#this is entirely inspired by one dialogue exchange in nightmare

[zmediaoutlet]

fic: the wake

pairing: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester/John Winchester rating: M length: 23k tags: Alternate Universe - Normal Life, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism

summary: Sam comes home.

The day his dad died, Sam missed the phone call. His cell had been on silent since he sat for the qualifying exam the day before. The sequence was this, as far as he can tell: he sat down to the exam with the rest of his cohort; he sweated through Nakamura's frankly assholey question on stats; his dad died; he finished the exam; then he and Corey and Jin went out for drinks at Streeter's, and Corey and Jin got shitfaced and Sam was the DD, like usual, because he always is, and he dropped Corey at his apartment and Jin at her apartment with her car and then he biked home to the tiny box that he lived in all by himself and dropped down to his too-small bed on the floor and breathed in deep and knew even without getting the grades back that he'd done it, that he'd passed, and that after this it'd be the years of classes and TAing and writing papers and doing his clinic rotation and running experiments, but he was going to do it, he knew he would. So he slept hard, and he woke up in the morning and went for his run on Lakefront like he always did, and it was a pretty morning, he remembers that, not too humid yet and Lake Michigan glinting in the early light, and he came back to his studio and showered and dressed and went down for a bagel at Bubbe's and drank his coffee slow, savoring it, knowing he didn't have anything to do that summer that he didn't want to do, and then he finally opened his phone to see if Corey wanted to play basketball at the rec that afternoon and he saw, at last, three missed calls from a 785 area code, and one voicemail. The numbers weren't in his contacts but his stomach lurched. He listened to the voicemail, and he heard Carl Guenther's voice like out of some misty distant past say, I'm trying to reach Sam Winchester. I hope this is the right number. Sam, I'm sorry, but it's not good news. You need to call your brother. Like Sam hadn't done in—years.

(read more on AO3)

[taoofshigeru]

Sea of Stars Final Thoughts

See this post for my initial thoughts. Comprehensive spoilers to follow, obviously.

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1) World design was the highlight of the game for me. Each area looked unique and was fun to navigate around, and the way they were able to integrate some puzzle design into it was quite nice. Using the Graplou to get around felt super-smooth, which isn't always the case in isometric-style platformers.

2) Combat was solid but really not much of a challenge. I never game-overed on a boss up to and including the final boss, and both times I did lose was just a mob where I went in without bothering to heal. The key reason for this was Seraï's Disorient was busted and allowed my team to rip through every single-enemy boss like tissue paper. And most bosses were single enemies. You just keep hitting them with turn delays and then they never take turns. Tack on Arcane Barrage and Great Eagle later on in the game and it gets pretty ridiculous.

I mean, lock-breaking is a neat idea but I've experienced very similar things done better in Octopath Traveler's break/boost system, and when I was fighting bosses I kind of wanted to just be doing a game that didn't depend so much on timed hits. Bravely Default II included similarly stunlock-focused moves like BP Depleter or the Bravebearer class' entire moveset, and the main criticism of that game was how it had a counter system where late-game bosses would randomly counter actions taken by the player in ways that many, myself included, felt were punishing and unfair design. And I feel like this game showed me the other side of what happens when you just let a move like Disorient be usable without any sort of punishment.

Crustaleon dropped minions that lasted more then one multitarget attack before he could be delayed, and the Sea Slug dropped boulders even when it wasn't its turn, and I was excited to see one or both of those mechanics be folded into the final boss battle. Given this, the final fight with Aephorul felt like a real anticlimax. It was just a literal curb stomp for the heroes. Aephorul got to take like, 5 whole turns.

All that said, I enjoyed managing and being able to swap out the party of 6 in real time was nifty. I just wish they had done more with it in terms of late-game/true ending bosses with some real teeth.

3) The music was great. Particularly a fan of the Dweller boss theme mix that plays during the Dweller of Torment fight, and that super-amped Glacial Peak theme.

4) Writing/story was where I felt the game really ran into real inconsistencies. If I divide the game into acts.

The first act, up until the Dweller of Woe fight, I was fairly consistently not enjoying the story. The second act, from the Sea of Nightmares to Swan Song of the Warrior Cook, I found to be genuinely inspired. The third act, Seraï's World, Fated Hour up until the final boss fight, did well but also felt like it was somewhat coasting to the end off the strength of the second act. (Resh'an kind of just quits the story after you fight the birds to scroll through his text history with Aephorul and I was expecting him to play a mildly bigger part in the true ending.)

And the pirate dialogue in particular had some real turds that came off as mean-spirited rather than humorous. It's okay to have a story with some whimsy and humor, and for an RPG to poke fun at itself or the genre in general. But there were some jokes there that just personally felt sour to me. Case in point:

My honest opinion is that when the entire second half of your game boils down to using one move on bosses repeatedly until they die, maybe cut the Keenathan half of that exchange. The game and the script is more than this, but that's the quote I'll remember from it the most.

5) All that said, the cast had its moments. Garl is the good boy of all time, and while I'm neutral on Resh'an and Seraï as characters they had this great dynamic during the Dweller of Strife fight that ultimately leads to the warrior cook's untimely death.

Resh'an: "The rules exist for a reason and people will get hurt if I break them." Seraï: "People have gotten hurt following your god damn rules!"

Given that a) Garl dies as a result of Seraï tossing the vial of time at the Dweller and b) Valere and Zale would have died had she not done so, the script leaves room for them to both be kind of right, which I thought was a neat and nuanced writing decision.

I kind of wished they had explored it a bit more, too. Valere and Zale understandably focus on what Garl does while living on borrowed time and that does take precedence. However, after the funeral, it may have been effective for one of them to exchange some harsh words with Seraï over her decision back there. That would have helped crystallize them as two distinct characters with a wider range of emotions. As opposed to just being Garl's matching sidepieces. (Which is itself a fine role, still!)

---

To be clear, I liked Sea of Stars quite a bit! I had beef with some specific elements that keeps it out of my top tier of pixel RPGs, but more than anything I'm really, extremely appreciative that people make games like this. Will look forward to seeing whatever Sabotage does next.

[sheliesshattered]

This Isn’t A Ghost Story extras for Chapter 6: The Future

Chapter 6 of This Isn’t A Ghost Story has been posted! You can find it here on Tumblr, or here on AO3. Spoiler-ish extras under the cut!

With chapter 6 under our belts, we’ve made it through the main portion of this fic! The next two chapters will wrap up a few loose ends -- and possibly create a couple more, of the open-ended variety -- and if I hadn’t gotten quite so deep into the world-building for this, I might have actually ended the story here. All the research I did for the world-building directly inspired the next two chapters, which were both written and finished before I had anything more than a basic sketch in place for chapter 6. 

Egyptology in the 1920s has clearly been a huge part of the world-building for this story from the beginning, and we get a bit more of it in chapter 6. The Doctor mentioned Howard Carter briefly in chapter 5, and here we loop back around to that and find out that Clara and the Doctor knew Carter well. I didn’t want to derail the chapter too much with talking about their friendship in any detail, but large portions of the timeline of when they were in Egypt in the 1920s was built around the historical events of the discovery and documentation of Tutankhamun’s tomb, and there are a few passing allusions to it in the journal entries in chapter 3 as well.

Howard Carter (pictured above in 1924) and his team of excavators found the entrance to Tutankhamun’s tomb in November of 1922, which would have been during the phase when Clara and the Doctor are exchanging letters and falling in love. One little historical detail that I sadly couldn’t quite use was that 23 November 1922 was actually a date of minor significance in the discovery of the tomb. It was the day that Carter’s financier, Lord Carnarvon, arrived at the dig site to witness the opening of the tomb, along with his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert, who would have been about a year and a half younger than Clara. This picture of the three of them was taken at the entrance of the tomb in late 1922, and is similar to how I imagine Clara and the Doctor’s picture with Carter would have looked:

As the tomb was being excavated, Carter and Carnarvon assembled a team of experts to help with the huge task of cataloging, preserving, and translating all the many items found in the tomb, and though I never called it out specifically in This Isn’t A Ghost Story, I figure the Doctor was part of that team, probably specifically focused on translation work. In late February 1923, there was a short halt in the excavation that lasted a few weeks, which was what led, in our fictionalized version of events, to the Doctor briefly returning to Glasgow, and Clara’s impulsive decision to follow him there. After their wedding in May of ‘23, Clara and the Doctor went directly to Egypt, and the Doctor returned to work on Carter’s team.

Family members, tourists, and the press were all known to visit the dig site during that first year of excavation and the resulting media craze:

Given that, and Clara and the Doctor being ‘disgustingly in love newlyweds’ it seemed reasonable that Clara would have visited the site at least a few times, and been on good terms with Howard Carter. Carter actually got his start in Egyptology when he was hired as a young man to paint reproductions of ancient temple walls and other Egyptian artifacts:

During the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb, he made detailed sketches, including careful measurements, of every item removed from the tomb and where it had originally be found in the tomb. Much of what we know about King Tut’s tomb now is down to how methodical Carter was in documenting the original untouched state of the tomb, both with measurements, drawings, and photography. These are both drawings Carter did of the tomb during that period:

Chapter 3 mentions that Clara decided to learn to draw in the summer of 1923, so I liked the little detail that it was Howard Carter, with his meticulous and beautiful art, that suggested she take up the hobby. Modern Clara also notes in passing that she drew all throughout her childhood, particularly her ghost, which all connects back to those early days of their marriage in 1923.

I’ve got more up my sleeve about the world-building elements for the next two chapters, but since chapter 6 was the last chapter I finished, long after chapters 7 and 8 were done, I thought I’d talk a bit about the writing process as well. The final scenes I wrote for the entire story were near the end of chapter 6, and despite knowing what I needed this chapter to do, what needed to be in place to set up chapters 7 and 8, chapter 6 gave me a bit of trouble along the way. 

I imagined this chapter in a lot of different ways as the story was evolving, but I always knew I wanted to emphasize the possibility of future travels for Clara and the Doctor. The theme of ‘101 Places To See’ is so strong in canon that echoing it for 1920s Clara was a big part of my world-building from the beginning, and I felt like any version of a happy ending for Clara and the Doctor had to include travel. An early draft of this chapter ended on Clara’s final line from Mummy On The Orient Express, ‘Then what are you waiting for? Let's go.’ to help emphasize that travel theme -- and because I can never resist borrowing a line from canon whenever I can find an excuse.

Another early sketch for this chapter had Clara and the Doctor venturing out for grocery shopping, with the Doctor complaining up a storm while Clara tried to carry on a conversation with him without any strangers taking note of it. Originally I had planned to include more of Clara’s work week, and had scenes roughed in where her friend and fellow teacher Amy Pond found out that Clara had gotten “engaged” over the weekend, leading Clara to have to make up something on the spot about how she’d been in a long-distance relationship that had only recently turned serious, which was why Amy had never met him. There was a whole thing about how Clara and Amy (who taught ancient world history) were co-directing Coal Hill’s production of Antony And Cleopatra, and Amy wanting to make sure that Clara wasn’t going to run off to see the world with her new fiance before the night of the play. Eventually that all got boiled down to just a single exchange between Clara and the Doctor, as I decided to keep the focus tight in on the two of them and their relationship, and not even include dialogue from any other characters.

One thing that comes up again and again in my writing projects is that when I’m imagining the plotline early in the process, it always takes up a lot more calendar days than the final product does. I imagine events taking place over the course of weeks, but then find that the emotional flow works much better condensed down to a handful of days instead. Despite my stories following that same pattern in development for more than a decade now, it somehow always seems to surprise me, lol.

Really early on in working on Ghost Story, I knew I wanted to keep Clara’s canonical birthdate of 23 November 1986 and build the rest of the timeline around that, and I picked out November 2014 as the time period for the main part of the story because it corresponds roughly to when the end of s8 of the show originally aired. But in a very early outline of events, Clara didn’t have the nightmare that led to her memories coming back until the night of her birthday, a full week later from what ended up happening in this final version. 

Even as recently as a few weeks ago, I was still planning on ending this chapter on her birthday, and it wasn’t until I started digging into the scene by scene and line by line breakdown of the chapter that I realized that it really wasn’t necessary. And leaving her birthday as an upcoming event folded in nicely with the ‘Future’ theme I wanted for this chapter, so again I decided to keep the focus tight on Clara and the Doctor’s relationship as they unravel the mystery and deal with the fallout of what happened in 1927.

Figuring out what I actually wanted to happen this chapter versus what could be left on the cutting-room floor, as they say, was a huge part of the final phase of writing This Isn’t A Ghost Story. Once I had cut out extraneous scenes and meandering plot tangents (and poor Amy Pond), I was left with a very specific list of scenes and conversations, and I wrote them much the same way I write everything, jumping around to a given scene as dialogue or internal monologue occurs to me. To me it always feels like putting together a large jigsaw puzzle, filling in holes and connecting up pieces as the puzzle comes together.

I find that technique works really well for me when I’m in early and mid development of a story, but once I was down to just a couple of scenes that still needed written, progress slowed way down. I got to the point where I knew the emotional content of a scene and even most of the dialogue, and needed just a little bit of stage direction to stitch the whole thing together. Those of you who have been following along with my #process thoughts posts here may remember me posting about working on that last scene just a couple of weeks ago, trying to wrestle it into shape. 

@tounknowndestinations, @praetyger, and a few others of you have asked about it, and I can now reveal that the very last bit to get written was the sequence with Clara preparing for bed and then the two of them getting into bed. I had the awkward sex conversation and the final scene the next morning already written, I just had to connect the first part of the chapter up with those last scenes. I’m happy with how it eventually came together -- and very curious to hear if any of you could pick out that that was the last bit written? -- but not having the option to work on anything else, just those specific words in that specific place, made it more of a struggle for me than writing most of the rest of Ghost Story.

My husband and beta reader Jack was more involved with the editing of this chapter than he was with any of the other chapters, and in several places helped me rewrite individual lines or conversation beats until we were both happy with how they read. @praetyger asked how I know when writing is ‘done’, and I have to admit it’s mostly a process of reading it over and over again, and then getting Jack to read it and taking his feedback seriously. I tend towards overly long run-on sentences, so if Jack gets lost while reading a sentence, that’s one he’ll call out as needing to be reworded for clarity. 

There’s one sentence in this chapter that we went back and forth over quite a lot: ‘The feeling of what might have been that seeing their wedding photo had elicited in her wasn’t some strange, misplaced jealousy, but rather the knowledge she carried deep in her soul, buried in her subconscious, that their story wasn’t over yet.’ It was originally even more wordy, and Jack would have preferred the final version be a lot more simple, but it just didn’t read right to me without ‘elicited’ so I stuck to my guns on that bit, even as I filed down some of the wordiness in other parts of the sentence.

Both for reworking a sentence and for writing big sections in the first place, my method is generally to write it and edit a little as I go, trying to get the word choice and pacing as close to what I want as I can on a first pass. Then I’ll let it sit, at the very least overnight but often for days or longer at a time, then come back and reread it when it isn’t so fresh in my mind. At that point, sometimes a phrase will jump at me as awkward or something I used just a paragraph or two earlier, so I’ll rewrite it, let it sit, come back and edit it all over again. Sometimes what seemed like plenty of room for an emotional beat when I was writing it will go by way too fast when I reread it, so I’ll add to it, give it space to breathe. Rinse and repeat.

For the record, Jack’s favorite line from this chapter is this bit of dialogue for the Doctor: ‘“Yes,” he allowed warily, clearly not sure where she was going with this.’ I imagine it’s probably for similar reasons as why he liked the ‘she didn’t add again but knew they were both thinking it’ bit from chapter 5. I try not to put my own marriage into my writing too much, but there are some experiences of being married that I think are probably pretty universal.

@ephemeralhologram asked about my writing inspiration, and for me my writing is always driven by a kernel of a what-if idea and a desire to convey a certain emotion. I almost always start out with a ‘plotbunny’ idea, some tiny thing that I daydream about and consider from multiple angles until a plot and emotional tone starts coming into focus. 

For Ghost Story, it was actually a shitpost here on Tumblr about a real estate agent having a conversation with the ghost who haunts the house they’re trying to sell, along with wanting to try telling a Twelve/Clara story in an alternate universe completely separate from the show canon, which I had never done before Ghost Story. The emotional tone started out much sillier, more in line with that Tumblr post, but as I got into the world-building and decided I wanted to have a mystery and mutual pining at the center of this story, the tone shifted quite a lot.

The other major drivers of writing inspiration for me are that I enjoy putting words together into interesting and emotionally evocative combinations, and I enjoy conveying character emotion and eliciting emotion in the reader. No matter what fandom I’m writing in, no matter how close to canon or how AU, how short or long the story is, those two things are always at the center of my writing.

I walk around the house or do chores that I don’t have to focus on too much (dishes are excellent for this) just tossing around bits of dialogue in my head until I find an emotional beat that grabs me or a bit of phrasing that I really like. I jot those down into a googledoc -- most of my DW stories start out in a doc called “Doctor Who Bits” that is in fact just fragments of multiple stories, and then eventually a story will graduate into having its own dedicated googledoc. Figuring out the plot is just as much about deciding on the emotional journey I want to take the characters and/or the readers on as it is deciding on an order of events.

Thank you to @tounknowndestinations​, @ephemeralhologram​, and @praetyger​ for the questions! I am more than happy to answer any questions about my writing process or details about this story, or anything really, so feel free to hit me up in my ask, or in the comments on this post, or in a comment over on AO3. Thank you to everyone who has followed along with this story, and for all the support and encouragement you’ve offered along the way, I couldn’t have written this story without this wonderful little corner of the Whouffaldi fandom! ❤️

--

Extras for Chapter 7: The Museum

[barnzbucky]

reach for the moon - chapter 3 (Ivar x Reader)

Pairing: Ivar x reader; Hvitserk x reader (but not really)

Summary: Hvitserk makes two invitations you can't say no.

Warnings: alcohol consumption, mentions of arranged marriage; mentions of unrequited love; dialogue heavily inspired from the movie sabrina (I don't really remember how it went, but I think the talk with her father about the moon is pretty similar); please, ket me know if I forgot something.

Word count: 2.8k

A/N: I am pretty sure I had a feverish dream of me posting this on Sunday... I guess I forgot. But I am doing it now, and I haven't slept the whole night, so forgive me for any mistakes in the post. Hope you enjoy reading! ❤

masterlist | series masterlist

The market was already full by the time Hvitserk got there. He took his usual spot near the butcher, leaning in a wooden pillar to watch the people come and go, desperate to set their stand ready for when customers arrived. Soon enough, in the middle of the loud fishermen and running children, he spotted you, smiling and talking to a few merchants while buying your own food, carrying a heavy basket on your arm.

Before making his way to you, Hvitserk felt a hand on his shoulder and immediately turned to see who was keeping him, not being surprised when it turned out to be Ivar.

“Can you at least behave, Hvitserk? Your bride and her father arrive today, and it would be better for everyone if you kept yourself from courting other women while they’re here.” His brother’s voice was low and calm, a huge difference from when they left off the day before.

“I’m behaving, Ivar, but I can’t promise you anything. If Y/N wants me to touch her, how cruel would I be to deny her?” Hvitserk laughed and gestured his head in your direction, making the king turn to you.

When Ivar finally set eyes on  the woman Hvitserk was referring to, his breath got caught on his throat. You looked different from the last time he saw you. Your hair was now shorter, your posture straighter, and your smile certainly wider. The way you carried yourself didn’t remind him anything of the girl he met on the beach so long ago, but Ivar wouldn’t forget about you so easily.  He almost wondered how a person could change so much in 5 years before he remembered himself. You looked breathtaking. But, of course, interested in his brother, and to make things worse, he had to make a plan to send you back to where you were.

He swallowed and turned back to Hvitserk, trying not to sneer at the look in his face. Worse than you liking his brother was both of you liking each other.

“Hvitserk, the king will stay here for a week after the engagement feast, tonight, and then he will only come back for the wedding. Control yourself.”

Hvitserk laughed and removed Ivar’s hand from his shoulder, “We’ll see, Ivar.”

Ivar turned back and headed back to the Great Hall before Hvitserk reached you, refusing to watch someone who helped him so much when he needed, even if he knew nothing about you, fall for his brother’s charms and stupid courting ways.

“Do you need help?” You nearly jumped when you heard a voice whispering in your ear, turning around abruptly to see the smile that haunted all your dreams and thoughts over the last eight years or so.

“Ha! Prince Hvitserk, you almost scared me to death!” You laid a hand over your heart, breathing heavily. Despite your tone, the wide smile on your face told him your were anything but displeased to see him.

“I’m sorry, I promise it wasn’t my intention,” he chuckled and reached a hand to cup your face, his thumb briefly caressing your cheek. “How did you sleep in your first night back in Kattegat?”

You cleared your throat before answering, trying to disguise the way he made you flustered after the unexpected touch. “I slept very well, thank you. No nightmares”

The honest smile on his face quickly turned into a teasing one. “Any dreams, then? About a handsome prince who rescued you from walking home alone, maybe?”

Your fake gasp only made his smile wider, and he took the basket from your arm, quickly following after you, walking further into the market to continue shopping.

“There’s a feast tonight.” He stated, and you hummed, distracted with the fruit stands, and he continued. “Do you want to come?”

Your head quickly turned back to him, immediately forgetting about the apple you were examining, with eyes sparkling and a blinding smile on your lips. “Yes, of course! I’d love to.”

So far, in the few hours you were back in Kattegat, Hvitserk had already made impossible your goal of forgetting about him. Between walking you home and inviting you personally for a party in the Great Hall, he had your heart hammering in your chest from the excitement of spending time with him.

“Great!” His hand returned to your face and you held your breath when he placed his lips on your cheek, before leaning further and whispering in your ear, “I’ll see you there, then.”

You made the utmost effort to stay and continue your tasks in the market, but the giddiness and excitement had you rushing back home to start planning your clothes for the feast.

After taking what it seemed like forever to arrive home, you decided that your house was too far away from the city. You exasperatedly opened the door, startling both of your parents, and cheerfully greeted them both, before setting the basket in the table and heading to your own room.

The exchanged glances  by your parents went past you, but your father quickly followed suit behind you.

“What happened?” He asked, not entering your room, standing at the door and watching you go through your dresses with a frown etched on your face.

You turned your head to look at him, and the frown disappeared, making way for the smile you had when you got home. “Oh, prince Hvitserk invited me to the feast tonight, and I wanted to decide what to wear as soon as possible.”

Your father sighed and walked further  into the room, sitting on your bed. He had a feeling this would happen the moment you arrived with Hvitserk, and it was what he feared the most. You were barely back from Gleðiborg, after five years, and had already went back to your old habits of living and breathing for Hvitserk. It almost destroyed you the first time, and he feared it would happen again. Arne figured you still didn’t know the latest news about your beloved. Not many people did, but you certainly deserved to.

“Y/N…” He started, hesitating to tell you. You had such a beautiful smile on your face, and he hated that he had to be the one to wipe it out. “You need to know, prince Hvitserk is marrying a princess soon.”

You immediately froze when  he said those words, your mind having difficulty to process the information.

“What?” You turned back to your father and went to sit beside him. His arms immediately wrapped around you, much too used to comfort you after you ended up sad because of something the prince had said or done. “But… he doesn’t seem in love.”

Still wary of the subject, Arne shook his head and continued, “He is not. It’s a marriage arranged by King Ivar to set an alliance that will benefit Kattegat greatly.”

You let out a relieved sigh and laughed, quickly getting up and going back to your task of finding the perfect dress.

“So he’s not in love, nor is he married yet.”

“Y/N,” your father said with an unmistakable warning tone, but you paid no mind, “stop trying to reach for the moon, child, I told you that.”

Setting one of the options on your bed, you giggled and went to hug your father, receiving a kiss to your forehead.

“There’s nothing wrong with reaching for the moon, father. Especially if the moon is reaching for me, too.”

Your hands smoothed the dress for the uptenth time that night, nervous about the way you looked. You knew you had heads turning to look at you. Your dress, colored in a rich deep red, contrasting the dull colors of the street, was perfectly adjusted on your waist and breasts, enhancing all of your best features.

With a confident smile on your face, you entered the Great Hall, immediately being welcomed by the loud song and the talking, the strong smell of roasted meat and leather quickly overwhelming you, not much different than you remembered.

Occasionally stopping to make conversation, you walked around the room, making sure to avoid the shadowy corners and standing in the center of the party. It didn’t take long for Hvitserk to find you.

“Y/N!” The crooked smile and twinkling eyes had you grinning back, and you almost laughed when you felt the strong smell of mead coming from him. You maintained your confident smile and tried not to blush when his eyes roamed over your body before setting back on your face. “You’re here, and you look beautiful.”

“Thank you, Hvitserk.” You giggled, any thoughts of insecurity quickly leaving your mind. He handed you a horn filled with the drink before taking your free hand, walking you to a quieter and less crowded side of the room.

With more moving space now, Hvitserk started to sway, trying to find the rhythm of the music. He sneakily rested his hands on your waist and brought you closer, making you move to the song with him.

"Dance?" he asked, though you were past the point already, after dancing together for almost one entire song.

You barely smiled and quickly took control of your own body, dancing and moving, until you could barely breathe with laughter and bliss. Under the influence of the alcohol and the adrenaline, you couldn't stop smiling and giggling.

After a while, Hvitserk leaned in to whisper in your ear, moving slowly, giving you time to regain your breath. "We can go to somewhere quieter, if you want."

Immediately, the scenes you used to watch played in your head. He would take a woman to either the corner of the room with the dimmest light, or to the beach, bring food and drinks to court them, and trying to impress them, most if not all times successfully. To you, he looked at them like they were the most beautiful woman in the world, and you always dreamed of having him look at you that way. 

You weren't stupid, and knew they weren't actually important to him, everyone knew Hvitserk was hard to stick with only one woman. You knew why he was coming at you, asking you to get out of there. But you also knew yourself, and knew enough to entice him and to make him continue to chase you and to want you.

Despite that, you couldn't contain the smitten smile on your face. "Oh? We go to the beach, you bring mead and fruit, and tell me about your adventures overseas?"

As you predicted, Hvitserk leaned back again and laughed at your teasinging tone. "Aren't you so intelligent, Y/N?"

You grinned. "I'll meet you at the beach, then."

He returned the smile, and headed to the main table to grab the things you mentioned. 

You watched him go, momentarily caught in your thoughts, and had to shake your head and take a deep breath to snap out of them. Before turning around to walk to the beach, you caught king Ivar's piercing gaze directed at you, him apparently lost in thoughts as well. You smiled tentatively at him and he quickly turned his glance away from you, as if he was caught doing something wrong or embarrassing.

You kept looking at him for a minute, wondering if he remembered you from that night. You didn't cross paths as children, with him not getting involved in playing with his brothers like you did, and spending a lot of his time with Floki, the boatbuilder. And as you grew up, even less so.

You liked to think he remembered you. Except, you didn't know if he paid any attention to your face that night, or even if he would recognize you after 5 years. Hvitserk didn't.

You tore your eyes from him and headed outside, starting to walk the familiar path to the beach.

Carefully moving between the people, Hvitserk was being as discrete as he could, trying to avoid being spotted by any of the kings present. He knew, if one of them noticed him, it would be nearly impossible for him to go out and meet you.

Unknown to him, his younger brother kept track of him for most of the night.

Ivar noticed you as soon as you entered the Great Hall, wearing a dress colored especially to call attention to you, red as blood. You outshone every woman in the room.

He caught himself watching you more times than he cared to admit, and had to force himself to pay attention to king Fredrik's never-ending monologue, often wondering when he went from ruthless to diplomatic.

Cursing himself, Ivar suddenly wished he could be more like his brothers, because he didn't understand how a woman whom he had heard speak only 2 or 3 sentences, was so interesting to him. 

But when you locked eyes with him and smiled, he remembered the last time he allowed himself to be completely vulnerable, and it brought an uncomfortable feeling he hadn't felt in a long time.

Knowing all too well of his brothers intentions, collecting food and mead, he knew he had to act quickly and come up with a plan good enough to keep things under control, at least for the night. Fredrik was starting to get inpatient because of his brother's absence.

Ivar shouted his name and Hvitserk had to bite his tongue to avoid cursing his mother for making him so unable to avoid her youngest son and his plans. 

Despite the annoyance, Hvitserk walked towards Ivar, keeping his gaze away from king Fredrik and his daughter, princess Tove, his bride, someone he was fairly acquainted with. She smirked when she saw him.

"What, Ivar? Hvitserk asked, not bothering to hide his annoyed tone, knowing it would irritate both his brother and his bride's father.

Ivar signalled for him to get closer, enough so they could talk without being heard by their company.

"You need to stay here and talk to them." Commanding and resolute, Ivar's tone left little for questioning.

"I can't, I have someone waiting for me," Hvitserk responded through gritted teeth.

"Yes, Y/N." He cleared his throat before continuing, "I'll make sure she knows you're sorry you couldn't meet with her tonight." Hvitserk clenched his jaw and Ivar knew it would take more than that to convince his brother to give up on spending the night with a beautiful woman and instead amuse a very boring old king. "Please, Hvitserk."

That did it. He nodded and Ivar let out a breath before getting up and excusing himself.

The cold wind and the strong smell of the sea forced you to reminisce something you wanted to keep hidden for good, and you had to take a deep breath to calm down and remember you weren't there for a bad reason.

That thought made you smile. Knowing you caught the attention of the man you wanted for so long, and for so long you thought you couldn't have, was of great pleasure to you. Being the center of Hvitserk's attention was everything you dreamed and more, if you could say so based on the time you spent together at the feast.

When you opened your eyes, the sight of the waves and the moon brought another memory. The very last time you were there, crying for yourself and for prince Ivar, listening to him do the same. That was a hard night for both of you.

Almost recreating that night, though you were sure it would be the complete opposite, you heard someone coming behind you. An immediate smile took over your face at the thought of Hvitserk.

But when you turned around, it wasn't Hvitserk there with you.

King Ivar stood before you, forming a sight you weren't expecting to see.

Seeing him up close was unlike merely exchanging a glance across the room, from afar. You could see all of him now.

You couldn't help but compare him to Hvitserk.

They were almost opposites. Hvitserk owned the sunlight when he stood in it, reflecting his clear eyes and warm, flushed skin, making his smile brighter than usual. It was a sight.

But Ivar, between the dark background and dim illumination, his bright blue eyes were alluring, and the shadow on part of his face, not covering but enhancing all the best, almost made you lose your breath. It was like he belonged in moonlight.

He looked just like you remembered, but oh so different. 

Despite the obvious changes, like the longer hair and matured face, what caught your attention was the tired look on his face; the angry frown you remembered was no longer angry, but still a frown.

And he looked as pretty as you recalled then, and earlier, from afar in the Great Hall.

"King Ivar," you said softly after a minute or so, not knowing if a bow was necessary, "where's Hvitserk?"

tags: @luvjiminssi  ; @ryukjin  ; @hecohansen31  ; @heavenly1927  ; @youbloodymadgenius  ; @ace-fiction  ; @poisonous00  ; @jzr201  ; @rose1729 ; @shestrying2write ​ ; @zuxiezendler  ; @learninglemni-blog ; @didiintheblog  ; @the-jess-life  ; @blonddnamedhandz  (if you’d like to be tagged or to be removed from the tag list, just send me a message/ask, no problem ��️ if I wasn’t able to tag, please check if your blog is available to show on search) 

[jamiebluewind]

Pok The Nightmare King?

***

@skysfallingbaby proposed an interesting concept. "Maybe Pok Gukgak is the Nightmare King". And while this theory make a lot of things a lot more messed up (like trying to use Riz in a sacrifice), it got my theorist senses a tingling.

So, without futher ado, let's get started.

***

First off, What is Pok exactly? We can assume that the Nightmare King doesn't just look like a goblin as he doesn't actually look like any one race when people have tried to describe him. We could guess some kind of magical effect that alters his appearance, but the Nightmare King was also banished (a spell with no time limit outside homebrew rules, unless the spell is not held for a minute or the creature is banished while already on their own plane) and seeing as Pok lived on the material plane for years, he couldn't be the Nightmare King... technically. The thing is, the Nightmare King doesn't have to be there to be there. Ragh's mom was piloting a clone of herself in real time while her real body was unconscious and housed miles underground (possibly in the molten core of the planet). A goblin suit could be piloted by the Nightmare King using the same principles. Even a direct connection to the Nightmare King is established in game via his corrupting influence constantly leaking from his plane of existence into the material plane (specifically in Silvar).

The next question that comes to mind is Why did Kalvaxus eat Pok if they were allied? and to that I say Do we know for sure that he did? What we do know is this...

Kalvaxus taunted that he ate Pok, but he did it in the middle of a battle to throw off Riz.

Kalvaxus would have eaten Pok while bound. Barring being able to enlarge/reduce Pok (and even then, he would only shrink to about the size of a cat), it would have taken a 6 to 7 foot tall dragonborn a WHILE to eat someone 1/2 his height and 1/5 his weight, bones and all (and dragons and dragonborns don't even have the established voracious appetite goblins do).

Riz and Sklonda were told Pok died at sea until Kalvaxus said otherwise.

Pok and Shadow Cat/Calina worked together

Shadow Cat/Calina was absent at Pok's funeral and never contacted Sklonda or Riz afterward.

Shadow Cat was spotted immediately after the battle with Kalvaxus (making it possible that she was given a heads up about Kalvaxus' plans).

So, using this information it's not that hard to theorize that Pok might not have been eaten or was eaten under the orders of the Nightmare King. Reasons to taunt might have been something The Nightmare King told him to say once free or just something he said to rattle Riz knowing it couldn't be proven. Reasons to ask to be eaten could have been to dispose of a clone he was piloting without risking leaving a magical trace behind (which could have been done regularly for one reason or another, but if Kalvaxus got caught red handed, they would have had an established story set up and a witness to it happening).

There's also a few things that happen during the Shadow Cat/Riz dialogue that take on a whole new meaning. I'll link the dialogue below, but one exchange really stands out. She said "Pok Gukgak. It's a good man" and when Riz asked what went wrong between them, she said "Nothing went... wrong between us" immediately followed by her offering "a little information swap" and to answer a question about his dad in exchange for answering her own. This was despite Riz previously saying "I wanna know where the crown is. I wanna know where Fabian is. I wanna know why people are coming for us in our sleep." and thus already knowing what information Riz would trade for.

Finally, let's look at Riz.

He is the son of Pok and Sklonda Gukgak.

He is an inquisitive rogue and on more than one occasion has been described as being "one with the shadows".

He has always has issues with sleeping, often avoiding it or just not getting enough of it.

He has always been able to see Shadow Cat and has met her at least once.

He was going to be sacrificed on an alter by a Nightmare King controlled Fig to complete some kind of ritual.

He was not attacked in his dreams when he failed his throws, the first time getting Baron while awake and the second time pounced on by Shadow Cat while asleep (while even Ragh was attacked in his sleep and got up while already under dominate person as Adaine watched).

Shadow Cat knew a lot of stuff about Riz, including current stuff ("I know that YOU only do things to kinda distract yourself from how DEEPLY sad you are that your dad is gone, I get that. The maidens and then you find the maidens and then it's on to the next thing and the conspiracy board and you don't sleep and you're digging digging digging- it's like when you were in that palimpsest. You will dig until your own hands are bleeding...").

Shadow Cat's first offer to get his intel was to answer a question about his dad if she got to ask him a question in return (followed by saving Fabian despite that being one of the things he asked for).

Some of these wouldn't hold water alone, but combined they paint a very interesting picture. Shadow Cat being so familiar with Riz makes more sense if she has been keeping an eye on the son of her boss off and on for a long time. It also explains why Shadow Cat immediately offered to give him intell on his dad in exchange for answering a question and clicking her tongue when he turned it down like he did. Riz being the son of the Nightmare King (maybe only a tiny part or an infused thing due to how it happened) would mean he's probably immune to some Nightmare magic and skilled with others (like how half-elves are immune to Sleep, but can't trace), which explains why he has yet to get attacked while dreaming and his natural stealth skills, perceptiveness, and sleep issues. The Nightmare King trying to use Riz in a ritual sacrifice instead of just some guy on the street might mean his son is required for it.

This all leaves me with so many questions.

Considering how strategic the Nightmare King is, why exactly would he pick Sklonda?

Could Pok have fathered Riz specifically to sacrifice later, as a backup for something, or as a cover for being around certain people?

Why did Pok leave and was it planned?

What was Pok really up to during his life as a spy?

Is Riz required somehow to bring back the Nightmare King?

Does the ritual actually require Riz to die and if so, could they revive him without causing the ritual to fail (like if it required a lethal amount of blood from Riz or a mortal wound)?

What will Gorthalax reveal once he's freed (which will most likely happen once Ayda learns Plane Shift and has a slot free to use it)?

Could someone in the party potentially question Kalvaxus (maybe with the help of Gorthalax or a specific spell)?

***

Special thanks to @skysfallingbaby for the bardic inspiration for this tinfoil time. I honestly hadn't considered the possibility until you mentioned it, but the moment I did I just HAD to follow the logic to see where it led. It really surprised me how many pieces fell into place the further I went. It really was an absolute delight to research. Thank you ^_^

***

Original Post

[dweemeister]

Best Animated Short Film Nominees for the 91st Academy Awards (2019, listed in order of appearance in the shorts package)

So continues a proud tradition on this blog. This is the first of hopefully three omnibus write-ups on this year’s Oscar-nominated short films. We begin with this year’s slate for Animated Short Film. The category – once the domain of Walt Disney Animation Studios, Paramount, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) – is now one of the most democratic of all Academy Award categories, with so many smaller independent studios nominated in recent decades. This year, four of the five nominees are about child-parent relationships – from the beginning to the end of life; showing parents who can be overbearing, bad influences, supportive. Here now are the Oscar-nominated animated short films.

Bao (2018)

Armed with an awards campaign war chest from Pixar and Disney, Domee Shi’s Bao is the prohibitive favorite on paper. For Bao, Shi – a Chinese-Canadian storyboard artist for Pixar – was influenced by her father’s artwork (he was an art professor) as well as two anime films in My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999) and Spirited Away (2001). The film opens with a Chinese-Canadian woman cooking baozi dumplings for herself and her husband. Once he goes to work, one of the dumplings sprouts limbs and begins acting like a human. She takes care of the dumpling as if it was her child. This relationship between the mother and the dumpling child is actually an allegory for her inability to let her real-life child go – empty nest syndrome, if you will, playing alongside Toby Chu’s beautiful score.

The film should be lauded for its display on how the Chinese mother in the film expresses how much she cares for her dumpling child/actual child – through food and other smaller acts of love across time. Bao nevertheless runs into trouble when its twist first appears (far too late and far too abruptly). The moment – though steeped in allegory – is such a tonal departure from the rest of the film, that it is impossible to know whether a gasp of disbelief or belly laughter is the appropriate response. It calls into question why even use the dumpling child as a stand-in for the mother’s actual child in the first place. And, as one of very few Asian-American persons who personally dislikes Bao, if the relationship problems between mother and son is concentrated on the mother’s inability to let her child grow into adulthood, then why is it incumbent upon the son to come to her to reconcile (the fact the father literally shoves his son to do so is nearing emotional abuse)? It is unclear if the mother has learned from her behavior, acknowledging what damage she has done to the relationship. As valuable as Bao is in its depiction of an Asian expatriate family, its mixed messaging continues to vex me.

My rating: 7/10

^ I saw Bao last year in front of Incredibles 2 as part of the 2018 Movie Odyssey. I enjoyed it more the second time around, lifting it from a 6/10.

Late Afternoon (2017)

From Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon, Late Afternoon is directed by Louise Bagnall. Bagnall served as character designer and animator on Song of the Sea (2014) and The Breadwinner (2017). An elderly woman named Emily (voiced by Fionnula Flanagan) lives at home with dementia. On this titular afternoon – the title perhaps also referring to Emily’s stage in life – Emily is recalling experiences from the past, not entirely living in the present. Also in Emily’s home is another woman who is seen packing Emily’s personal belongings. This woman seems familiar to Emily, somehow. For anyone who has ever had a loved one with dementia, what is represented in the film will be familiar: a reliving of scenes from one’s past (whether real, murky, exaggerated, or imagined) at any and all parts of life. Their speech, rooted in those flashbacks, make little sense in the moment.

But with Bagnall’s direction, Emily’s utterances become comprehensible. Awash in and playing with simple colors, Bagnall takes us inside Emily’s mind – breaking geometric reality whenever she is reliving her expressionistic memories. Though Emily may find joy in these reflections, there is melancholy in her inability to understand all that she is going through. Emily’s dementia breaks through in the final seconds of the film, but we suspect that when the day or the hour is new, she again will be frolicking on the beach as a child or playing with her teenage friends or something else that may cause nightmares. Late Afternoon will probably play best to those who have been close to those with dementia, but the film will still move those who have not.

My rating: 8/10

Animal Behaviour (2018)

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) has been responsible for many memorable animated short films, and Alison Snowden and David Fine’s Animal Behaviour is the newest addition to that lineup. Snowden is a long-time NFB figure who also helped develop the Shaun the Sheep television series for Aardman Animation and the BBC; Fine is married to Snowden and, together, created the adult animation series Bob and Margaret. For Animal Behaviour, we sit in on a therapy session. The catch is that this very human situation is comprised entirely of animals. Dr. Clement is a pitbull who has repressed the urge to sniff another dog’s butt when meeting them for the first time, Lorraine the leech has a problem about being clingy in a relationship; Cheryl the praying mantis keeps cannibalizing her significant others; Todd the pig had a chocolate addiction but remains gluttonous; Jeffrey the bird says nothing about a past trauma; and newcomer Victor the ape has many things to sort out himself. There is also a cat whose reasons for attending the therapy group session are unclear.

Animal Behaviour’s jokes are tonally uneven and it almost wears out its welcome after Victor the ape has been present at the session for a few minutes. Many of the behavioral issues found among the therapy session participants are grounded in each animal’s typical behavior. Animal Behaviour romps around in its darkly comedic dialogue – from the animals sniping at each other’s behavior in direct and passive-aggressive ways. The humor is not the most inappropriate for children, but it is dependent on one’s acceptance of biting zingers that never descend into demeaning exchanges (a comedic balancing act that is difficult for humans to master, let alone through the medium of animation via animal characters).

My rating: 7/10

Weekends (2017)

Trevor Jimenez has been a storyboard artist for Blue Sky Studios, Pixar, and Walt Disney Animation Studios. With Weekends, Jimenez presents a semiautobiographical story about a six- or seven-year-old boy who splits his time between divorced parents – drawn from his own life going to his father’s residence on the weekends and staying with his mother during the week (in Jimenez’s own words, a, “fractured family”). The film is without dialogue, set in 1980s Toronto, and shows a boy in near-constant emotional anxiety (overt and otherwise). Unable to express to his parents the turmoil their divorce is having on his mentality, Jimenez instead uses music (Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No.1 when with his mother; Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” when with his father) and especially surrealistic dream sequences reflect the boy’s sense of displacement. Using a charcoal background with hand-drawn animation, Weekends is gorgeously animated – with the assistance from Jimenez’s Pixar colleagues – and it would not be surprising if Jimenez was influenced by Bill Plympton’s (2008′s Idiots and Angels, 2013′s Cheatin’) angular, pencillike lifestyle.

Few divorce narratives ever adopt a child’s perspective. We see the mother attempting to adjust to her new life, as well as the father living in a way more befitting of an undergraduate student in a dorm room rather than an independent adult. But Weekends always draws back to the boy, allowing the audience to see how he feels about his parents’ attempts to move on from the other (he is terrified of his parents forming new relationships; because Weekends is not seen through the adults, much is suggested, left off-screen) and his evolving relationship between both his parents. Weekends takes a meditative pace, but never feels overly ponderous in delivering its message. A sense of belonging and togetherness is essential to being human. In times of distress, it can be difficult to understand what role one plays in another’s life. All that doubt and the comforting revelations that eventually arrive are on full display in Weekends.

My rating: 8.5/10

One Small Step (2018)

Fledgling animation studio Taiko Studios has made their first film in One Small Step – a co-production between the United States and China. Directed by Andrew Chesworth (former Disney animator) and Bobby Pontillas (formerly with Disney and Blue Sky), One Small Step is about a Chinese-American girl named Luna Chu, who is inspired to become an astronaut after watching television coverage of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission. She lives with only her father, a shoemaker and footwear repairman. Mr. Chu helps support her fascination with spaceflight and her dreams as best he can, even on the days when Luna is in a dire mood, believing that becoming an astronaut is out of reach.

If this story and this parent-child bond sounds rote, One Small Step handles one aspect of this narrative differently (the film, however, could benefit with more time due to its packed plot). On Luna’s darkest of days, she forgets to remember how important it is to treat herself and others with grace and kindness. Her academic failures are not an indication of who she is as a person. Her changing relationship with her father demonstrates how Luna loses sight of what is important as she struggles with schoolwork. Things as simple as her father’s offering of extra food before and after she heads off to university for the day or his repairing her shoes are taken for granted. Deliberately or otherwise (perhaps incidentally because there is no dialogue in this film), the film intuits that many parents of Asian descent express love through their actions, not with words. That includes Mr. Chu. As we see Luna in the film’s closing scene, she is of an age where she knows there are many things she wishes she could have expressed to her father. The tenacity she has shown in pursuing her dreams is enough.

My rating: 7.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

Two other films also played with this package: Wishing Box (2017) and Tweet Tweet (2018, Russia).

From previous years: 85th Academy Awards (2013), 87th (2015), 88th (2016), 89th (2017), and 90th (2018).

[your-art-is-gay]

Meet The Writer

1. What’s your oldest WIP, and how old is it? What inspired you to start it?

My oldest WIP that’s still currently in motion is my main one, The Academy. It turned two years old September 22 (ahh!!)

I got the idea when my dad (also a writer) suggested a school with a bunch of magical creatures living in tandem, instead of a magic school specifically for like wizards or whatever. I thought it sounded very interesting, so I took a couple of character’s I’d made before and started writing!

(Fun fact, a few of the main characters in the Academy were originally from a Percy Jackson fanfiction about demigods with fears that greatly contradicted their powers! Paris was a son of Aphrodite who was terrified of falling in love, and Kieran was a son of Hecate who despised magic! Early drafts of the Academy had very heavy influence from Greek Mythology as well, up until I decided that I really didn’t want it to be so similar to Percy Jackson and created my own mythos instead.)

2. What’s your biggest pet peeve when it comes to writing?

I tend to overanalyze, well, everything in my writing. One of the worst feelings is when I think of something really clever and then I discover that it opens up a plot hole in an earlier portion. Oh well, that’s what revisions are for, right? *gross sobbing*

3. What scene did you enjoy writing the most out of all your WIPs? What scene did you enjoy writing the least?

Ooohhh, that’s a good question. Frankly, I’m not entirely sure. I definitely really like the quiet, romantic scenes, because I’m a total sap and I don’t get to write many of those.

As for the one I liked the least, well… One of my main characters has been through some pretty traumatic shit in their past, and partway through the book they have a nightmare and completely break down, and gods I hated writing that. It hurts me so much to put them through that.

4. What’s your favorite trope?

Well, I have a lot of them. I really like characters who are done with everything and everyone and only go along with the crazy shit that happens to them because they have to. Like, they’ll let the plot drag them around but by the gods they’re kicking and dragging their heels along the way. I also really like casual fourth-wall breaking, Gilligan cuts, and the *thing happens and two characters in the background exchange money* tropes.

5. Which of your protagonists do you relate to the most?

Well, I have a character that’s very heavily based off of me―and who also shares my name. Although, while they were written with the intention of being somewhat of a self-insert, they’ve grown and changed as a character so much now that we really aren’t alike anymore. Frankly, I’m not entirely sure. I’d probably say Nick just for simplicity’s sake, but I don’t really know.

6. What is the worst writing experience you’ve ever had with another writer, anywhere, since you’ve started writing?

I don’t really talk to people in general. I don’t think I can recall a negative experience with another writer, actually.

7. What character from a famous story, book/movie/comic/game, or otherwise, do you despise the most? Why?

Severus motherfucking Snape. I have so many reasons for hating him.

He was an abusive, racist prick who got pissed when his female friend wasn’t romantically interested in him, called her a racist name when she tried to help him, and fucked off to join the wizard Nazis.

He only defected over to the good side because he was still obsessed with Lily and was afraid of her being murdered.

He literally asked Voldemort to spare Lily so he could be with her―sure, kill the year-old infant and the man she actually loves, but no, keep her alive so I can force my love on her.

Despite being a supposedly “good” guy, he mentally abused his students for years, so much so that he even became Neville Longbottom’s worst fear.

Neville Longbottom, who frequently goes to see his essentially braindead parents and is alluded to being able to remember when they were tortured so badly that they became that way, was tormented so badly by Snape that he became Neville’s worst fear.

Upon finding the Potter house after the were killed, he completely breezes past James’ body, ignored the wailing and bleeding child in the crib, just to hold Lily’s body and weep over how he never got to sleep with her.

He has an unreasonable hatred for Harry just because Harry looks like James.

He was so salty about something that happened when they were children (that wasn’t even Lupin’s fault, by the way) that he outed Lupin as a werewolf and forced him to resign, depriving Hogwarts of the only good DADA teacher it ever had.

And yet, despite all of this, he is given a redemption arc. He is considered a redeemable character, when Draco Malfoy, a literal child who was tortured and abused for a good portion of his life and had very little of a say in most of his awful choices, “doesn’t have a heart of gold.”

Snape is seen as a romantic, selfless guy by a good portion of the fandom because…he was obsessed with a girl who wanted nothing to do with him? Because of a throwaway line where he proclaimed he would always be obsessed with a girl who wanted nothing to do with him?

It’s bad enough that the fans think this, but the books treat it like this as well!! SNAPE, of all people, gets a redemption arc―if you can even call those bullshit excuses that. I, for one, am thoroughly sick of abusive characters getting redeemed.

(Sorry for ranting, I have a lot of feelings about this.)

8. What’s your favorite line of dialogue you’ve ever written?

Most of my characters are sarcastic little shits, so that’s really hard to say.

9. Who’s the worst character you’ve ever written, in terms of morality?

Well….hm….  The thing about my characters, particularly my antagonists, is that I do my very best to make them something other than just evil. In their eyes, their bad actions are justified. So, it’s really hard to choose.

My main villain is a very self-righteous, ambitious sort of guy. He’s kinda racist (a lot of older magi in my story just….really don’t like the fae), and thinks that the magi (magical folk) are superior. BUT, instead of wanting to take over the world or anything, he just wants to leave. Long story short, the magi are originally from another dimension, and it’s there that he wants to return them. Unfortunately, this other dimension is presumed to have been destroyed, and even if it is there, opening a rift to go there could potentially completely destroy our world. He doesn’t care about that, though―after all, it’s only humans and dirty fae that would die.

The only other character I can think of is the one I just really hate. Like, she just oozes evil and I kind of love to write her, because I don’t really have any other characters that have that slick evil personality. But she’s a pretty terrible person too. Her twin brother was taken by the fae as an infant, a changling left in his place. The changeling doesn’t know that yet―but she does.

Their entire life, she’s blamed him for why she doesn’t have her actual brother. She pretends like she loves him, but the entire time she’s been emotionally abusing him and making him constantly feel like crap about himself. She’s even physically abused him, by taking iron and burning him whenever she can get away with it.

I think she’d probably be the worst.

10. Do you prefer happy endings or bad endings? Or do you prefer the middle ground?

Definitely good endings. I can appreciate well-written bad endings, but only after I get over my initial emotional response to it. Sometimes, that takes me a while―like Swarm by Scott Westerfeld. I read that almost a year ago and I’m still fucking pissed. I’m just not really a fan of endings that leave a bad taste in my mouth. (One of the reasons I chose to reread Huck Finn for English instead of doing Of Mice And Men, despite the fact that I kind of loath Huck Finn.)

I’m also aware that not all stories can have feel-good endings, and in many of them, those types of endings just don’t make sense. *squints at the end of Mockingjay*

But, in general, I greatly prefer good endings.

[aion-rsa]

How Roger Corman Finally Restored His Uncensored Vision for The Masque of the Red Death

https://ift.tt/3cl3Pwr

The Masque of the Red Death, Roger Corman’s masterful 1964 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, has been fully restored and can now be seen in all its diabolical splendor. The seventh of eight “Poe Cycle” films Corman made in the 1960s, Masque is arguably the best. Before its release, Poe had already delivered Corman from the low budget black and white films he shot in 10 days in the 1950s to the relative luxury of three-week shoots and psychedelic underworlds. 

The new DVD/Blu-Ray is the first fully uncut, extended version of the film to be available. Besides restoring cinematographer Nicolas Roeg’s sumptuous camerawork, we get extra scenes which were cut by censors. The package also includes a 20-page booklet with a new essay from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ film preservationist Tessa Idlewine.

The original “The Masque of the Red Death” short story was published in 1842, and it is only 15 paragraphs long, shorter than a Cracked article. To fill out the horror feature, screenwriters Charles Beaumont, who wrote episodes of The Twilight Zone as well as The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, and science fiction author R. Wright Campbell incorporated Poe’s short story “Hop Frog” as a subplot, and added elements of the short story “Torture by Hope” by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.

While Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death has discovered new life as a comforting modern parable during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it was released in 1964, many took the film to be a comment on the nuclear nightmares of the Cold War era. It did open the same year as Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. And atomic bomb fallout resulted in its own “Red Death,” leading to an entire generation to be assured the living would envy the dead. The film was filmed during the Profumo Scandal of 1963, and British tabloids were filled with stories of “Man In The Mask Parties” in Hyde Park Gate.

“I have Tasted the Beauties of Terror”

As an Anglo-American horror movie, The Masque of the Red Death continues European genre progressions set by the Italian Gothic film, Beatrice Cenci, directed by Riccardo Freda in 1956, and Mario Bava’s 1963 film La frusta e il corpo (The Whip and the Body). Corman’s influences went beyond genre, however, incorporating the post-apocalyptic imagery of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. In Masque, Death’s messengers report survival rates to their Master, who calculates only “a dwarf jester and five other people remain alive in the world.”

In an interview about the film’s restoration with Den of Geek, Corman admits he “should watch more genre films to keep up with it. But I’m more inclined towards somewhat more serious films, and particularly foreign films.”

The Masque of the Red Death also appears to owe a great debt to American experimental independent filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of The Pleasure Dome (1954), and recalls Michael Curtiz’s 1933 horror film, Mystery of the Wax Museum, which was shot in the pink-and-green two-color Technicolor process.

After years of black and white exploitation pictures for American International Pictures (AIP), Corman’s Poe cycle began his move to color, and the exciting new challenges of shooting beyond monochrome. The adaptation of The Masque of the Red Death set a new level of excellence in Corman’s use of set dressing, lighting, and costume design. They are given a fuller palette.

Says Corman, “I always thought that Poe represented the unconscious mind, and I shot according to that. It was one of my themes.”

In Poe’s story, the pride of Prince Prospero’s palace is seven rooms. Each is decorated and illuminated in a specific color: blue, purple, green, orange, white, and violet. The last room is black and bathed in light which shines a deep color of blood. All of the furniture is black, including a clock, which chimes each hour. At the chime of the clock, the revelers at the masquerade freeze. The musicians stop playing. The dancers strike a pose, and all conversations stop. Revelry resumes when the chiming stops. The rooms represent the human mind, the blood and time infuses corporeality. Corman’s direction manages to let that seep into every frame. The tone is both mischievous and chilling.  

The Masque of the Red Death is atmospheric. The dialogue is more important than the action, but the settings and framing are paramount. “I felt the unconscious mind doesn’t really see the world,” Corman explains. “The conscious mind sees the world with eyes, ears, and so forth, and simply transmits information. So, I made a point on all of the Poe films of never going outside unless I absolutely had to. I wanted to have full control, to shoot within the studio. Whether it came through to the audience, I don’t know. But at least in my own mind, I was able to deal with special effects with a number of things, with the concept of the unconscious mind.”

The cinematography was done by Nicholas Roeg. While Corman hadn’t yet become acquainted with Mario Bava, Roeg’s camera allows the Italian horror director’s psychedelic influence to surge through the camera. The Masque of the Red Death “was the first I had done in England,” Corman tells us. “And they showed me a work of a number of English cameramen, and I thought Nic was the best of the group. And the collaboration went very well. I thought he did really, a brilliant job [with the] camera work.”

Roeg would go on to direct classic independent cinema with films like Don’t Look Now, Performance starring Mick Jagger, and the David Bowie cinematic encapsulation, The Man Who Fell to Earth. “I never knew, did I inspire him to be a director, or did he feel ‘if Roger can do it, anybody can do it?’” Corman wonders.

While Corman had a bigger budget and more time to make the film, cost- and labor-cutting alternatives occasionally provided fortunate outcomes. “Danny Heller, my art director, and I, always went to what was called a scene dock in studios where we’re going to work,” Corman says. “The scene dock contained flats from previous pictures, just individual flats. When we did Masque of the Red Death, we found these magnificent flats from Becket.”

The Price of Evil

Vincent Price has the most delicious delivery in this film. His devil worshipping Prince Prospero is the cruel sovereign of a village plagued with an all-consuming Red Death, and Price’s inflections are infectious. His voice is seductive, and his cruelty brims with good humor.

“He had the character pretty much set in mind when he came into it,” Corman remembers. “Vincent always did a great deal of preparation. We would discuss the characters, just Vincent and me, before the rehearsals. He and I were in agreement on the character, and then he would bring that character to the rehearsals. We did not do a great deal of rehearsing because of the Screen Actors Guild rules. They charge you as if you are shooting when you rehearse.”

Price played Roderick Usher in Corman’s first Poe adaptation, The Fall of the House of Usher. For The Masque of The Red Death, the director only gave one note. “As I remember, I said, ‘The really key to Prospero’s character is that he believes God is dead,’” Corman says. “And everything stems from that belief. That with the absence of God, he was free to do anything he wanted.” 

Ultimate power breeds ultimate corruption. The film is set in a country decimated by an epidemic. While the prince of this unnamed land offers refuge for his courtiers, he derives perverse satisfaction in condemning his subjects to death by their exclusion. While Prospero is making his annual deign-to-see-the-peasants day, one of the townspeople dies of Red Death. 

The prince intended to offer peasants some crumbs in appreciation of their labor, but young Gino (David Weston) mocks him. To make matters worse, the ungrateful worker’s lover Francesca (Jane Asher) defends the man, prompting Prospero to label both of them insurrectionists. He burns the village to the ground, throws Gino and Francesca’s father into one of the most foreboding castle dungeons in horror history, and puts Francesca up at his palace. Tempted by the idealism and faith of the village’s “resistance,” Prospero corrupts and sacrifices for sheer joy.  

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Meanwhile the prince promises his aristocratic guests that they will be immune to the scourge, unless they displease him. He throws a masked ball and forbids anyone to wear red, as it would be in bad taste. He is actually preparing a mass sacrifice in exchange for Satan’s favor. Asher’s Francesca is an incorruptible innocent who seems to have perfect faith. The Satanic prince will not tolerate any Christian worship on his estate, so he delights in tempting the faithful into the “velvet darkness” of evil. Prospero hopes to turn her into a Satanist or drive her mad.

For the Uninvited, There is Much to Fear

The film was hit with heavy censorship. In the U.S, the Catholic Legion of Decency sent a list of changes, and in the UK, the British Board of Film Censors required a separate set of cuts. The Legion of Decency bemoaned the “Satanism and erotic costuming” on the screen, according to the booklet which comes with the DVD/Blu-Ray package. Father Sal Miraliotta, a separate reviewer from the Legion of Decency, first approved the film and then changed his grade to a B, which meant morally objectionable. He ultimately downgraded it to a full Condemned rating, blasting the Satanic worship and its malignancy of the soul, and mocking the screenwriters’ “strung-together gibberish” and “mumbo-jumbo Latin.”

Hazel Court’s Juliana is captivating and as conniving as Prince Prospero. She’s also more subtly insidious. Juliana dedicates herself to the service of Satan and receives the ultimate payoff. While most of Juliana’s satanic invocation was left in, censors wanted the word “Alleluia” removed. The U.S. version also censored the film’s climax. When the Man in Red is talking with Prince Prospero, the dialogue was changed from “Each man creates his own God for himself. His own Heaven – his own Hell” to “Each man creates his own Heaven – his own Hell.” This takes out the idea that God could be created by man, something Ian Anderson would explore on Jethro Tull’s classic 1971 album, Aqualung.  

When asked whether all this divine intervention made Corman think he just might be going to hell, he says, “No, that never occurred to me. I’m sort of a lapsed Catholic, and I don’t believe there is a hell.”

Some of the cuts had nothing to do with blasphemous ideology. The tiny dancer Esmeralda is played on camera by young actor Verina Greenlaw, but her dialogue was dubbed over by an adult woman. Skip Martin’s clever Hop Toad character plots vengeance over her royal mistreatment at the hands of Alfredo, campily played by veteran actor Patrick Magee. One unsettling scene was removed from the U.S. version because it seemed Esmerelda’s relationship with Hop Toad was more than friendship.

Corman also cut nine frames from the scene where Francesca is stripped down and thrown into a bathtub because it gave the illusion of nudity. The removed frames ensured Asher’s breasts would not appear on screen.

“I’ve Already Had That Doubtful Pleasure“

The irony, upon seeing the restored scenes, is how they actually feed into the surprisingly righteous conclusion of the film. The Masque of the Red Death is rife with blasted, unholy incantations, but the prince’s callous sacrifices and lifelong debauchery mean nothing to a master who answers to no one. Talk about moral relativity! The hero of The Masque of Red Death is Death, and Death worships no gods and no devils. The depths of Prospero’s belief turn out to be mere demonic delusions.

Corman shot the low-budget Poe pictures through bulky Mitchell cameras on 35mm film and the restoration breathes a new life to each underfunded frame. Composer David Lee’s soundtrack of tambourines, fifes, and brass evokes the medieval period, as do the elegant costumes by Laura Nightingale. The restoration highlights the lushness of both, as they mix to underscore the “velvet darkness” with subliminal subtext of renewal and hope. At the same time, the restored cut actually makes the darkness darker.

The Masque of Red Death ends with the words “Sic transit gloria mundi,” Latin for “thus goes the glory of the world.” Corman’s take on Poe’s apocalyptic parable is a truly inglorious achievement. The film is proof that no budgetary restrictions hold back artistic vision when lunatics get the run of the asylum. They can create and destroy a whole crazy world.

The Masque of the Red Death is available on Blu-Ray, DVD, and Digital now.

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The post How Roger Corman Finally Restored His Uncensored Vision for The Masque of the Red Death appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[seducing-mr-perfect]

We last left off at the bar scene, where an angry Min-june left the hotel bar post an argument with Robin, and her subsequent conversation with her father. Shortly after, she has a nightmare involving all the men in her life – including the one she’d met just a few days ago. And somehow, it’s that very man that consumes her thoughts for the rest of the film.

The nightmare sequence is important for obvious reasons. We already know that Ju-hyeoung is a selfish lying coward who doesn’t care for Min-june at all, that he treats her with utter disrespect then blames her for his own choices. But what we don’t know, until this sequence, is that this has become a pattern with Min-june.

The first boyfriend mocks her for being ‘nice’. The second one takes issue with her need to look after and care for him. Ju-hyeoung blames her for his cheating tendencies. The men she dates don’t see a warm, loving, genuine woman with a maternal streak - they see a girlfriend they can use and discard as they see fit. And Min-june, in attempting to be the perfect girlfriend for them and ignoring her own needs, ends up digging her own grave.

Interestingly, in her dream, Min-june focuses on the last part of Robin’s rather extensive sentence. You will be treated like trash by men, and then you’ll grow old alone. Given that this part of his dialogue sticks out more strongly than the qualifiers he used just before (“if you continue on [acting the way you do in relationships]…”), it’s possible to assume that she feels this is his overall opinion of her, and that it will never change.

I feel this impression she has - of what Robin thinks - is what becomes a major block to her recognizing how real, or deep, his feelings for her run, later on. Because she doesn’t have a context for why he speaks to her this way at the bar, the only assumption she is able to make is that Robin thinks she is a pathetic, clingy person who deserves to be treated like trash in general.

But none of this is what this analysis is really about. This analysis is about Robin’s challenge to June, and how she tackles it.

Why does Min-June take this challenge so seriously in the first place? For this we need to look at one statement that June made, the one Robin so bluntly interrupted with his challenge:

I could have a line of guys begging for me. I could, but I don’t. You know why?

The real answer to 'why’, June addresses in her exchange with Robin much later in the film (at the bench scene, where she confides in him how uncomfortable she is with resorting to manipulation and power-play in her relationships). June doesn’t want men to beg for her, even though she knows she’s completely capable of having them do so. She just wants to be able to show how she feels without having it being constantly used against her.

She takes this challenge because it’s important for her to establish that she can. That she isn’t some naive ingénue who knows nothing about relationships or people or desirability. She isn’t trash. She isn’t someone who deserves to be alone for the rest of her life. And she needs to prove to herself, as much as to Robin, that she is more than capable of playing the man at his own game if she really sets her mind to it.

The only problem is that the man she's trying so hard to 'seduce', is just as determined not to fall for it. Or at least knows how to let it not show.

Operation Beautiful

The next time we see Min-june at her workplace, she’s in a flattering floral dress and pearls. A look - in contrast to her usual professional and office-wear (the pantsuits, the smart dresses, the shirt-skirt-quarter-pants combinations) - that is meant to emphasize her femininity and play it to her advantage. She speaks of using her beauty as a weapon “that will make the enemy’s heart pound”.

But here is also where she makes a massive miscalculation. Robin is too tough a customer to snatch that way. He already has several walls erected, walls that June can’t even see yet.

Did he anticipate that June would seriously take him up on his words at the bar? The movie doesn’t exactly tell us either way.

Does he, however, know what she’s trying to do? Highly likely, given his reactions both here and the scene in his hotel room.

Robin could have ignored June entirely, or not mentioned her dress at all. But he doesn’t. He chooses not only to comment on her attire in front of her colleagues, but also to cast it in an undesirable light. Almost as if he is accepting her challenge and then turning it on its head, sending a clear message that she’ll need to try harder, strategize better, if she is to actually stand a chance at besting him.

So it’s highly possible that this is his way of pulling the rug from under her feet, ensuring he still has the upper hand in this battle that’s erupted between them.

Operation Angel

Operation Beautiful works as a short - but slightly insignificant - comedy scene. This sequence works as that, as well as foreshadowing to a very important plot point (Robin’s grandfather’s connection to Maeda). Here she attempts to conform to another trope of traditional femininity: that of “looking after” him through cleaning his office space (she even buys fresh flowers to decorate his table). This includes rifling through these things and throwing away stuff that she thinks is useless and unnecessary. And this is where she makes her second major mistake.

In the film Robin is shown, time and again, as being very possessive of his personal space, and reluctant to share anything about his private life with anyone. Even around his closest friend, Jennifer, he sidesteps any personal questions, deflects and often changes the subject. Twice, he shuts down Min-June’s attempts to step into his personal space (both times involve her seeing his grandfather’s photo).

Here, Min-June not only intrudes on his space but also unwittingly throws out the most valuable item in that office: his grandfather’s Maeda uniform. Yet, this intrusive, impulsive act is what contributes to him ultimately trusting her with one of his biggest secrets towards the end, knowing she will understand how big a deal it is. It would be foolish to miss the importance of this scene, given that when he finally chooses to confide in someone about Maeda, that person happens to be Min-June herself.

Min-June doesn’t know it yet, but she has already wormed her way into the deepest parts of Robin's life and history, and knows him more intimately than most people would.

What’s interesting about these two sequences is also the background music that plays while these two operations are going on: a song by Sweet Sorrow called Tangdanghan Kunyoga Arumdada*, which is a modern Korean jazz-inspired number that describes a confident, beautiful woman that the man is slowly falling for. This seems slightly contradictory to the way Robin thinks of Min-June if you’re seeing the movie for the first time, but makes plenty of sense when you realise that he had actually had feelings for her all along.

A 386 Versus A Pentium

So far Min-June has made two rather unsuccessful attempts at besting Robin at his own game, and her techniques and moves are about to get more and more complicated. She refers to this particular attempt as “psychological warfare”, hoping to find some soft spot in him that she can touch and exploit (he has one already, for her, but she has no clue of it yet).

Interestingly, though her main focus is to get him to sympathise with her, she also doesn’t completely rule out using her physicality to further attract him, by unbuttoning the first two buttons of her blouse. Which makes for a slightly comedic (and also some HUGE FANSERVICE 😂😂😂 for Daniel Henney fans especially) turn which Robin briefly addles her brains by opening his door with no shirt on. But this scene goes beyond just giving us an excuse to see Daniel Henney shirtless. As with “Operation Angel”, it gives both Min-June, and us viewers, a glimpse into Robin’s past - this time through a gunshot wound from his first love.

What I find most fascinating about these two sequences is how both the uniform, the photograph and the gunshot wound are framed within these scenes. They are pictured as seemingly unimportant things that nonetheless are central to understanding where Robin comes from and what matters to him.

Min-June sees these items in passing and doesn’t dwell too much on them, but by the end they are central to her understanding of him. Her intrusive discovery of them is also why Robin trusts her with the most personal, emotional parts of his life, and why Jennifer correctly guesses the two were close enough for Min-June to have seen his scar.

Once Min-June has made herself comfortable in Robin’s hotel room (perhaps too comfortable: she is caught snooping on Robin’s photograph of his grandfather), she attempts to - in her own words - “request his counsel on difficult matters and bring out his soft side”. She begins by dramatically stating outside his door that she feels like dying, and then plays on his ego by deferring to him and claiming that she has realized how right he is, and then establishing some level of proximity by asking him to teach her his ways. This is a move that backfires on her. As with the “Operation Beautiful” exercise, Robin seems prepared and is ready to have the upper hand over this conversation.

He does so by insinuating that Min-June’s thought process is outdated and unable to deal with change - comparing her with a model such as the Intel 386 (Is he the Pentium, then? Is she meant to upgrade into…him?) and stating that making changes now could cause her brain to “stop functioning from a fatal error”.

What does Robin mean when he says this? After all, this is the same woman he singled out for a project he was personally invested in, and not just because he was physically attracted to her. This is the woman he labelled as having “a particular talent for deception”, who had singlehandedly made their first step towards sealing the Maeda deal possible through her attempts at duplicity.

Interestingly, again, Min-June feels Robin’s comment is aimed at her as a person, in totality, rather than an aspect of her life. And why wouldn’t she? Robin never really makes the distinctions clear enough.

Does he really mean this to refer to June as a person? Or is he just referring to the way she handles relationships?

Funnily enough, when Robin has to give Min-June an analogy to drive home his point about relationships, he speaks in purely business terms (when a piece of stock has no future, you have to know when to cut your losses and sell. Relationships are the same…) assuming she will understand perfectly. Yet, when Min-June sasses him out on the ridiculousness of his statement, she does it by indicating that this is what he must think of her at the workplace as well.

How does Robin respond to this? By offering her a chance to prove her mettle professionally. He pits her against her co-worker and friend, Brian, for a very important deal. If she succeeds in beating Brian and bagging that deal, he will give her lessons.

–

I’ve often wondered about the international title given to this movie**. Seducing Mr Perfect. Who is the Mr Perfect here? What seducing actually takes place?

But the more I think about it, the more I feel the title is really an ironic take on the story itself. Min-June tries - and fails - in her actual attempts at seduction, unaware that Robin has, in a way, already been 'seduced’ by her. And Robin appears sorted and 'perfect’, only to be revealed as immensely flawed, a mass of contradictions, an emotional mess of a man - someone so guarded, and with so many walls, that he almost loses out on what’s most important to him in the process of erecting them.

–

* At some point, I will be posting rough translations of lyrics of the 4 songs in this movie, followed by a write-up on the song, how it fits in with the movie and the characters, and the sequences they feature in. I do think any analysis of this movie would be incomplete without an exploration of its excellent jazz-based music.

** The films original title - Misuteo Robin Kkosigi - directly translates to “Flirting with Mr Robin”, which sounds great in Korean…not so much in English.

–

[awesome-moon-stone]

@stelledue

Since shortly after release weekend, I’ve been corresponding with someone who worked closely on the production of TROS and works for one of the major companies I cannot disclose here. I have verified the source to my satisfaction. To protect the source, I am rewording what we spoke about over the last two weeks and am submitting it to you in bullet point format I have written based on what they told me. The TLDR is that they were upset with the final product of TROS and wanted to share their perspective on how it went down and where it went wrong.

The leakers for TROS had an agenda and are tied to Disney directly. My source confessed that they have an agenda as well in that they struggle with ignoring what’s been happening to someone who they think doesn’t deserve it.

JJ always treated everyone on and offset with respect so my source’s agenda is that what Disney has done to JJ and how much they screwed him over should be something people are at least aware of, whether you like him as a filmmaker or not.

Disney was one of the studios who were in that Bad Robot bidding war last year. Disney never had much interest in BR as a company but they did in JJ because they saw WB (who JJ went with in the end) as a major threat.

JJ is very successful at bringing franchises back like Mission Impossible, Star Trek and Star Wars. WB is struggling with DC and aside from Wonder Woman, DC is still seen as a bit of a joke in its current state by the GA.

WB wants Abrams for some DC projects. My source said that this generation’s Star Wars is the MCU, and Marvel’s biggest threat is a well operational DC. They want to keep DC in the limbo that they’re in right now. Abrams jumpstarting that franchise with something like a successful, audience-pleasing Superman movie makes them nervous. Their goal is to make JJ look bad to potential investors/shareholders.

My source mentioned this shortly after the premiere: “The TROS we saw last night was not the TROS we thought we worked on”.

JJ was devastated and blindsided by this. He’s been feeling down over the last 6 months because of some of the ridiculous demands Disney had that changed his movie’s story. While the scenes were shot, a lot of the changes were made in post-production and the audio was rerecorded and altered. My source said they’ve never seen anything like this happen before. He’s the director and he wasn’t in the know about what they were doing behind his back.

Apparently, JJ felt threatened over the month leading up to the premiere.

Rian was never meant to do IX despite some rumors that he was.

JJ was brought back by Iger, not KK. Disney insisted on more fan service, less controversy.

JJs original agreement when he signed on was indicating he would have way more creative control than he did on TFA. It became evident this wasn’t the case only a couple of weeks into shooting when the trouble with meddling started.

JJ wanted to do some scenes he thought were important but Disney shut it down citing budgetary reasons.

May 2019: JJ argued that those scenes were crucial. He had to let go of one of the scenes. The other scene he insisted on was approved at first. He did reshoots and additional photography in July. The new scene was shot at BR in October.

The “ending that will blow your mind” was a part of this. Older actors were included like Hayden, Ewan and Samuel and anyone who wasn’t animated. The force ghosts weren’t meant to be voices because they shot that footage on camera. The actors were in costumes. Rey was supposed to be surrounded by the force ghosts to serve as sort of a barrier between her and the Sith surrounding them.

My source thinks but can’t 100% confirm that this is because of China. It’s an office talk of sorts. Some VFX people claimed they got a list of approved shades of blue they could use on the Luke force ghosts. Cutting this out was when the bad blood turned into a nightmare for JJ because the movie he was making was suddenly unrecognizable to him in almost every way.

My source knows JJ well enough to know that he’s just not the yelling type but apparently in a meeting he yelled something along the lines of “Why don’t you just put ‘directed and written by Lucasfilm’ then?” My source wasn’t present for that exchange but knows some who were.

Disney demanded they shoot some scenes that would have things in it for merchandise. “They fly now” is one of them. It’s also JJ’s least favorite scene. At a November screening of a 2:37 cut, he cringed, groaned and laughed when the scene was on.

My source says that JJ was most likely not joking when he said “you’re right” in the interview where they asked him about TROS criticism.

JJ’s original early November cut was 3 hours 2 minutes long.

In January, JJ suggested that they turn this into two films. My source told me this well before Terrio mentioned it in an interview a couple of days ago. When Disney said no, JJ was content with making this 3 hours long.

Over a period of 9 months JJ started realizing that one by one his ideas and whole scenes were being thrown out the window or entirely altered by people who have “no business meddling with the creatives”.

They were not on the same page when it came to creative decisions and it became obvious that Disney had an agenda in addition to wanting to please shareholders. Disney could “afford messing up IX for the sake of the bigger picture” when it came to protecting things unrelated to IX.

The cut JJ eventually and hesitantly agreed to in early December was 2:37 minutes long. It wasn’t the cut we saw which he wouldn’t have approved of (and which is 2:22 long). Apart from the force ghosts, there were other crucial and emotional scenes missing. The cut they released looked “chopped and taped back together with weak scotch tape” (JJ's words).

The movie opened with Rey’s training. Her first scene with Rose was shortly after Rey damaged BB-8 during the training. Rose made a silly joke about how Poe is going to kill her for damaging BB-8. There was a moment where Rey took a minute to process what just happened when she saw that vision during training. She looked distressed and worried. The next scene was noise as the Falcon was landing and Rey runs over there. Those two women who kissed at the end were visible in this shot and they were holding hands. One of them ran towards the Falcon as it landed.

Kylo on Mustafar scene was 2 mins longer. There was a moment where Kylo seemed a bit dizzy and his vision was shown as blurry for a second. Almost as if time half-stopped while everyone in the background was slow-mo fighting. Kylo hears Vader's breathing, then shakes his head and time goes back to moving at a normal pace and he jumps right back into the battle (the scene from the trailer where he knocks that guy down which did end up in the movie later).

They cut some of the scenes from the lightspeed skipping segment. Some of the planets that were cut were Kashyyyk, Naboo, and Kamino.

The scene where the tie fighters are chasing them through the iceberg - those corridors were inspired by a video game JJ used to play in the 90s called Rebel Assault 2 (the third level in the game with the tunnels on Endor specifically).

Jannah was confirmed to be Lando’s daughter.

Rey not only healed Kylo's face scar but she killed Kylo when she healed Ben. Kylo ceased to exist when Rey healed him. My source mentioned that some people assume it was Han Solo who healed him but that isn’t true and that wasn't Han Solo. That was Leia using her own memories as well as Ben's to create a physical manifestation of his own thoughts to nudge him towards what he needed to do. That was her own way of communicating that with him. And it wasn't possible without her dying in the process. She made the ultimate sacrifice for her son and this flew over people's heads with the Disney cut.

The late November cut (the last cut JJ approved of) had scenes with Rose and Rey still. JJ wanted to give her a more meaningful arc. Disney felt that that was too risky too. My source mentioned that Chris Terrio said that it was because of the Leia scenes but this is only partially true because she had four other scenes including two with Rey/Daisy that Leia was not in.

Finn wanting to tell Rey something was always meant to be force sensitivity. In the 3 hour cut, it’s explicitly stated. There was a moment when Jannah and he were running on top of that star destroyer and Finn needed to unlock or move something and he force-moved it and acted surprised when it happened. This was replaced with a CGI’d BB-8 fixing whatever he needed to fix on there.

Babu Frik was nearly cut because some execs at Disney thought he would be the new Jar Jar. They are really surprised that people love him this much. He was JJ's idea and was created in collaboration with some artists and puppeteers. The personality was all JJ.

There were a bunch of scenes where Rey and Kylo (separately) went through quiet moments of reflection to deal with what they were going through. On her part, her going through the realization that there's something sinister about her past. Him going through regret and remorse but trying to shut it out. My source said that the Kylo scenes were especially amazing because of Adam's performance and how he managed to portray that inner turmoil. It provided much more context and added deeper meaning to both his battle with Rey and the final redemption arc at the end. It didn't happen so suddenly and it was more structured than what we got.

The Kylo/Rey scene where he dies was at least 4 minutes longer with more dialogue. Ben was always supposed to die. Source also added that if he wasn’t, then that might’ve been in an earlier draft which they haven’t read. The first draft they read included Lando (the first few didn’t). The Reylo kiss and Ben’s death was not part of the reshoots. It was a part of the re-editing. Even the cut that JJ thought was coming out earlier this month had a longer version of that scene than what was shown in the theatrical cut.

JJ was against the Reylo kiss (or Reylo in general). This was Disney's attempt to please both sides of the fandom.

JJ was not happy with where TLJ took the story. The final result is a mix of that story and the story told by Disney and whoever they tried to impress (“certainly not the fans”). JJ is gutted over the final result. Star Wars means a lot to him. He had to sacrifice large chunks of the story in TFA but he was promised more creative control on TROS and instead the leash they had him on was only tightened as time went by. A source said that this is the one franchise and the one piece of his work that he didn't want to mess up and instead it turned into his worst nightmare. When he found out that he was blindsided with the cut they presented, he said "what the fuck??" when Kylo was fighting the Knights of Ren at the end and the Williams music that was used for it was not what he wanted at all. He seemed to think it was out of place.

JJ's cut still exists and “will always exist”. We most likely will never see it unless “someone accidentally leaks it.”

Ok, so there you have it. If there are questions, I will try to follow up with my source but it’s up to them if they want to share more so I cannot guarantee an answer.

Edit: I forgot one thing that the source wanted included, concerning FinnPoe in TROS:

The source asked about FinnPoe after seeing Oscar Isaac's comment about how Disney didn't want it to be a thing. This is true. JJ fought to make this happen. This is why Oscar is blaming Disney. It's not just a random throwaway comment. He knows for a fact that it was Disney because these discussions happened. The main cast is insanely close with JJ and are just as pissed, though seemingly more outspoken about it than JJ. During TFA, Disney was hesitant to hire John Boyega because a woman was front and center so they deemed that risky enough so bringing in a male lead who's black made them nervous. JJ fought to make that happen for about nine months before getting approval. The same issue came up when JJ fought to have Finn&Poe in TROS but he lost that battle as he lost many creative battles for this film. Many people, JJ included, came to the realization during this production that the story really is told by shareholders/investors instead of the creatives or anyone at Disney specifically. He tried to make a lot of things happen and was shut down because of this. They had him on a leash and many blame TLJ for the stricter creative approach.

[cbshearer]

Since shortly after release weekend, I’ve been corresponding with someone who worked closely on the production of TROS and works for one of the major companies I cannot disclose here. I have verified the source to my satisfaction. To protect the source, I am rewording what we spoke about over the last two weeks and am submitting it to you in bullet point format I have written based on what they told me. The TLDR is that they were upset with the final product of TROS and wanted to share their perspective on how it went down and where it went wrong.The leakers for TROS had an agenda and are tied to Disney directly. My source confessed that they have an agenda as well in that they struggle with ignoring what’s been happening to someone who they think doesn’t deserve it.JJ always treated everyone on and offset with respect so my source’s agenda is that what Disney has done to JJ and how much they screwed him over should be something people are at least aware of, whether you like him as a filmmaker or not.Disney was one of the studios who were in that Bad Robot bidding war last year. Disney never had much interest in BR as a company but they did in JJ because they saw WB (who JJ went with in the end) as a major threat.JJ is very successful at bringing franchises back like Mission Impossible, Star Trek and Star Wars. WB is struggling with DC and aside from Wonder Woman, DC is still seen as a bit of a joke in its current state by the GA.WB wants Abrams for some DC projects. My source said that this generation’s Star Wars is the MCU, and Marvel’s biggest threat is a well operational DC. They want to keep DC in the limbo that they’re in right now. Abrams jumpstarting that franchise with something like a successful, audience-pleasing Superman movie makes them nervous. Their goal is to make JJ look bad to potential investors/shareholders.My source mentioned this shortly after the premiere: “The TROS we saw last night was not the TROS we thought we worked on”.JJ was devastated and blindsided by this. He’s been feeling down over the last 6 months because of some of the ridiculous demands Disney had that changed his movie’s story. While the scenes were shot, a lot of the changes were made in post-production and the audio was rerecorded and altered. My source said they’ve never seen anything like this happen before. He’s the director and he wasn’t in the know about what they were doing behind his back.Apparently, JJ felt threatened over the month leading up to the premiere.Rian was never meant to do IX despite some rumors that he was.JJ was brought back by Iger, not KK. Disney insisted on more fan service, less controversy.JJs original agreement when he signed on was indicating he would have way more creative control than he did on TFA. It became evident this wasn’t the case only a couple of weeks into shooting when the trouble with meddling started.JJ wanted to do some scenes he thought were important but Disney shut it down citing budgetary reasons.May 2019: JJ argued that those scenes were crucial. He had to let go of one of the scenes. The other scene he insisted on was approved at first. He did reshoots and additional photography in July. The new scene was shot at BR in October.The “ending that will blow your mind” was a part of this. Older actors were included like Hayden, Ewan and Samuel and anyone who wasn’t animated. The force ghosts weren’t meant to be voices because they shot that footage on camera. The actors were in costumes. Rey was supposed to be surrounded by the force ghosts to serve as sort of a barrier between her and the Sith surrounding them.My source thinks but can’t 100% confirm that this is because of China. It’s an office talk of sorts. Some VFX people claimed they got a list of approved shades of blue they could use on the Luke force ghosts. Cutting this out was when the bad blood turned into a nightmare for JJ because the movie he was making was suddenly unrecognizable to him in almost every way.My source knows JJ well enough to know that he’s just not the yelling type but apparently in a meeting he yelled something along the lines of “Why don’t you just put ‘directed and written by Lucasfilm’ then?” My source wasn’t present for that exchange but knows some who were.Disney demanded they shoot some scenes that would have things in it for merchandise. “They fly now” is one of them. It’s also JJ’s least favorite scene. At a November screening of a 2:37 cut, he cringed, groaned and laughed when the scene was on.My source says that JJ was most likely not joking when he said “you’re right” in the interview where they asked him about TROS criticism.JJ’s original early November cut was 3 hours 2 minutes long.In January, JJ suggested that they turn this into two films. My source told me this well before Terrio mentioned it in an interview a couple of days ago. When Disney said no, JJ was content with making this 3 hours long.Over a period of 9 months JJ started realizing that one by one his ideas and whole scenes were being thrown out the window or entirely altered by people who have “no business meddling with the creatives”.They were not on the same page when it came to creative decisions and it became obvious that Disney had an agenda in addition to wanting to please shareholders. Disney could “afford messing up IX for the sake of the bigger picture” when it came to protecting things unrelated to IX.The cut JJ eventually and hesitantly agreed to in early December was 2:37 minutes long. It wasn’t the cut we saw which he wouldn’t have approved of (and which is 2:22 long). Apart from the force ghosts, there were other crucial and emotional scenes missing. The cut they released looked “chopped and taped back together with weak scotch tape” (JJ's words).The movie opened with Rey’s training. Her first scene with Rose was shortly after Rey damaged BB-8 during the training. Rose made a silly joke about how Poe is going to kill her for damaging BB-8. There was a moment where Rey took a minute to process what just happened when she saw that vision during training. She looked distressed and worried. The next scene was noise as the Falcon was landing and Rey runs over there. Those two women who kissed at the end were visible in this shot and they were holding hands. One of them ran towards the Falcon as it landed.Kylo on Mustafar scene was 2 mins longer. There was a moment where Kylo seemed a bit dizzy and his vision was shown as blurry for a second. Almost as if time half-stopped while everyone in the background was slow-mo fighting. Kylo hears Vader's breathing, then shakes his head and time goes back to moving at a normal pace and he jumps right back into the battle (the scene from the trailer where he knocks that guy down which did end up in the movie later).They cut some of the scenes from the lightspeed skipping segment. Some of the planets that were cut were Kashyyyk, Naboo, and Kamino.The scene where the tie fighters are chasing them through the iceberg - those corridors were inspired by a video game JJ used to play in the 90s called Rebel Assault 2 (the third level in the game with the tunnels on Endor specifically).Jannah was confirmed to be Lando’s daughter.Rey not only healed Kylo's face scar but she killed Kylo when she healed Ben. Kylo ceased to exist when Rey healed him. My source mentioned that some people assume it was Han Solo who healed him but that isn’t true and that wasn't Han Solo. That was Leia using her own memories as well as Ben's to create a physical manifestation of his own thoughts to nudge him towards what he needed to do. That was her own way of communicating that with him. And it wasn't possible without her dying in the process. She made the ultimate sacrifice for her son and this flew over people's heads with the Disney cut.The late November cut (the last cut JJ approved of) had scenes with Rose and Rey still. JJ wanted to give her a more meaningful arc. Disney felt that that was too risky too. My source mentioned that Chris Terrio said that it was because of the Leia scenes but this is only partially true because she had four other scenes including two with Rey/Daisy that Leia was not in.Finn wanting to tell Rey something was always meant to be force sensitivity. In the 3 hour cut, it’s explicitly stated. There was a moment when Jannah and he were running on top of that star destroyer and Finn needed to unlock or move something and he force-moved it and acted surprised when it happened. This was replaced with a CGI’d BB-8 fixing whatever he needed to fix on there.Babu Frik was nearly cut because some execs at Disney thought he would be the new Jar Jar. They are really surprised that people love him this much. He was JJ's idea and was created in collaboration with some artists and puppeteers. The personality was all JJ.There were a bunch of scenes where Rey and Kylo (separately) went through quiet moments of reflection to deal with what they were going through. On her part, her going through the realization that there's something sinister about her past. Him going through regret and remorse but trying to shut it out. My source said that the Kylo scenes were especially amazing because of Adam's performance and how he managed to portray that inner turmoil. It provided much more context and added deeper meaning to both his battle with Rey and the final redemption arc at the end. It didn't happen so suddenly and it was more structured than what we got.The Kylo/Rey scene where he dies was at least 4 minutes longer with more dialogue. Ben was always supposed to die. Source also added that if he wasn’t, then that might’ve been in an earlier draft which they haven’t read. The first draft they read included Lando (the first few didn’t). The Reylo kiss and Ben’s death was not part of the reshoots. It was a part of the re-editing. Even the cut that JJ thought was coming out earlier this month had a longer version of that scene than what was shown in the theatrical cut.JJ was against the Reylo kiss (or Reylo in general). This was Disney's attempt to please both sides of the fandom.JJ was not happy with where TLJ took the story. The final result is a mix of that story and the story told by Disney and whoever they tried to impress (“certainly not the fans”). JJ is gutted over the final result. Star Wars means a lot to him. He had to sacrifice large chunks of the story in TFA but he was promised more creative control on TROS and instead the leash they had him on was only tightened as time went by. A source said that this is the one franchise and the one piece of his work that he didn't want to mess up and instead it turned into his worst nightmare. When he found out that he was blindsided with the cut they presented, he said "what the fuck??" when Kylo was fighting the Knights of Ren at the end and the Williams music that was used for it was not what he wanted at all. He seemed to think it was out of place.JJ's cut still exists and “will always exist”. We most likely will never see it unless “someone accidentally leaks it.”Ok, so there you have it. If there are questions, I will try to follow up with my source but it’s up to them if they want to share more so I cannot guarantee an answer.Edit: I forgot one thing that the source wanted included, concerning FinnPoe in TROS:The source asked about FinnPoe after seeing Oscar Isaac's comment about how Disney didn't want it to be a thing. This is true. JJ fought to make this happen. This is why Oscar is blaming Disney. It's not just a random throwaway comment. He knows for a fact that it was Disney because these discussions happened. The main cast is insanely close with JJ and are just as pissed, though seemingly more outspoken about it than JJ. During TFA, Disney was hesitant to hire John Boyega because a woman was front and center so they deemed that risky enough so bringing in a male lead who's black made them nervous. JJ fought to make that happen for about nine months before getting approval. The same issue came up when JJ fought to have Finn&Poe in TROS but he lost that battle as he lost many creative battles for this film. Many people, JJ included, came to the realization during this production that the story really is told by shareholders/investors instead of the creatives or anyone at Disney specifically. He tried to make a lot of things happen and was shut down because of this. They had him on a leash and many blame TLJ for the stricter creative approach. via /r/saltierthancrait