#something about how both their last names are so emblematic of where and who they are in the story

[rwbyrg]

Ruby Rose as in the flower, but also the verb to rise. To get up. Be restored to life. To rise like the moon. To ascend.

Oscar Pine as in the tree, but also the verb to pine. To long for someone who is lost. To miss them. To suffer, especially because of a broken heart.

[inexistingwarmth]

The romanticization of true love in miraculous ladybug, and its impact on adrigami and lukanette

I guess the trope of true love is quite common in media, we grew up watching fairy tales where star crossed lovers found each other and connected in an intimate and irreplaceable way.

Soulmates ? Other halves? You complete me ?

It has long been romanticized, when a character would hesitate between two love interests, they would be told :

" pick the second one because if you truly loved the first one, you wouldn't have fallen for the second one "

In this sense', True love invalidates any other potential love because true love is the one, and the feelings felt for another person are not as authentic.

Realistically speaking, we may fall for more than one person and it is okay, they all were real while they lasted. But fiction tends to romanticize the concept of a love that makes all the others evaporate.

In miraculous ladybug, it is established early on that Marinette and Adrien are soulmate, being told they were meant to be by Master fu.

And then, the love square happens

Marinette falls for Adrien as his sensible, shiny and perfect looking self.

And Adrien falling for Marinette as her confident, bold and also perfect looking self.

While not knowing their other version, or not acknowledging it as a love interest. The idea of loving unknowingly each other amplified the star crossed lovers theme.

It was cute though.

Yet as time went by,Marinette's infatuation turned into a sort of romanticization of Adrien, she did interact with him and he held her in high regards, but her perception of him forbid her from seeing him lucidly enough.

She saw him as kind, good looking and talented, but also perfect. When alya suspected Adrien to be cat noir, marinette even dismissed it. She failed to see the foolishness and impulsiveness of cat noir in this boy she idealized.

She has a teenage crush, a caricatutal one sometimes but still a teenage crush. She is young, so her feelings are innocent and intense, to her that crush could be love.

It doesn't help when her friends encourage her believing that it could lead to a fairytale ending. For marinette; it is hard to move on.

Why is it hard to move on ?

She invested a lot emotionally in that crush. When you have those feelings, you usually cultivate a fantasy on your own, your little romance. marinette even imagined the name of their future hamster. It is almost a comforting escapism, by moving on she has to let that go, all the efforts, the embarrassments, the instants that gave her hope..

If she lets that go 'the reality she is used to will be all new ..

Letting go without ever knowing how he felt. With all the perhaps and maybes.

It is and remains a romanticized scenario but isn't that what makes us hold on to things ? We have our narrative that shape our reality and give value to little things ..

And if he was her true love, can she allow herself to love someone else? If she does, something as intense was not true love? What is true love then ?

Whether it's her thoughts; or the message of the show, the idea of Adrien being the one is what seems to be holding her back, she romanticized him too long, and letting go of that dreamy reality is a big step.

What about Adrien now ?

If marinette loved him secretary, Adrien was way loud and blunt about it, to the point of becoming a burden since after all, it was an unwanted affection.

Adrien is clearly a hopeless romantic. While marinette idealized the boy she liked, he seemed to idealize the idea of love, way more than she did.

Marinette and Adrien were friends, but Cat noir and Ladybug had a more intimate bond, a shared secret, a delightful comfort around each other, vulnerability and a genuine connection.

For Adrien, who's a hopeless romantic, he should not let go, he should keep fighting, trying, until he is capable of reaching the heart of his beloved.

His trying can be suffocating for her since she really cares about him and loves someone already. But in his world, it is his devotion.

He feels like the connection he shares with ladybug is special and that no one knows him like she does. His interactions with her are also an escapism so letting go of that feels unimaginable to him.

And in a way he could protect the specialness of their bond by not really being that open with other people..

Like maybe, kagami ?

If you watched "lies", even the title is emblematic of the shelter he hides behind. When kagami makes the effort of drawing his most authentic self, he first acts as a shiny model then as quirky cat noir.

But none of those poses portray the vulnerability and truth she craved for.

Perfection doesn't have to mean flawless, as she got close to him, the perfect Adrien was a flustered, confused boy who did not hide behind an automatic smile.

Luka could've been to marinette the kind and sensitive guy she liked in Adrien

And kagami could've shared with Adrien the connection and truth that he only expressed toward Ladybug.

Let's be honest they had so much potential ..

But both adrien and marinette held back and left those two heartbroken. Although they accepted the feelings of luka and kagami; and went as far as dating them, they were not as invested ..

It is true that they were both busy and had a lot on their mind, but we saw marinette swooning over adrien right before seeing luka in "lies" that parallels "truth" and adrien would still flirt with ladybug as cat noir.

Were they really trying to move on ?

I dont doubt marinette thought luka was charming, she was more confortable around him but he had a soft effect on her, he had the tenderness and sincerity that marinette discovered on adrien in the umbrella scene

Adrien was also drawn to kagami since the begining, with her he had the thrill of escaping he had with ladybug and she was as smart and confident as the woman of his dreams.

But ..

Both our main characters had already a reality that was hard to let go of .. a romantacized person and a romantacized bond ..

They were not addicted to the agony but it was their routine, their daily emotions, something that became more of a reality than a part of it ..

Moving on would truly be going out of their confort zons .. it could've led to something beautiful.. but both couples broke up early .. im still grieving ..

If only the show stopped romantacizing soulmates .. fall in love .. again and again .. each one of those romances is valid ..

[traincat]

I’ve been trying to piece together a few things from your Twitter and Tumblr posts alike and still can’t make heads or tales of things, so would you mind helping out a FF & spideytorch noob? 1) what is currently happening with Johnny in the comics? (I’ve fallen head over heels for this guy, largely all your doing) 2) when’s the last time he and Peter have interacted, canon wise? (And do you think upcoming interactions are likely?) 3) your thoughts on if they’ll have him come out in the near future? (has that ‘biggest change to the fantastic four’ teaser come to pass yet?) Love all your content, thank you!

I'd say no problem but then I started thinking about this current run again and got a headache. But yes, I can do that to save you from reading it, because it is very largely not good.

So I don't think it's unfair to just flat out say the current Fantastic Four run is not very good, largely due to writer Dan Slott's efforts. Slott was previously on Amazing Spider-Man for 10 years, to mixed opinions, but a large portion of Spider-Man fandom, myself included, blames him near singlehandedly for the decline in quality of Spider-Man books over those ten years. I will say, in the interest of fairness, that Slott as a writer has an incredible fondness for the Spider-Man/Human Torch relationship, and that a lot of the recent teamups and interactions between them have been written or co-written by him. So it's all not all negative here. But in general, I personally find Slott's more recent comics (the last seven-ish years especially) to be badly plotted out, messily characterized disasters that feature characters written with all the emotion of a cardboard cutout. That's me putting it nicely.

To explain this fully, you have to understand the position Fantastic Four comics were in from the years 2015 through 2018, both in the fictional 616 universe and in the real publishing world. Following the 2015 Secret Wars event (great if you want some Johnny angst in the background of your plot), the Fantastic Four were disbanded -- Reed, Sue, and their many biological and found family children were presumed dead but in reality were remaking the multiverse, unable, for a reason that was never clearly defined, to reach home. Ben and Johnny were left on Earth. They had an unspecified falling out, likely due to Reed and Sue's absence, and went their separate ways -- Ben joined the Guardians of the Galaxy and went to space. Johnny was featured on both Inhumans and Avengers books. What's notable about this period is that it's the first time since 1961 that there was no Fantastic Four book being published by Marvel. Now the real world reason behind this is both complicated and extremely petty: Marvel really wanted the Fantastic Four film rights. Marvel denied this explanation at the time, stating that the reason was sales motivated, but it was a thoroughly flimsy excuse and Jonathan Hickman, writer of 2015's Secret Wars and overseer of the current X-Men plot, gave an interview saying the decision was film rights motivated. This decision kept the Fantastic Four books off the shelves for three years, up until the Disney-Fox merger, which secured the X-Men and Fantastic Four rights for Disney's Marvel Studios. Marvel then announced that the Fantastic Four book would be returning. So that's a little bit of background as to the precarious place the Fantastic Four currently occupy in the Marvel universe -- it's worth noting that this year is their 60th anniversary, and Marvel has done very little for it. Compare this to the X-Men, whose film rights Marvel also obtained during the Disney-Fox merger, and whose books are currently dominating the publishing lineup. The Fantastic Four definitely occupy an unpopular position, one Marvel themselves is at least partially responsible for forcing them into.

But to move back into the actual content of the book -- the readjustment period Slott wrote reintroducing the Fantastic Four into the Marvel universe can be described as clumsy, at best. It's never fully explained why Reed, Sue, and the kids couldn't return to Earth, something that was explored in Chip Zdarsky's 2017 Marvel Two-in-One, which featured Ben, Johnny, and Doom on a multiversal roadtrip to try and find their family and which I on the whole recommend, despite it having an awkward ending due to being cut short by Slott's announced Fantastic Four main title.

(Marvel Two-in-One 2017 #4)

Instead, the Fantastic Four return to a Marvel universe a little different than how they left it, with the Baxter Building -- formerly the offices of Parker Industries, the company Doc Ock started in Peter's body during Superior Spider-Man that Peter inherited after his defeat and then lost spectacularly when he trashed his own company to fight nazis (good for him) -- occupied by a different fantastic foursome in a plot that goes nowhere and does nothing. This is somewhat emblematic of the early days of Slott's run -- he introduces ideas that fail to go anywhere, including Johnny's rekindled relationship with his other best friend and former college roommate, Wyatt Wingfoot, who he was seen being very cuddly with in the early issues.

(FF 2018 #1) A small group of Fantastic Four fans have argued for a while that if Marvel was to have Johnny come out, a relationship with Wyatt would feel very natural -- they're already close, with Wyatt being an important Fantastic Four supporting character since the '60s. I have some further analysis here on the conspiracy theory that Johnny and Wyatt were supposed to be in relationship at the beginning of this run but that that plot was, for whatever reason, nixed. I don't know that I entirely believe this theory, for the record -- but I do think the pieces line up remarkably well.

Anyway, that didn't/hasn't yet happened, obviously. Slott instead for the most part put Johnny on the back burner for the beginning of his run, up until the Spyre arc, which I have reason to believe is the main story he pitched that he credits with securing him the Fantastic Four title. The Spyre arc suggests that the Fantastic Four's failed space exploration during which they got their powers wasn't just to beat the commies to the moon, as Lee and Kirby envisioned (simpler days), but to reach a specific planet outside of our galaxy. When the team sets out to conquer this mission, they arrive at the planet, but are quickly captured. The planet, they find out, operates like a soulmate AU -- everyone has a fated person that they are matched to via a gold armband. Reed and Sue are soulmates (and Ben is confined to an underground subterranean with the other monsters, because this is a Fantastic Four comic) while it's discovered! Shocker! That Johnny is actually the soulmate of the one the planet's inhabitants, a winged woman named Sky, with the suggestion that this is both why Johnny's previous relationships have never worked and why he loves space exploration -- he was just trying to get to his Soulmate TM.

(FF 2018 #15) "What's going on here? Where are my clothes?" As you can see, this didn't start off super great, with Johnny being separated from his family, stripped naked, and put in Sky's bed with a soulmate armband slapped on him. Did I mention they're only removable if your soulmate takes it off for you? And that Sky has consistently refused despite Johnny asking her to? Yeah. It's bad. (I think it's important to note Johnny's long history as a victim of assault plays into this narrative, whether or not Slott is personally holding that in mind while writing, which I don't believe he is. cw in the linked post for discussions of sexual assault.) There's an additional issue here in that Slott has a history of problematic writing regarding women of color, featuring characters he's created to act as love interests being oversexualized, infantilized, villainized, or some mix of all three, with two examples of this phenomena being Cindy Moon and Lian Tang, both of whom he introduced in quick succession in Amazing Spider-Man. Slott certainly didn't have to write Sky as manipulative or controlling towards Johnny, but that's what he chose to do, and that factors into the bigger picture of unfortunate themes in his writing.

Sky returns to Earth with the Fantastic Four despite Johnny appearing unenthused about the idea and initially generally reluctant to interact with her. Apparently they went on a few dates after this and kind of made up. I don't know because I stopped reading for about ten issues in there but I feel confident I missed very little. It's hard to talk about the Sky plot without referencing Johnny's previous interactions with a character named Lyja, a Skrull whose relationship to Johnny I have a long breakdown of here. It's doubly hard, because Lyja actually showed back up in Fantastic Four during this plot. Lyja's modus operandi has remained consistent throughout almost all of her appearances, which I guess makes sense, because she literally has no storylines that do not involve her being obsessed with Johnny, and this recent story isn't any different: Lyja shows up, Lyja disguises herself as another woman in Johnny's life to get close to Johnny, Lyja gets caught and claims it was all fine because she did it for love. This time she disguised herself as Sky.

(FF 2018 #32) Not gonna lie, kind of proud of him for this one. That's one of my problems with Slott -- very occasionally, he busts out good moments, only to undermine them with the rest of his narrative.

In the same issue, Alicia Masters, the first woman Lyja impersonated in order to get close to Johnny, uses her supervillain stepfather's radioactive clay to control Lyja's mind and send her back to space, and I do think she utilized girl power when she did this. Johnny, left reeling after Lyja's latest attempts to trick him into a relationship, ends this issue by sleeping with Victorious, Dr. Doom's right hand woman.

I know she pegged him. I know it. This scene was a little controversial in Johnny fandom, because a lot of people viewed it as Johnny cheating on Sky and thought that that action was out of character for Johnny. I'm personally of a little different opinion, which is that regardless of whether or not you view Johnny and Sky in a committed enough relationship that Johnny's tryst would count as infidelity when all Johnny and Sky are bound by are magic plot soulmate bracelets, I think Lyja's involvement changes things significantly when it comes to Johnny's characterization. All of Johnny's "playboy" periods, if we can call them that, coincide directly with Lyja having been in and then left his life again, which I think makes a certain amount of sense -- it's Johnny trying to wrest control back after a situation where he had none. None of this is explicitly canon, I have to note, but sometimes in comics you have to do the work yourself. So I think this is a case of something being accidentally extremely in character that Slott accidentally stumbled into because he had these love triangles in mind, not because he put a lot of thought into it.

Speaking of love triangles! Johnny sleeping with Victorious gets more complicated when Dr. Doom announces his intent to marry Victorious -- not because he has any romantic interest in her (this engagement caused a lot of uproar in Fantastic Four because Victorious had been previously referred to as being like Doom's adopted daughter) but in order to install her as Latverian regent in his absence. I'm not going to lie, I love a political wedding. Victorious, for some reason, thinks Doom will be deeply upset that she slept with some closeted blond twink and the member of the Fantastic Four he views least as an enemy and more as an annoyance. Johnny, who Sky is currently not talking to because she "felt" him sleeping with Victorious through their magic plot soulmate bracelets, also feels nervous about Doom finding out about this, which I guess is slightly more valid. Anyway, for some completely ridiculous reason, Victorious decides the best time to tell Doom about this little indiscretion is when they're standing at the altar, which coincidentally the Fantastic Four are also standing at, because Doom asked Reed to be his best man in a not at all homoerotic little setup involving midnight swordfighting and Reed slipping Doom's emerald ring onto his own finger. Sorry to sidetrack into DoomReed territory here but it's just like. It's just a lot.

(FF 2018 #33) Also, Ben walked the bride down the aisle. :,) Look at his gigantic hand.

Anyway then Doom decides he's going to kill everyone in a completely reasonable and not at all overblown reaction to Johnny and Zora having what was most likely both disappointing for Zora and weepy for Johnny sex. And that brings us up to where Fantastic Four comics left us yesterday -- in answer to your "big change" question, that's most likely coming up in the next issue, so it hasn't come to pass yet.

Having gotten all that out of the way -- the last time Johnny and Peter interacted canon-wise was in the recent Empyre Fallout Fantastic Four, at the end of the Empyre event:

It was cute! Slott does right good interactions between them. This is possibly the Stockholm Syndrome talking. I don't know if more interactions are likely imminent -- the Empyre event was fairly recent. On the other hand, Slott does like writing interactions between them. So I'd give it about a 50/50 shot. I was skimming the letter page in the latest issue and someone wrote in asking if Peter was likely to appear in the pages of Fantastic Four again any time soon, so there is definitely a demand.

As for Johnny coming out -- I don't know. It's not a call I feel comfortable making at this moment, which I guess means I wouldn't bet money on it. I'd like to say yes, especially because I think Slott set up, whether that was his intention or more likely not, several good places in his run where Johnny could have come out. The beginning, when he's implied to be living with Wyatt again and where he and Wyatt are paralleled against Ben and Alicia. Ben's bachelor party, where Johnny laments not finding the right person -- specifically person and not woman -- and where Ben tells him to "be brave, Johnny Storm." And the soulmate planet plot, where I think could have had a very different and much better ending if Johnny had told Sky that she couldn't be his romantic soulmate, because he knows he wants to be with a man. But those are just places that I think would have made good opportunities for a coming out story. Instead, Johnny's been involved (dubiously) with three different women over the space of the last 10 issues, which is more heterosexuality at one time than he's been confronted with in the last 60 years. So my thoughts are still that it's going to happen eventually, but quite possibly not anytime soon.

Hope that helps! And that my incredibly long answer about what's currently going on with Johnny in comics sheds some light on things!

[ssa-emilyhotchner]

14x10 ~

First, I'm going to start by saying that I'm beginning to really enjoy the last few seasons. Apparently, they are filled with subtle Hotchniss, so I guess I'll have to actually start watching s12-15🤭Btw, I have to give a special shout-out to @hotchnisscardigan​ who told me about the existence of this! 🥰🥰

The episode revolves around an old case that most of the team worked on in the past. The Milwaukee case. Sounds familiar? That's because is one of the most iconic Hotchniss episodes.

14x10 was a walk down memory lane. Not only because of the case they worked on, but because we started seeing Emily reconciling with the decisions she made in her past. It's obvious that the writers not only wanted to focus on the evolution this case had over the years, but on how Emily was handling her own demons from her past. What's really interesting is why they decided to choose this specific case for this specific episode. They used such an emblematic Hotchniss episode to include Emily's doubt about dating Andrew Mendoza? Coincidence? I don't think so. 

JJ mentioned this during the episode, and she was definitely not wrong: 

This conversation between Emily and Andrew gives me an incredible amount of deja vu. It kind of reminds me of 5x02, how concerned she was for Hotch. And how she wasn't sure it was such a great idea for him to return back to work. 

What really gets me is when Andrew says “what's one more scar“. I truly believe the CM crew wrote this on purpose, to somehow create a hidden reference about Hotch. With Foyet and his 9 stab wounds, all the issues later on regarding his internal bleeding because of the scar tissue. It just completely makes sense to me. 

I was completely in awe when she couldn't remember that case. How is she going to forget that moment? When it was such a decisive one for her? She almost sacrificed her career in the FBI trying to save his. It just doesn't make any sense to me that she'd forget an important moment like that. Unless she chose to forget, for her own sake. Which would make sense, after hearing all her love quotes/phrases from these last seasons. She was definitely still in love with Hotch, but trying her hardest to move on. 

Even JJ couldn't believe that she didn't remembered. Just look at her exasperated face haha.

We've seen before that in these last few seasons, every time someone mentions Hotch's name, Emily does an unusual face expression. It feels almost involuntary. And this time was no exception. It's like all her memories about Hotch were coming back to her. 

In this scene, the team is talking about the kid (who turned out to be the unsub), but somehow, part of me feels that she was remembering Hotch, just by looking at that painful expression she made. The way she couldn't even finish the sentence, makes this scene even more powerful. Emily wished she had kept in touch with Hotch after the whole Peter Lewis incident, but she knew that it was for the best that she didn't. A few weeks later after this, she starts talking about parallel universes and to me is just her simple way of saying that maybe in another life or in another time, they could've ended up together, but unfortunately there was always something that pushed them apart (Doyle, her resign from the FBI at the end of s7, Peter Lewis).

Also, Emily makes the same face expression as the one she has at the end of 13x01, when JJ asks her if Hotch was coming back. She looks down, to the side, anywhere that doesn't include making eye contact. It's as if she knew that her eyes could give her away. That right there, turned out to be her real tell. 

Was she channeling Hotch? Didn't I just made a post a few days ago about how the binoculars where Hotch's favorite gadget? I think is the first time I've seen her using them in 14 seasons.

This moment right here, has a deeper and more significant meaning than what she lets on. The first time I saw this scene, it reminded me of the whole Doyle arc. Especially when she says: “It is more about remembering what I was intended to do, and reconciling with what I had to do“. If she had confided in the team, but especially in Hotch, things would certainly have turned out differently, and that's a thing she has to live with forever: the uncertainty of not knowing what would've happened and how much her life would've changed, if she had trusted her team during that moment. If she had trusted her instincts. If she had trusted Hotch💔

And that's what haunts her, how different her live would be right now if she had trusted her instincts. 

But, would she have been able to save him? To save Hotch? “I might have changed things for him” I truly believe she's talking about how if she had stayed, if she had done things differently with Doyle, if she had trusted her team instead of running away to protect them, she would've been able to continue helping him like she did after Haley died (which we know was the obvious reason for his speedy recovery). They would have had the relationship we know they both wanted, and maybe he wouldn't have had to face Mr. Scratch alone. Maybe not even face him at all. 

That's what she's really afraid of, why she can't move on. The endless possibilities, the what ifs.

This last scene with Andrew SCREAMS Hotchniss to me. Those scars Emily's referring to? She's obviously talking about Hotch. I'm going to sound cliche but hear me out. How was she expected to move on when she practically had to live with a ghost? Hotch's presence was felt everywhere she went. Her new office, the round table room, the jet. As I've mentioned before, their relationship was much more deeper than both of them would ever like to admit. And of course, that would result in her scars taking a lot longer to heal. 

I think that what affected her the most was Hotch's decision not to return to the BAU. It was something she was clearly never expecting. Not after everything they've been through.

Before this scene, she says something about not being sure dating in this line of work was the right thing for her. She was just fine with Mark during s11, wasn't she? So what event could've happened to her during s12-14 that drastically changed her perspective? I'm putting all my money in Hotch and her disappointment when learning he wasn't returning. 

[baodurs]

i filled out this super cool button character profile by @extraordinarymage for sabrina! thank you for making this, it was a lot of fun to fill out <3 the bulk of it is under a cut and oh boy is it long !!!

Short, Quick Reference

Name: Sabrina Wiseman

Pronouns: She/her

Sexuality: Bisexual

Love Interest: Kent

Main personality trait: Confidence

Secondary personality trait: Morbidity

Relationship with Nick: Full of love, haunted by unaddressed guilt and frustration. But mostly full of love.

Nickname for Nick: Saint Nick (used sparingly)

Resentful or accepting?: Slightly resentful

Main strategy (interpersonal, insightful, innovative?): Insightful

Ethical or expedient?: Expedient

GENERAL

Name: Sabrina Larkspur Wiseman

Nickname(s): Sab, used by anyone; Sabby, only Nick and Sally; and, of course, Button for Nick.

Birthday: I think I made her an October Libra for the purpose of a template I did months ago, but I’m not sure! No concrete birthday yet, I’m always very slow to nail down details like this.

Age: 20

Pronouns: She/her

Sexuality: Bisexual

Hair color + style: Blonde. A little past shoulder length, sometimes wavy. Usually a middle part. For Aeon, tied back in a bun.

Eye color: Blue, entirely because of the section of Frank O’Hara’s “Meditations in an Emergency” that goes, “My eyes are vague blue, like the sky...”

Height: 5′5

Piercings: Multiple in each ear, but a couple have started to close.

Tattoos: None yet! Sab likes the idea of a tattoo but is worried about finding the perfect design, whether she’d end up hating it, that the pain might be greater than she expects and she’ll look like a baby in front of her tattoo artist. I’d like to think she eventually consults Sally and/or Glitch to come up with an idea that she falls in love with, but I haven’t come up with what that would be!

Clothing style: Mostly solid colors, not a lot of patterns. Nothing super bright, but a fairly varied mix of pastels, neutrals, dark colors, black. Partial to denim skirts and sweater tops. Ankle boots. Likes a good turtleneck. She’s bolder when it comes to formal wear, and especially loves suits. Big fan of silk and satin.

Since she has a pretty accurate face claim, I’ll link some gifsets I’ve rb’d for appearance ref if you are so inclined.

STATS

I’m always adjusting minor things and swapping scenes around, but these are from my most recent Sab run! Most scores hover somewhere around these values.

Personality:

Confidence: 53%

Humor: 5%

Morbidity: 22%

Resentful: 57% | Accepting: 43%

Strategy:

Interpersonal: 12%

Insightful: 50%

Innovative: 10%

Ethical: 43% | Expedient: 57%

KEY DECISIONS:

What is Nick’s nickname and why?: Saint Nick, used very rarely. It’s a joking reference to the time she thought Santa was an evil Ment out to ruin Christmas, and a point about Nick overdoing it with the cheer. “Saint Nick” is usually code for “I know you mean well, but please mind your own business.” Otherwise, she just calls him Nick.

What is their favorite type of cookie (and its name and why?): Salted caramel chocolate chip! No special name.

What was their initial reaction to Sally hugging them, as kids?: She just froze. That could just be me projecting adult Sabrina onto her childhood self; I don’t imagine that she was as uncomfortable around strangers or quite as cautious back then. But that’s what I’ll stick with.

How did they ace the ASE test?: The in-game option she takes is “My entire life has revolved around strategic avoidance,” but the one about being just plain smart also sounds like her. If Sab has the chance to thoroughly (over)prepare for something, she will do it. Her mind blindness also has her constantly (over)analyzing situations. So, hard work and relentless anxiety!

Did they manage to win their first assignment? How?: Yes, by having Sally block the door. I’ve headcanoned some slight differences in how it plays out, which I wrote about in-depth here. To summarize, Sab thinks of blocking the door as a desperate last resort, not a clever loophole, and she pushes back against Rosy’s praise because she wishes she could have done it the “real” way. Rosy goes from being impressed to being annoyed that she’s willfully missing the point.

What was the primary emotion Button felt during the Aeon bombing (love, gratitude, etc?): Guilt. She feels very guilty about how much Nick has given up for her in general, but I think that in the moment, it’s on a smaller scale. The fact that Nick was on the phone with her when it happened, coming to her rescue like always, becomes emblematic of their whole relationship for her, and she really fixates on that.

Who drove them home from the hospital from and why?: Glitch. Sab responds to her initial text with “Are you sure?”, and is relieved when Glitch takes that as “Yes, please.” She doesn’t relish the idea of being around someone more connected to her family or Nick at that point.

How do they feel about Nick riding around in their mind?: Worried, at first. Just because it’s so unknown and absolutely insane. After seeing Doctor Amari, she’s excited! Sab is thrilled to be a Pollard Five and intends to take full advantage of it. I am not looking forward to seeing how she reacts when that’s taken away from her.

Why did Button agree to do the undercover mission?: To prove she still deserves to be an MIV. Sabrina feels stupid and reckless for putting herself, Nick, and Aeon in this position, but she knows she’s smart, and she hasn’t worked this hard for nothing. She wants to prove what she could do with a normal Pollard Score and make herself too valuable to give up even when she’s back to Zero.

Told Glitch about your mind blindness?: Depends on the playthrough. I’m constantly going back and forth on whether Sab meets Glitch for coffee or wanders the city with Nick in her second chapter 5 slot (after trying to track down Kent). If she does meet Glitch, though, she absolutely tells her; with how touchy Sab is about privacy, she couldn’t stomach not warning Glitch that Nick could hear everything they said.

Figured out K’s secret?: Nope. She finds enough of the clues to be given the “I knew it!” option in-game, but she didn’t actually put it together. Sab is too angry and embarrassed by learning that Kent is an AMO to find any reason to interrogate it. “The random guy I met before school just happens to be a jerk” is a perfectly sound explanation to her.

Found Noh’s clues?: Not at the metro station. Sometimes she sees the Vengeance brooms in chapter 5 (again, depending on the playthrough), but that’s it.

ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP:

Love Interest: Kent

Why them?: Sab feels an immediate kinship with Kent after learning about the NPO program. It’s kind of funny how quickly he moves from the least sympathetic position in her eyes (Ment who got past me and read my mind without my knowledge) to the most sympathetic (non-powered child of a prominent family aiming a league above where he “belongs”). A lot of new respect for his competence. Her fate is sealed when she realizes that his kindness at the hospital wasn’t him trying to make up for some wrongdoing, but just him being very sweet. (She had scoffed over “You needed help.” But now she’s like, “Oh. He meant that?! Fuck.”)

As they spend more time together, Sab realizes how weirdly similar they are in other ways, too. And she starts to feel safe/secure around him in a way that she’s extremely not used to. Growing up surrounded by Ments, Sab has a lot of issues about being too much, too difficult, needing to “be worthy” of love. So someone like Kent who is not a Ment, who has no “obligation” to care about her, and whose judgement she trusts implicitly? Being around him and being loved by him mean a lot, and I think will go a long way towards helping her reflect on her other relationships!

What are their first impressions of each other?: Okay, there are like 3 first impressions with Kent. First: he’s tall and handsome and secretly adorable, and they have similar career goals, so she’s drafting a five-month plan to woo him and get his number. Second: he’s a lying, self-obsessed loser who owes her many explanations. Third: oh no, the first impression was true! And he’s been continually, selflessly kind to her in spite of her overt hostility. Scratch the five-month plan, because the crush was only fun when it was entirely superficial; now she really, really likes him and that just sucks.

We know that Button makes a good impression on K by stopping for their dogs, but apart from that... I mean, the “we confused each other” from chapter 7 is very apt. Sab has lots of shifting personas, and Kent sees pretty much every one within 24 hours. The prevailing impression before everything gets cleared up is probably just that she cares a lot? About everything? Her stopping for the dogs, how seriously she takes the first assignment, the way she seems so deeply affected by something he said or did that morning. It’s a rare side of her to meet first because she usually pretends to be above everything.

What feature does your Button find most attractive in their RO (ex. appearance, personality, etc.)?: Probably his composure. And his... steadfastness? The way he seems unruffled by anything, his soothing presence. She really admires that about him and finds the calm contagious.

What do they do to spend time together?: Going on drives together! Kent driving while Sab plays songs she thinks he’ll like, talking or not talking. Cuddling on the couch while reading their own separate books. Museum dates. Walking the dogs together.

Do they argue? How do they handle arguments and disagreements? How do they make up?: I imagine that the first month or so of their relationship would be difficult, just because they’re both bad at expressing themselves and not used to relying on other people. Kent kind of negates a lot of Sab’s impulses to get defensive or hostile, so instead of arguments, I think there are more likely to be awkward periods where she’s just stewing in something without addressing it. Most of their fights would be, like, one of them becoming really distant for a concerning number of days until the other tries to awkwardly check in on them.

What does their future look like?: Uhh some random lore: I think eventually they do get married, despite neither of them caring that much about it. Sabrina would be excited to have something to plan, and she knows it would make the people around her happy. They have a long engagement; there’s never really an “official” proposal, just an acknowledgement that yeah, they’ll get married one day, and then eventually they get rings. The engagement is almost Sab’s favorite part, honestly. She likes planning and showing off her ring and calling Kent her fiancé, a lot of fanfare on her part for a wedding that ends up being very modest and chill.

OTHER RELATIONSHIPS (Feel free to go in depth!)

Relationship with Nick: When I first started developing Sab, I thought that with as difficult/prickly as she can be, her relationship with Nick would be worse than it is. Never bad, but certainly strained, with more jealousy/resentment on her side. However, she rejected this. She is resentful, but never towards Nick—she internalizes the negative parts of their relationship so they manifest as guilt instead. And that’s the problem, not resentment. Sab thinks he’s overprotective, but that doesn’t make her angry; it just makes her sad. She wishes things were different and he didn’t feel so responsible for her, but she also doesn’t know how she could manage without him taking on so many of her burdens. So, guilt! So much love, but always looming guilt.

Having Nick in her head has helped. It’s added a new kind of guilt (“I’m a horrible person for being so giddy that people can’t hear my thoughts even though that requires my brother to be in a coma”), but getting inside Nick’s head for once and really feeling his love for her changes things. Makes her feel way more secure, I guess? It’s easier to see her brother as human person, a friend who loves her, rather than a perfect selfless paragon who sacrificed everything to raise her, which is an important shift.

There are also Things happening with self-presentation in the fact that they’re both models, and flirts, and pretend to be shallow. And the ways that they’ve responded to vastly different expectations. And selflessness versus selfishness. But I have no idea how to talk about that yet.

Relationship with Father: Strained and distant. Sabrina doesn’t necessarily blame him for leaving, but she hates how he’s handled it. She’s incredibly frustrated that John insists on keeping them in this miserable limbo of uncomfortable visits, even though moving away was (to her) a tacit acknowledgement that she and her parents are better off without each other. He’s trying to force a relationship that Sab thinks is ultimately harmful for everyone involved. For Nick’s sake, she’s willing to grin and bear the visits, but it never works because John can obviously tell it’s an act. He pushes her, she gets defensive, and so on to infinity.

Relationship with Mother: Like with John, Sab doesn’t resent Hope for the incident itself, or for leaving afterward. It was terrifying, and the idea of being around Hope makes her panic—but she thinks of that as just another irrational anxiety symptom, and she’s trying to work through it. What she does resent Hope for is letting it get to that point at all. Sab is incredibly bitter that Hope will suffer silently to the point of almost killing her (during the incident) and potentially herself (with the BRS), while Sab has no choice but to be completely open. Especially because they’re so similar in that way—she’s almost jealous. “Oh, so your silence is allowed to almost kill me and it’s ‘nobody’s fault’ but I can’t pretend to enjoy a single lunch with Dad without him calling me out for lying?”

And even though she doesn’t hold the incident itself against her, Sab is very hung up on “Why are you never quiet? Why are you always there?” She knows, on some level, that this was not a Personal Judgement against her. But because Hope keeps so much quiet, this is the only honest expression of her mother’s feelings that she can remember! It would take a lot for Sab to believe that Hope was really, genuinely interested in reconnecting with her, rather than just pretending to love her "enough” this time because to do otherwise would reflect poorly on Hope as a mother.

Relationship with Sally: Besties <3 Sally is the only member of the Wiseman inner circle that Sab doesn’t have complicated feelings about. They both have hidden morbid streaks that they bring out in each other, and can laugh about. They both have competitive streaks that work well together because they’re always on the same team. And their wants/needs from the relationship complement each other well, I think. Sally has always felt valued because she’s useful and not because she’s loved, while Sab has always felt smothered by love/care without feeling like she genuinely adds value to other people’s lives. So it means a lot to both of them that they’re able to help each other practically, while also genuinely loving and supporting each other outside of that.

Relationship with Gray: Full of trust and genuine care, but predicated on distance. Sab loves him a lot for being so careful not to cross any boundaries, physical or emotional, with her. She’s grateful that he’s there for Nick in a way that she doesn’t feel she can be. But "I like Gray because he doesn’t push me and is good to Nick” means that any hand he extend makes her defensive, because she’ll either view him as an emissary of Nick or start to panic because their normal routine is being disrupted (she doesn’t tell him about Hope in ch 3, for example).

They get along very well in a friend-of-a-friend sort of way, and bond over being cautious counterparts to Nick. Also, Sab never had a crush on Gray, but she is not immune to tall superhero and thinks it’s fun to fake flirt with him. (You know Isabela’s “You have pretty eyes” routine from DA2? Sab does that to Gray when conversations steer towards things she’d rather not talk about.)

Relationship with Glitch: I’m really excited about these two! They click from the start, and Sabrina feels immediately comfortable around Glitch, which makes her feel distinctly uncomfortable whenever she catches herself. Externally, they have pretty different personalities, but they’re both perceptive and... socially manipulative? aware of their self-presentation?... in ways that they both pick up on right away. So it’s a lot of conversational maneuvering and trying to figure out what the other’s game is, while also genuinely enjoying each other’s company.

Relationship with Kent/Kenna: I could go truly insane here. See the romance section above instead.

Relationship with Kim: Sab wants him to like her sooooo bad. He’s one of the only people to ever really get through to her, re: my headcanon conversation after the first assignment. Authority figures tend to treat her as special, whether that’s negatively because of her mind blindness or positively because she’s such an overachiever. She had no idea how to respond to that not being the case (and didn’t handle it well at first), but chapter 6 solidifies her respect for him.

It also turns Rosy’s opinion of Sab around; he was impressed by her in class but left his office thinking she was self-absorbed and naive. But the bombing is a reality check, and her response is very measured and practical in a way that surprises him.

Relationship with Lev: She doesn’t mind the comparisons to Nick or the “maybe one day they’ll fix you” comments as much as you might think. They aren’t her favorite, but she prefers that sort of thing to the inspirational platitudes belied by coddling that she got from her family growing up. Sab has fond memories of Lev and is grateful that he’s always been kind to her, but doesn’t have any particular feelings apart from that.

Relationship with Clarence: Holds a grudge against him for causing a scene, making her late, and generally being a jerk. But she can’t fault him for being right, after what happened! Mostly she just wants to avoid him, but she’ll be thrilled to lord her success over him if/when she proves herself.

Relationship with Dean Branham: Like Rosy, another authority figure that Sab desperately wants to impress. But without the personal investment she has in Rosy’s validation, more “Oh, this person is in charge, so I should make her like me!” Despite Nick’s and Rosy’s reservations, Sabrina doesn’t really have a problem with being “strongarmed” or manipulated into cooperating; for now, she figures Branham was just doing her job and respects her tactics.

Relationship/attitude towards Ments in general: Mostly just uncomfortable and wary around them. Sab doesn’t want her mind read, and she figures that no Ment wants to be forced to read it either. So she has a pretty strict “no Ments” rule for close personal relationships (excluding Nick, Sally, and Gray, of course. But only Nick really counts because he’s the only one who can hear her thoughts whenever she’s nearby). Not out of hatred or resentment, just because she knows it will be easier for everyone in the long run.

Do they have any other important relationships, past or present? (Relatives, friends, etc.?): Not many, but yes! Sab dated around a lot in the 2 years before Aeon (more like year and a half, because she completely shut it down once she was more focused on preparing for the MIV program), but there are 2 relationships that were formative/important for her. A high school sweetheart, and someone Sab met through modeling. She doesn’t keep up with her high school ex, but the model is her best friend outside of Sally and Nick, and they still keep in touch! I’m still developing them/the relationships, and I’ll probably post more about them someday. They’re fun!

PERSONAL BIO

Describe their personality: Confusing and contradictory. She has two main modes that confuse people who meet both (e.g., Kent). She’s either cold, stuck-up, and sometimes hostile, OR she’s charming, frivolous, and sometimes flirty. Mode 1 is tense but stoic and inexpressive; mode 2 is seemingly relaxed but very posed and insincere. Mode 1 is for when she feels uncertain or has no agenda apart from “get to point B”; mode 2 is for when she’s more comfortable or trying to manipulate someone. Her actual personality is a bit closer to the second, but she doesn’t pretend not take things seriously or hide when she’s annoyed.

Strengths: Analytical, methodical, detail-oriented. Very driven and hardworking. May not always act like it, but does have social skills/charisma; a great liar, if you can’t read her mind. Unfailingly loyal and loving to her favorite people, so so so warm and affectionate and supportive if she really loves you. Very perceptive.

Weaknesses: Way too proud. Can be petty and vindictive. Self-absorbed (she doesn’t mean anything by it, but it’s hard for her to see past herself sometimes). Stubborn, hates being wrong. And... emotional isn’t the word, but strong negative emotions can really cloud her judgement. It ties into her being proud, petty, and stubborn; if she’s really upset about something, she can cling to that emotion instead of re-evaluating it or moving forward.

Phobias: From this ask about the phobias that are planned to show up in-game, there are a few that I could see fitting Sab, but I want to wait to see how they’re implemented before I fully commit. Which is very metagame-y, I know (and I am very metagame-y about IF), but “fear of X” is so broad that it really does depend on when/how it manifests in the text.

That being said, agoraphobia is almost a lock; crowds do make Sab very anxious if she can’t keep track of everyone within a certain distance, and if she can’t leave when she starts feeling antsy. Claustrophobia is a maybe. The choice that triggers it (in chapter 4, about hating MRI machines) suits Sab, but I’m not sure if she hates MRI machines because she hates tight spaces, or if it’s more related to her general anxiety about hospitals, medical tests, etc. Which she definitely has!

What activities/club did they do in school?: She avoided anything group-oriented as far as possible. She took piano (maybe violin?) lessons and did recitals, but wasn’t in orchestra. The one exception was maybe National Honor Society or some equivalent, which she would have joined for her resume’s sake. And I think she would have tutored!

Where do they escape to when they need space?: A little used library corner, where she can people watch without being seen/heard.

How do they feel about/cope with their mind blindness?: Sab hates it but tries not to dwell on it. She knows that it’s no one’s fault, and she mainly just tries to... minimize it? Drown out her thoughts, limit her contact with Ments. And, least healthily, very rigidly managing herself. Because there’s so much of her that exists outside of herself, without her control, she tries to either filter or completely suppress everything else. Part of why she got into modeling, she can perform and be perfect and have total control over the final product of her body in the photographs for whatever campaign. Some Day This Will Be Better. But definitely not where she is in current canon.

How has your Button changed since the Incident with Hope?: Developed many new anxieties and disorders and syndromes :) She also became way more self-conscious, as in literally conscious of and way more tightly monitoring herself, what she’s thinking, what she’s expressing, how she’s sitting, etc. Less emotive face, more rigid posture.

If they weren’t an Aeon student, what would they be doing?: Sab would have beaten herself up forever if she “proved everyone right” by avoiding Unity/Ments entirely, so she’d want to stay in the family business somehow. She probably would have ended up doing scientific research on mental agility. Maybe even working for Mirrortech or some other biotech company, which I imagine would have been an interesting conversation to have with the family.

RANDOM FACTS:

Zodiac sign: Like I said, I assigned her Libra months ago for the sake of a template. But I don’t know enough about astrology to commit. Libra or Leo, probably.

Hobbies: Music, reading poetry, “cooking” (i.e., sitting on the counter and not helping while Nick makes dinner)

Likes: Watching other people (Nick) play video games, dressing up, taking long showers/baths, dark chocolate with caramel, back hugs

Dislikes: Being patronized, hot weather, going to the doctor, driving, doing anything she is not good at

Type of bedsheets: Bamboo.

Drink of choice: Cucumber mint lemonade! For hot drinks, some kind of caramel coffee. For alcohol, she refuses to get drunk because she’s terrified of having even less control of her mental broadcast, but at home/around people she trusts she’ll have a glass or two of wine. Doesn’t know enough to be picky, but doesn’t like it too sweet.

Favorite food: Probably some pasta dish Nick makes with asparagus and tomatoes and a lot of garlic.

Favorite color: Like a light turquoise!

Favorite music: Music to her was another mind-shielding tactic before anything else, so she tends to like upbeat-ish electronic/pop stuff. Catchy and repetitive, and/or with lots of personality to drown out her own thoughts. On the other end of the spectrum, she does have a soft spot for crackly, lo-fi, old or old-sounding slow songs—something about fuzzy recordings simulating a weak telepathic signal.

Favorite season: Hmm, spring and autumn are both good. She likes either side of winter.

Anything else you’d like to share: My heart and a long, fulfilling marriage, with anyone who reads all this 💍

[rachelbethhines]

Tangled Salt Marathon - Mirror, Mirror

It’s time for the evil clone trope.

Summary:  When their caravan is waylaid by a fallen tree in the middle of a storm, the group stop by a seashell house owned by a Frenchman named Matthews. As they explore the house, they come across a mirror that houses evil doppelgängers who quickly replace everyone except Rapunzel and Pascal.

Yup, It Sure Looks Like You Got a Hurt Hand There, Cass

Consequences need to matter. They need to have a lasting impact on the story. Otherwise there’s nothing there to cause conflict and therefore no reason to include it in the story.

Oh Look, the Mains are Fighting Again for the 50th Time. Not Like We’ve Never Seen That Before.

Do the writers not know how to write any other conflict besides petty annoyance? Why are these people even friends? You can’t act like the time cooped up on the road is driving them apart if they’ve done nothing but fight before then as well. This has no impact other than to make the audience not care. 

Just Cause You Point Out the Flaw Does Not Mean It’s Still Not a Flaw

Just because you make a meta joke acknowledging that you’re main characters are going to make a mistake against their better judgment, does not change the fact that they’re making a mistake. 

This isn’t as egregious as back in the The Eye of Pincosta ,because at this point they have no reason to be suspicious of the house and it is raining and the caravan is leaking, but it still paints your main characters in a bad light. 

Also remember when Cassandra was the smartest one in the group and not the dumbest bitch on the planet? 

Yeah me too. 

What the hell happened S3? 

So This Episode Features the Same Problem As Not In the Mood, Beyond the Corona Walls, and King Pascal 

This episode exists just to set up later plot points that won’t be revlevent until season three. Those points just being an introduction to Matthews and the shell house. Yet the rest of the episode is unneeded filler. It’s not using its given screen time efficiently. 

I Know This Is To Set Up Suspicion of Matthews for Later, But It’s a Poor Argument

Yes! No one is ever just nice! No one actual helps people during storms! People don't ever just live out in the country in big fancy houses or have taverns on the side of roads! 

It’s all the more insulting that Cassandra turns out to be right here for little reason, especially when she was so way off base with Adria just two episodes back. 

This This Only Episode Where Shorty Matters

Shorty actually has a reason for being here. He’s too weird for the mirror people to replicate and so tips off their evil scheme to Raps. He also is shown defeating the mirror Rapunzel by using his equally weird hobbies.  

Now he did wind up resolving Freedbird and freeing everyone from the Vodniks’ coral prison, but that’s cause he’s a walking deus ex machina and the writers wrote themselves into corners there; he’s not actually integral to those episodes’ stories. Here however you’d have to restructure the whole episode to make it work without him. 

On the one hand that makes him less replaceable than Hook Foot, yet on the other hand, there’s not enough scenes of him doing things to justify his existence in the season. He’s also just a plot device and not an actual character who drives the action usually. Basically like Fidella and Owl, but with the ability to talk and is more intrusive. 

Evil Cones Is Also A Worn Out Trope 

This has been a science fiction staple since the 50s and it’s just a modern play upon the folkloric myth of changelings and spirit dopplegangers. Unlike the previous “fake god’ trope though, this one has more room for flexibility and the writers here go for an 80s Thing homage which is kind of clever. But that still doesn’t change the fact that it’s overplayed. 

So At What Point Did Cass Get Captured By the Mirror? 

Was this before or after dinner? Because before she was with Raps the whole time and I doubt a clone Cass would say anything about not trusting the shell house. Meanwhile, after dinner, Raps and ‘Eugene’ were guarding the mirror, so when? 

Timeline Alert! 

Is this three weeks since the Great Tree, or have they been stuck in the caravan for three weeks? I’m going with Great Tree since they were ticking each other off in both Brothers Hook and Rapunzel Day One. 

Therefore it’s been seven months since Secret of the Sun Drop and possibly now going on eight months. 

This Explanation Doesn’t Make Sense

They don’t ever answer Rapunzel’s question. The “share the same mind” explanation is a load of bunk that’s contradicted several points in the episode and it doesn’t inform the audience of anything.  We never find out what they are, what they’re after exactly, why they were trapped in the mirror to begin with, nor how the mirror actually works. 

It’s the same issue as with Mother and Father in Freebird. It’s a fantasy trope played straight just because this is meant to be a fairy tale world, but it clashes with what little world building we’ve gotten thus far. 

Still Not an Explanation 

It’s just Rapunzel with red eyes and extra long fingernails. That doesn’t tell me anything. It’s clearly not these creatures true form and it doesn’t explain how she only manifested when the real Rapunzel showed up. Cause beforehand the others were trapped in the mirror alone and apparently didn’t see the reflection clone appear until Raps pushed her back in. 

What are these things? Where do they come from? How do they work? What do they want? 

Not answering these questions is just lazy writing. 

If They ‘Share the Same Mind’ Then Why Do They Fall For Rapunzel’s Bluff?

Like shouldn’t they be able to sense that she’s the real Rapunzel because she’s not mentally communicating with them? 

So Um...How Do We Know Cass Even Did Get Out?

Like it’s clearly intended by the writers for season three to be the real Cassandra and that the mirror Cass is defeated here, but like this scene is edited weird and mirror Cass would explain how OOC Cass acts after this dumb shell house arc. 

So Why Can’t Y’all Just Stay in the Caravan? 

Like at this point I think the storm would be safer. The caravan is literally right there, all you gotta do is run for it and hunker down in it. Yeah it leaks a little, so what? You surely have weathered out storms in it before if y’all been traveling in it for over seven months now. 

So What Did We Actually Learn Here?

How to get along? Cause that’s something the gang should already know how to do given the time they’ve spent together, and it’s not like they won’t be right back at each other's throats again in the next episode. 

Conclusion 

I like the episode better than King Pascal and it’s less pointless than the Hook Foot episodes, but it’s still emblematic of many of the problems that season two has.  

[starring-movies]

Killing Eve: Episode Analysis

*SPOILERS*

Season 3, Episode 7 - Beautiful Monster

We begin the episode with Villanelle, who is waiting to meet with Hélène, after the sloppy kill in Romania. As she’s waiting, we get some close-up shots of Villanelle and a suit of armour, which she tells Hélène “was really staring at me”. The close-up shots are repeated from S2E5, where they portrayed the ‘watcher’ and the one ‘being watched’. In S2E5, Villanelle was the one who was ‘the watcher’ (i.e. the one with the power and in control); whereas in this scene, Villanelle has now become the one ‘being watched’ (she has now lost the control in her life and job that she previously had).

As we see Villanelle waiting for Hélène, within the shot of Villanelle we can see 8 swords behind her, the imagery of which invokes the tarot card, the ‘Eight of Swords’. After looking it up here, the ‘Eight of Swords’ card is “a symbol of the limiting thoughts, beliefs and mindset that prevent her from moving forward in her life. However, look closer: if the woman removed her blindfold, she would quickly realise that she can escape her predicament by letting go of her limiting beliefs and establishing a new, more empowered mindset. The water pooled at her feet suggests that her intuition might see what her eyes cannot”.

This imagery is very apt for Villanelle’s current situation; as she’s feeling the limitations due to the lack of freedom that she’s realised she has, together with her entrapment in working for The Twelve. The spears are also positioned to look like they’re coming out of Villanelle, which illustrates to us how she’s on the mental offence and trying to protect her current vulnerabilities and fragility from what happened in Russia, from Hélène.

A song (most likely an unreleased Unloved song) with the repeated lyrics, “into the fire”, is used in this scene. Paired with the suits of armour and weaponry in the scene’s shot, we are shown how Villanelle is metaphorically going “into the fire” and beginning a battle against The Twelve for her freedom.

When Villanelle goes in for her meeting with Hélène, there are more swords and suits of armour around the room and behind Villanelle, further emphasising the entrapment she’s in. A Dutch tilt angle is also briefly used, and it’s only used on Villanelle. The Dutch tilt was last used for Villanelle in S3E2, to show her disorientation and shock after finding out that Eve was alive. However, it’s used in this scene to reflect Villanelle’s unease at having to attend this meeting with Hélène.

We also get a call back to S1E7 in this scene with Hélène. Hélène commandingly tells Villanelle to “sit down”, just as Anton repeatedly did back in S1E7. With Anton, Villanelle refused to sit down and disobeyed his orders; however with Hélène, Villanelle knows that she is outmatched, and so reluctantly has to comply with the command.

Hélène then proceeds to press on the wound on Villanelle’s arm, but then quickly embraces her. This is Hélène’s attempt both at a power play and at manipulating Villanelle. She does this as an act, to show Villanelle that she’s more powerful than her and can easily hurt her if she wants to; but also wants to give the impression that she can provide the ‘motherly’ protection and care that she knows Villanelle is in search for.

Villanelle responds to this act in typical Villanelle fashion, by appearing like she was going to reveal what happened (“I did something bad to my mother”), but then deflecting (“I took a shit in her shoe when I was three, a really big one”). She does the exact same thing as this with the psychologist fromThe Twelve in S1E2, when she is confronted with a picture of ‘Anna’ she says it’s not Anna but her mother, but then says she was joking because her mother had “really thin, shitty hair”; and she also does it in S1E5 when Eve asks her what happened and she agrees saying “okay”, but again diverting by saying “can we get one thing clear before we go on with this? Is that a sweater attached to a shirt?”.

Villanelle uses her comment to Hélène, where she thanks her “for the inappropriate touching” and tells her “god, you’re sexy”, to try to maintain her facade to Hélène that nothing’s wrong with her and also that she saw through her ‘caring mother’ act.

This is the second episode of Season 3, the other being S3E2, where different title cards are used. In S3E2, the title cards were on a red background (the colour of Villanelle’s outfit in Rome), but this time they’re on a green background (the colour of Eve’s outfit in Rome). The red colour for Villanelle was used in S3E2, as that episode was the liminal one for her character development. It was in that episode where she began to try to climb the ladder to becoming a Keeper in The Twelve, subsequently becomes discontented from the realisation that she’s been tricked and also that she doesn’t have the freedom she thought she had. Whereas it’s this episode that is the liminal moment for Eve, where she finally fully accepts and embraces her “monster”.

The title cards are also emblematic in showing us the progress of Eve and Villanelle’s journey to becoming “the same” as each other. From S3E2 to S3E7, the black circle with Sandra Oh’s [Eve] name in it becomes slightly larger, symbolising Eve’s “darkness” becoming more prominent. From S3E2 to S3E7, the black splodge with Jodie Comer’s [Villanelle] name in it becomes significantly smaller, symbolising her growing humanity and her receding “darkness”. In S3E7, the black circles with Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer’s names in them have also become the same size as each other, indicating that Eve and Villanelle have finally come to a point where they are “the same” and managed to reach an equilibrium.

The song ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ by Jack Leopards & The Dolphin Club (thought to be an alias for Taylor Swift to righty release the song under her own ownership), is played during the title cards. The lyrics we hear are:

“I don’t like your little games,

I don’t like your tilted stage,

I don’t like you,

I got smarter, I got harder, in the nick of time,

Honey rose up from the dead,

I do it all the time,

Look what you made me do,

Look what you just made me do,

Look what you made me do,

No, I don’t like you”

The song is appropriate for Villanelle, as it emphasises her feelings and struggle against The Twelve. She doesn’t like the “little games” they’re playing with her and she “got smarter” in realising how she was being manipulating by them.

In the next scene we see Eve having a meting with Carolyn to discuss their progress with finding out what happened to Kenny. As usual Eve brings the focus back around to Villanelle and Carolyn retorts that Eve should “do well to remember heroes only get the girl in Hollywood”. It’s clear that everyone else can see Eve’s obsession and attraction to Villanelle, except Eve herself. Kenny calls Villanelle “your girlfriend” to Eve in S1E8 and Hugo picks up on it, asking Eve “what’s the deal with you and Villanelle... why is it? Do you like watching her, or do you like being watched?”.

We then get a scene of Eve, Bear and Jamie in the Bitter Pill office, as they try to track down Villanelle. Eve starts speaking to the bakery that Villanelle ordered the bus cake from, to try to get her personal information. Before Bear tells Eve he’s found the information that she was looking for, she was about to use Niko’s pitchforking to pity the bakery worker into giving her the information. This shows us how, although Eve does have love Niko, he has always been disposable and able to be pushed aside in Eve’s life, in favour of the things she values as more important (like her job or in this case, Villanelle). It also shows us how Eve just uses Niko, she was using him before to maintain her facade of having a normal life and now she’s using his tragic maiming to find Villanelle. This additionally shows us Eve’s relentlessness and how she has no moral boundaries for what she is willing to say or do to try to track down Villanelle.

When Villanelle and Dasha are in the hotel in Aberdeen, they have a conversation in the hotel lift. Just like Hélène did at the beginning of the episode, Dasha presses on Villanelle’s wound, as a power play. However, unlike with Hélène, Villanelle knows that she can ‘one-up’ Dasha and they start trying to take digs at one another.

Villanelle tells Dasha - who we know, from her tracksuits, her necklace with a ‘D’ on it, and the fact that she refers to herself in the third person, that she is incredibly self centred - that Russia has changed since she lived there and that there will no one waiting for her to return home, but she will only be greeted by “indifference”. Hélène told Dasha in S3E4 that “people would be dancing in the street and chanting your name, ‘Dasha, Dasha, Dasha’”; so Villanelle telling her that people will be indifferent about her returning to Russia would dent her ego a little bit.

In response to this, Dasha bites back by saying that she doesn’t care about a “hero’s welcome” and if she wants stroganoff, she says “my son can make it”. We then suddenly get extreme close-up shots of Villanelle and Dasha, because Villanelle “didn’t know [Dasha] had a son”. The extreme close-ups continue as Dasha continues to push the knife in further, by saying that she will die with her feet up and holding her son’s hand, but that Villanelle will die alone because she destroyed her family.

Although Villanelle and Dasha don’t get along (and Dasha tried to kill Villanelle once), Villanelle still most likely views Dasha as a mother figure of sorts. Dasha mentioned that Villanelle was “dumped” on her when she had “mosquito bites for breasts”, which tells us that they’ve known each other for a very long time and that Dasha (just like Konstantin) would have had a part in raising Villanelle. In S3E4, Dasha starts cleaning up Villanelle’s things telling her “you don’t deserve nice things if you don’t look after them”, just as a mother would. Also in S3E1 Dasha also makes a big deal about how proud she is of Villanelle, saying “you’re so talented, you’re the best I ever trained, you’re destined for greatness”; and telling Eve in S3E6 how “I created her, I took raw shit and moulded it into steel, I broke her back, I give her wings”.

Villanelle will be aware that she’s like Dasha’s prodigy. So for Villanelle to suddenly find out that Dasha has a son, and she’s not like the child that Dasha never had, it’s yet another disappointment and loss of a maternal figure and/or family for Villanelle. The sudden use of the extreme close-ups just accentuates and draws our attention to Villanelle’s emotional reaction to this realisation and Dasha’s enjoyment in her suffering.

However, Villanelle hides any hint that she’s been effected by what Dasha has told her and instead comments, unfazed, about Dasha’s halitosis (which is bad breath) - again another remark that knocks Dasha’s ego.

We then see Villanelle and Dasha on the golf course in Aberdeen, observing the target they’ve been sent to kill. Villanelle is wearing the green hairy outfit, literally embodying the “beautiful monster” that Hélène said she was. However, although Villanelle fulfils the role of the “beautiful monster” on the outside; by deciding to not kill the target and letting him run away instead, she doesn’t actually end up fulfilling the role of being the “monster” that Hélène said she was.

Dasha also comments to Villanelle about how she will miss “that feeling you get when you snuff out a life, when you can see your own eyes reflected in dilated pupils, when you can count the number of breaths they have left on one hand”. This is something that we’ve seen Villanelle enjoy a number of times: the Greco kill in Tuscany S1E1, the Carla De Mann kill in Paris in S1E2 and the Fat Panda kill in Berlin in S1E3.

When Eve finds Dasha on the golf course while in pursuit of Villanelle, Dasha makes a comment about Niko’s moustache being “like Stalin”, which prompts Eve to kill Dasha by crushing her chest. We see the same expression from Eve, which we saw from Villanelle at the Tuscany kill in S1E1, as she revels in “that feeling you get when you snuff out a life” that dAsha was describing. Similarly, we also see Dasha’s enjoyment as she watches Eve and vicariously feels her experience “that feeling”, from killing her.

After Villanelle hit Dasha with the golf club and is waiting for Konstantin to pick her up, the song ‘Watch Your Back’ by The Coathangers. The lyrics:

“I’m stuck here,

No way out,

Back, you can never go back,

You can never go back,

You can never go back,

No, no, no”

The lyrics of the song demonstrate how Villanelle now has “no way out” and “can never go back”. By ‘killing’ Dasha she’s now made her choice and will never be able to return to working for The Twelve and has to find a way to move forward now instead.

The song also relates to Eve, who similarly “can never go back”, after having a hand in killing Dasha and finding enjoyment in the act of doing so (unlike when she killed Raymond). Once Eve has fully released and embraced her “monster”, she can never return to the life of normalcy she once had.

Just like how Eve was about to use Niko’s pitchforking to get the information she wants, she also does it again when the American target tries to get help from her. The American man asks for help to escape from Villanelle, but Eve just repeatedly asks him what the girl looked like, and then proceeds to push him out of the car so that she can peruse Villanelle. It shows us Eve’s frenzy and focus on trying to find Villanelle and not caring about anything, or anyone else, at all.

‘I See Darkness’ by Red Mecca also starts to play as Eve crushes Dasha’s chest. The lyrics we hear are:

“Just as time,

Wonder why,

I see darkness in you,

I see darkness in you,

I see darkness in you,

Lose my breath,

Alone with you,

I see shadows of you”

The last time this song was used, was for Villanelle’s mother in S3E5. The song is used in this instance, to again show how Eve has come to a turning point and a point where her “darkness” is fully rearing it’s head. As the song is used for Eve’s darkness while she kills Dasha, the use of the song for Villanelle’s mother to connect the two scenes, supports the thought that Tatiana may have also been a killer (and most likely killed Villanelle’s father).

When Villanelle and Eve narrowly miss each other at the train station in Scotland after Konstantin had his heart attack; an unreleased song, presumably by Unloved is played over the scene. The lyrics we can hear are:

“I once had a love,

Or did love have me,

It set me free,

It set me free”

The song encapsulates Villanelle and Eve’s relationship: do they love each other or are they at the whim of Love, being consumed and controlled by it? Whatever the answer may be, they can both say that the love they have for one another put them on a journey that has “set [them] free”. Eve has come to accept her “monster” and Villanelle’s eyes have been opened to the lack of freedom she has in her life.

In the final scene of the episode, at Liverpool Street train station in London, Eve gets a phone call from Villanelle. We get a wide shot of Eve as the camera pans away from her, which is a shot that is repeated with Villanelle in the tea dance scene in S3E8. The wide shots are used to highlight Eve and Villanelle’s isolation when they’re not together; when Villanelle and Eve aren’t together, they have no-one else who is there for them. The shots are also used to illustrate to us how everything else in the work pales into insignificance when they’re together; there can be so many other people around and so many other things happening, but their sole focus is on one another - the rest of the world continues to turn but their worlds’ stop when they’re without the other.

You can read my previous Killing Eve posts here:-

First Introduction to Villanelle

First Introduction to Eve

S1, E1 - Nice Face

S1, E2 - I’ll Deal With Him Later

S1, E3 - Don’t I Know You?

S1, E4 - Sorry Baby

S1, E5 - I Have a Thing about Bathrooms

S1, E6 - Take Me to the Hole!

S1, E7 - I Don’t Want to Be Free

S1, E8 - God, I’m Tired

S2, E1 - Do You Know How to Dispose of a Body?

S2, E2 - Nice and Neat

S2, E3 - The Hungry Caterpillar

S2, E4 - Desperate Times

S2, E5 - Smell Ya Later

S2, E6 - I Hope You Like Missionary!

S2, E7 - Wide Awake

S2, E8 - You’re Mine

S3, E1 - Slowly Slowly Catchy Monkey

S3, E2 - Management Sucks

S3, E3 - Meetings Have Biscuits

S3, E4 - Still Got It

S3, E5 - Are You From Pinner? [Part 1]

S3, E5 - Are You From Pinner? [Part 2]

S3, E6 - End of Game

S3, E8 - Are You Leading or Am I? [Part 1]

——————————————————————————

[arrtemisia]

Hey so... If you could redo cannon Makoto what would you do? How would she change? I'm curious cause out of the main cast she was the only one that I just couldn't get a solid interest in (aside from Ann but that's just cause the idea of her being a fashion model confuses me more than anything I think)

God. So much stuff.

There's a couple big things about her that bug me, and none of them really change at all in her canon vs fanon portrayal, which means it's hard for me to enjoy her even in fanworks. In my opinion, I think her biggest flaw is that she's simply miscast, and her character would have worked much better as a confidant instead of a thief, which would've given her a place of her own to shine and avoid the weird dissonance between different aspects of her character (and this was actually their original plan, so Hifumi would have taken her place which. She would've fit in much better imo bc she's actually suffered under another's will like every single one of the others and she's an actual strategist instead of just """smart,""' but that's a topic for another post), but since we're talking about how I'd personally fix Makoto in the role she currently fills, I'm going to list some of the issues I take with her and potential solutions.

First of all, just to get it out of the way, she needs an actual reason to be here. She doesn't have one, full stop.

The big thing tying the thieves together is that they're all victims of abuse and oppression who rebel against their tormentors and want to prevent anyone else from suffering like they did. I'm not saying Makoto has never struggled, because she has, but it's really, really not the same type of struggle.

This leads to weird moments where everything about Makoto's personality and characterization, such as being a stickler for the rules, idolizing the police, etc mean that she has no in-character reason to stick with the thieves after kaneshiro is dealt with and should maybe even be opposing the thieves' way of doing things, but the plot drags her along anyway because the game really wants her to be a party member. And really, what's up with her awakening? She gets threatened once and then bang-boom-kapow she has a persona? It's weak.

Also before anyone says "well all those things about her personality change when she awakens and she sheds her good girl personality and yada yada," no she doesn't, actually, and I'm getting there I promise

The easiest solution here is also the most drastic. Swap when Makoto and Akechi join. This kills two birds with one stone; Makoto gets an actual reason to awaken through Sae, and Akechi's betrayal hits harder because he's pretending to be with you for longer (although admittedly this is much less needed on Akechi's part ever since royal).

Not only does this give Makoto a much stronger reason to awaken and join in the first place (Sae starts twisting into something horrible and Makoto wants to help both stop and save her), but it also gives her an internally consistent reason to stick around. Before, unlike the others (who all at least have "I want to stop others from feeling like I did," or in Futaba's case, "I wanna find the ppl who killed my mom."), once Kaneshiro is done with, Makoto has no real big personal reason to stick around other than "I'm a thief now and the plot says so ig." Now, of COURSE she'd want to go after Shido because he's the one that was manipulating her sister, and after that of COURSE she'd want to help take down mr divine sippy cup in order to get Shido tried and jailed.

However, if we're not going to shuffle around the order of party members bc that'd nuke the canon plot a little, then we need to rework the entire Kaneshiro arc and/or Makoto's backstory and values as a whole. Yeah this is why the first solution was the easy one.

I'm going to go in-depth about how I feel Makoto's personality and values should be reworked later I'M GETTING THERE, so I'll talk about that then. As for reworking Kaneshiro, I... don't have a whole lot of ideas. The palace itself is fine, it has one of the coolest atmospheres in the game (c'mon, there's got to be a fun bank heist in a game like this), but Makoto's connection with him is very weak. Maybe have it be that he was extorting her for years in secret and she never said anything? Maybe have him be the one that ordered the hit on her father? I'm not sure what would be strong enough to match to the other palace leaders, without feeling forced. I'll have to come up with more ideas for this one.

The second big issue I have with her is less of one specific thing and more of a collection of smaller problems that all come from the same source. She waltzes in, takes over, and starts acting like she's the boss of things. She then names herself the "strategist" and yet only ever states the obvious and, to use a word I hate, mansplains things to you that you already learned two palaces ago. She's constantly condescending and passive agressive to the other team members, especially Ann and Ryuji, berates everyone for not being as naturally book smart as her when all the other characters are smart in their own ways and just not good at academia, all the while everyone around her, even characters that normally wouldn't take that (ryuji, ann) or are too prideful to admit to anyone bring better (mona), are constantly like "You're so cool, Makoto!"

It's a classic case of show don't tell, and rhe game is obsessed with telling you that Makoto is "smart" and "cool." Once she joins the team, all the characters that were originally shown to be smart in their own ways are never allowed to say anything meaningful ever again bc Makoto is the "smart" one. She never does anything particularly different compared to the other party members, but the game is constantly insisting she's special.

I'm very hesitant to call her a mary sue, because I don't think she is one, and also I disagree with the use of that term at all as these days it's just meant to devalue powerful characters that happen to be girls, but I definitely think she's emblematic of a common writing flaw that can lead to mary sues. The problem with making a character the "smart" one as a personality trait instead of something that just comes naturally is that you have to dumb down everyone else's characterization to make them look smarter or cooler by comparison. It means that the character you're trying to prop up bends everyone else around them, making them act in ways they normally wouldn't in order to make the one character you're trying to look cool seem better by comparison.

This has an easy solution: cut that shit out. Have her slowly find her place on the team naturally instead of forcing her way in as a pseudo-leader. Don't give every single "well, duh" line to her, and cut the scenes where she stands around explaining obvious things you already know in a condescending manner so she looks smarter. Let the other characters actually act like themselves when they're in the same room as her instead of bending around her to prop her up. Have her treat those characters with respect in turn, bc for all intents and purposes when it comes to thief stuff they are her senpai, instead of just having her act like she's better than them, or boss them around, or be passive agressive about the fact that their grades are bad. Show that other characters are smart in other ways instead of acting like Makoto's book smarts are the end-all be-all. And for fuck's sake, stop acting like "smart" and "punches stuff real good" are personality traits, which leads me into my last big point.

Makoto and Queen don't really feel like the same character. Okay, so to explain this, let's walk through her awakening again.

Makoto is a good girl who's a stickler for the rules, sucks up to authority, idolizes the police, is obsessed with her grades and academic performance, and looks down on others who don't do the same. A couple people call her useless and then she gets threatened by a mob boss, after which she decides to live her life for herself and completely shed her good girl lifestyle and rebel against everyone pressuring her.

That is, except for the teensy tiny detail where she doesn't.

Nothing significant about her personality changes all post her awakening and joining the thieves, aside from the part where she sucks up to authority maybe a little less. She's still uptight, her grades (and the grades of those on her team) are still her top priority, she still idolizes the law and those enforcing it.

Y'see, persona has a bit of a common problem with saying one thing about a character, be it making a reveal or saying they're gonna change in some big way, but not fully committing to it. You can see it most in p4 (party members saying they're gonna quit/stop/do whatever and then backtracking in the last two ranks of their social link), but it's rarely so severe that it completely ruins their personality and character arc as a whole. Makoto, I feel, is the main exception.

The writers want Makoto to become this tough, rebellious biker queen who oozes badassery in every move and will never follow anyone's wishes for her ever again, but they also want to keep her old personality of the uptight naive rule-following law-abiding academic. So, instead of altering one to better fit the other, they try to do both... badly.

Instead of integrating the two parts of her personality, it just feels like she swaps between them whenever the plot calls for it which is really, really jarring. She'll be stuttering about following the rules and getting to know her generation one second, and then the next she'll be yelling about mowing down shadows with her motorcyle the next. It feels like Queen and Makoto are two separate uninteresting half-characters, with only a couple personality traits each, instead of one whole well-rounded character.

Either rework Makoto's thief aesthetic to better suit her personality as a whole and give her something other than "I'm totally not a good girl anymore" to make her compelling, or actually commit to Makoto shedding her past life everyone around her had forced on her and change her personality. Have her grades start to slip, have her talk back to Sae, change the way she dresses so it's rougher and less perfect, hell, maybe even have her quit student council. Just, anything to make her more well-rounded as a character.

I have some other nitpicks with her here and there, like the fact that her confidant is actually just Eiko's confidant and doesn't give Makoto herself any development, or the way the game keeps trying to set her up as Joker's waifu or whatever, but those are just that; nitpicks. The three big things I mentioned earlier - her not having a compelling personal reason to be a part of the thieves, the way the writers shove her into the spotlight by putting down everyone around her, and the fact that her characterization is just one badass half and one smart half that don't mesh and have little else in between - are the problems I feel are what's actually holding her character back.

Again, I do think that all of this stems from the fact that she's miscast, but it's too late to fix that now. While I personally really dislike Makoto, I do kind of understand her appeal for others when she's written well, and she's a totally valid character to like. I just wish she was portrayed better.

(Also, if anyone wants to reblog this, feel free I ask that you please don't put this in Makoto's main character tag. I know how much it sucks to get a bunch of negativity in a character's main tags as I am an Edelgard fe3h fan)

[killingeveperspectives]

Perspective: Eve Polastri and the invisibility of women’s pain

“[A woman] has to know how to love

know how to suffer her love

and be all forgiveness”

These are the final verses of the poem “Sonnet of the ideal woman” written by the acclaimed Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes, same guy that brought you Girl from Ipanema®. (Don’t start hum… too late). I remember reading this sonnet only once, but its last verses became branded in my mind like a curse. Society’s view of ideal womanhood is perfectly encapsulated in these three haunting lines. That is women’s purpose, not only for men but for humanity, her suffering frivolous in the face of the redemption to be brought forth through her selflessness. Anything else is egoistical, evil, and dangerous�� for everyone. From Pandora in ancient Greece, to biblical Eve, to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, to 90% of all horror movies ever, women are constantly warned of the dangers of curiosity and desire, which lead to destruction and death. Her redemption is to be a vehicle of someone else’s redemption, just like Virgin Mary redeemed biblical Eve by being the vehicle of humankind’s salvation. This narrative is so ingrained in our collective unconscious that it requires an immense effort to not let it slip into its familiar nest within our minds.

The biblical story of Eve’s fall from grace is arguably the most pervasive patriarchal myth to shape our patriarchal society, but if we unwrap its millennia of projections of male anxieties, the myth holds a kernel of universal truth: The flesh is weak. We are dangerously inclined to act on desire over reason by force so strong it is symbolized by the Devil: it possesses the mind. These impulses are irrational, reckless, primal and compelling. While Freud constructed much of his theory on the fascination of unconscious drives, I believe no one has said it better than W.H. Auden: “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand”. Our lives and livelihood depend on striking a fine balance between restriction and satisfaction of impulse, and to those who have ever fell in passion with someone or something, passion can be one of the most disruptive experiences of a lifetime. Thus, Eve’s myth carries layers of meaning both as we understand our nature and also as to how we project these anxieties onto womanhood.

Eve Polastri is not just Eve, she is Eve, she is the proverbial woman. She is morbidly curious, tempted by desire, gives in, and destroys the world around her. But Killing Eve is no cautionary tale, Eve Polastri Is not committing a forbidden sin against a narrative moral code which commands an imposed narrative punishment. Thus, Eve Polastri embodies and transgresses the biblical myth: she is the woman exploring her own impulses in her own story and becoming authentic through it– which makes her a remarkable character in her own right. At the core, the character is also us, a regular person urging to become whole, that sees in the metaphorical abyss of Villanelle’s indulgence a reflection of what she yearns: liberation. There is a courage to Eve, and we watch her entranced, because, whether we want to admit or not, we all fantasize about playing with fire. However, there can be a tacit perverted satisfaction in this story: we want Eve to fall from grace but when she does, we want to punish her for it, thus sublimating and reprimanding our own impulse, and falling back in the old narratives about womanhood. 

In Season 1, Eve seemed to have been taken as a surrogate for the audience quite unproblematically, nevertheless when desire starts to show its ugly face in Season 2, part of the audience started to feel alienated from the character, and even antagonistic. Which is unfortunate, because her face off with Villanelle in the finale was arguably the most victorious, honest and cathartic moment of the character so far. Season 3 opens with a recluse Eve licking her wounds, trying to pull herself together any way she can, after all she suffered and all she learned. She changed and change is painful – in an abstract sense, violent as well. Her initial isolation was self-imposed by the character but as the season progresses Eve becomes more and more distant, which creates a parallel to how women’s suffering is perceived in real life.

Ironically, when Eve is shutting down from the world around her in the beginning of the season, she is more open to us than she will ever be in the remainder of the episodes. We are allowed to exist with the character through her painfully dull, mundane day-to-day, as the extent of her suffering manifests in the blunt messiness of her exterior life and her valiant effort to keep it together with the help of a budding alcohol and cigarette addiction. Eve is not a strong woman; she is a woman that claimed herself at a great cost. This cost was depicted with frustrating realism, just like in real life, once the thrill of the battle is over, it’s time to tend to the wounded, drag the corpses and count the dead. It’s inglorious. No wonder Eve literally and metaphorically hid, she burned the bridges with the world around her. How could she possibly explain what she went through and how could an outsider possibly understand? A question that mirrors the feeling of many a person, especially women, that entangled themselves in violent dynamics: Alienation and loneliness.

Initially, the character continues the apophatic self-definition, Eve says no a lot, symbolizing her efforts to reassert control over her life. From Villanelle, to Carolyn, to her job, Eve is trying to play by her rules and her truth, she knows what she wants not, but the interesting question posed at the end of Season 2 is “Now that Eve reclaimed herself, what will she do of what she has become?” – Sartre style. However, there is a major shift in Eve’s character after her interactions with Villanelle in episodes 3 and 4. The character’s arc becomes centered towards admitting her feelings for Villanelle as the source of conflict, however one could argue that the main source of conflict is the existence of these feelings itself. Therefore, merely admitting them shouldn’t solve the main conflict, on the contrary, due to their inherent contradictory nature it should exacerbate it. 

This sleight of hand not only impoverishes the character’s emotional landscape, motivations and general arc, but also echoes the verse: ”A woman must know how to suffer love”. Like countless women before, Eve’s story is subtly telling us that the misery comes from her rejection of a phagic “love” and the metaphorical self-annihilation intrinsic to the experience, instead of the authentic ambivalence and paradoxes of the character’s inner self. Eve’s conflict should be at its core about herself not about Villanelle – who serves as a symbolic element.  In the end, good women are expected to erase themselves and to become vessels of God and of others. Coincidentally, Eve’s character becomes oddly redeemed when she becomes a vessel for Villanelle’s need to belong.

Here is where the writers quite painfully abandon an once intriguing and compelling character. Eve doesn’t find nothing new to say about herself, no new path nor synthesis of her desires, and identity – which could and should have given Eve agency in renegotiating her dynamic with Villanelle, especially if it was to bring them closer. Eve ceases to be defined by her own inner conflict and becomes defined by her attraction to Villanelle alone. As Eve obsessively seeks Villanelle, who is in turn occupied with a story of her own, at no point the audience is asked to care about Eve’s suffering nor does the writers bother to interrogate the character about it, let alone let the character process it. Eve is deprived from exploring herself and facing her own pain, almost as if Eve was so devoid of individuality that the character itself is alienated from the obvious pain and conflict it should be experiencing. But nor Eve, nor any other character and, most importantly, nor the audience is asked to care. In the emblematic scene where Eve jumps into a dumpster to literally look for scrapes of Villanelle’s supposed affection as a way of reconnecting with her, no effort is made to reframe it or question the length at which the character lost itself, because no one cares. When in the finale, Eve, who is oblivious to Villanelle’s change of heart, is interrogated with a relevant question “Did I ruin your life? Do you think I am a monster?”, the character straightforwardly reassures the anti-hero at the expense of the rich internal conflict that should have been derived and fleshed out from these points, because no one cares.

Eve believes in Villanelle unconditionally, despite all conceivable lines being crossed, despite the destruction and conflict this relationship has brought her, because Eve is doing precisely what her character is supposed to be doing: erasing her individuality, enduring her pain in the name of this love, forgiving no matter what they do to her so that they can be redeemed through her. “A woman has to know how to suffer her love and be all forgiveness”. Thus, Eve as a character becomes a device in Villanelle’s story arc occupying the same restricted space female characters were always allowed to inhabit. Villanelle goes on a somewhat muddled character growth arc, filled with redemption elements which traditionally involves the presence of a source of acceptance and love, generally in the form of a love interest, that will be granted to the hero at the end of the journey. Eve’s function in the story is not as a compelling protagonist with universal struggles, but as both enabler and trophy in Villanelle’s story. The narrative finds itself trapped in the old tales ingrained in our collective unconscious, in a jarring contrast with the previous seasons’ transgression and uniqueness.

Paradoxically, this precise abandonment gives the season the richest opportunity for the audience to interrogate the place of women’s pain. Eve’s abandonment mirrors the invisibility of the suffering of countless women, who painfully sacrifice their livelihoods in the name of their loved ones, be it Nicos, or Villanelles, or family, or friends, or their communities. Who, day in and out, are responsible for caring and supporting others through their struggles while left stranded with their own conflicts. After all, when so much depends on their self-sacrifice their pain is unimportant, even an expected part of this glorified martyrdom. Are we keen on looking at these women who inhabit these confined roles and acknowledge without judgement the enormous burden they carry? Are we ready to empathize with them when they rebel, when they fail and break, and even more so when they acquiesce? Having a queer twist on this narrative is not enough to claim it transgressive, as this cultural recipe perpetuates itself also into homoromantic relationships, as women often see themselves trapped in this dynamic with their female partners as well. Women are no less oppressed by patriarchal ideas of womanhood if these ideas are perpetuated through their relationships with other women.

 Akin to Eve’s biblical story, the erasure of female pain is also layered, as we all crave unconditional love, and its redemption, so we can be at peace with ourselves – completely satisfied, accepted and safe – which is naturally symbolized by “The mother”. Therefore, it is easy to impose these fantasies in the ideal of womanhood, as easy as it is to relate to Villanelle and romanticize the role Eve plays in her development, her acceptance of Villanelle’s character being a powerful cathartic release for our own need and fantasies of belonging. 

In this context, hidden in Season 3’s oblivious narrative, lays an interesting invitation to evaluate how we individually, and as a society, negotiate our urge to be nurtured and the necessity to nurture others and how these roles are culturally and socially informed by patriarchal ideas we collectively and individually carry about womanhood, and to what extent we are ready to challenge them.

[ranma-rewatch]

Episode 17: I Love You, Ranma! Please Don’t Say Goodbye

Howdy dowdy, everyone! We are getting so close! So close to finishing the first season of Ranma 1/2! Last episode ended with Akane still having no clue who Ranma is, so this time they’ll resolve that? I think? I am fairly sure she remembered him throughout the rest of the series. I guess I’ll see how after I rewatch the episode, which for you will be with the next paragraph.

There we have it! The end to Shampoo’s introductory arc! How did I feel about it?

That’ll be more clear later on, let’s start by going over what happens in it. Ranma and Akane head back to her house, with her still unaware of who he is. Her family is only now starting to understand that this is actually happening, that Akane has somehow actually forgotten Ranma.

Shampoo shows up, when she glomps onto Ranma out of pure instinct Akane attacks him. Realizing that there is some part of her memory left unaffected, Shampoo goes to do the attack again, but Ranma intercepts it and steals the shampoo. He immediately tries using it on Akane, but it just knocks her out, it doesn’t regain the lost memories. Dr. Tofu shows up and reveals that’s because the formula he stole only takes memories, it can’t give them back.

Luckily, he has a book that has the recipe they need. Unluckily, Kasumi shows up and in his lovestruck silliness he rips the book into tiny pieces without realizing it. With no other choice, Ranma decides to head to China, since they’ll have the shampoo formula needed there. Everyone asks for personal souvenirs (though I don’t know how he’d buy any Ranma is usually broke) and Akane wonders why this stranger is doing so much for her.

Speaking of that very question, Ranma quickly runs into Shampoo, who wants to know why Ranma is trying to get Akane’s memories back so much. All he says to that is that he doesn’t like the idea of being forgotten by someone. Clearly, that is all it is, there is no other context to the situation.

She messes with Ranma a bunch, faking him out with a bunch of other kinds of shampoo, but eventually after a lot of hijinks Ranma is able to strike a deal with her: all it will take to get the memory-restoring shampoo is killing the ‘girl Ranma’. Well, half-kill, Ranma could at least negotiate to that.

And if you need someone to half-kill Ranma, of course there’s no one else to go see except Ryoga Hibiki. Only problem is, for once he doesn’t want to beat Ranma up, no matter how nicely Ranma asks. After all, if Akane’s memory is never restored, it gives him a chance to be with Akane instead. Still, Ryoga does have a temper, and Ranma eventually goads him into a fight...that Ranma quickly wins, unscathed.

Mr. Tendo and Mr. Saotome step up for the job, but Akane sees them attacking this poor defenseless (and as she sees it, weak) teenage boy and tries to stop them. That annoys Ranma, since he’s going through all this pain for her, but when he insults her in annoyance, she reacts to it. So, Ranma insults her a bunch and her memory comes back.

The only problem there is, now that Akane remembers Ranma, Shampoo is back to wanting to kill her for being an obstacle to getting with Ranma. This leaves Ranma with what he feels like is no choice, and he shows Shampoo that he’s both the man she loves and the person she was trying to kill. (Without mentioning the curse, mind you, instead telling her that he has just been ‘pretending to be a guy’) As he seemed to expect, she jumps to wanting to kill him, but it quickly becomes clear she’s crying, and she runs away, telling Ranma they’ll never see each other again. Then there is a short scene of Ranma and Akane having a spat. The end.

I think this time I'm going to start with the stuff I liked. I appreciate the structure of the narrative here, as Ranma tries one thing after another, any way he can, to solve the problem. It moved fairly quickly and was a good fodder for some jokes.

The bigger reason I liked the episode, of course, just comes from how far Ranma is willing to go to help Akane. He plans to swim to China, by himself, if it means getting her memories back. He can say whatever he wants, but I do feel like this episode was great at showing just how much he really does care about her.

It also made fairly good use of Ryoga, though it’s something they’ve done with him a few times now. By this point, it seems his love for Akane and how he sees Ranma as the thorn in his side have become his primary character traits, rather than his original driving hatred. That’s not necessarily bad, but I’m glad that, as far as I remember, it won’t be his main focus forever.

That last scene with Shampoo is also fairly strong, though I’ll get more into my thoughts on her in a second. All of the things I liked aside, there was definitely one part of this episode I really didn’t care for.

It probably sounds dumb, but I just really didn’t like the solution to the memory loss. To put it more specifically, I like the idea that they’re able to break through what’s been done to her through her connection to Ranma. I just don’t like that it involved Ranma insulting her over and over again. Like, I get it, he’s a dick to her sometimes, that reminds her of him more than all the nice things he’s been doing.

But it’s also just rough to watch, at least for me? I didn’t find it funny. In a way, the whole thing casts a strange shadow on the entire Ranma/Akane dynamic. Arguing a lot is one thing, but the sheer level to which Ranma was insulting her felt closer to negging then anything else. Especially because it’s all focused on how Akane looks, things that are clearly a big insecurity for her.

Enough worrying about those two, let’s talk about who this arc was more properly about, Shampoo (no last name)! This is our first Character Spotlight in a while, so let’s make sure it’s done well!

Let’s talk about her voice actresses, shall we? Her original Japanese voice was provided by Rei Sakuma, who was also the cat Jiji in Kiki’s Delivery Service (which is kind of funny considering something happening to Shampoo next season). Like some of the other voice actresses we’ve talked about thus far, she was in the idol group DoCo. For English, she’s portrayed by Cathy Weseluck. Some of her more well-known roles are as Near in Death Note and Spike in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. (Both of which are not roles I’d expect from Shampoo’s voice actress.)

They both play Shampoo very similarly, I’d say. Shampoo has a very high-pitched voice, and at least so far her vocabulary in ‘Japanese’ isn’t very large, so half the time she sticks with Chinese instead. This gives her an almost baby-like quality to her voice, which is contrasted by how cold it is when she starts talking about how Ranma or Akane have to die. What I would say as a point of delineation, at least so far, is that Sakuma’s performance feels more genuine, while Weseluck makes it seem like the childishness is just a front, it doesn’t sound sincere.

That kind of voice, genuine or not, is pretty emblematic of what we’ve seen of Shampoo thus far. Namely, that she’s fairly simple. Shampoo is chasing after Ranma, to kill or to marry, because of ancient traditions of her people, not because of what she really wants. Yet she pursues him relentlessly anyway. She’s eager to fight, eager to love, and absolutely willing to use underhanded methods to remove anyone from the picture if they get in her way.

I will say that, in terms of fighting ability, it’s pretty vague thus far how good Shampoo is. Ranma is capable of beating her with no problem over and over again, but she never gets to really fight Akane, all she does is give her hair the works.

Speaking of Akane, I will say that Shampoo’s presence does highlight certain aspects of her character. They’re both rather jealous, and prone to violence over it. But where Akane and Ranma are still trying to work through their baggage, Shampoo is down to cuddle from second one. Shampoo is also the first other fiance of Ranma’s, though that’s less something planned out for him and more something he made happen by accident.

I guess it’s time to talk about it, no use putting it off any longer. Shampoo has never really been a character I liked in the franchise, and part of the fun of this Rewatch is seeing how my thoughts have grown on her. I used to just kind of find her annoying, but now there’s more there too. Namely, racism. Yeah, the broken English/Japanese she speaks, combined with how she’s written in general, give Shampoo a kind of ‘dumb’ quality that never sat well with me, especially now that I know that it’s emblematic of the kind of stereotypes Japanese people tend to have about people from China. I still hope to have my opinion changed on Shampoo, but it hasn’t really happened yet.

It hasn’t been made clear yet, so I will say now that I do like this episode. It has some good comedy, I enjoy the hints of Ranma’s burgeoning devotion to Akane, and it closes out Shampoo’s initial storyline pretty well. But I’m also mixed on it, mostly just because of that insulting scene. It’s strange, having a story that I liked about 80% of, because it’s difficult knowing how to weigh that 20% that I didn’t care for. (Also, can I just say I hate that the title feels like a lie?) In the end, I’m placing this just one spot above the last episode, which means the current standing is thus:

Episode 7: Enter Ryoga, the Eternal ‘Lost Boy’

Episode 12: A Woman's Love is War! The Martial Arts Rhythmic Gymnastics Challenge!

Episode 15: Enter Shampoo, the Gung-Ho Girl! I Put My Life in Your Hands

Episode 9: True Confessions! A Girl's Hair is Her Life!

Episode 2: School is No Place for Horsing Around

Episode 6: Akane's Lost Love... These Things Happen, You Know

Episode 13: A Tear in a Girl-Delinquent's Eye? The End of the Martial Arts Rhythmic Gymnastics Challenge!

Episode 17: I Love You, Ranma! Please Don’t Say Goodbye

Episode 16: Shampoo's Revenge! The Shiatsu Technique That Steals Heart and Soul

Episode 8: School is a Battlefield! Ranma vs. Ryoga

Episode 11: Ranma Meets Love Head-On! Enter the Delinquent Juvenile Gymnast!

Episode 4: Ranma and...Ranma? If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Another

Episode 5: Love Me to the Bone! The Compound Fracture of Akane's Heart

Episode 1: Here’s Ranma

Episode 3: A Sudden Storm of Love

Episode 10: P-P-P-Chan! He's Good For Nothin'

Episode 14: Pelvic Fortune-Telling? Ranma is the No. One Bride in Japan

Next time, we are closing out the season! It’s kind of strange to consider that, I’m actually almost done with the first season of the series, known here in the States as “Digital Dojo” and in Japan as the only season of Ranma 1/2. (The next season to the end was all Ranma 1/2 Nettōhen) Will I like I Am a Man! Ranma's Going Back to China!? That’s the big question, and I’m eager to see. Ta ta for now!

[gofancyninjaworld]

On the Make: How Saitama gets no credit.

Depending on your cynicism index, suggested music for this post range from 'We’re Moving on up’ to ‘Good Luck’.

<20: In bold at the end

Being ‘on the make’ is a term for people looking to gain money or power, often by unscrupulous means. That’s definitely a thing and does mean that we regard anyone openly ambitious with a bit of suspicion. Wouldn't it be nice if the world just realised what awesome people we were and just gave us our due?

The key chapter in OPM to understanding how the story turned from a loosely-connected set of stories about a depressed too-powerful guy wandering around and bashing bad guys to a coherent story about a too-powerful hero and his influence on the world is Punch 14: I Don’t Know You. If you’ve forgotten it, click on the link and go remind yourself. In particular, Saitama was devastated that for all his efforts, he was completely unknown In Punch 15, he complains bitterly about it, describing it as strange that he, who has done more work than any hero he has heard about, should be mouldering in a ghost town rather than be celebrated. Recognition is extremely important to Saitama: it is what pushed him when he was struggling to become a hero and that’s why he decided to become a pro-hero in the first place. As we know, becoming a pro-hero hasn’t as yet led to anywhere like the recognition that Saitama is due.

Punch 93 has given us several ways that people do look to get ahead, in ways that work and ways that most definitely do not. Getting ahead in the Hero Association isn’t based on giving a nice Powerpoint presentation, a clever report, or having sake with the bosses. It’s about being seen to contribute value. So let’s look at them!

First, the ways that can work, along with their risks.

A: Needlestar -- The Straight Ask

Needlestar came straight out and asked for promotions in return for the considerable risk the supporting heroes were being asked to take on at the Monster Association. From the enthusiasm with which the heroes closest to him clapped his back, you could tell that they were all hoping for some sort of reward, but didn’t want to say.

What’s Good: If hero ranking is supposed to reflect the size of the contribution a hero makes to the good of the world, then asking explicitly for undertaking a high-profile, high-risk endeavour to be rewarded with rank is most reasonable. While Sekingal hasn’t said anything about the size of the promotion, the fact that one will be forthcoming is great. It helps Needlestar in another way: now he’s the guy who made sure we all got something out of this mission.

The Risk: Asking for a promotion in return for high profile work is also asking for one’s actions to be given extra-close scrutiny. If the mission goes badly, it could backfire spectacularly.

Don’t ask, don’t get

B: Sekingar -- The Buck Stops With Me

Sekingar has explicitly taken direct responsibility for leading the mission to rescue Waganma and destroy the Monster Association. He may consult others but he shapes it, he has final say and he’s seeing it through in person.

What’s Good: There is nothing like taking successful ownership of an important project for getting a well-deserved promotion. No one can doubt that meeting the Monster Association’s challenge is an important one. The rewards are as he says: a promotion is the very least of his gains. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make an historic impact and he very much intends to take it.

The Risk: If it goes badly (Waganma dies, and/or the monsters aren’t eliminated), Sekingar’s name will be entirely and indelibly linked to a horrific failure. Being asked to resign would be getting off very lightly indeed. One needs only the lightest touch of cynicism to note that Sicchi isn’t trying to share responsibility for his colleague’s actions -- this baby is all Sekingar’s.

For better or for worse, this is his baby

C: Fubuki -- Useful Collaboration

Fubuki's modus operandi has always been consistent hero work and steady points accumulation, aided by being surrounded by other heroes so no one person is over-exposed to risk. As a way of getting ahead, it's unspectacular, but it's shrewd and effective a. She's also very alert to opportunities to be seen to be doing good.

Unfortunately, her usual team has been disabled and so she's decided to latch on to another group of heroes by way of contributing to a successful team effort.

What’s Good: Relatively low risk method of achieving far more than one would ordinarily be able to. It helps that she's taken enough of Saitama's advice to find stronger rather than weaker heroes to work with.

The Risk: The risk of collaborations lies in defining one’s contributions. It helps that Fubuki’s talents complement rather than supplement that of the others. However, her attempt to claim credit for how things turn out if they go well will probably not go down too well, particularly as the ‘New Fubuki Group’ exists only in her head.

D: Genos -- Breakout Star

What in the world are you wearing young man? Genos is aiming to be a top hero, by which he means rank in the top ten of the S-Class, but his approach couldn't be more different from Fubuki's.

Not for him the slow careful process of building an excellent track record of demon elimination and finding the gaps the HA values (workaholism, the ability to fly into impassable regions, the willingness to file good quality reports, can cooperate worth a damn with other heroes on bigger threats). No, he's out to give the HA what it most desperately needs by slamming the head of a dead dragon on the table: heroes who can single-handedly kill one of those monsters.

What’s Good: If it succeeds, it indisputably distinguishes him in a crowded field and gets him to his initial goal. He’ll have gotten in weeks where many others haven’t been able to get in years.

The Risk: Oof, the risks are huge. There’s dangerous and then there’s crazy dangerous, but being killed or permanently crippled is only one of the dangers. You need the hide of a dragon to be able to try this: few things are as easy to mock as high profile failure. The risks are mitigated somewhat by the fact that he’s not told anyone what he’s intending b (so there’s less face to lose) and that the data-gathering nature of his body means that he can still gain from losses. But boy are those risks big.

Wearing his intentions on his sleeve: literally

And two ways that don’t work

E: Amai Mask -- The Naked Power Grab

Amai Mask tries to strongarm his way into not just joining the strike team, but lead it, regarding it almost as his right. It doesn't go down well.

The thing is, all followership is earned to some degree. Without henchmen, a despot is just a shouty man. The S-Class heroes are following Child Emperor by tacit consent. As to Amai Mask, they don’t know him. They don’t understand him. They don’t like him. They sure as hell don’t respect him. He has never acted in their interests, using the media as a threat. He hasn't earned any sort of right to lead them. Then he makes things worse by denigrating them. ‘You’re so stupid that I’d better lead you,’ has never been a successful rallying cry anywhere.

What’s Good: Nothing! At best, you might be able to browbeat people into some sullen following, but be sure to watch your back at all times. It was going to end in bloodshed but for King’s timely intervention.

The Risk: It damages cohesion, trust and respect.

Would he really risk a bloodbath just to get included in the strike force?  Why yes, yes he would. 

F: Saitama -- Gormless

If Saitama wandering aimlessly around the drains isn't emblematic about his approach, I don’t know what is. Wander around, pop monsters like over-inflated balloons, go home and wait for the credit to roll in. Which it doesn't. There was a brief period in which he did report his activities -- as a C-Class hero. As soon as he was no longer a C-Class hero and no longer had to report his activity weekly, he reverted to his old ways and let the world see or not see what he does.

Amazingly, he is getting promoted on a weekly basis on the word of witnesses, but it’s nothing like what he deserves.

What’s Good: No actual effort required. Get to pretend moral superiority to those actively asking their due.

The Risk: No real reward attached. Without ownership of the results, others are free to discount your contribution and even to take credit. Saitama does want to be recognised and his contributions appreciated. Saitama is like that principled, yet embittered guy low on the organisational totem pole who doesn't understand how guys with less than half his talent, even guys he trained himself, are rising in the organisation while he’s given a few crumbs.

Summing up

<20: There’s nothing unscrupulous about asking for your legitimate efforts to be acknowledged and appropriately recognised.

Fail to do so, and I hope that your just reward is in heaven because you certainly aren't getting it on Earth!

It’s going to be very interesting to see who wins and who loses and how things shake out for the different players both in the short and long term. Good luck guys: you're all going to need it!

________________________________________________

Asides

a Truth be told, Fubuki's idea of the Blizzard Group is a good one. What's wrong with it is that in implementing it, she's strong-armed people to join, deliberately sought out heroes weaker than her so as not to be outshone and worse, she's held back their development as individuals. But the idea itself is sound.

b I tell a lie. Other than Saitama, who set him this task, and Dr. Kuseno, who isn't being allowed to sleep in support of this aim, Genos has told Garou of all people about his goal. Then again, Garou doesn't count! [Genos failed to read Rule 7 of the Evil Overlord's Guide which bids one to shoot the hero first, then explain one's motives afterwards. Otherwise they just get rescued in improbable ways at the last possible second.]

[ryanmeft]

Movie Review: The Last Black Man in San Francisco

Looking for a political message in The Last Black Man in San Francisco is like looking for a Big Mac in Italy: you’ll probably find one, but you’re kind of missing the point. The opening is one of those things that exists for how it looks and how it sounds: a lollipop-sucking little girl skips down the sidewalk past Hazmat-suited cleaners, and eventually past a suited street preacher yelling about the water being poisoned. Across the street, two ordinary guys wait for the bus. It has much to say about gentrification, home and identity, but these images of ordinary life are at the heart of it.

Jimmie Fails, played by Jimmie Fails---and what a name---is a young black man who has watched as his family home in San Francisco, built by his grandfather, has fallen to gentrification. The elderly white couple who owns it now has let it become ensconced in vines and other foliage, let the paint rot, let age set in without offering a balm. With his best friend and slightly nutty would-be playwright Montgomery (Jonathan Majors), he sneaks in when the owners aren’t there to do repairs. This comes off as a strange eccentricity early in the movie, at least for me; I went in completely blind, and so knew nothing about his connection to the house. When they aren’t repairing the house, Jimmy and Montgomery live with the latter’s blind grandfather (Danny Glover), and Jimmie deals with his bitter, defeated father (Rob Morgan). Eventually, the elderly couple is evicted in an inheritance spat, and Jimmie decides to move into the old house.

Running parallel to this is a storyline involving Kofi (Jamal Trulove), a childhood friend of the pair, who was in homes with the abandoned Jimmy when they were children. Kofi is leader of a gang who mostly hangs out on the sidewalk outside Montgomery’s place and makes sure everyone knows he is a tough customer. Invited to the old house for the evening, he tells stories from the past and bonds with his friends. Back on the street, he says hurtful things to cover up his own insecurities. That is a theme in the film, the covering-up of things. It is in both the images and the characters. Jimmie is covering up his pain of abandonment by trying to reclaim an old piece of himself. Montgomery is a bit more refined than the now-adult children he grew up with, and attempts to find the ordinary person in himself by studying the manners of Kofi and his crew. A callous tour guide reads from a pre-memorized script. People who have been hurt bury their hurts in excuses and rationalizations.

Isn’t that just the slow, sad way of things? The movies too often spend their time exploring toughness---the rugged individuality that is undoubtedly part of the American character, spurring us to new horizons and endeavors. They spend comparatively little time really exploring connection and tenderness, the way we strive, almost from the first moment of independence, to regain a measure of the closeness we enjoyed in older days. When they do explore this, it is often saccharine and given to grand cinematic gestures that simply don’t reflect how people actually relate to one another. This film aims for something different. The central thesis is that we do long for connection, that we do not benefit in the whole from hiding this longing, and that society, fearful of true, non-greeting card connections, works overtime to ensure we never show it. The major story beat in the film, which changes what we know, also does not change it, because it is as much about self-image as it is about any house.

Kofi’s eventual fate is emblematic of this, and here, to do the film justice, I must discuss a spoiler. After a very bad day with the house, Jimmie and Montgomery return to find that Kofi has been killed in an altercation. His gang confronts them when they ask what happened; it is a show of dominance. One of them gets right up in Jimmie’s face---then break down and cries on his shoulder. It is as true a moment as you will find in film. How often do we even see movies acknowledge that men can or should cry?

I need to take a moment from talking about the movie’s emotions to discuss its visuals, because the world Jimmie and Montgomery inhabit is as much a part of their characters, their souls, and it exists both with them and around them. A gate to a construction site is slowly opened as if it led to Hades; inside, men jackhammer concrete in slow motion. The inside of Jimmie’s house is dusty and unused, hanging with memories, enhanced by everything being made of undecorated wood. Montgomery leans out over his balcony off the top of his house, which looks like a cake, and looks down the street at the low-level skyline. Jimmie skateboards toward the camera while a tall hill festooned with lights comes aglow in the early evening. Even a bus ride is made to be gorgeous, with scenery going by in such a way that the bus appears for a second to be moving backwards. No doubt, on and around that hill and those streets are other stories. A city is an organism. Adam Newport-Berra is the film’s cinematographer, and he focuses on shots that emphasis the history of everything around us.

When the film made the indie festival rounds, the story of where it came from was widely told: Joe Talbot and Fails were childhood friends, and it is based on Fails’ own loss of his family home and routing through the caretaking system. Though Talbot is the director, Fails (with their friend Rob Richert) is co-writer, and it is their film together, a labor of love in the truest sense. Fails has a career in front of him if he wants it, though I wouldn’t begrudge him not wanting it---he has here presented his story and his feelings and those of many others left behind by the system, by a world that never stops advancing long enough to look back.

Verdict: Must-See

Note: I don’t use stars, but here are my possible verdicts.

Must-See

Highly Recommended

Recommended

Average

Not Recommended

Avoid like the Plague

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 All images are property of the people what own the movie.

[spelviin]

endgame thoughts, not because i think i have anything valuable to say abt it, more just bc i want to get my initial unsullied opinions out before various overly nitpicky or overly praisy internet thinkpieces come around

okay so. first of all, i’m tired to death of the way folks talk about the mcu. like, it’s either a godly feat of everything and the most important thing ever or the literal devil incarnate and the source of all evil in this world. i am literally so fucking bored of both these perspectives and have zero time for either of them. 

yes, the mcu is emblematic of a lot of problems in the current state of the film medium as a whole. yes, it is also a really cool feat of storytelling that a whole bunch of movies spanning a whole bunch of years could all come together and culminate in a big huge blowout finale. yes, it could have been far better, but yes, it also could have been far worse. 

i wasn’t a fan of thor being a punchline in this film. like, the whole “lol thor fat” thing was like, really tired and not cool. and the fact that his genuine moments of expressing grief and the significant trauma he’s been through were played off for laughs more often than not bc “lol thor supposed to be big many man but he’s crying like a wimpyboy instread.” like, fucking please. it’s 2019 and other male characters were allowed to be shown crying and processing their trauma but thor’s??? not allowed for some reason??? anyway they did him dirty in this movie and i’m not super pleased abt that. 

i didn’t like that they fridged natasha. i’m not a fan of scarjo so much these days, but i did like natasha. 2012 me adored her and was 100000% behind her as the Only Woman (despite being miffed that she was the Only Woman) and i really liked her character and redemption arc through the films that she appeared in. and like, i get the justification for fridging her. like i get that she was this assassin who killed a bunch of folks and in the end, not only wiped out the red in her ledger, but saved the whole damn universe in doing so. i get that. i’m just annoyed that they literally went and fridged the Only Woman to give the boys manpain before the third act. 

speaking of the ladies.... the One Scene Where Women Get To Do Things. my god. the critical feminist part of my mind greatly resented the obvious lip service of that scene, and the fact that the ladies only got the one shining moment before we got back to the sausage fest. but lord, the lesbian part of my mind hella enjoyed it. like i was legit bouncing in my seat like YESSSS FUCK EM UP LADIES i was just completely stoked. 

and my god. MY GOD CAN WE TALK ABOUT CAROL’S HAIRCUT AKA A GIFT TO THE LESBIANS. THIS MOVIE HAS MANY SINS BUT WE CAN ALL THANK IT FOR THAT HAIRCUT. (and again, feminist me is like, hey, dont focus on her appearance, focus on the important shit she did in singlehandedly turning the battle around for everyone, but lesbian lizard brain is hhhhhhhhhhhhh girl hot)

anyways. 2012 me was a month out of a major jaw surgery when i saw the first avengers, puffy faced, on heavy painkillers, and unable to eat any solid foods, and just generally weak and miserable. i dragged myself to the theatre and i smiled the whole way through that movie bc even though i was feeling super shitty, that 360 shot of the team made me so excited and happy. so happy that i watched and rewatched a bootleg download over what was probably the worst summer of my life, and it made me happy and gave me hope, dumb as that may sound. 

i havent watched the first avengers movie in a long time, and i’m not sure if i’d feel the same way seeing it now. remembering how it felt then still makes me happy, but seeing that same 360 shot repeated in endgame didnt stoke much emotion. tumblr fandom took a lot of my avengers joy away. the drama and character hate and constant complaining and cringe culture bullshit exhausted me. and the recent turns of the mcu also contributed to that. a lot of things contributed to it, i guess. but i dont feel as happy as i once did. so a lot of this movie rang a little bit hollow, needless to say. 

that being said, though, i did feel a little flicker of that joy. for all the movie’s and the franchise’s faults, of which there are many, i can say that the moment where all those portals opened up and the revived characters stepped though, i felt that happiness again. i legit almost cried when i saw shuri’s silhouette step out of that circle. that moment when the score came in with that booming version of the avengers theme, i was 2012 me again, just for a moment, and i think that’s worth something. to me, that’s worth something. so for all its sins, i thank the movie for that. 

this is rly rambly and im tired so im just gonna say 2 more things. things i’m not personally super invested in, but other people are, and so i feel i need to have an opinion on em.

first is bucky. i fucking adore him, and i am kinda miffed that he got like, no interactions with steve. i know steve/peggy is the canon ship, i knew it was always endgame (heh) and that stucky is just a fandom thing. but god damn it, even if they were never gonna have their relationship go there (which tbh i literally never even came close to expecting to happen) it still feels a little bit unfair to have steve basically ignore probably the most important person in his life. like, i know he wanted to live his happy straight life with peggy, and passing on the shield and identity of captain america to sam is super important, and i loved that moment and would never begrudge him that bc i adore sam. i was just... really sad that bucky had to get kinda shafted for that. (literally all i was saying in the last half hour was “but where’s bucky? but what about bucky?” our boy deserved better. 

second is tony. tony tony tony. i know folks have a lot of strong feelings about him, both ways. i know of folks who think he’s the scum of the earth for some dumb reason, and i personally know others who think the entire mcu should revolve around him, for equally dumb reasons. i’m more neutral. i think he’s a good character who made questionable decisions in the past. i feel for him and his struggles with PTSD. i respect him as a character in-universe and also for what he and RDJ accomplished. like, if he hadn’t hit it out of the park with that first movie like a fucking decade ago, none of this would have been possible, and i think that’s pretty damn cool, regardless of feelings on the monster juggernaut the mcu has turned into. basically, i know some folks are maliciously rejoicing at his death while complaining that he got a hero’s send-off when he is a Bad And Not Morally Pure Man, which is. boring. and other people (namely one who i know personally in my family) who are mad because he is an Angel and deserved the Best Happy Ending Because No Bad Things Are Allowed To Happen To This Perfect Boy. i’m not here for either opinion. i’m okay that he died (peter crying over him did get to me in a huge way, but i think tom holland just has a power that if he’s crying, i’m crying so idk). i think it’s cool that he got to save everyone and got a heroic and well deserved send off. this isnt a revolutionary opinion i just wanted to throw it out there bc im bored with the polarization. 

and... yeah? i think that’s it? sorry, im really tired and this probs doesn’t make sense but i just felt like i had to get the initial reactions and feelings down before the thinkpieces get to me lmao. 

oh, also nebula deserved better 2kforever i just love her a lot and want her to be happy and not suffer, kthxbye 

[preppymayhem]

5, 8, 21, 36, 40, 46, 51!

5. Which fandoms have your written fanfiction for?

I have never been a superly monofannish person, and I have written for a fair number of fandoms, but discounting fandoms that I was assigned for fic exchanges I have written for Gundam Wing, Fullmetal Alchemist, Escaflowne, Mighty Ducks, Inuyasha, City Hunter, Dawson’s Creek, Avatar the Last Airbender, Sailor Moon, Ouran High School Host Club, Eureka Seven, Steven King’s IT/IT (2017), V (2009) and due to my one lone Beronica Fic, I guess you can say I have technically written for Riverdale. About a month ago I orphaned a lot of my older works because they had become a bit incongruous with what I want attached to my name, so not all of those fandoms are still present on my AO3.

Fandoms that I’ve written exclusively for Yuletide as my main assignment are:  Soul Eater, Diana Wynne Jones’ Archer’s Goon, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Claymore, Drive Me Crazy, and Notting Hill.

8. How did you get involved in your latest fandom?

Well this is a fun story, but it is sort of a set of factors that brought me to watch an old 90s teen soap opera in this the year of 2018/2019. I should start by saying back when I was a part of the actual target demo for teen shows I only watch Buffy and didn’t deign to watch any of those other inferior teen shows and actually counted not being a weekly viewer of Dawson’s Creek as a point of pride. (It was very much one of those “I’m not like those other girls” nonsense attitudes, oh bb!Kristen you stupid, stupid girl). I did however osmose certain things about the show because at that time, you just sort of did. So how did I go back and actually watch this show well….

The first factor was that in the back half of 2017 I had the weirdest dream, where I literally dreamed the plot of my current WIP Boy Problems for Disney’s The Mighty Ducks which I had not seen or thought of in years (God told Joan of Arc to save France, God tells me to write steamy obscure dudeslash fic, Thanks God!). 

The 2nd Factor was that in like October of 2017, I watched Riverdale which I binged and then kept through to the winter finale of season 2 and then 5 months later thinking I was free (spoiler: I was not in fact free) and I started sort of following it and now I am here sort of following it week to week, but mostly mocking it while dreaming of my super gay alternative, and being increasingly annoyed with the fandom’s tendencies to make superficial comparisons to other show, a fandom trend I have always hated and that harkens back to Zutara fandom in ATLA (Zutara is not 1xr or Van/Hitomi, thanks). 

And the third factor was that way back in like July or August or some time there was a clickbait article that was basically TV shows characters that should have ended up with someone else/wrong endgame pairings which I clicked mostly because I wanted to see what they wrote about the How I Met Your Mother finale (I love reading takes on the HIMYM finale, I find it fascinating) and well the clickbait article stated that Dawson/Joey should have been endgame. This intrigued me because it contradicted everything I had ever heard/osmosed about the show.

So I decided that I would watch it to draw my conclusions and to see if what I had heard was wrong (which I thought was a possibility because I don’t by my nature trust giant ship fandoms like PJo was back in the day, it’s something I still sort of keep to this day), and I was like I will mock it and at the very least I will be able to have ammo against stupid fandom comparisons and due to a shared actor, maybe pick up good screen caps for like a moodboard for The Fic that had now progressed from being a dream to a thing that actually exists. 

And so I started it and as God would have it, I got invested, and now find that the Clickbait article was wrong, fandom needs to shut up Bughead/Barchie/Jeronica is not like Pacey/Joey thankyouverymuch, and I can’t use caps for a mood board because I would just cry and can’t associate anything from the show with anything else. 

So that’s story about how this dumb binch got invested in Dawson’s Creek years after everyone has moved on!

21. What was the first fanfic you ever wrote?

No Joke, the first fanfic that I wrote down and then posted was a Sailor Moon/Gundam Wing crossover that was basically just a retelling of the story of Sailor Moon with added giant robots. If you are like “Please tell me it wasn’t Senshi/Pilots” I am afraid I can tell you that (The pairings were if I recall Heero/Serena, Duo/Amy (What?!), Wufei/Raye, Trowa/Lita (cause they were both tall) and Quatre/Mina (Oh Quatre sweetie, I’m so sorry)) I killed Mamoru, and Relena just didn’t exist because this was set more in the SM universe than the GW one so I just brought over the pilots. It was multi-chaptered and I wrote a chapter a day. I wrote five parts of it covering all 5 arcs of Sailor Moon. 

Yes, I was totally better than those other girls as you can see. And no, those fics no longer exist online. In my defense I was 15 years old, I had not yet realized I was a lesbian and if I were to write that story now it would be Usagi/Relena because that story would be effing amazing.

36. What’s your favourite genre to write?

I enjoy a long slice of life romcom if I’m honest. The plotting of both my longest fics (Boy Problems and Living Arrangements) are the sort of stories that i love to write and come the easiest to me. I am also partial to quiet thematic characters beats and fics that explore characters putting things back together which if I can ever get back to 1xR as a ship that inspires me, I would love to do just a slice of life romance of them paralleling and finding their way back to each other. Also just cute romcom premises are always fun.

40. What do you struggle the most with in your writing?

I am so off and on when it comes to prose. Like there are times where I can do it and I love it, and other times it’s a struggle and I have to fight from just making everything dialogue (I maintain confidence in my dialogue.)

46. If someone was to read one of your fanfics, which fic would you recommend to them and why?

I think both Boy Problems (Mighty Ducks) and Living Arrangements (Dawson’s Creek) are the most apparent clear examples of where I am right now as a writer, but they are longer and the fandoms aren’t super in anyone’s face. I would say of my shorter one-shots, Save the Last Dance (Gundam Wing) and Once Lost, Now Found (City Hunter) are the most emblematic of me as a writer and my approach to characterisation. I also every once again get into to hugely stylistic gen pieces that I generally feel very proud of like Creation in Nine Acts (Avatar the Last Airbender, a mock creation myth for the Avatarverse, written before Korra was a thing but was not meant as the literal creation myth anyways) and State of IT (IT a short vignette from IT’s point of view.

51. Rant or Gush about one thing you love or hate in the world of fanfiction! Go!

I don’t know if this a thing I love or hate, but I am tired of fandom’s missives of you MUST COMMENT/KUDOS on everything you read. Comments/kudos/likes/reblogs on fanworks (not just fic) are great, but I don’t think that anyone is obligated to do any of those things. I think what I would rather do than rant or gush is to say that I think if you are a creator try to at least find comfort in validation of respecting and loving your own work. Write for yourself first and foremost. I think when I let go of the need for validation was when I really allowed myself to grow and appreciate myself as a writer. I wasn’t worried about what other people would think but just if I can read this and enjoy it and allows me a little more time thinking and writing about characters that I love than I am good, and I post it as a sort of second thought for if I enjoy it there may be others (even if it is one other person). So I guess I would leave it at that. If you’re a reader, don’t worry if you don’t leave feedback, no one is owed it and you don’t have to give any if you don’t feel that you can. And if you are writer, I would urge you to focus and write for you first and foremost and treat any feedback as a sort of treat on top of the pride of knowing you saw something through.

[clarenecessities]

Queerquiggle/Cybunnypoop

Subtitle: This Again

It’s been around two years since the shit hit the proverbial fan, but seeing as the individual in question has since deleted & remade, some of you may not be aware of whom you’re interacting with.

Queerquiggle & queerneopets are the latest installments in a series of urls belonging to one person, hereafter referred to as the original url, cybunnypoop. Other former urls for his neoblog include (but are not limited to): gaygelatin, shewhoneopetswiththee, neobloq, and candypaintbrush.

I should tell you all off the bat that he’s a Trump supporter, a “recovering” transphobe, and extremely Islamophobic, so this post may contain some upsetting information. There are some instances of misogyny, antisemitism, homophobia, and racism, as well. Oh, and ableism. Honestly, pick an -ism.

None of the information in this post should be a repeat of my first post regarding the matter. Warning: this post is even longer.

As before, I’d be remiss if I didn’t lay out my bias: I don’t like him. He’s been downgraded from “nemesis” to “nuisance,” as he’s no longer harassing minors (as far as I’m aware), but we’re never going to be best buddies.

We’ve spoken several times, though never to any resolution, and with each interaction it became increasingly obvious that it was futile. I ultimately blocked him following repeated propositioning and an unwillingness to engage beyond casting any disagreement as bullying and telling the kids to go back to their safe spaces.

Cybunnypoop is now 25 years old, and he hasn’t started anything major in a while. His posts remain fairly unpopular, though whether that’s the result of the quarantine or simple bad content, I couldn’t say. You’re under no obligation to take my word for any of this. Though I’ve provided links and screenshots where I can, what you make of that evidence is up to you.

TRANSPHOBIA

As it so happens, Cybunnypoop has recently tried listening to another human being, and has been educated about trans issues in a way that ~100 people on the internet offering resources apparently couldn’t accomplish.

What this means is that Cybunnypoop is now IDing with various names (itself nothing new, pseudonyms are an old hat here), gender identities, and pronouns, depending on the platform. I’m sticking with he/him for this post, as those were the last requested on his neopets blog. His description says shey/shem but unfortunately I have no idea how current that is, and his about says “whatever”–so if I’m misgendering here, I apologize; it is not intentional.

I, Clare, Author of This Post, am cis. So it’s not my place to gatekeep or say whether or not he’s ��“really trans””. And, as he has expressly admitted to being transphobic in the past, none of this section is really up for debate. I’m just going to provide the information, including his apologies and the redaction thereof. I don’t know that he truly understands everything he did wrong, but he’s explicitly stated he thinks transphobia is bad, so hey, maybe we can all learn something.

I’m gonna try to keep this chronological, so here we go:

A fun little addition to a post via an anonymous terf, “You are still males, you have male privilege, you KNOW NOTHING & NEEVER [sic] WILL KNOW of our goddamn struggles.“ which Cybunnypoop began with “So much agree!”

When asked about the “trans bathroom debacle,” he stated he was, “just afraid it’ll result in sacrificing handicap-accesible bathrooms.” which is only tangentially transphobic but bears addressing: Why would it ever mean that?

Cybunnypoop has something of a preoccupation with the potential negative impact equity would have upon him, and ableism is a convenient vehicle for this–lord knows this country is appalling in terms of accessibility. However, no proposed version of “trans bathroom”s leads to the dissolution of ADA-compliant spaces. Whether it’s allowing trans people to use the bathroom they identify with, or installing/redesignating gender neutral spaces, it remains an issue of improved accessibility, not diminished. A disabled trans person has as much a right to use a bathroom as an able-bodied one.

When he graduated he was questioned on his political beliefs, specifically how he could support Trump and remaining uneducated about trans issues while claiming to be an LGBT ally–and congratulated on graduating. Rather than answering the questions, or thanking them for the congrats and ignoring the rest, Cybunnypoop declared it “harassment”. This is about the standard for what he deems harassment/bullying: Anything that disagrees with him.

Reposted a quote from Dixon Diaz, the alt right guy you may remember him quoting in several citations from my last post, which read, “Liberal: a person who tells you that you’re a bigot if you’re afraid of having weird men in the ladies room, but becomes traumatized if they see “Trump 2016” written in chalk.“ [sic]

trans people bad, diversity bad, children bad & trauma fake

An ongoing problem with fetishizing trans people, dating back long before his identification as trans, and indeed, during the period in which he was a self-avowed transphobe. (Warning: link contains slur!)

This grew more pronounced as he came to understand what it means to be trans, and zeroed in on transwomen in particular. This is itself a complex issue: When is a kink flattering and when is it dehumanizing? Are immutable adjectives inappropriate to fetishize, or is it positive representation?

Again, as a cis person, it isn’t my place to say–I’m just letting y’all know what he’s said, and you can determine how you feel about it. This post isn’t a thinkpiece on my opinions.

Select quotes from The Apology:

“I was transphobic. I was resistant to that term because I felt it was a misnomer. I was more…trans-ignorant, I felt, than “transphobic.” […] I couldn’t see what I was doing because I was too busy, I felt, being attacked.”

“I had a warped view of trans people, and I was too ignorant and stubborn to acknowledge it–to see it, even.”

“[…] it’s hard not to let a jerk taint your view of a minority, especially when that jerk was your introduction to the minority.“

I’ll be honest, my problem with this apology is in how it’s structured, not in its content. It seems to convey genuine remorse, but focuses the bulk of the message on excuses, including that last point, which… isn’t relatable.

Even this I could forgive (after all, he’s new to apologies) if it had heralded a change in attitude–but nothing changed. He continued on as before, and continued to refuse discussions of other issues (which we’re getting to soon).

Which brings us to The Second Apology:

Posted some day and a half after the first, it opens with the artfully passive aggressive line, “I thought this could be over but it’s obviously going to stick around.” And it’s all downhill from there, folks!

“What do you want? What more can I say? There isn’t anything left to say. Nothing will satisfy some people.”

“I never bullied anyone like some do to me.“

“If you don’t want to believe I am different,[…] then the problem is not mine. In these cases, it is a good idea for you to stop talking about me and lying about me“

Here is a glimpse, perhaps, into what he expected. He was waiting for accolades. Commendation. He’d just apologized–and unlike earlier attempts, it was genuine! I don’t know that he anticipated forgiveness, but the outright rejection of that apology by several individuals drove him almost immediately into a bitter tirade, once again foisting the blame onto the people he had hurt or offended.

Aaaand a redaction of former apologies. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a date on this one, so it may be referring to the older apologies, but its content bears addressing:

“Yeah, I apologised like a year ago […], and they refused it, so I’m done apologizing–not that I even have anything to apologise for.

“I’ll sooner die than acknowledge and apologise for their demented reconstructions of my words.“

Which, if this is about the older apologies–oops!

“I won’t deny I said some things that people found offensive, […] but they just took everything and ran apedoodie with it. It amazes me that, for all they claim to hate me, they have this obsession with everything I do and say.”

This is actually fairly emblematic of my own interactions with Cybunnypoop: Specifically, the characterization of all attention as both positive, and obsessive.

What is it about being held responsible for his actions that leads him to cry wolf? Historically, an unwillingness to debate his political beliefs. Oh, he’ll espouse Trump’s “virtues” for paragraphs and paragraphs, but anyone who criticizes him is obviously a liberal idiot who just loves to hate him, and I’ll bet they say “lame,” right? It’s these assumptions about other people that lead him so often to tilt at windmills, rather than addressing the subject at hand.

RACISM

“Obama spending $21 million to put refugees to work…why not spend that money in the inner cities to put young blacks to work… once again Obama and the Democrats have proved the black community is their who’re [sic] because we always come back to them after they screw us” a quote he posted from a Facebook page I won’t even name, because it’s literally got the N-word in it! But he’s definitely not a racist, right?

Obama being (literally) booted out of office, by a Confederate battle flag, symbol of white supremacy since the 1960s. (There’s been some suggestion it’s in the classic minstrel show style. Though he forwent the traditional depiction of red/pink lips in favor of purple, there remains the possibility that he just can’t draw caricatures).

I’m going to address this post more in the ableism section, but it’s worth noticing how often, and how readily, he uses the word c*lored unprompted. This is not the first occasion.

More lambasting of whitewashing as a concept, sarcastically proposing we paint a black person white and mutilate them to better portray Michael Jackson (whom he refers to as ‘Wacko Jacko’, an ableist and derogatory nickname) apparently under the impression that there are no other black men with vitiligo.

I think it’s important to cover this, as from Cybunnypoop’s posts suggesting we be outraged at the “yellow-washing” of Joan Watson (see my previous post) it’s clear that he has no idea what whitewashing means.

It is not literally painting POC white.

The term whitewashing is derived from cheap white paint of chalked lime, used for a long time to refer to a specific means of censorship, “to gloss over or cover up vices, crimes or scandals or to exonerate by means of a perfunctory investigation or through biased presentation of data”. Simply put, it’s revisionist history, and the methods used to maintain that illusory timeline.

It isn’t difficult to see how the term came to be applied to the representative censorship in Hollywood.

Shared a Facebook graphic, “Black people who were never slaves are fighting white people who were never Nazis over a confederate statue erected by democrats, and why, because democrats can’t stand their own history anymore and somehow it’s Trumps Fault? [sic]“

“Also, you see Blacks everywhere, but they’re still considered a minority.” (He appended some context but frankly it’s even more damning.)

The term “spirit animal” is annoying but not because it’s racist, I guess

ISLAMOPHOBIA

Cybunnypoop’s Islamophobia is tied in pretty heavily with his support of Trump, so I’ll be citing a few of those posts in this section as well.

“Ban seven countries’ worth of ideology which promotes violence against women, LGBT people, animals, and nonworshippers? Sounds good to me!”

The cognitive dissonance of a self-avowed Catholic posting this is… incredible.

“Sorry to inform you, but the terrorists who attacked New York, Boston, Orlando, our embassies, and others weren’t Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Jews, or atheists. They were Muslims.

“It’s not Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, or atheism which oppresses women, slaughters animals, kills gays, and calls for the conversion or beheading of nonbelievers. It’s Islam.

“Until the ideology evolves to be as peaceful and tolerant as it claims, it doesn’t belong in America.”

There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s begin by refuting Trump’s claims that “the vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country.” Plain old xenophobia, not even in the ballpark of truth. Over the past 15 years, none of the self-described Muslim terrorists committing crime have come from the countries on Trump’s ban list. Zero. The country producing the most successful attacks against the USA is the USA itself.

A basic look at the data further reveals that white supremacist, self-described Christian terrorists actually lead the rate of attack and death toll by about 2:1. Yet, bizarrely, nothing from Cybunnypoop about the ‘violence and intolerance’ of Christianity, or even white supremacy… Who saw that coming?

It speaks to Cybunnypoop’s prejudice that he would believe such a blatantly false piece of information with no investigation or critical thought whatsoever. Although, it may speak more to his unwillingness/inability to use Google. We have had some problems with that in the past. 

“Dear Liberals: [sic] You claim to protect women. You claim to protect LGBT. [sic] You claim to protect animals. You claim to protect people who don’t ascribe to the dominant faith. But you’re protecting a violently misogynistic, homophobic, intolerant ideology which still slaughters animals in the name of their god and beheads people who worship otherwise. What the *** is wrong with you?”

Man, for derailing conversations so often to complain about perfectly valid modal grammar he sure loves breaking the English language.

When asked how he could still support Trump, he replied, “Because he hasn’t actually said or done anything wrong. The only thing with which I disagree was the transgender military ban, and that has been shot down, so it’s hardly relevant.”

Particularly in conjunction with his condemnation of liberals on the basis of not like, banning Islam, this is an explicit endorsement of everything from repealing the Alternative Tax Minimum to his sexual misconduct. Everything, except the one thing that directly affects one of Cybunnypoop’s demographics, was right.

HOMOPHOBIA

“I’m not like others in the LGBT spectrum. [bolding mine]

“I hadn’t cared for gay marriage nor had I especially cared to support the cause. […] I’ll fight for the welfare of the many before I’ll fight for the wishes of the few.”

(Well, historically, no, he won’t). Even without the implication that all the gay people who want to get married are selfish, this ignores the reason behind the push for the legalization of gay marriage: The AIDS crisis. Terminally ill gay men were forcibly evicted from their homes after watching their partners die, horribly, because they couldn’t inherit the lease/property. Their partners’ remains were the custody of parents who often wouldn’t allow the survivor to attend the funeral.

Up until gay marriage was legalized on a federal level, these incidents still occurred. One Indiana woman had to pay over $300,000 in taxes upon the death of her wife, and was told by the funeral home she could not arrange for her wife’s cremation as she was an “unrelated third party,” despite having the power of attorney. This is a significant concern.

“I don’t care for "pride.” I’ve actually started to loathe the undertones of the pride movement. […] is it truly worthy of a month and a gold star? […] I think it’s losing relevancy. Can we really celebrate something that’s no longer legally unique? Can we really have pride for… wait, what is it we’re proud of, anyway? We’re legally equal now; we’re socially equal, for the most part.” [bolding mine]

I don’t know if he forgot the homophobia he’s experienced, or if it just doesn’t matter unless it happened it to him.

“The next time someone asks you why LGBT Pride marches exist or why Gay Pride Month is June tell them ‘A bisexual woman named Brenda Howard thought it should be.’“ -Tom Limoncelli

“Another thing–and the most loathsome part–about the “pride movement” concerns the very word itself. “Pride” …be proud of who you are, and be proud of not caring what others think of you. Fine. Sure. It’s fun to wildly flaunt your differences. But what’s the opposite of “pride”? “Shame.” So, if gays are to have pride, does that mean straights are to have shame?”

So why are we to be entitled to pride–why are we allowed to feel good about ourselves and they are not? […] The majority are not oppressive, and even if they wanted to be, they legally couldn’t. 

Good news guys, homophobia is dead and definitely super illegal.

“(Never mind the fact that pride is a negative, narcissistic trait and one of the Seven Deadly Sins.)” [bolding mine]

(We interrupt this post to bring you his “Antipridist Pride”)

“While it seems most of the LGB world makes their sexuality their entire identity, I leave it as just one facet of many.“ Once again, he’s not like Those Other Gays.

“ I’ll bet I pissed off a lot of gays with this post, but I don’t care, and I’m proud of not caring.“ (proceeds to describe the LGBT community as loud, angry, straight-bashing, etc. for a good paragraph or so, obviously very much caring)

That’s enough of that post, huh? Let’s move on.

“I know that a lot of the LGBT community is hypocritical–and intolerantly, angrily so. They scream about others giving them tolerance and respect while they don’t give others such basic rights.

“If there’s Black Pride, why couldn’t there be Caucasian Pride? Gay Pride, Straight Pride.“

As I broke down in my last post, Caucasian≠white, and was first misapplied by white supremacists and popularized by actual, literal Nazis. He evidently doesn’t care, and claims I “created” it. (I can assure you, I haven’t been alive since 1785).

“Is it me, or are there actually very few good gay celebrities?”

Doesn’t like the term “lesbian” because its “image is too pornified”. As I understand it this is fairly common among those who were raised in more conservative or religious families, so it’s not an issue per se; it just becomes weird in conjunction with his wanting to be called a dyke at one point (though I can’t find the post where he said that explicitly, only ones where he describes himself as such).

Said he’d expected Ted Cruz to be a “gay prostitute” because he gave off untrustworthy vibes.

MISOGYNY

As I’m sure most of you are aware, Cybunnypoop is pro-life. From certain parties, that can be motivated by misinformation rather than misogyny (though certainly the misogyny drives that misinformation). In his case? Well, actually only about 75% misogyny. The other 25% is empathizing with fetuses just until they’re born. Idk if it’s because of his parental situation or his existential dread or what, but we’re not here to psychoanalyze him; we’re here to review.

“It’s a point which I make constantly. It’s not hard to not get pregnant. You have a variety of options. There’s birth control. There’s getting your man snipped […]. And there is one absolutely fool-proof, sperm-proof way: ABSTINENCE. It’s stupidly simple, but there are self-righteous women and men out there who say–if you’ll pardon my pun–screw that. Free sex, rah rah. But if you don’t want to “risk” a baby, don’t do the do. There are plenty more things to do in life.”

Yeah, it may be “stupidly simple” for an “asexual homosexual” but other people do, in fact, get horny. “There’s birth control.” Where? You gonna pay for it? You gonna talk their “man” into getting a vasectomy? Pay for that?

I want you all to keep in mind that this is the same person who waxed poetic about his addiction to porn. And hentai. Which he downloaded in a public library, because he was just that addicted. But if someone (god forbid) “does the do,” and their birth control fails? Well, too bad. You should have been able to control your libido.

When Trump was elected he had the following to say:

“This is a time for healing.” No, this is a time for you to suck it up. You may not have wanted this result, but I and half of the country did. So, instead of bitching and moaning and trying to undo what I and half of the country have been working hard for, you need to shut the fuck up, go to school, work, or volunteer, and stop being an intolerant, selfish, hypocritical asshole.

Frankly this could go in a lot of sections but it’s using bitch pejoratively so…

Honestly there are more instances but I feel like you get the picture and this thing is already absurdly long, so we’re going to move along.

ANTI-SEMITISM

On screenshots of a neoboard discussing the origins of the ichthys symbol (the Jesus fish), Cybunnypoop added, apropos of nothing, “Hey, how about the fact that Christianity was originally illegal while Judaism was lawful, and the early Christians had to hold some Jewish mores so they wouldn’t be arrested and executed? Interesting, isn’t it…” and tagged it “two can play at that game”.

Christians weren’t being persecuted for not being Jewish; they were being persecuted for refusing to participate in state events from which the Jews were exempt via religious tradition. Christians were too new to be considered traditional, and were therefore considered in contempt of the state when they refused to, say, make a sacrifice on behalf of the Emperor. Also, we called each other brother & sister but still got married, and spoke weekly about eating a man alive, so people were kind of concerned.

Also, like, it was an explicitly socialist religion in an empire. That was never going to end well. The “mores” they had to hold were “don’t be anti-fascist” and “stop meeting in secret, we don’t know who you are and it’s freaking us out,” neither of which is explicitly Jewish and neither of which you can blame the Jews for.

Pretty minor, but in a poorly executed attempt to be inclusive, he wished everyone a happy Easter & Passover at the same time, only to be informed that Passover wouldn’t be happening for a month. So more about the assumption that Jews are lesser Christians again than any direct hostility. Perhaps better evidence of his ignorance of Jewish customs/how to hit “search” on Google.

 ABLEISM

Here there be slurs!

Alright. We’re going to begin this with a breakdown of the “lame” issue. Here’s the thing: Cybunnypoop hates it. He compares it (ceaselessly) to the r slur, which he uses liberally in his own defense.

I’m certainly not saying it isn’t a slur, or that you should use it, but to be frank, he’s wrong.

In both severity and time in which it’s been part of the English vernacular, lame is far more akin to other ableist slurs like “dumb,” “stupid,” “moron,” “idiot,”–all words which Cybunnypoop uses on the regular. The closest comparison we have to the r slur would be “cr*ppled”–which Cybunnypoop quotes on the regular.

Dumb is the closest analogue, as those middle three weren’t really popular until the American Eugenics Movement kicked in, but hey. If it bothers him so much, why say any of them?

Simply because, it only bothers him when it affects him directly and is said by his enemy.

For example, no problem whatsoever quoting Trump’s book, Cr*ppled America.

Here he calls someone ableist scum for calling him the r slur, yet here he mocks another’s offense at the term by comparing it to modern medical jargon.

Atheists and Liberals [sic] are “dumb”

“entirely okay” with the R slur

This post, which was also in the racism section, littered with fun slurs and what’s either blatant hypocrisy (see: his regular use of words like dumb/stupid) or one of the most incredible point-dodges I’ve ever seen.

Now we get into a recurring theme, with a recurring character. The problem with most of Cybunnypoop’s legitimate criticisms (e.g. lame is a slur, accessibility is bullshit) is that they’re never even googled, let alone researched, and that they come, 9 times out of 10, at the expense of another minority. Or, through sheer ignorance, one of his own.

“Trans people get [famous trans people]. Gay people get [famous gay people]. Black people get [famous black people]. Who do I get? I get Joe Swanson.”

“While everyone’s battling over how to bend backwards and make others comfortable, I’m just sitting here, cursing out the ungrateful bastards because there are places I can’t even ACCESS. […] And never mind the fact that there is no good disabled representation out there. You know who I get to look up to? Joe frickin’ Swanson. It’s so nice to be a forgotten minority. [bolding his]

Joe Swanson, for those of you who (like me) have no idea who that is, is a character on Family Guy in a wheelchair. This begs the question: Why do you need to shit on other groups and their representation to acknowledge how bad you have it?

There are dozens of famous disabled people I can name off the top of my head. Stephen Hawking, Hellen Keller, Beethoven, Lord Byron, FDR, Frida Kahlo, Sudha Chandran, John Milton–a cursory Google search reveals even more. Saying there are no famous disabled people is a shitty fucking thing to do, both because you’re erasing their accomplishments and you’re depriving other disabled people of that representation by pretending it doesn’t exist. Spreading misinformation so you can complain that everyone else is better off than you specifically is just plain cruel.

“I’m so sick and tired of society catering to race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, but never giving a thought to people with disabilities. We don’t get a slice of the “diversity” pie.“

Catering to. … Catering to.

“Until our society can grow to acknowledge, accept, and represent the diverse world of disabilities, then we don’t have true equality and diversity.”

Like… he could have just made a post saying this. I mean, we have diversity regardless of equality, but that’s semantics. We don’t have to tear down other minorities to be heard. There’s enough “pie” for everyone.

Society: You should accept everyone regardless of sex, culture, gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, economic status Person: What about disabled people? Society: Huh?

I’m not a big fan of his little infographics, primarily because he uses them exclusively as a platform to strawman himself, but this one in particular is uh, frustrating. If he’s speaking about popular society, very few people accept all the groups he listed, particularly class/economic status. If he’s speaking about our country….

Federal protected classes include: Race, color, religion/creed, national origin/ancestry, sex, age, physical or mental disability, veteran status, genetic information, citizenship. 

It’s the same story.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

BLOCK HIM. Do not reblog his content. Stop him preemptively from reblogging yours. Do not engage with him. 

If you try to debate him, he will probably call you a bully, and you will probably get some not-so-mysterious anons. You will definitely be unable to reach a resolution. I know of at least one individual who’s attempting to “rehabilitate” him, so I guess we’ll see how that goes? I’d be genuinely delighted.

Reblog this post if you can, to spread the word.

Educate yourself about the issues addressed in this post. If you have questions, my inbox is always open.

I am not infallible, and I will also make mistakes. Please bring these to my attention immediately and they will be addressed.

This is a much less urgent situation than the previous post, as he’s (mostly) stopped harassing people, but you have a right to be aware of whom you’re interacting with. Whether you block him or befriend him or whatever is up to you, and I hope whatever choice you make is the right choice for you.

[essenceoffilm]

Through the Melancholy of the Passage of Time

He might have been compared to a summer’s day, particularly the last hours of one [1]

“To walk down memory lane” is a clever English idiom since it combines the psychological act of reminiscence with the concrete, physical act of walking down the lane. Its aptness stems from the fact that we humans tend to remember spatially. Memories may or may not be easily localized in the brain, but their mental content is often tied to spaces or, specifically, lived spaces, the way we experience them, to borrow a term from Juhani Pallasmaa [2]. The lane is a term that denotes a type of space, a part of the roadway, and, in the idiomatic expression of walking down memory lane, the spatial term has a temporal twist to it as the space of the lane refers to the past. The lane connotes home, family, and childhood. The sweetness of the nostalgia for these things can make one lose themselves on memory lane. This is essentially what happens to Ned Merrill, the hapless protagonist of Frank Perry’s The Swimmer (1968). 

The Swimmer is based on the short story of the same name by John Cheever, “the Chekhov of suburbs,” which director Frank Perry’s wife, Eleanor Perry turned into a screenplay. Cheever’s short story tells of Ned Merrill, a married man and a father, who, while spending a lazy Sunday by the swimming pool of his neighbors’ domicile, decides to swim from their place to his house by using the many pools of their bourgeois neighborhood. As Ned starts to get closer to his home, pool by pool, he begins to realize that he is swimming down the poignant memory lane. In other words, Ned starts to realize that he seems to exist in a different time from the rest of the world. He is clinging to the past of having a decent family life before an apparent divorce, debts, and loss of home. When neighbors and friends remind Ned of this, he seems totally oblivious.��“We’ve been terribly sorry to hear about all your misfortunes, Neddy,” an elderly couple of the Hallorans tells the protagonist in Cheever’s short story; “Why, we heard that you’d sold the house and that your poor children...” [3]. After hearing about the bypass surgery of his old friend, Ned is puzzled. “Was he losing his memory,” the third-person narrator wonders about Ned’s predicament, “had his gift for concealing painful facts let him forget that he had sold his house, that his children were in trouble, and that his friend has been ill?” [4]. Not until the very end, when Ned is confronted by his empty, closed, and run-down old house, does the concrete of the lane hit Ned straight in the face. 

Perry’s film adaptation preserves the core ideas as well as the basic structure of Cheever’s short story, but it also makes some significant changes to externalize, so to speak, the story that operates mainly on the level of inner life. These changes manifest in the form of added dialogue, new characters, and additional action. For example, there are, most notably, two significant characters added to the film who do not appear in the original short story: Julie, played by Janet Landgard, the young woman who had a crush on Ned when she worked as a babysitter for his children in the past, and Shirley, played by Janice Rule, the neighbor with whom Ned had an extra-marital affair in the past. Both of these character additions are used to highlight Ned’s alienation from both his family life and the present in general. Julie is shocked by Ned’s obliviousness to their age difference and runs away after Ned makes a pass on her. Shirley, on the other hand, is utterly frustrated by the sudden return of Ned’s desires and locks herself out from him. They live in the present and they react negatively to Ned’s inability to do so. The film also removes Ned’s wife, Lucinda, whose name is carried by the “Lucinda river” of the pools Ned swims through, who makes a brief appearance in the beginning of the short story where Ned is hanging by the pool of the Westerhazys, one of their neighbors. This change might, I believe, actually improve Cheever’s original idea because it emphasizes the absence of Ned’s family -- also elaborating the idea that the two have divorced (which may or may not be the case in the short story). Overall, this beginning scene has a lot of dialogue in it compared to its minimalist concision in the original text. After gazing at the Lucinda river, Ned talks about his plans to the people around him and converses about other matters, while the short story has barely enough lines to fill one page. 

Since the film has additional character and new dialogue, it is bound to face the question how the characters and their manners of speech should be dealt with since the original text does not provide a point of departure. Perry’s bold move is to use overly punctuated, exaggerated, and theatrical acting which creates an ironic distance between the characters and the audience. While at first glance the contemporary spectator might simply see these as emblematic of poor production values during the New Hollywood phase, Burt Lancaster’s campish performance as the constantly smiling Ned in his youthful swimming trunks gains a poignant melancholy to it as the film goes on. There is a similar sadness to his relentless smile as there is in Setsuko Hara’s tendency to force a smile in Ozu’s elegiac Late Spring (1949, Banshun). 

In addition to characters and extended dialogue, Perry’s film also creates new scenes to the story. There is, for one, the scene where Ned swims through an empty swimming pool, dedicated to swim through all of them, with a young boy. An obvious visual metaphor for Ned’s useless attempt to project his fantasy of the preserved past on the dry present, the scene feels a little awkward and out of place, but, at the same time and as such, essential to the unique film. The scene with Ned running by the side of a horse and the scene where he and Julie run through an obstacle course, both of which are not in the original short story, are so strange and awkward that their displacement makes the spectator wonder why in the world were they added to the film. There is charm to their awkwardness, however, as there is to the rest of the film’s New Hollywood aesthetics of unnecessary zooms and slow-motion. 

Although Cheever’s short story is not completely exhausted by subjective interiority, since it has dialogue as a source of additional information beyond Ned’s deluded perspective and it is, one might add, told from the third-person perspective of an omniscient narrator, its epistemic connection to Ned’s perspective is stronger than that of the film. This is mainly due to the primal difference between literature and cinema since the latter can hardly escape its realism and attachment to the concrete. Fortunately, Perry realizes and embraces this, taking advantage of cinema’s prized abilities. After all, Ned’s action of swimming through the river of pools is bound to the concrete; it is bound to bodily activities and real spaces of memory lane. 

This change in narrative perspective is already eminent during the opening credits. Perry uses shots of a forest in autumn, including a shot of an owl, emblematic of the “last hours” of Ned’s “summer day,” which hints to the attentive spectator that it is already autumn rather than the summer. In Cheever’s short story, this is revealed only toward the very end. Thus Perry’s film elaborates the build-up to the revelation of Ned’s detachment from the reality of the present to the fantasy of the past. 

The film is, however, rooted in Ned’s epistemic perspective and most of the diegetic information provided by the cinematic narration is shared by Ned and the audience. All the information that challenges Ned’s delusion comes from what other characters say directly to Ned so he also, at the very least, receives that information (even if he does nothing with it). Perry also uses such cinematic means as prolonged dissolves, zooms, slow-motion, and point of hearing to reflect the subjective perspective. The shot, which superimposes a close-up of Ned’s face with the landscape of the Lucinda river at the moment when Ned decides to swim through it, is a perfect example of subjectivization without a point of view shot. The same could be said of the beautiful shots of Ned and Julie walking in the woods, where Julie talks about her past crush on Ned. The shots are either out of focus or the characters are in the background, which is out of focus, as the foreground is dominated by flowers and trees in focus. 

Resonating with the beginning shots of nature in autumn, the film ends with a startling change in narrative perspective. Although Ned’s discovery of the emptiness of his house (signifying that he did, in fact, lose it) is told from the third-person perspective in the short story, it is also specifically said that Ned sees the emptiness of his house: “He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty” [5]. In Cheever’s text, it is Ned who looks in at the windows. In Perry’s film, on the contrary, Ned arrives at the door and desperately shouts and pounds it, but he never looks in at the window. Instead, there is a cut from Ned by the door in long medium shot to a medium shot of a hole in one of the windows. A slow zoom-in toward the hole is followed by a cut to a reverse shot of the window from the inside of the house where the camera pans to the left, disclosing the sheer emptiness of an abandoned domicile, ending up at the closed door that is being pounded by Ned. A final cut returns us to Ned by the door, outside. Although there is no sudden change in narrative perspective or “ocularization,” because the shots of Ned by the door are not subjective point of view shots either, there is nonetheless an unprecedented change in perspective because the spectator, for the first time, sees something that Ned does not. Obviously, the spectator has already began to “see” further than Ned, but here such seeing becomes literal. The device is, however, brilliantly not in violation of the rest of the film (especially if the opening credits sequence is taken to account, but without it as well) nor even of the short story (even if such a violation only mattered to people to whom books are holy sacraments not to be misrepresented by adaptations) because it still reflects Ned’s experience. Standing by the door, pounding and shouting, Ned realizes his delusion, his self-betrayal, and the overall emptiness of his existence. It is cinematic free indirect discourse, something whose literary counterpart is prevalent in Cheever’s short story. 

As Ned falls to the ground before the indifferent door, his demise is perpetuated by freezing the frame, a typical cinematic device of the period. Following Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959, Les quatre cents coups), George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), a key film of the New Hollywood movement, ends with a freeze-frame of interrupted movement, but Perry’s The Swimmer did it first. The film is overall rife with New Hollywood aesthetics from the slow-motion shots of running in the obstacle course (as well as the existence of the scene in general!) to the zoom-ins to close-ups of human faces and the long shots of Ned and Julie walking out of focus. Where the lack of focus enhances the melancholic and nostalgic atmosphere, the slow-motion shots (not only of running but also of swimming) and the freeze-frame articulate the theme of movement: time is, quite literally, slowing down in Ned’s experience, and it freezes when he meets the wall putting a stop to his painful denial of death. 

Due to its existential tone, The Swimmer resides in the spheres of the films of Antonioni and Fellini. Like La dolce vita (1960) or La notte (1961), however, The Swimmer also has its social dimensions. The whole idea of an urban terrain filled with pools and rife with water seem to carry critical echoes, which are only emphasized by the scene, which one could see as being developed into an accumulating gag by someone like Jacques Tati, where a couple commends their recently installed filter in their pool that removes 99.99% of all excessive material from the water. Its satirical edge is never too sharp to notice, however, and it is constantly softened by the film’s elegiac ubiquity. 

An existentialist parable, Perry’s The Swimmer externalizes the inner life of its protagonist by adding dialogue and characters as well as by utilizing cinematic means and changes in narrative perspective. As such, it surmounts the dull “quality” adaptation. This externalization is more than appropriate because, just like the metaphor of memory lane, both Cheever and Perry have realized that memories are not only temporal but also spatial; they attach to places, environments, and our bodily activities in them. Maybe Ned decides to swim through the pools because swimming in pools and walking in his trunks remind him of summer and carefree existence with his family. In the end, what would be a better allegory for these mechanisms of memory and nostalgia, where space and time coalesce, than a seemingly consistent chain created by pools separated by yards, fences, and lanes?

The original poster for The Swimmer advertised the film by presenting the customer with a rhetorical question: “When you talk about The Swimmer, will you talk about yourself?” Despite the awkward, campy clumsiness of the expression, which actually fits with some of the charm of Perry’s film, it was hard not to think about myself when I walked out of the cinema into the excessively warm summer evening. It is a cinema from which I have walked out for thousands of times ever since I was a 16-year-old. It is also a beautiful, old art deco cinema from the days of silent cinema that is currently being left behind by its long-time tenant, the Finnish film archive. Walking out from the cinema into the more than familiar streets of Helsinki, there was a call in the air to take a stroll down memory lane. 

Notes:

[1] Cheever, John. 1964. “The Swimmer”. In The Brigadier and the Golf Widow. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, p. 62. 

[2] Pallasmaa, Juhani. 2007. The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema. Helsinki: Rakennustieto. 

[3] Cheever 1964, p. 71. 

[4] Ibid. p. 72. 

[5] Ibid. p. 76.