#thank you classic sci-fi for all the ideas i borrowed | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

claudeng80 · 7 years

Text

Pressure

AU: Star Trek (Sequel to Historical Fiction)

Board Location: B4

Obi had not anticipated the romantic possibilities of the laboratories, but Shirayuki was quickly remedying the lack. His head thumped against the wall of the lab as Shirayuki pushed him, the feathery tendrils of a Rigellian climbing fern catching at his hair, the light glowing purple from the Zilm’kach blooming overhead. She had climbed onto a germination pod to reach him and he laughed, reaching out to steady her, but she reeled him in, twining her arms around his shoulders like the vines she cultivated, stealing his senses and throwing him off balance. He tilted back to lean against the wall again and it was her turn to laugh as he pulled her along.

It had been a week since he’d discovered Shirayuki using his likeness in a romance simulation and they’d kissed. His life had been remade. He went to work, but it passed in a haze. The only time that seemed real was the time he spent with her. His eyes met hers, a nearly level view for once, and he wondered how she’d hidden that look for so long, how he’d missed the way she saw him. He’d been too busy hiding his own feelings to look her in the eyes, most likely. But they saw each other now.

He trailed a hand across her lower back, feeling the curves of spine and hip, her little wiggle as his fingers came too close to her ticklish sides, the unconscious stretch as he pressed into the muscle along her spine. He hadn’t planned on giving her a massage, but she’d been on her feet most of the day already and if that was what she needed…

Her eyes said that was not what she needed, no matter how she curved and stretched under his hands and leaned forward into him. Her body lay against his from hip to breast now, and she slid her hands up into his hair, nails zinging electricity across his scalp. He couldn’t keep from gasping, and at the sound she leaned into him even further, belly pressing into his and cheekbone sliding along his jaw until her lips met the skin of his neck. For a breath she just held him, breathing him in, then she turned her head just the degree it took to latch her lips to the underside of his jaw.

His head fell back without conscious volition, and he’d never see that shade of purple again without feeling her lips and tongue working their way across his neck, pausing at his pulse, nibbling playfully on the tip of his chin. One hand left his head and drifted down his arm, and he was never happier to be out of uniform as when her fingers teased his bicep under the edge of his sleeve, smoothed across the inside of his elbow, then closed around his wrist.

He held his breath as she pulled back, wondering if he’d done something she didn’t like, and he couldn’t read her eyes. She looked like she was waiting, but he had no idea for what. She grunted as he loosened his hands from her back and pushed down on his wrists.

Someday he would learn that Shirayuki wasn’t so good with her words when it came to things she wanted. She either hid them (see fantasizing about him in the holodeck for who knows how long) or just showed him. She pulled his unresisting hands against her ass, eyes somehow shy even as she was fanning the roaring flames that made up his blood. He should question this, he should ask her what she wants, but he pulled her up closer, up on her toes on her box, then entirely off the ground. She grunted in pleased surprise and wrapped her legs around his hips, her hands pulling in his hair but he didn’t even care, she could be tearing it out in clumps and he still wouldn’t have been able to move, addicted to the air at her skin, warm and smelling of some unidentifiable flower.

Her shoulder was delicate and pale under the neck of her uniform, reddening where he nipped too hard, but her gasp was more pleased than pained. She peppered kisses along his hairline, any skin she could reach, and he understood, he wanted every spot of her kissed, loved-

At the sudden needle-sharp stab in his ears, Obi pulled back with a gasp. Alarms blared, adding to the pain, and Shirayuki looked frightened now, sliding back to the ground, hands releasing him to clutch at her head. He’d been through worse decompressions, but it was never something to take lightly. “Where’s the shelter?” His voice sounded weak and distant, even to himself, and there was no knowing whether ear pain or thin air was to blame. He worked his jaw to try to equalize the pressure

“Lata’s lab next door.” Shirayuki grimaced, and Obi mirrored the expression. Nobody wanted to be locked in a small compartment with Lata for any period of time, but it’s not like there were a lot of choices. Obi started for the door, but Shirayuki wasn’t moving. He paused to look back, and she asked, “Do you trust me?”

Of course he trusted her, that required no answer. He just held out his hand, and before he knew it she was towing him into the back of the lab. The sun-lamps were bluish and chill around what looked to be a monster caricature of a flower laid flaccidly across the lab floor. It trembled as Shirayuki climbed into its center, its wedge-like petals curling up as she braced on them, and she tugged at him to follow. They knelt, the spongy surface beneath them ridged and grooved in a pattern that bit into Obi’s knees. It reminded him of the sole of an environment suit’s boot. Shirayuki hung off the side, scratching at a sickly pink petal until it started to move on its own, curling in slowly like hands. Once she had three or four petals moving, the rest started to follow suit, and Obi started to feel like the pearl in a very large oyster as one petal after another met in an arch above their heads.

“Are you sure this is safe, miss?”

“Of course I am.” Her eyes weren’t quite as confident as her voice, Obi thought as the petals started to push down on his head and he had to hunch, then sit. The last thing he saw before the light was blotted out was Shirayuki’s eyes, and if he were going to suffocate in a giant zombie flower, at least he’d be with her. When everything came to a rest, he couldn’t quite sit upright, but Shirayuki probably could.

“And this is going to be airtight?”

“It’s a giant cabbage from Pellinar Alpha. We’ve been studying its natural pressure seal, and there is nothing else like it. It’ll hold against even a full decompression.”

“Oh, the pressure storms.” It was amazing that anything lived on Pellinar Alpha, let alone something this large. He’d seen the planet once, from the air, marveling at the intricate shapes the seasonal decompression winds weathered the landscape into, but his father hadn’t allowed him off the ship for the entire week they were there. That actually brought up an important point. “And how long it is going to keep us sealed in here? I’d rather not have to call for transport out.” His communicator was in his pocket, even off duty, just in case, but he would never ever live down a request like that.

There was the little whine in her throat that meant Shirayuki was about to speculate. Great. “Once the pressure equalizes, it should just be an hour or so.”

He was still worried. “But the storms last for weeks.”

A roving hand caught at Obi’s knee, and Shirayuki pulled herself closer. “Actually, we’re pretty sure that pressure isn’t the primary stimulus that keeps them closed throughout the storms, there are chemical messages passed throughout the root network reminiscent of …” She caught herself and reined in her enthusiasm. Normally Obi would encourage her to go on, but normally they weren’t in imminent danger of suffocating in a plant. “Anyway, I’ve been stuck in here before. It didn’t last but about an hour.”

As though someone knew he’d been thinking of it, his communicator blipped. “Lieutenant Obi, check in. You don’t appear to be in a pressure shelter. Are you in distress?”

“I’m safe, sheltered in place in lab eleven with Scientist Shirayuki.” Please don’t ask any more questions, he hoped. All of his co-workers had figured out how he felt about Shirayuki months ago, but nobody knew about the developments of the last week.

“Explain the nature of your shelter.”

Oh, he was in for it now. “It’s a plant. Scientist Shirayuki assures me we have sufficient atmosphere and it should just stay sealed for an hour or two. Don’t worry about me.”

He could hear giggling over the communicator. “Oh, I’m not worried about you anymore, I’m worried about Scientist Shirayuki stuck in there with you. Behave yourself, I don’t want to have to tell your children they were conceived in a plant.” The comm clicked closed. He was never going to speak to Ensign Kai again. He wasn’t sure Shirayuki was going to speak to him either.

But those were her fingers twining into his hair, and her lips on his cheek. “Are they gone for good?”

“Should be.” He had to trust her that there was enough air in there, because it sure didn’t feel like he was getting enough. “What did you do last time, stuck in a plant for an hour?”

She hummed against his neck. “I used my imagination.”

“Thought about root networks?” She’d darted out of meals and social engagements often enough with sudden ideas. The thought of her constrained with nothing to do but think for an hour … it was a bit terrifying.

“Thought about you in here with me.” Her teeth scraped the corner of his jaw, then she pushed against his chest until he was lying flat on the springy floor of the flower and settled herself on top of him. She was far more aggressive in total darkness than she was in the light. Then she stopped, sighing heavily. “But we should probably rest and conserve oxygen while we’re in here.” Her voice trailed off.

Obi was just about to deflect with an innuendo about how lying on top of him like that was definitely not minimizing his oxygen consumption, but she finished her sentence in a whisper. “But after, would you like to come back to my quarters?”

He was going to have to check himself into Sickbay if she kept stopping his heart like this. “Just to be clear, you want - “

“Yes.” She interrupted. He wished he could see the blush she was surely sporting now. But then she’d see his in return. It sounded like there’d be another opportunity later.

If she could put herself out there like that, maybe he could too. She deserved to know. “I love you,” he whispered.

#obiyukibingo #obiyuki #fanfic #shirayuki in space #in which a plant saves the day #thank you classic sci-fi for all the ideas i borrowed #the plant is roughly based on one from heinlein's red planet #and the planet inspired by larry niven's we made it #i do but sample from the feast-table of our forefathers

24 notes · View notes

lesbianrobin · 3 years

Note

What do you think are the good and bad aspects of each season of ST?

ok 1. thank u for this question omg and 2. this answer may or may not be a mess, but either way it’s long (almost 7k words lmao) bc i’m insane, which is why it’s under a cut. it’s still by no means an exhaustive list but these are the things that just kinda came to mind.

also i realize you asked “good and bad” and i wrote this whole post as “strengths and weaknesses” which um. is not Exactly what you asked. but close enough <3 i also ended up including a lot of au ideas ksjdckmn bc like i personally hate when people say a certain plot or whatever was bad without suggesting anything that could have improved it yknow so whenever possible i tried to provide Some idea for fixing the issues i had with the show!!

season 1

strengths (this is probably gonna be the longest section but that’s because a lot of these strengths also apply to s2/s3 by default)

nostalgia and authenticity

this one’s pretty simple, but i think that season one did a good job of blending classic eighties media homages (such as the many many e.t./el parallels) with explicit pop culture references (such as mike’s yoda impression, mentions of the x-men, etc) to create a show that’s essentially dripping in early eighties nostalgia without it feeling too forced. before st, i think the most popular depiction of the eighties in mainstream media was that overly exaggerated neon scrunchie aesthetic from the mid to late eighties, and it was usually done in a comedic sense first and foremost. st took a different approach, instead focusing on the early eighties, a time that’s often ignored in favor of going either Full Seventies or Full Eighties, and i think that this choice likely resonated with adults who lived through the eighties and hadn’t yet seen something that felt quite so accurate to their own adolescence. a lot of young people who watched st were totally unfamiliar with this period of time, unfamiliar with books/movies like “stand by me” that st borrows from heavily, and i think st lent more seriousness to the eighties than most young people had experienced so far, and this was refreshing and interesting!

the use of dnd in the show is also quite genius in a way i’m not sure i can articulate?? it isn’t something Everyone would have played at the time, but it’s something that existed within a different context back in the eighties than it does today, and it really lent a sort of authenticity to the naming of the show’s sci-fi elements. like, of course these kids would name parallel dimensions and monsters and superpowers after these similar things in their favorite game! it just feels so real and it grounds st in our reality moreso than you might expect from the typical sci-fi or horror universe.

utilization of existing tropes

almost every single character in st clearly originates from some popular trope. the plot itself is riddled with classic eighties movie tropes. almost every single element of stranger things can be clearly traced back to some iconic eighties film or just to, like, overused horror/sci-fi/mystery/coming-of-age movie tropes in general. this might sound like a bad thing, but it really works in st’s favor! starting off with familiar tropes gives st the ability to easily create a lot of complexity and make a big impact by selectively deviating from those familiar, comfortable tropes!! while el’s whole plot, hopper’s character, etc, are all examples of this in action, i think the steve/nancy/jonathan plot is the greatest example. even from the start, the fact that good girl barb dies while nancy is off having sex with her asshole boyfriend is an incredibly thorough inversion of the most well-known horror movie trope in the book. how often do girls in horror movies have sex for the first time, walk home alone in the dark of night, and live to tell the tale? nancy and jonathan’s dynamic at first glance is a sort of classic “good girl meets boy from the wrong side of the tracks, discovers he’s actually got a heart of gold” thing, but instead of following this well-trodden path, st diverged. nancy is brash, impulsive, and at times downright insensitive. jonathan is angry, bitter, and actually a bit of a creep at first. while they have the capacity to emotionally connect and support one another, they can also bring out each other’s darker side, which is not what we’ve come to expect from that initial tropey dynamic.

in addition, steve, the popular rich asshole boyfriend, is actually... a human being! unlike the cartoonishly evil jocks that we’ve come to expect (especially from eighties movies), steve has complexity. despite his initial immaturity and selfishness, he’s also kind to barb, he backs off when nancy says no, he’s gentle and sweet when they sleep together, his first big Dick Move of the season is in defense of nancy, he realizes the error of his ways after the fight and does what he can to fix it, he’s worried about nancy when he sees that she’s hurt at jonathan’s house, and to top it all off, he ends up saving both nancy and jonathan’s lives when he could have just walked away, and the three of them all work together to fight the demogorgon. like... steve began as the most stereotypical character of all time, and by the end of the season, he had one of the most compelling and unique arcs among the whole cast!

finally, at the very end of the season, instead of dumping steve for jonathan as expected, nancy ends up getting back together with steve, and they’re both on friendly terms with jonathan. i realize that i just kinda. summarized s1. but my POINT is that i don’t think the dynamics between the monster hunting trio would be nearly as fun and interesting had the characters of nancy, steve, and jonathan not been set up to follow certain paths that we already had charted in our own heads. like, within the first couple episodes of s1, it’s pretty obvious that nancy and steve are gonna break up, nancy will get with jonathan, and steve will either die or go full evil or just never be seen again. like, duh! you’ve seen this story a million times! you know that’s how it’s gonna go! so, when the story DOESN’T go that way, the impact of each character’s arc and the relationship dynamics become stronger due to their unexpected complexity and authenticity.

distinct plotlines separated by age group

this one’s rather obvious, but the way that the adults in s1 were essentially in a conspiracy thriller while the teens were in a horror flick and the kids were in a sci fi power-of-friendship story and all three converged at the end... wow. brilliant showstopping etc. not only was it just really well done and unique, it also gave stranger things near-universal appeal. like, there’s genuinely something for pretty much everyone in season one!

casting

obviously this applies to every season sorta by default, but when i think about what made season one So successful, i always think about the cast, and not just winona ryder. yes, she’s absolutely amazing in the show and it’s very doubtful that st would be as big as it is today without her name being attached to it from the start!! however, i think the greatest determining factor in st’s success is the casting of the kids, particularly millie bobby brown. like... el is just absolutely incredible. she’s amazing. this has all been said many times before so i won’t harp on it, but millie and the other kids are all So talented and charismatic and i think their casting has been instrumental to the show’s success.

strong visuals

the way that multicolored christmas lights which have been around for decades are now kinda like. a Stranger Things thing. jesus christ. those lights are probably the biggest stroke of stylistic genius on the show.

atmosphere and setting

this is probably like. the least important one here for me sdjncdsc because i think s2 and s3 both had like Even Better atmospheres and shit but s1 was good too and it laid the groundwork!! i know a lot of people would have preferred st be set somewhere more Spooky with lots of fog or giant forests or whatnot, and while i do enjoy thinking about alternate st settings and how they might alter the vibe, i think hawkins indiana was a good choice. as the duffers have said, placing stranger things in a fictional town allows them more flexibility than if they’d gone with their original plan of using montauk, new york. besides that, i think the plainness and like... flatness... of small-town indiana just Works. like, the fact that hawkins is never really scary on the surface is a big part of the horror in the lab’s actions and their impact. hawkins isn’t somewhere that people just disappear all the time. it isn’t somewhere known for strange occurrences (prior to s1, that is). it isn’t somewhere shrouded in mist and secrecy. hawkins on its surface seems like the sort of place with no secrets and nothing to fear, and that’s the point! the lab is out in the open! it’s right there! everything is so close to the surface, yet so far out of the public eye, and i think that really works.

the byers family’s whole deal (specifically the joyce/jonathan dynamic)

this is going here bc i miss it so bad in s2 and s3. i’m not one of those people who believe The Byers Are The Whole Point of the show, because st is and always has been an ensemble, and el, hopper, and the wheelers are just as instrumental to the plot as the byers, but ANYWAY, i do think the byers were one of the most interesting aspects of s1. joyce’s difficulties with supporting her sons as a poor and (implied mentally ill) single mother, jonathan’s stress as a result of having to earn money, care for his brother, and keep the house in order when his mother is unable to do so, and the resulting tension between them when will’s disappearance and supposed “death” brings the situation to a tipping point? holy shit! it’s so good! that argument after they see will’s “body” is just incredible and gut-wrenching. their relationship feels so real and messy and i think it’s just... good. also winona ryder REALLY acted her heart out and she carried a lot of s1 which i think people often forget to mention so i’m saying it here.

weaknesses

pacing/timing

ok so pacing is probably going to go in each season’s weaknesses, to be honest, because i think they all had a blend of some good and some bad pacing. good pacing is invisible pacing, though, so i probably won’t be putting it in any of the strengths sections and will only be focusing on it in the weaknesses. i’m also probably not going to talk about weird day/night cycle things, just because i don’t want to get nitpicky on timelines because that would require going back and rewatching things to double check timing which i don’t wanna do at the moment lmao. anyway, when i think of bad pacing in season one, i primarily think of two things: nancy’s little trip into the upside down and subsequent sleepover with jonathan, and the sort of staggered nature of the climax in the final episode. the latter is simple so i’ll explain it first: while i understand that each group’s respective climax is like part of a chain reaction and that’s why each big moment happens separately and at different times, i think that st is strongest when the whole group is together, and i think that makes the stakes feel higher too, so i’m not In Love with the way s1 separated everyone and gave each group their own climax.

okay, now on to the nancy/upside down thing! idk if i’ve ever talked about it before, but i think the worst decision made in s1 by far is the inclusion of nancy’s brief trip into the upside down, wherein she dives headfirst into another dimension with absolutely no backup, watches the demogorgon chow down, freaks out and runs around for a minute, and then leaves. like... what the fuck? even putting aside what an idiotic decision this was (because i do think nancy’s tendency to rush into things headfirst is an intentional and consistent character trait), it just kind of destroys any remaining suspense surrounding the demogorgon and the upside down, and it accomplishes basically nothing besides scaring nancy enough to have jonathan sleep over, which is lame. i will break it down.

like, first of all, nancy just getting to waltz in and out of the upside down and get a good, long look at the demogorgon makes the entire thing far less mysterious, and by extension far less scary. like... before this scene, we the audience haven’t got a good look at the demogorgon. we’ve seen its silhouette briefly and we’ve seen a blurry picture of it, but nothing more, and i think that is far more effective at building fear than this jaunt nancy goes on which gives us a full view of the thing and makes it into less of a horrifying nightmare and into more of a humanoid animal. like, maybe this is just me, but i found the demogorgon far less intimidating after that scene than before. it also lets nancy and jonathan know For Sure that they’re right without providing any crucial information that they need to fight the demogorgon (aka it’s unnecessary to the plot), which removes a very compelling story element (the faith nancy and jonathan need to have in order to keep going against a vague and poorly understood enemy, the doubt they might have about each other and their own sanity, the possibility that they might be wrong, the trust they need to have in each other) a bit earlier in the plot than i believe is ideal. at the end of episode 5, nancy goes into the upside down and jonathan doesn’t know where she is and it’s intense!!! you’re thinking like, oh fuck, not only is nancy missing and fighting for her life now too, jonathan might be implicated in her disappearance!! some people already think he’s the one who killed will and people know that he took creepy pictures of barb and nancy before they both disappeared, maybe this is gonna cause some serious problems for him!! maybe nancy will find will in the upside down and she’ll help him survive!! fuck, maybe she’ll actually die!! this is huge!! and then episode 6 starts and they’re immediately like oh nevermind jonathan found the tree and got nancy out and she’s fine. my point with all of this is that nancy entering the upside down could have done A Lot in the grand scheme of the plot, but all it did was just... get jonathan to sleep over so he and nancy could have some awkward romance moments and steve could see them together and pick a fight. which could have honestly happened at Any point while nancy and jonathan were working together to hunt down the demogorgon, without ruining the demogorgon’s and the upside down’s mystique. so yeah <3

weird behavior and dumbass decisions that make no sense (aka the whole camera thing)

gonna go off about the teen plot again sorry but: why was nancy so unbothered and quick to forgive jonathan for taking those pictures? girl what the fuck are you doing? why wasn’t that a bigger deal? why was jonathan’s motivation for doing it so weak and why did they just kind of forget about the whole thing? why did nancy TRACK HIM DOWN AT THE FUNERAL HOME while he was PICKING OUT HIS BABY BROTHER’S CASKET to be like hey can you tell me what’s in this creepshot you took? it’s insane. it’s so insane. i mean i think the funeral home thing is hilarious and i don’t mind it being in the show necessarily but like my point here is that i think a lot of character decisions in s1 just kind of.. happened because they Needed to happen for the plot. like, they wrote this plot that required jonathan to be secretly taking pictures of the party and required him and nancy to work together after seeing something odd in the pictures, but they didn’t like... really consider what that event would mean for their characterization and relationship. the whole thing was sort of just dropped with minimal discussion and i think it did both nancy and jonathan’s characters a disservice and was really mishandled.

lighting and saturation/color grading

i am literally begging horror/sci-fi shows to let me see shit. i GET IT okay i understand that when you’re doing cgi effects it helps to keep the lights down and i’m not mad at any of the lighting in the demogorgon/upside down scenes!! i’m really not i think the demogorgon scenes in s1 all look sick!! but like... dude. the colors. where are they. why does everyone look like a vampire. i know blah blah this was probably an intentional stylistic choice intended to mimic film at the time blah blah but dude a lot of old movies are very colorful!! please just let people have color in their faces so everyone doesn’t look like a sheet of paper!!! also i’m white and not a professional lighting designer so yknow grain of salt but i think lucas was kinda poorly served by the lighting sometimes in s1. not Hugely so, not to the degree that i’ve seen poc be poorly served by lighting in other shows, but there were some times where it felt kinda like the lighting setup was just not designed with darker skin in mind.

horror

i just personally don’t find s1 very scary like... ever. i don’t think they were really Trying to be extremely scary yknow so i’m not counting this as a big deal, but i do think that each season has improved on the horror aspects. i think s1′s horror lies more in the mystery and the unknown than in what’s seen onscreen, and as i’ve said already, i think s1 kind of fumbled that suspense ball.

season 2

strengths

the possession plot

i’ll warn u rn this whole s2 strengths section is probably gonna be really short bc idk like. how much there is to really say i feel like it’s all so self-explanatory skjncmn. anyway yeah the possession plot!! eerie as fuck, and noah OWNED. so did winona tbh and finn and sean etc but like. noah. wow! i think the possession plot helped the show maintain a good amount of tension and suspense throughout the season, and a lot of scenes with possessed!will are flatout disturbing to watch. in a good way. i think the mindflayer and will’s possession were far more genuinely frightening than s1′s demogorgon, and it provided a new layer of depth and intrigue to the antagonist besides just “bad monster want eat people.”

tone and aesthetics

halloween season... literally halloween season. halloween season. that is all.

actually i will elaborate a bit and just say that i think s2 did a good job of having the sort of foreboding vibe that s1 was often going for, but without the annoying darkness and desaturation. so points for that.

also st2 is like one of the best Autumn pieces of media ever like it just. like steve and dustin on those train tracks with the fallen leaves all around them.... god. god the vibes are unparalleled. all of the halloween stuff also really contributes to the nostalgia st runs on yknow it makes you think about childhood and trick-or-treating and you kind of get transported like damn... i remember going to the rich neighborhoods to score the good candy..... idk i just think the whole thing is incredibly effective.

“babysitter” steve

by sending nancy and jonathan off together, the show created a problem: what to do with steve? this problem pushed them to create the unconventional and unexpected duo of steve and dustin, and the world is so much brighter for it. seriously though we all know steve and dustin are great i don’t need to argue that point. all i’ll add is that i think allowing steve to grow in this way, serving as a mentor figure and becoming genuine friends with someone so unexpected, really took the originality of his character to the next level. no longer content just to defy his archetype, in s2 steve begins branching out in ways that never would have been considered in s1, creating an incredibly complex and interesting person from the sort of character that most shows would have simply written out or killed off for convenience’s sake. and it works and steve and dustin are such a joy to watch and i love them. <3

the lucas/max plot

so first of all max mayfield is the most perfect baby girl on god’s green earth and idk what i would do without her but anyway. i think lumax is the best romantic relationship in the show and not just because they’re the only ones with like an age-appropriate approach to the whole thing. it’s also because their relationship accomplishes more than just putting the two of them in a relationship!! lucas and max spending time together motivates billy to do his evil shit, providing more conflict in the narrative, and it also helps establish max as part of the group in a relatively natural way while giving both her and lucas a great subplot. lucas (and dustin) has a crush on the new girl, they start spending some time together, and lucas ends up needing to decide whether he’ll keep the secret of the upside down and lose her, or risk both of their lives by telling her the truth. that’s a pretty big, character-defining decision that he gets to make!! max has to choose whether to trust this boy she barely knows and endanger herself, or to walk away and stay safe, yet another great character-defining choice that also contributes to the sense we get as an audience of max as somebody who’s incredibly lonely and desperate for love and connection. this post is way too long already and i have a ton more to say so i’ll stop now but yeah i think lumax really Works in the show without ever distracting or detracting from the overall plot and narrative in the way that some other ships (coughjancycough) often do.

balance between the normal and abnormal

s2 i think did a pretty solid job of melding daily life with more fantastical sci-fi horror elements. i enjoyed seeing so much of the kids at school in the first few episodes!! you really get a strong sense of where they’re at in life, what their daily lives are like, and you get a sort of gradual shift into madness that makes everything feel more grounded than i think it would if they had just leapt straight into the horror shit, yknow?

the el and hopper dynamic

go back and rewatch s2 and tell me that’s not one of the most moving portrayals of parenthood and trauma and growing up that you’ve ever seen. you can’t. or well you can but i won’t listen. i really can’t imagine stranger things without el and hopper’s relationship, and it’s my absolute favorite part of s2. their whole dynamic is so beautiful and complex, and gives them each amazing personal arcs in addition! the black hole scene is literally one of the show’s greatest moments of all time. any given scene between the two of them in s2 is just guaranteed to be heartwarming as well as heartbreaking, and i think that makes for an incredible show.

weaknesses

flashbacks

okay this applies to Every season they All have too many flashbacks but in s2 specifically... please stop showing me shit from season one. i watched it. i know what happened. you don’t need to spoon feed everything to me!! flashbacks can be a really helpful way of delivering information to an audience, but st has a bad habit of not only being kinda demeaning in how often they flash back to shit that the audience already knows, but they also have a bad habit of using flashbacks almost as a crutch to avoid having to deliver information subtly and naturally.

you know i gotta say it... the lost sister

this is so sad. the lost sister really is like a great concept for an st episode, and i’m not mad about the idea of st taking a break from the normal action to focus on one story for a full episode, but the execution of it was just dreadful. kali and her crew feel very over-the-top and stereotypical, and its placement in the season totally kills the tension and excitement that was built in “the spy.”

i think the lost sister honestly could have gone over far better, even with the stereotypical fake-feeling gang kali has, if they had just swapped it with “the spy” like... ok, the end of episode five has el setting off to find kali and will collapsing on the ground seizing. right? imagine if, instead of immediately following will to the lab, we’d followed el. we don’t know what’s happening with will, but it’s a very simple cliffhanger that leaves us on edge without making us feel cheated by the show cutting away. we follow el on her little journey, everything happens much the same as canon, and then at the end, el sees hopper in scrubs. she sees mike, screaming, sees that they’re both in danger. holy shit!!! what the fuck!!! what’s happened since we left will seizing on the ground??? we feel el’s fear and confusion. she decides to go home. and then... boom. “the lost sister” is over. now, we rewind, right back to will seizing on the ground, and “the spy” commences. we learn how they got into the danger that el saw in the end of “the lost sister,” and we sit on the edge of our seats all through “the spy” and “the mind flayer,” KNOWING that el is on her way back to save them but not knowing when she’ll arrive!! idk i don’t think that would have necessarily saved lost sister but i think it may have alleviated some of the issues that i and many others have with it, timing-wise.

the nancy/jonathan sidequest

once again, the idea of nancy going off on her own little mission to find justice for barb after s1 is like. amazing. genuinely i love that plot for her and i can’t imagine anything better for her to have focused on in s2. unfortunately though i think her and jonathan’s little trip to see murray was just kind of... lame. the whole thing just felt like an excuse to get the two of them alone together, yknow? which is fine i guess people contrive all sorts of situations to get characters alone together for romance reasons but in this case i think it just really doesn’t work for me because of what it’s juxtaposed with. like, will is POSSESSED, and jonathan is just off on a mini road trip and sleeping with his bestie, and jonathan never seems to communicate to joyce/will that he left town, and joyce never like... thinks to tell him that will is like sick and fucked up and they’re looking at him in the lab??? like it’s so weird i know joyce always forgets about jonathan when shit’s happening with will but jfc you’d think at some point in that like... 72-ish-hour period where jonathan was out of town she would have thought about him. like at least once. maybe i’m forgetting something and she mentioned him sometime and i missed it but even still, i hate the juxtaposition of nancy and jonathan just like cheers-ing at murray’s place and sleeping together and whatnot while everyone else is dealing with possession or trying to hunt down dart yknow? it feels really boring in comparison and i think it could have been done far better. like it was SO insanely easy for them to get into the lab and get an admission of guilt and escape with it!! i think it might have been a lot more engaging if maybe someone from the lab tailed them to murray’s place and they had to like lose the tail and race to get the recording out to as many news outlets as possible before they got caught, or something like that. the tension in their plotline is completely resolved in episode four!! episodes five and six are just them screwing around and addressing envelopes. while there were a lot of strong ideas in this plotline (i really enjoy nancy going out of her way to get justice, and the fact that they have to water down the story to make it believable), i just think the focus on nancy and jonathan getting together hindered it a lot without adding a ton to the plot or their individual characters.

season 3

strengths

starcourt mall as a setting

while i don’t think the mall was utilized quite to its full potential (something i could make a separate post about if anyone’s interested), i do think that starcourt was a genius addition to the series. i’ve said this before, but building a new mall is a literal Perfect in-universe justification for a significant leap forward in fashion and aesthetics, and it provides a great location for characters to just... be characters. idk how else to articulate this i just think that the mall is a great setting to let people interact with each other and to bring people together who may not have been otherwise (i.e. scoops troop). not to mention how sick it was to see the mall get wrecked toward the end kdjncdkm like they were able to do so much more with the mall in terms of like The Finale than they could with just the byers house or the cabin or the school or even the lab. i love all the back tunnels they run through it’s such a fun like acknowledgement of how this glitzy eighties mall is just a real place where employees get shipments and take out the trash and shit idk it’s all about the perfect facade and what’s hidden what’s underneath what’s hiding in plain sight etc etc i’m just saying words now. anyway.

willingness to experiment and go against expectations

gay robin. neon aesthetics. giant fucking meat monster. i know some people hate both the neon and the meat monster but i personally think they were kind of amazing and like. yknow regardless of personal tastes i think it’s impossible to deny that s3 had a lot of incredible visuals, and they’re all visuals that just wouldn’t have been possible if the show were too afraid to stray from its s1 aesthetic. robin being canonically gay (and her resulting friendship with steve) and the season’s striking visuals are two things that most everyone (besides like homophobes skjncdknm) can agree were great, right? and they were both departures from where the show began and what we all expected!! so yeah i think while some of the experimentation in s3 wasn’t ideal it was also that experimentation that allowed for some of the season’s strongest elements to come about.

the hospital sequence (and the season’s action/horror scenes in general)

this one is fairly self-explanatory. while they may have underutilized the “body snatching” element of the season, the hospital sequence with nancy and jonathan fighting off their possessed bosses did an amazing job of building tension and creating a genuine sense of really intense and personal danger.

in general i think that s3 melded action and horror rather well, particularly in the sauna test, the hospital, and when the mindflayer busts through the roof of hop’s cabin. horror can come from many things, and in this case, st elicited horror largely from the feeling of helplessness, and it was really effective for me personally. i think it worked better for me than s1′s brand of horror because it doesn’t rely so much on a lack of knowledge or a sense of suspense that inevitable disappears upon a second viewing.

the body horror we got in s3 was also really fun! that’s it i just think all the blood and guts and slime were fun and i would like more of them. once again, the impacts of body horror are less dependent upon the viewer being in the dark or unsure as to what’s happening, and as such i think it tends to be a little more effective at eliciting reaction in the long term.

timing and mechanics of the battle of starcourt/finale

i think the battle of starcourt is just fucking awesome, and beyond that personal opinion, i think it’s the most high-stakes and intense finale of all three seasons, and this is for two main reasons! 1. el is out of commission, and 2. (almost) everyone is in the same cental location. this means that (almost) everyone is in danger all at once, and they are all working together at the same time to fight the same threat. s1/s2 have their groups more fragmented for the finales, and while i understand why in each case and i wouldn’t call either season’s finale necessarily weak, i do think the centralized nature of the s3 finale just Works on another level. in s1 and s2, large segments of the cast are already perfectly safe by the time el dispatches the primary threat. in s3, however, everybody save for dustin and erica is still in danger up until the last moment, and el is seemingly (you can def debate how much power she still had in her when she peeked into billy’s mind and whether the memory broke the mindflayer’s hold on him or if she was actually controlling him to some degree) completely vulnerable. this increases the tension and raises the stakes, making the finale a real crescendo to fortissimo as opposed to a series of little mezzo forte moments. i hope everyone reading this knows music idk how else to phrase that my brain is stupid.

emphasis on friendship and adolescence (but in a different way than s1/2)

this is definitely a controversial one but i think that s3 really did like... show a side of friendship that had been more or less unexplored thus far in the show. el and max were amazing, and i think it’s really nice that we got an opportunity to see the kids have some growing pains as well as see them support each other through Normal Adolescent Stuff like boyfriends and breakups instead of just like. death and trauma. this is maybe just a personal preference, but i think it can be really enlightening and provide a lot of depth when you get to see how characters respond to normal everyday conflict and not just how they respond to giant world-ending conflict!! letting el use her powers for goofy teenage shit like spying on boys and messing with mean girls at the mall is not only fun for her and the audience, but it also really emphasizes just how much those powers are a part of el, making it that much more devastating when she loses them at the end of the season.

weaknesses

tonal dissonance

so this is like. obvious. but it must still be said! i won’t go on and on about it since we all know this so i’ll try to like talk about it from an angle people don’t usually? anyway. it seems to me like they were maybe a little worried about s3 being too dark. while the choice to really lean into humor was definitely driven by the sorts of eighties teen films from which s3 drew inspiration (like fast times at ridgemont high), i think it was also done in an attempt to alleviate the more troubling implications of some events in the season, particularly the russian bunker plot. like, yeah, st can be incredibly dark, but if they’d played the whole “children being stuck inside of a foreign military base, tied up, tortured, and drugged” thing completely straight without the humorous elements that exist in canon, it had the potential to be like... disturbing on a new level. steve and robin don’t have powers like el yknow their kidnapping/torture doesn’t have any sci-fi elements to sorta soften the blow. they’re just innocent teenagers being brutalized and traumatized by grown men. so anyway yeah i think maybe the writers were concerned about this storyline coming off as too dark and they wanted it to be a little more whimsical but they ended up pushing way too hard in that direction and creating extreme dissonance at times. this goes for joyce/hopper/murray/alexei too, but to a lesser extent. i think the ridiculousness in that group felt a lot more like... realistic. but still.

newspaper plot

once again i feel like i don’t even need to say this skjdncmn we all know it was insane how the show basically ended up delivering the message “while misogyny is a serious problem poverty and classism are not” and i’ve said it on this blog a million times so i don’t need to repeat myself. i’ll focus on another weak point of this plot: the fact that it completely separates nancy and jonathan from everyone else. once again, the show’s preoccupation with j/ancy held them back! like... can you imagine a version of s3 where nancy and jonathan both worked in the mall? i have a lot of ideas about this possible au and like how the plot could play out differently if they worked in the mall but first of all it’s just more realistic, second of all it further utilizes the mall as a central setting, and third of all, it would bring everyone together. as it is in canon, nancy and jonathan were unnecessarily isolated from the rest of the group, and this isolation was detrimental to both of their characters. like, they only ever get to interact with each other! if they’d gotten summer jobs in the mall, they could have had more interactions with the kids/steve/robin, and they absolutely still could have had a similar argument! maybe in this case, nancy notices the rat thing (or something else odd) herself when taking out the trash behind the mall, and she wants jonathan to ditch work with her to check it out bc she thinks it may be related to the lab. jonathan doesn’t want to ditch work because he needs his job, nancy argues that they’re working shitty mall jobs anyway and who cares if they get fired, and we get more or less the same thing as s3 without the cartoonishly over-the-top misogyny. i mean honestly i think the rat shit could have been cut entirely it didn’t rly... accomplish much of anything. in my opinion. like imagine s3 without the rat plot you literally would not be missing anything except it would be more surprising when the dudes melted into goo at the hospital. so yeah i think it would have been better if nancy and jonathan had jobs at the mall, weren’t isolated from everybody else, and were maybe absorbed into the party’s plot or the scoops troop’s plot from very early on, allowing them to interact with more characters and have a less... dumb.... plot. like god splitting up nancy and jonathan between the party/scoops troop would have been So Much better i just. sdkjcnksdmn anyway yeah.

briefness of group reunion/separation of groups

remember in s2 at the beginning of “the gate,” where mike and hopper had a confrontation and max and el met for the first time and el hugged everyone and steve and nancy had their sad little moment together outside... where’s that energy? obviously the s2 reunion wasn’t that long either, but it made space for some significant emotional moments to take place. s3′s reunion had some hopper/el/mike resolution, but besides that... there was nothing, really. i just think that the whole group getting together in s3 was SO exciting and powerful the way they did it (with both the scoops troop and the adults having their own Big Moment reconnecting with team griswold family), but the emotional potential was more or less squandered.

i also think in s3 at times they were really stretching to keep everybody separated even though it made no sense. and like... in s1 the separation worked bc nobody else knew that (x group) was experiencing weird shit too, and beyond that, each group (as i mentioned in the s1 section) was sort of operating within their own genre and bringing something unique to the season. they’ve stopped doing that though! now, the groups aren’t separate bc each plot is tonally/structurally different, the groups are just separate bc... they need to be, because it’s a big ensemble cast and you can’t just have them all be together for a whole season or it would be way too difficult to coordinate things and keep the show dynamic. all this is to say that i’m excited for s4 because the location differences make it so there’s a Reason for each plot to be separate at the beginning, and i think that’ll work better.

general ridiculousness

i dont mean like i think it’s bad that they made jokes this is just me lumping in all the dumb shit like hopper not worrying about el and not wanting to check on the kids, him and joyce bickering long after they both know they and their children are in danger, max seemingly forgetting that billy is a racist abuser, etc etc. i think many of these are just a symptom of the show 1. trying desperately to keep the groups split up a certain way even though it may not make any sense, and 2. trying to fit into a certain genre/trope mold when their actual characters are more complex than the tropes they’re imitating. this is so fucking long already i am not gonna elaborate further rn but i trust u all know what i mean.

soooo... yeah, that’s about all! i mean it’s not all there are definitely many more things i could talk about and i know i focused sorta disproportionately on the teens which is my bad :/ but i’m done for now. thank you for asking, and apologies for the delay in responding!! i’m sure some people reading (if anyone read this far) will disagree with some of what i’ve said and that’s alright like i’m not The Authority on st or anything i’m just trying to talk about like my own thoughts yknow? so yeah luv u all i hope someone enjoyed reading this!!

#asks #em talks #lesbianrobin.canon #stranger things #if u actually read all this i love u and im sorry #these r just my opinions!! and im sure i misremembered some shit my brain is swiss cheese #i did my best tho

84 notes · View notes

crowdvscritic · 3 years

Text

round up // JULY 21

‘Tis the season to beat the heat at the always-cold theatres and next to fans set at turbo speed. While my movie watching slowed a bit with the launch of the Summer Olympics on July 23rd, I’ve still got plenty of popcorn-ready and artsy recommendations for you. A few themes in the new-to-me pop culture I’m recommending this month:

Casts oozing with embarrassing levels of talent (sometimes overqualified for the movies they’re in)

Pop culture that is responding or reinterpreting past pop culture

Stories that get weEeEeird

Keep on-a-scrollin’ to see which is which!

July Crowd-Pleasers

1. Double Feature – ‘90s Rom-Coms feat. Lots of Lies: Mystery Date (1991) + The Pallbearer (1996)

In Mystery Date (Crowd: 7.5/10 // Critic: 6/10), Ethan Hawke and Teri Polo get set up on a blind date that gets so bizarre and crime-y I’m not sure how this didn’t come out in the ‘80s. In The Pallbearer (Crowd: 8/10 // Critic: 7/10), David Schwimmer and Gwyneth Paltrow try to combine The Graduate with Four Weddings and a Funeral in a story about lost twentysomethings. If you don’t like rom-coms in which circumstances depend on lots of lies and misunderstandings, these won’t be your jam, but if you’re like me and don’t mind these somewhat-cliché devices, you’ll be hooked by likeable casts and plenty of rom and com.

2. The Tomorrow War (2021)

I thought of no fewer movies than this list while watching: Alien, Aliens, Angel Has Fallen, Cloverfield, Interstellar, Kong: Skull Island, Prometheus, A Quiet Place: Part II, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Star Wars: The Revenge of the Sith, The Silence of the Lambs, The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and World War Z. And you know what? I like all those movies! (Okay, maybe I just have a healthy respect/fear of The Silence of the Lambs.) The Tomorrow War may not be original, but it borrows some of the best tropes and beats from the sci-fi and action genres, so much so I wish I could’ve seen Chris Pratt and Co. fight those gross monsters on a big screen. Crowd: 9/10 // Critic: 6/10

3. Dream a Little Dream (1989)

My July pick for the Dumb Rom-Com I Nevertheless Enjoyed! I CANNOT explain the mechanics of this body switch comedy to you—nor can the back of the DVD case above—but, boy, what an ‘80s MOOD. I did not know I needed to see a choreographed dance routine starring Jason Robards and Corey Feldman, but I DID. All I know is some movies are made for me and that I’m now a card-carrying member of the Two Coreys fan club. Crowd: 8/10 // Critic: 6.5/10

4. Black Widow (2021)

The braids! The Pugh! Black Widow worked for me both as an exciting action adventure and as a respite from the Marvel adventures dependent on a long memory of the franchise. (Well, mostly—keep reading for a second MCU rec much more dependent on the gobs of previous releases.) Crowd: 9/10 // Critic: 7.5/10

5. Liar Liar (1997)

Guys, Jim Carrey is hilarious. That’s it—that’s the review. Crowd: 9/10 // Critic: 7/10

youtube

6. Sob Rock by John Mayer (2021)

It’s very possible I’ve already listened to this record more than all other John Mayer records. It doesn’t surpass the capital-G Greatness of Continuum, but it’s a little bit of old school Mayer, a little bit ‘80s soft rock/pop, and I’ve had it on repeat most of the two weeks since it’s been out. Featuring the boppiest bop that ever bopped, at least one lyrical gem in every track, and an ad campaign focused on Walkmans, this record skirts the line between Crowd faves and Critic-worthy musicianship.

7. Double Feature – ‘00s Ben Affleck Political Thrillers: The Sum of All Fears (2002) + State of Play (2009)

In The Sum of All Fears (Crowd: 8.5/10 // Critic: 7.5/10), Ben Affleck is Jack Ryan caught up in yet another international incident. In State of Play (Crowd: 8/10 // Critic: 7/10), he’s a hotshot Congressman caught up in a scandal. Both are full of plot twists and unexpected turns, and in both, Affleck is accompanied by actors you’re always happy to see, like Jason Bateman, James Cromwell, Russell Crowe, Jeff Daniels, Viola Davis, Morgan Freeman, Philip Baker Hall, David Harbour, Rachel McAdams, Helen Mirren, Liev Schreiber, and Robin Wright—yes, I swear all of those people are in just those two movies.

8. Loki (2021-)

Unlike Black Widow, you can’t go into Loki with no MCU experience. The show finds clever ways to nudge us with reminders (and did better at it than Falcon and the Winter Soldier), but be forewarned that at some point, you’re just going to have to let go and accept wherever this timeline-hopper is taking you. An ever-charismatic cast keeps us grounded (Owen Wilson, Jonathan Majors, and an alligator almost steal the show from Tom Hiddleston in some eps), but while Falcon lasted an episode or two too long, Loki could’ve used a few more to flesh out its complicated plot and develop its characters. Thankfully, the jokes matter almost as much as the sci-fi, so you can still have fun even if you have no idea what’s going on.

9. Double Feature – Bruce Willis: Die Hard With a Vengeance (1995) + The Whole Nine Yards (2000)

Before Bruce Willis began starring in many random direct-to-DVD movies I only ever hear about in my Redbox emails, he was a Movie Star smirking his way up the box office charts. In the third Die Hard (Crowd: 10/10 // Critic: 7.5/10), he teams up with Samuel L. Jackson to decipher the riddles of a terrorist madman (Jeremy Irons), and it’s a thrill ride. In The Whole Nine Yards (Crowd: 9/10 // Critic: 8/10), he’s hitman that screws up dentist Matthew Perry’s boring life in Canada, and—aside from one frustrating scene of let’s-objectify-women-style nudity—it’s hilarious.

10. This Is the End (2013)

On paper, this is not a movie for me. An irreverent stoner comedy about a bunch of bros partying it up before the end of the world? None of things are for Taylors. But with a little help of a TV edit to pare down the raunchy and crude bits, I laughed my way through and spent the next several days thinking through its exploration of what makes a good person. While little of the plot is accurate to Christian Gospel and theology, some of its big ideas are consistent enough with the themes of the book of Revelation I found myself thinking about it again in church this morning. (Would love to know if Seth Rogen ever expected that.) Plus, I love a good self-aware celebrity spoof—can’t tell you how many times I’ve just laughed remembering the line, “It’s me, Jonah Hill, from Moneyball”—and an homage to horror classics. Crowd: 8/10 // Critic: 7/10

July Critic Picks

1. Summer of Soul (…or, When the Television Could Not Be Televised) (2021)

Even director Questlove didn’t know about the Harlem Cultural Festival, but now he’s compiled the footage so we can all enjoy one of the coolest music fest lineups ever, including The 5th Dimension, B.B. King, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, and Stevie Wonder, who made my friend’s baby dance more than once in the womb. See it on the big screen for top-notch audio. Crowd: 8/10 // Critic: 9/10

2. Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)

Robin Williams takes on the bureaucracy, disillusionment, and malaise of the Vietnam War with comedy. Williams was a one-of-a-kind talent, and here it’s on display at a level on par with Aladdin. Crowd: 8/10 // Critic: 9/10

3. Against the Rules Season 2 (2020-21)

Michael Lewis (author of Moneyball, adapted into a film starring Jonah Hill), is interested in how we talk about fairness. This season he looks at how coaches impact fairness in areas like college admissions, credit cards, and youth sports.

4. Bugsy Malone (1976)

A gangster musical starring only children? It’s a little like someone just picked ideas out of a hat, but somehow it works. You can hear why in the Bugsy Malone episode Kyla and I released this month on SO IT’S A SHOW?, plus how this weird artifact of a film connects with Gilmore Girls.

5. The Queen (2006)

Before The Crown, Peter Morgan wrote The Queen, focusing on Queen Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren) in the days following the death of Princess Diana. It’s a complex and compassionate drama, both for the Queen and for Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen, who has snuck up on me to become a favorite character actor). Maybe I’ve got a problem, but I’ll never tire of the analysis of this famous family. Crowd: 8.5/10 // Critic: 9.5/10

6. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)

This month at ZekeFilm, we took a closer look at Revisionist Westerns we’ve missed. I fell hard for Roy Bean, and I think you will, too, if for no other reason than you might like a story starring Jacqueline Bisset, Ava Gardner, John Huston, Paul Newman, and Anthony Perkins. Oh, and a bear! Crowd: 8.5/10 // Critic: 10/10

youtube

7. New Trailer Round Up

Naked Singularity (Aug. 6) – John Boyega in a crime thriller!

Queenpins (Aug. 10) – A crime comedy about extreme coupon-ing!

Dune (Oct. 1) – I’ve been cooler on the anticipation for this film, but this new look has me cautiously intrigued thanks to the Bardem + Bautista + Brolin + Chalamet + Ferguson + Isaac + Momoa + Zendaya of it all.

The Last Duel (Oct. 15) – Affleck! Damon! Driver!

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (Nov. 11) - I’m not sure why we need this, but I’m down for the Paul Rudd + Finn Wolfhard combo

King Richard (Nov. 19) - Will Smith as Venus and Serena’s father!

Encanto (Nov. 24) – Disney and Lin-Manuel Miranda making more magic together!

House of Gucci (Nov. 24) - Gaga! Pacino! Driver!

Also in July…

Kyla and I took a look at the classic supernatural soap Dark Shadows and why Sookie might be obsessed with it on Gilmore Girls.

I revisited a so-bad-it’s-good masterpiece that’s a surrealist dream even Fellini couldn’t have cooked up. Yes, for ZekeFilm I wrote about the Vanilla Ice movie, Cool as Ice, which is now a part of my Blu-ray collection.

Photo credits: Against the Rules. All others IMDb.com.

11 notes · View notes

drcreatureflix · 4 years

Text

More Family Content: Setting Up A Grimdark Campaign

Grimdark is a setting style thats focus on dystopian fantasy violence and the ammoral, think less ‘Starving Games 9: the diverging maze runner, girl is special but in love with two guys’ nonsense and more the Warhammer. I myself, (being someone who never grew out his angsty side) is an absolute whore for this kinda stuff. The main appeal for this setting is no matter who you are, you are a villain. But thats good. Cause everyone is a villain in a grimdark campagin and being the villain is cool sometimes. So I thought I would give you my process of setting up a Grimdark D&D Campaign if anyone wants to try it.

Inspiration

Well before we commence on actually scarring our players we need ideas. And to quote Picasso, “good artists borrow, great artists steal”. So lets look at some recommendations for you to read or look up or play to steal-I mean take ‘inspiration’ from.

The Warhammer Franchise: If you looked up Grimdark in the dictionary you would find a image of the Warhammer universes with the words ‘For The Emperor’ covered in heretic blood. The Warhammer Franchise has two Grimdark settings, the ‘40k universe’ and the ‘Age of Sigmar universe’, both good examples. The 40k universe being a high gothic sci-fi universe as the zealous and xenophobic imperium of mankind and their space marines who fight gods of chaos and egyptian alien terminators... and Orks (Yes actual orks) who paint things red to make them ‘go fasta’. Age of Sigmar is the more fantasy side with Giant bat zombies and Rat hulks and whatever the Hell-pit Abomination is supposed to be. Both good starting points, if you would rather read then trying to play the games and get drowned in lore, for the Age of Sigmar angle try ‘Scourge of Fate’, ‘Court of the Blind King’ and ‘Rulers of the Dead’ for my recommendations, though Age of Sigmar has book series for each faction in the game so choose an aesthetic you would like. For 40k, could not recommend anything outside the Horus Heresy series, yes its over 50 books but pick the first one ‘Horus Rising’ and that should help. Warhammer actually even has ‘Warhammer horror’ series set in the universes as well if you want to go a spoopy angle.

The Starcraft Franchise: Moving alittle over and returning to the realm of science fiction there is the Starcraft franchise. The starcraft games really pull from the previous mention Warhammer for its concepts and designs and pulls it off well. Plus I really enjoy the world building almost as much as the warhammer stuff (Okay last time I will mention Warhammer). So go onto youtube and look the games up or go buy and play them. However there are some books aswell if you would rather just read up on the lore like ‘Flashpoint’ and ‘Queen of Blades’. Obviously this is if you want to go for a more sci-fi or steam punk styled game but its D&D, do want you want (And if you want to do a sci-fi, look up the Dark Matter suppliment). But overal a good idea of how to do Grimdark.

The Song of Ice and Fire Books: Now put your pitchforks and torches down, I know season 8 of Game of Thrones was the equivlent of a hooker; that being you expect a huge payoff but you get robbed the satisfaction, being left with nothing but disappointment and a strange itch in your groin afterwards that reminds you of what you hoped for. But we are talking the books not the tv series (Though you can include it I suppose). Many of us know this franchise for its sheer bleak outlook of alliances and the concept of loyalty and the roulette of life that may just kill someone important at any point. Obviously a more medival approach for Grimdark but a good one and I would recommend it to anyone (When he finally finishes writing THE DAMN FINAL BOOKS). Obviously the whole book series is the reading recommadtion so find them cheap somewhere and delve in headfirst.

Other more Eldritch recommendations: Cosmic horror and grimdark go together like a fat kid and diabetes so I thought I would throw some quick recommendations for if you want to explore this angle aswell:

The Yellow King-Robert Chambers: A collection of short stories revolving around cults and maddness... yes please.

Bloodbourne-fromsoftware: Phenomenal game, explores both classic gothic and cosmic horror, I have drawn from this game for inspiration A LOT more than I am comfortable saying. If you can’t get through the game, maybe try the Offical Artwork book as it can gve images that you can use a inspiration for scene dressing in game.

The HP Lovecraft bibliography and the Cthullu Mythos: Seperating the man from his work, the penned work of HP Lovecraft is still some of the best written cosmic horror from the arguable father of cosmic horror... once you get over the racial stuff.

The Dark tower book series and IT- Stephen King: A more light hearted apporach to Cosmic Horror but still good horror to pull inspiration from. Main issue, if you wish to read up on Stephen King, set some time aside

The Darkest Dungeon-Red Hook Studios: Not gonna lie, I love this game probably too much (I will probably blame it for my obesity if I wasn’t aware thats it’s my fault I am a fat f*ck) I think it shows exactly how bad it probably would be a adventurer (I actually base my own stress rules on this game-more on that in another post) so is a good representation on what a grimdark fanatsy world would be like on these characters.

Session 0

Alright now that you have successfully ripped off every grimdark franchise-I mean collected recommendations for inspiration, let’s move onto what to discuss in your Session 0.

1. What are your players okay with?

This one is painfully obvious but a session 0 is like when you lose your virignity; you don’t set some bounderies or go into it somewhat prepared, you are gonna face a sticky situation afterwards and probably get your head kicked in by someones dad for corrupting their kid (Just me?...).On the topic at hand, its good to know what your players are okay with and can inform your story direction. For instance, I had a player who want to play a reform brothel worker but i would not allow it due to the circumstances of another player. Normally the questions I ask beforehand is is the following

Are you okay with detail viseral descriptions of violence?

Are you okay with scenes of torture/depravity?

Are you okay with depictions of slavery or prostitution?

Are you okay with themes like suicide or mental/phyiscal abuse?

Are you okay with sacrifical death or occult themes?

Are you okay with swearing?

Following this you should adjust according to suit your players, you want them to enjoy being evil, not weeping at the evil around them. So before you do anything, set your bounderies.

2. What is their motivation?

Another obvious one but also important one. To help establish characters in the world they live in, you must discuss their motives. Why are they on a quest? What are their intentions with the reward after? And so on and so on. Then once you have that and have discuss you can help the players fit the world alittle more. A thing I have told my players is to think of a motive for a character and turn it into an obession; this is due to the theme of obession is thorough throughout many grimdark settings as it’s easy to make a character’s good intentions twisted when they become so obessed with and wrapped up in it.

Of course you’ll get players that while wanting to play grimdark still want to be the token good upstanding hero because reasons (These would be the people that go to a pick and mix shop just gets white mice the bland pricks). But it is okay, you can work with it and truthfully I like the dynamic of the bright eyed advenutrer and friends that slowly gets tainted by the reality of the world they live in (If you want some inspiration on this I recommend the show Madoka Magica).

3. Understanding

Okay this is a more serious point. Alot of players I have played grimdark have kinda took some of the darker elements for granted as well they haven’t experience things like that. Which in turn can hurt players that have experience in those matters. So I always ask my players (And I am asking you too future grimdark DMs) to look into these themes, research and understand why they are not right and why we should not really have them in real life. If you are playing something like this just so you can be a slave trader without consequence then may I ask you to leave the table.

Playing to be a villain is good, playing to be an asshole is bad.

And that should help, I would in0clude some the additonal rules I use aswell like Stress and Bleeding but I will save them for another post after I am finished rewriting them for the third time and this post is already so goddamn long. If you also have recommendations for new DMs when it comes to running Grimdark, by all means share them. Thank you for reading.

#dnd #dnd 5e #dnd 5e homebrew #dnd 5e campaign #dnd 5e character #dnd 5th edition #dnd campaign #dnd discussions #dnd grimdark #dnd dark fantasy

18 notes · View notes

silvensei · 5 years

Text

In This Mad Machinery

A human and an android swap bodies, resulting in identity crises, existentialism, philosophy with the boys, and fun!

Detroit: Become Human | gen | 20k | rated T | introspective comedy/sci-fi

Chapter 3 (2.5k words) | [AO3 link] | [first] | < prev | next >

- - - - - - - - - -

A bell chimed above the door as it swung open. A portly woman turned around from the counter, a practiced yet warm smile and greeting at the ready. When she noticed who her new patrons were, she paused and propped a hand on her hip. “Well, look what the cat dragged in!” she teased amicably. “Hank Anderson! Haven’t seen your face ‘round here in ages!”

“Sorry, Bel. You know how life gets in the way,” Connor said, parroting Hank’s briefing from the car. “Is the usual still on the menu?”

“Aw, hon,” she laughed, “joshing as always!”

Connor smiled. He had no idea what that meant.

Fortunately, she turned her attention to the other member of his party. “As much as it’s good to see an old favorite, new faces keep the business going. Name’s Ysabel.”

Hank waved. “Connor.”

“Well, Connor, want a menu? It’s just your typical array of diner classics, but with enough pizzazz to knock your socks off, guaranteed!”

“Oh, no, thanks, ma’am, just a coffee for now.”

“Two cuppa joe and a patty with the fixin’s.” She waved them off and adjusted her apron. “You boys go make yourselves comfortable, y’hear?”

She left for the kitchen. Hank ushered Connor into the diner proper, over to the rows of red booths with black and white marbled tables. With windows on two sides, natural light filled the space. Only a handful of other tables were occupied, people chattering amongst themselves. It wasn’t terribly spacious, but in the way that it felt cozy rather than claustrophobic.

Hank settled in a corner booth, his back to the wall. “She seems nice,” Connor commented, sitting across from him.

“Bel? She’s more than nice. She’s probably the closest thing to an angel I’ve got.” His head turned to look out the window, letting Connor notice a momentary bout of erratic flickering in his LED. “It doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from, but she still makes this place seem like a mother’s kitchen. Just home recipes abound. And to top it all off? She don’t take shit from no one.

“One time—” he laughed, “—One time, ages ago, Jeffrey and I came by for lunch just pissed off. An easy drug bust flipped right around and left us with nothing, sending us right back to the drawing board. One officer was so furious she quit that morning. So we came in here, fuming, cussing up a storm, just miserable bastards looking to drown our frustrations in some good ol’ comfort food; it was too early for booze, but hell, did we come close. Bel came over with absolutely not the right thing, like soup and salad or something. I’ll admit, I was a bit of a hotheaded prick back then—”

“‘Back then’?”

“Watch it, boy,” Hank warned with a grin. “Anyway, I snapped at her, saying I wasn’t in the mood to deal with this, we didn’t want this, how hard was it to grill a fucking burger, I didn’t even have my coffee yet, and so on, and she shut me up by throwing a glass of water in my face. It was nearly empty already and didn’t have ice, but it was enough to do the trick. Then she said, ‘If starting over is so easy, why don’t you kids stop bitching and suck it up?’ Then she walked away.” Hank rested his chin in his hand, the smile still on his face. “It was the literal smack to the head that I needed. She gave us the soup n’ salads on the house as an attempt to get us to eat healthier. The coffee was free, too, but it was mostly hot sauce to get back at me for yelling at her.

Connor’s own smile had only grown. He wasn’t entirely sure why; it seemed like an involuntary response. “If that’s not the definition of a guardian angel, then I don’t know what is.”

“What can I say? You really do need a friend around who’s not afraid to knock some sense into you.”

Connor leaned back, sinking into the red cushions. This was comfortable. Natural light diffusing through the windows; fun conversation with the white noise of other discussions over quiet music he couldn’t place; the ever-present aroma of a kitchen hard at work; a pleasant warmth from the sunlight (without the radiation). He would like to come here again.

With such fond memories, though, why hadn’t they come here before in the six months Connor had known him? He decided to ask.

Hank continued looking out the window. His expression shifted into something Connor couldn’t interpret, but the brief red light gave him some clues. “It just seemed a bit boring to bring an android to a restaurant, y’know? You don’t really eat and all….”

“You boys gossiping over here?” joked Bel, sliding two mugs of coffee onto the table. Connor jumped; he hadn’t heard her approach. Or maybe his ears did, but his attention was focused elsewhere. Bel laughed. “Late nights at the bar making you jumpy?”

“Ah… not so much anymore,” Connor improvised. “Some late nights on the job, if anything.”

“Oh, I’d bet. Between homicide and android rights cases, you two are probably set on work for the next couple years.” She fished around in the pocket of her apron.

“Where did you hear about our casework?” asked Hank.

Bel found her target and deposited a couple small cups of thirium into the bowl of half-and-half creamers. “All over the news, hon! You’re really paving the way for androids in the work force. Setting the bar pretty high, too, while you’re at it.” She smiled before whisking off to other tables.

“As nice as ever, that Bel,” Hank commented. He inspected one of the thirium cups and asked, “How is this compared to plain old creamers?”

Connor’s hands hovered around his mug. He lacked his infrared temperature sensor, his unfamiliar tactile senses only told him ‘hot,’ and he couldn’t even remember what a fourth-order differential to estimate heat loss through radiation looked like. He’ll just give it a minute or two to cool. “I’m sure thirium doesn’t taste pleasant, but because the android program recognizes it as essential to mechanical function, it won’t register the taste. It’s just used like a nutritional benefit.”

Hank’s nose scrunched for a moment as he regarded tainting his sacred drink. Then he shrugged, poured one in with a stir and downed a gulp. He stared past Connor, eyes narrowed as he critiqued the taste. There was a smattering of yellow in his LED. “Mmmmm,” he soon hummed. “0.12 calories.”

A snort of laughter caught in Connor’s nose, which turned into a short bout of coughs. The tickle it left in his nasal cavity was completely alien. “Shit,” he choked out. Hank was much better at containing his reaction to just a smirk. “I don’t like how involuntary that was.”

“Hah. Welcome to the club.”

“And hot off the presses!” Bel swept over to them once again, setting a platter in the middle of the tabletop. “Did the onions myself! It was such a treat to break out the cheddar patties again, too; they just go to waste when you’re not around.”

Connor sat mesmerized. He and Hank had gone to many—if not most—burger joints in and around Detroit, but the hamburger in front of him was the tallest, most layered sandwich he had ever seen. Two burgers, flecks of cheddar dripping from them, overflowing with caramelized onions, roasted peppers, mushrooms, slices of some other cheese, lettuce, pickles—is that macaroni? A sharp kick to the shin snapped him from his trance long enough to thank Bel and send her off. “Lieutenant!” he hissed. He leaned forward to keep his voice down, regretting the full whiff of that savory, melty scent he got. “Do you know how many calories are in this?!”

“With this head of yours, I do now, yeah. And no way am I telling you, impulsive programming be damned!” Hank set a devious grin in his borrowed expression; this mischievous image of his doppelgänger made Connor uncomfortable. “Give it a try. I can guarantee it’s delicious.”

He knew he shouldn’t. It was unhealthy, grease-laden, and caloric. As if the burger wasn’t enough, the bed of beer batter waffle fries that coated the plate with accompanying cups of barbecue sauce could’ve been a meal on its own. It also smelled incredible.

It was technically a command from Hank, he realized, but without a HUD of objectives, it was nothing more than words. Nothing binding about it.

But it smelled so good.

He picked up the burger, leaving in the steak knife skewer holding it together. Before he could second-guess himself, he took a bite. There was a crunch from the brioche, a different crunch of the onions, then too many to distinguish, each with its own flavor that he had no previous reference on which to base any categorization, but together, it was splendid.

His instinct was to isolate and analyze each individual component, but without his tech, it was just a bombardment of information. By the time the taste stopped overwhelming his senses, half of the burger was gone.

Hank was swirling the coffee around in his mug, expression dripping in ‘told ya so.’ “A goddamn culinary masterpiece, right?”

Connor took another quick bite (getting mostly onions and macaroni) before he replaced it on the plate. He wiped off his hands on a paper napkin to buy processing time. “Lieutenant,” he said. “Hank. I still disapprove. But I understand now.”

“Fuckin’-A right!” Hank took a bite out of a waffle fry. “Listen, I get that you guys don’t need to eat, but it wouldn’t kill ya every now and then. CyberLife at least could’ve built in better taste buds. All I’m getting is calorie count and salt content, not any of the finesse.”

Trying a fry for himself, he noted the tang that he deduced as saltiness. Though not the main dish, they were also quite good. He took another. “It’s not vital to androids’ function—”

“And it’s not ‘vital’ to come and eat out like this. It’s just fuckin’ delightful.”

That is true. Much of his existence these days isn’t spent out of necessity. He didn’t have to pet Sumo, but it made him happy to do so. Munching on a third fry, he realized that humans were the same, except with more of a sensory benefit, like the fluffiness of Sumo’s fur. Why weren’t they the ones with compulsive programming? It seemed like they would need it more, what with all these distractions that can physically affect their mental state. “Ohh…,” he realized, “no wonder addictions are such an issue.”

“Now— hold on, now, how’d you jump to that conclusion? Like, yeah, but—” Hank’s LED began blinking. He flinched from something before raising his eyebrows. “A call from Jeffrey. Now this’ll be interesting.” He hesitated before he looked around the room. “I, ah, should probably take this elsewhere, ‘case it’s on the down low.”

“Tap the temple to answer,” Connor advised as Hank slid out of the booth and went to the door.

Connor crunched another fry, one that was extra crunchy. He should probably pay Bel soon and get a box for the rest, should they have to leave in a hurry. If only he knew how much two coffees and a—shit.

He picked up the untouched coffee. It was barely warm now. Unhelpful one-track human brain. Can’t even set a reminder in the background. He took a sip. It didn’t warm him or anything, but it tingled his tongue in a sort of dry, sharp way. Coffee was bitter, right? He didn’t think it would be this bitter, but Hank did like his coffee black. Despite complaining he couldn’t taste much, Hank’s mug was completely drained.

He spotted Bel this time as she approached. “Could I get a box for the rest of this? It sounds like we might have to leave soon.”

“Always off to save the city, you two are. I’ll get this all wrapped up in a jiffy!”

“And how much do I owe you?” Connor asked before she left with his plate. He was pretty sure Hank’s wallet was in his left pocket.

Bel cocked a grin. “Hon, has it really been so long you don’t remember?”

He paused. “Got two coffees this time.”

“Oh, silly me, that’s true! How’s an even ten bucks sound, then?”

Connor couldn’t help a small frown. “That seems a bit low….”

“Nah, call it a ‘welcome back’ discount.” Her expression lost its teasing edge, becoming something warm. “It’s good to see you again, Hank.”

While he liked the woman, if the conversation was going to turn sentimental, he wasn’t sure how well he was going to keep up his act. “It’s good to see you, too, Bel,” he replied before bringing his cold mug to his lips, hoping to end it there.

“And I hope you kept your talent for parenting.”

Connor almost choked. “What?”

“You were always a good father.” Bel was looking over his shoulder, off down memory lane. “Cole was the brightest kid in the county. But while more tragedy has befallen you than I would wish on anybody, I still hope Connor’s lucky enough to be in the same kind of care.”

“No, sorry, Connor’s not my son, he’s a detective—my coworker—not to mention an android.”

“Which means he might need it most, eh, sugar?” She shifted her weight and her gaze, looking back at him. “Sure, he looks what, twenty-five? Thirty? But isn’t he a new model? He probably ain’t even three yet, and he’s been deviant for way less than that. A father figure to show him the societal ropes sounds perfect to me.”

He felt like a process or ten had stalled. Fortunately, Hank returned to the table, so Bel took his plate and left with no more than a wink.

“Jeffrey wants us at the office today,” Hank said. Connor blinked and took a breath, trying to not focus on Bel’s inanity. (RK800 androids were the most advanced—hot off the production line immediately—he didn’t need—)

“Specifically, he wants me,” continued Hank, “so technically, he wants you. Said it shouldn’t take long.”

Connor cleared his throat. “So why didn’t he call me directly?”

“He did. A few times.”

Startled, Connor quickly dug out Hank’s phone. The screen lit to two missed calls, one new voicemail, and some new emails. “Oh….”

“Not so easy when it doesn’t directly invade your brain, huh? Now can you forgive me for not texting immediately?”

“I thought we were supposed to be unraveling the secrets of existence, Lieutenant, not dissecting your communication and dietary habits.”

Hank laughed. In Connor’s opinion, it didn’t sound right with his voice, but it made him smile nonetheless. “So, are we both going or just me?” he asked.

“I dunno, what else am I gonna do?”

Connor hummed. “It’s Saturday, right? Markus might be home.”

“Markus? As in rA9 Markus?”

“If CyberLife keeps this up, he’s bound to hear about it sooner or later, so why not tell him now? He usually checks in on his human on the weekends.”

Hank shrugged. “Might as well, I guess. Gives me something different to do. Where’s he live?”

“Around. Don’t ask me, you’re the one with the GPS today.”

Bel returned once more and set a cardboard box on the table. “Well, boys, it was my pleasure!” she boomed. “Y’all better come back soon, alright?”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Hank said with a smile as he stood. “Wonderful coffee.”

“Aw, c’mere!” She pulled him into a hug, something that didn’t fluster Hank at all. When the embrace broke, she held him by both shoulders and said, “Oh, Hank, he hugs like you already!”

The real Hank’s eyebrow twitched. “What…does that mean?”

“Nothing, nothing!”

Connor avoided their eyes until he found a ten and some ones in his wallet and handed them to Bel. He picked up the box and used his free arm to give her a quick hug. It was warm. Nice. “Thanks, Bel.”

“Anytime!”

[next >]

#Detroit Become Human #DBH #Connor RK800 #Hank Anderson #my writing #DBH fanfiction #body swap #my roommate set off the smoke alarm while I was writing up this post #she was trying to fry an egg #her only response was 'you learn something new each day'#like sure dude but also this is our fifth year of college #you are twenty-four

2 notes · View notes

secret-diary-of-an-fa · 5 years

Text

“Another Life” Review: Another Hour of Mine I Won’t Get Back

One of the good things about Netlix (particularly compared to traditional TV channels) is that its ability to deliver a wide variety of content simultaneously allows it to experiment with things that might not have wider appeal. This is particularly important where genre fiction is concerned, because you can’t rely on formula to develop something genuinely good in that area. Who’d have thought that a ‘cursed object’ story set exclusively in the art world where everyone talks like they’re delivering a devastating Gustav Klimt review would turn out to be one of the best horror movies of recent years? And yet Velvet Buzzsaw blew me away and gave me a reason not to give up on western culture completely. Likewise, who expected a revenge saga about classical music with (at most) one or two truly graphic scenes to be the most gut-wrenching and powerful psychological thrillers of recent years? Yet The Perfection was one of the only truly transcendent films I’ve ever had the privilege of watching. The same goes for series- it’s hard to imagine that an overwhelming blend of surreal and dystopian imagery, hard-to-grasp technological concepts, semi-obscure literary references, needlessly brutal violence, gleeful depravity, whip-smart humour and a borderline-sociopath with a Hello Kitty rucksack would ever be aired on a proper channel. Altered Carbon, however, turned out to be one of the best sci-fi series of the last decade, missing the top spot only thanks to the existence of Rick and Morty.

The reason I’ve started with all this gushing praise, however, is merely to provide context and a necessary counterbalance to the excoriating review that follows. For you see, an ability to deliver niche or experimental content can lead to abject failures as well as shining successes. For every underrated gem, there must be a meticulously-polished turd waiting to ambush the unsuspecting connoisseur. Ladies and gentlemen, Another Life is that turd.

On paper, Another Life sounds like good, solid sci-fi. A starship captain has to travel across the universe to ascertain whether an alien race that recently dropped probes on Earth is hostile or just curious. Along the way, her journey will be complicated by a crew who’s used to working under a different captain with a radically different style of leadership and all the usual, real-life-plausible dangers of travel through uncharted space (along with a few blatantly made-up ones). It’s not a terrible idea, but every bad creative decision that could be made is made and so the whole things collapses like a poorly-made soufle before the end of episode one.

For a start, let’s talk about the show’s aesthetics and visual decisions. the CG budget clearly wasn’t huge (which is fine), but the show tries to realise as many of its effects as possible using CG anyway, which stretches that minimal budget far too thin and draws attention to how artificial and contrived everything looks. For example, the decision to make the alien probes on Earth giant shimmering walls of crystal that can only be realised through CG is particularly baffling, given that they could just have been big fuck-off metal things that could have been physically built as a set. Meanwhile, the show‘s overall look is... well, bland. If you’ve seen literally any space sci-fi before, you’ve seen the individual elements of the tech in Another Life. I think it’s aiming for Archetypal, but it just looks lazy. It doesn’t help that they liberally borrow terminology from other sci-fi. I know that ‘Impulse Engine’ is technically (probably) the correct name for a slower-than-light engine that works in a particular way, but calling your space engines that just invites comparisons to Star Trek, which won’t be favourable. Back to the point, though: in addition to cribbing heavily from superior shows, Another Life also makes everything look far too smooth and clean. A spaceship is a working vehicle filled with people doing dangerous, difficult, often dirty jobs. Its interior shouldn’t look like an iPhone fucked a trendy west-end bar. Seriously, the ‘future’ set in fucking Crystal Maze looks more convincing.

The problem of everything seeming too smooth and clean extends beyond the visuals and into the casting. Practically everyone in the core cast is in their early twenties. They’re not bad actors, necessarily, but they clearly need older, more experienced hands around them to guide their performances and the absence of these more seasoned actors is felt acutely. There’s a reason why mature sci-fi shows usually cast across a broad age range- you’re asking your cast to deal with conceptual and scientific abstractions that can be challenging for people who don’t have a few performances under their belt. It also feels wildly implausible that a dangerous space-mission would feature a bunch of hormonal twenty-somethings who’s personal drama might get in the way of them making clever decisions. The main lass (whose name I’ve already forgotten), is played by a noticeably older woman. Indeed, that age difference is a big part of her character: can she win the trust and respect of the young hotheads? Unfortunately, one older actress does not a seasoned cast make. Besides, the character she’s playing just isn’t worth rooting for. It’s not that she’s a terrible person- she’s coldly aloof, but so was Picard and everyone loves that dude. It’s just that she has no depth. She has a family back on Earth, and we’re told that she’s missing them and trying to ensure the mission’s success so she can see them again, but the supposed internal conflict has no effect on her behaviour. She just goes about robotically calculating and minimising risk, even though doing so ensures that she’s going to be in space, away from her loved ones, for much, much longer. Within the narrative of the show, she’s making the correct, mature decisions, but shouldn’t they be causing her some introspective strife? No? Yes? Does this fucking show care one way or the other?

Of course, janky characters and budget set designs are kind of par for the cause with sci-fi of a certain type. Sometimes it can be endearing (the fact that the sets literally wobbled sometimes in early Doctor Who was part of its charm, for example). A much bigger problem is Another Life’s total lack of narrative logic. The main character (no I still can’t remember her name, nor be bothered to check) managed to get ten people killed the last time she was in charge of a starship. Surely that’s the point at which you politely ask someone to retire? Even if there were mitigating circumstances (which there probably were because showing fallibility in its lead is not something this show feels comfortable with), why on Earth would anyone put her in charge of a crew of emotional 20-somethings she’s never met before while their previous, trusted captain is still on the fucking ship and clearly feeling mutinous? That’s just bad management on behalf of planet Earth’s top brass. I can only hope that someone in HR got the sack for that one. Or, better yet, that a giant hammer will spontaneously fall out of the sky and hit this show’s script-writer so hard in the head that he loses control of his motor functions and bowels and is forced to retire to a convalescent home for the incontinent.

The captain’s own decision making processes are just as baffling as her bosses. There’s a bit where the crew figures out that they can get back on course and cut down on journey time by slingshotting around a slightly temperamental star using the same shielding they use when traveling at FTL (yeah- FTL space travel is a common thing in this universe, yet humans have somehow never met another alien race before- make of that what you will). They already tried to slingshot round the star once and were forced to abort and break orbit because of the strain on the ship. The plan has an 89% chance of success. The 11% chance of failure doesn’t equate to instant death or anything- logically, it just means the shield would fail and they’d have to break orbit again (because that’s what happened before: remember that we’ve already established that slingshotting around the star doesn’t do anything worse than rattle the ship and give everyone plenty of time to back off). For some reason, Captain Caution decides that the high chance of success, negligible risk of serious repercussions and massive potential benefits just aren’t good enough and vetoes the plan, thereby adding months to the voyage. Isn’t establishing whether the new, technologically superior alien neighbours are friendly or not something of a time-critical op, by the way? Naturally, the crew mutiny (under the leadership of the previous captain), try their plan and it fails miserable.

And there’s the final nail in the coffin for Another Life. It doesn’t play by its own rules. Its established that the FTL shields can’t use much power, because they’re on all the fucking time during FTL. It’s established that nothing particularly terrible happens when you try to slingshot round a star and have to abort. It’s established that combining those two facts to get a speed boost has an 89% chance of success. And yet, when the crew try it without the Captain’s express permission, bits of the ship start to explode, everything goes to shit and the vessel ends up in a decaying orbit around the sun, somehow drained of power. The show’s in such a hurry to show that it’s main character is right and correct and noble in everything she does that it forgets rules it laid down literally five minutes earlier.

The whole shoddy shebang has a weirdly patronising and conservative ethos. “Listen to your elders and official superiors”, it whispers smugly. “They always know best, even when they’re responsible for the deaths of ten or more people in the quite recent past. Don’t think for yourself. Don’t try to improve your situation. The old, safe ways of doing things are always best, even when they seem neurotic or unworkable.” It’s weird, because it’s the exact opposite problem that sci-fi normally has. Normally, sci-fi tries so hard to be forward-looking that you end up with a bunch of wide-eyed fuckwits trusting the power of friendship and love over a more measured, carefully-planned approach. Both sides of the coin are equally annoying since they involve sacrificing the internal logic of the fictional universe on the alter of Some Hack’s personal ethos. However, Another Life earns my full, unmitigated disapprobation, not just a mild slap on the wrist, because it doesn’t even bother to be a good sci-fi show before jumping into the message-mongering bullshit. Remember, all this shit is from episode one. My advice to those of you craving some hard space sci-fi is to re-watch Nightflyers instead. It’s weird as balls, well-scripted, has a properly-established set of hard sci-fi rules and there’s even a romantic subplot involving the hologramatic projection of a hideous mutant. Yeah. Go watch that instead. I think I might, too, come to think of it.

#Secret Diary of a Fat Admirer #Another Life #Another Life review #Netflix #Nightflyers #sci-fi #science fiction #TV #hard sci-fi

6 notes · View notes

purplelizardman · 6 years

Text

The History of Slimes

Slimes and Ooze

In modern RPGs, there are few monsters as iconic as the humble ooze. Enjoying a recent surge in popularity thanks to That Time I got Reincarnated as a Slime, a light-novel and anime of the same name, and their inclusion in dozens of popular titles, slimes have never been more prominent RPG and mainstream culture.

On a recent project, I’ve had the odd privilege to journey down the short rabbit hole of the ooze’s origins. It was a fun journey learning about the myth, history, and culture behind oozes, but the best journeys are shared. I hope you will enjoy The History of Slimes as much as I have enjoyed researching it.

What is a Slime?

The ooze or “slime” (used interchangeably) is usually a weak monster in RPGs. It is characterized by an amorphous, ooze-like form, and is generally of low or non-existent intelligence. It almost exclusively attacks by ingesting its target, swiping with tentacles, or (rarely) using magic.

Slimes are unique in that they do not derive from classical mythologies. They are recent phenomenon in storytelling and one that’s gaining traction at a surprising rate. Before we uncover their origins, let’s take a journey backward through time.

Slimes in Popular culture

Slimes are prolific in popular culture among the RPG crowd. They are featured in dozens of games, including the ever popular titles:

Dragon Quest

Dungeons and Dragons

Minecraft

Mother Series

Final Fantasy

Not to mention, anime, manga, sci-fi, and fantasy novels.

The modern tradition of dewdrop, almost amicable slimes in RPGs dates back over three decades to the release of Dragon Quest in 1986, where it was so beloved that it became the series’ mascot.

In all likelihood, Dragon Quest borrowed the idea of slimes from other RPGs such as “Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord” (1981) which was a part of a wave of RPGs inspired by the famous “pen and paper” rpg called “Dungeons and Dragons”.

In 1977, the original Monster Manual hit store shelves and in it was one of the most iconic creatures of Dungeons and Dragons: the “Gelatinous Cube.”

Gary Gygax included this cube-shaped monster was mostly a joke: a transparent cube that fit perfectly into the 5x5x5 hallways of the grid-paper dungeons, travelling along and sweeping up anything in its path. It was a magical, monstrous Roomba, before Roombas even existed.

But Gary Gygax did not conceive of oozes in a vacuum, he had a little help to come up with the idea.

Slimes in Movies

There is no more iconic slime movie than the “The Blob“ a 1958 cult sci-fi horror classic, The Blob tells the story of a mysterious thing that falls from the sky and begins devouring everything it can find. As it eats, it grows. Then a group of plucky and unfortunate youths stumble into its feeding ground while on vacation.

At a runtime of 86 minutes, and with special effects that solidify its place as sci-fi cult classic, it’s well worth a watch.

But even Hollywood wasn’t original enough to invent the idea of a slime monster out of thin air.

Slimes in Sci-Fi

Before the cinema, slimes had a far more literary legacy in science-fiction.

One of the most iconic and disturbing representations of slimes was the Shoggoth from H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos. The Shoggoth first appeared in publication in 1929 and is a disturbing monster with the ability to shift its form, imitate speech, and wield its large strength to crush enemies. Perhaps unique about the Shoggoth, was that it was the first time slimes were presented as beings of higher intelligence than humanity.

Despite being a truly terrifying iteration of the slime, the shoggoth is far from its origins.

As early as 1926, we see the slime appearing as villainous monster in The Malignant Entity, published in the renown pulp magazine Amazing Stories.

During the early 1900s, the slime made a slew of appearance across pulp magazines. In 1923, it even made it to the front cover of Wierd Talesin the story “The Ooze.”

But the earliest recorded usage of slime as an antagonist seems to be in The Odyle a short story published by Charles Edmond Walk in 1907 in The Blue Book magazine.

It’s a story about a scientist who brings life to cells that start growing and just don’t stop.

At last we arrive at the origins of the humble slime: the amoeba.

Born in the early 1900s out of an intersection of rapidly growing medical knowledge and human fear of medical science, the humble slime is the embodiment of human hubris gone awry. It is the crystallization of the fear that we have waded too deep into the unknown waters where only gods and darker things dwell and that we have used that forbidden knowledge to make the device of our own undoing.

At least, that’s what the slime was and what it would still be, had not Gary Gygax and pulp movies from the 1950s taken an otherwise intensely threatening concept and transformed it into the humorous, lovable slime we all know today.

Notably, the slime still appears in its amoebic form in many space sci-fi iterations, including the popular turn-based strategy game series Masters of Orion and an episode of the original Stark Trek series: The Immunity Syndrome.

Unique to the space sci-fi version of the slime (amoeba) is that it is almost always large enough to engulf entire ships and sometimes even pose a threat to planets. It always represents an unending hunger and primitive, malevolent intelligence, such that negotiation is never an option.

Conclusion

The humble slime has enjoyed many interpretations during its short life. From the small, but dangerous amoeba, to adorable animated dew-drops, to dungeon cleaning roombas, the slime has been it all.

Outside of space sci-fi and space fantasy, the modern slime enjoys a whimsical feel due to the representation of the slime in 1950s cinema culture, and then again in the pen and paper game “Dungeons and Dragons” which enshrined its position as an iconic and somewhat silly monster.

How will slimes be in the future?

It’s hard to say, but there is a growing slime presence in modern media which, in the past, has lead to exploration and even humanization of mythic creatures, and the humble slime is no exception. Look for representations of slime that push the boundaries between humanity and ooze in a lovable and relatable way.

Happy sliming to you all!

Do you have additional information about the history of ooze as a monster? Do you have a link to an online-readable version of The Odyle? If so, please leave a comment below.

The History of Slimes was originally published on Friendly Neighborhood Lizard Man

#education #finlam #history #history of ooze #history so slime #ooze monsters #origins of ooze #origins of slimes #PurpleLizardMan #rpg ooze #rpg slime #slime monsters

9 notes · View notes

magpiefngrl · 6 years

Note

17) if you could give your fledgling author self any advice, what would it be?

Thanks for the ask!

What people want to do with their writing differs. Some write for fun, to have a laugh with the rest of the fandom/community; it’s a hobby. Some are trying to see if they’ve got what it takes to become professional writers; some just like the ship and have no interest beyond that. They’re all valid reasons to write. My advice is to the kind of fledgling author I used to be, the one who wanted to be a professional and wanted their writing to be decent, and it’s this:

Read a lot

Write a lot

Step out of your comfort zone

Attend workshops/read writing guides/be open to critique

[discussion under the cut ‘cause it’s looooooong]

1. Read a lot

It goes without saying; reading is what feeds a writer. I did a travel writing workshop once and the editor told us that he could always tell from someone’s writing what they’d been reading. What one reads the most comes through in one’s writing whether they intend it or not. This “or not” is why I’ve been vigilant ever since to avoid reading anything that I don’t want to be influenced by: gossip mags, for instance, or run-of-the-mill urban fantasy.

As for fic writers, I’d suggest reading the best examples of writing in your fandom. Read them often and try to see what it is about them that you love and you’d like to emulate: is it the banter? The prose? The UST and emotions? The plot? How did the author do it? Tip #4 below helps with that.

I’d also strongly advise resisting the temptation to read only fic. Like the editor above, now I can usually tell if an author has been consuming only fanfic, because the sentences sound familiar. Fanfic can be restrictive when it’s the only thing you consume. People like to rail against published books on tumblr, but as someone who actually wants to be published one day, that attitude irritates me. It’s also false. There’s a ton of marvellous stuff out there, books from people from all over the world, books with great prose or great plot, books from marginalised authors, classics that are classics for a reason, new authors doing incredible stuff.

tl;dr: read the best writing you can get your hands on (incl. published books) as often as you can

2. Write a lot

This also goes without saying. Writing is a skill; the more you practice, the better you become at it. Fic is amazing for it! You practice writing plot, dialogue, characterisation, description. You might insert on original character or two.

At the beginning, a new writer’s output might not be as amazing as what they’d like it to be, but recognising that it’s not there yet is actually a huge step in improving. So write loads, and don’t be afraid to write things no one will see. Set a word count target (you could join a community such as @gywo) and try to reach that target. It could be 300 words a day or 2k words every weekend or a total of 12k a month, whatever works for you. Make writing a habit. Ask people here to prompt you, write off-the-cuff. Some of it won’t be great – to you. But there’ll always be a reader who loves the quick drabble you wrote. And even if the post goes unnoticed, move on. Write the next drabble/fic, and then the next. Just keep writing and keep making it the best you can.

tl;dr: write your arse off

3. Step out of your comfort zone

This tip isn’t one you usually see in these kinds of lists, but to me it’s an important one. What I mean is that complacency can be a writer’s biggest enemy. Say you’ve reached a decent writing level, you’ve got some readers, you’re having fun writing your fics. They’re becoming popular so you think you’re doing something right and write some more in the same vein. This is all good, but it might also lead to stagnation.

Stepping out of your comfort zone shakes things up. This advice relates to the other tips. First, read something that you normally avoid, esp. if people are saying it’s a fantastic piece of writing. My thinking is that if X fic has rave reviews but happens to be mpreg (which I loathe), the benefits of being exposed to the great writing outweigh the mpreg–and I can always skim through that part. Do consider your triggers if you have any and look after yourself, but also don’t confuse them with dislikes.

Reading outside your genre is a great way to shake things up: if you’re into Eighth-Year drarry, read them as fifty-year-olds. If you only read Auror case fics, read a smoking-hot PWP or an achingly-cute domestic drarry. If the books you buy are all adult sci-fi, try this contemporary YA everyone’s been raving about. Read poetry, if you don’t! Even if you don’t get it. Just read it, consider the word choices and put it aside. You don’t have to read outside your comfort zone all the time, but try to do it with some regularity and make sure you choose great quality works.

Same with writing: if you write in one genre, try writing a story in another. Maybe you’ll fuck it up. No one needs to see it. At least you’ve tried. This is where workshops or writing exercises come in handy. Recently I took part in one where some drarry authors wrote a paragraph with sentences up to seven words, and another that was only one sentence. Imagine writing a 200-word sentence! You’ll probably never use it in your life, but it’s such a great way to practise sentence structure and see the effect it has on tone and pacing. Prompts can help as well: some of the AU prompts I received were things I longed to write, but others were harder. Some I fucked up. But I wrote a flower shop fic for a friend, which is something I’d never in my life write willingly lol, and it turned out wonderful and it’s actually become very popular. I’m currently writing a historical AU, which is def outside my comfort zone, and it’s taking me ages, but it also forces me to examine it from all angles to find how to make it work for me, and that means I get to learn a bit more about writer-me.

Writing outside your comfort zone is also about writing things that might make you emotional. Natalie Goldberg’s writing book (mentioned above) was one of the first I read and it’s influenced me a great deal: she says that when you feel choked up or upset or emotional while writing a scene, keep writing. You’ve tapped into a vein. Digging deep in a character’s psyche might make you uncomfortable, sure; it means digging deep inside yourself and some dark parts of you that you might not necessarily like. Keep going. For me, that’s what pushes someone’s writing from good to amazing. It’s why some fics stand out, get recced loads and are lauded, even if they don’t have a huge amount of kudos.

tl;dr: read books outside your genre, do writing exercises and write things that make you emotional

4. Attend workshops/read writing guides/be open to critique

Let me repeat that this is advice for people who want their writing to be better and who possibly want to go pro. If you’re writing as a hobby, you needn’t pay attention to this. For the rest: learning the technical aspects of the craft can make a huge difference in your writing.

At first, you might enjoy a fic and not know why. Workshops and writing guides can help you identify what it is you liked. You’ll be able to examine a novel with a different eye when you’re familiar with the 3-act structure rather than go “wow, the pacing was amazing, I couldn’t put this down, but I don’t know why”.

There are dozens of writing guides out there. After reading more than thirty, I can confirm they get repetitive after a while. But read a couple of them, at the very least. Check if your library has: Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, Steering the Craft by Ursula Le Guin (though I wouldn’t rec this one if you’re completely new), On Writing by King, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott (which is also really funny).

Attending a workshop/accepting critique is the hardest to arrange. It requires other people, you can’t read it or borrow it from your library. Now, I’ve heard from people who attended creative writing seminars that they were in class with a bunch of idiots who had strong opinions as to what’s literature and what’s not. If that’s something you’d rather not face, then there are creative writing MOOCs around where people are kinder and more supportive. I’ve taken several and am a huge advocate of them. You can audit a MOOC (watch the video with the lecture, do the reading, skip the assignment) but participating will help the most. You might get 1-2 or even 15 people commenting on your work, telling you what worked and what didn’t. Some common elements will arise: perhaps everyone liked the dialogue, but many felt the description was lacking. It’s not a pleasant feeling, but you’ll have a clearer idea of what works and what doesn’t. Examining each piece of critique and seeing if you agree or not with it is a big step in improving.

Having your work betaed is of course the number one thing you can do to improve, and having a good beta is invaluable–and not always easy to find. Try to find a good beta. Finally, If you’re in a fandom community, see if you can arrange a workshop thing with your friends. Just make sure that you’re all on board with critiquing each other’s writing with kindness, but also not just squeeing. Squeeing can take place with critiquing, it’s not mutually exclusive.

tl;dr: learn the technical aspects of the craft and learn to accept critique

Thanks for the ask! I hope you don’t mind such a detailed answer :))

#writing advice #writing #writeblr #writing tips #my craft or sullen art #asks #i think i'll copy this on my wordpress

107 notes · View notes

awed-frog · 7 years

Text

This is going to be a mess - I had to erase the original post because the bots just wouldn’t stop coming, so here is how it all started -

And here are your kind requests -

So - thank you for your lovely asks and PMs - here we go.

(Keep in mind that those moments were hugely embarrassing to me, so you shouldn’t find them funny or anything. They’re tragic stories I’m relating for your moral betterment - that is all.)

1) The ‘The Greeks Made Me Do It’ story

As a bit of background, I was eighteen and had just moved to another city to start my studies. I’d been there for a month, knew literally no one, had no idea where half my classes were and my ideals of switching to a Sophisticated Look and becoming A Lady had miserably failed, which means I was walking around wearing this insanely expensive, Managing Director of the IMF coat plus combat boots and frayed jeans plus a lopsided handmade scarf and 'Marilyn going on Morticia’ lipstick (I worried - a lot - about being the only weirdo and the only unfinished person in the entire town, because that was before I met Hamster Girl and Colour Matching Girl and I spend as much on weed as you do for rent but everything I own is see-through, threadbare or ripped Guy). Plus, I couldn’t speak or understand the local language all that well, and I’d taken to nodding and smiling whatever people said, which generally made me look like an idiot and meant I never knew what was going on.

(And, yes, it’s tempting and it seems like the easier option, but seriously - don’t do that.)

All of that means I was more or less living in the university library so I could pretend I had a purpose in life and, well, going from a high school library to a real academic library was like stepping into the Restricted Section - I mean, of course, I read what I was supposed to read, and I lost myself in serious books that had little to do with my actual subjects (that was my Minoan period - I’m sure every Classics student had one), but there were also the - uhm - other books, you know? All those studies about homosexuality in the Greek world, and how Mapplethorpe’s pictures were connected with frescoes of Saint Sebastian, and people having sex with statues and kings trying to trick their young wives into anal and truly lurid collections of Greek art which my high school teacher had once described as ‘Something you should probably have a look at, but if I let you borrow my copy your parents would not be happy with me’. And on that particular day, I had actually devoted my afternoon to a no-nonsense book about Eastern influences in Greek art, and well, the study of lovers and concubines on Greek amphorae was a sort of a plan B to relax a bit between chapters, because I was reading in a foreign language and it was hard work and when you don’t know anyone, it’s like you’re the only one working, right, and everyone else is off to wild parties and poetry lectures and screenings of a Guatemalan movie you never knew existed and that’s depressing af, so yay for weird art - but at around five I realized the day was done and I didn’t want to give the dirty book back because, come on, it wasn’t that dirty and I had a right to read it and it was complemented with passages by Theophrastus and Plato, plus it had come to me via the now defunct goblin-based system of tunnels underground the reading room -

~note - for younger readers, these things~

- so I didn’t want to give it back and go through the hassle of requesting it again, and I remember the fuck it moment that came over me - I was eighteen, I was studying the damn stuff, so I’d borrow the damn book and if the librarians disapproved, well, they could bite me.

(Obviously, they didn’t disapprove. The bored guy at the service desk didn’t even look at me, because nobody looks at you, ever, and your life is your own, so go live it.)

And next, I had to go shopping because there’s only so much time you can survive on cold cereal - and suddenly there I was, in a big and foreign supermarket, a dirty book burning a hole through my old Invicta, my Queen of England coat clashing with everything else I was wearing, and I was moving from aisle to aisle without making eye contact and trying to remember what spices were called in French, and I’d almost made it - I was collecting my mismatched groceries on the other side of the till when the bloody alarm started blaring, and two uniformed guards appeared out of thin air and it was like one of those slow-motion scenes in movies, right, when the dust in the air glimmers like gold and sound is no longer a thing and someone’s talking and everybody is staring and when God pushed the ‘resume normal speed’ button the two men were gesturing and smiling smugly and there was this old lady next to me and she was taking in my luxurious coat and my frayed jeans and putting two and two together - I physically felt her horrified, gleeful gaze on me like scalding water - and Jesus, I could see the headlines in my local paper already ‘Young Promise of Sci-Fi Literature Arrested’ (I was writing fantasy back then, but most normal people don’t seem to know the difference) and there were my parents, okay, my poor parents walking with their heads down as formerly friendly neighbours threw garbage at them and someone would interview my history teacher and he was bound to say, ‘She was something of a strange girl, but I never thought she’d end up in prison’ and next, of course, came the walk of shame in front of all twelve tills, with dozens of proper adults (people with families and eggs in their baskets, women with tasteful lipstick and women with kids and doggies instead of books about dead prostitutes) staring at me in disapproval, and What has the world come to and I heard that today, young women are as likely to commit crimes as young men and Do you think she’s on drugs? and then I was forced into the Small Room of Humiliation and asked to please empty my bag, so out came the frosting I was planning to eat raw and the crown of garlic I’d bought because it looked pretty and had no intention of ever using and a giant-ass bag of rice and as I looked on, horrified, I realized nothing made sense with anything and even those burly, middle-aged men could see that just fine - but, well, every single horrifying, meaningless item was on the receipt, so they had me empty my pockets (one condom, safety pins, a Swiss knife, an IKEA pencil and a very smooth and round rock, God have mercy on me) and next we all looked at one another like, What now? and that’s when I truly gave up on rational thinking, okay, because my first instinct is always to be of service, and so I said, in my heavily accented French, ‘The library book has a barcode, maybe that’s the problem?’ and of course, they hadn’t really looked at the book yet - it was face down on the formica table, looking all prim and innocent in its unassuming dark blue cover, but when the older man picked it up with his bear paw, I suddenly realized the front of it was quite different - I sat there and saw his eyebrows disappear into his hairline as he took in the big-ass picture (a painting of a woman fellating a much younger man) and the title (something along the lines of, THE JOYLESS SEX - TALES OF THE PLEASURE WOMEN, in all capitals, because books about Greek art don’t sell all that well, so anything to do with sex is pimped up to trick the unsuspecting general audience into giving it a shot) and of course he had to open it, because that’s how humans are wired, okay, and the thing right in the middle was a goat-like creature doing unspeakable things with two women and every single cell in my body wanted to explode and disappear and shout ‘IT’S MANDATORY READING FOR THIS CLASS I’M TAKING’, which was a lie, anyway, and I couldn’t get the words out and I couldn’t look up and I couldn’t look away - after a few excruciating minutes (seconds? hours?), the guy scanned the book on his barcode machine and yep, that’s when we all learned that library books respond to the same anti-theft thingies that pick up on stolen wine and cookies and fine cheeses, and Sorry, miss, and You have a good evening, now, and he was extremely uncreepy about it, but it was still hard to find my way out because of the WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOUNG PEOPLE UP THESE DAYS bewilderment that was shining like a beacon around his entire body, so, yeah - that was pretty embarrassing.

2) The ‘A Four-Part Seduction’ story

This actually happened almost one year before my adventure with the scanning machine - I was in my last year of high school, had kissed exactly 1 (one) boy, failed to seduce 3 (three) other boys despite my fox-like cunning and my sunny disposition, and I was now ready to sacrifice everything (well: my sanity and my dignity) for The Boy - a basketball player with a long, horse-like face and zero talent in anything whom for some reason I fancied the pants off.

(Looking back, I think I liked he was quiet and kind, and the age-old problem when you’re attracted to mysteriously self-effacing people is that you’re never quite sure - is there a colourful and occasionally wild ocean behind their silent lips and far-off gaze, or are they not saying anything because an evolutionary mishap converted half their brain into a second spleen, and therefore they were left with the mental capacity of a vivacious Mexican mole lizard? The joy is in finding out.)

Anyway, I have a feeling things haven’t changed all that much, but back then when you were intent on romantic hunting, you usually enlisted the help of your closest friends - people who inevitably were:

your age

unexperienced

not very familiar with The Boy and

generally speaking, completely unsuited to hatching a failproof seduction plan of any kind.

On this particular occasion, my advisors were:

a girl who’d been the better half of a couple for time untold (three months, two weeks and five days) and was thus The Expert

another girl who’d done ‘not it, but almost’ with an unnamed boy she’d met over the summer

a third girl who still didn’t quite understand what ‘it’ meant and

my only guy friend who was actually in love with me and I only found out about that twenty years later and that was one true what the fuck moment, because then I wondered what else I hadn’t seen when I was a teenager even if it was there in plain sight (like the fact my German teacher preyed on young boys, for instance,but that’s another story).

So, well - part A of The Plan - getting to know him better - had failed miserably, because what can you discuss with someone you only see once a week in French class and you have a monster crush on? I mostly pestered him about homework dates and then stared mutely at his hands as he turned the pages of his school diary and my God, he must have thought I was an anxious, forgetful idiot with absolutely zero life, ‘which means he already knows you better than most people,’ my best friend said consolingly, before trying out her married name signature (Alice DiCaprio) one more time. And as for part B - that had succeeded, but at what cost? Because through a string of sleights of hand and corruption, we’d managed to shift half our classmates around on the seating chart, so I was now sharing a desk with The Boy himself, but so far that had resulted in some awkward staring (mine), a couple of embarrassed smiles (his) and about 50 000 volt of electricity going through my entire body every time his elbow bumped into my arm by mistake (which happened a lot, because he was left-handed and I’m not and we were sitting the wrong way around).

Now, this had been going on for weeks when the skies suddenly opened above me and the teacher, an I’m frankly disappointed in how everything turned out ‘68 hippy, assigned us a written essay on Victor Hugo and socialism, something that, as an anxious, forgetful idiot with absolutely zero life, I knew quite a lot about. Plus, I was good at French, and that’s how The Boy turned towards me and asked if I’d be willing to help him, his hazel eyes all clear and earnest, shining like stolen jewels on his horse-like face, and being a Cosmo reader, I heard myself laugh throatily and ask, ‘Sure - what will you give me in return?’ and fuck, how do these things happen and why are we not in control of our own bodies and also thank God, because he blinked at me and then said, in a slow voice I read as flirtatious, ‘I’ll buy you a drink’. And that’s how we all entered part C - there were weekly meetings with him in the library to write the essay together, and daily meetings with my girlfriends to analyse everything we’d ever said to each other and I think he was looking at you during break and I saw him blush twice now, he must be sensitive and My sister knows his cousin, I can tell her to ask him if he’s seeing anyone and also long walks by the river with my long-suffering guy friend during which I rambled on and on about how shiny The Boy’s hair was and he contributed to this mind-blowingly fascinating conversation mostly in uhms and grunts.

(Again, how could I have been so stupid? I mean, it was for the best in the end, but - ouch.)

And one windy evening of March, lo and behold, it was finally time for part D (no pun intended) - a bona fide D-A-T-E with The Boy, and possibly there’d be fireworks and he’d say, I’ve been wanting to kiss you for weeks and some tourist would snap a candid photo of us and then marvel at it, years and years later, because Do you ever wonder what happened to this couple, Mabel? Look at how happy and in love and beautiful they are and I’m not saying cover of the National Geographic, but cover of the National Geographic. Also, movies had taught me what was supposed to happen, you know?,

which is why I borrowed make up and rollers from one of my friends and did a clothes pre-selection with her and then a second selection with my guy friend -

(I remember him sitting cross-legged on my bed and strumming my mom’s guitar as I hid behind the closet door to try on The Makeover Outfit and how his expression barely changed when he saw me in a skirt for the first time - how he said, ‘You look - good. He’s an idiot if he doesn’t go for it,’ and how the music turned into something slow and mournful as I disappeared again to put my jeans back on, and what the hell?)

- and at nine pm, I was ready - I had leveled up and transformed, or so it seemed - gone was the windbreaker, and the crappy Converse, and the overlarge plaid shirt - instead, my hair was curled in the right way and my skirt was short but not too short and I’d even bought a push-up bra which was uncomfortable as hell but Who cares, uh?, who cares? And let’s pretend my make-up was still perfect after biking twenty minutes in the half rain, because when I walked into the bar, some catchy song was on and my brand-new hoop earrings were catching the light just so and I was the Goddess of French and Sex and WITNESS ME and we saw each other at once - he was sitting with his friends, the Popular Good-at-Hockey Guys, and he turned as he heard the door open, as if he’d been expecting me, and he immediately smiled and came towards me and ‘So, what can I get you?’ and of course I ordered wine, because I was Sophisticated and also A Lady and as he pushed his way towards the counter I sat down at the only table for two and subtly (I hope) adjusted my cleavage and crossed my legs and wondered whether I should whip my copy of Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations out of my (well: my mom’s) purse just to make it extra clear I meant business, or if that would be considered impolite - a kind of, ‘You took forever to get me that drink’ reproach - and as I was still trying to decide, he came right back, all perfect and tall and horsey-looking in a grey shirt, and he was carrying my wine and a pint of dark beer and some idiotic voice in my head said, ‘Yes, we’d known each other for months, but I remember the night we truly fell in love - your father used to drink these strong beers, you know, and that evening-’ and before that thought could go anywhere, The Boy was there, at my table - he handed me the wine (our fingers touched) and he said ‘Thanks again, really - I would have been dead without you’ and then - and then he walked away and fucking sat down with his friends again because apparently he was a damn sophist underneath that equine disguise and he’d promised me a drink and now I had a drink and what the fuck? and for the second time that night I considered turning to Rimbaud, but you should never turn to Rimbaud because he was an addict and a killer, so I drained my wine in one gulp, looked around desperately, my vision already fogging over, for someone I could bother - there was no one I really knew, only older people and party people and cool people who were already looking at me weirdly - I shrugged my coat on and waved joyfully at The Boy on my way out and man, it’s been twenty years but sometimes I still wonder at it - I don’t think he wanted to be rude, I’m sure he was like me, awkward and empty-headed and inexperienced, and he now works with snakes in Canada so maybe there was something interesting about him, but after I never go to the movies guy and Do you go to this school? guy and Sorry, I’m looking for someone who’ll choke me during sex guy and - mostly - the ghost music / still not sure he existed for real guy, well - that was a crushing moment and the end of my grand plans and when I started to simply tell guys ‘I like you’ and also follow them home before they could realize what was going on and, whatever, if you’re looking for dating advice, that works much, much better.

[Thanks again for your messages - if you like my writing, please visit my AO3 page!]

#ask #short stories #short story #embarrassing teenage memories #wow it's good to be a grown up #anyway #i hope you liked these!#it feels weird to write about myself #but i expect you guys can relate about this stuff?#we've all been there and stuff #:)

87 notes · View notes

aion-rsa · 4 years

Text

The Flash: The Secret Origin of the Original TV Series

https://ift.tt/3mGVF4e

A flash of lightning. An iconic red and gold costume. Weird sci-fi villains and blockbuster special effects. We could only be talking about the beloved The Flash TV series, right?

Ah, but this isn’t Grant Gustin and Team Flash from the CW’s The Flash. No, this is The Flash TV series from 1990, the one starring John Wesley Shipp and boasting a theme song by none other than superhero movie maestro Danny Elfman.

The Flash was an expensive gamble for CBS and ultimately only lasted one season, but its legacy lives on and it remains an important part of superhero TV history. The show has crept back into the pop culture consciousness in recent years, with every major cast member making appearances on the current show, and it was even acknowledged as part of official DC canon thanks to recent TV crossover Crisis on Infinite Earths, a fitting bookend for a series that once seemed destined to only be remembered by die hard fans.

In honor of the show’s 30th anniversary, this is the story of how the 1990 The Flash TV series came to be and its brief, bright run.

UNLIMITED POWERS

The Flash began life as a pitch for a different show entirely. The men who would eventually steer Barry Allen’s network TV destiny, Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo had made a name for themselves in genre circles with their work on films like Zone Troopers and cult classic Trancers, and as big comic book fans, were looking to bring superheroes to the screen. And in 1989, they wrote a feature length pilot script for a series called Unlimited Powers.

But Unlimited Powers wasn’t a Flash show, and instead dealt with an entire team of superheroes. While Barry Allen was a key character, he would have been joined by other DC Comics heroes including Green Arrow, Doctor Occult (a minor creation from Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster), Blok (of Legion of Super-Heroes fame), Wally West, and Oliver Queen’s teenage daughter (three decades before a similar character would become a fixture on Arrow).

The Flash of Unlimited Powers wasn’t a man first coming to terms with his powers, but rather a 40-something Barry Allen recently released from a 15-year prison sentence, in a world where superheroes have been outlawed. Bilson and De Meo drew inspiration for Unlimited Powers from the “adult” takes on the superhero genre in the comics of the moment, an influence that Bilson freely admits.

“We were really into the comics of the ’80s that sort of reinvented comics and wrote them more for adults,” Bilson recalls. “Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, American Flagg!, and The Rocketeer were our favorites… so when we were adapting comic stuff at Warner Brothers, when it came around for us to do something, our sensibility was in those books and in the direction that Tim Burton had taken the Michael Keaton Batman movie in 1989. We wanted to make them as believable for adults as they were when we were 10.”

Bilson describes Unlimited Powers as “one of my favorite scripts that we wrote” but its near dystopian vision of a world secretly run by supervillains and most heroes having been forced into hiding or retirement was a little too much for CBS at the time, though it sounds incredibly timely right now in an era where The Boys and Watchmen are prestige TV darlings.

“One of the things that is proven true over time is that…The stuff that we couldn’t get done, somebody did it later,” Bilson says. “There was this weird thing where we were always a little bit too far ahead of the curve or something, but it is what it is. It was what it was.”

THE STARTING LINE

Bilson doesn’t remember whose idea it was to develop The Flash as a more “traditional” solo superhero show, but work began on a feature length script for The Flash pilot soon after Unlimited Powers fell apart. But while the pair were comic book fans, they weren’t completely beholden to them, either.

“We didn’t study the comics,” Bilson says. “We knew and liked The Flash. We read comics in general. Paul [De Meo] was much more of a comic book head as a kid than I was.”

That devotion might explain why their version of Barry Allen freely borrowed from other eras of the character, notably DC Comics of the era which featured Wally West as the Scarlet Speedster. Elements such as Barry’s upper limit of speed being around the speed of sound, his need to replace caloric energy with vast quantities of food, his close ties to STAR Labs, and even the character of Tina McGee, all came from the Wally West era of the book.

“We didn’t dig through all the lore,” Bilson says. “We looked for the elements that would be good for the show.”

Bilson and De Meo fought hard for their vision of what the series should be, but the guiding principle was to “play it straight.” The pair saw the project as a “descendant” of Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman movie and Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman film, the latter of which would be a considerable influence on the look, feel, and even sound of the show.

Like Batman, The Flash took a heightened and “timeless” approach to its production, blending fashion and technology from the 1940s and ‘50s with the modern day. And like its big screen cousin in Gotham City, the series boasted a memorable, heroic theme composed by Danny Elfman. But the rest of the show’s music was composed by Shirley Walker, who went on to do memorable work on Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series soon after.

“She used a 35-piece orchestra every episode,” Bilson says. “It wasn’t synthesizers or faked. We budgeted for it. I think she had 65 pieces in the pilot, and we managed to budget 35 pieces an episode to keep that orchestral score going. Shirley was amazing.”

The pair resisted CBS’ efforts to bring in more experienced TV executive producers, insisting on creative control.

“We were young enough to go ‘Who cares? We don’t care about money. We just care about what we care about,’ which was The Flash at the time,” Bilson says. “So they balked. They backed down, and we ran the show.”

THE ORIGINAL BARRY ALLEN

While Barry Allen was a key piece of Unlimited Powers, the version that would be showcased on CBS wasn’t a seasoned or cynical hero, but one at the very start of his career. The Flash pilot plays like a superhero movie origin story, introducing police scientist Barry Allen and his supporting cast, and detailing every step along the way from the moment he’s struck by lightning to how he earns his iconic red suit. Modern audiences are far more familiar with superhero archetypes than in 1990, so finding the right balance of heroism and humanity for their leading man was essential.

“At that time in our career and our writing maturity, I would say that [Barry] was the model of an empathetic, leading man who was a little bit of Danny and Paul and a lot of every movie hero we’d ever seen,” Bilson says. “It was a little bit of us and a lot of traditional, classic American movie hero stuff, a certain amount of modesty, in over his head, a little romance, a little surprise.”

Those qualities led them to series star, John Wesley Shipp. Shipp had spent the ‘80s as a daytime soap opera mainstay on shows like Guiding Light, As The World Turns, and One Life to Live, a run that earned him two Daytime Emmys. The Flash meant his first shot at primetime. The New York-based Shipp found himself in LA in late 1989, getting ready for an audition in January of 1990.

“There was a lot of talk about this new show that was happening, that was the most expensive show Warner Bros. had ever done,” Shipp recalls. “It was coming on the heels and was in development at the same time as Tim Burton’s Batman. I was very cautious about it, because I fancied myself a serious actor and I didn’t want to run around in a pair of red tights and I didn’t want to spoof. Comedy wasn’t really my thing.”

But Shipp was impressed by Bilson and De Meo’s pilot script, particularly the idea that the police scientist Barry was “the geek son of a cop family where real cops work the streets… this ordinary guy who’s the safe one in the family,” before getting powers and becoming a hero.

Shipp took the audition and eventually landed the role.

“As I understand it, they saw about 60 guys,” Shipp says. “I think I may have been the first guy they saw, as I recall Danny [Bilson] telling it. I auditioned for them… then I had to go in for the suits at Warner Bros. They liked what they saw. They took me and one other actor to the network.”

Movies

Batman 1989: The Long Journey and Enduring Legacy of a Superhero Classic

By David Crow

Movies

Richard Donner and the Importance of Superman: The Movie

By Mike Cecchini

The other actor in question was another daytime soap alum looking to make the jump to primetime, Another World’s Richard Burgi.

“It came down to Richard Burgi and John Shipp, and Burgi became our lead later on in The Sentinel,” Bilson says. “The ironic thing about The Sentinel was John Shipp was our first choice and Richard Burgi was our second choice. John knows this, but for The Flash at that moment, Richard Burgi was our first choice and John Shipp was our second choice, and everybody at the network liked John better. Of course, once we started going, you forget about Burgi and it’s all John.”

Ultimately, it was about the trust between Shipp and the producers that helped bring Barry to life properly.

“Danny was very collaborative,” Shipp recalls. “They really trusted me, and went with what I felt emotionally was the most truthful.”

Bilson agrees:

“He looked the part and gave it a hundred percent. I don’t remember ever having to talk to him about interpretation. He nailed it most of the time. It was just like he knew what it was. It was this thing that we all created together, that character.”

STAR Labs

Barry needed a scientific (and possibly romantic) foil and that came in the form of Amanda Pays as STAR Labs scientist Tina McGee, who had actually been cast before Shipp.

“[Amanda Pays] was coming off Max Headroom, which was a cool show,” Bilson says. “It was all about that [and] Amanda seemed perfect for this.”

The particular sci-fi demands of Max Headroom meant Pays was uniquely suited to a key component of the show.

“My god, I couldn’t believe the amount of technobabble here,” Shipp says with a laugh. “If you’re going to listen to technobabble, you need to listen to it being said by Amanda Pays. It’s just that voice.”

And while Tina was a fixture from the pilot, there was the little matter of another character, Barry’s longtime comics love interest and wife, Iris West. Iris was played by Paula Marshall in the pilot episode, and never seen again on the show.

“We realized we wrote ourselves into a corner, and it would be much more interesting if he was single, and then we could do the Moonlighting thing with Tina and bring women in and out of the show,” Bilson says.

But even the Barry/Tina dynamic presented challenges.

“Their template was we’re doing an hour movie a week and didn’t have time to be as careful as the new show is about character arcs and relationship arcs,” Shipp says. “There were times when I was confused. Are we flirting? Are we going to get together? Are we not? We’d flirt one episode and then it would be dropped the next and then there’d be a little flirty something.”

But with the principles in place, along with Alex Désert as Barry’s lab partner and best friend Julio Mendez, The Flash was just about ready for primetime.

“There was so much buzz about the show,” Shipp says.

But there was still another race to be won…

THE SUIT

“They were going to go darker than The Flash really is,” Shipp says. “We had to ground it in some kind of grit to sort of overcompensate for the lightness, the comic bookness, which if not taken seriously might alienate the kind of audience that we would need to draw to stay on the air.”

How much darker? Well, for one thing, the network was initially resistant to the idea of putting their hero in his trademark costume.

“In development, CBS just wanted a tracksuit with LEDs on tennis shoes,” Bilson says.

But The Flash costume is arguably one of the greatest superhero designs in history, and Bilson and De Meo weren’t going to let this opportunity pass them by.

“We were doing The Rocketeer at the time, so we had [comic artist and Rocketeer creator] Dave Stevens draw an illustration of a Flash suit [to convince the network], and then Bob Short built it.”

The Rocketeer creator Dave Stevens created this design sketch to convince CBS executives to give The Flash his iconic suit. (courtesy of Pet Fly Productions)

The result was one of the most impressive live action superhero costumes that had ever been realized on the screen. The primary reds and yellows of the comic were replaced by a striking crimson and gold, with built in muscles that gave the character an unmistakable silhouette.

While The Flash TV suit was a remarkable achievement for its day, and remains a powerful visual, it was quite a process for its star.

“They said ‘you won’t be in red tights,’” Shipp jokes. “I came to regret that later.”

While Shipp was in excellent shape and already sported a superhero-worthy physique, the suit was designed to follow in the footsteps of the recent Batman movie costume, with molded muscles and a hyper-real, enhanced look.

“They wanted it to be larger than life,” Shipp says. “Remember, it was 1990, we were in the post Pumping Iron, Jose Canseco, Mark McGuire, larger than life steroid haze, you know what I mean? Heroes had to be larger than life.”

As a result, Shipp’s first fitting for his Flash suit was perhaps more than he bargained for.

Movies

The Rocketeer: An Adventure Movie Out of Time

By Mike Cecchini

“It was quite an involved process,” he says. “I stripped down my underwear and they greased me with Vaseline all over, wrapped me in cellophane, and then I put on a spandex suit. They had individually sculpted foam latex muscle pieces, and they would glue them on to this spandex suit. They wrapped me in cellophane because the glue would get really hot while it was setting, and they glued the pieces on the suit with me in it.”

And that was just the fitting! Shipp had to endure long hours in a very physical role in that suit, which was just as hot as you might imagine.

“I was so enthusiastic. It was my first primetime show. I would have done anything that they asked me to at that point,” Shipp says. “They sprayed it with a sealant to keep all the water inside. They’d pull a glove off and it would be full of water up to the wrist and they’d just dump it out. After the pilot, they got a vest like race car drivers wear, with tubing so they could plug me into an ice chest and circulate the water because I started to get fuzzy because it was so hot.”

Ironically, after their initial resistance to putting their title character in a traditional superhero costume, once filming got underway, everyone’s tune changed.

“After the first footage came in, all the people at Warner Bros. and particularly at the network [wanted] to see the suit,” Shipp says. “It’s always the back and forth and a series of compromises.”

But even Bilson and De Meo, despite having fought for a proper superhero suit on the show, had to lay some ground rules for how it should be deployed.

“One of our rules was you never want to see it in the daytime,” Bilson says. “It wasn’t like Batman where he only comes out at night. We just don’t want to see it in the daytime, and the few times we did, it was rough.”

And yet, even in a red and gold superhero costume with enhanced musculature, Shipp was determined to bring as much humanity to the role as possible.

“My absolute commitment was not to be humorless because there was humor in the script, but it was rooted in character,” he says. “It was to play with this guy as truthfully as I could. Once the suit came out, the lights went down, and Shirley Walker’s music and the Danny Elfman theme came up, my work was pretty much done emotionally. Then it was up to Dane Farwell, my very fine stunt man, who I cannot to this day give enough praise to. He was almost as much the Flash as I was. I was Barry Allen.”

“NO SUPERVILLAINS”

With the pilot out of the way, The Flash embarked on its first run of hour-long episodes. And while the series eventually brought familiar Flash rogues like Captain Cold, Mirror Master, and most famously, Mark Hamill’s Trickster to the screen, that wasn’t the case early on.

“The first six episodes, [the network] wouldn’t let us do supervillains, and it was our worst nightmare,” Bilson says. “We grew up with The Adventures of Superman TV show with George Reeves, and we used to make jokes about how he always fought safe crackers, counterfeiters, and bank robbers. We got in there with the first six episodes at CBS, and they kind of wanted safe crackers and bank robbers, and we had to kind of prove our way into supervillains.”

Despite that obstacle, those early Flash episodes still work, thanks to a writing team that included TV veteran Gail Morgan Hickman, and comics stalwarts Howard Chaykin and John Francis Moore, whose work Bilson and De Meo had been admiring on American Flagg!.

Batman: The Animated Series – 25 Essential Episodes

By Jim Dandy and 4 others

“We didn’t have formulas,” Bilson says. “My thing was every episode is a different movie, so let the director and the creatives go make that movie. Sometimes the movies are good and sometimes they’re not, and if they’re good, we bring them back, and if they’re not, we don’t.”

But even the episodes that didn’t go all in on the comic book elements were still big productions, with some episodes taking nine days to shoot and long hours required of the cast and crew.

“We were there from the third week in August until the second week in May with four days off for Christmas and that was it,” Shipp recalls. “I was there 55 to 80 hours a week. You can imagine how long the crew was there. We didn’t have CGI. We were doing live action practical effects. We were blowing shit up. We were blowing out windows in back alleys in Hollywood … [it was an] enormous undertaking in 1990.”

For his part, Shipp was fine with the show straying from its comic book roots.

“We were CSI before CSI was cool,” he says. “I think what they originally intended and what attracted me to it was it was going to be a cop show with the superhuman element of speed. It wasn’t going to be supervillain of the week.”

ENTER THE SUPERVILLAINS

But of course, the show did soon give audiences three of Flash’s most iconic comic book rogues in the form of some TV-tweaked versions of Captain Cold, Mirror Master, and most famously, the Trickster. Unlike those other two comic book baddies, TV’s Trickster fully embraced the multi-colored weirdness of his comic book counterpart, costume and all, with a wild performance by Mark Hamill.

“It did concern me when we were suddenly having supervillain of the week,” Shipp says. “Of course, when you have the opportunity to have Mark Hamill as the Trickster, you’re going to do it. He really helped me with not shying away from the comic book element because I didn’t want to be a mascot. I wanted to be taken seriously. Mark came roaring onto the set, no holds barred, absolutely committed, and made me look at it from a different perspective.”

Hamill’s Trickster would ultimately appear in two episodes, including the series finale, both directed by Bilson.

“For me, it all came together with the first Trickster episode,” Bilson says. “To me, that’s really the pinnacle of the show of where it was kind of what we wanted it to be. Mark wanted to play the part. We got a call, and then he just took it to that thing that became the Joker later on [in Batman: The Animated Series]. But what he came up with … I was just directing. Directing is just guiding. Mark invented the heck out of that thing. It was amazing. He’s a great actor.”

THE FINISH LINE

“I think we wrapped the season and they made the announcement a week later,” Shipp says. “I know I left LA and was back in New York when the announcement was made. It was kind of like, good news, bad news. You don’t have to go through that again and there’s so much more story to tell.”

The Flash was well reviewed, and its ratings would be considered astronomical by 2020 standards. But it was also one of the most expensive shows ever produced at the time, and one that found itself bounced around the schedule, first because of the 1990 MLB playoffs, then the arrival of the first Gulf War, and then ultimately as it competed with legendary series like Cheers, The Simpsons, and The Cosby Show.

“We finished shooting the last episode, and I think either we found out we were canceled while we were shooting or it was shortly after that,” Bilson says. “So there was no starting down the path for next season. We knew we were on the bubble, I’m sure. I think it was even a close one that we got picked up for the back nine, so we weren’t even close to a sure thing. It didn’t feel like a death march at all. It just felt like you knew what the numbers were, and I guess we knew we weren’t going to make it.”

Comics

The Flash: Inside the Return of Jay Garrick

By Mike Cecchini

But was it really just the ratings?

“There was a lot going on behind the scenes that I think contributed to us not getting a second season,” Shipp says cryptically.

Bilson is more blunt.

“It was network politics,” he says. “I heard the next year that the boss’ bonus was tied to rating share points and that he traded our 16 for a show that had a 17. I remember hearing that the next year, but I’m not naming any names or anything.”

Despite this, Bilson still thinks the best was yet to come.

“We were figuring it out as we went along, and we thought we were hitting our stride there,” he says. The arrival of genuine supervillains seemed to point the way forward, and the hope was to come back for a second season with another two-hour episode teaming up Trickster, Captain Cold, and Mirror Master.

“I really hooked into this ordinary guy caught in extraordinary circumstances,” Shipp says. “This is what I always say to people at conventions, we all have our own vein of gold. We all have that thing that lights us up and draws us out that we do as well or better than anyone else. We’re all extraordinary in our own way.”

Despite being a one season wonder, Shipp looks back fondly on his time in Central City, and of course has remained a part of The Flash legacy with the current CW series, first as the father of Grant Gustin’s Barry, then as original Flash Jay Garrick, and then returning to his version of Barry to give the Flash of Earth-90 a fitting final bow in Crisis on Infinite Earths.

“I certainly feel 30 years later that The Flash has been more of a blessing in my life than I ever expected it to be,” he says. “I have an enormous sense of gratitude towards the people that have kept this show at sort of the forefront of the comic genre. I’m just deeply moved and deeply grateful for that.”

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The Flash is currently available to stream on DC Universe. Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo wrote the screenplay for Da 5 Bloods, which is now on Netflix.

The post The Flash: The Secret Origin of the Original TV Series appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3ckMuSh

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

0 notes

suit-lady · 7 years

Text

PS ~ A Peter Parker Story that Begins with Notes

Summary: This is a fluff piece college AU where reader and Peter are in the same English class. They start passing notes because Peter misses class one morning. And then,,,,,, a study date??? And nervous Peter???

Warnings: Swearing. The first word is a curse word. This is who I am.

Female Reader

Word Count: 2365

Part Two

Fuck.

Peter Parker woke up to the sound of his roommate’s alarm, which meant that Peter was late. He must have been too tired the night before to set his alarm. Sighing, Peter reached for his phone. He knew that Ned showered before class, so maybe he had enough time to—Nope. Class had started about ten minutes ago. There was no way, even if he could get ready in under ten minutes. Begrudgingly, he pulled his exhausted body out of bed and took his sweet time getting ready; he had almost four hours before he had to be anywhere.

Classes flew by as usual, but it seemed incredibly odd to Peter to begin his Thursday without his English literature course. In a passing thought, he hoped that he hadn’t missed anything terribly important. He really enjoyed the material in that class, so he more cared that he missed the quality discussion spurred on by the prof than actually missing any potential assignments. After all, Dr. Terrance always followed his syllabus to a T, so Peter had nothing to worry about.

Regardless, he was sure to set four (more than the usual three) alarms before going to sleep.

Peter hurried to get ready so that he could arrive in Dr. Terrance’s classroom early and personally apologize to him for being absent the day before, but the kind professor blew him off and offered a quick debrief if necessary. He declined but made the effort to pay twice the amount of attention in class that morning. Dr. Terrance was obviously appreciative; sometimes, talking about literature at eight o’clock in the morning just isn’t all that appealing to a bunch of eighteen-year-olds.

The bell rang before Peter even realized what time it was, but he was zapped from the classical world by a notebook plopping down on his desk. The spiral-bound book was opened to a page topped with the date and what Peter assumed to be the lecture title of the day before. In the middle of the page was a pale pink sticky note that read “Here, in case you want some half-decent notes to copy.” in your handwriting. He looked up to give a thank-you, but he had no idea who had given him the notebook in the first place.

Peter made sure to copy all the notes Sunday evening so that he could return the notebook to the owner before class. Making sure to get there a bit earlier than usual, he set the notebook, which was open to the same page, on the corner of his desk. He got out his sticky notes and scrawled “hey, thanks for the notes” on the pale yellow paper. Then, as an afterthought, he wrote, “your handwriting is beautiful btw” and just signed it with his initial: “-P.” Satisfied, he sat back and waited.

A girl sat in the chair to his right. Peter’s attention wasn’t drawn to you until you cautiously reached across his desk and took the notebook. After your eyes scanned over the note, you looked up at Peter with a kind smile. He smiled back at you, half being courteous, half because he couldn’t help but return a smile as pretty as that.

While you didn’t make eye contact with him for the rest of the period, you passed him another pink note right as the bell rang. You’d folded the note so that the sticky part kept the note closed. As he walked out of the classroom, he slipped the note into his pocket and didn’t read it until he was back in his dorm room. “nah, especially not my note script. Dr. Terrance talks so fast during lecture that my pencil basically flies across the page. –(Your First Initial)”

Peter spent most of the evening wondering what he should write back. He’d started the note, on a classier blue sticky note this time, but he only had “whatever. I like it” and a little emoticon face that had its tongue sticking out. Once he’d finished his homework for the evening, he gave up on coming up with anything half decent. He drew a stick figure shrugging and saying “I don’t know what else to say” in a little speech bubble. Mimicking the folds from the note he’d gotten from you, he folded the paper and placed it in his notebook for the next morning.

You had arrived before Peter, so he took out the note and passed it to you as nonchalantly as possible before the bell rang to begin class. He stole a glance at you as you stifled a giggle at his poor drawing skills. After class, you passed him a tightly-folded piece of notebook paper. He unfolded it, filled with curiosity, to find that you’d doodled a little caricature of him during lecture. Underneath, in faux calligraphy, read “Peter Parker”. He was surprised to see his name; this girl that he’d barely looked at before knew who he was. Taking out his notebook, he began to pen a note much longer than any you two had shared thus far.

He had to wait until Thursday before he could give you the note (no class on Wednesday), and received a long letter in return at the end of class on Friday. In the letter, you told him all about yourself. You started with your name, your favorite color, and a few other random things. You told him what your major was and what you dreamed about doing after college. Then, you wrote about how to spent time outside of the classroom. Lastly, you said you knew who he was because, according to you, “everyone knows Peter Parker, super smart kid with great humor.” He took it as a compliment.

He wrote a letter over the weekend telling you that he was Peter Parker, even though you already knew that. His favorite color was tied between red and blue, but he might like blue just a tiny bit more on cloudless summer afternoons. While at college, he was studying physics, but he hadn’t really decided what he wanted to do after graduation yet. He spent a lot of time doing nerdy things with his best friend and roommate Ned, like having sci-fi movie marathons or building the newest LEGO sets. He ended the letter with a short apology for not knowing who you were.

There was a new spring in Peter’s step as he walked to class on Monday. Over the weekend, he’d learned all about the girl who sat next to him in his English class, and he took some time on Saturday to go to the city and fight a little bit of extra crime. Being the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man in a college town wasn’t all that exciting; he ended up mostly protecting defenseless young women from creepy assholes at frat parties. While it was rewarding, Peter was always itching for something more. He and Ned would hang out in Chicago on available weekends, taking down all sorts of baddies that weren’t expecting any sort of superhero to be there to stop them.

He handed you the note as soon as he sat down in class and watched you from the corner of his eye as you carefully put the note in your bookbag. A smile pulled at the corners of his mouth: he was more than happy to see that you wanted to keep the note both safe and away from your prying eyes. After that, English was thoroughly uneventful, but confusing for Peter. For some reason, he just kept stealing glances at this girl. You’d captivated him; Peter refused to admit it, but he was done for.

That evening, Ned finally couldn’t take it anymore. Peter had been super jittery for straight up a week and a half, and had kept it from Ned. “What’s going on with you?” Ned asked the first time he saw Peter smiling at the ceiling.

“I met a girl,” Peter said definitively, like that was that.

“Okay… Details? What’s she like?”

“Well, actually, she can tell you about herself,” Peter said ambiguously as he pulled your most recent note out of his bag.

Ned read over the letter and encouraged his friend to go for you. “She seems really nice. You ask her out yet?”

Peter coughed awkwardly. “We’ve actually never spoken before. She let me borrow her English notes that day I missed class, and we’ve been writing notes to each other since then.” He pulled out the few other notes he had from you as proof.

“Dude,” Ned said as he shook his head, “you’ve gotta use your words, buddy. She sounds great, and you obviously like her. Are you really just gonna let her slip through your fingers? You realize it’s the end of the semester and you might never have a class with her ever again, right? This university is pretty damn big, Peter.”

Peter’s eyes widened. He hadn’t thought of that. “I’ll ask her the next chance I get.”

The next day in class, however, he was too nervous to actually talk to you. His voice got all caught up in his throat, and he felt like he’d been chewing on cotton balls all morning. Sighing as he sat, he decided he’d ask you for dinner the next time it was his turn to give you a note… Thursday. He was so busy contemplating how he wanted to ask that the bell made him jump. When he heard a giggle coming from his right, and saw you covering your mouth, your shoulders shaking. Dr. Terrance had already begun speaking, so you mouthed a quick “sorry for laughing” before paying attention to the prof for the rest of the period. Peter was so embarrassed that he didn’t notice your return letter until almost halfway through the lecture.

The letter said that you were glad to know more about Peter Parker other than that he was a nice and funny guy in your English class. You made a comment about how pretty the skies had been now that the rainy April weather was clearing up and the temperature was getting warmer. You said that you loved studying outside and invited Peter to study with you the next day. You ended the letter typically with your initial, but, underneath, you had written a PS: “text me with a yes or no so that I can tell you where I study x” with your number underneath.

Peter crashed through the door of his dorm room shouting, “NED!”

“What? Did you do it?” excitedly came Ned’s reply from his position at his desk.

“Well, sort of.” A quick pause. “No, not really.”

“What the fuck, Peter.”

“No, no! It’s still great! She asked me to study with her tomorrow!”

“She did?” Ned jumped up and hurried over to where Peter was still standing…in the open doorway.

Peter enthusiastically gestured to the letter and handed it over for Ned to read. As he read, Peter shut the door and began pacing around the room. What was he gonna say? Which subject should he take to study? Differential Equations, to show that he was ahead in math? Or should he take his Spanish homework, to show that he was working on becoming bilingual? Should he even worry this much about impressing you? What if you—

Peter’s thoughts were interrupted when Ned asked, “So did you text her?”

“Oh my God.”

“You idiot. Text her right now,” Ned scorned, returning the letter to Peter.

He texted you, “hey, it’s Peter! I’d love to study together tomorrow!”

You replied within minutes, “Great! I usually sit on the hill by the lake. I bring a picnic blanket, so don’t worry about having something to sit on.”

He texted back something about that sounding lovely, and the smile didn’t leave his face for the rest of the afternoon.

The next morning, he picked out a tee shirt that he figured would make you laugh. The shirt had a picture of iron’s chemical symbol and the word “MAN” underneath it. When he was going to be spending time with Mr. Stark, he was always sure to pack that one. He picked out dark jeans and grey sneakers and was out the door.

The late spring sun was hotter than Peter expected, and his black shirt absorbed a lot of heat. His pace quickened, as he worried about sweating too much before greeting the girl from his English class for the first time. He saw you sitting alone on the hill, reading a thick novel of some kind, your face mostly hidden by a large straw sunhat. He took the opportunity to sneak up on you (maybe cheating a bit using his super stealthy spider skills).

“Hi there!”

You jumped a little, earning an accomplished chuckle from Peter. “Oh, hello. I didn’t hear you walk up. Make yourself comfortable anywhere.”

Peter did so, and the two of you sat in a lovely silence as you read and Peter worked on his DE homework. On the way out the door, he’d decided to go with impressive advanced math. You, however, were too invested in what you were reading to really notice what he was doing at all. He listened to music as he worked, but left one earbud out in case you wanted to talk to him ever. After about half an hour of holding his breath every time you turned the page, of waiting for you to say something, he couldn’t help himself anymore.

“Do you maybe want to go out for dinner Friday night?” he blurted, a little too loudly and a little too high-pitched. Fuck. He hadn’t realized just how nervous he was.

You laughed, a beautiful sound, and looked over at him, saying, “That was a bit sudden.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, much quieter, beginning to backtrack, “you just seem so sweet and funny and lovely and I’d really be—”

“Peter,” you said, cutting him off, “I’d love to.”

You both turned your blushing faces away from each other, both afraid the other would see, and worked in happy silence for the rest of the afternoon.

#peter parker #spider man: homecoming #peter parker imagines #peter parker x reader #my hands are shaking so bad fucking kill me #my shit

245 notes · View notes