#this all started because I’m contemplating the differences between two archetypes

[king0fcrows]

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[neuxue]

Wheel of Time liveblogging: Towers of Midnight ch 8

Mat goes bar-hopping and contemplates obligations

Chapter 8: The Seven-Striped Lass

Oh it’s Mat. Well, enough people have told me Mat is better in this book than last, so if nothing else, confirmation bias alone should see me through.

(Though my indifference towards Mat extends further back than just last book, so… who knows).

He’s in a tavern, which should surprise absolutely no one, and thinking about how Aes Sedai are the bane of his existence, which… also should surprise absolutely no one.

Hey, now he and Thom can fidget with their Aes Sedai letters together. Safer than juggling knives in a world that doesn’t seem to have invented stress balls yet.

‘Master Crimson’? What is this, Cluedo?

And of course he’s not looking at women any more, definitely not noticing any of their, ahem, assets or anything, at least not for himself, you know, just keeping an eye out for his friends of course.

He’s also asking tavernkeepers for advice, because sometimes you just need a sounding board to convince yourself of what you already know. In this case, what to do about Verin’s letter and the conditions set on it. Which, to be fair, is a rather infuriating dilemma. When Verin plays games, she doesn’t fuck around.

“I could open it,” she continued to Mat, “and could tell you what’s inside.”

Bloody ashes! If she did that, he would have to do what it said. Whatever it bloody said. All he had to do was wait a few weeks, and he would be free. He could wait that long. Really, he could.

“It wouldn’t do,” Mat said

Aw, but wouldn’t it? I mean, Verin of all people would appreciate that kind of loophole.

“The woman who gave it to me was Aes Sedai, Melli. You don’t want to anger an Aes Sedai, do you?”

“Aes Sedai?” Melli suddenly looked eager. “I’ve always fancied going to Tar Valon, to see if they’ll let me join them.” She looked at the letter, as if more curious about its contents.

Light! The woman was daft.

Nah, she’s one of the rare sensible ones! Seriously, if I lived in a world with magic, in which there was a chance I could learn to do it, I would give approximately zero fucks about the reputation of the organisation that would enable me to learn it. (Yes, I know, it makes sense in this world that people are wary of Aes Sedai, but to me it’s one of those things like… oh, I don’t know, characters who decide they’re not actually interested in immortality because it would mean outliving their loved ones. Like okay, yeah, there’s a price, but magic. Immortality. I will never understand some fictional characters. Or maybe this just says something about me and which side I’d be on in these fictional worlds… but then, are we really surprised?)

“Can I trust you to keep your word?”

He gave her an exasperated look. “What was this whole bloody conversation about, Melli?”

‘Can I trust you to keep your word’ is kind of a… tautological question, though. And one that always amuses me, along with variations like ‘how can I trust you’ ‘I give you my word’. Because ultimately you’re still just left with the decision of whether or not you trust that person’s word. And no real way of knowing whether or not you should. Once again, I am perhaps exposing myself as not ideal hero material here.

I will say I’m impressed by Mat’s ability to not open the letter. Though I hope at some point we get to see what it says; Verin’s so good at this kind of thing it would be a shame not to see what game she set up here.

The bouncer doesn’t like Mat, which is kind of not surprising given that a bouncer’s job is to stop shit and the purpose of Mat’s entire existence is to start shit.

The paving stones were damp from a recent shower, though those clouds had passed by and—remarkably—left the sky open to the air.

I see what you did there.

Also I’m now trying to place this against everyone else’s timeline and it’s hurting my brain a little. The weather would suggest this is post-Dragonmount but I feel like Mat still had a bit of catch-up to do… ah well, I’m sure we’ll find out. For whatever reason timelines are something of an exception to my usual ability to retain details, probably because, weirdly enough, I often just… don’t care that much? In the sense that usually, when you actually need to know (or when it would be interesting or add something to the story to know), you’ll know.

Mat was not about any specific task tonight

Oh, wandering about at random are we? Which, if you’re Mat, means that regardless of how you started the night, you’ll almost certainly be about a certain task before you finish it. The Pattern has plans, after all.

Getting a feel for Caemlyn. A lot had changed since he had been here last.

Wow, okay, yeah, as the reader we’ve been in Caemlyn plenty over the past several books, but Mat was last here in book three. Damn.

A lot has changed since then. In Caemlyn, yes, but also Mat has changed quite a lot since then. It’s interesting, even in real life, going back to a place you either visited or knew well in the past. The sense of familiarity but at a slight distance, along with the memory of when you were there last, which can then serve to highlight how you’ve changed. And then all the things that aren’t familiar, though you can’t always be certain if that’s just because you’re seeing them differently…

Light, he had heard of paving stones attacking people.

What is this, the French Revolution?

Mat’s found a better tavern, by which I mean a worse tavern, but it’s all a matter of perspective and perspective is a funny thing at the tail end of a pub crawl, so let’s just not think too hard about it.

I’m suddenly very interested in the story of this woman with breeches and short hair dicing in a dodgy tavern with three dudes and not responding to any of Mat’s smiles, ahem. Yes I’m being pandered to, no I don’t care.

But Mat did not smile at girls that way anymore. Besides, she had not responded to any of his smiles anyway.

Alright, that’s much closer to Jordan’s Mat. The absolute lack of self-awareness in being able to think those sentences side-by-side, because hey, Mat, if you don’t smile at girls that way anymore, how do you know she’s not responding to them? (Plus the fact that Mat’s ‘best smile’ has, I’m pretty sure, not actually worked once this series when he’s actually thought about it).

From these first few pages in general, Mat does sound somewhat more how I would expect him to—the way his thoughts and actions contradict themselves, his tendency towards an absolute lack of self-awareness, the running joke of his ‘best smile’… though it also feels like it’s being laid on a little thick? Almost as if Sanderson has picked out a handful of things that work, or that have appeared elsewhere, and is studiously applying them and avoiding adding in too much else or deviating too much from those narrow bounds.

But that’s almost certainly me nitpicking and also looking specifically for this; it’s not really a complaint and at first glance this does seem better than the writing of Mat last book, so… fair enough. Point is, this is definitely not as jarring to read as that first chapter last book was. Still different, sure, but more within the parameters of the rest of the differences.

Mat’s more interested in the local gossip, which—ah.

“They found him dead this morning. Throat ripped clean out. Body was drained of blood, like a wineskin full of holes.”

The gholam’s back in town, then.

Well, in town, anyway; I suppose it hasn’t actually been to Caemlyn before, that we’ve seen. Hey, Elayne? Maybe listen to Birgitte and your bodyguards for a bit and actually take a break from your errands and adventures into the city alone for a bit.

Dice are landing on their corners and also starting up in Mat’s head, so looks like your night of aimless fun and tourism is coming to an end, Mat. Don’t forget to sign the guestbook on your way out.

It seemed impossible that [the gholam] could have gotten here this quickly. Of course, Mat had seen it squeeze through a hole not two handspans wide. The thing did not seem to have a right sense of what was possible and what was not possible.

Oh, well, in that case you two have something in common! Good, you won’t run out of things to say on your next date encounter.

Though on a less flippant note, I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this before, but I like how Mat gets paired against or linked with opponents or entities who fall into the larger umbrella archetype of ‘trickster figure’ but in different or darker ways: the gholam, the Eelfinn and Aelfinn, arguably Fain/Mordeth… and then there’s Perrin, who is set against Trollocs (the darker side of a mix between animal and human) and Whitecloaks (who exist to force questions of morality). As if they’re both sometimes set against those who reflect a darker or warped version of some aspect of who they are.

It’s not a perfect like-to-like matching; they have other opponents who don’t fit that kind of classification quite as well (though I would still argue that just about any enemy they—and quite a few other characters—face highlight some aspect of themselves via contrast or by presenting a warped kind of mirror), but it’s just a little… random thing I quite like. Particularly Mat set against other types of trickster, because it fits with the very definition or idea of what a trickster figure is in the first place. This idea of looking into a kaleidoscope of mirrors and seeing theme and variation until they flicker at the edges.

He had sent word to [Elayne], but had not gotten a reply. How was that for gratitude? By his count, he had saved her life twice.

Sigh. I sort of thought they had reached an understanding as far as the accounting between them last time they spoke, but I guess we’re still doing this. Which, okay, before everyone comes for me on this, yes he has saved her life multiple times, and no she has not always responded immediately with gratitude, but specifically in the last instance she very much did, and it was a rather lovely moment where they both saw more in each other than they had before. Where they each realised that their previous (first) impressions were not necessarily the full truth, and that there was someone to like beneath that. A friend, even.

And I liked that; I absolutely have a soft spot for the friendship between Mat and Elayne, in part because they’re actually quite similar in a lot of ways. And so for both of them to start to see beneath the surface, to see more than just what they expect to see, was a nice moment of character growth for both of them.

Anyway, leaving the gratitude thing aside, it’s a shame Elayne hasn’t replied, if only because I wouldn’t mind seeing those two interact again. I just like their weird relationship. I like weird friendships between characters in general, really; it’s a good way to get to see a character from an ever-so-slightly different angle, or throw them into a slightly different kind of light. (In all honesty there’s a small part of me that would have been very open to an Elayne/Mat relationship rather than Elayne/Rand and Mat/Tuon, but mostly I just like them as friends who sort of… force each other to take a second look at things, and in doing so to realise some things about themselves).

For once, there had been a battle and he had missed it. Remembering that lightened his mood somewhat. An entire war had been fought over the Lion Throne, and not one arrow, blade, or spear had entered the conflict seeking Matrim Cauthon’s heart.

Yeah, well, don’t jinx it.

Also Mat you were sort of in the middle of some of your own battles and while you’re pretty good, you’re not quite good enough to be in two places at once. Still, can’t fault him for looking on the bright side, I suppose. Especially because there’s a rather large battle headed his way any day now.

Three inns in one night. Making a proper pub crawl of it, I see.

Though Thom’s more in the mood to play sad flute music, presumably over Moiraine. I mean fair; I, too, would probably play several laments for her sake. Bring her back already.

Caemlyn was seen as one of the few places where one could be safe from both the Seanchan and the Dragon.

Oh no doubt it’ll stay that way. What could possibly go wrong in this beautiful Camelot that’s been held up since Book 1 as an example of beauty and (relative) stability?

I’m pretty sure one of the first things I said upon seeing Caemlyn back in EotW was ‘that’s a nice city you have there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it’ and, twelve books later, I stand by that.

Mat tries to get Thom’s attention by snagging his coins, and Thom just tosses a knife through his sleeve without interrupting his playing. Respect.

***

Oh hey a mid-chapter break without a POV change. That’s unusual.

It’s something of a location change, though, because Mat’s back at the Band’s camp now, considering the pros and cons of horse meat. Well, mostly cons in his opinion but I would like to state for the record that horse is actually quite tasty. No of course I don’t know this from experience what are you talking about.

The gholam of course has an even less discriminating palate—or I suppose technically more discriminating, just less socially acceptable.

But Mat and Thom have moved on to planning for their fieldtrip to the Tower of Ghenjei, because, you know, these characters have it easy: just one thing at a time, all easily dealt with, no piling on of way too many problems and decisions and things or people out to kill them…

“Maybe Verin will come back and release me from this bloody oath.”

Unfortunately she had to take some rather drastic measures to release herself from a different bloody oath, so uh… sorry, Mat, you’re out of luck on that one.

“Best that one stays away,” Thom said. “I don’t trust her. There’s something off about that one.”

I mean, you’re not wrong. But you’re also not exactly right. Man, I’m going to miss Verin. She’s one I very much look forward to seeing on a reread: there was always something about her and it was great fun to speculate and try to work out exactly what her deal was, but it’s different when you know. And we got so very little time with her once that was revealed—it was a hell of a way to go out, of course, but I’m definitely excited to see how she reads when you know from the beginning.

“Either way,” Thom said, “we should probably start sending guards with you when you visit the city.”

“Guards won’t help against the gholam.”

“No, but what of the thugs who jumped you on your way back to camp three nights back?”

You know what this reminds me of? Birgitte scolding Elayne when Elayne tries to go out on her own. It’s far from the only thing Elayne and Mat have in common, but it does amuse me.

Talking to that clerk meant Elayne knew Mat was here. She had to. But she had sent no greetings, no acknowledgement that she owed Mat her skin.

Maybe because she acknowledged it last time the two of you spoke? Or have you forgotten? I think that’s what irks me here: they’ve already had that conversation. It made sense (more or less) for Mat to be annoyed about Tear, before Elayne and Nynaeve gave him their thanks and apologies, but after that fight with the gholam in the Rahad, Elayne and Mat seemed to clear the air between them, so it’s just… kind of weird and a bit annoying to have this dragged out again. It seems like it would make more sense at this stage for him to just be annoyed at her for ignoring him, rather than for not thanking him for… something she’s already thanked him for.

He does shift after that to wondering how to get her to set all her foundries to making Aludra’s dragons, which is a much more pertinent question. I now kind of want Elayne and Aludra to meet. I feel like that could be entertaining.

Teslyn Baradon was not a pretty woman, though she might have made a passable paperbark tree

This should sound insulting but for whatever reason I find it hilarious. Why is this so funny.

Maybe this is why we were getting Mat’s grumbling about Elayne not thanking him (again) for saving her life: because thanks are the first thing Teslyn, an Aes Sedai of the Red Ajah, offers Mat unprompted. That would more or less fit with how these things are usually set up in Mat’s narrative, I suppose.

Though Sanderson doesn’t quite seem to have the hang of the Illian dialect; it’s close but some of the phrasing is just a bit off. But that’s me nitpicking again.

“It do be important to maintain some illusions with yourself, would you not say?”

Wiser words than you may even realise, Teslyn, given who you’re talking to. Though I think she does realise this; she’s quite perceptive, and she’s spent a fair bit of time with Mat now, and I think she very likely does see his tendency towards… perhaps not quite denial anymore, at least not as strong as it once was, but a degree of self-deception (and total lack of self-awareness, of course).

She nodded to him. A respectful nod. Almost a bow. Mat released her hand, feeling as unsettled as if someone had kicked his legs out from underneath him.

Yeah, this is what you’d expect from Mat. This is what he does: grumbles to himself about lack of gratitude, or Aes Sedai causing problems and having no respect… but then as soon as that gratitude or respect is shown, he doesn’t quite know how to deal with it. Because he’s not actually arrogant enough to accept it with haughty disdain, but nor is he self-effacing enough to truly not care about getting praise and credit. So you end up in this awkward in-between state that is, I think, actually quite common amongst people in general. It’s definitely something I see play out in the workplace, at least.

And so he offers her the horses that, last book, he refused Joline. Because she’s shown him respect and so he will return the favour. Because they’re treating each other as people, and Mat may push for what he feels is his due, but he won’t just take it without giving something in return. He’s better than he likes to think he is, as Thom once pointed out.

“I did not come to you tonight to manipulate you into giving me horses,” Teslyn said. “I do be sincere.”

“So I figured,” Mat said, turning and lifting up the flap to his tent. “That’s why I made the offer.”

And that’s it, really. It’s amazing what open and honest communication can get you, sometimes. It’s almost like that’s a running thing in this series.

There, he froze. That scent…

Blood.

Mmmm, dinner.

Next (ToM ch 9) Previous (ToM ch 7)

[rinharu-purple]

MakoHaru vs. RinHaru is like Apples vs. Pears

Ooohhh, how nice that we have a horrific pandemic hugging our from us fellow humans cruelly treated earth, so that we could stay at our homes, bake our own bread, have hundreds of zoom talks and try to learn how to knit a sweater for our dog. Everybody chooses another recreational activity to spend their time at their homes...Me? Well. I can  finally write my thoughts on Makoharu vs Rinharu ship war because that's my business and knitting has never been my forte...oooor writing gramatically perfect essays and yet here - we - are.

I think Makoharu and Rinharu are veeeery different and I will try to tell you in this post why is it that I think so...(nope, not because I'm a Rinharu shipper, why would you think that, and no there will be no Makoto shaming, he's a precious baby boy and I love him)

Lets start with the context, in which these two kinds of relationships can be found in.

Makoharu is the “We have been best friends since we were in our diapers and now we are like siamese twins, like salt and pepper, like Ernie and Birt, like avocado and lime juice” type.

Mako and Haru got to know each other while they were 6 years old when Makoto tripped on a sand castle on the playground and Haru helped himto stand up. Ever since then, it's almost always has been Makoto's mission to help Haru stand up, get up or get out of any situation, pool or bath. They are neighbour kids so they've spent their entire life together. Day by day, year by year. They've started swimming in a SC together,  went to the same school and then attended to the same university. Even when they were on school trips outside the city, they would share the same room. So unsparable they've always been. Considering the fact that they are currently in their early twenties, they must have spent almost 15 years together. In that point they no longer need to use words to communicate or Haru has to tell Makoto about his problems. Makoto can always be spot on about Haru's concerns whereas Haru can sense when something's up with Makoto, even though he's not so spot on as Makoto. Haru is not the best when it comes to seeing through the souls of people. He has a quite accurate sense of detecting suffering souls though.

Makoto is always observing and following Haru in a not creepy way. Makoto is loyal to Haru and givies Haru a safe space, where he could always go to, when in distress. Makoto is the translator to Haru's thoughts and feelings, when it's far too uncomfortable for him to express his thoughts himself or the replier to his unasked questions, when its too embarrasing for him to pose them. He gives him handkerchiefs, when he sneezes, tells him to get out of the pool because its still too early to swim outdoors. He also guides other people in their handling of Haru, so that he wouldn' be put into unsettling situations. Makoto is taking over the role of a protector for Haru. Some also see Makoto in a maternal archetype. Even though I find this a little bit far fetched, Makoto is definitiely the mother figure in the team, that's for sure. Just not in this duo.

What is then Haru's role in this relationship? What does Haru think of Makoto canonically? I really had to skip this part and give it some thought before writing anything about this, because I didn't have any straight answer at the first time. Haru cares a lot for Makoto. I mean, we all saw how he freaked out when he's nearly drown in the ocean. He also reacts frantically, when Makoto tells him about his plans to go to Tokyo.Haru is also very sensitive about Makoto's fear of the ocean and always tries to stay between Makoto and the ocean while taking walks at the beach. But Haru usually goes his own way, doing his own things, regardles of Makoto. Sometimes it's almost like he would take Makoto for granted, especially when he's lost way too much in his own problems. He doesn't see Makoto as a basic part of his swimming career and also doesn't confide in him in topics regarding Rin. For example he never told him why he'd quit swimming and he also didn't mention him about the “fence tension”. Makoto is transparent with Haru, but can we say it other way around as well? We saw Makoto struggle with his feelings towards swimming in High Speed and Haru could only catch up to this after quite some time. The same goes for Makoto's dilemma about his future plans in Eternal Summer, because Haru was dwelled way too deep on his own dilemma. What about their team relay in the first season? When he's shattered to pieces because Rin won the 100 m freestyle race, he just disappeared and discarded anyone else. This might be te only unbalanced element in the MakoHaru relationship.

Whatever the roles in that ship might be, due to their closeness and co-dependence Makoto and Haru are extremely comfortable around each other and trust each other completely. It is an established relationship which has very strong roots. It is an unbreakable bond. This is the main context of this ship. What about RinHaru?

Rinharu is the “Ever since I've met you my life hasn't been the same and I can't stand you yet you complete me trope... like yin and yang, like Mr. Darcy and Elisabeth, like two polars of a compass, same same but different” type.

Rin and Haru have always been rivals but also friends. They would compete in every single silly challenge out there, but then set the prize in rather questionable things like “the winner carries the loser bridal style”. They are responsible for the most of the emotional meltdowns of each other but then again they are also the ones to gather the broken pieces of each other and “save” one another. On the other hand, they contuniously keep taps on each other, observe one other from behind the scenes. They also are not using words to communicate like in MakoHaru, the only difference from MakoHaru ist that not only they fail to understand each without words but they also misinterpret each other and therefore have many quarrels along the way. Then again we have many intimate scenes between them, mostly at night, in a car, on a bench, in Haru's room or in the same bed abroad, in which they express their thoughts and feelings very straightforward with clear sentences. No innuendos, no sugary coats, no ego-masks. As honest as they can be. More interestingly, those feelings and thoughts usually turn out to be mutual. They think and feel the same way, they just don't confess them often. It is a relationship of two opposing ends all the time and yet they crave to be next to one another, swim together, see the world together, be like one another, cherish their moments and memories together.  They appear to be  the “opposites attract” stereotype, but they keep growing, expanding and evolving. Neither them nor us viewers know what the next scene in their relationship will be like. It's a relationship that's still in the making, they dont' have an established pattern.

As much as MakoHaru will stay being best friends RinHaru will also stay being friendly rivals, regardless- of any other direction their ship may take. Imo those are the foundations of these two ships, so how are they played out in the series? What is the tone of these relationships?

Makoharu is green and blue, you mix them and you have either a darker or a lighter shade of green

I've just described MakoHaru as an established, safe relationship. It's not only that, but its also a harmonious one. Makoto and Haru are harmoniously compatible with each other. They don't argue much, or have completely opposite opinions, wishes, desires. Even when they differ in their ways, they still manage to find a common ground and keep theit relationship on track. So that's why the producers always give MakoHaru scenes a stabile tone. They don't have drama, but they also don't have emotions on the extreme end of the spectrum. The comforting atmosphere is the basic of their interactions. When they have an argument, they work this through swiftly, and close the deal. They don't carry the burden along the way, they just leave it there.

In illustrations Makoto and Haru are mostly portrayed facing the same direction, wearing the same uniform (obviously), in the same setting, in cooperation. Their Drama CD stories are also that of two characters getting along well. Makoto pampers Haru to his good health as a firefighter and protects him from the police or they cook a meal together and Haru plays to role of a trainer to Makoto. But hey are also portrayed like a somewhat married couple in a domestic seeting. Even Nagisa mentions in the first season that hey look like a newlywed couple. Btw I really think that Nagisa is a hardcore MakoHaru shipper.

RinHaru is red and blue, you mix them than you have motherf#cking purple!

“.. like yin and yang, like Mr. Darcy and Elisabeth, like two polars of a compass, same same but different”  of course they are red and blue! Red and blue are two of the three main colors so they are not harmonious. When mixed they try first to dominate each other but when they finally blend, they make the sophisticated yet charming purple. Something that is neigther blue nor red, something brand new and that's RinHaru. When they are together they clash, they compete, they try to dominate each other but once they finally give in, it's a sight we've never seen before. The ever unforseeable atmosphere sets the tone of RinHaru, which is why both Rin and Haru are still insecure about each other and because their reactions are unpredictable to each other. They appear to be indifferent or comfortable when together and yet there is a certain lack of confidence in their  interactions. They break their heads while contemplating about each others actions and carry the burdens of the unanswered questions in their own heads for quite some time.

In the official artworks they are mostly looking at each other, provoking each other or“mirroring” each other. They are moving forward on their own paths, but in the same direction. Their Drama CD stories show Rin as a policeman, who try to arrest the trespassing merman Haru but then end up showing him his favorite sights and Haru offering him his blood to save his life. In the second one, Haru and Rin, on their way back from the high school regional tournament, at night, using the only time to spend some time together, reminiscing about their eternal summer together and making promises about the future. In another one, Rin is spending the night at Haru's and they once again reminiscence about their childhood and then it takes a misleading turn which includes teenage boys keeping books under their beds. There are always some intimate sparkles in those stories and Haru and Rin always have a romantic moment, in which either one does something romantic to the other or they share theit romantic thoughts about their relationship. RinHaru in my opinion is handled like a "beginning of the relationship" couple. They are exploring their feelings and their relationship progresses with time.

And that is an important point. MakoHaru might be portrayed like a married couple but they are not one. On the other hand, RinHaru really is an everevolving relationship. MakoHaru's setting hasn't changed ever since the first season but RinHaru is taking a different turn in every single one.

Here is a brief comparison of the first and last highlighting interactions of the both ships in each season.

First Season:

In the first season MakuHaru starts as it always does. Makoto pulls Haru out of his bathtub so that he could go to school in time, much like in the past. And there are important scenes in which they express their appreciation for them sticking to each other. RinHaru on the contrary, starts on a bitter note due to their dispute from the middle school and keep a cold face until they both speak or in this case shout/cry out their true feelings and make up.

Second season:

Second season also starts with Makoto pulling up Haru out of his baththub and ends in the same manner, even though they also have a fight because Makoto also tries to bring Haru to his senses about giving more serious thoughts to his future plans. RinHaru starts the second season with a new set of feelings. They set a new tournament record and reach the finish line at the same time, giving each other high five and experiencing this new “fired up face” sensation. At the end of the season we see them again at the starting block on neighboring lanes, but this time they give each other a confident, challenging and yet playful smile before diving in.

Third season:

In the final season up to date Haru and Makoto are attending university in Tokyo and to my surprise aren’t living together. Their first scene is as usual Makoto helping Haru out of water but Haru, this time, pulls Makoto right into the pool, pointing to the fact that Haru, indeed, has become more assertive and confident in his actions. At the end of the season, we see them both still meeting as best friends and studying together. Rin and Haru set off for the final lap of the series miles apart, nonetheless we find them thinking about each other, while they’re in water. Being far awy no longer bringst fear to their relationship, since they know that they are working towards the same goal and that their paths will cross again. And exactly this is what we see in the very final scene. Haru and Rin, standing side by side, at the international stage. Wondering what the future holds for them, but one thing is for sure...They’re diving into the future as a duo.

So when we leave every other scene out of the discussion and solely focus on what are the starting and ending status of these two ships are, we can see that MakoHaru stays stable over the years and don’t show much change, whereas RinHaru evolves and progresses over time and these guys are feeling closer to each other despite spending most of their times apart.

So how do the other characters react to these ships?

Well as mentioned earlier Nagisa is definitely a MakoHaru shipper. He makes suggestive comments about their relationships amd is also very attentive to Mako’s worries about Haru which brings me to Makoto’s reactions to RinHaru. Why was Makoto jealous of Rin and wanted to race him in freestyle? I think Makoto was jealous of Rin because he’ realized that there is someone, who occupies a certain area in Haru’s life, which he cannot be involved in. This would make any best friend uncomfortable and he also confides in Rin after his fight with Haru. Rin on the other hand accepts MakoHaru as best friends and supports it and tries to cheer up Haru about his fight with Makoto by saying that Sousuke und him fight all the time. Sousuke also seems to be aware of the dynamic of RinHaru and is quite cold towards Haru while messing with Rin about his fixation on Haru. He is also quite aware about Rin’s expressions changing while tlaking about Haru, so he senses something out of the ordinary there. Rin’s homestay parents also give Haru a wink while telling him that Rin used to mention from someone whom he looks up to. Ikuya as a newly introduced character, also shows some jelaousy like behaviour towards Rin, although this behaviour is pretty mutual. but I could see Ikuya having more concerns than Rin here. Let’s also not forget about how even Kisumi’s realized that Haru appeared to be lonesome, when Rin was in Australia during middle school (which Haru silently confirms during Ikuya’s heartfelt burst out in Starting Days). People know, that there is something more then what meets the eye for RinHaru.

In total, MakoHaru has always been a relationship, which owed its strength to its stability and therefore is a very rooted and powerful relationship. Makoto is without a doubt Haru’s best friend and he will remain being that. However I don’t think there has been more than that and also don’t see it turning into something romantic. I mean, like 19 year old college students in Tokyo, don’t you think that they would at least get into a flatting situation if they were more intimacy there? (or maybe this isn’t something common for Japan, I dunno). Since Makoto’s journey takes a different orientation than Haru’s I wouldn’t be surprised if Makoto would soon have a girlfriend. I see Makoto more of a heterosexual guy tbh.

RinHaru on the other side, is still a story in the making and their strong feelings and obsession for each other and most importantly, their paths finally meet and they will be able to finally spent more time together and get to know each other even more. Considering the passion, intimate moments and their desire to be together could turn into something in romantic. I think the romantic feelings between Rin and Haru have been there right from the beginning, but they had to live through all kinds of experiences and form their personas as professional swimmers and find their true identities, while establishing their relationship first before giving thought to what other feelings might be there. So its just a matter of time, that they become aware and act upon these feelings, so we could just hope that we got more Free! productions.

Thank you everyone, who’s made it this far. I know it’s been a long post, but there was no way for me to cover it any shorter than that. Please excuse any typo or grammatical mistakes. I checked the whole text twice, but I’m pretty sure, that I’ve oversaw many mistakes. Did you like it though? Would you add/change something in it? Let me know. I would love to hear your opinions!

[baneofloslorien5384]

A (hopefully) Unique Robcina Headcanon

As some of you may be aware, I am very much a fan of the M!RobinxLucina pairing from Fire Emblem Awakening. Have been since I was reading spoilers in fanfics before I even played the game. Bad Bane, bad! Anyhow, I’ve seen Robcina fics in all shapes and sizes, but one factor that’s largely absent is this: how would things be affected if Lucina’s present day counterpart, the one who’s born just before your first brouhaha with Valm, knows and understands just who her counterpart from the future is? Well, here is my interpretation. Enjoy!

-          At times, living with her younger self could prove quite confounding when Lucina tries to say…well, anything, really. For instance, when regarding her then-infant younger self, she would start by saying “Isn’t she” and then fumble before beginning again by saying “I mean, me, adorable?”.

-          Robin, who’s never one to let such an opportunity for a good laugh go to waste, slyly replies “Yes, you really are cute, Lucina”. This prompts the older Lucina to blush adorably and run out of the room in embarrassment, all the while trying to convince herself that her younger self giggling is just a mildly sinister coincidence.

-          Robin, who’s much easier to slap with a “Guilty” verdict, then slips Little Lucina a cup of tasty fruit juice, saying “Here’s my end of the deal”.

-          Lucina is not the only one to end up confounded when talking about this subject. When Robin encourages Lucina to spend time with her younger self, he gets discombobulated in midsentence as he splutters out “You were…are…is…a cute kid?”.

-          Following the end of the Valmese War, when the Shepherds regrouped at Ylisse prior to heading to Plegia, Lucina was more-or-less gang pressed into spending time with her younger self. Eerily, Little Lucina did not seem at all nervous when confronted with a stranger and even seemed to get fussy if Lucina tried to leave the room while Little Lucina was still awake.

-          As Lucina has stated several times, her original plan is to leave Ylisse once Grima is vanquished. This goal becomes increasingly difficult to follow-through on as she falls in love with Robin and reconnects with her parents, but hints are dropped that she still intends to go through with it.

-          Though Robin would resign from the Shepherds in a heartbeat if he had to choose between that and Lucina, he rather dislikes having to make such a choice at all, especially since he can see how kinda-sorta having her family back has helped Lucina to open up and become happier.

-          Deciding that this dilemma calls for not the tipping of the scales, but for the scales to be tipped over and smashed into itty bitty pieces, Robin goes to Chrom, tells him of the situation, and suggests that the Exalt “do something ham-fisted”.

-          Chrom apparently obliges…and handily. For, within days, the story of the Warriors from the Future leaks out. With the public now aware of Big Lucina’s true origins, which are backed up by her Brand and the existence of a second Falchion, her plans to leave are rendered utterly pointless.

-          After Lucina shoots Robin and Chrom any array of blistering and yet strangely ineffective death glares, she resigns herself to her secret being out and ponders how her life will proceed from here. Ultimately, she takes the post of Captain of the Castle Guard (to be clear, Frederick is Chrom and the royal family’s personal bodyguard…slash-unofficial-butler, while Lucina handles the security of the castle) while Robin becomes Chrom’s chief advisor.

-          As Little Lucina grows from a baby to a toddler, she picks up on Big Lucina’s true identity with downright creepy speed, and promptly develops a unique blend of hero worship and self-aggrandizing.

-          Ascribing to the, technically correct, belief that the two of them are the same person, Little Lucina greets Big Lucina by saying “Hello, Me”. Big Lucina, who just can’t ignore that particular bait, replies “You are not me and I am not you. You are you, and I am me”.

-          Little Lucina, who still isn’t deterred after, literally, hearing this at least once a day, minimum, always answers “You were me, and I will be you”.

-          Considering how much Big Lucina does NOT want Little Lucina growing up like she did, combined with her tendency to take things too literally, Big Lucina finds this assertion annoying at best and outright alarming at worst.

-          For a time, Big Lucina was kept much too busy to agonize over her younger self’s unique quest for an identity, given that she now had to police the castle on top of being a good wife to Robin and a good mother to Morgan.

-          Of course, even that doesn’t go off without a hitch since, when Lucina is fitted with new armor to denote her rank, Robin’s belting out “HOLY CRAAAAAAP!!!!” is heard echoing through the castle, causing everyone who can fight to come running…only to discover Robin’s amazement that Lucina isn’t flat after all, but wore bindings over her chest to make her masculine disguise more convincing.

-          In a rare show of volatile temper, Lucina loses it and, in order to get back into her good graces, Robin must brave the direst of perils, venture into the darkest depths, and steel his nerves against abominations that defy explanation even as they turn the stomach and scar the soul…by which, I mean he has to go to the boutique and splurge on the clothing that Lucina prefers.

-          After getting over the sheer weirdness of there being two Princess Lucinas, one of which is supervising her own home security, the castle guard grows quite fond of their unlikely captain, even following her unspoken orders to treat her like their captain rather than their princess.

-          During one particularly memorable instance, Big Lucina was marching through the castle on an inspection of the guard and the castle’s defenses, straight and brisk, hand on hilt, shoulders squared, and back straight. Much to her surprise, she realizes that everyone was snickering at her when they thought she was out of earshot. Only after nearly an hour did Big Lucina realize that this was because Little Lucina was marching alongside her, mimicking her marching style flawlessly.

-          Robin treats Little Lucina much the same way as he, later, treats Little Morgan. That is, like a daughter or a favorite niece. When Big Lucina was elsewhere, and Chrom and Sumia were busy, Robin would read stories to Little Lucina, play Hide-and-Seek with her, and such.

-          At first, Robin is bewildered that Big Lucina seems so alarmed by these seemingly harmless moments…until he realizes that Big Lucina and Little Lucina have a very important commonality: both of them grew up having a crush on Robin.

-          This is illustrated by, for example, Robin taking a day off to have a family picnic with Big Lucina, only for Little Lucina to snatch his hand and ask him to play with her. This leads to a tug-a-war between the two Lucinas while Robin contemplates the existential weirdness of not only having the same woman on either arm but the impact that a nigh-literal duplicate of oneself can have upon one’s sense of uniqueness in the universe…okay, he instead contemplates how many terrible puns he can make about “having arguments with yourself” he can milk out of this situation. So, sue me!

-          Though Robin never, EVER passes up the chance to rile up Chrom after he becomes the world’s youngest grandpa, his ability to be mean is actually rather limited. Thus, he is constantly hard pressed to do anything other than melt submissively in the face of Little Lucina’s adorable smile and ten syllable version of the word “Please”.

-          The matter is not helped when Little Lucina decides that, since she and Big Lucina are technically the same person, that that makes Robin THEIR husband. Being the softy that he is, Robin does too little to disabuse her of the notion whereas Big Lucina, upon hearing Little Lucina ask that Robin address her as “my little bluebird” (Robin’s nickname to Big Lucina), straight up loses it.

-          Robin has to talk fast, and mightily strain his thinking muscles, in order to convince Big Lucina that he isn’t going to trade her in for a younger model somewhere down the line. And, though she eventually comes around, tensions between her and Little Lucina persist.

-          Morgan, being Morgan, merrily pours gas on this particular bonfire by greeting Little Lucina with “Hi, Mom!” And Little Lucina, not to be outdone, replies by saying “When I grow up, I’m going to have you!”

-          Robin then makes the truly grave mistake of dissecting that particular statement. If he were to abandon all sense of fidelity, morality, decency, common sense, self-preservation, and proper hero archetypes, and did, in fact, have a baby with Little Lucina, then would that child essentially be a third Morgan? For that matter, when Little Lucina does grow up and marry (hopefully) someone else and have children, then would those children be half-siblings to Morgan and…Morgan? And, just how would that look on a genealogy chart? Would Big Lucina and Little Lucina share an entry line they’re technically the same person? If so, how would the genealogist get across that these are two ladies from different points in time rather than one woman with two husbands? How could the genealogist illustrate that Big Lucina’s children and Little Lucina’s children are half-siblings, assuming that’s the case. And…and Robin decides he could really use a drink right about now.

-          Despite Morgan’s insistence on addressing Little Lucina as “Mom” whenever she thinks it’s funny, she typically treats her more like a little sister or a favorite niece and the two become fast friends. Later, Morgan begins instructing Little Lucina in the fine art of pranking.

-          As Little Lucina is still quite young, most of these pranks involve myriad ways to get out of taking her afternoon naps. These include, but are not limited to, arranging stuffed animals beneath the sheets to create the appearance that she’s under the covers, mixing up smoke bombs to distract the guards, setting up buckets of round nuts to trip people up, ropes and pulleys arranged to bury entire rooms in flower petals, and other brain aneurysm-inducing nonsense.

-          Big Lucina, who’s near to a tantrum over these shenanigans, adamantly and hotly insists that she was nothing like that as a child and takes Morgan to task for meddling with the “purity” of her younger self.

-          Morgan, characteristically, begins to gush about how maternal Big Lucina sounds when giving a scolding, which causes Big Lucina to relent a little…until Morgan tells her that Little Lucina is a “brilliant prodigy of pranking who comes up with brilliant pranks”, and that nearly all of Little Lucina’s shenanigans were ones she thought of herself. At this, Big Lucina loses it and lets out one of those she-could-break-glass screams, which has Chrom and half the castle guard breaking down her door before they realize it’s a false alarm.

-          A horrified castle functionary (i.e. useless bureaucrat) then sees the damage and, after a long moment of abject horror, says that that door was over six hundred years old. This triggers an amusing, and irreverent, discussion about just who the hell keeps track of those sorts of things.

-          Robin, being Robin, is about to throw his bit of gasoline on the bonfire by saying that Big Lucina puts a whole new spin on the phrase “you’re too hard on yourself”. When he notices that Big Lucina looks like she’ll dismember and eat him alive if he tries it, he instead asks if she’d like a trip to the Bathrealm.

-          Although Little Lucina’s prankishness tapers off enough that the castle is not poised to explode, her nursemaids and governesses, even years later, will insist that Morgan and Little Lucina’s pranks were the stuff of legends. And that they have the gastric ulcers to prove it.

-          Given that Robin has dodged many of Morgan’s pitfalls and snares, sometimes by tricking her into setting them off herself, it’s no surprise that Robin is sometimes called in to diffuse suspected traps set by Morgan and Little Lucina.

-          Since Morgan is well aware that Robin is her toughest quarry to prank, she, Little Lucina, and sometimes Lissa and Big Cynthia as well, will sometimes arrange massive arrays of double-bluffs. Or triple-bluffs, quadruple-bluffs, quintuple-bluffs, sextuple-bluffs (and, yes, that’s a real word), etc.

-          In these instances, lots and lots and lots of pitfalls, snares, etc. would be laid out in the hopes that Robin, in his efforts to avoid as many of them as he could, would get got simply by virtue of the law of averages. Remarkably, this strategy did not work…because other people, including the pranksters themselves, got caught in them before Robin even arrived. This explains the forest of people dangling by their ankles all pointing, in a very disgruntled manner, in Morgan’s general direction. It also explains the cardiac arrythmia Frederick has at such hazardous untidiness and the urge Chrom has to buy a wyvern when people start complaining to him about his granddaughter.

-          Curiously, Morgan hardly ever pranks Big Lucina, partly because Big Lucina is quick to learn the fine art of maternal scolding and partly because, due to Morgan’s memories of Big Lucina being so fractured and hazy, Morgan is worried about turning what memories she does have of her mother into bad ones. Little Lucina, by contrast, will prank Big Lucina at the drop of a hat, usually to get her older counterpart to loosen up and have fun. As with more than a few convoluted concepts, Big Lucina finds this quite baffling.

-          At some point, either consciously or otherwise, Big Lucina finds herself laughing at Little Lucina’s shenanigans, prompting the latter to, literally, jump for joy and give Big Lucina an impressive tackle hug. Knowing her original plan to leave Little Lucina to live her own life, and that staying with her is throwing that life out of whack, but also knowing she’d long since stopped wanted to leave her younger self, Lucina says aloud “Sometimes, I just don’t understand myself.”

-          Robin, being Robin, gets a kick out of this choice of words and, since seeing Big Lucina smile is one of his greatest, and hardest fought, pleasures in life, promptly adds Little Lucina to his arsenal of “secret weapons”.

-          Big Lucina, who we already know is quite capable of envying herself, gradually finds it becoming harder and harder to watch her younger self have the childhood she lost, from such things as Chrom reading Little Lucina a story to Sumia giving her a simple run down of how to bake. Big Lucina’s own recollections of these are few, distant, and tarnished since, even back then, Grima was known to be lurking on the horizon. Watching Little Lucina live the life Big Lucina wanted her to live thus, paradoxically, heals one old wound and creates a new one for Big Lucina.

-          Jealousy, in this case, works both ways, as Little Lucina clearly sees that Robin doesn’t look at her the way he looks at Big Lucina. And, this is further accentuated by Big Lucina being bigger, stronger, and prettier than Little Lucina.

-          Though Chrom is definitely not as bright as Robin, he’s no dolt. He can clearly sense that something is very wrong with his daughter…his two daughters…his two Lucinas…whatever. And, having about as much subtlety as Ike when someone is serving vegan cuisine, he decides upon a ham-fisted intervention (i.e. tricking them into going the same room, locking them in, and waiting until they make up before letting them back out).

-          After a rather lengthy period of trying to break the door down, yelling at each other, and then ignoring each other, the ice begins to crack. Eventually, recalling her chat with Severa at the Bathrealm, Big Lucina tells Little Lucina her reasons for not wanting her to grow up the same way Big Lucina did. ALL of them.

-          Hearing that Big Lucina’s being such a strong warrior came at the cost of her parents, her home, and most of her countrymen, Little Lucina is able to put much of Big Lucina’s reactions into context. The two also have a more civilized conversation about their reasons for envying each other.

-          Little Lucina, quite possibly recalling something she overheard between Big Lucina and Robin (or even acting on something Robin told her) tells her that she knows Big Lucina is just as welcome to spend time with her…their…whatever…parents as Little Lucina is. She even relays how proud Chrom is of how strong and brave Big Lucina is, and how much Sumia’s face lit up when Big Lucina was cooing over a Pegasus foal.

-          One thing that astonishes Little Lucina is that Big Lucina envies the former’s time with her tutors. Being a little kid, Little Lucina finds this utterly incomprehensible…until Big Lucina admits that her own education (reading, writing, maths, dancing, etiquette, etc.) was cut short by the rise of Grima. Indeed, Big Lucina can barely read and hasn’t written since before her parents’ deaths. This resonates with Little Lucina, since she loves reading, not-so-coincidentally because it’s one of her favorite pastimes with Chrom and Robin (she might leave out that second one).

-          Little Lucina, in turn, admits that even though she’s happy enough being a princess and all that entails, she wants to be strong enough to keep her people safe, especially her family, which is something Big Lucina can’t readily ignore.

-          Ultimately, the two reach an accord: Big Lucina will teach Little Lucina how to fight and Little Lucina will teach Big Lucina the same lessons Little Lucina herself is learning from her tutors.

-          After Chrom the Ham-Fisted lets them out, it quickly becomes apparent that the two have reconciled their differences. In one particular instance, Little Lucina, upon hearing that Big Lucina wanted to learn how to dance in time for her and Robin’s wedding anniversary, decides to teach Big Lucina the waltz. Given the height differences, however, some…out-of-the-box teaching techniques were called for.

-          By that same token, Big Lucina allowed Little Lucina to accompany her on her inspections in order to learn the layout of the castle, as well as the names and faces of the guards, since a would-be intruder just might be wearing the same armor as them.

-          Though Robin didn’t say anything, it wasn’t hard for him to guess that Big Lucina could barely read. He did, however, step in it when he discovered, the hard way, that Big Lucina’s handwriting hadn’t changed much from her childhood dabblings, right down to how she used the Brand of the Exalt to dot the i in her name. When he saw some of Big Lucina’s attempts to write out some “homework”, he assumed that the author was Little Lucina…which led to some awkwardness.

-          At both Robin and Little Lucina’s insistence, Big Lucina puts her penmanship lessons into practice by writing letters to Robin that he can read when he’s busy and/or away. She would tell him about her day, ask how he’s been, and, somewhat unconsciously, allow a clearer view into her thoughts and feelings than most are likely to get from her in-person.

-          BIg Lucina’s handwriting improves quickly and, although Robin sometimes misses the cuteness of his wife’s childlike handwriting, he does manage to talk her into continuing to dot the i in her name with the Brand.

-          As Big Lucina’s reading improves, she, Robin, and Morgan make a point of reading together late at night. When Little Morgan comes along, Big Lucina is seemingly chomping at the bit to read the baby a story before bed.

-          Robin, who discovered how exploitable time travel is for those fond of puns, would often use this to jerk around certain people, such as Both Lucinas’ governess and/or Chrom. For example, when asked where Lucina was, Robin would answer “She’s playing with herself”. This would prompt a mad dash to quash lewd and lascivious behavior unbecoming of a princess…only to discover that Big Lucina and Little Lucina are playing chess. This, in turn, led to a mad dash after Robin, who hadn’t counted on his pursuer(s) having ready access to hammers.

-          As a new family tradition to underscore that Big Lucina is considered as much a part of the Ylissean royal family as Little Lucina, Chrom and/or Robin (there’s an ongoing debate about which of them came up with the idea first) have the two Lucinas celebrate their birthdays on the same day, right down to sharing a big cake with ‘Happy Birthday LucinaS’ written on it in icing and with the two Lucinas trying – sometimes successfully, sometimes not – to cut their respective first slices in unison.

-          Although the gifts for each Lucina underscore how the two are similar and yet different, such as Big Lucina getting an eye-melting yukata while Little Lucina gets a similarly hideous hair ribbon, someone (usually Robin) sometimes gets them matching jewelry or other accessories.

-          The two Lucinas also get gifts for each other. In one particularly cute instance, Big Lucina got Little Lucina a rare first edition of the chronicles of the Hero King Marth’s exploits while Little Lucina got Big Lucina an exact duplicate of the butterfly mask she wore while traveling as Marth.

-          As the years go by, Big Lucina and Little Lucina begin to develop more divergent personalities. Big Lucina’s fashion sense is still atrocious whereas Little Lucina’s taste in clothing is much more normal…but she compensates by being fond of terribly gaudy accessories, such as hair ribbons with zebra patterns and jeweled hairpins which are bright enough to act as a substitute for flash grenades. Further, while Big Lucina can sometimes be tightly wound and over-serious, Little Lucina seems able to move from decorous to rambunctious in a heartbeat.

-          Although Big Lucina does not want to rule Ylisse, as she believes that to be Little Lucina’s right, she reluctantly consents to being named third in line for the throne, in the event that Chrom, Sumia, Little Lucina, and Little Cynthia all predecease her.

-          When Big Lucina becomes pregnant with Little Morgan, Little Lucina is delighted. Although by then she no longer considers Little Morgan her daughter simply by virtue of her and Big Lucina being “the same person”, she is nonetheless keen to help her older self.

-          Aside from reining in Sumia, who’s a little too excited at her and Big Lucina being pregnant together, Little Lucina is keen to make sure Big Lucina gets her bed rest, helps read to the unborn baby, and generally proving weirdly effective as a pregnancy coach.

-          In as much as health permits, Big Lucina continues her duties as Captain of the Castle Guard during her pregnancy…I mean, come on, can you picture Owain doing it? Or Cynthia? Or Noire? Or Brady? Or…well, suffice to say, none of the future children are management material.

-          Eventually, swollen ankles force Big Lucina to stop her regular patrols. That and some found her hard to take seriously when she was squeezing a baby bump under her armor. At that point, she not-so-voluntarily assumed the administrative duties of her post while the actual patrolling, inspections, and drills were divvied up between Big Morgan and Little Lucina.

-          At some point into the pregnancy, Little Lucina, and the Big Lucina, sense that Big Morgan, despite putting on airs, is somewhat leery at the prospect of her younger self’s birth. Deciding to play the Big Sister…I mean Mother…I mean…I don’t know what I mean, but Little Lucina tries to talk to Big Morgan, ultimately gleaning that Big Morgan is worried that she’ll be replaced by Little Morgan.

-          After pushing Big Morgan to talk to Big Lucina about her problems, Big Lucina gets some good practice in helping to reassure a child who is in distress. In fact, Big Lucina is uniquely qualified to deal with Big Morgan’s fear of being replaced by…well, herself. Chrom and Sumia promptly join in and, between the three of them, relay some of their interactions and how, when they sensed how out of place Big Lucina felt in this timeline, they MADE a place for her.

-          When Little Morgan is born, Big Morgan and Little Lucina are tripping over each other, and/or tripping each other, to get in the queue to hold her.

-          Even though Little Lucina knows she’s much too young to have much of a shot at being Little Morgan’s godsmother, she says she’ll so be in the running once Robin and Big Lucina have a few more kids. Proving that at least some of her impishness is here to stay, she times this assertion to coincide with Robin and Big Lucina taking a long pull of their drinks.

-          Aside from pranking others, Big Morgan tries to teach Little Lucina a variety of other bad habits, including Taguel torture, dressing like Big Lucina, circularly dramatic speech (i.e. “My Super Genius Plan of Genius Planning!”) and eating like a starving wolf…in terms of both quantity of food eaten and table manners.

-          Most of these “lessons” don’t take. Little Lucina likes rabbits too much to pull on Yarne’s ears (and certainly knows better than to pull Panne’s), prefers to melt people’s eyes with her accessories rather than her clothes, can talk dramatically but not circularly enough, and nyxs the eating bit because, though she’s not above messiness, Big Morgan’s brand is a bit much and she also learns, the hard way, that she shares neither Big Morgan’s immunity to stomachaches nor her imperviousness to sudden upticks in dress size.

-          Though Little Lucina will always have a soft spot in her heart for Robin, she does eventually get over her crush. She does, however, insist that, when she does find someone she loves, that Robin and Big Lucina will come to the wedding. Naturally, there are no objections.

-          Little Lucina does, eventually, fall in love with Raphael, the Prince of Warriors.

-          Who is Raphael, the Prince of Warriors, you ask? He is one of the sons of Priam and Say’ri. In fact, Robin, the two Lucinas, and several veterans of the Shepherds visited Chon’sin to celebrate his birth.

-          Some were startled when Big Lucina, upon seeing then-baby Raphael suddenly seemed quite overcome and then left the room, crying uncontrollably. Though it was well known that Big Lucina adored babies, not the smallest reason being how rare they were in her timeline, even those who knew her best thought her reaction a bit extreme.

-          Robin, being Robin, managed to track her down and get the truth out of her. Much to Robin’s amazement, Big Lucina reported that she’d actually met Priam in the future, as she and the other children were making their escape to the past. Though Priam proved a valiant warrior, and was instrumental in their escape, she distinctly remembered how melancholy he was, as he knew his time was ending and that there were none to inherit Ragnell or to carry on the legacy of the Radiant Hero. Seeing Priam, married and with children, acted as a particularly overwhelming sign that she truly had changed history for the better.

-          Robin, being Robin, took the opportunity to tease Big Lucina about how much of a sentimental softy she could be…which must’ve been especially galling since Big Lucina actually resorted to inviting the ever-present Tharja to join their little chat.

-          Though Little Lucina loves lording her Little Lord role over the other younger counterparts to the children from the future, perhaps developing a liking for telling people what to do like her father, Robin, and Big Lucina, people begin to notice that Raphael is much harder to boss around.

-          Aside from being born handsome, enough so that Little Lucina sometimes has a hard time keeping her words straight when talking to him, Raphael is an independent thinker who is not impressed by fancy titles, honorifics, or pretty words. Raphael, much like his father, respects strength and bravery, but he also respects wisdom and conviction, owing to his mother.

-          Though copious translation was needed, Miriel and Laurent posited the theory that, although Little Lucina was becoming her own person rather than considering herself to be nigh-predestined to become a second Big Lucina, she did retain the subconscious psychological belief that there would be a certain area of overlap, namely that Little Lucina would also be judged worthy of respect and deference by all who knew her. Robin had a much simpler explanation: Little Lucina had a crush on Raphael, and was galled at how he seemed to find her unimpressive.

-          Little Lucina, rather like Big Lucina, is not one to take such sleights lightly. Sensing that getting Raphael’s respect is best done with feats of strength, Little Lucina makes several attempts to prove that she can play with the big boys.

-          In doing so, Little Lucina learns, the hard way, that it’s hard for a young woman to develop Ike-esque biceps. Later, much like Big Lucina did in her still-wanting-for-a-proper-explanation fight with Chrom in Arena Ferox, Little Lucina learns that fighting strength-for-strength against someone who’s much, MUCH stronger than you tends to end badly.

-          Much like Big Lucina did, Little Lucina decides that, in order to overcome this aggravation, she needs to evolve. She studies many fighting styles, including several Chon’sinese styles, and devises her own fighting style which can be adapted to numerous opponents and tactical situations.

-          Little Lucina was eager to use these new talents to put Raphael in his place…but, much to her surprise, this did not go to plan. Rather than fight, Raphael insisted that they meditate, after which Raphael made some rather pointed comments on how Little Lucina’s chi, and priorities, were a bit out of whack. The dedication Little Lucina showed in her efforts was impressive, but it was done out of jealousy, pride, and a unique perception of entitlement, rather than the good she could do with what she’d created.

-          Flummoxed, Little Lucina reflects on her motives and, not-so-coincidentally, both the original and subsequent motives of Robin and Big Lucina. Granted, both of them found different reasons for fighting as time went on, but the consistent part of it all was that they were fighting to protect the people and land they both loved. Fame, recognition, respect, and such had never factored into it.

-          With this fresh perspective, and with her persistently wounded ego no longer acting as a distraction, Little Lucina challenged Raphael to three (non-lethal) duels, the stakes being that, if Little Lucina won at least once, Raphael would take her on a date. Raphael lost. Well, sort of. He later came to very much enjoy Little Lucina’s company.

-          Ultimately, Little Lucina and Raphael get married. As promised, Robin and Big Lucina attended the wedding.

-          Despite being a prince of Chon’sin and a distant relation of the Crimean royal family (IkexElincia; I am SO PISSED that it wasn’t even an option, let alone a thing!) Raphael simply does not do decorum, and he has a rather selective adherence to tradition.

-          In a rather jarring example, when it came time to carry Little Lucina off, rather than carrying her bridal style, he simply slipped one hand under her rear end and lifted her up, forcing her to stay balanced upon his palm.

-          In truth, Little Lucina’s combat training with Big Lucina made keeping her balance an easy, but fun, feat. She nonetheless made a good show of swaying in place, flailing her arms madly, and making all sorts of I’m-about-to-fall noises in order to cause the wedding guests to have infarctions. It worked too.

-          When Raphael was informed that he was supposed to carry his bride using both hands, he, demonstrating that he had the combined candor of Priam and Ike, asked “Why? She’s not as heavy as she looks.”

-          After this remark caused several more guests to have infarctions, Little Lucina gave a credible imitation of a scandalized gasp and whacked her groom on the head, which caused several more guests to have infarctions.

-          Halfway to the door, someone (probably Robin) remarked that Little Lucina was having too easy a time keeping her balance. Raphael responded by saying “Well, like I always say, let the women work too!” and then began to flex his wrist and walk in a weaving pattern, thus making things more fun (but hardly more difficult) for Little Lucina. Needless to say, the guests and their flimsy cardiovascular systems gave the castle’s healers quite a workout.

-          While Big Lucina was experiencing a truly unique case of being embarrassed at herself, Robin was taking the display in the spirit with which is was intended; namely by laughing his ass off. He then remarked that he fully expected to die laughing and Big Lucina, who still had some tone deafness when it came to idioms, took his words literally, scooped him up, and raced towards the nearest healers, trampling several important persons in her path.

-          Many years later, Raphael and Little Lucina’s son, Greil XXXVIII (VERY popular name amongst Ike’s progeny) was introduced to Robin and Big Lucina’s youngest daughter, Elena.

-          Just to be clear, Elena is not Little Morgan. Little Morgan’s name is…well, Morgan. Much like Big Lucina and Little Lucina are both named Lucina.

-          …and, somewhere in Ylisse Castle, the Royal Genealogist just has a heart attack. But I digress.

-          Greil XXXVIII, who is clearly going to inherit the family biceps when he grows up, keeps Elena entertained by performing feats of strength that would be tricky for boys twice his size. Needless to say, Elena comes away quite impressed.

-          Despite already sensing that Greil and Elena will stay “just friends”, Robin simply can’t resist and ponders aloud as to whether a relationship between the two could be considered incestuous, since Greil XXXVIII and Elena, technically, have the same mother.

-          The response to this wiseassery is the Ylissean royal family delivering a syncopated and very well practiced chorus of “Robin, shut up”.

 Likes are appreciated, reblogs are appreciated, and feedback via messaging and ask is loved. Thanks for reading, and catch you later.

[oscopelabs]

3D, Part 2: How 3D Peaked At Its Valley by Vadim Rizov

I didn’t expect to spend Thanksgiving Weekend 2018 watching ten 3D movies: marathon viewing is not my favorite experience in general, and I haven’t spent years longing to see, say, Friday the 13th Part III, in 35mm. But a friend was visiting, from Toronto, to take advantage of this opportunity, an impressive level of dedication that seemed like something to emulate, and it’s not like I had anything better to do, so I tagged along. Said friend, Blake Williams, is an experimental filmmaker and 3D expert, a subject to which he’s devoted years of graduate research and the bulk of his movies (see Prototype if it comes to a city near you!); if I was going to choose the arbitrary age of 32 to finally take 3D seriously, I couldn’t have a better Virgil to explain what I was seeing on a technical level. My thanks to him (for getting me out there) and to the Quad Cinema for being my holiday weekend host; it was probably the best possible use of my time.

The 10-movie slate was an abridged encore presentation of this 19-film program, which I now feel like a dink for missing. What’s interesting in both is the curatorial emphasis on films from 3D’s second, theoretically most disreputable wave—‘80s movies with little to zero critical respect or profile. Noel Murray considered a good chunk of these on this site a few years ago, watching the films flat at home, noting that when viewed this way, “the plane-breaking seems all the more superfluous. (It’s also easy to spot when these moments are about to happen, because the overall image gets murkier and blurrier.)” This presumes that if you can perceive the moments where a 3D film expands its depth of field for a comin’-at-ya moment and mentally reconstruct what that would look like, that’s basically the same experience as actually seeing these effects.

Blake’s argument, which I wrestled with all weekend, is that these movies do indeed often look terrible in 2D, but 3D literally makes them better. As it turns out, this is true surprisingly often. Granted, all concerned have to know what they’re doing, otherwise the results will still be indifferent: it turns out that Friday the 13th Part III sucks no matter how you watch it, and 3D’s not a complete cure-all. This was also demonstrated by my first movie, 1995’s barely released Run For Cover, the kind of grade-Z library filler you’d expect to see sometime around 2 am on a syndicated channel. This is, ostensibly, a thriller, in which a TV news cameraman foils a terrorist plot against NYC. It features a lot of talking, scenes of Bondian villains eating Chinese takeout while plotting and/or torturing our ostensible hero, some running (non-Tom Cruise speed levels), and one The Room-caliber sex scene. Anyone who’s spent too much time mindlessly staring at the least promising option on TV has seen many movies like these. The 3D helps a little: an underdressed TV station set takes on heightened diorama qualities, making it interesting to contemplate as an inadvertent installation—the archetypal TV command room, with the bare minimum necessary signifiers in place and zero detail otherwise—rather than simply a bare-bones set. But often the camera is placed nowhere in particular, and the resulting images are negligible; in the absence of dramatic conviction or technical skill, what’s left is never close enough to camp to come back out the other side as inadvertently worthwhile. I’m glad I saw it for the sheer novelty of cameos from Ed Koch, Al Sharpton and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa—all doing their usual talking points, but in 3D! But it’s the kind of film that’s more fun to tell people about than actually watch.

But infamous punchlines Jaws 3-D and Amityville 3-D have their virtues when viewed in 3D. The former, especially, seems to be the default punching bag whenever someone wants to make the case that 3D has, and always will be, nothing but a limited gimmick upselling worthless movies. It was poorly reviewed when it came out, but the public dug it enough to make it, domestically, the 15th highest-grossing film of 1983 (between Never Say Never Again and Scarface) and justify Jaws: The Revenge. Of course I was skeptical; why wouldn’t I be? But I was sucked in by the opening credits, in which the familiar handheld-underwater-cam-as-shark POV gave way to a severed arm floating before a green “ocean.” Maybe flat it looks simply ludicrous, but the image has a compellingly Lynchian quality, as if the limb were detached from one of Twin Peaks: The Return’s more disgusting corpses, its artifice heightened and literally foregrounded, the equally artificial background setting it into greater relief.

The film’s prominent SeaWorld product placement is, theoretically, ill-advised, especially in the post-Blackfish era; in practice, it’s extremely productive. The opening stretches have a lot of water-skiing; in deep 3D, the water-skiers serve as lines tracing depth towards and away from the camera over a body of water whose horizon line stretches back infinitely, producing a greater awareness of space. It reminded me of the early days of the short-lived super-widescreen format Cinerama, as described by John Belton in his academic history book Widescreen Cinema (recommended). The very first film in the format, This is Cinerama, was a travelogue whose stops included Cypress Gardens, Florida’s first commercial tourist theme park (the site is now a Legoland), which has very similar images of waterskiiers. Cinerama was, per the publicist copy Belton quotes from the period, about an experience, not a story: “Plot is replaced by audience envelopment […] the medium forces you to concentrate on something bigger than people, for it has a range of vision and sound that no other medium offers.” Cinerama promised to immerse viewers, as literalized in this delightful publicity image; Belton argues that “unlike 3-D and CinemaScope, which stressed the dramatic content of their story material and the radical new means of technology employed in production, Cinerama used a saturation advertising campaign in the newspapers and on radio to promote the ‘excitement aspects’ of the new medium.” There’s a connection here with the earliest days of silent cinema, short snippets (“actualities”) of reality, before it was decided that medium’s primary purpose was to tell a story. It didn’t have to be like that; in those opening stretches, Jaws 3-D’s lackadaisical narrative, which might play inertly on TV, recalls the 1890s, when shots of bodies of water were popular subjects. This is something I learned from a recent presentation by silent film scholar Bryony Dixon, and her reasoning makes sense. The way water moves is inherently hypnotic, and for early audiences assimilating their very first moving images, water imagery was a favorite subject. It’s only with a few years under its belt that film started making its drift towards narrative as default; inadvertently or not, Jaws 3-D is very pure in its initial presentation of water as a spectacular, non-narrative event.

If this seems like a lot of cultural and historical weight to bring to bear upon Jaws 3-D, note that it wasn’t even my favorite of the more-scorned offerings I saw that weekend, merely one that makes it easiest for me to articulate what I found compelling about the 3D immersion experience. I haven’t described the plot of Jaws 3-D at all, which is indeed perfunctory (though it was nice to learn where Deep Blue Sea cribbed a bunch of its production design from). I won’t try to rehabilitate Amityville 3-D at similar length: set aside the moronic ending and Tony Roberts’ leading turn as one of cinema’s most annoyingly waspish, unearnedly whiny divorcees, and what’s left is a surprisingly melancholy movie about the frustrations, and constant necessary repairs, of home ownership. There’s very little music and a surprising amount of silence. The most effective moment is simply Roberts going upstairs to the bathroom, where steam is hissing out for no apparent reason and he has to fix the plumbing. The camera’s planted in the hallway, not moving for any kind of emphasis as the back wall moves closer to Roberts; it doesn’t kill him and nothing comes of it, it’s just another problem to deal with (the walls, as it were, are settling), made more effective by awareness of how a space whose rules and boundaries seemed fixed is being altered, pushing air at you.

Watching a bunch of these in sequence, some clear lessons emerge: if you want to generate compelling depth by default, find an alleyway and block off the other half of the frame with a wall to present two different depths, or force protagonists to crawl through ducts or tubes. This is a good chunk of Silent Madness, a reasonably effective slasher film that, within the confines of its cheap sets and functional plotting, keeps the eye moving. It’s an unlikely candidate for a deep-dive New York Times Magazine article from the time period, which is well worth reading in full. It’s mostly about B-movies and the actresses trying to make their way up through them, though it does have this money quote from director Simon Nuchtern about why, for Bs, it’s not worth paying more for a good lead actress: “If I had 10,000 extra dollars, I’d put it into lights. Not one person is going to say, ‘Go see that movie because Lynn Redgrave is in it.’ But if we don’t have enough lights and that 3-D doesn’t pop right out at you, people are going to say, ‘Don’t see that movie because the 3-D stinks.’” Meanwhile, nobody appears to have been thinking that hard while making Friday the 13th: Part III, which contains precisely one striking image: a pan, street morning, as future teen lambs-to-the-slaughter exit their van and walk over to a friend’s house. A lens flare hits frame left, making what’s behind it briefly impossible to see: this portion of the frame is now sealed off under impermeable 2D, in contrast to the rest of the frame’s now far-more-tangible depth. The remainder of the movie makes it easy to imagine watching it on TV and clocking every obvious, poorly framed and blocked 3D effect, from spears being thrown at the camera to the inevitable yo-yo descending at the lens. (This is my least favorite 3D effect because it’s just too obvious and counterproductively makes me think of the Smothers Brothers.)

Friday the 13th was the biggest slog of the 3D weekend, and the one most clearly emulating 1981’s Comin’ at Ya! I am not going to argue for that movie, either, which is generally credited with kicking off the second 3D craze; it’s a sludgy spaghetti western that delivers exactly as its title promises, using a limited number of effects repeatedly before showing them all again in a cut-together montage at the end, lest you missed one in its first iteration. It’s exhausting and oddly joyless, but was successful enough to generate a follow-up from the same creative team. Star Tony Anthony and director Ferdinando Baldi (both veterans of second-tier spaghetti westerns) re-teamed for 1983’s Treasure of the Four Crowns, the movie which (two screenings in) rewired my brain a little and convinced me I should hang around all weekend. This is not a well-respected film, then or now: judging by IMDb user comments, most people who remember seeing it recall it playing endlessly on HBO in the ‘80s, where it did not impress them unless they were very young (and even then, perhaps not). Janet Maslin admitted to walking out on it in her review; then again, she did the same with Dawn of the Dead, and everyone loves that.

An unabashed Indiana Jones copy, Treasure begins strong with a lengthy opening sequence of tomb raider J.T. Striker (Anthony) dropping into a cave, where he’s promptly confronted not only with a bunch of traps but, for a long stretch, a small menagerie’s worth of owls, dogs, and other wildlife. There are a lot of animals, and why not? They’re fun to look at, and having them trotted out, one after another, is another link back to silent cinema; besides water, babies and animals were also popular subjects. The whole sequence ends with Striker running away from the castle above the cave, artifact retrieved, in slow-motion as Ennio Morricone’s score blares. There is, inevitably and nonsensically, a fireball that consumes the set; it unfolds luxuriously in detailed depth, the camera placed on a grassy knoll that gives us a nice angle to contemplate it looking upwards, a nearly abstract testament to the pleasures of gasoline-fueled imagery. Shortly thereafter, Striker is in some European city to sell his wares, and in every shot the camera is placed for maximum depth: in front of a small city park’s mini-waterfall, views of streets boxed in by sidewalks that narrow towards each other, each position calibrated to create a spectacular travelogue out of what’s a fairly mundane location. There’s an expository sequence where Striker and friends drop into a diner to ask about the whereabouts of another member of the crew they need to round up. Here, with the camera on one side of a bar encircling a center counter, there are something like six layers of cleanly articulated space, starting with a plant’s leaves right in front of the lens on the side, proceeding to the counter, center area, back counter, back tables and walls of the establishment. Again, the location is mundane; seeing it filleted in space so neatly is what makes it special.

The climax finally convinced me I was watching forgotten greatness. This is an elaborate heist sequence in which, of course, the floor cannot be touched, necessitating that the team perform all kinds of rappelling foolishness. At this point I thought, “the only way I could respect this movie more is if it spent 10 minutes watching them get from one side of the room to another in real time.” First, the team has to gear up, which basically means untangling a bunch of ropes—clearly not the most exciting activity. The camera is looking up, placed below a team member as they uncoil and then drop a rope towards the lens. This is a better-framed variant of the comin’-at-ya principle, but what made it exciting to me was the leisurely way it was done: no more whizzing spears, but a moment of procedural mundanity as exciting as any ostensible danger. Basic narrative film grammar is being upended here: if a rope being dropped is just as exciting as a big, fake rip-off boulder chasing our hero down the cave, then all the rules about what constitutes narrative are off—narrative and non-narrative elements have the exact same weight, and even the most mundane, A-to-B connective shot is a spectacular event.

This isn’t how narrative cinema is supposed to work, and certainly not what James Cameron’s conception of good 3D proposed. The movie keeps going, building to a bizarrely grim climax involving a lot of face-melting, scored by Morricone’s oddly beatific score, which seems serenely indifferent to the grotesqueness of the images it’s accompanying. (This is a recurring trait in the composer’s ‘80s work; the score for White Dog often seems to bear no relation to the footage it’s accompanying.) That would make the movie oneiric and weirdly compelling even on a flat TV, but everything preceding convinced me: 3D can be great because it’s 3D, not because it serves a story. I’ve spent the last decade getting more angry about the format than anything, but that was a misunderstanding. Treasure of the Four Crowns is, yes, probably very unexceptional seen flat; seen in all three dimensions, it’s a demonstration of how 3D can turn banal connective tissue and routine coverage into an event. The spectacle of 3D might never have been its potential to make elaborate CG landscapes more immersive, something I still haven’t personally been convinced of; as those 19 non-CG shots in Avatar showed (undermining Cameron’s own argument!), 3D’s renderings of the real, material world and objects have yet to be fully explored. 3D’s ability to link film back to its earliest days is refreshing, in the way that any rediscovery of forgotten parts of film language can be, while also encouraging thought about all the things narrative visual language hasn’t yet explored, as if 3D could take us forwards and backwards simultaneously. In any case, I’m now won over—ten years after Avatar, but better late than never.

[sazandorable]

so im gonna do that AAW meme thing! cw: tmi about aza’s thrilling life, some cringey or vaguely depressing/upsetting anecdotes, some happy things in a silly way, and fandom

1.      Sunday, 21 October:

o   Describe your experience of finding out about asexuality/the ace spectrum.  What source(s) did you find it from? How did it feel to find out about asexuality? How did it change your life?

~Sherlock BBC fandom~! /o/ Yeaaaaah.

To be precise, the kink meme, on livejournal. just a random prompt asking for something exploring the arrangement between asexual sherlock and uhhh probably john but tbh i don’t remember that. maybe Irene. I’m almost sure this was right after the Scandal in Belgravia episode had aired, and that episode was why people were playing with the idea of Sherlock being uninterested in sex.

I don’t remember my exact feelings when I read that word, but I do remember that I was delighted at the concept (+ the discussion in the same episode about falling in love outside of your sexual orientation) and immediately convinced, that I jumped into researching asexuality, and that barely a few weeks later I was very deep in contemplating and musing about my own levels of attraction and sorting out all that stuff. I do think I just instantly realized this concept applied to me; I found the AVEN site and its definitions very fast, and grey-a felt good instantly. (I found demi later, and it took me a bit longer to claim it for myself, though I don’t remember much details about that.)

Like, years later I’m very much bitter about and Over™ Sherlock BBC, its writers, and that episode in particular and their stance on the sexualities and orientations of all their characters, but... it did bring me something very precious, that it would have taken me years to find out about otherwise.

It did change my life in that this is when I realized that I really, really, really didn’t have to date, have sex, marry or whatever “one day” if I never wanted to and I wasn’t “late” on anything. Took off a lot of pressure, and also made me stop trying to dub-con myself into accepting things I didn’t actively want just because I didn’t actively hate them.

2.      Monday, 22 October:

o   Talk about your coming out experience.  Of course, one many never be finished coming out, but you could describe how you came out to friends, what reactions you have gotten, how you have felt by coming out, and more.

Mm, two:

not quite coming out, and I don’t remember how it came up, but I mentioned “ok but what about asexuality” at my mother, perhaps a year or two after finding out about it, and she just scoffed and said “that’s not a thing, it’s just being scared of sex,” and I just... froze. Blanked out. Zoned out. Possibly shook a little. This was my first first-hand experience of being just... disacknowledged, erased, denied out of existence, and I had absolutely not expected it, nor the violence of it, nor the casual quality of that violence. I couldn’t say anything in reply, and I don’t think my mother noticed anything at all.

on another hand, I once explained to a gay male friend of mine that, well, I don’t call myself a lesbian, I like girls but I don’t call my super-duper-precious-friend my girlfriend, we are extremely close but we don’t have sex or really date, I’m asexual; and his reaction was “?? THAT’S SO COOL. That fits you! I’m glad for you that you can just do whatever works for you without following conventions about relationships! Cool, great!” and that just made my day.

3.      Tuesday, 23 October:

o   Describe your experience of confronting stereotypes.  There are many stereotypes or expectations of what being on the ace spectrum is like, but of course aspec people are just as diverse as any other group.  How have you defied or corrected these stereotypes?

uuhhhhh

Mostly this happens when I talk about asexuality with people who are questioning themselves, explaining the many different flavors it can come in, that yeah you can be asexual at the same time as enjoying sex, masturbating, having fantasies, wanting to date, etc. Not so much smashing established stereotypes, more confirming that nop this thing that you think would “disqualify” you from being asexual doesn’t, actually, you still might be, you’re not “fake”.

4.      Wednesday, 24 October:

o   Talk about positive representation of aspec people in media which has benefited you or speaks to you strongly.  Aspec people are not often represented in media, so it will be nice to see which representations have the strongest impacts.

*STANDS UP, VIBRATING*

TWENTYACETEEN!!!!!!!!!!!!

This year I got two cases of explicit, confirmed, canon, accurate and nuanced representation with central characters in two series that were already extremely close to my heart, and I’m so happy about it!!!!

Spoilers for both fandoms!

1) Shimanami Tasogare: a recently finished manga about LGBT community. In one of the last arcs, we learn that the very central yet mysterious character Anonymous (Dareka-san) is asexual. Like, the character says it, in full letters, and it’s discussed a lot.

Well, it’s more complicated than that, because it’s set in Japan and written in Japanese and Japan has different approaches, concepts and vocabulary around asexuality than English-language; what Anonymous initially describes might be closer to what English-language would call aromanticism. But they also later go “Am I interested in sex, or not? Who knows :)”, with their potential interest in sex represented with them reading porn magazines, and they’ve already expressed that they’re not interested in dating, so as it happens they’re probably both aro and ace (in English terms) anyway. (In the same sequence, they also explain that they might be male, or female, and generally aren’t overly concerned with how people think of them, anything works for them.)

This brings the other characters to think some more about their own desires for love, sex, relationships, human contact... There is a beautiful scene where the main character thinks that knowing this lets him finally understand Anonymous, that this must be why they are so mysterious and detached and fleeting — and Anonymous tells him point-blank that nah. They’re not just their asexuality. Don’t reduce them to that. They’re not “anonymous” because they’re asexual, and vice-versa — those are just two incidental parts of who they are. They are a full person, who just happens to be asexual, and also to enjoy being anonymous and unknown and find freedom in living their life this way.

It was just incredible to read entire chapters dedicated to a central character talking at length about their asexuality, and also how they relate, not only to straight people, but also to queer non-ace people. In the end the main character still doesn’t quite get Anonymous, and that’s how they like it.

2) The Magnus Archives: an ongoing horror podcast that’s casually LGBTQIA-friendly. (Like, a lot of horrible stuff does happen to queer people, but that’s because there’s a lot of them, and I do think that statistically more of them survive than straight people. Equal opportunity horror.) I had been toying with headcanoning the main character Jon as asexual for a variety of reasons for a while, and then in an episode that aired a few months ago a character casually mentioned that “apparently [he] just... doesn’t. At all.” Asked to elaborate, the writer confirmed on twitter that yup, he’s written as asexual (though who knows if Jon would use that word himself, he doesn’t really think about it).

I’m especially delighted because this came up, in context, because Jon has dated. At least once. We know his ex, and she is super chill with him. This reveal also comes up in the same breath as the reveal that a male character seems to have a crush on him, and IMO the show seems to hint that said character is aware that Jon doesn’t do sex, and doesn’t/wouldn’t mind this if they were to date.

Jon did start out as the usual cold, rational, unempathetic character archetype (in fact, he’s very reminiscent of BBC’s Sherlock in early episodes), but by the time this line comes up, the listener knows that he actually cares a lot and is full of emotions. He’s shown to be very, very protective of the people close to him — though also very bad at it. And at expressing it. But, still around the same time of the ace reveal, he is making deliberate efforts to communicate more and value everyone’s feelings. And of course, being the central character, he’s a veeeeery developed character with tons of evolution and nuances, and a huge fandom fave. The reveal that’s he’s asexual has changed exactly nothing in the show; but, like I said, it fits him, he read as asexual to the point that I was suspecting it despite zero real textual evidence until then.

When this episode came out and I heard that line (... I actually had missed it on first listen), I was at work, and I just started almost crying at my desk.

And then I got to go around yelling about it at my fandom friends.

... And at my non-fandom friends.

[aion-rsa]

Please Don’t Skip the Therapy Scenes on The Sopranos

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This article contains some spoilers for the six-season run of The Sopranos.

Classic HBO series The Sopranos is now old enough to find new fans who weren’t even alive when it originally aired. Zoomers, or kids born in the late 1990s and early 2000s are increasingly intrigued with the iconic drama for many of the same reasons folks were wrapped up in it back when it premiered in 1999. The show depicts violence in a very raw and realistic manner and shows a faction of organized crime that feels like a time capsule of a period that is now well in the past, while also touching upon a general sense of nihilism that modern viewers can appreciate.

Not coincidentally, The Sopranos also was one of the first programs to dig into human psychology via therapy on a level that wasn’t corny or cartoonish (nobody is lying on a couch in an office with a doctor taking notes in a pamphlet during the session here). The subjects of mental health and the mafia don’t exactly go hand-in-hand, and the shorter attention spans of the modern TV viewer have led to a lack of appreciation for the former topic. 

Caught up in the excitement of the dark, violent New Jersey underbelly, some newer fans report getting bored by Tony Soprano’s (James Gandolfini) psychotherapy appointments with Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco). Reddit threads are littered with discussions on the odd habit of completely skipping over these scenes throughout the series:

I’m watching for the first time and am on season 2 atm. I just find the scenes with Jennifer Melfi the psychiatrist totally irrelevant and annoying, to the point where I have skipped every scene with her in it. The scenes just feel like a recap, where she explains obvious things that just happened, as if the audience is so dumb we cannot keep up with what is going on in the show.

Other viewers completely understood what the objective of the sessions was, but found it redundant after the first few seasons:

For the first 2 or 3 seasons, I enjoyed the psychiatrist scenes. But after a while I feel they are more of a nuisance and not worth watching. I know it’s a way for the audience to peek into what Tony is thinking, but I don’t find it being worth it.

This is where the show runs the risk of losing an audience that is used to watching media that moves at lightning speed. TikToks, YouTube videos, and cliffhanger culture has zapped the brains of the younger generation to the point that it can be hard to revel in the minutiae of a character’s psychology. They know Tony Soprano is interesting, but they don’t want to figure out why they find him as such. 

The Sopranos proved that it was viable to put a murderous criminal in the protagonist role, show him execute his victims, and then go home to his wife and kids like any other American man of the 2000s would. Tony Soprano added obsessive infidelity, mommy issues, sexism, homophobia, and toxic masculinity to his list of deplorable traits, yet the audience still sympathized with him and wanted to understand where he was coming from. 

A lot of the audience’s sympathy for Tony can be attributed to his therapy sessions with Dr. Melfi. As has been famously discussed for the last two decades, the show was one of the first to depict a patriarchal man in a position vulnerable enough to seek out professional mental health advice. And those who skip these scenes are skipping one of TV’s best ever storytelling devices.

Tony starts visiting Dr. Melfi in the pilot after experiencing a panic attack while watching a family of ducks flying away from his backyard pool. He continues to visit Dr. Melfi throughout the series as the panic attacks recur and he looks for answers to all of the other predicaments and depressions that overwhelm his inner psyche. He also spills his guts on many matters that painted him in a bad light, but occasionally we get to see his explanations for those inadequacies.

One of the show’s big goals is to demystify and demythologize these mobsters, specifically Tony, depicting them as real people who have personality quirks, idiosyncrasies, and who endure emotional hardships. The whole thing can get very dense because there are multiple layers and subtexts exposed to the audience within a short period of time. Seeing Tony talk about what it all means to him makes it so much easier to contemplate what it means to us. 

There is a larger literary debate that extends out much further than just this show: if an author puts something in a text with a specific intent, but the reader gleans something in juxtaposition to that original conversation, is our understanding of the work valid? Is there room for analysis that contrasts with what the artist put out into the world? Without Dr. Melfi, creator David Chase’s work is rife with confusion and laden with concepts that can go awry if absorbed by the less thoughtful TV viewer. She is our Tony Soprano for Dummies handbook; she is the mediator between us and the complex anti-hero on the screen. Tony is relatively the same person at the beginning and end of his therapy, but the treatment is required viewing for us to understand why he performs the actions he does outside of the doctor’s office. 

Jennifer Melfi is her own fully formed character herself though, with thoughts, emotions, and opinions on the psychoanalytical treatment she is giving; this is a huge reason why we are able to live vicariously through her. She seeks guidance from her own therapist, Elliot (Peter Bogdanovich) about this criminal client, and in a way is asking the follow-up questions that we still want to know after listening to Tony. 

Through it all Melfi is capable of maintaining her own moral compass, passing up the opportunity to use Tony’s violent proclivities to her advantage when she is sexually assaulted in the third season and avoiding the temptation of sexual advances from him in the fifth season. Because she is so grounded, she serves as an effective conduit between us and Tony. If she were compromised in any way, she would run the risk of influencing or enabling Tony’s despicable behaviors more. 

If you skip over the therapy scenes, you are missing out on what Tony claims he feels about a lot of the issues that happen in his personal and professional life (his emotions can often cloud the reality of his situation, though.) He wears his emotions on his sleeve a lot more when in the chair than he does in the Bada Bing or sitting with Carmela, Meadow, and A.J. at the dinner table. The main reason for this is because those three people shape his outlook on life a tremendous amount, along with his mother, Livia, and Uncle Junior. His relationship with those five delves into a deeper discussion on how traditional masculinity connects with his Italian heritage and Catholic values. 

Melfi helps Tony realize that his mother’s cold child-rearing methods led to confidence issues and doubt over what it means to “be a man” (this is one of the only signs of progress he ever makes in the show). This epiphany becomes a crutch that Tony leans on heavily when compartmentalizing the differences between how his life turned out and the heavy contrast to his own son’s future. 

His narcissism creates a void for A.J., who struggles with suicidal thoughts and severe depression when he can’t live up to the depiction of masculinity that Tony exudes. Tony tells Melfi that A.J. is weak and shameful, an admittance that would never come from his mouth when around his family. With Dr. Melfi, we get these fascinating diatribes on the outdated tropes that shape Tony’s own view of himself as a Gary Cooper-esque man in American society. Fast-forwarding is literally skipping past Tony’s characterization. 

Additionally, a social issue comes into relevance in the first half of season 6 when one of Tony’s main capos is outed as gay. The majority of the mafia is made up of toxic men with incredibly fragile makeups of masculinity and they immediately want him whacked, or at least eliminated from the group in some way. Tony reveals to Melfi that he doesn’t share all of his associates’ homophobic tendencies, instead putting credence into what a valuable earner his capo is for the DiMeo family. While he’s still not capable of harboring evolved social values outside of the context of the business, he’s revealed as someone who has put thought into what is right and wrong. He’s a bad person, but he’s three-dimensional. Not every layer is evil. 

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That is why you are truly missing out on who Tony Soprano is if you skip his sessions in therapy. You will only get to see the violence, the hateful rhetoric, the devolved sexism, and the illegal day-to-day activities that make up a typical mobster. With psychiatry, you get to engage in the vibrant cesspool of personalities that create Tony Soprano, the legendary anti-hero archetype of TV lore.

The post Please Don’t Skip the Therapy Scenes on The Sopranos appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[pyropsychiccollector]

Danganronpa: Another IF (Chapter 5, Part 4, Finale Part 2)

            “Thunderous applause for working out something so obvious a monkey could do it… Oh, wait. That gets no applause at all.” Junko snarked.

            “H-Hold on…” Sayaka stuttered. “You called Mukuro… your older sister…”

            Junko grinned madly.

            “That’s exactly right! You recalled something that was said five seconds ago, good for you! Indeed… Mukuro is my hopeless older twin sister…”

            “Twin sister…?” Celes echoed.

            “I am me. And Mukuro is Mukuro.” Junko proclaimed. “No matter how much makeup she wears, Mukuro can never become the Ultimate Fashionista. As long as the barrier exists between mind and the body, two beings can never become one… even if they are twins. It almost feels cliché, so I’m embarrassed to admit it… But it’s the truth. Mukuro Ikusaba—the archetypal ‘athletic older sister’—and me—the archetypal ‘adorable genius little sister.’ The Ultimate Despair crew called us the ‘Despair Sisters’!”

            She was cackling madly toward the end, signaling a change in Junko.

            “Did you just suddenly… change your personality?” Leon asked warily.

            “I already told ya! I’m fickle beyond hope—I even get tired of my own personality!”

            Fujisaki stared nervously at the floor.

            “If you’re twin sisters… Why are your last names different?”

            “That question again…” Junko rolled her eyes. “I get it all the damn time… I don’t care if it’s your first offense—I’ve had to answer that same question to the point of despair! Anyway! It’s cliché as fuck, so come up with something yourself and we’ll roll with that!”

            Makoto looked over at Mukuro in concern. Something occurred to him just now.

            “So wait… You put your sister out in the open with the rest of us, in harm’s way? Why…?” He didn’t get to finish as Junko cleared her throat and put on some glasses, switching personalities again.

            “Right. Allow me to explain. For this project, I required someone to pull the strings behind the scenes in the academic coliseum. Someone to operate Monokuma and keep watch over all of you—in a word, a ‘Mastermind’… However, according to my calculations, Mukuro Ikusaba was incapable of serving that role. She was, after all, a pitiful sister. The kind of incomparably pitiful sister who would go off on her own and enlist in a mercenary group. For that reason, I took the behind-the-scenes role and elected to leave her out in the open as a student. Keeping her with me behind the curtain was an option, but she wouldn’t have been of any help there… Besides, like I said, fifteen participants is a nice, round number. But then, there was the dilemma of Mukuro Ikusaba’s title, ‘Ultimate Soldier’. It is, in a word, ‘3H’. Hopelessly foul, hopelessly disgusting, and hopelessly repulsive… To know that she was far removed from the needs of the society required no calculation on my part. On the other hand, it would have been a shame to let the beauty of my Fashionista title go to waste.”

            Kirigiri narrowed her eyes.

            “So that’s… why you switched places?”

            Junko went on.

            “However, she resembled me even less than I had calculated. Despairingly so… She was no better than a filler character—a ‘Girl A’, so to speak… Coupled with her underwhelming appearance, many predicted she would be one of the first murdered.”

            That got Mukuro to stiffen and look at Junko strangely. Had… Had Junko seriously contemplated killing her at some point? The soldier recalled many times in the past when she had attempted to do so… But this was the Killing Game. Though she was ashamed to admit it now, it was a project she had wholeheartedly supported… because it was what Junko wanted. She thought that, had she listened to Junko’s every instruction, her sister would stop the murder attempts, even for a little while… But then… Was that why Junko wanted her to kill Naegi? Just so she could be executed for it?

            “Don’t tell me… the only reason…!” Makoto exclaimed, coming to a similar conclusion as Mukuro.

            “Naturally, that’s not the only reason. There was also the more prevalent fact that I’d gotten tired of her. You know… I’ve never ooonce had things go according to plan… It’s like, by planning things out, I know what’s gonna happen, so I started getting booored…” Junko made a cutesy expression, switching personalities again. “… so I had a change of heart and was gonna use the last murder case as a chance to be done with her! But then that stupid, ugly bitch had to get cold feet, and pique my interest with her defiance… But that worked, too! ‘Cause I could just use the scenario to erase Kirigiri instead!”

            Mukuro reeled back as Junko concretely confirmed it. Junko… was just going to have her kill Makoto, and she probably wouldn’t have had a fair trial afterward… That, or Monokuma would have left a trail of evidence a mile wide, all pointing to her as the culprit. In that scenario, there would have been no point to defying Junko and fighting for her life. Junko would’ve been the only person she had left. Makoto would be dead, and she had no strong connection with the others… In all likelihood, she would have just accepted her death, because it’s what Junko would have wanted.

            Somehow, she didn’t take comfort in the fact Junko decided to call of that option… And maybe it was because… Junko could still want to execute her on a whim… Like in this final Class Trial, should everyone lose.

            Junko never said that if she won that they would both live… As her explanation just made clear, Mukuro was a student in the coliseum. If Junko won… she was going to be the sole survivor. Mukuro was just going to be another casualty.

            Mukuro’s hand clenched around her chest… That didn’t make her choice any easier. If anything, when voting time came, this was going to be the most difficult decision of her life…

            While Mukuro had been ruminating, Junko had apparently rambled on, gushing to everyone else about the greatness of Despair. And now they were to the point of working out what the motives were for, and how they tied to the memories that were stolen. Interpersonal relations, the past, greed, and betrayal… were all very cliché motives indeed, but they are not the only motives in the world. They were Junko’s seeds of Despair. Things that drove people to murder, and thus spark Despair in them. Junko claimed that they Despaired because they had Hope, and that the two concepts were two sides of the same coin – you cannot have one without the other.

            It took Junko flat-out stating it, but the reason their memories were stolen… was because they had all promised they would stay their whole lives in this academy, if necessary. They did not desire to escape. And without that desire, they were never going to kill each other… She stole their memories to encourage thoughts of escape.

            To nudge the trial along, Junko showed off pictures of the outside world. Of course, none of them had memories of those horrific sights… So to them, these pictures were bizarre and outlandish. Junko egged them on, saying the trial couldn’t continue on if no one could remember what those images were about… and that’s when Mukuro reached a decision.

            “… It’s the Biggest, Most Atrocious, Most Despair-Inducing Incident in human history.” Mukuro explained to them all, earning her sister’s ire. “It’s… the reason the academy was converted into a shelter.”

            Junko growled at the soldier’s defiant attitude.

            “Hey! What happened to no hints?! I explicitly told you, no hints!”

            Mukuro shook her head.

            “Ah, but it’s something they heard about before, remember? Junko, you told me I could contribute to the trial if it’s about information they already had… And they’d heard about it from Alter Ego, when he decrypted those files.”

            Junko backed off when her sister reminded her of that… It was true. Mukuro wasn’t technically breaking any rules… The files had said as much. Junko still looked pissed.

            “S-So, wait…” Leon began to sweat. “You’re sayin’… We closed ourselves off in this academy… because the world basically ended? How does that even work?!”

            Celes cupped a hand over her mouth as she nodded in agreement.

            “I do believe we would have noticed signs that the world was ending, before we entered the academy…”

            Junko cocked her head smugly.

            “Hmm…? You mean when you entered the academy two years ago…?” She grinned.

            “T-Two years…!” Mondo exclaimed, reeling back in shock.

            “… That would explain the photos…” Sayaka mused.

            “And Hagakure’s notebook…” Makoto added, to the idol’s confusion.

            “Huh?” The blue-haired idol tilted her head at the Luckster.

            “It was on the second floor of the dorms… Like Kirigiri said, she found a notebook of hers in one of the lockers… But that wasn’t all. Using the Emergency Use e-handbook that was found in the Headmaster’s secret room, I went ahead and investigated the other lockers. There wasn’t really much in the few that I could open, but there was one that still had stuff inside… A crystal ball, tarot cards, and a bunch of notebooks and other supplies. And one of the notebooks had Hagakure’s name written in it.”

            “H-Hold on…!” Mondo scrambled to recover. “You’re saying… those lockers belonged to us?!”

            “They’d have to… for Kirigiri and Hagakure to have lockers up there…” Fujisaki remarked.

            “But I never even attended a single class here!” Leon continued to deny it.

            “Hagakure’s notes suggested otherwise…” Makoto refuted the baseball star. “And if we studied here for two years, then it’s no surprise Hagakure had so many notes!”

            Kirigiri cupped her chin in thought.

            “I see… So that’s when it ‘started’ for each of us…” At her friends’ confused glances, she elaborated. “Each of us blacked out upon setting foot on campus. I would wager that sensation of blacking out was actually just the loss of our memories… We attended school for two years. The Biggest, Most Atrocious, Most Despair-Inducing Incident in human history happens outside the academy walls, and we agree to shelter ourselves in here...”

            “Because Headmaster Kirigiri wanted to protect you from all that wonderful Despair outside~!” Junko preened. She then slipped on her glasses again. “But he never considered that there was Despair inside as well…”

            Everyone with amnesia sobered up as it all came crashing down on them. The revelations. They’d attended school for two years… possibly became the closest of friends, and experienced growth as a class. Junko and Mukuro worked behind the scenes to bring about the end of the world, and they then sheltered themselves here, most likely so that they could fix the world later when the worst of it was over… A monumental task indeed, but not an impossible one for Ultimates like them.

            And then… tragedy struck, as Junko made her move and stole their memories. Confused and befuddled them, making them strangers to one another again, and inspired them to murder…

            “And those cameras…” Fujisaki remembered with a whimper.

            “That’s riiight~!” Junko chirped. “All your atrocious murders have been broadcast the world over! Some people on the outside haven’t given up yet, and that’s another reason you all had to kill each other~… You guys had to bring it on home to those people that hope is a joke! That even beacons of hope can feel despair~…”

            And that was the long and short of it. The full extent of Junko and Mukuro’s betrayal. And yet… something still stuck out to Makoto.

            “What do you mean… ‘another reason’…?”

            Some perked their ears up at that. It was true. Junko had said that.

            … The fashionista adopted a sad personality.

            “W-Well… It’s just… spending two years together as a class, even I couldn’t stop growing close to you guys!” Junko sobbed. “So… to have you all kill each other… to have the most important people in my life take their own lives… It’s… It’s so despairingly wonderful~… Orgasmic, really…”

            They all just stared at the blonde, who was without a doubt insane… But before they could even grow angry about it, Junko clapped her hands together.

            “However, as fun as this is, we don’t have any more time to talk… It’s time we brought this to a close.”

            “Bring it to a close…?” Makoto echoed hollowly.

            “Ballot time, obviously! Those are the rules, aren’t they?” Junko got all cutesy again. “Oh, and by the way, since this is the final ballot, I decided to change up the rules a bit, toooo!”

            “You changed them?” Sayaka asked in bewilderment.

            “You guys are Hope, and I’m Despair!” Junko said, holding up Monokuma playfully. “The vote is to decide which of those two deserve to be punished… And if there’s even one vote in favor of punishing Hope… then I will be declared the victor, and Team Hope will be punished!”

            “E-Even one vote?!” Fujisaki yelped with wide eyes.

            “Ah, no worries. I will, of course, not be participating in the ballot.” Junko said like it was no big deal. “And to make things even more fair, my disappointing older sister will be on your side! Because she’s a stinky traitor that got too buddy-buddy with you all.”

            Mondo growled lowly at the fashionista’s proposed rules.

            “You’ve got way too many advantages, bitch…!”

            “Don’t worry… Nobody here would choose… to have themselves executed…” Makoto assured the biker.

            “Oh, and while we’re at it—if I win, you guys’ punishment… is to peacefully and quietly go senile inside the academy! That’s what I’ve decided on!”

            ... Needless to say, this caught them all off-guard.

            “Huh?” Makoto asked intelligibly.

            “So… you’re basically saying…” Leon trailed off uncertainly.

            “We’d just… continue living here?” Fujisaki asked in disbelief.

            “It means we can survive…” Mondo scowled.

            Junko got all sad again.

            “And if you don’t like that… then you can punish me… and go out into the world…The dead world. A world in which only Despair exists. I don’t imagine you’ll survive long.”

            “Wh-What’s your point?!” Makoto questioned. “No matter what you say… we…”

            Junko cut him off rather excitedly.

            “Stop right there! I just realized something. Just having you rot away in here is pretty damn dull, ain’t it? The audience’ll never go for it. All right, I’ve got it! I’ll give one of you one spectacular mothafuckin’ punishment!”

            “What?!” Sayaka exclaimed distressfully. “You mean…

            “That one person… will be executed?” Celes finished for her.

            “As for who… I’ve got that under control! Naegi! You’re the one!” Junko cackled.

            “M-Me…?” Makoto asked in horror.

            “I don’t like you, Naegi!” Junko told him bluntly. “You’ve been reeeally defiant! In short, I’m giving you two choices… If even one of you wishes to punish Hope… then Naegi will receive a cruel punishment, and everyone else will live happily together here… But if you all wish to punish me, then I’ll have you leave this place. And you will leave. And then you will die miserable deaths in the outside world. So basically, if you throw Naegi to the sharks, the rest of you get to live!”

            That got looks of dismay from everyone in the room. Not because of Junko’s pessimistic belief that they’d die once they left here, but because… if there was even one vote… one… They’d lose Makoto for real. The guy who came back to them. Made them feel unified again, even when they had doubted each other in this final trial…

            And it was obvious to Junko that they all had doubts, even Makoto himself.

            “What’s this? All outta steam? Not so sure of yourself anymore? Are you afraid of getting punished?” Junko jeered. “Do you not trust your friends…?”

            More than a few winced at that mere suggestion. It was true they had fallen apart without him… So it was natural he’d experience doubt here, too. This was their lives on the line, supposedly.

            “N-No! That’s not it!” Makoto insisted.

            “It’s only natural that you would be experiencing fear. Everyone else seems to have come to the realization that fighting against me is a meaningless endeavor…” As Junko trailed off, Makoto took another look around the room. But it wasn’t quite what Junko was suggesting… There wasn’t self-doubt written on their faces, it was suspicion directed at one another. Especially Mukuro, who was actually the only one conflicted about this ballot time. “Yes… I love those faces… They’re beautiful, eroded away by Despair… Kirigiri can’t betray her daddy, and Muku can’t betray me! Just one person’s Despair means Game Over for ya! It’s hopeless, Naegi! You’re fucked! Hey, hey, who do you think is gonna do it? Whose Despair is gonna kill Naegi?”

            Makoto looked down momentarily before placing a hand over his hear.

            “No one… is going to give in to Despair!” He vowed. He pointed at her in righteous fury. “No one… is going to lose to you!”

            Junko just sighed.

            “You’re no fun… Stubborn to the bitter end… Ah, whatever. Let’s get this over with... The final ballot… It ends there—your dubious Hope… and you, as well!”

            And just like that, they entered the final debate. Junko listed out every reason why they would be “fucked” if they left the academy… How it would be betraying the Headmaster, who so earnestly wished to protect them. She listed it all.

            And yet… One by one, Makoto got through to his friends. It was an uphill battle, but Makoto addressed each of them in turn.

            Leon…

            “You know… I honestly thought I hated baseball!” The Ultimate All-Star confessed. He grinned roguishly as he ran a hand through his wild mane of hair. “But Naegi got me thinkin’! It’s not really the sport that’s a pain in the ass, it’s those stupid regulations about cuttin’ your hair, wearin’ a uniform! All that formal bullshit, I hate it! But… not the game itself. There’s just somethin’ about it… It’s a part of who I am, and there’s no friggin’ way I’m gonna let the guy who taught me that take the fall so I can ‘live’!”

            Mondo…

            “Aiyah…” Mondo hung his head as he placed his hands on his hips. “My bros would kill me if I just threw Naegi to the sharks… Daiya and Ishimaru both…” He then looked up and gave a thumb’s up and a massive grin. “I’m not strong. Much as I try to be on my own, I’m just a reckless little shit that got both his bros killed! I’d be a dumbass to let it happen a third time!”

            Fujisaki…

            “I ran away from being a boy because I wasn’t physically strong… And other boys would give me weird looks for not joining them in most games… I was so scared about my secret getting out, and then worried for Mondo because he lost his temper in the heat of the moment I decided to be brave! I was worried you all would hold that over his head…” Fujisaki muttered quietly, head bowed before he looked up, his face lit with the brightest grin he could muster. “But Makoto understood, and made me comfortable with my real strengths! I’m really good with computers, and I want to help people that way instead of working on my physical weakness… And… I want to be strong in character, like Makoto is. So… I’m not going to let him die here!”

            Kyoko…

            “… I didn’t know my father, so I can’t tell you what he wanted for me… but if he really was my father—if only by blood—then I’m certain… he would never tell me to stay here if it meant deserting Naegi… I can’t explain why, but I know I’m right… Just because I didn’t know him… doesn’t mean I can’t understand him, I suppose…”

             Celes…

            “Ehehe…” The gambler held a hand over her mouth as she tinklingly laughed. “Trying to inspire Hope in me, when all I’ve ever wanted to do is escape from here… Truly, you are an amusing knight, Makoto. That is what you promised, is it not? Perhaps that is why you try to reassure me, even now, when it is your life at stake, and not mine… There is only one suitable response in this situation. Makoto, let us escape together! I will not accept anything less.”

            Sayaka…

            “Makoto… You know my vote was never going to be to punish you…” The idol beamed kindly. “In all that time reaching for my dream, I saw the worst of society, getting disheartened day after day… But then… I saw you, even if it was only from a distance at first. You proved to me people could be better. They could look beyond themselves, and not expect anything in return! You showed me that being selfless was possible, and that selflessness was the whole reason I wanted to be an idol in the first place! There’s no way I could let Junko execute you. Not now, not ever. I lost you once already, and I’m never letting her take you away again…”

            And finally… Mukuro…

            “… Makoto…” The soldier trailed off at first, hand clenched to her chest, gaze down. “This isn’t an easy decision for me to make… I’m literally being forced to choose between you and Junko. Whatever I choose, one of you is going to die…” She looked up with fierce determination. “But… In the end, my trust in Junko has been shaken. Even if I voted for Hope to be punished so that she could live, there’s no guarantee she would really let any of us to ‘live’ in this academy… And while I place little value on my own life, as well as the lives of others, I can’t help but remember how painful it was to lose you… and how relieved I was when you came back to us. I couldn’t bear to go through with that again. Your ‘death’ hurt me worse than any physical injury could have… I have no desire to feel such Despair again. Like Junko said… I’m not her. I can never be her. I swore my loyalty to her because she was family, and she always seemed to be the ‘brain’ between us… But if she’s just going to hit me with another dose of Despair – your real death – and then kill me later, I might as well turn the tables while I can. Junko ordered me to be a student along with all of you, and I’ll consider that her last official order. I… was a member of Class 78, too, so that won’t be a problem… right? I thought a soldier was supposed to never question orders… but… watching everyone here defy Monokuma at every turn, watching you defy him, Makoto, it started making me think what a soldier can fight for. They can fight for the sake of the mission… Or they can fight to protect. And I… I want to be that kind of soldier. I want to protect… you… because you got me to start thinking about the world outside of Junko, You’ve never asked for anything except to be friends, and I… like that… When we get out of here, I’ll be sure to protect you from the Despair that’s out there. If you can affect me, a member of Ultimate Despair, you can easily change all of those people Junko tricked into joining her cause!”

            As Mukuro concluded her speech, which put all of them but Junko at ease, Kirigiri smiled and added a little more input.

            “You know, I don’t think it was Luck or misfortune that brought you here to Hope’s Peak… You’re here for a completely different reason… You’re here to crush the Ultimate Despair… and never relenting in your stand against Despair itself… We should be calling you the Ultimate Hope.” The Ultimate Detective crossed her arms in satisfaction. Junko, meanwhile, reeled back in anger and shock.

            “What… the hell? What the hell are you?! You sicken me… This is absolutely nauseating… Your faces, your words, your interactions… they disgust me! That doesn’t make you cool, y’know?! You’re lame! You’re lame, you’re lame, you’re lame! You suck! You suck, you suck, you suck, you suck…!”

            Makoto closed his eyes in concentration.

            ‘I’m not a world-class anything—nor would I say I have any special abilities worthy of calling ‘Hope’… However… However, I will not…!’

            And just like that, Junko and Makoto entered the final part of the debate – just between him and her. she threw insults and all sorts of negativity at him, but he shot through all those derogatory remarks…

            “Despair of tomorrow! Despair of the unknown! Despair of your memories!” Junko taunted, but Makoto shook his head.

            “Hope keeps on going…!” The Luckster proclaimed passionately. “I will not give up, and I will not give in. I will not grow weary of myself, or the world. I will not abandon the things and people I care about. And I will not succumb to Despair! I mean, my optimism is my one redeeming quality!”

            Junko was at a total loss for words.

            “What… the hell?! What the freaking hell?!”

            With the debate come to a close, Celes placed her hands on her hips and glanced around the room.

            “It looks like we’re done here. I suppose it’s Ballot Time?”

            Leon ran a hand through his hair.

            “We cast our ballot with the switch here, right?”

            “Okay! Here goes…!” Fujisaki cheered.

            “Finally…! Time to end this fucking ‘game’…!” Mondo grinned.

            “Let’s put an end to this Class Trial… and all the bloodshed it represents…” Kirigiri intoned solemnly.

            “With our own hands!” Sayaka agreed wholeheartedly.

            Mukuro and Makoto both smiled, having nothing else to add. They all cast their ballots… and the slot machine ended up on three faces of Junko. Despair was found Guilty… and Despair would be punished…

            “Huh…? What just…” Junko trailed off in disbelief.

            “Junko Enoshima… you lose.” Kirigiri asserted.

            “Lose? Lose? I did? Th-That’s… That’s…!”

            Leon groaned.

            “What now? You gonna deny it?”

            Celes rolled her eyes.

            “Figures. Even the Ultimate Despair is vulnerable to a dose of her own Despair…”

            “Deny it all you want, it won’t change a thing!” Sayaka said firmly.

            But Junko continued on…

            “THAT’S—FREAKING AMAZING~!!” Junko grinned rather gleefully.

            “H-Huh…?” Fujisaki didn’t understand… none of them did.

            “This… This is Despair!” Junko cooed. “I came to this academy… two years ago… and I toiled away, crafting the most intricate plan… I was even gonna sacrifice my sister for its success! And yet, in the end, I still failed! There is no greater Despair in this world!”

            “Wh-What… What are you talking about?” Makoto wanted to try and understand, even if Junko was perhaps the evilest person he’d ever met.

            “I was Despairingly hopeless! From the moment I came into this world, I was tired of everything!” Junko gushed. “So I’ve been looking forward to this moment… this once-in-a-lifetime experience… my whole life… My first and last chance to experience the most awesome Despair! The moment of my death! And to experience it alongside the world-class Despair of my project’s failure… Ahh! I’m so hopelessly ecstatic!”

            “Is she… happy?” Fujisaki asked warily.

            “In any event… you admit defeat, yes?” Kirigiri asked for clarification.

            “Aha… Ahahahaha! It doesn’t really matter whether I’ve won or lost! ‘Cause, either way, it’s all the same for you guys, in the end… Despair outside, and Despair inside! There’s nothing but Despair for you!”

            “N-No… You’re…” Makoto trailed off, only for Mukuro to support him.

            “You’re wrong.” The soldier fixed her sister with a stern glare.

            “Hrmm?” Junko faced her sister curiously, having not seen Mukuro talk back to her like this.

            “I… I can’t claim to be onboard with the concept of ‘Hope’ yet… But if that’s what it means to support Makoto, then I’ll do it! I’ll make sure to undo all of your plans, even on the outside! I was in deep enough to know a lot of your major plans, so seeing them foiled will not be difficult at all. Because… it will bring you even greater Despair, and I’ve always wanted to give you what you want, Junko… Even if you never praise me, I’ll work hard to undo everything!”

            “We’re not afraid of your Despair anymore…” Celes chimed in.

            “We’ve made up our minds! We’re going out there, our Hope held high!” Mondo added.

            “Naegi talked us into it…” Leon chuckled sheepishly.

            “Our little Ultimate Hope~!” Sayaka cooed, pecking Makoto on the cheek and making him blush.

            “Junko Enoshima, you said that Despair spreads like a contagion… Well, Hope does the same thing.” Kirigiri said matter-of-factly. “I’d say the eight of us are the proof you need of that.”

            “K-Kirigiri…!” Makoto smiled in gratitude.

            Junko was still locking eyes with Mukuro, but then she reeled back in disgust.

            “I just can’t get a break, can I? Even Muku growing a spine from out of nowhere… There’s no way such a useless older sister will actually be of help to you guys… I despise that look you guys get at times like this! I know I’m only inviting more pain by doing this, by prolonging how long I have to look at those faces…” Junko calmed down marginally. “… But one last thing. You guys have this helpless obsession with Hope, and if you don’t wanna let that go, that’s fine and all… but you’d best prepare yourselves… because from here on out, you’ll find Despair cropping up to block your path at every turn. No matter which road you take… no matter where you try and hide… Wherever there’s Hope, there will always be Despair—like the two sides of a coin, they’re inseparable. Will you guys be able to hold firm in your devotion to Hope through all of that?”

            “O-Of course we will… We…” Naegi trailed off, only to get cut off by Enoshima again.

            “Don’t bother! I’m just talking to myself here! There’s no need for you to respond!” Junko sighed dreamily. “But even that must come to an end… After all, it’s about time for my punishment, don’t you think?!”

            “You intend… to execute yourself?” Kirigiri asked.

            “Those are the rules!” Junko preened. She then fixed Mukuro with a moody glare. “And if you even think about interfering, I’ll have the remote crushed, and you’ll still all be trapped in here! You know I’ll do it!”

            Mukuro closed her eyes in resignation, but Makoto spoke up.

            “I don’t… really think it’s necessary for you to…” He got cut off again…

            “Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!!!” Junko screamed.

            “What?!” Makoto was taken aback.

            “Have you listened to a word I said?! I have no Hope for my life! Quite the opposite—I’m giddy with anticipation for the once-in-a-lifetime chance to taste death’s Despair… So back off!!!” Soon enough, Junko hovered over the red button that had plagued them throughout all the trials. “Upupu… Upupupu! Ahh, so this is death’s Despair… It’s exquisite! I wish I could have shared even just ten percent… no, even just one percent of this Despair… with the rest of the world! I wish I could have taken the world and coated it in this marvelous Despair! Now, let’s begin! I have a very special punishment reserved for last…! Let’s get this ball rollin’! IIIT’S PUNISHMENT TIIIME! AHAHAHAHAHA!”

            With that crazed speech given, her eyes swirling deeply with Despair, Junko finally pressed down on the button… And the usual sequence began. The screens over the survivors read, “Congratulations! Junko Enoshima has been found guilty. Commencing execution…” An 8-bit sprite version of Junko walked off the screens with Monokuma gleefully, rather than being dragged like the past murderers had been…

            It wasn’t a single execution. Junko was put through a montage of executions… One where she was tied to a post and bombarded with baseballs. One where she sat on a motorcycle that ran around in a motorcycle cage that was electrified. One where she had to operate a computer to shut defuse a countdown… and was summarily given the electric chair for successfully defusing it. There was one where she had to sing and hit the notes of a karaoke song, to fill a score meter until it was full, and a beartrap along the edge of the stage; the trap snaps closed just as she’s about to fill the meter all the way. There was one where she had to navigate a field of landmines, and failed to do anything when Monokuma flew by in a bomber plane and dropped a nuke. There was, “The Burning of the Versailles Witch,” where she was in the midst of burning flames, and then crushed by a firetruck. There was, “The Space Journey,” where she went up in a rocket and swiftly came crashing back down.

            There’d been one execution for each of them. Makoto had a feeling the last one would’ve been reserved for him…

            Finally… There was the Detention execution. The one that failed for Kirigiri. Junko sat in a chair, without a desk, as the conveyer belt carried her back to a giant metal cube that would utterly crush her… She was holding Monokuma in her lap, flashing a victory sign, and shooting them all a Cheshire grin. Her attitude made them think she would back out at the last second…

            But she never resisted. Soon enough, she was under the cube. The mechanism temporarily stopped, making even Junko think it had malfunctioned again… But just as she looked up… It slammed down on her hard. There was a thick, goopy noise as her blood splattered all over, indicating her death was not faked…

            Junko Enoshima was, without a doubt, permanently dead…

            And what they all presumed to be the escape switch was lying a little away from the cube that had crushed Enoshima, and had ceased working the moment it crushed her. The switch was coated in blood now, but it was otherwise undamaged.

            They would finally be able to escape… The final Class Trial… Junko Enoshima, the Ultimate Despair… their lives at the academy… The game was totally, completely over.

            ~*~

            It was over, but the building didn’t go down in a Hollywood-style explosion, and it didn’t all fade to black… It didn’t end in extravagant, flowery detail, nor, really, did anything ending-like happen at all. Everything remained the same.

            Well… except one thing.

            The AC stopped. The thing that Junko called the “air purifier”… shut down. That was it. They would have a little precious time to collect anything they might need to go out into a world that was purportedly war-torn and enveloped in chaos and Despair… But then they would have to leave. They wouldn’t be able to stay.

            … Not that they intended to in the first place… But this, was their Farewell to Despair Academy…

            ~*~

            The eight of them eventually regrouped in the entrance hall, where it had all began. They remained silent for some time, standing in front of the door… caught up in their own epilogue, and all the events that preceded the conclusion.

            After a while, Kirigiri folded her arms.

            “Just standing here isn’t going to get us anywhere… It’s about time we get going…” She nodded to the Luckster. “Naegi, would you do the honors?”

            “S-Sure…” Makoto stuttered, taking the switch from her and feeling its weight in his hands…

            “Do you think it’s real?” Leon couldn’t help but ask. “Is that really the key to this door?”

            “As best as we can guess…” Fujisaki muttered. “Based on what she said, this should open it…”

            “She said she would ensure we left…” Kirigiri rubbed her chin contemplatively. “And then she left us this just before she died… Given that, it seems very likely that this would be the key we need to get out of here.”

            “B-But still… what if it’s, like, a self-destruct button?” Leon proposed. “Enoshima never said we’d leave this place alive…”

            “That is possible, yes…” Kirigiri conceded.

            “But we can just not push it…” Celes pointed out. “The air purifier is dead, and will never work again.”

            That was true. But to quell their fears, Mukuro spoke up.

            “It’s the escape switch. There is no deceit. Jin Kirigiri pressed that button to seal us within, when this all started. Junko could not have tampered with it.”

            Though that might not have meant much, coming from a former enemy… many of them had to admit, it was a little comforting that the Headmaster held the switch before Junko did. It meant that it wasn’t another contraption that she developed… It was possible that she did tweak with the remote, behind Mukuro’s back… But that wasn’t a possibility they liked to dwell on.

            Mondo scowled with determination.

            “Even if it is a trap… We just gotta risk it. I have to know… how the gang’s doing on the outside. The gang Daiya and I created together…”

            “My band… My friends…” Sayaka whispered quietly, hugging her arms in fright, Makoto wrapping his arm around her shoulders in comfort.

            “We should also check on the loved ones of Asahina and the others…” Fujisaki chipped in. “They deserve to know what happened, if they don’t know already!”

            “I just hope… the world we all know and love is waiting for us on the other side of this door…” Leon grinned nervously. “That Enoshima’s story was one big, fat lie…”

            Makoto hummed in thought.

            “But no matter what’s happened to it, it’s still ‘our world’… So, whatever is waiting for us out there… watch out, because here we come. Besides, well, compared to this academy, the world’s a pretty big place… and because of how big it is, there’s obviously always going to be despair somewhere… but there’s just as much hope, y’know?”

            Sayaka loosened up in his arms, marginally.

            “The search for hope—the endeavor to find hope… That, in itself, is true Hope… and as long as you have that, you can keep pressing forward, no matter how hard you fall…”

            Celes giggled, hand covering her mouth again.

            “I’m certain if Togami were here, he would say that he doesn’t need the ‘likes of you’ to tell him that… It would be just like him to look down his nose at someone as… Hopeful as Makoto…”

            Mondo groaned.

            “Oi… Don’t bring up that arrogant sonuvabitch again… I was ready to punch him from day one…”

            “And you did punch Makoto…” Sayaka scowled, to which the biker looked appropriately chagrined.

            “Keep in mind…” Mukuro spoke up again. “There are people on the outside who haven’t given up on Hope yet… Now that we’re through with the trial, I can tell you that one such group is called the Future Foundation, which is made up of Hope’s Peak graduates and former staff… We will not be alone in righting the wrongs I helped to commit…”

            No one denied Mukuro had a hand in creating all this… But, internally, more than a few admitted that Junko really was the brains of the operation. Though Mukuro was misguided, she was loyal to her family… which a lot of them could not find fault with. If you couldn’t find companionship in your family, who could you fall back on?

            … Well, Mukuro would be finding out the answer to that question, now that Junko was gone…

            “Let’s just see what we can do out there…” Kirigiri stated. “I look forward to continuing to work with all of you.”

            “I guess this is goodbye… goodbye to this academy… And Ishimaru, Asahina, Sakura…” Fujisaki said.

            “Yamada, Togami, Fukawa, and Hagakure as well…” Celes remarked, twirling a lock of hair around her finger. “Though I would normally charge for my services… If you are ever in need, come and talk to me. Whether or not I will be able to help you is another matter…”

            “It had to happen sooner or later… Let’s send everyone off with a smile!” Sayaka said, smiling sadly. “I’ll… I’ll come up with some songs to pay homage to them!”

            “Guys, if you ever need some muscle, just holler! I’ll come runnin’ over in a flash!” Mondo promised.

            “That goes for me, as well…” Mukuro admitted, knowing Makoto would at least want to help his friends here. She planned to stick close to his side, though.

            “I’m not gonna miss this place…” Leon admitted.

            “I can’t say I will, either.” Kirigiri concurred. “But I do kind of feel strange about leaving…”

            “I’m not quite sure how to put it into words…” Makoto said finally. “… but I guess this is our graduation, huh? Well, then… Here goes!”

            Finally, Makoto pressed the switch… with his own hands… with their own hands… they would walk through the door to the future where Hope and Despair were intertwined… They had Hope, so they would soar. They had Hope, so they would continue the fight, and right the wrongs of the past.

            With little fanfare, there was a large blaring sound as the door’s mechanisms began to unlock and open. The turrets trained at the door went up into the ceiling, and the iron door finally opened…

            They’d earned the freedom they yearned for since the beginning...

[drinkthehalo]

Sleep No More Shanghai - Final Thoughts

Some final thoughts on Sleep No More Shanghai. There will be some minor spoilers.

I saw the show 34 times, over five visits from NYC from Dec 2016 to Oct 2017.

My initial thoughts on the show are posted here and highlights of my favorite performers are here.

I have to be honest, the show lost a lot of magic for me after the first cast change. There are some great new performers, but the original cast was INCREDIBLE. It brought together many of the best performers ever to work with Punchdrunk.

It was particularly magical because many of the performers were in The Drowned Man, and of course you know me - anything that reminds me of  Drowned Man makes me happy. (I wouldn't be the @sleepnomoreboston of Drowned Man; my heart warms at the thought of it living on in any form.)

But it's not just the nostalgia - it's that Drowned Man had a particular performance style that was all about developing interesting characters and engaging the audience. Building in little interactions and moments throughout the loop, recognizing audience members who'd been following a while - and developing the characters with complex motivations, dialogue, and humor. And with many performers having worked together before, and with weeks before opening to rehearse together, the chemistry between cast members was absolutely off the charts when the show opened.

Since the cast change, I feel the loss of those performers, and that original chemistry. Miranda Mac Letten and Laure Bachelot as Sexy Witch. Omar Gordon & Fred Gehrig as Cunning Man. The extraordinary chemistry between Fania, Miranda, and Olly as the witches. Fania as Bald and Omar as Banquo. I could go on and on.

That said, of course cast changes are inevitable, of course new performers will come in and many of them will eventually become the next generation of "great performers." 

So - final thoughts -

I was lucky enough to see Paul Zivkovich as Macbeth. Having seen Paul as Macbeth many times in New York, it highlighted for me the differences in the Macbeth loop in Shanghai. The Shanghai Macbeth is SCARY. Scarier than in New York, more deranged.

In New York the Walled Garden solo is contemplative, Macbeth wrestling with the nature of his own soul, and sorrowful, foreshadowing his fall from grace and his death. In Shanghai it's still beautiful, but it's also explicit that in his internal struggle the dark side of Macbeth has won. The Walled Garden is right outside Duncan's room, so Macbeth peers in, creeps in through Duncan's room, lingers over the bed, malicious. It’s not just a philosophical struggle between good and evil; it is a premeditated decision to murder another human being.

The other reason the Macbeths seem worse in Shanghai is Duncan. In New York, Duncan is a symbol. Regal. Distant. I never really care when he dies; my heart doesn't start to break until Banquo and Lady Macduff.

But in Shanghai, Sam Booth's Duncan is a stunning reinvention of the character. He's still a symbol - as every character is - but he's also human. He's *specific* and idiosyncratic. He sings to himself, and dreams, and has moods and fears.

He's terrified not just of his own death but of age, of irrelevance. He's conflicted towards his son, proud and yet full of dread that Malcolm will one day replace him. He latches on to Lady Macbeth because she makes him feel youthful, alive in the face of the looming death he fears. He's flawed; he thrills at the prospect of an affair with his host's wife. 

Sam's performance highlights the man beneath the regal symbolism of the character. The fragility of his humanity, as he stumbles up the stairs singing, as he struggles to remove his jacket under the influence of the drug. As he dreams of kissing the woman who's sent him to his death.

He becomes a symbol, not just of "the king," but of regrets and lost possibilities.

A few other thoughts:

For my final visit I didn't get to see Andrea Carruciu at all. But thankfully I did see him for a final time in August and was as impressed as before with the quality of his performances as both Macbeth and Porter. Two of the most complex roles - and so different from each other - for someone new to Punchdrunk to pull them off as well as Andrea is an exceptional feat.

I love the Bride as a character, and the performances of both Tang Tingting and Debbie/Wen Hsin Lee who originated her.

I love watching Speakeasy Barman play pool with the audience. I’m delighted with how much fun Olly is in that role.

I love that Witches 1 has such a huge space to flow through, how beautiful it is with an unobstructed view and a high ceiling. 

I love every single thing about the Dragon Boat scene. How epic and emotional and eerie and dark it is. It feels like Drowned Man, like Twin Peaks, like that video of Faust that’s floating around. It’s completely new to Sleep No More yet fits and complements everything about it.

I love Witches 8, obviously.

I love the gorgeous film noir lighting in the speakeasy, and the layout so that you can see many more angles on the Macbeth/Banquo fight. If you stand in the right place you can see the expressions on their faces up close in ways that are impossible to see in New York. 

I am super impressed with Garth Johnson, whose improvisations are clever and full of characterization. I was thrilled when his Porter made up for the lack of mirror behind the lobby desk by finding his reflection in the top of the lobby desk itself. 

I was thrilled also with Ian Garside’s Porter, who was full of sorrow yet also amusing and sweet. He performed his 1:1 with an emotional narrative that I’ve not quite seen before, and loved very much.

(Overall the Portering in Shanghai is A++).

Although I miss Omar & Fred I still love that Cunning Man is such a distinctive, devious character in Shanghai.

I love the expanded use of the Macduff child's mirrored bedroom. Multiple scenes and 1:1s happen in there, making sure that far more of the audience notices what is certainly one of the most chilling and heartbreaking sets that Punchdrunk has created.

I love the little passageway into the crib room, and the scene over the cradle with the tiny lights. Eerie and beautiful. The beauty of the set in Shanghai is extraordinary.

I didn't get to see Austin Goodwin's Boy Witch, Conor Doyle's Porter, or Paul Zivkovich's Porter, all of which have been popping up recently. That's Punchdrunk, of course. Get used to disappointment.

I understand they need flexibility in the cast schedule, that many of the people I want to see are swings who wouldn’t be on the regular schedule anyway, that Punchdrunk’s long-running show model depends on the audience not getting attached to particular performers in particular roles. But of course we get attached anyway. A great performance can be life-changing. The performers are not interchangeable.

Ed Warner is my great regret of Sleep No More Shanghai. I did not see him perform at all on my final visit, and saw him only once before, as Banquo. His Banquo was exceptional (best Banquo 1:1 I've ever had) but I would have loved to see him as Husband or Cunning Man.

I wanted to see him as Husband because I have not yet seen a fully convincing performance of Husband, and I think Ed would convince me. He can capture vulnerability like no one else. The best Husband I've seen is Ben Whybrow, who is an extraordinary actor (I wish I'd seen his one man show in London) - his 1:1 moved me to tears both times I saw it - but he also projects competence, self-confidence, a sense of emotional remove, a sturdiness. That doesn’t work quite right for the Husband character - he should be very young, very naive - a character whose primary function is to be manipulated by Cunning Man and (in a way) Bride.

Your heart should be breaking for him, but with Ben I wonder why he falls for it. He seems like he should know better. But I think Ed - based entirely on that Miguel 1:1 where his eyes were brimming with tears and I STILL remember every moment of it like it was yesterday - he could project the vulnerability in such a way that I would never question it. I would feel the tragedy of the character, and the longing for love that drives him; he'd have my complete sympathy, without my doubts.

But I'll never see it. Sigh.

Oh and Cunning Man because... I don't know, it's just a funny character in Shanghai, and I'm super curious as to what he'd do with it. It's the opposite of Husband, an archetype I've not seen Ed play - how would he handle it? I’ll never know.

Anyway. I am, in general, running out of things to say about Sleep No More, in any form. Six and a half years is a long time to be active in a fandom, especially one as physically and financially exhausting as this one. I’m taking a break for a while, but I’m sure you’ll see me around.

[selfish-swine]

Let’s Talk About Star Fox and Character For a Moment - Part 2: OOC is Serious Business

Continued from here. If you haven’t read part 1 yet, then go do that first! You need context! Anyway, this is a long one.

So that whole big rant I wrote up was really just a preamble to get to something I REALLY wanted to rant about but found myself basically writing two rants to get my point across and needed to split stuff up to establish a reference point for what I’m talking about.

Let’s Talk about the fandom’s universally disliked unfavorite, Star Fox Command on the typical topic of how badly it characterized everyone and derailed things and all that hullabaloo.

Now let’s get somethings clear here. First off, I do NOT think Command is a good game by any stretch, mechanically or narratively. It does screw a lot of shit up. Second of all, I am not saying Command doesn’t derail characters senselessly and deserve pretty much all the ire it’s earned from the fandom.

BUT. Big but here.

It is important to not dismiss all of Command for these mistakes. To start with, for as much Command gets flat out WRONG, it also gets a lot RIGHT. Falco and Fox’s bromance is especially strong in Command, and characters like Slippy (who basically never gets written poorly) are still solid. Pigma also gets some actual emotion to his unceremonious death in Assault as a spooky space ghost, to say nothing of the small implications it gives to Andross’ motivations. Then there are things that were just the result of Command having an honestly shoddy translation job all things considered, which especially pertains to Star Wolf. Panther’s third person self-narrations are a misunderstanding of him speaking in an arrogant manner in the original Japanese, and Leon’s infamous liking of rainbows was meant to be sarcastic - but these are things that can not be conveyed in text in ENGLISH (but can in Japanese). Then there is Wolf, which brings me to the real point I want to get at with this post.

I said before it is important not to dismiss all of Command for these mistakes, but really what I should say is it isn’t fair to dismiss Command for the same mistakes other games did before it, specifically Assault. The big offenders of Command, Fox and Krystal, are just as derailed in Assault (if not moreso in the case of Fox), along with Wolf and to a lesser extent, Peppy, yet no one bats an eye because it suits the fandom’s tastes at large (or at least the English speaking fandom), and that bothers me. Out Of Character writing should not be accepted just because you like the direction it takes, because that is disingenuous to the characters.

Let’s start with Fox. Fox’s archetype (to see why archetypes are important read part 1 you weenie) is that of the charismatic heroic leader. There are some subtle differences between his Western and Japanese depictions, namely his confidence (Japanese Fox is in 64 at least more son-in-his-father’s-shadow than Western Fox, but is no less cheeky or cocksure for it), but the general idea stays the same. This is consistent with Fox in the SNES comic, 64, and Adventures (as well as the Farewell Beloved Falco comic). He meets every challenge head on with confidence he can over come it and his sense of justice is strong, and this is reinforced mechanically as Fox being the player avatar, puts us in direct control of confronting these challenges with confidence and bravado.

Assault Fox lacks any of this. He is bland, boring, robbed of any character he once had. He stammers like a teenager more than he ever did as an actual teenager over the simplest of things, constantly walks into traps and danger in spite of knowing danger is ahead and waiting, routinely makes bad leadership choices by no virtue other than the plot necessitating it, and then at the end of the game acts absolutely unemotional to the supposed death of his mentor figure only to later reveal he knew all along his mentor wasn’t actually dead and was just hiding this from his team. Honestly, I might just need to make another rant dedicated  JUST to WHY and HOW these ideas are detrimental to Fox’s character, but for now I’m going to leave this simple and possibly revisit the topic in greater depth. Either way, Assault Fox is uninteresting and vapid, underreacting to everything despite being previously established as a smart ass quippy hot blooded hero, and that’s terrible. Yet, noone notices or cares, because at least he didn’t break up with Krystal.

Let’s talk about Krystal next. To say she was treated OOC in Assault is honestly to suggest she had a character to begin with, but in all fairness she does have elements of it from Dinosaur Planet and Star Fox Adventures, if broken and disjointed due to her loss of protagonist status. Going back to what I wrote about archetypes, Krystal was, in DP64, completely set up to be an aspiring hero, but when DP64 became SFAd, she lost that narrative importance and was reduced to a Damsel in Distress crossed with a Macguffin Girl, which totally undermined what she had, but as I said there was traces of something still there. She is bold, brash, heroic and full of justice (much like Fox), but also more contemplative and insightful as well. She’s the wise hero to Fox’s action hero, or should have been at any rate.

So what did Assault do? Absolutely rob her of all that and just ram in hard the Love Interest nonsense. Everything about Krystal in Assault revolves around FOX - she has NO agency onto herself anymore, something she even had in Adventures at least at first until she got captured for 90% of the game. Not Assault Krystal, though. Her whole character is defined by her fawning over Fox, worrying over his idiot well being and wanting him to be safe, stammering affectionately like two high school kids who haven’t had their first kiss yet. Yes, she does have some moments free from this nonsense, but those moments are not her DOMINANT portrayal. Even when discussing things with bad boy romantic rival Panther, she focuses on -Fox-. Krystal’s entire character in Assault is dominated by the existence of her love interest.

That is the worst case of “love interest centric” writing you can commit, because when you take the stuff away that doesn’t bear on Fox, you have so little left. I’d honestly consider Command Krystal BETTER than Assault, because her rude angry bitchy self was at least her OWN character and not joined at the hip to Fox. Notice how the cutscene with Fox and Krystal with Tricky, Krystal barely says anything worthwhile to the conversation? It’s all Fox being flustered liked a stupid teenager while Krystal coyishly “teehees” in the background while Tricky hammers in the fact they are romantic interests. No. Agency. But again, no one cares, because its fuel for their ships, amirite?

Now we get to who is in my opinion the worst offender of Assault’s derailing character writing, Wolf. Fox might’ve gone from heroic leader to bland cardboard, but at least he’s still the protagonist. Krystal might’ve been reduced to a vapid love interest, but at least she didn’t have much left to lose to start with. Wolf, though, not only oversteps his boundaries as an archetype, but he PUSHES OUT other characters from their meta narrative roles as well. Wolf is the black hole of Assault’s writing, and he absolutely got away with it because he’s ��cool” and “badass”. He is the pinnacle of my point in this rant.

Let’s talk about archetypes again. Wolf’s is that of the eternal rival, the black recolor, the evil counterpart to the hero. His mission is to see Fox undone for the sake of his own ego. In Japan, a little more supplemental information is known, namely that Wolf has a rivalry with the McCloud family name as a whole starting with James, and Fox’s reaction to Wolf’s persistent pursuit is treated more humorously than in the west (namely Fox is subtly dissing Wolf rather than being intimidated by him), but these subtleties do not change the core base that Wolf is an impulsive, rivalry motivated antagonist.

So of course Assault saw fit to.... shift him into a mentor role. This only compounds for the worse when you consider the fact that Wolf only even formed Star Wolf because Pigma manipulated and goaded him into doing it (another Japanese lore tidbit), further cementing that Wolf does not make good wise decisions. He is violent and aggressive and obsessed with his rivalry. Why the HECK is he suddenly giving advice to FOX? Wolf is the WORST person to give advice or take advice from, he is literally Mr. Bad Decisions, but Assault’s writers saw fit to absolutely change his entire persona from an aggressive archrival to a quasi-antihero cool guy big brother-esque mentor... and Fox doesn’t even remark on it! (Another mark for Fox being OOC I suppose).

Worst of all though isn’t the damage this does to Wolf, but rather, to Peppy! Wolf becoming the mentor effectively butts him into Peppy’s meta narrative role, and he essentially replaces him for it. This isn’t to say Star Fox characters can’t develop and shift around and change, but Wolf doesn’t DEVELOP into a mentor, nor does Peppy develop BEYOND it. Wolf just usurps it from Peppy and proceeds as usual. Good character writing is finding how to fit a character into a story - that is, finding a role they fit into and working from there. This is why so many fan OCs fail - they don’t fit into a role, they usurp from canon characters. One need only look at all the Star Wolf OCs that exist purely to replace “uncool” characters like Pigma or Andrew and see the flaws. When you write to replace another character, you aren’t writing true to that character, you are shackling and chaining them down to the one they are replacing. This is what Wolf does in Assault: he is sloppily mischaracterized, and then because of that, he butts into another character’s writing space.

And once more, the fandom at large did not notice or care, because Wolf is “cool”, “badass”, et cetera. This is my beef. This is my issue. So I leave you with what I said at the start of this rant: do NOT just accept changes to a character because it placates you superficially. THINK about what roles it is a character serves and why, and respect that. Don’t just blindly complain about character derailment just when it suits you because you don’t like the change personally, or because it fucks with your ships. Press yourself to be better than that.

[emiyaseraph]

My RWBY Review (part 2)

For this second part of my review, I will share with you my personal impression on RWBY Volume 4. I have avoid to talk about Qrow on purpose because I think writing a post exclusively for this character. Again, I’m sorry for my bad English ! Enjoy !

Now, I will be the first person to be harsh on the first three volumes of RWBY. I find them derivative of their anime inspirations without enough narrative meat to justify their existence and one of the main draws, the fight scenes, to have degraded due to Monty Oum's death. However, the third season did do some things with its narrative that might have put the story on track and maybe enable RWBY to be the best anime inspired web series possible. Sadly and to my severe disappointment, that was not the case.

One of the issues is the fact that the narrative, tone and characters haven't really changed despite the events of the third volumes. The third volume made a drastic shift towards a darker and more severe narrative where both the metaphorical symbol of protection against the Grimm (Beacon) and one of its shining heroes (Pyrrha) were snuffed out. This shift could have made Volume 4 a volume where the leads must refocus and deal with their loss as well as the external threats of their world. Instead the volume largely sticks to its original narrative beats and tone much to its detriment.

Animation :

The fight scenes have been bugging me a bit in this volume especially since the third episode. It was a bit hard to describe but the physics felt... wonky and light ? My profession is very far from that of an animator and a graphics artist so it's really hard for me to describe what I thought was a seemingly pervading problem with the fights.

I REALLY wasn't a fan of the third episode's fight. Which is bothersome because normally I really, really like any fight Sun Wukong is in. For anyone who feels like the fight scenes have been... lacking this season, and not merely choreography wise (what moves they do v.s the other elements), you're not alone. The fight scenes feel that way because they lack conservation of momentum.

Ruby doesn't even have basic platforming physics anymore, she feels like a character who has speed hacks/movement cheat codes. Like an infinite jump ability. Before, it was more like she just had a double jump, which isn't physically possible but when we see it we know what the rules are and it makes sense. All of the fight scenes now have really bad momentum, where Ruby will never feel the recoil from anything unless the animators remember that recoil exists. Like when she sliced Harambe but he was so heavy it stopped the slice, the weight of the blow should have recoiled and lifted her off her feet, even just a little bit. If they were using 3D animation software, like Poser, the program would have forced this to happen, which is why it's never been a problem before. But now that it's hybrid 2D, Maya doesn't force the models to conform to ragdoll physics, so there's only recoil if the animators remember to include it. They NEED to go back to Monty's Design philosophy, which is the simple Hong Kong Action movie school of thought: All fights have a rythm. Before, fights in RWBY were essentially well-choreographed music videos. They all were self-aware of the background music and incorporated elements of the music in the fight. When the music was fast, the fight was fast. When the music was slow, the fight was slow. They don't need to be as creative as Monty used to be, but making sure that your fights have a rythm and a sense of at least video game level physics to them is important. Before, people could only run up walls if Weiss used glyphs to make a path and Ruby used her speed semblance or something. Now, it feels like any of the characters could run up a wall, stop for a break in the middle, jump and land back on the wall, and keep on running up, which is immersion breaking and looks terrible. The fight in episode 3 was better for the way they used the clones, but the physics were still WAY too goddamn insane. I mean, can Blake fly ? Because it really feels like, once she's in the air, she can fly. And that's BAD.

As for Sun, he suffers from the same animation flaws that Ruby does. He doesn't move in a believable or realistic way during the fight, and it's very jarring to see that. His actions don't produce appropriate reactions. It's like when you watch a bad movie and someone turns the gun sideways and shoots bullets for like 100 bullets straight. Or when someone is shot 100 times and can carry on a conversation, and then get a "second win" and like, win the fight even though they should be dead. The fight scenes feel completley unbelievable right now, and not just because they're fighting a sea monster. The animation team REALLY has to step up their game with Maya and address their physics problem. As it stands, they're having a LOT of trouble making their fights even LOOK good anymore, let alone be interesting. Because, the funny thing is, the fight here WAS interesting. The use of clones was super creative! And the actual animation STYLE was pretty nice. But the actually fight LOOKED terrible, because they aren't following not just Monty's, but a very basic design principle of fight scenes, which is conservation of momentum.

I sincerely hope that the animation team knows that. They're doing a spectacular job with the artistry and the animation, it's the consistency of the momentum and physics I feel need some work.

Characters Development :

First, let's talk about Ruby. In volume 4, probably due to the need to develop the other characters of the RNJR team, I haven't seen much evolution for her. We were "sold of the dream", if I may say so, for the premiere of volume 4, with a rather interesting fighting style, Ruby who turns into petals, which flies, which is even badass. And then volume 4 started, and I felt like I was no longer seeing Ruby, but a kind of half-character, not able to fight properly, who didn't reason, and even worse, who put in danger her comrades (and Qrow)... Despite all that she has seen and despite teaming up with three people who have lost someone dear to them during the fall of Beacon, she remains the naive, innocent and idealistic girl from volume 1. There are only two token nightmares about the Fall of Beacon but otherwise there are no moments of severe outrage, anger or frustration at the world. She also never reaches a point of contemplating what it means that heroes don't always save people and don't always win. This should be even more prevalent with Ruby and the remnants of team JNPR traveling through areas full of death due to the Grimm. In the end, even if it catches up with the tiny conversation with Jaune with the arrival of the Nuckelavee, I finds that for a main character, it's very average. It has almost half the volume devoted to her, and yet I don't feel I see her advancing, it's even the opposite. One point catches up with the whole thing: the letter at the end, where she admits that she is still a little girl. Well good ... so I wait to see the continuation.

Then we have Weiss... In my eyes, she's the most developed character in this volume. I have read in some other review that some people don't understand why she went back to her father, because we don't have a lot of details on that level, except that his father brought her back to Atlas, and they have a hard time understanding why she followed him, especially when you see the evolution during the volume. The main reason she came back is probably that she still felt under the authority of her father. But her stay at Atlas turned her into a pressure-cooker. The hypocrisy of the Atlesians and the unbounded greed of his father have blowed the flames of her anger. Why did she not rebelled instead ? Simply because she knew only this world. She grew up in a golden cage and her stay at Beacon made her discover the truth about the outside world. Finally, once she has tasted freedom, a cage remains a cage, no matter how luxurious it is. She stands up to her father, to the fact that she shouldn't be in Atlas, that she should fight, be with her team. I guess it's to develop the background, see where she grew up, see her family, understand why she was so arrogant at the beginning of the show. In short, give it consistency. On the other hand, I think that her decision to go looking for Winter is meaningless. What is Winter doing in Mistral ? If at least we had been given some explanations on Winter's mission or her role in the fight against Salem, but not … Weiss randomly overhearing about Mistral and making her going there is for me a stupid plot development.

Blake's arc is far more anger inducing as she repeats the same arc from Volume 2: having to rely on her friends and allies again. While this could work in theory as it was her past with the White Fang that partially caused Yang to lose her arm, it ends up being a case of cyclic character development. Blake is shown being the cold loner that she was at the start despite Sun showing up to help. In fact, she suffers from an issue I have with anime characters in times where they act social stunted and don't explain themselves properly; Blake only explains her reasoning as to why she's returned to the loner archetype at the very end when her opening up to people would seem the most like an asspull. Her dynamics with Sun exemplify this problem as Sun, instead of being a valuable partner, is reduced to a punching bag and laughing stock for comedy that undermines Blake's arc. Even the moments between Blake and her family are undermined by comedy that ends up making dampening any arc she has.

Yang's arc, while not cyclic like Blake, is the worst of the individual character arcs and thus, extremely frustrating. Yang at the end of the third volume, lost her arm to Adam.This could have led to many different possible story lines as Yang very much is proud of her physical capabilities; the loss of the arm could have delved into PTSD or how she will cope with her skill being hampered. Unfortunately, the story taken explores none of these aspects. An artificial arm enters her story very early on and at first, you might think that this is merely signaling that there will be a payoff at the end and many episodes of her dealing with the trauma. However, the next scenes dealing with her involved a slight jump at a broken glass, a nightmare that doesn't really haunt or torment to any real degree and a talk with Professors Oobleck and Port. These scenes are all we get before she puts on the artificial arm. This is strike one of her story as it makes it seem like she got over her trauma too easily. While I am of the understanding that there could be more possible consequences in other volumes as PTSD isn't something that can flare up, the presentation in RWBY makes it seem like she had only a few moments of trauma before finally coping with it. This presentation makes us feel put off her story arc in volume 4 as it seems like everything was for naught.

The issues of the character arcs are further amplified by the fact that the time scale of the series is erratic. Initially, the writers stated it was six to eight months since volume 3 in universe. However, this seems contradicted by many events in the show: why does it take 6 months to get from Vale to Menagerie, what has Weiss been doing for six to eight months ? Doing nothing ? What about Yang, is there any time between her scenes of fear and trauma and equipping the arm ? The unclear time frame of many things in the show make it hard to be invested in the show.

What about the other characters ?

This leaves us with the remnants of team JNPR and their long path to Mistral. This is definitely where the bulk of the storyline was focused. We get more interesting details about the world, character backstories, and the two major fights this season in this storyline. Probably my favorite part of this storyline was the evolution of Jaune from where he was the past three volumes. While he's still not a fighter on the level of the other huntsman/huntresses-in-training, he's certainly getting there. We get to see his drive in the wake of Pyrrha’s death last season and also how he has been coping with her loss. Though what we see on the surface doesn't necessarily reflect what is hiding within.

But the highlight of episode two brings us back to Jaune, a man who paid for his sin of ignorance. In Volume 3, many characters lost something. But very few characters were punished as severely as Jaune. He was ignorant for a whole three volumes. He turned a blind eye to Phyrra's genuine affection and it was something that those of us watching never looked twice at. But when she finally died at the hands of Cinder, Jaune's ignorance held much greater meaning. Jaune's late night training is one of the heaviest hitting moments in Volume 4. It shows just how hard Jaune has taken the loss, but also how much he is struggling to recover from the revelation of his ignorance towards Pyrrha, and his lack of a second chance.

The rest of the team's journey was more of a mixed bag. We got Nora and Ren's history, which was good, but not necessarily great. It felt like they were setting up this grand threat of the horseman Grimm as a larger threat. This was a Grimm responsible for the devastation at Shion village as well as Ren and Nora's backstory, so one might think that it would be a more major element going forward. However, it gets taken down two episodes after we see it in shadows in Ren's flashback. That felt like either a bit of a missed opportunity or a bit rushed. Our only other major fight scene this season was against the new antagonist Tyrian, another follower of Salem. We actually got to see Qrow going full(ish)-power against an upper-tier enemy, which did not disappoint.

And now I get to address the elephant in the room. Ren and Nora. These two have had the largest amount of story development and it is more than worth it. Ren and Nora were characters that we knew almost nothing about. Their story was dropped in small hints throughout the Volumes. For instance, the rant Nora has at the beginning of Volume 3. Nora casually drops the fact that she and Ren were both orphans. Throughout Volume 4 we get more and more insight into just who these two were and where they came from. This is especially true from Ren's side of things as he constantly lets his emotions take hold of him. It is clear that being home isn't exactly the most entertaining idea for him. After all, this is someone who ran away from home to be a huntsmen. This is probably his first time being back in Anima since he arrived at Beacon, if not earlier. From the appearance of bizarre footprints in ruined cities, to the tension emanating from Ren with each village team RNJR visits it is clear that Ren has a lot of unresolved issues in Anima. Everything ultimately comes to a head with episode 10 where we finally see what has been plaguing Ren and Nora's past. I won't spoil it here but I think Ren has been dealing with most trauma out of all the characters in terms of longevity. Finally seeing Ren and Nora face their fears was a great moment and the parallels shown between the fight against that fear and the day they both lost their home were strong devices to keep the moment as impactful as the other great moments in Volume 4. The backstory of Ren and Nora definitely served as one of the big highlights of this season and I do hope that we get to see more backstories appear in the forefront as we head further into the series.

As for Sun... He annoys me, I don't know if he is really in love with Blake but in this volume I find him too clumsy or even sticky. I don't care what you ship, they've made him a bumbling idiot who knows nothing about anything. I get why from a narrative standpoint Sun is there to ask the questions that the audience has because Menagerie is home to Blake, but... They've made him Vol.1 Jaune.

In conclusion ...

The setup for future volumes is limp and lifeless. Oscar, a new character that is host to Ozpin's soul, is given little characterization of his own self and serves more like a sentient vessel in terms of characterization. The plots with the White Fang and Salam's group seem pointless as there is no real effect of any of this, just build up. While build up is important, we need to see a small consequence of this build up, whether it's militarization of the White Fang or movement of supplies. Even the resolution in the end where the four members of RWBY set out to Mistral seems more like a sudden return to Status Quo than a preparation for a major fight as it felt that everyone except Weiss really didn't change and even Weiss isn't given that much.

This is my opinion on RWBY Volume 4. I look forward to Volume 5, hoping to have much less disappointment at the level of screenplay and character development. I see you for my next posts about Qrow and RWBY Ships... 

See You NEXT TIME !

[preserving-ferretbrain]

Soon I Will Be Invincible - Review

by Wardog

Saturday, 08 September 2007Wardog dusts off her cape and puts her pants on outside the rest of her clothing.~Soon I will Be Invincible is a book written by a loser for losers. Perhaps I'm being slightly unfair but the guy on the back is aggressively bald, over-educated, a computer game designer and has written an over-angsty, over-affectionate novel about superheroes and supervillains. I'm not saying he's not somebody I would love to hang out with but then I'm not saying I'm anything other than a loser too.

I'm a fair-to-moderate reader of superhero comics but I'm no authority on the genre so what I'm about to posit could be either a) so obvious it's not worth stating or b) completely wrong but I do think there's been a bit of a change of focus. Back in the day, it seems to me that superheroes were deliberately presented as everyman figures, community-spirited boys-next-door who just so happened to get gifted with exceptional powers. They seemed to be saying: "This Peter Parker fellow, he could be you, you could be the superhero."

But, of course, moral values have shifted with time. We're no longer all about the wholesome friendly neighbourhood superhero, we want the dark and the driven and morally ambiguous. The people who read comics are, for the most part, people like me (weird, unpopular kids) and, here on either side of the millennium, superheroes - those gifted by pure chance or cruel circumstance to be more attractive, more powerful and more popular than, say, me - are beginning to look rather like the kids who laughed at me at school. Thus you start to pay more attention to the villains, initially just larger than life foils to set against the unyielding virtue of the superhero. But, unlike the hero, villains tends to be self-made men who have progressed down the long road to world domination by dint being more intelligent and more determined than everyone else around them. A familiar motif for weird unpopular kids, I'm sure. The superhero belongs to the realm of the blessed and the accepted. The villain is the perennial scorned and derided outsider. I could take over the world, you know. If I wanted to.

SIWBI takes place on an alternative earth that, although rife with aliens, fairies, superheroes and supervillains, future tech and magic, is recognisably our own. The first person narrative alternates between the point of view of Dr Impossible, brilliant scientist turned supervillain and Fatale, a newly created cyborg who has just been invited into The Champions, a famous group of superheroes, previously led by Dr Impossible's arch nemesis. The plot, such as it is, is typical superhero fare: Dr Impossible escapes from prison and hatches the usual supervillain scheme to knock the planet out of orbit and herald in a new ice-age. Meanwhile CoreFire, the leader of The Champions, has disappeared and the group must to struggle to re-form into an effective unit and deal with the events of their past. As is practically de rigueur these days in anything dealing with people with super powers, the self-consciously trite plotline and the comic book archetypes are there primarily to illuminate the recognisable human dimension to it all. Thus The Champions battle not only Dr Impossible but their own very human failings and, even as he flounces around in scarlet cape and helmet, Dr Impossible angsts over the whether "the smartest man in the world has done the smartest possible thing with his life." It's not exactly ground-breaking but it seems to work well enough and adds pathos to Dr Impossible's obsession with invincibility, not so much to protect him from those with superpowers but to protect him from the very ordinary world that has always excluded and derided him and never loses its power to hurt him.

There's a lot to like here, if you're into that kind of thing. The chapter titles are all stock phrases ("Foiled Again" etc.) and most of the secondary characters are nods to various comic book characters. In fact the whole style and approach of SIWBI is incredibly affectionate and genial, although I do have to wonder what it's doing presenting itself as literary fiction because I can't imagine you'll get it, or indeed see the point of it, unless you're also fond of and familiar with the genre to which it offers itself as an homage. And I know that Grossman wanted specifically to write a book but it seems a peculiar choice to me. His writing style is brisk and punchy, favouring a lot of dramatic statements that would look absolutely perfect floating above a character's head in a speech bubble ("It was time for me to stop punishing myself and start punishing everyone else") but when they're just a just a line on a page they occasionally fall somewhat flat. It's kind of the equivalent of writing POW just like that. In fact, the blatant attempt to "literary-ise" the book, and through association the genre, is one of the more irritating features SIWBI. You like comics, dude, just accept it. Some people will laugh at you, some people will agree, and some people will start to talk about Maus. Regardless, Watchman will never be Ulysses.

As well as occasional stylistic difficulties the narrative jumps between the present and the past in a rather jarring manner. Although it's interesting to get (some of) the backstory, it does completely ruin the pace to the extent that what ought to be an adrenaline-saturated rush towards the final stages of Dr Impossible's plan bog down in a lot of superhero dithering and bickering. For the most part, Grossman is at his best in his supervillain's head. The attempt to give Dr Impossible a reasonably credible psychology for behaving as supervillains behave within the genre (always explaining his plans to the good guys, shrieking I AM A GENIUS at every slight provocation and so forth) does not entirely work because if you were actually capable of such self-awareness one would hope you would also be capable of behaving in a moderately sensible fashion. Nevertheless, Dr Impossible's seemingly unflinching commitment to a role he knows must always be the losing one does generate a certain emotional resonance and bizarrely, as the novel stutters to his inevitable defeat, a certain tragic force.

Dr Impossible, painted with all the narrative garishness a supervillain deserves, is not a subtle character:

For a second I stand at the fulcrum point of creation. God, I'm so unhappy.

But he is complex. Grossman writes him with genuine flair and appreciation. And, one loser to another, it's impossible not to empathise with his broken and lonely desperation:

If you're different you always know it and you can't fix it even if you want. What do you do when you find out your heart is the wrong kind? You take what you're given and be the hero you can be. Hero to your own cold, inverted heart.

Villain he may be but he's probably the arrogant, articulate poster boy for every geeky comic lover out there.

Sadly, the other characters can in no way live up to him, so much so they seem almost like afterthoughts. The Champions bitch and moan like a bunch of sulky teenagers and, even if that was partly the point, it didn't make them easy or pleasant to read about. As for Fatale, new superhero on the block, who narrates with Dr Impossible, she's tedious beyond expression. I had a feeling that, as a woman, she was probably meant to be saying profound things to me but her narrative voice is pedestrian at best and offers none of the exuberance or emotional engagement of Dr Impossible's. I skimmed most of the superhero sections.

Even so, Dr Impossible is worth the price of admission alone. If you're even remotely interested in the superhero genre or have ever contemplated world domination while sitting by yourself in maths, you'll probably find something to enjoy here.

PS - Please note the views expressed within the article are solely those of the author. Ferretbrain as a whole does not believe Mr Grossman is a loser.

Themes:

Books

,

Sci-fi / Fantasy

~

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Arthur B

at 18:32 on 2007-09-08I'm sorry, but there's only room for one "arrogant, articulate poster boy for every geeky comic lover out there" and it's

this guy

. :)

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Wardog

at 16:05 on 2007-09-10Oh come on, geeks need all the help we can get :)

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Jamie Johnston

at 12:59 on 2007-10-01Aside from the merits and demerits peculiar to this book (which I haven't read), I wonder whether it was a good idea to try to do superheroes in a novel at all. They grew up in comics, which are basically a dramatic form like plays, films, or television. They seem to get on fairly well on film and television (never seem them on stage), but throwing them into continuous prose narrative strikes me as probably unwise and possibly self-defeating.

If Grossman has, as you guess, done it in the hope of giving the genre literary credibility, then he's rather missed the point, hasn't he? Putting superheroes into a novel doesn't make them into literature any more than doing 'Richard III' as a comic would make it into childish pulp.

'Heroes' is a pretty good example of an intelligent transfer of superheroes from one literary form to another because it recognizes and deals with the differences between the two forms. The scale of television (both the size of the screen and the length of episodes and series) means it can't cover the whole range of dramatic action that comics do, so it concentrates on what television does well, which is the drama of personal relationships; but it also remembers that saving the world is the point of superhero stories, so it uses the flash-back / flash-forward structure to suggest a larger drama going on without having to indulge in the big colourful battles which do the same thing in a comic. It also recognizes that on television, with live actors and real-time action, superhero costumes simply aren't going to be credible, so it simply ditches them.

I'd say a superhero novel should probably ditch costumes too, for different reasons. In comics, costumes solve three problems: first, how do we easily distinguish different characters when the simplified style of the artwork makes all faces and bodies look very similar? second, how do we make every page look exciting even when nothing much is happening? and third, how do we make it easy to work out what's going on when up to a dozen different actions need to be depicted on a single page smaller than A4?

The advantage of solving those problems outweighs the disadvantage of a slight loss of credibility. But in a novel none of those problems arises in the first place, so costumes have none of the advantages but retain the disadvantage of implausibility (which is in no way reduced by the traditional internal narrative explanation: "I must protect my secret identity by wearing a costume which incorporates a mask... and bright yellow tights and a billowy green cloak").

Gosh, if I look behind me through a telescope I can see the point where this comment stopped being relevant to the article... Oh yes, that's right. Well, I think that's probably why I'm very dubious about doing superheroes in a novel at all. The whole point of the superhero genre is that it externalizes the drama and symbolism of the story. The way the identity of each character is made explicitly visual through his costume and is expressed in action through his superpower is a prime example of that. The whole point of the novel, on the other hand, is that it internalizes the drama by taking the reader into the minds of at least some of the principal characters. Action in a novel is secondary - it affects the characters and triggers internal change. If there was ever a narrative form which was unsuitable for superheroes, it's got to be the novel, surely?

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Wardog

at 10:49 on 2007-10-04I think I read in the introduction or the acknowledgements or somewhere that presenting the story as a novel rather than a comic was a carefully thought through decision, and one the author felt strongly about. On the other hand, I do think the interactions of various literary (or artistic) forms is interesting and, for that alone, perhaps I feel more supportive of it than perhaps it deserves. I was possibly being quite unfair when I suggested it was a doomed attempt to confer a literary validity on a popular form. As you point out, books / comics hop easily to the big and small screen and back again and books do, in fact, turn readily into comics (I've even seen a comic version of Proust for God's sake) and it seems peculiar that it's always been an unspoken one-way street i.e. that things can be turned into comics and comics can be turned into movies but never the other way round.

For what I've read about Heroes, I think it was always designed primarily as a drama rather than a slightly more high brow than average contribution to the superhero-genre. Tim Kring claims explicitely that his inspiration was Lost, he has no geeky nostalgia for the days of X-men or whatever ... essentially he started with television and incorporated superheroes rather than starting with superheroes and incorporating television. If that makes sense.

And there are some quite amusing sequences about costumes in SIWBI in fact! I think the point is that the novel - regardless of whether you think it's an appropriate experiment or not - deliberately attempts to offer a plausible psychological landscape to the external superhero world. Thus, Dr Impossible has an outrageous costume to allow him to put aside the vulnerabilities (or attempt to) of the man behind the mask and become a supervillain capable of delivering the usual array of hysterical villain lines. And one of the themes of the book is the clash between the external and the internal, the visual and the psychological. It doesn't *quite* work because you can't actually offer up a credible explanation of supervillainous compulsions i.e. why do they always pour our the details of their dastardly plans at the slighest provocation.

But it was fun.

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Jamie Johnston

at 16:37 on 2007-10-07Perhaps my reaction comes partly from my continual annoyance at the use of the novel form in general. I feel that a lot of storytellers write novels not because that's the best narrative form for the story they want to tell but because either they prioritize being a novelist over telling the story to its best advantage or, worse, it simply never occurs to them that there are any other narrative forms at all.

But certainly I don't want to say that a story can't be transferred from a comic to a novel just as well as the other way round. In principle any story can be told in any form, it's just that some forms are going to be better suited to the nature of some stories. But genre is a horse of a different colour. Still, I mustn't be too categorical since I haven't actually read the thing! If he's trying to explore the inside of the characters minds then the novel is certainly the form to do it with, but I would tend to think that all that would really achieve is to expose the psychological implausibility of many central elements of the superhero genre. Which, from your comments, sounds more or less like what happened. But it's interesting to find the edges of a genre.

As for 'Heroes', I'm interested that you say that Kring (not a bad supervillain name, that) wasn't particularly interested in superheroes. I hadn't heard that, and judging solely from the content of the series so far I'd have guessed the exact opposite. I can count on one finger the concepts, super-powers, characters, and plot developments in 'Heroes' which aren't almost identical to things I read in the X-Men comics when I was 15. And I notice that the producer of 'Heroes' (and the script-writer of a couple of episodes) is Jeph Loeb, who was a writer on X-Men for a long time, if I recall correctly.

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Arthur B

at 17:12 on 2007-10-07I think that just shows Kring recognised that he doesn't actually know much about superheroes and was wise enough to hire people who did.

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Wardog

at 10:19 on 2007-10-09On a rather tangential note, it's interesting really that the novel, once the bastard offspring of better literature, is now very much established as, perhaps, the most authentic and recognised of all literary forms - perhaps in a few hundred years the comic will supplant it. I mean, there's not exactly much call for epic nowadays - what sort of narrative forms did you have in mind, Jamie? And I suppose the major point of interest for SIWBI is that it's a novel, not a comic. As a comic it would be sub-standard post-Watchman fare I'm sure. As a novel at least it doesn't get lost among a morass of very similar items.

And with references to Heroes, I think something similar is at work; because he is not a great big superhero geek, Kring is more concerned about providing good television and, therefore, lots of the very obvious superhero tropes and motifs and arcs he uses, he does so with the blissful ignorance of the utterly unitiated. Whereas any superhero fanatic worth their tights would probably be unable to use them as effectively because they'd be preoccupied with what enormous cliches they actually are...

[orionredstarr]

Close-Up: Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio on 'Dead Man's Chest'

I stumbled across this old article from 2006 when potc2 was first released and found it a very interesting piece -- how the writers described the characterization and concept of Jack Sparrow, the actor Johnny Depp how he was playing Jack, and in relation to Kiera Knightley who plays Elizabeth Swann. There were some interesting nuances you might like to read in this potc ‘time capsule’ so have fun reading!

:)  ORS

article by Scott Holleran

During a recent interview about Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean series—including next year's installment—writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio demonstrate clarity, intelligence and a flash of the randy humor that's made the franchise a hit.

Meeting at the Walt Disney Studio in Burbank, the brains behind the spectacle that now opens Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest are a couple of pals who grew up in Orange County with frequent trips to Disneyland. Three years after Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl took Hollywood by storm, its writers are ready to go another round.

Box Office Mojo: Is Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest exactly the movie you wrote?

Terry Rossio: It's not an easy question. There are things I would change. But there are aspects that exceed what we wrote as well. The trade-off is probably worth it— Ted Elliott: —life is full of these little trade-offs— Terry Rossio: —and there are relatively few. They amount to quibbles. I'd say it's 90 percent of what we wanted.

Box Office Mojo: Did you choose the darker tone?

Terry Rossio: I'm not sure it is darker. You could just as easily say it has more slapstick. Maybe it extends further in each direction—maybe there are occasionally darker alleys. Hopefully, those are balanced. Ted Elliott: We didn't intend to have sequels. The first [movie] is a story in and of itself, a sort of capital 'r' romance in the Prisoner of Zenda sense that ends in an idealized love between Elizabeth and Will. So, what happens after that? Ideals are very difficult to [achieve] in this world. It's much more interesting to watch somebody struggle, where it's not so easy to know what's the right thing to do at all times.

Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

Terry Rossio: In the first film, Jack Sparrow wants to get his ship back, and that's what he's focused on. Though he does some underhanded things, he's aligned with the heroes for the most part. That's kind of uplifting. In the second [movie], Jack Sparrow is more desperate. His needs put him at odds with pretty much everybody—his crew, Will and Elizabeth and, obviously, Davy Jones. His desperation is magnified, and that may go a long way toward that impression that it's darker.

Box Office Mojo: Davy Jones talking about death is definitely darker.

Ted Elliott: Well, we're using the same palette that we used in the first movie. But we're definitely using different values in different combinations and, yeah, we actually do set out to suggest the world of pirates is darker. The darkness was implied in the first and we're making it more apparent in the second [picture] because we are ultimately leading to this climax [in the third picture]. It's a far more interesting type of drama to see people operating in this morally ambiguous world.

Box Office Mojo: When did you first ride the Disneyland attraction?

Ted Elliott: I was seven or eight years old. We grew up in Orange County [California], so Disneyland was always about 15 minutes from the house. I spent a lot of time there. Before we started working on the movie, I'd probably been on the ride at least a hundred times. It was my favorite ride. Number two was Monsanto's Adventures Through Inner Space—I just liked the idea of things getting really tiny and walking around in that environment—but number one was Pirates of the Caribbean.

Terry Rossio: My experience was similar. I'd been on it maybe a hundred or two hundred times before we even contemplated doing the movie.

Box Office Mojo: Were you drawn to the attraction's horror features?

Ted Elliott: It was the totality of the experience. That ride begins with what is a dark ride feature. It really does—the skeleton, the cursed treasure—it's always been part of the ride. Right at the beginning, the skeleton warns you to keep your hands and arms inside [the boat] and says that Davy Jones is waiting for those who don't obey. It always had this supernatural aspect of legends that we all associate with the sea. But there had never been a movie that tied pirates to it. Terry Rossio: For me, what the ride accomplishes so well is that sense of a fully realized fantasy. It's a tip of the iceberg feeling—like [you are entering] a world that has its own rules and is its own reality. It's like going into the world of Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. The ride felt like little vignettes or episodes that feel as if they have a larger story behind them. I was curious to find out: how did those guys get there? How did the dog get the key? What's going to happen? The fun of doing the Pirates of the Caribbean films is that you get to create a world. I think that's what audiences like—they want to go visit that world. They want to visit those characters and look around corners and see where that path leads or where that ship came from. Box Office Mojo: Is there more gunplay in the sequel?

Terry Rossio: No. There's more pet violence perhaps. But don't overlook the rather brutal moment [in the first picture] of the butler coming to the [governor's residence] door and being shot. Ted Elliott: Also, the first death we see in the first movie is Will throwing an axe into somebody's back—when the pirates are invading Port Royale—and he doesn't know that the pirates are unkillable. From Will's point of view, he is the first person to commit actual violence.

Box Office Mojo: Is the third picture done?

Ted Elliott: No. We still have a couple of months left to shoot. We shot the location work simultaneously with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest but the plan was always that we would have something left to shoot.

Box Office Mojo: Is the title Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End?

Terry Rossio: That's what we're campaigning for—but it's not set. Ted Elliott: I like it because then you could say 'POTC: AWE.'

Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

Box Office Mojo: Johnny Depp has received widespread praise for his portrayal of your character, Captain Jack Sparrow. How much of your writing remains in that characterization?

Ted Elliott: We wrote a very specific character and Johnny played that character but his performance was one neither of us could have imagined. We wanted to create this trickster. If you go all the way back to [Robert Louis Stevenson's novel] Treasure Island, we kind of borrowed the moral ambiguity of that story. The whole thing comes down to [young boy] Jim Hawkins making the call as to whether [pirate] Long John Silver is a good man or a bad man—that's the emotional crux of that story. Silver does kill people—he betrays everybody—and this moral ambiguity is inherent in the pirate/swashbuckler genre. To that regard, the trickster archetype seemed appropriate. That's what we wanted to do with Jack Sparrow. Whether Johnny identified that consciously, he definitely found a perfect performance. Terry Rossio: The world wants there to be movie stars and, in a sense, the story becomes Johnny Depp—because people want that. In terms of understanding why he's [created] an iconic character, the story becomes 'Johnny Depp is brilliant' which of course is true because Johnny Depp is brilliant. People are not necessarily as interesting in pedestrian reality. You still have a storyboard artist who comes up with a visual of Johnny first stepping onto the dock as the ship sinks. We wrote that [scene in which Jack Sparrow is introduced]. We wrote lines like: 'you're the worst pirate I've ever heard of—' and [the response] 'but you have heard of me.' People quote those lines. If the character had walked on screen and just stood there and said, 'hello,' it wouldn't be the same. So, clearly the screenwriting goes into the creation of the character. And I have to credit Gore Verbinski's direction. Ted Elliott: When we were writing and making the first movie, [we had in mind] the Sergio Leone [spaghetti] Westerns like The Man With No Name [movies]. The Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef characters are essentially gods compared to all these mortals. They can shoot better, they can ride better, they're smarter, they're faster and they don't say much. To some extent, that's what we were playing in the first [Pirates], that Jack and [Captain] Barbossa [played by Geoffrey Rush] are kind of pirate gods. They come into the lives of these two mortal characters— Terry Rossio: —and we continue that into At World's End— Ted Elliott: —and, to some extent, Jack is the demi-god, the trickster. He straddles both sides. Is he on the side of the gods—is he opposed to the gods?—is he on the side of the mortals? He's on his own side. Terry Rossio: You can also track the dialog in those [spaghetti Westerns]: the less words you say, the more god-like you are—and, in Pirates of the Caribbean [pictures]— Ted Elliott: —pirates talk. Terry Rossio: —the less Johnny says, the more truthful he is. The more words he uses, the more you should mistrust him. Ted Elliott: So, yes, there is some conscious thought given to the behavior of Jack Sparrow.

Keira Knightley and Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

Box Office Mojo: Does it concern you that Jack Sparrow will be perceived as less likable in this movie?

Ted Elliott: More interesting, not less likable. I can't say what everybody's going to feel, but, certainly the intent here was for people to be surprised by what Jack is doing. My argument against making him more likable is that he [ought to be] understandable. Everything he does is perfectly within character and, in a way, all we're doing is revealing greater character depth. His character in the first movie included things that were less than admirable, less than likable.

Terry Rossio: The most important commandment is to sustain interest—if you do that, everything else follows; you can move people emotionally, you can make them laugh, you can do all sorts of things. It's most important to demonstrate character complexity or to let characters do things that create interest, because that's how we live our lives day to day. Same thing with complexity. For some reason, there's a focus when people talk about movies about the idea of somehow 'getting it,' like things should be easy or clear. What really goes on in movies is that things are beguiling or intriguing and interest is sustained by seeing glimpses of a world or a story. That's what happens in real life. People have to navigate the world based on incomplete information. That can draw people into a story. Yet, for some reason, people don't understand that and they're resistant to that technique. Luckily, we get to do it in these movies, which I think actually works. Likability and simplicity are not all they're cracked up to be.

Box Office Mojo: What is the meaning of the series?

Ted Elliott: It's a study of what is a pirate. How free can you really be? What are those trade-offs? Jack kind of represents the ultimate free man—he really has no obligations to anybody, and, obviously, if you make an obligation to somebody, you're limiting your own freedom. But, if you're not willing to limit your own freedom, you can't have those relationships. If you look at Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest from that point of view, you kind of see what really leads to Jack's ultimate fate and why Elizabeth does what she does.

Box Office Mojo: Jack Sparrow's an anarchist?

Ted Elliott: Essentially, yes, he really is. Terry Rossio: I wouldn't say he's a complete anarchist— Ted Elliott: —he's opposed to social structures, he's opposed to government— Terry Rossio: 99 percent of that's correct but Jack has his own internal moral landscape. The choices he makes are not necessarily inconsistent with forming relationships.

Box Office Mojo: Is there an inner goodness to Jack Sparrow?

Terry Rossio: No. Jack says it clearly [in the first movie:] there's what a man can do and what a man can't do. Those words encompass his inner contradictions—that's what's so beautiful about them—he's saying you cannot generalize, you cannot philosophize, you cannot come up with a simple [moral code]. It's almost saying each situation calls for its own resolution; there is simply what you will do and what you won't do. Ted Elliott: He's also saying, judge by deeds, not words.

Box Office Mojo: Do all the characters return in the third movie?

Ted Elliott: Yes.

Box Office Mojo: What are the mechanics of your writing partnership?

Terry Rossio: We do the back and forth exchange of files. One of the techniques we learned while working in animation [on Shrek] is to work in sequences. For me, it's easier to attack a three-page thing than the entire script. Ted Elliott: I know writers who actually work in the full draft and I can't figure out how they do it. If you have a hundred pages, if you want to get to a scene in the middle, you have to go through all that other stuff. Whereas, if you've broken it up into sequences, you only have to deal with exactly the part you need to work on.

Box Office Mojo: How do you take a step back and look at the big picture?

Ted Elliott: That's why the cards are up on the storyboard. We work out the story on index cards to break it down. Terry Rossio: Truth be told, sometimes, you don't get that view of the Big Picture until opening day. Also, it's a very immersive job; you wake up and you're on a set and talking to actors and going to story meetings and, with the amount of time you spend understanding how a story should work, you don't necessarily have to go to the boards. You're living the film as it's being made, and you can sometimes tell [what to write] because you know that world so incredibly well. You [already] have the context of the larger movie.

Box Office Mojo: How do studio pressures affect the writing process?

Ted Elliott: You're ultimately trying to create a physical object. It's wonderful to imagine, but once you start rendering the script as something physical, you have to deal with the physics. It really comes down to the physical constraints on what's mostly intellectual. The reason I became a screenwriter is to make movies. If I just wanted to write screenplays, that's all I'd do. If I just wanted to be a writer, I'd never write screenplays. There is much more satisfactory work than writing a screenplay because it's not the final work. You're not actually writing to communicate with your intended audience; you're writing to communicate with the people who are making the movie. Terry Rossio: Sometimes the physical constraints on a movie are the people working on the movie and Ted's much more able to navigate that. Ted Elliott: I come at it from the point of view that, if Terry, for example, doesn't get my idea, I'm not communicating my idea—not if it's really a great idea—or, it may not be a great idea or, in Terry's subjective opinion, it's not a great idea for the movie. [Director] Gore [Verbinski] may initially disagree with an idea [in the script] and we may have arguments. But what eventually develops is a new idea that we're all satisfied with.

Box Office Mojo: Can you give an example of an idea you refused to compromise?

Ted Elliott: In the very first meeting we had on Pirates 2 and possibly Pirates 3, we kind of pitched to Gore, [and producers] Jerry Bruckheimer, Mike Stenson and Chad Oman how the movie ends—I don't want to spoil it—with Jack, Will and Elizabeth. We said 'this is what we want and then in Pirates 3, this happens.' They were like, 'nyahh.' But we've learned an important lesson, which is that the right idea at the wrong time is a wrong idea. So, we stopped and said, 'alright,' and talked about what more we wanted to do with this movie. A couple of weeks later, Gore had come back to those [same] ideas and, now, they're there. There is a point where the writer has to be allowed to take responsibility for the work—or not take responsibility for the movie.

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Read full article here {X}

[becky-helene]

Random video game wondering. Long post, sorry mobile app doesn't allow for "read more" and I'm too lazy to post this via means that do have ability to insert "read mores".

I have a question for people who play rpg games (specifically Dragon Age and Mass Effect since those are the particular games I’m more so thinking of, not to mention the only ones I’ve played….or played a bit of and plan on playing more of in ME’s case…but question also applies for Fallout, Skyrim, or any sort of game that allows for character creation and multiple playthroughs so as to experience different story outcomes)

Do you generally consider your first go through of the game/first created character as your main or “canon” game/character? Or do you hold off on really thinking about canon or main until you’ve found the “type” of playthrough (character, romance, story choices, etc) you like the most? (Or don’t think about canon/main at all and are just like “hey, chill, you’re overthinking”, which is a valid avenue to take too lol).

----(cue contemplating own Ryder options, feel free to scroll past if uninterested)----

I’m all bouncing in my seat waiting for Andromeda, and in that excitement I’ve been contemplating on my Ryder. For now, all I’ve really come up with is that I know it’ll be sisRyder, most likely she’ll embody the “precious cinnamon roll, with the occasional snark” archetype since I tend to gravitate towards that a lot, if hairstyle options include any curly or at least wavy options I'll most likely be using them, cause well duh lol, and….that’s kind of it. Well, there’s also practically a folder full of possible names that I either need to trim down or at least settle on some finalist for first Ryder while holding onto the rest for future sisRyders.

I’m still flip flopping on who she’ll romance. Partly because we don’t really know who is romancable by sisRyders…..but mostly because I can’t decide between Liam and Jaal (assuming they’re romancable at all, let alone by sisRyder). Liam is adorable and my Death in Paradise and Downton Abbey fan self is all “yes plz!” at Gary Carr voicing him (though good god I was not prepared for full Brit accent Gary/Liam. Oh god send help I’m dead).

And Jaal….well, Iron Bull is my #1 Video Game Boyfriend, and I’ve developed serious Garrus love even without playing the whole trilogy for myself. So, clearly large nonhumanoids (and sporting some sort of eye covering apparently, since they’ve all got that in common….oh, and scarring of varrying degrees) that invoke feelings of “fuck, I’d climb him like a tree” is my video game boyfriend type. I’m not discounting the idea of Vetra being my video game girlfriend for a later Ryder regardless of who she’s romancable by, but for now my indecisive ass can only handle two candidates.

A part of me is wondering if I should come up with in depth character study, personality, and what not, and really make Ryder to be like….the best and most (at least to me in my own head) fleshed out as she can be, as I've seen other people doing in preparation for their Ryders. But then another part of be is like “why are you obsessing? She’ll just be your first Ryder, who knows if she’s your main”. Which is true. None of my “main” Dragon Age characters have been my first.

---(long drawn out oversharing of Inquistors/Hawkes/Wardens, again, feel free to scroll past if uninterested)---

For Inquisition, what would be come my canon type of game (f!Adaar mage romancing Iron Bull, mage allies, Wardens stay, I think Orláis outcome that would later become my canon was first used here being reuniting Briala and Celene, Inquisitor drinks from Well, Leliana as divine) was my second ever playthrough.

But it wasn't until I'd played through different characters, romances, choices, etc, before I realized that was my absolute favorite. And it wasn't until my I think 20th/5th (if counting both current games and the games I lost when my PS3 had a meltdown and I lost all my save files/only counting that which I've played since upgrading to ps4) game in total that I declared Yasema Adaar (I think 13th/3rd of f!Adaar mage Bullmances) as my main/canon. And the only reason she beat out previous f!Adaars for "canon" title was because she was the first character (f!adaar and otherwise) I stuck through the entirety of all dlcs with, as supposed to giving up on JoH and/or Descent halfway through and moving on to Trespasser. So, that feat alone deserved the title of main/canon character.

As for my main Warden and Hawke, Hawke is somewhat similar---my favorite "type" of Hawke (f!Mage Fenris rivalmance) was maybe my 2nd or 3rd ever DA2 game (2nd was maybe mage and Fenris friendshipmance, 3rd was when I was like yeah I'm kinda liking the rivalmance). The particular Fenris romancing mageHawke that inevitably became my canon Hawke was just the one of many other mageHawke Fenrismances that I happened to have used in putting together Yasema's world state. So she became canon by default.

Ditto on my Warden. My first ever DAO playthrough was an f!Cousland rogue romancing Alistair and became his queen, my second was f!Amell romancing Alistair and became his mistress when he became king. My Amell became canon because, again, by default due to making the Yasema world state triple dose of mage ladies.

Although, if going by what type played most often.....I guess DAO stands apart from DA2 and DAI in that while those two my most played type became canon, I only have 1 Amell playthrough verses like....3 or 5 Couslands, if counting one that I was in the middle of when playstation had its meltdown and I lost saves thus incomplete game, and another that's from me trying to recently revisit DAO on a computer and I gave up on and is therefore also incomplete unless my console gaming preferring self returns to it at some point.

If we're counting only complete plays, then it's about 3 Couslands, 1 Amell, (also have half of an f!Aeducan that was meant to serve as the third Alistair romance outcome of the two remaining Wardens together, but that got cut short due to PS3 having a second and this time fatal meltdown halfway through playing).

And as for Mass Effect, well I'm still in the middle of attempting to play the original trilogy on PC. It's slow going due to my aforementioned dragging my feet when it comes to PC gaming. So, my Shepherd will automatically be my canon since she'll be the only one most likely lol.

----(okay, enough blather, back to the actual point)----

Okay, this got a lot more long winded and ramble-y than originally intended. Sorry about that.

Anyway, so yeah, just curious about anyone who does declare specific portags as their canon/main in any of these sort of games. Is first automatically canon to you, or do you take a wait and see approach before declaring what is your main play through?

Oh and somewhere in all my rambling I think I lost the reason by I started this post in the first place, which is that I'm treating my first Ryder as if she'll be my main/canon, when really my history has shown first ever play through=\=main or canon down the road. Isn't it fun when your ADHD makes you easily distracted *and* hyperfixated? :/ lol

[oiseaux-de-proie]

Who are you?

What do you believe to be truth if anything?

What do you care about the most?

Do you have a reason to live?

What makes you feel alive?

I don’t know how to address these questions, where to even begin, and I’m thinking that if I try to, if I pin down and define the answers to these, they won’t be accurate- maybe an ephemeral perspective of myself and reality that I won’t resonate with later, or something that will box me in, that I’ll feel an obligation to stay true and consistent to when it’s disingenuous. When I think of these questions, I feel something unsettling deep inside of my chest and in some cases get a cold sweat.

Why is that? As far as I know, it could be two reasons.

Maybe I am afraid to define myself.

Maybe I’m afraid that there isn’t anything there to define at all.

At the same time, I feel an absolute need to find some sort of definition, something, because I feel lost and really want to justify my own existence.

I could be afraid to pin myself because it’s like dispelling an apparition. When you touch the vision it crumbles to dust and all you’re left with is nothing- at that point I wouldn’t even have the illusion that somehow I can find my way.

At the same time, these may be rationalizations for something more explainable that I just can’t think of because I’m too buried in my own emotional baggage to even see it. I’ve gone through a lot of interpersonal issues in my life that have lead to a lot of identity problems. These things could be a source of this feeling when it comes to defining who I am and what my convictions are.

When I think of myself I either think of nothing but air, or- pretending, acting, faking being a person in the first place. In my personal journal I wrote an entry where I said that at the center of my being it felt like there was an unchanging hollowness and void- I lack true attachment to everything. Feelings, ideas, and people brush against that part of me but never permeate through it. I think that’s still true to an extent but I doubt how true that is entirely. It could be true entirely and right now I’m deluding myself, or that could have been a limited perspective of myself at the time. Right now, I think maybe there are some things that really do touch me. This leads, perhaps, to the last question I was asked, What makes you feel alive? And that itself likely would connect, next, to, What do you care about the most?

What makes you feel alive?

The first problem I have with this question is, what does “alive” even mean? I don’t know how to define that. I think I may have a sense of it but I don’t know how to pin that down. I could always be alive and my living is just feeling “dead”. I don’t know what it really means, but the closest thing I can define it as is, what makes me feel strong, genuine, unchanging emotions? What draws me into a moment?

I probably will not remember and know everything that does right now, but there are a few that come to my mind immediately.

One is being out in Nature- wilderness- true, removed wilderness, or the closest thing I can get to it. I wrote an entry about this entitled “God”, and I wrote about it the night before writing this because that’s what came to me when I started to think about these questions and ask myself what makes me feel alive. I always have a yearning for these places.

Another is my best friend. For me this is a very big thing to unpack and something that I don’t know how to fully define or place either, but moments with her, moments of real connection, or even just fun, expressing to her and seeing her expression, writing, and art. My connections with people are themselves a shaky thing but this is one that never was for me. I can say that I feel something very strong and solid, and feel that I can hold onto a sense of living-ness as long as I know she exists at all, even apart from me.

Then there are...spaces. This part gets difficult to define, and it’s the most intangible about everything- indefinable things, conceptual places and moods, sort of like mental art but something greater, perhaps the concept of archetypes, things related to decay, or beauty, groups of concepts that very clearly define something visceral. The major one I’ve been able to pin down...I see it in color- It lives in my writing and some of my art when I can muster it. There are others too, cold and blue ones, and bright green ones ,and soft foggy ones- even explaining it now is not working. Perhaps this is the concept of art itself, of Beauty. So, perhaps what I mean by this is the contemplation of beauty, the forms of beauty that resonates with me for whatever reason.

And that connects directly with art and Expression through it, primarily writing and music. Writing is where I have been more competent with this, and rarely now but more often in the past, very few things have felt more like living and existing than being in the process of conveying something through these mediums, or encountering something being expressed in these mediums that resonates with me. That is why being creatively dead and unable to express is a great source of depression and consternation for me.

And then, there are bigger concepts that bring me some sense of feeling, or wonder, something living. I thought had found something transcending everything, although I know now that it's a lie. I cannot define what the transcendence was, but the more “information about existence” and past lives, gods, supernatural properties I uncovered, the more I felt some sense of unspeakable euphoria, even if it became mingled with terror. Perhaps this points to higher knowledge, pursuit of Knowledge. (Though this is a huge point of contention for me now.)This lie offered me a way to feasibly know, but I no longer know if anything beyond the physical and empirical can be known or even vaguely pursued.

The other concept aside from that- Humanity and the connections between it. I don’t know why or how to explain this, but learning about people and culture, the things that connect the world together, what connects us- understanding these things- the process of that gives me a similar euphoric feeling.  This isn’t so much about finding a definitive answer rather than exploring our nature itself, knowing what it is to collectively be human. This is why I am drawn to Anthropology- understanding the being of mankind.

I’m sure there’s a better way to put this and it’s slipping my mind. I feel that confining all these things that affect me to words is doing them a great disservice and misconveying them- this is the best option I have though, to explain it. Maybe I will know how to explain these things more accurately later.

All of these things, however, lead directly into what I care about. They make the answer to that question rather simple.

What do you care about the most?

Caring is living, loving something is living, breathing in the essence of a thing and feeling, having it deeply communicate to you is living. Thus- if something makes me feel alive, I must care about it. The things that I care about the most are the things that bring me life.  I distilled the above six concepts into six words: Nature, Connection, Beauty, Expression, Knowledge, and Humanity.

I do have some problems with explaining it like this, however:

Are those really it? That’s what I can tell so far, but I feel that behind those six things is something singular, and something far less...big, something more base and primal. I would consider it arrogant to think that my true motivations are that high-minded, but for now I can’t name what that could be, or if something like that is really what’s truly behind those things.

Assuming those concepts work...I feel like they are too broad, and I also feel very wrong distilling them into words, but it’s nice to put labels on it, to make them sort of intelligible. It feels...weird and not quite right doing that, but it’s what I have to work with.

And assuming the labels work- it’s broad in the sense of how much they matter to me. Surely I can narrow down which of those matters the most to me, but at the same time they are all interdependent on each other.

A connection isn’t valuable unless there is something to share, nature and beauty are validated by interpretations that are inherent to humanity, expression is used to convey and to connect and is also deeply human, and being human is almost entirely about connecting with other members of our species. We create stories and art to convey things to each other.

The only one of the six that stands apart is knowledge, but that might be the one that matters to me the least. I don’t want to sacrifice any of the other five to know the truth. Then again, while I believed in a lie, I would have gladly given up everything I had to go and live within it. I have a feeling that has to do with immaturity at the time, however, and escapism. When I lost everyone I loved because of it, I just wanted them back. Would wandering the cosmos to learn more about truth be worth never connecting to another human being again? I don’t think so. If knowing the truth stripped me of my human perspective, distanced me from others, and made art and beauty no longer important to me, would it be worth it? No. Not to the me who is human now, and who will always be human. Knowledge still matters very much, but it is secondary to everything else.  

Perhaps I’ve concluded that nothing matters within a lonely vacuum. This would, therefore, make Connection and Humanity the most important. I can’t tell which of those holds precedence over the other. I am tempted to say that connection does for me personally, but I am also thinking connection is a byproduct of humanity itself. The both of them are deeply tied to each other. Maybe they’re equal. Maybe they’re different parts of the same thing.

And this is not something particularly profound. This ties back to the statement that’s always been made, “Humans are social creatures.” I need people. I need people- at least the thought of people, knowing that other people exist. I need this before I can even begin to process everything else, but after that, when it comes to forming the connections that matter the most, it’s not just any sort of connection. For instance, what sets the connection I have with my best friend apart is that we see, understand, and value the same things, even if they may be in degrees that vary. The connection involves the other five aspects of what makes me feel alive, and it has, in part, for almost every other person I have felt a real draw to- although not as complete.

I don’t need those relationships to live, however. Humanity existing is enough, even if I have no friends….Being able to speak, to write, to publish, and to read and absorb and understand and love the perspective and being of other humans is enough; that is why I have not killed myself yet, even when I’ve had no friends; these relationships are just the apex of that, they are the best of it.

So, perhaps, what matters the most to me is Humanity, and the way to experience humanity is through connection, and the way to connect is through expression, sharing beauty- and perhaps nature inspires a lot of beautiful concepts...and, even, perhaps pursuit of knowledge is linked to understanding nature. It is possible that all these things are linked like this and that Humanity encompasses it all, at least in my worldview.

[bakechochin]

Book Reviews - The Malice

The Malice - Peter Newman - It’s rather telling of me that on my month off from uni, I opt to spend my free time reading grizzly shit like this, but god damn is it fucking worth spending my free time on - As a sequel to ‘The Vagrant’, I was expecting good shit (please don’t expect me to read a sequel without comparing it to the original), and the two things that really stood out to me about that book, the amazing world and the beautiful writing (in lovely juxtaposition with how fucked up everything that goes on in the world is), are still here in abundance -> The world especially was something that I really liked, because in this book Newman not only shows us new unexplored elements of the world (I especially liked how this book follows the Empire of the Winged Eye a lot more than the last one, which only properly delved into the Empire at the very end), but looks at how elements of the first book had changed in the time-lapse (and it’s always the return of stuff that I didn’t expect to see returning, which was fucking sweet) -> I also liked how, unlike the previous book which only really delved into the main cities, this book shows us the wider wild world in all its glory, meaning that we are able to definitively say that the wilderness of this world is just as fucking horrifying as everything else - The characters were a bit hit-or-miss but generally likeable enough, especially Vesper -> Newman has a skill of taking characters that should at best be uninteresting and at worst actively annoying in how little they can do, such as silent protagonists, babies, goats and in this book children, and actually managing to make me like them; as a rule I’m not fond of children and find their presence in books irritating because of how helpless they often are, but Vesper proves herself to not only be independent but very likeable in her optimism and legitimate care about those who surround her -> Duet made for a great counterbalance to Vesper and provided some pretty sweet scenes; I was a wee bit concerned at first that the duo in this book would just be a recreation of the duo in the previous book (i.e. Duet as a grim put-about honour-bound killer like the Vagrant, Vesper as the more human and genial of the two like Harm), but the circumstances surrounding Duet, especially all the stuff with the Harmonised, was enough to make Duet a stand-alone character separate from the Vagrant character mould -> I do kind of wish that the adventurers weren’t weighed down by the burden of that fucking baby goat; yes the goat in the previous book was an arsehole who got the Vagrant into shit, but that was because the animal was actively being an arsehole, whereas in this book shit often goes awry because the goat is just a gormless idiot, which is far more frustrating to read -> I wonder about the purpose of Samael besides beings a means to reveal more about the wider world and the infernals; he was an alright character in that low-effort way of being in the ‘inoffensive put-about warrior with a sense of justice’ character mould, but he didn’t really add anything or do anything noteworthy, and really only seems to be there to a) retain a link to the Knights of Jade and Ash from the last book, b) remind the reader that the supposedly horrifying threat of the Yearning and the infernals is still relevant (because although defeating the Yearning supposed to be the whole goal of Vesper’s adventure, it’s rarely ever brought up), and c) pad out of the length of the book -> The side characters were all pretty alright, my favourites being the returning revolutionaries from the first book, and of course Ezze/Little Ez, the greatest of geezers - Whilst we’re on the subject of characters, I need to rant for a bit about how much I fucking love the First, and how glad I am that it had a bigger role in this book than it did in the last one -> Okay so in my reading experience, there’s a lot of ways of making a villain, and it all depends on the book (and now I’m gonna bring up The Gentleman Bastard sequence as evidence for my point because that’s what I always do and fuck you for trying to make me do otherwise); in ‘The Gentleman Bastard Sequence’ the villains have to be bigger dickheads than the dickheads we’re rooting for, in ‘The Kingkiller Chronicle’ the main overarching villains are supernatural murdering dickheads with no redeeming qualities but such a villain is necessary in a book that’s intended to be like an archetypal tavern-told story, etc. -> I’d liken the First to Shrake in ‘The Gates of the World’, as it is an effective villain due to both its persuasiveness and how fucking overpowered it is, but whilst Shrake exists as this sort of aloof and cantankerous character who no one in the cast can really relate to, the First finds a way to get through to humans and make them side with him -> That, and the multifaceted and fucking awesome ‘innumerable collected bodies controlled by one hive mind’ thing, makes the First one of my favourite fucking villains in a long while - The whole ending was really really nice, with a contemplative and pleasant journey back the way they came to right all their wrongs that equally warmed my heart and made me very excited for the final book in the trilogy, whenever that’s coming out - I do have a few concerns regarding how the world has changed; not wanting to spoil, but a lot of the main overpowered antagonists of the previous book aren’t really around in this one, and there isn’t a whole lot to fill the void they leave behind -> Like the world seems a lot emptier in this book; there are limited trips to major cities and the cities that we do go to don’t have the same enigma and threat to them now that the infernal deities that once presided over them aren’t around any more, meaning that the adventure seems less like the risky dangerous trip through city after city that we got in the previous book, and more like just a journey through fucked-up wilderness interspersed with run-ins with characters who progress the plot - Come to think of it, a lot of the issues that I have with the adventure as a whole is the stuff that is different from the previous book, which sounds petty but let me elaborate -> Yes obviously I love the idea of Vesper picking up the sword that her father once held and going off on her own quest in her father’s footsteps, and obviously Newman wanted this as well, which is why I can’t help thinking that the setup to put Vesper in her father’s position is kind of contrived -> The adventure itself, the exploration of the world and the interactions between Vesper and Duet, is all fucking great and I loved reading it, but in order for this to happen Vesper had to be completely shanghaied into the midst of this shit with little to no warning and no time to recover, and this only happened because Vesper made a poorly-justified impulse decision -> And this therefore results in a completely jarring tonal shift between Vesper’s quaint life on the farm, raising goats and wistfully dreaming of something more, to crashing in a military compound prison and being marched through a battlefield whilst all the people who took her there get gruesomely fucking obliterated around her; compare this with the first book, which starts off mid-adventure to establish the dark tone of the story, which is then retained throughout -> Also I guess a minor thing I was uneasy about is how the Vagrant was a fully grown man and therefore could take a bit of a beating in the harsh world, but Vesper is only like twelve or something and may very well have gotten the shit kicked out of her by everything throughout the course of the story, but as it turns out a) Vesper was strong-willed and quick-thinking enough to not be too up against the odds, and b) had Duet with her, who could fuck shit up to a radical degree, so feel free to disregard this point -> However, what the child protagonist thing does negatively alter is that children don’t know shit about sword fighting, so there’s way less radical sword fight scenes in this book than there were in the previous book; the Malice just kind of functions like the Luggage in Discworld, coming along from time to time to dramatically deus ex machina Vesper and Duet out of whatever shitty situation they’ve stumbled into - 8/10

I have a load of other book reviews on my blog, check that shit out.