#someone somewhere described it as painfully heterosexual

[peach-s0up]

i need more h2g2 content do i watch the movie guys

[bladewarde]

𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐑𝐘: 𝐈𝐍𝐅𝐎𝐑𝐌𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍

full name: laera nicknames: laer bear, sweetest, dove, shield place of birth: westgate, faerun current location: lower city, baldurs gate ( formerly ), in the wilds between elturel and bladur’s gate sexual/romantic orientation: heterosexual preferred pronouns: she/her gender: female

one personality trait they’re proud of having: her efficiency and thoroughness to get things done... so long as there’s a profit to be had somewhere. defining gestures: tight jaw; hard stare; hand usually resting on her sword hilt. she’s always watching something, and always ready to react. speaking style: she has an accent typical of those from the dragon coast, and being westhavian, it can be particularly thick at times. insecurities: truthfully, laera is seldom insecure, but one thing that sticks out to me is her uncertainty in relationships. she was brand new to relationships and romantic love as a 26/27 year old, and while she’s confident in knowing what she wants in a partner, expressing that is... difficult. she’s surprisingly shy, and with her only frame of reference being story book romances and fair ladies, knowing she doesn’t quite fit that image is a hangup of hers. positive traits: she is staunchly loyal to those deserving of it; laera will defend and protect those closest to her without hesitation. she is also resourceful, pragmatic and cunning; how she uses those skills, though, is largely dependent on her current affiliations lol negative traits: by far her largest is that she is very... gruff. she approaches a lot of situations like a business transaction, as if there’s something to be given and taken ( in her mind, there always is ); at times can be unfeeling; and quite impatient. other people’s opinions of them: laera is not an easy person to get along with: she knows this, acquaintances know this, and close friends definitely know this. more than likely, people say she’s not someone to be messed with... and they’re absolutely right. three words to describe them: angry chaos woman. 

one major turning point in their life: definitely being surrendered to the church of tyr. it forever changed her life as she knew it to be, and still has a major impact on her. if they could time travel, when would they go?: if she knew what she does now, likely before she stole whatever it was that landed her in the church. favorite way to waste time: sharpening her blade, carving spells into her shield, or reading ideal romantic partner: ideally someone very similar to herself... angry chaos man LOL given a blank piece of paper, a pencil, and nothing to do, what would happen?: she’d likely doodle for a bit, but probably practice her handwriting. she was responsible for manuscripting religious text at the abbey of blinding truth -- her handwriting needed to be nice. the fact she can even read and write at all as a commoner is a gift; she’s somewhat proud of that. view on home and family?: laera honestly doesn’t remember the specifics of westgate as a child, but the big things, such as ships harboured in the dock, the fish market, and mazes made of homes and alleys, she does remember. her formative years, though, were shaped by feelings of entrapment and anger, directed at the church and everyone who was sworn into its service. naturally, these feelings also extended to her mother, her only living relative.   any secret stashes?: undoubtedly she has a pouch of coins hidden under the floor boards of her hovel... just in case.

how do they express themselves?: very vocally and painfully honest. she doesn’t cover up anything, and will absolutely give her two gold pieces, whether it’s asked for or not. what did they want to be when they grew up?: like any little girl, she probably had dreams bigger than herself; maybe wanted to be a sailor or a tavern owner. what do you like most about them?: i love that if anyone is earnest about trying to befriend laera, they have to work at it. she does not give her friendship easily, and generally speaking, she isn’t an easy person to get along with. so finding some nugget of commonality between them and her, and using that as a entryway to befriend her -- it’s definitely a surprise for her. it shows that someone is willing to not give up on her bc she is a certain way, and ( hopefully ) is genuine. she likely will be trepidatious, especially when she’s so often surrounded by others who backstab and are liars, but earning her respect and loyalty means having an extremely loyal companion.

one or more plots you’re dying to have:

laera befriending someone during her time at the church... or having a church companion? ;_;

definitely more interpersonal things were she and someone can comfortably ( or not ) open up to one another

she is a tank!! let her protect someone!! 

i’ve been wanting to play around with the idea of laera committing to being chaotic evil OR being recruited by someone ( or a group ) that is evilly aligned. she can easily be nudged in that direction, i want to see it happen >:(

𝐓𝐀𝐆𝐆𝐄𝐃 𝐁𝐘: @stagsworn​ shrimpyyyy  ♥♥ 𝐓𝐀𝐆𝐆𝐈𝐍𝐆: @shinizenchi (omen... or nova?)  / @hellesfeuer / @aurorues​ / @glorybled​

[blapisblogs]

Okay, this isn’t what I usually post on here, but since this considers a movie I recently added to my blacklist, and has been cluttering my thoughts since I saw it, I figured fuck it, I have to write something about this.

Recently I made the decision to join a group of people online to watch a bootleg recording of the Emoji Movie.

It’s bad.

Shocking, I know, but I mean it. It is bad. Not even funny bad, just bad. As in it exceeded my already low expectations. I set the bar on the ground and it burrowed under it.

I may not ever liveblog this movie (because Jesus Christ, why would I even if I didn’t watch it already), but I will talk about why I felt it was bad.

Spoilers below the cut. Not spoilers for the Emoji Movie (because it really doesn’t deserve a spoiler-free rant(?)), but for other, better animated movies that others have already pointed out that it at least vaguely resembles (namely Wreck-It Ralph and The Lego Movie).

For starters, the overall pacing of this movie is hands-down the worst I’ve ever seen for anything. It literally fucked up the perception of time for the other people who were watching it, myself included. I can’t even find words to describe what terrible pacing this has, or even find an apt comparison for it because it’s just that unbelievably incompetent. There were three writers working on this thing, and it seemed like none of them had a single idea of how basic story flow works.

Speaking of the story, it’s just as dull and confusing of a mess as most people had feared. It has all the trademarks of your formulaic animated kids movie. Male protagonist who doesn’t fit in but wants to change that? Yep. Annoying best friend (who doesn’t act like one in this at all) sidekick that’s supposed to be funny and charming (but in this movie actually isn’t either of those things)? Yeah. Girl character who’s “not your typical girl” who ends up being the love interest to the main protagonist? Oh you better believe that’s there. Main Protagonist does something that puts multiple people in danger and now he and his newfound friends have to go out to save everyone, and in the end he defeats the bad guy and gets to be himself? Oh yes. Bland cishet romance? Duh. Jokes that try to appeal to millennials but fall flat? Definitely. Bathroom jokes? There’s a freaking poop emoji (two, actually), of course there is. Oh, and so much blatant product placement that it’d make an Adam Sandler movie blush.

The internal logic of this movie’s world just doesn’t make sense. In this film, whenever someone wants to use an emoji, that emoji gets scanned, and the ones with expressions have to make and hold the right face while they’re being scanned, and apparently they have to go through this process every time the phone user wants to use an emoji. Why do they need to be re-scanned every time? Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to just take a picture of everyone once and use that? Why do they all have to act “in character” for their whole lives even when they’re not going to be scanned? (You know how the characters in Wreck-It Ralph “break character” once the arcade closes? Yeah, that’s definitely not what happens in this movie; what you see is what you get.) There are animal, food and object emojis in this world, so do they get to have different emotions while others don’t? Emoticons exist in this universe (as elderly people), so what happens if the user wants to send one of those instead of an emoji? The emojis with expressions definitely have parents since at least three of the characters are parents, so how does that even work? If two different emojis have a kid together, what does that kid turn out to be? Are two different emojis even allowed to be together in this fucked up universe? Why do the poop emojis need to use the bathroom?! There are so many questions that this movie raises, and pretty much none of them are answered. I mean, as bad as the Cars films can be with a similar “how is that even possible in this universe” logic problem, even those aren’t quite as in-your-face questionable as the ones this movie brings up. (Plus, there are at least minor attempts at getting around some things in the Cars series, whereas the Emoji Movie doesn’t even try.)

The characters are all pretty much one-dimensional, even the ones that are supposed to be more “complex” than the others. It’d be one thing if they were at least enjoyable to watch, but they’re not. Gene, the main character, is supposed to be someone the audience likes, but the moment that his confession of forced heterosexual feelings “love” for Jailbreak is rejected by her, he leaves both her and High-Five, and while the writers obviously want people to feel bad for him, it comes off as him acting like an asshole just because his spontaneous feelings weren’t reciprocated by the woman he didn’t even know for a whole day (I think it was a day anyway; like I said, the pacing and sense of time in this movie is fucked up). The writers want you to believe that Gene and High-Five are friends, but given that High-Five initially wanted to go with him for selfish purposes (he’s a “loser” emoji who doesn’t get used much at all and thus gets excluded from some kind of after-party thing, which also brings up a lot of questions), and given the lack of any sort of interaction between the two to imply that they’re growing closer as friends, it comes off as completely false and forced. (Also, I know in most animated stuff they record the actors separately, but dear lord, you should not be able to easily tell that the voice actors for the characters interacting with each other on screen were never in the same room together. In this film it’s painfully obvious that High Five’s voice actor had little to no interactions with the other actors because he has so many moments of solo ad-libbing that make no sense and nobody bothered to stop him or leave any of it out despite it not even being funny.) There’s a moment where Gene’s father, Mehl (haha), reveals that he also has more than one emotion but he’s learned to suppress it, and it’s supposed to be emotional, but given that the earlier scenes he had with his wife, Mehry (HAHA), had him blaming her for why Gene is the way he is, it doesn’t quite make up for what he said in those earlier scenes, and in a way seems to make it worse since he knew it was “his fault” yet blamed her for it anyway. At the end of the movie, Jailbreak goes from being a character who ran away to pursue her dream of being more than what she is supposed to be, to... well, love interest. Yeah, she does other stuff, but at the end she’s basically just a love interest for Gene. Oh, and she also rudely brushed off her mom who was no doubt worried sick about her for who knows how long rather than give her any sort of comfort, which doesn’t make her very likable either. Also, the actual humans that exist outside the phone are barely in this, and their subplot is pretty pointless. (It’s also a forced heterosexual subplot too, because one just wasn’t enough I guess.)

You know how one of the biggest rules of writing is “Show, Don’t Tell”? Apparently none of the three writers working on this movie have heard of that, or they have and they completely ignored it, because there is a lot of telling in this movie and not much showing, especially in the opening with Gene narrating for several minutes.

I don’t think any of the writers know anything about how the internet or smartphones work, or anything at all. The child has a disguised “piracy” app on his phone? They think that it’s possible to reverse the deletion process on a phone, while it’s happening no less? (Factory reset? What’s that?) I am pretty sure that they don’t understand that internet trolls are actual people and not a thing the internet itself makes up? The kid calls the store so he can make an “appointment” for his malfunctioning phone instead of just going there? There are several points where the kid with the phone could’ve just turned off or muted his phone, but didn’t because I don’t know?

(Wreck-It Ralph spoilers ahead) There are revelations that come out of nowhere with absolutely no build-up and are poorly timed, and the biggest example of this has to be the scene it’s randomly revealed that Jailbreak is the missing princess emoji that was only briefly brought up one time before that. I knew that this twist was coming due to it being spoiled in other reviews, and I’ve seen badly-handled reveals before, but I’ve never seen it handled this poorly before. Say what you will about Wreck-It Ralph, but the reveal that Vanellope was the actual ruler of Sugar Rush had hints and build-up to it, and it waited until the time was right to confirm that information to the audience, unlike this movie where the reveal is dropped on the audience somewhere in the second act without much if any build-up to it because the writers just threw their hands up into the air and said “Fuck it! I don’t know! Who cares!”

Sir Patrick Stewart as the poop emoji was completely pointless. I don’t think he even got that much screentime, and the only thing they really did with it is a random Star Trek joke that makes zero sense in the context of the movie itself. (He’s sitting in a chair in his “assigned cube” like Picard does in Star Trek TNG, even though none of the other emojis have chairs in their cubes and this reference is just there because... really forced voice actor reference.) Of course that’s not even getting into the fact that there’s a character who is literally sentient feces. I know it seems ridiculous for me to criticize this part since one of my favorite guest characters from Rick and Morty is Fart, but Rick and Morty is already a weird show with side character names that are even weirder than that, the casting of a decently-known actor for that small part made sense (Fart’s very Bowie-inspired, and Clement is well known for his “rough impersonation” of Bowie), and wasn’t just “we got this well-acclaimed actor to voice a literal turd; that’s the joke”. Plus, at least the writers of Rick and Morty can at least, you know, write characters and a story.

Speaking of characters, there’s something I find unsettling about how the women in this movie are portrayed. Jailbreak starts off as a character with a goal to make it to The Cloud (literally shown as a cloud, of course), but by the end of the movie it seems she completely gave up that dream because she fell victim to the writers’ need to make her a heterosexual love interest to the boring male protagonist for no reason realized she loved Gene for no reason. Gene’s mother, Mehry, is the only one in the family who doesn’t have any “unusual emotions”, while her son and husband do. The only human girl in the real world that I know has a name is just a love interest (though to be fair, the rest of the human characters aren’t very well defined either). The only female character in the cast who isn’t a love interest is the villain, and she’s clearly meant to be an unlikable bitch who wants people to either conform or die. All of the characters are written badly, but something about how these writers portrayed their female characters really doesn’t sit well with me. I doubt this was intentional (at least I really hope it wasn’t), but still.

Like I said, the product placement in this movie is horribly blatant, with probably the most painful example being Candy Crush (which is now adding Emoji Movie levels). I’ve heard that someone in charge of production said that the apps shown in this were going to be shown front and center in this movie, but christ. You’d think that maybe there would be some creativity as to how these apps look and work inside the phone from the perspective of a character who exists inside it, but... no, not really. Hell, the Candy Crush app just made me think of Sugar Rush from Wreck-It Ralph and remind me of how much better that movie is in comparison. Or lots of other movies, for that matter.

(Wreck-It Ralph and LEGO Movie spoilers ahead, and possibly Inside Out too) Speaking of which, early on people were already crying “ripoff” because the basic premise already sounded so similar to that of Wreck-It Ralph (only it’s a phone rather than video games), LEGO Movie (at the very least with Jailbreak resembling Wyldstyle), and Inside Out. I haven’t seen the latter film (yet), but I can say that the accusations about it ripping off the other two aren’t far off. For starters, the basic premise is similar to The LEGO Movie (male protagonist goes on an adventure with his newfound funny friends and eventual love interest and saves the world from a bad guy), with some elements of Wreck-It Ralph mixed in (set inside something humans play with, protagonist is treated differently from others but learns to believe in himself, his newfound friend doesn’t fit in either, one friend turns out to be royalty, in a way it even kinda rips off how the opening was narrated by the main protagonist). However, what made Wreck-It Ralph and The LEGO Movie both more successful than this one (among multiple other things) was that they actually did something with their settings and plot, and they featured characters that were written so that people would want to see them succeed. Emmet’s relatable because there are people who don’t think they’re special or talented in a world where everybody else is. Ralph is relatable because there are people who are judged for what they do for a living without knowing them on a more personal level. We’re supposed to like Gene because... well, because the movie said so. Yeah, he’s different, but unlike Ralph and Emmet, there’s no sense of charm or wit to him (or anyone else in this movie, for that matter). What it also lacks that the other two have (again, among many other things) is heart, and at least some subtle forms of creativity. I can tell that the people who worked behind both of those movies had fun with what they were doing and believed in it. The Emoji Movie just... doesn’t. It feels like cheap, poorly-handled advertisement first and a movie dead last. I couldn’t think of anything I saw in it that didn’t make me think of something else that handled it better.

Also, this has nothing to do with the movie itself, but I’ve come to hate the people who use the “kids might like it” argument to justify this movie’s existence. Kids deserve better than movies like this, and in this day and age there’s plenty of things that kids would like that have more respect for their intelligence than this movie does.

This, however, I will blame the movie for: the people behind it have been shown saying stuff like “it has a good message” and it’s “feminist,” but it’s all just blatant lies; nothing about this movie is progressive or has a good, well thought-out message in general. I’ve heard men who hate this movie claim that the “feminism” in this movie is forced, and it is, just not in the way they say it is (considering they usually imply that feminism in general is bad and unnecessary). Look, Wonder Woman (as a comic book series and a character; I haven’t seen the movie yet) is feminist; the Emoji Movie is not. The Emoji Movie is trying to disguise itself as feminist (or rather what some doofuses think feminism is) as a tactic to get people to see it because that’s what people these days want to see, and the execution makes it obvious that they don’t really care about actually being feminist or even understand what it means. One person in the stream said that one of the creators claimed that Gene’s inability to handle just having one single emotion and his dad’s suppressed multiple emotions was supposed to be a metaphor about being gay (though I found it to be more akin to being a metaphor about being neurodivergent), but if that’s supposed to be true, then why not just actually make Gene gay? (Not like anybody in the LGBT+ and/or neurodivergent community would want to be associated with this garbage movie; I’m bi and autistic and I know I wouldn’t.) I honestly think that they just said it so that they could sucker people into seeing it. In fact, that’s how it seems to be for all the other “good messages” it wants to send as well: they say they’re there, but they’re just saying it because they know that’s part of what sells these days, and they think that if they just say that then people will give it their attention and money, and I honestly find that despicable.

In short, this movie offers nothing to most everyone (I say “most” only because this could be used as an example of how not to make a good movie), and the people who green-lit this should be embarrassed. I know some people want to see it ironically, but please don’t go out and see it, especially not in theaters. It’s not worth your time, and especially not worth your money.