and I think it’s like, kind of similar here. It’s like, does it matter if it’s autobiographical? Does it matter how much is true and how much it’s not? This is kind of more a universal truth of internet, uhm, intimacy. And like, I think that is enough to be a valid – frustrating, uhm, but valid, still…

S: If I was gonna think of where I would position it from a literature perspective – because that’s what I know, and that’s what I do — is, it is quite reminiscent of I Love Dick in some ways. It’s very confessional, it’s telling the story of someone’s relationship with someone else who doesn’t get a chance to…weigh in, I guess, and it is a retelling. It’s using real artefacts, I guess, with reimagined, and in some cases hyper-realistic…mmm

X: Re-enactments.

S: Yeah. So I think, that’s where I would position it. In terms of when thinking about literature which is what I do.

C: Yeah. Yeah, I guess, Xanthea you’re more of a memoir fan? Uhm..

X: Yeah. I love a good memoir.

C: You prefer it to…you prefer things that are passing things off as fully truthful? Or some version of…the truth?

X: Yeah “fully truthful”…whatever that is. Uhm. I like things that aim to be truthful. And I like things that interrogate themselves enough to feel like…anything that’s passed off as “this is entirely what happened, the truth”, I don’t believe… but uhm. Yeah. I think at this point it doesn’t matter who made it – for me, this has a larger truth to it, in some ways.

C: The universal experience…

X: I think it is getting at a universal experience of like, internet intimacy.

C: So you don’t… so it doesn’t matter if like, that experience, is making a claim to like, “this was my experience”? Like this is… or…

X: Honestly, I don’t think it matters. Like, uhm. I think it’s kind of beyond the point. And I think it’s why I’m more interested in stuff that’s made because of this work. It’s just kind of opening up to more conversations.

C: Yeah, sure.

S: I think I really…probably the reason I like autofiction as a literary genre, is because it interrogates that idea that you were saying of…does it matter or not matter if it’s true or not? I like work that plays with that idea, and I think this work is probably important because it does feel true, it feels like her version of events. And I think, I would definitely love to see more games that interrogate that idea of truth versus untruth. And I think…I haven’t played a lot of games like this, but I’m not super across all the games. I don’t know a lot of things. I play Animal Crossing, and the Sims, and Stardew Valley. And I don’t have, y’know, a large library, but when I do find experimental games like this I do seek them out, and I would be very interested to see what builds off this. I think in terms of that idea of does it matter if this is really her experience, I’m thinking of games like Emily is Away -

C: Yeah for sure.

S: Where, it’s very similar in some ways of, like, that experience of being on the desktop, being in the chatlog, having these conversations… And it is a different experience in terms of how, what you get out of playing that game versus playing Cibele.

X: Yeah and I think as well, uhm, making games around experiences that are, I guess popularly more marginalised, having that ability to play with truth and how much we know about things is kind of important. I’m just thinking back to a few months ago when I was really obsessed with Ned Kelly and there was lots of “based on truth” sort of, fictionalised accounts of Ned Kelly, but also, there are fictionalised accounts of like, the women in his life as well, so there’s novels around that. And how, I found, all of those novels coming together, all of those fictionalised entities coming together, it didn’t even matter at the end whether it was true or not, I just got a really interesting viewpoint of someone who has created so much drama and intensity and how that had affected other people. And I find that really, like, just as valid in terms of storytelling as someone claiming this to be the whole truth of like, a biography of Ned Kelly, which, I’ve never really gained much from. But, like, a fictionalised account of sister, I found really really interesting coz it was like, looking at, how…now I’m just talking about Ned Kelly. I’m gonna stop. I’m sorry. Uhm.

[Laughter]

S: What I liked about this game was that it felt aggressively female. And I mean, it is, it’s aggressively female, it’s aggressively confessional, and I think the gaming world needs more of that and I think it does, in some ways, carve out a little patch of internet or game, as it was, and opens a door. It starts a dialogue about what games can be – or continues a dialogue I suppose, I wouldn’t necessarily say it starts a dialogue but… I think the more people who understand that games can be for them, and games can be kind of art and games can be whatever they want and games can tell a story and games can be for women who have been made to feel that games weren’t for them by men, the better. Not that that’s what was happening here, but I can see that this game would make someone who had been made to feel that way feel that “oh games can be female” and that’s great and fun and cool.

X: I think that’s a good place to start, I mean finish, not start, finish.

C: Alright, so…

S: Let’s do it all over again!

C: Yeah, I think so too.

X: Any more final words?

S: Mmm, this has made me wanna follow Nina Freeman more and see what her other games are like. I haven’t played her other games, I feel like… it might be worth…

C: Oh yeah!

X: The date one is sick. [Laughs] I love the date one.

C: The date one, yeah, we played that? We Met in May, the recent one.

S: Oh wait, I have actually…

X: It’s absurd, I love it. You make a boy do weird things with his arms.

C: Yeah! There’s like a game where you grab his nipples…

X: Yeeeah, my dream.

S: Ohhh, I think I’ve played one of her other games which is basically just a very, very simple one.

C: How Do You Do It?

S: Yeah yeah I’ve played How Do You Do It, that was fun.

X: That’s funny actually, because, when we were playing it, I was like, “let’s make a game, this is like…I’ll play this game! I’ll play this game forever. Like. Give me a nipple-grabbing game.” Uhm…yay!

C: Yay!

S: Woo.

X: Thanks Nina…sorry we were so critical of your game.

[Laughter]

C: Yeah, uhhh, thankyou Sian, for doing this, and also thankyou Xanthea, for doing this.

S: I’ll see you when you get up to ‘E’ for Emily is Away.

X: I’m a sound person!

[Podcast theme plays]

#game90 #cibele #podcast #nina freeman #star maid games #games of 2015 #autobiographical games #internet romance #pod oriented

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fal-carrington · 5 years ago

Text

Just The Two Of Us Pt.2

Pairing: Kamilah x Mc x Adrian

(Part1)

Disclaimer: The characters are NOT mine

Prompt: After the last night fighting against Gaius, before his fall, he puts his plan into execution, changing the lives of Adrian, Kamilah and Mia forever. Friendships may end, a heart may be broken and a new love may arise. In the end who will win the girl's heart?

Tag list: @loveshamelessly @scarlet-letter-a0114 @thecleveridiot09 @galaxyside-0 @desiree-0816

6 months later

"Oh, damn it!" Mia screamed as she landed on the other side of the Raines Corp basement, her back hitting an airbed tightly, needless to say that was useless. One more attempt, another failed attempt to try to be disconnected from Kamilah. Lily ran to help her friend get up, Kamilah leaned her back against the cold stone wall a few feet away from Mia in the basement, her back also sore from the impact. Gaius was not joking when he said that the girl's pain would be her pain from now on. The queen frowned with that inconvenient pain, adjusting her posture and rearranging her suit. "No, no!" Adrian shouted through the thirteenth-century book in the middle of the basement, desperately searching for answers as he saw no result of his new experience. That was all he'd been working on for months, trying to find a way to disconnect both. First he had appealed to science, hired the best scientists money could provide, believing their blood to be the main source connecting them, but finding that the blood that bound them now was only one, and that Mia's blood had adapted to Kamilah's, once again found himself frustrated in all his attempts by using science to be flaws. So he called for the only possible alternative. The supernatural. Jameson was dead, Gaius dead. The only ones with the answer were dead. Kamilah sighed approaching her friend. "Adrian." She tried to call him. "Do not even try, Kamilah." He refused to look at her. Kamilah, unlike Adrian, knew how to recognize a lost cause when she saw one. She no longer had any hope of disconnecting herself from Mia. After several failed attempts and no positive response, there was not much to do. She was cynical and responsible enough to warn him that the situation could not go on for long. "We both know very well that of all the things Gaius has put together for us both, they all had permanent effects. I can not believe this time there's a way out.” Kamilah said quietly. "No, this one. I will not give up,” he said convulsively. "Look at her." Kamilah pointed at Mia, leaning against Lily's arms. "If you continue with these failed assaults, she will end up dead. Is that what you want? You'll kill her!” Adrian turned his face for the first time, there was a somber expression on his face, but his face lit up at the sight of Mia, but then that thought came into his mind that he could never have Mia, since she belonged to Kamilah, and Kamilah did not even tolerate her. "Kamilah, you do not know what's best for her!" He turned to her. "Lately I know what's best for her more than you!" "What are you insinuating, Kamilah ?!" Adrian's deep voice increased. "Enough!" Mia's voice echoed through the room, drawing their attention. She tried to stand, unsuccessfully, causing Lily to hold her again. "This is exactly what Gaius wanted, to get you two to fight, do not you see?” She approached the two tall vampires with Lily at her side. She turned to Adrian, her eyes softening. "Adrian... I understand that you are frustrated with this, believe me, I am too. But this time, I am with Kamilah on this one, you are giving every day more of yourself pursuing a goal that we may never reach. We tried everything, and nothing works. And I feel... That part of me dies every day more in seeing you like this. Maybe there's nothing else we can do.” She touched Adrian's face with an obvious sadness on his face. Her brief touch, until she moved her hand away and went to the stairs with Lily, leaving them alone. Adrian touched his cheek watching her walk away.

"Adrian. We have been in this situation for months, I did not want to be living this as much as you, I know perfectly well that the three of us are going through the same pain—" Kamilah started to speak, but was interrupted by him. "Are we, Kamilah?" His tone suddenly hostile. "As far as I'm aware, Mia and I are in love with each other, and we can not be together because of the circumstances, and you know that and still, you married her." Kamilah opened her mouth in disbelief. "Excuse me, I just did it to protect you! Gaius would have killed you!" "He would have killed me anyway!" "If it were me, you would have done the same!" Kamilah said. "Do you think it was in my plans to marry a mortal in her twenties, knowing that my closest friend is in love with her ?!" Kamilah touched her own chest, Adrian rolled his eyes with his arms crossed. "She promised before everyone to be faithful to you! She will be bonded and married to you until her death! How do you think I feel about this? Have to see my best friend have everything I wanted, everything that was meant to be mine? And you do not even like her!" "I did all this for you, I gave up my freedom, I married a mortal, I saved your life and her life, and yet, do you think I'm selfish? I'm well aware of your feelings for the girl, I would never do any of this if your life was not at risk! Mia saw the situation with the same eyes and did the same for you! " "Do not put Mia in the middle of it!" He shouted angrily. "But, she's in the middle of it. She's part of that. Do you really think she'd be happy to see you dead? How do you think I'd stay with you dead? Never in my entire life have I even considered the idea of marriage, and she is only twenty-two years old, she is too young. You know perfectly well that there's no way I'm going to have feelings for her!" "Do not make promises you can not keep, Kamilah." Adrian sighed, running a hand over his face, tired. His eyes on the floor throughout that conversation, when he looked at Kamilah, there was a look of resignation on his face. A sad look, mixed with anger. Kamilah opened her mouth to argue, but then fell silent. "I... I'll stop trying. For now. For her,” he said decisively, Kamilah nodded.

"We still have an issue to address. The Ferals.” Kamilah said, reminding him that there were still hordes of ferals, created by Jameson and scattered throughout the city. "We have to deal with the rest, they are a threat. To the city and to us.” "I agree. I can deal with them,” Adrian said. Kamilah took a deep breath for what she was going to say, whether or not that had to be said, she had to discuss it with Adrian. "What is it?" He asked, noting the uncertainty on Kamilah's face. "I believe it's better, and safer... As long as we're dealing with the ferals, Mia stays with me at my house," she said, waiting perfectly for Adrian's confused and angry reply. "Absolutely not!" He said shaking his head. "Adrian, think about it. She's connected to me, I can protect her. If she's in my line of sight, I can keep her safe and prevent any harm from happening to her, that pursuit can last for months, maybe even years.” Kamilah said rationally, she knew that although Adrian denied it, he knew she was right. "No. Never. She can stay with me there. I can also keep her safe." "We both know this did not work out very well last time." Kamilah crossed her arms. Adrian bit his lips, running his hand through his hair, the frustration in his face evident. "You know nothing's gonna happen between us." "You two in the same bed?! Let's not discuss this, Mia will stay with me. I can take care of her.” He pointed to himself, angry. "I'm trying to talk to you civilly, but it seems like you do not understand, I have more voting power than you do. We're talking about my wife, after all." Adrian opened his mouth in disbelief, the apparent anger on his face. "The same girl you consider irresponsible and a bad influence. The wife that you do not nurture any kind of feelings. So do not try to pretend you care about her.” He said bitterly. "I swore I would take care of her, that I would be faithful, in joy and sorrow, until death do us part. You know me well enough, I take my promises very seriously. She is my wife, and she will be my wife until we find a way to undo what that monster did, which seems impossible.”

"What are you two arguing about now?" Mia appeared on the staircase, the weariness evident on her pale face, they both turned to her. "We were arguing about where you're staying," Kamilah said patiently. Mia walked downstairs, looking at both of them uncertainly. "I have a house, guys." She pointed as if it were obvious. Kamilah sighed with her hands on her waist, Adrian's face softened. "With the situation of the ferals, with our... Situation. Kamilah and I thought it might be safer for you to be a place where we can take care of you and protect you.” Adrian approached her, gently touching Mia's hand. "But, Lily..." "Lily, it's not an option for you," Kamilah said coldly. "And... what are the options?" Mia bit her lip, looking uncertainly at both of them. "You're more than welcome to come and live with me in my penthouse." Adrian smiled, passing security and comfort to her with that look. "You know... You know I'll always be there to take care of you." "Or... You can come live with me," Kamilah said quietly. Mia's eyes widened in surprise at the queen's. "With you?" She asked in surprise. Kamilah sighed. "Mia, listen. You and I... We're married now.” Kamilah said choosing her words carefully, noting that Adrian flinched at that. Mia looked at her shyly with interest and surprise in her face. "And we're connected, until we find a way to undo that, if we can do that, you're my responsibility. You're my wife, I have to protect you.” Mia noticed the rare vulnerability in Kamilah's voice. "I do not want to be a burden on you." "You will not be. I promise.” Kamilah shook her head.

Mia swallowed hard looking at the two vampires who looked at her expectantly, waiting for her answer. She turned to Adrian after a long moment, touching his hand. "You know how I feel about you, do not you?" She asked softly, Adrian nodded. "I loved every second that we both spent together, you'll always have a place in my heart Adrian. You know how I love you.” Kamilah looked away as she heard this, avoiding looking at that scene. "But... Kamilah, are my wife now." The sadness on Adrian's face was apparent. "We did what we had to do, and I do not regret doing what I did, you're alive after all." Mia gave a weak smile. "You do not love, Kamilah," Adrian said in anguish. "But that was a real marriage... That we both can not undo. And I promised, I promised I would be faithful to her. And right now, the right thing to do... It would be if we both lived together. Please, don’t make me choose between you and her.” Mia said with tears in her eyes. Adrian sighed.

“Why? Cause you’d choose her?” He asked almost crying with his eyes wet. "Yeah. I’d choose her.” Mia said unexpectedly, causing Kamilah to look at her intrigued. The girl was choosing her. Something she would never expected to hear from Mia.

“I understand. I think our relationship just ended.” He said sadly. "I'll give you both privacy," Kamilah said after a while as she watched the scene of exchanged glances between the two, she had to get away from that environment fast. The only thing that crossed her mind was to go to the balcony of Raines Corp, take a breath or feel the cool breeze of the night beating her face, it always relieved the eminent tension in her mood. She did not think she would find Lily, eating a sandwich in Adrian's private restaurant. "Heya." Lily smiled as she approached the counter. Kamilah immediately picked up a bottle of whiskey, filling her glass. "Whoa, geez... Things are worse than I thought." Lily commented watching her drink the glass in one turn.

“I have 2063 years old and I went through a lot of lovers, how many you can imagine.” Kamilah laughed bitterly. “They all died with the time and I went on, but in any moment of my life I would imagine that I would be married.” She said looking at her wedding band at her finger. “If we were back in my time at Egypt’s, I can swear things would be different.”

“Come on, Mia is not so bad, you know that. She’s brave, she cares a lot about people. If you give her a chance to meet her for real, you gonna see that.” Lily tried. "Mia hates me. Adrian hates me. I ruined the happiness of the happy couple. They just broke up downstairs, Adrian basically gave her a ultimatum and she choose me over him.” Kamilah filled her glass with whiskey again. "And all I was trying to do was save both of their lives."

“Oh, god. I can’t believe this is actually happening," Lily pointed out. "But... You and Mia are a couple now. You had to save the life of your best friend, and you ended up with a wife. And, admitting it, Mia is kind of hot and fucking smart, you know that.”

“I’m not interested in my best friend’s ex. Adrian would never forgive me if I fell for her. Which we both know there’s absolutely no chance of happening” Kamilah said angrily. “I’m the only one rational and responsible here, can not they both see that we have no other choice?" She filled her glass again with whiskey. "They're in love, usually people like that do not see the voice of reason," Lily said quietly. "So, what are you going to do?" "I believe... I believe the right thing to do would be to live as a couple. I mean, there's no other way to get rid of it, with her, I can make things right, I can make my home her home, take care of her, give a health plan. A good life for her, we both know she deserves it. She's young, I do not mean to arrest her, she can go out with anyone she wants, sleep with whomever she wants, but in the eyes of society, we can just... Pretend.” Kamilah shrugged and sipped her glass of whiskey. "You know, for someone who does not care about her, you really are willing to do that," Lily said with a smile. "How... how has she been going these last few months?" Kamilah asked. "She's kind cries sometimes," Lily admitted. "She's pretty stubborn to admit she's not satisfied with the situation, but she's not unhappy about her choice to save Adrian's life, she does not regret it, but just between us... About the situation being this way, I'm glad she has you to take care of her. I know you will not disappoint her. And, maybe you end up feeling something for her that you did not expect."

Kamilah looked at her with those words. What did Lily mean? "When can we go?" Mia's voice made them both look at her, standing between the doors of the restaurant, next to Adrian.

Mia and Lily’s apartment "Do not forget your sweaters!" Lily came out of Mia's closet carrying three sweaters in her hands as she helped the girl pack her bags. Kamilah waited patiently in the living room, reading her e-mails on her cell phone. "I do not know if all my clothes will fit in two suitcases," Mia said looking at her luggage on her bed. "I guess I'll have to come get the rest of my things later," she said contempltively. “I'll miss my bed though.” She touched the sheets.

“Kamilah’s house will make you forget this place really quickly, I’m telling you her place is huge and amazing as fuck, but I’m going to miss my best friend.” Lily said smiling.

“Own, Lils.” Mia opened her arms, hugging Lily tight. Lily wiped the tears from Mia’s face.

“Kamilah will take care of you. She may seems cold and difficult, but she’s nice, you know that.” Lily said. “I can’t believe you are actually married.” Lily laughed.

“I know, I know.” Mia wiped the rest of the tears with her sweater sleeve. “Neither do I. It’s so strange.” Mia shrugged. “Anyways, help me pack the rest, she will not be happy if we make this any longer.”

When the two finished packing Mia's things, they ran into Kamilah in the living room, who stood up gracefully, putting her cell phone in the pocket of her jacket, and elegantly placed between them.

"Is that all?" She asked, furrowing her face towards the suitcases.

"W-Well, there's still some things, but I can pick them up later," Mia said looking at that tall, beautiful woman in front of her. She had to stop stuttering every time Kamilah put those cold, brown eyes on her.

"Okay, then." Kamilah came over to retrieve the suitcases.

"Careful, it's heavy—" Mia tried to stop her, but Kamilah took both of them with ease and turned to the front door without saying another word. Mia and Lily exchanged glances.

"That was scary and sexy," Lily observed. Mia rolled her eyes. The two followed the vampire queen to the entrance of the apartment, Kamilah packed the suitcases with agility in the trunk of her Mercedes, and got into the car without another word. "If you need anything. Call me,” Lily said hugging her best friend again.

"I will." Mia smiled before getting into the car, intimidated to be in Kamilah's car. Lily put her head in the window.

"Drive safely, childrens," she said with a smile, Kamilah rolled her eyes, leaving Lily waving back. A few blocks ahead, Kamilah drove in silence, Mia curled up in the car seat, hugging herself, staring at the vehicle around her. She had never been in a car so elegant and big. Kamilah’s perfume was all over the place.

"Are you cold?" Kamilah asked looking at her of the corner of her eye.

"Just a little," she replied timidly. She saw Kamilah turn on the car heater. Seconds before she came sneezing.

"Are you feeling well? We can drop by the pharmacy,” Kamilah suggested.

"I'm... It's just that with all these experiments we've been through, I end up with low resistance. I caught the flu."

"And you let Adrian almost kill you today with that craziness ?! Very responsible of you, Mia.” Kamilah scolded her.

"What did you want me to do? Adrian was so excited that he had finally figured out a way to free both of us. I had to.”

"And now you're sick," Kamilah said.

"I'm fine." Mia rolled her eyes.

Despite Mia's complaints, Kamilah drove to the pharmacy to buy drugs and painkillers for her.

Kamilah’s penthouse

"Here we are." Kamilah said as the doors to her penthouse opened, she stepped in front of Mia, carrying her suitcases. Mia followed just behind, looking around that gigantic place. The young girl swallowed hard, discredited with that place, it was like being between modernity and antiquity, everything around her was so sophisticated, elegantly decorated and full of old and historical things. Mia took a few steps hesitantly, Kamilah left her keys on her key chain. It was all so open and black, she could see the buildings of New York through the glass walls, the view was beautiful, but it was impossible not to look at the decorative items of Kamilah's house. She watched the Egyptian objects on a glass table leaning against the wall, beneath an Italian painting of a Renaissance artist, which Mia remembered in her history lessons. She took another few steps, spotting a large leather couch near a black piano. Certainly there was much more of it, much more to see and explore, she knew it.

"... Mia?" Kamilah called out. Just then, she realized that Kamilah was talking to her and she was not paying attention.

"Uh?" She asked disoriented.

"I asked if you were hungry," Kamilah said as she pulled off her jacket.

"Oh no. I'm good.” Mia said quietly, her arms crossed, still looking around her shyly. “Thank you.”

"I think maybe I'm with low stockpile of human food at the moment, I was not ready for your arrival, but we can sort this out in the morning, I can ask Maria to go to the market and get what you want,” Kamilah said. She was always so practical... With everything. She take it as if everything could be solved with only a point of order.

"Who... Who is Maria?" Mia asked curiously.

"My maid," Kamilah said.

"And, she knows about... you?" Mia asked.

"Yes, but she is trustworthy. She's been with me for almost fifteen years. She comes two days a week to clean the place, so do not be surprised if you see her around here often,” Kamilah said. "Well, I'll introduce you to the house." Kamilah said walking ahead, Mia hurried to follow her. "It's your home now, which means you can do whatever you want, go wherever you want, eat whatever you want, any time you want, without the need to ask me." Kamilah went down a long corridor, soon her office appeared where—according to her, it was the place where she spent most of her time in the house, the library, the gym, the guest rooms... And finally the last room. Her bedroom. "This is my room. Our room.” She introduced. "Our?" Mia stepped inside, staring at the black-walled room, it was huge, in the center of the room was a king size bed with white sheets, a large rug, a closet on the right, and the other side of room was the bathroom. "Like... We're going to sleep... Together... In the same bed?" Mia pointed to the bed. Kamilah looked at her as if questioning her sanity. "Do not worry. I do not bite.” Kamilah said approaching her. “You can decorate as you please, but leave the bed. I like, it’s comfortable.” "That's not what I'm worried about." Mia swallowed hard looking at her. "I barely stay at home, so the bed will be practically yours. You can have the left side of the closet, I do not care.” Kamilah left Mia's suitcases on the bed. "So, what do you think?" She looked at the girl who was expressionless. "You have a hell of a home," Mia commented, taking an unexpected smile from Kamilah. "I'll take it as a compliment. I think you can handle yourself from now on.” Kamilah said.

“...Do you mind if I take a shower?" Mia asked, Kamilah turned to her with frowning brows and a grimace. "Uh... Right, this is my house now too." She said, Kamilah nodded.

“I need a drink.” She said leaving Mia alone in that huge room.

“Home sweet home, I guess.” Mia said quietly to herself with her hands on her waist.

After a long bath in Kamilah's bathtub, Mia finally finished packing, putting on a set of pajamas, a pair of shorts and a tank top, she wiped her blond hair and left the bathroom hesitantly. Everything in Kamilah's house was large, dazzling and charming. She was not accustomed to all this, and she doubted she would ever get used to it. This was her life now, living in a penthouse, living a life of luxury next to Kamilah, the vampire queen, CEO and best friend of Mia's ex-boyfriend. This could not be stranger and uncomfortable. She sighed, taking a deep breath before leaving the bathroom, at least the bath had helped to get that bad feeling out of her body, she took her medicine, and when she reached the living room, she came across Kamilah.

She was quiet and calm, playing on her piano a beautiful and sad melody. A glass of whiskey lay on top of the piano. Mia stopped to look at her, was anything that woman could not do without perfection? Kamilah's brown eyes rose from the keys and found hers, she felt her cheeks burn with Kamilah's warm gaze.

"You... You are really good at that," Mia complimented. The shadow of a smile appeared on Kamilah's face, Mia approached her, Kamilah's eyes never left her, Kamilah could not help, but notice the curves of the girl's body in those intimate clothes, the almost transparent shorts, the blouse with the cleavage marking her breasts. Her blond hair fell over her shoulders, messed up. She was really beautiful and attractive, there was no way to denying it.

The damn thought of throwing the girl in her bed and having her all night long disturbed her. She wondered what Mia's taste would be, her lips, what it would be like to kiss and bite that whole neck. To stare into those green eyes as she made the girl scream her name. At that moment, the queen cursed herself for that sudden desire to invade her conscious, Mia was the love of Adrian's life. And Adrian was her best friend, she could not have her.

"Thank you." She said taking her eyes off Mia, and focusing on the keys. "What is it?" Kamilah asked as she noticed the girl's uncomfortable behavior. "I know that look, you're thinking of something."

The blonde bit her rosy lips uneasily, putting a blonde wig behind her ear.

"... I have some conditions, for this between us to work." Mia forced herself to look into Kamilah's mesmerizing brown eyes. The vampire raised a perfect eyebrow in response, the curiosity killing her from within.

"Conditions?" Mia bit her lower lip.

"Requests," she corrected herself.

"Go ahead." Kamilah nodded. Mia took a deep breath before continuing.

"I need a job. I do not want to stand here doing nothing alI day. I can not work for Raines Corp after all that's happened.” Mia sighed. "... And I also do not want the men’s of your Clan following me around the city. I'm not used to it, I do not like it."

"I can think of the first suggestion, but the second is non-negotiable. They're protecting you."

"Kamilah ..." Mia shook her head. It was almost impossible to argue with Kamilah, her word was always final.

"Absolutely not." Kamilah stood, Mia drew back a few steps, startled by the sudden movement of the beautiful woman in front of her, where Kamilah approached her until she was inches from the girl's face. Those brown eyes studied her coolly, her face impassive, perfect.

"I'll try to clear things up for you." Kamilah began to speak in a quiet voice. "I did what I did to protect Adrian, not for you. For him. I could not care less about the life of another mortal. And it cost me a lot, including my friendship with him. You and I are married and connected, whether you like it or not, that is, we have roles to fulfill with each other in the eyes of society, you can think as an act. Adrian does not seem to understand, so I hope you understand, I'm not expecting your love, your affection, or anything like that, so do not wait back from me. You do not have to like me, much less I of you, if you fulfill your part of the agreement, that is to be my fake wife, you can have everything you could possibly want. I will fulfill with mine, and both we are satisfied. I’m a woman of word, Mia”

“This... This is a wedding, a relationship, not one of your contracts!” Mia argued, red faced.

“Yes, it is. It's just business, now you’re my associate, so don’t think about fail with me. Understood?” Kamilah said those final words like a hangman about to kill her new victim, she passed Mia silently and entered her office. A solitary tear trickled down the girl's face as she watched her life turn upside down.

#choices you play #bloodbound #kamilah sayeed #bb #kamilah x mc

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thebluelemontree · 6 years ago

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Would you want a sandor pov? In any case what would you expect of his internal monologue and what would you want to have revealed about him.

I do, and I don’t. Let me start with why don’t. I like a bit of mystery. I like that it takes time and attention to detail to figure Sandor out. Part of the fun for me was learning his tells, comparing his words versus his actions, then sifting through how he may be perceived by the biases of each POV he appears in. That has sparked so many stimulating conversations I’ve had the pleasure of being in. Different people contributing their observations until we have a pretty comprehensive, but still unfinished, portrait of the guy. Sure, you can do that with a POV too, but as a fandom experience, not having Sandor’s POV has left a lot of room for some really thoughtful and intriguing headcanons. Exploring those possibilities has been a lot of fun, especially with other people I enjoy talking to.

I would love to know more about his family history in his own words, especially about his sister. We don’t know anything about her or how her death affected Sandor. It could have been another monumental event in his life, or he could have been barely old enough to remember much about her. Not that I’m holding my breath on this one ever being mentioned considering GRRM’s track record, but did he know his mother? If so, what does he remember about her before she died? I’d also like to know precisely where his personal hostility toward Tyrion comes from. He probably heard a twisted and incriminating version of the Tysha incident from Cersei (similar to the one LF told Sansa) since he was her shield during his formative teen years and that’s why he’s so guilt-stricken to think he abandoned Sansa to a hellish fate. That’s my guess, but none of that has been confirmed for sure. There’s smaller stuff like what he did during the Greyjoy rebellion, what it was like being Cersei’s shield, what he thought of Jaime or Tywin, etc. I definitely want to know about his time with the Elder Brother and their relationship. Thankfully though, none of this requires a Sandor POV. He could just tell us in someone else’s POV. Assuming he stays on his current trajectory, I think Sandor will open up more as he becomes more comfortable with peopling.

Hypothetically speaking, I think his POV would be a pretty bleak place to be most of the time. Definitely not dull though. An extremely biased and exaggerated perspective no doubt. He sees what he expects to see, so he’s never wrong or disappointed. I’m not sure seeing inside his head would necessarily do him any favors in the sympathy department, but that’s debatable. Most of his conscious thoughts would be a more uncensored version of all the cynical, blunt, and judgemental stuff he already says. Everyone and everything would be some combination of stupid, weak, phony, pompous, ingratiating, hypocritical… you get the idea. Sure he’d be right sometimes, but Sandor has convinced himself that the world is divided into butchers and meat, and you don’t want to be the meat. I’m not sure even his fans would enjoy reading his unfavorable opinions on Robb, Eddard, or especially Mycah as he was run down. Sandor would probably be actively thinking some pretty callous thoughts to emotionally distance himself from the victim and become indifferent to the act. If you thought some readers were too unforgiving of Sandor now, I can only imagine how much more damning a POV recount would look. It would be a lot harder to take a step back and judge Sandor fairly if we were privy to every cold and unempathetic thought in his head. Not impossible because he’d still be the same character, but just harder. So much of his attitude is him desperately trying to run from his own trauma and helplessness by refusing to identify with the helpless, thus being unable to empathize. If early AGOT Sandor had a POV, it would get to a point where the difference between genuinely not caring about human life (like Gregor) and talking yourself into believing that you don’t care about human life starts to look indistinguishable when it yields results like being okay with obeying an order to kill a defenseless peasant kid. I know he was on a bad path at the beginning and I think I have a pretty good idea about his thought process already. I don’t really want to be distracted by so much darkness, because I’d rather focus on what he chooses to do in spite of those professed beliefs instead. That’s where the deeper truth is. I think it helps that a good portion of his story is told through Sansa’s eyes. She looks at him with far more understanding and fairness than he does himself. No one judges Sandor more harshly than Sandor.

What would be interesting to see is signs of his subconscious manifesting itself, like in dreams or nightmares. Oh boy, would I love to know if he has dreams that parallel Sansa’s! Or his unadulterated gut reactions to things he was not prepared for. Brief flashes of things he might have hoped for in a different life. A home. A wife. Things from the past involving family members, both good and bad. Contemplations on his conversations with the little bird and all ensuing conflicted feelings. Anything regarding Sansa would be a hot mess. On the one hand, he’d be stewing on how she frustrates him with her world view. On the other, he’d feel attachment and a growing loyalty to the one person that took his side and seems to live up to that world view. He’d be whipping back and forth between craving that connection and fiercely trying to dislodge her from his brain so she can stop making him feel all these feels.

He’s very emotionally immature. I think he’d lack much of the language to process what he’s feeling toward her at least with more positive words. He knows he’d kill for her, die for her, and not lie to her. He feels a sense of loyalty and a need to protect her, but he would only know how to express that through the language of violence that he’s accustomed to. But how to make sense of what’s underneath that? That’s where his drunken internal monolog would be a lot of fun to read through. He’s way less inhibited and controlled. We’d probably get a lot of “little bird this” and “little bird that.” I wouldn’t be surprised if it got a little foolish and sappy with some idealized song imagery. While he may insult her for her courtesies, there’s also the other part of him that thinks she’s a real “proper little lady,” sweet, kind, and respectable. Then he’d be angrily chastising himself when his attempts to outwardly express the softer feelings of love come off as rough handling, but really he’s clumsy and inept like a bull in a china shop. I’m just using the term “love” here to simplify a set of feelings that perhaps would be considered the building blocks of love, but maybe not a consciously thought of and felt in totality as love. He doesn’t know how to ask for, receive, and reciprocate intimacy the right way. His thoughts might come across as those of a very needy child when he wants her attention. As she begins to grow more womanly, his physical attraction is something easier to understand, but those feelings also embarrass him as they are inappropriate due to her youth, social status, and the high pedestal he’s placed her on. Those thoughts would pop up occasionally before being promptly stomped down with shame and self-loathing. All of this would be mixed in with Sandor’s uncontrolled anger, PTSD, and fear of vulnerability. That last one would be a big feature of his internal conflict: you can’t have intimacy and connection without being vulnerable with another person.

#valyrianscrolls #sandor clegane meta #sandor clegane #sansa stark #sansan meta #sandor POV #sorry so late with this #with the holiday weekend coming I worked through my lunch breaks #then ended up crashing when I got home #anonymous

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village-skeptic · 6 years ago

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on “having it both ways”: thinking about S2 and looking ahead to S3

So apparently once a year I end up latching on to Riverdale pre-season promo and having WAY TOO MUCH to say about it.

Image analysis, pop-culture riffing, S2 criticism, meditations on resistant reading, my own discomfort with “wrongfully accused” narratives in this particular historical moment, and some hopes on the literal eve of the S3 premiere, below the cut...

So, last week when this piece of promo dropped, the very first thing that I thought of was the visual reference to Chicago and the Cell-Block Tango.

(I didn’t do it! - but if I’d done it? - how could you tell me that I was wrong?)

HOW perfect is that homage? The red lighting, the raised arms? The promo still just FEELS like a snapshot from a Fosse dance routine. (A little more on legendary choreographer Bob Fosse here.)

It’s a defiant pose, right in the center of the frame, but a slightly vulnerable one at the same time. There’s nothing hidden here; everything’s on display. The pose draws the viewer’s eyes inescapably to the body - a muscled body, but one which here seems like a gymnast or dancer’s body: lithe figure, tapered waist, power that is channeled into performance.

youtube

(this is tasty; this is plenty; this is hungry work)

So, on a first pass, insofar as it puts this demonstrative male body on display, it’s a little bit of a subversive image, I think. And that’s well in line with the way that Riverdale so often courts the female (and/or gay male) gaze, and at its best does some really unusual stuff with masculinity.

I thought about all of this - and then, silly me, I saw that this piece of promo was NOT a still, but is, instead, a short clip.

Archie doing pull-ups on the prison bars, as another heavily muscled dude saunters behind him, reads to me like a completely different type of performance! To the degree that it invites the eye, it sends the message: don’t fuck with me. In motion, we have purely the pursuit of greater strength, the purging of weakness in favor of the means of self-protection.

Instead of Chicago, my mind jumps to 3x01′s title source: Fortune and Men’s Eyes. Dominate or be dominated.

Realistically, I’m willing to believe that the ambiguous interpretation here between “still” and clip is just a quirk of how it happened to be uploaded to Twitter by a social media intern.

Still - the interpretative gulf between the still image and the image in motion got me thinking how often Riverdale seems to want to “have it both ways,” and what that does to the audience’s experience and expectations of the show.

For instance:

Other people have written at length about how Riverdale’s pursuit of aesthetic homage or plot contrivance has created character inconsistencies that occasionally baffle. Cheryl is alternately a tragic Gothic heroine and a lacquered, ruthless Mean Girl; Jughead is both a sensitive loner writer and also a bad-boy gang leader; Betty is both Betty and Dark Betty. (GOD.)

Other folks have discussed how the show needs to really play out the consequences of conflicts between the characters. It’s not that the show shouldn’t drop bombshells like the Bughead breakup(s) or the conflict between Betty and Veronica/Jughead and Archie, but it seems all too willing to reset back to milkshakes in a booth at Pop’s without doing enough work to explain WHY things are okay again. (See also: resolving major conflicts between characters literally with a song.)

The desire to “have it both ways” also really shows up in the show’s tendency to engage complicated issues (racism, sexism, colonialism, the prison-industrial complex) on a shallow level - thus getting credit for mentioning them, without really taking the time to explore them meaningfully or to explain the characters’ investment in them.

The result of this, in terms of storytelling, is that you leave a lot of room for resistant (even combative) readings of the text to emerge. To name a few of my own:

frustration with Jughead’s acceptance of what feels like a suuuuper patriarchal role as “the Serpent Prince” (and later King)

the fact that it’s really hard to sympathize with Veronica throughout entire swathes of season 2

a profound opposition to a storyline that sexualizes Betty’s mental health issues in a really exploitative fashion

And then... there’s Archie.

In the “Cell Block Tango,” the murderesses of Chicago (bar one) get to justify their crimes. Conversely, as we open the third season of Riverdale, the audience knows that Archie’s being blamed for something he didn’t do. Despite bragging about it (!!) to a bunch of mobsters (!!!!), Archie is not guilty of the murder of Cassidy Bullock.

...but he IS guilty of so! many! other! things! across Season 2. I’m sure I’m forgetting some, but aiding and abetting a criminal, covering up a murder, blowing up a car, and forming an extralegal vigilante militia group - TWICE - all come to mind.

The last bits of S2 offer us a version of Archie’s amends-making that comes in the form of defending the Serpents, turning on Hiram, supporting his father, et cetera. And then the very last image of S2 - Archie being clapped in cuffs right at the moment that he’s supposed to be sworn into office - is meant to distress us.

But a season of watching Archie embrace fascism leaves some marks, y’all. And a not insignificant portion of the audience, still frustrated with the character’s choices, couldn’t help but say - well, he had it coming.

So, yeah. It’s been a few months between the close of S2 and the open of S3, and in most cases that would be enough time for me to sit with the story in and of itself, to consider more broadly where it had failed or succeeded, and to allow some of that “resistant reader” response to drain away.

But real talk, you guys: I’m finding it really hard right now, at this moment in American history, to connect emotionally with the story of a young man trying to fight the charges of which he has been wrongfully-yet-ever-so-plausibly accused.

[Please note, I am NOT trying to say that RAS is somehow trying to weigh in explicitly on the SCOTUS debacle. The S2 finale laying the groundwork for this plot aired this spring, and S3E1 has (presumably?) been in the can for a while now. And, to its credit, Riverdale has in both seasons explicitly criticized a sexual culture that objectifies young women and reduces them to “points” (the football team’s playbook) and to prey (Nick St. Clair).]

But, for me personally, I can’t help looking at this plot and hearing echoes of “It's a very scary time for young men in America when you can be guilty of something you may not be guilty of.”

Here’s the interesting thing: I think RAS knows this, and I think the promo around this plot is partially designed to try to dispel these connections.

(For me, at least, it’s having mixed results.)

(source)

For instance, I can’t look at this still (young man, formal suit intended to project good character and youthful vulnerability, sullen face, flanked by counsel) without thinking, “Wow, this feels....Brock Turner-y.”

I don’t know if anyone’s written about courtroom photos and sketches as a genre of visual composition, but I feel like I’ve seen variations of the Riverdale still a million times, often printed on the front page of the local university newspaper, discussing the controversy over the conviction (or NON-conviction) of a promising young athlete accused of something awful that no one who knows him EVER would have suspected he would do. (Nice boy, nice family, so many extracurriculars, such good grades!)

Of course, there’s a major difference between the photos above: Archie’s defense team is entirely female.

Obviously this makes sense because Mary Andrews and Sierra McCoy are both major supporting characters who are also lawyers - but it also makes sense in trying to dismantle some of the potential gut reactions to this visual framing. There’s some “innocence by association” going on here, I think. And after all, Archie IS innocent of this particular crime!

This still lands with mixed effect for me though, because any defense strategy that suggests the intentional composition of a visual tableau feels inherently cynical, even when the character is sympathetic or innocent.

For instance: I just watched The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which features a scene where the main character shows up in the courtroom in full Upper West Side respectable regalia to try to get the obscenity charges against her dismissed - she fails and ends up having to plead guilty, because she mouths off at the judge. Anyone who’s familiar with Amy Sherman-Palladino’s work will recognize this bones of this plot point in the courtroom scene in Gilmore Girls: Rory’s grandparents’/lawyer’s attempt to portray her as a naive little angel backfires, and she ends up getting a ton of community service as penance for stealing a boat. It’s important to note that the characters are both guilty of their charges - although, as another favorite show of mine might note, “the situation’s a lot more nuanced than that.”)

(source | source)

Another way in which the pre-season promo is distancing Archie from both his actions last season, and the present context external to the show, is to emphasize his profound contrition. In this teaser from Riverdale 3x01, we get Archie declaring that “whatever happens to me in the courtroom on Tuesday - that is what I deserve.” This a statement of universal guilt and responsibility (one might say martyrdom?) that goes well beyond the scope of his actual infractions.

Now - I really, really appreciate that we’re getting a sad Archie rather than a mad Archie. And I want to acknowledge that he’s so definitely a kid here, trying hard to “man up” and to grapple with the fact that he screwed up big time and that there are consequences for his actions. After a season of doing the wrong thing over and over and OVER again, he’s trying to do the right thing.

But here’s the thing: Fred responds to this confession of near-universal guilt with what (in this snippet) feels like a pair of universally-exculpatory statements: “You are a good kid. You got manipulated by a mobster.” (Mary is more nuanced: “You do not deserve to be framed for murder.”)

Archie does not deserve to be framed for murder, and he certainly did get manipulated by a mobster. In fact, I would like to formally start a petition to have Archie not fall under the control of an unscrupulous adult in S3!

However.

Instead of accepting guilt for anything and everything and being immediately absolved for non-specific sins because of his inherent “goodness,” I really want to know that Archie understands what he actually DID do last season. He climbed wholeheartedly on board with the plan to Make Riverdale Great Again, and in that process, he did things that were NOT AT ALL commensurate with being “a good kid.” I think both the character and the show would benefit from a more explicit meditation on exactly why Hiram’s manipulation was so effective, and why Archie moved so quickly past being merely Hiram’s pawn, and voluntarily embraced the role of Hiram’s very ambitious accomplice.

One of the specific preconditions of restorative justice is that the offender has to acknowledge their actions and the hurt that they caused. Reconciliation and vagueness are incompatible for so many reasons, but one of them is because a BIG part of learning from your mistakes is thinking precisely about what you did so that you can choose not to do it again.

I read a bunch of the new Archie comics over the break, and I think I now have a greater appreciation for the trope of Archie as a schlemiel. Despite his best intentions, the Archie archetype keeps making the same goofy, klutzy mistakes over and over again. This is fine, even funny, when it means that Archie just keeps accidentally ending up with a bucket on his head. Whoops!

It is super not okay if it means that Archie just keeps finding himself supporting fascists. ...whoops?

(At present, my entire country is being “manipulated by mobsters.” Clearly, I have some feelings about this.)

I don’t actually know how to wrap all the loose ends of this analysis up meaningfully and coherently at the finish here - but then again, that probably puts me into good company with our showrunners. Optimistically, I’m going to hope that that’s intentional - that I’m judging in media res, and that plotlines and character arcs in S3 will weave together in a way that will surprise and delight me!

But mostly, I’m going to reiterate my hope that S3 makes meaningful choices. That the people in charge don’t waste their actors’ time filming oodles and oodles of material that gets sliced and diced to ribbons. That they make choices EARLY about major plot points; that they stick to them; and that they let the rising action and falling action of your narrative reflect those choices, and the consequences that naturally accompany them.

I hope that the people in charge of S3 will resist the ever-present temptation to “have it both ways” - which ultimately works out to really no definitive way at all. Telling a sturdy story is risky in a totally different way than courting controversy - but it’s so, so worth it.

#riverdale #riverdale meta #riverdale spoilers #archie andrews #us politics #scotus #the urge to overanalyze this image feels like the tug of a Portkey behind my navel #was already a tag #spoiler: resistance was futile #chicago #marvelous mrs maisel #gilmore girls #village-skeptic: back on her bullshit #if you made it through this whole thing I love you to bits!

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baked-potatoes · 6 years ago

Text

Review - Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018)

January 4, 2019

*spoilers included*

Director: Christopher McQuarrie

Starring: Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Rebecca Ferguson

Distributing Studio(s): Paramount Pictures (USA)

Runtime: 148 minutes

Rating: PG-13

US Release Date: July 27, 2018

Synopsis: Ethan Hunt and the IMF team join forces with CIA assassin August Walker to prevent a disaster of epic proportions. Arms dealer John Lark and a group of terrorists known as the Apostles plan to use three plutonium cores for a simultaneous nuclear attack on the Vatican, Jerusalem and Mecca, Saudi Arabia. When the weapons go missing, Ethan and his crew find themselves in a desperate race against time to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands.

I feel like last summer had an amazing and well-received queue of film releases (that was a weird sentence), and this seventh Mission Impossible installment does pretty well. Action movies usually are what they claim-- action porn-- but McQuarrie gives us a more unconventional take on the genre. Characters are believably flawed (Hunt makes a great deal of mistakes throughout the movie), and motivations are cloudy, as one might expect in the world of espionage and terrorism.

As a side note, the Golden Globes are this Sunday at 8PM EST/5PM PST, so I’ll be reviewing the Best Picture (Drama AND Comedy/Musical) winners after then! Which movie do you think will win? I’m excited to see who wins the Best Actor and Actress categories, since the race this year is intense.

Acting

What a great ride and medley of (mostly) rounded and realistic characters. Tom Cruise plays Hunt to a T in this film, spilling his heart on his sleeve and giving Ethan Hunt a fresh vulnerability. And Hunt is all too realistic, making mistakes and swearing profusely, just as any person would in his messy situation in this film. I think I saw him cry when he mourned Alec Baldwin’s Alan Hunley’s death, and it was the sort of ugly crying that shows off a well-developed acting ability and depth. Hunt’s character is massively rounded in this film, and coupled with cast chemistry and impressive stunt work, it works out really well.

Speaking of Hunley’s death, we get to see Henry Cavill as the main antagonist-- the man revealed to be the mysterious John Lark. It’s a complete far cry from Clark Kent as he plays the duplicitous CIA assassin August Walker (such a cool name), complete with a porno mustache and angry bicep reloading. Cavill captures this character’s essence extraordinarily well as a bitter, somewhat-insane man who complements Ethan Hunt-- for better or for worse. From the co-op bathroom (smartly-edited) fight against Liang Yang’s character to the final standoff on a collapsing cliff, Cavill’s turn as Walker shines in every mannerism and action.

Rebecca Ferguson comes back as MI6 agent Ilsa Faust from MI: Rogue Nation and plays her conflicted character to a similar T; a scene between her and Hunt in a wooded canopy park is one of the quietest yet vulnerable moments in the film. Perhaps the character arc is a bit exhausted after two films, but her character nicely fits into the IMF as it does in Rogue Nation. Like I mentioned, I didn’t really see how her character would develop over the course of this film, but I can see a real humanity within her as she tearfully reunites with Hunt and learns of the existence of his ex-wife, Julia: a compassionate and capable (if slightly boring) returning character who parallels Ilsa’s life and choices, played by Michelle Monaghan.

Other stand out performances include that of Sean Harris, who reprises as Solomon Lane. I have mixed feelings about his character because it just looks like his role in Rogue Nation but pushed to a side antagonist role. Harris plays it beautifully though, and it really looks like the deranged terrorist I remember from Rogue Nation.

Some other standout roles: Angela Bassett as CIA director Erika Sloane is powerful, capable, and as nice as you’d expect from a CIA director (meaning, not very). Her character is shrewd and cynical throughout the entire film and radiates careful danger. The ending speech to Hunt about saving one person over millions seems a bit clichéd, but it’s a well-played concession to Hunt’s humanity. Alec Baldwin does quite well as a final arc for CIA-turned-IMF secretary Alan Hunley, and his death genuinely moves Hunt enough to chase Walker around the city. Overall, his character and Simon Pegg’s Benji Dunn are played for laughs (I laughed at some of the running gags throughout the franchise, such as Benji messing up gloriously as a sidekick), but they and the rest of the IMF deliver brilliantly in the near-hopeless finale, when the nuclear bombs seem slated to go off and render their efforts meaningless. Ving Rhames is, of course, stalwart, and it’s just a well-rounded, chemistry-filled cast of characters that I’m excited to see in the next MI.

Directing, Screenplay, Cinematography, Soundtrack

Christopher McQuarrie comes back from Rogue Nation to direct but aimed to create a different tone than the fifth film (as all of them do), and it pays off really well. Fallout mixes thrilling action, sympathetic arcs, and well-crafted plot twists to deliver a unique film for the IMF. His choice to do a long take for the HALO jump keeps the pace of that scene suspenseful and exciting, and that bathroom fight is smartly filmed without shaky cam or fast jump cuts, showing us how Hunt is a scalpel while Walker is a hammer (as noted by Sloane) in their fighting styles. And the two characters were beaten by Liang Yang’s John Lark decoy, showing us a great motif McQuarrie wants to show us in his script and direction: that these seemingly perfect people make mistakes. Hunt’s mistakes are continually mocked by other characters and often lead to genuinely terrifying consequences (although I laughed when Hunt tries to drop a helicopter payload onto Walker’s helicopter and fails, swearing). And even as Tom Cruise does these mind-bendingly amazing stunts, McQuarrie brings him a real vulnerability and does so for the entire cast. Well, Walker didn’t really have too many redeeming qualities (and his villain reveal seemed kind of clumsy in his dialogue), but I found him incredibly complex either way. He’s painted as a villain and assassin, but he’s loyal and ruthless for the CIA, which is really exciting to see. It’s not often that you see a unflinching and brave villain because those are qualities you’d expect in the hero, not the villain. The rest of the characters make mistakes too, as Benji fumbles with his navigation tablet and Ilsa misses shots from her motorcycle.

McQuarrie also made the decision to bring Lorne Balfe as the composer for this film’s soundtrack, and I have to say, bravo. Balfe’s soundtrack complements McQuarrie’s sympathetic and vulnerable script with a suspenseful yet moving score. There are elements of Lalo Schifrin's Mission Impossible theme mixed in with a softer, quieter tone overall. Some critics complained about the “Nolan-esque” style, saying it sounded too much like Hans Zimmer, but I disagree. It has its own style that fits in with McQuarrie’s direction and complements well with many beautifully shot scenes (side-scrolling London sprinting, anyone?), and honestly, I’d be thrilled if I were compared to Hans Zimmer.

Speaking of the cinematography, I enjoyed it a lot. Most of the film is shot in 35mm film (the ubiquitous film format). Cinematographer Rob Hardy collaborated with McQuarrie to create a closeup, gritty visual style, and it creates a strangely intimate yet pulse-pounding effect. Going back to that bathroom fight, Hardy used fluorescent lighting to contrast against the Palais party’s rave lighting and the brutality of the close-up and well-edited brawl. That infamous HALO jump is shot in digital IMAX over Abu Dhabi (recreated in post-production into Paris) and apparently could only be shot as one take per day (shortly after sunset).

Summary and Rating

Mission Impossible: Fallout brings an excellent take on the franchise as it delves into a combination of thrilling action and complex emotions.

9/10 : Hot Potato!

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission:_Impossible_%E2%80%93_Fallout

https://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/blog/blog_post/?contentid=4295008965

#bakedpotatoesreview #film #missionimpossiblefallout

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 7 years ago

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What would u say are the best and worst book narrated by each character ?

I sat down to come up with my least favorite book by each narrator and had a pretty easy time of it — there’s an unfortunate dip in quality in the series around #39 - #43 that I can point to as definitely not my faves — and then ended up totally baffled by how to choose JUST ONE favorite book by each narrator, because such a task is almost impossible. In conclusion, I really love Animorphs, as you probably never would have guessed from reading this blog. So, with a little cheating, here goes:

Tobias

Least favorite: #43, The Test

The plot of this book pretty much requires that all of the characters, but most notably Rachel and Jake, act in ways that really don’t fit with their behavior for the rest of the series. My cynical hypothesis about What Was The Ghost Even Thinking rhymes with schmender schtereotyping, but even if I more kindly assume that everyone was just acting strange to jerk Taylor around, I can’t really enjoy this book.

Favorite: #49, The Diversion

Tobias’s point of view works so well for this book, because its plot draws attention to his status as a partial outsider not only for human society as a whole but also for his team. He’s literally trapped in a liminal space that here actually gives him a lot of perspective on his friends’ families — and the importance of sticking close to his own. (And by that I mean 93% Ax, 7% Loren.)

Other favorite: #23, The Pretender

Speaking of Tobias being sort of stuck between roles, this book is so good because it shows the strength of his position as both able to access and able to escape being human. He moves flexibly between a ton of different roles in this book — a leader to the hork-bajir, a supporter to Jake, a parent to himself, a son to Elfangor, a quasi-hawk, a quasi-human, a quasi-andalite — and does so with astounding grace and aplomb. Resting bitchface has never seemed like a cooler accidental superpower.

Another favorite: #33, The Illusion

This book is the brutal shadow-self to #23, instead shutting Tobias out of a whole bunch of different roles over the course of the plot. It does however contain one of the series’s best villains (Taylor is terrifyingly sympathetic) and some of its best moments of heartwarming body horror in the final battle.

Least favorite: #8, The Alien

Honestly, there’s nothing really wrong with this book, but there’s nothing amazingly right about it either. It has a few great moments (Jake’s naïve optimism at the kandron’s destruction giving way to fear for Tom, Ax having dinner with Cassie’s family, Tobias definitely not tattling on Ax) but overall the plot is just kind of inane and doesn’t do much to move the series forward.

Favorite: #38, The Arrival

Estrid et al. act as such a cool check-in for not only how much Ax has grown as a person through spending too much time around humans, but also how much the team as a whole has grown until they are actually more effective warriors than a group of battle-trained andalite assassins. Every time I reread this book I end up making noises of triumph and fist-pumping the air, no matter how public my location is at the time.

Favorite favorite: #46, The Deception

This plot hinges on the stark contrast between Ax’s terrible and unavoidable awareness about the horror of open war and the Animorphs’ lack of standard of comparison beyond “hey, remember D-Day?” MM3 and #28 both do important work to condemn humanity from the outside, but this book actually uses Ax’s perspective primarily for celebrating the whole human species from an outsider’s point of view.

Marco

Least favorite: #40, The Other

As I’ve mentioned here, at this book’s core is an interesting concept that very emphatically does not age well. On top of the cringe-inducing attempt at an After School Special treatment of the idea that (*gasp*) queer men with AIDS are human too, it also has a largely nonsensical plot that strains both credulity and logic.

Favorite: #25, The Extreme

It’s a brilliant use of Marco’s perspective to comment on the constraints and terrifying outer reaches of Jake’s leadership, one that also contains a highly enjoyable mix of humor and horror. Because Marco. I could reread this one a thousand times and still find new aspects of the narration to delight in.

Also favorite: #15, The Escape

This book makes amazing use of Marco’s unreliable narration and lack of self-insight to contrast his willingness to imagine himself confronting sharks with his willingness to run from them upon a real encounter, along with his determination to kill his mom and his inability to stop himself from saving her. Marco is at his most human in this book, and also his most lovable.

Also also favorite: #51, The Absolute

The governor of probably-California is one of my favorite minor characters in the series, and I absolutely love the dynamic between Marco-Tobias-Ax any time it occurs (this book, #46, #30, #49), meaning that this surprisingly fun aside acts as a much-needed breath of fresh air and comic relief in between the Animorphs losing the morphing cube (#50) and blowing up the Yeerk Pool (#52). Plus, Marco + tank = OTP.

Cassie

Least favorite: #39, The Hidden

I’ve said most of this before, but this book is just… nonsensical. And it’s not delightfully nonsensical like parts of #26 or #14, it’s mostly cringe-inducingly nonsensical.

Favorite: #29, The Sickness

Arguably this is the best Animorphs book, both IMHO and by fan consensus. It’s got a simple but devlishly difficult plot, a ton of great characterization moments for all six kids, a handful of brilliant devices and settings that meld beautifully to Cassie’s overall character arc, and a wide-reaching perspective on the importance of overcoming difference that is a huge part of what makes these books so good. It’s also funny, horrifying, edge-of-your-seat engaging, and tear-inducingly beautiful at the very end.

Also my favorite: #4, The Message

Whereas #29 is probably just hands-down the best book ever written, #4 holds a special place in my heart because it’s the first Animorphs book I ever read and the one that convinced me to go find the rest of the series. This one is sweet and mystical, bleak with the dawning realization that these poor defenseless cinnamon rolls are in this war alone but also hopeful with the realization that these precious cinnamon rolls are in this war together.

Jake

Least favorite: #47, The Resistance

Although I’m of the opinion that #41 is more poorly-plotted, this book manages to be both poorly plotted and glaringly racist. Its plot doesn’t make sense on several different levels, not the least that Visser Three knows how to find the hork-bajir valley in this book and then apparently forgets how to get there for the entire rest of the series. And don’t get me started on Jake’s reprehensible behavior from the moment he casually declares Tom “as good as dead,” through to him trying to boss Toby about what’s best for Toby herself, all the way on to him being a jerk to Rachel and Marco. Blah.

Favorite: #31, The Conspiracy

Unlike #47, this book actually makes really good use of Jake’s character flaws to drive the plot forward — he’s bad at being vulnerable, and that ends up being a huge problem for his team. It also leans hard on the irony of Jake being the only one with a “textbook” family (i.e. upper-middle class, heteronormative and monogamous, European-American, traditionally gendered, outwardly happy) and also being the only one under constant threat for his life any time he’s at home, thereby accomplishing one of the series’s better comments on the fact that children’s lives aren’t as simple as we’d like to think.

Favoriter: #53, The Answer

There are definitely flaws with RL implications in this book, but the plot is so freaking brilliant that I can still regard it as a Problematic Fave. The final battle is so well-engineered and the Moral Event Horizon is so terrifying as it swings by that I assign this book to myself for rereading any time I’m struggling to write action or battle. It’s a scary, awful book, but also a very fitting capstone to the series.

Favoritest: #26, The Attack

This setting is so cool. This plot is so cosmic and yet so personal. This use of the chee is so bitingly brilliant in its commentary on pacifism as a luxury not everyone can afford. This story has so many moments that are either heartbreaking callbacks (the opening scene with Tom’s memories from #6) or bloodcurdling foreshadowing (Jake and Rachel’s casually absolute trust that each will be willing and able to kill the other if necessary). This narration feels like a middle-aged and yet middle-school protagonist struggling to figure out who he wants to be — and defeating a cosmic power at its own game with the power of love. I could gush forever.

Rachel

Least favorite: #48, The Return

Again, there’s nothing truly wrong with this book; it’s just a silly and inconsequential aside into the main character’s maybe-dreams at a time when the plot outside her head is heating up to the boiling point. It makes this whole thing come off kind of like Bilbo sleeping through the Battle of Five Armies.

Favorite: #27, The Exposed

I’m not normally a big one for romance, but this book makes me ship Rachel and Tobias so hard that my tiny bitter walnut of a heart grows two sizes every time I read it. Rachel has such great self-awareness that she doesn’t like any situation she cannot control or at least do violent battle against, and yet she dives into the bottom of the ocean with both eyes open and her chin up because that’s what she has to do to protect the rest of her team. Crayak has no idea what he’s talking about when it comes to asking her to turn on her loved ones.

Additional favorite: #32, The Separation

As I’ve said, I didn’t really get this book until I realized that it’s not so much about Rachel herself as it is about how the rest of her team views her, and how she defies their simple categorizations, both well-meaning (Cassie) and not (Jake), through simply being herself. Rachel is both masculine and feminine, both tough and vulnerable, and she makes no apologies for any of it.

And another favorite: #37, The Weakness

This book has an important role for the rest of the series in that it shows how the Animorphs’ guerilla tactics can easily be taken too far, and also how Jake’s discernment of his teammates’ strengths and weaknesses keeps them all alive. Rachel makes a fair number of logical-seeming decisions in this book that prove short-sighted, and of course it all leads to her and Jake’s brutal Checkovian epiphany at the end.

Added additional also favorite: #22, The Solution

A brutal but powerful read, this book focuses on the ugliest parts of Rachel’s personality (her sadism toward David) but also the most powerful ones (her compassion for Saddler and protectiveness toward both Jake and Jordan). It also shows that her reckless taste for violence and her boundless desire to protect her families both biological and found are actually two sides of the same part of her personality.

Okay I have a lot of favorite Rachel books: #17, The Underground

It’s oat-freaking-meal. Only it’s not just oat-freaking-meal, and I’m not talking about the extra-tasty maple and ginger flavoring. It’s a biological weapon. It’s a way to harm the enemy, but only through harming prisoners of war. It’s a social dilemma the like of which we rarely see in children’s books. It’s a lesson in decision making under uncertainty. It’s a moral imperative, but no one is quite sure what that imperative is saying. It’s a deconstruction of the implied assumption that it’s possible to write adventure stories in which no one gets hurt. It’s awesome. It’s hilarious. It’s disturbing as fuck. Welcome to Animorphs.

#animorphs #narration #animorphs meta #asks #answers #anonymous #rachel berenson #jake berenson #tobias fangor #aximili-esgarrouth-isthill #be really nice if cassie and marco had last names wouldn't it #k.a. applegate is a god #the rest of us just worship her

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frasier-crane-style · 7 years ago

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Black Panther

It was okay.

-Just about every post or review I’ve seen of this has started with some variant of “I’m a white guy, so I can’t imagine what this means to black people,” which I find a little patronizing. If it meant a lot to you, I’m not going to denigrate that--although part of me thinks that some of that’s due to a cynical marketing campaign positioning this as the first movie that’s ever had black people in it. Just know that I can’t speak to how important a movie is to the black experience, either for or against, I can only speak to how I enjoyed it and what I thought of its various elements.

-I liked most of the cast, I thought a lot of the way they visualized Wakanda managed to pull off the “grass huts and forcefield” level of technology Jack Kirby envisioned without coming off as cheesy--even if it doesn’t quite fit to the Hudlin, Wakanda has always been advanced, backstory (in the comics, there are giant panther mecha. In the movie, there are... rhinos with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads). I thought the Korea action sequence was good, as well as parts of the final battle--the action ranges from bad (the opening fight) to good, but I don’t think it’s ever as visceral as Cap and Bucky storming through a SWAT team, a throwaway moment that now comes across as a highwater mark in a genre of Homecomings and Ragnaroks.

-Some people have said that T’Challa was boring, I thought the character and the acting was fine in a story that didn’t give him a lot to do (see below). I’d rather have a quiet, Zen Black Panther then see Tacoma Whippits turn him into a joke machine, and the obligatory bits in the first half where he has to act like a dork so we in the audience “relate to him” or whatever are just the worst. You had Feige specifically comparing T’Challa to James Bond, but I don’t remember Sean Connery slipping on a banana peel to tell us viewers that he was a fun guy. Just make the guy a convincingly badass motherfucker, we’ll like him. It worked in Civil War. (This is half a petty nitpick since after the ‘Q’ scene, they knock it off, but still, first impressions are important.)

-Petty nitpick department: For a genius, you’d think Shuri would realize that it’d be a lot easier to launch jeep-disabling weapons from the jet instead of making them into tiny little beads that you have to throw as you fall out of a plane. Even Batman just goes ahead and puts a gun on the Batwing, you know.

-They make this big point of how advanced Wakanda is, but it really doesn’t seem that much more advanced than what SHIELD and Tony Stark have. Like, what’s the difference between a Quinjet and whatever Wakanda’s version of a Quinjet is? The Black Panther suit seems less advanced than Iron Man’s stuff. Yeah, you can store it in a necklace, but it can’t shoot repulsor beams, it can’t fly, you have to physically walk around in it instead of being able to pilot it by remote. And the heart-shaped herb is a good biomodification, but it seems on par with Captain America, and not really something that has a mark on the Hulk, Quicksilver, Extremis, or Spider-Man. Kinda seems like the whole country could be taken out by one of those advanced Helicarriers from Winter Soldier. I realize they don’t want to make these guys too op, otherwise the next Spider-Man would end with Peter calling in a Dora Milaje to take out Venom for him, but it makes the Wakandans come off as a bit sheltered. “My Vibranium armor makes me bulletproof!” “Yeah, we have this Luke Cage guy, his skin does that.”

-Half of the plot seemed kinda... pointless? This has been out three weeks, so I feel safe in discussing spoilers--why couldn’t Erik just show up in Wakanda and challenge T’Challa in the first five minutes? Hell, why didn’t he show up before Civil War and challenge T’Chaka’s old ass? Seems like that would’ve been easier, plus, that was the guy who actually killed his father.

-I guess Killmonger’s plan was... and much of this wasn’t presented as such, so I’m just hypothesizing...

Phase 0: Wait for T’Chaka to die so Wakanda is vulnerable during the transition of power. Don’t, like, set out to assassinate him yourself, even though that seems perfectly doable. Just, you know, hope you get lucky.

Phase 1: Dangle Klaw in front of T’Challa’s face with a vibranium selling plot, then sabotage his attempt at capturing him to weaken T’Challa’s position within Wakanda. (No idea how T’Challa couldn’t find Klaw before when the Avengers and Ultron were able to do it with ease in AoU. I guess T’Chaka really was lying down on the job there.)

(-I’ve seen it suggested that T’Chaka let Klaw run free as a way of covering up N’Jobu’s death, but it seems like A. there’s no way Klaw could’ve known that much about it, B. it’d be far safer to just find him and kill him on the spot, and no Wakandan would question it.)

Phase 2: Kill Klaw himself to gain favor with the Wakandans, which will work, and cause T’Challa’s lifelong best bud to turn against him (even knowing that Erik was responsible for Phase 1).

Phase 3: Defeat T’Challa in battle. Phases 2 and 3 are now pointless since all of Wakanda is now honorbound to follow you.

-Speaking of, if you’re some superpowered guy in a supersuit, I should think you could pull off disarming some jabroni with a gun without stabbing him in the heart. I mean, Spider-Man does that five times a day, and he’s fifteen. I guess the implication was that they Jack Ruby’d him? But then Marvel doesn’t want to dirty up Wakanda that much, so...

-I get Erik’s dad smuggling vibranium out of Wakanda, but why would he partner with a racist psychopath like Klaw to do it? You’d think a prince pulling an inside job could set up something a little better. It’s the Marvel universe! There must be like fifty supervillains he could’ve called up.

-Didn’t like that T’Challa’s big fight with Klaw, his arch-nemesis, was Klaw getting in one hit that BP no-sold, then just winning. That’s John Cena bullshit.

-There’s no way in hell I buy that a week after her father is murdered in a terrorist bombing, the unbearable Shuri is making quips about her brother having a girlfriend, much less stopping a religious ceremony to crack wise. Imagine Princess Di interrupting a royal wedding to moon people. Now remember that Wakanda is supposed to be way more honorbound and traditionalist than Britain.

-The whole resurrection of T’Challa thing makes no sense. So, Erik has taken over Wakanda and burned all but one of the heart-shaped herbs. So, since only the royal family can take the herb and become a Black Panther, Shuri has to step up... no? She just kinda follows along while they take it to M’Baku to make him the new Black Panther? But conveniently he’s saved T’Challa so they can give him the herb and immediately repower him.

-And if M’Baku’s people are such Luddites, how come they’re able to take on the Vibranium weaponry of W’Kabi’s guys? Do they also have Vibranium weapons? If so, where exactly are they drawing the line? Is a sword that can cut through Iron Man okay, but not a flying car? (Yes, I know there’s an explanation about jabbari wood in the EU, but they could at least put in one line about it so we know how it works without reading the novelization.)

-For a country that’s apparently super committed to isolationism, Wakanda really easily gets on board with Plan Imperialism. I guess most of the Wakandan people are morally inferior to the Asgardians, since even in Ragnarok’s hatchet-job, most of them were depicted as either actively resisting Hela’s imperialism or being cowed by her army.

-And no, don’t say the Wakandans were honorbound to follow Erik, because T’Challa specifically shows up in front of everyone and says that the duel isn’t finished, so a whole parcel of them are deliberately choosing Erik over T’Challa, despite Erik being this outsider, out-of-wedlock, blasphemous murderer they’ve never seen before... who is also obviously a psycho.

-It just seems like Wakanda goes really quickly from being one hundred percent behind T’Challa to going “You’re weak! Erik is strong! We need a strongman to lead us otherwise we’ll get our asses kicked!” I don’t buy that the Klaw fiasco is enough to totally torpedo T’Challa and make Erik untouchable.

-I mean, it’s the same basic plot as the first Thor, only there it works because the Asgardians don’t know just how much of a weasel Loki is, plus he goes to the trouble of setting Thor up first.

-I got it, the issue is that this is based on the Don McGregor storyline where T’Challa had been away from Wakanda for a long time, serving on the Avengers and macking on gaijin Monica Lynne, so all of Wakanda was pissed at him and willing to hear this Killmonger guy out. But in the movie, he hasn’t done any of that, so it comes off as forced and contrived that all of a sudden, Wakanda is telling T’Challa to get to fuck.

-In fact, wouldn’t it make sense for Killmonger to factor M’Baku into his plans and take advantage of that tribe in some way? Since that’s one of the few things he could conceivably know about Wakanda (he really got lucky that W’Kabi was the first Wakandan he came across and totally sympathetic to a coup by a complete stranger).

-I guess the implication is that W’kabi and a lot of other Wakandans want to take over the world as some mix of maybe well-intentioned extremism, warrior pride, and garden-variety ambition, and they’re just following Killmonger because he can sign the papers. Which, when you think about it, makes Killmonger the black Donald Trump and his followers the Republican Party--”yeah, sure, he killed one priest, but he’s passing our tax bill, so...”--but I guess we’re going to skip straight from that take to him being a weeb?

-(That’s not really an issue with the film so much as a lot of the audience--not black people, but, like, Tumblr in general--deciding ahead of time exactly how they were going to feel about the movie and all its characters, which seems crazy to me. Like, why even go see the movie? But, not the movie’s fault, fanthings bein’ fanthing.)

-I thought the whole Okoye/W’kabi relationship was underdeveloped--at the end, when she stands up to him, I was like “oh, yeah, those two are A Thing.” I can’t imagine how much more forced taking the time to say Ayo--who is pretty much just the third Dora from the left here--is specifically in a lesbian relationship would be. So that’s a free pass from me for this stupid “gay representation controversy”. Even the T’Challa/Nakia thing felt pretty half-hearted and obligatory. The character of Nakia is alright, I was just never sure why these two in particular are into each other besides him being hot and her being hot (especially when the one thing we know about them is that their worldviews fundamentally disagree). Maybe she’s just the only woman T’Challa knows who A. has hair, B. isn’t related to him.

-In fact, it’s weird how the entire conflict in the movie is really between isolationism and outreach, yet there’s really no character representing or arguing for isolationism, not even any of the villains. T’Challa, I guess, but obviously he changes his mind. It seems like there should be a ‘devil on his shoulder’ type deal arguing for tradition. I think M’baku should’ve been that--the guy who slinks off into the shadows at the end, warning T’Challa that he’s coming for his ass because he opened up the borders and fucked with resurrection. (Five points to whoever gets that reference.) Instead, the conflict is lopsided because everyone seems to be against isolationism, they’re just differing in how.

-Actually, the whole thing of Wakanda following Killmonger just because he’s won this bullshit trial by combat because it’s tradition, and T’Challa urging them to follow him because it’s the right thing to do, could’ve been an okay take on that conflict, but instead apparently Wakanda legitimately wants to follow Erik and take over the world. And they just don’t spend enough time developing that.

-I also think they don’t spend enough time on T’Challa being depowered and kicked off the throne. It seems like there could be a really cool movie where, in the first fifteen or thirty minutes, Erik Killmonger shows up out of nowhere, kicks T’Challa’s ass, takes over Wakanda, and for the rest of the movie T’Challa is forced to rely on allies like Ross and M’baku who he can’t completely trust or rely on, and he has to fight his own people who are just trying to do the honorable thing, and he has to rethink being the Black Panther and earn that position instead of just having it handed to him. I’m pretty much describing the Don McGregor storyline this was adapted from. But, you know, why would you take that and add all this filler with Klaw and South Korea and such, and then skimp on the actual dramatic material? It’s like a version of Iron Man 3 where Tony’s house doesn’t get blown up until an hour and a half in, and then he immediately calls in the Iron Legion and goes to kick the Mandarin’s ass.

-Speaking of Korea, it seems a bit hypocritical to make this big production of being woke, then to throw in this inaccurate and ‘exotic’ side mission. It just seems like it’d be more thematic for this deal to be happening in Haiti or Jamaica or any other African country, somewhere where they could further comment on the story’s themes and develop them more. Maybe have the setting reflect what some of the characters want in terms of their goals, or fear happening to Wakanda? We kind of get that with the Boko Haram guys in the opening, but they’re dealt with so glibly (like muggers in a Batman movie) that it’s hard to see them as credibly a factor in any character’s thinking. Is T’Challa worried people like that will drag Wakanda down? Is Nakia determined to stop them? Seems like it was just something BP dealt with in ten seconds so he could hang out with this girl he likes.

-It’s funny that they follow in the steps of Ragnarok and Doctor Strange by dirtying up the heroes’ forebears--almost like that plot point is part of some formula 🤔 🤔 🤔 --yet still find time to white-wash a lot of Wakandan society. The Dora Milaje don’t have the underage, wives-in-training aspect. M’Baku and Nakia go from supervillains to frenemy and love interest, respectively. (Yeah, they turn W’kabi into a villain, but he beat his wife in the comics, so that’s not much of a stretch.) And yet, the plot relies on much of Wakanda being horrible people--willing to conquer the world, but not accept refugees. It’s a weird mix of utopianism and ‘uh, yeah, we still need to have a plot where the villain isn’t immediately dogpiled by all the average citizens who don’t like hyperwar.” Again, the Don McGregor storyline makes a point of Wakanda being a flawed, imperfect society, so it makes sense that Killmonger can take it over, but the movie is making the exact opposite point--Wakanda is so advanced and it’s so wonderful--and the plot doesn’t work anymore.

-To go into fanfic territory, it probably would’ve worked better if there were a significant amount of Wakandans who were pissed at T’Challa for letting Zemo live, because traditionally, someone who’d killed the King of Wakanda would be done, so it’s another divergence between what T’Challa finds moral and his country’s traditions. Just have M’baku say “you let your father’s killer live!” instead of “you failed to protect your dad!”

-I’ve also seen it suggested that Killmonger’s master plan could’ve involved finding Zemo, springing him from American custody, and then delivering him to Wakanda. That sounds a lot stronger, but it would also result in Zemo necessarily being taken off the board, and even a bastardized Zemo seems too important to the Marvel Unnie for that. Maybe he could have a cousin who’s really into their family history?

-I think there were a few too many characters in this story. Most of the ‘strong female characters’ just seemed to spend the finale getting their asses kicked by Killmonger, while Ross’s Top Gun moment seemed pointless when--if T’Challa won--it seems like he could just order the transport to turn back... what, were they going to start World War 3 the moment they left Wakanda’s borders?

-Like, did Angela Bassett actually do anything in this movie?

-Shuri, for instance, I think was so clearly intended to be ‘the meme one’ and just ended up ill-fitting in the MCU’s realistic milieu. I mean, this is a universe where Peter Parker isn’t much of a science nerd, he has a ‘guy at the computer’ to do his hacking for him and an AI to help him out and all that. Then over in Wakanda, you have a sixteen-year-old super-genius that’s the best scientist in the country and it clearly clashes with the grounded feel of the universe, but they just plow ahead with it anyway because “oh, it’ll get women interested in STEM, it’ll show black girls can do anything.” And she actually gets the better of T’Challa and razzes him with her ‘witty one-liners.’ I just find it really condescending. She’s basically a black female Wesley Crusher.

-Petty nitpick department: The first stinger is a dog. They end the movie SHOWING that T’Challa is revealing Wakanda to the world and using its technology and wealth to help out the underprivileged. Cool, got it, very clearly established all of that. Then after the first set of credits, we get a scene of... T’Challa going before the UN and TELLING that Wakanda is being revealed to the world and yadda yadda. It seems like the more natural scene would be him going up to Tony Stark or whatever and saying “hey, I’m joining the Avengers, and the next time there’s a problem, count me in!” But they cheaped out on getting RTD, so instead it’s just a less visually interesting presentation of a plot point we’ve already covered. This in a movie that was already very long and apparently left out crucial plot scenes.

-It’s also strange to have him give this big speech about how we’re all one tribe and we all have to come together, but a lot of his team seems at least casually racist? Like, you don’t see T’Challa saying “hey, M’baku, Ross was being pretty polite in addressing you, you didn’t need to bark at him like a dog just because he’s white” or “hey, sis, Ross is actually a buddy of mine and a pretty cool dude, maybe you shouldn’t greet him by calling him a racial slur?” I’m just saying, you wouldn’t see an X-Men movie where Jubilee is an unrepentant homophobe and all of the other mutants are cool with it.

-They set up that BP’s big special move is absorbing kinetic injury and then blasting it back out again, only it isn’t really clear how much he can take before it starts hurting him, if it ever hurts him. Like, could the Hulk punch him, then he gets up and walks it off, or would that break every bone in his body but leave his suit all glowy? I get that Captain America’s shield is unbreakable, so is BP walking around in an entire suit of that? And wouldn’t that make him invincible/boring? And for such a tactician of a character, they don’t really have him find any clever ways of using it, he just gets hit, uses the blast, moving on. You’d think there would be a scene where he does something counterintuitive or painful, but it’s just him thinking three steps ahead and charging up this power so he can use it at a crucial moment.

-It also adds to the video game feeling of a lot of the already pixel-y action scenes that he literally has a rage meter limit break thing.

-Petty nitpick department: The movie characterizes both Klaw and Killmonger as Joker-style wisecrackers, which makes me wonder what they’ll do for villains in a sequel, since that’s Reverend Achebe’s thing and he’s about the last big villain in Black Panther canon who isn’t either dead in the MCU or adapted into an ally. And three evil Cockney jokesters in a row seems like a lot.

(-I’ve heard Dr. Doom suggested for a villain, but I kinda doubt Marvel would job out T’Challa/Wakanda to him, and Doom really needs a W if he’s going to be Doom.)

-I also don’t think the movie really engaged with its premise of depicting an African society that had never been colonized. In the real world, racial dynamics vary enormously from America to Europe to Japan, but Wakanda pretty much has the same viewpoints that African-Americans would have: resenting white people, using American idioms (”Guess who just popped up on the radar?”), even quoting American memes. It seems like in real life, Wakanda would be more concerned with the rest of Africa instead of being obsessed with America. I mean, in the comic books, you had Wakandans with this sense of jingoism, who resent all outsiders, no matter their skin color. Them making a distinction between white Americans and black Americans (for instance) comes off like pandering.

-Like, they start off the movie with BP fighting Nigerian slavers who have taken a number of women hostage and conscripted child soldiers, and obviously BP is against that, but how does Killmonger feel about those guys? Zuri? M’baku? Black people oppressing black people in Africa seems like a more immediate concern than police shootings all the way over in Oakland, but the whole idea seems too complex to factor into this white oppression dynamic, so they just use them as action scene fodder and move on to black people oppressed, white people mean. Maybe that’s supposed to be Killmonger being hypocritical and prioritizing stuff that reminds him of his own suffering over other issues, but that needs to be played out in the text.

-Because it seems like a really obvious counterpoint to Killmonger that there are political situations much more complex than “evil oppressors vs. innocent oppressed”--just look at the Middle East--and hence his simplistically violent philosophy is doomed to fail. Instead, the movie kinda concedes that his position is right, he’s just going about it in the wrong way. Which I think is intellectually dishonest.

-Petty nitpick department: They have an entire bit about how Shuri has designed these soundproof boots for T’Challa, but he never uses them. In accordance with the rule of Chekov’s Gun, which states that if you show a gun in the first act, then in the third act, it should turn out that it’s only purpose was to be a dumb joke.

-Petty nitpick department: So this takes place immediately after Civil War, and Civil War ended with Captain America in Wakanda, but then they never mention him in this and he doesn’t seem to be hanging around. I guess he’s off freeing all his buddies from the Raft during all this? But then the stinger of this is Bucky having been revived, and he was frozen again in the stinger to Civil War. So I guess it goes Civil War >>> Black Panther >>> the stinger of Civil War >>> the stinger of Black Panther? Usually when continuity is this convoluted, Han is still alive.

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