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What’s so Funny About Vengeance, the Night, and Batman? – Two Superhero Parodies in Conversation

Back in 2016, the first trailers for Director Chris McKay’s The Lego Batman Movie hit. A spinoff of the take on the iconic hero, voiced by Will Arnett, from 2014’s The Lego Movie. Those trailers spelled out a plot covering how Batman’s life of crimefighting is turned upside down when Robin unexpectedly enters the picture. It was a funny trailer, promising another insightful comedy from the crew behind The Lego Movie. A promise it handily delivered on when it came out in February 2017 with an animated feature steeped wall-to-wall jokes for the sake of mocking Bruce Wayne’s angst filled crusade that can only come from understanding what’s made the character withstand the test of time.

But there was a thought I and others had from seeing that trailer up to watching the actual movie:

“This seems… familiar.”

Holy Musical B@man! is a 2012 fan-made stage production parody of DC Comics’ biggest cash cow. It was produced as the fifth musical from YouTube-based cult phenomenon Starkid Productions, from a book by Matt and Nick Lang, music by Nick Gage and Scott Lamp with lyrics by Gage. The story of the musical details how Robin’s unexpected entrance ends up turning Batman’s (Joe Walker) life of crimefighting upside down. Among Starkids’ fandom derived projects in their early existence, as they’ve mainly moved on to well-received original material in recent years, Holy Musical B@man! is my personal favorite. I go back to it frequently, appreciating it as a fan of both superheroes and musicals. (Especially since good material that touches on both of those isn’t exactly easy to come by. Right, Spider-Man?)

While I glibly summarized the similarities between them by oversimplifying their plots, there’s a lot in the details, both major and minor, that separates how they explore themes like solitude, friendship, love, and what superhero stories mean. It’s something I’ve wanted to dig into for a while and I found a lot in both of them I hadn’t considered before by putting them in conversation. I definitely recommend watching both of them, because of how in-depth this piece goes including discussing their endings. However, nothing I can say will replace the experience of watching them and if I had included everything I could’ve commented on in both of them, this already massive piece would easily be twice as long minimum.

Up front, I want to say this isn’t about comparing The Lego Batman Movie and Holy Musical B@man in terms of quality. Not only are they shaped for vastly different mediums with different needs/expectations, animation versus stagecraft, but they also had different resources at their disposal. Even if both are in some ways riffing on the aesthetic of the 1990s Batman movies and the Adam West TV show, Lego Batman does it with the ability to make gorgeously animated frames packed to the brim with detail while Holy Musical often leans into its low-fi aesthetic of characters miming props and sets to add extra humor. They’re also for different audiences, Lego Batman clearly for all-ages while Holy Musical has the characters cursing for emphasis on a regular basis. On top of those factors, after picking through each of these for everything worth commenting on that I could find, I can’t say which I wholly prefer thanks in part to these fundamental differences.

This piece is more about digging through the details to explore the commonalities, differences, and what makes them effective mocking love letters to one of the biggest superheroes in existence.

(Also, since I’m going to be using the word “Batman” a lot, I’ll be calling Lego Batman just “Batman” and referring to the version from Holy Musical as “B@man”, with the exception of quoted dialogue.)

[Full Piece Under the Cut]

Setting the Tone

The beginning is, in fact, a very good place to start when discussing how these parodies frame their versions of the caped crusader. Each one uses a song about lavishing their respective Batmen with praise about how they are the best superheroes ever and play over sequences of the title hero kicking wholesale ass. A key distinction comes in who’s singing each song. Holy Musical B@man’s self-titled opening number is sung from the perspective of an omniscient narrator recounting B@man’s origin and later a chorus made up of the Gotham citizenry. Meanwhile, “Who’s the (Bat) Man” from Lego Batman is a brag-tacular song written by Batman about himself, even playing diegetically for all his villains to hear as he beats them up.

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Holy Musical opens on a quick recap of Batman’s origin:

“One shot, Two shots in the night and they’re gone And he’s all left alone He’s just one boy Two dead at his feet and their blood stains the street And there’s nothing, no there’s nothing he can do!”

We then get a Bat-dance break as the music goes from slow and moody to energetic to reflect Batman turning that tragedy into the driving force behind his one-man war on crime. Assured by the narrator that he’s “the baddest man that there’s ever been!” and “Now there’s nothing, no there’s nothing he can’t do!” flipping the last lyric of the first verse. For the rest of the opening scene the lyrics matter less than what’s happening to establish both this fan-parody’s version of Batman and how the people of Gotham (“he’ll never refuse ‘em”) view him.

Lego Batman skips the origin recap, and in general talks around the death of the Waynes to keep the light tone going since it’s still a kids movie about a popular toy even if there are deeper themes at play. Instead, it continues a trend The Lego Movie began for this version of the character writing music about how he’s an edgy, dark, awesome, cool guy. While that movie kept it to Batman angry-whiteboy-rapping about “Darkness! NO PARENTS!”, this one expands to more elaborate boasts in the song “Who’s the (Bat) Man” by Patrick Stump:

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“In the darkest night I make the bad guys fall There’s a million heroes But I’m the best of them all!”

Batman singing this song about himself, as opposed to having it sung by others aims the crosshairs of parody squarely on the hero’s ego. His abilities make fighting his villains effortless, like this opening battle is more an opportunity to perform the song than a life-or-death struggle. Even Joker’s aware of that as he shouts, “Stop him before he starts singing!” This Batman doesn’t see himself as missing out on anything in life, even if he still feels that deep down. Being Batman is the coolest thing in the world that anyone would envy. He’s Batman, therefore everyone should envy him.

The songs aren’t only part of the equation for how these two works’ opening scenes establish their leading hero. While both songs are about Batman being cool, they’re separated by the accompanying scenes. Lego Batman keep the opening within the Joker’s perspective until Batman shows up and the action kicks in. Once it does, we’re shown a Batman at the top of his solo-hero game. Meanwhile, Holy Musical’s opening is about B@man building his reputation and by the end of the song he has all the citizens of Gotham singing his praises with the titular lyrics. Both are about being in awe of the title hero, one framed by Joker’s frustration at Batman’s ease in foiling his schemes yet again and the other about the people of Gotham growing to love their city’s hero (probably against their better judgement.)

That’s woven into the fabric of what kind of schemes Batman is foiling in each of these. Joker’s plan to bomb Gotham with the help of every supervillain in Batman’s Rogues Gallery is hilariously high stakes and the type of plan most Batman stories, even parodies, would save for the climax. Neatly exemplified by how that’s almost the exact structure of Holy Musical’s final showdown. Starting with these stakes works as an extension of this Batman’s nature as a living children’s toy and therefore the embodiment of a child’s idea of what makes Batman cool, his ability to wipe the floor with anyone that gets in his way “because he’s Batman.” It also emphasizes Joker as the only member of the Rogues Gallery that matters to Lego Batman’s story, every other Bat-villain is either a purely visual cameo or only gets a couple lines maximum.

The crime’s being stopped by B@man are more in the ��Year One” gangster/organized crime category rather than anything spectacle heavy. Though said crimes are comically exaggerated:

Gangster 1: Take these here drugs, put ‘em into them there guns, and then hand ‘em out to those gamblin’ prostitutes! Gangster 2: Should we really be doing these illegal activities? In a children’s hospital for orphans?

These fit into that model of crime the Dark Knight fights in his early days and add tiny humanizing moments between the crooks (“Oh, Matches! You make me laugh like nobody else!”) in turn making the arrival of B@man and the violence he deals out a stronger punchline. Further emphasized by the hero calling out the exact physical damage he does with each hit before warning them to never do crime again saying, “Support your families like the rest of us! Be born billionaires!” Later in the song his techniques get more extreme and violence more indiscriminate, as he uses his Bat-plane to patrol and gun down whoever he sees as a criminal, including a storeowner accidentally taking a single dollar from his own register. (“God’s not up here! Only Batman!”)

A commonality between these two openings is how Commissioner Jim Gordon gets portrayed. Both are hapless goofs at their core, playing more on the portrayal of the character in the 60s TV show and 90s Burton/Schumacher movies than the serious-minded character present in comics, Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, and other adaptations. Lauren Lopez’s portrayal in Holy Musical gets overwhelmed by everything thrown at him, eventually giving up and getting out of B@man’s way (“I’m not gonna tell Batman what to do! He’s Batman!”) Hector Elizondo’s Gordon in Lego Batman clearly reached the “stay out of Batman’s way” point a long time ago, happy to have “the guy who flips on the Bat-signal” be his sole defining trait. While the characterizations are close, their roles do end up differing. Lopez’s Gordon sticks around to have a few more comedic scenes as the play goes on, where Elizondo’s exist to set up a contrast with his daughter Barbara and her way of approaching Batman when she becomes Police Commissioner.

These opening sequences both end in similar manners as well; the citizens of Gotham lavishing praise on their respective Batmen and a confrontation between Batman and the Joker. Praise from the citizenry in Holy Musical comes on the heels of a letter from B@man read out on the news about how much they and the city of Gotham suck. They praise B@man for his angsty nature as a “dark hero” and how they “wouldn’t want him any other way!”, establishing the motif of Gotham’s citizens in Holy Musical as stand-ins for the Batman fandom. Lego Batman uses the praise of the Gotham citizens after Batman’s victory in the opening scene as a lead in to contrast their certainty that Batman must have an exciting private life with the reality we’re shown. Which makes sense since Lego-Batman’s relationship to the people of Gotham is never presented as something at stake.

Greater contrast comes in how the confrontations with the Joker are handled, Lego Batman has an argument between the hero and villain that’s intentionally coded as relationship drama, Batman saying “There is no ‘us’” when Joker declares himself Batman’s greatest enemy. The confrontation in Holy Musical gets purposefully underplayed as an offstage encounter narrated to the audience as a Vicki Vale news report. This takes Joker off the board for the rest of the play in contrast to the Batman/Joker relationship drama that forms one of Lego Batman’s key pillars. While they take different forms, the respective citizenry praise and villain confrontation parts of these openings lead directly into the number one common thematic element between these Bat-parodies: Batman’s loneliness.

One is the Darkest, Saddest, Loneliest Number

Batman as an isolated hero forms one of the core tenants of the most popular understanding of the character. Each of these parodies picks at that beyond the broody posturing. There’s no dedicated segment in this piece about how these works’ versions of the title character function bleeds into every other aspect of them, but each starts from the idea of Batman as a man-child with trouble communicating his emotions. Time’s taken to give the audience a view of where their attitudes have left them early in the story.

Both heroes show their loneliness through interactions with their respective Alfreds. Holy Musical has the stalwart butler, played by Chris Allen, try to comfort B@man by asking if he has any friends he enjoys being around. When B@man cites Lucius Fox as a friend he calls him right away, only to discover Lucius Fox is Alfred’s true identity and Alfred Pennyworth was an elaborate ruse he came up with to protect Bruce on his father’s wishes. Ironically, finding out his closest friend was living a double life causes Bruce to push Alfred away (the play keeps referring to him as Alfred after this, so that’s what I’m going to do as well.) After he’s fired he immediately comes back in a new disguise as “O’Malley the Irish Butler” (same outfit he wore before but with a Party City Leprechaun hat.) That’s unfortunately the start of a running gag in Holy Musical that ends up at the worst joke in the play, when Alfred disguises himself as “Quon Li the Chinese Butler” doing an incredibly cringeworthy “substituting L’s for R’s” bit with his voice. It’s been my least favorite bit in the play since I first saw it in 2012 and legitimately makes me hesitate at times to recommend it. Even if it’s relatively small bit and the rest holds ups.

That disclaimer out of the way, that conversation between B@man and Alfred leads into the title hero reflecting on his sadness through the musical’s I Want Song, “Dark, Sad, Lonely Knight.” The song’s split into two halves, the first Alfred reflecting on whether he played a part in Bruce’s current condition and the second B@man longing for a connection. The song does a good job balancing between the sincerity over the hero’s sadness and getting good laughs out of it:

“Think of the children Next time you gun down the mama and papa Their only mama and papa Because they probably don’t have another mama and papa!”

The “I Want” portion of the song coming in the end with the repetition of the lryics “I want to be somebody’s buddy.”

Rather than another song number, Lego Batman covers Batman’s sadness through a pair of montages and visual humor. The first comes after the opening battle, where we see Batman taking off all his costume except for the mask hanging out alone in Wayne Manor, showing how little separation he puts between identities. Compared to Holy Musical where the equivalent scene is the first we see of Bruce without the mask on, which may come down to practicality since anyone who’s worn a mask like that knows they get hot and sweaty fast. Batman is constantly made to appear small among the giant empty rooms of his estate as he eats dinner, jams on his guitar, and watches romantic movies alone.

Ralph Fienne’s Alfred coming in at the end of this sequence witnessing Batman looking at a photo of himself as a boy with his parents for the last time. Alfred outlines Batman’s fear of being part of a family again only to be met with Batman denying he has any feelings ever. Pennyworth’s role as a surrogate father gets put into greater focus here than in Holy Musical, as we get glimpses of Alfred reading a book titled “How to Deal with Your Out-of-Control Child.” Also shown in smaller scenes of Alfred dealing with Batman’s insistent terminology for his crime fighting equipment, like calling his cowl an “armored face disguise.”

Batman’s denial of his pain contrasts how B@man wallows in it. Though he’s forced to confront it a little as the Joker’s plan ends up leaving him with no crimefighting to fall back on to ignore his issues. This montage gets set to the song “One” by Harry Nilsson and details Batman, unable to express his true feelings, eventually letting them out in the form of tempter tantrums. There’s also some humor through juxtaposition as Batman walks solemnly through the streets of Gotham City, rendered black and white, as the citizens chant “No more crime!” in celebration, while flipping over cars and firing guns into the air.

A disruption to their loneliness eventually comes in the form of a sensational character find.

Robin – The Son/BFF Wonder

Between both Bat-parodies, the two Robins’ characterizations are as close as anyone’s between them. Each is nominally Dick Grayson but are ultimately more representative of the idea of Robin as the original superhero sidekick and his influence on Batman’s life. The play and movie also both make the obvious jokes about Dick’s name and the classic Robin costume’s lack of pants at different points. Dick’s origin also gets sidestepped in each version to skip ahead to the part where he starts being an influence in Batman’s life.

Robin’s introduction to the comics in Detective Comics #38 in 1940, marking the start of Batman’s literal “Year Two” as a character, predating the introduction of Joker, Catwoman, and Alfred, among others. Making him Batman’s longest lasting ally in the character’s history. His presence and acrobatics shift the tone by adding a dash of swashbuckling to Batman’s adventures, inspired by the character’s namesake Robin Hood, though both parodies take a page out of Batman Forever and associate the name with the bird for the sake of a joke. Robin is as core to Batman as his origin, but more self-serious adaptations (i.e., the mainstream cinematic ones that were happening around the times both Holy Musical and Lego Batman came out) tend to avoid the character’s inclusion. These two works being parody, therefore anything but self-serious, give themselves permission to examine why Robin matters and how different characters react to his presence. Rejection of Robin as a character and concept comes out in some form in each of these works, from Batman himself in Lego Batman and the Gotham citizens in Holy Musical.

The chain of events that lead to Dick becoming Robin in Lego Batman are a string of consequences for Batman’s self-absorption. A scene of Bruce barely listening as Dick asks for advice on getting adopted escalating to absentmindedly signing the adoption paperwork. Batman doesn’t realize he has a son until after his sadness montage. Alfred forces Batman to start interacting with Dick against his will. The broody loner wanting nothing to do with the cheery kid, played to “golly gee gosh” perfection by Michael Cera, until he sees the utility of him. Batman doesn’t even have the idea to give Robin a costume or codename because he clearly views the sidekick’s presence as a temporary measure for breaking into Superman’s fortress, made clear by how he lists “expendable” as a quality Dick needs if he wants to go on a mission.

This makes Robin the catalyst for Batman’s shifting perspective throughout Lego Batman. When Robin succeeds in his first mission, the Dark Knight is hesitant to truly compliment him and chalks up his ward’s feats to “unbelievable obeying.” Other moments have Robin’s presence poke holes in Batman’s tough guy demeanor, like the first time Batman and Robin ride in the Bat-mobile together, Robin asks where the seatbelts are and Batman growls “Life doesn’t give you seatbelts!”, only for Batman to make a sudden stop causing Robin to hit his head on the windshield and Batman genuinely apologizes. They share more genuine moments together as the film goes, like Batman suggesting they beatbox together to keeps their spirits up after they’ve been imprisoned for breaking into Arkham Asylum. Robin’s representative of Batman gradually letting people in throughout these moments.

On the exact opposite end of the spectrum, B@man needs zero extra prompting to let Robin into his life. Nick Lang’s Robin (henceforth called “Rob!n” to keep with this arbitrary naming scheme I’ve concocted) does get brought into his life by Alfred thanks to a personal ad (“‘Dog for sale’? No… ‘Orphan for sale’! Even better!”) but it’s a short path to B@man deciding to let Dick fight alongside him. The briefest hesitance on the hero’s part, “To be Batman… is to be alone”, is quelled by Rob!n saying “We could be alone… together.” Their first scene together quickly establishing the absurd sincerity exemplified by this incarnation of the Dynamic Duo. An energy carried directly into the Act 1 closing number, “The Dynamic Duet”, a joyful ode between the heroes about how they’re “Long lost brothers who found each other” sung as they beat up supervillains (and the occasional random civilian.)

That song also ties into the contrast between the Batman/Robin dynamic and the B@man/Rob!n one. While Holy Musical is portraying a brotherly/BFF bond between the two heroes, Lego Batman leans into the surrogate son angle. While both are mainly about their stories’ Batman being able to connect with others, the son angle of Lego Batman adds an additional layer of “Batman needs to take responsibility for himself and others” and a parallel to Alfred as Batman’s own surrogate father. It also adds to the queer-coding of Batman in Lego Batman as Batman’s excuse to Robin for why he can go on missions is that Bruce and he are sharing custody, Robin even calling Batman’s dual identities “dads” before he knows the truth.

In the absence of the accepting personal responsibility through fatherhood element, the conflict Rob!n brings out in Holy Musical forms between B@man and the citizens of Gotham. “Citizens as stand-ins for fandom” is at it’s clearest here as the Act 2 opener is called “Robin Sucks!” featuring the citizens singing about how… well, you read the title. Their objections to Rob!n’s existence has nothing to do with what the young hero has done or failed to do, but come from arguments purely about the aesthetic of Rob!n fighting alongside B@man. Most blatantly shown by one of the citizens wearing a Heath Ledger Joker t-shirt saying Rob!n’s presence “ruins the gritty realism of a man who fights crime dressed as a bat.” It works as the Act 2 opener by establishing that B@man and the citizens conflicting opinions on his sidekick end up driving that half of the story, exemplified in B@man’s complete confusion about why people hate Rob!n (“Robin ruined Batman? But that’s not true… Robin make Batman happy.”)

Both Robins play into the internal conflict their respective mentors are going through, but what would a superhero story, even a parody, be without some colorful characters to provide that sweet external conflict.

Going Rogue

Both works have the threat comes from an army of villains assembled under a ringleader, Zach Galifianakis’s Joker in Lego Batman and Jeff Blim as Sweet Tooth in Holy Musical. Both lead the full ensemble of Batman’s classic (and not so classic) Rogues at different points. As mentioned before Joker starts Lego Batman with “assemble the Rogues, blow up Gotham” as his plan, while Sweet Tooth with his candy prop comedy becoming the ringleader of Gotham’s villains is a key turning point in Act 1 of the play. Part of this comes down to how their connections to their respective heroes and environments are framed, Sweet Tooth as a new player on the scene and Joker as Batman’s romantic foil.

Lego Batman demonstrates Batman and Joker are on “finishing each other’s sentences” levels of intimate that Batman refuses to acknowledge. Shown best in how Joker’s plan only works because he can predict exactly how Batman will act once he starts playing hard to get. When he surrenders the entire Rogues Gallery (without telling them) and himself to police custody, he describes it as him being “off the market.” He knows Batman won’t settle for things ending on these terms and tricks the hero into stealing Superman’s Phantom Zone projector so he can recruit a new, better team of villains for a take two of his masterplan from the start. Going through all this trouble to get Batman to say those three magic words; “I love hate you.” Joker as the significant other wanting his partner to finally reciprocate his feelings and commit works both as a play on how the Batman/Joker relationship often gets approached and an extension of the central theme. Batman is so closed off to interpersonal connections he can’t even properly hate his villains.

Sweet Tooth, while clearly being a riff Heath Ledger and Caesar Romero’s Jokers fused with a dash of Willy Wonka, doesn’t have that kind of connection with B@man. Though there are hints that B@man and his recently deceased Joker may have had one on that level. He laments “[Joker]’s in heaven with mom and dad. Making them laugh, I know it!” when recalling how the Clown Prince of Crime was the one person he enjoyed being around. This makes Joker’s death one of the key triggers to B@man reflecting on his solitude at the start of the play.

What Sweet Tooth provides the story is a threat to B@man’s new bond with Rob!n. Disrupting that connection forms the delicious center of the Candy King of Crime’s plan in Act 2. He holds Rob!n and Gotham’s people hostage and asks the citizens to decide via Facebook poll if the sidekick lives or dies (in reference to the infamous phone hotline vote from the comic book story A Death in the Family where readers could decide the Jason Todd Robin’s fate.)

With the rest of the villains under the leadership of the respective works’ main antagonists, there’s commentary on their perceived quality as threats. When Holy Musical has Superman talking to Green Lantern about how much B@man’s popularity frustrates him, he comes down especially hard on the Caped Crusader’s villains. Talking about how they all coast by on simple gimmicks with especially harsh attention given to Two Face’s being “the number two.” Saying they’re only famous because B@man screws up and they get to do more damage. Which he compares to his own relationship with his villains:

Superman: You ever heard of Mr. Mxyzptlk? Green Lantern: No. Superman: No, that’s right! That’s because I do my job!

Lego Batman has commentary on the other villains come from Joker, recognizing that even all together they can never beat Batman, because that’s how a Batman story goes. The other villains get portrayed as generally buffoonish, struggling to even build a couch together and described by Joker as “losers dressed in cosplay.” Tricking Batman into sending him to the Phantom Zone provides him the opportunity to gather villains from outside Batman’s mythos and outside DC Comics in general. Recruiting the likes of Sauron, King Kong, Daleks, Agent Smith from The Matrix, and the Wicked Witch of the West, among others. When I first saw and reviewed The Lego Batman Movie, this bugged me because it felt like a missed opportunity to feature lesser-known villains from other DC heroes’ Rogues Galleries. Now, considering the whole movie as meta-commentary on the status of this Batman as a children’s toy, it makes perfect sense that Joker would need to go outside of comics to break the rules of a typical Batman story and have a shot at winning.

The Rogues of Holy Musical get slightly more of a chance to shine, if only because their song “Rogues are We” is one of the catchier tracks from the play. They’re all still more cameo than character when all’s said and done, but Sweet Tooth entering the picture is about him recognizing their potential to operate as a unit, takeover Gotham, and kill B@man. The candy-pun flinging villain wants all of them together, no matter their perceived quality.

Sweet Tooth: “We need every villain in Gotham. Cool themes, lame themes, themes that don’t match their powers, even the villains that take their names from public domain stories.” (Two Face’s “broke ass” still being the exception.)

Both Joker and Sweet Tooth provide extensions of the shared theme of Batman dealing with the new connections in his life, especially with regards to Robin. However, Robin isn’t the only other ally (or potential ally) these Dark Knights have on their side.

Super Friends(?)

The internal crisis of these Caped Crusaders come as much from how they react to other heroic figures as it does from supervillainous machinations. In both cases how Batman views and is viewed by fellow heroes gets centered on a specific figure, Superman in Holy Musical and Commissioner Barbara Gordon (later Batgirl) in Lego Batman. Each serves a vastly different purpose in the larger picture of their stories and relationship to their respective Batmen. Superman reflecting B@man’s loneliness and Barbara symbolizing a new path forward for Batman’s hero work.

Superman’s role in Holy Musical runs more parallel to Lego Batman’s Joker than Barbara. Brian Holden’s performance as the Man of Tomorrow plays into a projected confidence covering anxiety that nobody likes him. Besting the Bat-plane in a race during B@man’s Key to the City ceremony establishes a one upmanship between the two heroes, like Joker’s description of his relationship with Batman at the end of Lego Batman’s opening battle. Though instead of that romantically coded relationship from Lego Batman, this relationship is more connected to childish jealousy. (But if you do want to read the former into Holy Musical B@man, neither hero has an onstage relationship with any woman and part of their eventual fight consist of spanking each other.)

B@man and Superman’s first real interaction is arguing over who’s the cooler hero until it degrades into yelling “Fuck you!” at each other. B@man storming off in the aftermath of that gets topped off by Superman suggesting he should get the Key to the City instead, citing his strength and longer tenure as a hero (“The first hero, by the way”) as justifications. This only results in the Gotham citizens turning on him for suggesting their city’s hero is anything less than the best, which serves both as a Sam Raimi Spider-Man reference (“You mess with one of us! You mess with all of us!”) and another example of the citizens as stand-ins for fandom. Superman’s veil of cocksureness comes off quickly after that and stays off for the rest of the play. Starting with his conversation with Green Lantern where a civilian comes across them, but barely acts like Superman’s there.

One of the play’s running gags is Superman calling B@man’s number and leaving messages, showing a desperation to reach out and connect with his fellow hero despite initial smugness. Even before the first phone call scene, we see Superman joining B@man to sing “I want to be somebody’s buddy” during “Dark, Sad, Lonely Knight” hinting at what’s to come. The note it consistently comes back to is that Superman’s jealousy stems from Batman’s popularity over him. This is a complete flip of what Lego Batman does with the glimpse at a Batman/Superman dynamic we see when Batman goes to the Superman’s fortress to steal the Phantom Zone projector. The rivalry dynamic there exists solely in Batman’s head, Lego-Superman quickly saying “I would crush you” when Batman suggests the idea of them fighting. Superman’s status among the other DC heroes is also night and day between these works. Where Lego-Superman’s only scene in the movie shows him hosting the Justice League Anniversary Party and explaining he “forgot” to invite Batman, Superman in Holy Musical consistently lies about having friends over (“All night long I’m busy partying with my friends at the Fortress… of Solitude.”)

Superman’s relationship to B@man in Holy Musical develops into larger antagonism thanks to lack of communication with B@man brushing off Supes’ invitations to hang out and fight bad guys (“Where were you for the Solomon Grundy thing? Ended up smaller than I thought, just a couple of cool guys. Me and… Solomon Grundy.”) His own loneliness gets put into stronger focus when he sees the news of Rob!n’s debut as a crimefighter, which makes him reflect on how he misses having Krypto the Super-Dog around. (The explanation for why he doesn’t have his dog anymore is one of my favorite jokes in the play and I won’t ruin it here.)

Where Superman’s a reflection of B@man’s loneliness, Rosario Dawson as Barbara in Lego Batman is a confrontation of Batman’s go it alone attitude. Her job in the story is to be the one poking holes in the foundation of Batman as an idea, starting with her speech at Jim Gordon’s retirement banquet and her instatement as commissioner. She has a by-the-book outlook on crimefighting with the omnicompetence to back it up, thanks to her training at “Harvard for Police.” Babs sees Batman’s current way of operating as ineffectual and wants him to be an official agent of the law. An idea that dumps a bucket of cold water on Batman’s crush he developed immediately upon seeing her, though that never fully goes away.

Her main point is that Batman “karate chopping poor people” hasn’t made Gotham better in his 80 years of operating. A contrast to Holy Musical’s Jim Gordon announcing that B@man has brought Gotham’s crime rates to an all-time low (“Still the highest in the world, but we’re working on it.”) She wants to see a Batman willing to work with other people. A hope dashed constantly dealing with his childish stubbornness as he tries to foil Joker’s schemes on his own, culminating in her arresting Batman and Robin for breaking into Arkham to send Joker to the Phantom Zone.

Barbara’s role as the one bringing grown-up attitudes and reality into Batman’s world does leave her in the role of comedic straight woman. Humor in her scenes comes from how she reacts to everyone else’s absurdity rather than anything she does to be funny. This works for the role she plays in Lego Batman, since she’s not there to have an arc the way Superman does in Holy Musical. She’s another catalyst for Batman’s to start letting people in as another character he grows to care about. Which starts after she lets the Dynamic Duo out of prison to fight Joker’s new army of Phantom Zone villains on the condition that he plays it by her rules. Leading to a stronger bond between Batman, Robin, Alfred, and her as they start working together.

The two Batmen’s relationships to other heroes, their villains, Robin, and their own solitude each culminate in their own way as their stories reach their conclusions.

Dark Knights & Dawning Realizations

As everything comes down to the final showdowns in these Bat-parodies, the two Caped Crusaders each confront their failures to be there for others and allow themselves to be vulnerable to someone they’ve been antagonizing throughout the story. Each climax has all of Gotham threatened by a bomb and the main villains’ plans coming to fruition only to come undone.

Holy Musical has Sweet Tooth’s kidnapping of Rob!n and forcing Gotham to choose themselves or the sidekick they hate sends B@man into his most exaggerated state in the entire play. It’s the classic superhero movie climax conundrum, duty as a hero versus personal attachment. Alfred, having revealed himself as the “other butlers”, even lampshades how these stories usually go only for that possibility to get shot down by Bruce:

Alfred: A true hero, Master Wayne, finds a way to choose both. B@man: You’re right, Alfred. I know what I have to do… Fuck Gotham, I’m saving Robin!

B@man’s selfishness effectively makes him the real villain of Holy Musical’s second act. Lego Batman has shades of that aspect as well, where Batman gets sent to the Phantom Zone by Joker for his repeated refusal to acknowledge their relationship. Where the AI running the interdimensional prison, Phyllis voiced by Ellie Kemper, confronts him with the way he’s treated Robin, Alfred, Barbara, and even Joker:

Phyllis: You’re not a traditional bad guy, but you’re not exactly a good guy either. You even abandoned your friends. Batman: No! I was trying to protect them! Phyllis: By pushing them away? Batman: Well… yeah. Phyllis: Are they really the ones you’re protecting?

Batman watches what’s happening back in Gotham and sees Robin emulate his grim and gritty tendencies to save the day in his absence makes him desperately scream, “Don’t do what I would do!” It’s the universe rubbing what a jerk he’s been in his face. He’s forced to take a look at himself and make a change. B@man’s not made to do that kind of self-reflection until after he’s defeated Sweet Tooth but failed to stop the villain’s bomb. He’s ready to give up on Gotham forever and leave with Rob!n, until his sidekick pulls up Sweet Tooth’s poll and it shows the unanimous result in favor of saving the Boy Wonder. Despite everything they said at the start of Act 2, the people want to help their hero in return for all the times he helped them. All of them calling back to the Raimi Spider-Man reference from Act 1, “You mess with one of us. You mess with all of us.”

Both heroes’ chance at redemption and self-improvement comes from opening themselves up to the people they pushed out and dismissed earlier in their stories. Batman takes on the role he reduced the Commissioner down to at the beginning of the movie and flips on signals for Barbara, Alfred, and Robin to show how he’s truly prepared to work as a team, not just with his friends and family but with the villains of Gotham the Joker pushed aside as well. Teamwork makes the dream work and they’re all able to work together to get Joker’s army back into the Phantom Zone but like in Holy Musical they fail to stop the bomb threatening Gotham. Which he can only prevent from destroying the city by confessing his true feeling to Joker

Batman: If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have learned how connected I am with all of these people and you. So, if you help me save Gotham, you’ll help me save us. Joker: You just said “us?” Batman: Yeah, Batman and the Joker. So, what do you say? Joker: You had me at “shut up!”

The equivalent moment from Holy Musical comes from B@man needing to put aside his pride and encourage a disheartened Superman to save Gotham for him. This happens in the aftermath of a fight the two heroes had where Superman tried to stop B@man before he faced Sweet Tooth, B@man winning out through use of kryptonite. That fight doesn’t fit into any direct parallel with Lego Batman, but it is important context for how Superman’s feeling about B@man before Superman finally gets his long-awaited phone call from the Dark Knight. Also, the song accompanying the fight, “To Be a Man”, is one of the funniest scenes in the play. What this speech from B@man does is bring the idea of Holy Musical B@man as a commentary on fandom full circle:

B@man: I forgot what it means to be a superhero. But we’re really not that different, you and me, at our heart. I mean really all superheroes are pretty much the same… Something bad happened to us once when we were young, so we dedicated our whole lives to doing a little bit of good. That’s why we got into this crazy superhero business. Not to be the most popular, or even the most powerful. Because if that were the case, hell, you’d have the rest of us put out of a job!

This speech extends into an exchange between the heroes about how superheroes are cool, not despite anything superficially silly but because of it. Bringing it back to the “Robin Sucks!” theme that started Act 2, saying “Some people think Robin is stupid. But those people are pretentious douchebags. Because, literally, the only difference between Robin and me is our costumes.” The speech culminates in what I genuinely think is one of the best Batman lines ever written, as B@man’s final plea to Superman is “Where’s that man who’s faster than a gun?” calling back to the trauma that created Batman across all versions and what he can see in someone like Superman. So, B@man sacrificing his pride and fully trusting in another hero saves Gotham, the way Batman letting Joker know what their relationship means to him did in Lego Batman.

Each of these parodies ends by delivering a Batman willing to open himself up to a new team of heroes fighting at his side, the newly minted Bat-Family in Lego Batman and the league for justice known as the Super Friends in Holy Musical. Putting them side by side like this shows how creators don’t need the resources of a Hollywood studio to make something exactly as meaningful and how the best parodies come from love of the material no matter who’s behind them.

If you like what you’ve read here, please like/reblog or share elsewhere online, follow me on Twitter (@WC_WIT), and consider throwing some support my way at either Ko-Fi.com or Patreon.com at the extension “/witswriting”

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nautilusopus · 3 years

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do you have any favorite books?

Coraline by Neil Gaiman is the obvious answer lol. Still my favourite book to this day, obviously hugely influential in my own bullshit. Seriously check it out if you can find a copy, it’s pretty short and absolutely worth your time.

The Devil’s Storybook by Natalie Babbitt and its sequel (The Devil’s Other Storybook) are more of an anthology of short stories starring the Devil, who occupies every role from vague background presence to put-upon protagonist that are funny and thought-provoking and genuinely clever and that pissed enough people off that it was a banned book for a while. “The Imp in the Basket” is the kind of short story I wish more people knew about and wanted to sincerely discuss what actually happened at the end.

ugh i haven’t read a book i actually enjoyed in over ten years at this point uhhhhhh

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I think potentially the only classic I had to read in school that I genuinely liked and actually finished in one sitting on my own time. And I think the first time any themes a book had for me actually clicked and I was able to do any kind of meta analysis of it completely unprompted. Baby’s first literary comprehension. Slaughterhouse-Five is a semi-autobiographical piece set during the bombing of Dresden in WWII, and also some period in the “future” (the 80s lol), and ALSO on an alien planet as the protagonist is abducted and taken to a human zoo. The story is told achronologically, and I feel is hugely influential to my own shit where it skips around, building a narrative almost entirely by juxtaposing specific moments in time against one another. It's surreal and thought-provoking, and if you only ever make yourself read one classic, it should be this one. *

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien. Bear in mind this thing has fuck-all to do with the movie, and while in retrospect I now am able to enjoy the Don Bluth movie as its own thing, I remember being fucking furious when they busted out a goddamn magical amulet. It’s a different kind of story, but is more magic realism than outright fantasy, and the titular rats get a lot more backstory, as does the late Mr. Frisby iirc.

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo. God that book fucked me up. It is about a snotty porcelain toy rabbit that gets dropped overboard a ship into the ocean one day, and the various owners he has over the years as he changes hands, and the impacts they have on him, and it makes me fucking cry every time and is to date the only book to ever do so so fairly warned be ye. Fucking shit I wish I could dish out gut-punches half as good as that book could.

The His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman, which in and of itself is an angry rebuttal against everything the Chronicles of Narnia has to say, as well as Christianity in general. You’ve probably seen shit floating around about the HBO series, which I have not watched. Lyra is a horrible gremlin child running wild around a parallel universe Oxford until she accidentally stumbles onto a conspiracy that goes all the way to the Church which unofficially runs the government and eventually starts an interdimensional war against God. The first two books I think are better than the last one, which really drags in spots (and in a twist of irony had Lyra’s sexual awakening censored from the North American release which like... come on man). Absolutely worth checking out though, especially if you’re an angry pedant like I am.

Tales from the House of Bunnicula, by James Howe. Honestly the entire "Bunnicula Expanded Universe"(???) is great, but in particular I'm mentioning this sub-series because I think it actually kind of taught me to write. The framing device used is that they're being written by Howe's pet dog and sent in to him to publish by proxy. On top of having just a lot of good storytelling tips for beginners (how to create a plot! how to create character motivations! how to write female characters like actual people!), they're also fun little satire pieces of various kinds of genre fiction. Like, the third book is a riff on Harry Potter and making fun of all of JKR's worst writing tendencies, like her compulsion to phonetically write out everyone's fucking accent.

these days i'm just too picky to enjoy books anymore idfk. you have no idea how fucking disheartening it was growing up with actual taste (snooty snooty snoot) and watching everyone go nuts over stuff like divergent and eragon and maximum ride and fuckmothering twilight and shit. like, yeah misogyny absolutely played into why people shat on it because teenage girls aren't allowed to like anything, but lest we forget they were still shitty books guys. that never stopped being true or anything. and you were a social pariah if you didn't like them and that sucked. and then a couple ostensibly good series, like harry potter and artemis fowl and hunger games just dropped the fucking ball for one reason or another as they went on and never picked it back up. i think the mid 2000s almost singlehandedly just killed any real enthusiasm i had for reading altogether (this is not even getting into the fact a lot of really fucking bad "grown-up" novels came out around that period too. whole era was a baaaad time for books). so here i am writing, i guess, because i've decided you fuckers can't be trusted to make anything good yourselves. if you want something done right...

(*I like to think if Cloud wrote a book he’d write something like Slaughterhouse-Five. I think at one point I was even working on a fic along those lines -- a fictional story vaguely based off the burning of Nibelheim and the fall of Shinra that was written, in-universe, by Cloud several years later. Abandoned it just because of how fucking complicated it would be to do. Might come back to it one day.)

#asks #Anonymous

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unnecessarilygrandiose · 3 years

Text

I posted 2,983 times in 2021

100 posts created (3%)

2883 posts reblogged (97%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 28.8 posts.

I added 243 tags in 2021

#the raven cycle - 33 posts

#adam parrish - 31 posts

#the dreamer trilogy - 31 posts

#ronan lynch - 28 posts

#mister impossible - 26 posts

#the raven king - 23 posts

#maggie stiefvater - 20 posts

#tdt - 18 posts

#mi - 17 posts

#trk - 16 posts

Longest Tag: 140 characters

#i do hope they reveal in the next episodes that loki's 'feelings' for himself is just love-starvation and narcissism rather than actual love

My Top Posts in 2021

Listen. I am feeling extremely anxious to the point I have to remind myself to breathe because I need to talk about Young Royals. What a freaking amazing show. What. A. Freaking. Amazing. Show.

I mean there is so much I want to say about how perfect it is that I am overwhelmed because I have no idea where to start.

Okay. Okay. Deep breaths. Yes. There will be spoilers so if you haven't seen it I beg you to stop reading this and watch it at first opportunity.

Let's start with plot. What a plot. It wouldn't be difficult to make a plot where people say cliche things and do stupid stuff and make a story centred around misunderstandings and lack of communication but the writers, god bless them, did not do that. The characters communicated. The story had a life other than the teenagers being stupid and doing stupid teenager things. It moved forward and not at a single point it felt forced or dragged. Basically the story felt less like a story and more like it would if you were to actually start following around a bunch of boarding school teenagers around. Which is to say, realistic af.

The characters. The characters each had their own struggles. They were acknowledged without either being a huge deal or being stereotyped and glossed over. That's a balance which is hard to strike but the show struck it perfectly. No one was perfect and not one character did not grow. The popular girls could have been mean but were genuinely nice. Simon could have been a stereotype but had his own story, a life and friends outside Wilhelm. August was an imbecile and an asshole and the show made sure to highlight that instead of just portraying him as a villain. It would be easy to do that but in real life there are assholes more often than there are villains.

Acting, oh god those actors own my life now. The characters had flaws physically and they had awkward habits and you could actually feel exactly what they were feeling from the actors' faces.

The music. It felt as if the music contributed to the plot rather than just being there because something needs to be there. Omar Rudberg's voice is lovely.

The cinematography. I'm no expert but I just know some scenes wouldn't have been nearly as effective if not for the way they were shot. I mean, at the end when Wilhelm breaks the fourth wall and just stares at you, doesn't it give you goosebumps?

The sub plots. So happy that their romantic relationship wasn't the only thing about the whole show. People aren't only just their love lives, and the show made sure to do justice to that fact. Also really happy with where the plot left off. I want Simon and Wilhelm to be happy together of course, but I know it's not that easy and that their relationship needs to develop through the midst of all of the being outed but not really shit.

I would like to finish off with the highest compliment I can pay any show.

I have always preferred books to movies and shows because the internal monologue lets you feel exactly what the characters are feeling and that's a level of connection that you simply can't get if you're just watching their faces. But this show let me feel those things. It let me be them. More than once while writing this post I accidentally wrote something along the lines of 'reading the show' instead of watching it. Because watching Young Royals was as good as reading a well written book.

P.S. There simply needs to be a second season. I mean. Sara is accepting who she is rather than trying to fit in by kissing handsome assholes. Felice is standing up to her controlling mother. Wilhelm has indirectly acknowledged his relationship with Simon in front of the whole student body. The rebellion has begun. And we will see it to it's end, because if we don't, Netflix headquarters all over the world are burning down.

225 notes • Posted 2021-07-05 14:15:15 GMT

Okay why the hell is no one talking about the fact that PACEY BUNCE YEETED A CLASSROOM INTO THE VOID.

231 notes • Posted 2021-07-09 09:13:56 GMT

Rereading Red White & Royal Blue: Random stuff that I totally forgot happened:

Ellen Claremont was nicknamed Lometa Longshot by an Austin newspaper

June's in-flight reading list includes books like Death Comes for the Archbishop (don't know if it's even a real book, but the name is too funny)

Alex's favourite summer olympics sport is rhythmic gymnastics

Just before their This Morning interview, the crowd they're greeting includes a blue haired girl who's holding up a placard entitled GET IN ME, PRINCE HENRY!

BITCH MCCONNELL. Actually I didn't forget this but I couldn't not include it

Ellen used to hustle pool when she was sixteen doing homework at her mom's shitty bar

They kiss under a linden tree!

Alex takes a class named Ethical Issues in International Relations and wishes his classes weren't so painfully relevant to his life

binds Henry’s wrists to a hotel bedpost with his own necktie What. This happened and I didn't remember it. What.

We all remember the famed Ellen Claremont presentation, but the stuff surrounding it was just as funny. Like the way that particular meeting is called 'International Ethics and Sexual Identity Debrief', or when she reminds him to use a condom(he's 22, ma'am). But the prize, according to me, goes to: “Wait, honey,” she calls after him, “I had Planned Parenthood send over all these pamphlets, take one! They sent a bike messenger and everything!”

...so Alex is a good cook too. Ever the oblivious overachiever.

Alex is five-nine! After rounding up!

His codename is Barracuda. why

The day he gave his speech to the country was October 2nd, 2020. This is important to me

There is a minor scandal about Bea ordering cullen skinks on the day of Henry and Alex's officially courtship photographs

Alex calls Henry 'H'. Look the first time it happened I thought it was a one-off but it has happened 3 or 4 times now, why didn't I remember this,

Alex pooped his pants in the bus on the way back from the aquarium in fourth grade. (Alex disagrees, but. I guess we'll never know.)

238 notes • Posted 2021-10-24 08:48:47 GMT

The funniest thing about pynch is how Ronan is like a proper Victorian gentleman when going about his relationship with Adam. The whole slow burn in Blue Lily Lily Blue with the stolen glances and the mutual pining and the flirting but not really was nothing short of a proper courtship. Ronan asks for Adam's hand (get it? ronan and his obsession with hands?) on the day they are both legal age by kissing him in his childhood bedroom. And then in a very Mr. Darcy move he backs off immediately to let Adam think about it and stands on a roof smiling because even if Adam says no now, at least he was able to steal a moment of happiness. He does Not take Adam for granted the next day. And then they start living together in the Barns with their daughter psychopomp and pet raven and they're silly and sweet together and he looks at Adam's shoes carelessly lying on the porch and sees their future together. And when Adam goes off to college Ronan starts worrying about him finding someone better much like some rich Victorian wife whose husband has gone off to the Big City on a business tour. And all his thoughts about Adam are basically some version of 'If all else remained and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger' and then he unironically worries about having to share him with someone in heaven and then he worries about Adam's agnostic tendencies and then and then and then and then and then

391 notes • Posted 2021-09-26 07:37:44 GMT

Like, Neil's turn on is trust. I always imagine Neil properly started to fall for Andrew when Andrew give him the keys to the house. And everytime Andrew says something like 'I hate you,' but immediately disproves it by giving him the keys to his Maserati or kissing him or whatever, showing trust in minuscule ways, Neil smiles. No, that's a really big deal. This is a guy who hates his smile because it's like his father's and uses it as a weapon when he wants someone to see exactly how unhinged he is but when Andrew shows him trust, Neil genuinely smiles. The guy literally and canonically got a hard on because Andrew let him touch his hair. God bless these two.

464 notes • Posted 2021-08-19 02:17:24 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

#my 2021 tumblr year in review #didn't wanna post this intitially but thought i'd do it after all #because i realised how beautifully it encapsulates the fandom brainrot i've suffered this year #5 different fandoms that i'm active in featured in here #and the most interesting part of this is that i joined tumblr exactly one year ago so #yeah.

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botslayer · 5 years

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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) review (Long)

Star Wars has a place in all of our hearts, I think. This series has had literally galactic-scale highs and lows. Be it the video games, the movies, the comics, the novels, what have you, Star Wars is one of, if not THE biggest sci-fi universe in the world and one of the most important in all of nerd culture. After the controversial madness that was EVERYTHING about The Last Jedi, I felt the need to see this one. How does this new Trilogy end? Is it any good? Well, let's dig in. 1. Technical aspects The movie looks good for the most part. It's a lot of good CGI and descent puppetry, a lot of explosions, and a lot of color. All the places that the movie goes do feel genuinely unique to one another, so points there, I guess. But it has some serious issues with the editing. The editing is god awful for most of the movie, the camera flips around too much, I think. I don't want constant tracking shots but they keep jump-cutting all over rooms and very suddenly for scene transitions. There are a fair amount of wipes but only one scene transition actually stood out to me at the very start of the movie, everything else was kinda dull. This has to be addressed, Carrie Fisher is still in this movie. What they did was cut snippets of her head out of unused footage from Force Awakens and Last Jedi, then put it relatively well over the face of a body double. This allows her to exist in the movie but it isn't good. From an ethical standpoint and from how it affects the flow of her scenes. Her tone of voice doesn't feel right for any of the scenes she's in and her answers to what people say are usually just kinda weird, as well as what people say whilst responding to her. 2. Acting and characters (very lite Spoilers) The acting in the movie is okay generally. It's nothing to write home about though. It's solid and generally does the job but the characters themselves are a different story. One problem is that the movie introduces a shit ton of them, including but not limited too, (Spoiler warnings for this paragraph), Zorii Bliss, An old Spice running friend of Poe's who is trying to ape a Mandalorian (Like the society) vibe in the look of her outfit but doesn't do it well. Babu Frik, her tiny alien boss and a surprisingly tech-savvy little so-and-so. D-O, a small droid consisting of a cone head and a single wheel, voiced by JJ Abrahms. And Jannah, who like Finn, is a rogue Stormtrooper from the first order. Everyone and everything else introduced are just more generals for the "Final order" (A rebranding of the First Order) and a bunch of background aliens and stuff for the resistance. The main problem with these characters is none of them have time to develop because of how many are introduced. They try with Zorii, bless them, but her scenes are too short so her character doesn't "Develop" it just starts at one point and changes at the drop of a hat. And the returning Characters honestly aren't handled great either. Rey is okay for the most part, but Finn contributed just about nothing, Poe wasn't worth much more than a ride between planets, Kylo Ren goes back to wearing his old helmet for some reason and again, seems to change without much provocation. Leia's death is weird and kinda pointless, although I'm happy they won't do what they did again. The only consistently good, solid characters in the movie were the droids (Especially C3PO) and Chewbacca. Characters with very few lines or who literally cannot speak. That's such a weird thing to say, honestly. 3. Plot and thoughts as we go (Heavy Spoilers) A transmission has gone all across the galaxy, Emperor Palpatine lives. Kylo Ren is hunting for a "Sith Wayfinder" and Rey is training under Leia to become a better Jedi. Kylo finds the Wayfinder and goes to a sort of hidden Sith planet whereon he meets Palpatine, here it is revealed that Snoke was a clone made by Palpatine's servants, "The Nights of Ren" and that Palpatine was "Every voice Kylo heard in his head." (Not too subtle change into Darth Vader's voice as he speaks.) Kylo and Palpatine have a short exchange where the younger pledges both his and the First Order's services to him, in exchange, Palpatine will add a whole new fleet of Star Destroyers to them. Star Destroyers he literally just summons up from the ground. Hangar bay doors don't open, these things just slam up from the ground like titans of myth rising from ancient slumbers. And while that might sound cool, it comes with a lot of issues. For starters: Who made these things? The Knights of Ren? How old is that organization, then? How old are these ships? Why don't they have hangar doors overhead? Hell, we learn later that these things will bolster first Order forces by "Ten thousandfold." How many of these things are there? How many ships does the First Order (Now "The Final Order") have at this point? Anyway, back with the resistance. After a cameo by the best fictional game in the series, Holochess, we find that they're getting information from an ally I never caught the name of, flanked by some sort of weird alien on the ship who's apparently on a first name basis with Finn and Poe. We also learn the Final Order has a spy and a decent chase scene ensues. All well and good, but all this and the conspicuous lack of porgs makes me wonder how much time has actually passed between this movie and Last Jedi. Especially when we cut back to Rey who is trying to hear the voices of past Jedi but just realizes she can't and immediately drops the meditation in favor of running a training course. She ends up getting distracted while running it and accidentally drops a tree on BB8. She says to Leia that she will one day earn the right to use Luke's lightsaber... But it broke in the last movie. Again, can we please get a time stamp? Poe, Finn, Chewbacca, and their crew return, whereupon there's a kind of funny back and forth about what Rey did to BB8 and what Poe did to the Falcon during the chase. The highlight of which is "At least BB8 isn't on fire!" "What's left of him isn't!" During this breif stop, we learn that The Final Order is broadcasting their plans, in sixteen hours they will lay waste to entire worlds because as it turns out, the new ships that Palpatine gave them all have planet-destroying laser weapons on the bottom. A Fleet of Star Destroyers, each with Death Star-grade power. That's definitely upping the anti, I suppose. During this, we also learn that the "Wayfinder" Kylo went after is important because its the only way to find the planet Palpatine is holed up on, a world called "Exegol," you won't find it on any other maps. So the crew goes on a quest to find a man in service to the Sith, a bloke named "Ochi" who was last spotted on a planet called "Pasaana" because for some reason, Luke and Lando Calrissian were tracking him. The movie doesn't explain why they were after him, nor why they seemed to abandon the search. (Or when any of that happened, for that matter.) Our heroes journey to Pasaana where, as it turns out, there's a festival happening. One that celebrates family and ancestry. Cue the best comic relief in the movie, C3PO, as when Poe expresses that he isn't psyched about working with a crowd of people all around him, C3PO expresses elation, "We are very lucky, it only comes once every Forty-Two years--" Etc. Honestly, C3PO is the best part of the movie. As the resistance crew goes about the Festival, Rye gets a necklace from a local who asks for her family name, not just her given, but Rey just says she doens't have a family name. Kylo contacts Rey with their weird psychic bond they had in Last Jedi, and they have an interesting exchange about the last movie and her wanting to take his hand at the end but deciding against it, and how when he offers it this time, she will take it. He steals the necklace Rey got from off her throat because as established in TLJ, he can do stuff like that. He has Final Order members analyze the necklace and learns of the planet Rey and her cohorts are on while they gad about the festival looking for any sort of clues or leads. They end up getting found by Final Order Troopers, but saved by Lando, apparently, Leia told him where they were. They mention the resistance could use his help, but he just says that his flying days are behind him before he sends them off. The gang is followed by Final Order troopers, resulting in a chase scene, one I quite like. The Final Order has jet troopers now, and the crew basically just have their sidearms as weapons, having stolen vehicles from the locals. It's a very intense action scene, even when the crew crashes into "Not-quite-quicksand." Everyone starts sinking in and Finn says he's always wanted to tell Rey something. What it is goes unanswered as he sinks down. The lot of them have fallen into a cavern of some sort. They explore the cave until they find two things, Ochi's land cruiser, and Ochi, who as it turns out is long dead, nothing more than bones and whatever he had on him at the time. Rey digs through his body and finds a scary-looking dagger that has most definitely been used for some less than savory deeds, Rey sensing the negative force energy off it. 3PO tells them that the inscriptions all over the dagger are in Sith Runic. He CAN translate it, but he can't say it aloud. It has to do with Old Republic regulations on translation modules. They keep the dagger, at least. There's also a giant serpent, one the cast calm into letting Rey get close, whereupon we learn she has the ability to force-heal injuries. The snake lets them out and she explains that it's basically channeling some of her own life force into whatever she's healing, and when she sees Ochi's ship, she's unnerved. She knows it from the day her parents left her. Some true madness begins to unfold as Kylo shows up in his ship and Rey cuts one of the wings off, forcing it to crash. Chewbacca is captured and ostensibly killed accidentally by Rey because she summons force lightning and blows his transport's engines. There's another brief exchange with Kylo about him seeing the lightning for real, thus her capacity for darkness, before Finn and Poe tell her they NEED to leave. They do and Kylo radios for pick up as the Final Order literally toes the Millenium Falcon into a Star Destroyer. It is here we learn that Kylo knows about the spy in their ranks and that Chewbacca survived. While they waddle about in Ochi's ship, thinking of a plan, C-3PO reveals that there IS a way to get a translation out of him. Essentially they need to do a factory reset. This means 3PO will lose all memories of his friends and life. But what is that compared to a galaxy dominated by fear? Poe knows the man for the job, trouble is they need to go to a world called "Kijimi" where Poe made a booboo before joining the resistance. But again, literal planets worth of lives are at stake, so he swallows his lack of pride and they go. A not bad tracking shot of Poe creeping around the streets and finding it crawling with Final Order troopers later, his mistake comes up to him. Both her pistols drawn, and one to his head. We learn that "Zorii" and Poe's old outfit were spice runners, and their old friend "Babu Frik" is the guy they'll need to crack 3PO's head open. Babu only sees people who are part of the crew, which Poe no longer is. They eventually convince her and the other spice runners to let them in. There's a genuinely heart-wrenching moment where 3PO goes completely silent before the process gets going and he says he's just taking one last look at his friends. Meanwhile, we see Poe and Zorii on top of a building, Poe mentions how no one came after the last movie, their distress call was for nothing. Way to invalidate the most controversial movie in the series, you dolts. Also, Zorii seems to have changed for no reason. She went from not wanting to look in Poe's general direction to inviting him out to her new life as a farmer on some rock at the fringes of the galaxy. Poe turns her down because he has a war to fight, whether or not he wins. She gives him a First Order Captain's badge, which would allow docking in any Final Order ship or planet because the rebranding is only so recent, I guess. C-3PO gets rebooted and the crew learns what the inscription on the dagger means, but again, the cost is 3PO's memory. He reboots and introduces himself as "C-3PO, human-cyborg relations, who are you?" Babu introduces himself and Rey fixes the wheel on a robot found on Ochi's ship, a little cone head thing we don't learn the name of until about an hour later, "D-O." At about this point, Rey realizes what's in orbit just overhead, Kylo's flagship... And Chewbacca inside. The crew boards the ship to free Chewy and get the Falcon back, along the way, Rey mind tricks a couple of troopers, the crew shoots a few dead, and then she goes off on her own, trying to find something. Her scenes on the flagship are pretty awesome, as she enters Kylo Ren's quarters and starts not only talking to him again but also fights him. This leads to some very interesting cinematography, a fight where when they accidentally break things in their respective locations, they appear in front of the other, so for example, Kylo is in the streets of the city the crew was in, specifically a market in it. He cuts open a pot full of berries/nuts and they all appear on the ground in his chamber while Rey is fighting him. It's pretty impressive. During the fight, we also learn A. the real reason Rey's parents sold her: Protecting her from her grandfather. B. Who this grandfather is. The Emperor. Rey is seriously Palpatine's granddaughter. C. Rey's parents died protecting her. Kylo learns she's in his quarters when she accidentally destroys a podium, on which was resting Darth Vader's semi-melted helmet. From there, it all spirals out, Ren has them lock down the ship, Rey snags the dagger and Chewy's gear, Chewy, Finn, and Poe are caught, only to find out that general Hux is the spy who saves them When his motives are questioned, Hux says he doesn't care if the resistance wins. He wants Kylo to lose. Rey and Kylo have one more confrontation before the falcon shows up and Rey literally leaps into space to get on the entrance to the falcon. Where Finn is. Audibly screaming at her. Y'all can say what you want about a downward bombing in space probably not working very well in Last Jedi, but this is a whole new level of bullshit. Rey leams OUT OF A RAY SHIELD into the vacuum of space. I don't care that Leia survived being out way longer in TLJ, at least she wasn't audibly saying things as she went, at least it felt like she was in space instead of just a big random fall. Also worth noting, to ver their escape, they blast the bad guys with the Falcon's engine trails, this burns or knocks back all the Troopers but Kylo, who is standing roughly the same distance as at least two of them, and Rey, who is closer than ANY of them are unaffected. This one moment is more agitating to me than most of The Last Jedi, honestly. There's Wardian grade plot armor, and then there's this. The crew gets away and Hux is killed by another general because he figured out that Hux was the spy, they end up at another planet because of the inscription and the Falcon crashes, drawing the attention of "Jannah" and her random tribe of people. They resolve to fix the Falcon while waiting for the water to calm, something they at once have zero choice or time for. Turns out the Sith Wayfinder is on a hunk of the second Deathstar. Rant to come. While waiting for the water to calm and repairing the Falcon, we learn Janna is a rogue Storm Trooper, just like Finn. Her entire company was meant to open fire on civilians, but ALL OF THEM refused. Finn mentions he didn't think there were others but I have to question where Jannah's entire unit gets off doing that. How did all of them fight their programming? Moving on, BB8 raises a concern, he hasn't seen Rey in a while. Turns out she stole the rogue trooper's sea skimmer and rides the waves JUST right, so she can make it to the chunk of Deathstar. I was never big into the idea that Rey was a Mary Sue until this happened. I was willing to write everything else off up to this point but NO. She has NEVER used something like this. She spent most of her damn life on a planet with NO water and no point actually drove anything like this save for the land boat she stole from the natives during the festival but even then, it didn't have the quirks this thing had (It's a repurposed ship of some sort, she needs to constantly raise and lower an arm of the ship to reduce drag, I suppose.) I know this seems like the most random thing to officially stand in that camp, but what's that old saying about straws and camel's backs? Rey goes to the shard of the Deathstar and starts exploring, it's full of old classic Storm Trooper outfits, mostly helmets. She goes to the Emperor's old throne room and through an old door, she ends up in a kind of trippy, maze-like space until she finds the Wayfinder and faces a seemingly Sithified version of herself with a dark robe and a collapsable double-sided lightsaber. This version of her fights her for all of four seconds and is never seen again because normal Rey flees out of the room and into Kylo Ren's waiting gaze. Now, my question is WHY would Palpatine keep one of these things on the Deathstar 2? In case he wanted to go to Exegol? Why not keep it in a more remote location than about thirty feet to your left? It's an ancient Sith artifact, you'd figure he'd be more protective of it. But nooo. So Kylo breaks the Wayfinder Rey found, wasting all of our time, before engaging in a lightsaber fight on the outside of the ruins. Finn and Jannah catch up to see this but can't do anything, partly because if they don't hug the ground, the turbulent water below will likely send a wave up just high enough to knock them into the ocean, Rey and Kylo, however, are clear I guess because they have higher ground away from the tides, they still get sprayed a lot. The fight ends with Leia dying from using what's left of her energy to reach her son, Rey stabbing and then healing Kylo before she leaves in his ship. The crew, save for Rey, and Jannah's rogues join up with the rest of the resistance where they find out what happened, and Chewbacca loses it. The Wookie collapses to his knees and starts screaming and wailing, beating into the ground, etc. He's lost all his human friends, 3PO's mind is wiped, the only things left from the good old days are R2 and the Falcon. This is a genuinely harrowing moment for longtime fans, I think. Meanwhile, Rose Tico shows up for the second time this entire movie, the first time being her explaining why she can't go with, she has lines that could have been given to almost any rando in the resistance which is honestly a shame. Then we cut to Ahch-To, The planet Luke exiled himself to in Force Awakens and TLJ, to find Rey burning Kylo's ship and very nearly, Luke's lightsaber. Luke's ghost shows up, catching the saber, and giving her a pep talk, telling her he knows now that exiling himself was stupid and that she needs to face the darkness in herself and the galaxy head-on. That delusion she saw getting her Wayfinder wasn't the first, she's seen herself ruling at Kylo's side as the empress, but given Luke's Pep talk, him showing her a spare lightsaber that used to belong to Leia, and the fact that Kylo had HIS Wayfinder in his spare ship, Rey agrees to continue fighting the good fight. But how will she leave the planet? Luke's force ghost raises Red five from the ocean. I'm not kidding, he literally just force lifts it with some show-offy joy. That thing has been waterlogged for how long? Even assuming Rey could fix it, where the hell is she getting fuel for it? Back with Kylo, we see him gawking out over the sea, a familiar old voice starts talking to him. Han Solo's ghost shows up and they start having a heart to heart oddly reminiscent of the one they had in Force Awakens. Han says he knew his son was in there somewhere, and when Ren says "Your son is dead" Han says "No, Kylo Ren is." In that spirit, I will now refer to Kylo as "Ben" for the rest of the review. Ben throws his lightsaber into the ocean and is left to his own devices by his dad's ghost. The resistance somehow knows that there are radio towers on Exegol that help the ships navigate through the constant storms and rain, Poe and Finn organize a plan, to distract the ships while a ground force attacks the tower and Chewbacca will go off and send another distress signal, allowing others to join the battle if they can. They come up with this because D-O has the plans for the ships and the like stored in his head if memory serves, and also 3PO gets his memory back, R2 had a back up, wouldn't you know it? The Resistance charges into battle against the Final Order over Exegol, And thus begins a fun clusterfuck of lasers and explosions. As one expects from this trilogy. Now, the first order has this actually brilliant moment when they realize they can shut down the tower, and start broadcasting the same helpful signals from one of the ships themselves. Which they do, this allows them to down some Resistance ships before Finn sees what's happening and has them do a ground invasion style attack ON that ship. As in they deploy troops over the top of it ON HORSEBACK. Honestly one of those things that's so loveably stupid. They end up in conflict with a bunch of troopers on top of the ship as they look for weak spots to plant bombs or the like. Rey, meanwhile, has snuck into the Emperor's hiding place, just as Ben lands on the planet. There's a lot of running around on all sides, dogfights under and around the larger ships, Ben fighting knights of Ren with just his bare hands and the Force, Rey being lured into Palpatine's grasp, Finn and Jannah's group shooting at troopers and passing ships as they look for weak spots. It would have all been fairly tense if the editing wasn't done by a coked-up squirrel. Almost nothing feels impactful in the fights, there are too many cuts in scenes largely about singular or just two characters. There are good elements to all this but I didn't care enough about most of these people. for it to mean much. Also worth noting: not much can be done. They've already lost so many pilots, soldiers, and fighters, Finn and Jannah's group haven't fulfilled their goal yet, Palpatine is giving Rey a very "Let the hate flow through you" speech about how it's all pointless and her friends are doomed, but if she kills him, and becomes the empress, the Final Order will be hers to control, she agrees for a moment, letting a bunch of the Knights of Ren and Palpatine begin ritual chanting as a horde of them look on, Poe is out of hope. Rey is about to give in and Ben is surrounded with no weapon. All hope is lost... Until Rey enters another sort of shat with Ben and gives him the lightsaber she was moments ago going to kill the Emperor with. Ben strikes down his aggressors and makes his way to Rey and the Emperor, they slaughter the knights in the immediate vicinity. While that's happening, an entire fleet of random people shows up to help the resistance. Zorri and Babu are right next to the Falcon, which contains not only Chewbacca but Lando. The fight begins anew as Finn and Jannah blow the antennae in the ship they're on and cripple the Final Order Fleet. Now all the Resistance has to do is blast the planet-killing lasers and the entire ship they're rigged up to will also be destroyed... Which makes some sense but is still a pretty massive design flaw. Down with Rey, Ben, and Palpatine, the youngsters try to strike the Emperor down, only to basically have their life forces partly fed upon. Ben goes flying down a naturally formed cave shaft, presumably to his doom. Palpatine has regenerated from the life steal thing and sits on this massive stone Sith throne just under the battle in the sky, and in a moment so absurd I was dumbstruck when it happened, sends lightning up into the sky. A massive MASSIVE pillar of it, so massive that not only does it reach the sky, but when it does, it fans out and strikes dozens, if not hundreds, of resistance ships, taking them right out of the sky. This guy is over a hundred years old, several of which he was DEAD for and for some reason now, he has power I would only be able to describe as "Godlike" for no damn reason. I forgot to mention earlier that he didn't live through being exploded in ep 6. He brought himself back to life somehow, just wrote it off as his access to the dark side. He still looked terrible though, like he was actually a corpse with rotten hands and pure white eyes and all that. But somehow, two random idiot children's life forces, nowhere near in their totality, are enough to rejuvenate him and give him power unseen by most of the deadliest Sith in all of Star Wars. Vader's apprentice from The Force Unleashed wasn't this fucking OP. The worst he did could be chalked up to gameplay, this one-man lightning storm bullshit is actually canon, though. So this creates a problem: How does Rey defeat someone with the power of a god on her own? She ignites Leia's old lightsaber from when Luke was training her and then redirects the Emperor's lightning back into his face, destroying his head. From there, the Final Order's fleet is destroyed and Finn and Jannah are rescued from a fiery death as the ship they're on starts crashing to the ground, I guess being the only surviving members of their attack squad. Ben climbs out of the shaft and gives his life force to bring Rey back from the dead, they share a kiss and Ben dies, allowing Rey to flee in the Red Five, much to everyone's relief. There are celebrations and hints of things to come, including Lando taking Jannah with him on adventures through the stars, Rose hugging some dude who ISN'T Finn, much to Finn's annoyance, and Zorii and Poe exchanging wordless gestures. The final scene is Rey going to the old Skywalker Moisture farm to burry Luke and Leia's lightsabers just outside the house. How she knew where the farm was or why she buries them is anyone's guess. She pulls out a new lightsaber, a Yellow one. Which... Okay, I guess but where did she get it? Did she make it? How? Where? Did she just find it somewhere? How? Where? But anyway, an old woman comes walking by and mentions that the hasn't been anyone at the farm in so long and asks Rey who she is. Rey says "My name is Rey." "Rey Who?" Luke and Leia's force ghosts appear and smile at Rey. She proudly announces that she is "Rey Skywalker." And her and BB8 watch the suns over Tatooine set. The end. 4. A Nitpick? Some of these are just little things I couldn't find a good place to put elsewhere: In flashbacks, we see Luke training Leia a bit, in those scenes, her lightsaber is green. In the modern-day, for whatever reason, it's blue. I'm not sure if that's an oversight or not. Also worth asking: Where is Luke's personal saber? I did some research and he apparently reclaimed it at some point in the EU (Which is no longer canon) but even in Last Jedi, the last we see of it is him almost using it on a young Ben Solo. Where the hell did it go? 5. Conclusion I see this movie has it’s good bits but it isn't enough to make up for how shoddy the overall product is. There are too many new characters to let even the pre-established ones breathe, let alone each other, the editing was total garbage to the point where I genuinely got a headache, the plot invalidates both episodes eight AND six, while itself being kind of terrible... Nothing can kill Star Wars for me. This movie certainly tried. TL;DR: Do not watch this trash, I don't care if it's your first Star Wars film of if you're a long-time viewer, it isn't worth your time or money. Merry Christmas, everyone, and have a happy new year. (FTR: This is something I stole from my own deviantART, I’m not plagiarizing shit, I’m just copypasting myself and adding edits if I see hiccups in the future.)

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onwardintolight · 5 years

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In which Onward rereads the Thrawn Trilogy and writes a massive review (and some other related stuff)

Alright, so I know I said that the characterization vs. plot thing in new canon vs. Legends was a rant for another time, but I’ve been thinking about it nonstop since and I really need to get a few thoughts out, so I guess this is that time, lol.

I’ve recently been diving into some of the Legends books for the first time in years. Partly because I’ve started listening to audiobooks and can get a whole lot more reading done in a day than I was able to before, and partly... well, I’m just curious to revisit it. I read a number of books from the old EU as a kid, and I definitely had mixed feelings back then. On the one hand, I was delighted—more Star Wars! Yay! On the other hand are the mixed feelings, which have so faded from memory over time that all I can remember anymore is that I didn’t like how the books portrayed Leia.

So anyway, I’ve been curious to give some of them a shot again, and see what I think now (all except COPL. I’m never going back to that one). I started with two that have come on my radar through the Han x Leia fandom, Tatooine Ghost and Razor’s Edge. They were wonderful! I absolutely loved Tatooine Ghost, especially. Razor’s Edge was super fun and had some truly fantastic moments (including some unforgettable shippy ones), but it felt more plot-driven than I tend to prefer (give me ALL the deep character stuff!). Despite that, I still loved it. I already own Tatooine Ghost and I plan to get my own copy of Razor’s Edge, too.

Then I decided to revisit the Thrawn trilogy.

Oh boy.

Before I dive into that, though, I first want to say that I have many friends on here for whom the old EU is their Star Wars. I have the utmost admiration for you all, and I mean no disrespect. I support you in this being your Star Wars 100%. I’m not seeking to get into any big arguments or flame wars. In fact, I will put most of my ranting about Heir to the Empire et al under a cut, so please feel free not to engage if that sort of thing bothers you.

Honestly, I’m a big fan of focusing on positivity in fandom, of focusing on what I love and not harassing others who enjoy things I don’t. That being said, I do support a good critique. I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not trying to force my views on anyone, but I can certainly express them in my own space and support other people’s right to express theirs in their space. What better space to do so than on my tumblr?

Before I go under the cut, I have one last question for my old EU stans. Based on my enjoyment of Tatooine Ghost and Razor’s Edge, and knowing I’m a particular sucker for character-driven stories, especially if they involve Leia and Han (and/or their ship), are there any other Legends books you’d recommend? Please let me know because I would love to discover more of that goodness!

Now, onto the Thrawn trilogy....

(It probably goes without saying, but major spoilers ahead)

Disclaimer: I’m sorry if I get some of the details wrong; I listened to the audiobooks and don’t have access to the books themselves right now so i’m writing out all these thoughts from memory

About Leia

So, it turns out that little me was right. Older me had the exact same reaction upon reading the Thrawn trilogy. What the heck did Zahn do to Leia? She seemed so diminished, shrinking. Hardly like Leia at all. If I had been reading a physical book, I would have been tempted to throw it numerous times.

First of all, she was set aside almost entirely for the first book. Despite the fact that the Empire was looking for Luke too, Luke got to be free and keep roaming the galaxy, doing his thing, and Leia was forced into hiding. If I remember right, it wasn’t really her choice (I believe it was Han who refused to take her no for an answer), nor did she argue it much. She just kind of followed the men in her life and let them do all the leading and galaxy-saving. Sounds a lot like Leia, right? *rolls eyes* Overall, she didn’t do much, and she didn’t have any part in the big climactic battle.

(On another note this reminds me a little of one of Zahn’s new canon books, Thrawn Alliances. SPOILER ALERT: at a key moment, Thrawn pleads with Padme to talk with Anakin and try to convince him not to do something really terrible and disastrous that probably will result in people dying, and Padme basically just sighs, throws up her hands and says something like “It’s no use. When he gets this way no one can convince him of anything” and I just want to SCREAM BECAUSE NO THAT’S NOT THE FREAKING PADME I KNOW AND SERIOUSLY???)

Anyway. *calms down*

In Dark Force Rising, Leia had a much more interesting plotline as she wins the allegience of the Noghri. I liked her better here, and she seemed a tiny bit more like the Leia I know. But it still just felt... lackluster.

In The Last Command, she’s once again pushed to the side thanks to the men in her life making the decisions in the name of protecting her. True, I understand that for the majority of these books, she’s been pregnant, and so it’s not just about protecting her, but about protecting the twins. But that didn’t stop her from doing what she felt she needed to in Dark Force Rising. And in this book, she’s already given birth. Winter’s there; she can take care of the twins (as she eventually does). When the heroes assemble and go to Wayland for the big climax of the trilogy, she’s convinced by the men to stay behind (*cue me throwing imaginary book across the room*). Honestly, it felt contrived for the sake of the plot (she has to be there for what happens next) and more than a little bit sexist.

She does eventually go, however, which made me want to cheer. I would have hated it way more if she hadn’t gotten to participate in the big last battle with C’baoth, particularly in light of the way the books had set her up as a Jedi-in-training (not very far along, but still). I was excited because surely this must mean she plays a big part in that, right?

...She does not. She basically shows up and then gets trapped, doing hardly anything. Plot-wise, she’s pretty much there to provide an extra lightsaber and moral support of the Force-user variety. I’m glad she got to be there, but... yeah, overall, I’m really not happy with how these books treated my favorite character, and one of the actual main characters of the OT. It kind of felt like she was replaced by Mara, tbh. Which leads me to...

About Mara

Mara, like Leia used to be, is a very angry person, and for good reason. But her anger came off in these books as rather petulant and irrational. Once again, it felt a bit sexist. I hope I’m wrong, but the trajectory seems to be a trope that Leia has already been subject to (in ROTJ, as much as I love that movie, and with the job finished in this trilogy): Soften the angry woman. Make her pleasant and pliable and a little bit subservient. Legends fans, PLEASE tell me this doesn’t happen to Mara. I hope she continues to be a sarcastic, independent woman who takes no sh*t. I hope she loses none of her power, even as she loves and marries Luke.

Mara had probably the biggest character arc of this entire trilogy. Unfortunately, that isn’t saying much. I really felt like her story had a lot of potential and could have been really compelling, but Zahn just doesn’t seem to know how to write characters with depth. In the end, her big moment of throwing off the Emperor’s power over her honestly just felt kind of contrived and shallow. Oh look, here’s a clone of Luke she can kill instead. That will magically make it all go away. Convenient.

I wanted to love her. I think I probably could love her, if I read good fanfic. The problem is that the source material leaves all depth to the imagination.

About Everything Else

I mentioned that Mara seems to have the biggest character arc, but that wasn’t saying much. I had a lot of trouble distinguishing any other character arcs at all. The characters all seemed to be caught up in this big plot, carried along with it and deposited victorious at the end, without any obvious growth or change (except, again, for Mara).

I suppose you could say that Luke learned to stand on his feet without the help of Ben’s Force ghost. But that was given such minor emphasis that I didn’t even think of it until this moment, weeks after finishing the book.

Aside from my rage at the misogyny, I think this gets to the heart of why I disliked these books. The motivations and emotional/personal journeys of the characters are of utmost importance to me. To me, they’re the whole point. When a book is all plot and little character, I just... don’t care. It doesn’t feel real or relevant. It doesn’t show me that I can slay dragons, too.

I know that theoretically, I could imagine those character journeys. I could fill in the blanks in my mind, or through fic. I have a big imagination; I’m really pretty good at such things.

But tbh, when it comes to these books, I don’t even want to. To me, the plot itself felt pretty lackluster. I keep using the word “contrived” but it fits so well. Things happened and decisions were made that didn’t make much sense, just so the plot could go the way Zahn wanted it to. Now of course the same argument could be made for new canon (particularly, imho, the ST movies), but at least with new canon, there’s a deliberate and largely persistent focus on character. (And less sexism.)

Other complaints:

- I got sick of C’baoth in the first book. His villainy was not the least bit fearful or intimidating. His nearly prevailing over the heroes at Wayland felt more accidental than anything.

- Don’t get me started on stupid Bel Iblis and his stupid hurt manly pride that the women in power have to coddle and bow down to before he will lift a finger to help during a genuine EMERGENCY when he was desperately NEEDED (*cue me throwing the imaginary book across the room yet again*) (I think Leia would have had a few more choice words for him than she did in this book. They instantly presented themselves to my mind, at least)

- I can understand why Thrawn was such a big deal when these books first came out, but I think Thrawn is kind of oversaturated these days, and tbh I’m kind of sick of him (I’m going to blame the more recent canon Thrawn trilogy for that). While I like a good Sherlock Holmes mystery, I’m not too big on admiring that sort of “man as a machine” type character. Rationality is not everything, not by a long shot. It is empty and, frankly, shortsighted on its own. The best part about Thrawn’s story in these books for me was seeing him make mistakes (actual mistakes! yay!) and meet his end, perhaps in part due to that over-reliance on rationality and arrogance in his own abilities.

A few things I did like:

- another main female character, yay! Two if you count Winter

- I thought Talon Karrde was an enjoyable character and I’d love to see more of him

- I remember loving the vornskrs as a kid and a little bit of that adoration returned when I read this, bringing with it all sorts of happy nostalgia

- some parts of the plot were fun and exciting, and I could understand why they might feel iconic and Star Wars-y to others

Overall, however, I think Thrawn as a character kind of represents these books as a whole. It’s all very cerebral and practical. There’s art but it only serves the purpose of the rational. To me, these books felt like they were all mind, no soul.

I know that those of you who hold these books dear may disagree, and that’s fine. Honestly, despite my serious problems with them, I don’t hate these books. I might even read them again someday, maybe. I may be convinced to appreciate them more once I read people’s headcanons and hear what people love about it. So with that said, what DO you love about it? Where do you see these books’ soul?

#I was going to tag this with the appropriate tags #but then I decided I'd rather not open myself up to the toxic variety of Legends fans #(of which I know you all are not but which do obviously exist out there)#anyway #it feels good to get all that off my chest #thoughts #Star Wars

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carrotwine4captainhops · 5 years

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Major Character Death as a creative writing tool

I’ve always been interested in the craft of writing. I’ve been mulling over the way Major Character Death is used as a tool in fiction for awhile, and after watching the extremely problematic death of Quentin Coldwater, (and the self-congratulatory responses of the show’s producers who apparently believe they invented the concept) I thought I’d give you the the high school level compare and contrast MCD essay you didn’t really need or want.

Before I start, I want to be clear that MCD as a tool is not a bad thing by itself. Many, many fiction authors use it in a very calculated way, and as long as it serves the story well, they’re doing their job. Many essays and books about the craft of writing discuss its use because it is just another tool in the creative writer’s tool box. When done well, it makes you cry in a good way; when done badly, the death feels like a cheap gimmick to force an emotion without doing much work as a story teller. The latter is definitely what happened with the season finale of The Magicians.

If season 4 of the magicians had been a novel, it would have been sent back for major revisions before publication.

The first MCD that came to mind while watching the season 4 finale of The Magicians, wasn’t technically an MCD, but may as well be: the ending of the Golden Compass trilogy. The two protagonists have recently fallen in love, and make the difficult decision to return to never see each other again as a way to save the multiverse from the damage caused by traveling between worlds. They won’t even be able to contact each other, and will have to live out their lives as if the other had died.

It was incredibly painful to read (it’s the first book I cried over), but it was beautifully written and a very logical conclusion that the author set up from book one. The books are about (among many other things) the failures of adults and authority when they make selfish decisions, and by choosing to put the health of the universe above their own happiness, they made the bravest, most adult decision they could. It’s a message about the hope that younger generations can fix the things that their predecessors broke if they’re brave enough. The Magicians almost had a similar message.

The second MCD I thought of was that of “Wash” from Firefly. Like a lot of other fans of the show, I got angry at this death in the movie Serenity (essentially the series finale of the TV show). Wash was the comedic relief and voice of optimism in a dark and dystopic show. While Quentin was clinically depressed, and, in the words of Margo Hanson, ”moderately socially maladjusted”, he also acted as the voice of hope to his peers. Both characters were the emotional core of their shows, which was a big reason why they were chosen by their perspective creators as the deaths that would be most felt by the audience. They both got a funeral scene, to really drive home how much the other characters (and by extension, the audience) would be impacted by their death.

In Wash’s case, having his death be accidental impalement during a crash didn’t feel entirely satisfying or necessary. It felt like a lazy way to make the audience sad and motivate the rest of the characters to Really Get That Baddie… BUT, this cheapness is balanced by the symbolism of an outlaw pilot literally dying at the helm of the ship he loved while trying to save the world. It also didn’t send any problematic messages to the audience. Wash was not the protagonist or a “self-insert” the way Quentin was; he wasn’t suicidal or part of an underserved minority group (and make no mistake, by making Quentin sexually fluid/bisexual, the producers signed themselves up for a more thoughtful treatment of his death, if it had to happen.)

The message from Wash’s death is one that is very familiar to readers of genre fiction MCDs: simply: “not everyone lives” and “people who put themselves in high-risk situations sometimes die”. Both of which are painful but fair messages to absorb.

This same tactic was used again by Whedon with Agent Coulson in The Avengers. As an optimistic “plot-armor-free” side character who had become a fan favorite, he was given an entire arc in the movie that the audience wasn’t expecting, made to be even more loveable, and then killed off in a long emotional death scene which was then used in the third act turning point of the movie. Whedon made it clear in interviews that the whole death was coldly calculated to squeeze emotion from the audience, and up the stakes in a way that a large body count couldn’t. It upset a lot of fans, it wasn’t perfect, but it was well done and fitting for the narrative and made the movie stronger, and, again, he wasn’t a member of a minority group. (And as a side note, a different creative team knew how popular Coulson was and managed to resurrect him for his own TV show and managed to do it in a way that wasn’t flip-his resurrection had consequences that lasted at least until season 5, the current season).

There is no mitigating balance to Quentin’s death. He was suicidal from day one of the series, and he left via (a purposefully plausible) suicide. His first question, once he realizes he’s dead, is not, “Did the plan work?” or “is Eliot OK?” (the friend he’d been working so hard all season to save) or even “is Julia/Alice/Josh/all my other friends ok?” These are questions that would be plausible and fitting in a character who’s journey has about helping friends and the world out of tough situations. But no, the first thing he asks is “did I finally kill myself?”

With one sentence, his character returned to the self-centered, timid, low-confidence, suicidal mess he’d been established as within five minutes of the show’s pilot. He had no self-realization until after watching his own funeral, at which point he happily and peacefully goes to heaven. At best, that’s heavy-handed symbolism. At worst, it’s erasing all of his character growth and making his entire story pointless, while sending the very dangerous message to the audience.

The writers stated in interviews that they made his death all about suicide on purpose, and now (as of this writing) they continue to refuse to grapple with how problematic that is.

Another MCD that seemed to do the same thing was Tris from the Divergent series. Like Quentin, she was the protagonist. Also similar to Quentin, her arc was almost too on the nose: she was born into a clan literally named “Abnegation” and indoctrinated from birth to sacrifice herself for her community. She wasn’t even allowed to look into mirrors in case she caught even a smidgen of self-regard. And how does her story end? By her sacrificing her life to get the “big baddie” and save her friends and family.

Like Quentin’s death, a lot of her character growth appeared to be erased in the last few chapters of the book. Prior to Book 3, Tris had been learning to question her upbringing, to think for herself, that it’s ok to look for happiness for oneself, and that selfishness takes many forms, not all of them bad. When she makes the decision to kill herself in the end, it left a bad taste in my mouth. The plot didn’t require her death, (for example, there were other characters who could have gone in her place, and as a leader at that point, the more difficult decision probably would have been to send someone else on that mission and learn to live with the guilt). Her death and the manner of it, seemed to say, “just kidding, actually the only way to realize your self-worth is to is sacrifice your happiness and entire self for your community.”

Sound familiar?

Quentin Coldwater was just starting to learn (and because he had an audience, to teach) many of these same things. For three and a half seasons, we see him form strong friendships (when he thought he couldn’t); help people (when he thought he was useless), pursue romantic relationships (when he thought no one could love him); he lives an entire lifetime with Eliot during a quest on alternate timeline, where he’s shown having to make the difficult decision every day, to stay alive, to keep working on the tedious and almost hopeless task of completing the puzzle to finish a quest, and then it turns out that the answer to the puzzle all along WAS that daily struggle. Later, in season 4, he tells us that he hopes to be a dad (again) someday; he shows more and more confidence in his magical abilities every season. All of that was erased by the way his death was written.

Even with the uneven messaging of Tris’ death, there is at least lots of room for interpretation. I believe the author was trying to show her final sacrifice as a way of reclaiming part of her upbringing that wasn’t toxic. The character went through a rebellious phase during book one, during which she seems to reject all parts of her former life, even the good ones, right after leaving the Abnegation community for the hedonistic clan of Dauntless. It would definitely be good growth for her, as part of self-actualization, to accept the good parts of her upbringing. I don’t necessarily believe that’s the message we get at the end, but we at least have the possibility. Not everyone has reacted negatively to the way Quentin’s death was handled, so maybe there is more possibility of interpretation than what I see. I’m willing to be proven wrong, but nothing I’ve seen from critics or the showrunners statements has yet convinced me.

Another (highly speculative), parallel I couldn’t help but make over the last few days, is between the Magicians showrunners’s treatment of this MCD and Joss Whedon of a decade ago. His recent fall from grace has finally allowed more critical examination of his past works, but I remember how, at his peak, he could do no wrong. He was the voice of hollywood feminism. He was lauded by critics, peers, and fans. Any voice that questioned him was mocked, dismissed, and even harassed. Anyone else remember when critics call “Dollhouse” a feminist show? None of that has not aged well, has it?

The Magicians producers, riding high off of critical acclaim of Quentin’s homosexual romance in Season 3x05, had ample chance to make the braver choice: to allow a queer suicidal boy make the choice to keep fighting every day despite how hard it was; To break rank with 99% of other TV shows and allow his homosexual romance to be explored and given the same consideration as the hetersexual romances. Instead, they made him kill himself and be happy about it, literally saying in interviews that he had nothing left to live for. Without even addressing his feelings for Eliot. They buried yet another gay, all in the name of a shock-value gimmick, and they think they’re being “revolutionary” and that anyone critical of their choices is “just sad”.

There are about a thousand different ways season 4 could have gone that would have made the writers’ intended message less problematic, more impactful, and more satisfying, and none of them involve a MCD OR a trite “happily ever after”. Consider, for example, that Zelda could have completed her redemption arc in some kind of sacrifice similar to quentin’s. Everett was much more her “big baddie” than he was Quentin’s, it’s just strange that she never got to really confront her mentor-turned-enemy. Consider that, since Quentin’s main focus and motivation all season was to get Eliot back, that he actually succeeds, but, their reunion and relationship is strained. If we must push this idea that “magic comes from pain”, think how much more painful it would be to be to have Eliot finally confess his love to Quentin, but now Quentin is unable to pursue that relationship because of all the trauma he’s suffered at the hands of Eliot’s possessed body all season. Consider that he finally breaks under the strain and excuses himself from further questing, which would easily allow Julia, Kady, or Alice to get more screentime. (I mean, this is just stuff off the top of my head. For a hundred other ideas, check out Archive of Our Own).

They did just about everything wrong with this particular major character death, and I don’t think their choice is going to age well in the years to come.

#cw: suicide #cw: self harm #the magicians #spoilers #season 4 #meta analysis #writing about writing #words about words #major character death #quentin coldwater #bury your gays

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anneapocalypse · 5 years

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Anne watches MCU: Civil War

Civil War is the logical culmination of the Avengers series thus far and effectively presents the Avengers Initiative as a catastrophic failure.

I like this movie. I like it a lot. I think it does a surprisingly good job with continuity, both logistical and emotional.

I also think that what I took from it is perhaps not what the filmmakers intended, that in fact I probably like it for reasons that were accidental, and that were I deeply invested in these characters and their relationships, I would probably hate it.

I think at this point it works best to look at the Captain America series as a subseries of the Avengers. Both Winter Soldier and Civil War are unavoidably Avengers films as well as Captain America films; they balance an ensemble cast with Steve as the emotional core of the story.

I can see why Thor and Hulk were written out for this film, because the cast is already bursting at the seams and the movie is really long. I do miss Bruce getting to weigh in on the Accords, but Thor didn’t need to be here. Thor is not a citizen of Earth, and this really isn’t his story.

Finally, Bucky Barnes gets some character development. I have wanted to like Bucky up until now but there just hasn’t been much to hold onto; The Winter Soldier is Steve’s story, not Bucky’s, and we get precious little of Steve’s old friend coming through in the present day.

I still hate mind control plots, because you can make a character do absolutely anything and while the character might hold themselves responsible for it, the audience won’t, which makes it great woobie fuel: you get to have the character wrestling with all the guilt and horror of having technically committed terrible acts, but it’s not really their fault, so the audience can feel sorry for them and indulge in all the angst without any of the uncomfortable culpability. Nevertheless, I am happy that Civil War established some parameters around Bucky’s brainwashing and allowed his real self to come through. He’s certainly a more interesting character to me now than he was in Winter Soldier. Had I seen Bucky re-frozen at the end of Winter Soldier, I wouldn’t have felt much about it. Now, I actually kind of care.

But Wanda’s situation, by contrast, is much more grounded and compelling to me than Bucky’s: she actually did do something terrible while trying to do good. Wanda saves Steve, accidentally kills a bunch of civilians in the process… and reacts to that like a normal human being. There is a direct contrast to the way Tony Stark behaves in the first Iron Man movie, and the complete disregard for civilian casualties not just in the character but in the films themselves. This is Marvel’s meta-commentary on its own cinematic history as much as it is establishing continuity for the characters. Wanda reacts with immediate horror and regret, and she doesn’t have to say a word to convey that to us. That is good writing, good acting, and good direction. Now Wanda has to live with what she’s done, and decide who she’s going to be in the world after that, when she can’t change the past or the public’s opinion of her.

Tony and Pepper’s relationship is on the rocks, giving real consequences to the tension we’ve seen in their relationship in the Iron Man trilogy. Whether or not those consequences will stick beyond this movie remains to be seen (assuming I watch further), but it is nonetheless a breath of fresh air to me.

We already know from Iron Man 3 that Tony suffers from PTSD, and in this movie we see him confronted face to face with his responsibility for the events of Ultron. What makes Tony sympathetic in this movie is his very real remorse, and his desire to make amends, expressed in his supporting the Sokovia Accords.

And there are moments when I sympathize with Tony’s perspective, when I don’t find Steve to be in the right. When Steve says that Wanda is “just a kid”—yes, that may technically be true, but you can’t have her fighting in the streets, using her tremendous powers in real battle, and then turn around and say she’s just a kid. You can’t have it both ways. Of course Steve wants to defend Wanda; what happened in Nigeria was an accident. But calling her a kid doesn’t cut it.

Steve is still sympathetic, of course, even when I don’t fully agree with him. This is a Captain America movie and Steve is its emotional core. That he is preoccupied by even the mention of his old friend shows his humanity, as does Peggy Carter’s funeral, which gives an external voice to his convictions—even if it is a bit on the nose.

Who supports the Accords and who refuses makes sense for the most part, though I think this story would be better served by a clearer definition of what constitutes an “enhanced individual.” Steve, Wanda, Bruce, for sure, are enhanced individuals. There’s no question that they possess abilities impossible for most humans. But what about Tony? His powers come from the Iron Man suit—without it, he’s just a guy. Genius billionaire playboy philanthropist—but not superpowered. Then there’s someone like T’Challa, who can be enhanced when he has the powers of the Black Panther, but can also have those powers removed. Clint is just a guy who’s a really good shot—is he an “enhanced individual?” What about Natasha? She’s a highly skilled spy and assassin, sure, but she doesn’t have superpowers. Do the Accords include people with highly specialized training? Do they include anyone who might qualify as a vigilante, powers or no powers?

These questions are never clearly answered in the film. But if we read between the lines, it kind of makes sense that Tony and Rhodey and Natasha would feel less personally threatened by the Accords than Wanda or Steve.

Tony especially feels the least put upon by the Accords, for a few reasons. First, Tony is already a public figure by nature of being a billionaire. He is accustomed to living a very public life, and doesn’t view the Accords as a breach of his privacy. Most importantly, Tony’s wealth has always served as a kind of “do whatever the fuck I want and get away with it badge” (to borrow a line from Transformers). Even with the Accords in place, we still see Tony calling the shots, and when Cap goes rogue, Tony sees it as a “PR nightmare,” an inconvenience, but still a problem he can make go away.

A lot of character beats in this movie really work for me. I love Natasha’s assessment that “We played this wrong,” not necessarily changing her position but admitting to a tactical and interpersonal failure. I love her calling Tony out for putting his ego before everything—and the fact that it actually gets through to him for a bit is gratifying. I even enjoyed T’Challa trying to avenge his father, though I think I appreciated that a lot more for having seen Black Panther first.

There are a couple of character decisions that don’t track for me. I don’t think the film does a good enough job (or like… a job) of establishing why Clint would side against Natasha when she is his closest friend in the Avengers. I also think it’s strange that Natasha thinks Bruce would side against them if he were there. Bruce hates himself. He thinks of himself as a dangerous monster; that’s the whole reason he ran. He would absolutely be on the side of the Accords.

I have no opinions on the way Vision sides because Vision doesn’t feel like a character to me or like he really serves any purpose in these movies beyond being a walking plot device. I know he’s got an Infinity stone powering his brain and that’s going to matter in the next movie, but as a character everything about him smacks of “He’s here because he’s in the comics.”

The scene in which Spider-man is introduced was so out of the blue that I literally checked my phone to make sure I hadn’t accidentally started casting a different movie. I guess he’s mostly here to provide Tony some perspective on being an actually enhanced human: “When you can do the things I do, and you don’t, and the bad things happen, it’s your fault.” Peter Parker is the most innocent vigilante! And now both sides have a teenager. He does have some great dialogue with Tony and I can’t really be unhappy he’s here because he’s just too damn likable.

But nothing tops the Steve/Sharon kiss for being out of the blue. Came from nowhere and went back there fast. I have no idea why that was here, except that Steve is the hero and The Formula demands that he kiss a girl at some point. Peggy’s dead so her niece will do I guess. Anyway, it was bad, but brief enough to ignore.

And nothing drives home that this movie is not in any way a standalone like the appearance of Ant-Man. I actually laughed out loud when he appeared because I was imagining what this random cameo would look like if I hadn’t just watched his origin story and it was hilarious.

The big full-team battle was clearly the scene that was supposed to be the most fun to watch—which in itself is a bit strange. Clint and Natasha, in particular, seem not even to take the fight seriously. And in a story all about the fallout caused by superhero vigilantes, one would think those superheroes fighting each other in a huge group would cause even more damage. But it doesn’t, because they just super conveniently have their big battle on an empty airport tarmac, which was so funny. I assume we’re meant to think the place was evacuated but a part of me just really wants to say there were people in that air traffic control tower they knocked over.

Avengers 2.75: The Avengers vs. Delta Airlines.

The most truly stupid part was the ending. I had to go ask red where the fuck Steve knowing about Tony’s parents was set up, and apparently it was a blink-and-you’ll miss it moment in Winter Soldier. I sure didn’t remember it, so that came way out of left field for me and seemed purely contrived to make sure Tony’s change of heart would be short-lived.

But goofiness aside, there was a lot about this movie that worked for me. The focus on relationships surprised me, frankly. I was expecting a stupid, contrived battle of egos between Tony and Steve, and what i got was actually a fairly nuanced (for Marvel) story that gives real consequences to the actions of the Avengers thus far, brings to a head the tension that has been building between Tony and Steve from the minute go, and very effectively conveys the Avengers Initiative as a failed experiment.

The moral of Civil War, intentional or not, is superheroes can’t work together.

Because the Avengers are not a team. Not really. They're a bunch of lone superheroes trying to work together, succeeding for brief moments, but overall failing to build a team dynamic and Civil War is where it all falls apart.

It really put into perspective a lot of what was bugging me about Age of Ultron, which I couldn’t really put my finger on until I ran across this post and it all fell into place for me. I never bought that they were all friends or had built any deep bonds. Tony going rogue wasn't a betrayal of trust so much as it was just the clearest indicator that there wasn't any to begin with.

This movie raises questions about loyalty... and when it comes to Steve Rogers, the answers are pretty unambiguous. Steve Rogers is a powerfully loyal person who sticks by his people no matter what, and never was it more clear that the Avengers are not his people. Bucky is his people. Sam is his people. Peggy is his people. These are Steve’s friends. Steve Rogers is the first Avenger. He is also the first to jump ship when the Avengers fail to align with his principles. That’s who Steve is, and this movie also serves as a very effective character study. Despite its proximity to Ultron, there’s a reason this is a Captain America movie first.

If we’re supposed to see Civil War as a family torn apart, it fails, because this series never sold us on that family dynamic in the first place. From the start, every Avengers film has been about driving conflict between the characters, especially Steve and Tony. You cannot destroy what was never there, and if Civil War is meant to be that kind of tragedy, it does not succeed.

If I was a real fan of the Marvel cinematic universe, one deeply invested in these characters and in the idea of the Avengers becoming a found family, Civil War would’ve been a massive letdown and I’d probably hate it.

But coming in as a casual tourist in this franchise, a story about the tragic inability of superheroes to work as a team is fascinating to me.

And intentionally or not, that’s what Civil War is.

#anne watches mcu

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christinethethunnus · 5 years

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So..back from watching HTTYD 3...

(I respect everyone who loved it and cried during watching it, so if you loved it a lot, I recommend on not reading this post.)

(Contains entire plot of movie including personal criticism.)

And I didn’t really like it. I thought the visuals were good, but the plot and motivations were really weak compared to the previous movies and there was a lot of weird stuff in there that was just unnecessary or actually relevant.

My main problem with is it’s just too predictable. Movies can be predictable, and maybe because this is the last movie of a trilogy I might have gotten too hyped up. But if you’re going to make it be predictable, then add actually good conflict or good dialogue. But the dialogue is so cliched like, How are your plans on conquering the world going? You’re the one who changed me, I will destroy everything and everyone you love MUHAHAHAHHA Our home is not only this place we live on, it’s us and something like that.

And am I the only one who thought the writers were gonna go with Tuffnut is actually gay for Hiccup route? I know he’s an annoying character, but the way he’s always bringing up

is Hiccup’s getting married to Astrid, is he not gonna get married to her, he’s gonna help out with him, talks about a lot about Hiccup, overly agreeing with everything he does and the weird smashing Hiccup into his ‘beard’

was really disturbing in my opinion. I don’t get why Tuffnut’s there.

Snotlout likes Valka now. Yeah, wasn’t okay at all with that. And he still has inferiority issues, now with Eret. Which was resolved in the end with Hiccup’s mom going like hey, I think you have better brains than Eret, which means we have possible chemistry and this is NOT OKAY TO ME. Snotlout never had any scene which would make her say that, and why would she even show any interest to someone at a similar age to her son?

I have no idea how Snotlout’s character development is like in the tv series, but writers, if you’re gonna use that as a character trait, can’t you just have it actually be relevant to the story and build up the guy to be an actual character than a stereotypical stupid bully jerk who now likes the MAIN CHARACTER’S MOM???

And the villain.

This guy. I forgot what his name was after I came out watching it, so I just found it’s Grimmel, Grimmel the Grisly. Okay. You claim to have killed all of the Night Furies. How did you know you killed all of them? Did you like count all of the N.Fs and then started killing them off one by one? Did you do the same with the Light Furies? Does NightLight Furies live outside of the Hidden world and that’s why you could count all of them?

How does Valka know the Night Furies were all killed too? If He’s a dragon ‘hunter’ why didn’t Valka, who were protecting the dragons like Hiccup, not know who he is and have methods to defend against him? Was she just protecting dragons who lived in a certain range of land?

I really thought Grimmel was going to turn out as the ‘Anti-Hiccup’, someone who Hiccup could have been, challenging Hiccup physically and psychologically. He could have threatened to destroy Berk with the help of his conqueror friends, he says he’s a hunter but Hiccup and his friends and viking guys just chill on the island.

At that scene when Grimmel’s like ‘can’t you guess where they must have gone’(evil guy face), I was thinking that this guy knows EVERY PLAN THAT’S GOING ON IN HICCUP’S BRAIN OMG DON’T CAMP IN THAT ISLAND YOU GUYS ARE DOOMED but no, they have to tail Ruffnut, who was accidentally left behind, to find the actual location wayyyyyy later on. Great tracking skills, I’m so impressed.

I can’t help but think the writers went the easy route because they didn’t want to take risks and disappoint or shock the kids that would watch the movies, but you’ve already taken risks in the first and second movies with Hiccup’s leg and Stoick’s death, the viewers have grown up with the movies, so why are you going backwards all of a sudden? Not to mention this being the end of the trilogy so I can’t expect that the next one will be better than this one.

My final rant is a plot I wrote right after I came back from watching it yesterday, contains the entire plot of the movie, I didn’t change the final half completely because I had to rest after all that 3D and moving chairs, just added ideas which I thought could have been in some scenes. It’s not great, some scenes could be cliche too, but it’s what I wished could have been. I haven’t watched the entire TV series, so please put that into consideration.

(I didn’t write Grimmel’s name because I forgot what it was at the time when I was writing this down, but I think bad guy’s enough for his current characterization and you could add any name in it if you wanted, I also forgot how you call the people of Berk and just wrote vikings instead. There’s no full dialogue scenes either, just some gibberish lines.)

Hiccup and gang saves the dragons, and returns to Berk.

Berk is overpopulated by dragons and humans, and while managing to co-exist with them, are having problems like the dragons consuming too many fish, serious arson, and some of the vikings (including Gobber) are interested in plundering other villages with their dragons, because that’s what VIKINGS DO.

The giant dragon knocks down the towers which served as houses for the dragons, and they need a place to stay, and the newcomer dragons end up barging into the Vikings’ houses, being not accustomed to the rules. The alpha, Toothless, tries to control them, but the damage is done.

So, Hiccup is forced to look for a haven for some of the dragons to stay beyond Berk, which he recalls the memory of his dad, and the stories of the ‘Hidden World of Dragons.’ And while he wants to work on looking for that, Hiccup is chief, and can’t leave the village like he used to while Stoick was around. Hiccup also addresses that they’ll have to do something about the dragon hunters and their plans to use the dragons as weapons, and same scene with Gobber, him saying that one day Hiccup will meet his match.

(Scene with the Conquerors, showing them training dragons to be brutal killers and detailed plans of weaponizing them) appearance of the bad guy, he doesn’t look menacing, thin and has the appearance of a weasel. Is irked at the mentioning of ‘dragon riders’, and follows similarly to movie scene. (shows his power of DARTS by immobilizing a big dragon)

Snotlout, claiming to be second in charge, leaves with Astrid, (and the dragons) and he brags about how dismayed she must be to lose such a guy like him (Astrid ignores him), and continues to fantasize about Hiccup’s mom.

Astrid: (disgusted, scoffs) she’s like the same age as your mom

Snotlout: and more awesome, thinner and beautiful...... (A:ugh)

Snotlout mumbles about her probably preferring Eret, and they talk over Snotlout feeling inferior and wanting to get compensation from being adored by stronger women. (like Valka or Astrid) Astrid points out he can’t fill in that gap by getting married to the previous chief’s wife, he has to prove himself actually being courageous (S:Which I am!) They go through clouds, and is astonished.

(black screen, transitions to Berk)

Toothless tries to play with Hiccup, but he’s burdened by his chief duties and can’t spend time with his bud. Pouting, Toothless leaves the hut and catches the scent of the Light Fury and searches for her, meeting in the forest. They have a moment, but she flies away, and Toothless looks at his prosthetic tail with resent, and looks back to the sky with longing.

(Transition to hidden island in the clouds)

Snotlout and Astrid arrive on the island, and finds it good enough to hide the dragons in it, and the dragons find refuge in the woods. Snotlout announces all is done and they should leave, but Astrid decides to explore the island, and draws it on pieces of paper. Snotlout questions what she’s doing, and Astrid answers it’s for Hiccup’s map. S comments on when she’s so become like Hiccup, and she comments,

Yeah, I never saw it coming. (Astrid smiles as she continues to draw, when suddenly she spots the Light Fury in the sky, and hurriedly draws it on another paper.)

Done with work, Hiccup sighs as he finally comes out, and sees Toothless, and asks whether his bud wants to get some flying with him. Toothless looks depressed, and trips Hiccup with his prosthetic tail.

“Aw, come on, what you’d do that for?” (Toothless:growls) and Hiccup is slightly worried about him. Astrid arrives with Snotlout, their mission accomplished, and Snotlout announces that HE’S seen a NEW NIGHT FURY, ONLY WHITE BUT NEW AND IT WAS HE WHO FOUND IT SO HE’LL NAME IT- Astrid comes over to Hiccup, and hands over the drawing, and that it disappeared while being chased by other dragons she’s never seen before.(the bad guy’s dragons.) She comments on them being very hostile, and that they were trying to force the L.Fury to come with them. Toothless listens to them talking, and makes enthusiastic motions at the mentioning of the Light Fury (also named by Astrid)

(transition to Valka) she talks about how the Night furies went extinct (memory scene) she was looking for other dragons which were going extinct, and comes across the bad guy’s lair which had skull upon skull of all kinds of dragons, and mostly Night and Light furies. And since she could communicate with dragons she never heard of them recalling on seeing another Night Fury, so assumed they had gone extinct. (Fishlegs adding that the last records of N,Furies were made of patches of writings from decades ago, so it was unclear whether they went extinct or not)

After listening to Valka, Hiccup is delighted at the idea of finding a new dragon, and wants to go and find it. Some of the Vikings are interested in having another Night fury to protect them, which they could use in their pillaging villages.(Viking stuff) Hiccup is still against using dragons as weapons, (H: They are our family) and Gobber counters, We are already using them to make weapons, you, are doing it as well, Hiccup. (H:But not to harm other humans-) But you are no Dragon. It’s high time you chose the side where you want to rule over.

And Hiccup notices most of the things he did was to assist in humans living a better life with dragons than actually trying to solve the problems the villagers had. He wonders whether he just took the place of chief just to not disappoint his father. Hiccup turns to talk with Toothless to collect his thoughts, but he’s not there, and Hiccup feels more alone and burdened than ever.

Toothless is absent during the previous scene, as he hears distress calls from afar and looks for the Light Fury. He can’t fly, but can glides down and climbs trees to look for her, and finds her hurt and afraid, injured by the bad guy’s dragons. (same scene like the movie, tries to court her, but fails, tries again, but fails, and then succeeds with the drawing.) and when she tries to get more close, she’s shot by the evil guy’s dart, and Toothless is captured in a trap. He calls a distress call, which orders all of the dragons on Berk, who goes to save him, and the Vikings including Hiccup notice this. Before Toothless is taken, Hiccup arrives on the back of another dragon, and Hiccup encounters his enemy for the first time, but the guy flies away with his dragons.

(transition to dart scene) Eret explains who the bad guy is, calls him ‘The Dragonslayer’ who was rumored to have killed all of the Night Furies. which connects to Valka’s story of the dragon skeleton heap. Eret adds, that if the conquerors have called upon the bad guy, then they must be ready for another attack. The Vikings call on war with the conquerors and the Dragonslayer, and they’ll use their dragons to crush them. Against the idea, Hiccup tries to say they could work things out without fighting, but he is reminded by Snotlout (Valka winces) how that turned out a year ago. He looks for Astrid to support, but she agrees with Snotlout, saying that she can’t lose him too. Not a second time. And she glances at his prosthetic leg. [which H notices, and understands]

The crowd over agreeing or disagreeing on war, and Hiccup bellows Enough!

He asks to give him some time, he’ll work something out, and goes into his hut. (opens his map and Stoick’s book about the Hidden world.

(same scene with the bad guy)(the bad guy’s dragons circle around Hiccup, threatening him, drooling venom)they have a talk about how the guy became a hero by killing a night Fury, (Hiccup is reminded of himself

in the first movie) Hiccup claims the dragons are harmless, and can live along with humans, as he has proven with Berk,

But the bad guy retorts, then why can’t the other Vikings exist with the dragons, if they are so harmless? Why didn’t the people of Berk co-exist with dragons before Hiccup, although they must have had so many chances to?

Hiccup: Because they went the easy way of trying to kill them off.

B.G: Exactly. And how wrong is that? You don’t seriously think dragons to be equal to you? Just because they are big lizards that breathe fire and can fly? You wouldn’t befriend flies even if they had grown to the size of a horse, you kill them. same with dragons.

Hiccup tries to ignore the bad guy’s words, claiming he’s nothing but a cold blooded murderer, and the bad guy says he killed dragons for humans, and was therefore hailed a hero among men. Just like Stoick.

“And whose chief were you again? Hiccup, Savior of Dragons?”

Suddenly, Astrid hacks into the hut with Stormfly, which smelled the dragons’ venom. She saves Hiccup (and asleep Toothless or fake Fishlegs, but then Toothless comes to save Hiccup with Astrid)

and the bad guy retreats on his dragons, shouting that he will kill off the last Night fury alive, and he will wear their skin as his coat to honor Stoick, the greatest of dragonkillers. If Hiccup dares to stop him, he will destroy Berk. (The hut is burnt down)

Everyone hurridly arrives to see Stoick’s hut burn down, and Astrid pulling Hiccup out, them coughing from the smoke.

Hiccup says they’re in danger, the bad guy’s going to come for them unless he gives up Toothless and the dragons. The Vikings and Snotlout claim this a proclamation of war, and they leave to prepare for it, and Hiccup tries to stop them, but they don’t listen, and leave off without him. Agitated, he sighs, and leans on a post to think. Astrid comes up to Hiccup, and asks him if he’s okay.

Hiccup: Yeah, probably, on a second…I don’t think so.

She smiles as she gives him the map of the island she (and Snotlout)found.

“I don’t think this is the place you were looking for.. but it’s not half bad. And it’s a new add to your map. “ Hiccup ponders on this information, large, not on the map, and hidden from plain sight.

He calls on the Vikings that they could move on to this Island to hide themselves, and the dragons to hide from the ships that are coming for Berk. Hiccup declares that he cannot lose the soul of Berk which is both this island and the lives of people of it.) Including the dragons.

(same scene with the bad guy and the conquerors) – B.G says he has a plan to find them (Moves off to the island with the dragons.)

(scene with Snotlout and Valka talking about inferiority issues (she says she only loves Stoick, and gives him motherly advice on being warrior like by talking about Stoick)

---(Below are summaries of the scene from the movie, and the ideas I wished it could have been)

*The L.F arrives on the island, Toothless is given the good new tail and goes after her

Hiccup tries to capture the bad guy, falls into obvious trap (Ruffnut captured and annoys the bad guy, he follows her back with the armada)

- Ruffnut talks about everything about the Hiccup Gang, the bad guy could have like used that to harm Astrid and force Hiccup to do his shit or if they’re only eating fish, use some dragon to poison the water and fish so they’ll starve to death. Ever heard of Siege tactics?

*Hiccup tries to find Toothless, finds the hidden world. (Toothless hailed king, Hiccup is saved by Toothless and remembers his dad talking about his mom and getting not married and how love is powerful)

- This could have gone like this, Hiccup and Astrid is attacked by the dragons, and as Hiccup is the intruder, (or he or Astrid accidentally injures a dragon) Toothless shows hostility towards him, (mirrors hostility from first movie), until he recognizes it’s his best friend. Hiccup, who looks upon him with some fear. Toothless tries to look menacing to save face, and ‘kidnaps Hiccup and Astrid’, flying out to the outside world to save his friends.

- and Hiccup has a flashback of his dad, being this dragon killing warrior, and how he too wanted to be like his dad. But despite his fearsome front, he still believed in love and loved his mother.

*Goes back to Berk, only to find that the L.Fury returned with them, she is captured by the bad guy, and Toothless is captured, and the other dragons have to follow their ‘Alpha’ and are caged. Hiccup is distressed, Astrid cheers him up, the gang suit up and glide down to the so conveniently barked enemy ships ALONE and tries to save Toothless (with no plan, just kamikazes into it) - After the bad guy leaves, the Vikings panic on having no ships and stuff and they’re stuck on the island(All of their dragons are gone and nobody notices or panics?? Did the dragons mean nothing to them?)

- Hiccup talks with Astrid about how similar he could have been to the bad guy, whether if the bad guy is actually the true successor of his dad, the dragon slaying warrior. Astrid reminds Hiccup of how he’s changed the lives of Berk for the better by saving and looking for ways to live with dragons, that he’s always been looking for ways for both dragons and humans, and just because everyone doesn’t get Hiccup’s methods deem his work useless. Hiccup being an exception has changed so many lives and destinies, including his dad. And don’t forget it’s him who made Astrid who she is now. Now determined, Hiccup stands.

- (Orders the Vikings to fight for their once friends, and regain the victory of vikings (and Snotlout agrees with him, (maybe he’s finally learned some humiliation and acceptance by then, idk)

- Leads the Vikings all to fly, and they all attack the fleet (surely he has more flying suits...)

*they don’t save Toothless until the last part, saves the other dragons first and destroys ships, and then has fight with bad guy, who flies off with L.Fury and Hiccup follows with Toothless, Toothless zaps the other evil dragons into oblivion, bad guy injures Toothless and Hiccup holds onto the guy and tells L.F to go save Toothless, and he lets go and falls with the bad guy.

Bad guy rips off Hiccup’s wings, and L.F catches Hiccup, Hiccup takes off his prosthetic leg and the guy (holding on to the leg) falls to the ocean and dies(probably) - There could be dialogue in this scene, cliché but cool like if your father could see you now something. Maybe he takes both Astrid and the Light Fury and makes Hiccup choose between the two,

and Hiccup frees the Light Fury, tells her to save Toothless, hands himself over to the bad guy, and chooses to fall to the sea to save Astrid .

“If your father could see you now. Sacrificing the love of your life... and your life for a dragon.”

“He’d be proud.”

[insert Astrid grinning back at Hiccup]

- Astrid attacks the bad guy, who falls from his dragon(or falls with dragon until the dragon gets to his senses and abandons him) and Astrid leaps down to save Hiccup, (she tries to glide but the fall is too great) and they hold onto each other before falling……and then the Light fury catches them. (Give me more Hiccstrid dammit)

(Hiccup chooses to let the dragons go, away from the humans so that they’ll never be used as weapons again)

(I kind of expected the dragons to shut the door to their world and that’s why they can’t meet again, and can’t they just go back to the isle of Berk by making ships? I see no reason for them to not go back home)

*Hiccup lets go of Toothless and the dragons, and gets married with Astrid (best scene with the final fight scene, where they both look at each other and the soundtrack from the first movie oh SO GREAT ) Years pass, Berk has no dragons, and Hiccup and Astrid and their kids go to the end of the world and sees Toothless again, Toothless remembers Hiccup and they ride him and Stormfly and goes off (monologue going on like the dragons are waiting for humans to accept them)

- monologue about Berk, establishing shot with clouds, the first person view being a flying figure, and the viewer sees faint figures which look like dragons flying through the sky. The camera moves through clouds and dives down, showing the new island of Berk, the sea and Viking fleet. - Hiccup leading a fleet with Astrid, they come across a great mist and hear sounds of dragons, but cannot see them. Astrid stands on the front deck with her children, they try to touch the mist as if she’s trying to touch the clouds (homage to first movie) The new generation of vikings are worried of the sounds being a threat, but Hiccup calms them down, and silently waits looking up to the clouds.

Suddenly a black great figure lands on the ship, the children scramble behind Astrid’s back, and she assures them, saying it’s okay.

- Hiccup slowly movies towards the figure, and same scene as in movie, they recognize each other, and the camera shows their expressions (as if they realize something forgotten) and ends with title.

(End)

The bad guy’s plot for my plot (the first half I wrote) , First, make his dragons force the Light Fury to land on Berk to hide herself, and she’ll meet Toothless, and the N.L furies mate for life so they’ll fall for each other. The Light Fury’ll want to find a safe place to not get captured again, so she’ll look for a place to hide with her possible future mate in or out of Berk, but he orders his dragons to injure her, and get her calling for help, forcing Toothless to be more concerned about her. (Making them inseparable) And then it returns back to the movie with him capturing her and then forcing Toothless to be captured and then taking all the dragons in Berk.......................................................................................................................but why doesn’t he force them to lead him to the Hidden world, where he could kill all dragons by blocking the hole and Atlantising them? Why would he let her go in the first place, without any dragon following where she is?? Can he SMELL DRAGON? IS THAT HOW HE CAN TRACK THEM DOWN?? How was he sure that they’d come back after the Light Fury took Toothless back to the H.Word??? This is so confusing and ugh your plans are the worst GRIMMEL THE GRISLY YOUR NAME IS FORGETFUL AND SO IS YOUR TITLE OF DRAGON KILLER GO FOR SOMETHING THAT PEOPLE CAN REMEMBER AFTER HOLDING ONTO MOVING CHAIRS FOR OVER AN HOUR in fact, you are NEVER SHOWN ACTUALLY KILLING A DRAGON, YOU ALWAYS JUST PUT THEM TO SLEEP YOU ARE NOT A DRAGON SLEEP FAIRY

I do think the sub-title ‘The Hidden World’ doesn’t suit this plot, but it doesn’t matter probably. I’m really sad to see it go, but am still joyous to see that wedding scene. I’m happy to have grown up with you, How to Train your Dragon, good bye and farewell.

#rant #httyd3 #whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

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staygoldenlightning · 6 years

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An exciting new review experience in three parts! It’s gonna be a long one!

It was only a matter of time until I addressed this elephant in the room: I’m a little bit obsessed with To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before — both the Jenny Han novel and the Netflix original movie. And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. To All the Boys is the story of Korean-American, high school junior Lara Jean, whose personal love letters to each of the five boys she’s loved are accidentally sent out, all while she’s dealing with the challenges of her older sister leaving for college (and leaving behind an ex boyfriend that Lara Jean has always had an eye for). In an act of mutual damage control, Lara Jean and her former crush Peter Kavinsky enact probably the best (and definitely my favorite) rom-com cliche of all time: they pretend to be a couple.

I received a copy of the book (the first in a trilogy I haven’t read the rest of yet, NO SPOILERS) as a Christmas gift last year, and I read it back around February or March. Now that the Netflix film has taken Twitter the world quite literally by storm, I figured it was time I launched my thoughts right out into the eye of it. So without further ado, here’s everything I have to say about To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, presented in three parts.

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before: The Movie

When I’m out of town for the night, Matt has a ritual where he gets a pizza or some snacks and watches a movie I wouldn’t like with the cat. Last week, on a night when Matt was going to be out late and my cat and I were home alone, I decided to do the exact same thing myself (except now I’m pretty sure that he would actually enjoy this movie too). Actually, there are a lot of reasons why this movie is good for EVERYONE, even us “grown ups.” I was feeling a little down on that particular day, and I needed something lighthearted and a little bit indulgent to get my mind off of it, so I put on To All the Boys, because even though I knew I wanted to watch it, I’d been putting it off, in a way.

While some nights since its premier I just didn’t have the time to sit and watch a whole movie, hype scares me away from things. Not in a hipster sense of “If too many people like it, then it must not be good,” but I fear the bandwagon effect. I don’t want to like it just because other people do and I want to fit in. But I have nothing against liking something popular if I actually connect with it. With this movie, I was actually expecting it to be a little cliche, a little cheesy, and a little silly, but in all actuality, it’s just the best rom-com I’ve seen in a really long time. Seriously.

The casting, the characterization, and the pacing all impressed me in their own ways, but what actually stood out to me about the movie was the cinematography and the storytelling choices. I’m not pretending to know anything about movies, but this could have easily been a movie that focused on the plot to give the people what they want: ROMANCE. While that’s still the main focus, the creative direction of the movie really surprised me with the handling of all the side conflicts circling around the main arc. Visually, it was way more interesting than you’d expect from a rom-com: the shots are interesting, and a little bit conceptual, and all meant to capture Lara Jean’s state of mind, not just what she’s doing or what she looks like.

I also give the movie huge props for something a lot of teen movies weirdly fail at, which is writing dialogue that actually sounds the way teens talk. There was no awkward slang, no overly-rehearsed sounding monologues, and even Kitty sounds appropriately mature for her age without going overboard. Even with it’s modern inclusion of social media, To All the Boys actually nailed it in the dialogue department.

I’ve only got one real bone to pick with the writing overall, and that’s the scene in the first act of the movie that, in my opinion, pretty obviously gives away the twist at the end. I read the book; I knew what happened already. But for someone that didn’t, I think they showed their hand too early. (Notice how I’m speaking in generalities to avoid spoilers). The reveal wasn’t explicitly stated, but I think it was too heavily implied. What Kitty says on the couch is enough. If there was a way that the dramatic irony of us knowing the secret that Lara Jean doesn’t could have enhanced the movie, I would have been all for it, but I don’t think they pulled that off. But this is still a small enough gripe not to ruin the movie for me.

And one more thing: the movie didn’t treat really any character as merely an expendable plot device. Lara Jean is and incredibly well-developed protagonist who I came to love almost immediately (how couldn’t I when she daydreams in regency-era period dress?). But the important thing is that we never stop learning about her; not all the information is dumped into exposition, we have to earn our full understanding piece by piece. While I did feel that Gen was reduced a little bit to the “mean girl” stereotype, we do eventually find out why she acts the way she does, and it’s actually a game changer, if only subtly. (Actually, it’s my opinion that the movie needed more Chris, too.)

This is also part of what makes Peter K. such a great character in his own right, not just as “the love interest.” What’s refreshing about Peter is that he’s a softer form of masculine lead that we don’t see too often, but the kicker is that he’s not afraid to show it from the very start (and to be honest, I didn’t get this as strongly from Book Peter). No “tough guy” layers to dig through—his heart’s pretty much on his sleeve, even though he’s still the cool guy all at the same time. Plus, Noah Centineo is a dreamboat (we were all thinking it). I’m telling you, he’s going to be the Chad Michael Murray of his time.

This is unfair and their outfits match.

While of course there wasn’t time for book-length dives into every character, even Lara Jean herself, the characters were portrayed in a way that encourages the audience to make a connection.

https://twitter.com/ivyjune12/status/1037885481302847488

I’m a firm believer that a movie is not a book. Obvious, but what I mean is that a movie doesn’t just have to be a direct retelling of the book in exact detail. In my opinion, if that’s all a movie does, it was unnecessary. I did all that in my head already. What I think makes a great movie adaptation is that it has to have something to say, some interpretation of the characters, plot, and themes, while still capturing the overall idea and spirit of the book from whence it came. I understand the cuts that were made for the sake of real-estate (though I’m hoping a certain deleted kiss surfaces in the sequel I’m praying for). What they did was tailor down the story to make it more self-contained, more refined, and more to the point so that it fit the medium and told they story it needed to tell while really letting us live inside Lara Jean’s head for a while.

But also, how much do you think Subway paid for that product placement?

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before: The Book

You’ll have to excuse my copy of the book, for it has the leftover residue of a “soon to be a major motion picture” sticker that didn’t quite come off all the way. Switching gears, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han is just about everything you want in a YA read: a quirky, relatable (and diverse!) main character, a pseudo-love triangle with ~nuance~, and a family secret or two threatening to fracture some relationships when it erupts. I’d known about the book for a few years (thanks, Tumblr), and I made pretty short work of it once I actually had a copy in my hands. The romance arcs made it a page turner in a lot of ways, with the way they criss-crossed and changed shape and came to a heated point.

That being said, I found the book itself a little slow in places in terms of pacing. It’s on the longer end of the YA spectrum, and while I can’t say I ever lost interest, I got a twinge every now and then when I finished a chapter without learning anything new, per se.

My other issue had much ado about Margot, Lara Jean’s older sister, who, despite not being present for the majority of the story, never truly leaves us. I completely understand why Lara Jean thinks of Margot often: she misses her sister, is distressed about keeping the secret, and worries that she’s not ready to fill Margot’s shoes as a caretaker. But in the book, Lara Jean is so preoccupied with Margot that I have to admit that there were moments I was sick of hearing about her.

What I loved most about the books was that Lara Jean’s romance was surrounded by several subplots dealing with friends, family, responsibility, family, and growing up. While a movie only has so much time before it loses us to sleep or boredom, a book can go on, night after night, expanding the main character’s world that we’re lucky enough to be living in. In the book, we get to see a lot more of what Lara Jean’s mom, and her Korean culture, means to her. We also get to see a lot more of how her family has grown from the past until now, and how they’ve all taken on changes before and after Margot’s departure. And maybe the thing I was the most heartbroken about was the letter in Margot’s desk and all the implications it held. Lara Jean wasn’t the only one with a secret, and I love the complexity it added to the sisters’ relationship.

https://twitter.com/ivyjune12/status/1037856493410897920

If you’re wondering about that Tweet, I was quickly disappointed and then overcame it.

Moving on, I’d be so interested to see what more movies would do with the material we have, because there’s a choice to be made at this point: do they go back and pick up the conflicts they didn’t have time for the first time around, or do they move on to whatever new ideas are hidden inside books 2-3? No matter what happens, sequel or not, the movie has actually really nudged me towards picking up the rest of the series—something I wasn’t totally convinced (Peter Convince-sky? No, but A for effort) I’d do before.

2 Outfits Inspired by Lara Jean Covey

I saved this little bonus section for last, mostly just to amuse myself. It was impossible not to notice how amazing Lara Jean’s style was in the movie; every outfit was a SENSATION and I haven’t stopped thinking about a single one. So, for giggles, I dug around in my closet and came up with the two closest Lara Jean outfits I own.

https://twitter.com/gicatam/status/1035720646196510720

1. Skirts and Stripes

A tried and true Lara Jean combo, a button front skirt paired with a cute (often striped) top can be found during a few scenes in the movie, but I would say I came closest to the airport outfit. While my color scheme is off, the spirit is there: I even braided my hair as much as possible. Fun fact: I am a cartoon character who owns this shirt in two different colors, and these boots are old enough that I can ~almost~ call them vintage (not really).

2. The Pink Power Suit

All right, it’s not a suit, but the soft pink blazer paired with skinny black jeans and a black choker was almost certainly a confidence move for the first ride in Peter’s Jeep. I don’t wear this pink blazer enough, and I wasn’t sure if I’d love it with this outfit because it’s more of a salmon than a blush (I want to introduce my best friend Squidward to everybody in town wearing a salmon suit). Actually, this combo worked out surprisingly well, minus the fact that I’m wearing a literal shoe string as a choker.

Actually, I’ve left the house wearing it like that before, and I love it. Fight me.

^This is the best image I could find of this outfit and I’m bummed about it.

Lara Jean’s style is the perfect combination of vintage revival and current trends, which is really everything I want to be in my life. I’m already making my list of things I need to add to my own closet: a yellow beret, a lot more bomber jackets, a gorgeous red ballgown. Maybe by the end of autumn, I’ll have the full collection. From now on, every time I go shopping, I’m doing so with the motto: “What would Lara Jean wear?”

If you made it to the end of this post, I salute you. Know of any other books/movies with outfits I should try and copy?

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before: Movie, Book, and 2 Lara Jean Outfits An exciting new review experience in three parts! It's gonna be a long one! It was only a matter of time until I addressed this elephant in the room: I'm a little bit obsessed with…

#Book Review #books #Movie Review #Movies #Outfits #Style

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j-wonwootrash · 6 years

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Wonwoo || Novels & Webtoons

Word count: 1.9k Genre: Fluff, Student!au, slice of life, romance A/N: Sorry if it’s badly written but I hope you all enjoy reading!

“Nothing Much.”

———

When Wonwoo was little, he loved books. He could spend hours in the mini library he had that his parents renovated for him. They would purchase him a lot of series, especially those that were eventually adapted into a movie. It was finally his paradise.

Enclosed and introvert, he wasn’t the type to mingle with everyone— he thought novels were such a good company. His classmates found it hard to approach him because he was always with his novels, around 3 of them on the side of his desk. It was as if he ought to finish them within a day.

Because of his love for novels, he loved creating and coming up with new plots and stories of all genres. He planned to write his very own series and maybe soon publish it. Who knows?

But other than being a bookworm, he loved gym and music class. They were the only way to rest brain from too much words and of course, no one knew except him. He has best friends too— Mingyu, Soonyoung and Seokmin, people he became close with.

You and Wonwoo had quite a strange encounter at class. He was your classmate but you didn’t really paid any attention to him, mainly because he had his novels. You’d say he was those characters in stories that weren’t really important in your life, that is you considered yourself a heroine.

There was one time you had to continue your webtoon series as readers have been anticipating the next part of the climax. You needed inspiration, and for that you definitely needed time. During lessons, recess, and heck, even gym class!— you’d bring out your drawing tablet just to continue drawing. You knew you had to keep your readers because if not, goodbye fan base and goodbye opportunity to become a known webtoon artist.

“Can anyone give me some symbolism that we could see in Lord of the Flies?” Mr Kim, your literature teacher asked while he walked back and forth at the front of the class. He spotted you, who was scribbling quite vigorously with your head down. “What’re your thoughts y/n?”

You shot your head up embarrassed, bringing your pencil down to your desk as the class had their eyes on you. “Uh..” Your voice quivered and full of uncertainty.

“I see you weren’t listening, like always. Not a surprise. Detention after class.” He said as he took your drawing tablet. He still had a smile on his face, yet there was a hint of disappointment in them. When he saw you nod, he looked around the room for others who could answer. He saw Wonwoo, one of his best students in literature, dozing off with another novel in his desk.

“Wonwoo, can you help y/n answer?” He gestured to you as he had your drawing tablet in his hands.

“Well..” Wonwoo trailed off, unable to answer as it was clearly seen that he didn’t paid any attention. With his specs on, he fixed it as it was slightly crooked on the bridge of his nose. Cold sweat slowly trailed down his temples then to his jawline. Like a familiar encounter, he felt the pressure despite being the best one in class.

The bell rang indicating the end of the lesson. Mr Kim called the both of you for detention, confiscating your beloved things. “You may get these after you submit an essay of what we discussed today.”

“Gee thanks for dragging me to detention.” Wonwoo walked alongside you at the corridor, heading to towards an empty classroom.

“What, you’re blaming me? You were doing something else too.” You opened the door and sat on a desk to begin writing.

“Yeah Mr Kim wouldn’t have known that if you answered the question.” He grabbed the pile of papers in your hands, the tone in his voice reflected the annoyance you gave him.

“Afraid that I’ll ruin your reputation, top student?” You chuckled which basically made Wonwoo more annoyed.

“Says the one doesn’t even have a reputation.” He immediately made a comeback and for sure you heard him mutter ‘last’ that made you hurt— well, because first, drawing webtoons did not define you of being not bright; second, it did not mean you put education as last priority; and third, you had a huge crush on him. Hearing that from him only made your eyes form beads of tears.

Quiet, you looked at him with eyes he had never seen. It was a new discovery of you. Oh how you felt stepped on with that attitude of his. Now you knew he had that side of him, you swore to never talk to him again. Wonwoo felt a little accomplished for making you quiet with your ignorance of him. You didn’t know his burdens of an eldest child, where pressure was put onto him. He only wanted to make his parents proud.

“Webtoons requires creativity and lot of inspirations. A guy like you who reads and writes novels often should know that.” You sniffed in a low voice, obviously hurt.

He saw you leave the classroom, your completed essay on your desk. He thought of what you said, that was so true and it made him feel pure guilt. Your paper was blown off of the desk by the gust of wind outside, it flew to Wonwoo’s side. As he took the paper and read it, your way of words was something he never imagined.

You were creative and bright.

———

You sat still in your seat, unable to do other things than drawing. Sure Wonwoo did hurt you but you love him to the point you forgave him. What bothered you was your drawing tablet. Mr Kim called you out to tell you that he accidentally dropped it whilst running to punish some students. He wanted to get you a new one but you refused, saying that it wouldn’t bring back your drawings. You didn’t have any other hard drive where you had your drawings saved, and that was basically the only one you got. The latest chapter of your series were there and it was gone. It wasn’t even saved in your Drive because well, you didn’t have time.

Whenever you wanted to talk to Wonwoo he would look away and acted like you weren’t there. You knew he wanted to apologize but couldn’t so you just let him be— wait until he was ready.

It pained Wonwoo to know that you did not dare to look at his way. It pained him to see you stop drawing, that was something you loved. Why did he do that? Why would he hurt you? He didn’t have that attitude in him and yet he still did it. He never imagined hurting a girl, someone he actually loved. Countless of times he encountered you at the canteen, you would only avoid him. His heart felt crushed.

Heck, he had so much things that went through his mind and he couldn’t even utter a single sorry well because, what could an apology do? He knew it would only hurt you more.

He grunted in his seat that made his friends wondered his behavior. “Yo dude, what’s up?” Soonyoung fisted the boy’s arm.

“Nothing much.” Wonwoo lied but it made the boys shrug their shoulders and before they stood, they heard him say something.

“What to do if you hurt someone you love?” He scratched his head. Mingyu, Soonyoung and Seokmin knew what he meant.

“Approach her and say that you’re really sorry. Make it up to her.” Mingyu nudged his Hyung.

“Or try to explain to her that you didn’t meant it, that you did it without thinking.” Soonyoung said.

“Hyung, I’m sure she’ll understand.” Seokmin assured him, as he was close to you too.

———

He followed you to your house after school even though he felt like a stalker. This is stupid. He just had to talk to you and he kicked the stones that blocked his path. The stones led to you. As he looked ahead, your small frame showed him how fragile you were, how you skipped meals just to continue the series. And yes he did read the series after that fight.

“Y/N!” He finally called out to you, who turned around to see his worried face. Immediately you stopped in front of your house and he caught your hand. “I’m sorry!”

“‘You’re the most terrible snob’, Wonwoo.” Your lips formed a slight smile, at least that was what he thought he saw.

“Me?” He asked and a realization hit him. “Wait is that a dialogue from ‘Me Before You’?”

“A guy like you who reads novel often should know that.” You whispered.

The familiar sentence brought Wonwoo back to that day. Guilt hit him but it didn’t bother him. “You’re not mad?”

“Why would I?” You shrugged your shoulders as you looked elsewhere. ‘I can’t get mad at you because I like you.’ was what you wanted to tell him.

Wonwoo dropped his novels that made you look to him, his cheeks now were pink and you realized. “Did I just say it out loud?” You cupped your mouth in shock.

He nodded and you picked up his books to his arms. “Just forget I said that Wonwoo, you can leave since I forgive you and—“ You turned him around for him to start walking, and he suddenly turned around to face you.

“And I like you too.” He confessed, satisfied that you weren’t mad at him anymore.

———

Since then you started to go out with Wonwoo and experienced all sorts of dates; the carnival, cinema, aquarium, bike rides etc. It had been six months ago and he was still head over heels for you.

One time he asked you to create and draw for him a visual representation of his novel trilogy. You didn’t want to at first since he wasn’t a fan of cartoons and the colors were kind of too much for him. But since he got so used to you, he started to like it.

He published his first book online after few reviews from his friend who worked at the firm. It gained a lot of readers who were interested in it and they requested for the cover page for the protagonists. You gladly accepted his offer; he was your boyfriend after all.

Your date was postponed since Wonwoo had to complete the last few pages of the second book. You were at his place for a little while. He was obviously tired and was to take a break. You felt his presence behind you as you drew your webtoon series on the small table, with the soft carpet underneath you.

“Just let me rest for a while.” he let his head lean onto your small back frame. “One minute is fine.”

“One.. Two.. Three.. Four..” You began to count even though your heart was beating fast. “Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty five, thirty-“

“Hey that’s cheating.” He said so bluntly and right now he purposely put his weight onto you.

“My one minute is soon over though. And I get to decide on how to count, not you.” you excused.

“You’re as sly as a fox y/n.” He rested his hand to the floor. “Should I do something sly to you? Like in Fifty Sha—“

“What the heck you-“ you tried to push him away, only to be cut off with his actions. He wrapped his arms around your waist, he practically hugged you that your back was by his chest. “What’re you doing?”

“Recharging.” His chin was on your shoulder and you felt his breath tickle your ear. “I need energy and you’re the perfect one to keep me going.”

“So cheesy.” You scoffed but inside you were dying with butterflies that continuously punched your stomach. “But I like it.”

Wonwoo sniffed your strawberry-scented hair in response, giving you a kiss before he dozed off to dreamland.

#seventeen #seventeen fluff #seventeen au #seventeen romance #seventeen angst #seventeen imagines #jeon wonwoo #seventeen wonwoo #wonwoo imagines

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criticalpraisefilm · 6 years

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Top 5 Best and Worst Movies of 2017

Wow, this list was hard to write. Not because I didn’t have enough material, not at all. If anything, I struggled to find films to put on the worst list. Some of the films on the worst side of the list I actually enjoyed, because this year has given us so many fantastic movies. It’s been the best year for films in a long time. In fact, this year has been so good, I’m starting with some Honourable Mentions. Because I can. Honourable Mentions (in no particular order): Power Rangers Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie Logan Lucky The Hitman’s Assassin Baby Driver (newfound casting awkwardness aside) Wonder Woman (wow, how did I not have enough space on this list for Wonder Woman?)

And now, on to the good (and bad) stuff:

5th Best: The LEGO Batman Movie

After saving Gotham again, Batman finds himself struggling to find a purpose in life, when he accidentally adopts a child, and finds himself dealing with that, while trying to stop villains from taking over the world again. It’s hilarious. Get ready to read that a lot on this list, because half of my favourite movies of the year were at least partially comedies, but I really can’t say that much about the movie beyond that it’s full of jokes, and a vast majority of them work. You’ll end up laughing your way through it, which is the best way to watch a silly movie like this. And hey, if you miss half the jokes, that just gives you an excuse to watch it again.

5th Worst: Baywatch

The members of Baywatch have to accept some new recruits into their ranks that stir things up, while dealing with a local new drug ring. I wanted to enjoy this movie, because when it’s being funny, it’s pretty damn funny, and Dwayne Johnson doesn’t know how not to be entertaining. But I just couldn’t because it wasn’t funny often enough, and when it wasn’t funny, it was painfully unfunny. Maybe good for a few laughs, but nowhere near as successful a comedy as it could and should have been.

4th Best: Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Star Wars happens. Rey trains in the Force with Luke, Finn, Poe, Leia and the rest of the Resistance try not to die, Kylo Ren tries to make them die, it’s all very Star Wars. And it’s good Star Wars, pulling a great number of subversions of overdone Star Wars ideas, and combining enough Original Trilogy familiarity with it’s own originality to produce a great movie. The best Star Wars we’ve had in a long time to be perfectly honest. Carries on the franchise nicely and provides plenty of hope for the future.

4th Worst: The Dark Tower

A Gunslinger and a Man in Black spend a movie trying to kill each other, while psychic child Jake tags along with a Gunslinger to stop the universe from ending. I kinda wish the kid wasn’t there. Nothing against the actor, but the character detracted from the interesting part of the movie, which was the Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey shooting each other. Unfortunately, said kid was the focus of the movie. Mostly it’s just kinda boring. There’s not a great deal to say about it, because so little feels like it happened. Which is not the route you want to go in a movie where the entire universe is literally being destroyed.

3rd Best: Thor: Ragnarok

Thor and Loki team up again to fight Hela, Goddess of Death. They lose badly and end up on a mostly lawless planet, where Thor meets up with the Hulk, and starts putting together a team to give murdering Hela another shot. I keep hearing different numbers, but apparently a good amount of this movie’s dialogue was improvised, and it feels like it in the best possible way. The jokes, comedic timing, and character interactions are absolutely perfect and wonderful. It doesn’t even try to take itself seriously, and yet still tells an engaging story while being so funny it hurts sometimes.

3rd Worst: Assassin’s Creed

This came out 1st January 2017 in the UK. I’m counting it because this movie sucks. Callum Lynch is executed, and later wakes up to find himself imprisoned by the Abstergo Corporation, who want to use his “genetic memory” to find an artefact that will allow them to take over the world. For something with world-ending stakes, not a lot seemed to happen. Sound familiar? Again, this just turned out being not very interesting for much of the runtime. It’s boring, the plot makes little sense, every character is an asshole, the climax is so underwhelming I didn’t believe the movie was over initially, and it’s just a drag to get through.

2nd Best: The Disaster Artist

Actors Greg Sestero and the indescribable Tommy Wiseau find little success in getting movie roles, so they decide to make their own movie. Called The Room. The rest is history. James Franco’s impression of Tommy Wiseau is scarily uncanny at times, which is what holds up the movie’s comedy because the antics of that man are a sight to behold. The rest of the movie is held together by Dave Franco’s inspired performance as Sestero and the shockingly inspirational themes. If you are a fan of The Room this is a must see. If you are not a fan of The Room, go see The Room, and then see this one.

2nd Worst: American Assassin

Mitch Rapp wants to get revenge on some undefined terrorists, and so joins a super-secret unit of highly trained soldiers dedicated to...taking out terrorists I guess, it isn’t very clear or memorable. The main problem with this movie is the main character: namely, that he’s an idiot who thinks he’s a badass, and unfortunately the movie agrees with him. He constantly does stupid, reckless things that should get him killed, but don’t because he’s the main character. Other than that, it’s a pretty generic action movie with nothing new about it. If it had been about all the ways the main character died because of his stupidity, it would be a much better movie.

Best: Blade Runner 2049

Replicant Blade Runner K stumbles across a secret that could ignite a war between humans and Replicants. He and his holographic partner Joi must make the decision to destroy evidence of the secret, or ignite the spark of revolution. This movie was as perfect a sequel to Blade Runner as we were ever going to get. It looks beautiful, the plot plays out in fantastic style, the characters are all interesting, and the themes and ideas presented are just flawless. This is the best movie I have seen in many, many years, and stands a good chance of being one of my favourite movies ever, if not top of that list.

Worst: Fifty Shades Darker

Anastasia Steele, after making the best decision of her life and breaking up with Christian Grey, completely goes back on that and gets back together with him on the promise that he’ll be better and stuff. Not much else happens. What do I need to say? It’s Fifty Shades: the second one. That name has become synonymous with zero plot, terrible and terribly-written characters, bad pacing, stale writing, and just overall nothing interesting beyond the flat sex scenes. Even if it is much less reprehensible than the first movie, that does not by any stretch make it good, and it is really, really not. This movie should be avoided at any cost.

#Good Movies #Bad Movies #Best and Worst of 2017 #The LEGO Batman Movie #Baywatch #Star Wars: The Last Jedi #The Dark Tower #Thor: Ragnarok #Assassin's Creed #The Disaster Artist #American Assassin #Blade Runner 2049 #Fifty Shades Darker

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infinitebrownianmotion · 7 years

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My Year in Books

Dear Nobody

When asked if I’ve read a particular book, often all I would have to offer on the subject is a simple yes or no and perhaps whether I liked it or not. The interrogator might proceed to throw questions at me or share details about the book, which are usually met with a blank expression and/or a shrug. And as is usually the case, I will then be asked why I read so much if I can’t remember a thing about the book afterwards. I suppose I read purely for pleasure. I read so that I can lead many lives, look through new eyes, walk in someone else’s shoes, experience a range of emotions that I normally wouldn’t in my day-to-day life. I read so that I can learn new things. I read so that I can transcend myself. I internalize elements that I like in the books I read and then let them go. I don’t read to remember, although if something does stick in my memory, that’s great too.

Since 2014, I’ve set myself a Reading Challenge on GoodReads at the start of every year. It was this blog post by scientist and role model, TR Shankar Raman, that inspired me and continues to do so. Some years I complete the challenge, some years I don’t, depending on where I happen to be in my life at that point, both physically and metaphorically. It turns out that extended breaks in between jobs are great for reading, especially because one finds oneself broke and at home a lot.

Most of 2017 was spent at my field site in a remote corner of Arunachal Pradesh with atrocious cellphone connectivity. I had to come up with a way to keep track of my reading challenge without GoodReads.

This year’s challenge was a modest 42 books, which I’m happy to report I completed earlier this month! Overall, it was a fun year for reading. I surprised myself by reading far less Fantasy & Sci-Fi than I usually do. Not at all by design, I ended up reading quite a few works of fiction and one memoir written by people from non-Western regions of the world – India, Nigeria, South Africa, Palestine, South Korea, Japan – and I’m glad for it because I feel like I have delved a little into the history and culture of these places, carrying them around like a collection of mental postcards wherever I go.

I first discovered Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie when I watched her TED talk ‘The Danger of a Single Story’ back in 2009, making a mental note to read her first novel Purple Hibiscus. I finally got around to it this year (Procrastination 101) and boy, I fell in love with the narrative, the characters, the way Adichie doesn’t tell you what to think but describes everything in beautiful detail (never failing to activate all the senses) and allows you to arrive at your own conclusions. I then went on to read her other books – Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, The Thing Around Your Neck, Dear Ijeawele Or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions – in quick succession. Through her writing, I learnt about the Biafran War (which I’d never heard of until that point), Nigerian cuisine (ah, I could almost taste some of it!), attire, what life is like growing up in a university campus in Nsukka or as a ‘Big Man’ in Lagos. I got a glimpse of sexism, religion, and the political history of the country that was forced into being by the British Empire. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the three people I would love to write like, the other two being Vladimir Nabokov and William Dalrymple.

My book of the year was Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, one that I would wholeheartedly recommend to just about anyone. Because it doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from or what genre you stubbornly adhere to, this book will pluck at your heartstrings. A warning at the outset – it will not be easy, you will explore the dark side of human nature, the book will become a mirror that shows you parts of yourself that you would rather not acknowledge. You will never truly recover from the reading experience. But I can assure you that you won’t regret it. The book is in the form of progress reports written by Charlie Gordon, a borderline mentally disabled person with an IQ of 68 who works in a bakery. He has signed up for an experiment which, having been successfully carried out on a mouse named Algernon, is to be tested on humans for the first time. If successful, this scientific breakthrough will increase his intelligence by manifold. Charlie is excited about the prospect of becoming smart like his friends at the bakery. Reading through his progress reports, you are part of the process as Charlie begins to change, slowly at first and then in leaps and bounds. You watch as his relationships with the people around him change, as they start to treat him differently and he starts to realize the cruelty he was subject to. We also get glimpses of his painful past as his childhood memories resurface. In the meanwhile, at the peak of Charlie’s intelligence, Algernon has begun a sudden and unexpected deterioration, and eventually dies. What does this mean for Charlie? Ah, how can I possibly explain the range of emotions that this book evokes! It’s a journey of the soul.

Alice by Christina Henry was another great find this year. It’s a dark retelling of Alice in Wonderland, all the more delightful for being gory and macabre. Alice finds herself locked away in an asylum, but she can’t remember what happened to her or how she landed up there. She only remembers a man with rabbit ears. I won’t say any more about it – you’ll just have to see for yourself! After the spectacular first book, I was quite disappointed to read Red Queen, which I thought failed on many fronts but mainly in terms of plot. But if you like Henry’s style as much as I do, you could skip the second book and move on to the morbid world of Peter Pan in Lost Boy instead.

Other books I would recommend are Born a Crime by Trevor Noah (hilarious, charming and eye-opening account of his childhood in South Africa in the post-apartheid era), Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words by Andrew Morton (biography of Princess Diana, which I read only because I knew nothing about the Royal Family, it was an interesting read), Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones (so much fun!), Women by Charles Bukowski (for his style), and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (better than the movie).

I have this strange compulsion to finish any book I start, no matter how awful. If you suffer from the same disorder, then I would advise against picking up the following books: The Magicians by Lev Grossman (the characters suck, the plot sucks, the writing sucks – apparently it’s a trilogy, I steered clear of the second book), Half a King by Joe Abercrombie (didn’t find much to like, but started the second book to see if it could get any worse, then finished it before I realized I’d been reading the third book, so I accidentally read the trilogy – sort of), Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (mmm, I didn’t enjoy it one bit, I think I only like his writing when he’s on mescaline).

2017 was also a year for audiobooks. Up until now, I was on the fence about them. Would my mind drift while listening to a recording of someone reading a story? What if I didn't like the narrator? And since I like reading, re-reading, and mulling over particularly well-written lines, I dreaded the thought of having to navigate my way through the forward-back controls and the minutes and seconds of the aural world. Despite these concerns, I downloaded Philip Pullman’s triology, His Dark Materials. All three audiobooks were fantastic and I had a great time listening to them. I also found that audiobooks are a great companion to have when you can't read (easily) - in the shower, while exercising or doing the laundry, while commuting, you name it. And of course, there's nothing like snuggling up under the blankets and falling asleep to a bedtime story.

I’m currently reading The God of Small Things by Arundathi Roy and wondering about what my target should be for next year’s Reading Challenge. In the meanwhile, do you have any recommendations for me to add to my 2018 shelf?

Love, D

#reading challenge #GoodReads #books #reading

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nomoremetaphors · 7 years

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WASTED POTENTIAL: X-Men: First Class and the Death of Armando Muñoz

Or, How Racism F%#@ed the X-Men Movies

It’s no surprise to anyone who knows me that I am absolutely, ridiculously invested in the X-Men Cinematic Universe. Or, more specifically, I’m invested in what the XMCU could have been, if it had been approached as a cohesive whole rather than a series of vaguely confused attempts at continuity and Wolverine cameos.

For me, the biggest moment of missed potential comes with the death of Armando “Darwin” Muñoz at the midpoint of X-Men: First Class. People have talked, of course, about how his death was racist and doesn’t make sense -- because it was racist, and fundamentally, it doesn’t make sense.

To be fair, I don’t think the writers were being intentionally racist when they killed Armando off in the same scene where the movie’s only other black character defects to the side of the bad guys. I don’t think they were being intentionally racist when they had a Nazi kill a black man, who, in the comics, is literally and demonstrably unkillable.

But they did these things, and these things were racist.

And to be honest, that racism kinda f%#@ed the franchise. It’s not the only thing that did -- the decision to put ten year timeskips in between each movie of the second trilogy certainly didn’t help matters -- but I think that it’s the single bad decision that, if averted, would have changed everything.

Under the cut, I’ll discuss why Armando was such a significant character, and why his death shaped the direction of the franchise by destroying some pretty epic narrative possibilities.

(Trigger Warnings for: mentions of suicide, depression, trauma, real life racism, human experimentation. Nothing more explicit than XMCU canon, however.)

Part One: Armando as Narrative and Thematic Lynchpin

For a character with roughly seven minutes of screentime, Armando has a huge amount of narrative and thematic significance, and his character relationships are some of the most fascinating in a film that is, by and large, about character dynamics and interactions.

Part 1-A: Armando and Alex, Charles and Erik, and Parallelism

First, you have to account for Alex Summers. Alex is, narratively speaking, intertwined with Darwin, and I’m not just saying that because I ship the thing. From the moment they’re both on screen together until after Darwin’s death, their stories are intimately connected. Darwin’s death moves Alex irrevocably, though the final cut of the film fails to explicitly address that; it even has ripples to Alex’s own death, 21 years and 2 movies later, which visually and narratively echoes Darwin’s.

To make a long story short, Armando and Alex have a significant and almost immediate connection as soon as they interact. Alex fears his mutation, and Armando sees everyone’s mutations as gifts. In the next scene they're in -- Darwin’s last, unfortunately -- they've carved a space for themselves away from the rest of the group, playing pinball together. Pinball, interestingly, was technically illegal, and therefore an underground practice, in most places in 1962. It was, however, popular in Greenwich Village and Harlem, and given that Armando is from New York and Alex is a somewhat queer-coded ex-con, it makes sense that they’d be the ones playing.

That said, their body language speaks to a closeness that is deeply unusual given the short time they’ve known each other and the historical context in which this film takes place. When things start to go south at the compound, Armando gets Alex’s attention not by saying anything, but by drawing his hand across Alex’s torso, physically directing his attention to the direction that Armando’s moving.

Alex spends the majority of that scene following Armando’s unspoken directions, actually. If you follow Alex’s posture and eyes throughout the scene, you’ll catch several instances where he’s looking to Armando to see what to do next. They even touch more than once during the fight.

Additionally, Alex winds up standing at Armando’s right hand during the pivotal part of the scene, when Shaw is making his “sales pitch” to the young mutants. You see Alex sway a little toward Armando, eventually positioned at his shoulder. It’s all very King and Lionheart, and something that the small fanbase that ships them has caught onto.

Then, we come to the biggest moment: when Armando makes the plan, communicates it to Alex with nothing but a look and possibly an offscreen touch, and pretends to defect with Angel. You see the expressions shifting over Alex’s face as he goes from ‘betrayed’ to ‘understanding’ in the space of literally three seconds. There’s a plan, and Alex is going to follow Armando’s lead.

This goes wrong, of course, because of Shaw’s mutation. When Armando calls out Alex’s name -- his last word, actually -- and Alex uses his energy blast to try and kill Shaw, Riptide, and Azazel, Shaw uses his mutation to steal that energy, and to shove it down Armando’s throat. When Shaw leaves with his lackeys and Angel, the scene’s ending focuses entirely on Alex and Armando. Alex realizes that something is going horribly wrong, that Armando’s not adapting fast enough, and Armando looks at him, reaches out to him -- but neither of them says anything.

In my opinion, this character dynamic is a parallel and opposite to the Charles/Erik dynamic that so many people loved in XMFC. They can communicate completely silently, and all their most important moments are silent, whereas Charles and Erik have their relationship take up the lion’s share of the dialogue in the film. When Shaw uses Alex’s powers to kill Armando, Alex and Armando are trying to keep the team together. When Erik accidentally disables Charles with a bullet from Moira’s gun, he’s taking up Shaw’s war and making Shaw’s offer to the team.

Touch, too, is used very differently in the two dynamics; for Alex and Darwin, it essentially begins and climaxes with touch, and ends with an inability to touch, and the utter destruction of Armando’s body. When Charles and Erik’s relationship falls apart, Erik gets to cradle Charles in his arms before choosing to walk away from him.

When you look at each character individually, you can also see clear parallels between Erik/Alex and Charles/Armando. Erik and Alex are angry, with violence in their past: Erik’s trauma is pretty much the defining factor in the plot, and there is a deleted scene for Alex that explains that he once used his powers to defend himself from being brutalized in prison. Armando and Charles are both de-facto leaders when the time comes to lead, and Armando is probably the closest thing to a functional adult among the young mutants; that said, actor Edi Gathegi has stated that he played Armando with his comic book backstory, which includes a history of depression and a suicide attempt spurred by a neglectful abusive mother, and the entire plot of Days of Future Past had to do with Charles’s inability to cope with the trauma inflicted on him by Erik and the ensuing decade of horrors that was the sixties for him.

Overall, whether intentional or not, the Alex/Darwin dynamic echoes and mirrors the Charles/Erik one, reinforcing the theme that solidarity is impossible -- likely an unintentional theme -- and the idea of the homosocial-bordering-on-homerotic relationship.

Part 1-B: Armando, his Powers, and the Historical Context

I also can’t write this post without pointing out that Armando is the first black male mutant of significance in the XMCU franchise, both in order of release and chronologically. I cannot overstate, also, the relevance of a black man whose powers are literally just staying alive no matter what the world throws at him.

People rightfully made a big deal about Luke Cage, another bulletproof black man in the Marvel pantheon, and how important it was to see him onscreen. Right now, there is an ongoing and urgent public discourse about police brutality, and the way society undermines the personhood and the value of black lives.

Armando’s death in X-Men: First Class makes no sense, because in the comics, he’s survived everything from being launched into space, dematerializing into an energy being, and being touched by a literal god of Death. If anyone could survive Shaw, it would be Armando.

Additionally, consider that this film is set in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It only predates Freedom Summer by two years, and the Civil Rights Act by three. Armando’s blackness and his leadership role in the team matter, on a thematic and contextual level. A team of mutants -- long an allegory for all manner of oppressed populations -- led by an unkillable black man in the 1960s has immediate political ramifications for the setting, and for the present.

But the film refuses to recognize these things by killing him off and minimizing his relevance after the scene immediately following his death.

After Armando dies, we see the morning after, when Charles, Erik, and Moira return to the smoking wreckage of the Virginia compound to find Angel gone, Armando dead, and the rest of the team deeply, deeply shaken. We see, in the background, the crushed taxicab that used to belong to him. Charles and Raven have a brief conversation, where she tells him that Armando is dead, “and we can’t even bury him.”

Erik interjects with, “But we can avenge him.” This draws Alex’s attention immediately, making him sit up after having spent the majority of the scene somewhat curled in on himself.

After that, the final cut of the film doesn’t include any reference to Armando whatsoever, even when it would have mattered. A single deleted scene set during Alex’s training montage discusses Alex’s guilt or innocence in the matter -- Charles tells Alex that if he doesn’t get this right, he could kill one of his teammates. Alex reacts by stopping, saying, “He asked me to cover him,” and storming out of the bunker he’s using to train.

I understand that Erik’s trauma is the fundamentally important one for the plot of this film, but wouldn’t the movie be thematically fuller and rounder if it dealt, even implicitly, with Armando’s death and the effect it had on the others, especially Alex? After all, as I said before, Alex and Erik parallel each other in a lot of pivotal ways, from their dark pasts to their weaponized mutations.

Part 1-C: Armando and the Death of Solidarity

I mentioned earlier that Armando’s death reinforces the theme that solidarity is impossible, and I’d like to expand on that. I wrote a little bit about it in my thesis, Never Let Anyone Tell You Different, but essentially, a major unintentional problem with the X-Men franchise in general and the XMCU in particular is that it always splits mutants into good mutants and evil mutants, often refusing to recognize that there is a huge grey area in between, and that the allegory mutants represent makes this idea of good versus evil genuinely harmful.

Armando’s death is the first real fracture in mutantkind, and first, last, and only time anyone actively tries to maintain a sense of mutant solidarity, or to keep someone from joining the ‘evil’ mutants out of desperation, anger, or fear. Armando’s attempt to keep Angel on their ‘side’ of Shaw’s war is literally the only time in the franchise that something like this happens -- for example, at the end of the movie, Charles chooses to not fight it when Raven tells him she’s leaving with Erik, and in X2: X-Men United, neither Bobby Drake or Rogue try to convince John Allerdyce not to leave and join the Brotherhood of Mutants. Finally, in X-Men: The Last Stand, Logan seems fairly ambivalent on the subject of Rogue leaving the Institute to seek out a cure for her mutation.

Basically, the only attempt at maintaining a sense of communality among mutants, to fight that ever-present categorical dichotomy, fails. And when it does, it also divides mutantkind sharply -- by the end of XMFC, the X-Men are all white men, though one is a non-passing mutant and one has a mobility disability. The ‘evil’ mutants consist of two white women, a white-passing Jewish holocaust survivor, an Afro-Latina former sex worker, a non-passing mutant, and a Latino man.

I don’t think I need to explain why that’s a huge, huge allegorical problem, but I will anyway: when you divide out morality by associating goodness primarily with white maleness, you’re prioritizing positive representation of white men at the expense of representing everyone else, and that has a demonstrable effect on the the way people perceive themselves and others. We tell stories to define ourselves as human, and as parts of communities, and to learn how to be human, in a big way.

So, by killing off Armando, and with him, solidarity, the XMCU reinforces power structures that the entire concept of the X-Men as a mythos is supposed to oppose, which is, I’d say, not a good look.

Part Two: What Could Have Been

I want to take this time to talk, now that I’ve explained what’s wrong with the franchise as a direct result of Armando’s untimely murder, about what the XMCU could have been if he’d survived, or if he’d come back at some point after the attack on the Virginia CIA compound.

Option 1: No Death, XMFC-timeline goes off in other direction from the canon. Armando survives the blast and goes on to lead the X-Men through the battle during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He makes an impassioned plea for Raven to stay, and for Angel to come back. They may or may not, and Charles still gets shot, creating a bittersweet but ultimately hopeful ending for the movie.

Option 2: Post-XMFC, does not take into account Days of Future Past. Armando reassembles himself after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and has to deal with his own trauma, as well as the trauma that the others have gone through in his absence. He still takes up the leadership role, especially when Charles starts to spiral. The X-Men debut publicly after the assassination of Kennedy. Alex gets drafted for Vietnam, winds up involved in anti-war protests, and Armando, as a public figure, has to balance being a mutant with being a black man in America during this period.

Option 3: Days of Future Past. Instead of being sent back to prevent Mystique from getting her revenge on Bolivar Trask, Wolverine goes back to the past to prevent Armando from being captured by Trask Industries. His mutation is the one used by Trask to create the Mark X Sentinels that destroy mutantkind in the 2018-2023. He either finds Alex also trapped there, or Alex plays an important role in getting him back; additionally, they have to break Magneto out of jail for Reasons. In this option, Armando can have come back or never died at all. This can deal, allegorically, with issues like the Tuskegee Syphillis Study and the Henrietta Lacks case.

Option 4: X-Men: Apocalypse. The Four Horsemen of Apocalypse includes Armando as the Horseman of Death, as a reference to his time as a death deity in the comics and because he was the first mutant to die in Shaw’s war, which is really just a modern iteration of En Sabah Nur’s ‘survival of the fittest’ doctrine. Alex is War, Charles is an unwilling Pestilence, and Erik and Mystique have to lead a group of scared teenagers against Apocalypse and his Horsemen. This would be a film about Love overcoming the end of all things -- Erik and Raven’s love for Charles would save him, and the connection between Alex and Armando would eventually break them out of Apocalypse’s hold. Community and solidarity would prevail over the insistent, selfish individualism advocated by Apocalypse, which can provide a look at the idea of solidarity among and within oppressed groups -- like, for LGBT people, the often uneasy coalition between the LGB and the T parts, and stuff like that.

Basically, any of the movies subsequent to XMFC can be reworked to be better, more topical, and more interesting with the addition of Armando Muñoz. Armando is a potential lynchpin and turning point, and the fact that he was basically thrown out in favor of typical focus on whiteness has been a major contributor to the way that the XMCU has set itself up for failure on its allegorical and narrative levels.

People might say that dealing with the things I’ve mentioned here would make people uncomfortable or make the movie harder to sell, but I’d like to point out that Logan dealt implicitly or explicitly with refugees, the exploitation of female and Latina bodies, and the weaponization and abuse of children, and it has garnered hugely positive reviews and a box office of over $540million worldwide, making it the third most successful X-Men movie ever, and it’s only been out for a month.

This is doable. This is something that should’ve been done a long time ago. And this is something that those in charge of the next set of X-Men films should consider when they sit down to plot out the next phase of the franchise. The X-Men films are capable of doing incredible things, narratively speaking, if they just step outside the ‘traditional’ superhero mold, either by diverting narrative focus away from white men, explicitly engaging with topical social issues, or both.

Overall, the death of Armando Muñoz is perhaps the clearest example of how a lack of care has made the XMCU into the least successful of the three major superhero movie franchises, and interrogating the what-could-have-beens could pave the way for fixing the very real problems that have dogged the franchise since roughly 2006.

I hope that they do. We deserve better than we’ve gotten, as the audience, and these characters deserve better as parts of our lives.

As always, Murphy out.

#armando muñoz #armando munoz #xmcu #xmen #xmfc #cherik #representation in media #analysis #long post #featured

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