#which I ended up getting for like 80 dollars
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dontmindme2600 · 11 months ago
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GUESS WHO JUST SPENT AN ABSURD AMOUNT OF MONEY ON YET ANOTHER ART BOOK
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nomaishuttle · 1 year ago
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the two rules of sweeney todd cast recordjngs is 1. theyll never be better than 2012 london cast talk to the hand 2. theyll never be worse than 2005 broadway cast talk to the hand
#sry im literlly such a 2005 castrecording hater like im such a huge anti. i hate jt so baddd sounds like ass. they took the entire#orchestra out back and shot them dead leaving one piano player and.told him to judt make it work and then told sweeney that his entire#family died in a horrific fire immediately b4 he started rcording.#like im sorry ik sweeneys like a sad guys obvi i would be too yk sucks sucks Pooor thing better you should think she was dead yes i lied#cuz i looove you id be TWICE the wife she was i LOOOOOVE YOU HOW COULD THAT THING HAVE CARED FOR YOU LIKE ME !!!#anyways. but he just like. ik this sounds mena but his voice Sounds like a voice somebody would do to make fun of sweeney.#like it sounds like somebody mocking a mopey guy. but thats just the voice the guy uses 4 sweeney like..#also sry. im pretty sure the final scene lyrics they use in 2005 r the same as the original script from the 80s however. those lyrics just#dont flow as well ss the slightly edited version for the 2012.. like. hold on let me compare..#so the original Your Lucy!A crazy hag picking bones and rotten spuds out of alley ashcans!#Would you have wanted to know that she ended up like that?#whereas in 2012 its Your Lucy a mad hag. picking bones and rotten spuds out of dustbins#would you have wanted to know thats how she ended up ? and it just FLOWS BETTER SRYY.#ik its also partially bc most sweeney iterations r set. when sweeney is actually set where as 2012 sort of uses the framing devide of#disgruntled workers inn. i wanna say the 1920s? somewhere around there. which btw genius i love that devision.to draw parallels between the#working conditions of both time periods its quite genius babes. loveee to 2012 london cast recording. and it bangs far harder than those#other girls..#but like basically..imelda staunton if i ever get the opportunity i will genuinely give you 5billion dollars i dont think Aybody could ever#top her eprformance as mrs lovett. lifechanging. showstopping incredible#and michael balls sweeney is sooo good as well likee. he does such a good job balancing between like. i understand this guy. like i get him#i know his kotivationa and also This guy is fucking scary as hell#like he plays sweeney as far more like. Enraged than depressed. and i think it works RLY well for his interpretation of the character..#basically 🫰 <- thats for 2012 london cast. I wish that cast recording had all of the songs on its rly rather sickening.NO PIRELLIS MIRACLE#ELIXIR. LIKE IS IT A JOKEEEE DO YOU WANT ME DEAD ON THE STREETS? YOU SIR? ANYBIDY? GENTLEMEN NOW DONT BE SHY?#whatever. the one positive ill say for 2005 sweeney is that his performance. at times..is hysterical#i hate their version of final scene due to 2012 final scene being My favorite sweeney song. however. his like. Oh my god and also the judge#when he kills the judge and he says barker like hes powering up. he goes barkeeEEEEERRRRRR. whys that more acting than he did the entire#rest of the show. like its weird bc he was simultaneously over acting (as was the rest of the cast imo) and underacting ? like they were so#over dramatically sad that it looped back into them being completely flat and emotionless. its tly kind of impressive#but in fjnal scene when he goes OH NO !!!!! oh gOOOod. that was so funny
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ms-demeanor · 4 months ago
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I've been following what's been going on with Belphie the kitten and his person, Greer Stothers, has just mentioned pet insurance in a tag on a post and I wanted to give an example from my life backing up why pet insurance can be a good idea and why I think it is worthwhile.
Two years ago my sister's dog had bloat while she was on vacation. The kennel he was staying at recognized symptoms and called my sister to clear them to take him to the emergency vet. My sister is very financially secure and this dog is an enormous part of her life, so she said yes with barely a moment of hesitation. That ended up being about twelve thousand dollars of emergency surgery.
Large Bastard and I got pet insurance for Tiny Bastard the same week because we realized that if someone had presented that option to us, we would have had no choice but to have Tiny Bastard put down, and we didn't want to be put in that position.
I did a lot of research about different kinds of pet insurance and different levels of coverage and annual maximums and deductibles and so on and so forth. Tiny Bastard is a senior dog, so this was going to be expensive no matter what options we went with, so I chose a moderately priced plan with a $500 annual deductible, unlimited annual coverage, that pays 80% of the bills incurred annually below the maximum. What that means is that we pay the first $500 of care totally out of pocket, after which point we are reimbursed 80% of any vet bills for care covered by the plan.
The first year we had this plan I was kind of iffy about it. It's a noticeable monthly expense and we didn't even spend the deductible in vet bills the first year. Except that a month before the policy was set to renew, Tiny Bastard got diagnosed with diabetes. We now have monthly insulin costs and syringe costs; there are tests she has to have regularly to monitor her overall condition and we need to do more frequent vet visits to track symptoms.
Suddenly the insulin alone means that the insurance is break-even within six months and the additional visits and tests are something we can afford instead of something we'd have to put on credit.
Our plan (through ManyPets) covers medication, surgery, diagnostics, medical equipment, and euthanasia and cremation. It doesn't cover pre-existing conditions, joint conditions for dogs who were signed up over a certain age, dental care, spay/neuter, vaccinations, or prescription food but honestly all of that makes me just kind of wish we'd signed her up earlier - her knee problems *would* be covered if we'd had her signed up as a puppy, and the monthly cost would have been lower if we'd signed her up then. And there are at least a few emergency vet bills that I wouldn't still be paying off on my credit card. Hell, I've probably paid more in interest on some bruising she got in a fight three years ago than I have for this policy as a whole.
I am glad that Greer is able to take care of Belphie. I am glad that my sister was able to take care of her dog. But I'm also really, really glad that for a relatively low cost, I would be able to take care of Tiny Bastard if she were catastrophically injured, or if she needed emergency surgery. I'm glad that I'm able to take care of her now with her medications and her additional vet visits.
There are a lot of people who say that pet insurance isn't worth it, especially not for young animals. But if your young animal gets very sick, or gets badly injured, or eats a hairband and needs an emergency endoscopy, then it will probably be VERY worth it. It's a risk/reward question. You feel like you're wasting money if you're paying for a policy that you never use, but honestly that just means you're lucky to have a healthy pet.
I'm lucky that Tiny Bastard was relatively healthy before I got the insurance; I'm also lucky that she was insured when she was diagnosed with a chronic illness that will need lifelong care. This enables me to provide care for her that would otherwise be financially unmanageable, and that makes the insurance *extremely worth it* from my perspective.
And Belphie is a good example of why it's a good idea to get coverage even for very young pets. Greer is recommending it because this kitten has required a tremendous amount of care during a period in his life when it's generally taken for granted that a cat will be healthy. (And Greer is not stupid for forgoing pet insurance - pet insurance is still a relatively new concept and there are lots of people who are leery of it for a number of good reasons)
So I'd say that if you've got a pet or are getting a pet it is very worthwhile to find a pet insurance plan that fits in your budget. There are a variety of plans out there and some are very inexpensive. Check coverage levels (you can even get some with wellness plans that include dental care and vaccinations) and see if there's something that works for you.
I personally don't think I'm ever going to own another pet without having pet insurance. It's ridiculous how much easier it is for me to say yes to diagnostic tests or different treatments than it was before because I know I'm going to be able to fit Tiny Bastard's care into our budget.
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meimei-archives · 2 months ago
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KEEPSAKE!:: rafe cameron
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WARNING! :: 80's au, playboy! Rafe, car sex, riding, hair pulling, oral, fingering, teasing, fingering, slight edging, overstimulation, slight rejection, teasing, sexual tension, spanking
SUMMARY!:: after a failed date you expect some sort of a reward for putting up with Rafe Cameron who still seems to be hung up on his ex.
PT2
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Rafe Cameron has been on many dates. One would even say that he has hooked up with half of the girls after said dates— which were all unsuccessful. It's not that there was anything wrong in particular with the people he has taken out, it's just that none of them have piqued his interest for a second one. And it just so happens that you had been taken on one of said dates.
When Rafe asked you out on a date to the movies and dinner you hadn't expected the movie to be some trashy chic flick about an American actress going to Italy and falling in love with her friend's married Italian lover. It dragged on for 2 hours and you couldn't stand to sit through the first minute of opening credits. But not only did you sit through a silent car ride on your way to the restaurant but when you sat inside the restaurant it felt like this terrible date would never end.
"I used to be on the basketball team before I graduated and I started working with my dad,he’s really been pushing me to work towards more deals and shit" he rambled on and on for what felt like a lifetime. Only nodding off as he rambled on and on about his father and something about how his sister was stuck up; at least you think so- you’ve barely been paying attention.
But low and behold the lovely waitress with a tight lipped smile "would you like your bill.. or would you like to swing by a little later?" She asked politely looking at the both of you. "You can give us our check now" you answered quickly before pulling 30 dollars out of your pocket when the check was set on the table.
Once Rafe had caught his eyes on the cash in your hand he shook his head "you don't have to pay, what kind of guy would I be to make you pay for your food?" He says patting his pockets which makes you roll your eyes "it's fine" you reply flatly pressing the 20 and 10 dollar tip onto the wooden table and like second nature stood from the worn out booth walk to the class doors pushing them open and making a b-line to the boys nice and shining Pontiac.
Rafe grew up coddled, he was popular in high school, he had the cutest girl in his grade. Now he's digging it with girls who never made it past the first date because he never could find a bond with them, while working with his father and the geezers he partners with, losing all cool points he's earned on his way up in high school. Well on your end you didn't care for his past reputation, you didn't care for this date and the fact that you haven't had an ounce of fun since you had walked past your front porch was eating you up inside.
When you heard keys jangling in an instant you turned your head being met with Rafe walking over to the drivers side of the car. Unlocking the doors you both get in and once the car starts you fiddle with the radio never wanting to sit through silence and letting the hum of the radio come out softly through the speakers.
You were so caught up in your thoughts you had failed to realize how dark it had started to get, the once blue sky turned to deep orange and yellow hues. Watching as the power lines zipped past you in a blur, if you were going to sit in this car you would be damned if you had to sit in awkward silence and do nothing.
Just as Rafe had turned onto the highway the road seemingly empty as it got darker out and the headlights of his car lighting up the black asphalt on the road. Your view flickering between the road and Rafe who was watching the road with one hand on the wheel as the other slumped against the middle console.
The sight of his thighs sat stiffly while his jaw clenched. "Rafe, if you're not over your ex why'd you ask me on a date?" You ask curiously as you tilt your head leaning in a bit pressing the swell of your chest against his hand on the console. "What? I'm over my ex, I have been for a while now. What makes you say that?" He asks as he sputters over his own words at the thought of being hung up over his ex.
"You haven't asked a single thing about me on this date. You really only talked about you, and might I add you even talked about your dad which really doesn't help your case at all" you say flatly. "Seriously?! I am over my ex I swear" his voice goes up a few octaves higher as he tries to think of something that obscure the idea.
"When was the last time you slept with someone and actually enjoyed it then?" You ask with a twisted grin on your lips. You knew the answer but you wanted to hear it from him, you wanted the satisfaction of hearing the words yourself from his lips. "I don't know? And I'll have you know that I have had great sex without my ex" he snarked at you.
"Yeah your words aren't very convincing like... at all" you say as you push your legs under your thighs "I can change that you know? I don't know if by the end of it you'll even be thinking about her but...I'll occupy your head for a bit" you say, trailing your hand into his lap and rubbing against his thigh.
"What are you doing?" He scoffed as his eyes flicker from his lap with your hand trailing closer to his bulge earning a small gasp from him eliciting a small giggle from your lips loud enough to hear over the buzzing music. "Just keep looking at the road" you whisper as you press your lips to his warm cheek.
Your hand moving closer to his half hard crotch clad in jeans as you palm him, the feeling of fabric pressed against him has him groaning and running a hand through his dark hair in exasperation. "It's not really a good idea to be doing this... while I'm driving" he reasons, which makes you shake your head with a soft smile. "Then focus" you look up at him while your hands move to unzip his pants and unbutton them as well letting him lift his hips while you pull down his jeans far enough over his thighs.
"Shit" he harshly whispers at the feeling of your wet palm wrapping around his cock leaking precum and glistening under the orange and yellow street lights on the side of the road. Taking his cock into your fist, slowly jerking and teasing the tip with your thumb has the boy biting his plump lips while choking back a small groan.
The feeling of your warm tongue has the boy breathing heavily as his foot presses onto the gas harder spreading the car up. "Ease up, you want the car ride to last don't you?" You ask as you look up at him, your tongue pressing flatly against his tip and taking him deeper, letting your lips wrap around him.
The warmth of your mouth around him almost has his eyes rolling, letting his hand rest on the back of your head, needing to push your head down further but letting you slowly take him into the back of your throat as the tip of your nose brushes against his the happy trail on his lower stomach, stubble like hairs getting wet from how sloppy the blowjob you were giving him truly was. Strings of spit latching onto your lips and chin connecting down to his cock.
Pulling back slowly you began to bob your head, the wet sound of your mouth around his cock has him light headed as he drives slower than he normally would on the highway. Flexing his thighs as the feeling "You're so good at this- fuck y/n" he moaned as his jaw slacks at the feeling of your tongue running against the vein on the underside of his cock that had him nearly shivering.
"keep going. Don't stop" he groaned, letting his head fall back. His hair messily pushed against his forehead as it was soaked from the sweat building at his hairline and his eyes rolled back "you're gonna make me cum" he says breathily as he pushes your hair out of your way turning it into a makeshift ponytail.
Using your hand you hollow your cheeks as your hand takes care of what your mouth wasn't and it had him absolutely lost, still trying to focus on the road he makes a turn to the next exit and choosing to go the longer route to your house.
His breathing becomes more and more unhinged as you use both your hands to jerk him off and licking his tip has him moaning while almost swerving into a random mailbox catching himself before doing so. "I'm so close" he moaned as he clutched your hair tighter realizing how agonizing it felt when you hadn't changed your pace at all.
" faster" he demanded yet his voice filled with need, making you smile a bit as you moved your hands away from him completely and taking him into your mouth while he bucked his hips desperately for a release. you could, feeling the tip nudge the back of your throat while your nose was nestled tightly against his pubic bone. While your eyes are closed tight to focus on relaxing your gag reflex to not ruin the tight feeling for him you move faster hoping that would push him over the edge.
"Oh- fuck" he gasped as he gripped the wheel tighter as he felt his orgasm crash on him like a ton of bricks. "I can't...I can't keep driving or I'm gonna crash- fuck" he moaned as he pulls onto the side of the road and cutting the lights and engine. The only sounds that could be heard were Rafe's heavy breathing.
Watching as you pull back with glossy eyes as your cheeks and chin covered in spit and cum which has his head pulled back against the headrest completely dazed. "You okay?" You ask as you wipe off your face with small puffs of laughter falling past your lips. "I'm good...really good" he says with a faint smirk.
"I wanna make you feel good too" he says, his eyes trailing over to your fully clothed figure, your eyes low and red almost as if you had been high, lips puffy and swollen. "You can do that" you nod as you manage to crawl over the middle console and sit against his thighs, your skirt riding up your legs.
"You're so wet" he whispered as he felt the warm wet patch that had grown on your lacy panties, your own juices slick and glistening on your inner thighs and against his skin making you look down where you had been sitting with slight embarrassment. His finger rubs against your clothes slit watching as the wet patch on your panties becomes bigger. Pressing his thumb down on your clit had a moan falling past your lips; hips bucking in response as your hand trails to his wrist pulling his hand past the waist band on your panties.
"I need you, here." You mumbled as you felt his nimble fingers running against your slit making you whine desperately. Grinding against his fingers you can hear his laughing breathily as he watches you fall apart on top of him. "I'd call you desperate if I didn't want to fuck you so bad" he says as he presses his forehead against yours, watching the way you get off could make him cum untouched.
"Just shut up" you whined out with a small gasp pressing your lips against his hungrily your hand raking through his hair, your tongues lapping against the others and sucking on his pulling away with a small 'pop' you bite your lip as you keep eye contact with him. "Fuck this feels so good" you whisper your forehead still pressed against his as he rubs your clit in rough yet eager circles almost strategically.
"Yeah?" He asks as he pulls his hand away and out of your panties earning a small whine from you. His fingers pushing your panties to the side. "Why?" You practically cry out. Rafe's eyes never leave yours watching them gloss over from the loss of pleasure. "I want you to cum on cock" he says just above a whisper while he takes his length into his hand pumping himself a few times before pressing his tip against your entrance and with a harsh hiss he's slowly pushing inside your tight walls.
The warm and wet feeling has him drunk on the feeling of you around him. Pushing his seat back far enough that both of you are comfortable as Rafe watches you grind your hips against him slowly as he bottoms out inside you, the feeling being all too good for his liking.
"fuck- Rafe” you let a mewl that had been clawing at the back of your throat finally be released into the car as sounds of distant music, and heavy breathing fill the air. Bracing yourself for the strenuous movements you press your hands to his lower stomach, your nails just ghosting over his skin makes him shiver at the feeling. The soft thudding of your thighs meeting against yours sends goosebumps all over your skin. Rafe couldn't possibly keep his hands to himself as he finds the hem of your shirt and pulls it over your head.
"No bra?" He groaned watching as your bare chest bounced with every movement you made which has you smiling with your lip caught between your teeth. “Fuck you feel so good" you slur seeing how good he filled you up to the brim your arms wrap around his neck your foreheads pressed together as you watch his begin to slowly move. Rafe couldn't get enough of the sight as his cock disappeared inside your Pussy.
His cock buried deep inside you that you moan and dig crescent shaped dents into his skin. set a pace for bouncing in his lap. The feeling of your velvety walls tightening around making him choke back a moan. Rafe could feel the frothy white ring of your juices dripping down his cock making him groan.
"Oh- god" you whisper shakily. His hands holding onto your hips guiding a pace, the soft sound of skin slapping with your small moans reverberated through the car. You looked so good with your chest bouncing and your hair all messy. You looked good with a small sheen of sweat on your skin and your makeup smeared, he was becoming addicted to the sight.
He slowly thrusts into you letting you get used to his size not realizing you were beginning to bounce yourself on his lap desperate to feel pleasure. His pace practically teases you and shows you how desperate you really are from your small moans whimpers.
Rafe; eager to let his load off inside you, holds your thighs stopping you from bouncing any longer and begins to thrust his hips up into you. The feeling of his tip kissing the sensitive spot inside you makes your jaw slack, and your thighs quiver as you tried to force anything to come out past your lips to show Rafe how good he made you feel, but the way your nails dig into his skin and your body reacting to every punctuated thrust inside you proves that he didn't have to hear you to know that he way fucking you perfectly.
His hips pushing into you as your thighs and ass jiggle at the repetitive thrusts "oh my god!" You moan as you feel him pounding in a certain part of your walls. You tighten around him your hands grip him tighter as the air is knocked out of your lungs as you let out a sharp breath with a moan dying on your lips. “Fuck Rafe- fuck!” You stutter and moan gutturally as you arch into him.
"Just like that" you babble mindlessly as his stomach churns at the words spewing out. "Yeah? Want me to fill you up with my cum?" he groans as the knot in your stomach begins to tighten and Rafe's death grip on the fat of your thighs almost sends you over the edge if it wasn't for how hard he was pounding you.
he placed his hand on your ass, kneading the flesh harshly as whimpers left his lips at the feeling of your walls closing around him. "Just like that, yes, please please please!!" You beg, feeling yourself getting closer and closer as he becomes more rough with his thrusts. You pull his hair, again and again, harder and you can't help but become more aroused from the sounds he lets fall from his lips.
Sitting up completely Rafe doesn't hesitate to kiss against your warm skin, from the valley between your breast to sucking on your nipples, the warmth of his mouth has you utterly out of it while you fuck yourself on his cock begging for some sort of release. The sloppy wet sounds make your head spin, your hand trailing from his hair to between the both of you.
Rubbing your clit in hopes that this would send you closer to your orgasm. "Fuck- oh fuck" he moaned against your chest as you clench around him as he felt absolutely pussy drunk with you on top of him. Rafe could barely comprehend a thing as he stops you all together.
"Get up" he said breathlessly as you push yourself off of his lap, you slowly start to crawl back into the passenger seat thinking even the sex was a complete bust. But the feeling of his hands on your waist keeps you from moving. "Bend over into the seat" he says moving out of your way as you feel a smirk on your pretty lips.
With your back arched and your face pushed against the headrest you knew that you were done for, Rafe pushing inside you again and without a care in the world thrusts into you at the same pace he was going before.
"Harder- please" you moan out as the windows begin to fog over, Rafe begins to buck his hips into you at a faster pace as the slick sound of your pussy and precum mix loudly along with the patterning of your thighs slapping against his. You feel ecstasy at the way he made you feel so full.
His large hands onto your spine as making your chest push into the seat, not that you minded at all. Rafe from behind absolutely loses his mind as his fingers card through his dirty blonde locks. Fucking into you with harsh and sharp thrusts that have your toes curling. Your ass bouncing against him has him tossing his head back leaving a stinging sensation in both of your thighs.
you begin to bounce and grind against him to meet his hips. It felt like he was in your stomach and you didn't mind at all, your hands clutching the seat tighter as he used his hand to wrap around your throat pulling your back against his chest as the other cracked a harsh smack against your ass leaving behind a welt that you know would probably bloom into a bruise later down the line.
"Aw look at you, all fucked out. You like getting bent over and fucked like a slut in my car?" He asks as his grip around your throat tightens, you couldn't even gather your words as he hits a spot that has you breathing shakily and your moans are even more louder.
"Right here? Does it feel good here?" He asks as he drags his cock against that same spot again and again "yeah, it feels so fucking good" you moan as your eyes roll back. The feeling of his sweet lips on your skin as you feel like you're in heaven.
Your thighs are practically shaking at the feeling, pleasure practically taking over your body as Rafe pounds you into his front seat without a single care in the world. Pushing your face against the seat while he becomes sloppy and rougher with every passing second you could feel the pressure in the pit of your stomach growing and waiting to be released.
"I can't take it" you moan as you shake your head "I'm gonna cum" you whimper as you feel warm tears slide down your cheeks. "I think you can baby, you wanna cum so bad right? So take what I give you" he orders in a teasing tone as his eyes stay latching onto the sight of him stretching you out over his cock he lands repeated smacks to your ass that makes your body quiver. His thrusts are non stop and you can't help but let the pleasure envelope you.
"Oh fuck" you gasp as the feeling of release comes closer "cum for me. Look at me and cum” he groans while pulling your hips into his harder than before tipping you over the edge as your walls clench around him sporadically earning a guttural moan ripping through his throat.
"I'm close, where do you want it?" He asks as he continues to fuck into you "inside. Please cum inside me" you whimpered before you felt the pressure in your stomach let loose "you look so pretty under me like this" he praised as his fingers rubbed down your spine leaving goosebumps up and down your body.
A few more thrusts slow and deep have your toes curling and sending Rafe into an orgasm struck daze. "Fuck you feel so good" he groans as his hands rub against the red warm skin of your ass. Leaning over you and kissing up your spine as you both bask in your pre orgasm clarity.
"I see why so many girls like you Rafe" you say breathlessly with a smile making him chuckle as he runs a hand through his hair slowly pulling out of you with a hiss due to loss of warmth. "Well it's a pleasure to live up to your standards" he says as he reaches into his glove box and pulls out wipes cleaning you up.
The both of you getting dressed again and seated, Rafe starts the car and the both of you are back on the road with the faint sound of music filling the air as the both of you exchange small words every few minutes until Rafe turned on the road your house was located.
Pulling into your gravel driveway he parks and opens his door walking onto your side and opening it offering a hand which makes your brows shoot up at the sudden chivalry, taking his hand and shutting the door behind you he walks you to your fronts door and as you turn to look at him you see the small smile on his lips. "So...this was nice" he says as he looks down at his feet.
It wasn't.... Not until the both of you had sex in the front seat of his car at least. "Right... just- let me know when you get over Sofia" you pat his chest with an awkward grin on face as you watch his head fall back letting out a groan. "I told you. I'm over her- seriously we broke up and I haven't talked to her since" he shakes his head.
You could tell by the tone in his voice he wasn't, but Rafe was eager to see you again so it meant he was moving on. One step forward. "Let me know when you're ready for something serious Cameron."
You snap your fingers as you give yourself an idea, your hands find themselves under your skirt which had Rafe in a small shock at your actions seeing a flash of your pink panties as you pull them down your legs and balling it in your hand. "Until then have the panties as a keepsake to get off to whenever you like" you say stuffing the ball of wet fabric into his pockets. and with that you leave him at your front door with his hand in his pockets clutching your frilly panties.
Opening the door and shutting it behind you Rafe stands at your doorstep biting his lip turning on his heel and walking back to his car watching how the windows were still a bit foggy. Opening the driver side to the door and sitting down in his seat he sighs, dragging his finger across the glass in the shape of a U and to small dots in the shape of the tip of his index finger a smiley face left behind.
"I gotta get her on that second date" he huffed to himself as he pulled out of the driveway of your home.
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thewadapan · 1 month ago
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So why did Transformers One bomb?
Look, I'm just going to say it right off the bat: no, Transformers One is not the best Transformers movie of all time. I am (gritting my teeth) very happy for every single Transformers fan except me, who all seem to have liked it, and most of whom seem to have loved it. I agree that, as a production, it meets some baseline level of technical competence. It's a perfectly fine movie.
It's also the worst-performing Transformers movie Paramount has ever made.
Hopefully, now that its theatrical run has unceremoniously ended, people aren't going to try to rip me to shreds for theoretically threatening this multi-million-dollar film's box office revenue some miniscule amount by sharing a few teensy weensy complaints with my fifty followers.
Because I do just have a few little nitpicks, which I've tried my best to communicate, over the next 17,000 words of this post.
If you're not a Transformers fan, sorry, this essay is mostly written with the assumption that you've seen Transformers One. However, it might still be of some interest as a window into the current state of the franchise. I've written a basic plot summary of the movie to bring you up to speed, in that case. Because Transformers One purports to be the perfect introduction to the story, no homework needed, I've also done you the courtesy of elucidating background context as needed—think of this less as a review, and more as a history lesson, or maybe a "lore explained" YouTube video. After all, that's pretty much all that Transformers One is.
(And if farcically long posts aren't really your thing, you might prefer to listen to the special episode of Our Worlds are in Danger where my pals and I chatted about the film. Many of the hottest takes and silliest bits in this essay are shamelessly stolen from Jo and Umar.)
We've been waiting for Transformers One for a very long time. It's the first animated Transformers film to get a theatrical release since The Transformers: The Movie came out in 1986. It first entered development around a decade ago. Many fandom members I know online got to see it as far back as June. Its US premiere was in September; those of us in the UK had to wait a full extra month before seeing it, for no clear reason. This is a film which purports to show, in broad strokes, for the first time on the big screen, the origin of the Transformers: where they come from, who they are, and why they're fighting.
By the end of its runtime, Transformers One does not actually answer these questions. Don't get me wrong, it takes great pains trying to answer a lot of different, related questions—just ones which nobody was really asking in the first place: What does the word "Autobots" mean, if not "automobile robots"? What does the word "Decepticons" mean, if they're not actually deceitful? Why is he called "Optimus Prime"? Why is he called "Megatron"? If they were friends, why did they fall out? Why does Starscream sound Like That? Where does Energon come from? If "Prime" is a title, what were the other Primes like? How do Transformers transform?
Writer Eric Pearson, coming onto the project as an outsider to Transformers, describes having to go to Hasbro to ask these kinds of questions:
they had a script that outlined the story that they wanted to tell. I knew Optimus Prime and Megatron and I knew Bumblebee as well, or B. I had to ask about some of the other deeper ones, the mythology, “what exactly is the Matrix of Leadership?” Stuff like that.
See, Hasbro does in fact have the answers written down somewhere. The story as I understand it goes something like this. During the wild west of the '80s and '90s, Transformers "canon" was largely a by-the-seat-of-your-pants consensus-based affair between the freelance writers and copywriters the toy company would bring on to advertise their toys. That changed around the turn of the millennium, when late later-CEO Brian Goldner saw how Hasbro's licensed IP lines (such as Star Wars) were more financially successful and realised they could make more money by aggressively promoting their own in-house IP, which they didn't have to pay licensing fees for. (For the curious, a similar thought process at rival toy company Lego was what led to their creation of BIONICLE.)
The guy basically singlehandedly managing the Transformers brand at the time, Aaron Archer, eventually set to reconciling all the self-contradictory lore surrounding Transformers, an endeavour which dovetailed into the creation of the HasLab internal think-tank (best known for Battleship, the 2012 store-brand Michael Bay knockoff which was a failure critically and commercially but not in my heart) and ultimately the creation of the so-called "Binder of Revelation", an internal story bible which cost over $250,000 to produce and has strongly influenced nigh on every piece of Transformers media released since, but which we hadn't actually seen until it got leaked a week ago. As it turns out, the document itself (compiled mostly by marketers and toy designers) is patently useless to any writer: it's a typo-ridden internally-inconsistent wishy-washy mess that mostly describes the characters in terms of a made-up form of Transformers astrology that has otherwise never seen the light of day.
So although the Binder is the baseline story bible for most modern Transformers media, its influence isn't direct per se; it's more accurate to describe it as being an elaborate game of telephone between high-profile cartoons, comics, and other internal documents, with the Binder itself apparently just sitting in a drawer somewhere at Hasbro; Eric Pearson says that he never received a "binder", with the "script" he mentions either being the earlier draft from Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari (the guys who originally pitched the story), or some other unseen internal document. Director Josh Cooley, however, definitely seems to have been physically handed the Binder or its mass-market adaptation:
I knew that there was a lot of origin to be told, and when I first started, [Hasbro] gave me the Transformers Bible. I could not believe how big it was. I was like, "This is way more than I ever anticipated."
When trailers first dropped for Transformers One, a lot of my friends who are savvy were immediately like: "Oh, this is a weirdly faithful adaptation of the Binder of Revelation, huh."
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I. The One True Origin of the Transformers
Half of the people reading this are Transformers fans, and half of you literally could not give less of a shit about Transformers, so if you're in the 'former group (so to speak), you'll just have to bear with me while I bring the rest of us up to speed.
Before the Transformers' civil war begins, Cybertron is being oppressed by the Quintessons. The Quintessons are a race of five-faced aliens (as in, not Transformers), who execute everyone they come across, first introduced in The Transformers: The Movie, presiding over a kangaroo court on a castaway world. In the followup cartoon five-parter "Five Faces of Darkness", writer Flint Dille established that, gasp, they were actually the original creators of the Transformers! But basically nobody else at the time was particularly compelled by this idea, it seems, with most fans preferring the more mythological origin story conceived by Bri'ish writer Simon Furman for the Marvel comics. I think people kind of just didn't like to think of the Transformers as being robots—mass-produced, a fabrication, programmed—as opposed to an alien race of thinking, feeling beings like us. But because the cartoon was important to many kids, a lot of early-2000s media tried to reconcile the cartoon and comic origin stories by stating that the Quintessons didn't actually create the Transformers; rather, they simply colonised the planet early in its history and pretended to be the Transformers' creators, until the truth came out and they got kicked offworld. This is how the Binder of Revelation ultimately paid lip service to the Quintessons. In Transformers One, the Quintessons are just sort of here, they're these evil aliens secretly skimming Energon from its miners, they don't speak English (or whichever language the film was dubbed into in your market region), they're just these nasty societal parasites.
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Energon is Transformers fuel. In the original cartoon, it was these glowing pink cubes the Decepticons were always trying to produce using harebrained Saturday-morning-cartoon energy-stealing devices. There was a Cold War going on, America had just been through an "energy crisis", maybe you're old enough to remember any of that. Transformers are these big, complicated machines, so I guess the idea is they need this hyper-compressed superfuel to run off, and their homeworld has run out. By the time of the Binder of Revelation, the concept had been telephoned to the point where Energon is like the lifeblood of Primus or some shit.
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Primus is the Transformers God—but not the kind of God you have "faith" in, rather this actual guy whose existence is objectively known in various ways. He transforms into a planet, that's kind of cool, right? Where does Primus come from? Look, it doesn't matter, he's like, the God of Creation, he was there at the start of time. He created all of the Transformers. All the other species in the galaxy, though, they evolved naturally thanks to "science". Actually wait, didn't that Quintus Prime guy go around the universe seeding all the planets with different kinds of Cybertronian life? That's why they're called Quintessons. See, now you know. Who's Quintus Prime?
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Okay, so the Thirteen Original Transformers, or the Primes, are the thirteen original Transformers created by Primus. Most of them correspond to different kinds of Transformer: Nexus Prime is the god of Transformers who can combine, Onyx Prime is the god of Transformers who turn into animals, Micronus Prime is the god of Transformers who are small, and Solus Prime is the god of Transformers who are women. You might remember the Primes from Revenge of the Fallen, although there were only seven of them there for whatever reason.
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Honestly, The Fallen was the only one who mattered for a long time. The whole reason there's thirteen of them is because thirteen is kind of an unlucky number, right? Twelve would've been fine. But throw in a thirteenth guy, and he betrays everyone, he's this fucked up evil guy. In the Binder of Revelation, though, the Thirteenth Prime is his own special guy shrouded in mystery, because they kind of liked the idea that Optimus Prime would secretly turn out to have been the Thirteenth Prime all along, and he just forgot or something, because that means he has the divine right of Primes. In IDW's 2010s comic-book reboot, the Thirteenth Prime was called "The Arisen"—in reference to that one line in The Transformers: The Movie, "Arise, Rodimus Prime!" (this margin is too narrow to explain who Rodimus Prime is). Towards the end of his run, writer John Barber did some actually interesting stuff with the concept, playing with the ambiguity over whether-or-not Optimus Prime was actually the chosen one.
All of Optimus Prime's immediate predecessors as Autobot leaders, Sentinel Prime, Zeta Prime, the lineage seen in "Five Faces of Darkness"... they're all false Primes. They're Primes in name only. In fact, IDW had a whole procession of these cartoonishly evil dictators thanks to a few continuity errors leading to the addition of a couple of extra narratively-redundant fuckers. Transformers One tries to simplify it slightly by just saying that Zeta Prime was one of the Primes for real—occupying that thirteenth "free space"—and it was just Sentinel Prime who was only a normal Transformer pretending to be a Prime, then Optimus Prime who's a real boy.
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But if he's not a Prime from the start, Optimus Prime needs another name in the meantime. In the '80s cartoon episode "War Dawn", before he was called Optimus Prime, he was called "Orion Pax". Have you noticed that Optimus Prime is kind of an odd-one-out amongst all the straightup-English-word names like "Bumblebee" and "Ratchet" and "Jazz"? That's because his name was one of a tiny handful from very early in the franchise's development, before writer Bob Budiansky came onboard and came up with identities for the vast majority of the toys. Practically everyone Bob Budiansky named is called like, "Bolts" or some shit, long before the characters even know of Earth, which has always just been a contrivance of the setting you're not supposed to think about.
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Presumably to create a parallel with Orion Pax's transformation into Optimus Prime, someone at Hasbro in the 2010s came up with a new name for the bot who would become Megatron: "D-16". In real-world terms, this was nothing more than a dorky reference to the Megatron toy's original Japanese release being number 16 in the line ("D" stands for "Destron", which is what they call Decepticons in Japan). But in-universe, the name "D-16" was drawn from the sector of the mine where he worked. I don't get the impression it was originally intended to be part of a broader pattern.
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Which is why I'm baffled as to what the hell the reasoning was behind Bumblebee's pre-Earth name, "B-127". There's this bizarre situation in the Bumblebee film, where the name "B-127" first cropped up, where literally every other bot gets a normal cool name with personality like "Cliffjumper" or "Dropkick" except for Bumblebee, who is stuck with this clunky sci-fi name until he makes friends with a human teenager on Earth and she gives him the name Bumblebee. I guess I don't find it confusing that the writers would (correctly) realise it's a bit weird for Bumblebee to be called Bumblebee on an alien planet where bumblebees don't exist. What I find confusing is that they didn't extend that logic to any other character.
So despite everything else in the franchise's direction pointing away from "robot" and towards "alien", Transformers One ends up with this ridiculous situation where two of the most important guys are, for practically the whole movie, simply referred to as "Dee" and "Bee", I guess because the writers correctly realised the numbers sound fucking stupid.
And if you squint, "Elita-1" sorta fits this naming scheme. But the great irony of it is that the very same cartoon episode which coined "Orion Pax" simultaneously established that Elita-1 also used to go by a different name: "Ariel"! Like the Little Mermaid. Y'know, because an "aerial" is a type of electrical component- oh, forget it.
By the time the script made it into Eric Pearson's hands, it's obvious that he simply was not thinking about it that deeply. He describes the genesis of a scene where Bumblebee introduces his imaginary friends, "A-atron, EP 5-0-8, and Steve." A-atron was impov'd by Keegan-Michael Key as a reference to one of his own skits on Key & Peele. Steve ("He's foreign.") was literally just because Pearson thought it would be funny. It's true that Steve is an inherently funny name, and I guess if you're struggling to come up with jokes of your own, it can be handy to fall back on something which is inherently funny.
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And again, our silly answers to these silly questions beget yet more questions. If he started out as "D-16", then where did the name "Megatron" come from? And if all the Primes have epic made-up fantasy names, then surely that one guy can't just be called "The Fallen", right? That's not a name, that's an epithet. Unfortunately, someone at Hasbro had the bright idea to answer both these questions at once: The Fallen's real name was "Megatronus". Later, for consistency, they threw on the title, and we get "Megatronus Prime", which sounds like what a thirteen-year-old on deviantART in 2014 would call their Steven Universe fusion of Megatron and Optimus Prime. So you see, Megatron actually named himself after Megatronus Prime, famously the most evil of the Primes. In Transformers One, this is changed slightly so Megatronus is merely the strongest of the Primes, as part of its overall effort to make Megatron not look completely insane.
Which, it must be said, is a tall order. Better stories have tried and failed. Back in 2007, Scottish writer Eric Holmes came up with Megatron Origin, a perfectly-fine comic miniseries which drew heavily from the miners' strikes that took place in the UK from 1984-1985, coinciding with the inception of the Transformers franchise. In that comic, Megatron is a lowly miner who, through a series of chance events, winds up at the head of a dangerous political revolutionary movement.
For some reason—I guess because nobody had ever tried to make Megatron anything other than a bloodthirsty cackling madman before—this take on Megatron as a guy who rose up against a corrupt system became the defining interpretation of the character, copy/pasted pretty much wholesale into the Binder of Revelation. Orion Pax also opposes the system, and bonds with Megatron over it, but they disagree on how to fix it: Pax believes in peaceful reform, Megatron just loves to kill. In Transformers One, the problem everyone has with Megatron is basically "whoa, this guy's a little TOO angry!" and there's a point towards the end of the film where Megatron suddenly starts jonesing to kill literally anyone who stands in his way, because he's irrationally angry.
The core problem here—and it's kind of the Magneto problem, the Killmonger problem, whatever better-known example you care to insert here—is that these guys all fundamentally exist just to be a big villain who loves to kill people and who ultimately gets defeated, but the kids who grew up on this stuff in the '80s are now adults who are no longer satisfied with cardboard cutout villains. People like a complex villain, they like a villain who has a point. They like to root for both sides. And in fact, it's easier to sell more toys to people who are rooting for both sides, if your villain is just another kind of hero. But you don't really need to take the same effort with the good guys: they're good by design, righteous by nature. They don't need to stand for something, they just need to stand against the guy whose whole thing is that he loves to kill people.
But again, we're starting from a place where the evil faction—who half the planet will ultimately align themselves with—are literally called "Decepticons". It's a name you'd only ever call yourself ironically, maybe reclaiming it from your enemies. In this film, there's some tortured logic that implies they're called Decepticons because they were deceived by Sentinel Prime. Like if you met a gang of guys who call themselves "The Robbers", but it turns out to be because they got robbed one time, and they actually have zero intention of stealing from anyone.
The Autobots are easier, of course. "Auto" is a prefix that just means, like, the self, or whatever. And the most agreeably American ideal of all is selfishness the power of the individual, the freedom to seize one's own destiny. Prime's original '80s motto, "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings," is bastardised in Transformers One into the slightly less rolls-out-off-the-tongue "Freedom and autonomy are the rights of all sentient beings," because (I can only assume) they forgot to work the word "autonomy" earlier into the script. If they ever greenlit Transformers Three, I suppose the motto would have ended up as something like "Freedom, autonomy, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope are the rights of all sentient beings." Even though bodily autonomy is one of the most salient motifs present in the film—all but referred to by name—I suppose the filmmakers were worried that you might think, when Prime says "freedom", that he actually means something completely different. So now you see! "Autobots" is actually the descriptive name of a political movement which believes in obviously good things. Like "Moms for Liberty".
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Okay, so the cannier among you have probably spotted the mean rhetorical trick I'm pulling with this encyclopedia-entry-ass introduction. By sarcastically relitigating all the storytelling choices I dislike from the last 20 years of Transformers lore, I can build up a negative association with Transformers One without even reviewing the movie itself! On a subtextual level, I'm deliberately misattributing these bad ideas to the filmmakers, conveniently ignoring the mountains of evidence to suggest that they were just trying to make the best of whatever Hasbro handed them from on high. If anything—you might think—the filmmakers deserve even more credit, for spinning this shite into something even remotely good on the big screen.
Like, you'd be wrong, but I can see why you might think that.
II. The Spider-Verse of Transformers
Okay, I can see that I've spat in your soup. I'm sorry. There are lots of good bits in Transformers One. I can even think of one or two of them off the top of my head, without really racking my brains.
Maybe halfway through the film, there is one specific moment where the story suddenly promises to get good. You can pinpoint it down to the word, down to the frame even. Our heroes have just discovered that their planet's leader, Sentinel Prime, is a complete fraud who's been secretly exploiting them ever since they were born—and worse, castrated them by removing their transformation cogs. They are all very cross about this. Orion Pax expresses that he wants to come up with a plan to expose Sentinel Prime. Megatron is too angry to listen. Orion Pax asks, "Don't you want to stop him?" And Megatron replies, "No, I want to KILL him!" And there's like, a little tint of red creeping into the glow of his eyes.
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Whoa. Chills. Up to this point in the film, Megatron has been kind of surly at times, but he's otherwise a generic kids' movie protagonist. He's often chipper. He makes quips. He has this banter with Orion Pax where he's always complaining. It's literally that one "Optimist Prime"/"Negatron" comic, committed to film. Like I'm not even being facetious, one of the film's few obligatory "emotional moments" has Elita-1 sit Orion Pax down and say, "You know what I love about you? You always see the bright side. Like you're some kind of OPTIMIST or something." And then later completely unrelatedly God gives him the mandate of heaven and says "ARISE, OPTIMUS PRIME!" Y'see, as originally conceived, "Optimus" is the word "Optimum" if it was a name, which is why people sometimes localise his name as "Best #1". But it's genuinely kind of cute to reverse-engineer the etymology as coming from "optimist", I guess. Like, it's stupid, but it's cute.
Argh, I got distracted with naming minutia again! Entirely my bad. That's the last time, I promise. Where was I? Right, we'd just found out that Megatron is kind of scary. Brian Tyree Henry's line delivery as he growls "KILL" is his crowning achievement in this film.
Where Optimus Prime's character arc in this movie sees him change from a funny, rebellious spirit to a complete personality vacuum, Megatron's character arc is kind of the opposite. When we're first introduced to him, it's weirdly hard to get a handle on who he is. He's a fanboy for Megatronus, the strongest and most morally-unremarkable of the Primes. He looks up to Sentinel Prime. He likes sports. He doesn't like breaking the rules. In fact, we get the sense that, were it not for his friendship with Orion Pax, he would be literally indistinguishable from the legion of silent crowd-filling background characters he works with. But the moment he starts to become Megatron, it's like everything starts to click. Gears catch, where once they ground and idled. There is something in this guy that was made to fight, made to kill, made to rule. It's sick.
And the underlying tension in his friendship with Optimus suddenly snaps into focus. Megatron is mad at Sentinel Prime, but Sentinel Prime isn't there, he's somewhere else, far below... and he can't help but turn that anger on the next closest thing to an authority figure he has in his life, which is his peer-pressuring bestie, Orion Pax. There is a part of Megatron that wishes he'd never learned the truth, and he blames Orion Pax for his cursed knowledge, for constantly leading them into predicaments on his stupid flights of fancy. Now that he knows, he can't go back to how he was. He can't stop thinking about it.
I'll be honest, it rules. Obviously it rules. It's complicated and toxic and darker than this movie was marketed to be. In interview, Josh Cooley describes the draft of the script he was presented with when he joined the project as having been far more jokey, light-hearted, glib—and it seems we can credit him for saying "Look, this ain't right, the minute the credits roll these guys are going to be at civil war for millions of years."
So, they started talking about it in — what did you say, 2015? I came on board in 2020, and when I came on board there was the first draft of the script. So I don't think they'd been working on it that entire time, but they'd been thinking about it, for sure. And the script that I read was a little more comical? But it was clear that that wasn't the right tone for this film specifically, because we know there's gonna be a war, civil war on Cybertron, you can't have everybody making jokes and then all of a sudden there's a war. So, um, the stakes were really important for this film. And because our characters at the beginning are a little naive, and just on the younger side, not as experienced, it allowed more freedom for them to be a little looser and have fun really getting to know these characters. But once they realize something's going on and things are getting real, it needs to get real.
Cooley also describes his "in" on the film as being the brotherly relationship between Optimus Prime and Megatron (they're not literally brothers in this film, though they have been in the past), which perhaps explains why Megatron and Optimus Prime get to be characters, instead of just like, guys who are there.
That was always the goal from the beginning and what got me on board. It was this relationship between these two characters that was very human and brotherly. I thought about my relationship with my brother and how I could bring that in. It’s not like we’re enemies, but we grew up together and then went down our different paths, but we’re still brotherly. I became a writer-director and live in a fantasy land, and he became a homicide detective who deals with reality, so we’re two very different mindsets. I have always been fascinated by the idea of two people who come from the same place but end up in different ones. From the very beginning, I was like, ‘That’s something I can relate to.’
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Anyway, things I liked, what else. There's that joke at the very start, after the excruciating lore powerpoint, where Orion Pax does a fake-out like he's going to transform, the music briefly swells, and then it just cuts to him legging it down the corridor. In a similar vein, I liked the idea behind the Iacon 5000, where Orion Pax has them run in the race. I felt like the execution of the race left a bit to be desired—the only other participant who matters is Darkwing—but it's still honestly the best big action setpiece in the film. There's also that bit at the end where Megatron and Optimus Prime are both changing into their final forms simultaneously, and it's basically a Homestuck Flash (what would that be, "[S] OPTIMUS PRIME. ARISE."?), so obviously I liked that. Oh, and I really liked the environment design where the planet's landscape is constantly transforming, that's brand-new, someone had an Idea there, and it creates visual interest during the initial Energon-mining scene... even if I wished it had actually paid off in a more meaningful way than "the planet's crust opens as Prime falls to get the Matrix"—like, someone really should've gotten eaten by the planet, that's a cracking Disney death scene and they left it on the table! I also liked getting to see my blorbo, Vector Prime, on the big screen.
I think, as a Transformers fan who's had to sit through a lot of really quite sexist, racist, and plain bad films, you're well within your rights to come out of this one ready to give it a fucking Oscar. You should be ecstatic! It has none of those pesky humans clogging up the frame. It has plenty of robot action. It has jokes which- well I struggle to call many of them "funny", but they're at least trying to be funny in a different way to Michael Bay's films. The film is obviously a massive love letter to... honestly every part of Transformers except the live-action movies. It is an incredibly faithful and earnest adaptation of all the lore and iconography that has randomly accumulated the way it has over the last forty years of bullshit.
My main point of contention, then, is with the overriding sentiment I'm seeing from pretty much everyone else in the fandom: that this is not just the best Transformers movie, but that it's a great animated movie period, that it does for Transformers what Into the Spider-Verse did for Spider-Man, what The Last Wish did for Puss in Boots, and what Mutant Mayhem did for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That, in effect, this film will make you "get it". That it's better-looking, better-written, and more meaningful than a silly toy commercial has any right to be.
I think you can definitely see some loose influence from Spider-Verse in the overall look of the film—particularly in its color grading, and in the design of its main setting, the underground city of Iacon, where the upside-down skyscrapers hanging from the ceiling evoke the iconic "falling upwards" shot from Spider-Verse. Like The Last Wish, it's an animated franchise film that spent much longer than you'd think in development, only for the release of Into the Spider-Verse to have an immediate impact on its visual style... without actually affecting the basic story to the same extent. Both Transformers One and The Last Wish, in many ways, feel like stories concocted using an older formula; in particular, Transformers One bears startling similarities to a similar toy-franchise-prequel, BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, which was released twenty years ago! By contrast, Mutant Mayhem—which had a much shorter development period—is a direct reaction to Spider-Verse in both aesthetic and narrative, and it has a much more distinctive creative direction as a result.
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If you look at how all these titles have performed in cinemas, I think you can make a pretty strong case that audiences are perfectly willing to go out and see this kind of flick. A glance at Wikipedia tells me that Mutant Mayhem, The Bad Guys, and The Last Wish grossed double, triple, and quadruple their budgets respectively. In terms of the pre-existing cultural cachet they were banking on, we're talking about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a children's book series I'd never heard of, and fucking Puss in Boots. You cannot tell me that Transformers, as a brand, is on the same level as any of these properties. Meanwhile, Transformers One hardly broke even, while The Wild Robot—another DreamWorks film based on a children's book I've never heard of, which it ended up competing with in theatres—grosses three times its budget. My friends who've seen The Wild Robot say it made them cry.
Face it: Transformers One has not lit the world on fire. I've seen a lot of people cope with this by suggesting that it's to do with the film's staggered release, or even by claiming that the film's marketing was somehow misleading. I'll be honest, upon seeing it, it did not strike me as being at all dissimilar to the trailers. You can maybe say that the trailers undersold the depth of Orion Pax's and Megatron's relationship—which is its best aspect—but honestly, I think if they'd taken a lot of those scenes out of context and put them in early teasers, audiences would've laughed it out of theatres. Like, c'mon, it's toy robots, stop pretending it's Shakespeare. And otherwise, what you see is what you get; it's exactly what it says on the tin.
I wonder how many Transformers fans, on some level, have noticed that even when we're supposedly "eating good", and watching "peak cinema", our films just aren't as good as everyone else's. They're something you'll enjoy if you're already highly predisposed to enjoy them. But otherwise, they're not turning heads. They're not as funny, or as heartfelt, or as complex, or as exciting, or as charming, or as memorable, or as beautiful as these other films. Unlike with Spider-Verse, there's no word-of-mouth amongst normal people to say that this is a film worth seeing.
What I perceive in studios hoping to recreate the flash-in-the-pan success of Spider-Verse is a misunderstanding of what made people go crazy for that movie in the first place. Yes, it changed our conception of what an 3D-animated film could look like. Yes, the multiverse is very cool and all that. Yes, it had a huge IP attached to it. But on a more fundamental level, that movie has a fantastic story underpinning it. The script is razor-sharp. The story is beautifully complex. The vision of New York City it presents is a living, breathing place, populated by real people. It has the kind of craft to it that can only come from truly obsessive creators cultivating an absolutely miserable professional environment for a legion of passionate animators.
In interview, Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura actually spoke surprisingly candidly about his view on crunch:
I probably shouldn't answer this question, because I'm not exactly PC on my answer. I think the nature of filmmaking is, we're really lucky to work in a business that's about passion. Passion doesn't fit really well into a timeline, so inevitably you come to a crunch time. It's just true in the live action, it's true in every movie, and authors always tell me that about when they're writing their books — it's the same thing happens to them! There's something about the creative process that's not — it's unruly. So, I think if you're enjoying it, you need to recognize that. Like, you know, I don't wanna abuse anybody, and y'know — if you get into that period where people have to really work too hard, you gotta help them in that situation, then. 'Cause it's gonna come. It does on every movie. I've never seen it not come, no matter how well you plan, et cetera. 'Cause it's not a science what we're doing at all, and there's all these discoveries that happen near the end, which makes you go "oh, let's do some more, come on!". We discovered that on this movie, where we're calling ILM going "we've got a few ideas, you know, do you have enough man-hours?". [...] Like, you gotta be conscious of it — in live-action, for instance, there are some studios that are so cheap that when you're on — sort of medium location-distance and you're shooting 'til midnight, they don't pay for a hotel room. It's like, well, no-no-no, you pay for a hotel room. You protect the people.
According to everyone who worked on Transformers One, everyone who worked on Transformers One was very passionate about it. But there are parts of this film where I think you can say, pretty objectively, that it's falling short of its intended effect. So I guess maybe they weren't that passionate. I'm not saying that to be mean! It's just... isn't that better than the alternative—that this was the best they could do?
III. I did not care for The Godfather
At one point in the film, the gang's magic map leads them to a scary cave, which looks like this:
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Bumblebee fills the dead air by saying, "A cave, with teeth. Nothing scary about that!" The joke here is that this is a cave that looks like a mouth. But as depicted, it's a cave that looks like a mouth that doesn't look like a cave! I get that this is an alien planet, but stalactites don't grow that way on Earth, so when you see the cave onscreen, your gut reaction isn't "oh my, what a frightening cave!". No, this is a cave that makes you say, "that's not a cave, that's some kind of alien monster".
(It's not like "cave turns out to be a monster" would in any way be a fresh twist. In BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, there's a bit where a character swims into a scary cave, and it turns out to be the mouth of a massive sea serpent. In The Empire Strikes Back, the Millennium Falcon briefly hides in an asteroid tunnel which turns out to be a giant space worm. So I'm definitely not saying Transformers One would've been a better film if it had used this stock trope.)
Then once the heroes go inside, we're whisked off to an entirely different set of concept artwork, for this lush organic underground paradise. There's no danger there. The cave itself is reduced to a strange little footnote. Maybe it's only in the story because a concept artist drew it before they'd worked out the finer points of the narrative, and Keegan-Michael Key just ended up ad-libbing the "teeth!" line when he was told to vamp for a few seconds. Or maybe the teeth gag was fully written into the script from the start, and the environment artists just interpreted it way too literally.
Like, I'm sorry, I don't mean to start off on the wrong foot here by harping on about the cave thing—it's not a perfect example anyway—but to me it's a microcosm for my frustration towards what I perceive to be a lack of creative vision in this film. So much of the film feels like it's not there to be entertaining, or meaningful, or narratively load-bearing... it's just obligatory, something they threw in for the sake of having anything at all. It's colors and sounds. When you see the spiky shape onscreen, you think, "ooh, this film was pretty bouba earlier, but now it's more kiki!" They get the comedian to improvise a few one-liners while the characters walk from place to place. And it's like, yes, this is a film for children. Of course the heroes have an adventure map with a big red X on it. In many respects this is a glorified episode of Pocoyo, or the modern equivalent, which I guess is "Baby Shark | Animal Songs For Children".
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Nowhere is this sense of "we are obliged to put this in the movie" felt more strongly than in its supporting cast. When you look closely, you notice that Bumblebee and Elita-1—placed prominently in the film's marketing and being technically present for much of its runtime—don't actually do anything of narrative significance. They don't make choices that impact the story; they're just there, and it would not take much rewriting to excise them entirely, so it's just Orion Pax and Megatron on their little adventure. In fact, I'll just come out and say it: I think Transformers One would have been a better movie if Bumblebee and Elita-1 were not in it.
It helps that, from a Doylist perspective, the motivations for their inclusion are perfectly transparent. Firstly, think of the merchandise! Secondly, in Bumblebee's case, it's fucking Bumblebee, he's the whole reason half the kids will be watching, you can't not have him in there. Whenever Bumblebee's not onscreen, all the other characters should be asking, "where's Bumblebee?" Also, I think the creative team felt that they could use Bumblebee tactically to balance some of the darkness in the story.
In the G1 cartoon, Bumblebee just has the default Autobot personality—good-natured, a little sarcastic—with the dial turned a little more towards friendliness. There's this iconic anecdote from the production that cartoon, where writer David Wise found himself in exactly the same situation Transformers writers are finding themselves in forty years later: he was told to write a story about something called "Vector Sigma", and he had no fucking clue what Vector Sigma was supposed to be. So he asked story editor Bryce Malek, who also had no fucking idea. Malek in turn asked Hasbro, and was told that Vector Sigma was "the computer that gave all the Transformers personalities". Upon hearing this, Malek said, "Well, it didn't do a very good job, did it!" Vector Sigma, in case you missed it, does actually appear in Transformers One, as the polygonal shape that transitions into the Matrix of Leadership in the opening powerpoint; I guess they're one and the same now. Some things never change: in Michael Bay's Transformers movies, there is again just a single default personality that every single Autobot shares, a braggadacious action-hero facade over genuine bloodthirst. Who can forget that iconic moment in Revenge of the Fallen where Bumblebee rips out Ravage's spine in grisly slow-mo?
Aside from the fact that he's small and yellow, Bumblebee in Transformers One bears very little resemblance to any incarnation of the character kids might be accustomed to. Instead, he occupies a stock comic-relief archetype, he's a zany guy who goes "Well, that just happened!" If anything, his one joke in the third act—wanton murder—reads like it could maybe be a reference to his many Mortal Kombat fatalities in Bay's films. Beginning in 2007's Transformers Animated, Bumblebee has sometimes possessed deployable "stingers" that flip out from his hands, as a fun action feature for toys. Clearly someone on Transformers One saw this and thought it was the funniest fucking thing that Bumblebee has "knife hands", because the character spends the third act of the movie just shouting "knife hands!" and cutting people in half like a medieval terror.
(In the UK, Bumblebee's lines were re-recorded at the last minute so he says "sword hands" instead. This is because in the UK, we generally aren't able to kill each other using guns, so it's knives that are the big armed-violence boogeyman. Everyone's always talking about how all the kids have knives. And look, I'm not someone to indulge in moral panic, but genuinely, when I look at Bumblebee chasing around people with knives, saying, "I'm gonna cut these guys, watch!", I'm like... what the fuck were they thinking when they wrote that?)
Frankly, whatever is going on with Bumblebee is just an entirely different movie to everything else that's happening. When Bee shanks his twelfth nameless lackey in a row, the movie's like, awww, you're sweet! But when Megatron tries to kill the one (1) evil dictator who's just fucking branded him, who's still lying to his face while his people continue to die to the guy's fuckin' honor guard, Optimus Prime is like, HELLO, HUMAN RESOURCES?
Bumblebee is solely here to be funny, but there's a point in the film where it needs to become a war story, and the best they can think to do with Bumblebee is to have him kill people but in like, a funny way.
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As for Elita-1... look, to put it very bluntly, she is in this movie to be a woman. Transformers has had a long, long forty-year history of boys'-club exclusionism, if not outright misogyny, and each new series usually has a token female character, as a kind of fig-leaf for the fact that really, the only fucking thing Hasbro cares about is that the boys are buying the toys. Beginning in the 1986 movie, it was Arcee who got to be "the pink one" for many years of fiction—but not toys, y'see, when parents want to buy something for their beloved young lad, they don't buy "the pink one", no sir. In the 2010s, wow-cool-OC Windblade took over for a stint as leading lady, decked out in a commercially-non-threatening red color scheme. Recently, though, it's been Elita-1—Optimus Prime's girlfriend from the original '80s cartoon—who's been the go-to female character, and she's increasingly allowed to be pink.
There is a lot of love for these characters amongst creatives and fans alike, and especially in the last decade, female Transformers have been both more numerous and better-written than ever. Unfortunately Transformers One, which depicts Elita-1 as an arms-crossing career-obsessed buzzkill, whose arc sees her learn her place in deference to a less-competent man... well let's just say it struck me as a significant step back in this regard.
There's this great interview with Scarlett Johansson, voice of Elita-1, where she's trying to describe what makes her character interesting, and it's like she's drawing blood from a stone. She's like, "yeah, so Elita-1, I would say, she's on her own journey, because at the start of the film it's sort of like she's working at a big company, you know, and she wants to get a promotion, but then later on she learns that she can't, y'know, get a promotion". Look, it's not that Scarlett Johansson does a bad job—in fact, considering the material she's working with, she practically carries Elita-1 entirely on the back of her performance—it's just that I can't shake the impression that the filmmakers would rather pay Scarlett Johansson god knows how many thousands of dollars than try to think of a second actress that they know of.
As I've already complained, Transformers One has a pretty thin cast, but it effectively only has two other female characters who do anything. Airachnid is a secondary antagonist, Sentinel Prime's spymaster/enforcer, and it's clear that some concept artist really fucking popped off when designing her. She has eyes in the back of her head, and it's ten times creepier than that makes it sound. Her spiderlegs also create some visual interest during fight scenes. As a character, Airachnid has zero internality and is not interesting, but she is cool, so you'll get no complaints from me there.
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The film's other other female character is Chromia, who wins the Iacon 5000 race at the last moment. She really comes out of nowhere to clinch it. It's funny, because the leaderboards show this one guy, Mirage, hovering near the top of the rankings for almost the whole sequence. And Chromia's character model really looks suspiciously like Mirage's. In fact, there's a different character who stands around in the background a couple of times who looks much more like Chromia. Funnily enough, that background character is even called Chromia in concept art! So if you connect the dots, it really seems that the "Chromia" who is the best racer on Cybertron was originally meant to be Mirage, a guy, until they switched the character's gender at the very last minute, and didn't bother changing the leaderboards to match.
There are two possible explanations for this. The first is that Mirage was the dark horse of Rise of the Beasts, and for some reason they felt like his depiction in Transformers One would've gotten in the way of their plans for the character somehow. It's plausible, I guess. The second, infinitely funnier option, is that at some point someone working on the movie realised that they only put two women in the film, scrambled to look through the feature to find a suitable character to gender-swap, only to discover to their horror that they'd forgotten to put in any characters whatsoever. Fuck it, the racer guy! He can be a girl. Diversity win, the fastest class traitor on Cybertron... is a woman!
In case you were wondering about the Transformers One toyline leaderboards, by my count, Orion Pax has ten new transforming toys currently announced or in stores, Bumblebee and Megatron have six each, Sentinel Prime has four, Alpha Trion has two, Elita-1 has two, Airachnid has one, Starscream has one, Wheeljack has one, and the Quintesson High Commander has one. In fact, one of Elita-1's toys—the collector-oriented high-quality Studio Series release—isn't scheduled for release until some undetermined point later next year, and she was entirely absent from leaked lists of upcoming releases, which to me smacks of "we realised last-minute that it would look really really bad if we didn't bother to release a good toy of the one woman in the film". Oh, and obviously, Chromia has no toys—but there is an "Iacon Race" three-pack consisting of Megatron, Orion Pax... and Mirage. Go figure.
The thing is, all of the stuff I'm grousing about here is pretty much standard fare for kids' films targeted more at boys. Hell, even The Lego Movie—which is basically the gold standard of toy commercials—gave supporting protagonist Wyldstyle a pretty similar arc to the one Elita-1 gets here, which was probably the weakest element of that film. Evidently conscious of this, Lord & Miller redeemed themselves by devoting the entirety of The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part to deconstructing common narratives surrounding gender roles. I guess I just wish the young girls who presumably comprise some portion of Transformers One theatergoers could actually get anything out of Elita-1 as a character. Ah, what do I know, maybe it's still considered countercultural simply to depict a woman punching people.
Still, to give credit where it's due: Transformers One doesn't remotely touch the gender-essentialism prevalent in the Binder of Revelation, treating female Transformers no differently to their male counterparts in lore terms. Solus Prime is, it seems, just a Prime who happened to be a woman, rather than the mythological Eve after whom all women are patterned. There's a scene where our heroes are gifted the Transformation Cogs of the fallen Primes, and the Primes named thankfully bear no particular relation to the characters; in other words, Elita-1 isn't given Solus Prime's cog. As Alpha Trion puts it: "What defines a Transformer is not the cog in his chest, but the spark that resides in their core." Dude really remembered nonbinary people exist halfway through that sentence huh.
(Actually, the bigger mistake would've been with Megatron: if he was given Megatronus Prime's cog from the start, then this would've created the unfortunate implication that his descent into evil was only the result of Megatronus Prime's fucked up and evil cog, rather than a choice Megatron made of his own free will. The film instead has it the other way around: Megatron's radicalisation into a "might makes right" philosophy is what causes him to covet Megatronus Prime's transformation cog, to steal that power from Sentinel Prime, who stole the cogs of both Megatronus and Megatron in the first place. That's cool! This does create a bit of unfortunate narrative dissonance with Alpha Trion's words, alas, as it does seem like Megatronus Prime's cog really is more powerful than the others, because it gives both Sentinel Prime and Megatron a powerup.)
There's just something that I find so dreadfully mercenary about this movie's cast—honestly, everyone except Orion Pax, Megatron, and maybe Sentinel Prime. Take Darkwing, for example. Bro was clearly designed from the ground up to fill this stock character role of "bully who pushes our guys around and later gets his comeuppance". For a more interesting take on that exact same archetype, look no further than Todd Sureblade from Nimona, a bigoted knight who gets a whole damn character arc in the background, which directly complements that film's main themes.
Again, I'm not playing some kind of guessing game here, the authorial evidence is right there: Darkwing didn't even have a name until Hasbro designer Mark Maher was shown a picture of the character and asked, "If this was a Decepticon flyer, who would it be?" This is actually par for the course with ILM; most of their concept art is labelled with very basic descriptions, with the exact trademarks being picked in conjunction with Hasbro at a later point. Darkwing just stands out in Transformers One because he's the only recurring speaking character who's an OC in all but name (unless you count Bumblebee), he's the one guy who's been invented from scratch with total creative freedom, and he's boring as sin. It's like the filmmakers just couldn't conceive of a children's movie without that stock character—and they clearly had no idea what to do with him once they'd invented him, because he disappears entirely from the film at the start of the third act, when Orion Pax throws him into an arcade cabinet, which they have in the mines on Cybertron for some reason.
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In a film with as painfully few named speaking characters as Transformers One, there's really no excuse for having this kind of one-dimensionality in their portrayals. Genuinely, I ask—who are Orion Pax and Megatron fighting to liberate? Jazz, one of the biggest personalities from the original G1 cartoon, who gets all of two boilerplate lines here? Cooley seems to think so:
As you’re designing them the background characters are almost like Lego pieces where you put different heads on different bodies just to fill in a crowd. But some of them would be brought forward and be painted specific colors so that it represents a character that I didn’t know was such a big deal. But there was stuff—like Jazz, for example, has a pretty big role. It was important to have a relationship with a character that we know gets to be saved.
To me, the idea that casual cinemagoers would be invested in any of the Transformers as characters is laughable. Michael Bay's characters are famous for being hateful non-entities. In terms of the films, Jazz is best remembered for dying at the end of the first one, seventeen years ago; he looks completely different here. The one breakout character in recent years—Mirage, as played by Pete Davidson in Rise of the Beasts—was, as I've already mentioned, written out so that the movie could reach its girl quota... not that he would've had any lines anyway.
And I just don't buy the idea that the complete dearth of compelling characterisation in this film is just an unfortunate side-effect of its clipped one-hour-thirty runtime—that, given even half an hour longer, the film would suddenly be crowded with rich portrayals of all your Transformers faves. Bumblebee and Elita-1, ostensibly two of the most important characters in the film, are not in this movie because the movie is interested in telling their stories. They are in this movie for the sake of being in this movie. It insists upon itself.
IV. No politics means no politics
In fact, putting aside merchandising considerations, Elita-1 and Bumblebee serve one very specific purpose in narrative terms. The trait Optimus Prime and Megatron have always had in common is that they are both leaders—and what is a leader, without anyone to lead? Without Bumblebee and Elita-1, you'd have this farcical situation where the only person Optimus Prime ever gets to boss around is Megatron, until the very end of the movie when God makes him king of all Cybertron. The High Guard, Starscream's gang of exiles, serve a similar narrative purpose for Megatron; they're a ready-made army who've just been sitting around waiting for him to show up and take charge.
Towards the end, the movie does actually take care to show both Orion Pax and Megatron rallying groups of Cybertronians: in Pax's case, he reveals the truth to his legion of interchangable miner friends, while Megatron riles up the High Guard mob. Again, there's a bit of that narrative sleight-of-hand, a bit of a thematic cop-out, where the question of "how do Optimus Prime and Megatron come to be leaders of their factions?" is answered only in the most literal possible interpretation. Yes, we technically see the exact chain of events that lead to this point—but both characters are portrayed as born leaders. We don't see them grow into the role, except physically. The moment Megatron decides he wants to rule, he's able to take charge. Likewise, Optimus Prime just gets divinely appointed by God. At a key point, Megatron loudly declares "I will never trust a so-called leader ever again", and the movie plays a fucking scare chord like this is supposed to be ominous. Like, oh no! Optimus Prime is a leader! And they're friends! Whatever will Megatron do when he finds out his friend, Optimus Prime, is a leader?
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I don't think the movie has given any real thought to what a leader actually is. It seems to take a stance that power cannot be taken, i.e. through violent action, as Sentinel Prime and Megatron do. That one scene with Elita-1 suggests the most important trait for a leader to have, above and beyond any particular competency, is simply hope and optimism. What I just can't wrap my head around is the fact that the counterpoint the movie presents to Megatron, in the form of Orion Pax becoming Optimus Prime, does not support a belief in collective action or basic democracy—rather, it's a boring sword-in-the-stone divine-right-of-kings fantasy.
Except I do have a theory for why the film is like this. Let's look again at that interview with Eric Pearson, who came onboard in the "late middle" of production:
One of the first things that I did was a big pass on Sentinel Prime. I just felt like he was too obviously telegraphing his wickedness in previous versions, and I felt like, “No, he’s a carnival barker.” He’s got to be a big salesman. He’s a bullshitter, honestly is what he is.
(Honestly, if this is Sentinel after a "big pass" to make his villainy more of a twist, I shudder to think what the earlier drafts were like.)
Now, let's see how WIRED introduces their interview with Josh Cooley, titled "Transformers One Isn't as Silly as It Looks":
He liked the script, which traces how Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry) went from friends to enemies. But as the world went into lockdown as Covid-19 spread, Cooley found his story changing, if only slightly. Trump was still in office when Cooley started working on the film, and he was having meetings with the producers and they’d “start these meetings off on Zoom just going, like, ‘Holy crap what is going on in this world?’” he says. Ultimately, the infighting they were seeing between Democrats and Republicans in the same family became an undercurrent in the film’s friends-to-enemies storyline, “because that’s what Transformers is.”
So it's like, oh, this is a 2016 election thing. This is just that one election that broke everyone's brains. Of course this movie about a made-up political struggle on an alien planet being developed from 2015-2020 wouldn't be like, hey, you know what might fix our society's problems, is if we had an election. Of course the main villain is a "big salesman" "bullshitter" who says things like "The truth is what I make it!". Wow, guys, your film is so-o-o politically-conscious, and very pretty.
The fantasy is more or less that Donald Trump's army of reactionaries is marching on Washington to seize power through violent means, and on the way he drops Joe Biden into the Grand Canyon, but just before Joe hits the ground a giant fucking bald eagle swoops in to catch him and squawks, "God finds you worthy! Arise, President Biden!"
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In our escapist little morality play, our best friend slash allegorical dad gets made king of the planet, and we all get jobs in the government. As in, one of the funniest lines in the movie is straightup Bumblebee exulting, "This is the greatest day of my life. I get to work for the government!" When Prime met Bumblebee—an hour ago—the dude was talking to imaginary friends, and honestly the only fucking skill he's demonstrated since then is cold-blooded murder. We have this dissonance in the storytelling, where it's mostly a story about four friends going on an adventure (are they even friends? Most of them hate each other!), but it's also a founding-fathers political origin story, which means there comes a point where our hero just suddenly starts bossing his friends around in a deep voice, and they're like, "Yes, sir!" It creates this unhinged situation where the "good" faction on Cybertron is ruled by the biblical chosen one and his nepotism buddies.
Per that quote from WIRED (or are they just putting words in Cooley's mouth? I can't help but notice they don't give an exact quote!), the film is ultimately sympathetic to the bad guys (the Republicans, I guess). It deliberately suggests that there is really nothing that should divide the Autobots and the Decepticons: their political goals, it claims, are identical, and they only disagree on the means by which to achieve them. The Decepticons, who are angry and hateful, have simply been misled by a power-hungry liar with charisma—first Sentinel, then Megatron—and so the tragedy is that they are artificially pushed into conflict with their fellow men, when really they should be uniting to stand against their common enemy, the foreigner illuminati trying to steal Cybertron's wealth.
Now, I know I've just handed you a get-out-of-jail-free card. My political allegory here is chock full of holes. What, are Sentinel Prime and Megatron both Donald Trump? Get a grip. Obviously any real-world commentary in Transformers One was only intended in the loosest sense imaginable: things like, "people should be free to change into whatever they want!" I'm being unfair, I'm reading too much into it, this is a cartoon movie for children, and if I want politics, I should start reading some fucking books. Also, come to mention it, my whole argument about that cave earlier really didn't hold water, and- I know, alright? I know.
V. Place / Place, Cybertron
I'm not mad at this toy commercial because its politics don't quite align with mine. I'm not mad at it for having a boring-ass supporting cast. I'm not mad at it for reheating a bunch of half-baked lore I didn't care for from the early 2010s. I've actually spent a lot of time mad about Transformers media that I've thought was bad. There's Transformers: Armada, where the English translators are fully asleep at the wheel and render even the most basic cartoon plots incomprehensible though constant mistranslations. There's Transformers: Micromasters, where two white guys wrote a downtrodden race of tiny Cybertronians who greet each other like "Wattup, my micro!". There's the recent series of Transformers: EarthSpark, where there's an episode that I can only describe as "the Wonka Experience but it's an episode of a children's cartoon", with a plotline that mostly revolves around our child heroes straightup robbing a Onceler-looking businessman of his most valuable possession. There's Transformers: Age of Extinction, with that one scene, and also the rest of that movie. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most Transformers fiction is some combination of bad, offensive, and offensively bad.
So even though I've just spent thousands of words whinging and moaning about how I didn't like Transformers One, the truth is that I had a perfectly nice time at the cinema. I got to go see it with five of my pals who love Transformers just as much as I do, and we had a blast. It is easily in the top 50% of all Transformers fiction.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I guess I've always given a lot of thought to what Transformers looks like from the outside. Maybe it's that I'm compelled to spend so much time and money on it, that it somehow compels me to vomit up these kinds of essays, and all I want is to be able to make it make sense to anyone in my life. It would be so, so nice if I could just sit down in the cinema with a friend or family member for a couple of hours, and at the end of it, they'd be able to walk out and say, "Okay, I guess I see what you get out of it." Rise of the Beasts was kind of that movie for me, but Rise of the Beasts is also the seventh instalment in a blockbuster franchise. It kind of takes for granted everything about Transformers.
It doesn't answer, "what the fuck is a Transformer anyway?"
For many years now, fans have noticed a marked aversion to using the word "transform" as a verb, or even as a noun. Optimus Prime no longer says, "Autobots, transform and roll out!", he just says, "Roll out!". Transformers no longer transform, they "convert". In fact, Transformers are no longer Transformers at all: they are "Transformers bots", the italics here serving to distinguish a registered trademark. This is because the worms in suits at Hasbro are worried that, if they continue to use the word "transform" by its dictionary definition—that is, to change—then rival toy companies will be able to make the case that anything that transforms can legally be described as a Transformer. It will become a generic trademark, like Velcro, or Band-Aid, or Dumpster.
Yet in Transformers One, "Transformers" is not just the noun by which the characters are referred to—rather, it's used in a descriptive sense to specifically mean "Cybertronians who can transform"! Characters are constantly talking about whether they can or can't transform. Prime gets to say his catchphrase in full. It's a miracle. Not only that, characters even get to say the word "kill" instead of "defeat" or "destroy".
Transformers One has a level of unrestricted creative freedom not seen since the 1986 animated film. This is a film unconstrained by location shooting, or licensing deals, or uncooperative actors; through the magic of CGI, for every single frame of its one-hour-thirty runtime, the filmmakers can put literally whatever they want on the screen. They were given the assignment, "Make an animated prequel set on Cybertron telling the origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron", handed an estimated $147 million and a blank page, and told to go nuts. Like those born with transformation cogs, Transformers One had the power to become anything it wanted to be.
The 1986 animated film took that carte blanche to do whatever the fuck it wanted, and basically singlehandedly defined the direction of the franchise ever since. On a lore level, in terms of tone, I would say that Transformers owes practically everything to The Transformers: The Movie. Cartoons, comics, films, and video games have adapted every single one of its scenes countless times over. I'm not necessarily saying that it's a good film, or even that it's a particularly original film—much of it is ripped off from Star Wars—just that it took the franchise somewhere it hadn't gone before. It was looking to the future. As in, literally, it was set in 2005, at the time two decades into the future.
What gets me down about Transformers One is that—like most major franchise media released since The Force Awakens—all it can do is think about the past. Swathes of it are devoted to painstakingly recreating or setting up the various bits of iconography which have arbitrarily come to define the franchise. Even when it appears to be taking things in a new direction, it's not long before it course-corrects back into familiar territory: Steve Buscemi invents a surprisingly fresh take on Starscream's voice, and then Megatron half-strangles him to death, saddling him with a post-produced rasp to emulate Chris Latta's iconic performance from forty years ago.
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The very title of the film, Transformers One, is an allusion to the line, "Till all are one," which originates in The Transformers: The Movie. In an early script for that '80s feature, it was actually "Till all life sparks are one", referring to a literal metaphysical process in that draft whereby one Transformer's life force could be passed on to another, presumably with the belief that they would all eventually be merged into a single afterlife. In the finalized story, it's just this kind of mystical phrase vaguely evoking concepts of togetherness and unity.
Transformers One brushes up against the phrase a couple of times. Alpha Trion almost says it at one point, when passing on his dead siblings' transformation cogs: "They were one. You are one. All are one!" Whatever that means. Later, Orion Pax starts a chant amongst the miners: "Together as one!" And finally, at the very end of the movie, during his obligatory film-ending monologue, Optimus Prime again goes: "And now, we stand here together... as one." (Half of Cybertron has just been banished to the surface forever.) "[...] Here, all are truly... Autobots." (Again, half of Cybertron- Optimus, what the fuck are you talking about?) Regardless, this is inexplicably the one instance where the movie doesn't twist itself up into knots trying to nail the exact phrasing.
Actually, there is one other sideways reference like this I can think of. Early in the film, Orion Pax is chatting up Elita, and he remarks, "Feel like I have enough power in my to drill down and touch Primus himself." To which Elita replies, "You don't have the touch or the power." This is kind of a nonsensical retort unless you know that in the 1986 movie, one of the most iconic songs on the soundtrack was "The Touch" by Stan Bush, which had the chorus line: "You got the touch! You got the power!" It's a banger. Anyway, remember when I said Darkwing gets chucked through an arcade cabinet? Well, here's Cooley revealing why that arcade cabinet is in the film:
I actually wrote [that exchange between Orion Pax and Elita] because I love that song. [...] And we had this one version where D-16 and Orion were playing a video game, like a stand-up old arcade game—it was inspired to look like that, but a Cybertonian version of that. They’re playing that together like friends and the song, like the 8-bit song that’s playing is ["The Touch"]. But that scene got nixed. And so I wanted to work it in there somewhere. And I just felt like a natural place for it. But that was one where I’m like, "I just love that song and those lyrics and that’s Transformers to me so I want to get that in there."
(I've had to amend that quote to fill in the blanks where the article has redacted "spoilers" for the movie. Spoiler culture is an absolute pox, I swear. Can't have the audiences knowing about one (1) mid joke in advance—the movie barely has enough jokes to fill a "Transformers One Funny Moments" compilation as it is!)
This actually isn't the first time Hasbro has "nixed" a reference to "The Touch" in major Transformers media. In the Transformers: Cyberverse episode "The Alliance", a character references "The Touch" right before a training montage which is clearly supposed to have the track playing, except instead it's been replaced by a generic rock instrumental, presumably because they couldn't afford the license. And in Daniel Warren Johnson's Eisner-award-winning bestselling comic run, there's one panel where he clearly wanted to include the song's lyrics as a sound effect, but wasn't allowed, so the final sound effect famously reads "YOU KNOW THE SONG". But that's a random episode of a bargain-bin cartoon, and an indie-darling comic series—not a $147 million blockbuster. You really have to wonder if it came down to money, or if it was something else. God knows Transformers One would not actually be improved for having a chiptune remix of "The Touch" in it, anyway.
The most egregious misplaced bit of fanwank in the film isn't even in dialogue. In the 1986 film, there's this one iconic moment when Optimus Prime arrives at the besieged Autobot City, drives through a crowd of Decepticons in truck mode, then fires some afterburners, launching his cab up into the air, where he transforms mid-leap, drawing his blaster to shoot a couple of Decepticons before hitting the ground. It's a fantastic bit of original animation. It's the Akira slide of Transformers. And, surprise surprise, it crops up in Transformers One. In the climactic final fight, Orion Pax shows up to save Megatron, and he does the thing.
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But the problem is... he's not in truck mode! The film just cuts to him standing there in the middle of some anonymous mooks, then he does a standing jump into the air, the movie momentarily goes into extreme slow-mo like he's doing a fucking quick-time event, then he shoots a couple of guys and drops to the ground. There's no momentum. It exists purely to create that simulacrum, to take the single most iconic frame from that bit of 1986 animation, and stretch that one frame into infinity. The context is discarded, irrelevant. All that matters is that brief moment of recognition: "I know what that iiis!" God knows Transformers One has precious little in the way of impactful fight animation of its own; the choreography is stiff and uninspired, while the shots themselves are nauseatingly cluttered. Often, the best it can do is pilfer from older, better stories.
"Did you clap at any of the new moments and memorable characters?" "Were there any?"
Look, I get it. Transformers One is a prequel. By definition, it can't change the future. It has to play with the characters that are already in the toybox. But I do think it had this really special opportunity: to show theatregoers where the Transformers come from. To show us Cybertron not as a distant star or a barren scrapyard, but as a living, thriving alien world, unlike Earth, something special and worth protecting in its own right. Something new and memorable. In Rise of the Beasts—probably the best Transformers movie by default—when Optimus Prime is at his lowest, he wants nothing more to return home... but home is something we've only ever seen as a cold dystopia, ruled by Decepticons. The version of Transformers One I had hoped to see was one that would have imbued Optimus' homesickness with greater meaning. I wanted to feel his loss, and to hope that one day the war will end, and Cybertron can be restored.
I think Transformers One sincerely tries to achieve this effect. The concept artists have clearly put a great deal of time and thought into Cybertron as an environment. When the artbook comes out, I'm keen to see how much stuff didn't make it into the finished film. You have to assume most of it got cut, because there's next to nothing left!
At the end of the film, battle lines are drawn, the civil war is about to start... but strangely, the movie's setting does not convey the sense that anything beautiful is being lost. Nobody is unwillingly turned to violence, innocence-lost; they're all too eager to get to killing, friggin' Bumblebee is gleeful about it. There's no beautiful, iconic landmark, which gets tragically destroyed, like in some kind of Transformers 9/11—"What have we done! Where will this war take us!". There's no part of Cybertron's natural ecological environment to be ruined by the war, because the surface world is already turbofucked by the Quintessons to begin with. No, rather, we have the total opposite: Optimus Prime finding the Matrix (which was just, like, hanging out in the core of Cybertron or whatever) actually restores Energon to the planet, removing the unnatural scarcity which was the entire impetus behind the film's dystopia. He made Cybertron great again. So again, Transformers One fails to answer one of the most fundamental questions one might expect of a Transformers prequel: "When did things on Cybertron get so bad?" The movie ends with the planet in better shape to how it started!
The big original idea that Transformers One has is that Cybertron, the planet itself, should be in a constant state of transformation. I've already talked about the beautiful shapeshifting landscapes, but it's also the moving buildings, the complicated mechanisms, the roads and rails that magically lay themselves between the vehicles and their destinations. I've already mentioned how odd I find it that none of these environmental transformations have any significance to the story; the closest it comes to some sort of payoff is when Orion Pax falls into the hole that makes you king.
What I find most perplexing are the deer. When the gang makes it to the surface, the idea is to show the natural beauty of the surface, which the cogless have been denied their whole lives. The mountains glisten as they move. Nebulae glow in the night sky. The surface is blanketed in organic (?) plantlife, like a watering can forgotten in a garden. And, most strikingly, there are deer: mechanical animals, just like those found on Earth, being hunted for sport by the evil Quintessons. When the cruisers near, their glowing horns turn red with alarm, and they prance around in fear.
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I'm reminded of a brief gag from the third season of Transformers: Cyberverse—one of very few shows to have devoted any serious effort to Cybertronian worldbuilding—in the episode "Thunderhowl". Bumblebee and Chromia stumble across a "singlehorn" (read: unicorn), and when it senses danger, it neighs, transforms into a rocket, and blasts out of frame. And apart from being really cute and funny, it's like, oh, of course that's what animals are like on Cybertron! Everything on this planet transforms. Why not the animals?
For whatever reason, the deer in Transformers One are like the one thing that don't transform. Why the hell not? If Cyberverse could find the budget for its split-second sight gag, surely this blockbuster could, I don't know, have them turn into dirt bikes with antler-handlebars. That would've been something, right? If not, then at least could we maybe see some other animals on Cybertron, to really get across that alien biodiversity? Of course not. See, the deer exist to communicate one very specific story beat: a single moment of trepidation, where the heroes know there's danger nearby, but they don't know what. And all you need for that is a single kind of prey animal, with some kind of warning light to let you know, hey, there's danger! Once this purpose is fulfilled, the deer have no further significance to the story.
We need only look to BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui to see this exact same beat play out with a modicum of competence and creative flair. Also in the second act—in fact, at practically the exact same timestamp—our heroes, the Toa, have a run-in with the bad guys, and they're nearly captured... but then there's this sudden rumble of danger approaching, we don't know what. It turns out to be a herd of giant Kikanalo! They send the bad guys packing, except they nearly trample our heroes too! But then, Toa Nokama's mask begins to glow, and she discovers that her mask grants her the ability to talk to animals. They learn some vital information from the Kikanalo, and are able to ride the creatures for the next stage of their adventure. Finally, when they can go no further, the Kikanalo cave in the passage behind the heroes to ensure they won't be pursued. Holy shit, that's like, five different story beats with just that one type of creature!
It's not just that Transformers One struggles with that kind of basic narrative flow, where a single element serves multiple purposes. It's that often, it wastes precious time creating redundant setups to achieve the same effect twice.
For example, Megatronus Prime's face happens to look exactly like (what we know will be) the Decepticon insignia. At the beginning of the movie, Orion Pax mollifies Megatron by giving him a rare decal of Megatronus Prime's face. Traditionally, Megatron wears his insignia in the middle of his chest—but in this film, nearly every character has a big hole in the middle of their chest, where their missing transformation cog should go. So Megatron sticks the decal on his shoulder instead.
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Later, he gets a cog, and the hole in his chest is filled. When Sentinel Prime captures Megatron, he notices the Megatronus sticker, and rips it off. Then, he re-applies it on Megatron's chest—purely so it's in the "right" place for the iconography. And then, he uses his gun to crudely brand Megatron with a tracing of Megatronus' face, inadvertently creating the Decepticon symbol. Finally, in a post-credits scene, Megatron has fashioned a proper Decepticon brand with which to brand himself and his followers. So in effect, there are four separate moments where Megatron gets the symbol! Orion sticking it on his shoulder, Sentinel moving it to his chest, Sentinel mutilating him, and finally Megatron branding himself. You can make an argument that the symbol starts out meaning one thing, but ends up meaning another thing, which has a kind of tragic significance—but I think you would struggle to distinguish subtle shades of meaning from all four of these brandings. Considering the movie only has an hour and a half to work with, I find this lack of narrative economy to be honestly embarrassing.
(My friend Jo also points out what a misstep it is to just have Megatronus Prime's face perfectly resemble the Decepticon symbol from the start. Had it been a looser, more stylised—that is to say, original—design, the moment where Sentinel Prime roughly carves it into Megatron's chest could be a shocking reveal, as the basic outlines are abstracted and simplified. Gasp, that's the origin of the Decepticon symbol! Instead, from the very moment that sticker first shows up, it's like... oh, well, there it is I guess.)
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In a similar vein, both Optimus Prime and Megatron undergo two different transformations at different points in the movie: first, when Alpha Trion gives them transformation cogs, and second, when respectively they obtain the Matrix of Leadership/Megatronus' cog. The gun that sprouts from Megatron's arm in his intermediary form bears a much closer to resemblance to his iconic "fusion cannon" than the triple-barrelled cannon he ends up with in his final form. Again, in such a short film, can we really say whatever subtlety this brings to Megatron's arc is worth all this fanfare? Now, Redditors ask: "What is the EXACT moment D-16 became Megatron?"
In fact, probably the only point of criticism I've seen levied at Transformer One from within the Transformers fandom at large is that Megatron's arc is maybe a little "rushed". He starts out being best bros forever with Orion Pax, and by the end of the film, he's ready to drop the guy into a bottomless pit. The film takes a lot of time to justify his anger at Sentinel Prime, but the deterioration of his friendship with Orion goes much more unspoken, and is framed more as a point of irrationality: psychologically, Megatron comes to conflate his bossy friend with his oppressive ruler. I liked this, personally. I liked that it's as if a switch gets flipped in Megatron's head. But you do just kind of have to buy into it. The film itself does not put in the work to really sell you on the friendship souring, because again, it's too busy fucking around with two (2) magical girl transformation sequences for each of them.
Everything in the film is like this. They go into the cave and meet Alpha Trion, then leave the cave so they can watch a FMV cutscene with Sentinel Prime and the Quintessons, who've coincidentally arrived at that exact moment, basically just to rehash what they've just been told... and then they go back into the cave so Alpha Trion can resume his infodump, and then they end up clashing with Sentinel Prime's forces once that's done. At the beginning of the movie, they're at the very bottom in the mines, then they get banished to an even lower level, then they banish themselves all the way up to the surface, then they return to Iacon, and then Megatron gets banished to the surface again so he can be mesmerized by the beauty of the world and/or get gunched by Quintessons depending on what the film wanted me to take away from this. Compare to Minecraft but I survive in PARKOUR CIVILIZATION [FULL MOVIE], where the theme of class struggle is pretty efficiently depicted in the vertically-stratified setting.
I just find it so wasteful. Outside of the one scene where they're introduced, the Quintessons—ostensibly the true architects of Cybertron's oppressive status quo—may as well not exist. If not for Orion Pax addressing his closing remarks to the Quintessons, almost as an afterthought, I'd assume the film wants us to forget about them entirely, as it knows full well that its paltry runtime does not give it time for a second action-climax against the aliens. Even as sequel bait, it feels halfhearted at best; Josh Cooley is clearly already bored of Transformers, and seems unlikely to come back for another round unless the money is really really good (which *glances at the box office* it's not). So what the fuck are the Quintessons here for? Was the idea that Sentinel might just have pulled off his coup singlehandedly really so hard to stomach? Could the conspiracy not have been simplified to just involve Sentinel and his Transformer cronies? Hang on, are all the Transformers seen at the start of the film in on it, or just some of them? How's it decided who keeps their cogs and who doesn't?
VI. Into nothing
Why does this movie, where the main selling point is ostensibly that we're getting to see Transformers civilization for the first time, mostly focus on all these guys who can't fucking transform? Surely the entire thing that makes the setting fun is the Zootopia angle of, look, they're all different animals! Or the Elemental angle of, look, they're all different elements! Or the Emoji Movie angle of, look, they're all different emoji! Or the Cars angle of, look, they're all different cars! This is a Transformers film which features several significant sequences involving these cool trains, and there is absolutely zero indication that these trains are themselves Transformers. This is a Transformers film which extensively focuses on miners, and none of them transform into mining vehicles; they're holding, friggin', space jackhammers. Even the premise of "isn't it sad that these ones can't transform" is kind of undercut by the fact that all the miners get to wear fucking jetpacks, which is a frankly much cooler and more effective method of locomotion than driving.
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I'm just sick of Transformers stories having zero interest in the basic premise of Transformers, which is to say, they transform into something. I also think this is the biggest dissonance between casual audiences, who think "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, that guy who turns into a truck", and Transformers fans, who think, "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, the messiah or something". Normal people love to know what the Transformers turn into. They ask, "Wait, is there a Transformer that turns into [insert silly vehicle here]?" Of course people are interested in that angle! Vehicles are such a huge part of our daily lives—honestly, for those of us living in cities, more so than animals, the classical elements, or emoji—but the closest Transformers One comes to engaging with this lens is that aforementioned Iacon 5000 race sequence. By and large, it presents a world which is made for standing up and walking around. And personally I do think that's an insane approach to take?
Is the excuse that cars can't emote? Nonsense. If you've ever seen a traffic jam, you'll know that cars can sure as hell emote. Pixar, where Josh Cooley cut his teeth, famously spent a lot of time working out how to put a facial expression on a car. No, the problem dates back to the very start of the franchise.
In the 1980s, two main people were responsible for writing the comic stories: American writer Bob Budiansky, and British writer Simon Furman. Budiansky approached the premise of the franchise from an external, human perspective, writing about culture clash, and taking delight in the Transformers' mechanical alien nature as "robots in disguise". Meanwhile, Furman wrote the Transformers as giant people: he focused on their own internal conflicts and motivations, and the grand history of their war. Pretty much every Transformers story ever told can be boiled down to one of these schools of thought: Budianskyist, or Furmanist.
Budiansky quit the comic after fifty issues, allowing Furman to take the reigns as sole writer, and Furman basically got the final word on what the Transformers are. They did not evolve from naturally-occurring gears, levers and pulleys. They were not designed by a supercomputer, or built by an alien race. They are the chosen sons of God. The Thirteen are, of course, an invention of Furman's. And Transformers One is perhaps the most Furmanist story ever told. It's the culmination of years and years of lore building up, ossifying into something you can no longer describe as the history of a universe—no, this is a mythology. It's the most perfect form of brand alignment imaginable: this is not an origin story, this is the origin story. It's been the origin story for a better part of the decade—and now that everyone's seen it in theatres, it will be the origin story forever.
It's not just the fiction, either, by the way. These days, if you go into the store to buy a Transformers toy, chances are it'll turn into some misshapen made-up futuristic concept car with unpainted windows and wheels that don't even roll—and that's terrible.
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There's truly a lot to hate about Michael Bay's Transformers films, but with each new entry that's released following his departure from the franchise, I feel like I only find myself appreciating them more. In the 2007 Transformers movie, we see the Transformers crash-landing on Earth in their "protoforms", and their movements are animated like they're shy, like they're naked until they scan an Earth vehicle and adopt a disguise. The visual impact of Megatron, meanwhile, is that he doesn't adopt a disguise in that movie: he's a horrible metal skeleton that turns into a jet made of knives. It's weird and alien and it rules.
In the 1980s Transformers cartoon, and in the last-minute Cybertron-set prologue added to Bumblebee, and now in Transformers One, the Transformers look basically the same on Cybertron as they eventually do upon their arrival to Earth. Optimus Prime turns, unmistakably, into a truck. He has windows on his chest, and smokestacks on his arms. He doesn't have these features because he disguises himself as an Earth truck. He has those details because that's just what Optimus Prime looks like. They're his "essential brand elements", or "trademark details", which "identify the must-have elements in character design to be carried across all creative expressions". Prime may take any form he wishes, so long as it looks exactly like himself. A mask of my own face—I'd wear that.
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What I find fucked up about the reception towards Transformers One is that a lot of people seemed very invested in its success—and not its popular success, certainly not its artistic success, but rather its commercial success. They wanted this to be the first film to make one bumblebillion dollars. They wanted Hasbro to line its fucking pockets and make movies like this forever. So if you express any kind of negativity towards this film online, which might theoretically affect some other person's decision of whether or not to go and see it, which might theoretically affect the profit it makes at the cinema, which might theoretically affect the future of the franchise in some unknown way, then you're some sort of fandom traitor who oughta be executed.
If you're so worried about the future of the franchise, the fandom really isn't where you should be looking. Like, c'mon, the Transformers fandom has been good as gold, we buy so many toys. Meanwhile, Hasbro just got finished laying off around 100 employees with no warning to make their books look a bit better. Transformers designer John Warden—who'd worked at Hasbro for 25 years, is widely credited with inventing the modern paradigm of Transformers toylines, and ultimately became the creative director of both Transformers and G.I. Joe—was on assignment to a convention in the UK with the rest of the Transformers team when he heard the news. Suffice to say, he did not end up making a public appearance at the convention. With his work's health insurance snatched away without notice, he's had to resort to crowdfunding to pay his family's medical bills. As a well-known figure in the toy industry, he will presumably find a new job and land on his feet, but the same cannot be said for all 99 of the remaining employees we're told have been unceremoniously dumped.
The Binder of Revelation, which has been something of a holy grail of behind-the-scenes material for over a decade, has finally been leaked—presumably by one of these guys, presumably out of spite.
Now, I'm not going to pretend to have been paying particularly close attention to Hasbro's financials, but from where I'm sitting, it sure seems that ever since the sudden death of then-CEO Brian Goldner in 2021—credited for saving the company in 2000, and overseeing the explosive growth of its intellectual property ever since then—his replacement, Chris P. Cocks (or "Crispy Cocks", as we're all now calling him), has been dead set on gutting the company for all it's worth. The Power Rangers franchise, which the company acquired for $522 million in 2018, is dead in the water, with huge quantities of physical assets being flogged at auction for quick cash. In 2019, they acquired the entertainment company eOne for $4.0 billion, and now they're selling off the whole shebang (except the cash-printing Peppa Pig franchise) for just $500 million. I guess maybe they just fucked it big style?
Because now, Crispy Cocks has proudly announced that Hasbro is going to stop financing movies altogether.
I'm sure that in the wake of this announcement, many of those aforementioned fandom pundits will be drawing a correlation between this announcement, and the box-office figures for Transformers One, and the fact that you personally failed to convince your Mom to go see it with you or whatever. "Ah, you see! They didn't make enough of their money back, and now they're consolidating. Simple economic cause and effect. Market forces." And look, I'm not going to sit here and claim these things are wholly unrelated. Of course they're very related. But I am going to make the case that, in truth, nobody at Hasbro really cared how Transformers One did. Unless it turned out to be some pie-in-the-sky runaway hit, I don't think the future of the Transformers film franchise would've been particularly different if only the film had done better.
With Paramount, Hasbro has been making these movies and having them underperform ever since 2017's The Last Knight—which apparently lost Paramount $100 million—and that's because at the end of the day, what they're most interested in isn't making movies. It's making toy commercials. And on that level, the Transformers films have clearly been a success so far.
Now, Crispy Cocks' skinsuit fashions itself as a gamer, so he can personify Hasbro's hardcore pivot towards digital and tabletop gaming. While we await the release of the assuredly-dogshit, assuredly-hell-to-have-worked-on, assuredly-never-coming-out Transformers: Reactivate, the brand has been whored out to a procession of mobile games you've never heard of, glorified gambling machines designed to hack the monkey part of your brain with bright colors and Things You Recognize. The exact content of these games is irrelevant; all that matters is the announcement, on every single pop culture news outlet simultaneously (naturally—they're all owned by the same company, talk about Monopoly), of New Collaboration Between Transformers And Goon Warriors Free To Download Now. Your daily, weekly, bi-annual reminder to think about that thing you can buy.
That's all any of this stuff is.
All these words spilled about what a good movie Transformers One is, and how bad it is, and why the marketing failed it, and what the next one might be like, and- none of it mattered! It does not matter. From the beginning, this movie was always going to be too preoccupied with its own mercenary interests to be something anyone would ever be able to seriously talk about as a work of art, even corporate art. The actual content of the movie is irrelevant; I've spent very little of this review talking about it, because there's nothing there to talk about. It is the mere fact of the movie's existence that serves its purpose. Like the Optimus Prime Fortnite skin, it's enough for it to occupy our attention.
Maybe that's why they staggered the film's release date: because some marketing exec watched the rough cut and realised, if everyone saw it at once, we'd be done talking about it within a fortnight. And in ten years' time, after it has been paraded around whichever streaming services survive 'til then, and nearly every last cent of revenue has been squeezed out of it, the kids will be able to watch it on YouTube with ad breaks, and decide what they want for Christmas.
To the Transformers fans reading this, I am begging you, unless you happen to own shares in Hasbro for some fucking reason, to disabuse yourself of the feeling that you owe any kind of loyalty to a toy franchise. It shouldn't matter to you one jot how Transformers One did in theatres. The people who actually make the product you care about, the friendly faces paraded before you on livestreams and press tours, don't see this money anyway—they too are merely assets, who can be fired and replaced with cheaper, inferior equivalents.
I'm sure many of you will have, from the very start, seen this review for the foolish endeavour it is. I've wasted all this time criticising Transformers One for its lack of artistic vision, when the truth is, Transformers One is playing an entirely different game. Like the Disney Channel running "Fishy Facts!" segments to subliminally get kids interested in fish a full year and a half before the release of Finding Nemo, this is not a product—it's an ad for a product.
...
Okay I'll be honest, I don't entirely love where this review has ended up. It ends on kind of a "bummer note", I guess you could say. Flashing back to sections I. and II., I feel like things started out so fun. We had that whole bit at the start where I was telling you about the Transformers, remember that? We learned so much together. And there were even a few moments where I was able to express some kind of sincere joy and appreciation over this thing that I supposedly adore so much. Sure, I did a lot of complaining, but it was fun complaining, right? It had like, a sarcastic edge to it, sort of.
What happened? Why am I suddenly talking like I want to cut someone's head off? As I grow more bitter, I type this essay with increasing difficulty. The massive gun that's sprouted from my forearm keeps colliding with my monitor.
Hasbro descends from on high to reward @TFHypeGuy, a grown-ass adult who has spent untold unpaid hours fearlessly replying to every single viral tweet to tell people to go see the film, somehow netting himself 80,000 followers in the process, with a crate of toys, which was probably his end goal from the start. He and I duel. We trade blow after blow. Finally, he clobbers me with a Walmart-exclusive light-up Ultimate Energon Optimus Prime figure. "It didn't have to end this way," he says. Then he banishes me to the surface world to think on my sins.
VII. The Wrong Trousers 👖 | Train Chase Scene 🚂 | Wallace & Gromit
When Eric Pearson came onto the project,
It was late middle of the game. They had a script that had the outline of the story, which is still very much the structural bones of the story now. But what I found interesting about animation is there are certain things that were far along in the process. The train escape to the surface was very far along, so that was just kind of locked. Maybe you could change a line here or there. Meanwhile, the opening, the whole first 10 minutes, was all storyboards and sketches, which changed a bunch of times.
And I do think that's a really difficult position for a scriptwriter to be in. Sure, the parts of the screenplay I feel able to attribute to Pearson, I wasn't particularly impressed by. But I think this anecdote goes to show how unnatural the constraints can be on a story like this. When you think of like, a scene that's key to Transformers One, you're probably imagining something like the Megatron/Optimus fight, or the scene in the mine—not the train scene, which is basically a bit of arbitrary connective tissue bridging the two main locations in the film.
Josh Cooley, the film's director, the face of the film on the press circuit from a creative standpoint, came onboard after five years of previous development work was already done. Writers Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, who originally pitched the film and presumably wrote the early drafts of the story, might have already left the project by that point. Aaron Archer and Rik Alvarez, the creative forces behind the Binder of Revelation, left Hasbro years before the film was even pitched. It's no wonder to me that the final result feels incoherent, disjointed, and oddly stilted. It's certainly no wonder that nobody at Hasbro today really seems to care about the film; it's not their baby. If any of the people credited with bringing the project to completion had been given full creative freedom to make whatever Transformers movie they wanted, it would've looked completely different.
Luckily, there are still plenty of areas of the franchise where creators have just been allowed to go ham. Over in Japan, TRIGGER has taken a modest budget for a music-video and produced one of the most visually-striking bits of animation in the franchise, a true love-letter to all the weird parts of its forty-year history. And in America, comic creator Daniel Warren Johnson is halfway through his Eisner-winning new run on the title, which is the kind of thing I would basically recommend to anyone without caveats as being a phenomenal story, period. If that comic can be said to be an advert for anything, it's for Skybound's other, nowhere-near-as-good comic series, or for the unofficial unlicensed copyright-infringing Magic Square Optimus Prime toy Daniel Warren Johnson apparently used as reference the whole time.
I dunno, maybe Hasbro stepping back from financing these films is a good thing, in the long run. Maybe we can do without Transformers movies for a while. And however many years down the line, maybe Paramount or some other studio will put together a new team of talent, and they'll get to do whatever it is they want. And maybe the movie they make will be the one that knocks everyone's socks off.
Truly, I don't know where the road leads from here. It hasn't been built yet. It could turn out to go anywhere.
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If you made it this far, I hope some of what I've said has been entertaining or interesting. Thanks for reading!
Time to for me to come clean. There is one other reason why I've waited so long to release this review... and that's because I have a special announcement to make. Last month I set myself a little challenge: to write something that's at least as long as this review, but which isn't another negative-nancy tirade. It's a story.
The working title is "Ice Road Transformers". It's like an episode of that one reality TV show about Canadians driving trucks across frozen lakes—except the truck is Optimus Prime.
Early reviews say it's good! It'll be going through several rounds of revisions, to turn it into a well-oiled machine, hopefully in time for a seasonally-appropriate wide release in February. I'm very excited for you to be able to read it. You can follow me here or on Bluesky to be the first to find out when it's ready!
I'd like to thank my friends Jo and Umar for their work interviewing Cooley and di Bonaventura during the film's press circuit, along with Viv, Callum, and Omar for allowing me to enjoy this film much more than I otherwise might have. I wouldn't have been able to express many of my feelings about this movie nearly so cogently if not for the conversations I had with them. Additional thanks go to Chris McFeely, as his Transformers: The Basics videos (linked throughout this essay) refreshed my memory on a lot of the Aligned stuff, sparing me from having to read The Covenant of Primus again.
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darklink82 · 5 months ago
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Why the fuck is ANYONE excited for Robert Downey Junior as VICTOR VON FUCKING DOOM??!
Regardless of the fact that Disney once again whitewashing a Romani character for the third time in a fucking row makes it an automatic fail.
There is exactly one good option that is automatically disqualified due to the amount of money being spent on him.
RDJ is getting an 80 MILLION dollar pay plus additional expenses PER MOVIE. Disney is gonna play him up as much as possible. Let's look at the options for him as Doom as I see it.
They play him as an evil Tony Stark variant. This will only lead to the worst, cheapest, "I just learned how to write" tier, bullshit drama you could possibly imagine. Peter going "OMG he looks just like Tony" is not good writing, it is trash.
They play him as Victor Von Doom. Why the fuck did they hire the actor who played their biggest character to play another character who has nothing to do with Tony? One Quip, one change in his tone, a single look at his face and the entire illusion is destroyed and you just end up confused that RDJ is back but not as Tony for some reason.
And again, regardless of the fact that casting a generic white dude to play a Romani character already disqualifies him, the only way this could possibly work is if he completely changes his voice to be unrecognizable, never shows his face once, and none of the characters comment on the fact that he looks like Tony. In which case they could have hired literally anyone else. They could have hired a voice actor and a stunt man and gotten better results.
This is the most desperate, dishonorable, bullshit casting choice I could have possibly imagined. And that's not even getting into how much this will utterly and irrevocably fuck over the Comics Doom for the sake of "Brand Synergy"
And if anyone tries to pull up What If? Iron Man Demon in an Armor or Infamous Iron Man, you clearly didn't actually read those fucking comics because I have and I know that they have nothing to do with this.
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mostlysignssomeportents · 9 months ago
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Too big to care
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I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!
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Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.
Today, Google has a 90% search market-share. They got it the hard way: they cheated. Google spends tens of billions of dollars on payola in order to ensure that they are the default search engine behind every search box you encounter on every device, every service and every website:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics
Not coincidentally, Google's search is getting progressively, monotonically worse. It is a cesspool of botshit, spam, scams, and nonsense. Important resources that I never bothered to bookmark because I could find them with a quick Google search no longer show up in the first ten screens of results:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task
Even after all that payola, Google is still absurdly profitable. They have so much money, they were able to do a $80 billion stock buyback. Just a few months later, Google fired 12,000 skilled technical workers. Essentially, Google is saying that they don't need to spend money on quality, because we're all locked into using Google search. It's cheaper to buy the default search box everywhere in the world than it is to make a product that is so good that even if we tried another search engine, we'd still prefer Google.
This is enshittification. Google is shifting value away from end users (searchers) and business customers (advertisers, publishers and merchants) to itself:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith
And here's the thing: there are search engines out there that are so good that if you just try them, you'll get that same feeling you got the first time you tried Google.
When I was in Tucson last month on my book-tour for my new novel The Bezzle, I crashed with my pals Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden. I've know them since I was a teenager (Patrick is my editor).
We were sitting in his living room on our laptops – just like old times! – and Patrick asked me if I'd tried Kagi, a new search-engine.
Teresa chimed in, extolling the advanced search features, the "lenses" that surfaced specific kinds of resources on the web.
I hadn't even heard of Kagi, but the Nielsen Haydens are among the most effective researchers I know – both in their professional editorial lives and in their many obsessive hobbies. If it was good enough for them…
I tried it. It was magic.
No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again.
That was before I started playing with Kagi's lenses and other bells and whistles, which elevated the search experience from "magic" to sorcerous.
The catch is that Kagi costs money – after 100 queries, they want you to cough up $10/month ($14 for a couple or $20 for a family with up to six accounts, and some kid-specific features):
https://kagi.com/settings?p=billing_plan&plan=family
I immediately bought a family plan. I've been using it for a month. I've basically stopped using Google search altogether.
Kagi just let me get a lot more done, and I assumed that they were some kind of wildly capitalized startup that was running their own crawl and and their own data-centers. But this morning, I read Jason Koebler's 404 Media report on his own experiences using it:
https://www.404media.co/friendship-ended-with-google-now-kagi-is-my-best-friend/
Koebler's piece contained a key detail that I'd somehow missed:
When you search on Kagi, the service makes a series of “anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek, and Brave,” as well as a handful of other specialized search engines, Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, etc. Kagi then combines this with its own web index and news index (for news searches) to build the results pages that you see. So, essentially, you are getting some mix of Google search results combined with results from other indexes.
In other words: Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google.
The implications of this are stunning. It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug. Google prefers those results to Kagi, because Google makes more money out of shit than they would out of delivering a good product:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24117976/best-printer-2024-home-use-office-use-labels-school-homework
No wonder Google spends a whole-ass Twitter every year to make sure you never try a rival search engine. Bottom line: they ran the numbers and figured out their most profitable course of action is to enshittify their flagship product and bribe their "competitors" like Apple and Samsung so that you never try another search engine and have another one of those magic moments that sent all those Jeeves-askin' Yahooers to Google a quarter-century ago.
One of my favorite TV comedy bits is Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator; Tomlin would do these pitches for the Bell System and end every ad with "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company":
https://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76aphonecompany.phtml
Speaking of TV comedy: this week saw FTC chair Lina Khan appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It was amazing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM
The coverage of Khan's appearance has focused on Stewart's revelation that when he was doing a show on Apple TV, the company prohibited him from interviewing her (presumably because of her hostility to tech monopolies):
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/apple-got-caught-censoring-its-own
But for me, the big moment came when Khan described tech monopolists as "too big to care."
What a phrase!
Since the subprime crisis, we're all familiar with businesses being "too big to fail" and "too big to jail." But "too big to care?" Oof, that got me right in the feels.
Because that's what it feels like to use enshittified Google. That's what it feels like to discover that Kagi – the good search engine – is mostly Google with the weights adjusted to serve users, not shareholders.
Google used to care. They cared because they were worried about competitors and regulators. They cared because their workers made them care:
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/4/18295933/google-cancels-ai-ethics-board
Google doesn't care anymore. They don't have to. They're the search company.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi
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squoxle · 7 months ago
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Secret Obsession 𓆩♡𓆪 P.WB 18+
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✰ pairing: pervy!professor!wonbin x camgirl!student!fem!reader | ✰ wc: 4.6k | ✰ cw: MDNI!!! heavily sexual content…literally porn bro | ✰ plot: since your first year of college, you've had a side gig to earn extra cash. during one of your streams, you meet an interesting new user catches your attention.
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You watched the comments as they appeared on your stream.
"Please take off your shirt for me, baby. Oh my god...ur so sexy. Take it off for Daddy. Turn around so I can see it from the back."
A part of you enjoyed the attention you received from your little side hustle, but the real reason you did this was to fund your education--or more realistically...your housing.
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You leaned back on your bed, spreading your legs as you reached your fingers down to toy with your wetness.
"Fuck baby. ur so wet. i wanna see u abuse that little cunt."
A notification popped up on the side of the screen alerting you to perform a paid request. Someone was paying 80 dollars to watch you finger yourself. That was a hefty amount to say that your viewers were already paying a subscription--and you were gonna end up doing that anyway.
You first inserted one finger to get you started before slipping a second finger in. You pulled them back and forth, grazing your g-spot every so often.
"I wish I was fucking u with my dick rn. Faster baby, please. I'm already so close."
You felt the buzzing from your remote-controlled vibrator beside you. "Oh, I guess someone really wants me to use my toy, huh?" you chuckled lightly. You knew that paying to control the vibrations on your toy costs $150 for 10 minutes.
"yes, please. I wanna see u cum all over your sheets."
You reached over to grab the smooth toy before pushing it into your pussy. You didn't have enough time to stretch yourself, but your viewers liked to hear you struggle. "Ngh!" you groaned.
"If you squirt I'll give you 100 dollars. Cum for me baby. God ur so fucking tight. Let me fuck u one time plz."
The squelching sounds of your wet pussy coupled with your soft moans filled the room as a creamy substance coated the toy. The vibrations intensified causing you to tightly close your legs. You felt your pussy clench around the toy as you came closer to your high.
"open ur legs baby I wanna see u fucking that cunt. i would eat your pussy till you cry. ur moans make me so fucking horny."
Another notification popped up, requesting that you use the rose toy on your clit while you keep using the vibrator. It was 50 dollars, not much, but it was a simple request. Your chest heaved as you pressed the toy against your clit.
Your legs trembled as you climaxed. Fortunately, you were able to secure that extra hundred as you squirted.
"Okay, guys," you said as you slowly caught your breath. "That's it for today."
"aww. please can you just cum one more time."
"I really have to go right now, but I'll be back soon," you smiled. Even though your face was completely hidden you still gave your usual expressions. You waved as the viewers left your server one by one.
The last one there was someone new. This was the same guy...or girl that had been giving you all of those paid requests.
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Username: Darkomen302
They had a mysterious vibe about them and you wanted see if there was any inkling to who they were on their profile. Every now and then, a client caught your eye. So this was nothing new.
Their age was listed as "old enough to be here" which meant that they had been verified, but chose to keep that detail anonymous. The bio was even more useless. "I'm the demon you can't stop dreaming about."
No profile picture, no name, no age...this was unlike anything you ever experienced.
A fairy-like tone chimed from your laptop indicating a new message from your secret admirer.
"How much for a private call?"
"It depends on what you want to do," you replied.
"Okay, well I want to watch you play with yourself."
"That'll be $200. I can add it to your subscription if you want."
"What do you mean?"
"I can just update your account. You'll have to pay a little more though."
"That's okay, I'll take it."
You watched as the banner on his account changed from silver to gold, indicating that he had upgraded his account.
"That was fast," you thought to yourself.
"I wish I could call you right now, but I have somewhere to be," they messaged.
"That's alright. Maybe we can do it some other time."
"How about tonight?"
Their eagerness was slightly off-putting, but you've dealt with stranger clients.
“Okay, sounds good. How about somewhere around 9 o’clock my time?”
“What time is it for you now?”
“It’s 2:15pm right now.”
“Oh, well it looks like we’re in the same time zone. See ya then,” he sent a winking emoticon before going offline.
You closed your laptop and got dressed for your first day of class. When you researched your anatomy professor, not a single picture came up.
This wasn't entirely off-putting given that he was a new professor.
Living on campus definitely had it's perks. You were just a few steps away from all of your classes, which meant you didn't have to get up as early to be on time. But it also made you lazy for the same reasons.
You pulled your bag over your shoulder as you walked into the classroom.
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"Good evening, class. My name is Wonbin Park, but you will address me as, Professor Park," he announced as he wrote his name on the board. "Or Mr. Park, Dr. Park, Professor P. It's fine with me so long as it's formal."
"No fucking way," you whispered to yourself as you thought back to the first time you unintentionally met your professor...
"Oh my god, he's so fucking hot," you heard one girl whispering to her friend next to you.
"Have some fucking decorum," another student spat at them. "You can talk like that after class...no one wants to hear that stupid shit."
"We're not even talking that loud, relax," one of the girls spat back at him.
"So? I'm telling you right now that if the genders were reversed you'd be saying some shit like that's so disgusting, guys are dogs."
"Whatever," You watched as the girl rolled their eyes at his remark, but he wasn't wrong. They could at least wait till he's not around to talk about him.
"As much as I love to see some good peer interaction, I'd prefer if I could teach today's lesson without the distractions. It makes it kinda hard to focus, not only for me but for others in the class," he smiled as he looked over to your section of seats.
"As I was saying," he turned back to the board "This is just an introductory class to anatomy. A brief overview of what you'll see in some of your later courses like biology and microbiology."
You wrote a few copious notes about the content covered in class. Mainly the contact information, grade system, late work policy, and exam dates. Stuff you thought was too important to forget. You didn't really like asking questions so this should be helpful.
"Alright, everybody. Let's have a little social lesson. I have a cup of popsicle sticks up here by me. Grab one stick and this little prompt sheet. Then go find your partner to mingle with for the next 10 minutes and come back here so we can do one more round," he said walking behind his desk.
After everyone had pulled a stick there were still a few left over. So the professor offered to join the game for the last round before class ended.
"God I hope I get to be his partner," one of the girls who sat next to you whispered, clasping her hands together.
Ironically, you were the one who got paired up with him instead of her. You scanned over the list, thinking of a reply to each of them.
What's your name?
How old are you?
Where are you from/hometown?
What is something that makes you stand out?
What's your major?
Do you have any siblings/pets?
What's your favorite food/drink?
Do you have any hobbies/special talents?
"How about you ask the first question," he smiled.
"Umm...I don't really know which one to ask first," you chuckled shyly.
"Okay, then I'll start. What's your name?"
"_____ _____."
"Now, it's your turn to ask me a question. Since you already know my name, you'll have to pick something else."
"Hmm...how old are you?"
"22," he replied before you proceeded to fill out the rest of the sheet with his answers.
"Can I ask you a question that isn't on this paper?"
"Umm, sure...depending on what it is."
"I'm just curious to know how you became a college professor at such a young age.
"Well I started college pretty early and I took quite a few AP courses in high school which gave me a head start."
"What made you want to teach anatom--" you were cut off by the timer on his phone. The real questions you wanted to ask him would have to wait until later. This wasn't really the time or place for a conversation like that.
"Maybe we can talk more during my office hours," he smiled before signaling everyone to go back to their desks and gather their things.
"Before you guys leave, come by my desk to grab a copy of the syllabus. It's short and will serve as your guide throughout the semester. Please look at the syllabus before you contact me with any questions because you might already have your answer," he said as shuffling sounds filled the room of about 50 students.
You were the last one in line to grab your copy, you didn't really like pushing through people, so going last was a safe option. You still managed to catch a glimpse of the same two girls from earlier giving the professor blowjob eyes as they took the paper from his hands.
You couldn't deny the fact that he was obviously attractive, but these girls were a little over the top, to say the least, and you were certain their subtle actions would escalate in the following classes.
You took your paper and smiled softly as you met his eyes. There was something about the way he looked at you that made your heart skip a beat.
But you refused to be anything like those other girls. Plus you never really needed any extra credit activities. You were smart enough to pass on your own.
Lucky for you, this was the only class you had for today. Which meant that you could go straight home after this 2-hour lecture.
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As soon as you made it back to your room, you remembered that you had to do another live stream for your female viewers today. So you prepped yourself for some classic pillow fun.
"Hey, ladies. D'you miss me?" you asked as you came into frame. They often liked to watch you change, which was difficult because you had to keep your face out of view.
"I've been waiting for this all day. I wish I could help you undress."
You stretched your body to pull your shirt over your head, revealing your bra--that you planned to keep on, especially since you were wearing a brand new panty set. You always let the ladies be the first to see.
"The way I would throw you onto that bed and eat you out till you beg me to stop. I'd kill to be your roommate."
You moved the camera to face your bed as you straddled your fluffy white pillow. Just as you began moving your hips back and forth against the plush fabric, your comments were blowing up with requests for you to show your boobs.
"play with your nipples for me, baby."
Even though you didn't really want to take off your bra you did it anyway.
"Oh my god! Fuck yes! ur tits are so perfect."
*Bing* your laptop chimed as a text from your new friend popped up.
"Are we still on for tonight?"
You obviously couldn't respond in the middle of your stream so you just ignored it until a eye-catching comment caught your attention.
"Darkomen302 has joined your stream..."
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You continued the rest of your stream, as usual--getting off before thanking your viewers. You were curious as to what all this Darkomen user wanted to do.
"Yeah, we're still on. Sorry, I couldn't respond earlier...I was in the middle of a stream."
"Oh, I saw. You did pretty good by the way."
"Thanks lol. So did you want to just get started now?"
"Yeah sure, just let me finish up something real quick."
"Okay," you texted before closing your laptop.
It had been about 10 minutes before you came back online. You checked your student emails as you waited for a message from your secret admirer.
An email from Professor Park just came in about his office hours and other windows of availability...
Good evening, Miss _______.
It was really nice getting to know a little bit about you today. I'm glad we got paired up. Below are my preferred office hours, but you can contact me anytime using either my work email or personal phone number. (Mon-Thu 4-5pm) (Fri 4-5:30pm) (Sat-Sun 10-11am)
Make sure you stay on top of your assignments and take good care of yourself. I hope you have a good rest of your evening. Can't wait to see you again next week.
Sincerely, Professor Park.
Email Sent: Today 18:21pm
"Okay, well how about we go out for dinner tonight around 8--unless you're busy. In that case, we can just reschedule. Nothing too formal. I just have a few more questions," you responded.
"Sounds great! You can meet me in my office. I'll be working a little longer today."
Before you got a chance to respond to your professor a videocall notification from Darkomen302 popped up on your screen.
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"Sorry, if I seem a little pushy. I just couldn't wait until later. I kinda have something planned tonight," they typed.
"That's okay. I'll make sure you finish quickly," you smiled. "Just tell me what you want me to do." You were wearing only an oversized t-shirt and the same panties from earlier.
"Okay, well can you sit back a bit. Just so I can get a better view of your pussy."
You did just as they requested, sitting back to spread your legs in front of the camera before circling your clit.
"Did you want to turn your mic on? It might make telling me what to do a little quicker," you suggested. A part of you was eager to at least know this user's gender. Mainly to give you an idea of what you were dealing with.
"Yeah, sure. But I can't talk too loud."
"That's fine," you said as you continued to toy with your clit.
"Can you hear me good enough?" he asked as he switched his mic on.
"Mmm yeah. I can hear you perfectly," something about his voice seemed familiar, but you couldn't pinpoint it just yet. "Did you wanna turn your camera on too? That way I can watch you cum too."
"Umm..."
"Don't worry. You can keep it titled down just so I can see your dick," as often as you did this, having a little extra visual stimulation always made things better.
"Okay," you heard a bit of shuffling before his camera finally came on. You watched as he stroked himself through his pants.
"Oh my god, that looks so good," you hummed as you slid your fingers down to gather some of your slick.
He gripped his hard dick through his hands as you stroked his ego telling him how much seeing his clothed dick was getting you excited.
"D'you wanna see it?" he asked as his hands travelled to his belt.
"Yes, daddy. Please show me," you watched as he pulled out his hard veiny cock. You jammed your fingers into your pussy, coating them in your juices as you pumped them in and out.
"Ugh, fuck baby. Fuck that pussy good for daddy. I wanna see you cum for me," he groaned.
"Ngh, I want you to imagine fucking me like a good little slut," you said before pausing to spit on your slit. "Tell me all the nasty things you want to do to me."
"I wanna throw you over my desk and fuck you until you beg me to stop," he hummed as he began stroking his dick. "And after I make you cum all over my dick, I wanna put you on your knees and fill your mouth with my cream," he pumped faster.
"Mmm yes, fuck my throat and claim me," you reached for your dildo. This was getting more exciting than you thought.
"I wanna jerk off between your tits while you wear my glasses," you were quickly approaching your climax as you watched him beat off with those veiny hands.
"I'm so close," you moaned.
"Just hold out for a little longer. I'm almost ready," he moaned as he tugged at his dick some more. You listened to his eager whimpers as he came closer to finishing.
You slowed down a bit to give him some time as lewd sounds filled the room. For the first time, you wished he was here to really please you. To rip your pussy apart and fuck you just the way he wanted. Using you as his little fucktoy.
"Ngh~ Are you wearing a bra?"
"No."
"Show me your tits," he spat. "Right fucking now," his aggression was turning you on so much right now that you didn't even blink before pulling your shirt up to expose your tits.
"Ugh, fuck!" he swore. "You're so fucking hot. Ahh fuck! I'm gonna cum," he moaned as white cream shot out from his tip. You watched as it dripped down his fingers.
He continued stroking himself as he waited for you to finish.
"Fuck," you hummed. "We should do this more often."
"Yeah, you definitely help at relieving a lot of pinned up stress," he chuckled softly reaching across his desk to grab a tissue.
"And I didn't know you wore glasses."
"Only when I'm working."
"Sorry, but do you mind if I ask what kind of job you have?"
"No, that's fine. I just teach at a university."
"You seem kinda young. How old are you?"
"Well, I can't answer that question for obvious reasons, but I'm younger than 30. This might sound kinda weird but you actually remind me of one of my students."
"Oh, do I?"
"Yes, the first time I saw her was in the bookstore. I helped her grab something from the top shelf, and she dropped it on the ground when I handed it to her. Then we both reached down to pick it up, and I bumped into her from behind which made her moan a little. Next thing I know, we're fucking in a single-stall bathroom. I never saw her again after that...until I started teaching of course. A little bit before that was when I stumbled upon your streams."
Either this was the biggest coincidence ever or Darkomen302 was your professor.
"Oh wow, that sounds like something out of a movie," you chuckled.
"Yeah, I guess so. Well, I gotta go now. We should definitely do this again though. I had a lot of fun with you."
"Same here," you smiled before ending the call.
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You thought back to the first time you saw him today in class. A flashback of his face decorated by the golden sun rays popped into your head.
It was everything from the way he spoke to you to the way he scanned your body with his eyes that told you exactly what was on his mind. And you’d be lying if you said you didn’t feel the same way.
When you felt his hard cock press into your ass, all common sense left your mind as lust took over. You locked eyes with him before tilting your head in such a way to tell him that you wanted to go somewhere private.
Yes, this was stupid. Yes, this was reckless. But you wanted him more than anything in that moment.
You thought back to the way he lifted you onto his hard veiny dick and shoved every inch deeper into you. You could hear his breathing pick up as he fucked you harder and faster.
He gripped at your body as he pleasured himself. He helped you ride out your high by stimulating your clit before you dropped to your knees and swallowed every last drop of his seed.
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You fastened your chain as you finished getting dressed for your date with your professor. As instructed you headed straight to his office to meet up with him.
*Knock, knock, knock*
You knocked on his door before he called out, "Come in."
You walked in sheepishly, not entirely sure why you felt this way all of a sudden. To be fair, it felt like the universe kept pulling you together in different ways.
"I'm glad you came," he smiled.
"So when were you gonna tell me that you were a teacher," you asked as you stood in front of his desk.
"Heh, it was kinda hard to do that with your tongue down my throat," he replied. "I didn't even get your name until now," he smiled.
"Hmm...I guess you're right."
"Are there any other questions you'd like to ask me?" he asked as he stood up.
"Yes," you began. Though a million questions raced through your mind, only one managed to come out. "Do you like pasta?" you cringed at yourself, trying your best to hide your emotions, but it was of no use. He could see it all over you.
"Pasta?" he laughed. "Of course I do, but I had that yesterday and I'm kinda in the mood for a steak. I know a really nice restaurant we could go to."
"Umm, I--"
"Don't worry. They sell plenty of pasta," he chuckled, slinging his crossbody bag over his shoulder, before walking over to you.
You watched his movements in shock, your mouth slightly gaped open. "Well, come on. Let's go," he smiled, patting you on the shoulder before opening his office door. "I'll take you in my car."
You rubbed your thighs together as you sat next to him in the passenger seat. You couldn't take your eyes off of the bulge in his pants. You knew he wasn't fully hard at the moment, but you couldn't shake the thought of his dick in your mouth.
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When he pulled up to the venue you almost thought it was a hotel from the outside. You followed him in to see an extremely formal dining setting. For a second you felt a bit underdressed as you sat next to Wonbin in the red semi-circle booth, but that all disappeared when you felt Wonbin's hand grip your thigh.
Your eyes jumped up at him. Instead of responding, he just gave you a look with his eyes. Lustful and sirenic. This was a look you knew too well.
"Good evening. My name is Andre, and I'll be your waiter tonight. Would you guys like me to start you off with anything? Maybe some bread? Or water?"
"Umm, how about some chardonnay?" Wonbin replied, still stroking your thigh.
"Alright. And what can I get for the lady?"
"Mmm," you struggled to hold back a moan as he reached his fingers between your folds, pressing against your clit.
"She'll have the same," Wonbin smiled as the waiter wrote down your order.
"Okay, well I'm gonna go start working on those drinks now. The menus are right here whenever you're ready to order something else," Andre smiled before tucking his notepad into his apron.
Just as the waiter walked far enough away, Wonbin pressed into you again. "Agh," you bit your lip.
"You're already wet," he smirked. "You must've been thinking about some nasty things, huh?" he continued, massaging your clit.
"Here you are, sir," Andre returned with a frosted bottle of white wine sitting in a small tub of ice and two champagne glasses. "I'm not sure if you wanted the whole bottle or not," he started.
"Oh, yes. This is perfect. Thank you," Wonbin said as he placed the items on the table.
"Alrighty, well just let me know if you need anything else."
"Of course," Wonbin smiled as Andre walked away again. The waiter also left behind a small tray of fresh and frozen grapes. Wonbin picked one of them up and teased your clit with the icy fruit, coating it in your wetness.
He then popped the cold fruit into his mouth. He picked up another one which slipped out of his fingers and onto the floor. "Oops," he smirked, before sliding under the table.
"Mmph!" you yelped, covering your mouth as you felt his tongue lap at your pussy. "Mmm," you stifled your moans as he sucked and tongue fucked you.
You felt him pull back and blow cool air on your wet lips before climbing back into his seat with the grape in his hand. "I got it," he smiled.
You barely even heard what he said as you looked at him with desperate eyes. Just like earlier, your expression spoke louder than your words as you practically begged for what happened next.
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"Follow me," he whispered before standing up and heading to a section toward the back of the restaurant. You hesitantly followed him to a red curtain that concealed a hidden V.I.P. section.
There he brought you to a private room. "This'll be a little more comfortable than a bathroom," he smirked.
He locked the door behind you as you stood in the center of the room, just waiting to be destroyed.
"One more time wouldn't hurt," you though to yourself.
"Make as much noise as you want, baby. Nobody can hear you," Wonbin huffed as he pumped into you. The lewd sounds from your pussy, mixed with your breathless moans.
"AHH," you screamed as he clamped down on your tit, sucking it hard enough that you were sure to wake up with a mark.
After this, you were completely done with him. Right?
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," he spat as you moaned into his ear. He doubled down and started fucking you so hard and fast that you just went completely silent. Your mouth gaped open as the sounds of your skin slapping together took the place of your moans.
You did not want to become the girl who fucks her professor.
He turned you over, placing you on your hands and knees as he plowed into you from the back. You whined as he stimulated your clit while fucking you. You could feel his whole body engulfing you as he fucked you senseless.
"Yeah, baby. Just like that," he groaned, ripping his dick out to spit on your pussy before forcing in two of his fingers. You squirted a little as he stimulated your g-spot.
He pushed you down onto your side, lifting on leg over his shoulder as he fucked you some more.
"God, you're pussy is so fucking tight," he hummed.
You could get in so much trouble...and he could lose his job. Was it really worth it?
"Ngh," you hummed as he slowed down to give you long, hard, and deep strokes. He pulled out to spill his cum all over your stomach as you laid there with your pussy throbbing from the constant fucking.
He leaned down to kiss you on your cheek as he glided his dick between your folds.
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❀ Thank you all so much for reading! Make sure to check out other works on my masterlist!
❀ 𝚃𝚊𝚐𝚕𝚒𝚜𝚝: @chlorinecake @hoyeonheeseung @addictedtohobi @chaenqen @nikisvanillaccola @hynjinnn1 @melobin @laylasbunbunny @urfavberry @blooqz @adoresohee @billiondollarworth @youaremystarlight @wonbinisbabygurl @neotechclub @seesawh @cherihani @cartimitsuya @iceprincesgf @skywaslavender @mei-sunshine52 @sunnynearthecoast @ylukl5 @cake1box @bahraini-aphrodite @hwadejectedyoung @wonbinkisser
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cloveroctobers · 6 months ago
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COMEDY — SYDNEY ADAMU [Summer Writings]
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A/N: always imagined writing for Syd and I guess the time has finally arrived…only took three seasons but my girl deserves better and better is what she’s gonna get from me! This piece is set mostly in the final episode of season three as a heads up ❤️
S|N: there was a prompt list that I wanted to go off of to use for you the reader but now I can’t find it so I’m just going off the little I remember. Which is: you being a cyclist.
WARNINGS: language, self-doubt, neighbor trope, + mentions of sexual harassment.
⋆✴︎˚。⋆ ⋆✴︎˚。⋆ ⋆✴︎˚。⋆ ⋆✴︎˚。⋆ ⋆✴︎˚。⋆ ⋆✴︎˚。⋆ ⋆✴︎˚。⋆ ⋆✴︎˚。⋆
Having a new neighbor was interesting to say the least. You didn’t think she was fond of you after running into her twice, sneaking in the first time and nearly running your bike over her feet as she seemed to be in a rush herself. She looked as if she was the type of person that if she knew that she had to be somewhere by a certain time, she would be there much earlier than needed.
You on the other hand? Operated on your own time, not sticking to routines as much after your quest to turn into a pro cyclist fell through, and you were stuck working a shitty retail job down at the dollar general (shut out to your general studies degree, your mother did aways say you should have studied something more valuable although she didn’t go to college herself and felt like her money was wasted on you compared to your older sister who lived in South Africa as a zoologist)…where you basically came in when you wanted since the manager never knew how to schedule the four of you—yes—FOUR of you properly. You did what you needed to survive, just like anyone.
The second time you got her attention was when you buzzed her apartment, annoyingly on her day off, contemplating about the contract agreement in the emptiness of her living room.
“Uh…yeah?” She pressed.
“Oh good! You’re home. I thought I was going to have to bug Anita instead and she’s the last one I want to talk to.”
“Who’s Anita?” Sydney paused before asking although she had a feeling who, “And who am I speaking with?”
“She’s on our floor,” you shift from one leg to the other feeling the violent urge to pee, “with the big 80’s curly hair, she talks to herself and at times it is a little concerning and she’s a bit of a Karen. You’ll know once you see her when she’s constantly asking if you live here after seeing her a handful of times and as for me? I’m one of your best neighbors, Ms. Lady with the Colorful hair scarfs.”
“It’s Sydney.” She replies and you nod your head finding that name to be fitting, “Oh yeah, the other guy with the abnormally big octopus tattoo on his cheek told me about you. You always forget to bring your keys, right?”
Oscar.
You thought to yourself in irritation, “Oscar raw dog’s his crocs, so you shouldn’t take his word for anything.”
Sydney laughs, finding this apartment building much more entertaining (so far) than the one she left previously behind but never her dad. “Am I sensing a little tension there or…”
“That’s another story for another time! Can you please buzz me in or else I’m going to have to go right on this sidewalk and I really don’t need another public indecency charge.”
You were honest, Sydney could admit but she also didn’t want to be the one to let a stranger, if you were a stranger into the building if you weren’t really who you said you were you know?
“…how do I know you really live here and aren’t just stalking one of the other tenants?” Sydney quizzed, trying to remember just what you looked like in passing.
“Because stupid Oscar told you I like to forget my keys on purpose?” You remind while Sydney slowly realizes this, although you can’t see this revelation on her face you keep going, “I live at the end of the hall from you, I even used to date Oscar’s sister, but she cheated on me and tried to gaslight me and then took the dog—which honestly looked like a fucking dust bunny in the dark so I’m not really all that upset about it—
“What kind of dog?” She chortles, but the curiosity is also evident beneath it.
You started dancing to the beat of The Fresh Prince in your head, which somehow always worked when you were about to piss on yourself—apologies for being unladylike or unpersonlike but hey when you have to go you have to go, “some Asian breed that starts with a P…Pekingese? Yeah Pekingese!”
“…I don’t know what the hell that is?” Sydney pats at her scalp.
“It’s like a failed experiment of a pug and Pomeranian!” You inform, “It’s actually awful looking, and my know it all sister would scold me for being discriminatory to animals but whatever! Um, How else can I convince you person in the nice cold building while I’m out here at risk of getting a heat stroke?! The basement is horror level scary so if you have to go down there—make sure you have somebody with you or just don’t? There’s also a squeaky floorboard in the middle of our hallway, a weird stain on the wall that’s shaped like a top hat?” You ramble.
A buzzing noise sounds right after your last word and you deeply exhale, yanking the front door open to hold with your backside while you rolled your bike in. “Thanks neighbor! Hope to run into you soon.”
“Ah, dont mention it!” You hear Sydney call, “and maybe invest in a clip for your keys?”
“With the way my cobweb bank account is set up? Not likely, girl! Timmy the toilet is calling my name! Catch you later!”
Sydney shakes her head, letting go of the button to glance at her open laptop and sigh choosing to head into the kitchen instead for some frozen waffles for dinner.
Despite the fact that Sydney is hardly at her new apartment, she finds a paper bag with handles on her door knob when she gets in one night. Carefully she peeks in it while opening the door to her apartment, once inside she pulls out a new satin scarf. It’s a golden yellow with white polka dots on it with a note attached.
~Welcome to the building + thanks for letting me in the other day. I think you’ll like this? If not? I’d never know! —your neighbor ____at 84H.
Which started something between you two without really knowing each other. All you knew was each other’s names now, you had handwriting that honestly resembled calligraphy—something Sydney would have never guessed you were into but you also picked up that when you did see Sydney, she seemed to have a scarf covering her braids majority of the time. She wore them well so you thought why not? It wasn’t anything overly expensive but it was thought that counts?
~What’s your go to midnight snack? —your neighbor Syd @ 84D.
Was on a lime green post it on your door days later. It became your thing, leaving little notes every couple of days on each others door, in a way it became a silent message to let each other know that you both were still around even if you never had the chance to officially be face to face.
So you attempted to draw a horrible picture of what that may be and then drew an x right over it. You weren’t crafty in that way, writing a message beside the terrible picture saying: a struggle meal. A grilled cheese but jelly as the cheese and jalapeño chips. Are you a board game person or video gamer?
Days seemed to get hectic after that in the both of your lives that the post it game seemed to die down just a little. Summer hours seemed to increase since the two teenagers that you worked alongside of preferred to be outside rather than inside—you didn’t blame them. One of them ended up quitting, the other lied and said they sprained their ankle but their Instagram said they were really hanging out at the river, so it was down to you and your elderly coworker Janice, who was actually in chronic pain, and then your manager was “temporarily,” on leave after a customer complained of sexual harassment.
The look you and Janice shared said enough, you believed the customer.
So now you had a new manager from fucking North Dakota…you had no clue what was even out there and they had a whole different approach. They had a neighborly spirit that you wished the scarce people at your building had—except for Sydney of course. The new manager was actually out on the floor, greeting customers and asking if they needed any help! They even gave you and Janice a choice during your eight hour shift, you can alternate between the register and stocking or just pick your role for the shift. They also kept checking in making sure the both of you were well mentally (ha!) and if you needed to take a ten minute break before your actual lunch.
She was a dream but definitely wouldn’t last.
“Are you sure you don’t want a ride?” The North Dakotan asked, already in her pick up truck as you fumbled around with the chains to your bike.
Janice already beeped her horn twice in her Volkswagen Beetle, speeding out of the parking lot with Fleetwood Mac flowing from the windows. You snickered, hand waving in the air as you turned back to the chains, finally getting it unlocked.
“Thanks for the offer but one thing about me, I love this bike more than anything and as long as I can still ride it? I’ll choose this over any car or train any day.”
The manager smiles, “alright then, you have a good night. Get home safe, will you?”
“I’ll try my best.”
You’re limping towards your apartment, it’s late and the sky had this milky fog to hide the sense of dread—or was it grief that sat in your heart? You’re just at your door, body sore, spokes ruined from your bike but as bad as you felt you heard the huffing and sniffing from your left.
Picking up on the braids right away, you know it’s Sydney and it doesn’t appear that she’s having a good night although she’s dressed as if the night was supposed to be. Leaving your bike against your door, you pause, debating if you wanted to get involved or if she would even want to bothered with you while she’s having a moment. You use the act of your post it’s as the okay to be neighborly and check on your neighbor at the end of the hall.
The hallway feels like forever to get to Sydney but her round eyes widen in bewilderment as she feels you groaning to plop down next to her.
“Oh my god,” she gasps as she scans over your features with damp under eyes, “…w-what happened to you?”
Lolling your head to meet her gaze, you grin at her, ignoring the sting of the scrape on your chin and say, “I might have saw hell not too long ago.”
Sydney shifts, using the back of her hand to wipe at her nose, “I—don’t know how to respond to that.”
You explain, “Well apparently we all have to go somewhere—if you believe in that kind of thing. And I guess the person upstairs said let me show you as I turned into a speed bump.”
“You were hit by a car?!” Sydney yells, although her own head felt like someone was letting the air out of a balloon and her heart felt like it pulsating in a way that was probably too slow, with her veins feeling like the whipping of traffic on the freeway.
You knew that look, even had some pill bottles that actually became decor pieces on your bedside table that were supposed to help calm the track runner fuzzies inside to relax…but the concern was evident on her face yet it wasn’t really about you tonight, this was your first time officially meeting and the both of you looked like shit. Well maybe you more so but Sydney definitely felt like it.
“Worse,” you say searching your back pocket for the rolled up pack of gummies, “A electric scooter, that looked a whole lot like my teenage little shit of a co-worker who’s been out on injury.”
You held out the gummy bears to Sydney, lifting your gaze to meet dark brown hues once more. There’s laughter that bubbles in her chest as she envisions it, her large front teeth poked out behind her lips.
“I don’t mean to laugh at you—
“Eh, I do it all the time! Glad I could be of service to you.” You tip your imaginary hat, “And you know what he had to nerve to say to me after we both skidded across the street? That I scuffed up his kicks, when he was on the wrong side of the road!”
Sydney cupped her mouth, other hand holding onto a green gummy bear, “No! That’s so wrong.”
“If he ever decides to come back to work…I’ve got something for him.”
“A hospital bill?”
“Oh no! Hospitals give me the ick. All medical people do.”
Sydney tilts her head to the side at this, unsure what to fully make of that but somehow understood, however felt like she should still be slightly concerned that you didn’t get yourself checked out! considering how scrapped up and how your hair was basically mangled. Also who knew what you looked like underneath your summer attire…Sydney was no doctor but you seemed kinda careless!
“I’m afraid to ask.” Sydney bites off the head of the candy.
“Stick him on the register and sneak out for the day once the lines start to pick up. I hate to do it to our new manager since she seems cool but…it’s what he deserves.” You tighten your eyes wickedly.
Sydney slowly nods her head at this and snorts, “where do you work?”
“Dollar general,” you say with a shrug, “you?”
Sydney deeply sighs, “I’m a chef.”
“Oh-ho! Chef Sydney. I knew there was something special about you, neighbor.” You state.
Sydney shakes her head, “No, it’s not anything really.”
“Are you kidding? That’s admirable! Unless…that’s what has you out here when the party is clearly inside?” You connected the dots, hearing some laughter beyond her door, quickly analyzing her face and kicking yourself for not keeping your inside thoughts to yourself in that moment.
Sydney pulls her bottom lip into her mouth and closes her eyes.
“You know…you never did get back to me on you being a board game person or a video gamer.” Your attempt to ease her anxieties was a nice gesture, really.
Sydney took her time (which you were patient to), sucking air in between her teeth and digging her palms into her eye sockets, “uh…board game. My favorite is: Sorry!”
Your eyes turn into slits at that and Sydney, slowly removes her hands from her eyes to look at you. “Really?”
“What? What’s wrong with sorry?”
You start to raise your hands in surrender but stop your movements as your everything aches, “Nothing. I would have thought clue, connect four, maybe even scrabble?”
“Scrabble?” Sydney scoffs, “I rather eat a block of blue cheese without a glass of water.”
Scrunching up your lips at that you quiz, “are you lactose intolerant?”
“Only the weak minded are.”
“Oh?! That’s not very empathic of you.”
You both match each other’s stares but you crack a smile first before Sydney follows through with a burst of laughter.
“You’re judging me? when you’re the one who isn’t empathic to your stomach and makes a grilled jelly sandwich stuffed with jalapeño chips of all things?” Sydney holds her stomach as she laughs.
You’re laughing with her while arguing, “I never specified if I stuffed it or not. It could have been on the side, thank you.”
Which only makes her laugh harder, the both of your shoulders touching as the sound echoes throughout the hall. There’s tears streaming down her cheeks again for different reasons while your stomach clenches with humor.
Of course that is broken up by someone clearing their throat. Both of you turn to Oscar who’s standing there holding his groceries.
“What’s so funny tonight ladies?”
You stop laughing so you can reply, “that outfit you thrifted.”
Oscar scowls, “now I see why my sister left you.”
“Fuck off! You’re probably the main one that supports her OnlyFans career.”
Sydney gasped at that while Oscar sent you a middle finger, leaving you two alone as he travels down the opposite hall to his apartment.
Glaring at him, he casts another glance in your direction and you do the honors of placing your own middle finger right against the lips you kissed at him. He quickly looks away, nearly throwing himself into his apartment with a slam of his door.
Leaning into Sydney again, you both laugh until it’s hard to breathe and that feeling is both familiar on both ends. Once you catch your breaths, you lean away to hold out your unscraped hand for her to shake, “Hey, Chef Sydney. It was nice talking to you and meeting you.”
“Likewise.” She gives a small smile while shaking your hand before you groan and moan getting back to your feet.
And she stays outside a little longer, mostly to collect herself and watch you make it back to your front door and battered bike. You send a peace sign as a goodnight, limping into your apartment after softly clicking your door shut.
Sydney sits, clasping her hands together thinking over that small moment, not realizing how important it would later be as the days continued on.
“There you are,” The British voice catches her attention and she takes his hand as he helps her to her feet.
Luca halts her movements, checking in with Sydney as she tries to brush away what that was from her face, although it clearly wasn’t something she could ignore as the problem was already on the surface.
She begins to follow Luca back into the party, stopping in the door way as she peeks back at your door, already thinking about what to say to you next on a lime green post it, while letting some laughter shine in her eyes.
⋆✴︎˚。⋆ ⋆✴︎˚。⋆ ⋆✴︎˚。⋆ ⋆✴︎˚。⋆ ⋆✴︎˚。⋆ ⋆✴︎˚。⋆ ⋆✴︎˚。⋆ ⋆✴︎˚。⋆
Continue with my summer anthology writings & prompts here.
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kingsonne-zedecks · 5 months ago
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It's Here!
Cradle Animation Trailer
The trailer for the upcoming animation of the bestselling novel series Cradle, by Will Wight, produced by Jay Oliva at Lex + Otis Animation Studio has been released at last!
Cradle
Cradle is an amazing fantasy series by author Will Wight that reached its conclusion with the publishing of Book 12: Waybound, in 2023. Cradle is a western interpretation of the Xianxia genre, which can be described as "Magical Martial Arts."
As shown in the trailer, Cradle follows the journey of Wei Shi Lindon as he starts a journey of growth rather than remaining the weak Unsouled that his Clan has labeled him.
Fans of Naruto, Demon Slayer, Dragon Ball, Avatar the Last Airbender and more will all find elements from the stories they love in Cradle.
Lex + Otis Animation Studio
Cradle is being animated by Jay Oliva and his studio, Lex and Otis. If you don't recognize the name, you'll probably recognize some of his past work, particularly his work with DC Animations in general and Batman in specific.
His studio is equally impressive, and released a bit of a showcase of some of their more recent work that you can see here (in addition to the Cradle teaser, you did already watch that a couple of times right?)
The Cradle animation is a passion project for Jay, who loved the books so much that he reached out to Will to make sure that he had the chance to see them brought to the screen.
The Cast
The upcoming animation already has a fantastic cast announced, with more to come. The following have already been confirmed for the project.
Travis Baldree
Phil Lamarr
Steve Blum
Matt Mercer
Morla Gorrondona
Baraka May
Sumalee Montano
Maxine Phoenix
Matt Yang King
Where/When/How Can I Watch?
Will and Jay have really put the Tease in Teaser, as we'll have to live off of replaying the trailer and reading the books for the time being. But more is to come, and announcements will continue to be made as the project continues.
For those who have not been involved in the project yet, a brief explanation to get up to speed.
When Jay reached out to Will about the possibility of animating Cradle, Will decided to personally fund this trailer that they could then take to Netflix and Amazon and the likes to pitch the show. Then, together, they asked how much further they might be able to go, and so they reached out to the fans with a Kickstarter that ended up raising 1.25 million dollars.
Animation is expensive, especially when you choose to only work with studios that treat their employees well, so Will and Jay had to be smart with the money. The upcoming animation will be released to the fans as a thank you for our support in making this a reality, but it's real strength will be in supporting Will and Jay's original plan.
The 80-90 minute animatic that has been funded will be complete in mid to late 2025. With that, the teaser trailer, and the fans reactions in hand, Will and Jay will be able to approach platforms such as Netflix, Amazon, and Apple to pitch a full Cradle Animation.
Animatic?
Yes, Animatic. While the trailer is fully colored and animated, the final result of the kickstarted animation will not be. Here is a sample of the style of animation we will be getting next year
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This particular animatic is taken from the website of Tiger Animation, which is the South Korean studio that Lex + Otis partnered with for the Cradle Teaser and many of their other projects.
The animatic we get will be fully voice acted and scored, and the only step remaining to turn it into full animation is the funding required to send it off to Tiger Animation. Tiger Animation has an amazing portfolio as well, including Avatar the Last Airbender, Castlevania, and a large number of both Marvel and DC Animations.
Animation Structure
The 80-90 minute animatic will be released as a standalone product and will cover the contents of the first two books of the Cradle Series, Unsouled and Soulsmith regardless of any potential contracts with distribution platforms like Netflix or Amazon.
If/When a platform picks up Cradle and decides to fund the full animation, the show will follow a fairly standard 22 minute episode format. As such the animatic will also serve as the first four episodes of season 1 of the show.
This was a creative decision made by Will and Jay as part of the adaptation process. A number of the fan-favorite characters are introduced in books two and three, and its fairly unanimous that any fan that wasn't hooked immediately, was hooked by the third book, Blackflame.
That is to say, that, while the first two books will only receive two episodes each, this will not be the pace the rest of the show follows. The total number of episodes per season is dependent on funding, but the goal is currently to take 4 season to tell the story of Cradle.
So What Now?
Well. Now we wait. But in the meantime, share the information about Cradle, watch the trailer, show it to your friends and family, read the books if you haven't already, check out the wonderful audiobooks narrated by Travis Baldree if you prefer listening, join us on reddit and discord to talk about things.
In addition to just exposing more people to a wonderful story, each bit of interaction with Cradle is another piece of evidence to show the streaming platforms and prove that a Cradle animation is worth the investment.
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fizzigigsimmer · 8 days ago
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Didn't want to hijack @destroya2005 's post, but can never pass up an opportunity to call out the Duffers messiness.
Steve being forced to work at Scoops to "see what working in the real world is like" makes absolutely no sense, if he worked as a lifeguard for three years before then.
1. He was likely paid more as a lifeguard. Going off my own experience in 90s Illinois and Google AI lol, there was typically a small pay bump above minimum wage for lifeguards cause it requires a certification. Nothing huge but that dollar makes a difference. And goggle search seems to support it was the same in the 80s (on national average, there were always exceptions depending on location).
2. Even without that small pay increase, Steve already had experience getting and keeping a real American job lol, and there's no reason not to stick with that real job. Unless we're introducing the idea that Steve's dad is an elitist ass who doesn't think lifeguarding is a real job. But the writers never address this, or why slinging ice cream would be more "real" to Mr. Harrington so we're just left with the confusing conflict of Steve having already had real world work experience when his dad decided to force him to get some lol.
3. If it was a case of needing something that would last longer than the summer, then we need to address the question of why he couldn't just express interest about being hired on for winter work through the park district (or whatever public organization is running the place) he's worked for for three summers? I worked at my community pool as a teen, and even if the swimming facility was closed in the winter, the other activities attached to the facility and the connected park were still open. If not for school, it would have been easy for me to stay on and honestly work anywhere within the park district. Frankly they'd have been thrilled to pay me less than hiring older staff lol.
4. If it was their intent to imply that the Hawkins community pool is either too small or is detached from any larger community asset management (like a park district), they needed to make that explicit in the writing and filming. Which it most certainly isn't. LOL . They scripted this place to have a decently sized facility with multiple interior rooms, large enough to feasibly contain extras like an indoor sauna and a workout gym for their "sauna test", and showed multiple shots revealing the public park next door as well. The filming location is literally everything typical of a community pool: there is also a park next door with a playground, a basketball court, and a dog park, plus picnic and BBQ areas, and they are all managed together through the district. It doesn't take more than a quick google search for community pools in Indiana to confirm that even in tiny towns, this trends toward the norm. Even if the facilites aren't as large as this pool in metro atlanta, they at least tend to have a park with a playground for YEAR ROUND USE.
So in summary we have Steve, a recently graduated 18 year-old who is charismatic, easy on the eyes, a big name in town, with at least 3 summers of prior work experience, suddenly needing a permanent part time job, and he ends up in a doofy sailor hat at a place he hates because he wasn't qualified to work anywhere else? *squints* *tilts head* HOW? The math aint mathing.
All of this to say, that as a writer, the minute they introduced the idea of Steve working at the community pool for three years, their whole reason for having Steve work at scoops the season before disolved like sugar, and it's just so hilariously avoidable, and then fixable after that, and yet they do neither. They really just needed to provide the audience with further explanation for why he took that job besides : the plot we decided to go with demanded it.
Unless the reasoning is just that Steve's dad is a giant dick who goes out of his way to make his kids life hard as some kinda punishment for disappointing him. Which valid, and fandom writers are more than happy to take that and run with it lol. But a show really demands tighter writing. If that was what they were trying to say about Steve's dad, a throw away line about his dad wanting him to experience real work doesn't cut it.
Which yes, fandom runs away with that general assumption, but in reality it's glaringly obvious the Duffers just plain forgot that daddy wanting to teach his spoiled rich son a lesson about real work was supposed to be Steve's reason for working in the mall the prior season. And here we are.
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fullofgutsndopamine · 7 months ago
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What’re You After (Some Sort Of Disaster)
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previous more
or: you and hasan are rivals for trivia night. Until one day, you come up with a plan.
TW/ cursing, drinking, dick jokes.
yes my trivia team did lose to this question last week and yes, i’m still mad about it
Sarah slams her elephant down with such force that you worry the cheap dollar tree glass elephant will break and send you all on another trip to muitlple stores for a new good luck charm.
it wouldn’t be the first time.
You groan and crumble up the paper and throw it in the middle of the table into a half eaten plate of french fries.
Annie speaks first, “what kind of fucking nerds don’t know stranger things is a tv show set in the 80’s but does know the year our town was founded in.”
“they have to be cheating,” sarah says, “there’s just no way.”
“you all are bitching but you aren’t the asshole who has to go get a drink with our literal enemies.” you groan, rubbing your temple, a headache on the horizon.
Annie, “i’ll buy your drink, at least. and if he’s a gentleman, he’ll buy you another one. Make it a little less painful. think of it as a mission for us, y’know? to get more intel.”
“you can take my elephant for good luck!” Sarah smiles and takes your hand, presses it gently into the middle of your palm like it’s some family heirloom passed on and on.
“Good luck won’t help if he’s a serial killer.” you grumble, turning in your seat to look at his table again, a final glare, “or a dick.”
“which one is the worst, though?” Annie indulges as she digs through her purse.
you’re half listening.
hasan is the odd one out of the group, you see this now.
while the rest of the group is hugging, shoulders touching, heads pulled in close, he stands just outside the circle.
you wouldn’t be able to see it if you weren’t looking directly for it, but something about it makes you think of him in middle school, a mop of messy, curly hair on top of his head, large crooked glasses on the brim of his nose-telling these random facts he has to other class mates so excitedly through broken teeth and then rolling their eyes or ignoring him is so vivid in your head you have to turn away before you start feeling bad for him or something.
“what if,” you finally hear Sarah’s voice again, “you end up having an amazing first date and this is the story we end up telling your children.”
she giggles and Annie laughs so hard people crane their neck to look.
“he wishes,” you snort, “he’s going to be pretentious, i can already tell.”
“He’s on his way,” Sarah points her chin up at him, “remember: her all the information out of him you can-“
“and call us as soon as it’s over-“ Annie adds, and Sarah interrupts her again, a never ending thing, “and turn your location on so we know where to look for your body at!”
you groan, taking your phone out to do so, just as hasan appears at your side.
“Well, it was a good effort today, guys.” he smiles as he rests his hands on the table, “i had no idea that song was from a theme song-“
“of course you didn’t.” Annie huffs under her breath, an eye roll.
“sorry, what was that?” he says it with such a genuine smile and lean in you half believe him until you see the smirk on his lips.
“N-nothing. We best be going,” Annie stands, pulls Sarah up, “You have drinks to get anyways. we lost, and all. you two have fun and be safe!” and she’s pulling her out so quick Sarah barely has time to grab her purse as she’s yelling over her shoulder: “don’t do anything we wouldn’t do!”
you groan and he turns just in time to see your red face.
“one drink,” he smiles, “c’mon. that’s it, i won’t make it too painful. i promise.” and he holds out his pinky in the air, actually waits for you to hook yours around his and shake.
“lead the way.” he smiles and acts like he doesn’t see your red face as you lead out of the room and weave in and out of people.
for a second, you think you lost him. he’s so fucking tall it’s hard to lose him, and he weaves in and out to the bar with you with such practiced ease, his hand hovers over the small of your back as you get to the bar, order your drink, add a casual: “and whatever he wants.”
he takes it well, leans in with an eye roll to the bartender and orders, slides him his debit card so quickly it’s hard to see for a second as he slides into the seat next to you.
“you bastard,” you gasp, “i’m suppose to buy your drink.”
he laughs, “it feels wrong making you buy my drink after losing too. like adding salt to a wound or something.”
you sigh, and he cuts you off before you can speak again, a gentle elbow to your arm, “you all did much better this game. it was close.”
“you’re just saying that.” you huff.
“so what if i am?” he teases back, “it doesn’t matter. besides, only nerds know what year the town was founded in. you all probably had much better to do than look into the towns history.”
something about that borders on sad, leaves a bad taste in your mouth like you want him to elaborate, you wonder how many nights he spent alone, books his only companion, finding solace or some sense of community into looking at the towns history-
“if you tell me you’re wearing an ear piece or you have an inside guy, i promise i won’t tell my friends.”
it’s half a joke, and you say it with a smile in hopes he knows and it earns a laugh out of him, one you haven’t heard before, loud and happy and free as he throws his head back and claps.
when he sits up straight he leans in closer to you, and you can smell his cologne, or maybe his aftershave, but you refuse to let yourself think too much on it, and he moves his curly hair behind both of his ears theatrically, “no ear pierce, i’m afraid. just a kid who spent a lot of time in libraries.”
“not the sob story,” you half tease with a groan as a beer is placed in your hands, “i’m not nearly drunk enough. if you start crying, i’ll start crying. and fair warning, i’m a crying drunk.”
he snorts as he lifts the lip of the beer bottle to his lips, lets it rest momentarily, “noted. i’ll cut you off far before then, i promise.”
you snort back, hold your bottle in the air: “to your win.”
a smirk finds it’s way on his lips, “to new friendship,” and before you can say anything back he clinks his glass with yours gently and downs it.
“c’mon,” you finally say after the burn of the alcohol settles in your chest, “i know a quieter place.”
“lead the way.” he smiles back, offers his hand and you roll your eyes back at him but your hand finds it’s way on top of his, gently cupping around his and you pull him through the crowd.
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tiazennie · 6 months ago
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₊˚⊹♡ ₊˚⊹♡
All my fault Genre: fluff and a lot bit of angst hahaha Chenle X Reader Warnings: swearing and superpowers which is crazy. corny way of writing, and lastly the amount of times the word guilty and the phrase "all my/your fault" was used lmao. (lmk if there's more!) Background: You've always treasured stargazing. perhaps as a little child, you were amazed by how the stars shone brightly on you despite their millions or perhaps billions of miles away, and it was your only source of comfort when something upsetting occurred. It all began, you and your parents discovering that you generate electricity each time your heartbeat rises above 80 beats per minute. However, today is the day that you had the worst day of your life! Someone chooses to sit in your usual park place, making things worse. ⋆౨ৎ˚⟡˖ ࣪
It was nothing unusual to your parents to see you frowning as you made your way to the park. Most of the answers were the same, and they knew that inquiring would only make things worse. Since it was the weekend and they thought maybe you might go together to the beach to let it out and spend some time as a family, they decided to ask tomorrow instead of letting it go today. Even worsening your already unpleasant attitude was the realization that someone else was occupying your preferred location within the park. You wanted to just run away and electrocute him then and then. However, you remained composed and just requested him to go.  "Um, hi! you're sitting on my favorite spot." The guy looked up at you and gave you an unimpressed look. "Hello, I'm sorry but this has no writing that says 'Please don't sit here' so anyone can sit on it whenever." He replied to which you acknowledged. Most people just roll their eyes and leave, but he was persistent on staying. "This is fine, I like a good challenge." You thought before replying. "Still, you're sitting where I sit everyday." You say emphasizing the letter/word "I" as he poked his tongue out in his inner cheek out of annoyance. "Fine, I'll leave in one condition." You roll your eyes mentally, "every time." You thought. "What is it? Give you five dollars or pick up your things for you--" "Give me your number." He says cutting you off, immediately showing a shit eating grin after seeing your flustered reaction. "My- my number? Please like I'd believe that." You reply ready to leave after you hear a beep from your heart monitor. You had to run and fast! "Wait-" He almost said before hissing after feeling an electric shock throughout his whole body. He felt numb and paralyzed. You looked back and saw him having trouble breathing and shaking uncontrollably. You wanted to shake him out of his situation, but hearing your heart monitor still beeping you thought it would make it worse so you decided to call 911. "H-hi I'm seeing a guy getting electric shocked, please come and hurry!" You stutter before ending the call and crouched beside him immediately wearing your emergency gloves so if things like these, happen you could shake them out of their consciousness, to lessen the effects of the electricity coursing through their veins and knock some senses into them (After you make them lose theirs). "Please stay with me, fuck this all my fault." Right after saying that he stops shaking and carefully stands up. Scrunching his eyebrows in an attempt to remember the things that just happened and why his head suddenly started hurting. "W-what happened?" He asks snapping you out of your thoughts. "I-I you were--" You were cut off by the ringing of the ambulance and the people inside it making tons of noises. Someone pushed you out of their way to check his vitals. "Put him inside now!" Someone shouted, and that someone was your Dad. "What did you do now?" He asks as tears started to build up in your eyes blurring your vision. "I'm sorry, This- this all my fault Dad, I didn't m-mean to harm him." You whispered barely audible for your Dad to hear. But he was sure, you were blaming yourself again. "Just get inside the ambulance." You obey what he said careful not to touch anyone to not make the situation worse.
After that was a blur. You could barely remember anything because you constantly spaced out. Already knowing what's about to come to you in your house. You were cut off from your thoughts, when a nurse called you and said the "patient" wanted to see you. Nervous, you stand up, your legs wobbly from the happenings and the thought that he might want answers to what just happened. You enter his room quietly, not wanting to disturb him from looking outside his window. His eyes were twinkling, just like the stars that were sprinkled all across the sky. "Hi, again." You speak up audible enough to make him look at you in surprise before smiling. His smile somehow made you feel comfort and genuineness. You couldn't even explain what was happening to yourself after seeing his pretty smile. "Hi, so Y/n I need answers on what just happened why I am here lying on a hospital bed." You knew it. he could see the hesitation in your eyes and he was about to say take your time when you replied. "You see um, what's your name?"" You ask out of curiosity as he chuckles, he somehow found you cute in a awkward way. He liked how straightforward you are with your actions and words. "The name's Chenle." He says trying to ask for a handshake as you just looked at it, confused on what to do. Your parents never taught you those things, in fear that you might hurt someone unkowinglly. Although, the name did sound familiar to you. "Here goes nothing." You thought inhaling as much air as you needed to calm down. Breathing helped you in calming down. Especially, when the cause of your heartrate to go up was near your personal space, and was about to pop the little bubble you had always imagined as a kid so people won't come near you. "It's your choice if your gonna believe me or not." You said and explained everything from when you were a child finding out you had that condition and to now, why he was here in the hospital.
"So you're saying, I made you flustered and it caused your heartrate to go up causing you to produce electricity because your heartrate went up to 80 percent. So now, I'm here at the hospital because of electric shock?" You nodded embarrassed and ashamed, you just wanted an earthquake to spilt the floor you were standing on and just swallow you whole, in other words. You wanted to die. He looks at you with a 'are you serious face' before saying you needed to prove it to him, or he'll press legal charges on you (which was a joke, but you totally believed him). "How? Oh! I know." You started running, wishing your heartrate would go up because your shoes squeaking the floor sounded so awkward. After a few seconds your heart monitor finally beeping and you planned on touching your phone to charge it, when instead a mosquito landed on your nose and it kills it. Chenle looks at the mosquito not even a hot second and bursts out laughing, as you just looked at the poor insect full of guilt and now embarrassment after hearing his laughter. Heck, you didn't even know you could do that. "Do you believe me now?" You ask still out of breath. Feeling as if you had just ran on a marathon. He nods trying to keep his compoture and not remember what just happened to the mosquito.
"It deserved it, after almost ruing your porcelaine skin." He thought nodding to himself. "I was actually hoping you could forgive me after what I said in the park, and now." You speak up facing the floor. This was the time where you appreciate how pretty the floor is right now. Scared on what he was about to say. "It wasn't your fault besides, I've always wanted to be electrocuted." He admits in an attempt to lighten up your mood. It wasn't working, not even one bit, and he knew it. When he saw one tear fall down on to the floor. God, your heart felt like it was about to burst because of guiltyness. He was trying so hard to make you feel good that it felt bad. You knew it was your fault, why wasn't he believing it? Why was he persistent on making you feel okay, when you shouldn't be? This was all your fault, all your fault he's here and all your fault that your dad might lose his job again. "Why are you trying so hard on making me feel okay, Chenle?" You say seriousness lacing your voice, you hear him sigh as he attempts (horribly) to sit up from his bed. "Cause it really wasn't your fault Y/n. Your dad came in a few minutes ago, and explained everything to me. He told me that you would oftenly blame yourself on situations like these, and i get where your coming from. I do also, blame myself when something happens in my familly. But, I never really thought how much it affected the people around me, and after seeing you I felt pittyful of myself. I felt so shitty, that the reason why I never gotten close with my parents was because I kept on pushing them away because I was always blaming myself."
Chenle says, making you realize that maybe he was really right. Your parents were trying so hard on being the perfect parents for you, but you couldn't appreciate that because of your ongoing 'all my fault' mindset. You sigh and hug him, which caughts him off gaurd but he hugs you back even carresing your back. "Thank you." You say quietly as he smiles in the crook of your neck. "I'll wait for you Y/n, until you're ready. But don't take too long, I am not a very patient person." He says making you laugh, and he was sure this wouldn't be the last time he'll make you laugh. Fin (hellooo, I appreciate you sm for actually reading until the end to this piece of trash that I wrote also this was kind of short since I wrote this out of the blue at around 1 in the morning. I couldn't sleep because of stress and everything that's going on in my life (jk I have sleep paralysis). Anyways, hopefully you liked this (although it was shitty) and enjoyed reading it! Please stay hydrated and hopefully you get a good day/night. love yaa!) -Ria-
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kairithemang0 · 4 months ago
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Disney is such an interesting company, the way it's evolved over time to what it is now. Apart of me is disappointed, another part of me feels as though the current drought of good Disney content was inevitable.
I think about right after Walt died, how the company struggled then. However, even then I think their movies were still good, Robin Hood, the Aristocats, Great Mouse Detective, they're still good movies.
That's the era my parents grew up in, sure looking back on it now you can see the flaws in some of the movies, how the animation wasn't as polished as it was before Walt's passing, but then I compare it to the movies now.
The 2020s haven't been a good decade for Disney, Raya, Strange World, Wish, they all flopped. Encanto only made waves on Disney+, which is a good thing but that's one movie out of 5 that have come out of Disney in the past 4 years
Then you have to look at the remakes, how much money they're getting from those. However, their recent ones are flopping. The public knows what they're doing now, just remaking their old movies isn't going to keep bringing in money. The Lion King, Aladdin, they made over 1 billion dollars, The Little Mermaid? Under 600 million. That's still a lot of money, but Disney is also putting in so much money into these movies just for them to fail. People are sick of the remakes, they're sick of the sequels, but their original products aren't causing any excitement.
I don't know if Disney is still dealing with lost time and profits from Covid, but it's sad to see other studios doing so well only for Disney, who reigned supreme last decade with Moana and Frozen and Wreck it Ralph, to fall behind again
Disney seems to do this a lot, actually. The 80s were bad, the 2000s weren't great, the 2020s are bad again. Maybe the 30s will bring us something good, if Disney gets their act together and figures out what people want again.
People ask for 2d, for that old disney feel to come back. An obviously evil villain. Villains don't need a tragic backstory, they don't need anything, but this twisted foulness, a catchy song, and to be memorably evil.
Scar, Ursula, Lady Tremaine. You look at them and you go "oh yeah, they're evil". Which not to say Disney can't do twist villains, but it fails more often than it succeeds. Turbo was a great twist villain, his motivation was there and he was fun. But Hans? And Yokai? It felt random, out of place, like they were lacking the motivation to be good villains.
Scar wants power, so does Ursula, and Tremaine more of enjoys torturing her adopted daughter. These three are so iconic because they're so unashamedly evil and cruel, they're these powerful figures that spark fear into people who get what they deserve in the end.
But Magnifico? He's so painfully boring, he's so underdeveloped. It's sad, disheartening the way he could've been so interesting and yet fell flat in such a pitiful way.
I sometimes think about once upon a studio, this gorgeous mix of all pieces of disney animated history, every movie in there. No pixar or marvel or star wars, just everyone who started this, who made disney disney. It's such a lovely short, and it just radiates this pure disney energy, vibrant and colorful and magical. That's what disney is missing now, maybe that's me growing up, maybe it's just not for me anymore.
but honestly, i don't think this generation is going to have that nostalgia for disney the way me or my parents did, it's lost that because it feels so manufactured, this charm that only disney could do gone.
a weird way to say this is the new intro that plays at the start of their movies, it just feels so manufactured, like all it wanted to do was slide references into it to remind you of better movies. that 2000s/2010s CGI intro? that's my shit. the basic 2d intro? it's a classic, it's memorable, but this new one just doesn't have that affect
this is one man's opinion on something he once loved, but i'd love to hear other thoughts on what disney has become
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rubykgrant · 2 months ago
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Hi! I'm not sure if somebody asked you this before, but what types of music do you think the Reds are into? Maybe you have some examples of artists you think they like?
Sarge definitely likes a lot of country-western and classic rock/folk rock, but surprisingly loves more soulful music as well, jazz and blues (he wishes it wasn't called that, but oh well), and isn't afraid to give any musical genre a listen, which leads him to liking many songs that are funk/hip-hop/rap (he's also secretly a huge fan of Stevie Nicks and Dolly Parton). Some of his favorite songs are "Fortunate Son" by Creedence Clearwater Revival, "War" by Edwin Starr, "Ring of Fire" by Johnny Cash, "I Won't Back Down" by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, "Twilight Zone" by Golden Earring, "Lean on Me" by Bill Withers, "99 Red Balloons" by Nena, "September" by Earth Wind and Fire, "Country Roads" by John Denver, "The Gambler" by Kenny Rogers, "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" by the Charlie Daniels Band, and "Hit 'em High" by B-Real/Coolio/Method Man/LL Cool J/Busta Rhymes
Simmons tries to play-up being a fan of classical music to seem impressive... and he DOES like it, but he's also a big dork who loves songs that are specifically made for movies (Ghostbusters, everything Will Smith did for his films, etc), and collects soundtracks for whatever he likes (he really digs musical scores, like Jurassic Park and such). He also really likes 80s bops and techno/synth music, but doesn't want to admit he's into "nerd music". He also likes oldies and "soda fountain hits" from the 50s and 60s. Some of his favorite songs are "Take on Me" by A-ha, "Mad World" by Tears for Fears, "Sh-Boom" by the Chords, "Get in Line" by the Bare Naked Ladies, "The Impression That I Get" by the Mighty Bosstones, "Rocket Man" by Elton John, "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" by the Proclaimers, "Yoda" by Weird Al Yankovic, "It's the End of the World as We Know It" by REM, "Carry On" by Kansas, "Weird Science" by Oingo Boingo, "Johnny B Goode" by Chuck Berry
Grif will just say he likes "whatever", because he doesn't focus too much on one genre (and he doesn't want to admit he likes a lot of "oldie" rock, some pop and hippie music), and plays up liking chill zone-out songs more. He does enjoy a few weird/experimental/alt music (grunge and what-not). Some of his favorite songs are "We're Not Gonna Take It" by Twisted Sister, "Baba O'Riley" by the Who, "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane, "Sweet Dreams" by Eurythmics, "Stay Home" by Self, "I Get Around" by the Beach Boys, "I Wanna Be Sedated" by the Ramones, "If I Had a Million Dollars" by the Bare Naked Ladies, "Here I go Again" by Whitesnake, "Rock and Roll All Nite" by Kiss, "Headstrong" by Trapt, "But Anyway" by Blues Traveler
Donut does indeed love a lot of pop songs/dance music, but randomly likes more edgy stuff, but usually not too dark (some hip-hop in there, some alt rock, punk, and glam metal). Basically anything really catchy, which he WILL play over and over again when it is his turn to control the radio. Like Grif and Simmons, stuff he enjoys were in the soundtracks for movies he watched, and he has an appreciation for disco. Some of his favorite songs are "Cele-B-R-A-T-E" by Russell Velázquez, "Shake Your Groove Thing" by Peaches and Herb, "Car Wash" by Rose Royce, "Barbie Girl" by Aqua, "Dancing in the Street" by Myra, "Cherry Bomb" by the Runaways, "Walking on Sunshine" by Katrina and the Waves, "Wanna Be" by the Spice Girls, "Foot Loose" by Kenny Loggins, "Changes" by David Bowie, and "Ballroom Blitz" by the Sweet, "Baby One More Time" by Bowling For Soup
Lopez mostly enjoys more serious music, soulful love songs, and the occasional power-ballad... but he is not immune to a catchy tune with fun lyrics, including pop and salsa, and electronic music (though, he'll probably lie and insist somebody ELSE put it on the radio, and he just hasn't bothered to change it). Some of his favorite songs are "I'd Do Anything for Love" by Meat Loaf, "You Sang to Me" by Marc Anthony, "Bailamos" by Enrique Iglesias, "On Melancholy Hill" by Gorillaz, "Harder Better Faster Stronger" by Daft Punk, "Should I Stay or Should I Go" by the Clash, "Radioactive" by Imagine Dragons, "Satellite" by Smash Mouth, "No Children" by the Mountain Goats, "The Final Countdown" by Europe, "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor, and "I Love You Too Much" by Diego Luna
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smww4ever · 1 month ago
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Lois & Clark
Most people when they hear you are a SuperWonder fan, think you know nothing of Lois Lane. Assume you were born yesterday and just popped out of nowhere with this radical notion of SuperWonder.
No. I grew up on Clois. That’s all that was on the movie and tv screens. The love interest didn't really become a 'thing" until the show came out in the 90s to coincide with the comic where they get married. At least to me, it was always Superman’s girlfriend in the comics, playing around with different love interests. They finally decided to tie him down permanently with Lois. I’ll talk more about that in a little bit. But I want to first write about my thoughts and reactions to the finale of the Superman & Lois show.
I don't subscribe to Max. Can't afford it. I'm barely making ends meet. And it's not the type of show I'm interested in watching. I'm not a Clois fan anymore (or maybe I never really was). But what really shocked me, well maybe I shouldn't say shocked but found very interesting was what the writers of the show did with these characters.
I found out that both Superman and Lois die in the finale. She died of cancer. It came back. And Superman died of a heart attack. Yes you read that right. How? Well he received a heart transplant from Sam Lane. Yes you read that right too. His heart was ripped out of his chest by Doomsday and got squashed by Lex's boot.
Take a moment.
Ok we are back.
Like wtaf?
Oh and something about a serum that got the human heart of Sam Lane to work and go into Superman’s body according to his holo mom in the fortress. Don’t know any details as to how they did it, or who performed the surgery etc.
So, Kryptonians are not as advanced as we thought? Now I know why they sent him to Earth.
It's Dollar Store Earth.
But wait. Don't we have stem cells, and research into growing human organs?
If Krypton was an advanced civilization that achieved interplanetary and inter-galaxy space travel, wouldn't they have already solved that?
I mean his dad was a scientist? Maybe he wasn't that kind of scientist, huh?
Ok I had to stop and just re-read what I wrote. Are we in some alternate reality?
Yes we are. If this is the type of stuff they are writing into Superman. And people —I have no idea of the percentage that watched— think this is the best ever Superman, we are so f****d. They lapped this up. Guess they'll lap up Gunn's stuff too. You know dogs eat their vomit. Ok I know kinda gross.
He died twice. In this show he died twice. And neither him nor Lois lived on. He didn't cure her cancer. And because he only had a human heart lived less than if he had his own heart or a Kryptonian. And the writers wanted to give him his brother's heart. But most fans still think he would have only lived a few more decades. They are still thinking maximum life span like 80-90. Which is the life span of a human. Yet the lore is he can live centuries. Ok talk about a rip-off.
And they are crying, weeping, moved over this?
Superhero soap opera crud.
Meh.
Superman, The Movie
Ok I'll start here. I'll be honest about my impressions.
I saw the movie in the theater when it came out in 1978. It was an exciting time. As a kid you could imagine. What was cool was there was a movie theater down the street from where I lived. A neighborhood movie theater. It has long since been demolished. But I remember that opening shot to Superman and the music. The thrill, the magic. It took you there. A man could fly. Superman!
As a kid, when the damsel in distress got introduced, my impression was like "her"? Eew. Like that is so weird. Of course, mind you I'm a kid. All that romantic, gushy, kissy stuff was weird and gross, but it just didn't make sense to me.
Even as kid, I knew something was off.
Superman 2, something is really off. He did what? Well thankfully General Zod and his gang made the movie cool, but Clark was just dumb. We got to see Jor-El again. And mom too.
Superman 3, it started to fizzle. Richard Pryor? Well he was cool at the time. And of course Lana. I liked Lana better than Lois.
Superman 4, yes this run is over. Nobody cared.
Next!
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The 90s roll in.
We get the Lois & Clark show. Renewed excitement. I didn't catch all of it. It was one episode per week. You didn't have streaming services back then. You had to wait the next week for next episode.
So I missed a lot of that show. I tuned out when Lois got her superpowers. It wasn't until years later, when Netflix came out and they had the entire series available. This was long after the death of Blockbuster. And when Netflix was actually good. The only service of it's kind. I had to order the DVDs to watch the entirety. So I decided to watch all of it from beginning to end.
My Impressions
Lois was a b**** in much of the show, especially the beginning. She was enamored with Superman, a completely different woman. Around Clark, it was opposite. The fact that Clark was infatuated with her in the face of how she treated him, says a lot about him.
It wasn't until the end of the series that Lois mellowed out after the reveal that Clark is Superman. Boy did it take a long time. I remember I was yelling at the tv: "You idiot!' Then they superfluously said something about how she will be the mother of descendants and an icon or something. I was like ok. Then a baby was delivered to their door with a Kryptonian blanket. That was it. Forgot who's it was. I think it was supposed to be General Zod's kid. I don't remember.
You know for a tv show, it had it's moments. Some nonsensical moments and romanticism. It did sweep you up, but it left me wanting. Like something was missing or off.
I know the storytelling of Superman could be better. It should be. But we are stuck on the creators who decided to initially write him this way.
Newspapers and media overall are dying. It's changing big time. Superman can be written differently. Heck this last show, they did.
You're probably wondering about Smallville. I tried to. Man I tried. A few episodes in was the same storyline. Everybody got infected with Kryptonite. This was canned Spam Superhero Soap Opera with hot young actors. I couldn't take it anymore.
Superman Returns. They did him dirty again. Brandon could have had a better everything. Some nice things, some not so nice things. I still watch that from time to time.
At least we got Brandon in the crossover. I made a meme for that.
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The CW was total cheese fest. How it made it to the best Superman ever,... folks is smoking some pretty good weed. And I don't even smoke anything. Except for preferred smoked meat. 😂
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But I'll wrap this up.
When I saw Superman and Wonder Woman together, my epiphany came. It made perfect sense. So I dug deep. Of course there was a history with these two. Most people don't know of this rabbit hole. They dismiss rather easily. There is a fandom that loves them. And fan art, etc. The rest is history shall we say.
The New 52 and the DCEU animated movies made this relationship the most sense. The most positive thing I've seen. Yes, there are stories that could haven been written better. As I've said before they never gave SuperWonder a chance.
Now, SuperWonder fans to this day, are ridiculed, harassed, scoffed at and talked down to because they still believe in Clark & Diana.
Yes because there is a story to tell. Many stories.
Until next time...
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