#the first version was even longer

[thekittyokat]

you ever just have a lot, a LOT of feelings all at once about a character and not even remotely enough words or brainpower to FORM the words to describe everything you're feeling. so it feels like you may explode. yeah

[wheres-hoid]

This is an RE: Dracula (Bloody FM) appreciation post 💕💕

[cuntylestat]

no one will ever convince me that tom cruise did not absolutely kill it as lestat

[bruhstation]

of fucking course the best, most harrowing, most gut-wrenching tugs character only appeared in one episode (a bit of ramble in the tags)

[b4kuch1n]

pre-holiday leave crumbs

[awkward-teabag]

I have to wonder how many people celebrating AI translation also complain about "broken English" and how obvious it is something was Google translated from another language without a fluent English speaker involved to properly clean up the translation/grammar.

Because I bet it's a lot.

I know why execs are all for it—AI is the new buzzword and it lets them cut jobs thus "save" money and not have to worry about pesky labour laws when one employs humans—but everyone else?

There was some outcry when Crunchyroll fired many of their translators in favour of AI translation (with some people to "clean up the AI's work") but I can't help but think that was in part because it was Japanese-to-English and personally affected them. Same when Duolingo fired many of their translators in favour of LLM translation. Meanwhile companies are firing staff when it's English to another language and there's this idea that that's fine or not as big a deal because English is "easy" to translate and/or because people don't think of how it will impact people in non-English countries.

Also it doesn't affect native English speakers so it doesn't get much headway in the news cycle or online anyway because so much of the dominant media is from English-speaking countries and English-speakers dominate social media.

But different languages have different grammar structures that LLMs don't do, and I grew up on "jokes" about people speaking in "broken English" and mocking people who use the wrong word when it was clearly a literal translation but the meaning was obvious long before LLMs were a thing, too. In fact, the specific way a character spoke broken English has been a way to denote their native tongue for decades, usually in a racist way.

Then Google translate came out and "Google-translated English" became an insult for people and criticism of companies because it was clearly wonky to native speakers. Even now, LLMs—which are heavily trained on English compared to other languages—don't have a natural output so native English speakers can clock LLM-generated text if it's longer than a sentence or two.

But, for whatever reason, it's not seen as a problem when it goes the other way because fuck non-English readers or people who want to read in their native tongue I guess.

[anghraine]

A more coherent part of the adaptation+Darcy post I was threatening to release from drafts purgatory:

While I think all adaptations' versions of Darcy are pretty bad at representing Austen's character, though sometimes compelling in their own right, I think the various choices made are all ways of addressing the same problem with the character as written.

It's not a problem in the novel—indeed, I'd say it's a remarkable achievement there—but I think we don't always realize how extremely ambiguous the presentation of Darcy is through the first half of the novel. It's easy to read him as basically hostile because he was when he first appeared and because Elizabeth, our smart, likable POV character, gets stuck in that perception of him for half the book. So it's only on re-reading that most audiences realize Elizabeth drastically misread his real feelings and the original interpretation of his manner is thrown into question, at the very least.

But as I said in the other post, Austen plays fair: it is entirely possible to realize that Elizabeth is mistaken about some things (esp about how he feels towards her), it is possible to realize that particularly observant characters find his expressions and behavior difficult to interpret, it's possible to notice that we are rarely told how he's speaking or smiling, and scenes typically cut off before we can be told. And it's possible to notice the many issues with Wickham's account of him.

But it's also entirely possible to read everything he says and does as Elizabeth does, and the narrative gently encourages us to do so without often committing to actual description that would guide us in those ambiguous scenes. Austen might have, for instance, described his smiles in the Netherfield scenes as contemptuous, polite, or pleasant. But she just repeats that he's smiling while drawing very little attention to the fact and rarely committing to an indication of what his smiles or presentation of dialogue are like. So it's mostly up to us to decide, with the occasional (dubious in some respects) interpretation from Elizabeth.

And we're likely to reach different conclusions on re-reading—the earlier presentation of Darcy rewards re-reading a lot, because a lot of the time, we don't even realize how much we're not being told until the letter or even the Pemberley scenes, where Elizabeth identifies the smile we saw in his earlier scenes as the same one in the painting done during his beloved father's lifetime—making, say, the "contemptuous" reading very unlikely.

Now, getting away with that level of ambiguity and obscuring that the ambiguity is happening in the first place, as Austen manages to do in the novel, is both impressive and a hell of a lot harder in visual form. Not impossible! But if we see and hear him ourselves we're less likely to form judgments shaped by Austen's tricks of narration and Elizabeth's POV, and this typically involves commitment to a particular aspect of his presentation in the novel.

And if you think about it, the four major adaptations of Darcy are essentially committing to some part of his depiction.

Laurence Olivier's Darcy is smiling, witty, and charismatic—which are a part of his personality, but skewed so far out of proportion that he's virtually unrecognizable. And there's no attempt to obscure his place in the narrative as the actual love interest (I assume because duh, it's Laurence Olivier—but it was a pretty unrewarding role for him as written).

David Rintoul's Darcy is (in)famously "robotic"—the 1980 version of him leans into the withdrawn, inexpressive, difficult to read but clearly uncomfortable version of Darcy. The smiles in the earlier part tend to be tight, a matter of form, and/or unconvincing, by contrast to the later Darcy's comportment towards the Gardiners and Elizabeth, esp after the second proposal.

Colin Firth's Darcy is, well—okay, I'm biased because of my intense dislike for the 1995 production, but I do think it's also struggling with the same issue, but responds in the opposite way as the 1980. Where the 1980 tried to replicate the ambiguity in a way that retained Darcy's tendency towards a certain severity and dignity and mostly ended up at expressionless, the 1995 transforms it into visibly intense, sexualized brooding. This is coupled with Elizabeth's perception of Darcy's hostility being much more validated than in the novel; he snaps at her, most of his textual smiles are removed, even his letter is rearranged with an eye to half-dressed angst rather than the subtle charity of the omitted "God bless you", and generally his angst and passion!!! are played up rather than down ("I shall conquer this!!" / the melodramatic pond dive and shift in focus from Elizabeth's shame to Darcy being barely dressed / Darcy being grim in London, etc).

If the 1995 version of Darcy commits to Darcy's behavior being largely how Elizabeth sees it, the 2005 drastically reverses that. Matthew Macfadyen's Darcy is also struggling with passion, but tbh he seems like he's kind of struggling with everything. He's visibly consumed with anxiety, he's obviously shy where Darcy has to explain his discomfort or experience it as a POV character in the novel, he seems sweet despite occasional classism, and at times his arc seems more about learning to relax than anything else. That is, instead of representing Darcy as more or less accurately seen by Elizabeth, it leans into emphasizing the extent of her misunderstanding, with Darcy's behavior both more sympathetic than she sees it and clearly comprehensible if she weren't so biased against him (fwiw, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries also emphasizes Elizabeth's misjudgment to a considerable extent and deals with the ambiguity by keeping him literally offstage).

The point of all this is that there is a core issue of adaptation here—the difficulty of representing subtle novelistic ambiguity while making Darcy emotionally compelling at the same time. Adapted Darcys are often given extra scenes, altered dialogue, or (where described in the novel) altered mannerisms/emotions to try and achieve this. And all lean so hard into the aspect they choose to emphasize that they tend to sacrifice most of the rest of his personality to the interpretation they're committing to, and his feelings for Elizabeth tend to be incredibly obvious to the point that it sometimes strains belief that she wouldn't see them, even with all her investment in not seeing them.

I guess the thing is that I think just stopping with "this is an issue of the different media and can't be represented on film" is boring and underestimates the potential of film as a medium. There are plenty of performances that can only be fully appreciated on re-watching or re-listening to something with a fuller knowledge of what is revealed later. And to some degree, the adapters do have to choose how much they want to incorporate Elizabeth's perception of Darcy vs the bare narrative and what they're willing to give away about him to preserve what seems most important.

These are all active choices with actual significance, IMO. They imply priorities about the production and their production's take on Darcy that are intriguing in a way that gets lost by just giving them a free pass by way of the challenge of the medium.

[lulu2992]

I watched Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire and… it really doesn’t deserve the torrent of hatred I’ve seen it receive online.

It’s not a perfect movie, sure, but I’d say it’s an honest one; I feel like I saw exactly what I was told I would get. Even though it doesn’t have the most original story, it’s not bad, and it already has a very dense (but easily digestible) lore, as well as many creative and original designs. Plus, this was only Part One, and they said a longer, R-rated version would also be released at some point, so we’ve only seen maybe one-third of the story…

Creating an entirely new fictional universe that, although it’s inspired by many others (and this was never hidden), isn’t part of an existing franchise with an established lore, is hard and ambitious, and the film was clearly made with care and passion, so I for one welcome the effort.

Rebel Moon has potential, and I want to see more of it. When Part 2, The Scargiver, releases, I will be there!

[ruvviks]

toying with the idea of making yancey's friends not real. would that be too evil

[darabeatha]

x

[fictionadventurer]

"It looked like a good day for setting fence posts, and my mother said so while taking the biscuits from the oven. 'Some morning early, when I can get away, I want you to come with me along the edge of the hill in the wood-lot," she continued. "When the shadows of the trees begin to come down the slope, as the sun rises you feel the turning of the earth. You feel the whole globe under your feet rolling into the sunlight. . . . That's something I found one morning when I was driving the calves to pasture. I've been saving it up for you. I wonder if you've seen a more beautiful dawn in any of the places you've been.'

On my fingers I count the dawns I have seen--memorable, just in being dawns. Sleepy-eyed dawn from the Paris markets after a night of dancing; mist dawn against which I was just to late to see the minarets of Constantinople--all the fault of the stupid stewardess who didn't wake me in time; one startling moment of color on the hills around the Dead Sea before they went colorless in merciless heat; sudden dawn like a clap of light over the freezing-cold Syrian desert. Four dawns in twenty years. No, I do not know dawns as my mother does."

-- Rose Wilder Lane, "A Place in the Country" (1925)

[james-stark-the-writer]

decided to cross another horror classic off my list, now seated for Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). i actually know literally nothing about this, like other than the name of the villain and that it's a horror movie. i don't even know if this is a slasher or whatever. i don't know literally anything about this movie, i don't even know what the premise is other than there's some dude called Leatherface and he's probably killing people and, by the sounds of that name, doing some shit with their skin. love going in blind to these movies anyway. alright, let's fucking get into it.

[fuckyeahelenapaparizou]

Rehearsals for Eurovision 2005 [x; x]

[enpassants]

i dont get why people complain about the 'slowburn' of wesper being ruined when in the show when it, wasnt? there wasn't really a slow burn to begin with. the six of crows duology does not take place over an extended amount of time. yes a lot of the pining was cut out (and i regret that we wont get to see some of it) but that's pining, not slowburn. it just feels that way because of the tension and the want for them to finally get together, and the form of reading makes it feel drawn out. when you binge the episodes you don't get that same feeling. there are many things you can complain about wesper, but slowburn isn't one of them

[vivalu]

If I may offer how I viewed that scene. I definitely see where it seems like Zeus is breaking the "keeping oaths" part of his character rn, but we know he does actually release Ody after this, so he does keep his word. It's just that rn, part of the deal was that Athena convince him as well, and he's not feeling very convinced when she beat his game so easily.

That's fair but I could've sworn the lyric was "convince each of them or me" but I'm so bad at hearing lyrics so

[cq-studios]

8 and 11 for the fandom ask game?

8. you hope more people will come to appreciate ___ (a ship, a trope, an episode, etc)

Well, I’m sure pretty much anyone looking at my blog feels will agree when I say the mobile games.

Like I feel like people are too quick to dismiss them as just Gatcha cash grabs (and I understand they were to an extent, but that’s not all they were, you know?) . They both have told really interesting stories (even if KHUX took its time to actually get to it… 300 missions until Ephemer was insane lol) and added so much to the lore and casts. Not only that, but they gave us new content in what otherwise would’ve been painfully long gaps between games.

Just talking about this makes me even more excited for Missing Link.

11. if you're a writer or artist, what fic or piece of art are you proud of making?

As a writer and an artist I’ll answer for both.

For writing I’ll have to say Nameless AU is probably the fic I’m the most proud of at the moment, and, uhh it’s not out yet but just you wait! Once I finish that first chapter it’s all over for you lol

For art I think I’m obligated to say my Safe and Sound PMV. The art is old and not the greatest but it’s honestly a miracle it got finished at all and I’m proud of that.