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retiredkat · 7 months ago

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Great interview with Eric Bogosian

Vulture article

Eric Bogosian Would Get Naked for Interview With the Vampire 10:31 A.M.

Daniel Molloy is a fictional two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, bullshitometer, and sass-kitten, an aging journalist holding his own among monsters while conducting the titular Q&A at the heart of Interview With the Vampire. With clear-eyed wit and a dash of human vulnerability, Eric Bogosian gives Molloy a distinctly Anthony Bourdain–ish edge infused with notes of his own acerbic Talk Radio character Barry Champlain. In Anne Rice’s book and the movie that followed, Daniel Molloy is a cub reporter trembling over his tape deck. But in Rolin Jones’s brilliant AMC adaptation, which just wrapped up its second season, this isn’t Molloy’s first twirl around the vampire hoedown. The conversation takes place 50 years after that first interview ended in blood, gore, and sexual frustration (Luke Brandon Field plays the younger Molloy in flashbacks, including this season’s standout episode five). Now Molloy’s seen it all, has a loaded past with these vamps, and when he trembles, it’s from Parkinson’s, rarely nerves. Molloy’s the audience surrogate, cutting through Louis (Jacob Anderson) and Armand’s (Assad Zaman) competing narratives while ultimately shipping Loustat just like the rest of us.

This delicate dynamic got slammed into a concrete wall and lit on fire (complimentary) in the final minutes of the season-two finale, when Molloy was revealed to have been turned into a vampire by Armand, breaking the ancient vampire’s centuries-long incel streak. And boy, is it a reveal, with a cocky Molloy, riding high on his best-selling book, whipping off his sunglasses at night to reveal color-changing eyes while doing mental walkie-talkie with Louis. He’s even got a sick leather jacket to really hammer home that he’s a cool bad-boy vampire now. It’s an incredibly fun beat to leave this character on and opens up a world of season-three possibilities for Bogosian as a performer who, at 71, has always wanted to play a vampire.

Do you know how weird it is to be hitting record on my MacBook right now to interview you about playing a character who’s always hitting record on his MacBook to interview people?

It’s all weird to me. I’m from another century, so all these things are new to me.

This is suspiciously sounding more and more like an interview with a vampire by the minute! Which makes sense, considering where we last saw Daniel in the finale.

Since we have multiple narratives and jump around in time already, I don’t know where things are going. Personally, I’d love to see more of young Daniel, Luke Brandon Field. I think he’s terrific. I’d love to see more Claudia. I wonder whether vampires can time travel. I think they can move around in time. I’m not sure how much Anne Rice you’ve read, but Merrick can actually bring people back from the dead, so you never know.

What was your relationship to the books when you signed on to this show?

In the mid-’70s, when Interview With the Vampire came out, I was 20-something and reading that stuff and I loved it. Then I got distracted by life. When we started doing the show, I was going to read the first one again, but then I realized that the script and my character were quite different, so I thought, I better stick to the script.

However, I needed to know what happened next, so I started plowing through the books and it was amazing. The Vampire Lestat was a trip — that’s what they’ll be hitting next — and they just got trippier and trippier. I just finished the seventh, which puts all the stories together. I love Anne Rice because her imagination is completely unfettered and she plays with really deep themes in a way that’s not heavy. It’s not like you’re reading Ayn Rand; it’s more like Stephen King. She explores death in the guise of these vampires by asking, Oh yeah, you wanna be immortal? Here’s what immortal looks like.

I’ve always been a big fan of vamps. I lobbied Francis Ford Coppola to get a part in his Dracula in the ’90s. I guess I wasn’t a big star, so I couldn’t get a part in it, but he was nice about it and invited me to set. I’ve told this story in other interviews, but my wife was directing a play in Chicago, which, totally by coincidence, was written by one of our first-year writers. On the plane there, I was thinking about life, thinking, I’ve done so many things. What’s left? And I thought, Man, I still really want to play a vampire. And when I landed, I got a phone call: “Do you want to be on Interview With the Vampire?” At the time, it wasn’t like, “You’re going to be a vampire,” but I figured vampire-adjacent was good enough. And of course, it evolved, and as I got on set, Assad was explaining all of these things that were going to happen with my character. Sometimes I didn’t even want to hear about it because we never know what’s going to happen. There have been slight detours off the main story, particularly with my character.

What were those things you didn’t want to hear about your character that Assad was talking about?

I become, you know, under his spell in later stories, and there’s a whole relationship that goes on between us. I’m not entirely clear at this point how that’s going to shake out or if it’s going to shake out. I didn’t necessarily want to go waltzing into something where they were making me do anything weird or awkward or embarrassing to no particular end. I’ve done nudity and stuff like that a long time ago, and at 71, I’m not really big on getting naked and sexy onscreen.

However, having been around the genius of Rolin Jones for two years, whatever he wants to do, I’ll do it. When you’re around a master like this, it becomes a process of discovery. When I’m learning my lines it’s like, Oh, this is 3-D chess. There’s a lot going on here that I didn’t see the first time I read it. When I first got this job, I thought I was just going to be doing bookends every episode, like, “So, tell me the story,” and then it would be vampires the whole time, and at the end I’d be like, “Hmmm!” And then, “stay tuned for the next episode!” But Rolin had this idea from the beginning and it went deeper and deeper until it was insane by the end of the second season.

I would prefer not to be playing cliché. Sometimes I’m playing something that feels like a lot of other things I’ve done. Even in the service of a show that is terrific, like Succession or Billions, the things I’m doing on those shows are not things I’ve never done before. As a friend of mine said when I was doing Under Siege 2 with Steven Seagal 1,000 years ago, “They just want you to do that Eric thing you do.” My stage stuff is about being very big and very loud, and a lot of the stuff I do on-camera is like in Uncut Gems, being very angry and very broad. But this thing, particularly in the fifth episode, and going into the end — I have to go places that I’ve never gone as an actor before. The subtlety of episode five, where I am brought to tears, that’s new stuff for me, and I was really happy to do it. Not only working with Rolin and the directors but with everybody. The writers bring a lot of sensitivity, a lot of nuance to every scene.

I need to ask if you’ve seen this: Someone from the writers’ room tweeted a picture of a note card that was on the wall for episode five and it just says, “MOLLOY ASKS ABOUT 1973: DID WE FUCK?”

I love that beat. As much as I’m known for my verbosity, I love reaction stuff, too. Jacob and I are very in sync, and we’ve developed a good relationship. He’s not holding back, he’s not being cagey, and that allows you to trust the other person a lot. You’d be amazed how some actors … are actually not good actors. They’re thinking about what they look like and all this crap. Jacob can’t be thinking about what he looks like because sometimes he looks really nasty. He’s letting the emotions build out of him. And yet he’s always very adept at sculpting what he’s doing. It’s a great company. I never work with Sam, I just see him all the time on set, but that scene in the courtroom, and the scene in New Orleans … where’s that shit coming from? The emotion is wild.

You all have incredible chemistry with each other, too. Knowing where your character might go with Armand, or what other buried history may or may not also be between them, how do you play that dynamic?

In scripted narratives, you’ve just got to play what the script is doing and let the audience try to figure out the rest of it. On Succession, I worked with Sarah Snook, and her character was never clear until the end. They were making it very hard to figure out what she was thinking. And I don’t know that she always knew herself what she was thinking. She was playing the script.

There are a lot of ways to look at it, and ask, What’s really going on here? Much of it is the audience putting it together. They hear the lines, they see my face, and an older actor’s face kind of has a narrative built into it. All of it gets put together, and what you don’t know becomes fodder for your imagination.

And this audience has quite the imagination.

I’ve never been through this experience before, exploring where the audience is at. I’m reading a lot of the blogs, and they make a science out of it. Rolin gives them all they can eat in terms of details and Easter eggs that are blended into the story. I think like 30 percent of our audience is really familiar with the books, so they’re constantly checking back and forth between Anne Rice’s story and ours. So far, Rolin’s been scoring pretty well in terms of being consistent with the original material.

But again, Daniel is a whole different ball of wax. The Armand thing is interesting, because it goes into all kinds of fascinating realms far away and weird. I had to get out history books and start reading about ancient Kyiv.

The fans aren’t even just pulling from the books; I’ve seen some draw comparisons from your work like Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll. They’re finding all these crazy parallels.

That I haven’t seen. The character in this show and me in real life have a lot of parallels. Just imagine young Daniel in the show, that was my life. The funny thing is when I used to write and perform these monologues, in my mind they didn’t have anything to do with me. And then last year, Andre Royo, who played Bubs on The Wire, did one of my shows, Drinking in America, onstage. This was the first time that I’ve watched my own solo show, and he did a great job. I started to understand the biographical aspects of these monologues. It isn’t until afterward that I can look at it and go, Oh right, this is about that. Rolin told me that they were always thinking of me for this role. He didn’t know me, so this was coming out of his enthusiasm for a movie I did 700 years ago, Talk Radio with Oliver Stone. That was based on a play I wrote for myself. What I write about has to do with a certain kind of narcissistic personality, which seems to be the theme of this TV show — they’re all narcissists in one way or another.

I’m fascinated by my character. In episode five, when he’s in San Francisco, he’s kind of a loser. That’s what Armand says: “You might as well die right now. Where’s your life going?” And yet Daniel has two Pulitzer Prizes by the time he’s an older guy. What is that about? I would almost not believe it except that it happened to me. I was leading a really dissolute life in the late ’70s into the early ’80s. I didn’t win a Pulitzer, but I was nominated in 1987 and continued to be, I guess, “successful.” So it makes sense that it happens to Daniel. But you can also ask, What motivates this? It’s a way of fighting against the world or maintaining your sanity.

I think I’ll continue to play with the push-pull of this guy if I continue with the show. In San Francisco, he says, “Make me a vampire.” Later in Dubai, he says, “No, I don’t want it, because I’ll outlive my children.” He’s going back and forth. Of course, what we don’t see in the last episode is how did he become a vamp? Did he say, “Yeah, I want to do it?” Or did he get drunk with Armand one night and when he wasn’t looking, he became a vampire? I guess we’ll find out.

I’m sure it’s the subject of dozens of fan fictions already.

I’ve gotten so close with Assad. We’ve enjoyed spending a lot of time with each other. But when he gets on set, he turns into a different person. That’s some evil shit going on there. The way he ends up in that last episode, kind of smashed, he put everything into that. It’s a lot of fun. I never got into this business to do anything other than make believe and pretend. I feel more whole when I’m being somebody else than when I’m my own self, so the more deeply we can pretend when we’re making the show, the more deeply we can get into all of this, the higher I get from it. And when you’ve got guys like this who are ready to fly, I want to go flying with them.

I know you said you don’t really know what’s happening next season, but I look forward to your vampire adventures.

Rolin keeps sending me notes saying we’re gonna have an amazing time when we start shooting again. I can’t wait. It’s just that there’s a whole formal process of how this goes, and I’m waiting for my engraved invitation from the King of AMC to say “welcome back.”

#iwtv spoilers #iwtv #amc interview with the vampire #eric bogosian #daniel molloy #assad zaman #armand #jacob anderson #louis de pointe du lac #sam reid #lestat de lioncourt

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tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons · 10 months ago

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Appendix D: Some Pig/One More Final

The first three posts in this series are here.

Undertale was a slightly postmodern children's fantasy movie produced by Jim Henson's Creature Shop in the '80s. Noah Hathaway played the protagonist, Frisk, who went on a long quest to escape from a magical prison inside Mt. Ebott; Frisk's father had thrown them into the mountain, known to be full of monsters, in an attempt to kill them. However, it's suggested that as a human, Frisk is inherently more of a protagonist than a monster can be, and has a vague sort of magical power over them. Toriel's death, which Frisk accidentally causes early in the movie, is commonly listed as a Peak Sad Childhood Moment.

George Orwell wrote The Writing In The Web, a political fable about a cult started by a well-meaning spider. E. B. White wrote Snowball's Farm, a whimsical children's tale about a farm whose animals decide to take over.

Infamously, Emmanuel Goldstein's monologue fills dozens of pages, takes at least three hours to read aloud, and brings the plot of Ayn Rand's 1984 to a screeching halt.

Short story collections and anthologies often keep the same title, author, and spirit, it's just the stories that are swapped out. For example, classic episodes of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone include A Wonderful Life, The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, Miracle On 34th Street, and The Sixth Sense. 1983's The Twilight Zone Movie includes segments based on classic episodes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (directed by John Landis and given anti-war themes), Cocoon, The Poltergeist, and In Search of the Twelve Monkeys (the original starred a young William Shatner). Candle Cove is an episode of Black Mirror.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was a 1999 Ben Stiller comedy about a team of low-rent superheroes who theme themselves after public domain characters because they cannot afford licensing fees. The film was well-reviewed, but a box office bomb. It was actually the first film to use Smash Mouth's One Week - the One Week music video is actually cross promotion with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - and it would remain the film most associated with the song until Dreamworks' Happily N'Ever After hit theaters two years later.

The Amazing Digital Circus was a virtual pet game and toy line that struck when the iron was hot on that niche, before being bought out by Hasbro and rebooted a few times in different forms and mediums. Lauren Faust created a long-running television cartoon of it that was a huge smash hit with fandom culture despite the show's clearly very young target audience. The property's canon is all very light kiddie fare; the scariest thing about The Amazing Digital Circus is that for a brief and touchy stretch of time in the early 2000s, it was owned by the Peoples Temple, which was seriously considering turning it into a recruiting platform.

Your cringe unpublished works that you gave up on were almost certainly swapped around with other people's cringe unpublished works that they gave up on. There's lots of upwards and downwards mobility to the scramble, but not usually that much. Exceptions are very rare - like a beggar suddenly being made king, or a god being reincarnated into an ant - but they do occasionally happen. For example, what you know as the land of Oz exists only in the head of a young Milwaukee stoner, who suddenly came up with the idea for an epic graphic novel one day in the 2010s while sitting on the bus, and spent a couple of years absolutely convinced she would eventually make it. (She cannot draw.) Conversely, L. Frank Baum's children's fantasy series, Enormia, which has been adapted and reimagined many times, most notably as audiences' introduction to color film, exists in your world only as a different Milwaukee stoner's overly elaborate backstory for his jerkoff sessions. This kind of thing is much more the exception than the rule, and even such exceptions are almost always much smaller in scope - an obscure stillborn project getting swapped around with an obscure out-of-print novel, or an obscure direct-to-video z-movie.

The True Detectives forum and its many schismatic spinoffs, all of which are devoted to discussing mystery fiction, host literally thousands of Wind fanfics. Many of the writers - perhaps most of them - have never actually read Wind, just other fanfiction of it; next to none of the fics are worth reading. Most Wind fics reuse the original protagonist, Rorschach, but treat him as a generically relatable blank slate. The most common fic format by far is the "altdunnit", a form of what-if scenario in which the mystery that sets off Wind's plot is different in some way.

Rorschach is held by a substantial portion of the fandom to be an egg (a trans woman who has not realized it yet). Wildbow has never endorsed this interpretation, and it doesn't seem to be much on his radar. In recent years, the trans Rorschach portion of the fandom has grown; they don't tend to look especially kindly on Warn, much of which Wildbow wrote as a response to fans (like those on the True Detectives forum) he felt had been too inclined to take Rorschach's side in Wind. Flame wars over Warn's content were constant throughout its serial publication, and made it easily the rockiest experience of Wildbow's writing career.

Some noteworthy and relevant podcasts include Jonathan Sims' The Dresden Files, the Ranged Touch Network's Scott Pilgrim Made The World, Doof Media's Winding Down (later Warning Down), and the McElroy family's The Adventure Zone (an actual play podcast which has currently had three major campaigns, two anthology series, and various one-shots). Film Reroll is still an actual play podcast that runs the basic setups of movies (and occasionally other media) as short tabletop campaigns; occasionally, their version of a movie will be much closer to ours than it is to the version of the movie in their own universe.

Xenobuddy was an early childhood public access show, originally created for the BBC in the late 1990s but later aired internationally. The title character is a small alien puppet who lives on a futuristic spaceship staffed by children (who speak a vague conlang akin to a dollar store Esperanto). At the end of every episode, it gets lost and is found, usually by (harmlessly) bursting out of one of the children. It was very popular with its target audience and much loathed by parents. Edgy ironic fanart depicting the titular Xenobuddy as some kind of dangerous parasite abounds.

Static is a supernatural slasher franchise created by Wes Craven, with the first film, also simply titled Static, released in 1984. The movies concern a group of gibbering neotenous ogre-fae who wake up in the modern day after a long sleep, incorporate televisions into their bodies, and start eating people by sucking them into hellish pocket dimensions. The Screen-Guts collectively are probably in the top five antagonists most people think of when they think of slasher horror.

Toby Fox's ROSEQUARTZ is especially known for its meta take on video game morality systems. The game has a mission-based structure; throughout it, the player is encouraged to take on a pacifist playstyle, championed by the player character's late mother, the title character. However, the Crystal Gems give the player enough autonomy that you are entirely able to take a much more violent tack; doing so has a rippling effect on the game's writing in countless immersively-integrated ways. If the player goes out of their way to be as murderous as possible - the so-called "genocide route" - the differences from the main route grow much more extreme, and rather than gaining allies, you start to lose them, as the Crystal Gems realize what you're doing and one by one turn against you. If you manage to shatter Garnet - it's the hardest and most iconic fight in the game, Megalovania is playing, her Future Vision gets used for all it's worth - then you use your knife to slash at the cosmos, erasing Earth, Homeworld, and everything else. This, Toby Fox is saying, is apparently all you want out of a video game - another toy to break.

Warner Bros still did Space Jam with Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes, it's just that the Looney Tunes in question were Mickey Mouse and friends. They also still did a second one with LeBron James, which was, by God, somehow worse. They put Ms. Frizzle in it.

Walt Disney made his squeaky clean reputation on the back of adaptations of things like Rudyard Kipling's adventure novel The Call of Cthulhu, P. L. Travers' Thomas the Tank Engine, and Erich Kästner's feel-good coming-of-age kidnapping tale about the power of perseverance, Lolita, originally done with Hayley Mills and later remade with Lindsay Lohan.

Nabokov's extremely controversial literary classic that has defined the idea of the unreliable narrator is Father's Trap, from the perspective of a man who plots to obtain custody of both of his daughters for nefarious purposes. Most publishers ignored Nabokov's instructions not to depict the twins, Lisa and Lottie, on the cover. Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne have directed mediocre film adaptations, and songwriting team Lerner and Loewe did a musical that was a legendary flop.

The Japanese fashion movement is Gothic Pollyanna, after an otherwise-forgotten series of penny dreadfuls about a cute, cheery, rules-minded young girl who is, despite appearances, an insane criminal. Minor character Bonesaw in Alan Moore's Worm Turns also clearly hearkens back to the Pollyanna stock character.

The DEA was a prime-time soap opera about the ongoing "war on drugs"; it ran for eleven seasons from 1982 to 1993. Its plot focused on federal agents working at the Drug Enforcement Administration office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and especially partners Hank Schrader and Steve Gomez and their families. It is mostly remembered today for its downer ending (in which the treachery of late-show villain Walter White, or "Heisenberg", gets the leads killed, and he escapes from justice), and for its far-more-acclaimed spinoff series Better Call Saul, which also ran for eleven seasons from 1993 to 2004, functioning as a prequel, midquel, and sequel to The DEA.

Between The DEA and Better Call Saul, Kelsey Grammer played crooked lawyer Saul Goodman for twenty consecutive years of primetime TV, first as featured comic relief and later as a leading man. (He also guest-starred on the mostly-forgotten Mall Cop, establishing that it, too, was set in the world of The DEA and Better Call Saul.) Better Call Saul won more than a dozen Primetime Emmys. Peri Gilpin received several of these for her performance as Kim Wexler.

St. Elsewhere was a film written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan in the late 1990s; it was highly acclaimed and successful, and established Shyamalan in the public eye as a skilled auteur with an affinity for twist endings. The film's final scene reveals that its main setting, St. Eligius Hospital, exists entirely within the imagination of an autistic boy, Tommy Westphall, as he gazes into a snowglobe. The so-called "Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis", which posits that this same twist applies to most of fiction due to a network of crossovers, was invented by a Saturday Night Live sketch shortly postdating the film's release, in which an amnesiac Charles McGill (from Better Call Saul) wakes up in St. Eligius, attended to by a cast of characters who are more concerned with their own nonexistence.

After rising to prominence as a writer, storyboarder, and composer for Pendleton Ward's Science Time (where she established the Summer/Jessica relationship that would come to define later seasons), Rebecca Sugar got to make her own cartoon, Henry Ichor. Set in a recently post-apocalyptic but strangely cheerful world, Henry Ichor concerns a young teenage boy who is conscripted as a mech pilot due to his rare and innate ability to link to the powerful Evangelion mecha. (His preferred Evangelion is eventually revealed to be a form of his late mother, the reason he can do this in the first place.) Henry turns out to be a vital asset in protecting humanity from the monstrous "Angels" that frequently threaten it, and is surprisingly emotionally mature for his age. However, the adults around him (especially his father, Gennady) frequently push him too far, especially considering his generally noncombative and pacifistic nature. There is much interpersonal drama and much singing about it, with a very vocally trained cast. After several seasons of slow buildup, the show was forced to suddenly rush to its ending in only a few (infamous) episodes after an arc where Henry had a romance with an Angel in male human form. Henry Ichor The Movie and an ensuing miniseries, End Of Henry Ichor, helped bring the show to a more thematically satisfying conclusion.

Although he has played a creative or consultant role in many animated projects, Alex Hirsch is best known for the one he was actually the showrunner for, Disney Channel's smash hit Sunnydale. Focusing on a small California town constantly plagued by supernatural threats, Sunnydale generally followed a simple monster-of-the-week format, but kept audiences on the hook with teases at a deeper underlying mystery. The show almost didn't get a season two, as Hirsch found working with Disney very tiring, but he was eventually persuaded; season two ran through the rest of Hirsch's ideas at a faster pace, and concluded the show with the leads graduating from Sunnydale High.

For a brief historical moment, Daron Nefcy's show, Ender vs. the Space Bug Army, looked like it would become the successor to Sunnydale, keeping Disney Television Animation prestigious after Sunnydale ended. However, though Ender drew in a big crowd, and lasted almost twice as long as Sunnydale, it was not ultimately as well-received. EvtSBA is a children's space opera, wearing its Starship Troopers (Joss Whedon) inspiration on its sleeve, but also clearly copying some (superficial) notes from Philip Pullman. Set in a future where mankind has come into violent conflict with bug-like aliens, the show follows unbearably smug boy supergenius Ender as he is sent to military school to prepare for interstellar warfare. The show has an extremely cutesy and hyperactive tone; typical filler episodes include the one (generally taken as meta about fandom drama) in which Ender's siblings' futuristic internet arguments prove instrumental to the survival of the human race. Later seasons get a bit more serious, but focus heavily on shipping. The show is infamous for its ending, in which Ender, for his final exam, destroys the Formics' home planet and releases a psychic signal that eradicates the Formic race. Although the show explicitly notes that this includes many individual Formics who we have previously known as sympathetic characters, it is nonetheless played as a happy ending in which a hostile colonial power is defeated. Ender has ended the war; he has beaten the Space Bug Army.

"Meugh-Neigh. 'Meugh' like the cat, 'neigh' like the horse." "Does it mean something?" "No answer; none at all."

Orson Scott Card is an extremely prolific author of speculative fiction. Although it isn't as close to his heart as the Steel Gear series, in which he got to flex his military sci-fi muscles and allegorically retell stories from his faith, he is undoubtedly best known for Ishtar's Curse. Initially a short story and later expanded into a full novel, the plot concerns young Princess Ishtar, or Star, heir to the heathen fairy kingdom of Meugh-Neigh. (In later novels, she changes her name to Bethlehem Diaz, or Beth.) Spoiled and destructive but magically talented, Star is sent to twentieth century Earth so she can develop the wits and the strength of character to be a viable wartime leader for her people - or at least so she can be kept out of the way. After several years of personal growth and magical misadventures with companions she met on Earth, a more grounded Star devises a spell to erase the magic that makes up the bodies of most of her throne's enemies. This plan works, and merges Meugh-Neigh into the Earth as a small and ordinary European country. However, though her subjects are eager to celebrate her for this, Star is devastated when she realizes that she has killed trillions of innocent spirits, and, seeking to atone, she takes on the title of Speaker for the Dead (also the title of the book's first sequel). Although it's frequently ranked highly in lists of fantasy novels of the twentieth century, Ishtar's Curse has received some harsh criticism, with the standard line being that Star is an idealized fantasy of a repentant Hitler figure, and that the text presents excessive justifications for her actions. The story has also been called a reactionary response to Wilde's The Little Mermaid. After more than twenty years, a film adaptation of Ishtar's Curse was released in 2009, starring Dakota Fanning, to mixed reviews. The box office took a further hit due to a boycott campaign, after Card's views on homosexuality (and, relatedly, his membership in the LDS Church) became widely known. In the end, it lost the studio a lot of money.

Hideaki Anno is best known for the classic smash hit anime he made for Studio Gainax, Einstein Goliath Nestorian, a psychologically intense deconstruction of martial arts shonen like Yoshiyuki Tomino's Dragon Ball. Einstein Goliath Nestorian concerns a mystery man known only as Saitama, who finds that he has become dissatisfied with life and alienated from the world after only three years of training have enabled him to easily surpass any physical challenge. The original series is known for its sudden, surreal, and clearly budget-driven ending, although this was quickly alleviated with a similarly surreal but more definitive finale movie. Although many Western anime fans often think of Einstein Goliath Nestorian as pretentious and ultra niche, it was actually a huge mainstream hit in Japan, with a colossal franchise of adaptations, merch, and spinoffs (notably including a series of Retrain films, which began as extremely close shot-for-shot remakes of the original series but wound up spiraling into a very different updated timeline).

Previously most noteworthy for his 2003 visual novel Oreimo, Gen Urobuchi was tapped by Shaft for their extremely successful and acclaimed anime Ohayou Hana!, hailed as a deceptively dark deconstruction of the teen idol genre. The plot concerns a girl, Saionji Mayuri, who leads a double life, being of little note at school, out of costume, but spending much of her time as #1 idol Hana. Her mental stability begins to deteriorate as she realizes that the adults in her life - especially her father, himself a former idol - have groomed her to serve as a drugged and hypnotized propaganda mouthpiece for a shadowy conspiracy. She winds up in the worst of both worlds as her ensuing breakdown, and her handlers' response to it, destroys both of her lives and brings ruin to those she cares about. In addition to the popularity of the actual anime, many of its songs became decontextualized J-Pop hits. The idol anime genre would then receive a glut of edgy lesser imitators, like Love Live: School Idol Project, Cheetah Girls, and magical girl fusion Symphogear. Although the original Ohayou Hana! was a self-contained twelve-episode story, it received a sequel movie shortly thereafter, Ohayou Hana! Rebel!, which ended on a cliffhanger that has still not been resolved over a decade later. The upcoming Ohayou Hana! MK Ultra! is expected to get things back on track. An abridged series originating on 4chan, focusing on cropped screencaps from Ohayou Hana!, called the title character "Miss Ohio", producing the memetic tagline "being Ohio is suffering".

Zack Snyder first came up with the idea for Madoka around 2000, a long time before he'd actually get to make it; he put the project on hold in 2006 to make his adaptation of Worm Turns. He developed the idea with his wife Deborah and a cowriter, Steve Shibuya. Inspired by the Disney Princess phenomenon, as well as Naoko Takeuchi's Pretty Cure (one of the few anime that had already become a hit in the States), Snyder wanted to tell a coherent story about fights between magical girls who could make anything happen, who could make any fantastical world or visual appear. In Snyder's film, we follow Madoka Kaname, a teenager attending a Catholic school in Los Angeles. Madoka and her friends are approached by a strange young woman who goes only by "Mommy", and her animal companion (a CGI-ed up squirrel-cat thing), QB. They offer to make the teens into "magical girls", granting them one wish each in exchange for a life devoted to spiritual warfare. (Another mysterious new girl, Lilly, urges them not to take the deal in the strongest possible terms.) This turns out to be a scam; QB is pitting the magical girls against one another for his own reasons, and in the end, every magical girl and her wish gets corrupted. Despite much of the film's plot being a horrific bloodbath - the MPAA demanded a lot of cuts to get it down to a PG-13 rating - there is a happy ending; Madoka finally makes her own wish and uses it to topple QB's whole system. Madoka isn't often discussed nowadays but it was a major discourse bomb when it came out in 2010, alternately being called misogynistic Orientalist trash and a subversive feminist masterpiece. Snyder, for his part, often notes that QB is intended as an allegory for exploitative forces within the entertainment industry that treat young women as disposable resources with an expiration date; this is already clear to anyone who's watched the film, which is not exactly subtle in its symbolism. He also explains that the film sexualizes the girls in an effort to shame the audience, to get people to understand that they are objectifying the characters in the same way that QB does. The soundtrack's got a really cool ethereal cover of Nine Inch Nails' King Nothing on it, which is probably the most remembered part of the film today.

Selena Gomez became a star by playing Violet Parr on Disney Channel's superhero sitcom The Incredibles. While the show was initially a very throwaway villain-of-the-week affair whose leads had to keep their powers hidden from the public and their caped escapades secret from the government for self-explanatory comes-with-the-genre reasons, it would eventually unfold that the show was set in something of an X-Men-style dystopia where superheroism had been outlawed and supers oppressed by the government as a potential societal fifth column.

Brad Bird directed one of Pixar's most celebrated films, Wizards of Waverly Place; it was Pixar's first film with a predominantly human cast. Disney was hungry for a fantasy property after losing a bidding war for the Luz Noceda rights. It had strong populist anti-eugenic themes, with an elaborate wizarding hierarchy of antagonists who seek to remove the Russo family's magic as part of an effort to curb wizard overpopulation. The sequel came more than a decade later, and wasn't nearly as good.

In addition to Worm Turns, Alan Moore is notable for the heavily metafictional comic Pagemaster, about a boy, Richard, who finds a magical library that contains all stories that have ever been or could ever be told; he becomes lost and imperiled in assorted pieces of historically noteworthy literature (initially ones in the public domain, though later volumes would start using legally safe serial-numbers-filed-off versions of modern stories). The 2003 film, in which Sean Connery played the librarian in one of his last film roles, is widely regarded as a terrible, deeply-toned-down adaptation that didn't grasp the tone or themes of the original story at all; it only covered the first half of the first volume, in which Richard meets "genre spirits" who wish to sort all stories into rigid categories. In a later volume, Pagemaster Millennium, an aged Richard Tyler, who has since taken on the mantle of librarian himself, meets a teenage girl, heavily implied to be Luz Noceda, who has also become lost in the library. She has become corrupted by an eldritch book, or "Necronomicon", written by "the Wrong Author", heavily implied to be the devil (and/or Hugo Astley, an Aleister Crowley caricature from W. Somerset Maugham's The Winged Bull). Flushed with demonic power and enraged by what she's become, a monstrous Luz tears through the library in a blaze of hellfire, seeking to destroy all of literature and the world. It is only through the intervention of the Fat Controller - heavily implied to be God - that Luz is defeated; he mercifully erases her by hitting her with a train, and laments what she became.

#queued post #the scrambled timeline #I tinkered around with the ordering of these entries so much that I guess this is a scrambled post for the scrambled timeline #credit to hieronymous-botch for the Alex Hirsch's Sunnydale idea #credit to Lorelei for the Orson Scott Card's Steel Gear idea

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hustlerose · 9 months ago

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this is a really random gripe but i've been sitting on it for years and i have to speak my truth. "yes, your grace" is one of the most offensive games on steam. the idea of stealing the core mechanic from "papers, please" but having you play as a king instead is such a gross premise.

"papers" used its mechanics to make the player empathize with someone who is disempowered and dehumanized by the authoritarian system they live in. it puts you in the shoes of an anonymous worker. when you're forced to be a pawn in the regime, you have to question your own moral integrity. when you do "resource management" it's all about choosing between food and heating this week

what are you SAYING by applying those same mechanics to a king? ooooo poor king boo hoo he has to make scary choices like *checks notes* peasants are groveling at your feet and you have to choose whether to give them a dollar! boo hoo look how disempowered the fucking KING is!!!!!!!!! being a KING IS BASICALLY AS BAD AS being a WORKER IN A FASCIST STATE. FUCKING KILL YOURSELF.

it's like ayn rand made a video game. it's the most pathetic uwu bean version of monarchism. lots of people make games and stories about kings without such blatant disdain for any form of democracy. die 1000 deaths

#no one else has even heard of this but thank you for reading anyway

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godlessondheimite · 8 months ago

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we make fun of men writing women badly but we never make fun of the women who write straight men and accidentally make them gay and then get huffy and confused when people point out their characters read as gay. off the top of my head this is about s.e hinton and ayn rand. s.e hinton wrote a teenage boy who thinks of every man he meets, including his brothers, in terms of how handsome they are. ayn rand wrote one of the most sweeping and romantic love stories between two men in atlas shrugged. but god forbid you point that out.

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transgenderer · 1 year ago

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Milei is the owner of five English Mastiffs, with the progenitor being Conan, who died in 2017 after suffering from spinal cancer.[45][266][267] He considers Conan his son and has named four of Conan's six clones, including one named after the original and another named Angelito,[275] Milton (in honor of Milton Friedman), Murray (in honor of Murray Rothbard), Robert, and Lucas (both named after Robert Lucas).[276][277] Milei said that he cloned Conan because he understands cloning as "a way of approaching eternity".[267] To do this, he went to a clinic in the United States; the process cost him about $50,000.[267] He has described his dogs as four-legged children and thanked them after his 2023 primary win.[14]

Milei stated that he communicates with the dogs through a mystic.[10] For example, he commented that the new Conan provides ideas on general strategy, Robert is the one who makes him "see the future and learn from mistakes", Milton is in charge of political analysis, and Murray of the economy.[278] When asked about this by El País journalist Martín Sivak and Nicolás Lucca of Radio Rivadavia, Milei did not deny it, and said: "What I do with my spiritual life and in my house is my business. If Conan advises me on politics, it means that he is the best consultant of humanity."[266]

Milei said he had dialogues with the likes of Rothbard and Ayn Rand. In 2015, he cited Conan as a source of inspiration for his writing.[266] About Conan's death in 2017, Milei said that Conan had not really died (he described it as "his physical disappearance" and continued to refer to Conan in the present tense) but had gone to sit next to God to protect him, and that it was thanks to this that he had begun to have talks with God himself.[279] According to González, Milei wrote to a friend in a chat: "I saw the resurrection of Christ three times, but I can't talk about it. They would say I'm crazy."[45] According to various sources consulted by La Nación, Milei maintains that he and Conan have a mission that was assigned to them by God and has a mystical story with Conan. He said that he met Conan, who was a lion, as a gladiator in the Roman Colosseum about 2,000 years earlier.[280]

new president of argentina

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blood-orange-juice · 1 year ago

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Harbinger allocation post! Inspired by a reddit discussion.

I expect Pantalone to be treated the way Sandrone currently is. We'll get a heartbreakingly beautiful chain of sidequests about power, freedom, wealth inequality, the glory of mankind, and dysfunctional economic systems. He might show up in the main quest cutscenes but that's it.

(it saves Hoyo money on voice acting, and also they'll get to tell a properly complex story without torturing the people who don't want to read with Marx and Ayn Rand references)

Dottore is pretty much genshin Otto, he'll outlive the Teyvat arc. In 2030 people will keep hoping he'll become playable one day.

Pulcinella will be Snezhnaya's star, we'll all both hate and adore the guy by the end. I expect him to dabble both in politics and magic, because, well, elf ears. He's like Alice. He probably Knows Things.

Pierro belongs to the Khaenri'ah ark. People will so ship him with Dain.

#dottore #pantalone #pulcinella #fatui

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goodluckclove · 2 months ago

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A Literary Hot Take I Fear Posting

A childhood friend who I've known since the second grade just texted me yesterday to ask why I was reading Atlas Shrugged in the eighth grade. I was 12 years old just casually reading Ayn Rand. He pegged this at the time as odd, but it took him another 15 years to ask me about it.

Such whiplash. Statue of limitations doesn't apply to books, I guess. I responded first by saying how I was already reading Kafka and Kerouac, so it's really not a crazy leap in terms of reading materials. I then went on to insist that Atlas Shrugged is a pretty fucking wild ride, an insane capitalistic melodrama written by the creator of a philosophy that sounds sort of, partially cool when only on paper and not applied at all. Atlas Shrugged is way more entertaining than The Fountainhead, as it was written once Objectivism was fully formed and Rand was comfortable giving a majority of her attention to just one of the most bonkers stories I've ever read.

Before I get into this if you are someone fully unfamiliar with Ayn Rand, one of her major controversies relates to repeated SA references in her writing. It's not the only thing I talk about but I kind of have to mention it so like tread careful.

There's a death ray in Atlas Shrugged. Literal death ray. It's mentioned in one chapter and I'm pretty sure it's dropped completely after that. There's a secret society of industrialists and creators who live in a mountain and hide their existence via invisibility force field. There is one point where it turns into a manifesto during John Galt's sixty page speech, but also around that time there's like a literal action movie recon mission with guns and explosives and a helicopter.

Listen. Listen to me. I do not think Ayn Rand is a great person. Her philosophy was helpful to me back when I had only read just the grimmest shit imaginable, but on its own it falls apart immediately. The average Ayn Rand hero is an industrialist and CEO who is also perfectly capable of manual labor in their industry and partakes in it whenever needed. This is fun to imagine but also not a thing I don't think actually exists.

If you really truly despise Ayn Rand (some people do hate her to a degree I always found a little off), I can't say you don't have your reasons. I do have a feeling that a fair amount of the people that really hate her, as well as really love her, probably never finished one of her 1000-page tombs. Which is fine. Her philosophy is so extreme, even if it was created as a product of her formative years in the Soviet Union, that it's bound to trigger strong emotions immediately. Plus Rand's view on gender was just - just so deeply strange. Misogynist, but - like - incoherently misogynist? Super odd.

People know about Ayn Rand's thinly-veiled rape kink. It's a lot, especially in The Fountainhead. It's also executed strangely. There is a clear argument that it fits within the motifs of the characters and the story as a whole. There is a repeated reference of things being broken, of beauty and the desire to hold onto beauty - either to hide it, destroy it, or destroy and rebuild it. It comes up a lot with multiple characters and arcs. In that way a rape works as an extension of the themes already established, but the fact that it's a meet-cute start of a romance that we're supposed to support as a reader is uh - oof! Weird for me!

Also she proudly called herself a "male chauvinist" which - I don't know, Ayn! I think that's an inside thought, my friend!

Once again - I'm not an Objectivist. If anything in terms of philosophy I'm still between Existentialism and Absurdism. Rand's whole thing (Which I must stress is more magic system than applicable ideology in terms of realism) is not doing great things for society because it is based on a foundation that is already not real. I found some sort of shy appreciation for fragments of her beliefs that struck me as novel as someone in a deeply abusive environment. I will always have a strong sentimental connection to The Fountainhead, even though it's riddled with faults, because I read it the first time after my mom's suicide attempt. It helped to have something idealistic and heroic to cling to, even if the power fantasy is only grounded in the real world in the sense that architects are a job some people can get.

However, I stand by the belief that in an alternate reality Ayn Rand would've produced the best soap opera of all time. Pretty much all her batshit plot developments would work perfectly in a soap opera setting. People wouldn't bat an eye, I swear to god.

#hot takes i guess #i'm scared to tag this anything else #literature #philosophy #atlas shrugged is crazy homoerotic too #the fountainhead is less crazy but still definitely has its moments #howard roark designs a building for someone else and it was altered from his original blueprints #and he hates this because Ethics #so he blows it up #and he gets acquitted for it after a dramatic court scene #it's so fucking crazy #it's just absolute camp #it's fanfic for her own characters #every ayn rand hero would be insufferable to know in real life

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randomnumbers751650 · 1 year ago

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I finally have time to talk about Lone Trail. I will be focusing on its depiction of science, technology and its progress. Will get a bit political, but funnily enough less than I imagined.

The thing that called my attention most in Lone Trail were the discussions on the nature of scientific progress. This is a theme that’s dear to me and the stuff I research about. It’s easy to think of scientific progress like an inevitable march forward, like an escalator. After all, we are much richer than we were before, right? Go to OurWorldInData dot org to play around with economic statistics in time – make sure to check the World GDP chart, from year 0 to 2000 and see it taking off like a rocket from year 1700.

What kind of Uncle Ted fan or neoluddite would go against that? Haha…hah…

Truth is that, although its effects are there, it’s not a clear if this is the little, neat process techbros want us to believe. It’s new and produces more, therefore it’s good, right? I could be writing this as a new wave of AI-generated NFTs pollute my algorithm.

That’s what makes the storytelling in Arknights so effective: it mashes together fantasy and sci-fi to really tell stories on the role of beliefs, technology, science and religion. The Rhine Lab saga is definitely an exploration of technology, with focus on the equivalent of the United States. During the period before the First World War, 1870-1913 (which is the one that Arknights draws most from), the world underwent through the so-called Second Industrial Revolution and I’ve read economic historians considering it the most innovative period in human history. I mean, obviously, there is an absolute number of inventions in our current age, but in relative terms 1870-1913 experienced a much larger number relative to the previous one.

The escalator narrative constructs scientific achievements as work of daring people (mostly men, but there were women like Marie Cuire), that combined science and technology to help mankind, like Prometheus giving mankind fire from the gods (in fact, one of these books is even named “Prometheus Unbound”); more than often they have to fight against the establishment. Remember Ignaz von Semmelweis? He just wanted doctors to wash their hands. Even I learned this standard narrative in the university. But that’s not the entire story.

The positivistic paradigm – of a science free of value judgements, made with the power of math – has actually helped build this escalator narrative. In reality, some scientists and scholars are horrible people. Later, I learned that Semmelweis, as much as he campaigned for the right thing, was a very arrogant person, who abused everyone around him, to the point few people went to his funeral.

Narratives focusing on one single hero are easy to sell and the ones building them are always on the lookout. Remember how ten years ago, a lot of people tried to push the narrative Elon Musk was going to create a new industrial revolution? Nowadays he’s just an arrogant loser who keeps dragging on his midlife crisis. The 1880s also had similar people like that, such as Thomas Edison.

Kristen Wright is definitely better than them both, because she is actually an engineering genius. But she’s also just like them, in the sense of unethical experiments, collusion with the military-industrial complex and being an overall superficially charismatic, but rotten to the core person. And she’s surrounded by a lot of people like Parvis and Ferdinand.

Breaking this line of reason, I have to say how much I hate Nietzsche’s ubermensch and master-slave morality, I hate Great Men theory, I hate Ayn Rand; these people are sheep who think themselves wolves. And before you say that Nietzsche didn’t consider himself an ubermensch, well, neither did Parvis and his reasoning was the same. For every person fancying themselves ubermensch, there’s a lot of those whom he’d call untermensch to clean up their messes. You have no idea of how times I stumbled upon people (especially libertarians) that advocate lower barriers to regulations that were written in blood, so that progress can happen quicker. Creative destruction works, as long as some people get “creative” and others clean the “destruction”. Deaths and injuries? Acceptable, just give them a pension (but fight tooth and nail in the court to not do it beyond the barest of the bare minimum, because it’ll lower the shareholder profit in 0.01%). Increase in inequality? Nobody will care in a few years, it’ll make everything cheaper anyway (look up Baumol’s cost disease to see how wrong that statement is, without being incorrect). I’m not exaggerating, sometimes the people saying that don’t even bother lacing it in politically correct language.

Because Lone Trail showed it “worked” – Kristen Wright broke off the ceiling over Terra and that will have consequences (especially with Endfield coming closer). The data from her experiments will advance science, the sight of a broken ceiling will inspire artists and prompt politicians to act. Was it worth it? Well, it will depend on who you ask (like, Ifrit or Rosmontis would have strong feelings), but it’s just there now. Serious history isn’t kind on this question as well – many technologies have a lot of transgressions, both legal and ethical, in their supply chain (both the American and Soviet space program come to my mind – guess who helped them); the difference between an entrepreneur and a criminal are contextual, because both are finding new opportunities of profit and both interlock frequently.

In the end, anyone can put an equation that has its uses, not mattering if it’s a good person or not. But that is no excuse to find good ethical practices. Silence saw everything with her own eyes and I’m really glad she’s leading the initiative for a more ethical science in Columbia – especially because people who are willing to break moral rules tend also to be willing to break research rules (this is why the “research” made in concentration camps is actually useless, it didn’t respect experimental rules). So I’m really glad for the Arknights writers for understanding these nuances and communicating them to the audience through one of the best stories of the game.

#arknights #lone trail

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intogenshin · 4 months ago

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A lot went into creating Alhatham and Kaveh and how they contribute to the major themes of the chapter

I do think Alhaitham was meant to channel some of Nietzsche's worldviews, especially with regards to his elitism (since Nahida voices that concern in her voiceline about him), but ultimately just comes across as an egoist. The fact Haitham references Tagore, whose lectures (some of them) seem to be in response to Nietzsche, in his teaser and the conclusion of his arc being that he refuses the position of Acting Grand Sage both act as a denial of Nietzsche rhetoric

Kaveh has Zoroastrianism, the origin of western morals that Nietzsche was critical of, and Schopenhauer, a hero turned clown for Nietzsche (and Indian philosophy grifter) in his corner of all things, but also, and I don't understand why, fucking Ayn Rand

I want to believe miss Rand ripped off someone else who Hoyo chose as their inspiration and I just don't know who they are, but until then I have to use her name

I think fans find a bit of a dissonance between Kaveh's altruism and his idealism in art, maybe because he used all that money in such a self interested project instead of a selfless cause. Not hoyos best writing imo? Lol

Rand was an egoist who wrote fiction to shape her idea of her ideal man, something she used as a political tool against socialism in favor of capitalism, but hoyo didn't bring up ideology so I won't either.

In The Fountainhead, the protagonist is an architect who often argues with his clients and faces many difficulties in his commitment to his artistic ideals, going against an industry and a society that doesn't value innovation. The character itself and the story are pretty annoying and unlikeable, I'm just making it sound appealing, but it's pretty much the structure of Kaveh's struggle in his own line of work.

The difference is, in the novel the values the protagonist challenges are that of tradition with his ideals of modernism that neglect aesthetics. Kaveh is a pretty grounded architect in that regard, he does prioritize practicality and is realistic with budgets, but he also respects the aesthetic aspect of his work, the main struggle of his character is the devaluation of arts after all.

To me, what stands out is the intention behind this. The Fountainhead is more or less a statement on individuality (though Rand for sure tried to pass it as individualism), of going against what's established and what the society enforced through collective pressure. I think there is value in Hoyo making the same point with a character that embodies everything Rand was critical of (and other egoists like Stirner and Nietzsche): altruism, self sacrifice, compassion, collectivism. Kaveh defends and upholds the value of his individuality while sporting the ethical philosophy that egoists claim does the complete opposite. The message of the novel is something like "only through egoist values can man assert his individuality, altruists are dumb and lose their identity" yet here hoyo does the same with an altruist

The personality of the protagonist fits completely that of Alhaitham, he's a wild exploration of what Ayn Rand characters would look like if they weren't fucking annoying.

Something that immediately struck me was the fact Rand removed all (except for two) instances of the protagonist sharing his inner world, the narration of his inner monologues that Rand wrote in the draft didn't make it to the published version. This is because it made the protagonist come across as calm and collected, logical at all times in his behavior and his decisions in contrast to the other characters who share their anxieties, insecurities and frustrations. Likewise, the audience never finds out what Alhaitham is feeling at any point of the story. Even during the aq when traveler reveals his experience in Sumeru, the narration shares something relevant about Cyno (vague, but personal all the same) yet about Alhaitham it only says he's interested. Other than that, his story quest is also a larger reference to the novel, but not that important in terms of his character.

#alhaitham #kaveh

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theboywithburninghands · 9 months ago

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So uh... in my last story I sorta implied Pomni was autistic. This is the story that confirms it. I wanted to explore more of her worldview and how she might find ways to pass the time. So this is what came out of it. It's a bit short, but it's personal and sweet and I think you'll like it. Lists T/W: profanity in some of the linked songs? I guess? I hope anyone who reads my stuff has heard the word fuck or shit before...

Pomni paced about her room. Pacing helped her think. She was here indefinitely, and while her boyfriend and girlfriend kept her from slipping too far into existential despair, boredom was a whole different animal. So, after racking her brain for several hours one evening after dinner, she finally settled on the one idea that would offer instant gratification.

Lists. Lists of what? Well, any kind of list. Chronological lists, best to worst lists and vice-versa, top 100 lists… something about them scratched a hot red itch in her brain. Information could be so overwhelming when it was just flopped in front of you, especially in huge portions. If it was broken up piece by piece based on certain categories, it was far more digestible. You didn’t shove an entire pizza in your mouth, after all, you cut it into slices. Being able to break something down was not only comforting, but satisfying. Maybe that’s why she was so good with numbers…

So, Pomni went to Gangle. She had plenty of paper. Most of her room was covered with drawings of all sorts, done in crayon, colored pencil, watercolors, magic marker, even the odd charcoal.

“Sure, I can lend you some paper…” Gangle had said with a timid but pleasantly surprised smile. “I didn’t know you liked drawing too, Pomni.”

Pomni laughed a little. “Um, actually, I was going to make a journal. To keep up with all of the wild stuff that goes on around here, you know…?”

“Oh, okay! That’s a good idea! I don’t know if I have any regular pencils, but I have some black colored ones. Would that be okay..?”

Pomni had told her it was perfectly fine, and she went back to her room with ten big sheets of sketchbook paper, three black colored pencils and a red twist sharpener. She made a makeshift desk, the flat side of one of the oversized building blocks in her room and another building block for a chair. No real lumbar support, but eh. Her body was a bunch of pixels anyway. She set her things down tidily, placed one of the sheets in the middle of her desk, and began to write.

She tapped her pencil on her desk. Man, it felt good to have something to fiddle with while she thought… She decided to start with a profile of every other performer in the circus. She began by writing out a quick template, something she could use as a reference so every profile followed the same pattern. After some thinking, she came up with this:

Name: Their name (duh)

Potential Real Name: Educated guesses on what their real name was before they came here

Likes: Hobbies, favorite foods and candies, favorite people

Dislikes: Fears, least favorite foods and candies, anything else that bugs them

Musical Taste: Music I’ve heard them listen to on Layla, or if I’ve asked them.

*Hobby Related Stuff: See asterisk

Personality: What they’re like. What they’re like to me, others, etc.

*Variable, only if needed for major hobbies

Things like gender or age didn’t matter since she already knew all of those by heart. Personality would be the biggest category obviously… well, the only way to see if it satisfied her was to try it.

So she started with the first person that popped into her head.

Name: Jax

Potential Real Name(s): Jackson/Jack, John/Jonathan/Johnny, Max/Maxwell, Braxton, First initial J, middle initial A, last initial X, Alexander/Alex, Xavier

Likes: Me, Ragatha, practical jokes, spaghetti and meatballs, lock picking, bowling, Nerds Rope

Dislikes: Corn, bad dreams, condescension, authority, anime, Ayn Rand, black licorice

Musical Taste: Radiohead, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Foster the People, Soundgarden, Garbage (the artist), Linkin Park, Flyleaf, whoever wrote that song “Pepper,” Big Black, Bad Brains

Personality: Formerly a bitter, selfish assho-

Hm…

Pomni stopped to think. She had never tried actually writing down a swear word here before. They were never censored in her head, thankfully, but as soon as they left her mouth they were filtered out.

She picked up her template sheet and wrote “asshole” in the bottom left corner. A few moments later, a black censor bar appeared over it. Pomni smirked ruefully and went back to Jax’s profile, scribbling out the beginnings of her swear word and continuing.

Personality: Formerly a bitter, selfish jerk. In fact, in some ways, he still is. One of the first adventures I ever went on with him, he threw me out a window between two moving trucks. He kept putting things like tacks and whoopee cushions on my chair at dinner, hid bugs in my room, he was awful… A few months later, he let me come into his room and talked to me about the law of entropy… He actually said he was sorry for the way he treated me after that. Then he got me my favorite food (honey-glazed garlic salmon), down to the way I like it cooked. I kissed him. He kissed me back. We kissed a lot. We didn’t really know what we were for a while, but it got made clear pretty quickly that we both loved each other.

Now he’s… better. Not perfect… no one is perfect, but… he’s grown a lot. I don’t know what changed. He told me once he acted like such a bully so people would forget about this whole purgatory situation and be mad at him instead of at the world. I didn’t believe that then and I still don’t. I could ask him, but I don’t know how he’d react. I guess I’ll wait and see.

Anyway. He’s great, really. Underneath that sandpapery outer shell, he’s just as vulnerable and human as the rest of us. He’s funny, he’s charming, he’s handsome… and most importantly, he’s genuine. I love him.

Pomni smiled at this completed profile and set it aside. She paused to sharpen her colored pencil, the lead on the end worn down to a nub. After it was sufficiently sharp, she grabbed a fresh sheet of sketchbook paper, cracking her knuckles and fixing her posture before getting back to work.

Name: Ragatha

Potential Real Name: Agatha, Raquelle, Ann/Anna/Annie, Annabelle, Agnes, Anya, Christie

Likes: All of us here- me included, horses, video games, ballet, hugs, stuffed animals.

Dislikes: Centipedes, circus peanuts, ripping her stitches… she doesn’t have a lot of dislikes.

Musical Taste: Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack, Smokey Robinson, Tom Petty, Pink Floyd, OutKast, Kendrick Lamar, Joan Jett, Carole King

Video Games She Likes (Heavily Abridged): Dark Souls Trilogy, Final Fantasy VII, Legend of Zelda, Goldeneye, Spyro the Dragon, Bloodborne, Uncharted 2, Assassin’s Creed 2, tons more…

Personality: When I first got here, I thought Ragatha was just being nice to me because I was new. But she just… never stopped being nice. She always had my back, always had something encouraging to say… I left her behind like a coward the first day I was here and she didn’t give up on me. I look up to her.

She’s not perfect. She can be a bit arrogant without meaning to, and she used to let Jax walk all over her, but… well, things are a lot different with Jax now. And I think she helped in some way with that…

I love her just as much as I love Jax. I couldn’t imagine life without her sweet smile and her cute laugh and her hugs. Oh my god, her hugs! I HATE hugs, but somehow she makes hers incredible. She’s incredible.

Pomni re-read the profile and grinned. Oh, this felt so GOOD. Being able to put her thoughts down and in the form of a neatly organized set of lists. Scraps of order in this world of never ending chaos… She needed to write more.

She sharpened her colored pencil again and started work on Gangle’s profile, breezing straight through it and moving on to the next person. Zooble’s profile wasn’t as complete as the other three so far, since Pomni didn’t know as much about them. She would just have to add more to it the more she found out about Zooble.

She was a good ways into Kinger’s profile, adding Luna moth to his list of favorite insects, when her eyelids sagged. Pomni grunted and rubbed her eyes. Time must have really gotten away from her. She should ask Caine for a clock. Well… maybe not. Seeing time slowly creep by in this prison would probably do more harm than good. Either way, she must have been writing for an hour or two, it made sense for her to be tired. She went on an adventure that day.

She decided to take a break, give her brain a chance to wander. She crossed her arms on her desk and laid her head atop them. Sketchbook paper always had a pleasant, ethereal smell to it, like a shaft of sunlight illuminating a shelf of old yellowed scrolls in a castle’s study. She loved that smell. Pomni felt even more at ease. She found something to pass the time, and nobody could stop her. She could write as many lists as she wanted, about anything she wanted. She closed her eyes, the warm, private dark behind her lids the perfect place to imagine what she could write next.

Within minutes, she was asleep.

——

The faint yet insistent song of birds woke Pomni up. She blearily opened her eyes, lifting her head up off of her arms, the spots on them where her head rested warm and flushed. Pomni reached a gloved hand to her right eye and rubbed it, something slipping off of her shoulders and drifting politely to the floor. She turned around to find her comforter rumpled about her chair. It must have been draped over her while she slept at her desk. Did she do that..? She turned back to her desk.

It took her eyes a moment to defog, but everything on her desk was right where she left it, Kinger’s profile stopping at Luna moth. She stretched, a yawn bubbling up and escaping her mouth. She picked her blanket up and made her bed, tempted to flop right back down onto it and get some more sleep. But she needed to organize her things first.

She yawned into her palm and picked up the completed profiles, tapping the sheaf of papers on her improvised desk so they fell into order. She blinked and examined the top sheet. It was written in purple colored pencil, not her black one, and it definitely wasn’t her handwriting. She held it a bit closer.

Name: Pomni

Potential Real Name: No idea

Nicknames: Pompom, Poms, New Stuff, Newbie, Shorty, Clownface, Jingles

Likes: Jax and Ragatha, Salmon and rice, number puzzles, swimming, long walks, lemon drops, fudge ripple ice cream, cuddling

Dislikes: Hugs from strangers, snakes, spicy candies, cooking, whoopee cushions

Musical Taste: U2, Coldplay, Snow Patrol, Marina and The Diamonds, Regina Spektor, Keane, Ariana Grande, Corinne Bailey Rae, Duffy

Personality: Pomni shouldn’t have lasted long here. She’s a nervous wreck that’s prone to crying, depression, overstimulation and anxiety attacks. We were all a little worried she would abstract early.

But she never did. She showed everyone that not only is she tougher than she looks, she’s smart as a whip and one of the most courageous people any of us have ever met. She’s a great friend to everyone, and never gave up on even the people here that seemed beyond help.

We all love you, Pomni.

Pomni set the piece of paper down on her desk. She rubbed her eyes again, her glove coming away flecked with water. She got everything organized, sliding her paper and pencils under her bed. She took the sheet with purple handwriting, folded it neatly, and tucked it into her pillowcase. She rubbed her eyes again, sighed shakily, and opened the door to her room, ready to meet the sunrise.

#the amazing digital circus #funnybunny #buttonblossom #bunnyrabbitdoll #tadc #oh no cringe #tadc jax #tadc ragatha #tadc pomni #tadc gangle #jax x pomni #pomni x ragatha #autistic pomni

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insufferableprotagonistpoll · 4 months ago

Text

Round 1

Propaganda why Rintaro Okabe is insufferable:

"He's sexist: he feels ashamed to be in the same lab as Kurisu, a genius, so he spends his time saying sexual jokes to embarass her. He is super annoying with his complotist larping. Why wouldn't he shut up? (Actually he shuts up at the middle at the story, the point where it becomes good).

Also transphobic stuff (the "but he's a boy" joke... *aaaaaaargh*)."

"Commits insufferably to the bit.Will cut off and correct you if he thinks you're in the wrong.Severe Mary Sue syndrome of sorts but that varies wildly alongside his emotional state.Does not shut up ever.Misgenders and gropes his friend after transing her(It's a whole story but the way they treated them before wasn't ideal either).Technically caused an apocalypse but the rest of the main cast were accomplices in this so it doesn't really count.Creates a time loop so he doesn't have to face his friends's deaths and inevitably goes insane and tries to kill them all.Causes property damage to his landlord's home near daily.Gives his friends false hope that they'll be granted their greatest wish only to go back and say he has to undo them because they caused too much temporal distortion.All of them forget this happened but still.Kills a friend's dad,again technically.Don't think I've said he's obnoxious yet but if I did it bears repeating"

"Listen I love the game with all my heart but this guy is obnoxious.He's LARPING constantly.He always wants to be the smartest in the room.He groped someone to ""see if they're really a girl"" and(spoilers ahead) he grants every friend he has a wish that would be impossible otherwise via time travel then undoes all of that because whoops! Messing with time causes unforeseen consequences such as *checks notes* his friend Mayuri dying.It's been a hot minute since I've played S;G so I might be misremembering some things but good god the whole game we've been going over How Time Travel Is Bad Actually and he STILL went ahead with it!You've been targeted by the FBI and see someone turn into goo because of this!Even if he wanted to be nice because let's be real his friends deserve it after being targeted by the FBI because of him,undoing that because he misses Mayuri is a dick move.I'm not unpacking the emotional baggage he has with her,but objectively what he did was kind of horrible.He also trapped them all in a timeloop that one time."

"A young man who hides his insecurities below an neverending overconfident RP.

Because Kurisu, a scientific genius girl, challenges his authority in his flat, he regularly humiliates her by telling sexual things she finds embarassing.

Plus there is some other sexist and transphobic stuff I don't need to go into.

I know in the second half of the story he loses his mask and actually show his vulnerable and caring side. But gosh, he is so unbearable in the first half!"

"His voice is so grating and is the reason I didn’t want to watch the show."

Propaganda why Richard Rahl is insufferable:

"The character always, always has to be Right and Moral and Good. He always knows more than: his wife, organized religion, any and all government orders that he didn't set up personally. While he starts out reasonable enough in the first few books, he slowly devolves into the author's Ayn Rand-fantasy stand-in. In every book there's always a huge monologue that's secretly about how bad (fantasy) communism is.

Richard is also hypocritical. He will flip flop on issues and change with the whims of the author, but the narrative always portrays him as in the right no matter the context."

"Protagonist of the most idiotic book series ever, literally wins by sheer dumb luck and being too stupid to plan as the world bends around him. His girlfriend keeps getting kidnapped so he can rescue her, despite allegedly being powerful. He’s a fantasy Ayn Rand follower. He inherited a sword and the Most Powerful Magic Combination Ever which he can’t be trained in because he needs to learn by instinct. Every woman ever falls in love with him or is determined to help him by prophecy. He gets captured and tortured by several bdsm women (author fetish, blatantly) and doesn’t even appreciate it. He gradually seizes more and more control over he world than even his evil tyrant dad, then throughs a fit and runs off into the woods to sulk, leaving them to a violent conquest, when people object to this via voting. He’s inexplicably good at death football. I can keep going."

"Literally the oc in the author’s shitty Ayn Rand fantasy novel. All the women want him, he does magic by instinct. He cannot be trained because he has super rare magic that nobody else has had for millenia. His birth has been prophecied for centuries. Every new book features a new problem only he can solve by being too instinctly good at magic and untrained. He comes up with the Wizard’s Rules of Magic by dumb luck.

In one book he defeats communism and hopelessness by crafting the perfect statue of his girlfriend Kahlan, who is a way cooler character but still a Mary Sue & an idiot. The statue is so cool & beautiful & well made for the joy of making (unlike work under communism), that he sparks a riot and toppled the evil empire. By building a statue."

#rintaro okabe #steins;gate #richard rahl #sword of truth #insufferable protagonist poll #insufferable protagonist tournament #tournament poll

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