#with like. that particular combination of earnestness and cynicism

[seven-saffodils]

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[templephoenix]

A thread of stuff I remember from Brian Ruckley's IDW2 retrospective panel from TFNation this weekend, in no particular order:

• Brian scoured the TFwiki for all the female TFs that he could use; he was very clear on presenting them as a normal part of TF society from the start, no weird 'explanations' needed

• He planned out the main story beats he wanted to hit in his head, but didn't make extensive notes or anything

• If it hadn't been truncated, the Exarchon plotline would have - pending Hasbro approval - dealt with the Quintessons and their region of space, cut off from the rest of the universe. They wouldn't have been involved with Cybertron's origins

• He praised the work of all the artists but in particular Anna Malkova, who he considered the best thing to come out of IDW2 and particularly impressive for moving from artwork to comic storytelling

• Flamewar was an obvious favourite, one of many characters without much existing fiction which allowed for more freedom

• One of the main themes of the series was trauma, embodied in characters like Cyclonus and his ghosts

• Geomotus and others showed that neurodivergence exists in Cybertronians; he wanted to show that there was a variety of ways in which characters could see the world

• The Technobots annual was condensed down from a full story arc which would have featured the Terrorcons; the Technos were chosen as Brian's favourite combiner team

• He didn't want loads of combiners running around too soon, hence the Enigma being thrown into the sea; it would have resurfaced eventually

• He considered one of his biggest weaknesses to be that he didn't make individual issues read as well on their own rather than 'in the trade'; he hoped that he had gotten better at it as the series went on

• Favourite TF character types included female transformers and teleporters; he wanted Skywarp to be a trickster-type figure

• As the series went on Starscream would have remained neither a true Decepticon nor in any way an Autobot, trusted by no one and yet charming/threatening/maneuvering them into keeping him around

• A continuing theme would be the gap between how Cybertronians see themselves and how other species view them; organic planets would consider these giant robots terrifying

• He doesn't consider himself good at big shock reveals and doesn't like bait-and-switches, so tried not to do either during the series

• Despite the long-form storytelling aspect of the book, his personal favourite issues were the one-shots that divided each story arc, like Wheeljack on the moon

• The senate attack that kicked off the war in earnest was originally meant to come earlier in the series

• He didn't originally know that the continuity was being rebooted when he was asked to pitch for a TF comic; there was a lot of back-and-forth at the start as Hasbro kept adding requests

• The series would have gotten to humans eventually, although Brian wanted the TFs to encounter them already in space rather than on Earth

• He enjoys writing comics more than novels, and would happily do only the former if given the chance

• He needed a science-related TF to be the initial murder victim; he sent a shortlist of names to be approved and they chose Brainstorm

• Hasbro did not want too many original characters created for the series; the ones he invented were all done so because they were integral to the narrative

• Once they were told about the license being lost, Brian made a conscious decision not to kill a bunch of characters off before the end; he thinks that it would be too cynical, and that deaths have to serve a contextual and narrative purpose to be meaningful. He also recognises that every character is someone's favourite, and now they can imagine the adventures they might have in the future

All in all, a really interesting and honest panel! Thanks to Brian and all the artists for my favourite TF continuity ever; RIP IDW2

[chamerionwrites]

The thing about characterization is that it fundamentally goes back to curiosity about what makes people tick. And while this is a perfectly reasonable part of the writing process, and imo can be a great empathy exercise when done thoughtfully, talking frankly about certain aspects of it does tend to make you sound like a cartoonishly evil mad scientist. 

There are few absolutes in writing, and thus nothing I have to say about it is intended to be read that way. But when asked, my quick and dirty advice about good characterization is that real people are Consistently Inconsistent. Very polite people can be shockingly rude. Habitually cautious people can be quick to trust. Gregarious social butterflies can need space. “In-character” doesn’t mean lacking in contradictions; it means that when taken as a whole, the pattern of those contradictions has a kind of internal coherence. Likewise, “out of character” is frequently a function of circumstances. The what of someone’s thoughts/words/actions tells you less about them than the when and why. 

And there’s a kind of code-breaking thrill in inhabiting that idiosyncratic internal logic to the point where it becomes intuitive. I don’t really know any way to explain this to an outside observer without going full overwrought nerd, but it’s exhilarating when you get it right. It’s that flow-state rush of muscle memory taking over in a sports game, of becoming fluent enough in another language to think in it, of dancing in perfect step with your partner and the music, of finishing your best friend’s sentences. It’s Drifting from Pacific Rim. Where precisely do you have to poke a habitual cynic to get the kind of visceral righteous anger that is normally more the province of earnest idealists? What drives a conflict-averse people-pleaser to pick a fight? The answers aren’t always the same, but they are almost always revealing. Personally speaking, that’s one of the most rewarding feelings in fiction: making a character do the unexpected in a way that rings so absolutely true it feels inevitable to the audience in hindsight. 

Which sounds perfectly reasonable when you’re talking about prodding a jaded cynic into expressing righteous fury or a comfortable homebody into going on a reckless adventure, but. You know. There’s also a bit of the Writer Brain that looks at reserved/stoic/highly self-controlled characters and immediately goes Okay. I see. Now how do I make them cry. 

Am I necessarily going to go out of my way to do it? No. Am I running private thought experiments about precisely which combination of buttons would need to be pressed? You betcha lmao. And while I’ve made my share of self-deprecating jokes about writers being sadists (because there’s really no getting around the cartoonish mad scientist vibe of stating it aloud), it’s not actually about an enjoyment of suffering (usually quite the reverse). It’s about that particular process of curiosity and compassion and puzzle-solving pleasure involved in developing an intuition for how this specific person responds in any given situation, and then conveying that to the reader in a way that feels vividly real. 

Try explaining that without going full overwrought nerd, though, you know?

[gainaxvel3o]

Jurassic World and it’s sequel are not great, not even good, but over the past few months I’ve thought about them more and came to realize something I like about them.

They don’t take the originals for granted and are actually sort of cynical about themselves?

When you think about it, the first JW had a solid hook for a continuation. What if Jurassic Park was actually successful? For several months, the Park owners managed to maintain a stable, running Dinosaur theme park that brought in crowds of thousands that are entertained . However, things are not all well even before the Indominus Rex gets loose. The military are trying to weaponize the raptors, there is tension in keeping the dinosaurs in check, and probably the most damning indictment is that the scientists wind up creating one of the most dangerous monsters in the franchise because the focus groups determined the T-Rex “became boring.” In a repurposed line from the book Henry Wu, the main geneticist involved in the project, points out to his boss Masrani that none of the dinosaurs are natural, made from a combination of other animals’ DNA. The line’s use in the film is pretty interesting, establishing a more cynical undercurrent to the series than what was in any of the originals.

Fallen Kingdom goes further with this, almost feeling like a take that at The Lost World’s plot. When a volcano is said to erupt over Isla Nublar, Dr. Ian Malcom advocated for the dinosaurs to be left to die on the island. Our protagonists, of course, go to said island to save the dinosaurs, but their noble efforts turn out to be a smokescreen for the villains, who took advantage of their naivety to capture the dinosaurs and sell them off. The end of the movie has the dinosaurs escape into the wild, no doubt wrecking havoc across the country. Interestingly in both movies, whatever intentions the humans had, good and bad, were ultimately undone by nature. The Indominus Rex escaped by tricking the humans, but even if that didn’t happen Fallen Kingdom showed that the volcano would have destroyed the park in a few years anyway. If the characters listened to Malcom, the villains wouldn’t get very far and humanity wouldn’t be facing the problems caused by the end of FK. It was, in fact, the heroes’ attempts to save the dinosaurs that doom lives.

Does this make this series good? Honestly no. In addition to the characters being bland and some mean spirited gross stuff, a consistent issue I have with these movies is that they try to have their cake and eat it too; they attempt to balance their cynical notions with the earnest wonder of the original Jurassic Park movies, and never succeeding at it. Moments like the T-Rex and the Blue Raptor fighting the Indominus Rex or the little girl releasing the dinos at the end of FK are treated as triumphant, bright moments in the narratives that touch on the heartstrings. If they had learned harder on the cynicism, they probably would come together more coherently. Jurassic World in particular had a lot of potential for satire on the nature of merchandising and corporate meddling which it doesn’t do too much with. I’m quite curious as to how Dominion is going to handle the dinosaur apocalypse teased at the end of it’s predecessor. Will it live up to it’s ambitions? I don’t know.

I guess from this rambling is that these movies taught me that sometimes respect for the original source material isn’t enough. With recent reboots being so suffocating with how they put the originals on a pedestal, Jurassic World taught me that perhaps it might be better to observe it with a more cynical eye every once in a while, deconstruct the original so the story can take on more interesting paths it might not be able to if it was played totally straight.

[kentuckyanarchist]

There are few albums as bipolar as Boys and Girls in America—few that combine euphoria and aching nostalgic sadness in the same way, and fewer still that do it both masterfully and in absolute earnest. The Hold Steady’s third record greets you right from the start with a double motion: the album cover, all kids with hands in the air, hot pink with confetti flying (“up to yr neck in the sweat and wet confetti” as “Most People Are DJs,” from Almost Killed Me, had it), cuts against the very first line, where Craig Finn riffs on Jack Kerouac to affirm: “boys and girls in America have such a sad time together.” Kerouac evinced the same bipolarity in On the Road, and Hemingway too, Steinbeck too, not to mention Dylan, not to mention Springsteen—it’s part and parcel of a particular kind of American lyrical masculinity that likes to bellow and wail about its sensitive seriousness. Writers in this tradition—and Finn, whose first four Hold Steady albums approach flawlessness, is among the very best of them—plumb the unchartable depths of sorrow that provide everyday hedonism with its uneasy foundation. They give voice to a pain that can’t be outrun no matter how hard their characters try, one that catches them up in solitary moments and/or comes to suffuse whole segments of lives.

It was a feature, no doubt, of Almost Killed Me, the Hold Steady’s debut from 2004; it was unavoidably present in Separation Sunday (2005), their high-concept dramatisation of that line from “Thunder Road” about waiting “for a saviour to rise from these streets”. But on Boys and Girls songs like “Hot Soft Light” pummel you with it: the drunken reassurances and unsubtle heavy metal references of the verses cascade into the nightlife typology of the chorus, where all possible encounters are reducible to ideal types, “the guys / with the wild eyes when they ask to get you high” and “the girls / that’ll come to you with comfort in the night.” “Hot” and “soft”, such a simple pair of monosyllables, do all sorts of work here: they’re a mellow high before it becomes a problem (“it came on hot and soft / and then it tightened up its tentacles”); they’re a callback to the summing-up of human existence as just “hot soft spots on a hard rock planet” (“Most People Are DJs” again); and, when the title drops in the final line, they’re the body and the blood, Christ himself at the centre of the cross. In other hands counterposing religious ecstasy with drug-induced euphoria might seem pat, or at least like a failed attempt to shock; in Finn’s it seems entirely sincere.

Songs like “First Night” trade in a kind of nostalgia that’s not without its darkness and drama. More than almost any other Hold Steady song “First Night” runs off of Franz Nicolay’s keyboards, but there’s vastly more there too, in the strings and backing vocals especially. In the quadrumvirate of characters (not forgetting the narrator), Holly aka Hallelujah aka the central character of Separation Sunday is central, and she’s still in rough shape. The flashforward from that first night, when Holly “slept like she’d never been scared”, to last night, with Holly disconsolate and trembling, echoes in the shaking keyboards, over which the album title becomes a mantra in falsetto. At which point Finn, who from Lifter Puller days is well-acquainted with the art of the sneer and the snarl, intercedes: “don’t bother talking to the guys with their hot soft eyes”—those two adjectives for the last time—“you know they’re already taken.” All of which is not to forget that in the phrase “she was golden with barlight and beer”, “First Night” also coins the most beautiful ever way of saying “she looked hot when I was drunk.”

Songs like “Party Pit” take up the mantle of ceaseless mobility from Kerouac (the tradition Deleuze describes in which “everything is departure, becoming, passage, leap, daemon, relationship with the outside”) and run with it, juxtaposing a wayward narrator with an old friend who never escaped the vicissitudes of the teen scene. (As a 16-year-old I cycled home most nights across the Carter Bridge, over the railway just north of Cambridge railway station, and the line about crossing “that Grain Belt Bridge / into bright new Minneapolis” became wrapped up with that quotidian experience. I don’t know if “bright new Minneapolis” is a joke or just a conscious bit of mythmaking—I’ve never been to Minneapolis but I don’t see it as a city with lights so bright they can be seen glittering from above—but the image resonates nonetheless. And for the record: you’ll find lyrics sites saying the line’s “brand new Minneapolis,” but it’s not. Listen to this version.) Finn’s narrator’s been away to school and come back (“to start a band, of course”) but the heroine’s stayed put, “pinned down at the party pit,” stuck going round and round in circles, “gonna walk around, gonna walk around, gonna walk around and drink.” The party’s the site and source of sadness here and getting away’s jinxed too: coming home’s a bittersweet endeavour as much because of what’s stayed the same as what’s different.

And “Stuck Between Stations”, with its unpromising source material, its dated central metaphor, its shoehorning of a guilty-pleasure or problematic-fave author (as John Darnielle’s said—Darnielle being a man who knows his Berryman and knows his Hold Steady—the “sometimes in blackface” of Berryman’s Henry worries away at any too-friendly reading of that sad Minneapolis bard). It might not be the best Hold Steady song but it might be the one that most overtly strives for grandiosity in a Springsteenian mould, it might be the one that succeeds most evidently at making a bold statement that finds a way to hit home regardless of one’s circumstances. And the album’s clearest statement of ambivalence and bittersweetness is in the “buts” of its chorus: Berryman, at the time he took flight, we learn, “was drunk and exhausted but he was critically acclaimed and respected / he loved the Golden Gophers but he hated all the drawn out winters / he likes the warm feeling but he’s tired of all the dehydration / most nights were kind of fuzzy but that last night he had total retention.” Strung out but at least having made something of oneself—at home but not all year round—finding the booze sometimes a chore—and sometimes somehow glorious! It’s all there.

Lyrically, I wonder if this is achieved through a sort of wilful mythologisation. Berryman, after all, probably didn’t really love the Golden Gophers, but why not flesh out his story with the claim that he did? “How a Resurrection Really Feels,” from Separation Sunday, delves into its heroine’s despair but also zooms out to describe the graffiti tributes made to her by other unnamed characters—to show her story’s a legendary one in its own universe too. Once again Springsteen got there first, this time in “Highway Patrolman,” which invents a whole fictional town and county, and a slow dance for the characters to wax nostalgic about, all in order to build a world in the song and thereby make something somehow universal. Across all the Hold Steady albums the same characters recur in different (not always that different) predicaments, but their stories never totally cohere. They have the feel, at times, of characters in your peripheral vision or even on the edge of a dream, cohering to make certain points then splintering once more. The stuff of strange, half-true legends.

And then there’s the god question. Finn doesn’t just see love, or hope, or beauty, or tenacity “in the clumsiness of young and awkward lovers” (in “Citrus”), he feels Jesus there—and in so doing captures a sort of lowdown American pantheism found from Emerson to the Beats, not to mention in the final scene of Bruce Almighty. The particular form that the mystical takes in “Chips Ahoy” is not the same form it took in most of Separation Sunday, but in the narrative of the girl with a sixth sense for winning racehorses it’s there nonetheless. Even the stuttering puh-puh-puh assonance of “pinned down at the party pit” conceals a deification metaphor, its martyress fastened tight to the scene—as Lifter Puller more bluntly put it, she’s “nailed to the nightlife like Christ on the cross.” (As a disbelieving teenager I had a disproportionate number of Christian friends, I guess I was drawn to people who believed in things. It’s possible I thought I had something similar in certain bands, certain songs.) God, in America today, is as fiercely contested signifier as everything else, but it’s clear that the omnipresent God of Boys and Girls is also a personal God, not to mention a lenient, ecumenical one.

Boys and Girls met me at a particular time in my life, a couple of years after it was released, in summer 2008, which is probably the biggest part of the reason it’s stuck with me (other texts are sepia-shaded for the same reason: Bob Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, the first Conor Oberst solo album). The rest of the first four Hold Steady albums are probably just as good, but this one works in certain ways that set it apart. It’s less cynical than Almost Killed Me, less weary than Separation Sunday, less nostalgic than Stay Positive, and more holistic than all of them. It turns out that the holism and the bipolarity amount to the same thing.

[swordsandparasols]

A lot of the Strongest Deliveryman commentary is primarily about how Jin Gyu is a tortured sympathetic woobie.  And, I mean, ok, I’m in the minority that prefers Kang Soo to Jin Gyu, but he’s a good character and any problems with him certainly don’t compare to some of the horrors I’ve seen fandom go gaga over.  I do think, however, that there are some interesting things going on with him that’s being lost in that.

 Foremost, and possibly most pertinent to the show, is that Jin Gyu is essentially a study of how there’s no such thing as benign privilege or entitlement.  Jin Gyu, when we meet him, is drowning in both, and only now has lost some of the former, but very little of the latter.  He’s almost devoid of actual malice (we only see some from him in episode 6 when he doesn’t want to free Kang Soo from prison, and even that isn’t near what we’d expect) but is consistently destructive.  The reason for this is that his response to problems is to throw money at them, with disastrous results.  Dan Ah saves his life and he tries to fix it with the promise of money, but because his hubris (and terrible father) catches up with him, he instead leaves her with a debt-mostly caused by his intentions of goodwill-that wipes out the majority of her savings.  

 When he learns that his “entertainment” resulted in a person not being able to receive medical attention in time and ending up in a coma, his reaction isn’t “oh wow I messed up I’m so sorry,” his response is “let me throw money at this so it will go away! My money isn’t making this go away? HOW DARE YOU PERSECUTE ME!”  Had he accepted moral and legal-not simply financial-responsibility when he learned of the result of his actions, things would have gone differently for him.  He would have been disowned by his father either way, but that’s more because his father is a nightmare more than anything else, but if he’d admitted his fault, he most likely would have gotten a slap on the wrist and a fine.  Instead, his refusal to admit fault after his initial exposure leads to a media circus focusing in his rich kid entitlement, he flees arrest, loses the two people who were almost his friends at that point, resists arrest, and ends up penniless, friendless, disowned, disgraced and in jail.  The one time his actions in the first 5 episodes actually had good results was when, instead of throwing his money around, he covered Dan Ah’s job for her when she was hospitalized partly because of him.

 He gets out of jail though someone else exerting a similar privilege and power that is family possesses, but has learned nothing from his experience, still believing himself to be faultless and the true victim of all the events to date.  He knows he wronged Dan Ah but can only see it from a financial standpoint, and truly doesn’t get why her new dislike for him has to do with more than the money she lost because of him, and tries to force her to accept his money, thinking that if she does, he’ll have fixed what he did wrong. Since he isn’t actually a terrible person, he knows he did wrong, but he doesn’t truly understand WHAT he did wrong, so he just assumes that if he throws money at his current problem (having let Dan Ah down) it will fix things and he’ll be redeemed.  It takes two attempts on his life, being confronted by a gang of deliverymen, being hated by literally everyone in his life except maybe the woman who effectively owns him, and a peptalk from a nice old lady for him to actually accept any moral responsibility for his actions and apologize for them.

  The fact that the show doesn’t sugarcoat any of this or play up the sympathy card for him seems to have had a lot of people thinking that he was going to be made a villain, but the idea that he would be a villain never would have occurred to me just from watching the show.  Because he’s also been consistently portrayed as kind and well intentioned, as well as being portrayed sympathetically.  It’s simply that no excuses are made for him.  He isn’t mean, he isn’t malicious, he’s never thrown his family’s wealth or influence around, but he’s also irresponsible and refuses to take responsibility for his actions, relying on money to fix his problems, and believing that he’s been horribly wrong if it doesn’t.  He’s a semi-antagonist who had to hit rockbottom and get a few wakeup calls so that he can redeem himself and slowly work towards redemption.  He’s slowly starting that particular journey, but he still has a long ways to go.  (In particular, that pedestal he keeps trying to put Dan Ah on has got to go.)

 The other front that I think is getting overlooked is also about Ji Yoon, and kdrama character types in general, and the writer of Strongest Deliveryman really likes to go against types. That’s why our male lead is the idealistic  and endlessly nice and forgiving earnest and hardworking poor boy who always forgives his love interest for snapping at him and always rushes forward with god intentions even if he doesn’t have much of a plan, while our female lead is the sarcastic, emotionally closed off and cynical martial artist (who regularly uses her skills, and not in the typical “tee hee isn’t her high kick cute?” way) who is hyper organized and has long term goals and plans.  In the 2000s, the majority of kdramas I watched were sageuks, but when I read about or watched other kdramas, there were certain trends I noticed. So very, very many chaebol sons and heirs as the main and secondary male leads.  If he was responsible and emotionally closed off, he was the lead, if he was less responsible and flirty, he was the secondary lead.  Either way, he was emotionally damaged in some way.  The heroine was often an earnest and hard working poor (or at least, not rich) girl who somehow got entangled with them and healed them with her virtue or some such.  This, IMO, is part of why it’s significant that Dan Ah and Jin Gyu aren’t romantically paired, because their relationship is deliberately antithetical to that trope, and Dan Ah has rightly called him out on trying to force him into it.  Over time, South Korean sentiment changed and it was reflected in kdramas.  Chaebol heir leads faded out a bit.  They’re still around ,but focus shifted from the melodramas of old and in recent years, they’re been more about the working and middle class, lawyers, the media, political corruption, etc.  They’re making a bit of a comeback lately, but recently, the default setting for chaebol sons has been the worthless rich boy who had everything handed to him but is a fairly worthless human being who throws his weight and money around and thinks he’s better than anyone.  Jin Gyu is interesting as a partial combination of the two.  He’s “worthless” in that he has no apparent skills and seems to have been content to spend his life blowing his allowance on cool things but never actual working or making an effort to do something for himself, but he’s also justifiably emotionally damaged.  He throws his money around like it will fix everything and doesn’t think he should be held accountable for his actions, but he lacks the malice the most of his contemporary compatriots have.  He’s partially a deconstruction of one version of the chaebol son, and partially a critique of the other.

 Then there was The Rich Girl.  Hoo boy. While the traditional kdrama love square has never gone away, it’s become considerably more nuanced and varied in recent years.  The love square used to be :#1 probably lower income, virtuous and plucky heroine, #2 most-likely-rich-guy  A WITH ANGST, #3 most-likely-rich-guy B WITH ANGST (but with less money and angst than Rich Guy A), and #4 the bitchy and selfish rich girl.  The bitchy and selfish rich girl usually had A History with Rich Guy A, and would relentlessly chase him throughout the drama no matter how little kindness or attention he paid her, feeling completely entitled to him and convinced that he either loved her and wouldn’t admit it, or WOUld love her if that pesky heroine wasn’t around.  Sometimes she was rich because she was a successful careerwoman, or an athlete or model or some such, but just as often, she was just a spoiled girl who liked being born with a silver spoon in her mouth.  She usually had few, if any, redeeming qualities.  (You might be getting an idea of why it took me a while to widely venture outside of sageuks, given how many popular and easy-to-find-subbed dramas either fell into this formula one way or the other, or ended with everyone dead-and if everyone is dying in my show, there are going to be swords and rebellions and political wars involved.)  If the female lead was a rich girl, she probably needed to be humanized and brought down a few pegs by a less-rich male lead.  There was also frequently what I call, The Gift Bag Scene. In The Gift Bag Scene, the male lead has bought the female lead a gift and it’s on a table or somewhere else very visible.  The rich girl comes in and immediately sees the gift bag and assumes it’s for her for no apparent reason other than that it’s there, so obviously the male lead bought it for her as an apology for his behavior (usually just…not being interested in dating her) and won’t let him get a word in edgewise before she takes off with it.

 Then we have Ji Yoon. The Rich Girl-both protagonist and antagonist-has taken on more varied forms in recent years than the chaebol sons-and otherwise rich guys- and female secondary leads have thankfully become considerably more nuanced and sympathetic in recent years. On the surface, Ji Yoon appears to have many of the qualities of the Rich Girl, but…she isn’t. She’s entitled, hangs all over Kang Soo, has her own version of The Gift Bag Scene, and was obviously pretty spoiled growing up.  However, she’s also kind is determined to go her on way by choice and not by force, and has reasons for the things she does.  Unlike Jin Gyu, Ji Yoon chose to leave her family.  And unlike Jin Gyu, she knows she can go back home if she’s willing to put up with a few “I told you so”-s from her mother.  She set out on her own, failed miserably at it, and is giving it a second go. She hasn’t really learned much about her own entitlement and privilege yet, but she actually chose to go this route herself.  Jin Gyu doesn’t give up because he can’t, Ji Yoon can give up but doesn’t.  She’s aware that her actions seem foolish, but she wants to try to make a living and provide for herself instead of relying on handouts from her parents. She thinks Kang Soo has feelings for her because he’s endlessly nice and tolerant of her antics.  Even when he’s visibly annoyed, he still goes out on a limb for her.  He literally found her starving on the street and gave her food and shelter.  We may find her antics annoying, but we’re given reasons for her actions.  We the audience know that Kang Soo views her as an irritating younger sister, but we don’t have to take illogical leaps to see why she thinks otherwise.  Ji Yoon even has her own version of The Gift Bag Scene, one that seems to be a direct callout to the older version.  In her version, Kang Soo did not actually wrong her, but he was inconsiderate to a degree, and the bag wasn’t a gift to someone else, but a gift given to him as a result of a subplot that’s one of the show’s truly weak points.  Unlike the Rich Girls of the past, Ji Yoon seems to be perfectly aware that the bag isn’t for her, she’s just milking Kang Soo’s guilt for all it’s worth, and even directly calls out the trope, coyly challenging her to tell him that it isn’t really a gift for her.  (Kang Soo’s downfall: strong willed women who are well aware that he’s a sweet pushover.)

 All the above is why the scene in episode 6 where Jin Gyu and Ji Yoon are selling off her designer bags because she has to move to a more expensive apartment and end up making less than half of what she originally expected to make.  The scene is played for laughs because they were both drowning in rich people guilt, but they’ve both come a fair bit from where they started just by having that guilt.  Jin Gyu at the beginning probably would have given the bags away, but not because the sob stories made him realize how much better he still had it, but because he couldn’t be bothered and didn’t need the money or want the annoyance.  Ji Yoon is still a mercenary little thing, but she was a more hardcore mercenary little thing at the beginning, with little concept or interest in money beyond how it benefited her.  This is the girl who, barely having escaped homelessness and starvation, threw her lunch at a guy for annoying her, but also snuck back into her parent’s house to get all her nice things once she had someone else’s roof over her head.  

 As characters, Jin Gyu and Ji Yoon are both headed to roughly the same place.  Ji Yoon is going there a bit faster because she deliberately put herself on the path, even if she hasn’t learned as the moral or realistic economic implications of the path, but she also has the security of going home if she decides to leave it.  Jin Gyu has a slower and harsher journey down that path because he was literally forced on it, but will probably end up more committed to it because he doesn’t have that out.  Both have recognizable roots in the rich leads of the past, but have come a long, long way from those roots.

[artbookclubdublin-blog]

This is the list of book suggestions that were gathered for our first book club. We then voted for the book that we wanted to read for our first meeting. 

Documents of Contemporary Art: Participation, edited by Claire Bishop 

The desire to move viewers out of the role of passive observers and into the role of producers is one of the hallmarks of twentieth-century art. This tendency can be found in practices and projects ranging from El Lissitzky's exhibition designs to Allan Kaprow's happenings, from minimalist objects to installation art. More recently, this kind of participatory art has gone so far as to encourage and produce new social relationships. Guy Debord's celebrated argument that capitalism fragments the social bond has become the premise for much relational art seeking to challenge and provide alternatives to the discontents of contemporary life. This publication collects texts that place this artistic development in historical and theoretical context.

Participation begins with writings that provide a theoretical framework for relational art, with essays by Umberto Eco, Bertolt Brecht, Roland Barthes, Peter Bürger, Jen-Luc Nancy, Edoaurd Glissant, and Félix Guattari, as well as the first translation into English of Jacques Rancière's influential "Problems and Transformations in Critical Art." The book also includes central writings by such artists as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Joseph Beuys, Augusto Boal, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. And it features recent critical and curatorial debates, with discussions by Lars Bang Larsen, Nicolas Bourriaud, Hal Foster, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.

Ways of Seeing, by John Berger

John Berger’s now classic article "Ways of Seeing" (1972) revolutionarily, for his time, analyses the manner in which men and women are culturally represented, and the subsequent results these representations have on their conduct and self as well and mutual perception.

The Sublime, edited by Simon Morley 

In a world where technology, spectacle and excess seem to eclipse former concepts of nature, the individual and society, what might be the characteristics of a contemporary sublime? If there is any consensus it is in the notion that the sublime represents a taking to the limits, to the point at which fixities begin to fragment. This anthology examines how ideas of the sublime are explored in the work of contemporary artists and theorists, in relation to the unpresentable, transcendence, terror, nature, technology, the uncanny and altered states.

Book of Mutter, by Kate Zambreno

Composed over thirteen years, Kate Zambreno's Book of Mutter is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes -- and dead calm -- of grief. Book of Mutter is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author's searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of her mother's death. The text spirals out into a kind of fractured anatomy of melancholy that comes to contain critical reflections on the likes of Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha , Peter Handke, and others. Zambreno has modeled the book's formless form on Bourgeois's Cells sculptures -- at once channeling the volatility of autobiography, pain, and childhood, yet hemmed by a solemn sense of entering ritualistic or sacred space.

Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, Book of Mutter is an uncategorizable text that draws upon a repertoire of genres to write into and against silence. It is a haunted text, an accumulative archive of myth and memory that seeks its own undoing, driven by crossed desires to resurrect and exorcise the past. Zambreno weaves a complex web of associations, relics, and references, elevating the prosaic scrapbook into a strange and intimate postmortem/postmodern theater.

Aliens and Anorexia, by Chris Kraus  

First published in 2000, Chris Kraus’s second novel, Aliens & Anorexia, defined a female form of chance that is both emotional and radical. Unfolding like a set of Chinese boxes, with storytelling and philosophy informing each other, the novel weaves together the lives of earnest visionaries and failed artists. Its characters include Simone Weil, the first radical philosopher of sadness; the artist Paul Thek; Kraus herself; and “Africa,” Kraus’s virtual S&M partner, who is shooting a big-budget Hollywood film in Namibia while Kraus holes up in the Northwest woods to chronicle the failure of Gravity & Grace, her own low-budget independent film.

In Aliens & Anorexia, Kraus makes a case for empathy as the ultimate perceptive tool, and reclaims anorexia from the psychoanalytic girl-ghetto of poor “self-esteem.” Anorexia, Kraus writes, could be an attempt to leave the body altogether: a rejection of the cynicism that this culture hands us through its food.

In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective, by Hito Steyerl  

Available on the e-flux website: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/24/67860/in-free-fall-a-thought-experiment-on-vertical-perspective/

The Temporality of the Landscape, by Tim Ingold

“In Tim Ingold's article, there are two themes present; that "...human life is a process that involves the passage of time," and that "...this life-process is also the process of information of the landscapes in which people have lived". Through the use of these themes and his methodological structure, Ingold argues that the landscape can be read as a text. First, he defines the terms landscape and temporality, and second, he introduces a new word, "taskscape", and considers how this relates to landscape. Finally, to further prove his point, the author attempts to "read" the landscape of a well-known painting, The Harvesters, by Bruegel, in which he interprets the temporality of this landscape. This article is useful in understanding cultural landscapes in that it encourages the researcher to think about an often missing, yet integral part of the interpretation of landscapes: time. The researcher is also made to question the relationship of the dimension of time to a particular landscape.” [E. Martin]

The Indiscipline of Painting, by Daniel Sturgis  

Essay and catalogue texts to exhibition.

 High Rise, by JG Ballard

High-Rise is a 1975 novel by British writer J. G. Ballard. The story describes the disintegration of a luxury high-rise building as its affluent residents gradually descend into violent chaos.

Two Hito Steyrl essays, to be read in combination: 

Politics of the archive, Translations in film: http://eipcp.net/transversal/0608/steyerl/en  and In Defense of the Poor Image:

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last - inexorably - into evil.

Curating Research, edited by Paul O'Neill and Mick Wilson. Specifically the text called ‘The Complete Curator’

This anthology of newly commissioned texts presents a series of detailed examples of the different kinds of knowledge production that have recently emerged within the field of curatorial practice. The first volume of its kind to provide an overview of the theme of research within contemporary curating, Curating Research marks a new phase in developments of the profession globally. Consisting of case studies and contextual analyses by curators, artists, critics and academics, including Hyunjoo Byeon, Carson Chan and Joanna Warsza, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Olga Fernandez Lopez, Kate Fowle, Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Liam Gillick, Georgina Jackson, Sidsel Nelund, Simon Sheikh, Henk Slager, tranzit.hu, Jelena Vestic, Marion von Osten and Vivian Ziherl, and edited by curators Paul O'Neill and Mick Wilson, the book is an indispensible resource for all those interested in the current state of art and in the intersection between research and curating that underlies exhibition-making today.

The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson

A brave, fascinating memoir about love, gender, gender theory, having children, death, writing, and the modern family. Maggie Nelson, an established poet and prose writer, details her love for and relationship with Harry Dodge, a charismatic, gender-fluid artist ('are you a man or a woman?' the narrator wonders, but it just doesn't matter). In a brilliantly-written account that is moving as well as fascinating, Nelson charts her thoughts and feelings about becoming a step-parent, her pregnancy, Harry's operation and testosterone injections, and the couple's complex joys in queer-family creation.

Staying with the Trouble, by Donna Haraway

In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene, as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices. The Chthulucene, Haraway explains, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures. Theoretically and methodologically driven by the signifier SF—string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far—Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway's reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time.

[simplyoriginalcharacters]

Chris Doyle

Name: Christopher Eamon Doyle

Gender: Male

Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual

Age: 34 (in the first chapter)

Birthdate: October 30th

Occupation: Politician, Lawyer

Alignment: Lawful Neutral/ Lawful Good

Group/Organizational Affiliations: Unite Left Federation (Political Party)

Family: Jacob Doyle (younger brother), Patrick Doyle (father, deceased), Marica Doyle (mother)

Significant Other: Georgia Caro 

Height: 6"2

Build: Athletic, Broad-shouldered

Skin Tone: Pale

Hair: Light Brown

Eyes: Green

Appearance: Hair cut short and usually slicked back. Almost always dressed smartly- he’s a politician, after all, in expensive-ish suits, often three-piece ones; most of his suits are blue. He sometimes wears a fedora outdoors. He eventually stops wearing contacts in favour of thick, half-rimmed glasses.

Personality: He’s an outgoing person, charming and smiley, always with and outstretched hand to shake.  He doesn’t see himself as a good or an evil person, he thinks that’s up to God; he’s a pretty faithful Catholic. He almost always seeks to avoid conflict, to the point of spinelessness occasionally. He can often be single-minded in his work and can be indecisive under pressure. Dislikes children is quite uncomfortable around them. He’s fiercely protective of his younger brother. He’s soft-spoken and only shouts or swears in anger. Deeply earnest and optimistic personality gives him a “choirboy” and “boyscout” image in the media and with his colleagues; he always laughs it off. Laughter is his natural response to discomfort.

Motivations: He desperately wants to be liked. He desperately wants to be useful to the people around him. He’s in politics to make things better for his country. The thought of getting to the highest office in the land tempts him, but he doesn’t yet know if he actually wants it. Big believer in the possibilities of technology and scientific progress. A colleague half-jokes that he “likes to build big things”, referring to his love of grand projects in his role in charge of transport and public works.

Best Qualities: A great orator. Charming and reliable. If he thinks something’s wrong, he doesn’t keep it to himself.

Worst Qualities: Often indecisive and easily panicked.

Hobbies: Avid rugby player and fan of jazz music.

History: The son of two Florists, Chris had a modest but comfortable upbringing, getting a scholarship to an elite prep school. His parents were selfless but emotionally distant. He studied law at university. He married a fellow student at university to the horror of his parents, but the marriage broke up and ended in annulment within a day of the wedding. He was a basically competent lawyer who had occasionally campaigned in elections, but became particularly politically motivated after getting involved in a court case where he defended a homeless man who was falsely accused of beating a man for food. Another prominent court case led to him being recruited as a candidate by the United Left Party. He was overcome with grief when his father died, and as a result sunk into depression and nearly quit politics altogether.

His eloquence and good looks led to a meteoric political rise; he hires his younger brother Jacob as his aide.He gets into a relationship with Georgia Caro, a friend of an ex-colleague of Jacob who is also the youngest daughter of a former Prime Minister. Their relationship is mostly happy, but it’s sometimes strained due to his busy career and her alienation from her family. The current Prime Minister and party leader, Helen Kendrick assigns Chris to a series of difficult and troubled posts which he weathers in increasingly troubled times. He is seen by many of his colleagues to have fallen upwards into his position and way in over his head; he is heavily reliant on his brother, who’s a lot more cynical and less ethical about politics for advice.

I’d be happy with a general review, but I suppose what I want to know is how interesting this character is; I worry that he’s too bland and too much of a blank slate.

Hi! Mod D here, and I’ll be reviewing your submission.

This is a pretty solid profile. While relatively light, the information presented is consistent and flows together well. Chris’ Motivations make sense combined with his profession and Personality, and its very understandable how he got to be in the position he’s in. While these sections are concise that doesn’t stop them from presenting him as a multifaceted character. Chris doesn’t have just one singular motivation or trait, but a number of different factors that all conspire to push him forward in life (and not all of them are necessarily good). In particular I liked the highlight that Chris ‘desperately wants to be liked’ which seems extremely accurate for someone in politics. While it is a completely understandable desire, it’s also an inherently selfish motivation – yet Chris also uses the position it affords him to do unselfish things that benefit others (IE his defense cases and civic projects).

Keeping that in-mind, I wouldn’t consider Chris to be too bland or a blank slate. Rather, I’d consider him enough of a blank slate that he works well for the position he’s in at the start of the story. Leaving a character too generic gives readers nothing to latch on to and giving too much detail leaves little room for expansion. I think Chris hits the middle mark pretty well – he’s got a clear identity but also has room for that to be tested and change. There are plenty of points of conflict as well, between Chris’ political career, married life, and familial relationships. All of which can be interwoven for even more intrigue (and in some cases already have, such as Chris hiring his younger brother Jacob). So as far as a starting point goes for a character, I think this should work just fine.

One modification I would suggest is breaking up Chris’ History section into separate History and Relationships sections. As is that’s the only place where information about his various interpersonal relationships is presented, and while it does factor into his history separate sections would allow for better focus. Doing this would also allow you to highlight points of conflict much more easily. Given Chris’ nature, are there times when he’s disagreed with his brother’s advice? What, if anything, did he do about that – or did he just accept the advice to avoid a confrontation? Has he ever had any misgivings with Helen due to the assignments she’s given him? Does Chris often overwork himself, and if so what kind of strain does that put on his marriage with Georgia? Beyond that, delving a bit more into his upbringing and time at law school would help round these aspects out even further. Despite a prior marriage to an unnamed woman, all I know about Chris’ time in law school is essentially that he went. Similarly, I know nothing about his younger years and how his relationship with his brother and/or parents may have changed throughout his life. Did Chris become closer to his parents after he got older? Did his relationship with his mother change at all after his father died? Does their 'emotionally distant’ parenting have any influence on Chris’ need to be liked and at the center of attention? Additional inclusions like these could help round out Chris’ relationships and background and make them as multifaceted as his initial description.

All in all, you’ve got a very solid profile here. A bit more polish regarding the other people in Chris’ life (as well as his life up until the start of the story) would help give more for readers to chew on, though.

I hope this helps!

-D

[seajudge70-blog]

The Gifted is over for now, and so are a couple of its major characters

Since we last left the beleaguered mutants and mutant-adjacent characters of Fox’s possibly-doomed X-Men spinoff series The Gifted, they’ve been doing what they do best: constantly changing sides. Say this for a series that sometimes threatens to move quickly while going nowhere: It didn’t save a bunch of reversals for the season finale, a move that would have shamelessly mimicked the events that ended Season 1. No, before the finale even aired, there were change-ups and switch-backs and feints aplenty: Andy Strucker, the wayward aspiring edgelord, finally returned to his family. His fellow Inner Circle member Polaris, the smart-mouthed, revolution-hungry daughter of Magneto, became a spy for the Mutant Underground, accidentally got Sage killed, made the same reversal, after (further) revelations about Reeva’s extreme methods for her pro-mutant group. Blink left the Mutant Underground to join the Morlocks, then got killed... or, it seems, stuck in some kind of portal purgatory. (Wherever she is, it’s no longer in the MU.) Less officially, Caitlin Strucker has pivoted from reluctant and protective mom figure to fiery freedom fighter, and Reed Strucker is now a murderer! Which Andy finds very relatable.

I’m not trying to recap every development of the past couple months. Suffice to say, there’s been a lot of group-hopping, and a lot of those groups getting backed into different corners and shooting powers and/or bullets at each other. “oMens” dispenses with voluntary side-switching, though it also quickly dispenses with the Strucker family reunion, as Andy and Lauren get snatched back up by the Cuckoos just as they’re plotting their latest out-of-the-corner escape, from their Purifier-surrounded apartment building. Reeva, mostly undaunted by the defections in her ranks, wants to use the combined Strucker powers to destroy the Sentinel Services building.

And she succeeds! A whole damn building gets destroyed without a whole lot of fanfare before Esme’s slight hesitation allows the Mutant Underground to recapture their youngest members. None of this feels as momentous as it probably should, because “oMens” performs an uncommonly adroit—for this show anyway—act of refocusing the story from a multitude of drawn-out, season-long arcs to a particular character’s particular fate in a kind of back-to-basics move.

Usually back to basics is not where I want The Gifted to go, because it involves returning to the Struckers, who are consistently the least interesting and most irritating characters on this program (sometimes actively, sometimes just by default). But while the episode’s additional flashbacks are written in the same clunk-on-the-nose style as the typical cold opens without the benefit of brevity, the scenes from the marriage of Caitlin and Reed do build to something: Reed’s sudden decision to go up against Reeva, knowing that her attempts to knock out his powers will backfire, destroying her... and him.

And he succeeds! And there is the episode’s more momentous explosion, despite the smaller number of casualties. Reed Strucker dies, and Stephen Moyer is presumably off of this show, if there’s even still a show for him to be off of. (More on this in a moment.) Reed was, as mentioned, never my favorite character on the show, and Moyer’s performance always felt a bit too workmanlike to transcend how stodgy the character has been written. But I admit, I found his sacrifice, and his family’s devastation, affecting. On a less emotional level, I admire Gifted creator Matt Nix (who penned this installment, his first one in a while) for seeming to understand what a corner Reed had been written into, either defined by suppressing his powers, or defined by not being able to control them. To make such a serious, controlled personality realize that his destiny in all this (ugh, but I’ll allow it) involved surrendering control—at least of his body.

This move takes out season-long Big Bad Reeva, too, and I have to say, she turned out to be sort of a disappointing villain. Grace Byers certainly cuts a stylish figure in the part, but Reeva pretty quickly settled into the predictable kind of movie/TV ideologue, willing to game the results in order to hasten violent revolution on her side, blah blah blah. The most notable aspect of her character wound up being the strange visual cue that through some combination of framing, the Byers performance, and a profoundly dopey-looking depiction of her mutant power, Reeva often looked like she doesn’t have use of her arms. Now she has use of nothing.

It’s a satisfying end for Reed and a relief to be done with Reeva, but “oMens,” in typically fast-paced and mostly entertaining fashion, does point to just how much of this season has consisted of rapid piece-moving, a sort of perpetual motion that’s often fun in the moment but can feel wearying and repetitive over the course of 16 episodes; I think the slightly extended season was a mistake, and if anything, this is the type of show where 10 would be fine. Especially considering that even with more episodes at their disposal, the resolution of the finale felt a little rushed: Reed dies, the Struckers mourn, Polaris and Eclipse are reunited with their daughter, Morlock Erg (Michael Luwoye, whose increased role has been a pleasure of the last bunch of episodes) joins the group for real, as does Esme (great additions, also basically not commented upon at all). Another reconfigured group—and another cliffhanger, as Blink returns, looking futuristic and Future Past-y, ushering everyone through a new portal.

Whether we’ll get to actually see what’s on the other side is, as ever, in some doubt. The Fox-Disney deal is about to close, and if the new studio doesn’t want a mostly pretty successful X-Men movie franchise on its hands (it doesn’t) and already has MCU and Star Wars plans for its streaming service (it does) and can wash its hands of ancillary X-Men stuff (it can), and wants to treat anything that’s not Ryan Reynolds playing Deadpool as ancillary (it does), well, it doesn’t look great for the modestly rated, if somewhat appreciated, The Gifted Season 3... though maybe it will get yet another stay of execution based on the Fox Network as we know it maybe not having time to wind all the way down and reboot itself as largely sports and reality by September 2019. There are definitely moments in “oMens” that feel like they’re protecting the show’s fans for both possibilities: Most of the characters get some resolution to their emotional journeys, while the Blink thing assures fans that it’s not over, unless it is.

But that’s sort of an X-Men thing, too, isn’t it? I mean, it applies to a lot of superhero comics, but the X-Men in particular feel like a neverending strife generator. The movies reflect this, too: Days Of Future Past fixes the timeline, but Logan’s timeline still leaves plenty of room for heartbreak. The Last Stand gets justifiably erased from continuity, but then Dark Phoenix comes around and Jean looks like she’s wearing almost the same stupid goddamn Evil Jacket. Some of this, as in the comics medium, is pure franchise-driven cynicism: We gotta keep the series going even if we don’t have a plan, until such time as the plan gets scotched for unrelated corporate-merger reasons. But I think one reason I respond well to the X-Men characters on film and TV is that this neverending fight isn’t entirely mercenary. It’s also sometimes how the world works. If there’s any non-obvious, non-telegraphed truth in the earnest pulp of The Gifted, that might be it.

Stray observations:

OK, comics nerds, get to nerding: Are they just teasing a second, lower-budget Days Of Future Past riff with that Blink thing, or is there another storyline this Blink reappearance is queuing up?

There were such big doings a-transpiring with the Struckers this episode that I didn’t have rom above to mention how the mutants’ latest escape involved Thunderbird subjecting himself to an all-out chain-wrapping, speed-ramped, mailbox-throwing brawl, with a coda where he punches powers into Erg! I don’t have anything smart to say about any of that; I just thought it ruled.

Did Polaris say “the whole dang government” in her first scene? Dagnabbit, she really is softening.

“In a way, I feel like we’ve been preparing for this for a long time,” Lauren says about powering up with Andy, without so much as a wink. Yeah, Lauren. Like maybe 16 episodes? Or 29?

Caitlin, explaining her cache of guns: “I don’t have an X-gene. I figured it was the next best thing.” Her superpower is a bunch of guns; Caitlin is basically the Punisher now.

This season of The Gifted has really leaned into its stylized camera angles; canted angles have been all over these episodes, and “oMens” used plenty of low-angle shots, too. A nice way of keeping the show comic-book-y without getting too crazy.

Maybe I missed more details on this earlier in the season when I was watching merely for fun and not for recappery, but... the Purifiers are a crazed race-war militia, right? And law enforcement never really bats an eye at this? This episode includes a tossed-off explanation that the cops are willing to look the other way when they surround the apartment building, but Jace Turner (whose big journey seems to be a never-ending circle) is leading a full-on gun battle in the streets, and it’s not the first time. I get that maybe the show thinks it’s doing commentary here, but I feel like after a series of escalating firefights, the cops would not be looking the other way, or if they did, they’d just see another Purifier gun battle.

Is this the end of me writing about The Gifted?! If so, thank you guys for watching along with me! I’ve really enjoyed taking this regular dose of X-Men methadone in between the movies, and I’ll be bummed if there’s truly no more Fox-era X-Men stuff after this summer. Don’t let Tony Stark be the one who builds Cerebro!

Source: https://tv.avclub.com/the-gifted-is-over-for-now-and-so-are-a-couple-of-its-1832881840