#shitty drama denouement

[tippitv]

RECAP: Supernatural 15.03 “The Rupture”

Watching episode three and I finally understand the warding logistics better now. Note that just because I understand it better doesn’t mean I think it makes any kind of sense.

So it seems the “mile wide salt circle” encompasses both the town and the cemetery. Like the entire town and entire cemetery and the space in between them is somehow less than a mile wide as seen in the shitty map I made in MS paint last week.  

This is poppycock of course. It’s also bizarre that somehow all these demons and ghosts didn’t manage to spread any further out than that in the hours in took the Winchesters et al to evacuate the town and for Belphegor to perform the spell.

I’m so distracted by this that it’s hard for me to suspend my disbelief.

Rowena tries to reinforce the warding but there are too many ghosts attacking it. More ghosts keep spewing out of the ground. I think it’s weird that Hell is an actual physical place somewhere under the Earth’s crust while Heaven seems to be some kind of otherworldly dimension that looks like an Apple store.

Rowena’s feeling very defeated. Ruth Connell is doing a much better job than the crummy ghosts we've seen so far would seem to warrant. Her acting makes them seem scary and the situation desperate, whereas the writing for the actual ghost characters is...meh. Dean wants to go fight the ghosts but like… there’s really nothing to be done. Shooting them with iron or rock salt only works for a few minutes at most. To make any dent, you'd need all the salt in the Hannibal fandom after NBC canceled it. Shout out to my Fannibals!

I still think somebody needs to be thinking about contacting Billie. Reapers take souls to their great reward or their eternal punishment, I feel like they’d have some useful input. Plus I just want to see Billie again because Lisa Berry is dreamy.

Also Belphegor is such a weaselly jerk about the whole thing. I won't miss that guy. He's the Martin Shkrelli of demons. Shout out to everyone who hates jacked up pharmaceutical prices!

Sam says they're out of ideas. That's because y'all haven't sat around reading books out loud to each other for half an episode! 

Jack mentions something called "Lilith's Crook." Ah, Martin Shkrelli again. He has to explain it's that curved stick thing shepherds use while everyone is being ignorant. "Thing's actually more of a horn," he says. She designed it to control demons on Earth while she was in Hell. You'd think that kind of thing would've come up when Lilith was topside but no! Also there really should've been a call back to that. "You know Lilith... you killed her to let Lucifer out?" That kind of thing.

They work out a plan for Belph to summon the demons and ghosts back to Hell and the Rowena can heal the big spewing fistula in the earth. She wants Sam to assist her, which makes me

Dean coolly volunteers Castiel to accompany Belph. "You've been to Hell before." Cas should've been like, "Yeah to grip your ass tight and raise it from Perdition!" Also how's he supposed to get out again?

Aw jeez here's Ketch in his hospital room. I hope the only reason he's in this episode is to die. The nurse doesn't want to clear him for discharge so a pretty doctor walks in and kills her with a telekinetic neck snap. And that's why we have a nursing shortage in this country! Oh the doctor is Ardat, the demon who hired Ketch to kill Belph.

Fisticuffs ensue even though she could just pin him in place with demonic power. When he refuses to give up the Winchesters, she rips out his heart and shows it to him. He Pikachu faces at her.

I mean, did she really need to ask him? Wouldn't the most likely place be the mile-wide anti-ghost dome? She texts Dean pretending to be Ketch.

Belphegor goads Castiel about his friends sacrificing him, so Cas pushes him down into the ghost fistula. Lol. It doesn't shut him up for long, though. As they wander around Hell, Belph continues to sow the seeds of doubt. Anyway, opening the chest that contains the Doohickey of the Week requires Castiel to sing an Enochian song of praise, but we cut away on the third note. BOO.

Also, having now met Lucifer the whiny petulant manbaby, it's really hard to understand why Lilith or anyone would be so devout for so long. Maybe it's because he was locked in the cage so they didn't actually experience a lot of his pouting. It's all I can think of.

Before Castiel can hand over the Doohickey, Ardat knocks him out of the way. She looks like Joanna Gaines. Maybe she IS Joanna Gaines!

Castiel and Ardat fight. She tries to warn him about Belphegor, but he pops up behind her and kills her with Cas's fallen angel blade. Now we'll never know what she was gonna say! I bet he ends up just blabbing it out himself in the time-honored tradition of villains talking too much.

Indeed, he goes on about how the crook/horn is actually a leash/siphon. This thing is the Swiss Army knife of Doohickeys. He's going to blow the horn and suck all the demons and ghosts into himself to gain their powers. "I'll be a god!"

So while Belph is blowing and sucking, Sam and Rowena and Dean are dirtside working the spell. Ghosts are zooming back down the hole like the Indiana Jones Ark of the Covenant scene in reverse. Castiel tackles Belph and punches him in the face a lot which seems like the equivalent of flicking a dandelion at a law mower to stop it.

Improbably, it hurts jazzed-up Belphegor enough that he pretends to be Jack again to get Cas to stop beating him. Castiel screws up all his angel power and somehow kills him even though there's a buttload of evil spirits in him. Jack's empty body burns like a Thanksgiving turkey left on broil all day.

The ground starts sealing up but something's wrong. Rowena uses a knife to gouge out a "resurrection sachet" she's been keeping buried under her skin. It's why she came back after Lucifer killed her, if you'll recall. It takes Sam a minute to catch on that she intends to sacrifice herself in one final spell. He has to be the one to kill her because prophecy and she can't bring herself to to it for a lot of good reasons.

Now, I don't understand here. She says she's going to absorb all the demons and ghosts, throw herself into Hell, and they'll be trapped. But... didn't Belphegor absorb them? Or a lot of them? I hate that Ruth is doing such a great job and this just feels like forced drama.

Speaking of forced drama. Castiel returns to the surface and tells Dean he killed Belphegor. This could be cleared up with a five second explanation but he makes a lot of pained faces while Dean berates him for ruining their one chance. Forced drama.

Sam reluctantly stabs her in the lower belly... you know, in the uterus area... and she becomes a vessel... with her uterus absorbing all the evil...

"Goodbye boys," she says as she Last of the Mohicans throws herself into the abyss.

Well, it's better than Charlie's death but I still don't like it.

All the surviving team members return to the bunker for the denouement. Sam is taking things pretty hard, which is to be expected, so Dean goes to check on him. "God threw one last apocalypse at us and we beat it," he says to baby bro. Oh honey.

Anyway we're all pretty sure Rowena's going to be running Hell now, right? RIGHT??

Now we come to the part where Dean and Castiel act out a bad soap opera scene. It's just a thin reason to get them to break up for a while. Maybe in the final season they couldn't work Misha into the budget for every episode or maybe the writers couldn't think of more for Castiel to do. So he's gotta go off and it couldn't just be because "you know my surrogate son just died and I need time." 

No it's gotta be all "you always screw up our plans!" and "you don't trust me!" and "are you hearing that romantically sad cello music or is it just me?" and "it's not just you but now I must leave GOOD BYE!"

Onward and upward, readers! Stay tuned for the next recap.

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[overthinkingkdrama]

Hi, i might be reading wrong the last developments betwen Hi Jeon and Woo Kyung but to me it seems they are parting away. She took care of Eun Ho when he was beaten but didn't seem to have gone to see Hi Jeon at the hospital or called him. He didn't look convinced by her words that he did the right thing by saving her and killing Eun Ho. He accused her subtly too of leading on Red Cry with Si Wan and she was offended and had to remind him that he made up the story for her to tell to Red Cry. 1/2

She’s keeping him in the dark about her current connection with Red Cry and while he knows she’s nervous and lying, he didn’t ask why. He supported her when she was looking for the little girl in the green dress, she used to keep him update about her discoveries Now the subject has been dropped completely between them. This distance seems more obvious when compared to the attention he gives recently to Soo Young: he literally ran to protect her and arrest the man who assaulted her. 2/2

So i wonder if this means that this gap is going to grow bigger in the final to the point where they could be on opposite side and fighting each other? 3/3

I can definitely see where you’re getting your reading from. I also see the distancing between Woo Kyung and Ji Heon in these past couple of episodes, but I don’t see it in quite as dark a light, I think. I see it more as a heightening of tension and conflict right before the finale.

You raise a couple different points and I want to address them in order:

As far as the parting of ways is concerned, I see what you mean. I was personally really hoping for a scene of Woo Kyung visiting Ji Heon in the hospital after his injury, and was slightly disappointed when we didn’t get one. However, I have to admit that I’m viewing this from a shipper’s point of view, so of course I want my favorite pair to share more screen time where they bond and worry about each other.

The problem is, this is a thriller and not a melo. The focus is the suspenseful story line and the murder mystery, so there’s less leisure time where we get scenes that purely explore character relationships. If this was a romance then I would expect those, as in a romance character relationship is the plot in many respects. As it is however, all or nearly all of Woo Kyung and Ji Heon’s interactions are directly in service to the plot and their friendship or whatever it is that’s going on between them is left firmly in the realm of subtext that we can unpack or ignore as we like.

That’s a long winded way of saying that we get scenes of Woo Kyung caring for Eun Ho’s wounds because Eun Ho’s trauma and home life directly feeds into the Red Cry arc, whereas a scene of her visiting Ji Heon would not service the plot, but only develop the character relationships. This is a pacing decision, not necessarily a sign that the two characters are drifting apart.

I’ll admit some disappointment too that Ji Heon and Woo Kyung aren’t discussing her hallucinations and the girl in the green dress anymore. I was pulling from the first half of the show that Woo Kyung would eventually confide in Ji Heon all about her mysterious past and he would become instrumental in her unraveling the mystery. That didn’t end up happening. Instead Woo Kyung ended up using Red Cry to dig deeper into her past and uncover what happened to the real Se Kyung. It’s not exactly what I wanted, but I think it’s thematically appropriate, since Woo Kyung has always been suspended on bridge between Ji Heon’s lawful good and Red Cry’s chaotic vigilante justice, not coming cleanly down on either side.

I think that might be another explanation for the distancing between these two characters. The drama has essentially laid a false dilemma before Woo Kyung. She’s in a position where she feels trapped between the police investigation into Red Cry and the opportunity she has to use Red Cry to find out about her past. She feels that if she opens up to Ji Heon about her contact with Red Cry, she will lose her opportunity, perhaps forever, to find out the truth about the girl in the green dress. Red Cry actually presents it to her as two alternatives: to find out who he is or to find out what happened to her sister. And Woo Kyung consciously and definitively chooses the latter.

There’s a motif in this show regarding intuition. Our conscious and unconscious perceptions about other people. We see it between Eun Ho and Ji Heon. We see it with the little girl in green showing up as a hallucinatory representation of Woo Kyung’s intuition, showing her when children are being abused. And we also see it in the relationship between Ji Heon and Woo Kyung.

There’s a lot of unspoken suspicions between the two of them. I think Ji Heon knows that Woo Kyung is hiding something from him, but has for whatever reason has decided not to ask her for the truth from her directly. I like to think of this as a sign of the trust between them–he believes that Woo Kyung has her reasons to hide things, as she has many times in the past, and will come clean when then time is right. Similarly, I think Woo Kyung subconsciously knows that Ji Heon is right about her sunbae, Dr. Yoon Tae Joo, that he is most likely Red Cry, but she’s rejecting her intuition because a) she doesn’t want to accept the idea that the solution has been so close to her all this time and b) she needs Red Cry in order to solve the mystery of her past and c) on some level she sympathizes with Red Cry’s actions.

To be clear, I don’t think all of these are conscious thoughts on Woo Kyung’s part. Like when she used Si Wan’s story to lure Red Cry, she may have on some level really wanted Red Cry to do something about Si Wan’s situation, but she is far too conflicted about it to have done it with a conscious intention. I think that was the idea Ji Heon was poking at. And even though she did get very defensive when Ji Heon brought it up, and tried to put the matter back on him, and even outright rejected on two different occasions that Yoon Tae Joo might be Red Cry, we actually see later that she is seriously considering the idea that Ji Heon might be right. She asks Tae Joo several oblique questions about whether he desires to kill people who abuse children. That shows me that even though she is defensive to Ji Heon’s face, his words and suspicions are having a serious impact on her.

As for the comparison of Ji Heon’s relationship with Woo Kyung in the past couple of episodes vs his interactions with Soo Young, I do see what you mean. But I don’t necessarily think the two things are related, at least not in the way you’re implying they are. I don’t see his connection with Soo Young on the same level as the one he has with Woo Kyung, or as being of the same nature. I see him much more as a big brother figure toward Soo Young. And that’s been consistent throughout. The way he looks after her, but also tells her off. When he ran over to help her, I think he would have done that in any case, regardless of who it was. But especially because it was his hoobae, his partner, and he has a direct responsibility for her. Think about when he picked her up the morning after she spent the night in the drunk tank and fed her hangover soup. I personally see it as Soo Young having a shitty, abusive oppa and Ji Heon is stepping in as a replacement, protecting her. A found family kind of thing.

Naturally, I could be wrong, and my bias is obvious.

I sincerely hope that the two leads don’t end up fighting against each other in the end. I’ve definitely seen a few people worried that the drama is going to have a downer ending, and I don’t think those fears are completely unreasonable. But I’m still holding out hope for a happy resolution to everything. Part of the reason I don’t think we have to worry about Woo Kyung siding with Red Cry in the end, is because she has already basically gotten from him what she needed. The denouement has happened. She has confronted her step mother about her lies. We still don’t know the complete truth, but Woo Kyung has already started pulling on that thread and the whole web is well on its way to unraveling. I suspect fairly early in the upcoming episode we will know all, including whatever horror happened with the fireplace in that creepy house.

I really don’t have any idea what to expect from the finale, but I’m holding out hope for a satisfactory resolution for all of these characters who I have become extremely attached to in the past weeks. Thanks for sending me this ask. I hope my reply was worth the wait. Have a good night!

Jona

[madmonkeysandrum-blog]

NaNoWriMo Day 10

11:10 I struggle with a lot. I want to cram in some of me in there, like I want to give the MC my shitty parents and current issues with my dad but it will be too dark. I don't find it easy with conflict either, in my story it's the MC and her younger sister and I'm wondering if I'm trying to create conflict just because. I'm a practical and sensible person so unless the character is an asshole I struggle to create any drama. Everyone just gets a long. That's not a good thing if it's a murder mystery.

Not a lot written so far.

14:48 Made cookies, a little written. I've started a bit on the denouement, the scene when our sleuth gets to show how smart they were by tying everything together. But there's not a lot of things to tie. It's almost like, "Tell us, how did you know X was the killer." "Well because." That's not good. A part of me thinks I should drop this one as there's too much missing. In the passed when I've won NaNoWriMo things have sort of fallen to place as I write, the first draft has always been horrible but there's still sort of a bare bones of a story there that you can work with. Not getting the feeling that will happen here.

00:49 I managed to get the words down but rough... hard days to come.

[no6secretsanta]

Note: Dear @aoicanvas! Angst isn’t my usual repertoire and I really had problems trying to come up with something more bittersweet than No. 6 itself is, but reunion!fic, now that I could do! ~@tea-in-september

NARRATIVE FIDELITY

It was supposed to end with a proper finale, a denouement delayed being better than the story ending at its climax, but Nezumi had ignored to plan for the fact that it’s only in on stage that living people would follow the author’s directions.

The smell of musty basement no longer lingered on Shion. He had grown taller, of course he had; his hair was properly trimmed, his voice settled, his clothes clean. Nezumi couldn’t make himself pull back from the firm grip of Shion’s arms around him, not when he still woke from nightmares of a limp corpse going cold in the late winter sun. Oh, he’d thought he was past this, he’d thought he’d moved on, but here Shion was hugging him as the first person since someone dead two decades ago, and some spiteful narrative causality was set in motion.

“Nezumi,” Shion said in a voice that small and full of some repressed emotion, “I’ve never missed anything the way I’ve been missing you.” And in a violent second, Nezumi realised that that was what it was, this was what it meant to fall asleep at night while making believe that Shion was sleeping next to him.

He couldn’t speak the sentiment, and he didn’t know what to say as he met Shion’s bright eyes and that wavering smile. It dimmed as Shion lifted a hand Nezumi’s face and waited, a full five seconds, before he leaned in and kissed him.

There had been so few things Nezumi truly wanted that he’d had little practice in resisting temptation. A part of his brain kept saying to pull back, to tell him, to get it over with, to end it and get on with the rest of his life. But he had walked from all this once before, and he’d forgotten how good he’d gotten at ignoring the sucking cavity in his chest that Shion’s soft mouth was mending every time it came back to his after pulling back to breathe.

Nezumi had prided himself in never forgetting his lines, but the Shion in front of him was warm and brilliant and the happiest thing he had ever seen. He’d been kissing Shion for five minutes; there was no tidy way out of this any longer, and back when he was sixteen, he had never imagined that this was how sweet it tasted to be kissed without hidden meanings.

He ended up in Shion’s home and in Shion’s bed, and as Shion’s breathing slowed down in slumber, he was in it so deep that he couldn’t even make himself mouth the words he’d come to say in the darkness.

Shion, don’t wait for me. I won’t come back.

*

There were few things more grating than stories without proper endings. Wasn’t that the entire point of fiction? The illusion that the world had sense and order, that things ended, that it either went well or it went badly but at either rate, it was over, it could be closed off and left behind and forgotten if you weren’t happy about it. Nezumi hated novels without proper endings, and even if someone once told him that he saw everything in black and white, he still couldn’t think about his life in terms of the messy reality he saw every day.

He’d learned that hostility was an effective defence mechanism early on. Things that were soft and sweet didn’t last outside the walls of No. 6, and if he’d lived four years on nighttime memories of a cup of hot cocoa and a boy who had held his hand while he slept in a bed that was soft and clean, then it helped to be an actor and to know exactly where the pretending began. It hadn’t become a problem until he’d stepped between Shion and a loaded gun because it was unbearable to imagine a world where Shion was dead. Leaving was the safest way of surviving, and survival was the only way to win the game.

Time marched on in autumns and sunsets, but Nezumi left the story with an insignificant plot thread hanging and the storyteller in him kept returning to it in perpetual annoyance. He shouldn’t take the blame for Shion’s shortcomings, but he knew that he enabled it in his own tragic flaw. Shion promised that he’d always stay by Nezumi’s side, and Nezumi hadn’t pointed out the holes in Shion’s naive logic because Shion said all the things he wanted to hear even if it was ridiculous to believe that it could ever happen. Worst of it all, he had given in that final time: when Shion called his name, he turned around and went back to him and kissed him and there was no denying that whatever that kiss was, it wasn’t closure.

Shion would be waiting for Nezumi to come back, and Nezumi had to tell him to let go of the promise he’d never meant to make, and wasn’t going to keep. Shion wasn’t going to leave No. 6 and Nezumi wasn’t going to stay there, and even the most fantastic of stories couldn’t work on broken logic.

So Nezumi went back to No. 6 to end the story and start a new one that didn’t involve the ghost of an idealistic child genius trailing in his footsteps. He returned to the still-rebuilding city and he found Shion in an office in the innermost corner of some hallway of the building proudly housing the Reconstruction Committee. And that was the point where his carefully scripted epilogue went off the rails, because he’d forgotten to factor in that Shion had believed that good dreams could come true.

*

Shion’s body was warm and heavy beside him. Unmoving but breathing softly, curled up facing Nezumi with a hand resting on the pillow between them. It didn’t shift when Nezumi put his fingers against it, and if he lingered as Shion slept, then that, too, was something reserved for when he was safely alone.

He counted the seconds as he listened to Shion breathing and felt Shion’s fingers against his own, and the fourth time he had put it off, he carefully slipped out from the sheets, tucked them around Shion, and didn’t linger any longer as he stepped away to get dressed. A cold, clear day was dawning outside, the early traffic out of the city would already be running, but Shion would sleep for hours still. Nezumi had shared his bed with him for five months; there was little he didn’t know about how Shion slept, and what Shion could sleep through.

Shion hadn’t moved when Nezumi returned to the bedroom with the notepad he’d found on the kitchen table. He put his letter down beside the lamp on the bedside table; he’d written down the things he hadn’t told Shion face to face yesterday, and upsets would pass. Nezumi no longer mourned his dead family, and Shion seemed to be fairly unaffected by the death of his best friend and the destruction of his hometown. Letting it go without drama was a better solution than spending an hour arguing over something that was going to end in tears anyway.

It was his own story to end, and he allowed himself the sentimentalism of brushing his fingers through Shion’s white hair one final time. Shion’s relaxed face didn’t as much as twitch, and Nezumi pulled the blankets closer around him still and thought about all the good things he never would have kept anyway.

“Hey, have some good dreams,” he said quietly, and then he turned around and left his final unfinished story behind with what was - if he was completely honest about it - a really shitty solution. But hey, it wasn’t like there were any really satisfactory ways to end a story about massacres and natural disasters and teenage boys who got themselves hurt over and over because they kept believing that most people were as good as they were. If Nezumi felt a peculiar ache as he walked down the stairs of Shion’s apartment building, then it wasn’t like he’d felt it plenty before. When he’d sneaked out of a house in Chronos, when he’d given a knitted sweater to a girl dressed in rags, when he told Inukashi to shut up about Shion’s friend being in trouble and Nezumi’s decisions about that.

When he’d let Shion give him a goodbye kiss and then stayed awake all night when Shion got up before daybreak and left him behind for a girl who wanted to have sex with him. Had he still been sixteen, he might’ve even justified his avoidance now with the fact that Shion honestly deserved this.

His breath was clouding as he stepped outside, but the sky was pinking in the promise of sunrise, without a cloud in sight. The truly poetic way to start this would’ve been with some distant horizon in front of him as the day was just beginning, but seeing the promises of a sunny day above the rooftops of the tall buildings around him would have to make do until he’d left the city proper. He paused for a second as he tried to remember which direction the city centre would be in, and decided to follow a car that was just leaving its parking lot. It wasn’t as if he had any obligations; no work to mind, no house to keep, no-one waiting for him at a home that didn’t exist. His life was cleared out and the world was vast in front of him, and he had taken exactly seven steps towards the rest of the day as something heavy crashed into his back.

*

“What was that?!” Shion demanded as he gripped the front of Nezumi’s coat with both hands.

“I wrote you a letter!” Nezumi answered sharply, but Shion was not pacified.

“Yes, thank you, I saw that. Where are you going?!”

“I don’t know - ”

“Then why are you leaving?!” It was punctuated with a sharp yank, and Nezumi tried to pry Shion’s hands loose.

“It’s none of your business where I’m going. Cut it out, Shion.”

“No, it is my business, you are my business. What about yesterday?”

“What about it? You think spending six hours in my company gives you the rights to dictate what I do with my life?”

Shion flinched at the words, and the rage subsided somewhat, and let another emotion into play as his hands finally relaxed their grip on Nezumi.

“You were happy to see me,” he stated, and his grip grew stronger again, “You kissed me. You came home with me. You slept with me. Based on your actions, it makes no sense for you to walk away now and tell me you’re never coming back.”

“Shion, it could never work,” Nezumi said, and noticed for the first time that Shion was still in his sleepwear. He could feel the cold through his winter coat; Shion had to be freezing, but didn’t seem to notice. His face was set in determination, even as he looked close to tears as well.

“Why.”

“Come on. Why would it? You’re you and I -

“You were happy to see me, Nezumi.”

“Yeah, your majesty, because I like you. Didn’t I tell you back then, about how you showed me that people could be kind. I’d be an idiot not to like the person who taught me that. I’m sorry that I didn’t feel like ruining your overwhelming welcome yesterday, but this is how it is.“

“Do you know,” Shion says with careful enunciation, “that five years ago, I made a promise to myself? I promised that when you came back, I wasn’t going to let you go as easily as I did when I was sixteen.”

“Did you consider that I might want a say in things?”

“Then tell me what it is you’re going to find elsewhere so that I’ll know whether or not it’s right for me to try and make you stay.”

There was a beat of silence, as all of Nezumi’s reasons fell apart in incoherence.

“You know, my life has been nothing but a stream of shit,” he said, eventually. “I want something else.”

Shion blinked, and two fat tears rolled down his cheeks. “Am I just a part of that stream of shit?”

“You were the only thing that wasn’t,” Nezumi said weakly, and Shion wiped away a tear even as more kept coming.

“Do you know that you’re the best thing that ever happened to me? I don’t even want to imagine what my life would have been like if you hadn’t come around. I don’t want to imagine what kind of person I’d been. What kind of place this city would have been.”

“No good things ever last. It’s better not to get used to it.”

Shion’s mouth fell open. “I can’t agree with that,” he said, and sniffed, and finally let go of Nezumi to rub his bare arms with his hands.

“Yeah, and that’s why we’d never work,” Nezumi stated. “I’m sorry about the letter.”

Shion no longer looked at him, and seemed to try and curl in on himself in the cold.

“You should go back inside,” Nezumi told him, but Shion evidently refused to be the one to let this end. There was another full minute of silence. “Look, Shion - “

“You’re new here, right?”

“What?”

“I mean, you only came into town yesterday.”

“Yeah, after having spent like half my life out in - “

“Have you seen much around here yet?”

“What are you getting at?” Nezumi asked less harshly than he would have liked, because Shion’s eyes were still red and his voice was still coarse with tears even if his eyes had taken on a peculiar light.

“I mean, this city used to be a horrible place. Like, the people here built walls to lock out people in desperate need, it sorted its own citizens not by how their own needs, but their usefulness for the city. There was mass supervision of the inhabitants and unlawful arrests, and they did horrible scientific experiments on people inside the wall, and massacred people outside it.”

“Shion, what makes you think I’d forgotten about all of this?”

“That it’s all different now,” Shion said, and turned around to point southwards, where the remains of the wall was still looming in the early morning. “There was this big catastrophe, and old system fell apart and the people here have been working very hard to turn it into something new, something good. If you’d seen the old West Block now - or even in the summer, when the trees are all green and you can see the people work their gardens!”

He smiled brilliantly now, and his hands grasped Nezumi’s biceps. “I don’t think you can ever find a truly blank slate. And I don’t think it’s good to forget the mistakes of the past, if you’re strong enough to see the good parts among everything that didn’t work. Watching the people here build something good on the ruins of something terrible...” the sentence drifted off, and his smile softened.

“I used to know this boy who called himself Nezumi. Sometimes he called himself Eve. He could be a real jerk a lot of the time, but he was the strongest person I ever knew. He was the one who changed everything. And I want him to have all the good things in the world.”

There really was nothing he could think to say as Shion took his hands in his own icy fingers, and held them tightly.

“You know, you never did tell me your name.”

Shion smiled encouragingly as he hesitated, and squeezed his hands until he made his resolve and opened his mouth to speak. That was, after all, the conventional way of beginning any story.

[overwhelmedbyfeels]

Honestly things have been such a mess lately and looking more and more like it's going to be a long term battle. Not even sure if there is still a band left anymore. I still care about the guys but if we have to continue with the bullshit then I don't see the point really. Now we got two fake babies and a bunch of fake girlfriends and the most shady promo. I would rather give my time and money to someone else. Still gonna be here for your writing though :)

Who would’ve thought this shit would stretch for long and get even worse, eh? I certainly wouldn’t. But we’re here, and that’s the current situation. *sighs*

I don’t even worry about the band TBH. All this shit we’re seeing traces back to money. We’re seeing the result of a predatory industry preying on young talents (literal kids when the boys started). So, even if it takes 20 years, 1D will still come back because it’s profitable. (New Kids on The Block have returned, so why not 1D?).

Even if they were at each other’s throats (like the press wants us to believe), at one point they would still come back because $$$. Remember how everyone got excited about the prospect of some dude suing 1D and how that would mean all five reunited in court? That only proves that, despite the fuckery in this fandom, people would nut for a reunion. End of. 1D are a big name. It doesn’t matter that many think they’re a band for kids. Pretty much everyone knows about 1D, even if just to mock them as “kiddies stuff”.

(And here I don’t have much to say because 1D’s team targets grown men making all kinds of lewd jokes and singing innuendos at kids. If you go back to UAN tour, you’ll know a bunch of hormonal teenage boys were NEVER appropriate for little kids. “Blow a kiss, blow a job”? “Different dick every night”? PLS!)

But back to the subject. Yeah, it feels like everything will drag for some time. We see all those babies around, and it doesn’t seem like we’re getting any denouement soon. We can’t enjoy anything about the boys’ solo careers without some kind of fuckery, or being used to promote their so-called “girlfriends”. Everything is normal and people break up and get cheated and go back again.  Yup, nothing to see here. Celebrities are fickle and so are the normal people associated to them. :)

Many don’t care for facts and roll with it. Some even want you to dumb down to their level when logic and facts tell you otherwise. Fandom life is more and more complicated because you don’t know who to follow, the friend of yesterday is the heterosexuality-loving anti of tomorrow blocking you and pretending like they’ve never seen the shadiness they turn a blind eye on now. Many of your blog friends are deleting or changing blogs completely; everybody and their nan are a Kpop blog now.

I agree with you in that we don’t have many positive things right now. Haven’t had them for years now TBH. It’s just no fun. I can see why investing time in other thing would be nice, or even just enjoy casually the music that (hopefully) comes out. I’ll probably do that at one point, too. I’m not interested in drama. When I want drama I watch Soraya Montenegro try to kill three different characters in the same scene★. Now That’s What I Call Drama™.

All that said, I still want to see the boys emerge victorious. It won’t be easy (we’re seeing it now), but one day something good must happen, right? We’ve never asked for much.

We wanted nice merch? Have dolls, bags and 256 perfumes!

We wanted OT5 content? Too bad, they’re all mortal enemies now. Their securities actually are to protect them from one another.

We wanted the rumoured collabs with other artists like FOB? Get rekt! There’s no ‘team’ in ‘featuring’, and have I mentioned that all 1D boys hate each other?

We’re honestly starved of everything we’d get from a normal band. I’ll be blunt here: I don’t give a single fuck about personal lives, naming their families members or whom they’re supposedly banging. I never did. But what did we get? A bunch of “relatable” canvas girlfriends to supposedly makes us squee. Aww, see that? The boys date normal girls! Older girls! That means you too can be a 1D girlfriend!!! Yeahhh… there’s not a single thing surrounding 1D that had been aimed for typical fans. Everything had been done like we all want to bone them. (And many do, but that’s not everyone. They’re not pieces of meat and we’re not fucking pumas!)

1D success has been DESPITE their team. The boys are loveable and their bond is what has drawn most of the people in. I still think we don’t have many 1D fans as we have “I’m [1D boy]’s fan and I’m stick with the other 4” around here. Too many hateful stans that thrive on tearing the others down to elevate their fave. When I think about that, it’s not hard see why 1D shitty team got away with the putrid stuff they try to feed us: too many scavengers.

Anyway! I have no idea where I was going with this (it’s mostly 1AM ramblings), but yeah. We can only hope for something good in less than 20 years. I wish all five the best and want to see them succeed. I hope I can see it happen before we’re all 50-somethings. And thank you for the kind words. :) Glad my writing can add something positive to this hellhole of fandom. I’m here for the music, the boys’ friendship, to support them and fandom content. Sadly those are the things we don’t get any more. *sighs*

[thedungeonra]

My thoughts on THE LAST JEDI

It’s Christmas Eve-eve and I’m working 2nd shift.   It’s finally calmed down a bit so this seems a good time to talk about my difficult relationship with STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI.

I overall dislike the film, both as the 8th episode of the Star Wars Saga/9th film overall in the entire franchise and as a film on its own merit. But there was a lot I liked about the film.  A lot I LOVED about the film.  Which perhaps makes it more frustrating.  Were TLJ as categorically bad as say, HIGHLANDER 2: The one where they’re from the Planet Zeist, I would actually have a much easier time disliking it.

But first, what exactly is my history with Star Wars?

EMPIRE STRIKES BACK was the first film I ever saw in a theater.   My older brother took me.  I was all of 4.   I saw STAR WARS on TV later on and it was not until RETURN OF THE JEDI that I connected the dots that it was the same film.  You gotta remember that for my generation, what you call, “Episode IV: A NEW HOPE,” was just STAR WARS to us.   I loved ESB.  And collected what little merchandise was available in early 80s rural Indiana.

I’ve seen EMPIRE STRIKES BACK more than any other film.   I have a son, college-age right now, who grew up with the prequels.    We had our various lightsaber battles, and played the video games together and bought the toys.  It was great!

I don’t hate the prequels in the en vogue way that GenXers seem to hate them.  Jar Jar doesn’t bother me all that much.  Nor does Jake Lloyd’s Anakin.  I still fire up the DVD from time to time for the Podrace and Darth Maul duels.  And Qui-Gon is one of my favorite SW characters.  

I really enjoyed ATTACK OF THE CLONES because it feels like Ewan really had fun playing Obi-Wan.  And SITH… well… it’s not great.    I think the last two minutes of ROGUE ONE makes up a lot for the last two minutes of SITH.  It’s the Darth Vader we’ve wanted to see for decades.

And I loved FORCE AWAKENS. I really dig all four new leads. I was bummed that Luke had nothing to do and I felt Han got a really bittersweet ending (as did Harrison Ford finally get the exit he wanted from the franchise).  I thought the structural similarities between IV and VII were a feature, not a bug.   And I’ve been all for VIII since.

 Until.  The trailers for VIII began.  Something felt… not quite right.  And yeah, feel free to insert your, “I feel a great disturbance in the Force) joke here.  I couldn’t get excited for anything I was seeing in the trailers.  

Even seeing Luke in the cockpit of the Falcon felt like the grapes of Han’s, “Chewie, we’re home” to prunes in my mouth.   I assumed Luke would die in this film.  And after we lost Carrie Fisher much too soon, it was hard accepting that IX would be without Luke, Han and Leia.  I waited for the crowds to thin a bit and saw TLJ on Tuesday after opening weekend. 70mm IMAX at the Indiana State Museum, if knowing that of trivia is fun for you.

Now, then.  I’m not a film critic and this is not a film review. I’m just a middle aged Star Wars lover and film nerd.  

 But before we get into what I disliked about it, let’s start off on a positive note!  Firstly, I do understand and respect that Rian Johnson had essentially 4 basic audiences for this film, none of whom view Star Wars the same way.  Baby Boomers what saw STAR WARS in college; we GenXers what grew up with the movies; Millennials who grew up with the Preqs; and kids today whose first Star Wars theater experience was THE FORCE AWAKENS.  That’s a heavy burden and if anything, I feel like they failed in trying to appease to these 4 quadrants of the fandom.

I loved the opening battle sequence.  It’s maybe the best star war in Star Wars.  It looks and sounds great.  There is great conflict and drama.  It has this amazing gut punch with the last bomber.  Just superb.

I still really just love the four new leads.  Those are all rich characters.

I’ve seen a lot of people grousing about Rose and specifically, the entire casino sub-plot.  Rose was great!  In a movie where people are all over the place on the emotional spectrum, Rose felt like really the only person whose emotional responses actually made sense in their given contexts.  And she delivers the theme of the film at the end, which I did enjoy.  

And the space casino heist? Are you kidding me?  James Bond in space.  Loved it.  I felt the animal cruelty and slavery beats a bit too on the nose, but that’s just a taste thing.  I think my very first reaction on the twitters was something to the effect of, “a great space casino heist film wrapped in a shitty Star Wars story.” Beneicio Del Toro was certainly memorable.  I thought they were teasing a new Han Solo-ish scoundrel but instead, he’s this great foil to Finn.  I DJ shows back up again either in IX or in Rian Johnson’s spinoff films.    

My only real quibble with the casino scene was that Justin Theroux’s high stakes gambler/slicers should have been Lando, right?  You can’t put Billy Dee Williams at a Sabacc table for 30 seconds?  Also seeing how the owner of the ship DJ stole sells to the Resistance and the 1st Order, having him still Lando’s ship would have been a nice touch.   In the absence of the Rebellion and Han, Lando is not the best version of his self. Anyway, I’m not here to write a different movie.

I also really liked Laura Dern’s Admiral Holdo and I enjoyed how she shut down Poe’s mansplaining.   I don’t understand some of the choices made with Holdo, but  more on that in a bit.   Holdo crashing the Mon Cal cruiser into the 1st Order fleet while at lightspeed was insanely cool.  That’s the stuff we only ever imagined in the old Star Wars RPG; never thought I’d see something like that on screen.

Didn’t mind the Yoda cameo. Don’t understand people who say, “bro, that should have been Obi-Wan, bro.”  I don’t agree, but whatever.  Yoda seemed perfect to me.  

I don’t think it’s the best lightsaber fight in Star Wars, but seeing Kylo Ren and Rey fight together was really cool.  Was great to see the combat training the actors have done get a few minutes to shine.

BB-8.  Big fan.  I don’t understand why BB-8 didn’t get a moment to take out BB-9e while in that 1st Order Chicken Walker.  Would have been a quick scene and very satisfying.  Oh well.

The big ground assault on the rebel base at the end was great. That’s the ground battle I expected from the trailer of ROGUE ONE that didn’t seem to be in the movie.  I wonder if there’s a connection?

All of the performances were superb.  Carrie Fisher especially.  

The film was a series of several, often disconnected moments, that I thought were really good.

Now the bad stuff.  I find it insanely annoying and not a little condescending to allege that people who do not like THE LAST JEDI are obsessive fanboys who cannot let go of the past.   Or that we don’t understand the goals and themes of the film.  I get it.  Conceptually, I’m on board.  I’m VERY ready for the formula of STAR WARS to be reinvented.   I don’t need to see rehashes of Sith vs Jedi, Empire vs Rebellion, Skywalker vs Skywalker.  It’s tired. I know.   Dudes wanna fly off half-cocked into conflict when they should listen to the counsel of wiser women.  I KNOW.

Just… be good at doing those things.

So here’s what I hated:

The film doesn’t actually move the story forward.  The movie ends with the same status quo as the beginning:  

the 1st Order has the New Republic Resistance on the ropes and is assaulting their base.

Rey doesn’t have a teacher.

The 1st Order is exactly as effective with Snoke cut into pieces as it was when he was alive.

The Resistance is exactly as effective when a demoted Commander leads a mutiny against a Vice Admiral as it was with General Leia in charge.  

This film sets on fires many dangling plot points set-up by JJ in VII only to return the story to the same position.

And so on.  You get it.  It’s the illusion of change.  

I hated every scene with Luke Skywalker.    Man, just one huge bummer after another.   And again, conceptually, I can by that he’s at least a Grey Jedi now and believes both the Sith and Jedi are wrong in the possessive perspectives on the Force.  I can buy that he went off to Ach-To to cut himself off from the Force and die.  I can buy that he, in a moment of weakness, could not figure out how to save Ben Solo from the Dark Side and was tempted himself to take the quick and easy path.  He did, after all, cut Darth Vader’s hand off in the Death Star II Throne room.

But all of those things were executed in a clumsy way that seemed to have little regard for the character. It was a gigantic bummer.  Would have also been nice if someone had bothered to tell Luke that his best friend died at the hands of his own son.  Maybe that’s what Chewie told him?  Or Artoo?  But I dunno.  It’s not clear and they gave Mark Hamill nothing to work with in those moments.  

I absolutely hated his hero moment at the end.  Why set up Old Logan Luke who doesn’t want to face down the entire 1st Order with a laser sword in the 1st Act if he does it but not really in the 3rd Act?  There’s a wishy-washy desire to have things both ways in this film that drives me nuts.

Also, Luke on Denouement Planet was the clunkiest “misdirect” of the entire film.  I’ve only seen the film once and at my first viewing, it was obvious to me that this was not actually Luke.  

A) We’ve just seen three different flashbacks of Jedi Master Luke from his New Jedi Academy days after RotJ. And Denouement Luke looks exactly like Jedi Master Luke and not the Wild Man of Borneo from the first two Acts.

B)  the movie makes a big deal of showing us that the slightest disturbance to the surface crust of that salt pan will reveal the red dust underneath (which was a rad visual element).   And when Kylo Ren sets his foot in Sith Action Pose, we see the red underneath.  Whereas Luke is clearly NOT disrupting anything.  

C) How dumb is Kylo Ren that even though he just destroyed Anakin Skywalker’s blue lightsaber 10 minutes before landing, Luke is somehow wielding it?  I think there’s an argument to be made that Luke intentionally chooses a younger visage of himself (of the last time Ben Solo saw him) and is also using his own legacy against him (Anakin’s lightsaber) to put him off balance. But the film does not convey this.

All combined, these three elements rob all the underlying drama tension from that conflict because it’s obvious he isn’t there.

The dialogue was troublesome for me.  I legit sat there, stunned, at the end looking for a Diablo Cody writing credit. Remember how I loved the opening battle? Everything but that bit with Poe and Hux.  It was funny the first time.  The, “Holding for Hux” part after Hux did his nefarious monologue.  But they kept hitting that same beat.  Over and over.  I would have not batted an eye had Poe called Hux, “homeslice” in that moment. Thus, Diablo Cody.  

Also, Snoke’s “spunk.” line. Lolwut?  Though I had a chuckle and thought to myself, “… and wriggling” after Andy Serkis said, “raw.”

Why do they keep wasting Gwendoline Christie as Phasma?  Have they not seen GAME OF THRONES?  Are they unaware of the jewel in their crown?

The editing.  This film needs a good once-over to trim about 20 minutes out.  Do we need to see Luke milking a Watto-Cow or spearfishing?  Did we need to see Luke’s X-Wing parked underwater when it’s just an unnecessary head-fake?  As much as I did enjoy the casino bit, it felt over-stuffed.  

The wishy-washiness. Oh man.  This is the ultimate dealbreaker for me.  Look, I don’t mind Rey is the daughter of a couple Trump voters from Jakku with no connection to the Skywalkers.  The scene where Kylo Ren tells her, “You don’t even belong here. No one cares about you but me.” is fantastic.  I loved it. I love their relationship and I hope to all the cinema gods they stick to their guns and don’t reveal that Ben and Rey are just Jacen and Jaina Solo lite.  

Don’t waste our precious film time in VII making a huge mystery deal out of who Rey is and who her parents are in VII just to reveal in VIII that she’s nobody from nowhere one-hundredth of her name.  And don’t especially get pissy at me because I’m frustrated that you wasted my time on a non-mysterious mystery.  That’s false drama, breh.  And a really hacky way to “deconstruct” a story.

If you’re going to really deconstruct what we know about this story and these characters, then do it.  “Flip you. Flip you, for real.”  Don’t try to have your space cake and eat it too.    

Luke is done with this mess and isn’t going to show up and play the hero.  Until he does.  But not really.  

Kylo Ren has good in him, but not really.

Rey has darkness in her, but not really.

Now, this is not the same thing as a character arc.  I don’t lump this in with Poe being a brash self-centered pilot at the beginning but a real leader by the end.  I’m for that.  

I’m talking about if LAST JEDI were broken into numerical values, for every 1 there is a -1 and the story of the movie feels like a sum of 0.

Now, there are a lot of nitpicky things I’ve shared with the people in my life (most of whom are glad I’ve turned my focus to the internet).  Like, “what’s the deal with Snoke?  Who is he and what does he want?”  That’s just subjective, “season-to-taste” stuff that grates on me but I don’t feel objectively bad.   “Who is Snoke and what does he want?” was not a focal point of the previous film.  

Samey-same with Holdo not sharing her plan.  Finn’s plan actually not accomplishing anything.  If they knew they were being tracked and had two jumps left and a 6 minute window, why not prepare the transports, jump the old rebel base, unload the transport and jump again in 5 minutes?  That kind of thing.  You know, things people call, ���plot holes” on the internet that are not actually plot holes.

Leia Force Flying through space after the bridge exploded.  Just looked dumb.  If there was any excuse for Leia to bust out a lightsaber, this was the moment.  That would have been choice.    Tangential to this: the unceremonious death of Admiral Ackbar.

But those are digressions.

I would probably like this story much more if it were the last half of FORCE AWAKENS rather than a movie all unto itself.

That said, I think this petition to remove TLJ from the canon of SW films is idiotic.  This film is going to make a billion dollars by New Years and Disney appears to be giving Rian Johnson his own spinoff franchise. So yeah, this movie isn’t going anywhere.  

I also think its real low class to jump on twitter and be a raging dickmunch to Rian Johnson.  I’ll never understand why people punish creators for being easily accessible.   Or to people who loved the movie.  I’m not here to convince you that you shouldn’t love THE LAST JEDI or tell you you’re a dumb-dumb if you did.  I simply find it difficult to like for Star Wars movie reasons and movie-movie reasons.

I actually look forward to Johnson’s spinoff film because he seems much more comfortable with new characters.  I think he’s a person like Zahn who will add a lot of new hated and loved characters. But unlike Zahn, I don’t think he has a steady hand with legacy characters.

So that’s it.  6 pages on a Word document later (assuming you stuck around).  Feel free to hit me back on the twitterbox to tell me how both right and wrong I am!

May the Force be something or other.  But probably not.