#this comic changed me in fundamental ways i still have yet to process in their entirety

[thethunderthedragonfruit]

literally the only thing i could think about for this sequence

[kirinda-ondo]

You know him, you either love or hate him (or are moderately confused by my sudden dive into this hyperfixation); we're talking about Orko because I have a lot of feelings.

As a disclaimer, I am not gonna claim to be some kind of superfan. I am not aware of every single iteration of the lore and all of its secrets. I don't know anything about the DC comics. I'm only halfway through the 2002 series as of me writing this. I am not someone you want to have discussions on the wider Masters of the Universe.... universe with. However, after watching Revelation, the entire Filmation He-Man (and some of She-Ra, cause he was there too), and going on a deep dive of storybooks, annuals, and minicomics courtesy of He-Man.org and the lovely people who submitted their scans there, I do feel pretty qualified to at least talk about Orko.

So, with all that being said, I'd like to get into a little bit of backstory, if only for my followers who came to this blog for completely different things and are wondering where the hell my love for this funky little wizard dude came from all of a sudden. Truth is, Orko is actually one of my earliest faves! Mind you, I only had limited access to Masters of the Universe as a kid, only seeing a couple of rented VHS tapes and later getting my hands on a small pile of the Golden Books from Goodwill, but apparently it was enough for Orko to  imprint himself into my brain. However, also due to my limited exposure, he kind of got shifted to the back of my head as I got deeper into other things. I still knew for a fact I liked Orko a lot though, even if I couldn't quite remember why anymore.

And then Masters of the Universe: Revelation dropped on Netflix. I'm not gonna get into my opinions of that show lest I open a flood of irrelevant discourse (for those uninitiated, it is a bit... divisive, to say the least). However my feelings on the matter did encourage me to go and watch the original and well, holy shit I love Orko more now than I could have ever comprehended as a kid. He is THE quintessential underappreciated comic relief character I tend to gravitate towards, and then some.

But before I get into that, let me back up a bit and explain. Orko is a Trollan, a race of magical little dudes that are basically floating sweaters with hats and covered up faces. Out of these Trollans, Orko is an incredibly fucking OP archmage. Like, they straight up call him Orko the Great, he's so powerful. But then, he gets caught in a freak storm that whisks him away from his home dimension and into Eternia. Immediately, he runs into a young Prince Adam, who is trapped in a swamp/tar pit and needs rescuing. Orko, being the upstanding lad that he is, uses his magic to save him but in the process loses the item that allows him to focus his magic to the swamp (in the 80s version, it's a medallion, but in the 2002 series, it's a wand). Worse yet, the magic (and dare I say the very laws of physics) in Eternia works pretty much the opposite as it does in Trolla, so he's been incredibly nerfed.

So basically, Orko is trapped in a topsy-turvy world away from friends and family, a world with magic he is fundamentally incompatible with. Ouch. He's not completely screwed, however, as he is rewarded by the king and queen for his heroism and appointed... the court jester. Double ouch. He surprisingly doesn't seem to mind though. He genuinely does enjoy entertaining people, even when his tricks only ever work like half the time because he's basically a Mac program trying to run on a Windows computer.

It's not all horrible though, as he does quite literally get adopted by the royal family  and thus sort of become the entire palace's weird son/little brother (despite being older than many of them. He's very, very child-coded largely for the purposes of being a stand-in and example lesson to the actual children watching). But also, more importantly, he becomes one of the very select few to know that Adam and He-Man are one and the same.

But outside of secret-keeping, he is actually a pretty valuable ally to have against Skeletor and his dudes because even though his magic is kind of screwed up, when it does work, he's still one of the most powerful mages on Eternia. In various materials, he's created floods, a second winter, and hell, he can literally explode himself and still be perfectly fine. He's also really clever and can weasel his way out of a number of situations. In one episode, for instance, he manages to convince someone that he's He-Man and Adam is his "assistant" in order to free him from captivity so the day has a better chance of actually being saved.  He's also got the ability to just be really frustrating and incomprehensible to the point that villains who capture him sometimes either don't want him or don't know what to do with him anymore, which is honestly really funny. In an episode of She-Ra, the villains tried to scan his brain but because the inner machinations of his mind are that much of an enigma, he got diagnosed a weirdo and broke the entire machine. Absolutely delightful.

However, there's a lot more to Orko than just comedy and bungled magic. He's actually surprisingly complex!

See, going into this, I expected Orko's whole situation be played entirely for laughs while the sadder implications of his existence go entirely unaddressed. Coming off the heels of characters like Cobalt and others I enjoy, I'm used to this sort of treatment by writers. But they actually don't do that. The depressing subtext is for once, actually TEXT, which was INCREDIBLY surprising to me. We actually get to see another side of him, a side that hates that he can't be taken seriously no matter what he does, a side that is well aware of all the trouble he causes and feels like a burden to those around him. He actually runs away on multiple occasions, fully believing that he's unloved and everyone would be better off without him, even if that couldn't be further from the truth (a point which the Sorceress hammers home with multiple straight up magical video presentations, and in the 2002 series, a literary adaptation, of why he is loved and important).

Underneath all the hyping himself up that he does, there's a lot of insecurity. He's someone who desperately wants to be loved and respected and feels that without funny magic tricks to entertain people, he has no inherent value (which is incredibly relatable if you are also known by people as The Funny One). At one point he agrees with the notion that he doesn't feel like much more than a pet, which is absolutely heartbreaking. Even when he gets the ability to go back and forth between Eternia and Trolla, his feelings of inadequacy now extend toward his family, worrying that his own uncle, the one who taught him everything he knows and greatly contributed to him being Orko the Great back home in the first place, wouldn't be proud of him. Being on Eternia highkey wrecked his shit, man.

However, even when given the opportunity to go back home for good, he always chooses to stay because he's loyal as hell. Even if he needs some reminders, he does know he's needed not just in the fight against evil, but just because his friends and newfound family genuinely love him. It's heartbreaking, but also incredibly wholesome. I did not even remotely expect a comic relief character like this to get this much depth and respect from the writers, especially not from the incredibly campy and cheaply animated 80s series. I am genuinely so unused to this.

But I think that's also what separates him a bit from his fellow Silly Kid Appeal Characters That Kids Fucking Hate ala Snarf Thundercats or Scrappy Doo. He not only makes a concerted effort to be an actually useful ally, but he's also in fact very self-aware of his status as one of these characters. He knows he screws up a lot but he actually tries to accept responsibility and fix it. It makes me wanna root for the lil dude. Now I understand if someone isn't a fan of the brand of humor he brings to the table, or feel like he's simply a distraction from the Cool Buff Dudes Fighting Each Other, but I hope you can see why he might also be a really appealing character to other people, both kids and adults alike. I mean, he was popular enough to be embedded into the canon despite originating from the cartoon and not the toyline for a reason, after all.

Orko is a fun, entertaining, but also complex, heartwarming, and relatable character. I know there is a faction of people that would disagree with me, but I don't think you need to change him all that much or make him a super serious character to be more appealing. He's already got a lot going on that a writer could easily work with. It all just depends on where you decide to focus. Take a lesson from the show and accept that he's fine just the way he is.

[chezzzie]

Why Contemporary Women Artists Are Obsessed with the Grotesque

If artists are generally boundary-crossers, a younger generation of (mostly women) artists is going for full penetration—making artworks that speak to something deep in the body, producing responses that range from carnal attraction to disgust.Among the most potently grotesque examples are Tala Madani’s nightmarish babies and dystopian fantasies of voyeurism and violence, and Jala Wahid’s visceral, sculptural allusions to cuts of meat and dismembered organs and body parts. Or take Marianna Simnett’s unsettling, darkly comic videos that bring to life imagined narratives of bodily invasions—including a gruesome nasal operation and a fable about varicose veins and cockroaches-cum-cyborgs. Then there’s Maisie Cousins’s glossy, close-up images of a wet soup of food, decaying plants, and bodies, which recall the more appalling corners of Cindy Sherman’s imagination. In painting and drawing, too, the grotesque is rampant, with elastic, deformed, or monstrous bodies populating works by Christina Quarles, Ebecho Muslimova, Jana Euler, and Dana Schutz.

In recent exhibitions of work by older and historical artists, as well, we’ve seen the walls erupt in freakish, fleshy forms that have threatened the contained space of a room, as in Dorothea Tanning’s Chambre 202, Hôtel du Pavot, on view in her retrospective at the Museo Reina Sofia and traveling to the Tate Modern early this year. The ceilings of art spaces have dangled with multi-limbed, Medusa-like monsters and cyborgs (like the sci-fi-inflected psychic landscape of Lee Bul, who had a retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery in 2018).

With much of these artists’ works, the feeling of deep dread is often a blade’s edge away from erotic desire. As the narrator of Simnett’s film The Needle and the Larynx (2016) says, as she fantasizes about having her vocal chords surgically altered: “So sharp were his knives, so appealing…this was an irrevocable invitation.” This expression of temptation suggests a calling to make art—to create—as much as it does an inclination toward self-regeneration and other forms of transgression. The possibility of metamorphosing one’s flesh and image—of permeating thresholds—is both intoxicating and anxiety-inducing.

The grotesque is inherently associated with the feminine, long having shaped depictions of the female body—prostitutes, femmes fatales, and sorceresses.

The grotesque, as art historian Frances S. Connelly writes in her book The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture (2012), is “a boundary creature” that “roams the borderland of all that is familiar and conventional.” It is desirous of transformation—an “open mouth that invites our descent into other worlds,” like the underground rooms of Nero’s Golden Palace, excavated in the 15th century, which turned up walls decorated with hybrid figures sprouting bits of plants and architecture, and birthed the term “grottoesche.” (Today, our general understanding of the “grotesque” has been boiled down to mean simply “comically or repulsively ugly or distorted,” but art historians and theorists read more complexity into the term.) It is, in many ways, inseparable from the body, which is the most fundamental of boundaries. “What is most regulated in any culture is the body, particularly women’s bodies,” Connelly said during a recent conversation.

The grotesque, she writes, is inherently associated with the feminine—bodied, earthy, changeful. That thinking has long shaped depictions of the female body, including archetypes of sexual or environmental threat, like prostitutes, femmes fatales, and sorceresses. Even centuries before the term emerged, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle “advanced the influential argument that a woman’s body is monstrous by nature, a deviation from that of the normative male,” she writes.The term is fertile, opening up a womb-like space for new ideas and ethical conundrums to accumulate—a conduit through which cultures can play with taboos and shift the parameters of mores and conventions. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that some of the artists touching the grotesque assume a childlike, fairytale language. A fable tells us what is right and wrong, Simnett pointed out when we met. It is also “a game that you can write the rules for,” she said, one through which you can distort or expand reality. The landscape of morality tales and childhood lessons is ripe territory for boundary-pushing perversions to take root.

Very dark fairytales

Children play a central role in several of Simnett’s films, whose absurdist, grotesque narratives are preoccupied with infection, augmentation, and altered states. In her opus Blood In My Milk (2018), the girl protagonist flirts with the outside world, even as adults warn of the risks that this external environment poses.In scenes that take place within an echoey pink space suggesting the inside of an organ, children receive a lesson about the prognosis and treatment of mastitis in cow udders, interspersed with shots of oozing teats being squeezed and dissected. While an officious farm hand dispenses information about how to keep one’s milk clean and pathogen-free, the children engage in playground dares and brinkmanship that include fantasizing about dismantling a girl “into a million bits so she can never be rebuilt.” The children lust after blood in their milk.

Tala Madani is another artist who, in a different way, explodes any veneer of female containment or childhood innocence, making infants and girls agents of the grotesque. In her painting Sunrise (2018), a baby wields a sharp knife at a naked woman’s groin. An infant’s first act, the painting reminded me, is one of violence.In other compositions populated by menacing babies on all fours, withering adults are left in the dust. Shafts (2017) depicts a group of monstrously overgrown tots crawling off into a void-like cyberspace, with beams of light projecting out of their assholes. An aged man in the foreground holds up a flaccid string of feces like a banner of mortality—the next generation might have evolved into light-shitting cyborgs, but we are still blood, matter, and excrement.

The children in Madani’s works also exercise sexual agency. In her animation Sex Ed by God (2017), a young girl with legs splayed is being studied by an older man, a boy, and God (the narrator of this lesson). She reaches out of the frame and grabs her male onlookers, shrinking them down to size and squeezing them into her vagina, along with the rest of the scene. The adolescent counterpart to a baby who explores the world with its mouth, this teenager-protagonist processes the world and corrects its distorted power balances through her sex. (Madani has a corollary of a kind in the work of Ebecho Muslimova, whose ink drawings feature a female alter-ego who fills and consumes the world with her vast and doughy naked body, luxuriantly covering and penetrating objects—a piano, patio furniture—with uncontrollable flesh and organ.)Madani’s universe is one whose grotesqueries seem shaped, at least to some degree, by the thrills and anxieties of sexuality, motherhood, mortality, and technological change. But it is also one in which children subvert the hierarchy between parent and progeny. The grotesque becomes a means to dissolve power structures.

Both familiar and alien

The contemporary grotesque is interested in underlining the way that bodies that are different from the (white, male) norm, or that, in deviating from impossible standards, are treated as aberrant or monstrous. Artists who touch the grotesque subvert and claim power in part by owning flesh and blood.When I visited Jala Wahid’s studio recently, one sculpture she showed me comprised a cast of the artist’s buttocks resting on a smooth liquid-like surface that is based on the shape of a natural oil well. The exposed position of Wahid’s dismembered rear is both “a provocation and a vulnerability at the same time,” she told me, its position on an oil slick alluding to the politics of Kurdistan, where her parents are from. In her work, she is often thinking about the contested Kurdish body, which is continually “under threat” but also resilient—a body that is both powerful and yet subject to power and control. Another in-progress sculpture in the studio, a thick wedge of slick red jesmonite, will eventually approximate the form of a bloody ox liver that Wahid encountered in a meat market in Kurdistan. (It brings to mind the work of Paul Thek, whom she cites as an influence.)

The contemporary grotesque is interested in how bodies that are different from the white, male norm are treated as aberrant or monstrous.

Wahid is drawn to the great diversity of textures and colors that exist in bodies (in flesh, organs, offal), as well as the relationship between butcher and animal. She wants, in some way, to approach her role as a sculptor like a meat handler—with both violence and reverence—and to create forms that are live and confrontational. To frame her work solely in terms of power dynamics is to simplify it, however. She is interested in bodies in states of transformation, in their formal nuances and their vast capacity for expression. (She showed me a picture of an Assyrian frieze at the British Museum, which features the form of a hunted lion, its upper body upright and fierce, its hind legs shot through and flaccid—a single body in which “you have something really strong but at the same time dead and limp,” she explained.) But she does want her sculptures to have autonomy and wield a certain affective power in the room.

When bodies spill out of their boundaries, or when parts are severed from the whole, they become something unsettlingly other. That forces viewers to renegotiate the borderlands between inside and outside, between themselves and the source of their disquiet. In Wahid’s work, body parts and unidentifiable cuts of meat force viewers into a visceral encounter with objects that are familiar, but also alien. “A human corpse is not in itself abject, but one’s encounter with it certainly is,” Connelly writes, describing an idea within the philosopher Julia Kristeva’s seminal 1982 essay on the abject in art. This recalibration of one’s relationship to the object engages the body as it tries to gauge whether the foreign article is a source of threat or attraction—perhaps both.In the work of sculptor Doreen Garner, we see this at play to profoundly disturbing effect. In some cases hung from meat hooks, her hulks of fleshy silicone are neither human nor meat—too dismembered and deformed to be human, too suggestive of the whole to be flesh alone. Upon inspection, the horrifying human steaks, pierced with pins, reveal the fingers of a hand, or a stray breast. Garner’s objects are intended to touch a nerve deep in the viewer’s own body—specifically, to register the trauma visited on the bodies of enslaved black women by members of the American medical industry. This is the grotesque as a means to produce shock and empathy—to expose the transformation of the body into something monstrous as a consequence of the abuse of power.

Garner’s work occasionally recalls the work of a historical pioneer of the grotesque in art—Robert Gober—in particular, works like the artist’s Untitled (1990), a slumped chest cast in wax that sprouts a female breast on one side, a hairy male pectoral on the other. This crumpled human fragment expresses the vulnerability of the human body, and insists on its gender hybridity, while also speaking to another abuse of power that simmers beneath his work—that of the U.S. government’s failure to respond to the AIDS crisis.

A fascination with monstrous bodies

The grotesque, of course, is not owned by women artists. It’s interesting, as well, to note how queer artists, in addition to Gober, have played in this terrain. In his latest show, at Ashes/Ashes, Ryan McNamara presented a sculptural showcase that included I Can’t Even Think Straight (2018), a sad, cartoonish figure practically melting off the wall. Faces dissolve into pools of liquid fish scales (Whispers, 2018); a series of gungey monsters with skin dripping from their brains joyfully snap selfies. The ghoulish group was in part conceived as a celebration of the queer nightclub in Phoenix, Arizona, where McNamara danced with other outcasts and misfits in his youth.But women, too, are deploying monstrous bodies in the world to empower the marginalized, or to satirize cultural norms and behaviors around age and gender. In two of artist Jana Euler’s latest paintings, she seems to offer biting commentary on our culture’s existential angst and exaltation of youth. Global warnings (people who are over 100 years old) (2018) is a mosaic of portraits of the elderly, each with a fantastically warped face. They are melted, pinched, and sunken, with cyclops eyes glaring from foreheads, and mouths swiveled 180 degrees.

In race against yourself (2018), a naked man rides an equine incarnation of himself, hands and feet turned into muscular hooves. This ghastly centaur and its rider are set against a fleshy backdrop composed of a snaking, human-faced colon, squeezed into the painting’s borders. The work speaks to something deeply perverse in human psychology—a propensity to hurtle through our lives at break-neck speed until our bodies crumple and we hit the grave. We can’t escape our own proclivities, much less our flesh and blood.Indeed, a profound awareness of human mortality is rarely far from the surface when it comes to the grotesque. When I asked Connelly about the common preoccupation with degrading flesh and food, she had this to say: “Life is constant change; we’re eating the world, the world eats us. We’re all mortal. We’re all human. We’re all meat. That’s seen as really traumatic.”

Other artists have created distorted, dismembered, and multi-limbed bodies to more optimistic effect. Christina Quarles paints bending tangles of limbs, bodies that insist on setting their own parameters and determining their own identities. Cindy Sherman continues to irreverently expand the possibilities of the grotesque, harnessing digital technologies to create fabulously idiosyncratic faces via her Instagram feed—ones that contort her visage in every direction except towards any convention of beauty; her fictional selfies are gloriously aging, sun-damaged, plastered in makeup, with features too big, too small, too gender-ambiguous.

Sherman expands the aesthetics of the (female, queer) body. In Maisie Cousins’s saturated close-ups of decaying messes of flesh, entrails, petals, prawns, and flies, too, something generative emerges. Cousins’s celebratory collisions of wet body parts, food remnants, and plants give the abject a facelift. Images of mild disgust find a place within the aesthetic of slick fashion magazine advertising. As such, they variously recall Sherman’s glossy, stomach-turning mixtures of waste, Marilyn Minter’s photorealistic renderings of gaudily made-up bodies and imperfections, and Gina Beaver’s paintings of bodies and fast food. (The latter artist will open an exhibition at MoMA PS1 in March.) Cousins’s photographs are full of innuendo, ripe, inviting us to find beauty in things spilling outside of their borders—to see our own bodies in the bounty of organic matter that the world has to offer.

It makes sense that among a generation increasingly comfortable with open, fluid approaches to identity—and fluent in the great toxic and transformational soup of the internet—artists value aesthetics rooted in states of change and hybridity. “I feel that is a constant, to be in a permanent state of transition,” Simnett told me. “In a sense, everyone is undergoing a mutation. It’s where I feel most natural. You get to meet a million more people, species, ideas. It’s like tendrils constantly reaching out, rather than staying put.” This hunger to explore and break down the boundaries of human experience, however anxious or unsettling—to deconstruct and reinvent the body—is generating some of the most vital and complex art being made today. 

Tess Thackara

source

[ayuuria]

Yashahime Translation: Animedia January 2021 Issue

Please do not repost this translation without my consent! This includes screenshots of any type and amount. If you wish to share this translation, simply link to this post.

For more information regarding the use of my translations, click here.

I do apologize if some of the translations feel awkward. This one was slightly technical so I had to do some research on the side.

Animedia Education Lecture

You think you know but you surprisingly don’t

Working in Anime

— ­Editing Edition –

A corner where we delve into the work of anime production. This time, we ask Nii Kazuhiro of (share) IMAGICA Lab., who handles the editing for “Hanyō no Yashahime”, about editing!

The job of “editing” is vital not just in anime but also in live movies and tv dramas. People who like films may be able to vaguely imagine the burden of having the big role of organizing the scenes. However, exactly what sort of work do they do in anime production? This time, Mr. Nii Kazuhiro of (share) IMAGICA Lab., who oversees the editing of the action packed “Hanyō no Yashahime”, makes an appearance! We had him discuss editing and the special work process unique to “Hanyō no Yashahime”.

Tell us Nii-san! Let’s learn about “Editing”

Q: What kind of job is “Editing”?

It is a job that manages the flow of the whole film by connecting scenes or shots together. For example, how well a signature move in battle or sports is executed is dependent upon the tempo adjustment “editing”. Other things like scenes where shots are divided effectively by the placement of songs or music in an important work, will always have an editor’s hand (adjustment) involved. Even if the animation is created to flow exactly like the storyboard, a lot of times the timing of those scenes is fine-tuned with editing. Timing is just as important as properly moving images after all.

Q. During what phase of the anime production do you work?

Typically in anime, shots are edited at a phase where the color and sound have not yet been added and is completed as each phase in the production moves forward. Editing takes place before the audio work. Basically, it occurs twice: before voice recording and dubbing (translator’s note: Dubbing here does not mean voice over! Dubbing is the phase where they mix the voicing, sound effects, and music together to match the images). There are many works where color is added after dubbing has concluded, but in “Hanyō no Yashahime”, in order to allow for dubbing with the color, colored images are used as materials when editing. Since the images are colored, we can confirm the fine details with the director and production supervisor and then make adjustments.

Q. How does one become an “Editor”?

I entered a vocational school focused on film making and learned not just about editing but film making as a whole such as filming and lighting. There wasn’t any convenient editing software at the time, so I joined my current company that does film production thinking “Editing is something that can’t be self-taught so I want to learn on the job”. If you want to pursue editing, then you should watch as many different types of films as you can. You can’t notice things in production like direction and the camera angle of a shot if you don’t have interest in it, so I think it’s best to study it for the sake of knowledge.

Q. What abilities are needed for “Editing”?

Communication skills are an absolute must. Especially in animation which has a lot of detailed work itineraries and staff members creating it. To ensure that there are no mistakes, you must ask the director or production supervisor on anything you are unsure of. Of course, you can’t keep asking questions on every single shot so there are times where you will need to understand past productions and make decisions yourself. However, being able to muster up the courage and ask when necessary is important. You need communication skills for that purpose.

The “Hanyō no Yashahime” Production Site Packed with Fixations

— Please tell us the details on how you came to oversee the editing in “Hanyō no Yashahime”.

I had the opportunity to work with Director Satō (Teruo) on “Aikatsu Stars!” and he reached out to me. Since the story was connected to “Inuyasha”, which was broadcasted when I was a child, I felt a lot of pressure at first. While I was nervous when I heard the that main staff hadn’t changed much from “Inuyasha”, I felt “That’s all the more reason I have to work hard”.

— In regard to the editing work, did Director Satō make any demands?

I touched on this earlier in my response to “what phase we work” where I discussed how the director requested “Please have the images close to completion before the dubbing, where the music and voicing will be decided finalized, takes place. I would like to have editing done just before the dubbing as well.” This is what makes this so different from other works.

For example, in action scenes when the image is unfinished, it’s hard to understand the small movements or context. Hence, it’s difficult to take a “Maybe make the tempo like this” sort of editing approach. In typical animes, there are a lot of times where the final images solidify after the sound is completed. When that happens, there’s not much room to make edits for the most part.

However, in “Hanyō no Yashahime”, the images are mostly done before the dubbing so we can make adjustments with the director while matching the images with the voice actor’s lines. I thought it was a good idea. This is a trait unique to this work.

— Was there an aspect that you yourself focused on when editing this work?

While it’s a work with a lot of serious developments, what I focus on during those scenes is the “the interval between emotions”. In live film works, for thinking scenes, the actor’s “thinking act” is included so there’s an interval. However, in anime, the movement simply stops and there are no lines, so a lot of times you can’t measure the interval. Nevertheless, those serious scenes are important in “Hanyō no Yashahime” so I think it’s important to have “intervals” which is what I’m careful about. On the other hand, there are comical scenes, so I’m careful not to destroy the tempo. In anime, the tempo can change if it’s off by 6 frames*

*1 frame = 24 frames per second

The Feeling of Fun in Doing “Editing” Work

— In anime editing, does the work’s genre make a difference?

It does. Lately in action and sport (animes), materials included are not just from the storyboard but also from 3D CG as well, so we’re careful to make sure the connection between that and normal image (2D) scenes don’t feel out of place. When I first started, I couldn’t get the hang of it and was at a loss. The 3D CG portion is done by a different production team instead of the animation (drawing) team, so during my edits I couldn’t visualize the complete final form and fumbled as I worked.

In terms of idol anime, there’s “Aikatsu Stars!” that I worked with Director Satō on, but I was still a novice then… In work that’s geared towards children, I focused on making the tempo of the conversation scenes as steady as possible. If the tempo is too fast, it will end with everything being breezed through and a child will become unable to follow. I remember being careful of that.

— Are there times where you have to edit multiple episodes at the same time?

I mainly only work on one episode at a time. It’s just that periodically I have to confirm and make adjustments on a line-by-line basis in another episode at the same time.

— What part of “Editing” do you feel makes the jobs worthwhile?

In anime, images and CG shots that have been completed at each phase of the process are gathered individually as materials for editing. Updating those materials into one new episode and getting to see the finished product first is what “Editing” is. I think this is what makes the job of “Editing” fun the most. I get a sense of responsibility that I’m managing not only the shots but the entire work as a whole. Also, because I’ve seen the production process, I feel happy and simply moved like “That’s amazing” when all the phases are completed and the whole anime is finished. This is when I feel worthwhile as an editor. Also, I don’t think there’s much opportunity to take part in the production of the character movement and camera work in live filming, so I think this is what makes editing anime fun.

— After going through all the work, how do you feel when you watch the broadcasting of the finished version?

I end up watching it from different angles but when I watch it as a regular viewer, I become happy nonetheless. Of course, there are times where I personally think “I should’ve done this” at the little things. Now with social media, I know the viewers’ reactions in real time, so when there was a huge response to episode 1 with Inuyasha and the others, that put pressure on me going forward (laughs).

The Charm of “Hanyō no Yashahime” That You Personally Enjoy

— Of all the episodes that have been broadcasted thus far, which episode left the biggest impression on you?

Episode 3 where the three heroines (Towa, Setsuna, and Moroha) came together. I got to watch the (voice) recording for that episode and the battle scene was really cool. Also, I was able to properly draw the first conversation between the three so that left the biggest impression on me in that sense.

Then there’s episode 7. It’s the episode where you return to the scene of the three of them that at the very beginning of episode 1. The composition of back tracking up to episode 1 left an impression on me, so even as I was editing episode 7, I admired how it felt like the mystery was being revealed or rather feeling like “I see. This is where it connects”.

— By the way, who is your favorite character personally?

Moroha. She’s fundamentally an energetic character, her skills in action scenes are cool, and the way she seems to mimic the movements of her father, Inuyasha, is entertaining as well. While she behaves in a manner that makes you wonder if she had a tragic past, she’s a character whose emotions are easy to read so that’s why she’s my favorite.

— Including upcoming highlights, please give a message to our readers.

Going forward there will be more episodes regarding the three heroine’s past which I think is a highlight. As I was editing a future episode, I felt “We’re approaching the true nature of the story”. Please look forward to the cool action scenes and the episode where the three’s past will become clear.

[recentanimenews]

ESSAY: Berserk's Journey of Acceptance Over 30 Years of Fandom

  My descent into anime fandom began in the '90s, and just as watching Neon Genesis Evangelion caused my first revelation that cartoons could be art, reading Berserk gave me the same realization about comics. The news of Kentaro Miura’s death, who passed on May 6, has been emotionally complicated for me, as it's the first time a celebrity's death has hit truly close to home. In addition to being the lynchpin for several important personal revelations, Berserk is one of the longest-lasting works I’ve followed and that I must suddenly bid farewell to after existing alongside it for two-thirds of my life.

  Berserk is a monolith not only for anime and manga, but also fantasy literature, video games, you name it. It might be one of the single most influential works of the ‘80s — on a level similar to Blade Runner — to a degree where it’s difficult to imagine what the world might look like without it, and the generations of creators the series inspired.

  Although not the first, Guts is the prototypical large sword anime boy: Final Fantasy VII's Cloud Strife, Siegfried/Nightmare from Soulcalibur, and Black Clover's Asta are all links in the same chain, with other series like Dark Souls and Claymore taking clear inspiration from Berserk. But even deeper than that, the three-character dynamic between Guts, Griffith, and Casca, the monster designs, the grotesque violence, Miura’s image of hell — all of them can be spotted in countless pieces of media across the globe.

  Despite this, it just doesn’t seem like people talk about it very much. For over 20 years, Berserk has stood among the critical pantheon for both anime and manga, but it doesn’t spur conversations in the same way as Neon Genesis Evangelion, Akira, or Dragon Ball Z still do today. Its graphic depictions certainly represent a barrier to entry much higher than even the aforementioned company. 

    Seeing the internet exude sympathy and fond reminiscing about Berserk was immensely validating and has been my single most therapeutic experience online. Moreso, it reminded me that the fans have always been there. And even looking into it, Berserk is the single best-selling property in the 35-year history of Dark Horse. My feeling is that Berserk just has something about it that reaches deep into you and gets stuck there.

  I recall introducing one of my housemates to Berserk a few years ago — a person with all the intelligence and personal drive to both work on cancer research at Stanford while pursuing his own MD and maintaining a level of physical fitness that was frankly unreasonable for the hours that he kept. He was NOT in any way analytical about the media he consumed, but watching him sitting on the floor turning all his considerable willpower and intellect toward delivering an off-the-cuff treatise on how Berserk had so deeply touched him was a sight in itself to behold. His thoughts on the series' portrayal of sex as fundamentally violent leading up to Guts and Casca’s first moment of intimacy in the Golden Age movies was one of the most beautiful sentiments I’d ever heard in reaction to a piece of fiction.

  I don’t think I’d ever heard him provide anything but a surface-level take on a piece of media before or since. He was a pretty forthright guy, but the way he just cut into himself and let his feelings pour out onto the floor left me awestruck. The process of reading Berserk can strike emotional chords within you that are tough to untangle. I’ve been writing analysis and experiential pieces related to anime and manga for almost ten years — and interacting with Berserk’s world for almost 30 years — and writing may just be yet another attempt for me to pull my own twisted-up feelings about it apart. 

  Berserk is one of the most deeply personal works I’ve ever read, both for myself and in my perception of Miura's works. The series' transformation in the past 30 years artistically and thematically is so singular it's difficult to find another work that comes close. The author of Hajime no Ippo, who was among the first to see Berserk as Miura presented him with some early drafts working as his assistant, claimed that the design for Guts and Puck had come from a mess of ideas Miura had been working on since his early school days.

  写真は三浦建太郎君が寄稿してくれた鷹村です。 今かなり感傷的になっています。 思い出話をさせて下さい。 僕が初めての週刊連載でスタッフが一人もいなくて困っていたら手伝いにきてくれました。 彼が18で僕が19です。 某大学の芸術学部の学生で講義明けにスケッチブックを片手に来てくれました。 pic.twitter.com/hT1JCWBTKu

— 森川ジョージ (@WANPOWANWAN) May 20, 2021

  Miura claimed two of his big influences were Go Nagai’s Violence Jack and Tetsuo Hara and Buronson’s Fist of the North Star. Miura wears these influences on his sleeve, discovering the early concepts that had percolated in his mind just felt right. The beginning of Berserk, despite its amazing visual power, feels like it sprang from a very juvenile concept: Guts is a hypermasculine lone traveler breaking his body against nightmarish creatures in his single-minded pursuit of revenge, rigidly independent and distrustful of others due to his dark past.

  Uncompromising, rugged, independent, a really big sword ... Guts is a romantic ideal of masculinity on a quest to personally serve justice against the one who wronged him. Almost nefarious in the manner in which his character checked these boxes, especially when it came to his grim stoicism, unblinkingly facing his struggle against literal cosmic forces. Never doubting himself, never trusting others, never weeping for what he had lost.

    Miura said he sketched out most of the backstory when the manga began publication, so I have to assume the larger strokes of the Golden Arc were pretty well figured out from the outset, but I’m less sure if he had fully realized where he wanted to take the story to where we are now. After the introductory mini-arcs of demon-slaying, Berserk encounters Griffith and the story draws us back to a massive flashback arc. We see the same Guts living as a lone mercenary who Griffith persuades to join the Band of the Hawk to help realize his ambitions of rising above the circumstances of his birth to join the nobility.

  We discover the horrific abuses of Guts’ adoptive father and eventually learn that Guts, Griffith, and Casca are all victims of sexual violence. The story develops into a sprawling semi-historical epic featuring politics and war, but the real narrative is in the growing companionship between Guts and the members of the band. Directionless and traumatized by his childhood, Guts slowly finds a purpose helping Griffith realize his dream and the courage to allow others to grow close to him. 

  Miura mentioned that many Band of the Hawk members were based on his early friend groups. Although he was always sparse with details about his personal life, he has spoken about how many of them referred to themselves as aspiring manga authors and how he felt an intense sense of competition, admitting that among them he may have been the only one seriously working toward that goal, desperately keeping ahead in his perceived race against them. It’s intriguing thinking about how much of this angst may have made it to the pages, as it's almost impossible not to imagine Miura put quite a bit of himself in Guts. 

  Perhaps this is why it feels so real and makes The Eclipse — the quintessential anime betrayal at the hands of Griffith — all the more heartbreaking. The raw violence and macabre imagery certainly helped. While Miura owed Hellraiser’s Cenobites much in the designs of the God Hand, his macabre portrayal of the Band of the Hawk’s eradication within the literal bowels of hell, the massive hand, the black sun, the Skull Knight, and even Miura’s page compositions have been endlessly referenced, copied, and outright plagiarized since.

    The events were tragic in any context and I have heard many deeply personal experiences others drew from The Eclipse sympathizing with Guts, Casca, or even Griffith’s spiral driven by his perceived rejection by Guts. Mine were most closely aligned with the tragedy of Guts having overcome such painful circumstances to not only reject his own self enforced solitude, but to fearlessly express his affection for his loved ones. 

  The Golden Age was a methodical destruction of Guts’ self-destructive methods of preservation ruined in a single selfish act by his most trusted friend, leaving him once again alone and afraid of growing close to those around him. It ripped the romance of Guts’ mission and eventually took the story down a course I never expected. Berserk wasn’t a story of revenge but one of recovery.

  Guess that’s enough beating around the bush, as I should talk about how this shift affected me personally. When I was young, when I began reading Berserk I found Guts’ unflagging stoicism to be really cool, not just aesthetically but in how I understood guys were supposed to be. I was slow to make friends during school and my rapidly gentrifying neighborhood had my friends' parents moving away faster than I could find new ones. At some point I think I became too afraid of putting myself out there anymore, risking rejection when even acceptance was so fleeting. It began to feel easier just to resign myself to solitude and pretend my circumstances were beyond my own power to correct.

  Unfortunately, I became the stereotypical kid who ate alone during lunch break. Under the invisible expectations demanding I not display weakness, my loneliness was compounded by shame for feeling loneliness. My only recourse was to reveal none of those feelings and pretend the whole thing didn't bother me at all. Needless to say my attempts to cope probably fooled no one and only made things even worse, but I really didn’t know of any better way to handle my situation. I felt bad, I felt even worse about feeling bad and had been provided with zero tools to cope, much less even admit that I had a problem at all.

  The arcs following the Golden Age completely changed my perspective. Guts had tragically, yet understandably, cut himself off from others to save himself from experiencing that trauma again and, in effect, denied himself any opportunity to allow himself to be happy again. As he began to meet other characters that attached themselves to him, between Rickert and Erica spending months waiting worried for his return, and even the slimmest hope to rescuing Casca began to seed itself into the story, I could only see Guts as a fool pursuing a grim and hopeless task rather than appreciating everything that he had managed to hold onto. 

  The same attributes that made Guts so compelling in the opening chapters were revealed as his true enemy. Griffith had committed an unforgivable act but Guts’ journey for revenge was one of self-inflicted pain and fear. The romanticism was gone.

  Farnese’s inclusion in the Conviction arc was a revelation. Among the many brilliant aspects of her character, I identified with her simply for how she acted as a stand-in for myself as the reader: Plagued by self-doubt and fear, desperate to maintain her own stoic and uncompromising image, and resentful of her place in the world. She sees Guts’ fearlessness in the face of cosmic horror and believes she might be able to learn his confidence.

    But in following Guts, Farnese instead finds a teacher in Casca. In taking care of her, Farnese develops a connection and is able to experience genuine sympathy that develops into a sense of responsibility. Caring for Casca allows Farnese to develop the courage she was lacking not out of reckless self-abandon but compassion.

  I can’t exactly credit Berserk with turning my life around, but I feel that it genuinely helped crystallize within me a sense of growing doubts about my maladjusted high school days. My growing awareness of Guts' undeniable role in his own suffering forced me to admit my own role in mine and created a determination to take action to fix it rather than pretending enough stoicism might actually result in some sort of solution.

  I visited the Berserk subreddit from time to time and always enjoyed the group's penchant for referring to all the members of the board as “fellow strugglers,” owing both to Skull Knight’s label for Guts and their own tongue-in-cheek humor at waiting through extended hiatuses. Only in retrospect did it feel truly fitting to me. Trying to avoid the pitfalls of Guts’ path is a constant struggle. Today I’m blessed with many good friends but still feel primal pangs of fear holding me back nearly every time I meet someone, the idea of telling others how much they mean to me or even sharing my thoughts and feelings about something I care about deeply as if each action will expose me to attack.

  It’s taken time to pull myself away from the behaviors that were so deeply ingrained and it’s a journey where I’m not sure the work will ever be truly done, but witnessing Guts’ own slow progress has been a constant source of reassurance. My sense of admiration for Miura’s epic tale of a man allowing himself to let go after suffering such devastating circumstances brought my own humble problems and their way out into focus.

    Over the years I, and many others, have been forced to come to terms with the fact that Berserk would likely never finish. The pattern of long, unexplained hiatuses and the solemn recognition that any of them could be the last is a familiar one. The double-edged sword of manga largely being works created by a single individual is that there is rarely anyone in a position to pick up the torch when the creator calls it quits. Takehiko Inoue’s Vagabond, Ai Yazawa’s Nana, and likely Yoshihiro Togashi’s Hunter X Hunter all frozen in indefinite hiatus, the publishers respectfully holding the door open should the creators ever decide to return, leaving it in a liminal space with no sense of conclusion for the fans except what we can make for ourselves.

  The reason for Miura’s hiatuses was unclear. Fans liked to joke that he would take long breaks to play The Idolmaster, but Miura was also infamous for taking “breaks” spent minutely illustrating panels to his exacting artistic standard, creating a tumultuous release schedule during the wars featuring thousands of tiny soldiers all dressed in period-appropriate armor. If his health was becoming an issue, it’s uncommon that news would be shared with fans for most authors, much less one as private as Miura.

  Even without delays, the story Miura was building just seemed to be getting too big. The scale continued to grow, his narrative ambition swelling even faster after 20 years of publication, the depth and breadth of his universe constantly expanding. The fan-dubbed “Millennium Falcon Arc” was massive, changing the landscape of Berserk from a low fantasy plagued by roaming demons to a high fantasy where godlike beings of sanity-defying size battled for control of the world. How could Guts even meet Griffith again? What might Casca want to do when her sanity returned? What are the origins of the Skull Knight? And would he do battle with the God Hand? There was too much left to happen and Miura’s art only grew more and more elaborate. It would take decades to resolve all this.

  But it didn’t need to. I imagine we’ll never get a precise picture of the final years of Miura’s life leading up to his tragic passing. In the final chapters he released, it felt as if he had directed the story to some conclusion. The unfinished Fantasia arc finds Guts and his newfound band finding a way to finally restore Casca’s sanity and — although there is still unmistakably a boundary separating them — both seem resolute in finding a way to mend their shared wounds together.

  One of the final chapters features Guts drinking around the campfire with the two other men of his group, Serpico and Roderick, as he entrusts the recovery of Casca to Schierke and Farnese. It's a scene that, in the original Band of the Hawk, would have found Guts brooding as his fellows engage in bluster. The tone of this conversation, however, is completely different. The three commiserate over how much has changed and the strength each has found in the companionship of the others. After everything that has happened, Guts declares that he is grateful. 

  The suicidal dedication to his quest for vengeance and dispassionate pragmatism that defined Guts in the earliest chapters is gone. Although they first appeared to be a source of strength as the Black Swordsman, he has learned that they rose from the fear of losing his friends again, from letting others close enough to harm him, and from having no other purpose without others. Whether or not Guts and Griffith were to ever meet again, Guts has rediscovered the strength to no longer carry his burdens alone. 

  All that has happened is all there will ever be. We too must be grateful.

      Peter Fobian is an Associate Manager of Social Video at Crunchyroll, writer for Anime Academy and Anime in America, and an editor at Anime Feminist. You can follow him on Twitter @PeterFobian.

By: Peter Fobian

[sternbilder]

Camille Has Many KDrama Thoughts

As some of you have possibly noticed, I have recently fallen into a KDrama hole and I can’t get up, and I have just finished my 10th drama, which seems like less of an accomplishment than I thought now that I say it out loud, but anyway,

As a checkpoint/thinly veiled plug of some shows I love very much, here is a very long post with some of my thoughts on all the KDramas I’ve seen so far, as well as what’s next on my list, in case you too were interested in joining me in nonexistent fandom hell!

So firstly, all of the dramas I have watched to completion, in the order of how much I like them. First, my top five:

1. Sungkyunkwan Scandal (2010). My #1 favorite drama to date. I’ve probably watched it in full 4-5 times, and it’s still an absolute treat every time. Is it the best drama I’ve ever seen? Probably not. But it’s so fun and charming that it’s just gotta be at the top of my list. 

The best way I can describe this drama is Ouran High School Host Club, except in Joseon era Korea, and instead of flirting with girls the main characters learn about Confucianism and solve mysteries and play sports (twice) and end up accidentally involved in a complicated political scandal. Also, that one text post about how Shang from Mulan is bi because he falls for Mulan while he thinks she’s a man...This drama has that, except actually canon. And while I won’t pretend this is show is a shining beacon of representation, there are multiple main characters who are explicitly not heterosexual and several others with very plausible queer readings, which earns it a very special place in my heart.

As for the actual premise of the show, it’s basically about a wonderfully determined and kind and clever but lower-class girl whose writing skills catch the eye of the most stubbornly strait-laced but idealistic aspiring politician-type on the planet. She ends up getting a one-way ticket to the most prestigious school in the country, except she has to pretend to be a man the entire time because women aren’t allowed to be educated at this time. 

It’s a bit of a silly, cheesy show, and here are many wacky shenanigans, but the main cast is full of incredibly highly endearing and multifaceted characters, there is a lot of sexual confusion, the slowburn roommate romance has an incredible payoff, and it’s also full of deeply moving social commentary about class, privilege, and gender roles. This drama is a blast and I could go on and on about what I love about it, I absolutely adore it to pieces.

2. Six Flying Dragons (2015-2016). I debated between this and Tree With Deep Roots (next on my list, to which SFD is a prequel) as my #2 but I do think I want to place SFD higher just because it's the drama that I keep thinking about even after finishing it. of course, it has the dual advantages of 1) being released chronologically later (and having better production value, etc., because of this) and 2) being twice as long, but there’s just so much stuff to unpack with SFD that it makes me want to keep coming back to it. 

The show is about the founding of the Joseon dynasty, and six individuals (half of whom are based on real historical figures and half fictional) whose lives are closely tied to the fall of the old regime and the revolution that brought in the new. It has an intricate, intensely political plotline based on the actual events that happened during this time, and though this may sound kind of boring if you’re like me and not super into history (admittedly, the pacing in the beginning is a tiny bit slow), it quickly picks up and becomes this dense web of character relations and political maneuvering. Though none of the major events should come as a surprise if you’ve seen TWDR or if you happen to already know the history it was based on, the show adds such a depth of humanity and emotion to every event and character that nothing ever feels boring or predictable. As a matter of fact, there are several events that were alluded to in TWDR that, when they actually happened in SFD, left me breathless--because although I 100% knew these were foregone conclusions that were coming up at some point, I still had a visceral moment of, “oh no, so that’s how that came to happen.” 

But though I really enjoyed following the story of SFD and learning about the history behind it, the highlight of the show for me is definitely the great character arcs. I loved TWDR’s characters, too (especially Yi Do, So Yi, and obviously Moo Hyul), but with double the episode count SFD just has so much time for rich, dynamic character development, and I absolutely loved seeing how these characters grew and changed over time when their ideologies and fates collided in this turbulent and violent age: How young and ambitious Yi Bang Won eventually spiraled into a ruthless tyrant, how the naive and kind-hearted Moo Hyul struggled to retain his humanity in a bloody revolution that challenged his values and loyalties to the core, how the fiercely determined and idealistic Boon Yi grew into a pragmatic and capable leader who comes to realize what politics and power mean for her and her loved ones. 

SFD was also everything I wanted as a prequel to TWDR--I loved seeing the contrasts between some of the TWDR characters and their younger selves in the SFD timeline: The hardened and ruthless Bang Won as a passionate and righteous adolescent, the cynical and resigned Bang Ji as a cowardly boy who grows into a traumatized and bitter young man, and my personal favorite character, the comically serious bodyguard Moo Hyul as the very model of the dopey, lovable himbo archetype. And though the ending was controversial among fans (particularly those who watched SFD first), I loved how it closed all the loops and tied it back to the events of TWDR, both providing that transition I wanted but also recontextualizing and adding new meaning to the original work. I think it's still a very good drama on its own, but this hand-off is what really sealed the deal for me personally, because it was not only super emotionally satisfying to watch how the stories connected, but it elevated TWDR to something even greater (suggesting that Yi Do and the events of TWDR was the culmination of everything the six dragons fought so long and hard for), which is exactly what I expect from a good prequel. 

I’ve already talked so much about this drama but I also do need to mention that the soundtrack to SFD is A+, and the sword fights are sick as hell. There is also some romance, though it’s not really a focus--and all the pairings that do exist are extremely tragic, which is exactly up my alley. Overall, this is a hell of a historical drama, coming of age, villain origin story, and martial arts film in one, and I highly recommend it.

3. Tree With Deep Roots (2011). The sequel to SFD, though it aired first chronologically. Although this show isn’t one of those shows that I could rewatch once a year like SKKS or keep ruminating on like SFD, TWDR (much like Les Mis, or Fata Morgana) is thematically the kind of story that just makes my heart sing.

The story centers around the creation of Hangul, the Korean alphabet, by Yi Do (a.k.a., King Sejong the Great, who is the son and successor of Yi Bang Won, the main character of SFD) as well as two fictional childhood friends whose backstories and ambitions become central to the story of how and why this alphabet came to exist. Not only is the actual process of creating this alphabet absolutely fascinating from a linguistic and scientific POV, but the show dramatizes Yi Do’s motivations in a way that’s so incredibly touching and human--portraying the king as a soft-hearted and extremely charismatic yet fundamentally flawed and conflicted figure who tries so desperately to do right by his people. 

The show explores both a number of personal themes like redemption, atonement, and vengeance, as well as broader societal themes such as the ethics of authority, the democratization of knowledge, and the power of language and literacy. Though the show never forgets to remind the audience of the bitter reality of actual history, it’s still a deeply idealistic show whose musings on social change and how to use privilege and power to make the world better are both elegant and poignant. 

Romance definitely takes a backseat in TWDR, even more so than SFD, though this isn’t something I personally mind. There are, however, a lot of interesting politics surrounding the promulgation of the alphabet, including a string of high-profile assassinations--if SFD is historical/political-thriller-meets-action-film, then TWDR is historical/political-thriller-meets-murder-mystery, and it’s an incredibly tightly written and satisfying story whose pieces fall into place perfectly. Though not the sprawling epic that SFD is, TWDR is an emotional journey and an extremely well-written story with a TON of goodies if you’re as excited about linguistics as I am. 

4. White Christmas (2011). My first non-sageuk on this list! White Christmas is, in a lot of ways, an odd drama. It’s an 8-episode special, and featured largely (at the time) new talent. it’s also neither a historical work nor romance-focused, but instead a short but intense psychological thriller/murder mystery. 

The premise is this: Seven students at a super elite boarding school tucked away in the mountains receive mysterious black letters that compel them to remain on campus during the one vacation of the year. The letters describe various “sins” that the author accuses the students of committing, as well as the threat of a “curse” as well as an impending death. The students quickly find that they’re stranded alone at the school with a murderer in their midst, as they are forced to confront their shared histories and individual traumas to figure out 1) why they’ve been sent the letters, and 2) how to make it out alive. At the center of the survival game the characters find themselves in is a recurring question: “Are monsters born, or can they be made?”

If you’ve been following me for a while, it’s easy to see why I was drawn to this drama. In terms of setup and tone, it’s Zero Escape. In theme, it’s Naoki Urasawa’s Monster. It’s Lord of the Flies meets Dead Poets Society. or as one of my mutuals swyrs@ put it, Breakfast Club meets Agatha Christie. The story is flawlessly paced with not a scene wasted. There’s so much good foreshadowing and use of symbolic imagery, and though I’ve watched it at least 3-4 times, I always find interesting new details to analyze. The plot twists (though not so meta-breaking as ZE) are absolutely nuts, and aside from the somewhat questionable ending, the story is just really masterfully written.

Above all, though, WC is excellent for its character studies. Though I typically tend to stay away from shows that center around teenagers because I don’t find their struggles and experiences particularly relatable, WC does such an excellent job of picking apart every character psychologically, showing their traumas, their desires, their fears, and their insecurities. We see these kids at their most violent and cruel, but also their most vulnerable and honest. Their stories and motivations are so profoundly human that I found even the worst and most despicable characters painfully sympathetic at times, as cowardly and hypocritical and unhinged as they became. 

Like I said, it’s only 8 episodes long with probably the best rewatch value on this list. My only complaints about it are its ending, as well as its relative lack of female characters, but otherwise I would absolutely recommend.

5. Signal (2016). Okay, this might be the recency bias talking because I just finished this series but I'm sure but I'm still reeling at the mind-screw of an ending and I feel like it deserves a place on this spot just for that.

Signal is a crime thriller based on a number of real-life incidents that happened in Korea in the last 30 or so years. In short, a young profiler from the year 2015, who has a grudge against the police after witnessing their incompetence and corruption twice as a child, happens to find a mysterious walkie-talkie that seems to be able to send and receive messages from the past. on the other end is an older detective from 2000 who tells him that he’s about to start receiving messages from his younger self, back in 1989. Through the seemingly sporadic radio communications, the two men work together to solve a series of cold cases, which begin to change the past and alter the timeline.

As they solve these cases, expose corruption within the police department, and correct past injustices, the two men (along with a third, female detective who has connections to both of them) also begin to unravel the mysteries of their pasts, as well as why and how they came to share this connection.

Like WC, the story and pacing of this drama were flawless, reminding me of an extended movie rather than a TV series. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time, and the 16-episode run went by in no time at all. I always love timeline shenanigans and explorations of causality and fate and the consequences of changing the past, and this show has oodles of that peppered with the heartbreakingly tragic human connections and stories that the main characters share. The main pairing has great chemistry and gave me exactly the pain I crave from a doomed timeline romance, and the cinematography and soundtrack were also beautiful, which also contributed to the polished, cinema-like feel.

My only complaint is that I wish that the ending felt more like an ending, such that the drama could stand on its own. I do realize this is because there’s a second season coming, but right now the show feels somewhat incomplete, ending on a huge, ambiguous cliffhanger/sequel hook and with several loose ends. I obviously can’t give a final verdict until the entire thing airs (and I typically don’t like multi-season shows, so I will wait for the next season to come out both reluctantly and begrudgingly), but even where the show leaves off I still did enjoy it immensely.

...And now, some brief thoughts on the other 5 shows I’ve watched, because I ran out of steam and have less to say about these:

6. Healer (2014-2015). It’s been a few years since I’ve seen this show, but I remember being really impressed by this drama at the time, especially the storyline. Unfortunately though I don’t remember too much about the drama itself, which is a shame. It’s a mystery/thriller, I think, and there is hacking and crimes involved? The main character is a very cute and sweet tabloid writer and she falls in love with a mysterious and cool action boy who helps her uncover the truth behind a tragic incident that relates to her past, or something. Judging from my liveblog it seems like this was an extremely emotional journey, and I enjoyed the main couple (who are both very attractive) a lot, and it was just overall a cathartic and feel-good experience. I feel like I should rewatch this drama at some point?

7. Rooftop Prince (2012). It’s also been forever since I watched this show but I remember thinking it was hilarious and delightful and I definitely cried a lot though I do not remember why (probably something something time travel, something something reincarnation/fated lovers??). I do remember that the premise is that a Joseon-era prince and several of his servants accidentally time travel into modern-day Seoul and end up meeting the main character who is the future reincarnation of his love (?) and he is hilariously anachronistic and also insufferably pretentious, which the MC absolutely does not cut him any slack for, and they have an extremely good dynamic.

8. Coffee Prince (2007). I watched this around the same time as Rooftop Prince and I remember really enjoying it! it’s basically just SKKS, but the modern cafe AU, and I mean that in the best way possible? It definitely shares a lot of the same tropes--crossdressing/tomboy female lead, sexually questioning male lead who falls in love with her despite being “straight,” very good chemistry and also extremely charming secondary characters.

9. Shut Up Flower Boy Band (2012). This show...Was just OK. I enjoyed it at the time, but I can’t say I found it particularly memorable. As I said, I don’t typically find stories about high school students particularly relatable, and the battle of the bands-type plot was interesting enough at the time but didn’t really leave a lasting impression. As expected, the music was pretty good. I kind of watched this mostly to hear Sung Joon sing tbh?

10. Rebel: Thief Who Stole the People (2017). I wanted to like this show. I really did. I wouldn’t say it was bad, but the beginning was painfully slow, and I only really enjoyed the last 10 episodes or so, when the vive la révolution arc finally started kicking off. The pacing was challenging--the pre-timeskip dragged on about twice as long as it needed to, and I just wasn’t really interested in the Amogae/Yiquari storyline very much. I also really, really disliked all the romances in the show, especially the main pairing, since I didn’t particularly love either the male or the female leads until pretty late in the show. Overall I think I would have enjoyed the show more if the first 2/3 of it was about half as long, and it either developed the romance better or cut it out altogether.

What I’m thinking of watching next:

1. Chuno (2010). Mostly because the soundtrack to this show is so goddamn good, but also because I’m craving more historical dramas with good sword fights after SFD. I was kind of hoping Rebel would fill that need but I was a little disappointed tbh?

2. Warrior Baek Dong Soo (2011). Same reasons as above, honestly. also has a very good soundtrack, and Ji Chang Wook, who is a known nice face-haver, doing many very cool sword fights.

3. Mr. Sunshine (2018). Late Joseon era is something I’ve never really seen before in media so I’m pretty intrigued? Also Byun Yo Han was one of my favorites from SFD and I definitely want to see him in more things.

4. Rookie Historian Goo Hae Ryung (2019). A coworker recommended this to me and the trailer looks delightful. first of all it’s a sageuk with the gorgeous and talented Shin Se Kyoung in it playing a smart and plucky female lead, which have historically been extremely good to me, but also it gives me massive SKKS vibes, so how could I not.

5. My Country: The New Age (2019). This caught my attention because it’s based on the same historical events as SFD, so it features some of the same characters. I am very very interested in Jang Hyuk’s take on Yi Bang Won, even if he is less of a main character here compared to SFD, and he’s already an adult so he’ll already be well on his way to bastardhood. I also hear it’s very heartbreaking, which is instant eyes emoji for me?

6. Chicago Typewriter (2017). It’s about freedom fighters from the colonization era, which I’m very intrigued by after The Handmaiden and Pachinko, plus a reincarnation romance. I am very predictable in my choice of tropes. Also, Yoo Ah In is in it.

7. Arthdal Chronicles (2019-). Ok, it’s a gorgeous-looking historical fantasy set in Korea written by the same writers as TWDR and SFD, plus it has not just one but TWO Song Joong Ki characters, one of which is a pure, doe-eyed soft boy and the other an evil long-haired fae prince looking asshole who I hear is a complete and utter Unhinged Bastard Supreme. Nothing has ever been more Camille Bait than this, but unfortunately this show hasn’t finished airing, which does pain me deeply. speaking of,

8. Kingdom (2019-). It’s a fantasy sageuk with zombies, is about the extent I know about this show. The fact that it also hasn’t finished airing turns me off a bit but it looks absolutely gorgeous and I also just found out it was written by the same writer as Signal, so,,,,,,,,,

9. Gunman in Joseon (2014). I honestly don’t expect too much from this drama but I just enjoy its premise a lot? From what I understand it’s just Percy from Critical Role, but make it Joseon era.......Like, they just straight up took a Shadow the Hedgehog, “let’s make a sageuk, but guns,” approach, and I kind of unironically love that. Also the soundtrack kicks ass, which like...you can really see where my priorities lie here, huh,

10. Misaeng (2014). I don’t remember at this point why this is on my list but I found it in the Keep note I have of all the media I want to watch?? I have no idea what this show is about, except that it takes place in an office. Apparently Byun Yo Han is also in this one? I’m sorry this is the only non-sageuk or sageuk-adjacent show in this list, I know what I’m about, and it’s fancy old-timey costumes and cool braids.

[fierce-little-miana]

Why do I like Medea?

@irleughlivelyatalanteangodfan asked “May I ask what you like most about Medea?”

To which my first reaction is what is there not to like?

Of course of course someone might answered me that even in the more positive version of the myth Medea is at the very least a murderer. In the worst version she is a fratricide, infanticide, and mass-murderer. So there are indeed things to discuss.

First I must say that I love Medea the most at her worst. I do believe the academics working on the myth finding trace of older versions in which Medea is not at her worst are producing necessary content because it is solid and necessary academic work. And it is not uninteresting to see how with each newer version her depiction tended to be blacken. There is indeed something to be said of a myth that goes from a mythical magical woman to a murderous vengeful woman, especially when this woman is powerful in her own right (her magic) and foreign (three things that ancient Greeks despised). But that is not the appeal of the character to me.

No I love Medea in her murderous rage. I love everything that “dark” Medea stands for. One of the main thing being:

Feminine Rage:

This the name I give to something that became, without me noticing it, one of my favorite tropes in media. It is when a woman just snaps when confronted for the umpteenth time with something fundamentally unfair, fundamentally degrading, that is only leveraged against her because she is a woman.  

There are ways women are supposed to bear pain, humiliation, or attacks against themselves, that are dignified and are positively recognized by society. Gendered ways. While a man is going to fight against adversity a woman is going to endure it. I personally find it extremely disempowering. Resilience has good sides of course but it is not proactive, it is enduring a situation up until it changes of its own accord. Yet this is what women are taught to do. And women are taught to be resilient in the eyes of a society that covers them with outrages specifically because they are women.

A woman who ends up resorting to violence is a great transgressor. Violence is a transgression that might get women completely shun from the “civilized” world (whereas it is not automatic for men). And yet I think there is a secret fear/desire for a lot of women that they are actually one step or two away to falling into primal violence (I am not saying that all women feel like that obviously but the idea seems to speak to too many to be described as only personal).

I recently found this quote that goes in this sens pretty well:

“almost every woman i have ever met has a secret belief that she is just on the edge of madness, that there is some deep, crazy part within her, that she must be on guard constantly against ‘losing control’ — of her temper, of her appetite, of her sexuality, of her feelings, of her ambition, of her secret fantasies, of her mind”

Elana Dykewomon “Notes for a Magazine”

Women are divorced from their violent impulse, from a part of themselves, for the best and for the worst. This feminine rage is powerful way to reconnect with this part of themselves in a eyes of a society that keeps on tormenting them.

That’s what Medea story is in the end. A total dip in primal violence to avenge all the offenses she had to bear because she is a woman. And she only can regain her dignity, and a real agency through this violence.

Medea’s story is incredibly gendered. Sure there is the theme of who is the real criminal: the one committing the crime or the one not preventing it and benefiting from it? But it is mainly the story of a woman who sacrificed everything she had (rank, reputation, honor, morality) to make her husband and family succeed. She got her husband out of all dangerous situations they faced together, and has even offered him opportunity he wouldn’t have had without her. The story of Medea is the one of an older woman whose husband can’t use her anymore after having made her sacrifice everything.

So Medea snaps and exercises powerful violence on her husband and everyone who is working with him to strap her of what remains: her sense of self (I don’t know if it is in every version but in at least some of them Creusa asks to be able to wear Medea’s wedding dress to her own wedding). She punishes them all and finds herself back in the process. Even if she has to suffer excoriating pain in order to do so (killing her own sons) as long as the others suffer more than her and are punished according to their crimes she will not falter.

Medea is feminine rage at its peak, uncompromising and lethal. There is something extremely cathartic in this for me.

The story of Medea is also the story of a foreigner in an hostile land. It is less important than the woman part for me but still essential. And that is why I really like that in the french comic book by Le Called and Peña they do present her as significantly different from the Greeks women and significantly darker.

Not like any other:

Medea, like most of characters in myth, is related to gods. Circe is her aunt, so she is related to Hecate, which is unsurprising considering that she is a magician (a deeply feminine power in most greek myth). But she is also the granddaughter of Helios (actually all four of her grandparents are gods or close to be). But Medea isn’t just related to gods, she behaves like one.

Medea destroys not only Creon and his daughter but in some of the version she is responsible for the burning of the entire city. Exactly like an angry god who has been disrespected by members of a community and brought their anger on all the community (granted the citizens of Corinth did not like her but still).

But it is the punition that she reserve to Jason that strikes me as the most god-like. In ancient Greek myths gods often punishes humans or other gods who had wronged them with fates worse than death (like Prometheus or Lycaon of Arcadia). This is exactly what she does to Jason. She takes everything from him, everything, but she leaves him alive so he has to live through his punishment. He is left with nothing except maybe the shame of being Jason. Even in the Divine Comedy (written in the 14th century and not directly concerned with the Argonauts or Medea) Jason is placed in Hell for what he did to several women.

Medea is superior to nearly everyone else she runs into in her story and her actions in Corinth is a way for her to reclaim that.

A reasonable women:

Medea most famous deed might have been the killing of her sons in Corinth to annihilate Jason but even in this she keeps on being rational. She might fall prey to primal violence but she still plans and executes it with meticulousness.

After all apparently her name comes from the verbs μήδομαι / mêdomai which means to meditate, and might come from an earlier root meaning: understand/conceive.

Medea is victorious thanks to the power of her reason and cleverness. She doesn’t kill Pelias, she convinces his daughters to do so by tricking them into believing that they are going to make him young and healthy again. She gets the Golden Fleece. She gets the very dreadful idea of how to slow down her pursuing father’s fleet. Medea is not only powerful because she is a great magician. She is powerful because she is a smart, ruthless, dedicated woman.

In Corneille’s version, Pollux (an Argonaut whose role here is to be the confident of Jason) has this to say about Jason’s plan of marrying Creusa :

“Bien que de tous côtés l'affaire résolue

Ne laisse aucune place aux conseils d'un ami,

Je ne puis toutefois l'approuver qu'à demi.

Sur quoi que vous fondiez un traitement si rude,

C'est montrer pour Médée un peu d'ingratitude :

Ce qu'elle a fait pour vous est mal récompensé.

Il faut craindre après tout son courage offensé ;

Vous savez mieux que moi ce que peuvent ses charmes.”

Basically this replica starts with Pollux saying that he knows Jason isn’t going to listen to him but still what he is doing to Medea (repudiating and banishing her) is not cool. He finishes by “We need to fear her offended courage / You know better than me what her spells are capable of.” To which Jason answers something along the lines “no worries, her banishment should be enough to tame her”. To this Pollux retorts:

“Gardez d'avoir sujet de vous en repentir.”

Which roughly translates as “Be careful to not end up sorry about it.” Later in the play it seems that Medea has accepted her fate and she has given her wedding dress as a present to Creusa. Everyone thinks that everything is going great and this what Pollux as to say about this:

“J'eus toujours pour suspects les dons des ennemis :

Ils font assez souvent ce que n'ont pu leurs armes.

Je connais de Médée et l'esprit et les charmes,

Et veux bien m'exposer aux plus cruels trépas,

Si ce rare présent n'est un mortel appas.”

He starts by saying that gifts from enemies are always suspicious and dangerous and then say that since it is something from Medea he is ready to bet his life that it is a deadly trap (and by the way he is absolutely correct). This is how the verse from the middle of the replica translates:  “I know of Medea her spirit and her spells”. We can see that in this version, Pollux is deadly sure that Medea isn’t going to take that laying down and that she is going to be a formidable foe. But it is not only her magical ability that he recognises as dangerous (even if he insists a lot on it), it is her courage and her mind (reason).

Medea isn't cold, she burns bright, but she is still a calculating strategist whose magic is as dangerous as the way she uses her mind.

In the end, Medea embodies one of my favorite trope which is woman giving in to a justified burning anger more than ready to bear the consequences of said anger. She does so while acting and thinking like a god and being the best strategist in the room.

A god-like angry clever scorned woman? What is there not to love in her?

[the--ghost--king]

Spider-Man:Far From Home

Hey so I just saw Spider-Man: Far From Home. And I got like mildly spoiled beforehand about the end credit scene but that didn't take away from the story at all so time to dive the fuck into my ramble anger.

The movie is phenomenal. I was shacking and anticipating and on the edge of my seat the whole time but that doesn't mean that I don't have things that bothered me about it.

First, let's talk about Tony Stark and how his death has impacted Peter. Peter is unsure and doesn't really know what to do with himself at the start of the film which is completely understandable. He's still mourning, Peter doesn't feel ready (the scene with the reporters shows this expertly when you contrast Peter handling the Press and Tony handling the Press) which is completely understandable. He's 16, he's just come back to life and everything is strange and confusing. He's vulnerable as Hell this whole movie and a fuckton of people abused this vulnerability.

First of all, I'm just gonna start about Nick Fury and the second after credit scene. Talos was Fury all along which makes sense with how to an extent Fury didn't act like himself and missed certain things etc but that doesn't excuse the manipulative behaviour he exhibited towards Peter. Maybe it's just me but I was quite angry with how Fury kept pushing Peter towards taking the mantel of 'New Iron Man'. I get that He (Talos) was probably working with some loose orders and figured this was the best course of action because Tony left Peter the glasses but the way he went about it is all wrong. We don't expect Nick Fury to be a nurturing presence or anything but making Peter feel like he's failing the world and more importantly letting Tony down by not taking on the 'Iron Man' Mantle is fundamentally wrong in my opinion.

You can't tell an emotionally vulnerable teenager that his mentor figure, who has just died, would be inexplicably disappointed in him if he didn't do something he (the teen) is afraid of/ doesn't feel ready for/ doesn't want to do yet. It's upsetting that Tony's legacy and his death was used as a manipulation tactic like this. That it's Talos and not actual Nick Fury excuses some of his actions, Talos is maybe less aware of earth costums or is maybe playing up the 'Hard-Ass Nick Fury' idea but that's also kind of unbelievable because we know that Talos is rather empathetic by nature because of his family. He has it in him to be cruel but wouldn't do so unnecessarily and lovely reminder: Peter is a child. He might be a superhero but he is still a child and they should have taken a different approach towards getting Peter to rethink being involved in all this. Because the way Talos(Fury) just made Peter be involved by changing all these aspects of his trip that he can't control must feel very violating to Peter as well. He seemingly has no control over his life at all and it's fucking awful.

Now that we've got that out of the way it's time to fucking talk about our favourite motherfucker Aldrich Killain Quentin Beck. (I'll talk about Iron Man 3 and General Iron Man parallels in a bit) either way Quentin Beck aka Tony Stark inconvenienced me that one time and now I'm willing to Kill Children -Man number 700. Is this just going to be a thing in Spider-Man movies, all villains are going to say it's Tony Stark's fault they're doing what they're doing whilst they're fully functioning adults with autonomy(??????) (Is it obvious that I am Mad). Either way.

Quentin Beck is mad because Tony used his holographics technology and called it BARF. Sounds like a fair thing to be mad about when Tony seemingly didn't give him any credit for it. I use seemingly here because we don't have the full story. We just know what Quentin told us which is that Tony did something that upset him and Quentin figured the best course of action was to become the next Big Superhero and kill a bunch of people in the name of his goals. ( *cough* Killian *cough*). Also William from Iron Man 1 working with him is a fun little Easter egg but it also makes no sense that he'd somehow hate Tony because Obadiah yelled at him. Like what's the thought process there? Do we actually justify this? Doesn't Marvel know how to give people proper motivations for their actions? Maybe I'm just salty (and like I'm biased because I love Tony Stark) but still. Beck called him a drunken manchild (which a lot of Tony antis do) and then disregards all the good Tony has ever done for the world and how he's been growing and changing and trying to do better since IM1 and how that culminated in his death in Endgame to instead focus on the things he did before he decided to turn himself around (like a lot of Tony antis do).

Mysterio's entire motivation is based on him misinterpreting Tony's character. Tony did one thing that was detrimental to Mysterio and then Mysterio made a huge leap and just said, 'Y'know how I can best get my revenge over this tiny little thing that most people would either go to court over or go to the press with to gain public trust/opinion to ruin their opponents reputation? Making myself an elaborate superhero and not caring about casualties because they're for the greater good.'

Basically I'm done with people making Tony responsible for their actions when they made these radical choices completely on their own without him ever doing anything but upsetting them in one way or another.

I'm not saying that Tony didn't do anything wrong in this scenario (if we were told the whole truth and Tony stole someone else's idea for no good reason, which, knowing him, sounds fake) but I am definitely saying that Beck could have done literally anything else to get back at Tony especially if he had like 5+ years to think of his evil revenge plan.

So next up is first me being slightly mad about the Spidey-sense being called the 'Peter-tingle' and how it's really not explained how it works in the movie (maybe it was but I just missed it) either way, it was very funny but also mildly upsetting.

And then the last thing I'll complain about is the mid-credit scene. I'll talk about the whole Peter/MJ romance subplot later but I want to specifically concentrate on the identity reveal. I'd been spoiled for this but only a little. I knew they would paint Peter as the bad guy and they set the whole identity reveal with The Daily Bugle (well done on that) up by showing us William grabbing the USB-stick and this being done makes a lot of sense with Mysterio's character bc he was a conniving bastard who'd obviously have contingancy plans. I'm not mad about how the reveal was done or that it happened necessarily. Overall the scene was handled very well and was very impactful. I'm just kinda upset because Peter just gets thrown into this new thing and never gets a break and I'm upset about what they want to do with this information now.

Side note: they also foreshadowed the identity reveal when Peter was talking to May and Happy by making it look like he was maybe talking to a camera or something (clever shot Marvel).

But now my issue with the world knowing Peter's identity: It's going to Fuck his life over immensely, especially because the world thinks he's evil. The Next Spider-Man film (and I'm pretty sure the last one) is going to come out in 2022 and I'm pretty sure they're not going to mention how the Spider Man conflict is handled in other movies. Which means they'll have to fix that up in the next Spider-Man movie somehow.

In the comics some peope of the New York public disliked the Neighbourhood menace Spider-Man because of J.J Jameson and The Daily Bugle and how they talked about him being distrustful but the world didn't know who Spider-Man was, so Peter could live his life normally without Spider-Man debilitating him. In this timeline (fucking earth 616 Marvel who are you kidding, also does this mean that that was actually a lie because motherfucking Mysterio made his story up???) The world Knows that Peter is Spider-Man and he has no one to protect him, he's on his own, completely and he's not ready.

That's a huge thing in the film. Peter isn't ready but everything around him seems to push him to be without regarding what he wants at all and then the reveal happens. Idk if this made complete sense but the lack of agency Peter gets over his life especially with Beck pulling this shit is astounding and Marvel will have to somehow fix this by the next Spider-Man film and sell that convincingly and I don't like their prospects at all.

So now we're going to talk about things I liked about this movie:

The MJ/Peter romance. It was great and made a lot of sense. The way that MJ had issues with being vulnerable. Peter "Hopeless Romantic" Parker. How Peter just really wanted to get the girl and have something nice for himself after all the bad shit that happened. Their romance made sense and although I don't like love triangles the whole Brad thing was pretty funny and did have us on the edge of our seat sometimes. The romance was a subplot but it was a part of the story in a way that seemed very organic and it added to Peter's story and character without taking away from the bigger story.

Next thing up: a loose list of Iron Man 3/ Tony Stark parallels. (Which made me a very happy lad)

Tony lost his suit in IM3 and has to work around this, Peter loses his suit and then also has to work around this (although he gets help ig). (Very thin I know)

The villain being a deception somehow. Aldrich Killian being the manderin and Mysterio being the bad guy.

The way Peter just started rambling about the multiverse and science the moment he heard about it.

Peter ghosting Nick Fury

How Peter made his suit on the plane and configured a bunch of things and used the holograms so organically. (did you see how Happy looked at him it was so obvious that he was fondly thinking 'wow he's just like Tony')

Other things:

Peter swinging a vaguely hammer-like object whilst also holding a vaguely shield-like object

Peter holding a vaguely shield like object in another battle scene

The entire May/ Happy romance

NED AND BETTY

Brad (Also the Peter is half naked with this random lady scene had Issues but I've been mad about this movie over enough shit already and someone else has already talked about it for sure)

Their teachers

Flash loving Spider-Man and still bullying Peter.

Flash being a vlogger

The fact that they called it 'The Blip' sounds a little dumb but it grew on me.

Also the acting in this movie was phenomenal. Mad respect to Jacob, Zendaya, Jake, Samuel and Tom they captured the characters really well and every scene was good.

I loved all of the super unsettling and upsetting illusions Beck showed Peter (fucking Tony's grave and that goddamn skeleton of decay Iron Man crawling out of it was Art)

Also the second end credit scene with Nick Fury in space was funny. Nick deserves a break.

It might have seemed like I was shitting on the movie a lot but I honest to God loved it. It's just that me, this boy, is a whiny little bitch and nitpicking is one of my favourite hobbies.

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: Tomás Nochteff (Mueran Humanos)

Mueran Humanos, an Argentinian duo now based in Berlin, mixes post-punk, industrial-inflected synth explorations, garage rock and psychedelia. Carmen Burguess and Tomás Nochteff share vocal duties and play a very basic line-up of instruments: bass, synths, drum machines and samplers. In his review for Dusted, Andrew Forell called their latest, Hospital Lullabies, “a thrilling concoction of electronic, industrial, bass-driven body music fueled by the transgressive spirit of a DAF or a Psychic TV.” Here, Tomás presents his list of visionary music.

A list of visionary music

What is a visionary? Visions can come in dreams, in journeys to other worlds, in hallucinations. They can be the product of will, of a derangement of the senses, or they can come uninvited to save you or to haunt you and destroy your mental balance, even your life. It can be heavenly, or hellish, but to be authentic visions they have to be otherworldly. And to be visions rather than just imagination, they must have an element of truth. Not literal truth, like “that wall is green,” but a different kind of truth, the one that´s expressed in symbols, in metaphors, in omens and obsessions. In “Heaven and Hell,” Aldous Huxley analyzed the visions of people under the influence of psychedelic drugs, the visions of mystics and the visions of schizophrenics. He found fundamental parallels and concluded that they must have been visiting the same places. These people are not merely hallucinating, but they are perceiving another reality, visiting a different world, or maybe they are perceiving the world as it really is. And he quotes Jung on this: “schizophrenics and mystics are on the same ocean, but schizophrenics are drowning and mystics are swimming.” A visionary could be a mix of all these archetypes. Like Philip K Dick: was he on drugs? Yes. Was he mad? Yes. Was he seeking enlightenment? Yes. Had his visions an element of truth? No doubt about it. Were his visions revelations? To some extent, yes.

On our last album, Hospital Lullabies, the songs deal with all these different experiences on the journey to another world and on the invasion from another world into everyday life, with its horror and its beauty, the agony and the ecstasy. And how one copes, or doesn´t, with it.

So to celebrate it, I made a list of music that I do consider visionary. There’s madmen, there’s mystics and there’s psychonauts, all possible combinations of the three archetypes and everything in between.

Pharoah Sanders—“The Creator has a Masterplan” (Impulse)

I don´t know much about cosmic jazz, or any jazz for that matter, but what I know is that this record is pure bliss. “Harvest Time,” on Pharoah is another masterpiece. Alice Coltrane and Don Cherry are also incredible. This is music of the spheres; it has the touch of God.

Rudimentary Peni—CacophonyI (Outer Himalayan Records)

One of the few perfect punk bands ever, for lots of reasons. The bass lines are extraordinary, for example. But they belong here because of schizophrenic member Nick Blinko: incredible artist & novelist, obsessed with Catholicism and the supernatural horror. A guy who stopped his medication to force himself into a psychotic crisis just to write an album. Hero. Martyr.

Nico— “Janitor of Lunacy” (Cherry Red Records)

For me, Nico was the best and more underrated of all Velvets (and we love Velvet Underground as much as anyone). Also, the production from John Cale on her records is probably his best work too, or at least among his best. I feel that she is not appreciated enough. Iggy said that meeting her changed him. I suspect that´s true for all her famous friends: Bowie, Lou Reed, John Cale, Leonard Cohen, etc. They were all larger-than-life characters. And we know there is an element of self-built mythology on all that, a bit of acting. There is nothing wrong with that; rock and roll at its best is a complete artform and we must appreciate this self-built mythology as part of their craft. But with Nico you don´t get that feeling. She seemed that she didn´t care about her image, she was born Nico and I suspect that in that sense she inspired them all to no end. She was the genuine article. One of our main loves in music. Essential with a capital E.

Coil—“I Don’t Want To Be The One”

Jhonn Balance wanted to be a magician, and he died trying. I think he succeed in building a shamanic body of work with the help of the great late Sleazy and a myriad of brilliant contributors. Coil´s music at its best it´s like a plasma between worlds, or a very, very good psychedelic drug. My most beloved electronic/industrial/post-industrial project ever and one of our main influences. This performance is superb.

Lungfish — Feral Hymns

I´m not interested in DC post hardcore per se, and I don´t have any tattoos. I shouldn´t care about Lungfish the way I do, but they knock me out every single time. Daniel Higgs is a seer. I don´t know what he is talking about, but at the same time, my gut knows exactly what he is talking about. He speaks in images, like Tarot, like the religious painters, like Rimbaud and San Juan de la Cruz. His delivery is supreme. Raw and fragile, yet powerful and precise. Over circular, repetitive, minimal structures of music that have a haunting, arresting effect. Hypnotic, magical, devotional music. Either you get it, or you don´t. I can´t explain it. That´s the beauty of it, I suppose. And the truly mark of the visionary artist.

Ghedalia Tazartes—“Une Éclipse Totale De Soleil Part 2”

Ghedalia for me represents the pure, untouched, sui generis artist. Applying the techniques of musique concrete to the ancient folk music of the Sephardic Jews with a raw energy that usually you can only find in punk, or blues. I see in him an archetype, the Fool card in the Tarot. The madman that opens the gates of heaven and hell, gives himself to these supreme energies and survives only because of his perfect innocence.

OM—“Sinai (live at Sonic City)”

Maybe the greatest rock band of the last 20 years. Here with Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe to maximum effect.

Charlemagne Palestine—Live in Holland 1998

Like Ghedalia, Charlemagne Palestine is a Jewish artist that works in the avant garde field but subverts it with the tradition of his folk music instead of sticking to the cold, cerebral, rational program of academia. He has his own world. Watch this and you will understand what I am talking about.

Virgin Prunes—Excerpts from Sons Find Devils/“Walls of Jericho”

There is a VHS tape called Sons Find Devils, comprised of live shows and short experimental films (some of them made by Balance, from Coil). I had it as a teenager and watched it countless times. Sadly, it is not complete on YouTube or elsewhere but here are some small extracts. With their heretic mix of Irish Catholic imagery, Irish Paganism, Bataille, performance art and post punk, the Virgin Prunes made a unique and extraordinary body of work. A testament of its importance is that Gavin Friday was guest singer of two bands in this list: The Fall and Coil. And Mr. Scott Walker himself invited him to sing on a play. Maybe the historians ignore them, but Mark E. Smith, Scott Walker and Coil knew where it’s at, didn´t they? Their record If I die I die is a masterpiece. Produced by Colin Newman from Wire, no less, if you need more validation.

Boredoms—Vision Creation Newsun

I like some of the more comical, early work of Boredoms, but with Super AE and this one they got me. They got serious and spiritual, channeling Alice Coltrane, tribal drumming, kraut rock and noise into a glorious, euphoric sound. Maybe they are not visionaries, but their music can produce visions. I saw them around 2005 (on acid) with the three drummers line up, still in this phase. I remember thinking “this is what cavemen had in mind when they invented music.” I actually saw it, with my eyes closed. Early humans. In caves. Inventing music. God bless LSD.

Aphrodite´s Child — 666

The one record I bought for the cover only, it cost me 50 cents, best deal of my life. A concept album about the apocalypse. Easy contender for the best psychedelic rock album of all time. Pet Sounds? Get outta here. An absolute masterpiece.

Tim Buckley—Starsailor

Tim Buckley is a mystery. He died too young. How he went from his L.A. folk rock first album to the absolute unique sound of Starsailor and Lorca is impossible to understand and a miracle of music. All six records in between are masterpieces. He was possessed by genius and has the most beautiful voice. I don´t know much about him, but his music put me out there.

Sun Ra—Night Music 1989

Watch this. Space is The Place, indeed.

Pescado Rabioso—Artaud

This guy, Luis Alberto Spinetta, is considered by many to be the most important rock musician in my country. So being an arrogant teenage punk, or whatever, of course that alone was enough to reject him altogether without even thinking. But a couple of years ago I was blown away by a book of poems he published in 1978. Incredibly beautiful, unique and sophisticated poetry. I recently started, too late, to listen to his music. This is one of his most famous and revered records. It´s dedicated to, and inspired by Antonin Artaud, who tried and failed to reach the mystic enlightenment, generating a body of work in the process which is a testament to his spiritual ambition, his radical rejection of the material world and his pain. Spinetta understood this, he said the record was trying to find an answer to Artaud, a way out of it, a way out of the pain. It´s psychedelic music of the highest order. The lyrics are incredible but you can enjoy it even without understanding them.

Dead Can Dance—Dyonisios

I kept forgetting this band exists. This new album is great. I listened to it non-stop during last Winter/Spring. It´s the perfect time because the record is about Dyonisios, so as a soundtrack for the rebirth of Nature it´s perfect. Probably their best work in years. Sublime.

The Fall—“Garden” (Live at the Hacienda, Manchester, UK, 1984)

No list of visionary rock and roll would be complete without Mark E. Smith. Famously he said, “I used to be a psychic but I drank my way out of it.” Indeed, there was a time, between 1978-1990, when he was possessed by something, injecting realism with mysticism, mixing high and low planes, exposing the supernatural forces that hides in the cracks of everyday life. He never talks about hell neither heaven, but rather the way they mix and manifest here on Earth. You’ve got countless of bands using occult/mystic imagery, and you know it´s nice but it´s just a game. You’ve got thousands of bands referencing Burroughs and the cut-up technique, but no one can write as Burroughs did. MES did it. MES wasn´t playing. He was a realist of the augmented reality, he told it like it is, in his fragmented, hallucinatory, unpretentious, visionary prose poetry.

There is a lot in his lyrics that can be read in a mystic, occult way. He left a lot of clues for the ones that can read them. His texts are kaleidoscopic, and they reflect what´s in your mind, really. I think he will be recognized with time as the great experimental writer that he actually was rather than merely an angry Mancunian punk. He had more in common with someone like Iain Sinclair than with any other rock musician. One of my favorite web sites is The Annotated Fall, where fans analyze his lyrics in depth. Pay a visit if you can, I can´t recommended it enough. In many ways, he was too intelligent for rock and roll, and that´s why he was misunderstood, but he didn´t care, he believed in constant work, never explain, never apologize. The Fall took all the best things in rock and roll: Can, Velvet Underground, punk, Captain Beefheart, and pushed it to the next level. Our favorite rock group ever.

Huun Hur Tu — “Prayer”

I tried to stick to Western, modern music but I can´t help including this.

[flexiblefish]

Source:[X]

by Gavanndra Hodge 12 JANUARY 2019

Gillian Anderson is hard to pin down. Is she American or English? (Her accent slips between the two, depending on who she is talking to.) Guarded or warm? (She can be either, based on her mood.) Tough or vulnerable? (Or both?)

'‘Because my parents were American and we lived here in the UK, there was always a sense of not quite fitting in. Because of that I’ve always felt a bit of an outsider. I have perpetuated that because that is what feels familiar to me, it is what feels comfortable,’ she explains. When we meet Anderson is English and warm, talking about the birthday parties she has to organise (she has three children, Piper, 24, Oscar, 12, and Felix, 10); and although she is very petite, wearing white patent stiletto boots and slender black trousers, she exudes the commanding charisma that makes her perfect for her imminent roles. Rumour has it that she will be playing Margaret Thatcher in an upcoming series of The Crown, the Netflix series created and co-written by her partner, Peter Morgan. No one is confirming this, but no one is denying it either. Meanwhile, this month she stars in a new Netflix series, Sex Education, in which she plays a sex therapist who lives with her teenage son (Asa Butterfield). And in February Anderson has another plum role: Margo Channing in Belgian theatre director Ivo van Hove’s much-anticipated adaptation of All About Eve, also starring Lily James as Eve, with music by PJ Harvey. The play – a modern reinterpretation of the 1950 film, which starred Bette Davis as Channing, a blazing Broadway star who is gradually supplanted by a younger rival – is about ambition and betrayal, femininity and anger, stardom and personal sacrifice. Anderson’s is a bravura role, one that requires not just the cool intensity that we have come to expect from her, but also humour. Channing is deliciously droll, delivering endlessly quotable lines with comic precision (‘I’ll admit I may have seen better days, but I’m still not to be had for the price of a cocktail, like a salted peanut’). ‘A couple of years ago my boyfriend Pete said to me, “You know what would be a great role for you? Margo Channing,”’ Anderson says. ‘So I rewatched the film and I thought, “Oh my God, how much fun would that be!”’ Anderson, not one to wait for opportunity, discovered that theatre producer Sonia Friedman had the rights to the script and was working on it with van Hove – Cate Blanchett was set to be Channing. ‘So I thought, “Ah OK, I’ll just slink into the background.” Then my agents got a call to say that she [Blanchett] had backed out due to scheduling conflicts, and there was interest, and was I interested? So I was like, “Yes! When’s the meeting? Now?”’ Van Hove, on the phone from New York, is equally excited to be working with Anderson. ‘Margo needs someone who understands what the theatre is all about, someone who can carry a play, who can occupy the whole stage, and Gillian can do that; she is a fabulous theatre actress. Although, of course, she became iconic for me in the 1990s when she was in The X-Files.’ There is something a little surprising about Ivo van Hove, an avant-garde director celebrated for his reinterpretations of plays and operas such as Hedda Gabler, Antigone and Lulu, professing fandom for a mid-’90s sci-fi series; but that is to forget the huge cultural impact of The X-Files, its quality and its ingenuity. The series was about two FBI agents, played by Anderson and David Duchovny, who attempt to unravel various natural and supernatural mysteries. No one expected it to become such a success, least of all Anderson, who was 24 when she was cast in the show. It was her first major role and it made her a star. She won multiple awards for her portrayal of the sceptical Dr Dana Scully, including an Emmy and a Golden Globe. But such stardom often involves sacrifice and Anderson was suffering. The production schedule for The X-Files was brutal, involving 16-hour days for nine months of the year. Furthermore, in 1994, aged 25, Anderson married Clyde Klotz, assistant art director on the series, and nine months later she gave birth to their daughter, Piper. After three years she and Klotz divorced. It was while she was pregnant that Anderson started having severe panic attacks. ‘I was having them daily,’ she explains, experiencing palpitations, numbness, ‘hallucinations, all of it’. Things didn’t get better once Piper was born. ‘I was a young mother, and shortly after that we were separating, and I was working these crazy hours. I remember periods of time when I was just crying, my make-up was being done over and over again and I was not able to stop crying.’ Anderson sought solace in meditation. ‘I went to somebody and there was a meditation we did together. We went to some quite dark places and I got to see that I could still survive those dark places, I was stronger than they were, and after that the panic attacks stopped.’ Anderson had been having panic attacks, on and off, ‘since high school’. As a teenager she was a daydreamer and a troublemaker who felt different from her peers in Michigan because of her childhood in Harringay, having left the ‘incy-bincy flat with a bathroom outside’ that she and her parents lived in when she was 11 years old, when her family moved back to the US. ‘I started falling in with groups and trying to fit in, until it got to the point when it was like, “I don’t f—ing want to fit in. I want to look completely different to all of you, and stop staring at me because I have a mohawk.” I’d shave the sides of my head with a razor blade and dye my hair different colours.’ Anderson’s parents, Rosemary and Ed, were living in Chicago and were both just 26 when she was born. Soon afterwards the family moved to London so Ed could attend film school, while Rosemary worked as a computer programmer. ‘My parents were working very hard and would often work late. I have lots of memories of playing by myself in the back garden and searching for friends in the neighbourhood because I didn’t have siblings.’ After moving back to America, Rosemary and Ed had two more children, a son and a daughter. Anderson admits that her adolescent waywardness might have been related to the arrival of two new babies in the house. ‘I made trouble and I got attention that way.’ Acting is another way to get attention, something Anderson learnt early on. ‘I remember being in a play when I was in primary school. I was meant to be a Chelsea fan. I started chewing gum on stage and blowing bubbles and got all the attention. I thought, “This is all right, everybody is watching me!”’ But when she reached 16 and started doing more professional productions in America, performing became fundamentally important to her. ‘I enjoyed the connection between performer and audience, the control. And I remember thinking, “I can do this. They are showing me I can do this.” 'It changed everything in my life, knowing I could do something. Prior to that there hadn’t been that moment yet when I found purpose and direction.’ Anderson decided that she wanted to pursue acting as a career and was accepted at The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago. ‘From the very start of school I didn’t go into the dorms, instead I found an apartment with a roommate in a funky neighbourhood. I was the only one who was living out of school. That is my pattern, carving my own thing. 'All through [theatre] school I dressed like I was a member of The Cure. That was how I was in the world, grungy, not considered, not mature. I was forthright and gutsy – I drove myself to Chicago in my dad’s VW van – but slightly falling apart.’ She always knew she would return to England. ‘My childhood here, the smell of north London, it has such a massive tug on me. I really felt, when we moved to the States, that I would eventually have a life back here.’ She and Piper moved to the city after The X-Files ended its original run, and she went on to have two more children, Oscar and Felix, with her now ex-boyfriend, businessman Mark Griffiths (there was also a marriage to British documentary maker Julian Ozanne, which lasted for two years, with the couple separating in 2006).

In the UK Anderson’s career developed in a way that might not have been expected for the golden girl of ’90s sci-fi. She took juicy roles in big-budget period dramas – Lady Dedlock in Bleak House, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations – and appeared on stage, at the Royal Court and the Donmar Warehouse. But it was her performance in the BBC detective drama The Fall, starting in 2013, that solidified her reputation as the go-to actor for female characters who are charismatic and powerful. Anderson, as DSI Stella Gibson, was imperious in her white silk shirts and high heels, unwavering in her pursuit of the serial killer played by Jamie Dornan. The screenwriter Allan Cubitt created the role of Gibson with Anderson in mind. ‘I wanted Gibson to be an enigmatic figure. Gillian is a riveting actress, but there is an aloofness to her as well. Also I was attempting to reclaim the idea of the powerful femme fatale, without the fatale; someone who is aware that her beauty can be used to help her ends. That she is unafraid of that was radical.’ Anderson was deeply involved in the creation of Gibson’s look, altering the way she thought about herself in the process. ‘What fascinated me about her, and I feel that we were able to find that in the costume design, was that the way she dressed never felt like it was for anyone else but her. I don’t think I have necessarily changed the way I dress since her, but I feel like I am certainly more conscious of what I wear and what it says.’ As a younger woman her style was ‘messy, like a discarded urchin’. She would wear oversized suits and ‘floppy dresses that I had probably stolen from the thrift store’. Whereas now her look is sleek, and she favours brands like Jil Sander, Prada and Dries Van Noten. The Fall was about gender, power and desire; and it was while filming it in Belfast that Anderson began thinking more about the struggles that women face in the 21st century. ‘I was reading all these statistics about young girls being suicidal and having such low self-esteem and I thought, “Surely, given everything that we know, and the fact we are all having these feelings, can we not start a conversation about whether we want this and how to deal with it?”’ This morphed into her writing a book, We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere, with her friend, the writer and activist Jennifer Nadel, in 2017. Alternating between pieces by Anderson and Nadel, it details their own personal struggles, and includes practical sections on how to deal with issues such as anxiety and low self-esteem using practices such as meditation, affirmations and gratitude lists. ‘We both know how it feels to be in emotional pain,’ says Nadel. ‘Both of us have felt lost, and found a spiritual way out. Both of us have experienced radical transformation as a result of the things that we wrote about in that book.’ Cubitt and Nadel each say that among the most impressive things about Anderson, as a collaborator, are her focus and drive. ‘I have never met anyone with Gillian’s ability to focus. And she has a certainty about things, she is not mired in indecision,’ says Nadel. What this means is not just an incredibly long CV, but numerous satellite projects. Anderson has a line of smart, grown-up clothes that she has developed with the brand Winser London (‘I didn’t realise I was so opinionated about buttons!’). She also works for numerous charities, focusing especially on women’s rights and environmental issues. ‘Because of my work ethic and also having had such high expectations, both of myself and other people’s of me, at such a young age, I think it became near to impossible for me to relax at all, to do anything that wasn’t work-related, so a lot of my later adult life has been trying to force myself to do that, and I struggle so hard, and sometimes I lose sight of it. So there is a part of me that wonders if I am slightly addicted [to work], I learnt it so young.’ The scant spare time that Anderson allows herself is spent ‘going to the cinema, to the theatre, watching documentaries’. Piper, who has just completed a degree in production and costume design, is now living in her mother’s basement, and the two of them recently went on a trip to Amsterdam to see van Hove’s four-hour stage adaptation of the Hanya Yanagihara novel A Little Life. That might not sound like everyone’s cup of tea, but Anderson loved it. And despite all the seriousness and the self-examination (or perhaps because of it), she is good company, thoughtful and witty. She has, she says, got happier as she has got older, less self-critical, more self-accepting. ‘I am constantly reminded of the fact that I am not normal. But fortunately I have enough abnormal people around me to help me feel that it is actually OK.’

[heresince93]

Full transcript of Gillian’s Telegraph interview

Gillian Anderson is hard to pin down. Is she American or English? (Her accent slips between the two, depending on who she is talking to.) Guarded or warm? (She can be either, based on her mood.) Tough or vulnerable? (Or both?)

'‘Because my parents were American and we lived here in the UK, there was always a sense of not quite fitting in. Because of that I’ve always felt a bit of an outsider. I have perpetuated that because that is what feels familiar to me, it is what feels comfortable,’ she explains.

When we meet Anderson is English and warm, talking about the birthday parties she has to organise (she has three children, Piper, 24, Oscar, 12, and Felix, 10); and although she is very petite, wearing white patent stiletto boots and slender black trousers, she exudes the commanding charisma that makes her perfect for her imminent roles.

Rumour has it that she will be playing Margaret Thatcher in an upcoming series of The Crown, the Netflix series created and co-written by her partner, Peter Morgan. No one is confirming this, but no one is denying it either. 

Meanwhile, this month she stars in a new Netflix series, Sex Education, in which she plays a sex therapist who lives with her teenage son (Asa Butterfield). And in February Anderson has another plum role: Margo Channing in Belgian theatre director Ivo van Hove’s much-anticipated adaptation of All About Eve, also starring Lily James as Eve, with music by PJ Harvey.

The play – a modern reinterpretation of the 1950 film, which starred Bette Davis as Channing, a blazing Broadway star who is gradually supplanted by a younger rival – is about ambition and betrayal, femininity and anger, stardom and personal sacrifice.

Anderson’s is a bravura role, one that requires not just the cool intensity that we have come to expect from her, but also humour. Channing is deliciously droll, delivering endlessly quotable lines with comic precision (‘I’ll admit I may have seen better days, but I’m still not to be had for the price of a cocktail, like a salted peanut’).

‘A couple of years ago my boyfriend Pete said to me, “You know what would be a great role for you? Margo Channing,”’ Anderson says. ‘So I rewatched the film and I thought, “Oh my God, how much fun would that be!”’

Anderson, not one to wait for opportunity, discovered that theatre producer Sonia Friedman had the rights to the script and was working on it with van Hove – Cate Blanchett was set to be Channing. ‘So I thought, “Ah OK, I’ll just slink into the background.” Then my agents got a call to say that she [Blanchett] had backed out due to scheduling conflicts, and there was interest, and was I interested? So I was like, “Yes! When’s the meeting? Now?”’

Van Hove, on the phone from New York, is equally excited to be working with Anderson. ‘Margo needs someone who understands what the theatre is all about, someone who can carry a play, who can occupy the whole stage, and Gillian can do that; she is a fabulous theatre actress. Although, of course, she became iconic for me in the 1990s when she was in The X-Files.’

There is something a little surprising about Ivo van Hove, an avant-garde director celebrated for his reinterpretations of plays and operas such as Hedda Gabler, Antigone and Lulu, professing fandom for a mid-’90s sci-fi series; but that is to forget the huge cultural impact of The X-Files, its quality and its ingenuity.

The series was about two FBI agents, played by Anderson and David Duchovny, who attempt to unravel various natural and supernatural mysteries. No one expected it to become such a success, least of all Anderson, who was 24 when she was cast in the show. It was her first major role and it made her a star.

She won multiple awards for her portrayal of the sceptical Dr Dana Scully, including an Emmy and a Golden Globe. But such stardom often involves sacrifice and Anderson was suffering.

The production schedule for The X-Files was brutal, involving 16-hour days for nine months of the year. Furthermore, in 1994, aged 25, Anderson married Clyde Klotz, assistant art director on the series, and nine months later she gave birth to their daughter, Piper. After three years she and Klotz divorced. It was while she was pregnant that Anderson started having severe panic attacks.

‘I was having them daily,’ she explains, experiencing palpitations, numbness, ‘hallucinations, all of it’. Things didn’t get better once Piper was born. ‘I was a young mother, and shortly after that we were separating, and I was working these crazy hours. I remember periods of time when I was just crying, my make-up was being done over and over again and I was not able to stop crying.’

Anderson sought solace in meditation. ‘I went to somebody and there was a meditation we did together. We went to some quite dark places and I got to see that I could still survive those dark places, I was stronger than they were, and after that the panic attacks stopped.’

Anderson had been having panic attacks, on and off, ‘since high school’. As a teenager she was a daydreamer and a troublemaker who felt different from her peers in Michigan because of her childhood in Harringay, having left the ‘incy-bincy flat with a bathroom outside’ that she and her parents lived in when she was 11 years old, when her family moved back to the US.

‘I started falling in with groups and trying to fit in, until it got to the point when it was like, “I don’t f—ing want to fit in. I want to look completely different to all of you, and stop staring at me because I have a mohawk.” I’d shave the sides of my head with a razor blade and dye my hair different colours.’

Anderson’s parents, Rosemary and Ed, were living in Chicago and were both just 26 when she was born. Soon afterwards the family moved to London so Ed could attend film school, while Rosemary worked as a computer programmer.

‘My parents were working very hard and would often work late. I have lots of memories of playing by myself in the back garden and searching for friends in the neighbourhood because I didn’t have siblings.’

After moving back to America, Rosemary and Ed had two more children, a son and a daughter. Anderson admits that her adolescent waywardness might have been related to the arrival of two new babies in the house. ‘I made trouble and I got attention that way.’

Acting is another way to get attention, something Anderson learnt early on. ‘I remember being in a play when I was in primary school. I was meant to be a Chelsea fan. I started chewing gum on stage and blowing bubbles and got all the attention. I thought, “This is all right, everybody is watching me!”’

But when she reached 16 and started doing more professional productions in America, performing became fundamentally important to her. ‘I enjoyed the connection between performer and audience, the control. And I remember thinking, “I can do this. They are showing me I can do this.”

'It changed everything in my life, knowing I could do something. Prior to that there hadn’t been that moment yet when I found purpose and direction.’

Anderson decided that she wanted to pursue acting as a career and was accepted at The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago. ‘From the very start of school I didn’t go into the dorms, instead I found an apartment with a roommate in a funky neighbourhood. I was the only one who was living out of school. That is my pattern, carving my own thing.

'All through [theatre] school I dressed like I was a member of The Cure. That was how I was in the world, grungy, not considered, not mature. I was forthright and gutsy – I drove myself to Chicago in my dad’s VW van – but slightly falling apart.’

She always knew she would return to England. ‘My childhood here, the smell of north London, it has such a massive tug on me. I really felt, when we moved to the States, that I would eventually have a life back here.’

She and Piper moved to the city after The X-Files ended its original run, and she went on to have two more children, Oscar and Felix, with her now ex-boyfriend, businessman Mark Griffiths (there was also a marriage to British documentary maker Julian Ozanne, which lasted for two years, with the couple separating in 2006).

In the UK Anderson’s career developed in a way that might not have been expected for the golden girl of ’90s sci-fi. She took juicy roles in big-budget period dramas – Lady Dedlock in Bleak House, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations – and appeared on stage, at the Royal Court and the Donmar Warehouse. But it was her performance in the BBC detective drama The Fall, starting in 2013, that solidified her reputation as the go-to actor for female characters who are charismatic and powerful.

Anderson, as DSI Stella Gibson, was imperious in her white silk shirts and high heels, unwavering in her pursuit of the serial killer played by Jamie Dornan. The screenwriter Allan Cubitt created the role of Gibson with Anderson in mind. ‘I wanted Gibson to be an enigmatic figure. Gillian is a riveting actress, but there is an aloofness to her as well. Also I was attempting to reclaim the idea of the powerful femme fatale, without the fatale; someone who is aware that her beauty can be used to help her ends. That she is unafraid of that was radical.’

Anderson was deeply involved in the creation of Gibson’s look, altering the way she thought about herself in the process. ‘What fascinated me about her, and I feel that we were able to find that in the costume design, was that the way she dressed never felt like it was for anyone else but her. I don’t think I have necessarily changed the way I dress since her, but I feel like I am certainly more conscious of what I wear and what it says.’

As a younger woman her style was ‘messy, like a discarded urchin’. She would wear oversized suits and ‘floppy dresses that I had probably stolen from the thrift store’. Whereas now her look is sleek, and she favours brands like Jil Sander, Prada and Dries Van Noten.

The Fall was about gender, power and desire; and it was while filming it in Belfast that Anderson began thinking more about the struggles that women face in the 21st century. ‘I was reading all these statistics about young girls being suicidal and having such low self-esteem and I thought, “Surely, given everything that we know, and the fact we are all having these feelings, can we not start a conversation about whether we want this and how to deal with it?”’

This morphed into her writing a book, We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere, with her friend, the writer and activist Jennifer Nadel, in 2017. Alternating between pieces by Anderson and Nadel, it details their own personal struggles, and includes practical sections on how to deal with issues such as anxiety and low self-esteem using practices such as meditation, affirmations and gratitude lists.

‘We both know how it feels to be in emotional pain,’ says Nadel. ‘Both of us have felt lost, and found a spiritual way out. Both of us have experienced radical transformation as a result of the things that we wrote about in that book.’ 

Cubitt and Nadel each say that among the most impressive things about Anderson, as a collaborator, are her focus and drive.

‘I have never met anyone with Gillian’s ability to focus. And she has a certainty about things, she is not mired in indecision,’ says Nadel. What this means is not just an incredibly long CV, but numerous satellite projects. Anderson has a line of smart, grown-up clothes that she has developed with the brand Winser London (‘I didn’t realise I was so opinionated about buttons!’).

She also works for numerous charities, focusing especially on women’s rights and environmental issues. ‘Because of my work ethic and also having had such high expectations, both of myself and other people’s of me, at such a young age, I think it became near to impossible for me to relax at all, to do anything that wasn’t work-related, so a lot of my later adult life has been trying to force myself to do that, and I struggle so hard, and sometimes I lose sight of it. So there is a part of me that wonders if I am slightly addicted [to work], I learnt it so young.’

The scant spare time that Anderson allows herself is spent ‘going to the cinema, to the theatre, watching documentaries’.

Piper, who has just completed a degree in production and costume design, is now living in her mother’s basement, and the two of them recently went on a trip to Amsterdam to see van Hove’s four-hour stage adaptation of the Hanya Yanagihara novel A Little Life. That might not sound like everyone’s cup of tea, but Anderson loved it.

And despite all the seriousness and the self-examination (or perhaps because of it), she is good company, thoughtful and witty. She has, she says, got happier as she has got older, less self-critical, more self-accepting.

‘I am constantly reminded of the fact that I am not normal. But fortunately I have enough abnormal people around me to help me feel that it is actually OK.’

All About Eve is running at the Noël Coward Theatre from 2 February to 11 May 2019

[ettadunham]

A Buffy rewatch 3x21 Graduation Day Part 1

aka give us a kiss with a fist

Welcome to this dailyish text post series where I will rewatch an episode of Buffy and rant about it in 10-3k words. What you can expect: long run-on sentences and disjointed observations, often focused on one tiny detail about the episode. What you shouldn’t be expecting: actual reviews that make sense.

And today’s episode has a lot of everything, but I guess I’ll mainly just talk about Buffy and Faith. It’s been like 5 days since my last Fuffy rant anyway.

First of all, I wanna give a shout out to the anon namedropping the Still Pretty podcast into my inbox the other day. Congrats, I binged through the s1-s2 discussions already, and while I often don’t agree with a lot of points, it also put me into this weirdly critical headspace now. So there’s that.

But you know what, we’re gonna ignore a lot of that. There’s a lot of cool stuff in Graduation Part 1 that I like, even with some of those positively weird and questionable slices.

I mean the whole argument between Buffy and Angel is basically just reminding me that I too just want this to be done now? And you know what, here’s a hot take - Angel had no business there with Buffy on that crime scene. She didn’t want him there, she didn’t need him there, so of course she was annoyed with him. She doesn’t need to be the mature one when he’s the one adding nothing to this operation.

I also have a lot of mixed feelings about Anya and Xander at this point. The writing just went from 0 to 100 on the whole Anya likes Xander subplot and it’s weird.

Okay, over to some of the stuff I liked.

Buffy and Joyce’s scene here paints a nice picture of how far they’ve come. There’s something sweet about Joyce understanding what her daughter needs. Even if it is her staying away. (Which also somewhat foreshadows Joyce’s minimized role in the upcoming season.)

The difference between where they were at the end of s2 and s3 is also palpable if you look at the ever-present coming out metaphor.

Buffy:  Mom, I know that sometimes you wish I were different. Joyce:  Buffy, no.

Speaking of which, here’s also some delightfully out of context Bi Buffy reference for you all:

Willow (to Buffy):  You can’t do both? Xander:  Both what?

She can and she will, of course. But that’s for when I decide to re-read season 8 comics. I don’t know if there’s enough rant to cover all the nonsense in those though...

Buffy also has a lot of opinions about the Council, and that made me cheer. It’s so weird that we’re even now still treating the Council like this authoritative force, when Buffy pretty much told them to fuck off in Helpless. Now she’s just making it more official.

Wesley: The Council's orders are to concentrate on... Buffy: Orders? I don't think I'm gonna be taking any more orders.

Love that for my girl.

I guess in that context Buffy turning her back on the council isn’t necessarily about them, but about her turning her back on authority in general. Buffy saw the order and the system under which the world operates and she rejects it. She is here to carve out her own way, to truly “graduate”.

Meanwhile Faith has surrendered herself to the system and the Mayor’s authority. But there’s also nuance in that choice, thanks to the relationship the two develop along the way. Faith is following orders, but she’s also doing things her own way, and she clearly craves the direction she has thanks to the Mayor’s tutoring. There appears to be genuine affection between them, and much like between Buffy and Giles, a textual father-daughter relationship.

Faith even opens up a bit, talking about her mother and her childhood. During those moments was when I wondered about the Mayor’s treatment of her the most. He doesn’t seem to push her to talk and open up more about those experiences, and part of me wants to think that it’s because the Mayor has Ascension on his mind, and doesn’t actually have that much of a genuine care for Faith and to connect with those parts of her... On the other hand, pushing Faith to open up is a guarantee for her to shut down, and he probably knows that.

It’s... a tough line. Because I do think that the Mayor loves Faith, but it’s closer to the kind of love vampires have for each other, than truly selfless love. In my opinion, he mostly wants to mold Faith into the daughter he wishes to have in her.

Mayor: You look lovely. Perfect for the Ascension. Any boys that manage to survive will be lining up to ask you out. Faith: It just isn't me, though.

I know, Faith. The Mayor is so weirdly obsessed and heteronormative about Faith’s love life, he really is like any classically hellish parental figure.

Which brings us to Faith’s real obsession: Buffy.

I like that while we’re showing Faith seemingly relaxed about her whole position with the Mayor, we also see her murdering a punching bag, and having those half-finished sentences about her childhood. Despite everything, you still get the sense that there’s a lot of stuff going under the surface that Faith isn’t dealing with.

Having seen Five by Five also changes the entire context of the fight scene between Faith and Buffy. It of course begins with an innuendo, as all fights between the two do, but the end is what truly sets the mood and leaves me with a deep impression.

As Faith stands there at the edge of the balcony after Buffy stabs her, telling her ‘what a ride’ it was... You get the sense that this is how Faith saw it end all along. She’s been falling ever since she betrayed Buffy, and it was only ever going to end one way.

Giles tells Buffy that Faith ‘has her at a disadvantage’, because she’s willing to kill or whatever, but I don’t think that was ever true. Faith may kill people, but it’s not because she’s motivated. She’s certainly not motivated to kill Buffy.

Faith is just... going through the motions. She’s lost all her drive. Nothing seems to penetrate her heart.

Buffy on the other hand is highly motivated to save Angel. And that is the ultimate blow to Faith. Faith being in love with Buffy has been the rapidly textual subtext for the entire season, even if the Mayor of course tried to retcon it into Faith wanting Angel, or some other nonsense. But textual or subtextual, Faith’s actions were always about Buffy, one way or another.

And here Buffy is, ready to kill Faith in the hope of saving Angel’s life. That’s how little Buffy seemed to have cared about Faith in the end.

I’m not sure how much that played into Faith’s mental state, but I do believe that at this point, she was just tired. She was ready for it to end, much like in that haunting, unforgettable scene at the end of Five by Five.

And yet even then, she did one last favor for Buffy. She chose to take that last fall on her own terms.

There is an interesting question of what Buffy would’ve done if Faith didn’t take away that choice from her. When she stabs Faith, you can see the pure shock and horror on her face as it dawns on her what she’s done. Sure, she went to Faith’s place with this exact goal, but she wasn’t truly prepared to kill. And certainly not to kill Faith.

You can see in SMG’s face throughout this whole sequence, how horrified she is. Which definitely makes me think that she probably would’ve taken Faith to the hospital herself after that... but on the other hand, it’s Angel. And we’ve seen time and time again how much Buffy was willing to give up, even of herself for him. That was sort of the point of their whole relationship falling apart - the fact that they were constantly on the verge of losing themselves in each other.

So I find this a fascinating what-if scenario that I don’t know the answer to. Buffy killing Faith for Angel in that moment would’ve fundamentally changed her character. And I can’t say with certainty, that she wouldn’t have gone through with it after the shock subsided.

That’s why I love Faith for taking away that choice from Buffy. Because even if she were to die, her taking that jump meant that she would’ve died for nothing here, becoming a constant reminder and warning for Buffy about taking a life.

Killing another human being should be pointless and horrifying. That’s the lesson Faith chooses to teach Buffy in what could’ve been her final moments.

Meanwhile on Less Fucked Up Relationship Land, we have Oz and Willow “panicking”. I love them and they’re delightful, and I don’t have much else to say about that, other than that’s at least something much lighter to close on.

Sadly, I’ll probably only get to watch Part 2 about a week from now, but at least I’ll have plenty to process up until then.

[dailytechnologynews]

The world is utterly unprepared for artificial intelligence in the near-term: "Media Synthesis", the phenomenon which includes deepfakes, is further along than almost anyone realizes and is prepared for, and this will result in a lot of fun and angst come the 2020s

I run the /r/MediaSynthesis subreddit, collecting links and discussions surrounding this technology. The other day, I asked /r/MachineLearning about a topic that I've been tossing about my head for almost a full decade now: when will we be able to use style transfer on audio reliably?

In the simplest possible terms, "style transfer" is when you make one thing like another using machine learning. You upload a picture of a sunny day as an input, upload a bunch of pictures of night time as variables, and then get the original picture but now it's night time. The algorithm didn't fetch a picture of the scene at a different time of day. It altered the very pixels, turning day into night.

Here's a few examples:

Color transfer

Video transfer, turning a street scene with trees into one with buildings or more trees, among other things

Musical transfer, changing instruments and genres.

All of which are from 2017 or 2018.

There's a lot more, and this includes deepfakes which I'm sure plenty of people are aware of. The potential of this technology over the next 5 years— and yes, I'm saying five years, not fifteen or twenty five or fifty— is going to lead to people with no skill in machine learning or artistry to be able to alter existing media almost completely as well as generate some kinds of new media.

Back specifically on the topic of audio style transfer, this includes being able to take a song, any song, and altering at your leisure in a variety of different ways ranging from adding or subtracting instruments, swapping the vocalist or removing them entirely, and perhaps even extending the song in an "intelligent" manner— meaning the algorithm can actually generate more sections of that song that didn't previously exist (within reason). You could turn any top 40 pop song into a 20-minute-long pop epic.

My classic desire is taking TLC's Waterfalls and turning it into a barbershop quartet, complete with the mustachioed men singing in tune with all the 1920s graininess you'd expect. Did you like Bohemian Rhapsody but could do without the heavy guitars? Why not transfer it into a polka song? That's indeed very possible. Covering songs in a different style is obviously a thing that you can already find on YouTube and "X Goes Pop" compilations whatnot, but that involves actual musicians and artists putting in the time and effort. We're not far away from having a theoretical "Audacity 2.0" where you could do the same thing with a few clicks of your mouse.

One of my more esoteric desires goes a step further, and it's also very much on the horizon. I love Witchfinder General, but they've always been a bit too amateurish. They were almost a great band, if only a few lyrics were changed and some instruments were tightened up. In the future, I could be able to "correct" these "mistakes", going in to change the lyrics myself so that Zeeb Parkes is singing something a bit different over a band that's even slower and doomier than they actually were. In some cases, that means adding lines where there weren't originally.

It would obviously still be a laborious process because vocals in songs can be complex and heavily individualized.

But that was only ever a problem for the old era of digital software, where things had to be cut up and easily able to fit into bits and pieces and then essentially standardized as if you're playing something on a synth. This new era is something entirely different and infinitely more capable. You couldn't replicate Bob Dylan's soul if you had his voice in a voice synthesis software program as might exist today.

There's no style nor soul that'll be beyond my fingers with the right neural networks.

For someone like me, who loves creating entire musical scenes and movements from playlists and imagination, that's a godsend. For an actual musician or any creative who prides themselves on their humanity, it sounds like the worst dystopia.

I'm not overselling this either. Audio is, fundamentally, a bunch of waves. If you can edit those waveforms, you can create any audio you wish. It's just that the way we edit those waveforms is usually by hitting drums, strumming guitars, pressing keyboards, and singing.

Of course, there are much darker applications of this technology. The very first thing to come to mind is putting words in someone else's mouth for political purposes, as can be demonstrated here:

Deepfakes on Obama, Putin, and others

Making Trump say new things

If the latter sounds too robotic, don't fret/relax. Making voices sound audiorealistic is just a matter of parameters and data, of which the likes of Google, Baidu, Facebook, OpenAI, and many others have no shortage. The crappy free text-to-speech programs you might find with a Google search or in a PDF file is as representative of the state of the art as a bottle rocket is of the military's explosive ordinance.

And that's literally just the tip of the iceberg. Just because I'm focusing on audio doesn't mean there's nothing for images and video, obviously. Just the opposite— everyone is so focused on deepfakes and image synthesis that we're overlooking audio synthesis.

It's not coming in stages, nor is it arriving slowly and at easily digestible and tolerable speeds as might be written in a shlock cyberpunk novel. We're not going to struggle with image synthesis for 20 years, then struggle with audio synthesis for 20 years, and so on until we reach a point in the distant future where you can't trust anything you see. We're developing them all simultaneously and seeing progress come at breakneck speeds, and we'll be well within that future this time next decade.

In fact, this time next decade we'll have entirely different zeitgeists when it comes to art, entertainment, and the news. There's no refuge in cartoons. Neural networks are in the early stages of learning how to do caricatures and exaggerations— the fundamental root of cartooning. Others can generate short animations from text alone. Even more can be used to remaster old video games and create games from scratch.

And no, you can't find refuge in writing either. Scarily enough, it's the text synthesis network that shows the most signs of general intelligence. It's not AGI by far, but it's most general AI ever created and it isn't even a very complex machine at that. But it's apparently too dangerous to be released.

If you have a passion for all of this and create art for art's sake or are willing to accept fewer (but likely much higher paid) commissions rather than a "career" as we understand it to be, you're fine. If you're someone who wants to become a career artist/model/voice actor/musician/animator/writer/comic artist/newscaster and expect to find consistent work for the next 50 years, (first, good luck regardless) make these next five to ten years count and/or try considering jumping into the former category.

We don't need AGI for any of this either, so don't think that we have to wait until we "solve intelligence" to see any of this. Nor should you expect it to cost a fortune to use. We only need GANs and most of this tech is open source.

The final and most sobering realization of all this is the cold fact that, ironically contrary to all those predictions of how automation would unfold, entertainment and the arts will be the first field to go. Everyone said that all the drudgery of the world would be automated first, freeing up workers to pursue the arts because "a machine could never write a poem, pen a song, or paint a work of art".

This is something so stupefyingly far from public conscious that there is virtually nothing being done or said about it. You might initially think that it doesn't warrant much discussion until it actually arrives, but when you really start looking at this in-depth, you have a tendency to grow a bit fatalistic. One of my future-shock angsts is about schooling and how public and private schools in their current form are utterly unable to prepare children for the future into which they will graduate (a future in which school itself may become obsolete because there will be little point for it besides social functions and raw education, which isn't what American schooling is for). This is related, but a bit different.

We have a technology that didn't exist 10 years ago and yet will almost certainly upend the entire entertainment industry within 10 years from now. Photoshops and photo manipulation, "dumbfakes" if you will, weren't even a pre-meal mint, let alone the appetizer. We ought to be having a dialog on this, but we aren't.

Many of us refuse to believe it exists at all, that it's just some schizophrenic pipe dreams found on /r/Futurology and /r/Singularity. Others so desperately want to leave a place for humans that they will deny that machines will be able to do these things competently despite being shown the evidence. And those who accept it can only say "So what?" Even though I eagerly await a world where I could generate a multimedia franchise (and the global reaction) in my bedroom on my laptop, there are still pertinent risks.

As /u/ksblur said:

Strange how we live in a world of trust-based security. It would be relatively easy for cryptography to solve that issue (your phone could automatically reject calls without proper signatures or encryption), but people grew up "trusting" the systems so there's not a lot of incentive to change it.

Could you imagine inventing the telephone in 2019 and either A) not encrypting the data (landlines) or B) using weak 64bit A5/1 encryption (GSM)?*

TLDR Skynet wants to become a singer and artist, and Dad (i.e. Humans) doesn't realize it yet.

[shadowsong26x]

On the subject of Jedi recruitment

(This was kind of inspired by a post I saw elsewhere; I’m making my own because I didn’t want to hijack the other thread or go on a long tag ramble...)

TL:DR; No, the Jedi are not baby-snatchers. In and of themselves, they are not necessarily doing anything wrong. They are adopting kids with their parents’ approval. These are closed adoptions. That isn’t a problem.

That being said, there are some problems with the process--these are mostly external/contextual factors, but they are there.

(...also, as a note, I use “Force adept” as a catch-all term for “trained Force user” because I don’t know if we have a canon catch-all term and I like the way this one sounds.)

Okay. Actual Thoughts behind the cut.

So, like I said, I don’t think that the Jedi are necessarily doing anything wrong with the children they take in (not in a global/overall sense, anyway; interactions with specific individual children eh maybe sometimes nobody’s perfect; i.e., there was one case in Legends, IIRC, where they took in an infant who they thought had been orphaned, turned out the parents were still alive and were Not Thrilled; but, again, that’s a specific weirdness/miscommunication/acting on bad information, not a deliberate abduction). They’re certainly not kidnapping them, they’re initiating closed adoptions, etc.

But there are some external factors that make this much messier than that.

For example. What are the alternatives?

(Again, this is not saying that the Jedi are a bad option. They’re not. They’re a pretty good one, for a lot of people. But.)

Like, okay. We have seen a few other Force adept traditions (and I’ll admit that there are possibly more than I’m personally aware of; I’ve read I think the majority of the canon full novels that have been released at this point, but I’m missing some of the short-story collections and haven’t read a lot of the comics). But most of the ones that are out there are closed ethnoreligious groups (i.e., the Bardotta, Dathomir, presumably Lasan...) So they aren’t really accessible to parents of Force-sensitive children, especially in Republic territory. Also, while there are a few self-taught Force Adepts in Legends (i.e., learning on their own once given access to texts/theory/the right concepts), I can’t think of any in canon, so there’s no real telling how viable that option is, either. (And some of the Legends ones hit a wall eventually, and I think most of them ended up Dark Side adepts anyway, which I get a little pissed at but that is a separate discussion.)

The point is, if the choice is a) the Jedi Order or b) repressing/denying a fundamental part of who that child is or c) leaving them vulnerable to kidnapping or worse...that kind of sits wrong with me.

Especially since we don’t know what the followup is--we know there’s that one tiny who was selected and whose parents/mother agreed, but the baby will stay with her until they’re a little bit older/no longer An Infant (the exact reasoning behind this delay isn’t exactly explained and could be a number of things, but that’s not relevant to this decision), but what about kids whose parents are approached at around that same time who refuse? What’s the followup when parents make the call but the kid isn’t old enough to make their own opinion known (the way Ahsoka pretty clearly does in her flashbacks?)

What, if any, are the social/cultural consequences for refusing? Especially on Core worlds, which have some idea of what Jedi are capable of, both the good and the bad? But also, what about mid-rim worlds? Or throughout the Republic as a whole?

And what about the kids who aren’t lucky enough to be born in the Republic, or who are, but have parents who aren’t willing to give them up? Or who are, and their parents/guardians might have been willing, but they are just never identified*? Anakin gets let in late, but he was a special case. What happens to kids who don’t have that combination of circumstances/advocates working in their favor, but are past whatever age cutoff the Order has? Also, what is that age cutoff? Three? Six? We know it’s less than nine, but beyond that...which is not actually related to the “do Jedi steal babies” question, but it is a Jedi recruitment issue, so I feel it bears mentioning.

…so, yeah. I don’t really have a problem with what the Jedi themselves do, so much as I have a problem with some of the things they don’t do, and with the broader cultural context that has some implications that seriously bother me.

(...also, full disclosure, since it probably impacts my feelings on this topic: I’ve never really liked/been comfortable with the idea of the Jedi path as The One Way or even The Best Way For Everyone to be an active Force Adept and not Evil, especially since Jedi doctrine has probably changed/evolved over the centuries. It certainly did in Legends, and while we don’t have explicit canon on the subject, it makes sense that it would,as old as the Order is. Again, this is not in any way saying the Jedi path is a bad path. Just that if it’s the only path...that idea bothers me.)

*There are definitely some kids who are just never identified, despite living in the Republic. You know how I know?

Palpatine.

(And possibly also Maz, but I don’t really know that much/enough about her background. I do, however, know a fair amount about Palps, so I’m going to focus on him for the moment.)

Dude is from a somewhat remote but still solidly Republic world; a sector capital; his parents were wealthy/upper class/had the resources to figure out there was something unusual about their son and figure out what said unusualness was (or if children are identified through medical records/there’s a standard midichlorian test or whatever, those should’ve been on file, etc.).

And yet, so far as I can tell, he was never identified. There are enough Jedi from long-lived species out there that I don’t think erasing the relevant records after his parents refused to give him up would’ve necessarily been enough to hide his potential abilities (if that’s what happened, which…well, see my essay above; also what kind of records, if any, are kept on sensitive children who don’t go into the Order…or, come to think of it, how are potential candidates identified in the first place…).

And, I mean, one explanation is a handwaved Because Destiny Said So/the Son chose his champion and made sure he would be found by the correct teacher, but it’s also conceivable that there are kids, even from highly visible populations, who slip through the cracks.

And then I start thinking about groups that are less monitored/actually likely to go unnoticed. Kids growing up in the deep underbelly of Coruscant or other slums. Remote farming/mining/whatever worlds that are technically part of the Republic but are basically ignored (i.e., Space Appalachia). How many of them slip through the cracks, if someone like Palpatine could?

[...at this point the notes I wrote ages ago that I’m finally actually posting go into a long ramble about “how does one actually determine the number of Force-sensitives in the Galaxy slash if this is a hereditary trait slash what about people who are perceptibly more sensitive than Joe Average but not enough to join the Order...which is also an interesting discussion but wildly off topic so I’m going to leave that off unless anyone does want to discuss it.]

[representationsinparksandre-blog]

How Parks and Rec Represents the Complex World of Politics and Political Agreement/Disagreement

Along with successfully representing the diversities surrounding race, injustices of gender, and different economic classes in the media, Parks and Rec also dives into the complex world of politics and attempts to simplify it for their viewers. I mean, the show is named “Parks and Recreation” after all based on where the characters work, and their particular department deals with a lot of local government issues in Pawnee; it’s pretty clear that a majority of the series’ episodes involve politics in some way. Parks and Rec accomplishes depicting how people with vastly different political views can succeed in getting along with each other, learning from each other, and ultimately agreeing that each person’s opinion is valid.

To start off, let’s give the show’s motivations some background. Co-creator Michael Schur stated in a 2015 interview with The Huffington Post that the development of Parks and Rec was initially inspired by him and Greg Daniels’ frustration with the overall political process in America, and more specifically, the bitterness surrounding the 2008 presidential election. Pawnee, Indiana is intended to be a small city environment where dysfunction and disagreement between the citizens are quite common. Its residents do indeed have many different political views, but most of the time they keep plugging away to set aside their differences and come to a decision to ultimately make a positive change for their community. In this way, Parks and Rec actually represents a sort-of-utopian society where everything is rainbows and butterflies. The creators strive to suggest that coming together to find solutions for community issues is truly a lot easier than it seems in real life. Schur described his viewpoints by discussing that “in very broad strokes, Republicans and Democrats in this country simply don’t talk to each other and they don’t try to fix problems… the sort of cynicism of government, I think in my opinion, is worse than it’s ever been. And we just wanted to say one guy could have a set of extremely fervent beliefs that run completely counter to the beliefs of his coworker and they can still just get along and respect each other and admire each other and find things in common and they can sit down and have a glass of whiskey together at the end of a long night.”

This is seen directly between the relationship Leslie Knope has with her co-worker Ron Swanson. The show resists coming right out and stating Leslie Knope’s political party, but the writers make it evident in her beliefs and actions that she leans left and passionately supports the representation of strong women in politics. She is a loud and proud feminist who ends up running and successfully winning a seat in Pawnee’s city council with her supportive husband Ben by her side as her campaign manager. As the only female on the city council sitting next to stuffy, uneducated men, Leslie makes it a point to be the progressive woman with energy to get the job done and make Pawnee a better place to live. On the other hand, Ron Swanson is an avid libertarian and absolutely despises how the government can obtain his personal information. His personal views and beliefs are not so much intensely conservative, he just really hates the idea of the government in general. He’s even outrageously (yet hysterically) stated, “the government is a greedy piglet that suckles on a taxpayer’s teat until they have sore, chapped nipples”.

Regardless of their extremely opposing views of how the government should interact with citizens and society, Leslie and Ron remain close acquaintances throughout the ups and downs they have in the series. They also find certain issues and experiences they can actually fundamentally agree on. An example of this is when a big corporation named Gryzzl proposes a buyout of the land where a small, family-owned business called JJ’s Diner lies. Leslie, caring deeply for the prominence of local businesses, and Ron, a self-proclaimed “simple man” that appreciates a hearty breakfast, conclusively find a way to keep JJ's Diner alive and well. They come together to look for other locations in Pawnee where Gryzzl can purchase land that isn’t even used, rather than buying the land where an authentic breakfast restaurant is. This outlines the creator’s objective of creating a climate in the media where it’s not too difficult to imagine a world where people of different political beliefs can happily coexist.

Here’s a Youtube video that perfectly showcases how Ron and Leslie famously agreed to disagree:

Parks and Rec also finds ways to educate their audience on the mechanisms of “real world” politics. There are a vast number of episodes that install political lessons and tips when it comes to engaging with politics and elections, especially during the season where Leslie is running for Pawnee’s city council. Certain episodes include messages to not believe everything to read, follow your conscience when it comes to political candidates, consider the reality of the outcomes that follow politicians statements, and as I previously discussed, make an attempt to stay friends with those who do not share the same points of view. In this way, Parks and Rec leaves the sphere of being a workplace-sitcom to becoming a politically informative comedy.  

To finish my final blog post off, I’d like to include a few comical quotes from the series that demonstrate how the characters of Parks and Rec view the complex world of politics, government, and the beauty of community life in Pawnee, Indiana:

“When I was 18, I ran for mayor of my small town and won. Little bit of anti-establishment voter rebellion I guess. Here's the thing, though, about 18-year-olds. They're idiots. So I pretty much ran the place into the ground and after two months got impeached. Worst part was my parents grounded me.” - Ben Wyatt (Leslie’s husband)

“I like Tom [Haverford]. He doesn’t do a lot of work around here. He shows zero imitative. He’s not a team player. He’s never wanted to go that extra mile. Tom is exactly what I’m looking for in a government employee.” - Ron Swanson

“These people are members of the community that care about where they live. So what I hear when I’m being yelled at is people caring loudly at me.” - Leslie Knope

“The whole point of this country is if you want to eat garbage, balloon up to 600 pounds and die of a heart attack at 43, you can! You are free to do so. To me, that’s beautiful.” - Ron Swanson

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Works Cited:

Lapidos, Juliet. “The Politics of Parks and Recreation.” Slate Magazine, Slate, 25 Apr. 2011, slate.com/culture/2011/04/the-politics-of-parks-and-recreation.html.

Poniewozik, James. “Knope and Change: The Politics of Parks and Recreation.” Time, Time, 22 Jan. 2015, time.com/3678205/parks-and-recreation-politics/.

Ryan, Maureen. “'Parks And Recreation,' 'The Wire' And The Politics Of Pawnee.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 13 Jan. 2015, www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/13/parks-and-recreation-final-season_n_6459726.html.

Winarski, Claire. “What ‘Parks and Recreation’ Taught Me about IRL Politics.” HelloGiggles, 19 Apr. 2016, hellogiggles.com/lifestyle/parks-and-rec-politics-lessons/.

[fivepercentgodsandearths]

9 Reaches To Decode Black Panther **SPOILERS ALERT**   After seeing the Black Panther film I knew I had to pen a think piece to share what I saw. Not to debate the pros or cons of seeing it but to share with those who did see it some deeper insight into the symbolism, folklore and science throughout the film. Even though Black Panther is a 1966 comic developed by a couple of Jewish guys, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, when Christopher Priest, a black man, began writing the Black Panther comic in 1998, this character served as the inspiration behind the Marvel Studios film Black Panther. The story is about T'Challa, heir to a mythical NE African throne in the land of Wakanda; an isolated society comprised of 18 tribes who for centuries has possessed an alien element called vibranium that they acquired from a fallen meteor. Nearly indestructible and one of the most powerful substances on the planet, vibranium is used to create wealth and the highest technological advances known to humans. It is also the element that was used to forge Captain America's shield. Wisely hidden away from the outside world, the Black Panther and his council of tribal of elders known as the Taifa Ngao, have primarily kept Wakanda safe and free from outside influence for the majority of their existence. Like the Five Percent as in Wakandan culture, education or knowledge is viewed as a fundamental building block of its nation. As all things change, Wakandan culture is eventually discovered and the 10% [world’s powers] plot to pillage their vibranium. T’Challa’s father T'Chaka, the current Black Panther and King of Wakanda, is assassinated at the UN thus forcing T’Challa to step up and lead his people as the next Black Panther. The film covers his transition into that role and the challenges, literally, that come along with it. Before I get into the symbolism, folklore and science throughout the film, I think I need to give some context into why Black Panther Ain't Nuthing Ta F' Wit. First and foremost he is wealthier than any superhero in the DC or Marvel Universes. In other words, he's got more paper than Bruce Wayne, Tony Starks and Floyd Mayweather combined, and he has actual superpowers. Black Panther has super strength, psychic abilities, invisibility, super stamina, clairvoyance, master acrobat, healing factors, necromancy and other powers. If you, and especially the youth around you, have never really checked out the Black Panther comic I would encourage you to. If it's not you, what other fictional or nonfictional images of power are youth exposed to? If you cannot think of any, don't complain; either create them or support those who are creating them. Alright, here are some things I peeped in the Black Panther film that I think are worthy of sharing with you: 1. For my Yonians, central to the Wakandan culture was the worship of the Neteru Bast. Bast, in her ancient Kemetic zoomorphic form, is the symbol of the cat; what some people, particularly men, call a p*ssy. Partly symbolizing a protectress, Bast is the reasoning behind the powerful woman-led Dora Milaje warriors. This is also why present day f*ckboys seek to shack up with Bast women and take advantage of her Okoye loyalty. The heart-shaped sacred herb, a symbol of Bast's transferred power that enhances a person's strength, mobility, stamina, endurance and instincts, resembled a yoni and was cultivated in the subterranean regions of Wakanda... 2. A 'Monger' is a dealer or trader. 'Erik' is a Norse or Proto-Germanic name which means eternal ruler. Thus Erik Killmonger means "an eternal ruler who deals death." As a sexual innuendo of his toxic masculinity, his notches  for "bodies" [body counts] went well beyond his belt and covered his entire upper body. He clearly had no love for women as shown by the non-relationship with his mother, shooting his Bonnie & Clyde companion in the head, choking out a elder caretaker of the heart-shaped herb and demanding that she burn its sacred garden, slitting the throat of one of the Dora Milaje, slicing Nakia across her leg and almost murdering Shuri. This is what he did, yet many women have still shown sympathy for Killmonger's actions. "I understand what he was trying to do" I've heard many women say, "to fight for oppressed people" -even though there was no tangible evidence of him working with oppressed people, which includes women. This helped me better understand why some women, not all women, rationalize staying in abusive relationships, keep dudes around because the sex is Killmonger and follow conscious community miscreants; Stockholm syndrome. Some of us love words and potential yet fail to acknowledge what folks are actually doing. I've seen the argument that Killmonger is the result of being left in America, disconnected from his people, and it's not his fault. I agree that abandonment was not his fault and Killmonger's feelings about that family dysfunction were understandable; many black people in the wilderness of North America can relate and feel the same way. Yet his resolve with those feelings, as an eternal ruler who deals death, was not wise nor did it make him a hero. From his own mouth he prided himself on his assimilation into "the white man's" society, via his military experience, and he brought those colonialist ways to Wakanda. King T'Chaka was wrong for abandoning Killmonger as a child in America and Killmonger was wrong for how he handled that disappointment, as an adult, with his family and people. We need warriors with the aggression and passion of a Killmonger, especially as a Border tribesman, but not sitting on no throne. His inconsideration for other men and insensitivity to women, children and the society at large were qualities of a self appointed tyrant who rules by fear, not the qualities of a just and true King. Killmonger's "Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from ships, cause they knew death was better than bondage" quote and other revolutionary words were noble but I didn't see one act that demonstrated his capacity to be a loving Husband [King], a Father raising children [successors to the throne] with integrity and a Man of his people wisely working with his counsel of elders. 3. The burial ritual to connect with Wakandan ancestors and inherit the Bastian power of the Black Panther is similar to the Recapitulation technique some warriors in indigenous tribes use to also connect with their ancestral past and gain clarity of their life purpose. In Freemasonic lore it's also symbolic to the shallow grave the Master Architect Hiram Abiff was buried in before he was raised with a lion's paw grip. After you select an appropriate burial spot, usually among trees and in an isolated area beyond human disruption, a shallow grave is dug East [head] to West [feet] about 2 feet deep that's a little longer and wider than ones body. Next layer the bottom with a blanket. After that search the area for sticks and large leaves to cover the tomb that stops the soil from filtering through. You start covering the grave from the bottom to the top and once it's almost complete you climb in and finish covering it as you lay inside leaving a small hole for air. Fasting is important before you do it and the length of time you remain varies. I've done it for 24 hours and the best time to leave the grave is sunrise or sunset. The whole idea is to meditate on our demise as a form of detachment from the world. An earthen self-deprivation chamber, this is literally a place to reflect upon the past and present life and what they can do in the future. 4. M'Baku, King of the Jabari Tribe, in the comic he is the leader of the White Gorilla Cult because he gained his superhuman powers by killing a white gorilla, bathing in its blood, eating its flesh, and then he took on the name Man-Ape. The M'Baku line, "If you say one more word, I'll feed you to my children! I'm kidding. We're vegetarians" in the film was a play on that comic book backstory. Although the mountain ranges M'Baku and his tribe inhabit is nowhere near the Caucasus Mountains, I found it interesting that pre-Farrakhanian Nation of Islam members under the Honorable Elijah Muhammad [THEM] openly taught that white people [devils] that were exiled from our homeland and living in the caves tried to graft themselves back into the original black man. In the process some became [white] gorillas. In fact, he taught that the entire monkey family are from the 2,000 year history of the white race living in the Caucasus Mountains. Although M'Baku carried a shillelagh, THEM also taught that the guards of these mountain boarders kept weapons [flaming swords] to stop these humanoids from coming back among the original people. The above image is from the first page of the 1998 Black Panther comic by Christopher Priest where Agent Ross remarks that, "ZURI was into his THIRD re-telling of how the great god T’Chaka ran the evil white devils out from their ancient homeland." Naw I don't think Stan Lee, Ryan Coogler & Joe Robert Cole drew these parallels and wrote that. Christopher Priest obviously had knowledge of this and I could see the parallels. 5. After Get Out Chris Washington got WOKE, changed his gubment name to W'Kabi and started a rhinoceros farm on the fringes of Wakanda as leader of the Boarder tribe. After Rose 'Beckyed' him it's obvious he ain't been right since.   6. Tobias Whale is Killmonger's uncle; Killmonger's mother's brother. Whale developed a hatred for Black Lightning because N'Jobu reminded him of the Wakandans and the metahuman Black Panther who exiled albinos to the lands where they were hunted, killed and their bones ground up as a power potion, as Lady Eve reminded him. Green Light is a synthetic form of vibranium and when Quentin caught wind of what Killmonger was doing he came back to the Chi to re-stake his claim as a Frank Lucas-like vibranium plug for the 100. Lastly, Kevin was around at the end of the film asking T'Challa questions about his ship because he was with his family in Cali who happened to stay in the hood Killmonger grew up in. Kevin was out there laying low after shooting Ronnie. 7. When it comes to even just conceptualizing a Wakandian society, one of the downfalls of many men is trying to f*ck the Nakia's, Okoye's, Ayo's, Shuri's and Xoliswa's on their team instead of working with them. One of the downfalls of many women is allowing them to. 8. I loved seeing all of the Wakanda inspired regalia at the Black Panther movie premieres around the country. I haven't seen it since Kwanzaa and I look forward to seeing it again during Juneteenth. 9. Black Panther had the fifth biggest opening of all time and broke box office records during its opening weekend. It's the largest opening for a black Director, the second biggest opening for a Marvel Studios film and currently the #1 RATED FILM OF ALL TIME via Rotten Tomatoes. Not only does this demonstrate the earning potential of films told from our perspective but this, along with Get Out, is reshaping the false narrative that black themed films not doing box office numbers domestically and internationally. While some may see this as production houses and film companies becoming more open to our pitched ideas and potential larger pay dates, I see it as a watershed moment of self reliance and cooperative economics. Many of us already know our buying power as a black community, but willfully this galvanizes us to do more, culturally and artistically. Some felt as though nothing could top the response of Get Out, but here we have it, and this film won't be the last. Peace, Saladin Black Panther stars Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira, Martin Freeman, Daniel Kaluuya, Letitia Wright and Winston Duke, with Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker and Andy Serkis. The film is directed by Ryan Coogler and produced by Kevin Feige with Louis D’Esposito, Victoria Alonso, Nate Moore, Jeffrey Chernov and Stan Lee serving as executive producers. Ryan Coogler & Joe Robert Cole wrote the screenplay.

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