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michaels-blackhat · 3 years ago

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thoughts on evil Forrest 😈

We are going to start out by apologizing. This is very very late. I’m sure when you sent this ask, you meant it to be in the same joking tone that I approach all of my other propaganda posts. Sadly, this is actually going to be a deep dive into a few Evil Forrest related things, including the moment I feel they changed directions, the perfect wasted build-up, and the implications of the change/how it then negatively impacted the story. As I’m sure you already know, by being on my blog at all, I don’t think the story was good to begin with, so we are going to focus on the weird hoops they made themselves jump through to make that story still work. Additionally, I am only going to mention once, right now, how much of a waste it was to not have Forrest ‘fall for his mark’ and complete one of my absolute favorite tropes. Honestly, I think “because I want it” is a completely valid reason to like Evil Forrest. But, the question was “Thoughts on Evil Forrest” and these thoughts have been developing for over a year and a half. So, I apologize in advance.

The majority of this is under a cut, with highlights in the abstract. If no one wants to read this, I understand completely. Go ahead, skip it.

Note: it pains me greatly to not actually have full sources for this essay. Just know that in my heart I am using proper APA citations, I just absolutely do not feel like digging through tweets to find sources to properly cite.

Abstract:

Previous research indicates that Roswell New Mexico has a history of repeating excuses to explain mid-season changes to plots. This essay explores how those excuses are not only loads of crap, but how they hinder the show’s ability to tell a coherent story, misuse the multiple-plot structure to enhance the themes being explored, and lead to decisions that mean the show continuously goes over budget. This also means that characters are not used to their full potential and has led to what some fans consider to be “out of character” behaviors. While these behaviors are not universally agreed on, evidence can be shown that these behaviors directly contradict emotionally important character arc/plot points in the show.

The author of this paper acknowledges that the show took some strides to mend this problem. However, once again no consensus could be found on whether Forrest was a low-level member of Deep Sky and thus just allowed to fuck off on a bus, or his job was recruitment because he did a piss poor job of making Alex not join.

The concept of Evil Forrest has been with the fandom as early as New York Comic Con (NYCC) in 2019, when it was revealed that Alex had a new “blue-haired love interest”. Speculation abounded within the fandom, with some people, including the author, going “yeah, he’s evil” while others rejoiced in the concept of Alex having a loving partner. Speculation increased as fans discussed Tyler Blackburn’s seeming disinterest in his new love interest, prompting some once again to scream “EVIL” at the top of their lungs to anyone who would listen. Very little was revealed, beyond the fact that the new character would show up somewhere around episode 3 of the second season.

Episode 2.04 aired with some commenting on how he barely interacted with Alex- prompting more evil speculation- and others excited to see the characters interact more. The character appears again in 2.06, where he invites Alex to dubious spoken word poetry (which Alex attends); 2.08, where they have a paintball date and go to The Wild Pony; 2.10, where the two are seen writing together briefly at the beginning of the episode; and 2.13, where Alex performs his song at open mic night, tells Forrest his relationship with the person in the song was long over, and they kiss. Forrest was not revealed to be evil during season 2.

Amidst the season airing, Word of God via Twitter post announced that yes, Forrest had originally been planned as a villain, though not the main villain, but it was changed as filming progressed.

The Word of God Twitter post revealed that Forrest had originally been planned as a villain, but they decided that they could not make their “blue-haired gay man” a villain. This mirrors a similar situation and excuse used the previous season, where the character of Jenna Cameron was originally planned to work with Jesse Manes against the aliens, before it was changed because they just “loved Riley [the actress] too much”. Both of these examples occurred while already filming and reflect on a larger problem with the show. Though not the topic of this essay, it is important to note that both characters are white, both in the show and by virtue of being played by white actors. The fact that they couldn’t be villains for one reason or another is not a courtesy extended to the male villains who are all the most visibly brown, and thus ‘other’, members of the cast.

This also highlights the fact that, via Twitter, it has been revealed two other times that occurrences that were reported in season 1 also occurred in season 2. During the airing of episode 1.02, it was revealed that the single best build-up of tension in the show- when Alex walks to the Airstream not saying a word to Michael after a dramatic declaration- happened because one actor was sick at the time and they had to go back and film the kisses later. At the point of airing for episode 2.08, it was revealed that one of the actors were sick and unable to film a kissing scene. Allegedly, this caused the writers to retool the entire scene and deviate from the plan to make that subplot about Coming Out. The execution of this subplot will be explored later in this essay.

The last occurrence revealed via Twitter also revealed larger issues within the show: lack of planning and poor budgeting. During the airing of season 1, Tyler Blackburn was needed for an extra episode beyond his contracted 10. A full explanation was never given, but speculation about poor planning and to fill in because Heather Hemmens had to miss one of her 10 episodes due to scheduling conflicts for another project. During the airing of season 2, yet another tweet came out saying they made a mistake and Tyler would once again be in an additional episode. No explanations beyond “a mistake” were given, though once again speculation occurred. It is the opinion of the author that this was due to changing plot points over halfway through writing, while episodes were already in production. It has been speculated by some that these changes occurred during the writing of 2.08, which was being finished/pre-production was occurring roughly around the time of NYCC 2019.

Previous Literature:

A brief look at different theories of plots and subplots

Many people have written on the subject of plotting, for novels and screen alike. The author is more familiar with film writing than tv, but a lot of the concepts carry over. Largely, the B- and C- (and D- and E-… etc) plots should reinforce the theme of the A-plot. This can be through the use of a negative example, where the antithesis of the theme is explored to reinforce the theme presented by the A plot, or through other examples of the theme, generally on a small scale.

A movie example of this would be Hidden Figures (2016), where the A-plot explores how race and gender impact the main character (Katherine Johnson) in her new job. The B-plots explore the other characters navigating the same concepts in different settings and ways- learning a new skill as to not become obsolete and breaking boundaries there (Dorothy Vaugn) and being the first black woman to complete a specific degree program and the fight it took to get there (Mary Jackson). A TV example that utilizes this concept of plot and theme is the 911 shows. Each of the rescues in a given episode will directly relate to the overall theme of the episode and the overall plot for the focus character. This example is extremely blunt. It does not use any tools to hide the connection, to the point you can often guess the outcome for that A-plot fairly quickly.

This is not the only way to explore themes within visual media. Moonlight (2016) looks at three timestamps in the life of Chiron. Each timestamp has a plot even if they feel more like individual scenes or moments rather than plots as some are more used to in films. Each time stamp deals with rejection, isolation, connection, and acceptance in different ways. So while there is no clear A-, B-, or C-Plot, each time stamp works as their own A-Plot to explore the themes in a variety of ways, particularly by starting out in a place of rejection and moving to acceptance or a place of connection to isolation.

Please note that there are many ways to write multiple plots, there are just two examples.

While there are flaws within season 1 of RNM, overall the themes stayed consistent throughout the season, mainly the theme of alienation. The theme threads through the Alien’s isolation/alienation from humanity which is particularly seen through Michael’s unwillingness to participate and Isobel’s over participation. There is Rosa’s isolation from others, how her friendship with “Isobel” ended up compounding her existing alienation from her support system due to her mental illness and coping mechanisms. We see how Max and Liz couldn’t make connections. This theme presented itself over and over in season 1. While this essay is not an exploration of the breakdown of themes in season 2, it should be noted that there were some threads that followed throughout the season. The theme of mothers/motherhood was woven throughout season 2, with some elements more effective than others. Please contact the author for additional thoughts on Helena Ortecho and revenge plots.

One of the largest problems within season 2 was the sheer number of plots jammed into the season. These plot threads often ended up hindering the effectiveness of the themes and made the coherence of the season suffer. Additionally, a lot of them were convoluted and difficult to follow.

Thesis:

Essentially, season 2 was a mess. To look at it holistically is almost an exercise in futility. Either you grow angry about the dropped plots and premises, you hand wave them off, or you fill them in for yourself. Instead, this essay proposes to look at individual elements to explain why Forrest should have stayed evil.

We first meet Forrest in 2.04 when he is introduced on the Long Family Farm, which we later learn was the location where our past alien protagonists had their final standoff. He’s introduced. He’s largely just there. The audience learns he has more of a history with Michael. In 2.06, we meet him again with his dog Buffy (note: poor Buffy has not been seen again and we miss a chunky queen). There’s mild flirting, Alex is invited to an open mic night, which he attends. For the purpose of this essay, the author’s thoughts on the poetry will not be expressed. Readers can take a guess.

It is after this point that the author speculates the Decision was made. This choice to make Forrest not evil- paired with the aforementioned ‘can’t kiss, someone’s sick’- impacted the plot. We have Alex have a scene with his father- which the author believes could have been pushed to a different episode- and then have Alex go on a date and then not kiss Forrest at the end of the night. Here, the audience sees Forrest hit Alex in the leg, allegedly not knowing he had lost his leg despite ‘looking him up’, which parallels the shot to the leg that happens to Charlie. Besides wasting this ABSOLUTELY TEXTBOOK SET UP WTF, it also takes Alex away from the main plot and then forces a new plot for him. Up to this point, Alex’s plot was discovering more about the crash and his family’s involvement. Turning Alex’s date from a setup for evil Forrest to a Coming Out story adds yet another plot thread to a packed season. It is also the author’s thought that this is where the convoluted kidnapping plot comes in. With Forrest already in 2.10 for a moment, a plot where Alex is evil has Forrest attack him for Deep Sky rather than Jesse abduct him for a piece of alien glass Alex was going to give him anyway and then for Flint to abduct Alex from Jesse. It’s messy. In a bad way. Evil Forrest would have been a cleaner set up: no taking back a piece of alien glass Alex gave to Michael in a touching moment. No double abduction. Instead, there is only Forrest, who Alex trusts, breaking that trust to take him as leverage over Michael.

Implications:

Now, Alex has two plots (Tripp & Coming Out). The Coming Out plot is largely ineffective, as they are only relevant to scenes with Forrest and have the undercurrent of there only being a certain acceptable way to be out. This could have been used for Alex to discover his comfort levels, mirroring Isobel’s self discovery, but there was not enough screen time for that. Additionally, Isobel’s coming out story was about her allowing herself the freedom to explore. Alex’s story was about the freedom to… act like this dude wanted him to. Alex’s internalized homophobia played out often in the series but it was also informed by the violence he experienced at Jesse’s hands and the literal hate crime he and his high school boyfriend experienced. With that in mind, the “kissing to piss off bigots” line comes off poorly. This is a character who experienced what a pissed off bigot could do- reluctance to kiss in public is not the same as not being out. There is more to be said on this topic, but as it is not actually the focus of the essay, it will be put on hold. To surmise: Alex’s coming out is attempted to be framed as being himself, but it is actually the conformity to someone else’s ideals. It does not work as an antithetical to Isobel’s story, as the framing indicates that the conformity/right was to be out contradicts Isobel’s theme.

Further Research:

MAKE FORREST EVIL YOU COWARDS

Author Acknowledgements:

The author of this paper acknowledges that the show took some strides to mend this problem. However, once again no consensus could be found on whether Forrest was a low-level member of Deep Sky and thus just allowed to fuck off on a bus, or his job was recruitement because he did a piss poor job of making Alex not join.

#anti forrest long #i guess #evil forrest propaganda #I asked and no one said don't post it so...#here it is #I started writing this roughly 7 months ago

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doakaptan · 4 years ago

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code lyoko: a hidden gem of early 2000s cartoons

pov: the year is 2009, every day you come home from school to watch an unidentified cartoon on channel JoJo; only for it to disappear and never come back to tv ever again.

Hello, it is that time of the week again. I will cut the chase for you so- Basically, this semester greatly tired me and in order to go along until the school year ends, I watch shows that evoke nostalgia to get high on the feeling of temporary happiness and dissociate for a while. I am not even addressing the monstrosity that is the midterm, father-son and the holy spirit help a bro out, please. And well, Code Lyoko is exactly that show.

(from left to right: Yumi, Jeremie, Aelita, Ulrich <3 and Odd) (there is also William in later seasons but I don’t claim him)

Originally released in 2003 but, received international release just as it was canceled in 2007, Code Lyoko is a French cartoon that graced everyone’s televisions at least once before it completely disappeared from it. For my experience, I encountered Code Lyoko on a channel called JoJo while I was waiting for Yugioh GX to start.

At first glance, it honestly looked horrifying with how children had comically big foreheads but, the story and the visuals hooked me right in. First of all, I could look past the giant foreheads because the characters were good-looking for my 8-year-old taste and, the background illustrations are still beautiful regardless. Despite being beautiful, the places didn’t change much and we only saw the school, dorms and the forest that was behind it along with the old factory and the word of Lyoko but, the budget for the show was not the biggest so most of the scenes were used and reused again and again throughout the seasons.

I’m not going to lie the visuals were not as pretty as I make them out to be but, I was 8 years old and it was the first time that I ever saw a cartoon that had both 2d and 3d animation.

Also, I fell in love with Ulrich but I’ll get to that.

No, no I won’t

This is also a call-out post to me because apparently, I love everything that came before the internet and being online 24/7. Just like in How I Met Your Mother, as we are watching the world is introduced to the internet and what being online means so if I were to say that the third season is an inquiry on what the internet is and, how it works, I would not be that far off.

( Also recently Code Lyoko was added to Netflix so yeah go stream it )

To dive right into the plot: a Japanese, and 3 French(???) middle school students walked into an abandoned factory through a sewage canal and discover a supercomputer that had an artificial world (Lyoko) in it with another artificial intelligence in the name of Aelita trapped in it. By contacting Aelita they alerted an evil system that lived within the Lyoko called X.A.N.A that manipulates and hacks electronic devices through the powers of Lyoko. So as any other logical human being would do they materialized Aelita into the real world and created her a fake identity to make her study with them while they fight against X.A.N.A in both the real world and the artificial one, Lyoko. Then the school principal asks, "Why did you do that?" And the overly intelligent 12-year old that somehow hacked into the national security system and created a fake identity for an artificial intelligence replied, "Well I am a classic nerd that fell in love with an artificial intelligence I had to make her real at some point!".

Yeah... that was not funny.....

Anyways, so this is basically the entire plot of the Code Lyoko brought to you by a walked into a bar joke that did not escalate!

4 friends along with their new materialized friend Aelita try to protect the world against X.A.N.A and whatever it is trying to achieve... Is it ever clear what X.A.N.A desires? I’m not sure. I’m currently rewatching the show and I’m on season 3 but I’m kind of lost on the plot since I only care about what’s going to happen between Ulrich and Yumi...

SO, the kids spent most of their time trying to defend their school, friends, or themselves against X.A.N.A and honestly it looks like a tiring job. They miss important days, quizzes, exams... man... I don’t think they are even attending school... But worry not! Lyoko has a program called "Return to the Past" and when they are successful in defending the world against X.A.N.A in Lyoko, they get to return to the past and not miss whatever that they dropped to reach the abandoned factory.

I vividly remember wishing, praying, crying myself to sleep to have a computer like that when I was a child. I still do actually. It would be great if I were to spend the whole day beating up various machines in a virtual world then set back the time to retake an exam that I already know the questions of. Ah, a university student can only wish...

Code Lyoko was mostly sloppy in animation due to the budget cuts that had to be made in order for the show the survive but, it made up with the heart and soul it carried. The characters are all fleshed out, just like the locations and you can sense how much thought went into each and every detail the show carried. I don’t know if it's still available on the internet but I would suggest everyone who read until this point to look into the bible of the show. It is one of the greatest bibles I’ve had the pleasure of reading through.

The show aired in Turkey in 2009 on channel JoJo. The entirety of the first season and a few episodes from the second season were aired but it was pulled from airing shortly after to give Yugioh GX more slots since it entered its final season. One of the reasons was probably because JoJo pulled most of its audience from airing Yugioh. I would not blame them since I discovered Code Lyoko while I was waiting for Yugioh as well.

After Code Lyoko was pulled off from airing I forgot about it and did not think about it until recently. During our first year, while I was talking Asya’s ear off about an unrelated cartoon, I randomly remembered the theme song of Code Lyoko, and all came back to me. The sweet nostalgia. I also remember making my friends at the table watch a few episodes of it during our lunchbreak.

I am honestly glad that Code Lyoko was not one of the cartoons that got away from me. Aside from the addicting nostalgia, it gives me, it holds such a special place in my heart that I don’t think any other show can fill (maybe Yugioh GX can fill it but I will have to debate it with myself for a while).

So please, if you have time give this low-budget french cartoon a chance it will not disappoint you.

(also just a warning ulrich and yumi’s pining is one of the slowest of burns I’ve ever witnessed so be careful while rooting for them)

#man i love code lyoko #with my whole heart #i wish it had more seasons #it left on a cliffhanger jokes on you #ulrich i was in love with you when i was 8 plz call me back #also i still cannot believe this was real #code lyoko #code lyoko come back #ulrich stern #ulrich üzümlü kekim #yumi ishiyama #aelita schaeffer #odd della robbia #franz hopper dalgana bak aslanım #lyoko warriors #william sen de dalgana bak aslanım

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papermoonloveslucy · 3 years ago

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REMINISCING

August 14, 1977

By Frank Swertlow, Chicago Daily News

BEVERLY HILLS - During the first years of television, Ed Wynn, the radio and stage comic, was trying to break into television with a half-hour comedy on CBS. (1)

One night, he invited a couple of second echelon performers to make an appearance: a comedienne, known as "Technicolor Tessie" for her blazing red hair, and a song-and-dance man, best remembered for hollering "babalu."

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were the couple, and they, like Wynn, were sampling the waters of the new medium. CBS had asked Miss Ball and her conga-drum pounding husband to develop a comedy show for television. Later, after months of thought and testing their ideas on the vaudeville circuit, the couple came up with "I Love Lucy," the misadventures of Lucy and Ricky Riccardo. (2)

It made its debut on CBS in October 1951. More than a quarter of a century afterwards, "I Love Lucy" easily can vie for the honor of television's most successful show. It was the archtype [sp] domestic comedy, the bumbling husband and his daffy wife. It gave birth to two other Lucy shows, a host of specials and a giant production company, Desilu.

"We spent months thinking about what we should do," Miss Ball recalled. "We didn't want to be the average Hollywood couple. Nobody would think you had any problems if you had a car and swimming pool and a nice house.

"Ultimately, we wanted a show in which people could identify with us. Everybody could understand what it was like to struggle for a buck. I was an ordinary, everyday, middle class housewife. I wore the same dress often. My husband worked and tolerated my mistakes. It was something that everyone could identify with."

With the debut of the TV series, Lucille Ball, the former Goldwyn girl who started her film career in the 1930s, had a new career.

"I never expected the show to go more than a year," said Miss Ball. "I wanted to do the show on film so I could use them as home movies. Who knew about television then? It was a no-no to do TV work. The movie studios were against it."

To Miss Ball, who was not a new face to the public, the impact of her show was incredible. "We went to New York on a trip once and we were unprepared for what happened. People rushed up and wanted to touch you. They knew you, and called you by your first name. I had been in pictures for years, and most of the time I was never identified."

If the movers and shakers of the film industry who gave Miss Ball her start during the 1930s were alive, they would have been shocked. To them, simply and kindly, Lucille Ball was a B-movie queen, one of the many second-line actresses who never attained star billing, but who was an important ingredient to the motion picture industry.

Unlike many performers who labored under the cruel studio system, Miss Ball fondly remembered her early years in Hollywood. "It was nice to be under the umbrella of a studio. You always had a poppa. I loved it. I loved being part of the business. I would have swept floors just to be in it."

Miss Ball, however, did not forget the tactics of the brutal and disgusting lords of movieland. Harry "King" Cohn, the ruler of Columbia Pictures, stood out. "He made the biggest dent in everybody. He was ruthless. He always had to take a devious route." (3)

Miss Ball, who is not exactly a pushover, laughingly recalled the time she outwitted the sly Cohn.

Miss Ball had received an offer to work in a Cecil B. DeMille film, but Cohn refused to loan her to the producer. He was being mean. Then, Cohn decided to drop her contract. To do it, he sent the actress a horrible script something that the trade called a lease breaker. "Oh, everybody was dying to play opposite John Agar and Raymond Burr," she recalled jokingly. "I was going to be a harum [sp] girl." Naturally, Cohn expected her to refuse and it would be the end of her contract. (4)

The savvy Miss Ball decided to do the film and collect her check. When she made this announcement there was an uproar. She coyly told her bosses: "Oh, I want to do the film. It's a wonderful film."

Meanwhile, Miss Ball, who had been trying to get pregnant for years, found out she was going to have a baby. Now, she was in trouble. If Cohn found out, he would break her contract. "I only told my mother and my husband I was pregnant."

Keeping her lips sealed, she went ahead with Cohn's film. "The wardrobe girl kept looking at me in my harum [sp] girl costume and saying, 'What's wrong with you, you are getting so big.' "So, I told her, 'Don't worry, I ate a big meal last night. Just put a little more taffeta on my dress.' Well, I finished the film and I collected my $85,000."

"Then I had to go to Mr. DeMille and tell him I couldn't do his film. I was pregnant. 'What,' he said. And I replied. 'I'm going to have a baby. 'Get rid of it,' he said. And he was serious.' She declined. (5)

While Miss Ball's career as a TV star is secure (she still has a contract with CBS) (6) she is not so certain about the state of the industry. Today, unlike when she started on the air, shows are yanked off the screen within a couple of weeks. This, she said, destroys performers.

"If a show is canceled, the actor takes the blame. He or she suffers for it. They suffer inside. The rejection - they failed. (7)

"I would fail. You can't protect yourself. It's out of your hands. It's always Lucy failed or Rhoda failed or Farrah Sauset Fawcett Sauset, whatever her name is, failed. It's rough." (8)

Even so, Lucille Ball, the red-haired girl from Jamestown, N.Y., would still be on top.

# # #

FOOTNOTES FROM THE FUTURE

(1) Ed Wynn (1886-1966) was a vaudevillian who hosted “The Ed Wynn Show” on television from 1949 to 1950. Lucy and Desi guest-starred on the show.

(2) ‘Riccardo’ is probably a misspelling of ‘Ricardo’, but it was also the way their surname was spelled on “I Love Lucy” in early episodes!

(3) Harry Cohn (1891-1958) was a much-despised executive at Columbia Studios. Lucille Ball once facetiously told Louella Parsons that she liked Harry Cohn too much to ever sign a contract with him. What Lucille meant is that Cohn had a reputation for being difficult. Despite that fact, a casting draught forced her to sign with Columbia in 1949.

(4) Lucille Ball had often complained to Cohn about the quality of the pictures she had been doing at Columbia. At the time The Magic Carpet was made, Ball was only obligated to Columbia for one more film, and Cohn had producer Sam Katzman, who turned out most of Columbia's low-budget "B" pictures, concoct a cheap Arabian Nights fantasy as a punishment to Ball for her constantly challenging him. More salacious writers insist that Cohn’s frustration with Ball was due to the fact that she would not submit to him sexually.

(5) The DeMille film in question was The Greatest Show on Earth, a movie set at the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey circus. Lucille was set to play the elephant trainer, a role that went to Gloria Graham. It was a film Lucille really wanted to do - but she wanted a baby more. Later in life, Desilu created a TV version of the film. Lucille also guest-starred as the ringmaster on “Circus of the Stars II” in which Lucie Arnaz was featured as.... the elephant trainer!

(6) Lucille Ball had started working at CBS on radio and was considered their premiere star. In 1980, after her television shows had ended, she signed with NBC, a partnership that yielded very little except that Ball was obliged to appear on Bob Hope’s many specials, something she frequently did anyway. Both CBS and NBC declined her final series “Life With Lucy” which producer Aaron Spelling finally convinced ABC to air.

(7) Although this article was written ten years before “Life With Lucy”, Lucille could very well be describing her own devastation when the series was cancelled even before all the initial episodes aired. She was widely criticized and the series often turned up on “worst show” lists.

(8) Rhoda refers to a character on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” that was played by Valerie Harper, a performer that appeared on Broadway with Lucille. In 1974, the character was spun off into its own eponymous sitcom which aired for four seasons.

Farrah Fawcett-Majors was a beautiful blonde actress and poster girl that burst onto the TV scene in the mid-1970s. A year after this interview, she was in the hit series “Charlie’s Angels” entering American iconography for her feathered hair and curvaceous figure the same way Betty Grable had in the 1940s.

#Lucille Ball #Valerie Harper #Harry Cohn #Farrah Fawcett #The Greatest Show on Earth #Life With Lucy #Cecil B. DeMille #The Magic Carpet #Lucie Arnaz #Gloria Graham #Desi Arnaz #Ed Wynn #1977 #Frank Swertlow

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angryschnauzer · 4 years ago

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In Another World

Summary: In another world, it was Jensen that got the role of Captain America, not Chris. You have dreamed of meeting Jensen ever since you saw him in his CGI glory in The First Avenger, and your comicon experience you discover to be underwhelming. But then you meet a cosplayer in the bar... and life takes an altogether different turn for you.

Warnings: NSFW, 18+, Comicon, Comic Convention, Strangers at a Bar, Cosplay, Captain America Cosplay, Unprotected Sex, Hotel Room Sex, Oral Sex, Fingering, Blow Job, Anal Play.

Pairing: Chris Evans x Female Reader (no race specified)

The above Jensen manip i cannot trace, it was sent to me years ago by a now deactivated tumblr user, with the signature half chopped off. Its the artwork that inspired this fic. In case you weren’t aware, Jensen auditioned for the role of Captain America but it of course went to Chris.

I do not operate a tag list, but feel free to go ahead and follow @angryschnauzerwrites and put that blog onto notifications, as you will then be notified when i post a new story. Oneshots will be posted on Tumblr and AO3, Multichapter stories will be AO3 exclusives.

Due to the amount of stories i have written over the years i no longer have a masterlist, instead please check out my AO3 HERE.

In Another World

You sat at your computer, staring at the screen as you streamed the latest press junket. Marvel was going all out with its ten-year plan for The Avengers and with this press tour for The Winter Soldier you had fallen in love even more with Cap.

As the images streamed live from the far east, you watched as Jensen flexed his muscles and his co-stars laughed in admiration. He was born to be Captain America.

But you weren’t the only one watching.

In a small apartment in Boston another pair of eyes watched with an added level of sadness. He remembered the audition. Standing in the hallway with a bunch of other guys, all in their 20’s, all having a few bit-part roles under their belts in teen TV shows or low budget horror movies. The same green eyes that stared out of the screen had looked at him in the hallway, holding his hand out to shake;

“Hey man. Jensen”

“Chris”

Jensen smiled;

“Strong Boston accent there dude”

Chris chuckled;

“Say the same about you, what’s that Houston?”

“Dallas”

“Eh, close enough”

They chatted for a while as the guys ahead of them in the line entered the room, only to leave 5 minutes later. They didn’t look up at the guys left, no-one wanted to read expressions to give themselves fake hope. The door opened and the annoying droll voice of the elderly secretary called out;

“Ackles”

Chris looked up, holding his hand out to his new acquaintance;

“Break a leg man”

Shaking it briefly Jensen nodded;

“Thanks man”

You clung to your priority tickets, the excitement so intense you weren’t sure if you were going to puke or cry. You hoped for neither. It was your first convention and you had maxed out your credit card and called in sick from work when the special edition tickets had been released, refreshing your computer every ten seconds so that when they had been released online you had made your purchase within 30 seconds.

Now standing towards the front of the queue you were terrified. You had loved Jensen from the first moment you’d seen him in all his CGI glory in The First Avenger. You’d followed his career and had even gone back and watched his entire back catalogue. He was a natural for the role and the stealth suit from the most recent movie had made him look so handsome you had actually swooned when you had seen those first opening scenes of the movie aboard the Lumerian Star.

The con volunteers were doing an amazing job, herding the fans into some form of order, and as you got closer you could hear the laughter and squeals of joy as fans ahead of you were rapidly shown in.

It was your turn. The flimsy black curtain was pulled aside, and you were pushed into the brightness of the well-lit area that was surrounded on all sides by vivid blue panels that bore the con’s logo. Jensen turned and smiled, putting his hand out and you found you were standing next to him. Your head swam;

“Do you have a pose?”

“Umm…” You could see the con workers and volunteers moving their arms in a ‘hurry up’ motion; “I guess… a hug?”

“Sure thing”

He wrapped his arm around your shoulder and pointed towards the bored looking photographer;

“Smile sweetie”

You did. You smiled, your saw blobs as the flash blinded you. You didn’t even register as Jensen pressed his hand to your back, thanking you before turning to the next person who had already been pulled through the black curtain. A volunteer took your wrist and pulled you gently through the curtain on the far side, giving you your photo number as they apologised it was so fast.

The curtain closed and you stood there, blinking as you tried to focus on the small piece of paper you held. It was done. Over. You’d met Jensen and it had been so rushed you hadn’t even had chance to look at him.

The bile started to rise, you looked around and saw a trash can, leaning over it and vomited into the piles of used coffee cups and candy wrappers.

The hunt for a bottle of water at a con hadn’t been something you would think would take so long; a lot of the vendors had already sold out, others the line was so long it would have taken you longer to get the water than the queue for the con in the first place. It seemed as if everyone was walking against you, or you were going against the flow of them, but when you finally got your water you drained the entire bottle, soothing your bile parched throat. Wiping your mouth with the back of your hand you heard an announcement over the PA system;

“We apologise, but the Jensen Ackles panel won’t be broadcast out of the auditorium due to technical issues”

“WHAT?” you grabbed your wrist, looking at your watch as your eyes went wide. You’d been so dazed by your photo op and feeling ill afterwards you had forgotten about the panel. You needed a drink, and something stronger than water.

Chris adjusted the helmet of his costume as he looked in the mirror. The men’s room was quiet, the main panel of the con was on and he couldn’t bring himself to sit in the same room as the guy that had won the role that had made him millions; of fans and dollars.

After not getting the Captain America role Chris had continued to take bit parts and small independent movies. He was recognised occasionally but he hadn’t hit the big time. In fact there were months when there was nothing coming in and it was only after someone had asked him to fill in at a kids party where one of the superhero guys had fallen sick at the last minute did the idea of cosplaying come to him. Now however he was well known in cosplay circles, even getting paid for some appearances. He was called a natural for the role, but that was the hardest to hear. He’d worked hard with his costumer and within just a few weeks of the latest movie coming out they’d successfully recreated the amazing Stealth Suit in its darker colours.

Checking his pants for his wallet he decided he needed a drink, and something stronger than a soda.

Nodding to the bartender, you thanked him as he set the beer down in front of you before he went to the far end of the bar to pull the latest load of glasses out of the dishwasher. You sat picking at the label and tracing patterns in the condensation that gathered on the cool glass. You were vaguely aware of other people coming and going, and when the barstool next to you was taken you didn’t look up.

“What’ll it be Cap?”

The bartender’s greeting drew your attention from your drink, casting your gaze to your side and your breath was sucked from your body. You watched as the man set his helmet onto the surface of the bar before nodding to what you were drinking;

“Same as the lady please”

Your eyes travelled from where his hand sat on the countertop of the bar up the dark sleeve of his stealth suit, taking in his wide shoulders and up to the fluffy dark blonde hair, slightly messed up from where he’d been wearing the helmet. You couldn’t help it, but you were staring. Your jaw was hanging low as he turned slowly to you, his blue eyes sparkling with just the faintest hint of green as he looked at you and a self-conscious smile tugged at the corner of his mouth;

“Hi…”

“You’re… you’re…”

“No, just cosplaying…” he turned back to his beer for a moment until you finally found your voice

“No. You’re Chris”

He set his beer on the countertop and turned to you, this time a genuine smile on his face;

“Do we know each other?”

“Well…” you blushed; “We spoke on Instagram” He cocked an eyebrow, but his attention didn’t waiver from you as you continued; “You’re ‘AlmostCap’, right? You posted about wanting advice on how to dye leather boots a deeper colour? I messaged you with the details of the dyes costumiers use”

His face broke into a wide smile;

“Oh yeah, that really worked! How did you know that?”

“Majored in theatre design at college”

“Well that titbit of knowledge brought the whole costume together” he motioned to his stealth suit and you couldn’t help but to look him up and down; “Without you I wouldn’t look this good”

You snorted back a laugh;

“I’m sure you look just a good without the suit”

Bringing your beer to your lips you took a sip, not realising Chris had moved closer until his lips brushed against your ear;

“Would you like to find out?”

The hotel room door crashed against the wall, the metal doorknob leaving a dent in the drywall. Chris had you pressed up against it, one hand holding you flush with his chest as his other hand blindly reached out for the door to close it. As soon as his fingertips grasped the cool wood he threw it shut with a thud that reverberated through the room.

Your hands clawed at Chris’s costume, desperate to find purchase, something, anything to hang onto and anchor yourself as he kissed you so hard you saw spangled stars. He’d put his costume helmet back on for the rather quick walk through the convention to the hotel where you were staying. His lips traced patterns over your cheek before he pressed kisses down your neck, whispering as he went;

“I don’t normally do this…”

“Me neither…

“...especially in costume…”

“Oh Chris…Cap…”

“It’s Captain tonight, Princess”

His fingers had found their way to the buttons on the front of your dress, skilfully plucking each one from its grasp on the thin cotton fabric, before his still gloved hand roughly cupped your breasts. As his lips found yours again, he groaned into your mouth as he weighed your breasts in his large hands, the rough leather against the lace of your bra sending chills through you. If Chris had a Captain kink you weren’t about to say no, hell, it would be one of your biggest fantasies.

You found yourself being manhandled towards the bed, Chris’s kisses hard and ravenous, and when he wasn’t kissing you his tongue was doing the most devilish things on your skin. The bed touched the back of your knees and you were falling back onto the covers, Chris following seconds later as he pressed you into the mattress. With a thick thigh he pushed your legs apart, the rough Kevlar fabric of his suit brushing against the delicate skin of your soft skin as his fingers sought out the juncture of thighs. The brush of the harsh leather of his fingerless gloves made you groan into his mouth as he tugged your panties to the side and his thumb found your clit. Rubbing small circles, he teased it from its hood, before his fingers slid through your folds to ease some of your slick moisture from you to smooth his efforts.

When his lips left yours you chased after them, but his voice made you settle back against the bed and open your eyes;

“Uh-uh… stay there Princess”

You watched as he brought his fingers to his mouth, before his kiss bruised lips closed around his glistening digits and he moaned as he tasted you;

“You taste amazing”

“Umm… thank you?”

“Here…”

He brought his hand to your mouth and you grasped it as you sucked gently on just the fingertips, watching as Chris’s already lust blown pupils widened even further;

“Jesus fucking Christ, your tongue…”

Letting go of his fingers with an audible pop, you pushed yourself up onto your elbows, resting on one arm as you slid a hand between your bodies and palmed his erection through his suit;

“What about my tongue?” you grinned before you tugged him down to lay beside you.

Pushing up onto your knees you ran your hand down his chest and stomach, the costume warm from his body heat and firm to the touch. Your fingers clawed at his suit to try and find the zipper, and after thirty seconds of searching you let out a huff;

“Ok, how the fuck to I get in here?”

With a low chuckle Chris reached down and lifted a hidden Velcro flap that revealed the button and the top of the zipper, and you eagerly tugged the pants of his suit open. The large bulge in his boxers immediately filled the space of the open zipper, and you found yourself nuzzling against the hardness that the soft jersey fabric could hardly contain. Pressing open mouthed kisses to the hard shaft through the fabric, you felt Chris’s hands on your head, he wasn’t pushing but you could tell he wanted you. With a smile you just about tugged his boxers down enough to free his cock, the thick shaft standing proud from the fly of his stealth suit. You wrapped your hands around it, the flesh hot to touch and pumped him slowly.

“Ah fuck Princess…”

“Yes Captain?”

“Please…”

He sounded wrecked, and as you leant forwards and licked at the bead of clear precum that was pooling at the tip you not only heard but felt the low rumble of his moan of appreciation. Wrapping your lips around the tip you started to suck, your tongue working over the hot smooth flesh as your fist worked up and down, pumping him slowly as you let the saliva pool in your mouth so you could take him deeper. In a moment when you pulled off to take a breath Chris’s hands were suddenly on your hips, moving you until you were kneeling on the bed and straddling his shoulders, and for a moment you squealed where his sudden strength had moved you with such ease.

“Gotta taste you…” he muttered from beneath the skirt of your dress, his hands smoothing over the globes of your ass and you could feel his breath hot on your skin. His fingers tugged your panties to the side and he was pulling you down onto his mouth, his tongue swiping through your soaked folds.

For a moment you lost yourself, Chris’s efforts driving you closer to orgasm than you thought was possible, but you found your senses and leant forwards again, taking him as deep as you could and you felt his moan deep in your cunt as he almost came on the spot. Working your fingers into his suit you cupped his balls, feeling them tight and hot in your hand as you sucked hard on his cock. At the same time you felt Chris drive his tongue into your soaked hole and his thumb sought out your clit. Your orgasm was rapidly approaching, and you could feel your legs start to shake. The harder he drove forwards the deeper you took him into your mouth. You heard a muffled cry from between your thighs and you felt that first tremble of the thick vein that ran the length of his cock. At the same time you felt his fingers dance over the crack of your ass, one finger pressing lightly against your dark rose and you were cumming over his face as he pumped thick ropes of cum down your throat.

When your legs were about to give out you tactfully rolled to the side, laying on the bed next to Chris as he fought to catch his breath. With laboured efforts he wrenched his helmet off, and you propped yourself up on your elbows to watch as he started to fumble with his costume;

“Gotta get out of this…”

Watching a hot guy strip was not something you’d experienced before, and a hot guy dressed as Captain America? Well that was hitting all your buttons in one go. You smiled as Chris was muttering to himself;

“Fuckin’ suit, so fuckin’ hot… fuckin’ drenched in sweat…”

When he was down to just his pants you finally spoke up;

“Need a hand there Captain?”

Chris looked up and grinned;

“You mind if I use your shower?”

“Sure thing, it’s all yours…”

Chris started for the small bathroom door, his utility pants hanging low on his hips before he paused and turned, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth;

“Wanna join me?”

Showering with a guy you had literally just met was a surreal experience. The comfort and security of being partially clothed during a hook-up was completely stripped from you as you stood in the small shower enclosure the hotel room offered. Chris had looked absolutely sinful as he had stood beneath the cascading water; his skin patterned with multiple tattoos and just the right amount of chest hair that made you want to run your fingers through it as the hot water coursed over his body. Your fingers had trailed down over his hard stomach, tracing the trail of hair that led to his thick cock hanging heavy between his muscled thighs.

His lips had met yours eagerly again, and he soon had you pressed against the wall, his leg wedged between your thighs as you ground yourself against the firm muscle. Chris’s hands found your ass and eagerly pulled you hard against him, trapping his now angry cock between your bodies;

“Fuck… you’re so fuckin’ sexy” he muttered against your ear, his fingers digging into your asscheeks; “You gonna cum for me Princess? Soak my thigh?”

“Yes Chris, please…”

“What do you need Princess?”

“Something…. Just more…”

He pulled back from you, searching your expression for something, anything as he chose his words;

“I can give you more…” The depth of tone sent a shudder down your spine; “I’m gonna ask you this and you can say no, and I won’t walk out that door if you say no, but do you like ass play?”

You growled. You god-damn growled like a feral wildcat, nodding eagerly;

“Yes Chris… fuck, yes…”

He captured your lips for another fierce kiss as his hands slid over your ass and one finger trailed up the seam of your cheeks before pressing gently against your rear;

“Now Princess” he muttered against your lips; “I haven’t got any lube in here so it’ll just be a gentle press, you tell me if you want me to stop”

You nodded, biting your lip as he pushed forwards, one hand gripping your hip as he slid you up and down his soaked thigh, the other pressing gently but insistently against your back door.

Just that stimulation alone was enough, and you were cumming hard, your head pressed against the cool tiles as Chris sucked a hickey into your neck.

You stood there panting as you tried to regain your composure, Chris holding you tight in his arms as he gently caressed you as you finally came to your senses. Nuzzling against his neck you felt him push his hips forward, his thick cock hard again against your hip;

“Ready for another round?”

“Anything for you Cap” you grinned.

The pair of you had fallen back onto the bed, half dry and oblivious to anything other than pleasure. Body heat rising, you felt your back naturally arch as Chris lay on top of you, pulling his knee up to part your legs further and you could feel his thick length laying hot and hard against your soaked folds. As his other leg pushed up and parted your thighs even further, you felt that first nudge of his tip at your soaked entrance, your legs instinctively wrapping themselves around his waist and with one firm squeeze you felt his breach your body and slide into you.

The base noise that escaped your throat as you felt each glorious inch stretch your velvet walls was music to Chris’s ears, and he let you take the lead even though he was the one on top, letting your body grow accustomed to his size. His lips brushed against your ear as he spoke softly;

“You’re doing so good Princess, feel so fuckin’ amazing, takin’ me so deep”

You slowly relaxed your thighs grip on his waist and Chris started to move, sliding his hips back as he slid out, before pushing slowly back in. Propping himself up either side of you, you watched as his arms bulged as he looked down and watched as he pulled out again, your wetness liberally coating him.

With his tip just notched inside you whined at the loss, before with a powerful thrust he filled you completely;

“Holy FUCK!”

“Do you like that Princess? Like my thick dick splitting you open?”

“Fuck Chris, yes, do it again… please!” you whined.

The gorgeous man above you grinned down, seemingly turned on by your begging, and with a loud grunt he started to pile drive into you, his impressive girth stretching you in all the right ways, the slight upward curve to his shaft making your g-spot his number one target with every push. The man was a demon in bed, fucking you hard as he pressed kisses to your chest and breasts, all whilst uttering the dirtiest things about how good you felt, how well you were taking his dick. You begged for more and he eagerly gave it, fucking you through one orgasm before chasing another. His thrusts started to get sloppy, his hips stuttering and he cursed quietly under his breath;

“Fuck… I’m gonna cum soon…”

“Cum inside me… I’m on the pill…”

He pushed a hand between your bodies, rubbing hard circles against your clit and soon you were coming, your orgasm triggering his, and you as your body milked the cum from his body you both felt like you had found heaven.

With a grunt Chris rolled to your side, his dick sliding out of your soaked channel and he lay on the bed, his head propped up on one elbow, his dick full and swollen at your hip, still shining with your combined fluids. Your body trembled with the aftershocks of your intense orgasm, and you practically purred when Chris gently ran his fingertips over your breasts;

“That was fuckin’ amazing… I’m probably going about this the wrong way, but can I buy you dinner?”

“That’d be nice”

Dinner had been a fun affair; you had redressed, and Chris had worn his stealth suit pants but just wore the thin Under Armour undershirt instead of the full suit. Although the hotel was well used to people in cosplay costumes during the conventions using their facilities, Chris didn’t want to draw attention to himself, instead he wanted his sole attention to be able to be on you rather than people asking for photos. Throughout your meal the conversation had been fun and light, Chris telling you how he had in fact auditioned for the Marvel role but didn’t envy the craziness that came with the now worldwide recognition that Jensen had to put up with. You had explained how you now worked for a theatrical costumer’s agency on the West Coast, but had heard about some openings for a new series production out of Vancouver.

Chris laughed softly;

“Typical… I fall for a girl that lives on the opposite side of the country”

“You… you’ve fallen for me?”

Chris paused, resting his hand over yours;

“I’m sorry, I’m kinda sappy when it comes to relationships… and I gotta be honest, when I saw you at the bar, I recognised you from your Instagram and when you helped me… I was trying to play it cool…” he took a deep breath; “I hope I’m not scaring you off…”

Leaning forward you pressed a kiss to his cheek;

“No… it’s nice… its more than nice…”

Once the meal was over the pair of you stood in the foyer, unsure what to do before Chris pointed out the rest of his costume was in your room.

“Where are you staying tonight?”

“I was meant to be crashing on a friends couch”

Grinning you pulled him close;

“Did you want a bed rather than a couch?”

“Fuck yes”

Minutes later you were crashing in the door to your room, Chris’s hands and lips trying to cover every inch of your body, and this time with the knowledge of how his costume worked you knew exactly how to get his pants open, tugging them to the floor as you pushed him into one of the chairs and knelt at his booted feet. With his dick in your mouth he was soon hard again, but that was when he took control, standing and moving you until you were knelt on the soft chair arms looking out of the high rise window over the convention center and city below, the lights of the city oblivious as he flipped your skirt up and pulled your panties down, and filled you with one smooth thrust;

“Fuck… this pussy is fuckin’ perfect, you feel like heaven…”

Wrapping his strong arms around you he pulled you flush with his hard chest, sucking at your neck as his dick rubbed so beautifully against your g-spot you were coming again, screaming out your release as Chris pulled out and lifted you, pulling you to your feet before you found yourself pressed against the wall and he filled you again.

Clinging to his wide shoulders you felt him filling you over and over, your pleasure climbing higher than you ever thought possible. Chris’s strong arms were holding you up, his large hands gripping your ass as he fucked you into the wall, your legs wrapped around his narrow waist;

“Chris, I’m gonna cum…”

“That’s it, cum for me, let me feel that pussy milking me as I fill you up… you feel so good, I’m never letting this pussy go…”

As you came so did he, your walls squeezing him so tight he thought he may pass out from the sheer pleasure. For the longest time he just held you there, your bodies joined until Chris’s dick softened enough to slip out of you. Letting your feet fall to the ground you kissed as you made your way to the bed, falling onto the mattress before wrapping the covers around your flushed bodies, falling asleep soon after.

The sound of a phone ringing pulled you from sleep, the warm body next to you grumbling at the sound before it rapidly jumped out of bed;

“Fuck, that’s my phone”

Through bleary eyes you watched Chris’s naked ass as he rummaged through the piles of clothing on the floor, finding his phone and answering it just in time;

“Yeah… uh-huh… for real?! Yeah absolutely! Send me the details, I’ll be there!”

You watched as he listened a little longer before ending the call, turning to you and he had the biggest smile on his face;

“I might have gotten a part!”

“Really? That’s amazing!”

“Yeah, they want me to do some screen tests with a possible co-star, see if there’s chemistry”

Jumping out of bed you ran and hugged him, kissing him deeply as he carried you back to the bed;

“I feel like celebrating… how about breakfast in bed?”

“Ok, I’ll call room serv… oh…”

Chris was pushing your legs apart and kissing up your inner thigh, and that’s when you realised he was talking about a different kind of breakfast in bed. As you lay back and enjoyed the magic he could perform with his tongue, you blissed out from pleasure.

Three Weeks Later

Chris finished the last scene, the director calling cut and he grinned as he looked at his castmates. None of them could quite believe how they were there, standing in a cold and rainy British Columbia small town, with writers and directors that had been trying to get their series picked up for years.

The rest of the cast of ‘Supernatural’ was a small ensemble, and having been given the role of the older brother; Dean Winchester, Chris felt at home with the role and had been given he contract straight after his screen test with his on screen brother Sam. Laughing with the actor that played Sam - a native New Yorker by the name of Sebastian - the two of them had immediately clicked and their friendship and on screen chemistry shone through the camera.

“Hey Evans, Stan!”

The sound of the producer’s voice caught Chris’s attention;

“Yeah?”

They need you two back at the studio, costume fitting”

“Sure thing”

The sound of the small doorbell that had been fitted on the counter drew your attention from the racks in the back room, calling out for your new arrival that you’d be out in a second. The job you’d applied for in Vancouver had pulled through, and it was your first week. A new show that needed a lot of men’s casual wear, yet things like jeans and jackets needed seams strengthened for fight scenes and pockets added for prop weapons. You were yet to meet the two main stars of the show, the casting having not been fully finalised until just days ago, and everything was hush-hush until it was going to be announced at one of the late summer conventions.

Dumping the armfuls of clothing onto the counter you turned and almost fainted;

“Chris?!”

For a second he looked in shock before he vaulted the counter, and took you into his arms;

“You’re here? You’re really here?”

“You’re the star?! You didn’t tell me!”

You kissed him deeply, before a quiet cough from behind Chris drew your attention, Chris turning;

“Seb, I want you to meet the girl I was telling you about”

The other guy raised an eyebrow;

“You’re THE girl? Wow, it’s a pleasure to meet you” he held his hand out over the counter and you shook it, Chris still holding you in his arms; “I’m Sebastian but everyone calls me Seb”

Looking at the two of them you knew in that moment the show was going to be a hit, and you looked forward to making these two look even better on screen… if that was even possible.

#chris evans #chris evans fanfiction #chris evans smut #chris evans x reader #chris evans x you

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arcticdementor · 3 years ago

Link

“Hey bro! Check out this Nike ad!” This was my entry point into a new world.

…

Since Carlos had lived mostly outside the United States, he was able to follow soccer on a level I’d never encountered in my hometown. Back then, before social media and the advent of scarf-wearing Northwestern fútbol hipsters, big-time European soccer was like the metric system: Known to almost all but ourselves. But Carlos knew, and immediately used LimeWire to curate me a massive archive of 1990s through early 2000s soccer highlights. What was I doing in the world without them?

Oddly enough, in trying to inculcate me in soccer fandom, he started not with game highlights, but with the advertisements. Yes, Carlos was an educator and a voluntary footsoldier for Big Apparel. Going in, I had no clue about high-quality, internationally popular Nike soccer ads. The ads, written by the legendary Wieden+Kennedy firm, were miniature movies, films that were often creatively daring but also quite funny. The most popular of these ads might be “Good vs. Evil,” from 1996, where Nike’s best soccer players team up to play Satan’s literal army. The blending of sacrilege, theology and comedy just worked, like a more ambitious version of Space Jam that somehow took itself less seriously than Space Jam.

…

Yes, I know ads aren’t supposed to be high art. I understand that they are the purest distillation of manipulative greed. And yet, they sometimes are culturally relevant generational touchstones. While Nike was weaving soccer into enduring pop culture abroad, it was having a similar kind of success with basketball and baseball stateside. These ads weren’t just pure ephemera. Michael Jordan’s commercials were so good that, as he nears age 60, his sneaker still outsells any modern athlete’s. “Chicks dig the long ball” is a phrase (a) that can get you sent to the modern HR department and b) whose origins are fondly remembered by most American men over the age of 35.

Modern Nike ads will never be so remembered. It’s not because we’re so inundated with information these days, though we are. And it’s not because today’s overexposed athletes lack the mystique of the 1990s superstars, though they do. It’s because the modern Nike ads are beyond fucking terrible.

…

They’re bad for many causes, but one in particular is an incongruity at the company’s heart. Nike, like so many major institutions, is suffering from what I’ll call Existence Dissonance. It’s happening in a particular way, for a particular reason and the result is that what Nike is happens to be at cross-purposes from what Nike aspires to be.

…

For all the talk of a racial reckoning within major industries, Nike’s main problem is this: It’s a company built on masculinity, most specifically Michael Jordan’s alpha dog brand of it. Now, due to its own ambitions, scandals, and intellectual trends, Nike finds masculinity problematic enough to loudly reject.

This rejection is part of the broader culture war, but it’s accelerating due to an arcane quirk in the apparel giant’s strange restructuring plan, announced in June. Under the leadership of new CEO John Donahoe, Nike is moving away from its classic discrete sports categories (Nike Basketball, Nike Soccer, etc.) in favor of a system where all products are shoveled into one of three divisions: men’s, women’s and kids’. Obviously Nike made clothing tailored to the specificities of all these groups before, but now, Nike is emphasizing gender over sport. Gone is the model of the product appealing to basketball fans because they are basketball fans. It’s now replaced by a model of, say, the product appealing to women because they are women.

And hey, women buy sneakers too. Actually, women buy the lion’s share of clothing in the United States. While women shoppers are market dominant in nearly every aspect of American apparel, the clothing multinational named after a Greek goddess happens to be a major exception. At Nike, according to its own records, men account for roughly twice as much revenue as women do.

You might see that stat and think, “Well, this means that Nike will prioritize men over women in its new, odd, gendered segmentation of the company.” That’s not necessarily how this all works, thanks to a phenomenon I’ll call Undecided Whale. The idea is that a company, as its aims grow more expansive, starts catering less to the locked-in core customer and more to a potential whale which demonstrates some interest. Sure, you can just keep doing what’s made you rich, but how can you even focus on your primary business with that whale out there, swimming so tantalizingly close? The whale, should you bring it in, has the potential to enrich you far more than your core customers ever did. And yeah yeah yeah, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but those were birds. This is a damned whale! And so you start forgetting about your base.

You can see this dynamic in other places. For the NBA, China is its Undecided Whale. It could be argued that the NBA fixates more on China than on America, even if the vast majority of TV money comes from U.S. viewership. The league figures it has more or less hit its ceiling in its home country, so China becomes an obsession as this massive, theoretical growth engine.

…

Here’s the main issue for Nike in this endeavor: The company, as a raison d’être, promotes athletic excellence. While women are among Nike’s major sports stars, the core of high-level performance, in the overwhelming majority of sports, is male. Every sane person knows that, though nobody in professional class life seems rude enough to say so. Obviously, there’s the observable reality of who tends to set records and there’s also the pervasive understanding that testosterone, the main male sex hormone, happens to give unfair advantages to the athletes who inject it.

Speaking of which, there’s a famous This American Life episode from 2002 where the public radio journos actually test their own testosterone levels. The big joke of the episode is just how comically low their T levels are. Sure, you would stereotype bookish public radio men in this way, and yet the results are on the nose enough to shock.

As a nerdy media-weakling type, I can relate to the stunning realization that you’ve been largely living apart from T. Before working in the NBA setting, I was an intern in the cubicles of Salon.com’s San Francisco office, around the time it was shifting from respectable online magazine into inane outrage content mill. Going from that setting to the NBA locker room was some jarring whiplash, like leaving the faculty lounge for a pirate ship. To quote Charles Barkley on the latter culture, “The locker room is sexist, racist, and homophobic … and it’s fun and I miss it.”

…

The “Good vs. Evil” ad boasts a “Like” to “Dislike” ratio of 20-to-1 on YouTube. On June 17th of 2021, Nike put out an ad ahead of the Euro Cup that referenced “Good vs. Evil” as briefly as it could. In this case, a little child popped his collar and used Cantona’s catchphrase. As of this writing, the new ad has earned a thousand more punches of the Dislike than of the Like button.

When you see it, it’s no surprise that the latest Euro Cup ad is disliked. I mean, you have to look at this shit. I know we’re so numb to the ever-escalating emanations of radical chic from our largest corporations, but sometimes it’s worth pausing just to take stock and gawk.

…

But today we are in the land of new football, where we take dictatorial direction from less-than-athletic minors. After her announcement, we are treated to a montage of different people who offer tolerance bromides.

“There are no borders here!”

“Here, you can be whoever you want. Be with whoever you want.”

(Two men kiss following that line, because subtlety isn’t part of this new world order.)

Then, a woman who appears to be breastfeeding under a soccer shirt, threatens, in French, “And if you disagree …”

And this is when the little boy gives us Cantona’s “au revoir” line before kicking a ball out of a soccer stadium, presumably because that’s what happens to the ignorant soccer hooligan. He gets kicked out for raging against gay men kissing or French ladies breastfeeding or somesuch. Later, a referee wearing a hijab instructs us, “Leave the hate,” before narrator girl explains, “You might as well join us because no one can stop us.”

Is that last line supposed to be … inspiring? That’s what a movie villain says, like if Bane took the form of Stan Marsh’s sister. Speaking of which, was this ad actually written by the creators of South Park as an elaborate prank? It’s certainly more convincing as an aggressive parody of liberals than as a sales pitch. Why, in anything other than a comedic setup, is a woman breastfeeding in a big-budget Euro Cup ad?

It’s tempting to fall into the pro-vanguardism template the boomers have handed down to us and sheepishly say, “I must be getting old, because this seems weird to me,” but let’s get real. You dislike this ad because it sucks. You are having a natural, human response to shitty art. This a hollow sermon from a priest whose sins were in the papers. Nobody is impressed by what Nike’s doing here. Nobody thinks Nike, a multinational famous for its sweatshops, is ushering us into an enlightened utopia. Sure, most media types are afraid to criticize the ad publicly. You might inspire suspicion that what you’re secretly against is men kissing and women breastfeeding, but nobody actually likes the stupid ad. No college kid would show it to a new friend he’s trying to impress, and it’s hard to envision a massive cohort of Gen Z women giving a shit about this ad either.

Now juxtapose that ad not just against the classics of the 1990s but also the 2000s products that preceded the Great Awokening. Compare it to another Nike Euro Cup advertisement, Guy Ritchie’s “Take It to the Next Level.”

…

Here’s the problem, insofar as problems are pretended into existence by our media class: The ad is very, very male. Really, what we are watching here is a boyhood fantasy. Our protagonist gets called up to the big show, and next thing you know he’s cavorting with multiple ladies, and autographing titties to the chagrin of his date. He can be seen buying a luxury sports car and arriving at his childhood home in it as his father beams with pride. Training sessions show him either puking from exhaustion or playing grab-ass with his fellow soccer bros. This is jock life, distilled. Art works when it’s true and it’s true that this is a vivid depiction of a common fantasy realized.

Nike’s highly successful “Write the Future” ad (16,000 Likes, 257 Dislikes) works along similar themes.

…

The recent Olympic ads were especially heavy on cringe radical chic, and might have stood out less in this respect if the athletes themselves mirrored that tone on the big stage. Not so much in these Olympics. It seems as though Nike made the commercials in preparation for an explosion of telegenic activism, only to see American athletes mostly, quietly accept their medals, chomp down on the gold, and praise God or country. Perhaps you could consider Simone Biles bowing out of events due to mental health as a form of activism, but overall, the athletes basically behaved in the manner they would have back in 1996.

But Nike forged onwards anyway. This ad in celebration of the U.S. women’s basketball team made some waves, getting ripped in conservative media as the latest offense by woke capital.

…

“Today I have a presentation on dynasties,” a pink-haired teenage girl tells us. “But I refuse to talk about the ancient history and drama. That’s just the patriarchy. Instead, I’m going to talk about a dynasty that I actually look up to. An all-women dynasty. Women of color. Gay women. Women who fight for social justice. Women with a jump shot. A dynasty that makes your favorite men’s basketball, football, and baseball teams look like amateurs.”

When she says, “That’s just the patriarchy,” the camera pans to a bust of (I think) Julius Caesar. At another point, the girl says, “A dynasty that makes Alexander the Great look like Alexander the Okay.” Fuck you, Classical Antiquity. Fuck you, fans of teams. You’re all just the patriarchy. Or something.

Nike could easily sell the successful American women’s basketball team without denigrating other teams, genders and ancient Mediterranean empires that have nothing to do with this. Could but won’t. The company now conveys an almost visceral need for women to triumph over men because … well, nobody really explains why, even if it has something to do with Undecided Whaling. In Nike’s tentpole Olympics ad titled “Best Day Ever,” the narrator fantasizes about the future, declaring, “The WNBA will surpass the NBA in popularity!”

…

There are theories on the emergence of woke capital, with many having observed that, following Occupy Wall Street, media institutions ramped up on census category grievance. The thinking goes that, in response to the threat of a real economic revolution, the power players in our society pushed identity politics to undermine group solidarity. Well, that was a fiendishly brilliant plan, if anyone actually hatched it.

I’m not so convinced, though, as I’m more inclined to believe that a lot of history happens by happenstance. If we’re to specifically analyze the Nike Awokening, there is a recent top-down element of a mandate for Undecided Whaling, but that mandate was preceded by a socially conscious middle class campaign within the company.

This isn’t unique to Nike, either. Given my past life covering the team that tech moguls root for, I’ve run into such people. They aren’t, by and large, ideological. Very few are messianically devoted to seeing the world through the intersectionality lens. They are, however, terrified of their employees who feel this way. The mid-tier labor force, this cohort who actually internalized their university teachings, are full of fervor and willing to risk burned bridges in favor of causes they deem righteous. The big bosses just don’t want a headline-making walkout on their hands, so they placate and mollify, eventually bending the company’s voice into language of righteousness.

…

All the guilt and atonement transference make for bad art. And so the ads suck. There’s no Machiavellian conspiracy behind the production. It’s just a combination of desperately wanting female market share and desperately wanting to move on from the publicized sins of a masculine past. So, to message its ambitions, the exhausted corporation leans on the employees with the loudest answers.

There’s a lot of interplay between Nike and Wieden+Kennedy when the former asks the latter for a type of ad, but the through line from both sides is a lot of cooks in the kitchen. Based on conversations with people who’ve worked in both environments, there’s a dearth of personnel who are deeply connected to sports. In place of a grounding in a subculture, you’re getting ideas from folks who went to nice colleges and trendy ad schools, the type of people who throw words like “patriarchy” at the screen to celebrate a gold medal victory. The older leaders, uneasy in their station and thus obsessed with looking cutting edge, lean on the younger types because the youth are confident. Unfortunately, that confidence is rooted in an ability to regurgitate liturgy, rather than generative genius. They’ve a mandate to replace a marred past, which they leap at, but they’re incapable of inventing a better future.

…

Ironically, Nike mattered a lot more in the days when its position was less dominant. Back when it had to really fight for market share, it made bold, genre-altering art. The ads were synonymous with masculine victory, plus they were cheekily irreverent. And so the dudes loved them. Today, Nike is something else. It LARPs as a grandiose feminist nonprofit as it floats aimlessly on the vessel Michael Jordan built long ago. Like Jordan himself, Nike is rich forever off what it can replicate never. Unlike Jordan, it now wishes to be known for anything but its triumphs. Nike once told a story and that story resonated with its audience. Now it’s decided that its audience is the problem. It wouldn’t shock you to learn that Carlos hated the new Nike ads I texted to him. His exact words were, “I don’t want fucking activism from a sweatshop monopoly.” He’ll still buy the gear, though, just not the narrative. Nike remains, but the story about itself has run out. Au revoir.

#ethan strauss #nike #sports #substack

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themangoyogurt · 4 years ago

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Clementine: Chapter 2

You cursed yourself as a ridiculous love ballad blared from Poe’s overpriced stereo system. All you had wanted was a night of relaxation. The marble tub in the master ensuite was already filled with hot water and a bath bomb that was so overpriced it was practically criminal. Next to the tub, a chilled glass of white wine patiently waited along the latest novel you were gobbling up.

You had stupidly decided that some calming music was the final piece to your self-care puzzle. Except, you had never used something as high-tech as what Poe’s place offered. One wrong button later, and you were ninety-percent sure that only twenty-percent of your ear drum would be functional after this fiasco.

To make matters worse, there was angry knocking at the front door. The aggressive sound was so furious that it somehow cut through the music, causing you to flush in embarrassment as you ran to get the door. You were so frazzled from breaking the sound system and subsequently upsetting your neighbor that you even forgot to grab a robe on your way out.

The door flung open to reveal a man so large and imposing, you lost your breath.

He was in nothing except a single pair of boxers and fuzzy slippers. Despite his distinctly disheveled (and frankly, sloppy) look, he was handsome. Handsome, built like a refrigerator, and angry. Ogling your neighbor would do no good if he murdered you.

Except, one moment he looked furious and the next, perplexed. Normally, you’d bristle if any man so obviously gave you a once over, but the way his mouth comically hung open made you less offended.

“Clementine,” was all he uttered.

The two of you stared at each other in silence, when the start of yet another pop song interrupted the moment. You startled to attention and rushed to explain, “I am so sorry about the disturbance. I can’t figure out how to work Poe’s stupid stereo and now the thing won’t shut off!”

The stranger peered around your shoulder and a hardened gaze returned to his face. He gritted out, “And where’s Poe to help you out?”

Your brow furrowed, and you could have sworn that he almost looked bitter at the statement. Deciding not to get into it with a stranger, you politely replied, “He’s flying right now. I’m just housesitting while he’s gone.”

The man softened ever so slightly at the response and straightened up. “I think we have the same system. I could help you turn it off.”

“Oh thank goodness,” you breathed in relief, quickly stepping aside to let him in. The stranger seemed to know his way around the gigantic apartment, and you assumed that his layout was either the same or he’d been here before.

Awkwardly shuffling behind him, you timidly supplied your name in an attempt to start a conversation. He merely grunted out, “Kylo.” He didn’t even spare you a glance as he busied himself with tapping at a seriously sci-fi looking box.

After a few minutes of strained silence, the music finally cut out. The sudden quietness was so strong your ears nearly rang from the lack of sound. “Uhm, thank you! Can I make you a mug of tea or something?” you ventured, politeness outweighing the sheer awkwardness as you realized you were two half-naked strangers staring at each other.

He shuffled a bit before giving a terse nod.

Jeez, nobody’s forcing him to hang out with me, you thought in response to his frosty reaction.

Speaking of frosty, you noticed his eyes zeroing in on your rather pointed chest, causing you to turn pink at the neck. Thankfully, you had left a sweatshirt thrown over the couch. Snatching up the thick fleece garment, you tugged it over your head and led Kylo to the kitchen.

Kylo followed with heavy steps, and made himself right at home as he settled on a stool pulled up against a bar area facing the kitchen. Two mugs were pulled from a cabinet and quickly filled with steaming hot water. The liquid reminded you of the bath now gone to waste, but one look at the handsome man gazing at you made it all worth it.

A mug of chamomile was slid across the marble top and into Kylo’s hands before you joined him on the stool to his left.

“Sorry again about the music,” you muttered.

Kylo ran a hand through his hair, dark locks falling like Fall leaves. “It’s fine. It was an accident. So...you’re a house-sitter?”

You laughed, “Unofficially. I just moved to town, and I don’t have a place yet. Poe’s an old friend from college, and he just started some sort of travel show that’s gonna keep him busy for at least four months. I get to stay for free, and he doesn’t have to worry about his house going to shit.”

Kylo nodded, not surprised that the dashing pilot somehow landed himself a deal to host a travel show. He also came from money and had already made a name for himself jet-setting around the globe piloting his own private jet.

You gave him a cute little head tilt and asked, “And what about you? What’s your story?”

For the first time since he left the First Order, Kylo felt embarrassed. Deciding to fall back on vagueness he replied, “Ah, early retirement.” Women liked mysterious men, right?

He was surprised as you let out a low whistle. “Retiring in a place like this? You must’ve had one hell of a job to retire from.” You blew the steam away from your mug and took a long sip.

Kylo frowned and folded his arms across the tabletop. “And what about you? It’s a Wednesday and you’re blaring Taylor Swift near midnight.” You knew that he wasn’t being defensive, despite a slight accusatory tinge to his voice.

You turned to face Kylo, propping your head up on an elbow. There was something gravitational in your exchange, and your bodies had slowly inched closer and closer as you talked. By now, your knees were lightly touching, and you found yourself feeling electricity at the subtle touch.

He laughed as you playfully jabbed a finger in his chest. “I’ll have you know that I do, in fact, have a job! Have you ever heard of Hanna Hut?”

Something about you riled Kylo up, and he felt more alive than he had in the past month. Some teenaged boy part of his brain refused to admit that he had no idea what Hanna Hut was, hoping to impress the pretty girl sitting next to him. Instead, he rolled his eyes and scoffed, “Of course I have. And what’s it to you?”

His resolve slowly dissolved as a silent minute ticked by. He groaned as you finally broke the silence with a loud laugh. “A grouch who can see into the future. Amazing!” Kylo furrowed his brow, and bit back, “What are you talking about?”

“Hanna Hut doesn’t exist. At least not yet.”

Kylo furrowed his brow and pinked in embarrassment at being caught. You patted his thigh, ignoring how muscled it felt underneath your touch. His bare skin was warm and deliciously corded and taut. He stuttered out a non-reply, only earning a louder guffaw from you.

“Don’t worry. It will exist. Hopefully very soon! I’m opening my very own coffeeshop-slash-bookstore combo right here in town!” You couldn’t help but gush in excitement at your very new business venture.

It had taken years of careful planning and budgeting. Years of forgoing mimosas with the girls and squirreling away every dime. Literally. Years of accepting overtime, and years of enduring doubt from friends and family alike.

No more though. You had finally gathered together enough money to launch your dream business. The moment your bank account looked healthy enough, you threw up digits and peaced out of your tiny good-for-nothing town.

Finally, after years of grit and sweat, things seemed to be looking up. With free lodging for the next few months, you didn’t even have to stress about finding an apartment. Your deal with Poe worked out perfectly so that you could spend all of your time and energy looking for the perfect space to launch Hanna Hut.

Your excitement was infectious, as Kylo couldn’t help but flash a wide smile matching the one on your face. “And where can I visit this newfound ‘coffee-slash-bookstore’ venture of yours?” he asked, genuinely curious and interested in the concept.

“Well...I’m still looking for the perfect storefront. I think I might have found it, though! In fact, I’m meeting with the landlord tomorrow afternoon.” You quickly pulled out your cellphone to show him the airy space located in Greenwich Village. It was beautiful, but pricey. Still, you convinced yourself that the price tag would be worth it.

Kylo quietly listened as you continued to babble and swipe through photos.

“It’s a little expensive, but I think it’ll be worth it! The landlord said that if I signed a ten year lease, he’d cut me a deal on rent. I think that should help, especially since there are so many fees and he needs three months rent up front...”

The more you prattled, the more agitated Kylo became. A ten year lease? As cute as you were, cuteness didn’t necessarily equate to business acumen. He found your naiveté equal parts adorable and concerning. Although you were a stranger, he didn’t want to watch yet another out of towner get swindled and eaten up by the city.

He cleared his throat, and interrupted, “Ah, if you want, I could come with you to negotiate tomorrow. I hope I’m not overstepping, but I am a lawyer...”

You perked up and replied, “That would be amazing! But I don’t know if I could pay you. Judging by the fact that you live here, I don’t think I could afford your rates...”

“Ah, well I am retired so it’s not like I’ve got much going on for me. How about you buy me a coffee and we’ll call it even?”

He flinched in surprise when you practically leapt out of your seat. Clasping his hands in your own, you gushed, “Deal! Thank you so much, Kylo!” Kylo looked down at where your hands joined, marveling at how much smaller you were compared to him. Mustering up as much courage possible, he nodded and flashed you a smile.

Just like that, Kylo found himself looking forward to something for the first time in years.

#kylo ren x reader #kylo ren x you #kylo ren #reader insert #modern au #clementine

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qqueenofhades · 5 years ago

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Hi there. I've been scrolling through your "school stuff" tag but thought I'd ask directly - how did you find the transition to actually moving outside of the U.S. for your PhD? I'm looking at something similar and I'm wondering about your experience with the logistics (finding somewhere to live, visa, etc!). Thanks in advance, and congrats on being a doctor!

Oh lord. Why would you do that to yourself? I feel like that tag is mostly just intense kvetching, bogglingly obscure nitpicking complaints, and existential despair, and/or yelling at various institutions and/or people who could not do their god damn jobs. If you have read that and still actually want my advice, I salute you. I’m presuming you’re asking in regard to the UK, since it’s the only experience I can speak on, so hopefully that’s applicable?

In my case, I studied in the UK for a year as an undergraduate, at Oxford, so I was already familiar with the process (at least somewhat) when it came time to do it again for the PhD. Upfront, we must acknowledge the ugly deformed rabid elephant in the room that is Brexit, and the idiotic reform of UK immigration policy currently ongoing. Long story short, they seem to think they can function without low-skilled migration, that the domestic UK workforce will just happily lark off to do the jobs that working-class EU migrants have been doing, that this won’t totally bomb-crater the NHS, that they can run a country by basically only allowing in PhDs in STEM making over £30,000 a year, etc… so yes, this is a complete joke of an immigration policy and it’s what happens when you elect floppy haired xenophobic douchewads and their nightmare party as prime minister! ANYWAY, they’re introducing a points-based system from 2021, which may not affect you for an application under Tier 4, but UK immigration policy is going to have a lot of very stupid reforms and you’ll want to keep on top of those. If you have an offer in hand from a UK university, it is made somewhat easier, but you’ll still need to budget for processing costs, an NHS subsidy paid in for every year you will be there (something like $300/year), and a trip to a UK visa office to have your fingerprints and biometric information taken. If you don’t live near one, that will be travel expenses and so forth. You then have a temporary visa issued for first entry into the country, and a Biometric Residence Permit which you pick up at your university.

That, at least, was the process the last time I applied for a student visa, and it may all have changed by the time you do it. As noted, there are a lot of upfront visa costs, so you’ll want to be aware of those. You need a number of supporting documents, including offer of study, proof of income or ability to financially support yourself (since most Tier 4 visas either don’t let you work or only work a limited number of hours), proof of English proficiency (as a native English speaker/person from an English-speaking country, you won’t need this), and so on. You can’t start the process before you have the offer, but you’ll want to start it as soon as possible afterward, because it can take several months, and obviously needs to be done before you can travel. You will also want to open a UK bank account as soon as you arrive, which can be done once you have your residential address and a certificate from the student services office at your university verifying that you are in fact a student there. It’s pretty difficult to pay out of non-UK accounts, at least for monthly/recurring transactions, and there are international fees. You will also want a UK phone. I still have my UK phone/phone number despite my current hiatus in America, since most carriers offer free or low-cost roaming in Europe (though subject to change with EU trade negotiations), which is nice. I pay only a little extra to have Global Roaming in North America, so I can still use my phone as if I’m in the UK. If you’re planning to be traveling, this is a nice perk to have.

As far as finding programs goes, I’m sure I don’t need to give you advice on what you’re interested in and where you’re looking. Obviously, universities in the UK are grouped as “Oxford and Cambridge” and “everyone else,” though there are also rankings within those. I have been at both of these; Oxford as an undergrad, and then I did my PhD at a large public university in the North that ranks within the top 10 in the UK. The North will be much lower, living-cost wise (actually, if you can swing it, just… don’t do it in London, the cost of living in London is out of control. Of course, if the program you really have your heart set on is in London, then go for it, but just be aware of what you’re getting into). It’s also a rule of thumb that you don’t go anywhere for a PhD unless they’re paying you. Don’t self-fund a PhD, it’s just too expensive, and any decent university will give you some kind of financial stipend. I had a scholarship that covered three years of full tuition at international rate, which was good, though I had to take out some living-cost loans. So if you’re trying to decide between two programs that have both accepted you, a situation I was also lucky enough to be in, it sounds crass, but: take the money. One university had already offered me the tuition/scholarship, while the other had accepted me but wasn’t sure about funding. So I took the one that paid the scholarship. You need every penny you can get. You will be comically, absurdly, unbelievably broke as a graduate student. I was looking back on it like “wow I really lived for four years on BUTTFUCK NOTHING.” It is not for the faint of heart; you will have financial stress along with academic pressure, and while I was lucky enough to have generous friends and family contributing to my living costs, I still barely scraped through. It is something you should be aware of.

I don’t know if you’ve studied in the UK system before (I’m assuming not), but the structure for a PhD is much less determined than in the American system. It will also vary from university to university, so it’s worth establishing contact with a potential faculty supervisor to ask questions and refine your project proposal. I made contact with my eventual supervisor at my PhD university before I actually applied there; I gave him my (much too broad and pretty unrefined) project proposal and what I was interested in, and he helped me tailor it into something that could be done in a feasible time frame and which would make use of his expertise and contribute to the field. Whatever you’re thinking about pitching as a thesis topic, you probably need to make it more specific. I don’t know what field you’re in; I’m a humanities/history person, obviously, so the rule always seems to be WRITE MORE, INFIDEL. But the point is, the UK system has much less structured time, and basically relies on you to have the self-motivation to go out and conduct the research and write it up, and if you’re someone more used to rigid requirements and classes and so forth, you might find it a little hands-off. If you’re like me and can just be set loose in your field of interest and do your own thing, you’ll like it. I feel like anyone who is serious enough about their subject to want to do a PhD has to be primarily self-motivating, but some people function better with clear guidelines, and those are not always forthcoming. I can’t count the number of times I wished my supervisors would just TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK TO DO, but they usually highlighted something and had me work to figure out how exactly to fix it. They weren’t negligent or uncaring or unsupportive, and the project became much better as a result, but yes, it’s on you to do, and it can again be frustrating.

As far as living, I didn’t try to rent a flat from afar, sight unseen, in my first year. I just registered for postgraduate campus housing, and lived with four predictably horribly messy roommates (why???!) before I managed to escape and rent a private flat for the next three years. You will need a guarantor with a UK address (i.e. not your parents in America) to sign on the lease agreement, especially if you fall below a certain income threshold, and go through the usual background checking and approval. If you want to have the place to yourself, it will be, as noted, much cheaper to find something you can afford in the North and not-London in general, though southern England and the London commuter belt will all be expensive. If you’re okay living with roommates, or you make friends during your program, it might work to room together and share costs, but I am a pathological introvert and don’t like people, so I lived by myself.

Anyway. Right now, I am in the second round of applications for a Big Deal UK postdoctoral award, which would be for three years starting this fall if I got it, at another high-ranking large public university in the south of England. (So yes, everything that I just said about how much it costs to live in London/London suburbs is me playing myself). I would be applying for a Tier 2 visa (i.e. the permanent/settlement track/full-time work visa) if I got this, which would be another barrel of laughs and different requirements from a Tier 4. That is definitely unhatched chickens which we can’t count yet, as this is a highly competitive/prestigious award and there is absolutely no guarantee that I would get it, but it would mean that I would go through the international moving/visa application process for a third time, so I would once again become too unfortunately familiar with whatever bullshittery is happening now. Le sigh.

I don’t know if any of that is helpful; hopefully so. Let me know if you have more questions, and good luck.

#school stuff #anonymous #ask

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hellyeahheroes · 5 years ago

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“If you are poor how do you have an iPhone”

This is something that was gnawing at me for several weeks by now. Very recently comicbook twitter has gone on an anti-piracy outrage when one of the indie creators found out their comic book, that same one that had to change from selling in floppies to only selling in trades due to low sales, had hundreds of thousands of views on a pirate website. Due to the respect I have for that creator, I want to preface that what I am about to discuss is not a defense of piracy per se. it is not an argument that even applies in a large scale to indie scene that by far avoids some of the issues I will be talking about.

While I would never openly condone piracy, I have found myself playing devil’s advocate on that day out of sheer anger at one very specific argument that I have seen being thrown around by people condemning piracy. The exchange usually went like this - someone would go and try to say that comics are too expensive and that person would then be mocked for posting from their iPhone or another company equivalent. Every time I saw such behavior I have called it out. In some cases, people would apologize upon me explaining why this line of argument is out of the line. But in one a person had gotten furious I dared to question them, quickly devolving to childish insults and outright toxic behavior (the fact this person is an editor at Geeks World Wide made me completely give up on that website). But that is beside the point.

I want to just make it very clear that this “argument” is rooted in classism and, quite frankly, doesn’t even work. Let us explain the latter first

1. Why You Cannot Just Buy A Single Book

First I want to give the benefit of the doubt to the people using this argument. So we will do something dreadful and talk about math. For the purpose of this argument, I’m even going to go as far as not address the fact that even if you buy an iPhone through installment payments, at one point you are supposed to just have finished paying for the hardware. Meanwhile comic books expect you to keep buying if not one title, then hopefully another effectively forever. This fact in itself breaks the whole line of argument; A person could have wrapped up paying for the iPhone long before they ended in a financial situation where they cannot afford even comics. I will be ignoring this to address what I believe to be a steel man version of the argument - the strongest possible interpretation I can imagine. But even if we assume we live in a capitalist nightmare of endless payments, the rhetorics do not hold water.

Currently, on Apple official store, the newest iPhone11 costs you 30 dollars a month, while iPhone11 Pro is for 25$. In theory, the comparison that is presented should therefore work. After all, if you can afford 25$ dollars you can easily spare $5 for a comic book, right? For that price, you could buy as much as 4 comic books each month. Except that this assumption comes from a perspective that in order to read a single comic book all you need to do is buy that one comic book. Which is not the case. Or rather, it might be a case if we’re talking about independent publishers or markets like European or manga. But is certainly not one for Marvel and DC. While the problem is better than it once was we still regularly end in a situation where, in order to understand what is going on in a single Big 2 book, you need to read several others. This is a common case with big events. Let’s take a look at recently finished Absolute Carnage

This event had the gall to ask you to buy seven books and then upped it to nine. Nine comic books roughly 5 dollars per issue is 45$. To buy all of it would be to spend the equivalent of your iPhone11 Pro fee for five months.

Someone might now say that you obviously do not need to read the entire event. But the truth is, you do not really know that when it comes to making preorders. The event comics are deliberately constructed in such a way to trick people into thinking they have to buy all of it to understand what is going on. It was true when they were humongous, reaching even a hundred issues like the first Civil War, and it is true now. And while veteran fans have learned that usually you only need to follow main series and tie-ins written by its writer, even that can be a strain on someone’s budget. It might be that this person could only afford this one, single comic book. So when they suddenly find what might be their only source of entertainment incomprehensible without paying more money, they may face a dilemma. Deny yourself your one source of joy for any duration of time from a month to half of a year. Or quickly pirate that one book you never wanted to and was never interested in buying in the first place until you had the title you were paying for effectively held hostage.

I want to underline this is not just events. The most outrageous case of this issue right now is the X-Men line since Jonathan Hickman’s takeover. Which has become so self-referential you need to read all the titles in order to understand any single one. Without doing it the books become incomprehensible. This is me speaking from experience here. I was only interested in a single title from the initial launch. But the moment I saw characters talking about events from another book in a way that assumes I’m up to speed, I dropped it.

In order to get into this so-called great new jumping-in point as it launched fans needed to first spend around $20 a month to buy two miniseries for 3 months. And as Dawn of X rolled in, the number of books rose and keeps rising. X-Men, X-Force, bi-weekly New Mutants, Excalibur and Fallen Angels already request you to invest an equivalent of the monthly price of an iPhone11. And they soon shall be joined by Wolverine, Hellions, Cable, X-Men/Fantastic Four and possibly monthly Giant-Size X-Men. Those keeping attention to the math part might have noticed we are a single series (and we are lead to believe there is more than one coming) from X-Men becoming an investment equal to paying for two separate iPhone11s each month. It is proof that the Big 2 has adopted a “more eggs, fewer baskets” mentality. This customer-unfriendly approach to storytelling seems by design prone to weeding out and turning away all but big spenders who can afford to regularly buy multiple books. it is not different from the exploitative systems we find in video games, designed to prioritize so-called “whales”, as the industry came to call people who can blow ungodly amounts of money on a game, over regular customers.

2. The Rhetoric Itself Is Flawed

However, even if the hypothetical scenario presented by people using the “why do you have an iPhone” argument was true, we need to recognize how toxic this argument is. First of all, this whole line of reasoning is out of touch and assumes that a working iPhone is a luxury, while more and more times in modern society it becomes a necessity. I live in Poland and have not encountered this issue yet, I keep hearing of people who simply cannot get a job without having an iPhone. It’s because more and more fields require you to have working company apps or use them to find new workers in the first place. The miniature computer in your hand has become such a utility tool it now is actively getting harder to operate in modern society without affording it. This line of argument only betrays that you are out of touch almost as much as a similar argument being used to claim people who have flatscreen TVs are not “really poor”. Currently, flatscreens are only TVs being produced and sold anymore, cheap for purchase and cheaper to maintain than a full-sized TV long time out of use and with spare parts likely no longer produced.

Moreover, you don’t really know how exactly that specific person’s financial situation is. It may be that yes, they can afford an iPhone out of necessity but it does require them to be on a tight budget. Maybe the phone itself is actually passed on from a family member - speaking here as someone whose every phone ever was such a gift. It may even be that the person had to work extremely hard and save up a lot to afford this phone and simply is not able to expand on their profits anymore. Or, as mentioned above, that they once could and finished paying for the last installment but have fallen on hard times ever since. The list goes on. The crux of it is that you do not know other people’s stories and have no right to hold them to some arbitrary standards without that knowledge.

Which brings me to my final point - the whole argument relies on perpetuating a myth of “properly poor” people. The made-up image of nobly suffering poor who deny themselves any and all form of luxury in life (and remember, we established that the whole argument relies on seeing modern phones as a luxury, not a necessity they have become) to save money to get themselves out of poverty. Not to mention a similar myth of “kindhearted poor” who gladly give up what little they have to help others - the kind media love to perpetuate to distract from how bad the state of society is to lead to this situation in the first place. This not only does mispresent how the whole capitalist system is rigged to make it easier to save money the higher up the financial ladder you climb, but it also does not understand human nature. Human beings aren’t machines and it is impossible to really go through every single day without some sort of relief. Sometimes it may be a video game or a dinner at a fancy restaurant. Sometimes it may be a smartphone. Or a luxury item you never plan to use but just want to have to remind you what your goal is.

Yet our society made a game out of shaming and being judgmental to every poor person who spends even the tiniest amount of money on escapism, on any sort of relief from how stressful poverty is. And, speaking as someone who had panic attacks caused by sudden financial expenses wrecking my monthly budget, it is stressful. We expect people to act as all forms of entertainment and escapism aren’t also contributing to one of our human needs, the need to simply be able to wind down for even a moment, and thus not worth spending money on. Then we judge them if they resort to illegal means to fulfill that need.

I would go as far as making the argument this is a self-perpetuating problem. This very line of thinking, that poor must be at all times miserable and them spending even the slightest amount of money on anything nice is worth scorn? it is what actively encourages them to resort to piracy even if they could afford to buy comics. They are being constantly told by society they shouldn’t buy themselves anything not essential. And then the society acts surprised when they then fulfill their needs through illegal means to save money. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

I am not making this post to defend piracy. But I think we need to seriously consider what kind of rhetorics is being used to condemn it and what it actually says about people who use it and those who silently nod in agreement.

- Admin

#Marvel #DC #Piracy

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anarchistemma · 5 years ago

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Jerry Lewis. No comedian since Charles Chaplin has been so loved and so reviled. He is America’s Dark Prince of Comedy--brilliant, bitter, passionate and deeply conflicted. A man of many demons, his cockiness conceals a labyrinth of doubts and self-destructive impulses. An American original whom Americans have never quite come to terms with, he also happens to be one of the greatest filmmakers of the latter half of the 20th century. And for this he deserves an Academy Award.

It’s not surprising that he’s never even been nominated for one. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has a tradition of snubbing comedians. The list of those whose movies failed to win a single Oscar is appallingly long and distinguished: Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, Mabel Normand, the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Abbott and Costello, Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, to name a few. The academy finally gave Keaton an honorary Oscar in 1960, and one to Stan Laurel in 1961 (after Lewis lobbied passionately on his behalf), and even one to Charlie Chaplin in 1972, bringing the once-demonized “un-American” director back to Hollywood after 20 years of exile in Europe.

Now it’s time to honor Jerry Lewis.

Lewis was a superstar in the 1950s and early ‘60s, the I Like Ike era of “The Organization Man,” when a Wonder Bread corporate monoculture force-fed an entire generation a bland diet of conformity. In a time of crew cuts and bouffant hairdos, of TV dinners, suburban tract houses, gleaming new supermarkets and the homogenized nuclear family paradigm set forth by “Father Knows Best” and “Leave It to Beaver,” Lewis’ archetypal character, “the Kid,” served as an escape valve--a personification of the American id, cavorting across TV and movie screens, acting on the anarchistic impulses his audiences felt obliged to repress.

“We used to hang out on street corners, and guys would do Jerry Lewis imitations,” says Philip Kaufman, director of “The Right Stuff” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” who came of age in the 1950s. “The way that Jerry Lewis walked, that staggering, uncoordinated adolescent walk--you could feel the American youth culture being born. . . . Lewis and Elvis had this primordial American energy.”

Lewis gradually filled his comic archetype with nuances and complexities, so that it continued to resonate on deeper and yet deeper levels. He did this by becoming what he calls “a total filmmaker,” as Chaplin and Keaton had been. When Lewis began appearing in movies in 1949, he set about learning the technical intricacies of every aspect of production. “After about a year and a half I was able to load a BNC [35mm Mitchell] camera and do anything on the set that any technician did--maybe not with the quality of a man who’s done it for 25 years, but if he got sick, I could do it,” Lewis told me in an interview in December 2003. “I know depth of field like you know your wife’s first name. . . . I therefore proceeded to own every union card in the picture business.” Along the way, he also managed to invent the video assist, which allowed him to instantly replay scenes he’d just shot--now standard equipment on most Hollywood sets.

Once he’d mastered the filmmaking process, Lewis dared to declare his independence from the studio system. He wrote, directed and starred in a series of features that he also co-financed with his own money. “I mortgaged my house a couple of times, sold two cars, I remember that!” Lewis told me. In exchange for putting up half or sometimes the entire budgets of the films he directed, he got 50% or more of the profits and a level of creative autonomy that no screen comedian had commanded since Chaplin. “I had final cut on everything,” he said.

“I would love to have achieved the level of independence that he had,” Kaufman says. “The opposite is Orson Welles. He’s a half a generation before Jerry Lewis, but he gets destroyed because he can’t control the films.”

The movies Lewis directed--including “The Bellboy” (1960), “The Ladies Man” (1961), “The Errand Boy” (1961), “The Nutty Professor” (1963) and “The Patsy” (1964)--were bizarre stream-of-consciousness concoctions packed with brilliant pantomime set pieces and surreal comic nightmare sequences, moving Rorschach inkblots that reflected Lewis’ deeply conflicted psyche. “They were not regular Hollywood films,” says director Martin Scorsese. “There were no stories. No plots. They were very dreamlike, going from one free association to the next, almost like the later Luis Bunuel pictures, like ‘The Phantom of Liberty,’ which was a dream within a dream within a dream. You know you’re in the hands of a master; you just let him take you along. His films were almost avant-garde.”

Like Buster Keaton, Scorsese says, Lewis had an uncanny ability to pour his subconscious onto a movie screen, creating phantasmagoric visions permeated with disturbing psychological undertones. Unlike Keaton, Lewis often worked in color. He urged his cinematographer, W. Wallace Kelley, to pump huge amounts of light onto his sets until the comic book hues popped off the screen. “Lewis’ use of color has influenced many filmmakers, [such as] the way David Lynch uses color, and Pedro Almodovar,” Scorsese says.

In the mid-'60s, European critics--the French, most famously, or infamously, depending on your point of view--embraced Lewis as a genius, an heir to Chaplin and Keaton. Chagrined American critics sputtered outrage. They saw Lewis as a vulgarian, a pretentious, sentimental egomaniac who was a tad less subtle than the Three Stooges, and a lot less funny. And those were the good reviews. “Mr. Lewis is a frenetic performer,” wrote Eugene Archer of the New York Times, “but he lacks a point . . . a rubber-limbed robot making faces in a void.” Harriet Van Horne of the World Telegram wrote of a Lewis performance, “you flinch from the soulless vulgarity of his spastic twitches and low-class leers.” In his 1968 book “The American Cinema,” Andrew Sarris demeaned not only Lewis, but also his fans. “Lewis appeals to unsophisticated audiences in the sticks and to ungenteel audiences in the urban slums,” Sarris wrote. “He is bigger on 42nd Street, for example, than anyplace else in the city.”

Lewis seemed to scuttle any chance that American intellectuals would change their minds by taking the fight to the enemy. He wrote nasty letters to reviewers and denounced them on television and radio. He said they were “caustic, rude, unkind and sinister. . . . They’re burying the business they’re paid by.” And in his most infamous salvo, blasted in a 1981 Los Angeles Times interview, he called them “whores.”

But beneath his belligerence one sensed the man had been deeply wounded. In a telling passage in his landmark 1971 book about moviemaking, “The Total Film-maker,” Lewis confessed: “I cannot sit at certain tables at the Directors Guild because I make what some people consider is a ‘hokey’ product. John Frankenheimer waves and hopes that no one else sees his hand, simply because I film pratfalls and spritz water and throw pies.”

In countless magazine profiles and biographies, Lewis has been vividly portrayed as a tantrum-throwing egomaniac. But there is another side. I’ve talked with many people who worked with Lewis over the years--including his longtime collaborators, writer Bill Richmond and comedienne Kathleen Freeman--who told me stories of his private acts of extraordinary kindness and generosity. Peter Bogdanovich tells of how Lewis befriended him when he was a poor, young aspiring filmmaker--lending him a car, allowing him to screen movies at Paramount and charge the cost to Lewis’ production company. “He’s been a good friend to me for more than 40 years,” Bogdanovich says. When I first interviewed Lewis a year ago, I found him to be a perceptive, articulate but deeply divided man who oscillated during the course of our one-hour conversation from laughter to anger to tears. His ability to infuse his movies with these seething emotions gave them their strange emotional charge, and helped make them audacious and poetic works of art.

In “The Bellboy” and “The Errand Boy,” Lewis’ Kid finds himself wandering through sprawling corporate complexes: the ultramodern curvilinear interiors of Miami Beach’s Fontainebleau hotel, and the cavernous soundstages and maze-like streets and corridors of a movie studio. He desperately tries to mesh with the gears of the industrial combine, but his inability to function with the automaton efficiency of his co-workers inevitably causes catastrophe. “There’s a sense in which he’s a modern man, a universal figure confronted with modernity, with bosses and difficult jobs, and especially with a fast pace that’s difficult to keep up with,” says Henry Sheehan, critic for KPCC-FM and KCET.

There are haunting moments that evoke the lonely yearnings of the alienated in America’s increasingly institutionalized society, such as the brilliant pantomimes in which the Kid conducts an imaginary orchestra or imagines himself to be a movie mogul holding forth in a deserted boardroom. Or the scene where the Kid is assigned the Sisyphean task of setting up more than 1,000 chairs in an auditorium the size of a football field. Lewis films from one wide angle, holding the shot as the Kid recedes farther and farther into the great hollow hall. “When he started directing his own pictures there was a powerful visual sense,” Scorsese says. “It was almost as if the films were drawn by hand--animated. Something was very arresting about the way Lewis designed his scenes and shot them, the way he focused the eye of the audience.”

In the middle of “The Bellboy,” the Kid is ordered to help with the luggage of an arriving celebrity: Jerry Lewis, the movie star. Lewis the star arrives in a limousine with a huge retinue of yes-men and sycophants. “That kind of thing was refreshing and brilliant,” Scorsese says. “It opened the audience’s mind. What is the reality? We know we’re watching a film. We know it’s directed by him. We know he’s in control. Then he shows up as a film star within the movie! It plays with your sense of what reality is and what cinema is--and also what celebrity is.” In a culture obsessed with celebrity, Lewis shows us that a star is as objectified as a Playboy centerfold, and his existence at the top of the ladder every bit as lonely as that of the Kid at the bottom. The entourage of Jerry Lewis the movie star laughs at his every remark. When he tearfully reveals that a beloved aunt just died, the crowd howls with unhinged hilarity. “Nothing like a laugh!” someone screams.

In “The Ladies Man,” the Kid serves as a gofer in a boarding house full of young women. Lewis built the entire mansion--four stories tall, including a stairway and working elevator--on two soundstages at Paramount, with the fourth wall of every room cut away, like a giant dollhouse, so the camera could swoop on a crane from room to room, each of which was pre-lighted and wired for sound. It was another groundbreaking technical innovation, and a fantastic dreamscape through which Lewis’ imagination ran wild. In one spectacular crane shot, Lewis pulls back to show the entire dollhouse. “That shot is so striking,” Scorsese says. “In a funny way, it had something to do with the way I did a shot in ‘Gangs of New York’ in the beginning of the film, showing the [multileveled] hell of the old brewery

Scorsese found more inspiration in Lewis’ masterpiece, “The Nutty Professor,” in the famous sequence that occurs after Professor Kelp has transformed himself into the incandescent lounge lizard Buddy Love. At first we do not see Love. Instead we see the world through his eyes. In an intricately choreographed tracking shot, Love walks through the street toward the Purple Pit nightclub and various passersby react with astonishment to his high-voltage charisma. “I use that as an example of the kind of point-of-view shots that I use,” Scorsese says. In “Gangs of New York,” he told his assistant director, Joseph Reidy, that he wanted to choreograph a similar point-of-view shot in the scene where Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) places a rabbit pelt on a Five Points fence as a declaration of war. “I am constantly referring back to Lewis’ work,” Scorsese says.

Lewis explored the polarities of his personality--the lonely kid he had been in his youth and still felt himself to be, and the polished persona he presented on television and in live performances--not only in “The Bellboy,” but also in “Cinderfella” (directed by Frank Tashlin and produced by Lewis) and “The Errand Boy.” This theme reached its full and most complex expression in “The Nutty Professor.” The movie is an extended investigation of Lewis the public performer, and his insecure inner self. But more than a movie star’s exercise in self-absorption, it is a meditation on the American model of masculinity. Lewis acknowledges its pathology even as he admits that he cannot free himself of his aspiration to embody it. In the climax of the movie, Buddy Love transforms back into Professor Kelp before a stunned crowd of college students. Kelp makes a heartfelt speech about the fallacy of trying to create a false personality to please others and the need for self-acceptance, and there’s not a dry eye in the house. But in the film’s denouement, as Kelp leaves for his wedding with heartthrob Stella (Stella Stevens), the director reveals that she has stuffed two bottles of Kelp’s magic tonic in the pockets of her jeans--an admission that there’s a dark, erotic power to Love’s aggressive posturing that Americans find irresistible, despite whatever lip service they may pay to the values of sensitivity and brains.

“Lewis’ sense of burlesque is a strange type of comedy because it’s full of anxiety,” says director Barbet Schroeder (“Barfly,” “Single White Female”). “It’s a tragic vision that makes you laugh. . . . And all that is completely personal and completely extraordinary. He took burlesque comedy one step further, like any great artist, to a very freaky, disturbing modern tone.”

In 1977, someone at an American Film Institute seminar asked Lewis why his films hadn’t been rediscovered, as those of other great comics had been. “They wait until you die,” he snapped. Until recently, it looked as if Lewis might be right. During the last decade, a series of serious health problems--bouts of meningitis and pulmonary fibrosis--forced him to cancel live engagements and spend long stretches in the hospital. But last year, Lewis bounced back. He returned home from the hospital, and in the fall he released sparkling wide-screen DVD transfers of 10 movies from his golden period, complete with outtakes and commentary tracks.

And the damnedest thing happened. They got good reviews. The New York Times published not one but two rave notices. In the second one, Dave Kehr wrote: “Is it finally time to stop with the French-love-him jokes and acknowledge that Jerry Lewis is one of the great American filmmakers?” Kehr noted that the DVDs “reveal both the fierce creativity of his comic performances and the extreme formal sophistication of his direction. The centerpiece is the 1963 ‘The Nutty Professor’ . . . a study in split personality that both anticipates Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 ‘Persona’ and surpasses it in psychological acuity. It’s also a lot funnier.”

In December 2004, the Library of Congress concluded that “The Nutty Professor” is a movie of lasting cultural significance, worthy of preservation, and added it to the National Film Registry. Then in January, Lewis received a career achievement award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. The explanation for this turnaround is simple: As older critics retired, a new generation replaced them. They had come of age in the 1950s and ‘60s and had spent the better part of their youth in the dark, watching Jerry Lewis and laughing till they just about wet their pants. “For me, personally, the impact of watching ‘The Nutty Professor’ as a boy in a drive-in in the Valley was huge,” says Robert Koehler, who writes for Variety. “It was the first time I had felt a weird sense of terror, horror and comedy all in one fell swoop. I’d never felt that before in a movie. There was something going on here besides just another Hollywood comedy. There was a sense of wild theatrics. I was only 7 years old at the time; I couldn’t even put my finger on it, but it so absolutely impressed my young mind.”

As they grew older, like Morty S. Tashman in “The Errand Boy,” these young fans made their way to Hollywood to become part of show business. Their film school professors and older critics had told them Lewis was vulgar and tasteless, but they went back and watched the movies and didn’t believe it. “I always thought he was funny, from the first time I came to him, at 9 years old,” says Henry Sheehan, president of the L.A. critics association. “Once I grew older and learned something about composition and the mechanics of gags, I was full of admiration for him. I think my experience is pretty common for people my age.”

For years a growing number of Lewis supporters had been urging the association to give the comedian the career achievement award. This year the membership suddenly agreed. “It was pretty widely supported,” Koehler says. “In the past there have been complaints. The first year I was in the group, his name was brought up and some people were openly contemptuous. I heard none of that this time. I don’t know why. I think it’s the test of time.”

As the night of the awards ceremony approached, a question loomed: How would Lewis react? Would he be able to drop the contentious attitude he’d held against his old adversaries for more than half a century? When I talked with him shortly after the award had been announced, he seemed to be struggling for his equilibrium. “I don’t really know how I’m going to deal with it,” he admitted, then murmured something about handling it with grace. But when he talked with other journalists, some of the old fighting verbiage crept into his remarks. He told Larry King the award was “the best revenge I’ve ever had.” And to a reporter from the Los Angeles Daily News, he said, “Jesus Christ, is that retribution or not?”

Finally, the moment came. Peter Bogdanovich presented the plaque. Lewis stepped to the podium. His eyes passed over the crowd. “Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. I am delighted to be the recipient of this award. . . . What took so goddamned long?” The room exploded with laughter. Lewis segued smoothly into his Vegas act and did about 10 minutes that had the critics, filmmakers and stars doubled over and gasping for air.

Then he stopped, his voice growing serious. “I would feel somewhat remiss if I didn’t show you something that I believe brought me here tonight,” he said. Film rolled, and on the screen behind him appeared a 35-year-old Jerry Lewis doing the famous Chairman of the Board pantomime from “The Errand Boy,” his gesticulations and mugging timed to the tempo of Count Basie’s “Blues in Hoss’ Flat.” It was much more than funny. It was at once melancholy, poetic and exhilarating. When it was over, the room rose in a howling, hooting standing ovation. The only one of the night.

Now it’s the academy’s turn to step up. A few months ago, Bogdanovich wrote a letter to its president, Frank Pierson, suggesting that Lewis be given an Oscar. I hope the Academy doesn’t take too long. The hour is late. Another great clown and groundbreaking filmmaker, too long ignored, deserves to be honored by his peers.

JL’s yahrzeit

The once and future King of Comedy 👑

#rip #jerry lewis #the once and future king of comedy #yahrzeit #LA Times #david weddle #jerry lewis deserves an oscar #king of comedy #quote

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geek-gem · 5 years ago

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I’m worried of folks reading this, just finding this really fucking stupid. This is about the new 2019 Joker movie. After reading some stuff from Wikipedia about the film.

I’ll be honest despite I worry of possible people saying, “No not gonna happen” to this. All while not spoiling the Joker movie. But beware because I may get you thinking about the film. Despite I try to not spoil anything major about the movie. Basically I may spoil anything but I’m just being weird.

I want a continuation in some way of Joker movie with Joaquin Phoenix back. But him meeting a older Bruce Wayne who’s a younger Batman.

Listen I know Joker 2019 is meant to be a stand alone. Including I’ve learn about more of what they did with the ending. With Todd Philips saying the film is up for interpretation. Including I think I’ll say this, it’s not a huge spoiler. But also Todd Philips has said he left the ending ambiguous. Yet still I love the film.

Mainly this idea I had of some sort of continuation is it’s still a low budget character study. But it’s basically an epilogue to just this version of the Joker which is Arthur Fleck. While meeting a older Bruce Wayne who’s now Batman.

But it’s done in a realistic sense like the Christopher Nolan films. Yet there’s less of that epic action or some sorts. It’s more of a character study and I have thought stuff. Maybe it’s a character study of Bruce and Arthur/Joker is also a major character. With the film being again a epilogue to this Arthur/Joker as a character. Maybe some other characters from the comics are in there too.

Including the film taking place in 1996, 15 years after Joker. Which takes place in 1981.

Yet it’s mainly about Bruce and Arthur. The film’s title I have thought, while sounding silly is titled, “Bats And Joker”. That sounds kind of stupid but Joker has called Batman, “Bats” multiple times. I think I’ll keep it as a place holder title.

I’m also suggesting a new Batman actor for this one film only. While that sounds stupid, my main choice has been Kit Harington. Which yes I know he’s going to therapy and I hope he’s doing well. But there’s probably other great choices too.

Again these are just ideas. But I understand the situation with Joker 2019. It’s meant to be a stand alone film, Joaquin is an actor who doesn’t do multiple films and I respect that. I just really liked Joker 2019. That I seem to love the idea of some form of continuation and strangely wanting this interpretation of the Joker meeting a Batman.

Also I do admit, something like this might ruin what made Joker 2019 very unique as a film. Considering the more I learn about it and as I look back at it. I have my own thoughts of the film.

I just wanted to get that out of my system. This may never happen. But I wanted to talk about this. Also God damn the main Joker theme from Joker 2019 is so God damn wonderful. Here’s the one I’m listening to, it’s so fitting for the character and the movie.

youtube

Edit I forgot to mention a silly thing and I didn’t wanna do a reblog saying this.

But in a humorous take of this idea but also tragic. It’s basically Arthur finding a new best friend in Bruce Wayne. As they are two sides of the same coin of two men changed by trauma and other things. With Bruce while not condoning whatever Arthur has done, he comes to understand what made Arthur who he is.

Especially if you’ve seen the movie, their relationship in the future would be pretty heated if they ever met again.

#joker 2019 #joker #joaquin phoenix #Arthur Fleck #batman #bruce wayne

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steve0discusses · 5 years ago

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Yugioh Season Zero: Yuugi Gets a Tomagachi Pt 2

So because I spent like...weeks away from Yugioh I recently decided to kinda review what was even going on in this show, and so, as I was quickly going through my own recaps this week while putting this Season Zero episode together, I was reminded about this observation I made so innocently so long ago.

I keep making jokes with this show and then the jokes end up being real. Like it just keeps happening, so I don’t know why I bother trying to dive so far into the hypothetical thinking “Yugioh would never possibly do this” but...I’ll keep trying.

So, lets see just how dangerous a Season Zero Tomagachi can be. (v bad)

So about 3-4 days have passed since Honda left school for maternity leave despite the fact he is a 14 yo biological male and was never pregnant. I’m glad he’s here to break gender norms and I’m glad that the teacher has just accepted this.

Anzu has decided it’s time for an intervention and thinks, “if I can talk sense into Yuugi occasionally, maybe I can talk some sense into this purple haired alien that we’re also friends with?”

Miho, I swear.

(read more under the cut)

Yuugi has decided to show off his digital pet, which looks a whole lot like the Olympics mascot from 1996.

Izzy. That was the name of the Olympics mascot from 1996. I got the stuffed animal of him for my birthday and that’s the only reason I remember this weird ass 90′s fact.

I do not like the weird bangs that are Tomagachi arms, and it says a lot about the volume of Yugi’s bangs that they could have tiny arms attached to all those little bangs and it would...match up.

Now I watched a dubbed version done by English voice actors (hence why I’m getting all these names wrong) and I figured, I may as well take you on the same journey I went through watching this episode, starting with the name of Yuugi’s pet here.

Some of you, who know every single thing about Yugioh, are right now like “oh girl, do you not even see how you’re getting played all over again? Do you not realize what you JUST walked into?” and don’t worry, we’ll get there. But first, I have to go through this entire episode. Don’t worry, I’ll address the elephant in the room shaped like “the Joshua Tree” but with bangs that are hands.

(if you are too young to know about the lore behind U+Me=Us, then please look it up and listen to their entire discography and know that we were so hardcore about U+Me=Us that, for a very little while, they topped TRL over Destiny’s Child and Britney Spears)

And so they decide to do the very awkward fusion thing where you slap the butts of these Tomagachis together, but Jounouchi’s tomagachi is way too tsundere to date.

Anyway, in walks this boyman who I think gets bigger and bigger every scene he is in, like Violet Beauregarde. I mean...the door is...only so big. One of y’all brought up in the comments (I think gingerninja) that his name means “whale” in Japanese. Indeed he is.

He decides to show us his shiny golden pet, and remember this is 1999, so here’s some...1999 technology alright.

Dear lord, never draw these nips again.

Just...never again.

This is just...

How is this the only post I’ve made in months that hasn’t been flagged?

...Anyways, Kujirada’s monster, instead of going on awkward play dates, just kind of devours whoever he goes up against in a battle. It’s sort of confusing though because like...the same process for battle is the same as for this weird social network/dating scene.

Like there was absolutely no battle system until just now, when this thing started eating other people’s little monsters.

RIP Johnny and Somomo, who we knew for like all of 4 seconds. Truly one of the most devastating blows of Yugioh lore to see the death of these little monster assholes that have consumed all the time that these kids should have spent studying/actually attending school.

And then, our hero arrives and he’s a freakin mess because he hasn’t slept in 3 days.

And I was fully expecting for Honda to also lose and gain a valuable lesson in how to better use his time. I was waiting for Yuugi to pull out his little pet and go through a whole transformation sequence right here and now. But, something impossible happened.

I can’t believe the episode is already over and it was Honda that won. You heard it here first, kids, always skip school for video games, the Yugioh way.

I mean...kudos to Honda, I guess. I’m just really surprised he won something. I mean, the last time I saw him play a game he full on died by being tossed into a pit of lava and then he got turned into a robotic monkey for like 12 episodes.

Haiyama, meanwhile, did not take this very well, since he was the one from the bathroom who was being coerced into giving money to Kujirada in order for Kujirada to buy the golden pet, who just lost within a day of buying it.

As Haiyama leaves, we kind of assume that Haiyama is about to get his ass kicked in, because he’s small and cute and wears glasses, and this is Yugioh Season Zero, and those are all the things required to get your ass kicked in.

When just...everything starts to get really, really weird.

Also, this happened,

And FYI whenever I do these Season Zero episodes, I also look into the other translations on Youtube and the one I looked at seems to have also noticed that the Warehouse situation in Yugioh has gotten a little bit out of hand.

Ah, I see what you did there, random Youtube guy. I mean I love the abandoned warehouse, personally, he’s a core actor in this show. But yes, I do see how it’s turning into a little tiny bit of a meme.

Hilariously, Kujirada makes sure to run directly past Yuugi on his way to the abandoned warehouse district while carrying this girl in a sack over his back.

It is the middle of the freakin day.

So you’ve probably guessed the main twist by now, mostly because of the lack of characters, but as Tristan comes to the end of this warehouse, out steps our very large 3 Stooges boy who keels over and is...entirely covered in bloody lashes????

For your consideration--Haiyama has the yellow glasses and this face type, yes? and Kujirada has the hair? You stick the two together and remove entirely the problematic whipping sequence and you have yourself a

Of course I say this and maybe Weevil is also in S0 and Haiyama is just his own type of nut.

With a whip for some reason. OMG why does this child have a bullwhip?

Also how on EARTH did he manage to get Miho all the way up there???

So Haiyama explains, while pulling out a photo album of just tons of people in it, a comically large photo album of people that I guess he just keeps in his butt pocket, that these were all the people who were doing dirty deeds for him in exchange for money. No idea how the hell Haiyama got all that money, but he likes to blow it all on what is essentially slavery because apparently once you get money from Haiyama, you’re stuck with Haiyama for life.

Like really there is so much gang imagery in this show, it’s like a big PSA of “Don’t Join a Gang, Kids! Or Your Classmate Will Whip You With a Bullwhip Until You Pass Out In an Abandoned Warehouse” and it’s like damn Yugioh fine, I wont, damn.

But like the whole murdery photo album was certainly something because uh--there were more people in there than Kujirada so it’s like...did they die? Did all those people die? Did you in fact murder all those people, Haiyama? Did you manage to kill all those people at age 14 like you’re some sort of Bakura? Like, it’s Yugioh, so I really am just assuming they died but like...can’t add it to the death count until they outright say, right?

And then Yuugi’s timing was pretty excellent.

colorist kinda messed up on Yuugi’s teeth here. It happens. Cartoons are hella hard to make so we’ll give it a pass.

The TRAJECTORY.

Haiyama then decides to point out to Honda that Miho is essentially using Honda like he uses Kujirada and that was...kind of cathartic for me, actually. Thank you, villain, for recognizing that this whole Miho obsession thing is uhhhh kind of wrong. I guess we’ll see if the fact that Haiyama pointed this out to Honda will actually stick or if Honda will forget it by next episode.

Although, in Miho’s defense, she may be too stupid to know that she’s actually using Honda. She may just be that stupid. I honestly can’t tell what her deal is at this time.

But then Haiyama decides to try and extend the great offer to Honda of being whipped and manipulated for the rest of his life in exchange for keeping Miho alive, which um. Wow Yugioh, this is a 14 year old kid. Wow, that’s some dark stuff wow, this basically serial murderer has just been hanging out in the back of their class for their what we assume is their whole lives, and NO ONE NOTICED?

Like again, this entire class is just...they gotta be plants. There’s gotta be at least 3 people in this class being made in test tubes underneath Domino by Gendo Ikari, there’s just no way they aren’t.

And what’s crazy about Zero vs the rest of Yugioh is that in Zero they just happened upon a freakin maniac. They didn’t like...search this guy out, or enter a contest that they knew was freakin cursed. No, they just wanted to play with a Tamagachi. That was it. Instead, they found out that their one classmate has been abusing their other classmate to the point of hospitalization for the past several years.

They just wanted to play with a Tomagachi.

After that, Yugi had a fun intro sequence into Yami Yugi where a beam of light expanded across his face from the middle and that was actually a very nice effect 10/10 I can’t actually cap the animation but you can trust me. For a low budget thing that this season appears to be, that was a nice low budget way to do a good effect.

(seriously, if Yuugi lived a normal life would he have ever known he was cursed? Would Pharaoh have ever woken up at all?)

Honda at this point passed out due to the constant whipping, which is very surprising because I’m so used to Tristan, who once threw Double Spike Mullet Man over his shoulders. Honda is kind of a weakling in comparison.

So, Yuugi looks down at this device with a little monster in it and is like “yo I have a great idea, lets make the monsters fight eachother” and so we got like...a Yugioh meets Pokemon aesthetic, and FYI Yuugi’s monster still has the weird hand bangs. It’s...it still looks like that.

And, turns out the kick that Jounouchi’s monster gave to Yuugi’s monster made Yuugi’s monster learn how to hate, enough to gain a new power.

...so, in the end, Yuugi spent a really long time making his monster just a very nice guy, and would have absolutely lost if Jounouchi’s tomagachi hadn’t kicked Yuugi’s tomagachi’s ass. I guess that’s symbolic.

PS never forget that these are Tomagachi’s with a 20-50 pixel screen.

and there you are, Haiyama eaten by his own Tamagachi.

Yuugi was like “and THAT’s why you don’t whip the people who are your pets. You treat your pets with love.” and it was like wtf that guy was devoured by his own Tamagachi.

And then you think about it a second later and it’s like “WTF YUUGI. Yuugi. That’s still not a very good message.” And like I figured...this is probably a translation error that they accidentally made Yugi seem like he was cool with using people so long as you’re nice about it, but it was in the other version I watched as well so I think the real desired meaning just...didn’t quite make it to the final draft. I hope.

Straight up, this episode would have scared me absolutely to death while I was still in the Tomagachi craze and feeling very guilty about not taking care of them. Like can you imagine just killing your Tamagachi over, and over when you’re 10 and then watching this episode? Like Gremlins did irreparable damage to me as a kid, can you imagine what this episode would have done?

This guy was devoured by a Tomagachi and Yuugi just watched.

Don’t worry, Miho says “momma” here so she is still about as blase towards Honda as ever.

They did pan down to show us that Haiyama is still alive after this whole event. Of course he’s...passed out so he’ll probably just end up in the hospital wing in Domino they’ve reserved for Yuugi’s classmates.

...Eaten by a tamagachi.

Now, a little bit of story time, in the process of putting these caps together, I figured well after the fact that I should, youknow, go and check on the spelling of all of these characters (because again, I watch the dub so I have no subs to tell me how things are spelled) and the sub version had omitted quite a bit of the episode, including the parts where Yuugi says his pet’s name.

...so I was like...is Yuugi’s pet named Yuutou or Yuutsu? And surprisingly enough, when I typed into Google “what is the name of Yugi’s tamagachi” ...

DAMN IT, YUGIOH.

HE REALLY DID CANONICALLY NAME HIS PET U2!

Freakin U2. SPELLED LIKE IT LOOKS LIKE.

That makes no freakin sense, whatsoever. Yuugi is the type of person who listens to weird grungy alternative from whatever local show his weird anti-establishment cousin tells him about and would just--I mean he has so many accessories and eyeliner, he does not put in his Mom’s CD of U2 and drift off, no, he puts in a burnt CD of early Radiohead while he spends 2 hours dying his bangs in the sink. There is no universe, let it be Season Zero or Season whatever where Yuugi acknowledges U2.

I can’t believe this is Canon.

I just...Wow. U2.

U2.

Y’all I am shook that Yuugi is a closet U2 fan.

FYI, I have been listening to U2 for the entire time I’ve typed this. I mean, Pride is a good jam.

Anyways, I know none of you that are too young to know 2gether looked this up when I mentioned it earlier, so here you go, one of the best worst songs ever made. In case you were wondering what I was busy doing as a young tween instead of having a Yugioh phase.

youtube

#Yugioh #ygo #Yugioh season zero #tomogatchi #yuugi muto #jounouchi #honda #anzu #miho #U2 #this episode was mad effed up wow #I mean damn that was um #that whole thing with the freakin whip just came out of nowhere huh #tw blood #tw whipping #I mean you don't really see the blood but even so it's...it's cuts youknow #2gether #U + Me = Us (calculus)#So sad that this song was lost in time youknow the kids these days they know about backstreet they might listen to N*Sync but 2gether? No.

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johnny-and-dora · 6 years ago

Text

holding back the flood

“Oh god. Their baby is the size of a cherry. She’s tearing up again.”

or, the one where jake and rosa take care of a extremely stressed, highly emotional and mildly pregnant amy. (future fic) read on ao3

Amy really doesn’t know why she’s crying.

As a Santiago, she prides herself on having at least a reasonable amount of self control when it comes to emotional displays in the workplace; she was taught long ago that they were highly inappropriate, after all, and she takes great pride in being a teacher’s pet/star mentee.

Disregarding Holt’s advice (which isn’t something she often does), one of the thousands of things she’s learnt since she became a sergeant is that it’s optimum for everyone’s productivity – and overall physical wellbeing – if she can keep stress braids, Santiago-scale freak outs and full-on weeping to a minimum at work.

(No-one needs to mention the Great Printer Catastrophe again – and absolutely no-one needs to mention that she’s permanently banned from being anywhere near the machine if it’s ever low on ink.)

Badly timed, apocalypse-inducing paper jams aside; Amy is a strong, emotionally resilient, rational woman. She rolls her eyes and smiles at Jake when he cries at films, she flawlessly multitasks with letting her anxiety get the best of her, and she tries her best to remain professional at all times (ignoring the extremely few instances in which her husband has tempted her into Supply Closet C). She cries when she wants to, when she needs to, but as a rule, she absolutely holds it together at the precinct, especially in front of her officers.

At least, that’s what she’s been firmly trying to tell herself for the past few days, because her usually reliable ability to “hold it together” currently seems about as unstable as her current hormone levels.

Since she got into work this morning, she’s cried four times already – once because they were out of granola, once because Charles’s lunch smelled at least ten million times worse and at least ten times more eye-watering than usual. Once, most unceremoniously, in a toilet stall on her break because her head wrecks and she’s so nauseous she can barely enjoy filling in paperwork anymore, and once because she suddenly remembered the sonogram picture, grainy and monochrome and forever universe-changing, that currently takes pride of place in their kitchen, stuck lovingly with an old I LOVE NY magnet to their fridge.

Notably - and most likely the shining, golden solve for why she might be spending 3pm on a Thursday afternoon sobbing her little heart out in the evidence lock up, riding out her own little hormone rollercoaster - Amy is nine weeks pregnant.

(Now is not the time, but something in her lights up every time she actually dares to think the actual word “pregnant” into existence; she fondly remembers snapshots of the past two months, the swell of joy in her heart at those two life-altering little lines, another test passed with flying colours. The look on Jake’s face when she told him, the way he’s been doing everything he can to take care of her. The time he came home with a little pair of baby sneakers that he “couldn’t resist” and she kissed him after lecturing him about how now wasn’t the time for frivolous purchases and they needed to be balancing their finances.)

(In short, they’re having a baby - and it’s terrifying and exhilarating and extremely, extremely nauseating, and she’s never been happier in her life.)

(And yet, she still can’t quite seem to stop crying.)

The emotional carnival ride of growing a human aside, she really doesn’t want to have an emotional break-down here, of all places, the one place in the precinct that’s meant to keep her steady. Quite frankly, Amy does not have the time to spare for these gross, irritating emotions right now. There is no time reserved in her tightly packed schedule for emotions of any kind, let alone multiple confusing and upsetting ones all at once.

She can’t even really note anything currently worth crying over. It’s just a simple detailed and meticulously planned patrol schedule due by the end of her shift that’s proving slightly harder to organise than first anticipated. Easy. Not a problem that she hasn’t solved a thousand times before.

Of course, that’s also on top of the thirty slide presentation about increasing productivity and efficiency within the precinct she has to give tomorrow that she’s barely had the time or energy to actually prepare for. And the in-depth evaluations she has to hand in of her entire squad by Monday.

And the fact that she’s already behind on the research for her pregnancy binder, and she still hasn’t revised their monthly budgets - because once she finally gets home she’s too exhausted to do anything other than sleepily curl up on the couch next to her husband, using Jake as her personal space heater while he strokes her hair and tells her about his day. She’s even too tired to yell at the TV during Jeopardy.

It’s nothing. At least, it’s nothing she would usually be worried about, tasks to complete that she would normally even be a little excited to feel the adrenaline rush of finishing early and getting some sweet spare time to revise her eighteen step plan to increase arrest numbers by 30% by December. Santiago-style.

And yet, to pregnant Amy, what usually constitutes as ‘nothing’ seems to currently signal the end of days - and so, here she appears to be.

Hormones raging, freshly applied mascara once again ruined, eyes red and puffy, breathing irregular, neon sign brightly flashing with the words “hot mess” directly above her head. She’s hiding, not exactly inconspicuously, between the endlessly neat rows of closed cases, knees hugged as close to her chest as possible while taking tremendous care not to squish the ever-so-slight, barely noticeable bump that remains breath-taking proof that she’s growing an actual, real-life, cherry sized (as Jake cheerfully informed her this morning over breakfast) human being inside of her.

Oh God. Their baby is now the size of a cherry. She’s tearing up again.

She decides after a while, with the shred of rationality Amy seems to have left, that she is currently a hot mess that only one person is fully equipped to deal with. She reaches for her phone, sniffling, trying her best keep her breathing steady, anxiously fiddling with the shining silver wedding band on her ring finger.

She’s about to text a “Code Blue, Evidence Lockup” to Jake (who she thought she couldn’t love more up until about three weeks ago, when he woke her up at 3am with a meticulously crafted colour-based code system they could use to covertly deal with pregnancy situations - it made her both very emotional and super horny) – but she feels a flash of panic when it’s not in its usual place tucked safely in her back pocket. Her heart quickly sinks when she realises it must be still in the top drawer of her desk.

She lets out another stifled sob of dread and embarrassment and frustration and practically every range of negative emotion under the sun - which is, obviously, exactly when she hears the door to the evidence lock-up swing open.

A spark of fear immediately ignites in her chest as her heart starts racing – not now. She instinctively squeezes her eyes shut, hoping desperately that if she makes herself as small as physically possible, even in her current state, she’ll be able to completely disappear.

The Nine-Nine have seen her in a much worse state, sure. She’s more sure than anything that her chosen family would be able to make her feel better in practically any kind of situation. And yet, pretty much her worst, world-ending, blood-pumping fear right now is anyone – except Jake, seeing as this is the job he kind of signed up for when he married her - having to deal with her like this.

As weighted footsteps inch agonisingly closer, her heart plummets even further at the absence of the familiar sound of well worn sneakers – instead, she hears the equally familiar yet less comforting click-clack of black high-heeled boots on the cold concrete floor. She prepares for the worst.

The next thing she hears, deep yet uncharacteristically quiet and almost with a note of panic, is an unusually soft “Amy?” – when she finally opens her eyes, Rosa swims into view, eyes so comically wide that she can’t help but exhale a shaky, weak laugh. This is going to be fun.

“Heyyyyyyyy, Rosa.” She gives a little half-hearted wave despite herself, deciding to fully embrace the slightly hilarious and extremely mortifying situation.

(It could be worse. At least it’s less mortifying then being walked in on when making out with your boyfriend of one day, resulting in the heart attack and subsequent death of your new captain. Jake and Amy hold a lot of precinct records between them – the award for “highest amount of captains accidentally killed” is probably the one she’s least proud of.)

“Um, hey. Are you...”

“Chill? I’m chilled. I’m to-tal-ly chill. Chilled.”

If possible, Rosa’s eyes get wider.

“Do you possibly happen to know where my husband is, by any chance?” She laughs nervously with this sort of manic grin plastered on her face, putting all her energy into seeming like a normal human being. She’s failing miserably.

Rosa raises an eyebrow, but thankfully decides to indulge her.

“...He’s working on Charles’s B&E, some lame cheese shop downtown that Charles is too devastated about to get any actual police work done. They left like twenty minutes ago.” Amy exhales, trying not to let her face fall too hard.

“Right. Chill. Do you mind if I text him? I left my phone downstairs and I can’t exactly go down looking like...this.” She’s barely finished her sentence before Rosa is handing her phone to her, and she takes it gratefully.

She quickly finds Jake’s contact and involuntarily feels her lips tug up into a small smile at the incredibly unflattering dorky candid - from easily a decade ago, maybe even the Academy - that is his contact picture.

(Some things never change. She’s very glad his hair has.)

To: Jake Peralta, 15:06 Hey babe, it’s Amy. Code Blue, Evidence Lockup. I know you’re with Charles so don’t drop everything and immediately rush back here, just come when you can. Using Rosa’s phone because I left mine downstairs. Love you x

The painstaking minute and a half she takes to type out and send it to him – all while her hands are shaking from the incessant and deafening panic alarm sounding in her ribcage - are made even worse by the intense burning sensation of Rosa’s direct gaze on her the entire time. Hold it together, Amy.

“Thank you.” She hands Rosa her phone back, wishing more than ever that if she concentrated hard enough she could just disappear from sight completely. An awkward silence descends over them both, bringing with it an inevitable thickness in the air not unlike the first warnings of a thunderstorm. It’s unbearable.

It’s not like they’re not close enough to talk about exactly why Amy is sobbing hysterically in the evidence lock-up at 3pm on a Thursday – far from it, in fact. Ever since Florida, Rosa has become more and more of a valued and surprisingly skilled confidante, even if most of her solutions to Amy’s problems are tequila and Nancy Meyers films. (It, somehow, always seems to work.)

If anything, Amy is desperate to tell one of her closest and best friends all about how nauseous she is and how stressed out she feels and how, by the way, she’s casually just in the early stages of growing a human inside of her and she feels even more panicked than usual and what if she can never get the balance of being a mother and focusing on her career right and-

But she can’t. Because they can’t tell anyone, no matter how much Amy yearns to share this joy with the people she cares about the most, and how much Jake wants to gleefully yell that he knocked his wife up at virtually everyone they pass on the street. They’re just not ready – in truth, she isn’t ready for it to be official, real and an unavoidable, gargantuan force of change.

Thinking the word ‘pregnant’ into existence is enough to cause a hurricane of raw emotion – but it’s a light breeze compared to actually saying out loud.

And yet, they both known Rosa won’t leave until she gets some sort of answer out of her. They’re at an impasse – an uncomfortable, awkward, silent impasse.

Rosa’s gaze is scrutinising and calculating and Amy genuinely wouldn’t be surprised if lasers started shooting from her eyes at any second – it’s something of a old western movie stand-off parody, except they’re waiting out who’s going to suck it up and actually start the conversation they should probably be having right about now, no matter how uncomfortable both of them might be.

After an excruciating eternity of roughly ten seconds, the other curly-haired and always slightly terrifying detective eventually sighs and resignedly slides down on the floor next to her, discarding whatever file she had to the side. Her expression (as usual), is unreadable as she clears her throat.

“So - are you going to tell me what’s causing...this...” - Rosa makes an awkward sweeping gesture in her direction, which she assumes can only be in reference to the whole aforementioned “hot mess” state that she’s currently wallowing in – “or am I going to have to interrogate it out of you?”

“Rosa, honestly. I’m fine.”

“You and I have a very different definition of what ‘fine’ is, Santiago.” Amy just shrugs, so Rosa folds her arms and extends her legs across the floor like she’s prepared to be here all night, in true Diaz interrogation style. Amy’s thinking about laser eyes again before her friend’s expression unexpectedly softens.

“Do...you want to...talk about it?”

“I don’t know.” It’s an honest answer, to her credit. Despite everything they’ve been through, seeing Rosa try to talk about feelings can still be a little like imagining a turtle out its shell, and Amy’s really not prepared to honestly talk about her physical and emotional state right now.

She just wants her husband to bring her some chocolate and give her a slightly inappropriate-for-work and yet badly needed neck massage, and Rosa is not someone she’d willingly go to for either of those things.

She sighs again, averting her gaze from Amy’s face to seemingly anywhere in the room before she starts talking again.

“Look dude, talking about your feelings is gross. If you don’t want to talk about it and you just want to sit here and cry it all out, I get it. I’ll stay here as long as you need, then go file my arson case and pretend I didn’t see anything. But...I’m here for you. Even if your feelings are the grossest or lamest, if you wanna talk, I’ll listen. Okay?” She finally brings herself to look at Amy directly, dark irises electric with the most intense sincerity she’s ever seen.

Okay, yeah. She’s definitely going to start crying again.

“Wait, I didn’t mean –“ Rosa begins; but Amy is already hugging her, forcefully and tightly and awkwardly from the side, tears once again free-flowing. She smiles brightly and tenderly at the way Rosa only stiffens up for a second before equally as awkwardly leaning into it, patting Amy reassuringly on the shoulder with her free arm.

They stay like that for a good minute, Amy sniffling and basically doing the exact opposite of holding it together, but also feeling like its okay. Like nothing she can do or say will end the world if she doesn’t let it. It’s a refreshing change of pace.

This, of course, means the second she finally finds the strength to detach herself from her best friend; well, it just kind of comes spilling out.

“I’m pregnant.”

Rosa’s eyes suddenly become comically wide again, and Amy laughs for real this time, bright and shining and clear.

“Seriously?”

“Mmm-hmm. 9 weeks yesterday.”

“Nice.” Rosa smiles, a genuine, rare glowing Rosa smile, giving Amy a light shove of encouragement. When Amy breathes out, it somehow feels like a huge weight has lifted from her shoulders. She grins.

“Yeah, it’s pretty cool. I feel sick all the time, all my clothes are becoming too tight, I can’t drink caffeine or alcohol or shame smoke and I’m so stressed out and emotional that I cry at literally everything – but, y’know.”

“You’re having a baby.” Rosa says with this kind of awe, and Amy gets this warm glow in her chest.

“Yeah.” She smiles. “I’m having a baby.”

“That’s...a lot.”

“Yeah. Everything’s just...a lot, right now.” She sighs heavily, still weighted with something she’s been worried about for the last week or so.

“We haven’t told anyone else yet, but – well, do you think it’s obvious?” She finally plucks up the courage to ask the question that’s been nagging at her mind ever since she started to have a little more trouble fitting in to her sergeant’s uniform, and the other detective pauses thoughtfully for a second to think about it.

“I don’t think so. You’re not...showing, if that’s what you’re so worried about.”

“No, no. We just... we didn’t want to tell everyone until...y’know. We were ready and it was the right time and...” She trails off, making a casual sweeping sort of gesture that somehow encapsulates her worst fears, and Rosa nods.

“I had my suspicions – you haven’t come out with us to Shaw’s in a long time, I haven’t seen you drink caffeine for a month, and you’ve been having even worse reactions to Charles’s disgusting food than usual. You don’t have to be a detective to start threading those symptoms together.”

“Damn. I thought we were doing a pretty good job of keeping it secret.” Amy sighs, folding her arms tightly across her chest, but Rosa just shrugs it off.

“You are. I saw all that but I still wasn’t sure. It just so happens that most of the people you’re trying to keep it secret from are highly trained NYPD detectives.”

Amy exhales a shaky half laugh and smiles, properly and genuinely, at the way her best friend looks at her with this kind of rare and precious softness, the corners of her mouth ever so slightly upturned into a smile.

“Also, I caught Jake on a baby name website last week and he panicked and told me he was brainstorming names for the monitor lizard you guys are thinking of adopting.”

“Oh, my god.”

“Yeah.” Rosa grins and Amy laughs at how wonderfully, amazingly stupid her husband can be, and her heart is actually warmed by the idea of Jake looking up baby names when he’s supposed to be working despite how irresponsible and stupid that is.

Somehow, she already feels better that she has all day, and there’s not a bottle of tequila or a DVD copy of The Holiday in sight. Another successful solve for the Sleuth Sisters (she’s still proud of that name and their corresponding cool-as-heck handshake, okay).

“Is that...why you’re here? You’re worried about everyone knowing?” Rosa asks, a little more tentatively than usual now she understands Amy’s fragile state a little better. She makes a face.

“Maybe. Honestly, I don’t really know why I’m here. It’s just between this stupid patrol schedule and this presentation I have to give tomorrow and my squad evaluations and my pregnancy binder and my actual pregnancy – well, I don’t know if I can handle it, okay?”

“...And that freaks you out because normally it would be something you could do easily.” Rosa nods, understanding, and Amy gives her a weak smile, letting her hands drop and rest naturally, almost protectively on her stomach.

“Amy, you are two months pregnant. There’s no way you can get done what you’d usually be able to get done by yourself, because you’re busy being exhausted from growing another human being inside of you. It’s perfectly normal to not be able to take on your usual superhuman workload, you nerd.” Rosa says, with this familiar exasperated disbelief at Amy’s overworking brain.

“I know, I know. It’s just...frustrating. I’m already struggle to balance family with career and the baby isn’t even here yet. It only just became a foetus, Rosa. A foetus!”

“Okay, okay.” Rosa puts her hands out like she’s trying to steady a horse, clearly fully aware that Amy’s about five seconds away from a Level 3 Santiago Scale Freak Out, Pregnant Edition – something neither of them are fully prepared for.

“I don’t have an answer to the whole baby and career thing, but you don’t have to think about that right now – you need to focus on you.” Amy clearly doesn’t look convinced enough, so Rosa sighs and tries again.

“Tell Holt you’ve been sick recently and you don’t feel ready for the presentation, and he’ll 100% understand, dude. Get Jennings to help you with the patrol schedule seeing as that nerd loves paperwork almost as much as you do, and you know your officers better than another sergeant in New York, so those evaluations will be easy – you could probably motivate them to even do it themselves. Problem solved, you get to go home early and kick your feet up with a non-alcoholic cocktail.” She flawlessly monologues off a game plan with an exceptional ease that leaves Amy in a state of awe.

“Wow. I...erm, yeah. That’s super helpful, actually.” Rosa nods, like it’s nothing that she’s just solved basically the entirety of Amy’s current mental-breakdown-inducing stressors in a matter of seconds, and then softens.

“You’re going to be fine, Amy. Trust me. Once the whole squad knows we’ll be queuing up to help you guys out.” She, of course, knew that already – but it’s nice to hear it out loud, a promise engraved in the unbreakable, indestructible bond of the 99th precinct. She’s definitely less close to tears now, which is always a plus.

She always knew she could count on her parents to help out, of course, and maybe a couple of her brothers when they weren’t busy graduating med school or travelling the world or having kids of their own. But it’s nice to know, to have it spoken, that she’ll always be able to count on her other family, too. That there are so many people who are more than willing to ride her stupid emotional rollercoaster with her, even through the seemingly endless loops.

“Thanks, Rosa.” “Anytime.”

As if on cue, their little bonding moment is abruptly hijacked when Jake comes crashing into the evidence lock-up – chaotic and electric and as hectic as she’s come to expect in the many, many years she’s spent slowly falling more and more in love with him, his eyes slightly wild , extremely out of breath. Amy’s heart rate spikes again as she realises with a jumble of adoration, frustration and amusement that he ran all the way here just to take care of her.

Not for the first time, amazingly not even for the first time this week, she quickly realises that she really couldn’t have found a better person to share the rest of her life with. She whispers a silent thank you to the universe.

“Ames! I’m so sorry it took me so long” – he pauses to take another breath – “I had to run from that stupid cheese shop, and I know you said not to drop everything and immediately rush back here, so I obviously dropped everything and immediately rushed back here, ‘cause I knew that you were just downplaying it and if it’s a Code Blue that’s important and-“

It seems to be only then that he notices Rosa watching them both, who gives him a subtle nod, unable to completely keep the smile from her face. Frozen, his eyes flick repeatedly and chaotically from Rosa’s to hers, as if he’s trying to telepathically figure out whether he can talk about the baby or not.

He looks like a cartoon character and/or absolute, complete utter idiot, and Amy laughs melodically, deciding to put him out of his misery.

“Jake, it’s okay – she knows.”

“...About the monitor lizard we’re planning to adopt?” He says slowly, and Amy and Rosa both roll their eyes simultaneously; neither of them bothering to poorly conceal their smiles anymore.

In lieu of an answer, Rosa gets up from the floor and punches Jake in the shoulder, smiling wider than Amy thinks she’s ever seen her smile (except maybe when Alicia is around). It’s extremely heart-warming and only slightly unnerving – she doesn’t think she’s ever recorded so many genuine Rosa smiles in one day - except maybe on her and Jake’s wedding night, or when she oh-so casually mentioned over lunch a few months ago that she and Alicia were moving in together.

It’s different and unexpected and unusual in the best way possible – sharing this joy, especially with someone she cares about so much. Suddenly, she starts to understand why Jake wants so badly to yell it out into the street.

“Dude. I know. And for the record, I think you’re going to be a great...monitor lizard keeper.” Amy smiles as she sees the tension practically seep out of Jake’s frame and he relaxes a little, grins at Rosa, bright as the sun. She loves him so much.

“You really think?”

“I know. You two are going to kick ass at this. A thousand push ups.” Rosa practically radiates sincerity as she places a hand on Jake’s shoulder. She doesn’t have to be a detective to know that she’s not the only one in the room who’s definitely on the verge of tearing up again. Jake, if possible, smiles even wider.

It’s all very disgustingly heart-warming and Amy thinks if it carries on much longer there’s a high chance that Hysterical Cry #6 could happen at any minute.

“Thanks, Diaz. We’re hugging now.” “No, we’re not.”

“Yes we are, c’mon, we’re having a moment.” Before she can object further, he hugs her tightly and Rosa hugs back - without hesitation or apprehension or any of it, just warmth. Amy takes the opportunity to wipe fresh tears away.

“Ames, you wanna get in on this?” Jake says after a minute, and she shakes her head.

“Nah, I’ve already had my one allocated Rosa hug today.”

“Just get in here, Santiago.” Rosa grumbles, slightly muffled, and Amy more than happily obliges, carefully lifting herself up and gladly sandwiching herself between two of her favourite people in the entire world.

Somehow, she can’t seem to remember what she was crying about.

“God, you guys’ lameness is infectious.” Rosa says after they break apart, quickly wiping her face with her sleeve like if she does it fast enough they won’t see. It doesn’t work.

“I’ve got to get out of here.” “...Haven’t you actually got an arson case to file?” Amy says, concerned, but she just shrugs it off.

“It can wait. You gonna be okay?” Rosa asks, and Amy pauses for a second, still hyperaware of the anxiety pushing down at the bottom of her stomach like lead and making her slightly dizzy. But then Jake squeezes her hand gently, anchoring her back down to reality, and she smiles.

“Yeah. Yeah, I am.”

“Good. If you need anything, ask, dummy. I’m not massaging you, though. That’s Peralta’s job.” She adds as an afterthought, which makes Amy laugh.

“Ah, a job I do with zero experience, very little skill and far too much confidence. The Peralta speciality.” Rosa rolls her eyes and casually strides out of the evidence lock-up like she hasn’t just been given the life-changing news that the Peralta-Santiagos are expecting - like she hasn’t just spent the last fifteen minutes flawlessly consoling a highly emotional and mildly pregnant weeping police sergeant like it was nothing. Amy has really no idea what she would do without her.

She watches her go with a sense of awe and peace and finally, sweet contentment - before turning to Jake, who smiles that soft smile that’s guaranteed to melt her like butter even when she’s not crazy hormonal and super horny. He squeezes her hand again, another secret coded language they’ve been speaking for almost a decade with remarkable ease.

“You sure you’re okay? I can go get chocolate if you need it, I know where Scully keeps his secret stash.”

“Mmm. I’m okay. Better now you’re here.” She says, wholeheartedly meaning it, and he carefully, tenderly hugs her, placing a chaste, appropriate-for-work kiss on the top of her head in a way that makes her think this is it. They’re having a baby. Amy wants to yell it out to passing strangers in the street.

“We’re having a baby.” She opts for the more practical decision of whispering it gently with this sort of quiet, glowing glee - he matches it in the way he looks at her, in all her red-eyed, mascara ruined glory, like she’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

“Hell yeah, we are.” He whispers back, grinning ecstatically, and her heart is New York lit up in Christmas lights.

She’s still a little stressed beyond belief about that patrol schedule, and the inevitably anxiety inducing email she has to send to Holt about putting off the presentation for a couple of days. She’s still behind on the pregnancy binder, and their monthly budgets, and every day the cherry sized piece of her heart that’s growing ever bigger in her stomach provides a whole new set of challenges she’d rather openly weep about that actually get on with overcoming.

But she has a dork of a husband who will willingly drop everything and sprint 20 blocks just to take care of her, and a terrifying best friend who can solve her greatest problems and quiet her worst fears without a bottle of tequila in sight. She has a family, one that is always growing bigger and bigger – a totally bizarre, mismatched, unique and strange family, but one that she grows more grateful for every single day.

So when Jake hurriedly whispers a “love you” and kisses her softly before running back to tell Charles that the owner definitely broke into his own shop for the insurance money, and when Amy finally returns to her desk, smile on her face, to find Gary eagerly waiting to help her figure out the patrol schedule as Rosa so wisely predicted, she is no longer crying – she’s still nauseous and exhausted, sure, but happy, so deliriously happy, and so deliriously excited to finally embrace hurricane of change.

She opens up her phone’s calendar, where she quickly types “Announcement Day!” into the slot six days away, before sitting back in her chair, deciding what episodes of Serve and Protect they’re going to watch tonight, glowing smile on her face.

Then, and only then, Amy just grips the bar in the carriage of her own little emotional rollercoaster before it can start up again – and she holds on tight, waiting patiently to enjoy the ride.

#my writing #b99 #brooklyn nine nine #brooklyn 99 #b99 fic #peraltiago #jake x amy #sleuth sisters!#i hope you like this #<3333 #shut up sian

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geneticmisfit · 6 years ago

Text

Okay

Let’s talk Venom. Warning, this is LONG.

Okay so, two things

1. I’m gonna first look at it as a movie, and then look at it as an adaption of the character, because those two are wildly different things and I never expect a movie to give us a correct take on the character, just that it is an enjoyable take on the character.

2. I’m also going to start with the cons first because boy do we have a lot

THE MOVIE:

CONS:

The script is a god damn mess. It feels like they left two halves of different drafts in this movie. The movie doesn’t know if it wants to focus on the arrival of the symbiotes, Eddie’s slow acceptance of his new buddy, rivalry between Riz Ahmed’s character ( I could say Drake but would anyone even remember his name ) and Eddie, or the rivalry between Riot and Venom symbiotes, or the fact that symbiotes consume humans as food and jump from host to host. All of those plot hooks are in the movie but it tries to focus on each briefly and as a result ends up focusing on NONE of it.

Acts are unbalanced. The movie spends way, way, way too long of a time in act 1. We get it, it is trying to show us Eddie’s life before things went south, the end of his career, and his lowest low after. But the movie draaaaaaaaags those events out. Eddie legitimately doesn’t get the symbiote until the 50+ minute mark, and the movie then spends another 20 minutes dealing with Eddie’s slow realization that he has a stowaway in his body ( there are three scenes of Eddie hungering ravenously without knowing why and eating random foods as a result. You only needed one scene of that. At least Tom is having fun, bless him. )

It glosses over things that are interesting, focuses too much on things that aren’t. This is connected to the act unbalance, but it warrants its own point. And we’re gonna do bulletpoints on this. The movie spends an ungodly amount of time focusing on Drake’s obsession with the symbiotes in the first act ( you thought Lasher and Scream would be in this ? They die after possessing a few people but not fully bonding with them. ) but then does nothing with it once Riot and Drake bond. Venom himself hints at there being a symbiote hierarchy and symbiotes having a Class system, it’s why Riot ( and later Carnage i’d imagine ) can form weapons with their body and Venom can’t, but it is literally ONE LINE and then the movie moves on. NO. FOCUS ON THAT. THERE IS INTRIGUE THERE ! Related to that, the movie makes it seem like Riot and Venom have history, but they only speak like 5 lines to one another before fighting to the death. Same with Drake and Eddie. Drake is the one who destroyed Eddie, yet Eddie doesn’t really fight with Drake over that during their fight. Third act is EXTREMELY rushed which might be because a) they have a lower budget than most so they can’t spend 15 minutes to a CG fight I get that, but also b) They probably wanted this movie to be under 2 hours, but the first act is too long and clunky to be worked around, so then you run into this problem.

Characters don’t have arcs. Now this is a biggie, not that most characters lack arcs, but that the two characters that do have arcs are criminally underplayed. Firstly, Eddie has a non-verbal arc in that at the beginning he is, and I’m quoting Venom here, a pussy. He’s meek, he’s a bit of a coward that tries to make himself look brave, but cowers when shit hits the fan. But due to his time with the symbiote, he learns to be more assertive himself and bolder. That’s a good arc ! But you really have to pay attention to it because the movie doesn’t shine any light to it. There isn’t even a recognition of it. BUT THE BIGGEST OFFENDER OF ALL IS VENOM HIMSELF. Venom has an arc that completely takes place OFF SCREEN. So, apparently, Venom’s initial goal in the movie is to make it to Life Foundation and hijack their Rocket to bring his symbiote pals back, and he doesn’t really care for Eddie and is using him as a ride. Okay, that’s good ! And the movie kinda hints at that by Venom just sloooooowly fucking up Eddie’s internal organs and then acting extremely defensive when Anne’s doctor boyfriend mentions it, and gets hostile. Okay, that is also good ! But, during their walk to the Third Act Fight, Eddie asks why Venom suddenly wants to stop Riot and he is like ‘ Oh I want to live here now, I like it here. And you, Eddie, you helped change my mind. ‘ That is, on paper, is interesting. BUT WE DON’T SEE THAT SHOWN ON SCREEN. There is ONE, small, moment of Venom looking at the San Fran skyline and musing ‘ Oh. This planet is not as ugly as I thought. It is actually beautiful. ’ and that’s good, and you get the sense that Eddie, a loser, and Venom, a self-professed loser, are becoming better beings as a result of their bonding and Venom recognizes that and wants to keep going, that’s good too, but the movie DOESN’T SPEND TIME ON THIS. And as a result Venom’s character turn just feels absolutely out of left field and empty.

......Phew. Okay, let’s focus on some PROS.

Eddie and Venom dynamic is a JOY to watch. They are both like a bickering married couple and bickering college roommates and you can tell Tom is having a BLAST with this interplay and you have fun as a result. Reports say that a lot of what Tom did with his Venom scenes is improv and honestly you can feel it at times. It feels natural. Worth the price of admission alone tbh.

Action scenes are enjoyable. Almost all of the action scenes are released on YouTube as shortened clips so you could watch those if you so wish but, there are a handful of nice action sequences here. Riot - Venom fight is way too quick for my taste but it has HINTS of creativity that feels restrained by its budget, and it’s a dumb cg vs cg fight. If you enjoy those, like I do, then you’ll enjoy this one too.

Venom looks good. Honestly, I see people saying his CG looks like shit but, honestly ? We have seen TERRIBLE CG characters in Superhero movies just last year. Steppenwolf was absolute ASS. He looked stiff, he moved like a toy, he didn’t emote, he was a blank face. And that movie had the budget of 300 million. Venom is THE OPPOSITE of that. His face is EXPRESSIVE, his movements feel FLUID, the way the symbiote lashes out with tendrils from Eddie and what it does without fully Venoming up is interesting and kind of cool to see. And this movie had a budget of 100 mil, so it’s impressive what they’ve managed to do with that budget.

NOW LET’S LOOK AT IT AS AN ADAPTION OF THE COMIC BOOK

If you look at it from that angle, it’s..........not good. SPIDEY IS NEVER MENTIONED ONCE. Not even in the vaguest sense. There is the mention of a Daily Globe Incident that got Eddie kicked out of NYC press scene, and you could theoretically retcon Spidey into having a hand in that, but beyond that I have no idea how they could have a rivalry in this universe they’re trying to set up. If they cross paths, it seems it would be to TEAM UP rather than FIGHT. There also aren’t any major references to Spidey’s world at large. Kletus appears in the mid-credits scene, Woody Harrelson in a glorious Carrot Top wig, and apparently the astronaut who dies in the crash that brings the symbiotes to Earth is J.J.’s son

Eddie is not Eddie from the comics. He isn’t angry, he isn’t bitter or vengeful, as I previously mentioned he is extremely meek and cowardly, and only after getting the symbiote does he become more Assertive and sure of himself. He is, however, still a dick at times, so that’s nice. So if you go into the movie expecting classic comics Eddie, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

TL; DR

It does feel like this movie has a lot of cons than pros, HOWEVER, the strength of Hardy’s performance and the dynamic between him and the symbiote is SO good, and seeing Venom is SUCH a blast, that it kinda ends up balancing out the negatives. THE FIRST FORTY MINUTES ARE UNEVENTFUL AND BORING, and feel free to take your pee and food breaks then, but after the Venom gets inside Eddie, the movie becomes MUCH more fun and enjoyable, and becomes a Good Time to be perfectly honest. There is a decent foundation here, and if Sony gets better screenwriters, and focuses on what made this movie good, and throws out the parts that didn’t work, it could legitimately have a real strong sequel. This movie does feel like it desperately wants to deal with Venom being a Lethal Protector, but is Obligated to set it up for the regular movie going audience so it doesn’t come out of left field, and you can tell the movie really enjoying itself towards the end when it finally set that all up.

TOO LONG, DIDN’T READ THE TL; DR

The movie is a solid 6.5. / 10. Go in expecting 90′s goofy ass comics Venom rather than Hardcore Spooky Crazy Venom, and you’ll have a jolly good time.

#god this got long.#;out of homework #if you??? care about my opinions???? then enjoy??????????? lmfao #i should be a movie critic god damn

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