#storytelling formats other than book style

[otherpeoplescreativity]

Can I just

ellipsis?

look, I've talked here about a few things I dislike about World Anvil, but this kind of creative work really does fit most excellently into the structure that World Anvil offers even on the "free user" level.

And if you get a couple of inventive people together, you can have something like:

Nista System

VNY's notes:

This system is the whole reason why the Nista Run is a possibility at all. It is not a friendly place, though. If you are not in-system at direct, explicit invitation of someone who runs a business (having existed for more than two standard years) in this system, then it's easiest if you blip in and update your navcomputer and go on your way. (Anyone who knows a Jedi also probably thinks this policy might as well be a dare. Hi! How ya doin'? Life treating you well? Sure got a lot of volcanic activity in this system -- any persistent troubles from that? Filters doing okay? Need someone to do a shift of the daily drudgery so you can read a book or something? No charge! I like seeing people get a chance to rebalance themselves. Uh, actually, that was not a tax collector pun, sorry, no. It was a mystic mob pun. The tabard didn't give me away?) First time I ever spent a night in jail for having offered to wait tables on someone else's shift. Not sure it's the first time Ben ever spent a night in jail for having offered to cover the fry cook's shift, though. Bossman seemed to know how this sort of thing goes down.

as a vignette appearing above

Holopedia Galactica entry: The system primary is Nista, a G7 V Yellow Main Sequence star. It is a typical G7, having a radius of {8.01 x 105 km} and a luminosity of {5.95 x 1026 W}. Its sunspot cycles are well-documented and should not catch the prepared traveler unawares. The closest orbiting body is Hvitløk, an iron-core rock planet with a trace atmosphere due to frequent volcanic activity which spews gas and fine particles into the space immediately around the planet. This material precipitates on the dark side of the world, falling back to the surface as metallic snow and renewing the planet surface. Hvitløk is oblong in shape, almost pointed on the northern axis, causing many exciting theories about celestial events in the early days of this system's formation. Next out in orbit is the Forretter asteroid belt, orbiting at a narrow radius and a rapid period for most asteroid belts -- a given body in the Forretter Belt makes one revolution in 281 standard days. Kjøkken is the dubiously designated "terrestrial world" of this system.

(and it goes on like that).

Elsewhere, the Holopedia Galactica offers a general-purpose explanation for the concept of a "hyperdrive".

Holopedia Galactica entry:   A hyperdrive is the mechanism that propels a starship into an alternate dimension known as hyperspace, where it is possible to travel at many times the speed of light within our native reality.

and immediately, one of the best characters from the old video game Crimson Skies pipes up with his own take.

What is "hyperdrive"?

To understand that, you have to understand hyperspace. Got any post-graduate degrees in mathematical learnin'? Me neither.

and then Big John Washington quotes a Mentat scholar:

Imagine an unmoored Gungan hydrostatic bubble, adrift in an ocean. It moves around where oceanic pressure and currents nudge it. It is affected by ripples of other bodies' motion. If it bangs into a more solid, more rigid structure, it may take damage.

I'll be honest with you, o my beloved Tumblrinas: I cannot imagine putting together a galactic encyclopedia full of all our assorted worldbuilding nonsense, such that the result is at all worth reading, with any other tool I've ever tried BUT this World Anvil system.

No offense but I think some of you would be a lot happier writing a fictional atlas or encyclopedia instead of a narrative story

[burquillos]

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the final MHA chapter because the internet seems to be very divided

I waited till MHA officially ended! Long post ahead!! People being divided on the ending makes sense. Different people come to watch shows and read comics for very different reasons and with very different expectations for an ending in mind. Especially for a series like MHA which is a battle manga that seeks to subvert shonen genre tropes.

I think part of the reason why people are so divided on it right now is because of leak culture and reaction culture. People have to remember that comic books and manga are a storytelling medium. The author actually thinks about the arrangement of the panels, what’s in the panels, and how the combination of these things can form a narrative. Reading it from twitter thread/discords from people in a rush to translate to get the information to you as fast as possible is NOT the intended way to experience the story.

The “leak format” kind of encourages people to put too much focus on certain panels and roughly translated text that would otherwise feel very different when you are reading the story through the intended medium, and when you pair that with the highly reactive way people ‘consume content’ nowadays, the result is a snowball of very volatile emotions being thrown around without a moment for people to breathe, think, and wonder for themselves “Why did the author write it like this? Was there something I missed? How does this re-contextualize story? Have I actually missed the point this whole time?” etc.

That being said, I sort of have a philosophical way of approaching MHA?? When I got back to it again, I was hyper-critical of it especially because I just came back from reading One Piece (and the writing styles and messages are VERY different). I slowly learned to judge the writing for what it is rather than keep comparing it to other series and I learned it was more enjoyable to experience the story like that.

The ending is a very hard pill to swallow for a lot of people which is understandable, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. I mean, just look at the ending lines of "Do Not Be Defeated by Rain", the poem that inspired Deku’s character:

I am also a stubbornly optimistic person, and my number one rule is never to engage with anything in bad faith. I CHOOSE to see hope through the margins and the final chapter being so open to potential encourages that thinking of mine.

So even though I think there are some things that could be handled better (the villains) and storylines I WISH were explored (OFA vestiges my beloved) there’s no reason why it couldn’t be fixed.

There is this openness to it that leaves so much room for hope and imagination that I can’t truly be mad at it.

I might find MHA lacking as an entertainment piece, but I will defend it to the end as an artistic piece.

Horikoshi has said before that he doesn’t care if his manga is popular or not, MHA is basically a culmination of the stuff he enjoys, and I KNOW drawing whatever the hell you want despite knowing not everyone will like it takes a lot of guts and it’s what makes MHA so human.

All the traces of him are in there, flaws and everything, so you can endlessly turn it around, flip back and forth and there will be always something new to unpack, learn, and realize and the thought of what could've been will always haunt people (just like Star Wars, a series he also likes kajdbaldnlk)

[demonicimagery]

you know now that i’ve finished gomens s2 i could probably write an essay on my mixed feelings. what about when a work is - especially so in some parts - very fucking good. thematically interesting and consistent, characterisation that is so painfully human and told in a fascinating manner. but due to a lack of conclusion - inherent because of the format (tv series) - it feels an inherently different sort of narrative to the original. i do not think good omens season two is bad - not at all, but what i do think is it is now a very fundamentally different type of story than that of the book. not because the events of the show don’t happen in the book but because the style of storytelling is altogether different. it’s inherently going to be the case when one of the original creators has sadly passed on, and it doesn’t necessarily make it bad - however it does make it not what personally made me love the book of good omens in the first place. maybe it’s because i came in with certain expectations given that i have read a lot of sir terry pratchett’s other work and basically none of neil gaiman’s, but it’s just a different format of story. like the difference between an epic poem and a serialised story.

[more-than-tender-curiosity]

What Gatsby musical do you think is best?

The Great Gatsby : A New Musical

Gatsby : An American Myth

And depending on which you pick, why did you choose that one?

I have been outspoken in my criticism of The Great Gatsby: A New Musical to the point where it's kind of marked me as an asshole to fans of said musical, but I'm not backing down. Read my opinions boy

No, but seriously. Let me begin by saying that I came to this point already worn down by so many heartless, obnoxious, cash-grabby adaptations of prior works (Mean Girls, Beetlejuice, Heathers, etc) that bank almost entirely on nostalgia and spectacle and, in some cases, the unknowing of their YOUNG target audience, in order to blind said audience into just calling the music a bop and moving on.

And I'm tired of it. Yes, I'm aware musical theater has always run on adaptations—Chicago and Little Shop of Horrors are among some of my favorites! But I approach every single adaptation of ANYTHING with the same baseline question: is this adaptation justified?

You could take the very moderate opinion of "having more musicals to listen to is a good thing!" but I think that's naive, and falling right into the trap set by creators who are only here for Lin Manuel-level Tony's and that's it. There's no dedication to actually making something new with something already established. Nothing transformative. It's lazy.

That's what I mean by 'is this adaptation justified'. Does the adaptation in question engage with the source material in a way that refreshes it, dives deeper into it, and takes advantage of the new method of storytelling (in this case, from book to stage musical) to showcase how the new method of storytelling benefits the source material? Like in the case of Little Shop of Horrors, it uses satire to highlight deeper issues that are barely skated across in the source material while also pulling forth factors of the source material that were more relevant at the time when it was released.

I for one am exhausted by adaptations at this point. It's always been a backbone of musical theater but now, even outside of theater, we are awash in them. it's been said before that pretty much everything you see now is a remake or an adaptation or a sequel or a prequel or a cinematic universe or something derivative, and that tends to punch down on the smaller, more creative, original ideas that might've flourished if the market wasn't oversaturated with mass-produced corporatized shiny flashy garbage.

This is where the two Gatsby musicals come in.

If you're here, you know that I...dedicate a lot of time to this novel. I could have gone to college and got a degree with the time I have spent on this novel and its study. Unraveling every single sentence, every character motivation, every real life factor that plays in to Fitz's writing of the novel—every draft, every movie adaptation. The entire history of this novel and its creation is carved into the inside of my skull.

Now, one thing you should know about gatsby is that Fitz wrote it when he was just coming off the massive failure of his play The Vegetable. That's not the full title, but I'm not going to bother typing out the rest of it. Because it was bad. It was not good. No one liked it. So, naturally, Fitz wanted to improve on his playwriting skills. Up until then, he was good at short stories and he was good at long, descriptive novels, but he couldn't quite understand how to condense and reformat his novel-writing style into something more like a stageplay.

Gatsby was sort of his attempt. You'll note that Gatsby is only 47,043 or so words, which is less than half of most of his other novels. The action and dialogue are snappy. There is, shockingly enough, less purple prose than prior releases (in spite of Nick spending 23984798347928374 words, approximately, to describe his new neighbor's smile). Scott was trying desperately to pare down his writing and see if he could slowly shift his formatting toward something that could translate to the stage.

Many of you know that The Great Gatsby was a total major uber flop.

There went his dreams of making this a play. And there have been many attempts since, all with very limited success, because for the most part, there is a total lack of understanding concerning what makes this novel a novel instead of play material. All too many times, there has been a disconnect as to what would translate effectively onto the stage as it is written in the book, like the themes of being dazzled by a spectacle but not, as displayed in the novel, the downside of such a thing.

As I said. All too often, there is too little thought given to the advantages of adapting a written work to musical theater. This leads to much of the deeper shades of the story being left to the wayside in favor of shallow spectacle just to keep the masses entertained without actually translating the stunning symbolism and figurative work Fitz put on the page.

This is what happened to The Great Gatsby: A New Musical. They took the most barebones understanding that most viewers would have of the story (that it's a love story, just like Romeo and Juliet!—side-eye), and made everything as loud and as fast and as bright as they could to make up for any lack of exploration beyond what is very plainly written on the page.

This does not work with The Great Gatsby.

I've mourned the gooberfication of Nick Carraway before. I love the 2013 film, as I'm sure many do because it was many of our first experiences with any Gatsby adaptation, but you can see it with Tobey Maguire and you can see it here in The Great Gatsby: A New Musical. So many times I see people call him an unreliable narrator but it's very clear they don't understand exactly why he's unreliable.

This 'gooberfication' I speak of is Nick's attempt to convince us that he's the innocent one here, in every single situation, and everyone around him is a liar and he's always telling the truth so you can trust him. He's the only honest person he's ever known.

Red flag central.

So from that line alone, you have to understand that everything Nick says or does, leaves in or leaves out, is suspect. He's out of his element in New York but he is absolutely not some baby-cheeked little goober who is SO TOTALLY BLINDED by his infatuation with Gatsby that he's just willing to go along with everything and doesn't pass judgment. We joke "Nick says he doesn't judge anyone then proceeds to judge everyone in the novel!" Yeah, no shit. That's the thing. He is a hypocrite made only lesser by the way he plays up the evils of everyone around him, and that's how he gets by. That's how he sleeps at night.

You can cast that into whatever light you like, whether it's the hypocrisy of saying he's so poor when he's living in at LEAST a two bedroom cottage with a maid and modern appliances and his dad is paying for a full YEAR of his life after paying his way through an Ivy League school. Or you could say he does this to throw suspicion off himself and possibly his sexuality, which is a whole can of worms involving Fitzgerald's constant projection onto his characters that I cannot bear to crack open.

Point being, Nick isn't just the passive bystander in all of these situations. He makes it sound like he is, like he's just doing favors for people who are worse than him, and how he disapproves of even everything Gatsby does despite his evident fascination with the man, but at the end of the day, he's just passing the buck. Washing his hands clean. There are so many clues in the book to this sort of thing that should tip you off to the fact that Nick Carraway is not just some silly sweet guy who gets swept up into a life of chaos and crime just to come out cynical. He was already a judgemental, cynical individual who was forced to come all too close to the realization that he, too, is more 'one of them' than he can bear to admit—even in spite of how he attempts to obscure his own hypocrisy.

Nick is not innocent. No one in this book is (besides Pammy, though she's a ticking time bomb if we're meant to understand the wealth she will inherit). That's the whole point of the fucking book. There are a thousand hands each pushing a tiny bit to keep these impossible shades of class division moving, and condemning one person (like Nick does with Daisy or Tom) doesn't solve the problem. Jay still dies. The American dream is still a nightmare. Nick still has a father to fall back on.

Which is why it's so impossibly perplexing to me to display Nick as some sort of lapdog who just seems honored to spend time with these people. Why Jay is just some quirked up white boy who is, quite literally, just too quirky and obnoxious to bear. He and Daisy are so in love and they're so close to each other and isn't it just tooooo saddd to bearrrr?? So romantic????

There's nothing deeper to it. No asking why Fitz wrote any of these characters the way he did. No understanding of the deeper implications of what he was trying so desperately to convey, on both a social and personal level. Yes, it's a love story, but it's also a commentary on just how fucked everyone is by the cages of tradition.

And there is just no trace of that in the Broadway musical. Everything is simple and easily digestible. There is no deeper interaction with the source material, no drive to have produced it at all except, perhaps, to cash in on the new public domain. They got the biggest names they could with the biggest cult followings, knowing so many would just eat it right up and call each song a bop and it would trend on tiktok and they might get a tony and then they'd move on. No integrity. No passion. No justification.

Gatsby: An American Myth is much the opposite.

After hearing a Totally Legal version of the Broadway musical, I was terrified of what ART would do to this book. Now that I had seen just how fearfully easy it was to just slap some 'art deco' and glitter on the stage, write a painfully obvious love song, and move on, I was really concerned that this trend of bloodless, toothless adaptations would continue and I'd have to sigh and move on with my life.

Fortunately, everything I mentioned that bothered me about the Broadway musical is set right in Gatsby: An American Myth. I really should have expected nothing less from Florence Welch in terms of the music (which is, of course, one of the most show-stopping elements of the musical, as it should be) considering her prior works and how they relate to the Great Gatsby. This is someone who has been obsessed with the book longer than I have been and has woven it into so much of her body of work that I'm surprised this musical didn't drop the day it became public domain. I cannot think of a better contemporary musician to handle that facet of a Gatsby musical.

This adaptation itself does exactly what I would have hoped. I am, of course, someone who holds the book and all its drafts to a very high regard—if this is a religion, that's my bible. What's in there, goes, though it's open to interpretation. Typically I would be against adding things at all.

What they added, however, was brilliant. Nothing massive—just, again, ways to take advantage of the musical theater method of production, and ways to modernize and acknowledge more contemporary understandings of the source material. Where the Broadway musical carefully tiptoed around any indication that nick was anything other than straight and in love with Jordan Baker, Gatsby: An American Myth leaned right into the idea that he was made an outsider by his sexuality, and that was part of why he related to Jay so hard. Because otherwise, why would he? He's a middle-to-upper-middle class Midwesterner whose father is paying for a year of his life while he works a little for-fun job in the big city. What does he know about being an outsider?

Gatsby: An American Myth shows you that. Shows how everyone is an outsider to each other in this story, and how individualism destroys a community that would otherwise support you. You can take that on a society-wide level or personal: Jay being totally disconnected from even himself, or the wealthy pretending they don't live on the same planet as the poor.

Another miraculous addition was a sort of bridge between Myrtle and Wilson that just makes sense. I don't want to spoil it too much, but everything they added or rearranged or re-highlighted just goes to display the depth and breadth this story really reaches. They read between every line, proudly displayed the complexity of every single situation and character—how all of them are the victim and all of them are the perpetrator—while STILL making it sound fantastic in my opinion.

It's by no means a flawless work and I saw it early on its production. It's changed since then and obviously I haven't been able to hear it since I saw it live, but I have total faith in the creative team to have not completely thrown away their good intentions in favor of trending on tiktok.

To conclude I would just ask anyone reading to please inspect the media you consume. Inspect the motives of the person feeding it to you. There's not really any sort of Nobility to art, but at this point, with so many shallow attempts to cash in on our desperate search for community and contentment, quality and passion have been thrown out the window. Shoveling this hot shit at us day and night (remakes, sequels, prequels, adaptations) has become another tool of capitalism to keep us just satisfied to not ask for more.

Ask for more. Ask for better. You deserve it.

[fleursdeleurcerveau]

Innisfree: A Changeling the Dreaming roleplay server!

Innisfree is a Changeling the Dreaming roleplaying server! The server focuses on narrative, storytelling and character interaction, rather than rolls & mechanics. Of course you are free to let the dice decide your characters’ fate though. Whether you prefer a more intuitive approach or like to stick to the books, keep in mind that out-of-character communication and consent are of key importance!

We currently exist of a group of about 20 active members, and around 80 in our affiliate VtM and MtA servers. We use both more long format RP styles and short “chatroom” styles, so there’s something for everyone! If you don’t want to RP, we also have a place where you can just share your characters and art~ Occasionally we run online Chronicles and One Shots, and host little events :3

What’s most important however is a casual but fun atmosphere where you can let your CtD characters come to life! Everyone is free to join, whether you know the core book by heart or if you’ve only heard about Changeling and are interested about getting started!

We hope to see you there~

[perenial]

gene im so glad you said this cause I haven't seen anyone else comparing it to the book as source material for like character and tone but i am So sure that if terry was alive the season would not be like this but i fear good omens fans dont realise how big a factor the lack of terry's influence is?? or like they forget that good omens was never just neilman???

ok before i go any further: i rly don't want to detract from anyone's enjoyment of the season and everything im going to say comes from a place of love for a) the original novel (& season 1 to a certain extent bc it got me back into it lol) and b) tv as a medium so like peace and love on planet let people enjoy things etc etc

but

like u said, terry's influence on the book was enormous – what makes gomens gomens is the balance of his genuine warmth and precise understanding of humanity tempered with neilman's sardonic voice and general like.....savvy approach to storytelling? i guess u could call it? anyway what rly helps the book is that it took them years to write it, passing ideas back and forth and rewriting each other's work until their voices blended seamlessly and a well structured capital-s Story was created. when i praise the book for being self-contained i think a huge part of that comes from the circumstances in which it emerged: two authors with complementary styles writing in a v particular time period where they had both the space to play with their ideas and the constraints of the novel as a storytelling format from which to craft something extremely specific.

adaptations are a tricky business and a tv version of gomens produced literal decades after the book was always going to have some unique challenges, but i don't think that's a bad thing bc the challenges could prove to be creative opportunities to take both the established audience and those new to the story by surprise. my biggest hot take here is that i don't think translating a story into a different medium means it has to follow the original narrative exactly, bc each medium has its own ways of communicating information and these structures, rules and traditions in turn inform what that story is. what matters more than following a story beat-by-beat is capturing what that story is about at its core, what themes and messages and ideas it works through and how.

all this is to say i never expected tv gomens to be a perfect reproduction of the book and if it had it been, it probably would have been worse off for it. that being said, there are parts of the book – like u said, its tone and character – that needed to have some fidelity in order to pull it off, and for the most part s1 did that bc it was still working predominantly within the bounds of the novel & its core ideas. while i did have some issues w how neilman & amazon adapted some details and characterisations, i generally rly liked s1 – it reminded me of why i loved the book and it was just generally fun to watch.

s2 was. not that fun to watch

a few positives before i go ham w the critiques:

the hair & makeup + costumes were fantastic (although i feel like s1 was slightly better re: makeup?)

the sound design & score made some of the more awkward scenes bearable and thats no mean feat imo

david & michael gave incredible performances w what they were given – michael especially managed to salvage aziraphale enough that his complete 180 didnt feel completely tonally dissonant (more on this later)

the detail of the sets is NUTS and i genuinely want to see more of hell bc of how intricate and fun the props look

i actually like gabriel/beelzebub!! their getting together montage worked for me, although they could have spent sliiiightly more time establishing what it is they like abt each other so much + why gabriel wanted to stop armageddon 2.0 so suddenly

the opening scene, although not on par w the novel's & s1's, was visually gorgeous and thematically resonant (although neilman owes me royalties for ripping it off from this shitty fic i wrote back when raphael!crowley was all the rage lol)

now w THAT being said:

like i said yesterday, the pacing was fucking awful. flashbacks are hard to work w at the best of times and the way they were used in this season felt so needless, especially the 40s one in ep 4 that takes up like 90% of the episode. in both flashbacks + present day there were scenes that dragged for no real reason, dialogue that looped back around on itself to stretch out the runtime, and weirdly enough places where there should have been character & plot work where there just,, wasn't any?? for example, maggie & nina's night locked in the café – some parts of the dialogue in later episodes made out that they'd had some rly deep conversation abt how they feel about each other or even that they'd had an affair, but that isn't clear from those scenes in the café. i'm not saying we had to see that conversation in its entirety but that there needed to be more connective details – either in dialogue or direction – that gave that part of the story coherence.

(there were pacing issues w the editing too but i don't want to jump down the editor's throats on this one bc im more focused on writing & direction issues)

the second major problem that i mentioned in my tags yesterday is the protagonist shift, which is an issue that started in s1. aziraphale & crowley are side characters in book gomens – significant ones, yeah, but still somewhat peripheral to adam (& anathema who counts as a deuteragonist imo). this works incredibly well w who they are as characters: they're Just Some Guys who happen to be involved in this epic biblical-level bureaucratic nightmare and importantly, they don't want to be in the spotlight. the arrangement was created so that they could explore what it meant to be themselves away from the Big Narrative; literally any time they get involved in larger affairs is bc the plot is alive and caught them unionising on company time. the last fucking chapter is adam (& god) being like haha u guys are alright keep it sleezy and letting them go. like. hello. neil u let them go.

but then!! tv gomens s1 does something interesting at the end w the body swapping addition that i dont totally hate – it gives aziraphale & crowley the extra bit of character work that brings them slightly more adjacent to their book selves. see i kinda view tv a/c as the younger, less settled versions of book a/c; they're still caught up in the immediacy of being key players and haven't fully realised that earth is their home. i haven't watched s1 in a while but one scene i remember rly clearly is crowley throwing all those astronomy texts in the air and angsting abt when he was an angel; i remember it bc his anguish in that scene feels a lot newer and rawer than book crowley's feelings about falling. when tv a/c do their bodyswap, it gives them the chance to land a blow against heaven/hell in a way that solidifies their allegiance to earth in a way that more closely resembles what book a/c have been abt the entire time (still adjacent, though. not parallel).

the reason why this works is that it does one final pivot to orient aziraphale and crowley as almost-main characters in a manner that makes sense in relation to a) their book selves and b) the position the tv show has placed them in. a combination of factors made tv a/c feel a lot less mature than their book counterparts but at the end of s1 they're sort of facing the same direction the book ended in, albeit through their own flashy late 2010s means.

when s2 was announced i was.......apprehensive bc to me, that felt like a satisfactory ending. i get the impression that amazon saw how wildly successful the adaptation was and was like oh shit we could make way more money out of this and neilman, having all those undead darlings that he and terry killed in the process of whittling the book into a workable novel, jumped at the chance to resurrect all those half-realised ideas. but not only were those ideas probably discarded for a reason, they've either been laying in wait for years unworked or they're new inventions, which means they weren't molded in the way that the book had been. like i said before, book gomens underwent years of rewrites and creative collaboration, and i think that process was what made it so good; s2 didn't have that. even if some of terry's ideas made it into s2, his influence is still missing bc he and neilman weren't in dialogue the same way they were in the book (and in some ways s1 bc i know terry was involved in the process of adapting gomens to screen before his death).

i don't think it's a case of newer fans forgetting terry so much as it is the context of terry's involvement being so removed from the current circumstances that certain aspects & discourses (i.e. is the s2 finale queerbaiting (no), does binge watching change the viewership experience (yes), etc etc) about the show overshadow other discussions that would usually be taking place. and before anyone says it's a case of neilman forgetting terry, i definitely don't think it's that either bc thats. yknow. wildly disrespectful. but also there are larger systems and structures at play than one writer no matter how much beef i have w him and his decisions, bc ultimately he's just one guy (a powerful and wealthy guy, but just a guy) and there's a wider cultural shift happening rn towards rehashing old stories without understanding what made them successful in the first place, and that same culture just doesn't allow for much, if any, constructive discourse analysis

so yeah

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

the title of the AU is officially "Jurassic Park: It's Ironic". the name of the park in-universe is The Birdcage. the AU will be primarily based off of the film Jurassic Park, rather than the book.

we're crowdsourcing this work of birdie fiction my friends

the terror birds are waiting...

[24frameslalla]

INTERVIEWER: One of your contemporaries said that one important aspect of In Cold Blood was your decision to use anamorphic lenses. He felt that it placed the picture just slightly outside of the documentary style and therefore it was able to involve people deeper with it on a dramatic, storytelling level. Would you be inclined to agree with that?

CONRAD HALL: Absolutely, I agree with that. It's definitely a dramatic film rather than a documentary film. But Richard Brooks's concept of that film was to make it very real. So he chose to shoot it in the actual locations where the story took place to bring realities to it that were outside normal film realities. Normally you go to a set and shoot it there or you find a location that's like where it happened. But to shoot a film where it actually took place, especially a murder story, is quite an unusual and innovative concept. So the documentariness of it was wanted and was thought of in those areas. It's real. But that had nothing to do with the framework of how you mount this reality….using the anamorphic lenses makes for a dramatic proscenium for a documentary.

INTERVIEWER: It takes it one step out of that documentary format and brings it closer to…

CONRAD HALL: It's like going to the L.A. Coliseum to see a Little League baseball game: in other words, it's not normally what you'd be accustomed to seeing this style in. It��s a different proscenium that makes it more dramatic.

INTERVIEWER: How did you go about lighting the locations for that dramatic effect?

CONRAD HALL: I chose dramatic lighting —lighting that was clean and uncluttered. But I think the basic technique or idea was to be very precise about what you were lighting and what you were showing. I tried to let blackness or non-visibility be a very dramatic element. I tried to use the blackness as a character in that film.

INTERVIEWER: So then you didn't stick to source lighting-I mean, your primary consideration was to create an effect. So I guess you deviated from the normal source lighting that you would find in a farmhouse.

CONRAD HALL: Well it all depends on what you think source lighting is. Is source lighting something in which you see a source in the frame or is it light that you know where it comes from but you don't see the source? Do you see what I mean?

INTERVIEWER: Whether it's justified or not?

CONRAD HALL: Yes, and I think I'm basically always justifying light. There's no question about that; that's the only way I can understand it: to know where it comes from. Then I can know what to do with it. To dream up places that light doesn't come from is an exercise in despair for me. I don't know how to think that way. I can't organize I unless I know it comes from someplace. But whether the place the light comes from is in the frame or not, that's not important to me. For example, I could have a lamp next to you and it would not be the major source of light on you. Now is that source lighting or not? But obviously there's a brighter source someplace else; i you had a chance to look around in this room, you would see that source and i would be justified.

- from the book, Masters of Light

[duhragonball]

Journey to the West ch.7-69

So I've been kind of inactive on this blog for a few weeks, and that's mainly because I've been trying to catch up on unread comic books, and also the 16th Century Chinese novel, Journey to the West. I am large, I contain multitudes.

I meant to document my thoughts on the book more often than this. Back in... wow, January, I wrote about the first six chapters, and then I got up to about chapter 27 and fell behind. This week, I finally caught up to @journeytothewest-daily , whose mailing list got me to read the book in the first place, and I've finally managed to pull ahead.

I feel like the book has become easier to read. That probably has more to do with me than the book, as I feel like I've gotten acclimated to the writing style and the episodic format.

The early chapters basically set up the characters. Sun Wukong gets an origin story, Tripitaka Tang gets an origin story, and then they get paired up and add Eight Rules and Sha Monk to their sqaud. Oh, and the talking horse. He doesn't talk much, so it's easy to forget about him. Once the main cast is assembled, the other 80% of the book is just these guys journeying to the west, and it settles into a pretty simple formula.

The monks come across some obstacle, settlement, or town, and they need to obtain food, lodging, travel papers, or a path forward.

While working on that, some bad guy shows up and captures Tripitaka Tang. Usually, this is a demon who believes that eating Tripitaka Tang will make him immortal, but they don't want to eat him right away, so they make plans to invite guests and marinate him really good or whatever.

Sun Wukong has to save his master, which ought to be ridiculously easy, since Sun Wukong has 8,000,000,000 super powers, but somehow it never goes quite right, so he has to fly to various supernatural realms to seek help from various divine figures in Chinese mythology.

Eight Rules might hit the bad guy with his rake during the fight. This usually doesn't matter, but I give him credit for trying. There's a surprising amount of poetry about rakes in this book. Like, it's a magic rake with its own fantastic powers or whatever, but Wukong's so ridiculously OP that it's just a distraction.

Sha Monk is a character who is also in the story.

Also Buddha and the Bodhisattva Guanyin sometimes reveal that they arranged for a bad guy to capture Tripitaka Tang, just to satisfy the requisite hardship he has to endure for this pilgrimage.

And once you get accustomed to the flow of this formula, it gets pretty cozy. I think I struggled with the early parts of the novel because it was setting up a situation I wasn't too familiar with. Also, I was looking for parallels to Dragon Ball, which was directly inspired by Journey to the West, but the connections are subtler than I expected. Once I got the lay of the land, it got easier to follow.

For me, the most interesting feature of the story is the power imbalance. Sun Wukong can basically do anything go anywhere and he's nigh indestructible, and all the gods seem to wholly support him now that he's Tang's disciple, so he can always get divine help whenever he asks for it. I see people complaining that characters like Superman are too powerful to work in storytelling, except Sun Wukong could one-shot an army of Supermans with a single stroke of his magic staff, then bring them back to life by petitioning the gods of the underworld, then kill them again by asking the Jade Emperor to do it for him. And yet Journey to the West still works in spite of this. Everyone who complains about Superman being too powerful needs to read JTTW, so they can see that they were proven wrong 500 years ago.

It is a problem, though, and it seems like the author is aware of it. At one point early in the journey, Eight Rules asks Sun Wukong why he doesn't just carry their master to their destination on his magic cloud. Wukong explains that he can't, because the magic that allows him to travel so quickly on the cloud doesn't work for human passengers. So he can go all over the world (and beyond) to find allies and information to help Tang, but he can't act as transportation. Despite all the divine intervention and supernatural helpers he has, Tang still has to make the journey himself. Wukong and the others can protect him and help him, but they can't do it for him.

And that's Sun Wukong's great weakness. He's invincible, but Tripitaka Tang is not, and if Tang dies, Wukong's mission is a failure. And this is no small thing, because Wukong's entire reason for being in this part of the story is to accompany the Tang Monk. Twice so far, they've had a falling out, and the Tang Monk basically kicked him out of the group, and Wukong very quickly realized he has nowhere else to go, and nothing else to do. For all his vast power, his purpose in life is defined by a very small, fragile thing.

So it's interesting to see how the author tries to balance Wukong's powers with the plot. Obviously there's the Tight Fillet, the golden band on his head which can cause him excruciating pain whenever Tang recites a spell. But there's also other items out there that can give Wukong some difficulty, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the bad guys on the way to India are more challenging than all the good guy supernatural characters that Wukong bullied in his youth. It's a lot easier to fight when you have no particular objective and nothing to protect, and your opponents were just minding their own business and trying to go about their day. Escorting the Tang Monk isn't just a job that Wukong has to do to make up for his past mischief; the problems he encounters along the way reflect the kind of trouble he used to cause. By doing this mission, he's forced to be on the receiving end for a change.

I think, as time went on, later writers started confronting the problem more directly. Dracula had a lot of powers, but Bram Stoker managed to give him enough weaknesses to suspend disbelief. Superman has his Kryptonite, but I think what really mattered was when characters like Superman started teaming up on a regular basis, and it became clear that the weaker characters needed to have some way to be relevant to the story. A lot of creative solutions have been developed over time, but unfortunately those don't seem to have been around in the 1500's, so Sha Monk just sort of stands around while the action unfolds. When you're the third-strongest disciple, and the strongest one doesn't need your help, what else is there?

[pallases]

21, 36, 47 for book asks <3

21. The book(s) on your school reading list you actually enjoyed.

this one depends on your definition of school reading list. when i took ap lit, during the second semester we shifted to small group choice readings and mine were pride and prejudice, volume 1 of les mis, and jurassic park all of which i thoroughly enjoyed. also pre-ap lit we were given a pretty lengthy list of books to choose a summer reading from and i picked a tale of two cities which i also really liked madame defarge was sooo fascinating to me

but if we’re sticking strictly to like. class-wide assigned readings i had fun with frankenstein :] shakespeare’s works too, though i think i would appreciate them much more today. and the things they carried by tim o’brien!! it’s a collection of short stories abt the vietnam war, semi-autobiographical, i really liked the writing style and formatting and it had a lot of interesting things to say abt war and storytelling

also maybe the book thief? this was in eighth grade when i was on some sort of individual advanced track and i think my teacher might have given me some books to choose from and i picked that. but not sure i might have just been straight up assigned it. regardless i loved it. other than that there weren’t many assigned readings that i didn’t like on some level these are just the ones that stick out now

36. Your absolute most favorite character(s) from any book you've ever read.

i think gansey might take the cake <3 he is just so very endearing and resonant. i would need to reread again to say for certain though bc the first time i read trc my favorite was v much adam then i reread and it slowly shifted to gansey idk which of the two i would like better if i read it now or if it would change to a different character altogether. but at this moment in time probably gansey yeah

47. What are the last three books you read?

answered here!

— bookworm asks!

[kylesvariouslistsandstuff]

SPYRO THE DRAGON In The Style Of THE LAST WISH

Here I go again about PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH, a movie that is over two months old and is finally out on physical media formats. I snatched up a copy on release day, in the aftermath of a nasty snowstorm. It was the Target exclusive edition that came with a small 40-page art gallery book, much like the BAD GUYS release that they did. Too bad those editions didn't have the 4K disc. What's up with that?

Anyways, one thing that really struck me about PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH, more so than most of the aspects it has been getting heaps of praise for... Whether it's the themes of valuing one's life and realizing that those who care about you are more important than some perceived glory, or the filmmakers' willingness to go quite hard with a story that's suitable for most children to watch, or the absolutely cool look of the movie... The thing that struck me, personally... I pointed out in my Letterboxd review and another post on here...

There's such a lovely, airy, dreamy, borderline-ethereal tone to this movie that I feel is completely unique to this one movie in the SHREK franchise. It still keeps some of that old-school adventure movie vibe that the first PUSS IN BOOTS movie was going for (Zorro/Three Musketeers/spaghetti westerns/etc.), and it taps back into the SHREK movies' farcical fairy tale stuff (but executes it differently), but the vibe they go for here felt fresh and new. The SPIDER-VERSE-inspired visuals and animation techniques certainly add to that, as it does eschew the ornate detailing of the other SHREKs/PUSS IN BOOTS Uno - and most computer animation films made for a good 20 years, from TOY STORY up until this past decade - for something more like a painted storybook illustration. But no, by the middle of the movie, I was really wrapped up in this movie's feel. Like, even that final shot of Far, Far Away... It just felt so different from what we've seen and known, and if SHREK 5 looks/feels like this does? Hoooo mama.

It ignited so much of my imagination while watching, the way a really striking movie does. I've always loved the fantastical of all kinds, and the dreamy fairy tale aesthetic is one I've always had a soft spot for. The bright colors, magic being everywhere, occasional threat and darkness, beauty in the ethereal, stories operating on dream-like logic more so than a conventional plot. The latter example, I feel, is what separates this movie from SHREK 1-4 and the first PUSS. Those are more conventionally plotted, with fantasy characters and weird elements in them, THE LAST WISH veers more towards the dreamlike quality of a fairy tale. That's especially true of the entire block of the movie that takes place within "The Dark Forest", whatever that dimension may be. But even the scenes outside of that are a bit like that, too. Puss' battle with the giant in Del Mar goes from a Three Musketeers actioner to, like, SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS or something. The filmmakers use animation to transport us into Puss' mind, his feelings, how he's experiencing his "legendary" fight with a behemoth! Hence the flourishes like the dashing lines and effects, the anime-inspired action beats, and so on.

I'm tangenting here, in true form. But yes, the dream-like storytelling, embracing the unreal qualities... It's part of why I love, say, the early Disney animated films of the Walt years so much. Or something like Marcell Jankovics' SON OF THE WHITE MARE (a film that I highly recommend if you've never seen it, it will completely boom your mind open to what an animated fantasy film could look and feel like). It's refreshing to see fantasy like that still thriving...

So, this brings me to... Of all things... SPYRO THE DRAGON.

SPYRO THE DRAGON played an important role in my life as a creator and artist, and I'm not only talking about the original trilogy of games developed for the PlayStation by Insomniac in the late 1990s, I'm talking about the first game specifically.

The original SPYRO THE DRAGON indeed feels kind of sparse and minimal compared to its much-more involved sequels, but part of me really loves it for that... The environments are certainly less populated and feel kind of lonely, I do love and enjoy the company we get in SPYRO 2: RIPTO'S RAGE (GATEWAY TO GLIMMER for any fellow Europeans reading) and SPYRO: YEAR OF THE DRAGON... Yet in a weird way, that almost services everything else. Stewart Copeland's score is also minimal in a way, airy and less genre-buffet like the later games are. Like in SPYRO 2, you have levels like "Zephyr" where the soundscore goes from an acoustic piece with all this weird stuff going on in the background to a completely out-of-the-blue banjo solo, like *that is* great stuff... But in the first game, it's a lot more straightforward. For each and every home world and its individual levels, rather than one level having a wildly eclectic piece of music accompanying it. The Artisan world is cozy and inviting, as a more homey and first hub world should be. The Magic Crafters and Dream Weavers worlds feel so airy and magical, the Peace Keepers world is a little more assertive and harsher in its score given its militaristic desert setting and quite buff dragon population. The Beast Makers' world is shadowy and eerie, yet still effective and beautiful in a way I might not be able to really articulate. Other than that, there are fairies and magic all around, whirlwinds that take you places, all sorts of weird-looking enemies...

SPYRO THE DRAGON feels like a PlayStation One fairy tale. If something like CRASH BANDICOOT was an adventurous Looney Tunes/Tex Avery homage, then SPYRO 1 is a fairy tale. SPYRO 2 and 3 bring it more into fantasy adventure/cartoon territory. What with talking cheetahs and professor moles and more advanced worlds and such. Think levels like Robotica Farms and Metropolis and such. That isn't to say SPYRO 1 didn't have some of that, though. After all, the Beast Makers world was home to Gnorc enemies using electricity, and the final boss in that world was a giant robot using electrified poles to make it operate. But I feel that outside of those few elements, SPYRO 2 and 3 pushed further in a different direction. Again, you have characters like Hunter and the Professor and things like the roller coaster/carnival attractions in Dragon Shores, tech-based levels, silly things like farm animals with saucers and laser guns waging war on a robot city, etc. Like, SPYRO 2 and 3 feel like Disney TV Animation cartoons from the 1987-1994 period, and other such adventure cartoons. The likes of DUCKTALES, TALESPIN, etc. And I mean that in the best way possible. But for comparison's sake, SPYRO 1 is more SNOW WHITE and SLEEPING BEAUTY and early Disney animated films like those, SPYRO 2 & 3 are more Disney Afternoon cartoons. And yet, some of that dream fairy tale quality is not lost in the sequels. One level in SPYRO 3 that always stuck out to me was Charmed Ridge, like it could've very well have been plucked out of the first game if not for the absence of bigger dragons to rescue and the abundance of characters you just wouldn't see in the first game.

But then you strip away the dreamy feel of SPYRO 1, and you've got a stock cartoon set-up. In fact, the bookend cutscenes in the game show the adult dragons being interviewed, complete with boom mics and an offscreen voice saying "Ok, rolling-" It's not taking itself too seriously. Actually, I thought the REIGNITED TRILOGY version of SPYRO 1 did something clever by having Gnasty Gnorc be watching all of this on TV. In the original, he seemed to have overheard the dragons calling him "ugly" and such from faaaaar away... In REIGNITED, he's watching the live interview on an old-fashioned TV. The one element that clashes with the otherwise fantastical, medieval/fairy tale times setting of the first game. Going back to the PS1 version the first SPYRO game, it's understandable. This was Insomniac's 2nd ever game, and their first major success commercially. SUPER MARIO BROS., SONIC THE HEDGEHOG, and CRASH BANDICOOT are kind of barebones first installments when you get down to it, with the sequels adding more and more cool stuff and expanding the worlds/stories along the way, as their respective developers have learned more from their experiences making the first one. Lather, rinse, repeat. So yes, SPYRO THE DRAGON is quite simple: Evil guy with scepter freezes all of your kind and turns your world's treasure into bad guys, standard collect-a-thon set-up. It's 2 & 3 where things get fleshed out more.

So... SPYRO THE DRAGON... PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH... What's the connection outside of how I personally link them up based on some similar qualities?

Well, I would love to see an animated SPYRO THE DRAGON movie. Or a TV series. Anything.

It's a purple dragon with a bit of an attitude that torches bad guys and lives in a cool fantastical world, what's **not** to animate? It's shocking that even Crash Bandicoot doesn't have a feature or a cartoon series. I get it, these things are complicated. SUPER MARIO BROS. got a live-action movie adaptation in 1993 that did so badly, that Nintendo pretty much ruled out big-time movie adaptations of their properties, excluding POKEMON. That a big-time animated Mario movie is coming out now, in 2023, says a lot. Nintendo was super-protective of their IP for so long, and THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE's success (it's inevitable) could only mean more Nintendo movies and shows down the line. SONIC THE HEDGEHOG got the big-time movie treatment merely 3 years ago in the form of a live-action/animation hybrid, then a second movie last year, and now there's a third movie on the way. Lots of other video game adaptations were live-action movies, some with lots of VFX animation and some not so much... Most of them did either so-so or poorly. The 2020 Jeff Fowler-directed SONIC THE HEDGEHOG movie and this new SUPER MARIO BROS. film from directors Mike Jelenic and Aaron Horvath mark a major change in video game movies, I feel. This isn't merely a once-in-a-few-years modest success like the 1995 MORTAL KOMBAT movie or the 2001 LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER movie, or a video game-inspired movie like FREE GUY or READY PLAYER ONE, to say nothing of Disney Animation's WRECK-IT RALPH duology... No, I feel Mario and Sonic themselves have possibly... Broke the dam, and the flood is gonna flooooow-

But, I always wanted to see a SPYRO THE DRAGON movie... And I feel, post-SPIDER-VERSE, post-MITCHELLS VS. THE MACHINES, post-BAD GUYS, post-LAST WISH, post-ARCANE, etc. etc. We're now in this era of painterly, beautifully-stylized computer animation films... I would say CG or CGI films for short, but it's weird using the term "computer-generated" in a day and age of what... Ay-Eye is being used for. Ick. Anyways, we're past ornate detailing and hyperrealism, these films are pushing stylization and giving us illustrations, paintings, concept art pieces... But living and moving. THE LAST WISH is the latest in this train of super-cool movies... So then I pictured it... something like SPYRO THE DRAGON done like that!

I know I'd personally love to see it, I feel that style suits it so wonderfully...

[rockislandadultreads]

Book Recommendations: National Tell A Fairy Tale Day

Clockwork Fairy Tales edited by Stephen L. Antczak & James C. Bassett

Combining the timeless fairy tales that we all read as children with the out-of-time technological wizardry that is steampunk, this collection of stories blends the old and the new in ways sure to engage every fantasy reader.…

Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s "The Red Shoes", New York Times bestselling author K. W. Jeter’s "La Valse" forges a fable about love, the decadence of technology, and a gala dance that becomes the obsession of a young engineer - and the doom of those who partake in it.…

In "You Will Attend Until Beauty Awakens", national bestselling author and John W. Campbell Award winner Jay Lake tells the story of Sleeping Beauty - and how the princess was conceived in deception, raised in danger, and rescued by a prince who may be less than valiant.

The tale of "The Tinderbox" takes a turn into the surreal when a damaged young soldier comes into possession of an intricate, treacherous treasure and is drawn into a mission of mercy in national bestselling author Kat Richardson’s "The Hollow Hounds".

In "The Kings of Mount Golden", Hugo and World Fantasy Award nominee Paul Di Filippo tells the story of a young man’s search for his heritage and a mechanical marvel that lies at the heart of a sinister pact in this fascinating take on "The King of the Golden Mountain".

Other Ever Afters by Melanie Gillman

Once upon a time... happily ever after turned out differently than expected. In this new, feminist, queer fairy-tale collection, you’ll find the princesses, mermaids, knights, barmaids, children, and wise old women who have been forced to sit on the sidelines in classic stories taking center stage. A gorgeous all-new collection in graphic novel format from a Stonewall Honor-winning author and artist.

What if the giant who abducted you was actually thoughtful and kind? What if you didn’t want to marry your handsome, popular, but cold-inside suitor? What if your one true love has all the responsibilities that come with running a kingdom?

Award-winning author Melanie Gillman’s phenomenal colored-pencil art creates another "ever after" for the characters who are most worthy of it.

The Original Folk & Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm edited by Jack Zipes

When Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published their "Children's and Household Tales" in 1812, followed by a second volume in 1815, they had no idea that such stories as "Rapunzel," "Hansel and Gretel," and "Cinderella" would become the most celebrated in the world. Yet few people today are familiar with the majority of tales from the two early volumes, since in the next four decades the Grimms would publish six other editions, each extensively revised in content and style. For the very first time, " The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm" makes available in English all 156 stories from the 1812 and 1815 editions. These narrative gems, newly translated and brought together in one beautiful book, are accompanied by sumptuous new illustrations from award-winning artist Andrea Dezso.

From "The Frog King" to "The Golden Key," wondrous worlds unfold - heroes and heroines are rewarded, weaker animals triumph over the strong, and simple bumpkins prove themselves not so simple after all. Esteemed fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes offers accessible translations that retain the spare description and engaging storytelling style of the originals. Indeed, this is what makes the tales from the 1812 and 1815 editions unique - they reflect diverse voices, rooted in oral traditions, that are absent from the Grimms' later, more embellished collections of tales. Zipes's introduction gives important historical context, and the book includes the Grimms' prefaces and notes.

Celtic Fairy Tales edited by Joseph Jacobs

Joseph Jacobs collected these fairy stories in the closing days of the nineteenth century. They are engaging brief episodes of fancy and fantasy from the oral tradition, which were designed to engage and fascinate the young mind. In this fast-paced, electronic world where life whizzes and fizzes by, it is a comfort and joy to pause awhile to savour such delights from a simpler and less pressured age. Reading one of these stories is the literary equivalent of stepping into the quiet and majesty of a medieval church or a circle of standing stones. In the twenty-first century there is a renewed appetite for magic, fairies, and fantastic worlds. With Celtic Fairy Tales, we are not only entertained but can also feel the gentle spiritual hand of history resting on our shoulders.

[dipperdesperado]

Transmedia Storytelling, Zines, and Solarpunk

I think that transmedia storytelling is like a superpower for creatives in the modern era. In a weird way, it feels like a mirror for how we experience life and share culture. For my friends that I don’t talk to every day, I can keep up with them on social media. They use different social media for different purposes. If I want to know what they’re doing in an unfiltered way, I go to BeReal. If I want to see the coolest things they’ve done recently, I go to Instagram. If I wanna see how they interact with their family, I go to Facebook. On any given day, I can take all of these story fragments, and use them to create a mosaic of their life. I can use the story fragments to craft a full, cohesive narrative, that is more engaging than if it was just given to me all at once. There’s just something so fun about putting the puzzle pieces together.

At its most foundational level, transmedia storytelling is the process of making stories fractal. This allows you to tell a story that can be told through movies, books, comics, games, and other mediums, each offering a unique perspective on the same story world.

One of the reasons that transmedia storytelling is so powerful is that it allows for a more immersive and engaging experience. Instead of being given a complete story all at once, in one form, transmedia storytelling allows the audience to piece together the story themselves by consuming different parts of it through different mediums. This creates a conversation between the story and the audience and gives the audience some ownership.

There are a few examples of transmedia storytelling, with franchises like Star Wars and Assassin's Creed, which have expanded their stories through movies, books, comics, and games. The SCP Foundation is another example, with its entries, films, and games all contributing to the same story world.

Now that we have a good understanding of transmedia storytelling, I want to get into a transmedia project that I want to try.

To test out this model, I plan to create a small, intimate story world across a couple of different mediums using a process that is focused on co-creation, liberatory design, and radical inclusion and diversity. By working closely with the intended audience and prioritizing unique perspectives and experiences, I believe that transmedia storytelling can be a powerful force for change in the modern era.

One of the most classic ways to share unique perspectives is through the zine format. They’ve gone in and out of style within the past few years, but I think it’s a great way to share unique ideas. I want to make a zine that acts as a hub for different pieces of solarpunk stuff from art to nonfiction essays and direct action, where all of the pieces connect to tell a larger story.

I think the first issue will be a solo effort, with my own works, and then future issues will be collaborations between me and whoever else makes cool solarpunk stuff.

[denimbex1986]

'Love him or hate him, there’s no denying that Christopher Nolan has had a singular impact on the American film industry. It’s almost depressing how many of his epithets are preceded by “the last.” He’s essentially the last director who receives consistent blank checks to make original films. The last director whose name is enough to pique the general public’s interest, regardless of subject matter. And the last director who could make a three hour biopic and have it (successfully!) marketed as a summer blockbuster.

At least for now.

Whether Nolan’s consistent success is a sign of better days to come in Hollywood or a final hurrah for a dying industry, his influence remains unparalleled. He forever redefined the superhero movie — creating a template that’s often repeated but never duplicated — with his groundbreaking trilogy of Batman movies. He could have rested on his comic book laurels forever after the cultural phenomenon that was “The Dark Knight,” but he quickly proved that his original ideas were equally marketable with the groundbreaking “Inception.” It was immediately clear that Hollywood had found its next great blockbuster filmmaker.

For the next decade, Nolan took advantage of his newfound creative freedom by making a wide range of original blockbusters. Films like “Interstellar” and “Tenet” had a tendency to reinforce everyone’s strongest opinions about him. To some, he was a man of unparalleled brilliance with an unprecedented ability to infuse popcorn storytelling with hard science. To others, he was a cold filmmaker who hid behind complex storytelling devices to make films that were designed to impress viewers rather than move them.

The truth is somewhere in between. Any serious criticism of Nolan has to begin with an acknowledgement of his talent, and any hagiography has to recognize that the same criticisms of his films have emerged again and again. One thing that’s abundantly clear is that Nolan has developed an instantly recognizable style. From his commitment to analog techniques and epic exhibition formats to his sleek color palettes and not-so-sleek sound design, you always know a Christopher Nolan movie when you see one. Keep reading for our primer on the stylistic elements that set the “Oppenheimer” director apart from his peers.

Scientific Subject Matter

Nolan has always demonstrated a fascination with the workings of the universe and the people who study it. This is reflected in blockbusters like “Interstellar” and “Tenet,” which make a point of grounding their time travel stories in rigorous scientific research and turning scientists into heroes in their own right. That fascination extended to “Oppenheimer,” which saw Nolan continue to explore the theme of balancing human emotions against a mathematically cold universe – albeit this time through the eyes of one nuclear physicist.

Cool Color Palettes

Nolan is sometimes unfairly branded as an excessively dark visual filmmaker, in large part because three of his first major features were Batman movies that required lots of black design elements. He has since proven that he’s capable of working with a variety of other colors, but his films often stick to cooler palettes. He uses multiple shades to create texture and depth, giving his films a consistent aesthetic without feeling monochromatic.

Abrasive Sound Design

One of Nolan’s more polarizing trademarks is his commitment to building out his cold cinematic worlds through aggressive sound design. His films are often fueled by booming scores that sound particularly abrasive in his preferred IMAX theaters. Some feel like his grinding soundscapes make it harder to hear his actors – an effect that’s compounded by his refusal to re-record dialogue in post-production.

Repeat Collaborators

Like many great directors, Nolan likes to return to the same ensemble of actors over and over again. Familiar faces include Cillian Murphy, Michael Caine, Kenneth Branagh, and Tom Hardy. He also frequently re-teams with below-the-line collaborators including cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and composers Hans Zimmer and Ludwig Göransson.

Creative Uses of Time

It’s entirely possible that no filmmaker has ever been more fascinated with the passage of time than Christopher Nolan. Many of his screenplays involve time unfolding in non-linear fashions, either because of creative writing devices (see: the reversed structure of “Memento” or the multiple perspectives in “Oppenheimer”) or because the story involves sci-fi riffs on relativity (see: “Inception,” “Interstellar,” and “Tenet”).

Large Film Formats

Nolan has remained deeply committed to analog film formats, preferring theatrical distribution over streaming and celluloid film over digital cameras. Those combined passions have turned him into one of the most prominent evangelists for IMAX and 70mm exhibitions. In addition to releasing rolling his films out in IMAX theaters, he consistently makes a point to shoot on large scale cameras and edit on IMAX screens to ensure that he captures spectacle in the largest formats available to him. This often results in wide shots that are truly breathtaking in scope.

Naturalistic Lighting

Even on his most outlandish genre projects, Nolan has consistently relied on naturalistic lighting to illuminate his scenes. Rather than saturate the frame with hazy colors or stylized tones, he allows his lighting to play out similarly to the way it would look in the real world. In addition to demonstrating his knack for shot composition, this helps infuse his sci-fi projects with a sense of naturalism that adds to his perception as a cerebral blockbuster filmmaker.

Practical Effects

Nolan’s longstanding commitment to making his own practical effects (as opposed to using CGI) is the stuff of legend among film geeks. He goes to great lengths to ensure that no shot is entirely computer generated, even creating J. Robert Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb test using a combination of practical explosions and forced perspective.'

[moonandmustache]

Review: “Heartstopper (Volume 1) by Alice Oseman

OVERVIEW

For this category, I selected the first book in the Heartstopper series. I had a lot of books I was considering for this category and just couldn’t pick one from (very long) short list.  So, I did what I do in such situations and consulted an expert and asked my friend Aaron’s teenage daughter who is an avid reader and this was her suggestion. Aaron actually said their whole family has been reading this series and it’s much loved by all so I was sold.

The story is presented in graphic novel format and the visual storytelling works well overall for the narrative. The author/illustrator does some interesting visual things here and there but it’s not really drawn well at all. It’s hard to tell the characters apart because everyone looks basically the same and there are barely any backgrounds for most of the story so it’s just talking heads in fields of white. It’s interesting that this was adapted for the screen because the drawing style feels like a quickly-drawn storyboard for a future film production.

I read online that this graphic novel is based on very minor characters in another of the author’s books. Heartstopper was originally published as a webcomic on the author’s blog and that is exactly what this feels like visually–a quick collection of webcomics assembled not intended for print but that was printed later. The serial nature of a web comic also helps explain the episodic nature of each little scene. It’s not that the story doesn’t flow or feels choppy, just that it’s clear that it was drawn a few pages at a time over many weeks or months. At the time of this post, I’ve only read the first volume but I am definitely curious to see if the later volumes intended for print are drawn in a more thoughtful way.

RELEVANCE

This book is very age-relevant as it focuses entirely on high school-age characters. The characters are not terribly deep and the story is very straightward but nonetheless it feels very real.  It’s a very relatable story for teens as it involves a situation many teens find themselves in–a friendship that blossoms into a crush which may or may not be mutual; in this story it is mutual and that leads to an eventual first kiss and (maybe in later volumes?) first relationship. It’s a very sweet (somewhat predictable and optimistic) high school romance story of the “opposites attract” variety. For LGBTQIA+ teens it’s relatable as a coming out story, as a story of falling for someone who may not even be gay, and the possibly familiar and often toxic “friends with benefits” sort of situation.

DIVERSITY/INCLUSION

This book focuses almost entirely on white teenagers at a private all boys school. There are two peripheral characters in the main character’s circle who are not white–Tao Xu, a fellow student, and (I think) Tara Jones, a student from another school who appears briefly towards the end of the story. The author/illustrator, Alice Oseman, is white, British, and identifies as an aromantic asexual. So, other than the fact that it’s an LGBTQIA+ love story with an LGBTQIA+ author, it’s not very diverse in any other way.

DIVERSE BOOKS WITH SIMILAR THEMES

Albertalli, B + Silvera, A. (2018). What If It’s Us?. Harper Teen.

Kobabe, M. (2019). Gender Queer. Oni Press.

La Sala, R. (2021). Be Dazzled. Sourcebook Fire.

Panetta, K. + Ganucheau, S. (2019). Bloom. First Second.

Sie, J. (2021). All Kinds of Other. Quill Tree

[sixohsixoheightfourtwo]

watchlist tag game!

tagged by @telomeke !

got a bit long so behind the cut

Currently watching -

A Boss and a Babe (Thailand 2023 / GMMTV) - watching this weekly. ok . LISTEN. I said some stuff in the tags of my first reblog about this series, when i had only seen the trailer, basically that it looked like they absolutely nailed what they were going for in terms of the tone, the dynamic, the chemistry, that it might be a bit silly but it looked GOOD. and . i stand by this!

I know there are people who aren't enjoying it... there always are. There are also people who have beef with Force & Book's previous series who are carrying that prejudice into this show. (imo enchante's biggest crime was that filter they used. everyone looking weirdly smooth. freaky tbh.) (also the last 2 eps were basically unnecessary but let's not get into it.) I feel like I saw a lot of people esp. at the beginning making excuses for watching ABAAB - saying well of course it's not good it's not doing anything new, someone even saying 'it's so bad it's good' - which baffles me lol. SO not how I feel about it! it's good! if you like it just accept it; if it's not for you it's not for you.

any way . Force + Book have really nice chemistry, great at showing the characters' comfort / ease / gentle loving care for each other without a lot of fireworks or histrionics. And tbh not a lot of like - tension even! they're too comfortable for there to be tension! eg. the scene where Cher helps Gun unbutton his shirt and they both go very quiet about it. & the scene where Gun accidentally crashes cher's livestream and he's not even really mad about it. It feels kind of like My School President in the tone it's going for, in that it's a bit silly and light but there is some substance beneath it and it can be cute but actually not overly NICE. And it feels like it's progressing towards a more natural idea of how a relationship develops than certain older bl which can be a bit all or nothing (eg. i JUST watched tonhon chonlatee .. scream) And this is surely gmmtv's first office bl since Sotus S which was five years ago? w/ever I feel like this series is maybe a bigger deal than it looks. Also it's a perfect non stressful weekly watch. (really feel like i almost DIED watching NLMG week to week.) check back in with me in uhh six weeks or whenever it's done.

Our Dating Sim (South Korea 2023 / Viki) - watching bc people on my dash were really into it. I'm two eps in and it's well done but it's not making me CRAZY the way I always want to be made crazy. I do love the k-bl short series format and the k-bl style of storytelling often gets to me quite intensely so I'm hopeful.

Bokura no Shokutaku/ Our Dining Table (Japan 2023) - one ep in. made me crave onigiri soso bad. I haven't read the original manga so I am watching fresh, no expectations. the first ep was totally delightful.

SUCCESSION - watching it weekly with one of my siblings . if u follow me u will know I am deeply into it & even a little weird about it & have been since november 2020. hashtag tomgreg rights hashtag kenstewy rights hashtag tomshiv rights. here's my hot take: in some ways i think the most recent ep was BETTER than the previous one.

Riverdale - watching it weekly ... admittedly usually while doing something else eg cooking. Listen. Riverdale is.. not explainable in any sensible way. If you know you know. Many things about it are stupid and unbearable but its derangement is unparalleled and i appreciate that. Almost no one is a full 3-d character it's like watching puppets.

How To with John Wilson - I absolutely love this series, it's on iPlayer in the UK but I think it's originally HBO. ep 1.6 How To Make Risotto actually haunts me. framed as a series of tutorials, it veers and goes off on tangents, in form it's kind of like visual essays edited together from .. fairly random footage shot on the streets of New York. with a lot of visual gags.

Looking forward to watching soon -

Our Skyy 2 ... truly .... I am going to be so insufferable for the next eight weeks. I'm planning to watch all of it - the only series I haven't watched is Star In My Mind. i WAS most anticipating the ATOTS episodes because i just want to see phupha + tian again. But NLMG and Eclipse and MSP look like they're doing some absolutely wild & funky things so yeah i am excited for all of it.

Only Friends - I think they've just started work on it right? but yeah. looking forward to getting a little unhinged about this.

The Eighth Sense - tbh I think i'm going to wait for it to finish before I watch it. I need some of the discourse to die down a bit so I can go in with the right frame of mind.

Still deciding if I’m gonna watch

Probably most of the upcoming GMMTV series I'll at least try but generally I like to read a few reactions before going in.

tagging @phneltwrites @brofisting @missionlameturtle @hexenmeisterer