#with many of the adaptational choices

[heyclickadee]

Weird confession, probably an unpopular opinion, but: I actually like a lot of the concepts and basic designs behind the costumes in the Rings of Power series more than I like the concepts and basic designs behind the costume in the PJ Lord of the Rings films (with the costumes for the rohirrim and the people in Gondor being the exception). Don’t get me wrong, the costumes in the PJ Lord of the Rings series look amazing. They’re gorgeous and, on the whole, better made than the Rings of Power costumes. It’s just that the there’s something very dungeons and dragonsy about the PJ Lord of the Rings costumes (especially for the elves), and I know that’s because there was a twenty year feedback loop where there was a slight DnD-ness to the PJ Lord the the Rings elf outfits which then just became standard Elf Clothes in LOTR fanart which then fed back into the people making art for the DnD handbooks, but still. And I’ll admit I’m biased—it just so happens that that aesthetic is one I don’t particularly like. So seeing the costumes in Rings of Power make a clean break from that was really refreshing. And they mostly look like clothes people would wear. And I love the ideas in the designs! Elrond’s brown cloak with the feathers? That’s a sweet little tribute to his mom. The gold dust makeup on Disa’s hands and her robe (which honestly looked better in action than it did in the promo shots)? Neat concept. Tar-Miriel’s crown (and all of her outfits, actually)? Stunning. I’m in love. I just wish the designers and costume makers had been given all the time they needed to really make every costume look as good as they probably looked in their heads.

[gingermintpepper]

In my Zeus bag today so I'm just gonna put it out there that exactly none of the great Ancient Greek warrior-heroes stayed loyal and faithful and completely monogamous and yet none of them have their greatness questioned nor do we question why they had the cultural prominence that they did and still do.

Jason, the brilliant leader of the Argo, got cold feet when it came to Medea - already put off by some of her magic and then exiled from his birthland because of her political ploys, he took Creusa to bed and fully intended on marrying her despite not properly dissolving things with Medea.

Theseus was a fierce warrior and an incredibly talented king but he had a horrible temper and was almost fatally weak to women. This is the man who got imprisoned in the Underworld for trying to get a friend laid, the man who started the whole Attic War because he couldn't keep his legs closed.

And we cannot at all forget Heracles for whom a not inconsiderable amount of his joy in life was loving people then losing the people around him that he loved. Wives, children, serving boys, mentors, Heracles had a list of lovers - male and female - long enough to rival some gods and even after completing his labours and coming down to the end of his life, he did not have one wife but three.

And y'know what, just because he's a cultural darling, I'll put Achilles up here too because that man was a Theseus type where he was fantastic at the thing he was born to do (that is, fight whereas Theseus' was to rule) but that was not enough to eclipse his horrid temper and his weakness to young pretty things. This is the man that killed two of Apollo's sons because they wouldn't let him hit - Tenes because he refused to let Achilles have his sister and Troilus who refused Achilles so vehemently that he ran into Apollo's temple to avoid him and still couldn't escape.

All four of these men are still celebrated as great heroes and men. All four of these men are given the dignity of nuance, of having their flaws treated as just that, flaws which enrich their character and can be used to discuss the wider cultural point of what truly makes a hero heroic. All four of these men still have their legacies respected.

Why can that same mindset not be applied to Zeus? Zeus, who was a warrior-king raised in seclusion apart from his family. Zeus who must have learned to embrace the violence of thunder for every time he cried as a babe, the Corybantes would bang their shields to hide the sound. Zeus learned to be great because being good would not see the universe's affairs in its order.

The wonderful thing about sympathy is that we never run out of it. There's no rule stopping us from being sympathetic to multiple plights at once, there's no law that necessitate things always exist on the good-evil binary. Yes, Zeus sentenced Prometheus to sufferation in Tartarus for what (to us) seems like a cruel reason. Prometheus only wanted to help humans! But when you think about Prometheus' actions from a king's perspective, the narrative is completely different: Prometheus stole divine knowledge and gifted it to humans after Zeus explicitly told him not to. And this was after Prometheus cheated all the gods out of a huge portion of wealth by having humans keep the best part of a sacrifice's meat while the gods must delight themselves with bones, fat and skin. Yes, Zeus gave Persephone away to Hades without consulting Demeter but what king consults a woman who is not his wife about the arrangement of his daughter's marriage to another king? Yes, Zeus breaks the marriage vows he set with Hera despite his love of her but what is the Master of Fate if not its staunchest slave?

The nuance is there. Even in his most bizarre actions, the nuance and logic and reason is there. The Ancient Greeks weren't a daft people, they worshipped Zeus as their primary god for a reason and they did not associate him with half the vices modern audiences take issue with. Zeus was a father, a visitor, a protector, a fair judge of character, a guide for the lost, the arbiter of revenge for those that had been wronged, a pillar of strength for those who needed it and a shield to protect those who made their home among the biting snakes. His children were reflections of him, extensions of his will who acted both as his mercy and as his retribution, his brothers and sisters deferred to him because he was wise as well as powerful. Zeus didn't become king by accident and it is a damn shame he does not get more respect.

[thisbluespirit]

Films watched (1990s): THE WINSLOW BOY (1999); dir. & screenplay David Mamet (adapted from the play by Terence Rattigan). Starring Nigel Hawthorne, Jeremy Northam, Rebecca Pidgeon & Gemma Jones.

"No, not justice. Right. Easy to do justice. Very hard to do right."

[curatedspacefiller]

I'm so horny for the fact they wrote the whole 'once you put it out there, they decide what it is. It can get away from you' scene into a show based on work of an author who is famous for threatening fanfic writers with legal action

And that's on top of the horniness I already had for them treating the source material as a light suggestion at best

[winepresswrath]

hi! i always love your MDZS/CQL takes; can i ask what are the questions you think CQL is asking, as compared to MDZS?

I haven't actually revisited either canon in ages, which is making me nervous. what questions the novel is interested in can be pretty contentious all on its own! @mikkeneko has an excellent answer in the notes here which I reccomend to everyone. My own thoughts are honestly pretty scattered- I keep on deleting things and going hm, that's not quite right.

So, for the obvious-to-me example, people reasonably zero in on the creation of innocent doctors/radish farmers who Wen Ruohan is holding hostage. In CQL it's easy to infer that Wen Qing and Wen Ning are maybe the only cultivators and almost certainly the only combatants among the Wen remnants, and their status is much more ambiguous in the novel, which I personally think is asking, essentially, "and so what? were they wrong to run, when they had a chance? Do they deserve what Jin Guangshan will do to them if they go back? Aren't they just people, actually?" Whereas the question that CQL is asking is more to the effect of "What does Wen Qing owe these people, when she is their only defence? What is she entitled to do to save them, at other people's expense? If she fucks up that moral calculus, what then? Does it matter if she's personally fond of some of the outsiders who are going to get hurt? If one of them saved her brother? Later, this question will flip to what Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng, and the parallel to Jiang Cheng's situation in particular is, I think, genuinely pretty fun. You're giving up the Wen as soldiers who've laid down their arms in exchange for Wen Qing also grappling with leadership and the question of how many horrors she can stand to look the other way on to protect her own people. one reason I keep deleting so much is that a lot cql's changes were motivated at least in part by censorship, which I think we mostly share a general and justified distaste for! but I also think that within the bounds of that censorship the creative team put a lot of work into actually doing something interesting with those changes. Or, for another example- nieyao! There's a much greater emphasis on the nmj-jgy relationship, it's unambiguously very close and they are clearly extremely important to one another, and I think that's because the cql team has a lot to say about love, trust, power, and the ways those things interact, and that reflects back on all of the other relationships in play, including Wangxian. Almost every time, when CQL chooses change a relationship they make the characters in question closer- that's true for Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji, for Wen Qing and the Yunmeng contingent, for Zixuan and Mianmian, and Huaisang and Meng Yao. It's even true for Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian, who have a close and trusting relationship in first life! CQL puts a much greater emphasis on "all right, so you care, what next?" How do you choose someone and then choose to be good to them? What if there's a massive power disparity between you? What if you seriously disagree about your priorities and morals? How do you trust someone who's betrayed you? When is it a stupid choice to trust at all? How do you have faith that you know someone well enough for that trust to be meaningful?

for legal reasons i would like to specify that it's not that mdzs isn't interested in these problems. i do remember wangxian's literal trust fall. cql is asking these questions all the time about everyone. also for legal purposes i'm not suggesting that cql lwj and jc love each other. but! they establish a three month wartime partnership looking for wwx and then jc immediately drops him on wwx's say-so despite apparently having a positive enough opinion of him to tell wwx he thinks they should make up twice. lan wangji will later tell wwx he thinks he should loop jc in on the second flautist! these are people trying to navigate some kind of relationship/shared interest/community, as opposed to a hateful void. cql wants to say hey, how do you go about this? while I'm here and rambling cql also puts a lot of emphasis on wwx's connection to yunmeng and changes things up so instead of feeling alienated right before he leaves our last glimpse of him there is happily picking lotuses and playing with a kid! in both stories the narrative is asking who do you protect? who do you leave behind? can you ever get it back? but the angles are very different.

[rotisseries]

rick riordan dickriders on here will be like "why are you complaining about the pjo tv show, go watch the movies and see what a bad adaptation really looks like" ok well listen to the musical watch it on youtube and see what a good adaptation looks like bitch. it can be done. as a fucking stage musical. what did that 15 million per episode do for disney that chris mccarell couldn't

[duncneydivorce]

don’t get me wrong pietro and namor fucked and if marvel weren’t cowards they’d canonise it already but I don’t understand why people want them to actually get together though. narratively its one of the worst things you could do to pietro. He already did the ‘struggling to assimilate’ thing for like 40 years. that’s what his storylines in America and Atilian were all about and it made for a really interesting character evolution for pietro and was a great way to explore the trauma of displacement but he’s long outgrown that by now. He shouldnt be isolated from everyone else in his life again. Shipping him off to Atlantis to go through the same exact thing all over again would regress his character by DECADES just to recycle a storyline he’s already done! Its bad writing that would ruin his character and just boring 😭

[s0fter-sin]

i’ve stopped expecting interesting animation from bones. the star and stripe fight is cool but like every other fight/moment in mha, it’s only cool bc the source material itself is cool; bones does nothing to elevate the manga

they rarely try to experiment with colour and style. i saw so many colourings of the moment star and stripe made a giant version of herself out of the air; people made her look like a cosmos, like it reflected and bent the sky around her, doing so many inventive things and for the anime to just make her an outline against that godforsaken sky? i’m disappointed

but people will take me saying i’m disappointed and spin it to me saying the fight was bad. it wasn’t, just like most fights and moments in the anime aren’t bad but that’s all bc horikoshi knows how to draw. they never do anything beyond that; they never try and adapt it. whether it’s bc of time, direction, budget, or what have you, they will never do something truly inventive with their colouring

i’ve said this before and i’ll say it again, it’s not just that the sky is blue; it’s what the blue sky represents and that is an unwillingness to broaden their colour palette or atmosphere to support the changes in the tone of the story. the story isn’t just “will midoriya get into his dream high school and achieve his dream job?” it’s child abuse and societal systems and their dysfunctions, it’s racism and morality and is it right to try and save someone who’s determined to destroy the world just bc they are also a victim?

look at the finale of atla, a show that mirrors the narrative tone of mha; it starts out bright and colourful and vibrant to match the happy and small stakes nature of the story and as the tone of the story changes, the environment changes to reflect that. the siege of the north pole? everything goes blood red when the moon spirit is threatened, then goes completely desaturated when it is killed with only fire bending having any colour. the day of black sun? uses a solar eclipse to change the lighting. the entire sozin’s comet fight? has red skies and lighting to show the threat

bones abject refusal to change anything about the art itself is a detriment to horikoshi’s complex narrative

[caughtkuru]

oh trashcan man they’ll never get you the way i get you

[longagoitwastuesday]

Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie as Heathcliff and Cathy seems like out of The Onion

[tofixtheshadows]

Shadow and Bone was a good show.

It was not without flaws, but I will always respect when media swings for the fences.

[queerofthedagger]

oh so it's Bad bad. jesus christ

[raina-at]

I think it's fascinating that Denis Villeneuve says he wants to make a movie out of Dune: Messiah, and then stop. It's a bit like if Star Wars had said after Empire Strikes Back: Yeah, that seems a good place to leave it.

[winepresswrath]

Every character on this show struggles with feeling unlovable because they're somehow broken or dirty or just put together wrong but for my money the real winners in this terrible competition are Claudia and Armand. There are, I think, a lot of echos between them especially in showverse- parental abandonment, abuse, being rescued and remade by vampires. Armand was one year older than Claudia when a vampire found him in a terrible situation and brought him home. So naturally just as Claudia finds someone she thinks could really love and know all of her Armand is going to kill her in the desperate hope of keeping someone who might love and know all of him.

[darkfrog24]

The one that got away

Still haven't seen the new Percy Jackson show but I have seen some fan reaction and here's what I'm getting:

In the show, there's a lot more Poseidon+Sally interaction. In the show, Sally Jackson is the woman he loves.

In the books, Sally is the ex who very much dumped him.

[harrowscore]

a few days ago i (re)watched the 25th anniversary concert of les misérables and. oh god. i forgot how much this musical did éponine dirty