#this episode is killing me it’s so farcical

[miyacchis]

the world was a different place immediately after 9/11

[t00thpasteface]

MASH is one of those shows where even if a character gets replaced, the show doesn’t lose anything. In fact, it gains something with the new character!

i admit i have a pretty clear preference for earlier seasons, but also i know that i am not the sole arbiter of quality in fiction, and i appreciate the tonal shift the show went through over time. i think with as heavy subject matter as what mash was tackling, they really had no choice but to get heavier as it went on.

what's more, i think the essence of good comedy is brevity and precision, so it's difficult to keep a comedy going the same way for several seasons and still be funny, especially since a satirical and highly farcical comedy like early mash requires basically firing on all cylinders all the time— getting a hundred plates spinning at once so they can all crash into each other in the third act. it's certainly my favorite kind of storytelling, but it's also virtually unsustainable as a long term project, hence the pivot as the show "grew the beard".

i don't think this is a bad thing, just an acknowledgement of the limitations of the genre. i personally find satirical comedy to be an incredibly powerful tool for social commentary and i tend to bristle at the popular concept of drama as inherently having more artistic value than comedy. "a good farce should go off like a pistol shot," as oscar wilde said. i also just tend to be drawn to what tvtropes calls "early-installment weirdness" in general, not even just for tv.

i seriously appreciate that there's pretty much something for everyone with mash, and that they can pull it off pretty well without having the severity of tone problem that you might otherwise expect from something that casts too wide of a net. i think a big part of that is the palpable friendship between pretty much everyone involved; nothing sells (or kills) a show better than when the off-screen relationships bleed through into the show itself. they cared about what they were putting out there and had fun making it! the more heavy-toned, long-arc mash of the latter half of the show is still great television, even if it's personally not quiiiite as suited to my tastes compared to the earlier half. but mash is like pizza: even when it's bad, it's still pretty good!!

plus i mean... even though i prefer watching/rewatching earlier episodes, it's nice having that "well what if they were going through a worse time" option available to me to see how that plays out, instead of only ever being able to just extrapolate and headcanon like i would with an otherwise strictly comedic show ^_^

[shunnedmorlock]

Hi! What are your opinions on each of the greens ?

Have a good day/night!

Otto: I think he gets a bad rap, not in absolute terms but relatively to the people like Viserys and Daemon. If you hate Otto for pushing Alicent to marry Viserys, you should hate Viserys much, much more. Otto is "merely" complicit in what happened. There was no one Vissy could've said no to more effectively than Otto. It just goes to a double standard you see a lot with these farcical black-green debates where people change their opinions on whether it's ok to judge people by in-universe standards depending on what "team" they're a part of. He has a habit of telling unfortunate truths that get him in trouble, but most of the things he says are just, like, objectively true, but people don't want to hear it. Daemon is actually a danger to the realm and his brother, Rhaenyra does actually have to give the scions of great houses a hearing, Daemon did actually groom Rhaenyra to claim the throne, Alicent's children do pose an inherent threat to Rhaenyra by their mere existence.

From a Doylist perspective, like many other things, I think episode 9 really butchered Otto's character. All of a sudden the guy who has been working hand in hand with his daughter for the past few episodes didn't tell her about the plot to seat her son on the throne??? And now the guy who got fired by Aegon for being too slow and measured in his war planning is pushing to kill Rhaenyra immediately? And he wants to send the Kingsguard to do clandestine assassin work? And he's reluctant to ban child fighting pits for like no reason? I'm sorry, you don't have to be a feminist to not like that!

Alicent: I have talked about her at length. Nixonian Queen. I kneel. The war will make her worse, and I enjoy it. One of the characters I think on-balance the show improved.

Criston: Not a good guy by any means, but dismissing him as just a resentful incel is just boring. It's very clear he was, at best, conflicted about his tryst with Rhaenyra to begin with - he liked her, they had a lot of chemistry, but he does genuinely believe in his vows. The marriage thing is obviously silly and naive, but from his perspective it's him trying to do right by her (and also preserve himself and his soul), which puts him a step above many other Westerosi men who canonically often feel no obligations to the women they sleep with outside of marriage or the children created. There is a real difference in values between him and Rhaenyra that goes beyond him hating women, even if his values aren't strictly speaking good. I'm sorry, but the fact that a Westerosi man is as sexually repressed as an average Westerosi woman is genuinely a point in his favor! I sincerely hope he and Alicent make each other worse. Substantially improved by the show.

Aegon: This is going to be controversial, but baffling/over-the-top/ill-thought-out decisions like Dyana and the child fighting pits aside, I much prefer this version of Aegon to F&B. I don't care that he's kind of pathetic, that's fun, that's drama, that gives room for character development and growth into the king he ends up becoming. It's clear the writers do want Aegon to be kind of sympathetic, but it seems they didn't consider what stuff like Dyana would do to that, which to me indicates they meant the focus of that scene to be Alicent and her behavior, not Aegon. Which is stupid. One of the worse victims of inconsistent characterization, switching between vaguely sympathetic drunken frat bro to outright sex criminal every episode, or even in the same episode.

Helaena: I like what they've done with her. It's more interesting for her to be a doomed neurodivergent prophetess than just a little dumb, even though she hasn't done a ton so far. Similarly, in an RP I was a part of, Jaehaera was depicted as not simple, just autistic and it was much more interesting.

Aemond: BORING! Don't care about this guy, sorry. Maybe I'll like him more when he is pathetically down-bad for Alys Rivers, but right now he's just like budget Daemon to me, who I also find boring. He was more interesting as a bullied teen.

Larys: He's a tough guy to adapt because his motivations are kind of nonsensical behind a vague idea of getting back at Rhaenyra (?) for dishonoring his brother (??) by putting his children in line for the throne (???). The foot thing is kind of gross and I do wish they'd have given him an actual motivation but whatever. The actor's good and I do like him and Alicent on balance. Improved by the adaptation.

Tyland: We love our little bureaucrat don't we folks? Hope he gets more screen time later on.

Jasper Wylde: FUCK YOU SHOWRUNNERS WHY IS THE GUY WHO HAS HAD ONE LINE THIS ENTIRE SEASON PART OF THE COUP BUT NOT ALICENT FUCKING HIGHTOWER??????

[cosmignon]

the fact sam and max is so comedic and farcical makes the little emotional bits in between hit so strange but good for me.

ive mostly engaged in the telltale remasters so from my pov i still think abt sam's personal, literal hell being a world where max isnt there. and the future freelance police timeline where max is comfortably looking after sam long after hes gone senile.

and im like what the fuck thats just love right there. those 2 just straight up love each other. whats that doing here in my goofy point and click game.

i vaguely know of what happens in bits and pieces of devils playhouse from osmosis. and ive only completed the first episode so far. but i think im still gonna get oblitorated anyways if thats whats still on my mind a year or so later. better make it count better kill me in one shot.

[centrally-unplanned]

I have been rewatching Buffy recently btw, part of a sickness recovery tactic; I haven't been blogging about it because It Be That Way sometimes, my executive dysfunction strikes with its own will.

But one cache'd thought I have (likely through talking about it with friends) is that Season 4 is a good deal better than I remember. Season 4 of Buffy is often maligned; its probably considered the worst season except Season 1. The reason for that is two-fold; one, Riley sucks. Two, the 'arc plot' is poor. Season 4 revolves around The Initiative, a government operation to kill, research and weaponize demons. Its head, Dr Walsh, is essentially built up as the arc villain - a compelling one, a human being with real motives and ideologies that can clash with Buffy. Until she is murdered by her own Frankenstein creation, Adam, who becomes the new villain but to Buffy is just a tough dude to either whack or be whacked. This is a bad choice - Adam is probably the worst final villain of the entire show.

However, this is also the wrong lens to put on Season 4; its arc plot is also the least important an arc plot has ever been. Season 4 is not a full comedy, but in fact it is deliberately trying to shake up the often-maudlin formula of Season 3 for a new tone. Ever-brooding Angel & stone silent Oz are written out as main cast members, to be replaced by Spike, objectively the funniest character in the show, and Anya, a far more zany romantic partner for the Scoobies than Oz could ever be. The college episodes are full of the ridiculousness of that environment, and a lot of social mockery of college mores. Episodes that could be scary still have a ton of laughs - Hush (which, hey, one of the best episodes of the show, in Season 4!) is in fact very funny, with famous Buffy gifs from it.

What makes this all work beyond "being funny" is tonal alignment - the theme of the season is everyone being "adrift". Giles is fired from both his jobs, Xander has no career path, Willow is drifting apart from her friends, and Buffy is struggling to find a way to be "normal". These are themes that are way better done farcically; they are, in a certain sense, a little bit pathetic. In one of the final episodes of the season, the "plan" to defeat the Scoobies is Spike just...casually drops fake gossip about them in convos and they are start tailspinning, because they already are tailspinning. And you can do that kind of social implosion really funnily, in a way Angel & Buffy's relationship could never be.

And note how that is one of the final episodes, and it barely has anything to do with the Initiative or Adam. Those plots definitely eat up screen time and have their moments, don't get me wrong, but its given a good deal less focus. Its not fight-riposte with the Initiative; instead a background hum complicating the new lives they are building. The last episode of the Season isn't even the Adam fight finale! Its a dream sequence lore-building episode instead. So yeah, its worse, but its almost intentionally worse; if the villain was an Angel-tier threat it would be impossible for it take the backseat to the thematic elements.

So while Season 4 still has its weaknesses, Adam was a mistake in the end, I see a lot better why it is the way it is and the good stuff it has going through it. As I have been watching I have been following along with this old review blog of Buffy, Critically Touched, which was one of the biggest "comprehensive" analyses of the show in the 2000's (its comment section is a time capsule gold mine). And it gives every episode a letter grade, and even displays the whole season as a graph. And if you look at Season 4:

Its pretty solid! For sure, it has clunkers, I think the opening ~5 don't nail the tone right. And Where The Wild Things Are is...yeah, you can skip it. But Hush, The Yoko Factor (the aforementioned Spike episode), Who Are You (Faith's return), Restless (the dream finale), are some of the best in the series. Also this reviewer doesn't love Superstar, the Jonathan-alters-reality-so-hard-he-inserts-himself-into-the-theme-song episode, but its amazing - his complaint is that it isn't about the arc plot? But the arc plot is boring! Its not the point. Its an A+ comedy episode for sure. This is too many home runs to be a down-and-out season. You just need to take Season 4 as it is, and not as something trying to be a repeat of Season 3's stakes.

Riley still sucks though.

[warningsine]

There are so many moments in season 5 that make me facepalm.

Leaving aside the fact that in the first four episodes nothing happens and the plot is nonexistent, many of the farcical developments do not land.

Not only does it feel like they are belittling the tragedy as well as the critical subject matter it represents (BLM and police brutality), but it also cheapens heartbreaking moments like Tasha's speech about Poussey and Brook's library tribute to her deceased lover.

Exhibit A: The seance in order to talk to Poussey. What is this, Yellowjackets 1996?

Other ridiculous scenes that may make you chuckle momentarily and might have worked tonally in earlier seasons (s2-s3), but not as parts of a season with such serious consequences for everyone involved:

The guards playing "fuck, marry, kill" while the inmates run amok.

Luschek getting a boner in front of all the angry prisoners while his colleagues are being humiliated and then joking about it.

That extended scene where that guard is performing a striptease. Wanted to capture the female viewers' attention there, huh?

The whole "talent show" arc.

Linda running around like a puppy instead of using her mobile phone. I enjoyed the short-lived Boo/Linda thingy because it allowed me as a viewer to see Boo's softer side, but sheesh.

The neonazis hanging out with the women they hate, because [spins wheel] there are coffee and funny impressions. Whatever happened to that tension among the tribal units in late season 4?

Gloria getting the hostages to the Poo.

Red, the other matriarch, spending half a season running around aimlessly.

“The Tightening” episode in general.

Moreover, I cannot for the life of me understand why the scenes where the inmates abuse, harass and rape the guards are treated as sitcom moments with no laugh tracks.

(Black comedy would have been more fitting than slapstick humor anyway.)

Subverting the power structure did not have to be about how the inmates, whom they had been humanizing for 4 seasons, are capable of doing bad things. We already know that.

More things that had me either scratching my head (bullets no. 1 & 2) or eye-rolling (bullets no. 3 & 4):

Certain background episodes. Until this season, the flashbacks had served a purpose: telling us why the ladies have ended up in prison and helping us gain insight into their personalities and actions. But Freida, Red and Alison's were not exactly that. At least, Linda and Piscatella's episodes--just like Bayley's in season 4--were used to point out the hypocrisy: these fuckers are responsible for people's deaths as well. Also, in the latter's case, his focus on avenging his lover made him lose his last shred of humanity--unlike Tasha's which remained intact.

Judy King being forced to look like Jesus. The series had tried to tackle white privilege before, but this symbolism (?) was bizarre.

It's no secret that I didn't like how they turned Maria (and Blanca and Ouija) into an antagonist in season 4 by having her brand Piper. Similarly, very original that in a room full of women the ladies of color are the ones perpetuating the abuse and herd mentality whereas a white character (Alex) cannot stand the sight and walks.

For similar reasons, the "white pride nationalists are mistaken for Muslim terrorists" arc rubbed me the wrong way.

Moving on to some of the other topics they touched upon and then dropped like hot potatoes.

Mass shootings? No mention of gun control.

Internet culture and inappropriate memes being toxic af? No commentary there.

The series asking us to root for the neonazi inmates because, um, they're funny and just like the other inmates, yo. No commentary on white supremacy being extremely dangerous either.

When they needed a strong script to make an organic transition from lightheartedness (s1-s3) and the existential grief of season 4 (from Piper and Maritza to Lolly, Sophia and Poussey) to drama, they failed.

The riot was not enough to sustain the stakes for 13 episodes, which is why the season dragged.

At least:

Selenis Leyva (Gloria), Danielle Brooks (Tasha) and Uzo Aduba (Suzanne) were there, managing to evoke some strong emotions out of me. Too bad that Laverne Cox didn't get more screen time.

Janae's flashbacks were great.

The show did try to say something about hostages, slavery, mob mentality and that portion of humanity that chooses to distance itself from the torturers.

Except for the case of the white pride inmates that I cannot comprehend, it was interesting to see the usual cliques fall apart, e.g., Flores working with Red instead of Gloria or Maria, Piper working with Taystee and the others.

The season came full circle. Daya, who accidentally got the gun and then chose to shoot one of the most brutal guards, to Taystee deliberately pointing the gun at the true villain--whose actions led to Poussey's murder--and then choosing not to murder him. Too bad that even touching that gun will come to bite Tasha in the ass.

Choosing to have Piscatella killed by a rookie with no training was quite poetic.

Reversing the roles and having Nicky comfort Red (and Lorna but that's besides the point here) was great to watch. If only these three women had been given actual arcs.

[scumbag-monthly]

The Young Ones - Bomb 💣

Original air date: 30.11.82

Reviewed by: @smashingblouses

Back in the early 80s there were a lot of anti-nuclear protests going on. It’s a particularly prominent memory for me because my parents were friends with some of the women who had protested as part of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camps in the 80 and 90s. Not only is Bomb one of my favourite episodes (Interesting being up there too) it also reminds me of that time, the people I met growing up and even some of the events I went to.

Bomb aired right around the time that the first peace camp happened at RAF Berkshire in December 1982. The episode is a farcical statement attacking government implemented nuclear weapons but also a gentle prod at some of the very people protesting the weapons. Something The Young Ones is always so clever at; ridiculing all sides.

The episode opens with a shot of a fighter jet dropping a huge atom bomb. The scene is set, the credits roll and we open on the bomb gently resting against the fridge, undetonated, in The Young One’s kitchen. 

We see the boys are all asleep, undisturbed by the destruction the bomb has caused, apart from Rick who, like the goodie two shoes he is, is awake and squeezing his spots in the bathroom mirror. Once he realizes the camera is on him he takes the opportunity to show us how great he is by giving us a private rendition of his latest piece of crap poetry. He sets the narrative by letting us know his political agenda for the day; cleaning up pollution and bombs. Little does he know, the perfect excuse for some good rants and political activism awaits him downstairs.

Neil awakens to the sound of his dying alarm clock. The death of household objects is a recurring theme through the show and later on the kettle explodes as it, quote Neil “would rather die than be used by me”. Neil seems to kill household items simply by depressing them to death. As a little aside it always amuses me to see the fake “Martial” amp in Neil’s room. A fun easter egg for any guitar players out there!

Down in the kitchen Vyv asserts his “weaponized incompetence” so that he doesn’t have to help Neil with any of the chores, leading to a farcical plate toppling, lentil spiling disaster, Mike tricks Rick into letting him into the bathroom by distracting him with one of his surreal jokes.

The morning unfolds and no one has actually noticed the atom bomb in front of the fridge. They play and fight around the kitchen completely oblivious to its presence. It turns out that Vyvyan apparently knew it was there all along but failed to mention it to anyone. Even an atom bomb in the house fails to worry Vyv.

Rick finally comes down stairs to see Vyvyan is eating cornflakes and ketchup as a result of there being no lentils for breakfast. Rick asks why he’s eating ketchup with his cornflakes and Vyv explains there’s an atom bomb in front of the fridge so he can’t get to the milk.

Suddenly they all notice the bomb that has been sitting right in from of their eyes and panic ensues. The boys each start to hatch their own plans as to what to do about said bomb. How will each character deal with such a conundrum?

True to character Rick decides to use the bomb to take down Thatcher and save “The Kids”. Dressed in British Army fatigues with trousers pulled up to nipples (an early precursor to his Bottom outfit) he sets off to the Post Office. His plan to send a telegram (wow that dates the show!)  demanding Thatcher’s cooperation. Whilst waiting in the queue Rick reveals his toxic hypocrisy, ranting and raving about how awful everyone else is. Beautifully or is that terrifyingly echoing the modern day Karen - was Rick the original Karen?

Meanwhile Mike is trying to sell the bomb to Libyan revolutionary Colonel Gaddafi via Reggie Balowski but in true car salesman style Balowski turns down the deal due to it not being the right colour and proceeds to scam Mike into part exchanging for a dodgy Robin Reliant - a car that “usually” has 3 wheels.

Vyvyan just wants to see the bomb explode and makes various attempts at setting it off. He finally whacks it with a sledgehammer bending it in the process, which apparently does nothing, before Mike locks him in a cupboard to protect his asset.

Neil goes about a very useless attempt at building a bomb shelter, and painting himself white to “defect the blast” this provides the perfect set up for one of Rick's great lines;

“Oh well that’s just great, racial discrimination, even in death!”

In fact this episode bares a lot of Rick's great one liners.

“People who don’t pay their TV licences against the Nazis!”, and “I can’t go to prison! I’m too pretty! I’ll get raped!” to name just two.

By the time Rick gets back from the Post Office he finds Neil hiding in his shelter and Mike has bought supplies for everyone. A great little example to show the family dynamic of the sitcom, Mum makes the home - Neil makes the bomb shelter. Dad goes out and gets food - Mike comes back with pizza and a Wimpy.

Rick rejoices to the boys that all “social prejudice and hatred” will be over by tomorrow, due to his amazing bomb threat plan, then promptly tells Neil he hates him garnering one of the biggest laughs of the show.

Finally we hear a strange ticking sound. The boys start to panic and dive under the table/bomb shelter pushing Neil out of his own creation - even Vyvyan is panicking. The bomb slowly cracks open like an egg and out pops a tiny aeroplane that whizzes around the room and flies out of the window. A surreal moment that reduces the viewer to gasps of mild annoyance and the notion of nuclear weapons to ridicule. One could say a huge anti-joke (A Rik and Ade special) but ultimately the message was conveyed, probably one of Ben Elton’s (blame Ben for the politics) finer non-preachy yet political moments.

[streedtvreviews]

StreedTV Reviews: Alfred Hitchcock Presents #1 Revenge (1955)

Review#9

I first watched Alfred Hitchcock Presents on MeTV October 1st 2022 and I immediately fell in love with it, I have very little experience with Hitchcock and his works, so far I've now seen 2 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and 2 episodes of his other anthology series The Alfred Hitchcock Hour

this was a wonderful start to the show, definitely very suspenseful, the relationship between Carl Spann and his wife Elsa is so endearing and sweet, which makes it all the more heartbreaking when she's traumatized by her vicious encounter with the unknown salesman

leaving her still and near emotionless, Vera Miles is an actress I recognize from a few films and shows, predominantly The Searchers (1956) she does a fantastic job portraying a woman deeply psychologically affected by her attacker

she reminded me of Morgan Woodward's Performance as Simon Van Gelder in one of my favorite episodes of Star Trek "Dagger Of The Mind" the mannerisms are remarkably similar

at the beginning of the episode, she's full of life and apparently she was a ballet dancer, one aspect i didn't understand was apparently she had a breakdown some time ago after having "too much happiness at one time" now I'm not a mind manipulating scumbag, aka a therapist

but that sounds a tad too farcical for me, I gotta mention I love Hitchcock's dry comedic opening and ending monologues, he's simultaneously refined and silly, I love the guy

near the end Carl vows vengeance on the man who scarred his wife, they go for a drive and she spots him, Carl slowly follows the mysterious man and brutally murders him, nothing is explicitly seen but implied, leaving the audience to ponder the grisly scene

once he gets back in car, Elsa claims she spots the man again and a deafening chill strikes Carl as he realizes he possibly killed the wrong man because of his wife's trauma induced delusion

with this the episode ends on a disquieting and eerie note, as much as I love this ending, I feel like it was somewhat rushed but criticism wise that's pretty much all I have, over all this was a compelling, dramatic and haunting tale of duplicity, what a great start!

Rating: 9/10

[nellie-elizabeth]

Barry: you're charming (4x03)

You know you've got something special when the sight of a man dangling dead from a bunch of cords out of the ceiling can make you... laugh? This show is fucking weird.

Cons:

I feel like the part of this show I've always had the hardest part connecting with is the part that's actually about acting and the world of Hollywood. There were a lot of things I liked about Sally's scenes as a teacher. I liked that she repeated Cousineau's tactics and seemingly got a genuine reaction out of an aspiring actor, only to be told by everyone else that her behavior was abusive and unnecessary. It was a good way to subvert expectations. But at the same time, the woman she screamed at ends up sticking around, claiming Sally's method actually worked. That felt a little cheap to me. Almost a validation of the thing the scene seemed to be trying to repudiate. The whole concept of getting to some deeper, truer place in the name of acting is sort of... farcical, right? What is the show trying to do with Sally's character, with the fact that she's here, back where she started, in some sort of position of authority but ultimately with nothing to show for all her hard work? Maybe I just need to keep watching to understand more.

Pros:

The stuff with the reporter, O'Neil, was so bizarre and hilarious. I loved Gene realizing what a fucking idiot he'd been, and trying to walk it back. The scene with Gene inside O'Neil's house, talking to his wife, was one of my favorites, just the utter absurdity of him having gotten away with something so brazen as breaking this woman's window and coming inside to smash up her husband's stuff. And later, we see that after some time with Moss, O'Neil is reduced to near catatonia, mysteriously speaking only in German, a language he apparently didn't speak before. That's just the kind of absurdity that makes this show so funny and great.

The psychology of Barry as a character feels sort of... out of my grasp, but in the best way. I love how he seems baffled and hurt that Cousineau would dare tell anyone the truth that he threatened his family. "I apologized for that", as if that's really going to be enough. In his head, somehow, he thinks it will be. It's so strange and kind of heartbreaking. When he's speaking to the Feds, and to Witness Protection, he repeats that Sally will be coming along with him. He has the totally delusional belief that Sally will want to leave behind her whole life and be with him, just because she said she felt safe with him.

The highlight of this episode was probably the Barry and Hank phone call. God, it was like witnessing a horrible, tragic breakup. Because Hank is right, Barry is only thinking for himself. He's actively spilling all the beans about Hank, Christobal, all of their criminal activity, then calling him up and telling him to do as he's told, and put a hit out on Cousineau. Hank has finally had enough, and on the one hand it's hard not to be sort of... proud of him for standing up for himself, but on the other hand it's so tough to see someone who actually had affection for Barry turn his back on him so decisively.

The assassination attempt is one of the most comedic, bizarre, memorable scenes this show has ever done. Barry's dead-pan certainty that the man in the back of the room has a weapon and is here to kill him, the man shooting his own hand off by mistake, the sniper taking out all the agents in the room but missing Barry entirely, Barry getting the gun, the man collapsing through the ceiling, dead, hanging from wires... Barry's bemused little expression, looking at his would-be assassins, made me laugh out loud.

So now... Barry is on the loose, maybe? Hank's plan to kill him went terribly wrong, Fuches is still inside not knowing what's happening, Gene's life is probably in very serious danger, and what will Sally do if Barry turns up wanting to run off with her? This show is so bizarre, and I still really have no idea how it's all going to turn out.

9.5/10

[thewadapan]

@snugglesquiggle in the replies says:

i think the competence of the character writing and worldbuilding in murder drones gives it the leg up over digital circus, personally. TADC is more palatable on the first watch, but ultimately i just dont care about it. like imo Uzi's gets more clear and specific characterization within seconds of murder's first episode than pomni gets in forty minutes

(For context, snugglesquiggle is a huge Murder Drones fan, having written a 160,000 word (and counting) fanfiction for the series, amongst others. If I'm being brutally honest with myself, that's possibly more words than the sum total of fiction I have written in my life, period. Its list of Murder Drones fanfic recommendations is absolutely monstrous, that's so many! People really took this thing and ran with it. Sidenote, I'm very unsurprised to see Fallout: Equestria - Project Horizons called out in its general fiction recommendations, what a blast from the past! That one's very Murder Drones-esque, innit?)

Anyway, I find it very interesting how certain stories like this can have such an impact. Like, I felt it myself, watching the show, that itch to take those characters or that setting or that vibe and write something with it! I think I felt it more with Murder Drones than with The Amazing Digital Circus, and I think that's because it's rougher around the edges, less "complete", if that means anything.

Obviously we're into very subjective territory here vis a vis depth of characterisation, but I definitely think that most people would pick Pomni over Uzi as the protagonist with a more well-defined and nuanced personality. But that's definitely not to say that Uzi's personality is flat by any means.

Part of it is that Murder Drones buries its character arcs beneath a borderline overwhelming helping of irony. Uzi's most iconic character trait is literally a catchphrase—"Bite me!"—which captures her sarcasm, her viciousness, and probably also some frustrated horniness. As snugglesquiggle suggests, Uzi's character is pretty much there onscreen fully-formed with seconds of her being introduced. But at that point, the show itself thinks the character writing is cliché. Uzi says some lines that may as well literally be "BLAH BLAH BLAH ANGST ANGST ANGST, I HATE YOU DAD!" Sure, the show knows there's more to Uzi's character than that, but it struggles against cliché for several episodes—and I think that at the end of the day, most of the complexity boils down to Uzi being a pretty faithful depiction of a certain kind of teenager. I think most people, myself included, would probably just read the character as being that archetype, and not get much more out of it beyond that.

One aspect that makes me struggle to seriously connect with the emotional stakes of Murder Drones is the farcically morbid nature of the conflicts. Uzi (and V, I think?) fully kill like a whole bunch of the other kids in "Cabin Fever", and on an allegorical level this is the teenage experience of feeling like you're hurting everyone around you, like you're a monster, like everything is a life-or-death catastrophe. It eats her up inside. But on the object level, nobody really seems to care about it? It's kind of all just jokes?

As for Pomni, much of her character is informed by her role as audience surrogate. She's the straight man, she asks questions, she sincerely engages with the emotional stakes of what's going on. The background radiation of her comedy is just her cowering, knees-knocking, doing the Shinji Ikari stare while Caine jovially tortures her. That stuff's fun, but sure, I'll grant that none of it is particularly interesting.

But at the same time, the subtler beats with Pomni hit me much harder than anything with Uzi. I think Pomni's big thing, right, is that she's ultimately quite selfish, in a way that real people are but which cartoon people often aren't. I love the bit where she leaves Ragatha to die. Like, there's no doubt in my mind that Pomni seriously thinks the monster is about to fucking kill this person—it's not strictly fear which moves her in that moment, she makes a decision. I also love the way she apologises for it later. It's the way that, despite everything, she is kind of a good person, and she very quickly pack-bonds with all these weirdos. And man, the part where she sees her reflection!

The experience The Amazing Digital Circus is trying to communicate with Pomni, I think, is something much more abstract and much more universal than Uzi's specific kind of coming-of-age. It's about feeling like you don't belong. Moreover, it's about feeling like you are existentially separated from your environment and the people around you. It's feeling like you don't belong in your own body. It's seeing other people as these vaguely disturbing entities. It's having a job that sucks. It's having a family you want more than anything to escape, but which you also love very much. It's moving to a new city where you don't know anyone. It's feeling like your life is less-than-real, less-than-life, and yet also dearly wanting to live. It's thinking to yourself, I shouldn't be here. And the beauty of it is that a lot of these experiences are totally different scenarios from one another on the face of it—but Gooseworx is clearly trying to tap into that essential truth of not-belonging. The stuff with Gummigoo in Episode 2 is cartoonishly blatant, but I don't think that makes it any less meaningful.

So yeah, I just felt like this comparison wasn't quite giving enough credit to Gooseworx' writing, but it's kind of a "two cakes" situation. I like both quite a lot. I didn't have a hugely deep connection with either of them, but it's nice that people have been able to!

Spent today checking out The Amazing Digital Circus and Murder Drones, and god, the kids today have it so good when it comes to this sort of content. When I was a teen, I was obsessed with Red vs. Blue and RWBY, which I think it's fair to say are the equivalents of the time, and the sheer gulf in terms of writing quality and production value is stunning. I hear there were some rumblings of unprofessional conduct from the production company, which would hardly be surprising considering this is yet another guys-working-from-their-basement success story, but much bigger companies with much shittier business practises consistently put out much worse content than this.

The Amazing Digital Circus is definitely the better show of the two, thanks to its slam-dunk premise and some great writing from Gooseworx. The producers have talked about aiming to fill a perceived gap in the market between kids' cartoons (The Boss Baby) and adult animation (Bojack Horseman), and I think they have successfully threaded the needle to create a very unique tone. There's a sense of these works existing totally outside the mainstream media machine; they're not getting BBFC rated, but you just know millions of kids are watching them. It's on YouTube and the fact that it looks like some Frozen Spider-Man kids' slop just means da parents won't question what their kids are watching.

But truth be told, there's nothing objectionable about the content of The Amazing Digital Circus whatsoever. It's unusually metatextual and loosely apes the aesthetics of much darker media, touching on slightly more existential themes than your typical kids' cartoon, but it still has a lot in common with those same cartoons. The zany characters are all fairly one-note, and the emotional arcs of the episodes are honestly quite straightforward. The second episode in particular has an absolutely textbook plot structure to it. It's a far more self-assured and traditional style of writing than you ever see in this kind of independent work—certainly far more so than Murder Drones, which is written by an insane person.

More than anything, I'm reminded of how I felt watching Puella Magi Madoka Magica: that it's a very solid work of fiction, but that the people who'd get the most out of the work are isolated teens struggling to make the transition into adulthood. Certainly if nothing else, the fandoms of these shows must be bringing a lot of kids together around the world. I adore this soundbite from Goose: "Above anything else, I just wanted it to feel kind of lonely." You see Pomni's worldview shatter, she suddenly finds herself in a body that feels completely wrong, and she has to construct a new kind of belonging for herself.

As for Murder Drones, that show's absolutely fucking nuts, yo. The writing is at once painfully basic and utterly incomprehensible. If someone just sat down and explained the plot straightforwardly, it would be fantastically boring. But man, the presentation, the sheer delight the animators seem to approach every scene with...! I'd say it's clearly trying to use "the characters are robots" as an excuse to expose da kids to some absolutely shocking levels of gore, much like the Transformers movies, but midway through the series it starts straightup swapping the oil and wires for blood and bones and you've got to respect that.

The writing itself is so excruciatingly irony-poisoned that it goes beyond cringe and somehow wraps back around again to being sincerely funny. The show kind of wants to have its cake and eat it in terms of constantly lampshading how flat and cliché the emotional plotting is, but also clearly aiming to genuinely tug at the heartstrings and whip fans into a frenzy. And it kind of succeeds, I think! The way it veers between bizarrely high-effort implementations of memes, seriously cool fight scenes and horror visuals, and big emotional moments is very disarming. If The Amazing Digital Circus is an attempt to faithfully rework the American-cartoon formula for a slightly older audience, Murder Drones aims to crib the aesthetics of high-school cartoons while actively rejecting every traditional narrative technique used in those stories. Which means it's kind of bad, which means it's also kind of great.

If it's not already, then within a couple of years it will be deeply cringe to have ever been into Murder Drones in particular or (to a slightly lesser extent) The Amazing Digital Circus, in much the same way that everyone seems embarrassed to admit they were ever a Homestuck fan. But like with Homestuck, I feel like these series are genuinely pushing at the frontiers of storytelling in a way that's commendable and might inspire new kinds of writing once the fans grow up.

ENA is also pretty good, for the record.

[orlothegreat]

Starting to wonder if Orlo's not in season 3 anymore? They're filming right now and elle's makeup artist (who's on set all the time) replied to sacha's post saying "Miss you being around." It kind of makes me think they killed him off :/ Idk, maybe Orlo left the palace or something? Or left and will be back next season? I don't see how they'd kill him off so early in season 3(like two episodes in) after his character development/exploring his sexuality last season. Also wouldn't think they'd kill off one of the only POC in the main cast? Plus what about his family/uncle/etc?

I really and genuinely doubt that Orlo is going to be killed off, because of the symbolic purpose he serves. He is more than just Catherine's best friend and most loyal confidante (even when tested by his own family, he didn't sway nearly as much as Marial or Elizabeth and never ever treated her the way Peter has). He is also still the (relatively) young man who sat weeping at Descartes and the idea of free thinking and progress in a royal library that was so old that it was covered in dust and cobwebs.

What do I mean by this? Well. ALL of the main cast stand for something more than who they are as historical individuals, which is why the show is justified in only being loosely historically accurate, While Marial stands in for Machiavellian selfishness, Archie for the corruption of virtue or principle, and Elizabeth as disillusionment and pragmatic survival. Meanwhile, ORLO is still the Conscience, capital C, a distinctly Russian archetype of the tortured intellect who Still Believes. One of my followers (please speak up if you see this!) is a Russian viewer who wrote a compelling analysis of Orlo AS Count Pyotr "Pierre" Kirillovich Bezukhov from Leo Tolstoy's iconic War and Peace: down to the point of being asexual-coded, having a conscience but also a very pragmatic fear of the repercussions of too-fast, too-drastic change, and wearing spectacles: which are also an archetype, of seeing but not acting. When the spectacles come off, after he has killed a man, Orlo changes, and so does the method by which Catherine acts: it becomes more violent, direct, and extreme.  

Orlo, as a character, is a SIGNAL. He is the externalization of ONE SIDE (the honorable yet level-headed side) of Catherine’s internal struggle.  And the ACT OF LOOKING is the primary way, literal and metaphorical, that he signals: hence the focus on glasses or no glasses. 

So I think it's reasonable to judge Orlo's viability through the rest of this series BASED ON what he REPRESENTS, metaphorically. Do we still have a narrative NEED for "The Conscience," or perhaps better put, "The Original Hopes and Dreams of the Heroine"?

I would argue YES.

This show really relies on the Bakhtin Carnivalesque (basically, almost farcical vulgarity in order to democratize, humor as a weapon, a form of satire) to confer its message on viewers, but I think it also knows when to tether itself to more serious moments (which almost ALWAYS involve Orlo, or, if they're vulgar and humorous, ORLO is the one to look upon these actions aghast and disgusted).

A prime example would be in season one, when Catherine, previously promised efforts at variolation (early vaccination science, which ORLO suggested) to stop smallpox among serfs, stands watching in horror as their bodies are burned en masse across the field from Peter's palace.

Another example is when ORLO gets lost in the woods and had to face killing another human being for the first time, and how that action directly tarnished his principles, posing the narrative question to the audience: when is this violent act justifiable, if ever?

Still another, in season two, when ORLO tries to talk Catherine down from freeing all the serfs in a single day, knowing that even positive change must be incremental if it will last.

Season Two tested MY faith, both in Catherine and in the writers of The Great; I thought, LIKE ORLO, that there was going to be at least a brief moment of reveling in Catherine's victory.

Instead, Catherine was proven to be what she genuinely is--still a child, with ambition but no experience, making the fatal flaw of never listening to people who have valuable insight to offer, highly educated but still relatively sheltered, a player in a much bigger game of politics and rhetoric in a country that was never good at changing quickly for the better. We are shown unequivocally that Catherine is not yet ready to become the famous, lol, girlboss empress of European history whom we all know.

It's worth noting that The Great also uses a style of historical narrative that straddles the eccentricities of an unfamiliar epoch AND social issues that still echo with resonance everywhere today (censorship, misogyny in the "media," religious intolerance and bigotry, the danger of certain cultural hegemonies, etc etc). Another famous franchise that does this is Lin Manuel Miranda's Hamilton: which also never claims to portray these historical figures accurately (hell, Alexander Hamilton owned slaves!) BUT which uses them as--again--archetypes, larger-than-life caricatures of themselves, who stand in for ideas. They're almost allegorical that way. Orlo is no exception.

At first, like you, I was REALLY angry (I kinda still am LOL), and I couln't tell if this was deliberate, or if we were meant to be convinced, like Catherine, that Peter had really changed, and was really intent upon being a good husband and father. I was horrified by Catherine pulling AWAY from Orlo, who is, to me, Peter's narrative foil AS AN ARCHETYPE, not just as a character/individual. I was sad when Orlo said "I am for you, always, even when you don't realize it," and left.

However, I think that, by the end of Season Two, we're meant to see Catherine's slip into the illusion of domestic bliss and true love AS A VAST MISCALCULATION (the thing with Peter and her mom.....yeesh.... lol) and I think we are meant to see Orlo's absence BOTH literally AND symbolically, as idealism, conviction, and hope for positive change temporarily thwarted by a (well-meaning but headstrong and arrogant) young woman's very HUMAN need for someone to love and support her.

But he WILL be back, because the show is, after all, called The Great, and they don't mean Peter. And Catherine needs her conscience and her hope back to incarnate her own highest potential.

And if he dies, well, then, it’s possible, always, on any show, but what a bleak signal, or portent, that will be for the show’s endgame. 

[lesbianmarrow]

i dont feel like making my usual posts about legends of tomorrow 6.03 “the ex-factor” and 6.04 “bay of squids” so i’m just gonna do bullet points 

6.03: 

i still love constantine and zari together but im getting a little tired of seeing them making out with each other. its like ok we get it i just dont need to see it. really funny when behrad came in with his hand over his eyes. me too dude. i did really like their sort of vibe of how they both do have feelings for each other but just aren’t going to admit it. what i didn’t like so much was the melodrama that followed, with constantine feeling hurt that zari told her mother what they had wasn’t serious. and then him telling her that he does want a serious relationship with her. it just didn’t feel like constantine, to be honest. i think that a lot of the fun of constantine’s character is that he will never really change for the better - in that way he’s very suited to comic books, where the status quo tends to prevail and there’s no guarantee character development will last longer than a particular run. but legends of tomorrow doesn’t want a static character like that, so they are changing him in this way. it’s fine, it’s sweet to see, but it’s not what i love about constantine 

zari having to deal with her mom trying to set her up with various persian guys and get her married hit close to home for me LOL. hasnt happened to me personally but i have plenty of friends & relatives who have to deal with that and it sucks 

i liked seeing zari shift back into superstar mode and i also liked that they showed a hijabi girl as one of the fans squealing over her. i just thought that was a nice allusion to how zari would be such an icon for lots of muslim girls. it sort of complicates constantine’s assumption that zari’s influencer content has no real value for the fans and is just a way to sell them stuff 

nate & behrad giving constantine a makeover was really funny

i liked when zari called ava by a nickname. they are besties!!!! i need to see more bestie moments with them

i liked how for zari’s first song the audio was super flawless as though she had recorded the song beforehand and was just lip synching but for her later song you can kind of hear the more crackly live quality with the microphone. good way to make that second one feel more raw and real. it was a really adorable duet i gotta say :p 

i thought the overall plot with the alien trying to invade and the legends having to defeat him through song was hilarious. and when he opened his suit and he was just a little guy. and mick STEPPED on him and KILLED him. so silly love this show 

i liked seeing how mick was having a rough time dealing with sara’s absence. because he feels like she’s the only one who understands him and without her he feels defeated and aimless. it’s totally opposite to how ava is dealing with sara’s absence, which is to exhaust every possible option to find her because if she stops to consider the possibility that it might be hopeless then it will break her. nice to see spooner getting through to mick, seems like they could become good friends

almost forgot to talk about gary and sara. gary is omnisexual bc he is omnomnoming people. so glad that sara could tell that the ava she encountered was not her ava

6.04: 

it’s soooo funny to me that phil klemmer wrote this episode himself. i feel like it’s been forever that he wrote an episode. i’m sure he was like pleeeease let me write this one and the writers room was like uh sure phil. it has all those historical references that you assume someone like him who’s into history would love

the episode is also just kind of like....farcical in a way that i find really hilarious. like the cuban missile crisis was obviously very serious at the time but i feel like the extremely high tension of this situation makes the humor land all the better. i like how the legends’ deceptions and subterfuge sort of mirror the political games being played between the various nations involved in this event. and the miscommunications like mick and spooner delivering a nuclear missile to castro when they definitely should not have done that

nate and zari storyline was fine, not my favorite, but i can see how it would make sense to have this storyline where they figure out how to be friends even though zari looks like nate’s ex. the football stuff was a bit silly but that’s okay. it’s legends it’s allowed to be silly

i thought mick’s trajectory in this episode was good. how he starts out so serious and then when it doesn’t work out he reverts back to his apathetic drunk self but then he is the key to finding a way to sara even though it means kicking everyone else off the waverider to hang out with this alien lady. i still think mick is gay but i’m okay with alien lady as a love interest for him. i mean the inherent queerness of alien fucking and all that

ava’s fake russian accent was so silly

[data-draws]

I'm sorry for this spam/rant but I have no other outlets...

I know to a lot of you this is going to sound super pretentious and cringey, but I mean this with my whole heart. Watching Sandman with my parents has shown me just how pathetically different we are as people, I mean, down to the very morals and way we view life. It may be hyperbole to suggest that it was sandman alone that made me realize this rift between us, but it was definitely the straw that broke the camels back. I have been trying for YEARS to talk my parents out of their extremely small minded view of the world, and I've definitely made progress, looking back it becomes clear to me that the progress I have made is only because it has become socially popular to be performatively progressive, when I came out as transgender, my mother literally mourned me, I was sitting in front of her and she started crying because she, and I quote "thought I had killed my daughter" how fucking pathetic and selfish of a mindset is that? It gets worse, even after their supposed later acceptance of me they are still very clearly *yet subtley* racist and homophobic, my father goes on rants about how there are too many interacial couples and gay people in the media these days, how its unrealistic and if they genuinely wanted to have representation it shouldn't be visible or should be literally the exact. same. percentage. as the percentage of minorities there are in society, meaning he wants only 12% of all media to show black characters because in the country we live in there are only 12% of black people in the larger population. it gets worse though. we sat down and watched episode five together, in the back of my mind I knew they were going to hate it and say something about it. so after it ended I decided to try and explain some of it, you know, atleast some of the BASIC metaphors and imagery used throughout the franchise to try and quell what I knew would be a bigoted throw of hatred if I didn't. my father left before I could start, but my mother instantly pulled up facebook and mentally clocked out, I continued talking though, giving her the benefit of the doubt and hoping she was still listening, she of course. obviously fucking wasn't and im an idiot for having this much faith in them for so long, I called her out on this and she repeated what I had said to "prove" that she was listening, except she twisted up my words to mean the opposite of what I was trying to get across, I then explained that what she repeated told me that she actually wasn't listening, she was just pretending to, and only "hearing" me, not absorbing a single word that came out of my mouth. I could continue ranting, and I actually want to, but now that the rage that I had internalized is subsiding to sadness and embarrassment I wont. I'm actually disgusted I was raised by these people, they can't have ONE FUCKING CRITICAL THOUGHT. its so exhausting being around them, I have to sidestep major misinformation and lies nearly everyday and pretend for their sake because they are highly spiritual so if I say anything that even somewhat questions their ridiculous pseudoscience I get blasted and shamed and embarrassed publicly, if I ever invite them to have a conversation beyond simply "dunking on the other guy" politically and repeating half-truths and propaganda they look at me like im an extremist and once again intentionally misinterpret my words to make me seem like a genocidal maniac. im fucking sick of this, why do I still hang around them when they can't understand the absolute bare minimum of what it means to be a real human being? I've met literal. ACTUAL 12 YEAR OLDS WHO HAVE BETTER CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS. im so exhausted and dumbfounded that I ever deluded myself into believing they were anything more than the farcical watered down image that I was trained to become. I'm glad I failed to be like them, they're genuinely horrid people. and the worst part is, they think because they aren't cult-members/terrorist sympathizers like my grandparents, they think they're amazing people, they genuinely don't register that they have severe moral failings.

[stuckasmain]

Buffy season 1 review

So a lot of people have been pushing this show onto me for awhile now, partially a friend recently because they like spike and thought the show was good. I got Interested and all seven seasons are on Amazon so why not! Here we are. I’m going to do reviews like this as I finish each season, since I’ve finished season one today I’m putting this out now. Going to hit the big points so on so on

𝐍𝗼𝐭 𝐚𝐥𝗼𝐭 𝗼𝐟 𝐯𝐚𝗺𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐬 𝐟𝗼𝐫 𝐚 𝐬𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐞𝐫-

so surprisingly not a lot of vampires for a show about vampires, like yes they exist and yes they are the main bad’s. However it’s really more of a scooby doo meets sailor moon vibe? Figuring out who the monster of the week is and how to destroy it. Like STUDENTS POSSESSED BY HYENAS, invisible girl, horny puppet, literal demon etc. Like don’t take this as a complaint I kinda love it. The vampires and the master were always sort of a element but it’s mainly Buffy turning around , staking one , turning back around and being “ ok what’s up :)” and it’s a praying mantis as a substitute teacher, take a shot. I’m assuming it gets more vampire based later on in the show.

𝐂𝗼𝗺𝐞𝐝𝐲-

god tier. Like actually whitty clever comedy, banter, sarcasm, comments , something with brains?! I am ALL here for it like seriously I’m living for how sort of hysterical the show is. Like how in a few weeks Xander is just “yea ok what is it , let’s get this over with yada yada yada kill it” shsisjsoosos. Like the sarcasm, the clever jabs and the almost farcical way it is at times. It’s not only comments but sometimes physical and it’s neat. Again not to bring up Xander for a second time but his ‘porn star’ and ‘peep show’ shirts give me life! Buffy herself is kinda : what, like , it’s hard? Vibes. another factor is the kinda hysterical romance mess up? So we got. Praying mantis woman, a vampire and a digital demon. Oh! And big scary computer lady.

𝐒𝐭𝗼𝐫𝐲, 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐯𝐚𝗺𝐩𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝗺𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐬-

so I kind of like how in the first episode Buffy was basically the comic of “girl born as a protagonist” who does everything in her power to ignore it. The storyline is extremely basic at the moment, mainly just that there is a slayer and then it’s again Scooby doo monster of the week. I LOVE how the schools not just shut down from how many kids go missing and die constantly.

the vampires themselves, very classic easy weakness sort of deal, and I love the vibes. How they look EXTREMELY similar to the lost boys vampires except more wrinkles, less detailed eyes and their fangs are back to their canines. Tho they get defeated as easily as video game zombies.

𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬-

Buffy: I expected her to be that super Mary Sue type and kind of to hate her, while she does instantly have powers and have the whole ‘everyone either loves or hates her’ element. She is actually a good character? Like the whole want to be a regular 16 year old girl clashing with destiny deal.

Willow: sweet baby nerd girl I adore her, next?

Xander: Hyena boy (it was one episode and I LOVED it and I keep calling him this-) I adore him he is everything. Mr. Awkward wearing a porn star t-shirt. Seriously we don’t deserve him , his dedication or his sarcasm. Also his strange fear of Nazis and his constant jokes about them??? Go off.

Giles: my soul, god I love him way to much. Idk what it is about total nerds. He’s such a sweet dorky father figure of a man and I love him so much. I also like how he’s so violently British- the mans name is Rupert. Rupert.

Angel: the pretty boy, the obvious vampire. Honestly he kinda disappointed me? You can tell there is so much more there but he just doesn’t stay long enough, even in the episode they info dumped on him. Oh so he used to be cool and now he’s Edward Cullen? Ok , anything else? I’m just waiting for mr brooding to do something. Cmon pretty boy, you’ve got so much potential.

Cordelia: HATED her until she literally bit a vampire back. Queen lmao.

𝐭𝐡𝗼𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬-

Over all the first season is VERY 90s and dated but I mean this in the best way. It was formulaic and super fun. I honestly am so excited about the next season, it’s gotten to where all my thoughts are gone to me just wanting to watch the show again.

[96thdayofrage]

Mrs. Douglas was the music teacher. Let me be clear: she was not a music teacher, she taught music at the three predominately Black elementary schools in my hometown. She taught at a different school every day and, if you lived in Hartsville, S.C. any time between 1968 and 2006, she was the music teacher. Mrs. Douglas is the reason everyone from my childhood knows the words to “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Black national anthem.

Being home-schooled at a young age, my mother hadn’t shielded me from whiteness so much as she surrounded me with Blackness. But I longed to go to school. I wanted to play on a playground and carry books in a knapsack. Having to raise your hand to speak and eating square pizza seemed like so much fun, which is why I cherished Wednesdays with Mrs. Douglas. On Wednesday afternoons, Mrs. Douglas gave me private piano lessons in her home and I was her prized student. I was a child prodigy and–if I could just remember to lift my wrists and keep my posture straight–I was on the path to becoming the next Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles. I was always eager to play for Mrs. Douglas because she had one thing that inspired students to perform at the highest level:

Mrs. Douglas was beautiful.

Even as a ten-year-old, I could see it. Everyone could. Perhaps the best way to contextualize her beauty is to say she was a combination of Thelma and Willona from Good Times. She had a pre-Beyoncé level of fineness that made little boys swoon and little girls belt their hearts out in perfect tune. And, she began every gathering with the Black National Anthem–“Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

It really is a perfect song. God must have laid that on James Weldon Johnson’s heart because, in 169 words, he somehow captured the entirety of the Black experience. The lyrics are at once painful and triumphant without wallowing in our trauma. And when we hit that “Sing a song...” part, we really spill out all of our Blackness. In the annals of Black music, “sing a song” ranks right up there with Frankie Beverly’s “Before I let you goooooooo....” or Ricky Bell’s confession that “it’s driving me out of my mind.” If there’s anything Black America can do, we can sing a song.

Mrs. Douglas did not teach me the Black National Anthem. I have never been in a setting where people actually learned the words or the melody. Everywhere I went, people just seemed to know it. Looking back, this was probably the work of Mrs. Douglas, but for the first ten years of my life, I assumed everyone was born knowing how to blink their eyes, do the Electric Slide, and sing “Lift Every Voice.”

One Wednesday, at the end of our hourlong lesson, Mrs. Douglas gave me a copy of the Maya Angelou bestseller along with the sheet music to “Lift Every Voice,” as if one were necessary to understand the other. She told me that she would be teaching me how to play the anthem for the next few weeks but we could only begin after I read the pages she had bookmarked. In the chapter, Angelou describes her elementary school class singing the Negro National Anthem. I’m sure my piano teacher was trying to stress the importance of the song to our history and culture but all I could remember is Maya Angelou describing her anger after a local school board official denigrated the entire Black race during her grammar school graduation ceremony:

We were maids and farmers, handymen and washerwomen, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous.

Then I wished that Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner had killed all whitefolks in their beds and that Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and that Harriet Tubman had been killed by that blow on her head and Christopher Columbus had drowned in the Santa María. It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life.

It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defense. We should all be dead. I thought I should like to see us all dead, one on top of the other. A pyramid of flesh with the whitefolks on the bottom, as the broad base, then the Indians with their silly tomahawks and teepees and wigwams and treaties, the Negroes with their mops and recipes and cotton sacks and spirituals sticking out of their mouths. The Dutch children should all stumble in their wooden shoes and break their necks. The French should choke to death on the Louisiana Purchase (1803) while silkworms ate all the Chinese with their stupid pigtails. As a species, we were an abomination. All of us.

Jesus. Was I supposed to be reading this? Were white people this bad? Was the song this good? And how would this help me play the piano? It did not help my posture at all. I know this was probably Mrs. Douglas’s attempt to ensure that I would thank her in one of the Grammy speeches that I would surely give later in life but, Ma’am...

I. Was. Ten.

Still, enthralled by her beauty and a little disturbed by her reading assignment, I committed to playing the fuck out of that song. And, by “playing the fuck out of that song,” I basically hit the keys harder and with more emphasis (Did I mention I was ten years old?). It was obvious that Mrs. Douglas was pleased. For the next few years, I played “Lift Every Voice” at all the Black functions around town, including Pastors’ anniversaries, cotillions and every Black History Month program. I didn’t even need the sheet music. I didn’t know any other songs. To this day, my entire piano repertoire consists of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” It was the only song I could interpolate into other keys.

But my favorite time to play the anthem was when Mrs. Douglas’s Combined Glee Club performed. The Combined Glee Club was basically the best singers from the Black elementary schools combined into one choir. Led by Mrs. Douglas, the CGC was the number-one ranked glee club in all of the greater Hartsville area. Not just anyone could be in the Combined Glee Club; you had to be selected by Mrs. Douglas. It was the official verification that you had musical talent. I’m sure some people put it on their college application.

If there was something Black going on, they were invited and those motherfuckers could sing. All of my neighborhood friends were on the Combined Glee Club and my best friend played the drums for them. (Yes, they had a drummer!) The CGC usually performed the Donny Hathaway version of “I Believe in Music” (which, until a few years ago, I believed was a song Mrs. Douglas had penned herself). But their specialty was opening up with “Lift Every Voice.”

If I am being honest, I have to admit that I am a tiny bit afraid of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in the way that I am afraid of the Holy Ghost or making potato salad for a family dinner. I know how important it is to us, so I am afraid to mess it up. Even though I hadn’t been around white people, I somehow knew it was our song. I had never seen it on television or on the radio. It was like a secret handshake or a fried chicken recipe–It belonged exclusively to us. Plus, if I messed it up, Mrs. Douglas might not consider the marriage proposal I was planning in a few years. Every time I played “Lift Every Voice,” there was a lot riding on it.

When I finally started attending public schools, my mother enrolled me at a predominately white school where I was assigned to a homeroom where I was the only black kid in the class. I’d like to explain how the white kids made racist jokes at my expense but, if they did, I didn’t even notice it. In fact, spending time around white people for the first time at ten years old, I learned more about Black people than I learned about white people.

I had not assimilated the subconscious deference to whiteness that often accompanies being Black. I became acutely aware that white people are not smarter or even more educated than any of the kids in my neighborhood. They were perfectly mediocre. They didn’t know how to double-dutch and they didn’t even have a glee club. In music class, the teacher just passed out instruments and let the kids have jam sessions. How were they supposed to acquire their daily recommended dosage of glee? I was a little ashamed of going to school there, so I led all my friends to believe that I was still being homeschooled until they discovered the truth at the annual Holiday Music Showcase.

Every year, all of the schools would get together for a Christmas program to show off their best musicians and singers. The white schools would have violinists, saxophone players and ensembles playing classical music with terrible basslines. As for my predominately glee-less institution, we learned a special super-Caucasian rendition of “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.” I was just thankful that we didn’t have to follow the Negro Mass Choir. They were last on the program.

My white classmates were unmoved as each individual school performed and, with each successive song, I slunk lower in my seat. During Washington Street Elementary’s performance, as they lifted up His name with a perfect a cappella version of “Children Go Where I Send Thee,” a kid sitting behind me whispered:

“Look at all those lips!”

Everyone giggled. I did not.

Our performance was predictably lackluster (probably because I refused to sing). It sounded like an episode of Little House on the Prairie. It sounded like long division. Rudolph’s nose had never been so unremarkable. Had he heard those flat notes wafting through the Center Theater, I’m sure he would have been as ashamed as I was. We trudged back to our seats as the Baddest Glee Club in the Land took the stage for the last performance. Of course, they sang “I Believe in Music.” Accompanied by Mrs. Douglas on piano and my homeboy James on drums, they blew the doors off the place. Even my classmates were impressed because, when they hit one particular a cappella refrain that every Black choir does, my classmates were clapping along. They were off-beat, but they still clapped.

After a rousing round of applause, Mrs. Douglas announced the next song from her piano: “Lift Every Voice.” Of course, all of the Black people in the audience—even the children—stood up. None of the white kids even moved. I was the only person in my entire class who stood.

Mrs. Douglas didn’t play that shit.

She stood up from the piano and glared at the audience as if to say: “You motherfuckers better stand up and show some respect.” I had never seen Mrs. Douglas express anger. And she waited. And the choir waited. She looked. And the choir looked. As she scowled at the audience, Mrs. Douglas saw me standing and smiled. She waved me to the front of the auditorium and whispered in my ear: “You wanna play?”

By the time I sat at the piano and she ascended to the stage to direct the Combined Glee Club, everyone was standing. She looked at me with her usual glance and in one microsecond, my back straightened. My wrists were raised to the perfect 45 degree angle.

And just like that, I was Black.

For the first time since I had read Maya Angelou’s angry words, I was no longer afraid of the song. I don’t know if it was the repetition of playing so many times, or the hand of some unseen thing, but I was suddenly able to play and sing the song simultaneously. And goddamn, did that Combined Glee Club lift their voices. They sang that song.

Our song.

I called Mrs. Douglas today.

I had so many questions. I wanted to ask her why she dragged me around town when I don’t have a sliver of musical talent. I really wanted to know why she made me read that book. I figured she’d tell me something about building my character, giving me a reason to socialize with people my age or how music helps the brain mature. Or maybe she’d make some perfect metaphor about birds in cages.

She did not answer.

I still have a song, though.

We are the song.

[theuntamer]

Episode 16 - on the run

WWX and JC are running from the Wen soldiers after the massacre at the Lotus Cove while JYL is waiting for them in the forest.

There's something morbidly, grotesquely farcical about how Jiang Cheng thinks this is even remotely about Jin Zixuan.

I talked about it before in this post how Jiang Cheng's gut reaction is to blame all their suffering on WWX's actions and that comes to the surface again in his grief. In my opinion, terribly sad, devastating, but also understandable.

What kills me is how WWX just takes it. Is this where his suicidal tendencies start? He's not fighting his brother at all, one might think he's hoping to die here. He's letting Jiang Cheng strangle him and he's hurting so much he's alright with letting his life end.

I see a slight parallel to the scene where he asks Wangji to kill him, so he would at least be killed by someone he loves. I think that plays a role here too, Jiang Cheng is one of those people that he'd let kill him, which is extra painful considering what happens later. *puts hand on forehead* poetic cinema!

The closeup on his right hand. The one that Madam Yu refused to cut off, leading to the destruction of their family. Terrible bargain but it's not his fault. He didn't even ask to be spared or fight back, not that he should be held accountable if he had, but still. I hope he treats it as an admission of care and even love from Madam Yu, a last (and perhaps first) gift from her, instead of something he should have lost.

episode 16 part I, part III