#the archetype is a bit of a fashion police | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

justiceraffles · 4 years ago

Text

About the Gosho Boys and literary crime fiction

This is a lengthy text wall in which I ramble about detectives. It started out with me thinking about the Gosho boys and their relationship with classic mystery fiction and literary/fictional detectives and it ended up derailing into a Hakuba rabbit hole in which I overanalyse details pointlessly for hours because I guess that is simply how most of my free time is spent.

(Fair warning that this is probably ridden with mistakes because I am capable of only 1.3 thoughts at a time)

So, when it comes to Shinichi, Heiji and Kaito, they all have a literary character from classic detective fiction that they’re closely associated with. Namely, it’s Sherlock Holmes for Shinichi, Ellery Queen for Heiji, and Arsène Lupin for Kaito. The relationship they hold with each of these figures (and with crime fiction in general) is very different, but it’s quite telling of their personality, character, their relationship with literature, and their respective approach to their profession. I talk about each of them a little bit and then just spend half the time talking about Hakuba.

Shinichi is born in a household where mystery fiction is extremely important. He is surrounded by this type of story and his parents nurture this interest actively. Detectives and mysteries permeate his life wholly. For Shinichi, Holmes is seen as the maximum exponent of a genre. Holmes is The Great Detective. The archetype, the one that defines what it means to be a detective and the one later writers will seek to emulate one way or another. Detective fiction is what it is today because of Holmes, so it makes complete sense for Shinichi to have him as his idol. Holmes is what he strives to be and it’s what people associate him with.

Heiji is a lot more subtle than Shinichi is, but he is also very much a lit nerd. Ellery Queen is both a character and a pseudonym for the writers that created him. As a character, Ellery Queen is such a perfect choice for Heiji’s favourite detective. He’s a mystery writer who doubles as a sleuth and helps his father, a police inspector, in solving crimes. Wonder if that sounds familiar, huh. Aside from similarities in the character (I could go on about some passages that have such strong Heiji vibes I’d be here forever) the Queen novels challenge the reader very directly. They tell you to pay attention, that you are presented with the exact same clues as the detective and should therefore be able to solve the mystery as well. The mystery story is a competition and the author issues a challenge by presenting it to the reader. I love this because Heiji has a huge competitive streak, and this is highlighted from his introduction. To find that the stories he’s passionate about also encourage this side of him is just so fitting and appropriate.

The case where Shinichi and Heiji meet always makes me think of the contrast between reading a Holmes novel and a Queen story. Personally, I feel like the enjoyment of a Holmes story often relies on letting yourself be awed by the deduction. You can follow along with the mystery but a big part of the charm is based on the detective himself and the way he explains the thought process that leads him to his conclusion. You’re meant to sit down and enjoy as Holmes explains himself, and admire his brilliance. There’s a focus on the truth and the way to reach it, which is very, very Shinichi. A Queen novel, on the other hand, invites you to play along as you read. You are on equal standing with the detective, and it’s up to you to reach the same conclusion he does. These are the principles of “fair-play” in mystery fiction. As it implies, it is very much a game! So Heiji challenging Shinichi to a battle of wits and deductions goes perfectly in line with what he’s reading. Holmes is the genius detective you look up to with admiration, Queen is a sleuth that invites you to solve the crime alongside him. These suit the vibes that Shinichi and Heiji give off themselves very well.

Kaito is much, much different for obvious reasons. He’s not a detective, and he’s not nearly as much of a mystery geek as the others are. The entire KID persona is closely associated with Arséne Lupin because Toichi fashions it accordingly. Even if phantom thieves aren’t quite the same as Leblanc’s original idea for the Gentleman Burglar, they still have a clear origin in Lupin and there’s important similarities to be made between them. Storytelling-wise, KID heists work on the same principles as Lupin stories. You know the criminal is there, hidden amongst the cast presented to you, and you know he will carry out the crime. And, regardless of whether you have an inkling of an idea of how he’s going to pull it off or not, you still allow yourself to be amazed by his methods regardless when the trick is revealed! Even when the schemes are outlandish and border on the fantastical and unbelievable, the stories are best enjoyed when you suspend your disbelief and allow the plots and characters to be over the top. But well, the connection between Lupin and KID is fairly self-explanatory. So, rather than KID, I think it’s more interesting to think about the relationship between Lupin and Kaito himself.

Kaito doesn’t seek to be seen as a modern day-Lupin in the same way Shinichi wants to be a modern day-Holmes. Unlike Shinichi who becomes a detective in great part because he has Holmes as his idol, Kaito doesn’t become a thief because of his admiration towards a literary character, but because of his love and admiration towards his father. Kaito dons the KID suit with pride because it’s something his father left behind, and he embraces each part of it because it can lead to answers and understanding. But, always cryptic, Lupin doesn’t provide a whole lot of answers and understanding, and neither does Toichi. Lupin admits that he struggles to recognise himself under all the disguises and roles he has played. The truth behind his father’s character seems to become more elusive the more Kaito becomes involved with thievery. The “gentleman thief” persona, despite being charming and theatrical, has consequences on a personal life.

...And then there’s Hakuba.

Hakuba is complicated.

But, Raffles! You say, Saguru is another Sherlock geek!

Well, yes. Of course he is. The deerstalker outfit and him naming his hawk Watson make that clear. Hakuba is an absolute Holmes nerd.

I’m here to read too deeply into it when it’s most definitely not that deep at all. But, there’s never enough information about Hakuba and I have a blast overthinking stuff. So that’s what we’re gonna do!

Despite obviously being a big fan, Hakuba’s relationship with Holmes is different from that of Shinichi’s.

First, we don’t get to see Hakuba nerding out about Holmes novels and stories in the same way Shinichi does. He doesn’t quote Holmes at length or go on about how much he loves the books. Instead, we know Hakuba’s a nerd because he’s apparently passionate enough about this character to include things associated with him into his own personal image and identity.

Second, there’s the way others perceive him. Shinichi and Kaito (as KID) get “Heisei Holmes” and “Reiwa Lupin”. Despite irking a couple officers every now and again, Heiji is held in high regard and considered a great detective by the police force. Hakuba has a considerable amount of fame, but he doesn’t receive the same amount of trust people place on Shinichi and Heiji. It’s easy to forget because Hakuba acts with a lot of confidence and familiarity around crime scenes, but several of his appearances highlight the way his presence is tolerated at heists because of his father’s influence and is generally seen as an outsider. The police take orders from Shinichi and look up to him for advice— it’s not quite the same with Hakuba. More often than not, Nakamori treats Hakuba like a visitor or observer than a consulting detective. All of this rambling to say that even though he presents himself that way, Hakuba isn’t (or, at least, isn’t seen as) the Holmes he admires.

So, if not Holmes, is there anyone that suits Hakuba better?

I’d say yes and no.

As far as I can recall, the series never makes any explicit comparisons or references to other detectives when Hakuba is concerned. That said, much like you’d associate the deerstalker and Watson to Holmes, Hakuba has some other quirks and behaviours reminiscent of other detectives. Now, I’m not here to say that Hakuba was made deliberately as a compilation of references to literary detectives. These similarities are admittedly mostly coincidences. That said, deliberate or not, I think an argument can still be made that the connections exist! And well, considering the lack of concrete information about Saguru, thinking about them is fun. So this is what I think:

One of Hakuba’s most prominent quirks is his fixation with time and exactitude. His pocket watch is a memorable prop and being precise about minutes and seconds is an important part of his character. You can find very similar behaviour in Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, who also carries a pocket watch around and is extremely particular about punctuality and numbers. Another thing interesting about Poirot is that he’s most interested in the psychology behind a crime, in understanding the mindset of the killer. Poirot mysteries have each of the suspects explaining their own version of events, because the detective wants to understand everyone’s version of perceiving the truth. In other words, Poirot mysteries have a focus on the whydunnit.

You can probably tell that now I’m going to gesture wildly at Hakuba’s “Why did you do it”

Speaking of Hakuba’s signature question, it’s probably also worth mentioning the Father Brown stories by G.K Chesterton. The sleuth is a catholic priest, and after his deduction and identifying the culprit, the stories usually end with the priest spending time with the criminal. Before an arrest is made, Father Brown has a private meeting with the killer (or thief). It’s implied that this is carried out as a personal confession of sins, and expresses a need to seek out an understanding of the motive as perceived by the criminal themselves.

I say this because the catchphrase does come off as a little strange. It’s curious that Hakuba asks why when we usually expect the detective to be able to sort it out by himself. But, it’s really not that strange to find equivalents to it in stories that focus on the psychological part of the crime and empathy towards them.

(Also worth mentioning that both Christie and Chesterton were presidents of the Detection Club, a group of writers during the golden age of detective fiction that based their stories around the concept of “fair-play” that I mentioned earlier when I was talking about Heiji.

Back on track: Hakuba and Poirot share key similarities.

HOWEVER! There are also differences between them. I’m referring to the fact that Poirot puts the most emphasis on this psychological level of a crime. Poirot says “I am not one to rely upon the expert procedure. It is the psychology I seek, not the fingerprint or the cigarette ash” On the other hand, I’d argue that out of all of the Gosho boys, Hakuba is the most fastidious about procedure. He has some level of knowledge of forensic investigation and places importance upon it.

Sherlock’s methods do draw inspiration from precursors of forensic science, so you could trace it back to that. You could also go to R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. John Thorndyke, who is inspired by Holmes, but places a heavier focus on the scientific method behind deductions. Thorndyke is probably the one to properly kickstart the forensic/medical sleuth subgenre that grows later with the improvement and development of DNA evidence and technology. We have Hakuba being observant enough to find one of KID’s hairs, and then use Hakuba labs to narrow his identity down. It doesn’t resemble Poirot’s methods, it also isn’t quite Sherlockian, but it does resemble other classic british sleuths!

OKAY, COOL. WHERE ARE YOU GOING WITH THIS RAFFLES.

I’M NOT REALLY SURE! I NEVER KNOW WHAT I’M DOING! I JUST WANTED TO TALK ABOUT HAKUBA AND DETECTIVE STORIES.

Alright. This is more of a personal interpretation/headcanon than anything else, but unlike the other three Gosho boys, who have one clear inspiration/basis/model, I like the idea of Hakuba reading a vast array of detective novels and picking up the little habits, methods, that he finds interesting or comforting. The deerstalker, the name for his hawk, his pocketwatch, his signature question, his methods, his knack for competition, all of them handpicked from the things that he enjoys most about detectives.

It’s also worth mentioning that all of the authors for these stories I’m associating with Hakuba are British. The thought of him being passionate about English authors as a way to understand his English side of the family is a headcanon I quite enjoy. And, technically, the same could apply to his Japanese side as well. I can imagine young Saguru reading Rampo’s Kogoro Akechi stories and also wanting a rival like the Fiend of Twenty Faces and jumping at the chance of chasing KID because how much he resembles the character. Or appreciating Akako’s cryptic clues because Rampo’s fiction also has supernatural edge to it.

I don’t know. I just like the idea of Saguru learning about the world, his family, and himself through literature? This is pure, unapologetic self-indulgence on my part, I have to admit.

Though, if I HAD to assign one specific detective to Saguru, I think it would probably be Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. Poe’s stories with the character as seen as the start of detective fiction, and Dupin serves as the prototype for detectives to come — even Holmes, even if he doesn’t get nearly as much recognition as Conan Doyle’s detective today. Despite the fact that Hakuba is the original teenage detective in the series, and he’s also often forgotten and neglected by both Gosho and a big portion of the fandom. Even so, he paved the way for Shinichi and Heiji, and is very important regardless.

Anyway! I don’t know why I wrote this and I am now very embarrassed but thanks for reading all the way!

#In which Raffles rambles #I am a very boring person and this is what I do for fun #Do you think my professors would accept Hakuba as a valid topic for a research thesis?#I am very bad at this #this is embarrassing #dcmk #gosho boys #hakuba saguru #saguru hakuba #shinichi kudo #hattori heiji #conan edogawa #Kuroba Kaito #kaitou kid #detective conan #magic kaito #detective fiction

266 notes · View notes

letterboxd · 3 years ago

Photo

Work Horse.

Taking on a rare leading role in his decades-spanning career, national treasure Tim Blake Nelson speaks with Mitchell Beaupre about demystifying heroes, reinventing genres and something called a quiche Western.

“This film is unapologetic about all the tropes that it’s deploying in service of telling the story... You’ve got a satchel full of cash. You’ve got gunslinging, physical violence, and feeding somebody to the pigs.” —Tim Blake Nelson

Described by Letterboxd members as “a national treasure” who “makes everything better”, Tim Blake Nelson is a journeyman actor who has tapped into practically every side of the industry since making his feature debut in Nora Ephron’s This Is My Life back in 1992. Whether you are a Marvel fanatic, a history buff or a parent trying to get through the day, the actor’s distinctive presence is a charming sight that’s always welcome on the screen.

Tim Blake Nelson is one of those rare actors who unites all filmgoers, a man genuinely impossible not to love, which certainly seems to be the case for Hollywood. Checking off working relationships with directors ranging from Terrence Malick and Ang Lee to Hal Hartley and Guillermo Del Toro, Nelson has covered the boards, even crossing over into directing and writing, both in films and on the stage.

Yet, despite being a renowned talent who can take a smaller supporting role in a massive Steven Spielberg blockbuster starring Tom Cruise and carry the film, Nelson-as-leading-man sightings have been few and far between. In fact, it’s quite a struggle to find a film with Nelson in a leading role, as even playing the titular role for directors who understand his greatness still results in him only appearing in the opening section of an anthology feature.

At last, the leading role Nelson fans were in need of has arrived in the form of Old Henry, a new Western from writer/director Potsy Ponciroli. Nelson plays the eponymous Henry, a widowed farmer with a mysterious past who makes a meager living with his son (Gavin Lewis), doing his best to leave his old life behind and hide away from the world. Things get complicated when Henry stumbles upon a satchel of cash and a wounded stranger (Scott Haze), bringing them both into his home. Soon, a dangerous posse led by an intimidating Stephen Dorff comes calling, setting the stage for an old-fashioned throwdown in this twisty Western siege thriller.

Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, Old Henry has been warmly received on Letterboxd. “Old Henry feels like the culmination of Tim Blake Nelson’s twenty-plus-year career, but from another dimension, where he’s highly regarded as a leading man”, writes Noah, speaking not only to the strength of Nelson’s performance, but also to the fact that this leading role shouldn’t be such a rarity. Todd awards Nelson the prize for “Best Facial Hair in a 2021 film”, before applauding the actor for pouring “every emotion in his body to play Henry”.

Letterboxd’s East Coast editor Mitchell Beaupre saddled up for a chat with Nelson about the intentional hokiness of the Westerns that made him fall in love with filmmaking, how the Coen brothers put other directors on notice, and the fatherly joy of keeping it all in the family.

I’ve seen a lot of interviews with you discussing your career as an actor, a writer, and a director. You always speak with such reverence for the art. Where does that passion come from for you? What made you want to pursue this field? Tim Blake Nelson: It’s funny, doing these interviews for Old Henry has been reminding me of my introduction to filmmaking as an art. I’ve realized that I had never quite located it, but it really started with the Sergio Leone Westerns, which I would see on television when I was growing up in Oklahoma in the ’70s. Before that, going to the cinema was always invariably a treat, no matter what the film, but I would just be following the story and the dialogue.

The Sergio Leone movies were the first ones that exposed subjectivity in telling stories on film to me. That was where I became aware of the difference between a closeup and an extreme closeup, or how you could build tension through a combination of the angle on a character with the editorial rhythm, with the lens size, with the music in addition to the dialogue and the story.

How old were you when this shift in your understanding of cinema was happening? I think it was across the ages of ten and eighteen, where I suddenly realized that this was an auteur here, Leone. There was a guy behind all these movies I was seeing—and in Oklahoma, you could see a Sergio Leone movie every weekend. This was a man making deliberate and intelligent decisions in everything that I was seeing.

I started noticing that a character was in a duster that goes all the way down to his boots, even though that’s not necessarily accurate to the Old West. That’s something else. Also, why is he wearing it in the desert? Would that have been very practical? And look at that cigar Clint Eastwood is smoking. It’s not smooth, it looks like it was a piece of tree root. Then later I learned it’s a particular kind of Italian cigar, but somehow it was defining this genre of Western. I marveled at that, and found it unbelievably thrilling to discover. I loved the stories and the dialogue and the intentional hokiness of it all. All of it was conspiring to teach me to venerate this form.

Sergio Leone, his daughters, and Clint Eastwood on the set of ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ (1966).

The connection there is interesting between the Leone Westerns to where Old Henry is at now. You’ve talked before about how the Western genre is one that is reinvented over and over throughout the years— Oh, you do your homework!

I try my best! What would you say defines the current era of Westerns that we’re seeing, and how the genre is being reinvented? Well, Joel and Ethan [Coen] did a lot of mischief, in a good way, with The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Genres are always about genres, in addition to their story. So, I would say that Buster Scruggs is the quintessential postmodern Western, if you look at it as one movie instead of as an anthology, because it celebrates the history of the form. The magic of that movie is that it engages you in each story while also being a meditation on death. That’s what connects each one of those tales, and then it’s also a meditation on storytelling to boot. In the final chapter, you have a character talking about why we love stories, and he’s telling it to a bunch of people who you’ll learn are all dead.

The stories are a way of delaying the inevitable mortality. I mean, look at that. It’s such an accomplishment. With that movie, I think Joel and Ethan put filmmakers on notice that Westerns had better always be also about Westerns, because whether you like it or not, they are. I think they probably came to understand that when they were making True Grit, although knowing the two of them they probably understood it already.

Do you feel there’s a direct correlation between a movie like Buster Scruggs and Old Henry, in this era of postmodern, revisionist Westerns? How it impacts a movie like Old Henry is that you have Potsy embracing the Western-ness of the movie. This film is unapologetic about all the tropes that it’s deploying in service of telling the story. You’ve got the cantankerous old man hiding a past, who’s a maverick who wants to keep the law and the bad guys off his property. He wants to be left alone. You’ve got a satchel full of cash. You’ve got gunslinging, physical violence, and feeding somebody to the pigs. Yet, it’s all accomplished without irony in a very straightforward way that is utterly confident, and in love with the genre.

I think ultimately that’s why the movie works, because it’s very front-footed. It’s not hiding from you. It’s not deceiving you and trying to tell you it’s something that it isn’t. It’s a good, straightforward Western.

Tim Blake Nelson as the titular singer in ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ (2018).

That’s a bit different from those Leone Westerns, with all of their anachronisms. I remember when the movie Silverado came out when I was growing up, and people were calling it a “quiche Western”, which was funny. That was what they would call it in Oklahoma because it had a bunch of movie stars in it, who weren’t known for being in Westerns. It was the Sergio Leone crowd calling it that. I went and saw it, wondering, “Well, if it’s a quiche Western, then why is everybody talking about it?” I saw it, and I loved it. Those folks putting it down like that were wrong. It’s actually a straightforward, hard-boiled, hardcore unapologetic Western. You don’t like some of the movie stars in it, but get over it. The reason that movie works is because it’s straight-ahead and well-told, and I think that movie holds up.

Old Henry is the same kind of animal. It’s more in the tradition of Sergio Leone—or, actually, I would say more in the tradition of Unforgiven. That was a big influence on Potsy.

Unforgiven was marvelous in the way it demystified that old black hat/white hat mentality of Westerns, opening up a more multi-dimensional understanding. You’re no stranger to that. A series like Watchmen takes that approach with superheroes, who in a sense hold the position now that Western heroes used to hold culturally. Do you find there’s more of a demand these days to challenge those archetypes who used to be put on pedestals—be they superheroes, cowboys, police—and provide a deeper analysis? Absolutely, yes. At the same time, I think the demystified Western hero goes back to John Wayne in The Searchers. I think it really started with that character, one of the greatest characters ever in a Western. There’s One-Eyed Jacks, with Marlon Brando, which was made just after The Searchers, and again embracing this concept of an extremely complicated man. I don’t think you get the Sergio Leone movies without that.

I always think of McCabe & Mrs. Miller as a Western that was doing something totally different than anything I had seen before. That’s another one, with that final image with the character smoking opium, going into oblivion after the demise of Warren Beatty’s very flawed character, after you’ve watched what it has taken to really build that town. You have a director, Robert Altman, making the deliberate choice to shoot in order so that they can build the town while they’re shooting the movie, and you really get the cost of it. I think there’s a lot of history to get to a place where a movie like Unforgiven can happen. Then Clint comes along and, as he often does, moves it forward even more.

Gavin Lewis as Henry’s son Wyatt in ‘Old Henry’.

That’s a film that tackles legacy, as does Old Henry, which at its core is ultimately about the relationship between a father and his son. You got to work on this film with your own son, coincidentally named Henry, who was part of the art department. What is that experience like, getting to share your passion with your son on a project together? Well, I think something that is true for the character of Henry and for myself, and perhaps all of us, is that we all want our kids to have better lives than ours. I want that to be true in every respect. Mostly, I want them to be more fulfilled than I have been. My kids look at me when I say that and say, “Thanks a lot Dad for raising that bar”, because they see that I have a pretty good life. Which I do, but I still think they can be more fulfilled than I am, and I want that for them. One of the great privileges of this movie was to watch my son—who was the on-set decorator—work his ass off.

Those are the words of an incredibly proud father. He’s a work horse, and he’s learning about filmmaking, and I think on his current trajectory he will go beyond where I’ve gone as a filmmaker, directing more movies than I’ve been able to direct. Do a better job at it, too. He’s also a singer-songwriter, and I think he can have a venerable career doing that if he wants, but he wants to make movies too, and I hope that’s going to happen for him. It was a thrill to watch him do the work, the twelve- and fourteen-hour days, and after every take resetting and making sure everything was right. It felt like an accomplishment to see him take on that responsibility and do the real work every day.

Related content

SJ Holiday’s lists of Essential Neo-Westerns and Essential Modern Westerns

The Best Neo-Westerns of the 21st Century, according to JS Lewis

Our interview with Slow West director John Maclean

Follow Mitchell on Letterboxd

‘Old Henry’ is in US theaters now and on VOD from Friday, October 8.

#tim blake nelson #old henry #western #westerns #western movies #sergio leone #clint eastwood #stephen dorff #letterboxd #mitchell beaupre #coen brothers #coen bros #buster scruggs #joel coen #ethan coen

20 notes · View notes

mask131 · 3 years ago

Text

Miraculous: A village inside a capital and rich kids talk

A long time ago I posted a small light talk about how Miraculous’ depiction of its protagonists made it a “rich kids” show. I want to return a bit on it.

[And before anyone asks yes I am French and yes I studied - and still study in Paris - and before that I lived for some years in it, so I know what I am talking about.]

But first, why? This is actually much more interesting. Why is Miraculous a show about rich, upper class kids in the best areas of Paris, while other famous French productions (such as Code Lyoko) depicted more faithfully the middle class/common life? And the reason is not elitism. The desire to show the best, most beautiful and iconic sides of Paris might have played - since all the great sights of the city are in extremely costly and upper-class areas ; but even then, this is not the true reason.

The true reason is that Miraculous applies the “village logic” to Paris. The village logic is a very common trope of French works and productions - ranging from movies to childhood stories, to games such as the famous “Werewolf” game (Les Loups-Garous de Thiercelieux). In France, you had villages, and in those villages you had jobs that were key, essential and found in all of them. As a result, those key jobs and key roles of the village became character archetypes, always present in village settings and forming the “village logic”: you have the mayor, the butcher, the baker, the midwife, the gendarmes, the teacher, etc... This village logic also applies outside of villages, to small towns in more urban areas, the only difference being that for example there won’t be a guy related to the wild like a garde-forêt or a hunter, and the “gendarme” will become the “police”. But anyway, this is very common when you deal with a village or small town to always center and focus around those specific roles.

Miraculous: Ladybug actually took back this “village logic”, which is no surprised because it is used a lot in fiction and books for children here in France. The only problem is that, they applied this village logic to here THE ENTIRETY OF PARIS! This is why it seems sometimes there’s only one policeman in all of Paris, Roger Raincomprix. This is also why Marinette’s family’s boulangerie is always present every time someone needs bread or pâtisseries or something like that, despite Paris having hundreds of boulangeries. They decided to not just focus on a given cast, but they also decided this cast would be the world and thus applied the village logic.

And this is why there is this discrepancy... Some kids and the school and several situations being presented as if they happened to the common life, to the middle class (for example Sabrina and Marinette being presented as mostly “lower class” or at least of A lower class because they are daughters of a policeman and a baker, jobs not thought of as high-paying), but when you take into account the true context, the prevalence of their parents in the city and the overall situation of the series, you realize that they are really much more upper-class than we thought.

That’s just what I wanted to talk about. As a result I do not know if this show was willingly or accidentaly made a “rich kids show”. But when we look at it, there is no way we can deny it

[Detailed study of each characters under the cut]

If we look at the Miss Bustier’s class:

# Adrien - any need to explain? Teenage model and actor for fashion, publicity and movies, son of one of the most famous designers of Paris haute couture. Lives in a freakin’ mansion.

# Chloé Bourgeois. Daughter of the mayor of Paris and a famous fashion magazine director ; lives in a luxury hotel. [I call it that the Bourgeois family is from la droite of the political spectrum]

# Alya. Well here you’ve got what one can call the “upper middle-class”, since she is the daughter of Le Grand Paris’ chef and a zookeeper (well, here THE zookeeper) of Le Jardin des Plantes, and lives in a quite nice and big apartment in Paris (and before the Covid hit, Paris was again the most costly place to live in all of France, so to have a big, nice flat you need to have the resources).

# Marinette. Daughter of the best baker of Paris. Note that is it referenced as THE BEST of ALL of Paris. That’s not nothing, especially since Paris has a lot of luxury bakers to deal with. In fact you can clearly see the village logic being applied here: the baker shop and their behavior/life implies that they are a middle-class family ; but then the whole situation actually implies they are among the upper-class, resulting in a discrepancy. The boulangerie has been shown delivering goods for numerous official and upper-class events.

# Juleka and Luka... Now they might seem regular middle-class right? Well wrong... Again, they definitively are upper-middle class (or rather they might be reduced to live to middle-class by their expanses). Indeed, they live on a péniche. And to live on a péniche (let’s refer to it as boat simply) is actually very costly. On top of the taxe foncière and taxe d’habitation that are pretty high ; there is also an additional tax to pay whose price depends on which dock you are staying. And the insurances prices for a boat are higher than a house. And of course, when in Paris, those prices are even higher - as a result, for example, a péniche at the center of Paris will cost you 90 000 euros (roughly 1 068 929 dollars). And one near the Tour Eiffel is 1,5 millions d’euros (roughly 1 781 548 dollars). JUST TO BUY! I’m not including the high taxes every year.

# Mylène. I’ve got no info indicating that she might be upper-class. After all her father is “assistant educator” and “mime” which is definitively a low-pay set of jobs.

# Max. This one is... another curious case. Looks like a middle-class/lower-class kid that had a sudden rise in society. I mean, for example his mother Claudie Kanté is a SNCF (or equivalent in universe) train driver, which is certainly not a high-paid job. But she also got to be an astronaut, which implies she will become rich and famous. He is intelligent enough and has enough material to create a sentient robot and other technological marvels, though without it being used in any other way than his own entertainment (so he doesn’t get any money out of it). So I don’t know what to do with him.

# Alyx. Daughter of the Louvres curator, or at least one of the employee of the Louvres (with a position good enough to actually live there?). No need to say more.

# Kim... At first I thought he might be upper-class too when I noted that the English wiki for Miraculous listed him as a winner of “France’s National Athletic Tournament” which was quite interesting... But I checked back the original French dub and this is a case of change in translation: in the French episode he merely won an inter-collège tournament at the scale of Ile-de-France, aka a regional competition. So scratch that.

# Sabrina... Now I have a problem with her father. Roger - and this is purely because of the “village logic”. Roger is the most prominent cop of all of Paris, THE embodiment of the police in the town, and as a result his exact position is extremely hard to pinpoint. On one side you see him do the job of low policemen (checking parked cars, helping with the flow of the traffic...) and on the other you see him answer to the mayor of Paris, commanding other policemen or acting as a representative of Paris’ police, which are all functions of someone high in the hierarchy of the police... Which makes it impossible to know if he and his family come from a low-class, middle-class or upper-class background.

# Lila - her mother works at Italy’s embassy in Paris. Safe to say she is from the upper-class.

And the rest of the class actually passes free because I couldn’t find any real indication about their situation, living area or family. Rose, Nino, Nathaniel, Ivan... Since the collège is supposed to be a public one, it is possible there is a mix of social categories ; but at the same time this “21st arrondissement” of Paris has a lot of Paris great locations right next to it or in it, clearly making it a high-class area (I know the show doesn’t really built a 21st and just threw together the most iconic places of Paris, but still the result would be a upper-class neighborhood).

And if we look at the other students outside of this class, we still have a weathergirl for a popular and famous television channel (though a kid’s channel, it still counts as a nicely paying job - Mireille) ; we’ve got relatives to the upper-class or rich kids mentionned previously (Zoé or Lukas) ; and Kagami who is also very clearly upper-class (driven around in a limousine, daughter of a fencing champion with strong relationships to Gabriel Agreste, coming from an ancient and wealthy Japanese family...)

Again - this is no criticism or hate of the show. I just wanted to point that out and analyse a bit the show’s situation.

#miraculous #miraculous ladybug #french stuff

8 notes · View notes

darklightsworld · 4 years ago

Note

Hello, I remember you saying some time ago you didn't like how female characters are portrayed in (current) anime because of how annoying and, maybe, misogynistic their archetypes are. Could you maybe elaborate on this point? I feel similar but can't articulate well and always end up feeling like I'm the one being misogynistic whenever this type of subject comes up in conversation x.x Sorry if this comes up as too personal.

Sorry about the late reply, I have been busy with a conference. Also sorry, because my answer is a bit long and all over the place ^^;

This is a difficult question, especially because nowadays people like to think in black and white, and everything is so extreme, like if they don’t like something, then it must be wrong and eliminated, not to mention the policing of every content based to this – which kills diversity and dismisses personal (and gendered) preferences. What I think is really a personal preference and not exactly a general critique of female characters in anime, especially because there are many factors to consider (genre, age and gender or the target audience, cultural background, etc.), and there’s also the audience with its multiple readings.

Personally I dislike most female character types manga and anime has to give, because I’m not really a person for overly feminine and girly things. The Japanese ideal is very cutesy and it’s the standard in both media for men, women and also real life. Not just looks, there is also the behavior side of things, the cutesy, childish, girly ideal, the passivity, helplessness, pretending to be stupid, etc, and I outright hate it when female characters are treated as stupid, clumsy messes. The question is, though, is this ideal really conservative and an embodiment of the toxic patriarchal system? Actually not necessarily. They definitely originate from the oppressive system, but over the decades girls made these ideals their own, and turned them into a weapon to get what they want. Even in real life, fashion is very feminine for me, always with frills, ribbons, flitters, tons of dresses and skirts, and it’s difficult to find plain clothes without any decoration, not to mention all the cuteness in goods and stuff, but as for the behavior of girls and women, the cutesy ideal seems more like a role to be played at a certain age or for certain purposes, like getting things they want and eventually the man. A woman, who didn’t like this ideal herself defined it as “they had to play the wounded deer”. Actually women, who use this role too much and even among women, are usually hated – this is the infamous burikko.

But no matter how they were in their younger years, married women don’t use this role anymore, and they seamlessly slip into a different identity, one that rules the family and the finances with iron fist (I’m stereotyping) – nothing cutesy, helpless or stupid about that. The Japanese themselves are aware of this cutesy role, both men and women, it’s their version of cunning flirtatiousness, it’s just a very different type of flirtatiousness than in the West. For example, there is currently even a tv show enacting certain situations where this cutesy behavior is used to get the man, and the hosts rate how effective the cutesy behavior was. But while I understand intellectually that these are not necessarily misogynistic stereotypes, I have some kind of a visceral hatred for them. The above tv show makes me outright nauseous. It’s a personal preference, and I don’t think I have to like these character types. But I also don’t think they should be erased from Japanese media, and it would be a mistake trying to push my very independent Western values onto such a different culture, so I rather avoid these characters – which is not easy.

So, what does this mean for anime and manga? Both are largely determined by genres (manga more than anime), genres work with clean-cut character types, tropes, traditions and reader expectation, so there is a reason why female (and male) characters are the way they are in different genres. Male-oriented works will obviously have female characters that appeal to men even if the work doesn’t have in your face fanservice shots (though let’s face it, if it’s anime, most of them do). I don’t like these female character types, I don’t think I have to like them, they are clearly not geared toward me, but I also don’t think they shouldn’t be there in a clearly male-oriented media. Sure, there can be discussions about removing overly exploitive situations, harassment and rape or things like that, but I’m not really against letting men have their fun – because I expect to have that same freedom in media geared toward women. There are occasionally unisex anime, but usually they still serve one or the other demographic in a way, and I don’t think it’s possible to create truly unisex anime that everybody will be satisfied with – fanservice for women will always bother men, and fanservice for men will always bother women.

Shōjo manga is a more difficult question, because somewhere in the 70s romance started to focus on imperfect heroines who still got the best guy, because he loved them regardless of their imperfections (“I love you the way you are”), and since then the genre is full of the stupid, clumsy, indecisive, housewife material archetype without any dreams beyond getting the boy (or very old-school women job dreams), which does not appeal to me either, so I usually avoid most romance shōjo manga, especially the high school variant, and even most josei manga, because I don’t care for the adult version of the same with marriage as the end goal *shrug* Actually it’s not even about these things only, like, I disliked Arte too (though not shōjo manga), despite it trying (and failing) to pose as a feminist social commentary, just because the mc way annoying. Fortunately there are a lot of other types of shōjo manga as well, even with more appealing female characters or the best, without female characters (plus the whole BL scene), so it’s not all that bad, at least in manga, not so much in anime. Interestingly, I’m much more compatible with shōjo manga by fujoshi artists. If I like a shōjo manga, usually the artist ends up coming out as a fujoshi after a while by posting BL fanart on her twitter or drawing outright BL manga – it’s been a pattern XD

Anime is more difficult, but I also admit, that my tastes might be extreme. In Japan there are many female fans who love the cute female characters of male-oriented media. Many women like Love Live, for example, because the girls are, I quote, “so cuuuuuute” – while I am fighting nausea… Yeah, Japan is imbued with cute. It’s especially difficult, because I’m usually not willing to watch a series even if there are such female characters in supporting roles or as a second protagonist with male characters I would love to see (Cop Craft was a recent-ish example). And while I avoid female only casts on principle, sometimes there are surprises. For example, the Yashahime anime has terrible writing, but I don’t hate the three main female characters (even if occasionally the anime has some iffy things to say about femininity).

I also mentioned multiple readings. It is important to note that the audience does not necessarily interpret everything the same, especially if there are cultural differences. One of the most famous examples for this is Sailor Moon, which was the incarnation of girl power and emancipation in the West in the 90s, but it has the same “dumb heroine gets the dream guy” trope, and the same conservative message of getting married and giving birth to children as any average shōjo manga, and the same “so cuuuuute” packaging. It really depends on the audience what they get away with.

All in all there are preferences, genre conventions, cultural differences, so the whole thing is quite difficult. But I don’t think you need to be worried about not liking or being uncomfortable with certain character types. And it would be a stretch to consider tastes like mine, for example, misogynistic. Sure, even in real life I make a wide berth around overly girly or feminine women (among others), but it can’t be helped, you can’t like and be friends with everyone, and I guess they wouldn’t like me or wanting to be my friend either. And that’s fine, and I don’t think it’s misogynistic for me to reject certain types of femininity for myself and to interact with, as long as I don’t want to erase or invalidate them, or deem them as inferior – and I don't. Of course, this is the attitude I expect towards myself as well. Live and let live 🖖

#magnoliawaltz

9 notes · View notes

princesssarcastia · 5 years ago

Text

a veronica mars leverage au, i guess, because what else should i be doing with my life?

*deep sigh*

So I was thinking about the mechanics of a veronica mars leverage au—as in, veronica mars characters in a leverage like set-up, because the leverage setup is the golden standard™ of like, the known universe.

you have veronica mars, mastermind; the rest of the crew being made up of wallace, mac, logan, and weevil. and mac is obviously the hacker.

but I also think that, in this au, the roles won’t be so clear cut. the problem is that in veronica mars, all of these characters (except mac, who is an archetype) display different skills from each of the five defined roles in the leverage universe: hitter, hacker, grifter, thief, mastermind.

veronica is a mastermind, sure, but she also makes killer fake IDs and breaks into systems like hardison does and is a hell of a grifter.

weevil can throw down, and lift things like a thief, and even pull one over on someone in a grifter-like fashion. and as head of the PCHers he has some definitive mastermind tendencies; he knows how to plan a fight, and a con.

wallace is more of a solid dude than a member of the criminal element, but when veronica needs him, he’s played roles like a grifter and pulled off lifts like a thief.

logan has a talent for violence, but also can lie like he breathes and put on shows to convince the best of them.

really i guess they all just have a little grifter in them.

if I had to had to had to give them all definitive leverage archetypes, though, it would be veronica: mastermind, logan: hitter, Weevil: thief, wallace: grifter, and of course, mac: hacker.

veronica is the mastermind because she knows all of them best, knows what they can do; because she’s capable of putting all the moving pieces together into one perfect plan; but also because she’s a control freak with maaaajior trust issues. there’s no way she could ever let anyone else be in charge.

logan is the hitter because he’s just got that underlying current of violence about him at all times, but also because my absolute favortie scenes of his are when he’s being protective of veronica. not that end of season three bullshit, mind you, but like the scene in season one when he rescues her from the federal agent, or the scene in season two when he bluffs his way into and out of the irish mob’s territory with an unloaded gun to save veronica. make him the hitter and we get breathtaking violence from him, sure. but we also get to see logan at his best: giving a damn about the well-being of others.

weevil is the thief because this guy is smooth. he pulled the heist at the carnival brilliantly in s2; and he stole that pen from the Kane household in s1 successfully even though the police arrested him and catalogued everything on his person, including the pen. it’s a bit of a square peg in a round hole, but I feel like he;d have comfortable knowledge of security systems and guard rotations and police jurisdictions.

wallace is the grifter because i’ve noticed that a lot of the times he asks veronica for advice on how to do stuff, its grift-related. “how do I seduce the fake head cheerleader?” for example. and he pulls some short term grifts for her, like when he infiltrates the silicon mafia at SD State. also he’s got the best innate knowledge of who people are and what they’re like. yeah, veronica can pull people apart, but Wallace is just good with them in a way she isn’t. and also he’s got the most emotional maturity out of any of these basket cases.

mac is the hacker because she’s god’s gift to computers, duh.

what I really want, though; what any good leverage AU is an excuse to do, is to make a found family out of these losers. imagine if these five people all...trusted and loved each other, in addition to liking one another?? i’m drooling just thinking about it.

I also think that, ironically enough, being righteous criminals in constant close contact would work wonders for veronica and logan’s relationship, lbr. if veronica is mastermind-ing their cons, she doesn’t have to wonder what logan—or any of her other friends, for that matter—are doing, and go a little crazy to find out. it’s an outlet for her control-freak-trust-issues.

aaaand if logan is their hitter/muscle, it’s literally his job to protect everyone, including veronica. violently, if necessary.

plus, they can both work out their paranoia on things that aren’t each other—cause it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you.

the best episodes always involved Veronica pulling her friends into cons with her; VM the show is already only a hop-skip-and-a-jump away from leverage, anyway! solving mysteries, sure, but also getting revenge, retrieving items, getting even...providing leverage.

like, seriously.

Veronica and Wallace effortlessly pulling a grift out of their asses when they’re caught in a sticky situation, using that emotional drift comparability in their brOTP.

Mac, getting the respect and cash she deserves for finding information and recovering hard drives and also, giving her righteous side some room to move.

Logan and Weevil sniping at each other, maybe having not-so-faux fights as distractions or part of a con— but having each other’s backs. playing partners in macho stoicism even though we all know they’re softies sometimes.

Wallace and Mac, standing to the side as exasperated captains of the maturity and stability team while Logan and Veronica share a dumpster fire.

Veronica and Weevil doing that thing, you know, where they’re kind of flirting and kind of pulling one over on their audience and pulling each other out of messes.

Wallace, prince among men, getting to play the handsome and charming credit to his gender he is. imagine, if you will, him pulling honey-trap cons on marks like sophie deveraux did. i am and it’s delightful.

the worst part about canon!VM is how much they all (veronica. largely veronica) tore one another down; betrayed people; didn’t trust them; hurt them; expected the worst and got it in self-fulfilling bullshit. imagine if all of that went away and then write it for me pleeeaaaseee

i’ve been brainstorming and like, there’s two paths you could go. one is a complete graft to the leverage fusion, in which they never actually went to high school together but instead are professional criminals who all grew into their own on their own and came together. in this path, we’d come in on our anti-heroes already in the thick of it—or at least, having deep histories together that allow them to trust one another right away.

the other is like, veronica falls to the “dark side” in high school and drags them all with her, handing out black hats as she goes. perhaps in a world where Aaron Echolls gets acquitted and Duncan Kane does not have an assassin at the ready to avenge his sister outside the law, where Veronica literally can’t sleep at the thought of him out there. a world where Logan and Weevil have that same insomnia, and Mac and Wallace care about Veronica enough to help.

and maybe it starts out as just a way to get new evidence so a judge can declare a retrial and get Aaron convicted; but ohhh, Aaron Echolls is not a man who can leave well enough alone. He’s a rich, powerful, attention seeking mother fucker who likes to taunt logan and veronica about what he did to lily. so even though it’s not Duncan paying for him to get assassinated, the end result is the same: Aaron dead as a doornail, like he deserves.

Maybe it’s a fake suicide, like Veronica planned out for her criminology course, the literal perfect crime. Maybe he gets murdered and dumped on Lamb’s doorstep with an audio recording of him confessing—edited by Mac, of course, to make sure Veronica and Logan’s parts in the charade weren’t included.

also i’d like to think that, in this world where they wear black hats to better play white knights, Veronica and Logan have just...the best-worst reputation. Yeah, they melt around each other, but ho-ly shit they’re still lethal—especially if you put one in danger. Maybe Logan’s got a reputation as an attack dog, and maybe Veronica’s got a reputation as holding his leash, and maybe they’ve proven they’re willing to do anything to keep each other safe. Maybe, they made a deal, a long time ago when they started out: Veronica gets to get into anything she wants, whatever crusade is currently pushing her buttons, as long as she brings Logan along to protect her.

their story is epic, after all.

anyway! In Conclusion, tl;dr, someone please stop me from having veronica mars feelings, and if leverage could please stop being the best found family ever, that would probably help.

#leverage au #veronica mars #logan echolls #eli navarro #cindy mackenzie #wallace fennel #fic idea #life of crime #criminal au #found family

21 notes · View notes

warsofasoiaf · 5 years ago

Note

Hi again, just a friendly reminder for you about Disco Elysium. I played it myself 2 weeks ago and I thought it was a wonderful game, looking forward to hear your opinion.

Here’s the weekend reminder about disco elysium: at some point I’d like to hear your thoughts about Kim and the deserter, but I’m sure you have a lot of first thoughts about the game’s narrative and styles at large and the overall themes ?

Yep, I’ve got many thoughts on Disco Elysium. Overall, I found it an incredibly enjoyable throwback to the classic role-playing games of the old Infinity Engine in a good way. It’s dialogue-driven in the way Planescape: Torment was, but was confident enough to avoid the pitfalls of combat that punctuated the D&D games in favor of a mechanical challenge of skill checks. All conflict is done through dialogue, either through picking a dialogue choice or engaging in a skill check. The game also helpfully gives you feedback, not only in your skill totals, but in how your actions influence the choices you’ve made. Did you take the corrupt union boss’s check? He has you over a bit of a barrel so it’s harder to resist him. Did you impress Cuno with your marksmanship by shooting down the body? You have a bonus to impress him since you’ve already done it before. This sort of openness with the mechanics of the game helps smooth over understanding of the functions, as well as reinforce the themes. Since everything you do is in the dialogue trees, and all of these choices occur in dialogue, it stresses careful reading of the dialogue box as opposed to something you just blow through to get quest markers or goodies.

Alright, let’s talk about the plot. Since there will be spoilers and it’s a relatively recent game, I’m going to throw a cut in here.

One of the chief themes of the game is sadness and loss, it’s written all across the setting. Heck, it’s even written into the name. Disco is the archetypical music genre that is dead, despite its followers wishing that it could come back. Elysium, the afterlife of Greek mythology. It was a failed communist revolution followed by a failed monarchist rebellion followed by a capitalist invasion, and now exists as a pit of corruption, crime, and plenty of people within Martinase look back to the lost days by cleaving to the old political systems as a source of comfort. Communists and monarchists look back to the old communes that were established, capitalists look to the successful Coalition and the ability of capital to absorb its naysayers and failures into itself for success, and the moralists look at the other three and say “you extremists are absolutely insane!” and hold to their own centrist platform and the path of incremental caution. This is hardly unusual in our own history, with far too many historical examples to list here. There’s a longing there for something that is lost, the people you meet in the game are lost, even what seems to be simple comedic beats have their own secret wishes, like Cuno who ends up helping you in the final act if you lose Kim, and can even become a junior police officer once out of the thumb of Cunoeese. Harry can sing the saddest song about the littlest church, and it’s a perfect expression of his regret, as his reptile brain lets him know. The deserter is lost in regret, albeit an incredibly negative sort. He curses those who are not ‘committed’ like him, who aren’t willing to murder like him. He looks at the Rene, the old monarchist with his boule, and wishes only to pull the trigger and silence him.

The main character you inhabit is a great twist on the blank slate character that dominates the ‘western RPG.’ The main character starts the game passed out in his own drug-fueled excess. Where most RPG’s either expect reading a large lore dump (this was the case with the Forgotten Realms Infinity Engine games, which expected people to know who Cyric or Auril was) or largely wave it off with bland exposition, this was a game that made what happened an integral part of your character. What drives such a man to try and destroy himself so completely? Going through the game reveals the answer: it’s Dora, your ex-wife. Before, your obsession with your job (your case load, as noted by Kim, is exceptionally high), seemed to be at odds with your character’s penchant for substance abuse and overall instability, but exploring the failed relationship with Dora sheds new light on Harry DuBois. Dora was a wealthy woman, and your character was clearly a member of the lower classes given his demeanor and salary. Your character tried to immerse themselves in the work perhaps to earn more money, or simply to earn prestige to help alleviate the mismatch. It didn’t work, Dora left six years ago, and the detective has been alone ever since. By calculating the ‘cop tracks’ that the character can be on, the game can populate dialogue with references to the behavior, allowing the character to fill out aspects of themselves in a character-driven way. Tyranny did this with its campaign character generation, and Disco Elysium does it here. Such things are always going to be niche in RPG’s, the driving trend these days is instead make a completely blank character and have them be built out from actions taking place in the game world, but this typically leads to characters who rationalize performing optimal paths and who do everything the game offers in the world, which translates either into a lot of time doing repetitive content (in order to built up other character builds to the same level of mastery to the original build) or leads to ludo-narrative dissonance at the ease of which the character plows through the content, like becoming the Arch-Mage in Skyrim without being able to cast a single adept-level spell.

However, that isn’t to say that Harry is alone. Instead, the detective is quite a crowd is his own head, with the 24 various skills that he has developed largely advising, suggesting, yelling, and talking over each other. This was almost certainly part of the reason the original name of the game was “No Truce with the Furies.” The Furies, in Greek mythology were embodiment of vengeance, primal feelings that sought out their goals. These 24 skills in your head almost cannot be compromised with, only accepted or rejected. They’ll yell inside your own head to listen to them. Electrochemistry wants its next fix, Volition is certain that Klaasje is trying to manipulate you and wants you to slap cuffs on her right now, Physical Instrument wants you to show everyone who’s boss with fists while Authority wants the same with words. This was almost overwhelming at first, 24 characters to figure out in addition to my own character as well as Kim, Cuno, Joyce, Everett, and the Hanged Man made me wonder what exactly I was going to do. What was the difference between Volition and Composure, or Shivers and Inland Empire? It helps on a replay once you figure out what the skills actually mean and can help shape your character into your preferred vehicle for exploring Revanchol West. Dealing with these characters can be fun, insightful, and incredibly heartwarming, as the player can understand when they finally find out that Reptile Brain and Limbic System are simply trying to help Harry out with the loss of his ex-wife by trying to get rid of the sad feelings as best they can.

What helps with this though, is that failing skill checks is not a death sentence. One of the most annoying things in games comes when you depend upon success after success that is out of your control, it encourages save-scumming behavior. This isn’t to say that failure isn’t a valuable learning experience or that difficulty is something to be avoided; the enduring popularity of the Soulsborne genre suggests that difficulty is not itself a bad thing. But failure typically has to be fair. If instead a game drops you in a room with 25 gorgons, forcing you to roll 25 checks against petrification or die immediately, that’s not challenge, that’s just padding the length of the game by forcing repeat content. Disco Elysium instead makes failure, particularly of red skill checks, either entertaining or allowing alternate paths. I laughed with absolute glee when my character took off from Garte yelling at him about the trashed hotel room which ended up becoming a full sprint while flipping him the bird, causing me instead to run over the nice wheelchair-bound old lady, in true black comedy fashion, or that you can get into a nodding war with Kim that’s so intense that you actually break your neck. That the game offers so many different methods to the same path helps elevate the role-playing elements.

Similarly, one of the best moments of game design was when you looked at the billboard to find out where Ruby could have gone. It’s a difficult Shivers check, which might force people into an insurmountable wall if they haven’t upgraded their Shivers skill. However, doing stuff in the fishing village, from going on a date with the harpoon girl to tracking down what went on with the body on the boardwalk, gives you bonuses to the check, encouraging the character to perform the side quests and explore the bonus content.

The game’s side content really does reward some more of the Dirk Gently type of character that sees connectivity in anything. The old lady reading outside the bookstore doesn’t have a missing husband only to later be the wife of the man who died on the boardwalk, or that a grounded character won’t walk out into the water to speak with the apparition of Dora as the mythical Dolores Dei (another great reference to what was lost, the lost wife seen as the lost mythic Moralist conqueror and crusader) means that the more grounded character does have the more grounded, less intense story. But the short length encourages replayability, and the idea that a grounded character has a more grounded story is in it’s own way a commitment to the game’s overall vision, even if it means you miss out on a key insight the first time around.

I’m incredibly impressed at how the developers stuck to their visions and the finished product that they developed. My hat is off to them.

Thanks for the question, Khef, the multiple Anon’s who reminded me, TBH, and everyone else who was looking forward to this essay.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

#disco elysium #video game reviews

25 notes · View notes

you-can-write-this · 5 years ago

Text

Character Creation Tip: Archetypes of Interest

If you’re having trouble formulating your cast of personalities, or your characters are feeling nebulous, then try this: begin with an archetype, and then complicate it or subvert it.

Arguably, the most efficient strategy is to begin with your character’s interests, and/or their chosen subculture. (This list is not exhaustive, and it spans a variety of styles and genres. Ignore the concepts which are too exaggerated or too bland for your reality.)

These are just a few ideas to get you inspired! Have fun, and be sure to absolutely ruin the archetypes you select-- don’t play them straight! In other words, these are all stereotypes, and it’s up to you to shift away from these stereotypes!

Rock - A passionate musician who feels more than they think. They list band names just to show off, and they hold extremely strong opinions on obscure controversies (e.g. slap-bass is best thumb-down). They can be talented or terrible. Stereotypically, they are slackers in almost every subject: they refuse to try in school and prefer unemployment to hard work. However, when they are passionate, they don’t recognize that they’re working. With their instrument, they are persistent, and may even become skilled. If they like the idea of pulling up in a flashy car, they’ll learn how to drive, and they’ll do it well enough. But if driving is a chore, they’ll be homebound or hitching rides.

Related interests: Even if they are characterized by their interest in rock, they are likely to have similar feelings about other, lesser interests. Common examples are comic books, D&D, and other nerdy media. They’re likely fond of tv & movies from the 80s and 90s. They may have an appreciation for some other genres, such as hip-hop, but will select genres to hate in order to establish an out-group (commonly classical, country, or radio pop). Stereotypically, they have an aversion to mainstream media and intellectualism; both make them feel inferior.

Dark counterculture - Goth, emo, and all those unlabelled. They are angry about something, but don’t know what to do with those feelings, so they choose society or authority figures as the target of their anger; they might seem very justified, or they might seem completely silly. Some brandish weapons, such as aesthetically pleasing knives, as a symbol of rebellion, but (usually) not as a tool for malice. Similarly, they gravitate towards dark iconography, which to them reads as “truth”-- satanic and violent imagery seem to call attention to the actual darkness they perceive in the world, a darkness often hidden away (although they do not believe in the devil, and do not necessarily advocate violence; if they do, it’s probably all hypotheticals, and never actions). Despite all this, most have personable, friendly, and often cheerfully childlike mannerisms by default, at least when socializing within the in-group.

Related interests: They probably have personal idols who they latch onto. Musicians are most common, but any celebrity is fine, as long as they can classify as a personal symbol of rebellion. A superstitious attitude has taught them to trust tarot, to believe in ghosts, and maybe even to practice casual witchcraft. They cope with internal pain through their vices, primarily drugs, tobacco, and alcohol. Particularly among girls/women (according to stereotype), they also may have a strong liking for childlike or “pretty” media-- Disney movies and children’s shows, for example, although older/nostalgic media for teens & adults may also make the cut. They are averse to mainstream media by virtue of it being mainstream, but older mainstream media, particularly from the 80s and 90s, can appear left behind and forgotten, and regardless of gender, the character may seek to protect this forgotten & broken toy, thereby developing a great fondness.

The idea of America - This trope only applies to Americans, as it describes American nationalists. They love symbols of America, including the flag, the eagle, the army, the police, and sometimes the fire department. In appearance, they have a high level of self-confidence, showing off their toughness and their perceived moral integrity. They are probably politically conservative, if not libertarian or independent. This type is proud to be loyal-- they are proud of how they stand by their family, or their clique, or even how they stand by their own self-- as a result, they resist changing social groups on principle (breakups are especially hard), and they may be willing to make great sacrifices in order to prove their loyalty (e.g. putting themself in danger). Personal sacrifice, to them, demonstrates their heroic nature. They are similarly loyal to America. Country music probably appeals to them, and so does mainstream media, such as pop music and action/superhero movies. In some areas towards the south, these characters are popular jocks, and may have brains as well as brawn; their futures may be promising, and they are well-liked. If younger, they may party, and if older, they are a parent, beloved by other parents in the area, possibly coaching a little league or joined to a PTA. In some areas towards the north, these characters are rebellious and countercultural. In this case, expect spiteful & defensive behaviors, paired with a distrust in authority; they will still have mainstream tastes, but they might be wary of the charming and well-liked. They may find themself stuck, on a loop, talking about leaving town or starting a business, but they mistake their own dreams for goals; it will never happen. In contexts that frame them as rebellious, others may describe them as annoying, childish, or aggressive.

Regarding gender: Not all of them are men. Within this archetype, many pride themselves as “tough ladies,” but be wary that they are not feminists. The men will be loyal to their families, and the women will be loyal to their husbands. Both men and women will place great importance on their gender role as a symbol of tradition, a loyalty to their upbringing and to each other. Women of this type may be proud gun owners, or may be athletic in the realm of “feminine” sports, such as tennis or softball; almost never football or basketball. If these women/girls are countercultural & rebellious in their context, expect them to spite well-liked women for being vapid, superficial, or boring.

Regarding moving: Someone who has grown up in the south well-liked for these qualities will still be confident & sociable in other cultural contexts. In the case of a countercultural rebel, it may depend.

Broader queer community - Not all queer people integrate their queer identity into their lifestyle-- but some do. Without an enormous subversion, this trope is better off written by queer writers. (This admin is queer in many respects.) Social politics engage them, invigorate them, and infuriate them. They’re a leftist if not center-left, and they have probably gained a lot of their knowledge & wisdom from social media, to varying degrees of accuracy; they’ve spent long hours scrolling through socio-political facts and opinions, lighting a fire in their stomach. According to stereotype, legitimate distress has left them spiteful at a young age, and they are quick to anger, quick to correct others. Friendships within the queer community bring them a sense of comfort. When comfortable, they are energetic and indulge in childlike behaviors; speaking too loudly, bursting into song, offering inappropriate emotional responses, etc. They are openly affectionate and may even enjoy cuddling with friends or openly cuddling with a partner(s). After previously feeling limited at a younger age, they are now desperate to express themself through any medium, and therefore gravitate towards wacky/colorful clothing, talk constantly about their queerness, and may decorate their houses/rooms with bizarre, sometimes queer, paraphernalia.

Related interests: If they’re invested in a tv show, podcast, movie series, book series, or other piece of media, they are probably very deeply and passionately invested. This media will usually be current, and will usually be just outside of the social norm-- for example, serious-toned animated shows, but not quite children’s television; if it’s live-action, then it’s science fiction or fantasy with a distinctive lore. Their chosen media falls into three categories: A. media with canonical lesbian relationships, B. media in which two or more men have a warm, positive relationship (which doesn’t always have to be interpreted as romantic by fans), C. it’s a YA story in which a vibrant cast of characters come together as a team or clique. They spend significant time talking about, thinking about, or writing about their favorite media.

Female celebrities - They have a vast knowledge of their favorite female celebrities, and keep closely up to date through social media. They are fiercely loyal to these celebrities, and take any spite towards these celebrities as an ethical offense. Unconsciously, they’ve developed a very strong sense of importance towards the gender binary, and for their own reasons, believe in supporting (certain) women, and distrusting men. Unconsciously, they imitate their favorite celebrities, and learn how to behave from them-- because of this, their world has a high bar for fashion and presentability. Their clothes are a perfect fit, style, and shape, and if they’re a woman/girl, their makeup is a wonder; in this way, they, too feel a little bit more like the women they admire. Stereotypically, if they’re a gay man, they probably imitate their favorite female celebrities consciously more than unconsciously, dancing along to the choreographed dances and attributing these imitations of femininity to their own homosexuality. In any form of imitation, their obsession with celebrities informs their norms, and informs their sense of self. Because they learn to view themself externally, comparing their own behaviors and presentation to that of celebrities, they will become experts in their own presentation, and as a result, become very well-liked, with many friends. Their lingo is very much up-to-date. They’re a fan of male celebrities as well, but they do not make it a hobby; it holds much lesser importance.

Related interests: In general, their tastes sway mainstream. They like watching celebrities because they like people, and so socializing and partying are their primary pastimes. With their heightened empathetic skills, they could relate to those in the out-group, but have trained themself not to, in order to feel most comfortable in their in-group. So they spend time with people similar to themself, and avoid or even act cruelly towards those they don’t immediately understand.

Classical music (for characters below 30 or so) - Their classical tastes span infinite times and locations. However, they take separate interest in European (or Ancient Grecian/Roman) history, and in this regard, they are probably fixated on a particular country during a specific period: for example, the Italian Renaissance, Soviet Russia, or Classical Greece. They’ve read a lot of classic literature from and outside of this setting. They feel disconnected from contemporary society and mainstream media, although their complaints may be diverse. They do extremely well in school, and heel to all authority figures. They relish in their ability to follow the instructions of teachers, bosses, and elders, and when they lack ability to fulfill commands, they become anxious and panicked.

Related interests: When they connect to contemporary culture in their own way, however, their hearts swell with pride-- maybe they make memes about classical art, and tote this as a character trait. Humor is a common way to show off that they don’t take their obsessions “too seriously,” and it often becomes central to their self-expression. Otherwise, they may have any number of interests, but it’s common for contemporary media to be handled with humor and irony.

School - Bookish, quiet, and unhappy. Stereotypically, this archetype is guided first and foremost by authority figures. They feel pressured to do better than anyone, and have either limited or failed to incite their social life. Since success in social relationships remains unquantifiable, friendship always ends up on the back-burner, even long after they’ve realized their mistake, and long after it’s too late. They get straight As most of the time, and feel proud of their ability to do better than anyone else. But they can’t write essays because they struggle to form their own opinions; if they get better at writing through shear hard work and perseverance, they will still struggle when an upper-level English teacher tells them to “cultivate your own unique voice,” because as far as they can see, they don’t have any voice of their own. They don��t know themself and are not sure how to learn about themself. Their actions follow the instructions of others. If they’re a college student, they’re having trouble picking a major, or have picked a major for pragmatic (not emotional) reasons.

Related interests: Poetry is a likely interest, whether it’s Instagram poetry, printed poetry, or the act of writing poetry. Even if they never seem to know who they are, if they write poetry, those poems seem to write themselves. They may also have nerdy interests, such as kpop, children’s tv shows, or anime. They aren’t explicitly averse to mainstream culture, either. Because they study so often, they’ve probably tried, at one point or another, studying with music on, so they have developed music tastes. They probably know their musical niche very well, whatever it may be (and no genre is necessarily off limits).

Academia - Perhaps a professor, or just as likely, a wannabe. They have some knowledge in many fields, and specialized knowledge in one field or a few. However, they will proudly bare their broad, shallow knowledge on the subjects they’re less familiar with. They form strong opinions on hardly familiar subject matter, and become domineering in conversation. They probably think that psychology is a nonsense field made up of unprovable, and therefore irrelevant, theories. Others will constantly be Googling the obscure words they speak. Lateness and disorganization illustrate the disconnect between their deep thought and a pragmatic reality. However, in their private life, they may exhibit extraordinarily silly or childlike mannerisms, in their own adult way. Such mannerisms appear to be a disclaimer to their personalities-- that they are not serious all the time, which makes them feel a little cooler, or at least, a little less cold, insociable, or nerdy. But in fact, they are indignant about any silliness which contaminates art or academia, and thus, they section off maturity (thoughtful, logical, serious, rigorous) and childishness (pointless, for entertainment value only, not strictly beautiful or strictly grotesquely beautiful). They are serious about serious matters and silly among silly matters. Contrast to the young fan of classical music, who approaches the mature, academic, or artistic as a form of entertainment worth joking about. According to stereotype, both the young classical listener and the academia enthusiast use humor to disarm their perilously serious interests, but the academic is much more cautious to distract from beauty or knowledge.

Related interests: They have a strong appreciation for the arts & culture. Classical music is the highest form of music to them, and hip hop is “not real music.” They are deeply moved by literature, sculpture, and painting; the older it is, the more they like it.

Skateboarding - Relaxed and sociable, this character can be seen skating from class to class on an outdoor college campus, or trying tricks with other skaters in back of the public library. They are fascinated by appearances, and are very careful about their presentation in regards to fashion (probably includes a beanie), their language, and the tastes they share with other people (in movies, television, etc.). Therefore, they may slip into superficial behaviors, judging others by first impressions or even just their appearances or their social status. They are aware of how others perceive them, and are both conscientious and self-conscious. The skateboard itself is an aesthetic flare taken very far, reflecting their strong sense of nostalgia. Their nostalgia shows up in their other interests as well: they watch television & movies from the 80s and 90s, they started playing D&D after “Stranger Things” came out, and they genuinely enjoyed reading The Catcher in the Rye. Their tastes and tendencies may be nerdy and subversive, but because they are conscientious about how others perceive them, they are great at forming good relationships with others. They are sociable and know how to be likable. Sometimes they try to simplify themself for the easier consumption of others, and they definitely hide some of their stranger interests & ideas.

Related interests: Music is important to them, but that could take the form of hip hop, rock (likely punk), radio pop, or the generally alternative & obscure. Whether they’re smart or they’re stupid, they probably have at least one significant academic interest, such as literature or history, and they don’t care if other people know.

Musicals - Loud, eccentric, melodramatic. The theater kid is so boisterous that even they can’t deny it, and with full self-awareness, they break from social norms. They usually have trouble taking things seriously. They don’t take rules or laws seriously, and will stand on tables while authority figures demand that they get down. They first and foremost chase their bliss, against odds, threats, and authority. If a loved one passes away, they will become somber and cannot contain their pain, sobbing every waking moment, and they will cry suddenly at birthday parties, (understandably) calling attention to their latest thoughts and feelings for all to hear. However, if an unimportant or disliked acquaintance passes away, they may be stealing away with a friend to the corner of the funeral home, whispering jokes about something else and laughing inappropriately. They will speak sexually explicitly in church and laugh as they catch the glares of a passerby. They are not themself without friends, because they need someone to be in on the fun, on the joke. However, unlike most of the archetypes on this list, they primarily target people within the in-group. Like their friends, they are feeling, and highly sensitive. But like their friends, they are not conscientious of other people’s boundaries, and they don’t like to be told what to do. They make enemies of other theater kids, and can be genuinely aggressive, scheming, and villainous. They feel no shame when they talk behind people’s backs, which is one of their pastimes. But most importantly, you can always expect them to burst into song at the absolutely wrong time. Expect very intensive knowledge about their favorite musicals, but probably not their inner workings-- they can recite scenes from memory, and they know the names of all the original performers, but they are less likely to know names of writers, and they tend to care less for trivia. They may know some music theory and how to play piano, but otherwise, they will remain in their lane, focusing on performance aspects.

Related interests: If they are of high school age or younger, they can party without any drink or drugs; otherwise, they modestly drink alcohol and then trick themself into thinking they’re completely hammered. Assume they first tried alcohol at a young age. Despite how loudly they talk about sex & drugs, they may be inexperienced & naive about drugs. If they do drugs frequently, though, they do party drugs at parties, or try out drugs at other social gatherings to feel hip & cool.

Furries - No, they don’t want to fuck real animals. They want to fuck cartoon animals, but more importantly, they want to be cartoon animals. Like the theater kid archetype, they are bombastic, emotional, and sociable, but unlike the theater kid archetype, they lack any social awareness at all, and they are strictly countercultural. Theater kids read the room and don’t care what they see; furries can’t read the room at all. Amongst the in-group, they are childlike: loud, offering inappropriate emotional reactions, and constantly crossing other people’s boundaries. They can be very inappropriate (sexually & otherwise), regardless of the setting, and regardless of other people’s reactions. But more importantly, they are fiercely affectionate. They hug strangers of the in-group, and otherwise actively pursue physical contact. When a loved one gets attention, they are quick to become jealous, and they pursue their loved one’s attention overtly or covertly; they become angry and demand attention, or they show off their sadness and hope their loved one will notice. Amongst the out-group, they expect others to limit their true self. They are either quiet, or they become overtly rebellious, treating the out-group as the enemy who will stifle them. When rebellious, they try their best to be obscene: they curse & insult haphazardly, they feel proud when authority figures come down on them, and they gravitate towards obscene gestures and lewd implications. They are either proud of their sexual experiences, or shame others for their sexual experiences. Self-expression is extremely important to them, so they wear edgy, suggestive, or brightly colored clothing. However, they only care about bringing the inside to the outside, and they’re not very aware of the gaze of others, so they may not take care of their hair very much, and they don’t wear makeup; these are superficial matters, not matters of the heart. They are attracted to the cute and to the dark, sometimes simultaneously, so it’s common for them to flirt while using childlike language (and perhaps to use childlike language in general). Stereotypically, they have an aversion to "basic” types and to intellectualism; both make them feel inferior. But from the “basic” types-- in other words, people who are well-liked with socially acceptable interests-- they are mostly averse reflexively. They may insult others for being vapid, prudish, and mean (even without cause), but they expect such people to look down on them, and become defensive in preparation for cruelty.

Related interests: They party. They lost their virginity at a young age, have tried every drug, and may cope with their problems through drinking and smoking. They talk a lot about the demons they’ve struggled with (usually mental illness, trauma, or feeling like an outsider), and they blame their bad behavior and these demons. Whether these demons are lesser or greater, they feel unequipped to deal with these problems; their demons haunt them incessantly and, usually with full awareness, run away from their problems through drugs, tobacco, and alcohol. They are also deeply involved with rave culture. Although they get high while they rave, they do not rave in order to cope, but in order to express themself. Being a furry is not the only thing they want to express about themself, though, and they probably have many, many labels they very closely identify with. These labels may include any of the following: leftist, nazi, communist, emo, e-girl/e-boy/e-they, gay, bisexual, pansexual, nonbinary, trans, punk, clinically depressed, clinically anxious, etc. The more controversial the personal attribute they have, the more closely they identify with it, and the more they seek to express it within and outside of furry culture.

Eastern philosophy - Woke, but not really, this archetype is attracted to obscurity. This trope applies to outsiders of the relevant cultures; they are unlikely to be East Asian in ethnicity or nationality. In casual conversation, they make quick and awkward connections, hopping spontaneously from topic to topic. Somehow your political opinions on big business have lead them to go on about chakras. But that lasts only a moment-- now they’re talking about Nietzsche and Kant, and now they’re connecting it back to chakras. You don’t see the connection. They’re well-read and they very much know it; otherwise, they skim books and talk constantly about the couple pages they’ve read. They’re always looking for something deep and meaningful that can bring them realizations about the world around them, but the packaging of information can make or break wisdom. The more distant from their world this wisdom comes, the more likely they are to trust it-- new superstitions from within their country are deceptive, ignorant, and nonsensical playtoys. However, methods of divination from Africa, China, Japan, India, and Indigenous America pique their interest. They find these methods fascinating, beautiful, and artistic. They are either convinced that foreign superstitions are accurate, or they perceive it aesthetically first and foremost, maintaining a respectable distance, and taking pictures for social media. Ancientness, acclaim, and foreignness may all be factors in whether or not they respect a source or a piece of media. They frequently throw out names in European philosophy, but in Eastern philosophy, they have formed a blind trust, and they live their life assuming truth of the third eye, of chi, of chakras, etc. Whatever their preferences and beliefs were in youth, they have moved on. They’re on a constant hunt for novelty, and the familiar is too comfortable, too convenient, to be true. They probably have good ideals-- love, community, globalism-- but they exhibit some egocentric behaviors. To them, the modern is inauthentic (it is plastic, monetary, commodified), and the ancient or foreign is authentic by virtue of it being obscure. In their constant hunt for authenticity, they speak honestly to a fault. They cannot filter their thoughts, and others will become frustrated or disturbed by some of their harsh criticisms. They may also become socially isolated due to their tangents, their rants, their overconfidence, and their delusions of grandeur. For this reason, they socialize with others of their kind, and those with other shared interests.

Related interests: They are guaranteed to have some typical nerdy or mainstream tastes, despite dwelling on extremely unaccessible media. They’ve experimented with various drugs, but they are not the partying type. They listen to experimental music which to most other people sounds only like sound.

Drag - This stereotype primarily refers to drag queens, who dress up in flamboyant exaggerations of women’s clothing. This archetype is very conscious of their appearance-- their sense of self is deeply connected to their physical traits, and as a result, they discuss and amplify the physical traits they closely identify with. This applies out of drag just as much as it applies in drag. If they are visibly non-white, they may very closely identify with their ethnicity, and engage in (probably harmless) self-stereotyping, or otherwise significantly engage with their heritage (e.g. cooking, dressing, speaking the language/wanting to learn the language and never getting around to it). If they are especially skinny, they will dress to emphasize it, and they will carry themself with the confidence of a skinny person who wants to be skinny. If they are especially overweight, they care deeply about body positivity, or in some cases, will purposefully make themself the butt of the joke, and tell fat jokes about themself all the time. A blond/blonde will take extra care to coif their hair, a curvy person will move to emphasize the shape of their body, etc. Other facets of their personality and background may also become the subject of some verbal self-stereotyping (usually of the purposeful, joking kind)-- they may talk about how southern they are, or how “poor” they are, or how communist they are, etc. They may have a (flexible, ever-changing) list of attributes they ascribe to themself, and go out of their way to express these traits, while holding a complex, passive-aggressive relationship with their undesired traits. If they are a drag queen who generally lives as a man, then he wears distinctly male clothing most of the time, but his look is distinctive-- not necessarily fashionable, and unlikely to be flashy, but most certainly distinctive. In this case, he might wear something which represents a surprising, subversive hint of femininity amidst a masculine look: for example, a pair of earrings, or carefully done eyebrows, or a quiet hint of lipstick, or beneath a men’s shirt, a corset. They may not necessarily be extroverted, but they certainly will be sociable and conscious of the feelings of others. If they are rude and obnoxious, then they may be consciously ignoring the needs of others. They have some slight, superficial social justice tendencies, but in being an ally to other groups, they end up with a foot in their mouth. They are not angry for the sake of any minority group; they are merely an advocate, and they are proud to advocate, and when they do put their foot in their mouth, they expose a hidden chink in their advanced social skills. Sooner or later, they will drastically misunderstand the needs of others, because they are quick to project their experiences and ways of thinking and feelings onto others, and in trying to make others happy, they may be seeking out the happiness of an imagined other self; it’s empathy, if a bit misguided.

Related interests: They love pop music, and have had their fair share of drinking and clubbing. Their tastes swing mainstream and they have had strange, adventurous experiences. They are more likely than most people to be superstitious, because they like it when things are simple, stereotypical, and easy to explain; they believe in predictions of the future, and they latch onto astrological stereotypes of other people.

Live laugh love - They have an addiction to inspirational quotes, and it’s beginning to effect their personal relationships. They post inspirational quotes on Facebook. They decorate kitchens with little signs and chalkboards and potholders, inspirational quotes adorning them each. And yes, above all, they worship those three words: live, laugh, love. They are probably a mother in their 40s or above. If not, they have a great and loving relationship with their mother; they openly share interests and hobbies with their mother, and treat their mother the same as a friend. Either way, they live a privileged life. They are financially safe, and they are guaranteed food, housing, and comfort every day, possibly for their entire life. They may live comfortably in suburbia, or they might be filthy rich. If they work, it is not too intensive, and they have a lot of time for their many hobbies and interests. They’re caring and giving with a lot of patience, and they’re quite extroverted, with a lot of friends they meet regularly. However, while they pretend to be adventurous, they are not adventurous; they are aspirational, while remaining comfortable. Their magnetism to inspirational quotes comes from a comfortability with self-love and self-care, which comes from a privilege to take time for oneself, and the privilege of a healthy upbringing.

Related interests: Pets. They’re a cat-lover or a dog-lover. Caring for another creature is an important hobby for them. They love aesthetics, particularly simple interior design, conventional makeup, and plain yet expensive clothing. They probably have an interest in a specific country or region, and cultural inspiration may or may not be respectful. They may be on social media. If they’re young, they’re on Instagram. If they’re on the older side, they’re all about Facebook.

Some primary interests which fit less cleanly into archetypes, or which I otherwise will not be describing on this list: discovering the culture of parents or ancestors, a specific culture unrelated to oneself, being religious (should be specific to religion and sect), true crime/serial killers

Keep an eye out for a second post about secondary interests, and the difference between primary and secondary interests.

#prompts #writeblr #character concept #writing inspiration #inspo

4 notes · View notes

tyrantisterror · 6 years ago

Text

Oh Fuck I’m TV Troping: A Short & Incomplete List of Bad Girls

Since that whole post about Bad Girls and Compassionate Male Heroes kinda blew up and the discussion just... isn’t stopping, I’ve been thinking of this trope a lot and uh, I guess I’m gonna list a bunch of examples of it since I’ve kinda been doing it already and it’d be nice to have them all in one spot I guess. Gonna put a cut because even though I don’t want to make a huge list, I still think this is gonna be long.

4 Tried and True Bad Girls - the following fit the archetype as I roughly defined it here pretty much to the letter. Of course, the thing about archetypes and tropes is that you don’t have to hit every single detail to still “count,” but it’s good to have a baseline.

Jessie

A member of an international crime syndicate, a notorious thief, and a recurring antagonist for the hero, Jessie from Pokemon is an excellent example of the Bad Girl trope because if you remove female pronouns while describing her, she basically fits the stock Bad Boy traits to a T. Aggressive and arrogant? Check. Prone to violent outbursts? Check. Intensely jealous of people who seem to have it easier? Check. Hidden tender side and tragic backstory? Check. Also she’s one half of the greatest romantic couple ever portrayed in fiction - and her counterpart is a compassionate, sweet-natured guy to boot!

Ryoko

I’m not going to fill this up with anime examples (though I probably could - Bad Girls are much more common in Japanese media), but I couldn’t resist including Ryoko, because she’s not just a Bad Girl - she’s a PIRATE, which, if my grandma’s collection of romance novels was anything to go by, is an incredibly popular occupation for a Bad Boy to have! More than that, she’s a space pirate, the plunderer of countless worlds, wanted by the space police force and considered a villain of legendary power. More than that, she can wield store brand lightsabers, shoot lasers out of her hands, and even spent a good chunk of time as a mummy! Ryoko’s personality is pure Dashing Rogue, the Bad Boy Girl who’s definitely a scoundrel but, maybe, just maybe, the kind of scoundrel who’s got a good heart. She definitely pines for love and an amount of stability, though she doesn’t want to stop traveling the stars as a boozing adventurer who gets into the most ludicrous scrapes. Everything about Ryoko plays up the ideas of a Bad Boy romance with the flair for drama and fantasy that a space opera can provide, except the Bad Boy is a girl and the sweet ingenue heroine is a boy.

Ryoko is who you wish Jack Sparrow would be.

Faith

Faith was introduced as a second Slayer in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was the result of magical shenanigans that suddenly rendered the whole “there can only be one slayer at a time” rule kinda moot. Ok that’s an extremely abbreviated summary and it’s really more complicated than that but I can already feel the non-Buffy fans falling asleep so let’s stay focused.

Since Buffy is, y’know, the main character, Faith was brought on to be her foil - an example of what Buffy wasn’t, but possibly could become. And since BtVS was a horror dramedy, Faith wasn’t a GOOD alternative - she was, explicitly, Buffy’s dark counterpart, from her brunette hair to her heavy and darker makeup to her rad leather jacket and, as the show frequently said, “slutty” wardrobe. Faith was more violent, more sexual, and more apathetic to others than Buffy was, and holy fuck did the show just hate her for it. Almost every character in it treated her like shit, with her sexuality in particular being a sticking point for many of them.

Faith is particularly interesting because she differs from Buffy (and the female cast at large) in almost the exact same ways that the show’s main Bad Boys, Angel and Spike, differed from its male characters - more violent, more sexual, darker clothes, etc. But while Angel and Spike get a great deal of sympathy from the narrative, Faith... didn’t. I mean they kinda sorta gave her some eventually, but most of it played out in the spinoff Angel, and the other characters continued to hold a grudge against her. Faith isn’t just an good example of the Bad Girl trope - she’s an example of how the reaction to Bad Girls differs from the reaction to Bad Boys, despite them being almost exactly the same.

Vriska Serket

OH FUCK IT’S HOMESTUCK

Ok, everyone still hates Homestuck, so I won’t belabor this point, but Vriska Serket, who is infamously the most divisive character in the entire story, is absolutely a bad girl. Arrogant, ruthless, abrasive, with a tragic backstory, a desire for both compassion and redemption, and a truly ambitious schemer, she ticks so many boxes and OH SHIT SHE’S ALSO A PIRATE. Like Faith, Vriska was in a story that had a lot of examples of Bad Boys too, and while the fandom fucking HATES Vriska, her Bad Boy counterparts are nowhere near as divisive, with one of them being extremely popular despite being a clown who murders people. The other one explicitly wants to commit genocide, literally saying almost exactly that, and is also far more well liked. WHY IS THIS?

But enough of the homestucks! Let’s move onto some...

Borderline Bad Girls - these ladies don’t fit the trope quite as neatly, but I still think they capture the jist, or at least used it as a base before experimenting in different directions. They are, at the very least, closer to the Bad Girl archetype than its sibling tropes, the Badass Heroine and the Femme Fatale.

Jessica Jones

I’m just gonna talk about the Netflix incarnation of this character, as I have not read the comic books featuring Jessica Jones and thus cannot comment on them.

The only real strike against Jessica Jones is that she isn’t a supporting cast member, like pretty much all other Bad Girls are. She’s the protagonist, the titular main character. That’s a unique honor for a Bad Girl to have! Otherwise, she fits - hard drinking, abrasive, rude, surly as hell, but with a tender heart, a tragic backstory, and a desire for redemption. Hell she’s even wearing the Bad Girl leather jacket.

Morrigan

Ok, we’re straying a bit far here, but I’m going to try to make a case here. Morrigan’s rudeness and abrasiveness isn’t quite as bombastic as the standard take on the Bad Girl trope - she actually phrases things very politely and speaks very softly most of the time, and is generally cordial to people when they are cordial to her. It’s the content of what she says, rather than the way she says it, that sets most people off. There’s also an odd naivety to Morrigan’s interactions that isn’t immediately noticeable because her vocabulary is so, well, verbose. She doesn’t make the “ill tempered thug” impression most Bad Girls make when they’re first introduced - she instead comes off as very sophisticated yet oddly ignorant of the civilized world, which is a very different starting point for a Bad Girl.

BUT! Morrigan’s character arc follows the rough path of a Bad Girl. She verbalizes a lot of callous and cruel ideas about the world when you first meet her, giving the impression that she is some sort of sadistic monster. It’s done in a very different way than the standard Bad Boy/Bad Girl, but it has the same effect - you are led to think this girl is a Bad Person very early on. And yes, to some extent she is - but, just like any other Bad Boy/Bad Girl, her actions later on show that’s not all there is to her, that, even if she isn’t aware of it, there is a loving core to Morrigan - she wants to be good.

Like most Bad Boys/Bad Girls, it’s eventually revealed that Morrigan’s childhood situation was NOT GREAT, and that she has been the victim of abuse and some very bad parenting. A great deal of her wickedness isn’t inherent to her, but something she was indoctrinated into - and, in TRUE Bad Boy/Bad Girl fashion, love, especially romantic love, makes her doubt her view of the world. It begins to break apart, and she gradually learns, to her confusion, horror, and eventually, hope, that there is another way to live - a better, kinder way.

One might argue that Morrigan doesn’t fit the Bad Girl trope, but another villainous female archetype instead. For instance, one might say she is instead a Femme Fatale, since she dresses all sexy like and whatnot - but Morrigan doesn’t really seduce people all that often in the narrative. Early on in the first Dragon Age game you have an option to ask her to seduce a guard, and Morrigan not only reacts in disgust, but instead horrifies the guard into letting you by instead (because Morrigan is great). The only time she does seduce someone is specifically to keep the main characters from an otherwise inevitable death via a dark magic ritual - and yes it does feel ridiculous to type that out, but 1. it makes more sense in context and 2. I think the ridiculous circumstances of this seduction kinda illustrates why it’s not really a core character trait of hers, which is why she doesn’t fit the Femme Fatale mold. Likewise, while one could say she fits the idea of a Vain Sorceress... well, other than being pretty and using magic, Morrigian really doesn’t. She’s not motivated by preserving her youth, and doesn’t really seem to care much for traditional beauty standards at all if her conversation with Leliana is anything to go by (though she does meet them anyway because, well, Video Games). Morrigan doesn’t really fit any villainous female archetype perfectly, but if we accept her as a Bad Girl, she makes for a particularly interesting example.

Hexadecimal

Straying further! Like Morrigan, one might be tempted to put Hexadecimal in the Vain Sorceress or Femme Fatale archetypes instead, but again, like Morrigan, she really doesn’t act like either of those two despite being a sexy lady who uses magic for villainous ends. Instead she’s defined by being the sort of superhero/action adventure cartoon variety of “crazy,” which isn’t based on any real mental illness, but rather an excuse for her to cause a lot of mayhem for no real reason. Unlike most “crazy” villains, though, Hex’s insanity is treated with sympathy by the narrative and the main hero - while most people would be willing to write Hex off as someone they’d rather live without, Bob, the hero, continually tries to reason with her and help her overcome her madness.

Most people wrote her off as a lost cause, but the hero showed her compassion. There’s smackings of a Bad Boy in that.

As the show goes on, Bob’s compassion for Hexadecimal is repaid with her own affection, and she slowly turns from villain to hero out of a desire to not only keep Bob safe, but make sure he’s happy - and she comes to realize he can’t be happy without the people he loves. Hex becomes a truly tragic and noble character towards the end of the show, as she knows Bob will never reciprocate her romantic affections but still remains on his side anyway, even saving the lives of people who argued against saving her. A villain who seems like a frothing mad dog, only to be turned into a hero after the compassion of a hero makes them realize the value of human life? That’s is SUCH a Bad Boy arc. Hexadecimal may not fit some of the aesthetic trappings of the Bad Girl archetype, but her arc fits it perfectly.

Harley Quinn

When she was first introduced, Harley Quinn wasn’t a Bad Girl so much as she was, like, the perky love interest of a bad guy. She wasn’t given enough focus and agency in the narrative to really fit the Bad Girl archetype. However, in recent years she’s been retooled a bit to work independently of the character she was designed to orbit, and as a result she may be our second example of a Bad Girl protagonist. She’s a supervillain, or at least was, and was in league with one of the worst at that. She’s loud and aggressive in combat, has a big bombastic personality, and revels in living an anarchic lifestyle. But, as her solo series shows, she does have a good heart deep down, adopting stray dogs and helping out fellow weirdos who have been left behind by a world that doesn’t give a damn about them. Harley Quinn is and has always been defined by her desire to be loved, which is very much a Bad Girl sort of trait - especially since that desire often leads to her acting out, just as most Bad Boys and Bad Girls act out because, ultimately, they haven’t been shown enough love.

Plus a lot of her modern designs add a leather jacket, and it just seems that once a girl wears a leather jacket she has at least a 70% chance of being a Bad Girl.

Azula, Mai, and Ty Lee

I had no idea where to put these ladies and whether or not they fit this archetype, but I felt they had to be noted because they’re very well known examples of complicated female villains who don’t fit the Femme Fatale archetype at all, which in turn makes them feel like pretty good candidates for Bad Girl-dom. Azula probably fits the archetype the closest, though you don’t see her desire for compassion until VERY late in the series (where she is, sadly, too far gone to get her redemption). Mai comes in close second, though her sullen demeanor oddly fits the Badass Heroine a bit better. And then Ty Lee... Ty Lee... I mean she’s like an even sweeter and kinder Harley Quinn, she hardly even counts as a villain except she works with the bad guys... I don’t know what we do with Ty Lee, guys. Ty Lee’s just her own thing.

#Bad Girl

60 notes · View notes

yagami1211 · 7 years ago

Text

2015 Kishimoto Interview

This interview comes from the Official French Naruto distributor, Kana : http://www.kana.fr/linterview-de-masashi-kishimoto-kaboom/#.WvmrC2iFP3m I : There are lot of orphans in Naruto. Are you interested in that character archetype ? Kishi : I had the chance to grow in a happy family with my parents. But I had the opportunity to watch closely what loneliness can do to a person with a few of my old friends being orphans. There was this friend who was older than me and I got along with him pretty well. As time went on and we grew closer, I could see his frustration of being orphan. Nobody gave him the newest toy and there was nobody giving him presents either. This person left quite a impact on me, and I remember when I used to feel sorry for him, he told me that parents can be a source of problems and conflicts. This was maybe true, but I felt this answer was some sort of pride or provocation to me. I don't know why, but as a kid, I was very curious and sensitive about family problems. I remember listening carefully to my friends' stories about how their parents divorced and how they were living with their mothers. They were entrusting their problems to me and I tried to give them advices as best as I could. At the same time, I grew conscious of their problems and psychological states. Thus, when the time came I went to tell a story about ninjas, I remembered those little villages from Nara ... like Iga or Kouga, where one could really learn to be a spy. Death was something that was ackwnoledged early on in such a carreer and children in training knew they wouldn't get to know their parents for very long. Once I decided that Naruto and his friends were going to be orphans, the memories of my childhood friends ( And especially this older friend ) came back to me and everything that came with that. I knew what I was going to tell and I dove into my childhood memories to create the multiple characters of Naruto. I had so much to tell. I : By the way, relations by blood, real families ... when they exists in Naruto are always dysfunctional. Like the only family that matters are the ninjas, this gigantic community. Where did this idea came from ? Kishi : Not limitating families by their blood relations seemed mandatory to me. The most obvious example of this is the relation between Naruto & Jiraiya. These two lonely beings, an hermit and an orphan, made the master/student relation works very well. It's very family like. The word "family" as most people understand it is too limited as far as I'm concerned. Especially since I'm writing for children who may or may not face the problem of parents divorcing. This conception of families comes from the region I grew up in, where peoples used to get together in groups called "Kumis" ( Clans or Groups in japanese. ) The custom was that you have to treat each member of the community like your own family. At home, the clan was called "Kou-Gumi". And we used to gather in groups of 8 or 10 to gather wood to prepare the baths, others would cultivate rice and those who finish early would help the others. Members of clans would gather each month to eat together and at funerals they were on the first seats. If one of the family would invite the priest to eat after the funeral ceremony, the others members of the clan were invited at the dinner too. The way the clan worked was like a real family, so this is why this "Kumi" system left such an impact on me. My village, in a way, worked like the communities created by the ninjas of old. Thus this experience influenced me when I created the ninja village system in Naruto. From the start, the ninjas were supposed to be one big family I : In the end, Naruto & Sasuke are two faces of the same problem : They're orphans. But they cope in completely different ways. Kishi : This was deliberate of me that those two characters would oppose each other by how they think. The difference is that Naruto is orphan by birth, but Sasuke still has his parents. And Sasuke suffers from his parents presence, but he suffers a lot more after they die. And that's where their first emotional difference is. Sasuke says Naruto can't understand his suffering because he never had the chance to have a bond with his parents. And in truth, Naruto really doesn't get it. Naruto will eventually form a close master/student bond with Jiraiya. Jiraiya gives attention, teaching and care to Naruto, a bit like a foster father. A foster father Naruto will grow to like and who will eventually be killed by Pain. At this point Naruto understand what a family can feel like and starts to understand what Sasuke could feel. But this experience comes too late and he doesn't get the chance to talk about it with Sasuke. Their reaction to losing close ones makes them even more different. Sasuke let himself be controlled by hatred. A hatred as strong as the love he used to feel. But for Naruto, the loss comes with a self reflection about revenge, pain and how personality and actions can evolve based on that. After seeing what revenge did to Sasuke, Naruto shows an enormous amount of self restrain and he feels he must learn to control himself to not become like this. That's his true performance as the hero: He survives pain & loss without abandoning himself to vengeance and hatred, realising the difference between self interest and public interest. I continued to play with this opposition so it could grow step by step. I wanted to take the reader by surprise. Naruto, at first, seems very emotional and instinctive and Sasuke is the one who seems cold & emotionless. But as time goes on, the roles are reversed. Emotions and logic aren't always obvious at first. To be frank, the reality is more complex. I feel closer to Sasuke as I would never be able to forget or forgive the one who murders my family. I can see myself in the way Sasuke reacts but reacting like him lead to an overwhelming amount of hatred and violence and to war. History repeats itself and the circle must be broken. This manga talks a lot about not repeating the errors of the past. And to be completely honest, overcoming traumatic experiences like Naruto does seems a bit idealist and naive to me. Even though, this kind of utopic idealism has to be written and defended in Shounen mangas. Shounen mangas must carry hope,above all. I : More often than not, the children falls victims to their parents plot but they don't object and are kind of submissive in that aspect. Especially Naruto himself. Did you realized this and can you explain behind your desire to show Naruto's optimism, his childhood bullied by society. Kishi : I was a very obedient kid and never contested the authority of adults, my parents or even my teachers. Their words were truth to me and I never asked myself questions. Very naturally, this part of me went into my characters. Most of the kids I knew were like me and those who were more Independent, more free or more "Punk" I should say never really left an impact on me. I didn't feel like putting them in my story. By instinct, I naturally puts "good kids" in my stories. When capitalism came into japan, after the war, it led to a very comfortable time for my generation. That's why the least I could do was to thank them and obey as a sign of gratitude. I was scared of my parents and the society of course, but I never had particular frustration of any kind. I silently noted the contradictions of the adults speeches and just didn't voice my opinion. In my mangas, of course, I voice my opinion. I voice my opinion more clearly, more freely since I write the story of the world I create. That's a bit cowardly, maybe ( laugh. ) I won't say I'm an anarchist, I'm a rather obedient person outside of my stories. I : The world of Naruto is always attacked by various threats, first policics. But bit by bit, you reveal that the hatred the enemies feel is just a mask, a mask to hide childhood trauma, psyche wounds and personal scars that time changed into some crazy project. Kishi : In the first chapters of Naruto, I already talk about power struggles, politics and the main projects of the main Trio. But what interest me isn't the end goal, but how they came to have that goal in the first place. How did they came to act like they do ? I really dig this psychological process. I think the reader is like me: He wants to understand. So I talk about the place the characters grow up, the reasoning behind their acts. I try to make the reader feel empathy for a character who seems evil at first sight. Because that's the thing. In most of the shounen mangas, the enemy is the ultimate evil. He can't be reasoned with. But countless mangas do that already and I didn't want Naruto to be just a repeat of other stories. So rather than focusing on the enemy's powers and actions, I would rather tell his birth, and how he turned into a monster. The motivations of those characters are often rather simple, It's always personal, like childhood problems or traumatic experiences that makes the reader identify to the character and feel empathy to him. I always try to give some hints about their past here and there so the characters aren't too simple. I progress step by step to make sure the reader can identify to the character slowly and progressively. I make sure to create characters that feels different from eachother, and different from the other jump mangas. I : Talking about differences, one of best thing of Naruto is your work on the character's designs. You didn't use any medieval japan and military stereotypes. You work on the clothes, you're aware about fashion and what's popular. Where do these influences come from ? Kishi : The animators of the animated series Naruto often praise me for my designs, because on how crazy they are, which makes my job even more difficult. Personally, I'm not really aware if it's good or not. It may seems obvious, but I wanted to distance myself away from the cliche ninja dressed in black on purpose. I didn't see any point in using an image that has been used countless time already. So I took the opposite direction. A little blond guy with a jumpsuit, and not even japanese. I wanted my character to be stateless, like Akira Toriyama's characters. That was the basic idea. Then there are some particularities based on my personal obsessions, like zippers. I found it funny to use anachronism in this medieval like setting, like the sandals. I love drawing toes and feet. I must be a fetishist of toes and fingers. Okay, that came out weird, I admit. About the basic designs, I used to read some fashion magazines and took inspirations from some fashion design I like so I could custom them into my characters. But I eventually stopped putting too much details, the designs were getting to complicated for a weekly manga. I : You mentioned Akira Toriyama. With Katsuhiro Otomo, he's one of your biggest inspiration. You were influenced a lot by their styles and even today you have difficulties distancing yourself from their styles. Today, as a professional, how would you describe Otomo & Toriyama's styles, in technical terms. And what is left of their work today ? Kishi : Otomo and Toriyama impressed me the moment I discovered their mangas, when I was a teen. Akira Toriyama forever changed shounen mangas with his "pop"ish designs. I drew a lot from Dragon Ball to create Naruto. An initiatory journey, the character gets older, he faces incredible difficulties that can't be overcome at first and he must overcome those trials with incredible efforts and a story divived in two main parts. Toriyama's style still impress me to this day, and as a kid as spent a lot of time analysing his style. The bodies aren't realistic, they're disproportionate and sometimes simplified to the extreme. This could be just mere awkwardness or clumsiness, but it's not. Everything is mastered and has a purpose. He's trying to create an effect : either comical or dramatic. And the way he draws his backgrounds shows how much Toriyama is a master : The proportions and perspectives are on point and detailed. There is contrast between his characters and backgrounds that I really like but can't really master myself. Toriyama is a master of graphical effects. I love how easily readable his panels are. He draws his panels a little more "dezoomed" than usual so more of the action could be seen. Those panels shows how much the direction, following the action, and the interaction with the background is mastered : Each character is at the right place, no contradictions. It's even more obvious in real actions sequences, where the fighting, the actions chain up with eachother perfectly and it's made all very clear for the reader to understand. I'm often told that mangas are sometimes hard to read. But Toriyama's skill in dividing the action and making it easy to read is unmatched. And he uses this skill with a lot of different angles, like the high-angle shot which he's excellent at. Otomo is an incredible master too. He pushed his esthetic sense in a completely personal direction. He takes care of every single detail, even if he knows the reader won't probably notice it. I love that with him. His works really left a impression on me, like Domu or Akira. For me, the themes of his designs aren't obvious but are more commonly explored by his characters. Akira will never be surpassed as far as I'm concerned. Otomo was inspired by Moebius and as far as art goes, he's in a completely other league compared to me. I'm no match and this can't be debated. And I'm not even talking about his skill in panels creation, rythm and angles. The focus always changes and he can apply deformations to each of his angles with a insulting precision. His deformed angles, like in Fisheye are just perfect and they're aren't just gratuitous. They exist to make the character express himself. It's like Otomo has a digital camera in his brain, it's very rare in mangas. He's the only one in japan, with Tayio Matsumoto, who can do this. It's not coincidence both were influenced by european comic books, and Moebius especially. Otomo is the first one who I really felt removed the barrier between mangas and cinema. Domu was like a reading a movie, and I never realized you could do that before reading it. I : Naruto is about to end. How do you decide when a story like this must end ? Do you have any doubts on to how to end it ? Kishi : As far as I'm concerned, Naruto can't exist without Sasuke, his opposite. Like with complementary colors, they can't exist without eachother. Naruto want to be acknowledged and Sasuke doesn't acknowledge anyone but himself. If they manage to sort out their problems, their bonds will likely come to a close and this story won't have any reason to continue. I still have a few doubts, but I have the last scene carved in my mind. I still need to develop Obito's character and everything will be ready for the climax. END

#Naruto #masashi kishimoto #Boruto #Sasuke #Uchiha Sasuke #Uzumaki Naruto #Interview

51 notes · View notes

theliterateape · 3 years ago

Text

When Activism and Progressive Ideas Become Little More Than Fashion

by Don Hall

After a few years of learning the ropes of the social game known as public school, I thought I had it figured out.

At the time my family of mom, sister, and I had moved from area to area, state to state, each year and I had been accustomed to the 'new kid' label annually. I had also in my struggle to continually find my place in the class hierarchies each school year caused my poor mother a lot of headache.

The game, I realized, was that each year, these kids, these teachers, didn't know me I could pretend to be anyone I wanted to be. Thus, by acting a role in the beginning of the fall, I could establish different results from grades that came before.

We moved to the edge of Central Kansas as I entered eighth grade. Benton Elementary School. The community loved football, country music, football, cars, and football.

I decided to become the kid who, instead of playing with others for recess, sat and read Isaac Asimov in the corner. The science fiction public intellectual. For the first six weeks of school, I established myself as the smart, quiet kid. By the time we entered November, the quiet part had all but evaporated but I had a deep appreciation for reading and a love for science fiction.

The pattern was routine. I'd come into a school for the first few days, establish the 'normal' and find a character-type that was an outlier to it. To stand out. To express some sort of individuality. To not conform with the crowd.

These fictions we create for ourselves in youth are instructive. They give us the chance to experiment with who we might want to be and how we interact with society. As we grow older, these fictions become reality in large and small ways in part because we gravitate toward our in-groups and the rewards of social understanding. We find a character to play, we are accepted as that character, those traits settle in and we more concretely become more fully realized as that person.

Perception becomes reality.

When I hear the modern parent losing his shit over his child adopting a gender-fluid, bisexual, activist archetype I want to tell him to calm down. This is how humans work. His child is doing what all children do. They are trying it on for size. The 'normal' in most American high schools is the same 'normal' everywhere: heterosexual, horny kids who judge each other constantly based upon outward appearance. Calling yourself 'gender-fluid' is just a costume piece to distinguish those outlier kids from everyone else. Certainly, for a minuscule percentage who genuinely have body dysmorphia it has life-changing consequences but for the vast majority, it's a pose to see how it feels.

There is absolutely nothing abnormal or harmful about it. It's like going to college without a declared major and auditing classes to see what you like. In fact, trying it on to see how it feels opens your kid up to a bit more empathy for those kids with genuine issues, doesn't it?

Where things get thorny is the fact that adolescence has now extended far past the teen years and well into the mid-twenties. The result is a generation of college and post-college individuals still experimenting and posturing with their specific identities designed to be seen and evaluated by their peers. Add to that the bizarre but now accepted dopamine rush of securing affirmation via TikTok and Instagram as well as the money to be made if the following is robust and we have a perfect storm of character acting involving real world problems.

An overwhelming 77% of Americans approved of the conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd and, in the summer of 2020, 61% of Americans held favorable views of Black Lives Matter. A full 70% of white college students were in lock-step with the #BLM agenda, wearing t-shirts, blacking out (then deleting the blackout then putting it back up) their Instagram feeds, marching in the streets.

Today, less than 45% of Americans are still in favor of the movement (including drops across all racial categories including black Americans) and less than half of those white college students are left in support. It seems that many tried on civil rights activism as n experiment in identity, marched out during the height of the pandemic in order to get out of the house, and decided it wasn't really the character they wanted to embrace.

Activism is getting fashionable rather than effective. At the recent Met Gala, those who care about ridiculously wealthy people dressing up and eating canapés were treated to slogans stitched into gowns that likely cost more than most American's annual salaries: Cara Delevingne with "Peg the Patriarchy," Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney in a banner-like gown that featured multiple, "Equal rights for women" ribbons cascading down from her shoulders, and, of course, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a Cruella-esque floor-length white gown with "tax the rich" scrawled on the back of the dress, in large red letters (her matching bag shared the same slogan).

CBS announced a reality show in the works called The Activist that was to feature the social media savvy and following of young activists. From the announcement:

The Activist is a competition series that features six inspiring activists teamed with three high-profile public figures working together to bring meaningful change to one of three vitally important world causes: health, education, and environment.

Activists go head-to-head in challenges to promote their causes, with their success measured via online engagement, social metrics, and hosts’ input. The three teams have one ultimate goal: to create impactful movements that amplify their message, drive action, and advance them to the G20 Summit in Rome, Italy.

Once announced, the idea was so thoroughly panned on Twitter that the company pulled it for retooling.

We have fans of Nicki Minaj marching in protest at the CDC in defiance of vaccines because the Trinidadian-born rapper, singer, and songwriter tweeted that her cousin canceled his wedding due to the COVID vaccine enlarging his balls.

Mega-corprations are now routinely leaving announcements on their websites that they "support Black Lives Matter and causes in pursuit of social justice" and "are commited to diversity and equity as a company." It's obvious that these are merely branding labels used to leverage a faux support of the Woke to garner their cash.

Diversity=Conformity Equity=Discrimination Activism=Branding

The danger is that there are real world issues that affect actual people at the end of these slogans. We know a few things about activism and protest in this country:

Perception Becomes Reality Protest is about awareness We are divided by rhetoric and misunderstanding

When the general perception of activism is that it is a fashionable pose, real problems are left unsolved. When the awareness that protest foments is an awareness of the fad-like nature of online activism, all of it suffers. When the divides we face in the current culture conflicts are due to badly phrased rhetoric and intentional misunderstandings, we are doomed to simply become a nation of children, searching for our in-crowd and experimenting with identity, screaming at each other.

#activism #Met Gala #CBS #The Activist #Nicki Minaj #AOC

0 notes

mmkelleywrites · 7 years ago

Text

Call Upon Your God

My best friend growing up was obsessed with God. His family never struck me as particularly Jesus-y, but Art took it hook, line and sinker. He was always reading one of the books of the Bible. Even some more strange books, like Enoch. I remember when I mentioned I'd never heard of them, he just shrugged and said most sects considered them non-canon.

The strangest things about him were, in no particular order, that he was friends with me, and his obsession with meeting God. I've always been a godless heathen, for lack of a better word. He never seemed to care, and honestly I enjoyed the Bible stories he had to tell me. Weird shit, like Jesus banishing a dragon, Angels breeding with humans and making monstrosities. You know, *weird shit.*

Towards the end of highschool, I lost track of Art. I spent some time in and out of mental health facilities. Some of the people I met in those years really liked the stories I remembered from Art. Sometimes because of the absurdity, but some of them found some hope somewhere in there too. When I finally got home, Art was there waiting for me. Bright, full of Christ and with cookies from his mom.

It was like we never parted. He was extremely excited that he’d gotten into Bob Jones University. I laughed at him when he mentioned “B.J.U.” He ignored my crude humor, as always. I guess they have a program that’s very intensive in Bible studies. I asked him about meeting God. He was still as convinced as when we were ten. After my stint in the facilities, I thought to ask, “Does that mean you want to die?”

“No!” he snapped.

An awkward silence, then he apologized for being snappy. He calmly explained that if he were to kill himself, or possibly even die purposely, that he’d risk not going to the Pearly Gates. Of course he prayed, and volunteered, and really anything he could do to emulate people who’d been Saints. He was working soup kitchens, advocating for AIDS patients, donating as much as his little job would let him to the homeless, and with all of that going on still manage to help out at the women’s shelter. He really latched on to the “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” bit from the big guy.

Is it any surprise he hadn’t met God? I knew it wasn’t going to happen, but at the same time, I admired the difference he was making in the world. He called me on my lunch break one day. In one of his religion classes at BJU, the discussion apparently shifted to inmates. Someone said they’d heard a lot of death row inmates suddenly find God once their fate is sealed. In typical Art fashion, he wedged visiting inmates into his schedule. He passed those stories onto me, too. Some of them were absolutely proud of their crimes. No remorse, they nearly pissed themselves laughing at the mention of the Lord or salvation. There were those who’d seeked out salvation. Not all of them through religion, but many of them had. He focused on those. Even the ones who seemed to absolutely believe found it laughable that God had actually come to them. Disappointed, but he added “Prison Ministry” to his resume of good deeds and kept that a few days a month, too.

I don’t really know if it was the same class, but discussion turned towards, “there are no atheists in a fox hole.” It was like he had been sitting on top of the solution the whole time. He dropped everything and joined the service. Three tours. Afghanistan once, Iraq twice. Assignments everyone else thought were crazy, he was the first in line. Every time he came back, he was the exact same Art. I honestly don’t know if he killed anyone over there. I didn’t want to ask, and he never seemed interested in talking about that part of his job. Eventually, he gave that up, and went back to BJU, this time on a GI Bill.

I got the impression he wasn’t very strict with himself on his attendance this time around. He was digging into more of the “non-canon” books again. I’m not sure where he found it, but he kept talking about doing works in the name of God as a means of transformation. Art said he was still figuring it out, but that he was starting to see all of the work he’d put in trying to meet God as a means of personal transformation. Service as a chrysalis, he said.

After that, I never knew when we’d talk. He’d call or show up at all hours of day, exhausted, but somehow invigorated at the same time. I kind of figured maybe he’d had some kind of existential crisis that lead into drugs and drinking. I’d seen it in the facilities, and he certainly fit the archetype that I’d seen do that. I just tried to be there for him as best I could. I tried to bring it up, maybe save him like he’d always tried for me. He swore up and down that he wouldn’t touch anything like that.

This part of the story is where my details get murky. A rash of murders ripped through our city. Art was the final victim. There were eight victims in total. The first person was an investment broker. He was plastered all over the news for very likely accusations of embezzlement. They came to raid his condo, expecting that he’d skipped town when he failed to meet his court date. No one was prepared for him, boiled in oil in his hottub. The murderer had broken in, put extra heating elements into the tub and refilled it with vegetable oil. They found two rare coins balanced on his eyes.

The next victim was similarly high profile. A nationally syndicated personality, known for spewing vitriol and outrage. He targeted anyone outside of his political circle. The person responsible caught him early in the morning going into the studio. The aide that usually arrived at the same time was running late that early morning. The sound proof studio made sure no one heard what must have been a horrific racket. He was chopped, limb from limb. It must have been done quickly, because he had still been gasping for his final breaths when the aide found him. He was too far gone to give a description of his assailant. The camera’s only caught a person in all black, like one of those ANTIFA protesters from recently. No forensic data was recovered.

The third victim is what started suggestions of more than one killer. The local news reported the wife of the second victim had been found dead in their home. They found her inside of a python. The small video clip of their house showed a small wine cellar that was only accessible from the kitchen. The person, or persons, must have broken in during the funeral and dumped a menagerie of snakes into the cellar after removing the ladder back into the kitchen. They’d removed the hatch and put the rug back over it. When she came home, she fell into Indiana Jones’ nightmare. Copperheads, water moccasins, pythons, cobras, an anaconda that came up missing from the zoo. It was a hateful death sentence. An expert from the zoo said that, if they hadn’t found her for awhile, there may have been nothing left in the python, as they digest bones and all.

Number four was our Congressman. Not a hometown hero, but not a villain either. He had a passion for expensive wines and dinners. Expensive outings, mostly at the expense of corporations buying his votes. He had been nailed down to a chair in his study. The coroner noted small cuts inside of his mouth, that they chalked up to the rats that had apparently been force-fed to him while live. There were also toads and snakes slithering and hopping around the study, and remnants of them in his stomach at the time of the autopsy.

At this point, people were mortified. Who was doing this? Comments on the local news’ website for these stories ran the gambit between praising someone for taking out the trash and admiration for their creativity in problem to disgust that no one could catch the person responsible for the depravity and being terrified that it would never stop. The fifth killing flew under the radar, but is now believed to be the fifth in the series of killings. An adult entertainment convention happened through town. One of the actresses was found burned alive in the alley along the hotel she was staying in.

The sixth victim is where these killings started to find their links cemented past speculation. I personally knew this guy. Art did, as well. He was a science teacher we both had in high school, Mr. Fink. A very capable man, but full of himself to a fault. He was convinced he was God’s gift to everyone. If you cornered him being wrong, he simply gaslighted you into thinking that he was right the whole time. They found him strapped to a waterwheel. Official cause of death? Drowning. They think he rotated on the wheel for days before being found. Someone noticed that all of these were the Hell-bond’s punishments for the Capital Sins.

They found the last two victims together. Art’s neighbor, Jim. He’d always spent so much of his life trying to one up Art’s family. They got a new car? He bought a boat the next week. Art got into BJU? His son was going to MIT. Art always ignored it. He said if you let the envy bother you, you’re just being prideful, and that’s just as bad. His wife found him in their chest freezer. It had been emptied, filled with water and he’d been forced in. The lid was weighed down with cinder blocks to prevent his escape. He was locked in a block of ice.

Art was there, too. The police haven’t been able to figure out why he was there. His flesh was singed and his torso was split from neck to pelvis. Since we were so close, I got a chance to see his remains. It reminded me of a used cocoon, a spent husk laying on the garage floor. There wasn’t much left, some bone and flesh. The organs were gone. I did some reading, Art’s death wasn’t a punishment for sin, but Jim’s was. I haven’t heard from Art, but I get this feeling in my chest that he’s out there. Maybe he met God, maybe he turned into what he’d been worshiping all this time?

#horror #short story #nosleep #creepy #creepypasta #serial killer #murder #religion #fiction #horror story #take things literally

2 notes · View notes

aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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

joescanlan-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Back to Basics and Back Again: Dan Peterman

Originally uploaded to Joe Scanlan’s website.

It’s common knowledge that recycling has had a very limited effect on the imbalance between the production and consumption of natural resources. The idea that we can save the planet by managing our glass, newspapers and plastics in naïve, not only because those materials are a mere fraction of the problem but also because they have not been readily absorbed into primary manufacturing processes. In any case, the journey from the garbage bin and back again is only one of many orbits that materials go through after they cease to be bauxite, petroleum, or trees. Thus the real concern of the planet is not the dissipation of garbage but the management of materials in constant states of transformation, commodification, and motion—a fact that the recycling industry seems reluctant to admit.

As long as that is the case, Dan Peterman’s work will not be about recycling. True, over the last ten years he has worked extensively with aluminum cans, recycled plastics and flammable garbage, and if there is a flaw in his method it is his own blindness to how strictly coded these materials are for most people. To be fair, Peterman’s blindness is more accurately an extreme focus, a proximity and familiarity with waste materials that precludes the didacticism usually associated with recycling. For six years after graduate school Peterman worked as a bulk mover and sorter for a southside Chicago recycling company called The Resource Center, an experience that seems to have expanded his student interest in object making processes into a broader stream of material consciousness. Knee-deep in the flux of the city’s refuse, Peterman developed an ‘oceanic’ appreciation of its absurd scale, to use Robert Smithson’s term (via Freud) for the anxiety induced by any seemingly limitless or formless expanse.

Peterman’s projects thus far (and there are many) are the direct result of negotiating his relationship to this expanse. Sometimes he attempts to map or structure it; other times he takes samples, turning them into art. Peterman’s works do not function as conclusions of final objects but as a kind of freeze-frame of larger systems in constant motion, crude models for how materials and products have become as transient as information. They are rooted entirely in his material experience, but his sensitivity towards the life cycle of substances allows his artworks to question their less tangible traits: symbolic meanings, social functions and monetary values. While working towards a more congenerous definition of art, he resists the current distinctions between conventional, institutional, site-specific and public art, suggesting that these distinctions are created by the artwork’s reception. All his works are formulated as public propositions, but geared to different audiences and for different effects.

Chicago Compost Shelter (1988) marked a seminal development in Peterman’s conceptual sophistication and sense of humor. Winter being a particularly tough time for aluminum scavengers in Chicago, Peterman devised a temporary warming shelter at The Resource Center’s Seventy-First Street aluminum buy-back station. He began by constructing a wood canopy and door into the side of a defunct Volkswagen microbus; fashioned the interior with curtains, carpeting, blankets and a working radio; and then buried the entire vehicle in active compost, which gives off heat as a by-product of its chemical breakdown. (In addition to traditional recyclables, The Resource Center also composts a lot of the city of Chicago’s organic waste, much of which is horse manure generated by the division of mounted police.) The shelter maintained a 75-degree temperature throughout the winter, providing its audience with a reasonable place to warm up or spend the night.

The construction and intent of Compost Shelter grounded Peterman’s personal philosophy on his place in the wider scheme of things, as well as the extent to which he believed he could influence the status quo. Formally, the Compost Shelter was nearly identical to Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Wood Shed (1970). But where Smithson’s seminal work was structured around the idea of making entropy visible (dirt was piled onto the roof of a woodshed until the center beam cracked, at which point the activity was stopped), Compost Shelter’s confluence of materials was constructive, even hospitable—bringing a dilapidated van, organic waste and natural forces together in such a way that their traits complemented, rather than contradicted, each other. For Peterman—and for a lot of us—Smithson’s willful futility and fatalism have become a matter of course. And yet Peterman proposes that realistically reducing the potential of human influence doesn’t necessarily mean a diminution of agency, nor a lessening of the belief that change is still possible.

These shifts in scale and effectiveness are most evident in Peterman’s idea of what constitutes a natural resource. For him, bricks of aluminum cans and planks of reprocessed milk cartons are no less raw materials than timber or coal. Peterman’s lack of distinction between consumer waste and natural resources shifts his concept of nature away from its classical definition towards “all the stuff that nobody else wants.” Basically, a natural resource becomes anything that is accessible or affordable, regardless of how much it has been pre-processed or post-consumed. Nature is no longer primordial, some pure place or thing to be protected, but a complex system of material weights and volumes to be stockpiled, traded, and used.

In 1993 Dan Peterman, Sonia Labouriau, Kirsten Mosher and Nancy Rubins were invited to do “outdoor” projects in the charred shell of the New York Kunsthalle, which had been devastated by fire just before its official opening. Peterman had already been experimenting with the sculptural possibilities of a plastic plank product made from milk jugs and marketed as an indestructible substitute for wood. Its primary uses have been outdoor furniture and walls for playgrounds, parks and golf courses. Amused by the irony of so many urban nature preserves deploying such a synthetic and brutally permanent material, Peterman purchased 3,600 lbs of it to construct a kind of petrochemical banquet table that was both a by-product of and a potential site for mass consumption. The table’s length also mimicked the material’s manufacturing process: discarded plastic is shredded, emulsified, compressed and then extruded faster than applications or markets can be found for it. In a limited way Peterman has done his bit by purchasing a personal allotment of recycled plastic planks from which he makes, and remakes, art. Invited to participate in a group show at John Gibson Gallery in New York this summer, Peterman shipped a portion of the Kunsthalle piece to the gallery, reconfiguring it into a patio with benches, the remainder staying at the Kunsthalle until another project beckons or some configuration of it is purchased as art. Meanwhile, the artist has a convenient stockpile of work, strategically maintaining a “presense” (or nuisance) in New York.

Peterman’s ongoing SO2Project began in the Aperto section of the 1993 Venice Biennale, where he exhibited six certificates through which anyone could grant him the power of attorney to purchase sulfur dioxide shares on their behalf. There were no takers, so Peterman purchased five shares at $250 each for himself at the most recent auction in April. He was the highest bidder, though his shares represent only 0.00005 percent of the total allotment sold. The top volume buyer was Allowance Holding Corporation, who purchased 90,000 shares at $150 apiece—89.3 percent of the allotment—which pretty much set the market price. Nonetheless, for $1,250 Dan Peterman purchased the right to place five tons of sulfur dioxide into roughly 30 cubic miles of the atmosphere.

Since then he has learned that the most effective way for coal-burning power plants to reduce SO2 emissions is to install ‘scrubbers’ in their chimneys, where limestone and water draw the most SO2 out of the coal smoke. The by-product of this process is gypsum, the main ingredient for manufacturing plasterboard and drywall. This incidental production of gypsum could end the mining of ‘natural’ gypsum, as corporations source the material from power companies instead of the hills of northern Minnesota. Drywall and electricity are important utilities for contemporary art galleries, and the versatility and economy of drywall technology played a major role in the proliferation of such archetypal spaces as white cubes, rehabbed industrial lofts, and corporate lobbies. Thus Peterman’s investment is not so much about making money on the futures market as it is about purchasing a volume of material that is obliquely linked to our experience of art, and then making these links more visible. Peterman’s SO2 allotment might be calculated into a commensurate amount of gypsum or lighting to be used in an installation; increased or decreased in terms of its monetary value as the market develops; or expanded exponentially in relation to its corollary atmospheric volume if allowable SO2 levels are reduced. Given the specific electric consumption or wall space of an art institution, Peterman might also enlist the institution itself in the SO2 market in order to transfer shares to their account, thereby indicating the scale of the institution’s waste production and consumption and its relation to culture and the environment—in other words, the marketplace.

It remains unclear whether the SO2 shares will be either a worthwhile investment or an effective control mechanism. It also remains unclear what the context of Peterman’s project is, what its audience or impact might be, or how any of his actions are being received—questions which he intends to frame more precisely in an installation at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art in November. For now he prefers this ambiguity, this confusion of intention and potential. This, of course, is the nature of the “free” marketplace. As the variables now stand, the gradual reduction of SO2 emissions over the next ten years will lead to either a huge surplus of gypsum, the proliferation of other power sources (most likely nuclear), or the eventual obsoletion of the SO2 futures market. Most likely, however, is that enough interested money will get involved to reduce emission levels to a certain degree, but never so far as to jeopardize the interests of business. A permanent level of managed pollution would be the result, not exactly a utopian outcome.

Peterman has clearly signed onto a system outside of his control, yet his actions as an artist don’t demonstrate a literal faith in telling stories or seizing control. Rather they operate as metaphors for what’s individually possible in the new world of managed air space and material ownership. The SO2 Project is not about playing commodities broker, but about the fact that gambling with such huge volumes—and consequences—is even possible. Is it conceivable to go shopping and have that activity ‘produce’ as many resources as it consumes? The question posed by the modest, visually deadpan, Sulfur Dioxide certificates is, do you want that to be the case? Will you have a choice? Either way, Peterman’s offer to purchase individual pieces of sky on our behalf is one of the most disturbingly pragmatic and poetic gestures of our time.

First published in frieze (Sept./Oct., 1994): 36-9

Download Back to Basics and Back Again: Dan Peterman

#joescanlan #artist #author #publication #writing

1 note · View note