#you could have TRIED to make more than like. a singular symbolic shot | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bladekindeyewear · 4 years

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HS^2 bloggin’ mainline 2020-10-31

THE SPOOKTOBER SPOOKD8 IS HERE! Time to blog it and hope to the lord of bones that it heavily features the 12-foot Home Depot Skeleton! Continuing from last time.

Will John remember that he should be off protecting the other kids from running off? Or will he search for Vrissy finally, now that he’s spent a literal DAY staring at his house burning down?

> (==>)

This is the last Blood tie with your childhood and the past you were clinging to like a man-child, finally cut. Your psyche is no longer allowed to be....

....Housetrapped.

Now get your Breathy ass over to your more adult responsibilities. Or do something as irresponsible as usual, but more forward focused and thus singularly impressive.

> (==>)

I LITERALLY GASPED

I knew I was a fatally addicted Homestuck fanboy despite the trauma but I didn’t know I was THAT much of a just-over-thirty-year-old fanboy, I literally GASPED out loud. To finally have the joy and confidence for the future that comes with JOHN and KARKAT together IN PERSON and interacting with a common goal.

What a dramatic, perfect shot. This IS Karkat right? That’s what the visuals and my heart and soul said

> (==>)

THEY’RE CLOSE FRIENDS

CLOSE ENOUGH FOR THAT

KARKAT HAS COME SO FAR

Karkat and John conversations are some of the strongest in Homestuck, I ship them as FRIENDS so hard

It brings to mind something I mentioned in the Breath, Blood, and the Flow of Reality explanation/theorypost, which was holy shit SEVEN YEARS AGO wow

I didn’t always understand the appeal of John as a character, ranking him in the middle of my liked characters list. But after a while, I suddenly noticed how enjoyable he was for the things his conversations did to others, making his pesterlogs some of the most enjoyable to read. I wrote the following two years ago, in a character rankings thread, back when we knew jack shit about the import of classes and roles:

“I didn’t really see why I should think John was such an amazing character until I realized his consistent effect on the other party. He’s goofy and doesn’t really understand anything, but he understands just enough about his friends and others to make cutting, hilarious, almost unintentional insights that can change people for the better, even if he’s off the mark. It’s not what he says himself, but what he brings about in others that makes him so great to read. I mean, if you wall him off from everyone else… he kind of fails.

That’s why I take issue with the complaint of protagonist syndrome, here. John is very little by himself, but enhances all the characters around him immensely. Imagine if John were doomed to stay the least powerful and/or game-advancing of the kids and trolls combined; notice how little that would do to the story, or his beneficial role in it.”

John cut himself off from EVERYONE for YEARS in the Candy timeline. He tried to be close to people and just ended up distancing himself from it. He tried to keep himself tied down by his old home and memories of the version of Dad he lost, and all sorts of childish stuff. But that tie is cut, and the bonds he’s forged need to be grasped to bring him out to exercise his maturity, because Breath is futile without real BLOOD.

> (==>)

Awesome shot.

KARKAT: ROUGH DAY, HUH.

youtube

(that was supposed to skip to 2:26 when you click but I couldnt embed it that way -- I haven’t metal geared i just seen clips and super best friends & know some memes)

So many scars. I used to even ship Jane and Karkat a little so they could just be aghast together at everyone’s shenanigans and level criticism at them together, but to think Jane’s fought and hurt Karkat THIS much...

(And yeah, his blood color is shown through his eyes now at this age, that’s correct.)

> (==>)

Oh my fucking god, going from that to Sprite mode that abruptly. XD

This is great.

JOHN: karkat? JOHN: what are you doing here? KARKAT: IT'S NICE TO SEE YOU TOO.

Hah, SO close that Karkat’s immediately critical of NOT being greeted warmly. :)

JOHN: this isn't a battlefield, it's just... KARKAT: THE OBLITERATED, SMOLDERING HUSK OF YOUR FORMER HOME. JOHN: well, yeah. KARKAT: WHICH WAS DESTROYED AS COLLATERAL IN AN ONGOING MILITARY CONFLICT. JOHN: oh all right, fine. JOHN: it just feels weird to call it that. JOHN: i guess i'm used to thinking of home as somewhere far away from all that war stuff.

Yeah John, the burning down from a bomb that was meant for you and ALL of your friends’ children is supposed to shatter you out of that illusion.

I’d continue criticizing, but Karkat’s about to do it for me:

KARKAT: JESUS *CHRIST* JOHN. KARKAT: I CANNOT EVEN BEGIN TO LIST ALL THE WAYS IN WHICH THAT CONSTITUTES A SHORT-SIGHTED AND PUKE-WORTHILY IGNORANT THING TO SAY TO ME, PERSONALLY. KARKAT: AND FRANKLY I DON'T HAVE TIME TO BOTHER, THANKS TO THE COUNTLESS FIRES I HAVE BEEN PUTTING OUT ALL DAY, THE ONE PRESENTLY CONSUMING YOUR HIVE NOTWITHSTANDING. KARKAT: YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD HAVE MADE THINGS GO A BIT MORE SMOOTHLY? JUST A FRACTION? KARKAT: IF YOU HADN'T JUST DECIDED TO WANDER OFF THE INSTANT SHIT STARTED HAPPENING. JOHN: jeez, i'm sorry karkat. JOHN: i had no idea how much time had passed. JOHN: i must have gotten a bit distracted by my house being blown up.

A BIT DISTRACTED. You empty-headed irresponsible guardian.

KARKAT: NOT WANTING TO POINT OUT THE OBVIOUS, BUT I FEEL LIKE THIS WAS A PROBLEM THAT YOU OF ALL PEOPLE WERE UNIQUELY AND MAGICALLY EQUIPPED TO DEAL WITH. JOHN: huh? KARKAT: YOU KNOW. KARKAT: WITH YOUR SHOOSH THING. JOHN: my shoosh thing. KARKAT: YOUR SHOOSH THING. KARKAT: THE GUSTY NONSENSE? THE GIFT OF GAS?? KARKAT: YOUR SBURB ALLOCATED BLOW JOB??? JOHN: uh. KARKAT: THE SUPERNATURAL COMMUNION YOU HAVE WITH ALL THINGS WINDY, YOU ASS!! JOHN: oh right, that. JOHN: that would have let me put the fire out, maybe. JOHN: i don't think there's anything in my skillset that would have unexploded my house though. KARKAT: THAT'S FAIR.

Mhmm. Many of the characters in Candy AND Meat are currently in a situation where due to either years of unpractice in a worshipful society that discourages it by fueling their insecurities or inability to due to confinement in a years-long space trip has caused them to AVOID using their powers for the main beginning stretch of our new story. People have complained about them outright “forgetting” to use their powers, and they’re right, to an extent, but it’s story-justified. They’re almost all physically or psychologically prevented from doing so! But those walls are coming down, starting now. They’re going to come back into their own. And we’re bound to see a LOT MORE of these literal Gods using their abilities to shape the fabric of reality as the story progresses.

JOHN: i suppose i'll add one more notch to the daily tally of crazy stuff that happened which i just have to accept as my life now.

It was all already happening, you just refused TO accept it until now.

JOHN: so... JOHN: what else happened while i was caught up watching the symbolic representation of my former life get consumed in a giant fire ball? KARKAT: OH BOY. WHERE TO START. KARKAT: SO FIRST OFF, IN HINDSIGHT, TODAY WAS PRETTY OBVIOUSLY JUST ONE HUGE BAITED TRAP. KARKAT: I SAY "IN HINDSIGHT", BUT FORTUNATELY IT WAS ALSO EXTREMELY APPARENT EVEN IN FORESIGHT TO THOSE OF US WHO SPENT A FEW SECONDS THINKING ABOUT IT. JOHN: ...right. KARKAT: OH COME ON EGBERT, SERIOUSLY? KARKAT: KIDNAPPING A PERSON OF IMPORTANCE, ONLY TO LET US KNOW PRECISELY WHERE AND ON WHAT OCCASION THEY WOULD BE MOST ACCESSIBLE FOR A RESCUE ATTEMPT? KARKAT: HAVING THAT OCCASION BE NONE OTHER THAN THE CORPSE PARTY OF A HIGHLY NOTEWORTHY POLITICAL FIGURE, WHOSE CASKET MIGHT AS WELL HAVE HAD A GIANT "KICK ME" SIGN DAUBED ON IT? KARKAT: THERE WAS BASICALLY NO WAY IT WASN'T A FRONT FOR SOMETHING HUGE. AND IT WAS! KARKAT: WE HAPPEN TO BE SITTING IN FRONT OF ONE FACET OF THAT HUGENESS AT THIS VERY MOMENT.

Wait. Oh, God.

Someone brought up the possibility that Gamzee might still be revivable by Jane, and I speculated that she’s deliberately CHOOSING not to because she actually doesn’t like him that much or has some semblance of fucking sense left in her.

But what if she PLANNED to have a public funeral for him, and then revive him SOON AFTER to turn him into a Christ-like resurrecting figure? D:

JOHN: well, when you put it like that... JOHN: i guess we all got pranked pretty hard, huh. KARKAT: THIS IS NO TIME FOR YOUR SHITTY NERD PRANKS JOHN. KARKAT: FRANKLY I'M INSULTED THAT YOU THINK SUCH A WORD IS EVEN REMOTELY APPOSITE TO THE PRESENT SITUATION. KARKAT: OTHER THAN TO DESCRIBE THE WAY I AM PERSONALLY BEING "PRANKED" BY REALITY IN HAVING TO EXPLAIN ALL THIS TO YOU.

Pretty much. Get serious, John, actual people are dying by the--

--oh right, he was like this through the apocalypse and death of everyone on Earth.

I guess this is in character. Paradox Space made sure to choose someone empty-headed and disconnected from reality enough to withstand this shit easily. He really is a Breath player.

KARKAT: IT TURNS OUT THAT WE DIDN'T NEED TO PUT SO MUCH EFFORT INTO THE RESCUING YIFFY PART OF THE OPERATION. KARKAT: SHE BASICALLY RESCUED HERSELF WHEN ALL WAS SAID AND DONE. KARKAT: AND TOOK CARE OF KICKING GAMZEE'S CORPSEBOX OVER WHILE SHE WAS AT IT, IN A STUNNING DISPLAY OF EFFICIENCY WHICH THE REST OF US CAN ONLY ASPIRE TO.

Excellent, yeah.

JOHN: it sounds like she'd be a pretty welcome addition to your ranks then. KARKAT: SHE'S A CHILD, YOU MORON.

Yeah, you’re fucking grown up now, John. Stop thinking of the kids as the ones who have to rise up when the adults aren’t all doomed or dead.

KARKAT: THE VRISKAS, PLURAL. JOHN: shit. KARKAT: THEY'VE BOTH BEEN CAPTURED. JOHN: shiiiiiiiit. KARKAT: YEAH. KARKAT: GREAT WORK KEEPING AN EYE ON THEM, BY THE WAY! KARKAT: YOU LITERALLY HAD ONLY ONE JOB, AND YOU MESSED IT UP IN THE EQUALLY SINGULAR WAY IT WAS POSSIBLE TO DO. JOHN: urgh, i know, i know. ):

At least he messed that part up while he was TRYING to watch them, and not when he wandered off and watched his house burn for a whole day instead of protecting the remaining kids.

KARKAT: JANE'S PLAN FOR THIS CONFLICT HAS THUS FAR CONSISTED ALMOST ENTIRELY OF KIDNAPPING VARIOUS HIGH PROFILE CHILDREN. KARKAT: IT'S BIZARRE. KARKAT: AS THOUGH WE ARE FIGHTING A WAR OF ATTRITION, WHERE THE MAIN RESOURCE BEING UTILIZED IS THE OFFSPRING OF THE MOST POWERFUL PEOPLE ON THE PLANET. KARKAT: IF IT WASN'T ONE OF THE CORE TENETS OF HER FASCISTIC PHILOSOPHY, I'D BE TEMPTED TO SAY THAT CURBING REPRODUCTION MIGHT HAVE BEEN A GOOD IDEA, IF ONLY TO PREVENT THIS KIND OF FUCKSHIT NONSENSE FROM HAPPENING.

Leave it to Karkat to point out the blatant absurdity of Homestuck’s nonsense in any given situation.

JOHN: wait. JOHN: wait a minute. JOHN: you said that both vriskas have been captured, right? KARKAT: EXCUSE ME WHILE I WEEP FOR JOY AT THE REVELATION THAT YOU HAVE BEEN PAYING ATTENTION FOR ONCE. JOHN: okay, well putting that emotional outburst aside for a moment. JOHN: how is that even possible? JOHN: doesn't vriska, the original vriska, still have her magic alien mind control powers? JOHN: it seems like it should be basically impossible for anyone to kidnap her. KARKAT: YOU'VE STUMBLED ASS BACKWARDS ACROSS THE MOST IMPORTANT POINT OF THIS UNFORTUNATE DEVELOPMENT.

...Is Karkat going to put two and two together and realize that Vriska must have been intentionally captured of her own free will for some sort of ploy?

KARKAT: YOU ARE CORRECT, IN THAT WITH HER CASTE-TYPICAL, *COMPLETELY SCIENTIFIC AND NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT MAGICAL* PSYCHOMANIPULATIVE ABILITIES, STAYING OUT OF CROCKER'S REACH SHOULD HAVE BEEN COMPLETELY TRIVIAL FOR SERKET PRIME. KARKAT: EVEN ACCOUNTING FOR THE FACT THAT SAID ABILITIES ARE NOT NEARLY AS POTENT ON HUMANS AS THEY ARE ON FELLOW TROLLS, THEY STILL OUGHT TO HAVE TIPPED ANY ALTERCATION SQUARELY IN HER FAVOR. KARKAT: BUT SOMEHOW, IT DIDN'T! KARKAT: INSTEAD, THINGS APPEAR TO HAVE GONE GLOBES UP IN CLASSIC VRISKITE FASHION, AND NOW ONE OF THE MOST UNEXPECTED AND UNWANTED BUT NEVERTHELESS USEFUL WEAPONS IN OUR ARSENAL IS DOING TIME IN CROCKERJAIL. KARKAT: THAT'S ABOUT ALL WE'VE BEEN ABLE TO GLEAN FROM TAPPING INTO THE BATTERBITCH AIRWAVES, WHICH IS A FANCY TERM FOR EAVESDROPPING ON THOSE OF HER AGENTS WHO TALK A LITTLE TOO LOUDLY IN SEMI-PUBLIC SPACES. JOHN: jeez. JOHN: i really screwed that up, didn't i.

Guh. I guess Karkat is underestimating Vriska a bit or just assuming the worst out of a habit of assuming the worst of everything. (Or, if he has his suspicions, he’s not telling John.)

KARKAT: HAVING SAID ALL OF THAT, AND WITH THE RECOGNITION THAT I AM CHOOSING TO NURSE YOUR BRUISED FEELINGS DURING A PLANET WIDE CONFLICT FOR THE FATE OF MY SPECIES, KARKAT: IS THERE ANYTHING I CAN DO TO EXPEDITE YOUR GETTING THE FUCK OVER IT? JOHN: i... hm.

Yeah, use your shoosh-paps from Karkat wisely, John. You needed them.

JOHN: i don't really know? JOHN: this all feels wrong, karkat. JOHN: no offense, but when you're around, it's usually a lot... KARKAT: A LOT WHAT? JOHN: a lot funnier. KARKAT: FUNNIER. JOHN: how to put this. JOHN: normally listening to you go on and on about how much we've fucked everything up is just very funny! JOHN: but now it's just not the same. JOHN: maybe it's part of what's going on with this entire reality? i don't know. JOHN: once upon a time i would have put down your ability to pull a silly rant out of your butt as a fundamental law of physics or something. JOHN: remember back when we first knew each other? JOHN: it felt like all you ever said to me was how much you thought i was screwing up and being a useless asshole. JOHN: and once i realized that you were also just a dumb kid who didn't know what was going on, i started to kind of enjoy it. JOHN: but now it's like... the only one who's still a dumb kid is me, and everyone else has something big and important going on that i just don't understand.

Mhmm, Karkat has every reason to be mad. And everything really, REALLY close to you that you care about is in danger from the very things he’s mad about. Karkat is RIGHT for once with every angry seemingly-exaggerated-but-not word, and that’s throwing you.

JOHN: i thought that i finally got what was going on with this whole war and everything. i wanted to be useful! JOHN: i guess i got a little too wrapped up in the feeling of something finally happening again. JOHN: and then watching it all blow up in my face, kind of literally now that i think about it...

...you think maybe something that happens to be A WAR is actually a big farking deal that you should be serious about??

JOHN: it's hard not to feel even more dejected about the situation than i was before. JOHN: and now even the patented karkat vant rant has lost all its sparkle.

IT’S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE FUN.

JOHN: maybe if you had like, painstakingly itemized a list of all the things wrong with my plan in a comically overdone fashion or something. KARKAT: I CONSIDERED IT, BUT HONESTLY THERE WAS SO MUCH WRONG THAT I CONCLUDED THAT THE BEST THING FOR EVERYONE WOULD BE TO NEVER SPEAK OF IT AGAIN. JOHN: oh. okay.

Heheh.

KARKAT: IF WE'RE BEING HONEST, YOU DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A PLAN, JOHN. KARKAT: CALLING IT A PLAN WOULD IMPLY THAT IT WAS A STRUCTURED SEQUENCE OF STEPS DESIGNED TO ACHIEVE A GOAL. KARKAT: WHAT YOU CAME UP WITH WAS A CONVOLUTED MESS WHICH STILL SOMEHOW INVOLVED DOING FUCKALL. KARKAT: AND I USE CONVOLUTED HERE IN THE SAME WAY THAT I WOULD TO DESCRIBE THE FRENZIED DRAWSTICK SCRIBBLES OF A SQUALLING HUMAN INFANT.

All Breath and no Blood? All concept and influence and ephemeral accomplishments and no physical impact or results?

Karkat has been fighting this whole time with physical results in mind. He NEEDS to tie that ephemeral shit down, and once added to his plan, once Breath sweeps the tide of actual sentiment of people, inspires them, you have an actual victory in reach instead of just more attrition.

KARKAT: I APPRECIATE THAT YOU SEEM TO HAVE DUG YOUR PAN OUT OF YOUR OWN CHUTE THE FEW MICROMETERS NECESSARY TO NOTICE THE PRECISE DEGREE TO WHICH THE WORLD IS BEING JUDICIOUSLY BATFUCKED RIGHT NOW.

Really need to dig yourself out more than that, John, yeah.

KARKAT: AS HARD AS IT IS TO BELIEVE, THAT'S A FEAT WHICH NO SMALL NUMBER OF PEOPLE ARE COMPLETELY INCAPABLE OF DOING!

(Which is why your plan of attack needs more Breath!)

KARKAT: BUT NOTICING THE PROBLEM AND MAKING MEANINGFUL PROGRESS TOWARDS SOLVING IT ARE TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS. KARKAT: THE NEXT TIME YOU GET THE IMPULSE TO "LEND A HAND", YOU'D BE BETTER OFF CANNING IT FOR FIVE MINUTES AND LISTENING TO THOSE OF US WHO'VE BEEN TRYING TO SOLVE IT A LOT LONGER THAN YOU HAVE. KARKAT: THIS ISN'T AN EXERCISE BEING CONDUCTED IN ORDER FOR YOU TO PROVE YOUR PERSONAL DEGREE OF MORAL RECTITUDE. KARKAT: AND IF IT WAS, YOU WOULD HAVE ALREADY FAILED MISERABLY! SO DO YOURSELF AND EVERYONE ELSE A FAVOR AND STOP TREATING IT LIKE ONE. JOHN: well... all right. if you say so karkat.

Phew. Let’s hope he takes Karkat’s gift of a worldbound, arms-in-the-dirt sense of responsibility (Blood) and runs with it.

KARKAT: I DO SAY SO, EMPHATICALLY AND AT GREAT VOLUME. KARKAT: AND NOW THAT MY OBLIGATION TO CATECHIZE YOU ON THE SUBJECT OF YOUR OWN LIFE IS FULFILLED, I HAVE A WAR TO GET BACK TO. JOHN: wait, hold on. KARKAT: OH MY GOD WHAT NOW.

--is it gonna be a hug?

> (==>)

JOHN. Put it together.

JOHN: you can't be leaving already. JOHN: there's... so much we still need to talk about!

No, not that!!

...well, yes, I’m all for more of you two talking but. This ain’t just about you two.

KARKAT: WHAT MORE COULD THERE POSSIBLY BE FOR US TO DISCUSS?? KARKAT: PLEASE DO NOT TELL ME YOU JUST HAD ANOTHER EMOTION THAT WE NEED TO DROP EVERYTHING IN ORDER TO DISSECT. JOHN: no, that's not what i'm talking about at all. JOHN: karkat, we still haven't spoken about *you*! KARKAT: ABOUT ME? JOHN: yes. KARKAT: ABOUT *ME*? JOHN: about you. KARKAT: WHAT THE FUCK ABOUT ME. JOHN: well... JOHN: you know, how you feel! KARKAT: HOW I FEEL. JOHN: or just... JOHN: argh, i don't know!

This was more of an intervention than a feelings jam, John. I’m not sure John’s in the condition right now to Breathily inspire Karkat somehow and help his war with an idea and drive he didn’t have before -- like he SHOULD eventually -- but I suppose we’re about to see.

JOHN: it's just been so long since we've seen each other. JOHN: all sorts of things have happened in that time, and it doesn't feel right to just not even mention any of it! KARKAT: LIKE WHAT?? JOHN: oh, i don't know karkat, literally anything! JOHN: i mean, look at you. JOHN: you are decked out in a tight body suit and have an eyepatch and everything. there is simply no way there isn't something to discuss there.

You talked with him plenty while NOT in person, though.

> (==>)

Such MOOD. What a good image.

JOHN: or like, forget the eyepatch, we don't have to talk about the eyepatch. JOHN: i feel as though my point still stands? JOHN: there is basically a bottomless well full of stuff to go through. JOHN: i mean we kind of glossed over it when you brought her up earlier, but what about yiffy? JOHN: this might not come across so easily due to human troll cultural boundaries, but her existing is kind of a big deal?? JOHN: i feel like somehow i missed the part where we all sit around and talk about how strange it is that two of our friends went off and had a secret child without any of us knowing! JOHN: is it too much to ask that we have that part now, karkat?

That’s fair. And they DO need to talk about it! But this is sort of like in the Game -- there’s important shit to do, and not a whole lot of time to do it. You’re going to do a lot of talking, but you won’t be able to do all you want with certain people separated from you by the circumstances of how this war is dividing your responsibilities.

JOHN: i mean, maybe it just doesn't mean that much to you. KARKAT: JOHN. JOHN: which is a little strange, given that it ties in to the whole conflict that you had with jade and dave. JOHN: oh god we have to talk about dave. KARKAT: JOHN. KARKAT: FUCKING HELL! KARKAT: I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT DAVE. JOHN: no, this is what i mean, karkat. JOHN: we need to talk about dave! KARKAT: HAHA! LIKE SHIT WE DO!! KARKAT: I HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE HOW THIS IS EVEN A RELEVANT TOPIC OF CONVERSATION. JOHN: oh come on. JOHN: there's no way you aren't feeling kind of messed up about him, right?

THIS is fair. Karkat does need to talk about this with somebody. Whether John is the right somebody... I guess he is where Dave is concerned. And he has to talk to Jade eventually, too.

JOHN: i know i am. JOHN: whenever i think about how things ended between you two... JOHN: especially now that he's... JOHN: ugh, i'm sorry. i'm SO sorry karkat. sorry doesn't even begin to cover it. JOHN: this whole thing feels so impossibly sad. JOHN: all i'm trying to say is... JOHN: it's not healthy to bottle these feelings up and not acknowledge them. JOHN: even if you aren't feeling anything right now, and i don't for a moment believe that's true, *i* need to talk about dave! JOHN: so can we please just talk about dave for a moment. KARKAT: NNNNGNGNGGGGGGGUUUUUUGUUGHHHHHHHH FINE.

It’s difficult to live in a Daveless world.

KARKAT: IF IT WILL GET YOU TO SHUT UP ABOUT THIS TOPIC FOR EVEN A BRIEF MOMENT, THEN FINE. KARKAT: REGARDLESS OF HOW POINTLESS AN EXERCISE I CONSIDER IT TO BE, I WILL DISCUSS WITH YOU MY "FEELINGS" ABOUT DAVE. JOHN: okay. JOHN: thank you. KARKAT: ARE YOU PREPARED TO BE INUNDATED WITH NONE OTHER THAN AN UNINTERRUPTED SPATE OF HARD, UNEMBELLISHED DATA VIS A VIS MY SWEEPS-SUPPRESSED, BISCUITFELT EMOTIONS ON THE DAVE SITUATION?? KARKAT: WELL HERE GOES.

--it’s not gonna be short, or cut away, is it? --actually it could just switch to a very sad sunset-like vista of the two sitting there, and one poignant line from him followed by a long, hanging pause.

> (==>)

KARKAT: *DEEP BREATH*

A giant expletive isn’t it.

The best sendoff you could give him.

> (==>)

Holy shit. It really IS a rant!

KARKAT: YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW I REALLY FEEL ABOUT DAVE? KARKAT: HOW I FEEL IS THAT I WISH THAT EVERYONE WOULD STOP FUCKING BOTHERING ME ABOUT HIM!!! KARKAT: ALRIGHT, SO HE AND JADE GOT HUMAN MARRIED!! BIG DEAL!!! KARKAT: DO PEOPLE FORGET THAT I WAS THERE?? I FEEL LIKE EVERYONE IS FORGETTING THAT I WAS LITERALLY INVITED TO THE OCCASION. KARKAT: I'VE EVEN COME TO EXPECT THIS KIND OF AMNESIAC BEHAVIOR FROM EVERYONE ELSE, SINCE I ADMIT THAT I DIDN'T EXACTLY STICK AROUND OR ACTUALLY SHOW MY FACE FOR MOST OF THE ORDEAL, BUT YOU EGBERT SHOULD HAVE NO FUCKING EXCUSE! JOHN: wait, karkat, that's not what i KARKAT: SO YEAH! THAT WHOLE THING HAPPENED, AND I CAME TO TERMS WITH WHATEVER THERE WAS TO COME TO TERMS WITH, WHICH WAS FUCKING *NOTHING*, AND THEN I GOT ON WITH THE ACTUAL IMPORTANT BUSINESS OF TRYING TO PREVENT THE WORLD FROM CRUMBLING! KARKAT: WHICH, NOW THAT WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT, IS *STILL FUCKING HAPPENING*! KARKAT: I AM UTTERLY APPALLED THAT THIS IS AN INFO MORSEL I KEEP HAVING TO SPOONFEED DOWN YOUR WINDCHUTE EVERY FIVE SECONDS, JOHN, I REALLY AM. KARKAT: I MEAN HOLY SHIT, NOW IS NOT THE TIME FOR THIS! KARKAT: AND ONE THING I CAN SAY WITH ABSOLUTE IRONCLAD CERTAINTY IS THAT IF DAVE WERE HERE, HE WOULD SAY THE SAME THING!!

Okay he dealt with it by keeping his hands in the dirt working on hard-fighting responsibilities, yeah, as a Blood player might. But the way he’s ranting about it seems a little-

KARKAT: SPEAKING OF WHICH, WHERE *IS* DAVE?? JOHN: um. KARKAT: I FEEL LIKE IF ANYONE COULD HAVE PREVENTED TODAY FROM DEVOLVING INTO A HEADLESS CLUSTERFUCK, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN... OKAY, MAYBE NOT HIM, BUT AT LEAST HE MIGHT HAVE HELPED DRAG YOU OUT OF YOUR DEPRESSIVE FUGUE A LITTLE SOONER! JOHN: (oh shit.)

Oh SHIT

> (==>)

Oh no... oh no, they’re BOTH about to let it out together.

They’re gonna have to cry it out. Finally, onscreen. THIS is why they weren’t showing us, why they were saving it. It felt so awkward at the time but it’s because it has to culminate in these two, some of the closest to Dave since CHILDHOOD, get to show us the effect on everyone in a microcosm.

KARKAT: NOT ONLY THAT, BUT MAYBE WITH BOTH OF US HERE WE COULD HAVE DISPENSED WITH THIS ENTIRE SORRY TOPIC ONCE AND FOR ALL, IF ONLY FOR YOUR BENEFIT! KARKAT: OH HI DAVE, JOHN SEEMS TO BE UNDER THE IMPRESSION THAT THE UNSPOKEN HISTORY BETWEEN US IS OF SUFFICIENT IMPORT THAT WE NEED TO HASH IT OUT THIS VERY SECOND IN FRONT OF THE BLASTED REMAINS OF HIS HOME! KARKAT: yo karkat that does seem to be a strange thing for my best friend john to be concerned about given that he has spent the past five years wallowing in the depths of deepest divorce fever KARKAT: and especially since jade and i have meanwhile been working as part of your resistance with no complaints, but sure, we can brofist each other and arrange our limbs in an unambiguously platonic way KARKAT: a way which is also flawlessly calculated to communicate to everyone present that here are two guys who are totally and unequivocally over each other JOHN: (oh god. you don't...)

Talk about John’s comment about Karkat’s rants not being hilarious in a situation. THIS situation really tugs it out of them. :(

KARKAT: THAT SOUNDS LIKE A GREAT IDEA DAVE, AND WITH THAT MAYBE THAT WAY WE CAN WASH OUR TOUCH STUMPS OF THIS WHOLE ORDEAL AND NEVER HAVE TO SPEAK OF IT AGAIN! KARKAT: WOULD YOU LIKE THAT, JOHN? KARKAT: WOULD THAT SATISFY YOUR CRAVING FOR CATHARSIS ON THE SUBJECT OF DAVE?? KARKAT: WELL WHY DON'T WE TRY IT THEN. KARKAT: IN FACT, WHY DON'T YOU CALL DAVE AND GET HIM OVER HERE RIGHT NOW! JOHN: (oh my god...)

> (==>)

These visuals are ON POINT. This entire sequence since Karkat showed up is masterfully done.

KARKAT: MAYBE WE SHOULD GET JADE TO COME AS WELL! JOHN: ): KARKAT: FUCK, WHY NOT INVITE FUCKING EVERYONE!!! KARKAT: WHY NOT PRESS "PAUSE" ON THE RACE WAR FOR A MOMENT AND HAVE ONE HUGE FEELINGS JAM LAWNMEAL WHERE WE ALL PUBLICLY EXPATIATE OUR VARIOUS CONVOLUTED EMOTIONS. KARKAT: FORGET PEACE TALKS, GET FUCKING *CROCKER* TO COME! KARKAT: MAYBE THE SIGHT OF A DAVEKAT RECONCILIATION IS THE SECRET KEY TO UNLOCKING THE PART OF HER BRAIN THAT STOPS HER FROM BEING A GENOCIDAL RACIST BITCH!!! KARKAT: HOW COULD WE HAVE POSSIBLY BEEN SO BLIND!!!!!! KARKAT: IF GAMZEE WASN'T DEAD, YOU COULD HAVE INVITED HIM AS WELL! KARKAT: HAHAHA, THAT'S OKAY, WE STILL HAVE A VERITABLE MENAGERIE OF PEOPLE WE KNOW WHO AREN'T DEAD. JOHN: ))))): KARKAT: ALL OF WHOM I AM SURE WILL BE SIMPLY DELIGHTED TO ATTEND WHAT WILL UNDOUBTEDLY BE THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT EVENT IN EARTH C'S BULLSHIT HISTORY. KARKAT: IF THIS IS WHAT IT TAKES, EGBERT, THEN I AM PREPARED TO DO IT! KARKAT: DON'T THINK THAT I WON'T!! KARKAT: IF JUST FOR AN *INSTANT* IT WILL GET EVERYONE OFF MY CASE ABOUT THIS, I WILL STAND UP WITH DAVE IN FRONT OF THE ENTIRE ***FUCKING WORLD*** AND SOLEMNLY VOW THAT I DO NOT GIVE A SHIT!!!! JOHN: KARKAT!!!!

That last bit with John. I can HEAR the rawness in his voice as he shouts that last bit... he’s about to burst into tears. And Karkat is going to have to with him. And they’ll cry it out together, as they should.

> (==>)

JOHN: ugh, fuck, this is just too much! JOHN: i thought you KNEW! KARKAT: KNEW WHAT??? JOHN: dave's GONE, karkat! JOHN: he's... JOHN: he's dead.

Let’s see it happen.

> (==>)

Just body language, the blow of the words...

JOHN: i didn't mean for you to find out like this at all, i thought... JOHN: i mean, i only heard about it yesterday, but i was convinced someone would have told you already! JOHN: apparently one minute he was there, and the next... JOHN: none of us even know how it happened, and it doesn't make any sense that he's dead, but he is. JOHN: he is dead and he's not coming back. KARKAT: JOHN: talk to me karkat, please. JOHN: please talk to me karkat. KARKAT: KARKAT: HE...

Jade and Rose were on a different part of this battlefield, they didn’t have the ability, time, and/or heart to break the news--

> (==>)

KARKAT: HE DIDN'T EVEN SAY GOODBYE?

aaaaAAAA

What a fucking expression, wow.

And what a regret RoboDave has to have for abandoning everyone without so much as a farewell letter. To think that ditching them like that was IN his Ultimate Soul is going to eat away at him. He may be linked to all of his self of selves, but he’s still an individual with individual regrets.

This was a damned good update. See y’all next time.

(It may be the new meds I’m on, but between this and the thorough love I see put into the unofficial archive, I’m suddenly reminded that despite all the drama, I fucking LOVE Homestuck. Even its current incarnation.)

#Homestuck #hs2 #Homestuck Liveblog #upd8 #Homestuck^2 #spoiler #spoilers #John Egbert #Karkat #Dave Strider #Jane Crocker

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meta-squash · 4 years

Text

Brick Club 1.3.3 “Four For Four”

Hugo introduces the chapter by going over the many changes that have happened in Paris since 1817. However, I think it’s kind of an unintentional “the more things change, the more they stay the same” moment when he talks about all these changes, and then a few paragraphs later mentions M. Delincourt and M. Blondeau, law professors at the school whom Bossuet and Marius are still taking courses from 15 years later.

It also feels like a “pay attention” moment here in terms of Hugo talking to the reader. He’s describing these changes that have happened between 1817 and 1862, and yet it’s a moment for the reader to take stock of what has changed in the world between then and the present in which they’re reading, and also what is still the same. Technology is drastically different, social standards are drastically different, and yet you will still find eight friends running around on a weekend having fun, and you will still find a person who falls in love with someone who uses her, and you will still find women who are happy with quick-and-dirty flings, and others who get screwed over by the men in their lives. Technology is ever-changing and constantly advancing, but certain aspects of humanity and human interaction are universal.

In all this discussion of joy and fun, Hugo specifically references Edme-Samuel Castaing, a doctor who in 1822 murdered one close family friend and attempted to murder his brother, in order to gain their fortune. Kind of dark for such a happy occasion. Each chapter leading up to the climax of the dinner seems to have a reference or two that’s just slightly sinister or strange, in the middle of all the happiness.

This chapter really tries to put you in the shoes of the grisettes, with all it’s direct discourse to the reader as well as its beautiful and detailed descriptions of all the places they go and things they do on their outing and how much fun they’re having. The reader is set up for just as intense a disappointment as Fantine here.

Hugo also describes the poet Jean-Pierre-Jacques-August de Labouisse-Rochefort (guy’s got a Tikki Tikki Tembo-level name) walking past them and comparing them to the three Graces, but noting that there’s one too many. Again, this feels like a separation of Fantine from the others. She’s not supposed to be there, not supposed to be in this situation, because she’s not like the other grisettes and perhaps isn’t treating this outing in the same way that the other three girls are.

What are the “keepsakes” Hugo mentions here? I know about Victorian memorial jewelry for mourning or hair-based jewelry and art to commemorate certain occasions, but this seems more romance-based and google is giving me nothing.

Tholomyes is in control here, and everyone knows it, even though Favourite is leading the group. It seems implied that he’s kind of been the one calling the shots the entire time this group has known each other. He’s pretty much a walking display of up-to-date fashion and wealth here. I’m not sure if the “nothing being sacred to him, he smoked” line is in reference to some sort of specific smoking etiquette of the time, or simply just idea that instead of frolicking with the others, he’s hanging back on his own and puffing on this cigar for his own singular pleasure. Either way, giving off pretty big “look at me I’m cool and idgaf” douchebaggery vibes here.

We see Fantine happy! Hugo also draws more attention to her teeth and hair, even having her hold her hat instead of wearing it. Maybe I’m wrong, or maybe working women had different fashions, but my conception of early 1800s hairstyles is fairly pin-heavy updos, so it seems like Fantine’s flyaway hair is just another symbol of her childlike-ness or naivety, especially paired with the description of her “babbling” in the next sentence. Her clothes are also described as being much more conservative than her friends. Altogether the picture of innocent, modest youth.

Erigone is the origin of the constellation Virgo. (Sidenote: trying to look up images of actual ancient Greek masks in the dumpster fire of 2020 is ridiculous.) I couldn’t find any mask references, but there are plenty of Erigone paintings from the late 18th and early 19th century. She also apparently featured in pastoral poetry quite often, so the use of her image here makes sense.

Hugo references Galatea earlier in his description of Fantine, and then again when he says “you could imagine underneath this dress and these ribbons a statue, and inside this statue a soul.” Hugo seems to imply less that she is a sort of Galatea-esque figure, and more that she is like Galatea in that she has a potential inside her that is as yet unrealized. And unfortunately it will remain unrealized, at least until she dies and becomes this symbolic, religious sort of spirit venerated by Valjean.

“A gaiety tempered with dreaminess.” Fantine is so head-in-the-clouds so much of the time. She seems to operate on a slightly different level from everybody else. Somebody mentioned a headcanon of her being autistic? That certainly seems to scan for a lot of this. (I also love it and hate it at the same time. More autistic main characters please! But also less tragic autistic main characters please!)

Hugo is very not subtle about Fantine being a symbol for Innocent And Pure Woman here. He really goes all out when describing her as this working girl who has all this ideal beauty and grace and modesty.

He also really wants to hammer home how important her modesty is specifically. I feel like there are some interesting implications here. Fantine at this point seems to be having as much sex as the other grisettes in her cohort. She gets to be modest and pure despite her sexual activity, while the other grisettes do not. Obviously we don’t really know much about the other girls, so maybe they also have children, but it seems like Fantine may be the only one. So despite the child out of wedlock and the sexual activity, Fantine gets to be pure and modest in personality, in dress, and in symbolism, while her friends are not. Partly I think this is, as Hugo said in the last chapter, an aspect of the powers of Love and how Fantine’s capacity to love so completely makes her different. But what does that say about the other grisettes, who don’t have that passionate and loyal love, and yet are still negatively affected by society or poverty? I mean, I get what Hugo is doing, making Fantine extremely sympathetic, but also making her this pure and modest woman instead of just a regular working girl like her friends seems to imply a betterness? Or at least a Reason for her goodness, while perhaps that reason wouldn’t exist had she been a grisette who acted like the rest of her friends do.

“Love is a fault; be it so. Fantine was innocence floating upon the surface of this fault.” The reason for Fantine’s wisdom is her capacity to love. It’s also her downfall. Because she loves without pretense, without experience, she is ruined. This makes me feel like her “wisdom” isn’t necessarily an intrinsic knowledge of any kind, it’s more like this unhindered ability to love despite the world’s cruelty? Every other main character starts out with a lack of love and then slowly discovers the ability to love (and also to be loved). Fantine starts out with not only the ability to love, but the ability to love completely. She gets screwed over by Tholomyes, and she does harden a little bit, but she never loves Cosette any less. Compare this to the Thenardiers and their children, or Magnon and her children. Fantine’s unique wisdom is that her love does not diminish the more hardship she encounters or the more miserable she becomes.

#les miserables #les miserables meta #brickclub #les mis #les mis meta #is it 5am? am i bad at finishing things NOT at stupid hours of the morning? however did I finish 4 collages for my Les Mis collage project?#yes to all of the above #lm 1.3.3

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dontasktheradiodemon · 4 years

Text

Ship Repairs

This actually happened... mid-October, but somehow I never transferred this chat log, so HERE IT IS NOW. Alastor helps Sir Pentious repair his airship; they take a break in the middle for a picnic lunch and chatter about things like magic and personal boundaries and conquering Hell, you know, normal friend things.

Sir Pentious

Work on the airship continued, now with the benefit of having a giant tentacle monster loading crates into the creation. It was almost complete, with decor really being the finishing touches needed. Pentious would have time to work on mechanisms and making sure everything *there* was in tip top shape... And with Alastor here, it seemed things were taking no time at all.

Other than the fact when Pentious would demand various tools, he wouldn't call them by their actual names, but rather whatever he'd come up with, which likely made the entire cooperative experience much more infuriating.

But now it was a break for lunch! Tea, sandwiches and cuts of meat. Nothing overly sweet this time. There's some brandy on hand if necessary.

Alastor

On the bright side, Alastor was learning an entirely new vocabulary of made-up tool names. Learn something new every day, right?

"Now, I'm no engineer—but it looks to me like you're gonna be done here in just another few days, is that right?" In lieu of any sort of proper etiquette, he'd started spearing cuts of meat with one claw to eat.

Sir Pentious

Sir Pentious sips at his tea, watching Alastor with one opened eye. And at least fifteen others.

"YESs, THAT IS THE PLAN. SHOULD I BE ABLE TO KEEP TO SCHEDULE, BUT YOU KNOW. THINGSs COULD CHANGE AT A MOMENT'Ss NOTICE."

Alastor

"Of course! All schedules are tentative down here." He says so flippantly enough; but there's real nervousness buried beneath it. This ship was smashed twice in short sequence; there are, he has no doubt, overlords and other heavy hitters who must smell blood in the water.

He pushes his concerns down for the moment; he doesn't plan on leaving without addressing them. "Even so. Good to see this thing in almost working order again."

Sir Pentious

Sir Pentious has definitely *thought* about such things, but also.... He's been pleasantly distracted by Valera that he hasn't worked himself to second death trying to fix the airship.

"YES, WELL, THANKS ARE IN ORDER. IT HELPS TO HAVE MORE HANDS ON DECK! OR TENTACLES, AS IT WERE, HAHA."

Good to have them NOT ripping his ship apart, again.

Alastor

"Any time!" He half bows in acknowledgment of the thanks. "It's about time said tentacles did something *useful* around here, anyway."

Good to not be ripping the ship apart again.

Sir Pentious

He's going to take a sandwich and start biting... Just little bites. Mentlegen.

"OH? IS DESTROYING YOUR ENEMIES NOT USEFUL?"

Alastor

"I've never considered you an enemy." The answer's out before it occurs to Alastor that Sir Pentious was quite likely including *other* potential enemies among the pool of his monstrous friend's possible targets. "And barely anyone down here that I DO consider an enemy has hardware big enough to necessitate calling him out! So—no, not much use for him, really." SMOOTH RECOVERY. He's going to stuff half a sandwich in his mouth and hope Sir Pentious focuses on the latter half of his statement.

Sir Pentious

..... <:looking:744577544283750520>

He is Looking at you Alastor.

..... <:squint:548214854138200065>

"... *YES*, WELL. FOR SOMEONE YOU DO NOT CONSSSIDER AN ENEMY, YOU CERTAINLY HAVE A WAY OF TAKING THE STEAM OUT OF HIS ENGINES." Pentious two of those times are entirely your fault. (Maybe even three.)

Alastor

For the next thirty seconds Alastor's number one priority is pretending that didn't cut him to the bone. He arches an eyebrow. "Sometimes someone you don't consider an enemy aims a cannon with a barrel wider than you're tall at your face, and you find you don't have many options but to aim something bigger back."

Brandy sounds better than tea right about now. He's gonna snag that bottle and pour some out. "I could've dodged, I suppose. It would have made me look bad and the hotel would've taken the shot—but I COULD have." A shrug.

Sir Pentious

His tail curls a little more around their picnic area. He's so much longer now. Pentious closes his eyes, grinning just before sipping his tea.

"I WOULDN'T WANT YOU TO GO DOWN WITHOUT A FIGHT, IF I AM BEING COMPLETELY FRANK! WHERE'SSSS THE FUN IN THAT? SSSTILL, YOU DEFENDING A HOTEL? YOUR *LUST* FOR ENTERTAINMENT REALLY DOES MAKE YOU UNPREDICTABLE. WHY, YOU COULD TURN HELL UPSIDE DOWN IF IT MEANT OBSERVING THE BUSINESS VENTURES OF A RATHER AMBITIOUS INSECT!"

This is a. Compliment? Or a drag? It's uncertain, but Penny is looking very smug about it.

Alastor

That's one crisis dodged. "MY lust for entertainment, you say! Right after saying you'd rather a fight with me be fun than easy! I think you've got a bit of entertainment lust yourself!"

He's gonna take it as a neutral statement of fact. "Ha! Maybe. I don't know about turning Hell *upside down,* though—I'm better at knocking things over than setting them back upright. Now, if anything around here is capable of turning Hell upside down..." He gestures in a way meant to take in the airship. "And not for any mere insect, either."

Sir Pentious

*PURRRRRRR*. That's such a loud Cobra purring. Look at him preening, as he brushes his hood over his shoulder, and holds his talons just below his chin... He is so pretty, look at him.

"YES, INDEED, ONLY A MAN OF MY CALIBER, A DEMON SUCH AS I HAS THE CAPABILITY, THE *DRIVE* TO CONQUER AND RULE ALL OF HELL! AND ONCE I FULLY CRACK THE CAPABILITIES OF INFERNAL ENERGIES, I WILL BE UNSTOPPABLE!"

Alastor

Alastor is Looking. A very pretty snake—and a *proud* snake, which just enhances the prettiness.

He's Looking too much. He's started leaning toward Sir Pent. He hastily leans back. "Now, what's this 'infernal energy' business you've been up to lately? Because it sounds to *me* like you're trying to tap into the same power source us magic users have been utilizing." He wiggles his fingers, *magic users*—alchemical and astrological symbols dance in red around his fingertips. "Is that about right?"

Sir Pentious

Sir Pentious seems to be somewhat acclimated to Alastor leaning towards him--his own head is slowly leaning away, unconscious of his own actions therein. Personal space.

His claws wave away the symbols, and Pentious grins at him, "MORE OR LESS, YES. THERE IS A LOT OF ENERGY THAT COURSES THROUGH THE GROUND AND THE VERY AIR IN HELL. WHEN A NEW SINNER ARRIVES, THERE IS ALWAYS A FLUCTUATION IN THE AMOUNT OF INFERNAL ENERGY AT ANY TIME!! I HAVE COME TO THE CONCLUSION THAT IT IS *TIED* TO SSSOULS, AND THAT THE EYES GROWING AROUND HELL (AT LEAST THE ONES I DIDN'T PUT THERE) ARE LOADED WITH INFERNAL ENERGY."

Alastor

Alastor certainly isn't unconscious of being leaned away from. He suppresses a wince. Right. That's something else he needs to bring up. And sooner rather than later.

But the self-consciousness only has a chance to last a couple of seconds as he's dragged back into the fantastical idea of channeling Hell's own energy through machinery.

"And YOU'VE figured out how to—what, convert that energy into electricity? Or just power machinery on the energy itself, unconverted?" Whichever Sir Pentious was doing, he'd certainly demonstrated the concept respectably enough to Alastor—channeling Alastor's own energy to power that absurdly big gun. "I can only imagine what kind of power you're going to have at your disposal once you've scaled that up! Turning manipulating the power of souls from a skill into a science... Why, who WOULDN'T you have the ability to overpower?" He's already busy mentally measuring up Sir Pentious's odds against Lucifer. No, probably not yet; but getting ever closer.

Sir Pentious

Oh, look at him. He's *preening* again. Every time he's praised and uplifted like this, he just looks like he's *so* proud of himself.

"OH, YES, UNFILTERED FOR NOW! BUT I WILL LIKELY WORK ON WAYS TO FILTER OUT THE IMPURITIES... IT IS SSSUCH AN ABUNDANT ENERGY SSOURCE THAT WHEN IT COLLIDESS WITH SOMETHING... MORE EYES ARE FORMED, AND THUS, MORE PATCHES OF ENERGY. OF COURSE, ONLY A DEMON SUCH AS *I* WOULD THINK TO UTILIZE IT!"

Alastor

"I certainly haven't seen anyone else trying!" Which is something, because plenty could have. *Alastor* could have—he himself works with that energy every day, it's the power behind his magic and even his machinery.

But Alastor has only ever used it as he's always used magic, tamed through his intent and his will. Like trying to move water from a river to a pond by cupping it in his hands—and here's Sir Pentious building a canal.

"How much have you looked into technology that's already powered by souls?" Alastor summons up his cane and holds it across their spread of food, microphone out. It rolls its eye as it tries to make eye contact with all of Sir Pentious's. "It works just like any other microphone—but it's not running on a battery, it's running on me. I couldn't begin to tell you how. The way I see it, either you already know that part and you can tell me—or you don't know, and studying it could give your research a boost."

Sir Pentious

Alastor's question has him looking over at the deerman with a bit of a squint. Ah, this topic... He'd attempted to keep his knowledge of this kind of thing on the *down-low*, but it didn't surprise him all that much that Alastor of all people would be more aware of it. Sir Pentious looks more closely at the cane, studying its singular eye, and he takes his hat off, holding the accessory close to it.

"IT IS RATHER A MIX OF THE TWO, ACTUALLY. I DO NOT FULLY UNDERSTAND IT, MYSELF, BUT I DO KNOW THAT OUR BODIES, THE STATES OF OUR SOULS AND MINDS HAVE AN IMPACT ON THE HELLSCAPE AROUND US, OR AT THE VERY LEAST, OUR *PERSONAL* HELLSCAPES."

The Hat is Looking at the Cane. .... Big grin!

Alastor

"Well, do you need another test subject to help you understand more? I'm connected to the cane, I can manipulate radios, I've got limited skill with some other machines... some of it's just broadcasting signals, but some of it's magic. Hell, I've got radio parts IN me—but you're going to have to take me on a couple more picnics before I agree to any dissections!" Look at him so eager to offer assistance, please let him help take over Hell, oh please, oh please— "I'm sure your research is miles beyond anything I'm built to do, but if there's anything I can naturally do more efficiently that you can copy—why reinvent the wheel?"

The cane winks at the hat. It's just a blink. There's no actual way to tell it's winking.

Sir Pentious

HMMMM. Pentious' tongue flicks, and he suddenly leans in VERY close. His hand reaches to grab Alastor's arm, and he begins inspecting him.

"YOU ARE A LITTLE *THIN* TO BE IMPALED WITH MY SIPHONING TOOL. IT WOULD GO RIGHT THROUGH YOU, BUT PERHAPSSSS I COULD WORK ON MAKING SOMETHING SSSMALLER." Another tongue flick, "YES, YES, LIKE A..." OH he's just going off on experimental mumbling. Mad Genius here.

The Hat is Looking Away.

Alastor

That arm is Sir Pentious's now, Alastor doesn't need it. It's safe to lean in now, right?

For the moment, Alastor forcefully swallows back the urge to fling out suggestions and questions, instead listening carefully with ears perked toward the mad genius mumbles.

Well, fine, maybe the cane didn't want to make eye contact. It looks away too.

Sir Pentious

Pentious doesn't lean back this time, though his hood opens up as he rambles on. Big and showy snake.

"HM HM! YESSS, I SHOULD LIKE TO RAM ALL KINDS OF THINGS INTO YOU, HA HA! FOR SCIENCE. FOR DISSSSCOVERY."

He smiles far above his eyes at Alastor. Sir Pentious was looking more in color than usual. This is one happy and energetic Cobra.

The Hat looks back at the cane, making a quizzical expression........

Alastor

Don't mind the brief burst of shocked static as Alastor processes the words that just came out of Sir Pentious's mouth. "... Well! You know me: high pain tolerance and far too curious for my own good! It sounds like an agonizingly good time! Call me over to ram whatever you'd like into me any time you want!"

... Is the hat looking at the cane again? It glances over to check—oh, yes, it is, look away, look away quick. ... Check again.

Sir Pentious

The hat is looking at Pentious now like B/. Penny is ignoring his sassy chapeau as he goes right back to preening.... Dainty claw taps to his hood.

"I SHALL CALL YOU OVER WHEN I HAVE SSSSPACE TO STRAP YOU DOWN TO A TABLE! NYA HA HAAAAAAA!!!"

Alastor

And just when the cane thought it was making some real progress with the hat.

"I'll be eagerly awaiting your call!" It's a date. Well, not a date, but close enough.

Oh, right, there's still food here, isn't there? Alastor nearly forgot. He's gonna grab another sandwich. "Say! While we're on the topic of ramming into each other's personal space..."

Smoothest conversational segue in Hell's history. Ladies and gentlemen, a professional radio host at work.

Sir Pentious

..... That segue is enough for Sir Pentious to realize he said something weird before, and he lights up like a pink light bulb.

"I DIDN'T MEAN THAT IN A *PERVERTED WAY*, ALASSSTOR!!!"

Alastor

"I didn't think you did! I know you m—I didn't mean it that way either!" Okay segue a little faster, Alastor. "It's about—I wanted to talk to you about Broadway."

Sir Pentious

He's already in full Pentious Pout as he replaces his hat on his head. Arms folded. Huff.

"ABOUT BROADWAY? WHAT ISS IT?? I DO NOT WANT TO GO AGAIN FOR A LITTLE WHILE, I HAVE A SCHEDULE TO KEEP TO!"

Alastor

Farewell, hat; cane hardly got to know thee.

"No, about last trip. There was—well." Don't tiptoe around the topic, remember, Sir Pentious prefers direct and plain. Alastor cuts out about five sentences of easing his way into the topic and plunges in. "You shoved me off of you." (And yes, it HAS been haunting him ever since.) "Now, believe it or not, I'm actually putting a little effort into being less of an irritation than usual. If my presence is getting on your nerves... just say so. Preferably before I've become so annoying that you feel the need to bodily push me away." A wan smile. "My goal is to AVOID reaching that point, see."

Sir Pentious

Well, that wasn't what he was expecting. Pentious squints, trying to remember. So much happened that day...

"COME ON, MAN! HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO REMEMBER THAT? COULD YOU BE MORE SPECIFIC???"

Apparently Broadway wasn't enough. Pentious may have smushed all of New York into Broadway. Even the restaurant was Broadway.

"I DO NOT RECALL DOING ANYTHING OF THE SSSORT!"

Alastor

"Oh, well! That's comforting." And also embarrassing, if it was such a not big deal that Sir Pentious doesn't even remember it. "During the musical. When we were leaning on each other. Not long after we were joking about... how much we don't like physical contact." Ah. "That was it. That was the hint to get off that I missed, wasn't it."

Sir Pentious

Pentious looks at him like he's speaking a different language, and he recalls everything going on at that point. These two having a laugh, and then Valera withdrawing and ignoring him suddenly.

He frowns, remembering her hand slipping out of his even though he had squeezed it lovingly. They'd talked about that after but it had hurt his feelings.

He waves Alastor off! "NO, YOU BLITHERING IDIOT! IT WASN'T ABOUT THAT AT ALL!!! VALERA PULLED AWAY FROM ME AND I WAS AGITATED AFTER BECAUSE OF HER BEHAVIOR. WHEN THAT HAPPENED, I WAS NO LONGER IN THE MOOD FOR FRIVOLITY!!"

Alastor

“Oh!” He doesn’t quite heave a sigh of relief, but there’s a static hiss as he exhales. “Well, don’t I look a fool, all this time and it didn’t have a thing to do with me! But give me a little credit, here—how was I supposed to guess that you were shoving *me* because of *her*?”

Sir Pentious

"WELL I DIDN'T THINK IT TO BE SUCH A *BIG DEAL* THAT YOU WOULD HARBOR IT FOR WEEKS." He is Looking at you Alastor, like a man on the brink of Realizing Things.

Except he's Pentious, so he just remains on that brink.

Alastor

Alastor’s #1 survival skill is talking himself back from the brink. “Of course you wouldn’t think so! Not to put too fine a point on it, but at the moment I’m in a far more precarious position than you!” His smile is nearly a grimace. “YOU, after all, are not engaged in ongoing efforts to convince a man you messily backstabbed that you’re worth the risk of keeping around! You don’t have to wonder what little irritation might be the last thing he’s willing to stand out of you. You’ve got nothing to prove.”

He lets that thought linger for only a split second; and then hurries onward: “So my initial request still stands. Tell me if I’m going too far—on anything—BEFORE I’m past the point of no return. You have enough to resent me for. I’m trying not to add more.”

Sir Pentious

Alastor is also very good at just talking a lot, and Pentious is listening but also shifting his mouth from side to side. His hood flares out and he throws his arms up!

"WELL I DIDN'T TELL YOU BECAUSE IT WAS NOT A BIG DEAL TO ME!!! I MAKE A POINT OF BEING DIRECT, ALASSSTOR ! YOU ARE THE ONE WITH DIFFICULTIES ON THAT FRONT, NOT I!"

Alastor

“Clearly it wasn’t! So it’s—The request is for future reference. For situations where it DOES apply.”

Sir Pentious

"WHAT DO YOU TAKE ME FOR?? OF COURSE I WOULD TELL YOU!!"

He stretched out his bowtie, "I HAVE CLASS, AFTER ALL!"

Alastor

“Well, good! Glad that falls under your criteria for class, then.”

Mission accomplished, he supposes. On the other hand, he just tried to be about as direct as a bullet and on top of that spilled approximately 1/3 of his heart to Sir Pentious, and he’s not sure if any of it registered at all.

That’s fine. He’s got brandy.

Sir Pentious

Unfortunately, things always took a while to really register for Sir Pentious. He'd never had friends he could rely on, and even his previous partnership with Match had been, from his perspective, business. Although working together with someone so closely was different for Pentious, too... He was awkward and aggressive and questioning everything.

So he pours himself more tea and looks away, without turning his head... And thinks over the things Alastor has said to him. He was trying so, so hard to be appear trustworthy, and that made the snake's paranoid brain more suspicious!

Which sucked. He liked Alastor's company, which was why he didn't want this to all go belly up. His tail curls closer, now, sliding against the deer's backside. You now have a sofa.

"... ALASSSTOR. I *DO* RECOGNIZE YOUR EFFORT. CONTINUE TO BE UPFRONT WITH ME, I CANNOT PROMISSSE WHAT MY..." He gestures, vaguely, then points to his head with an ashamed expression.

"JUST! *BELIEVE* ME WHEN I SSSAY I WILL *TELL* YOU."

Alastor

He is IMMEDIATELY leaning back on that sofa oh hell yes he's been trying to avoid touching Sir Pentious too much and being able to lean back against him is bliss. It's like a hug, except minus any and all features that resemble a hug in the slightest.

He waves off Sir Pentious's embarrassed disclaimer. "That's all I ask for! I'd like you to notice it. I don't expect you to TRUST it. Getting you to trust it is my job." And a job that he takes zealously seriously. He had been allied with his own Sir Pentious fifteen years before abruptly betraying him; if it takes another fifteen years before this one is completely comfortable with him, it will be fully justified and worth the wait. "I believe you. And thank you."

Sir Pentious

C O m f Y.

Sir Pentious turns his head, idly fidgeting with his jacket. WELL NOW HE FELT AWKWARD. And sweaty. Why did he feel SWEATY he didn't SWEAT. Penny pouting...

He reaches for the brandy, pouring himself a glass!!!

Alastor

That was, in Alastor's opinion, quite enough time spent talking about things like trust and communication. It's high time for Alastor to move them on to another topic. He'd thought of one earlier, what was it?

"Oh! Before I forget again—to celebrate the ship repairs, I got a little housewarming gift!" He pauses. "... Shipwarming gift. Want it now, or should it wait until all the repairs are finished?"

Sir Pentious

Pentious turns his head RIGHT BACK to Alastor in interest. A present??? A present! His hood floops open as he brings a hand out in interest, "OH? A SHIPWARMING GIFT??? HOW THOUGHTFUL! WHAT ISS IT? I AM *DYING* TO KNOW! HAHA!!" That clearly took his mind off of the awkwardness of the previous conversation. Eager to get away from vulnerability, thy name is Sir Pentious.

Alastor

"So, right now it is!" Alastor kind of thought it might be. He opens up a portal in mid-air to reach through and rummage around until he finds and retrieves a simple paper bag with the top rolled shut. "Here. I suspect it's going to take a little explaining." But he'll give Sir Pentious a chance to see what it is first.

Inside the bag are five little pouches of cotton gauze dyed red, tied shut with two long loops of fabric so tightly they'd have to be cut open. Visible beneath the gauze is a second layer to the pouches, clearly made out of snakeskin (guess whose); and between the gauze and the semi-translucent snakeskin, it's probably too difficult to see any further inside. Each double bag is stuffed full with about as much material as could fit inside a typical cup of yogurt, and whatever's inside is slightly crunchy.

Sir Pentious

A paper bag causes a grimace to appear on the serpent's expression.... What, a packed lunch? Of course not, but with the ratty preparation, he's really going to have to be won over!

Though looking inside just raises *further* questions...... Is that his skin. Sir Pentious looks up at Alastor without turning his head up to follow, a kind of expression that reads *Alastor, what the fuck am I looking at?*

Alastor

"I didn't have time to gift wrap it," he says dryly.

He scoots closer to explain the gift. (Note that he doesn't scoot AWAY from Sir Pentious's tail. He just sort of scoots around the perimeter of the picnic so he can keep leaning on the tail.) "I thought that—well, this poor ship got knocked outta the sky twice in short succession, it couldn't hurt for you to have a little bonus protection! Not extra armor—you've got that handled—but something to designed to repel more... MAGICAL assaults. So! You've got yourself the typical crystals and herbs, all bundled up in snakeskin—snakeskin is WONDERFUL for protection work, and no magical ingredients are ever stronger than ones DIRECTLY connected to the person they're meant to protect—plus a tiny portable radio in each one—got those from the dollar store!—to ensure they remain connected to their power source."

Look at him beaming. He's so proud of himself. "Just hang one up by whatever you consider the main entrance, and arrange the other four around the ship against the inside of the hull to form as close to a pentagram as you can, and they'll do the rest! Of course, a few little bags can't knock out every hex, curse, and spell—but they'll make it a damn sight harder for them to get through!"

Sir Pentious

He's listening to Alastor, occasionally tilting his head and plucking up once of the little bags to examine it. Very odd to see his own skin used for something like this... Usually he just burnt it. But he does like the fact that he was given something so specific... Alastor really wanted him to build his ship, and, considering it was an Alastor that blew it up *every time*, this would have to be a good ward!

"WHY ISS SSNAKE SSKIN GOOD FOR THESE THINGSSSS IN PARTICULAR?"

Local inventor specializes in machines, not hoodoo or whatever this was. He probably would enjoy studying it.

Alastor

"Why, bits of snakes are good for a whole slew of things! Snakes are some of the most inherently magical creatures you'll find. Venom for cursing and crossing, blood for poisoning—naturally, you can use venom for poisoning as well, but there's no magic needed for that, hah!—and snakeskin, it's something that a snake sheds off from time to time to be symbolically reborn; so it's good for magic tied to symbolic rebirths—like rebuilding your ship, here—or good luck—'shedding off' old, bad luck, see—and on and on. And ANY skin or hide or leather is good for protection, since that's what a skin is FOR, but between snakes' natural magic and the connection you'd have to the skin, under the circumstances this snakeskin is going to work better for you than, say, cow hide."

He's rambling, but it's a very excited rambling. He's rarely asked about his magic, and when he is it's rarely by somebody he'd really really like to share that info with.

"So I'm afraid the explanation isn't something simple you can find with a microscope—no chemical reactions or analyses of tensile strength involved. In my experience, most of magic is... you know how humans look human in the living world, but in death their souls takes on traits that metaphorically suit them. Spin a web of lies and see yourself reborn as a spider, that sort of thing. It's no different here: you've got something's physical form, and then you've got the traits that metaphorically suit it—and it's the metaphors in that object's 'soul' that hold power in magic."

Sir Pentious

Alastor most assuredly knew all about these sorts of things... and honestly! Sir Pentious couldn't hide the grin that was spreading over his features. Listen to this man go off--there were very few in Hell who prattled on with such excitement about their craft. Alastor, of course, and himself! Of course, there were likely *others*, but Sir Pentious frankly didn't have much patience to listen to much other than what he deemed to be interesting and good work. Yes, indeed, if it didn't pique the serpent's interest, did it really count as work at all?

No, apparently. So his own shed skin was most exceptionally effective! He couldn't do any scientific examinations, though, and that news brought his grin down a little as he went back to examining the contents. And then... Sir Pentious reached into his coat to withdraw a pair of glasses. They had multiple rows of magnifying lenses upon them, and he put them on, leaning his head back so that he could get a better look. Alastor had JUST SAID he couldn't find anything under a microscope, but apparently, Sir Pentious wanted to see for himself!!!

"I WAS REBORN IN HELL AS A SSSNAKE COVERED IN EYESSS. IN LIFE, I MUCH ENJOYED SSERPENTSS, BUT IT MIGHT BE MORE TO DO WITH THE KIND OF PERSSSSON I AM, HMM? SSSOMEONE WHO SSTRIKESS WITH CERTAINTY, *DEVOURING* ALL WHO UNDERESsssssTIMATE ME!" Big grins, his eyes all glowing red as he flicks his glasses--with the way he's looking at Alastor, it kind of looks like he has eight eyes, now that the lenses are all resting in different places. Eldritch Grin!

Alastor

Oh, look at that smile! It's nearly enough to make Alastor's heart start beating again. "Could be. Or perhaps it's both! Honestly, I bet there are more factors than we can dream of that decide our shapes down here. Maybe you were fated to become a snake the minute you named yourself serpent-ious!"

And here was Alastor thinking Sir Pentious couldn't squeeze on any more eyes. What a look. "Now, how many optometrists did you burglarize to make that thing?"

Sir Pentious

Clearly, that assertation sits well with him. Look at that smile.

Though the question that's posed gets another wide grin out of the serpent!

"OH, THESE? OH, YOU KNOW." A hand gesture, "BUT MOSTLY I TRY TO MAKE MY OWN MATERIALSSS, IF I CAN! THE LESS I HAVE TO INTERACT WITH THE DENIZENSS OF HELL, THE BETTER! UNLESS I AM BLOWING THEM TO BITS!"

Alastor

"You want something done right, you've got to do it yourself!" (How much meat is left? He's gonna snag some more. Yum.) "Where ARE you doing your materials fabrication these days, anyway? Can't be all aboard your ship, but I don't know what your current territory look like."

Sir Pentious

He makes a bit of a *face*, and puts the little baggies back inside the main baggie, before picking up his mug of brandy... "I HAVE TWO FACTORIES TO MY NAME, WHICH IS REALLY A GODDAMN SHAME. I INTENDED TO TAKE MORE TERRITORY AFTER THE LATESssssT EXTERMINATION, BUT EFFORTSSS WERE THWARTED BY THAT HARLOT--" he looks around like he just fucking saw a ghost--"CYCLOPS WITCH AND ANGEL DUST ATTACKED ME! I HADN'T EXPECTED HER TO HAVE SO MANY EXPLOSIVESSSS ON HAND. ALAS." Sip.

Alastor

"That IS a shame." Only two. Good grief. It's amazing Sir Pentious gets anything done at all, although Alastor doubts he'd appreciate hearing so.

He saw the fight with the harlot cyclops witch on the news. In his opinion, Sir Pentious shouldn't have had any trouble with her or with Angel Dust. The fact that he did... well. Alastor can't very well blame Sir Pentious for that, can he? "Maybe next extermination you ought to venture further from downtown and snap up the suburban industrial zones? I expect the turf's less hotly contested out there." He huffs. "But you've probably thought of that." Unlike Alastor, who hasn't had to think about this in half a century and even back then the extent of his involvement in the strategy was deciding how he'd like to crush his assigned target.

Sir Pentious

Looks like he's about to INTERJECT but then. Bingo. Sir Pentious nods, a little solemnly, looking pretty tired. "YES, EXACTLY, I *HAVE* THOUGHT OF THAT. BUT NEXT TIME I WILL BE MORE SSSUCCESSFUL! I WILL *DOMINATE* ANYONE WHO GOES UP AGAINSSST ME!"

He wiggles the bag around with quite the smile, "I HAVE ADDED PROTECTION, AFTER ALL!!!"

Alastor

Alastor beams. "That you do!" The best he can create without bargaining with nobility for a little extra oomph—and if he did that, the strength of the defenses would be tied to another demon's will, not to Alastor's.

"I'd say you have added firepower, too, if you want it; but, well—if you're ever going to call me into battle, it's only going to be a surprise to everyone first time. I'd think it ought to be the kind of surprise saved for a... special occasion."

Sir Pentious

"MM--" He's actually just drinking straight from the bottle. Old times,. Should they even be drinking while about to get back to working with power tools?

Oh well.

"YESSS, INDEED A SSSPECIAL OCCASION! PERHAPSSSS THE ANNIVERSARY OF MY DEATH!"....... He's immediately looking. Uncertain, as he can't exactly remember when that was.

"OR SOMETHING ELSE,"

Alastor

No, it's probably not a smart idea for Sir Pentious to be chugging the bottle before getting back to work. Therefore, Alastor will have to help him be responsible—by slinging an arm over Sir Pentious's shoulders, taking the bottle from him, and chugging it himself.

"I was thinking more along the lines of a special occasion like, 'When you take on whoever's got the most turf once you've worked your way up the ladder.' But, hey! No reason you can't schedule that fight for your deathday!"

Sir Pentious

*DRUNKEN DEMONS WITH POWER TOOLS. THERE ARE NO BRAIN CELLS LEFT.* Pentious doesn't lean away or out of the friendly embrace this time, beaming even if he's a little embarrassed.

"OH IS *THAT* WHAT YOU MEANT? THAT'SSSS NOT A SSSPECIAL OCCASION, THAT'SSS JUST BUSINESS!!"

Alastor

What's the worst that can happen to them? A hospital trip or two? Pshh.

"Well, can't it be both? Business is business, sure—but on the day that, say, for example... old blockhead takes a tumble? I'm going to consider that a *very special* business transaction."

He's not getting pushed away. That's good. That means they're back closer to where Alastor hopes they'd be. Right?

Or maybe it means Sir Pentious is only willing to let Alastor drape around him like this when he's too drunk to think clearly.

That thought alone is nearly enough to make Alastor withdraw completely.

No, not this time. He's already here, he'll enjoy it. But in the future—no getting closer to Sir Pentious AFTER he starts drinking. Once the bottles are open, Sir Pentious can close the distance himself, or else it won't get closed at all.

Sir Pentious

He's not that drunk yet! Of course, Alastor wouldn't know how Pentious felt without the booze nearby.

He himself enjoyed drinking around Alastor--wasn't that proof of trust, of friendship? It was probably not great to go off of Pentious' standards... He didn't really have friends.

"OHH, YESSS. INDEED, THAT *WOULD* RATHER BE A SSSPECIAL OCCASION, HHEE HEE HEE!!" He clacks his talons together with glee.

Alastor

"I thought so!" Oh, Alastor can hear his scream now... "But! I'll leave the details to you. I may have many skills, but warfare strategy isn't among them."

Sir Pentious

"MMM, I SUPPOSE NOT. BUT THAT MIGHT BE WHY YOUR BRAND OF CHAOSSS HAS BEEN SSO EFFECTIVE." Pentious gestures, "YOU SHOWED UP ONE DAY AND NOW EVERYONE ISS TERRIFIED OF YOU."

Alastor

"Amazing, isn't it! I haven't caused that kind of devastation in decades and ninety-nine percent of the population is still too scared to talk to me! Ha!" He shrugs one shoulder, "Still, it's what you say it is—chaos. It's not what one would call a firm foundation for empire-building, is it?"

Sir Pentious

"RATHER LIKE A BIG EXPLOSION WITH NO FOLLOW UP, YOU'RE RIGHT." He makes grabby hands for the bottle again, "LIKE A WRECKING BALL! I DO SO LIKE THOSE MACHINESSSS."

Alastor

He's gonna take another swig before passing the bottle back. "A wrecking ball, hah! How apt. Clears the playing field for something new to be built, but doesn't do the construction itself."

Sir Pentious

Pentious points at Alastor, nodding as he takes the bottle and just holds it, "EXACTLY! THAT'SSSS YOU. BLOW THEM OUT OF THE WATER AND I'LL DO THE REST!"

Alastor

Hand on his chest and smiling widely even by his standards, "With pleasure!"

It's where he was always happiest: blowing them out of the water and watching Sir Pentious do the rest.

Sir Pentious

That tail is slithering closer. You're gonna get a snake hug, you've no choice in the matter. Pentious leans back against his own body, taking another few gulps of brandy before he laughs, "OH, FUCK. WE'RE SSSUPPOSED TO BE WORKING AFTER THIS."

Alastor

Oh no, whatever will he do, it seems he has no choice but to be embraced in a coil of pure friendship.

Alastor huffs. "Maybe we should extend the break." He probably shouldn't be giving orders to an eldritch abomination while tipsy, things tend to get disconcertingly non-Euclidean when he does that. Then he brightens a bit and reaches over to poke the paper sack. "We don't have to be sober to place these, do we?"

Sir Pentious

The mere *suggestion* gets him beaming into full on LAUGHING.

"OH PROBABLY NOT!! BUT I LIKELY WILL NOT REMEMBER WHERE I'VE PLACED THEM, DEPENDING ON HOW FAR WE GO!"

Alastor

"Well, you probably won't *need* to know where they are once they're placed—but still. You never know." He ruminates on this a moment longer. "Well—unless you can think of a better way to pass the time, maybe we ought to just sleep it off and then get back to work."

Sir Pentious

"SSSLEEPING IT OFF IS THE *INTELLIGENT* THING TO DO. BUT I AM NOT YET AT THE POINT WHERE I WANT TO SSSLEEP, SSSO YOU ARE SSTUCK HERE WITH ME A LITTLE LONGER, ALASSSSTOR!" Yes, as if that's not exactly what Alastor wants at this point, but Pentious is somehow still clueless. To him, this is what friends are just like! He broke all kinds of social etiquette rules when he was alive, after all.

Another swig from the bottle, and he hands it back. "THERE'S SSTILL SSSOME SANDWICHESSS TO WORK ON."

Alastor

"I'm not budging." He is being coiled around, he wouldn't leave for the world. If the hotel catches fire right now he'll teleport in a newspaper and start browsing the job listings.

Another swig for him. "I didn't want to hoard them!" He says, and then immediately grabs three, now that he's being encouraged.

Sir Pentious

Prrr Prrr prrrr. Alastor likes his food!! It's not really *cooking* but Pentious always put work into it regardless. Picnic fair was his favorite.

He leans on Alastor, and splays his hand open as he reaches towards the sky.

"HELL *WILL* BE MINE. I CAN ASSURE YOU OF THAT. NOTHING WILL TAKE THAT GOAL FROM ME, ALASSSTOR. THAT ISS A *PROMISE.*"

Alastor

He has to swallow quickly to reply. (He'd stacked two sandwiches on top of each other to bite.) "I know it will. It's just a matter of time."

And he truly believes it. Not that Sir Pentious WILL—there's too much that's uncertain, too many people that will be doing everything in their power to stop him—but that Sir Pentious CAN. He's the only person in Hell that Alastor believes can. And he's going to see it happen or get exterminated trying.

#hissandvinegar #chat log

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astreetcarnamedwynn · 5 years

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bnha rewatch: eps 1 & 2

In leading up to the premiere of season four of My Hero Academia, I intend to rewatch the first three seasons, and who doesn’t love some good, old-fashioned, Midoriya-esque analysis? I’ll be tagging these as “bnha rewatch” if you’d like to block these specifically (All My Hero Academia content is tagged bnha if you’d like to block it all). I also posted it AO3 if that’s easier to read; the link to my AO3 account is at the top of my Tumblr.

“Izuku Midoriya: Origin” and “What It Takes to be a Hero”

I love Izuku and Katsuki, both individually and in their interactions with one another, and it’s interesting to see looking back how both of them are at their absolute lowest when they are (and since they are) separated from one another. You really see it in the opening credits for season one: in one shot, they’re facing away from each other, and they’re both drawn fraught. Both of them are frowning; both look noticeably unhappy. Izuku even has extra stress lines around his eyes to signal his low state.

Izuku is at his weakest at the start of the show. He’s still dreaming to be a hero, but he’s not fighting for it. In their classroom, when Katsuki tells him that he could try committing suicide in order to get a quirk in his next life, it looks like Izuku will fight back, he whips around angrily to confront Katsuki, but he quiets at Katsuki’s threatening gestue. I love this moment, not the least because it’s realistic (10 years of everyone shitting on you and your dream would wear a person down), but also because it emphasizes what really fires up Izuku, what gets him to overcome his and others’ doubts and begin to fight: saving someone else.

I also find it interesting that Izuku hasn’t given up on his dream, but he hasn’t done anything more than analyzing fights to try to attain it. He’s noticeably shorter, frailer, and weaker than Katsuki. Katsuki does have a quirk, but he still fights off the sludge villain for a significantly longer period of time than Izuku. This is not to knock Izuku. Again, it’s just to highlight how he’s at his lowest point at the start of the series. He hasn’t given up on his dream, but he’s not actively pursuing it like we see him do after these two episodes. Like one of Katsuki’s lackeys says about Izuku, “That’s just sad. I thought he’d have some fight in him.”

Katsuki is also at his lowest point at the start of the series. He’s nasty to Izuku, but also to everyone else in their class. He doesn’t have any qualms about telling Izuku to try killing himself in order to get a quirk in his next life. I find it interesting that even his lackies call him out on his meanness and for being so rough with Izuku, yet Katsuki doesn’t acknowledge his bad behavior in any way. He lays the blame on Izuku for “getting in his way” and failing to acknowledge what he says is the truth of the world: power is what matters and all that matters. Katsuki has power, he knows it, everyone knows it, yet rather than help anyone with it, Katsuki only helps himself at the start of the show. He’s only focused on attaining his dream. He won’t try to lift anyone up and instead actively kicks everyone and everything down (which sets up the start of his downfall when he kicks the bottle with the sludge villain and lets it out).

Katsuki's also completely twisted when it comes to his dream, meaning he's twisted about what being a hero really means. He focuses on popularity and riches: he declares that he’ll become even more popular than All Might and be the richest hero in the world. He very much reflects society’s twisted view of heroism in BNHA. We see this with Mt. Lady playing to the cameras in the opening fight and in Izuku’s comment that a hero’s career “depends on their ability to stay in the spotlight,” not on how effective they are at saving someone.

All Might fuels this, too. His first few scenes are fascinating for how performative they are. He’s ACTING. His movements are gestures, rather than natural motions. The backgrounds are the amazing USA themed backdrops, much like the background to a theatrical production. He’s putting on the ALL MIGHT SHOW, and he may have good intentions doing it, he may want everyone to feel safe and that everything is under control, but this acting is also having negative effects. No one knows about All for One at the start of the show. Toshinori tells Izuku that he did all he could to keep that fight (and that villain) under wraps. Katsuki only focuses on popularity and weath. One of the bystanders in the opening fight comments to Kamui Woods, “Come on, tree man, show us something flashy.” Even Izuku buys into the ALL MIGHT SHOW, how heroism is all good and positive: “saving people is the coolest thing you can do.” In his first conversation with All Might, his declarations of love feel almost like a boy reciting holy scripture and worshipping a god. For better or worse, they all believe the HERO ACT.

This is why I LOVE Izuku and Toshinori’s first interaction. It’s a total “Dorothy and the Wizard” moment from The Wizard of Oz. The curtain is pulled back, and Izuku sees the nasty reality of heroism. Literally when Toshinori shows him the horrific scar he got from All for One. Izuku also sees the nasty reality of heroism with how Toshinori acts and how he treats Izuku in this conversation. Toshinori is utterly worn down by the need to be All Might. Everyone depends on him, heroes and civilians alike. Toshinori played a part in this by designing and playing the part. He became THE symbol of peace, singular, one man, one symbol, and for all the good that did, it did bad too, particularly to Toshinori himself. If it’s not abundantly clear, I LOVE All Might and Toshinori → the two sides of him show what is bad AND what is good about heroism.

This is why his relationships with Izuku and Katsuki are so fascinating. Toshinori obviously looks at quirkless Izuku and sees himself, yet the parallel that fascinates me the most in these episodes is between Katsuki and All Might. Izuku plays a part in this too, but All Might drops the sludge villain bottle and Katsuki kicks it open. Both of them are so focused on themselves in those moments, and bad things happen as a result. All Might desperately wants to get away from Izuku so he doesn’t see the truth behind the show, and Katsuki is railing against Izuku and wanting to achieve his dream. What I love even more are the back-to-back scenes at the end of “What It Takes to be a Hero” when both Katsuki and Toshinori track down Izuku. Both of them have been SHOOK by Izuku’s display of true heroism. Toshinori is obviously older and more mature, and he comes to outright thank Izuku for reminding him of what true heroism is. Katsuki is younger and not yet mature, and he CANNOT deal. It’s the spark that lights the fuse that explodes at the end of season three: Katsuki’s view of himself as a hero, his view of what it means to be a hero, is utterly shaken by his failure against the sludge villain and Izuku trying to save him. Rather than admit that power isn’t everything, Katsuki instead doubles down, lashes out, and tries to kick Izuku back down to “useless, weak, defenseless Izuku" while reinforcing his power and capability.

Horikoshi’s exploration of power is interesting. Power is needed to be a hero. Izuku doesn’t last a minute against the sludge villain, he’s so physically weak. The heroes who try to fight the sludge villain aren’t powerful enough either, and if Toshinori weren’t there and inspired by Izuku to become All Might again despite the risks, Katsuki would have died. Toshinori is right when he tells Izuku that some villains can’t be fought without power. And yet power isn’t everything. This is what is shoved in Katsuki’s face (or down his throat, I suppose) in episode two. For all Katsuki's power, the sludge villain still nearly kills him. Toshinori also has forgotten that power isn’t everything. He’s become twisted by this point as well, from the pain that he’s endured and the price that he’s paid being a hero and the society that he lives in and helped build. Izuku reminds him of the truth. Power is needed, yes, but it isn’t everything.

Trying matters. Selflessness matters. Power without these leads to outright villains as well as to “heroes” like Endeavor and early Katsuki. Izuku doesn’t actually accomplish much, but he tries against the sludge villain, which is more than the other heroes can say. They all give up, even though they know the sludge villain has a kid hostage. Izuku tries, and this trying helps. He gives Katsuki the chance to catch his breath, to stay alive long enough for All Might to save them. More than this, he tries knowing that he’s outmatched against the sludge villain, who very nearly almost killed him just an hour or so before. Yet he still runs into the fray when he sees Katsuki afraid and in need. He doesn’t think about himself, his needs, his safety, his popularity, etc. He sees someone in need of help, and he runs.

Of course, what makes Izuku interesting is that this becomes a flaw. He breaks himself again and again and again in order to save someone, to the point that future characters chastise him for it. Trying matters, and selflessness matters, but just these alone lead to disaster like just power alone does. This disaster is hurting yourself rather than hurting someone else, but it’s still not good. Which is why it isn’t just Izuku as a reflection and continuation of All Might/Toshinori, but Katsuki as well.

#bnha #my hero academia #boku no hero academia #katsuki bakugou #all might #toshinori yagi #bnha rewatch #bnha meta #bnha analysis #midoriya izuku

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hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger · 6 years

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Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (semi-stream of consciousness) Thoughts Part 2: A Superior Spider-Miles

Lets talk about how this movie handled its primary protagonist, Miles Morales. SPOILERS ahead.

Look I could just go on for ages listing off specific examples of how this movie is hilarious, action packed, emotional and so on, but I think you can take that as a given. It’s all round great okay, so let’s maybe talk in more specifics.

Miles Morales is of course the primary character in this movie.

As I began to get at in the last part of my thoughts on this film, there is a distinction to be made between the primary protagonist and the sole or main protagonist.

In Spider-Man movies of the past there has been one main character, one protagonist, one lead character, Peter Parker of course.

This movie doesn’t simply switch that focus to Miles because that would mean the other characters who get play are supporting players in Miles’ story and that is not the case.

This is an ensemble/team story with Miles as the central focus of that team.

I suppose the most apt comparison would be that in Lord of the Rings Frodo might be the primary character but Sam, Merry, Pippin, Aragorn, Legolas, Gandalf and Gimli are more than merely supporting players in the story, they are vital and integral protagonists along with Frodo, even if the story belongs more to Frodo than to them.

So Miles in this movie = Frodo, even right down to having his mentor die and his uncle be semi-nasty.

As such most of the characters featured in the movie are filtered through the lens of serving the story wherein Miles is the heart and soul of the piece.

We will discuss the other characters a bit more in a future instalment, but broadly speaking their roles in relation to Miles is to serve as a barometer of how far he has to come to truly become a Spider-Hero among their ranks. This is after all his origin story and unlike the Maguire or Garfield Spider-Men he lacks the benefit of a montage sequence or time skip to herald in his experience.

The film follows his origin very linearly across the space of what at best is a few weeks thus we truly see Miles clear progression from unable to control even his wall-crawling to fully fledged Spider-Hero. Albeit one who still has much to learn and stumbles from time to time.

It is a beautifully executed arc that allows Miles to far more earnestly earn the mantle of Spider-Man compared to his comic book counterpart.

Indeed this version of Miles and his origin is for the most part grossly superior to how Bendis did it in the Ultimate Universe.

The singular drawback of the film’s take on Miles’ origin is that it is comparatively less grounded than Miles’ in the comics due to the presence of parallel universes, global/universal stakes and things of that nature.

However the film perfectly justifies this as a more faithful rendition of Miles origin simply would never have worked.

I’ve said countless times before in defiance of those foolishly insisting that Miles Morales should have been the Spider-Man of the MCU that this was utterly impractical.

And one the biggest reasons for this is the fact that Miles simply doesn’t have enough source material upon which to base a trilogy of movies.

This is owed to his being created as recently as 2011, his adventures being frequently derailed by crossovers and tie-ins with other characters (thus defeating the purpose of stories focussed upon him) and his stories playing out under the ‘written for the trade’ format. This means that whilst there were around 24 stories about Peter Parker in the first 28 issues of ASM’s publication (excluding annuals, but including his entire high school career) there was in truth just 7 in Miles’ first 28 issues. And not all 7 of those would have been useable in a film adaptation.

In fact if we consider just the first two (and most critically acclaimed) live action Spider-Man movies we can see that they combined elements from across Spider-Man’s then 40+ year history.

Spider-Man one combined elements of Spider-Man’s origin, the retelling of said origin from Ultimate Spider-Man, The Death of Gwen Stacy, ASM Annual #39, ASM Annual #9 and multiple other smaller elements from Spider-Man’s wider history, such as his job at the Bugle, his relationship with Mary Jane, etc.

Spider-Man 2, whilst chiefly based upon Spider-Man No More (ASM #50), also combined elements from ASM Annual #1, the broader concept of Doctor Octopus from his decades of history, ASM volume 2 #38 and other things I’m sure I am forgetting.

Again, not every Spider-Man story unto itself was particularly friendly towards being adapted into film but such a rich history made cherry picking workable elements to form a movie possible.

Miles possessing a shorter, more linear and decompressed history makes this much harder. Compounding the problem was that in order to introduce Miles to wider audiences necessitated doing an origin movie for him.

In 2018 superhero origin movies are something of a touchy subject in the wake of in excess of two decades worth of them, and for there to have been a less that 20 years a THIRD film presenting a story about a scientifically gifted NYC dwelling teenager to be bitten by a spider, gain super powers that he does not immediately use altruistically, thus generating guilt that propels him to wear web spandex and become a hero was never ever going to fly.

Unfortunately Miles’ origin is one of his relatively few reliably ‘filmic’ storylines. In fact this movie combines his origin story with elements from the second Miles story arc featuring his uncle the Prowler as well as the Spider-Men mini-series and the crossover between him and Spider-Gwen.

Oh and the Spider-Verse crossover (though in truth I think the movie owes more to the grand finale of the 1994 Spidey cartoon).

Oh and technically elements from every individual Spider-Hero they adapt into the movie, so Spider-Man: Noir, Spider-Gwen’s SP//dr’s origins from Edge of Spider-Verse (which were both anthology one shots) and Marvel Tails (Spider-Ham’s origin). And let’s not forget tiny elements from Peter’s history, including his marriage to Mary Jane, the Death of Spider-Man arc from Ultimate, etc.

There is after all a reason this movie isn’t called ‘Spider-Man: Miles Morales’ or something like that and rather ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’.

Sony Animation wisely realized they had to /out of necessity had to overlay Miles’ origin with a whole other story and then emebellish both by cherry picking from the wider Spider-Man franchise.

Because Miles on his own, especially if you just did his origin, wasn’t going to be enough.

What is to be praised though is how organically the film makers weave (no pun intended) the different storylines together and improve upon the source material.

Much like Captain America: Civil War and Spider-Man PS4 before them, they recognized certain weaknesses in said source material (Miles’ origin and the Spider-Verse crossover) and turned the subpar lemons they got into delicious lemonade.

In this movie Miles has only recently begun attending the Brooklyn Visions Academy and the film first and foremost focuses upon his home life and as a consequence this mitigates Miles attendance to a school the likes of which most teens do not attend, making him more relatable.

Also appreciated is the de-emphasis upon his being ‘just a good kid’ and science skills.

In the comics these are aspects that respectively undermine the idea of him as a flawed hero and make him too similar to Peter Parker.

Peter Parker was founded upon the basis of being both a hero with problems and an imperfect person. When Miles uses his powers to risk his life and save people from a burning building within a few days of getting them, it makes him come across as a good, nice and admirable person for sure. But that’s not exactly the right philosophical approach to Spider-Man. Peter Parker was selfish and irresponsible with his abilities and nursed pent up frustration when he got his powers. He was a good person but far from immediately altruistic.

Miles in this movie has an artistic side and employs that to make stylized stickers he slaps around the city and at times engaging in graffiti. He also finds studying an incredible burden and purposefully tries to fail his classes in order to get kicked out of the school he feels is elitist and doesn’t fit in at.

Miles is a million miles away from a criminal or a vandal of course, but these minor bits of misbehaviour do much to sell the idea of Miles as more well rounded and flawed like Peter was, but in a very different way. Similarly his artistic side gives him a unique interest distinct from Peter’s passion for science, whilst the movie still sells him as intelligent (but not the science whiz Peter is). His artistic side is also used beautifully in the third act of the movie where he uses spray cans to customize one of Spider-Man’s classic red and blue costumes and turn it into his black and red comic book costume, or at least a version close enough to it.

As far as making Miles a legacy character is concerned this is perhaps an absolute stroke of genius.

The symbolism of it is just delicious isn’t it?

Miles the inheritor of Peter’s legacy literally wears Peter’s suit then uses his own special skills to make it his own. He does however leave the fingers of the gloves unchanged thus the costume incorporates a clear visual signifier that beneath it lies the original costume, thus the original Spider-Man will always be beneath Miles helping to be the basis of who he is as a hero.

The transformation is made all the more compelling when we consider that there is a clear visual progression for Miles throughout the movie.

In the first third or so of the movie he is simply in his regular clothes. Then in the second third when he adopts a cheap high street Spider-Man costume. Then in the last act he adopts his comic book suit covered up by street clothes as the posters for the movie make clear, before shedding the clothes and unveiling the finished costume.

Its one of those things you just feel frustrated wasn’t in the original comics version of the story

Miles goes from a normal person, to someone trying and failing to be Spider-Man, to being someone ready to take the leap and become Spider-Man (symbolized by his wearing his costume under normal clothes, in other words infusing Spider-Man as part of his normal life) to finally BEING his own Spider-Man.

This new approach to the costume isn’t just superior to how the comics handled it, it highlights part of the problem with how Miles adopted his suit in the comics. There Miles was simply handed his costume courtesy of Nick Fury. This again undermined Miles as a successor Spider-Man because it meant Miles, unlike Peter didn’t make his own suit (or at least stylize it himself, like Ultimate Peter did) and thus undermined his sense of independence.

In this version of the story Miles might not have literally sewn together his costume but he also wasn’t just handed the suit. He actively seeks it out and is permitted to have it by Aunt May before taking it and literally making it his own. This accentuates the idea of Miles as his own man as much as it does him being a legacy to Peter.

Speaking of which the movie also alters Miles relation to Peter’s death. In the original story Miles saves a family from a burning building then resolves to never use his powers again. Awhile after he learns Spider-Man has been shot as part of his final battle with the Green Goblin and heads over to the battlefield just in time to witness Peter’s death. He blames himself for not using his abilities thinking that if he had this would have led to him befriending Peter and being in the loop, allowing him to help him when the time came. His BFF Ganke dissuades him of this notion. Whilst Miles can still be interpreted to hold guilt over Peter’s death his role in it is far more tenuous than Peter’s role in Uncle Ben’s death and the personal pain Miles feels is somewhat questionable.

But in the movie, Miles is present for the final battle as it happens, he interacts with Spider-Man. First by him saving Miles, then promising to train him and finally imploring him to destroy the Kingpin’s machine to ensure the city’s safety. Miles considers helping Spider-Man but is too scared to do so, he witnesses Kingpin murdering him and fails to destroy the machine as he promised. Then he goes home somewhat traumatized and very clearly deeply upset by Spider-Man’s death.

This makes Peter’s death cut much, much deeper for Miles than in the comics, adds a layer of guilt to him and drive to become Spider-Man and truly save the city so he can live up to the promise he made to a dying hero. So again, like a perfect legacy character, the movie renders Miles similar yet different to the original hero.

Other improvements made to Miles himself includes the way the movie handled his powers. Rather than having Miles easily have access to all his abilities the film unveils them gradually and doesn’t give him particular control over them.

Whilst by the end of the movie Miles is mostly fighting and web-swinging like a pro, he spends most of the movie bumbling around. Usually I hate this in Spider-Man media but here it works. Unlike in Homecoming where we are expected to believe Spider-Man after nearly a year is still a jackass, Miles has literally only had his powers for maybe a few weeks at the absolute most has had little chance to practice or refine them (even comic book Peter did a little bit via his show business career). Moreover whilst most versions of Peter make him relatively competent very quickly (presumably a biproduct of his scientific acumen) having Miles NOT be like that again works for his character.

Having Miles be less competent than Peter was off the bat again makes him more distinct than Peter and frankly is a better way to handle most legacy characters. When a legacy character is actively removed so as to allow for a replacement to fill their role one of the worst things you can do is have the replacement measure up to the skill of their predecessor particularly quickly. You want them to earn that role and begin with a major skill gap that they gradually improve upon. Case in point in the excellent Batman Beyond TV show, Terry McGinnis did not in his first season have anywhere near the competency of Bruce Wayne in his prime. He had talent but it grew over time.

In the comics whilst one could argue Miles either wasn’t truly as skilled as Peter was in the same amount of time (or if he was then it was sufficiently justified) a lot of that went out the window when you factor in his invisibility and venom blast powers.

These particular abilities opened up two problems with Miles character. They both over powered him or alternatively made him look foolish.

With the Venom Blast alone Miles could deliver extremely potent finishing moves to various opponents, even electrically powered ones with there being for the most part little limit on the effectiveness of the power. Similarly his invisibility doesn’t seem in my experience to be a power with many drawbacks meaning that between those two abilities alone (let alone his other powers) Miles could simply sneak up on and zap any opponent into submission, even immensely powerful foes like Blackheart.

This creates a Superman problem for Miles where there is either no drama because he could easily end most conflicts or else there is false drama because the stories must wilfully ignore his ability to easily end most conflicts.

The movie side steps these problems by simply making Miles incapable of using these abilities (or his wall crawling) on command until the third act climax, thus Miles isn’t over powered and his mastery of these abilities exists in tandem with his acceptance and transformation into Spider-Man. This is beautifully illustrated by him taking a literal leap of faith from atop a high building and demonstrating he is now fully capable of engaging his wall crawling powers (perhaps Spidey’s most iconic ability) at will.

Whether his invisibility and venom blast powers will be problematic going forward remains to be seen but within the context of this self contained movie, relegating mastery of them to the climax mitigates the problem of potential false drama.

The last bit of improvement this movie made was in his relationship with his ‘Uncle Ben analogues’.

Of course Peter Parker is to Miles what Uncle Ben was to Peter. But Miles also has a literal uncle, Aaron Davis a.k.a. the Prowler.

I already spoke of how the movie greatly improves Miles relationship to Peter’s death, but the movie’s nature as being about parallel universes allows it to have it’s cake and eat it.

Because of course there is another Peter Parker who can function as Miles’ mentor. It is by the way very, very telling that the most acclaimed and beloved versions of Miles (both of whom have come out in 2018) both have Peter Parker as a mentor baked into their origin stories, as the PS4 game did the same thing in a very different way.

Whilst PS4 Peter and Miles are akin to an older and younger brother, movie Peter and Miles are more like father and son or uncle and nephew or perhaps yet more appropriately Peter is the Mr Miyagi/Phil from Disney’s Hercules to Miles’ Daniel LaRusso/Hercules.

Pretty much EVERY Miles fan and a large number of Peter fans love this dynamic. They LOVE seeing Peter as a mentor and Miles as his student.

Even those, like me, who feel that comic book Miles should exist in his own universe independent of Peter Parker, acknowledge there is fertile ground from that dynamic that should be cultivated.

And yet frustratingly in spite of crossovers when they lived in different dimensions and guest appearances when they lived in the same one, this well of potential has remained untapped. As much as the comics pay lip service to Peter as Miles’ mentor the truth is it is simply not a thing in the comic books, Peter Parker has never truly trained Miles.

This movie gives us some training scenes but more poignantly interpersonal bonding scenes where both characters grow and improve via their relationship with one another.

Then you get to Uncle Aaron. In the Ultimate comics Aaron was a super villain thief who sought to use his nephew for his own gain, was willing to kill him and then presumably died. Then crazy shit happened because of Secret Wars but that isn’t important.

In the movie though, Uncle Aaron starts off as the cool uncle and rogue to Miles as in the comics, and is changed from merely a thief to also hired (and very deadly) muscle. However unlike the comic he never uses Miles and his attempts to kill him only occur when he does not know who he is. Arguably the most dramatic and engaging scene in the movie is when he finally learns who Miles is and we see him make a fateful choice...to protect his nephew. And immediately die at the hands of Kingpin for it.

Instantly Aaron is transformed into a more compelling, nuanced and realistic character. Frankly the vast majority of uncles really WOULD protect their nieces or nephews rather than harm them, and this juxtaposed with his role in Spider-Man’s death makes Aaron a more grey and sympathetic character than his comic counterpart.

His death is arguably overly derivative of Miles but this is offset by the presence of Miles’ still very much alive parents. After all there is a critical difference between being motivated by a fallen hero and/or your uncle vs. your father figure as Uncle Ben was to Peter. The scene is then touchingly used as a springboard to showcase how each of the Spider-Heroes has lost someone and been driven by this and for the arguably OTHER most compelling scene in the movie. Jefferson and Miles’ conversation through the door, which then leads into Miles final transformation into Spider-Man.

Finally the conceit of the parallel universe idea allows for the movie to once again have it’s cake and eat it in regards to Miles’ role as Spider-Man within his universe.

Miles gets to transform into Spider-Man due to the direct involvement of Spider-Man, but he also gets to be the Spider-Man who picked up a fallen hero’s mantle and become THE Spider-Man of his world, meaning he isn’t over shadowed by the presence of another Spider-Man simultaneously. Plus he has access to all of Peter’s villains most of whom are unique to their more mainstream counter parts, with special attention going to Olivia Octopus.

However you slice it, Sony punched up Miles’ source material and just leaves me abjectly miffed that this version of Miles isn’t the one we got in the comics.

#Miles Morales #spider-man #Ultimate Spider-Man #Brian Michael Bendis #Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse #Into the Spider-Verse #Peter Parker #Uncle Ben #Ben Parker #the prowler #prowler #Aaron Davis #Sony Animation #Marvel #Marvel Comics #Ultimate Marvel

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beyond-far-horizons · 6 years

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The Theme of Love, William Blake, DMC 5 and the fate of the Sons of Sparda

I’ve always loved symbolism and literary references in my favourite stories so I’m ecstatic to see the incredible William Blake join Dante Alighieri as a major influence on the Devil May Cry series.

Is before the game’s release too early to do some meta? Of course not!

So let’s dig deeper and see what possible plot points or themes we can glean from Blake’s work and other symbolism for what the dev team have said will be the conclusion for the ‘Sons of Sparda’

Spoilers abound - read at your own risk!

William Blake was a 18th Century English poet, artist and mystic who created his own complex religious mythology for his works. Sadly not widely known or respected at the time, he nevertheless had an increasingly powerful influence on the arts.

The main themes Blake grappled with were the hypocrisy of the Christian Church against what he saw as the natural forces of the imagination and sexuality. He was also very concerned with the effects of the Industrial Revolution on society, especially on the poor.

So he’s a good guy, but how does this relate to the Sons of Sparda?

Vergil and Urizen

The big bad of Blake’s mythology as most of you know by now is a god-like figure called Urizen. Blake hints that Urizen is the Christian/Abrahamic God but he is most similar to the gnostic Demiurge figure and represents according to Wikipedia ‘ Urizen is the embodiment of conventional reason and law.’

Now who do we know who puts cold logic above emotions?

‘He is said to represent the Heavenly host, but he experiences a Satanic fall in that he desired to rule. He is motivated by his pride and becomes a hypocrite. When Albion asks for him, Urizen refuses and hides, which causes him to experience his fall. After his fall, Urizen set about creating the material world and his jealousy of mankind brought forth both Wrath and Justice.[4] Wikipedia

Urizen being cast out from Eternity. Book of Urizen

Guys, it even says ‘motivated by pride’, what more do you want? More than this, Vergil does literally fall, unable to accept his loss to Dante and the path of emotion and honour Dante represents - the true inheritor of their parents’ will.

Despite Vergil’s coldness, he is filled underneath with anger -

‘What defines Vergil as a character to me is that while he seems like the perfect samurai in his very calm and calculated demeanor, you can always sense the simmering intensity and even rage.’ Dan Southworth

Yet he also exhibits a strange sense of justice such as refusing to stab Dante in the back as Nelo Angelo and pride in being a Son of Sparda TM.

In DMC 5 Urizen is described as a newly ascendent, powerful demon who seeks to use the Demon Tree to become king over the Demon World and (presumably via his actions in Red Grave City) merge it with the Human World. It’s been pretty much confirmed that Vergil is big bad Urizen in some form - from Dan Southworth’s re-pitched voice, Urizen’s looks - the blue colouring and spiky hair - and V’s assertion that Urizen is the Cloaked Man who stole Yamato - Vergil’s sword and who also has Dan’s voice and Corrupted Vergil’s looks. Also his scheme the same power grab Vergil tried in DMC 3 and the manga.

This being said, what does it tell us about Vergil’s motivation (sorry) in DMC 5? For this we need to look at the rest of the clues...

The Poison Tree

DMC 5 starts with the roots of the Demon Tree ‘Qliphoth’ invading Red Grave City and bringing with it a hoard of demons. It also seems to use the population’s blood as an energy source creating a demonic ‘fruit’ at its source that will grant the power to rule the Demon World according to demon Goliath.

This relates to Blake's poem "A Poison Tree" where, through suppression of anger, the protagonist’s rage grows like a tree and bears a fruit that kills his foe.

‘The allegory within the poem emphasizes that when a person hides or denies their emotions, they will become poisoned with bitterness and more vengefulness.’

https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-theme-poem-poison-tree-thank-you-144241

Again who do we know hides or denies their emotions? Given how closely the dev team are using Blake’s work this implies that Vergil as Urizen in some form has become consumed with bitterness and vengence, something we already saw from him in DMC 3. Added to this is his loss of pride at being the slave and puppet of his mother’s killer (Mundus) and being defeated by Dante a second time in DMC 1. We see this callousness in the way he treats Nero - his only child who he’s never met and Dante again in front of the tree.

(Interestingly this quote could also refer to Dante as a plot twist. I’d argue that although Dante is a lot freer with his emotions he perhaps hasn’t dealt fully with the rage and pain that life has dealt him - what do you think?)

Another interesting note is the word ‘Qliphoth’ which comes from Jewish mystic branch Kabbalah and means -

‘literally "Peels", "Shells" or "Husks" (from singular: קְלִפָּה‬ qlippah "Husk"),[2] are the representation of evil or impure spiritual forces in Jewish mysticism, the polar opposites of the holy Sefirot.[3]’

The Sefirot are emmanations of the Divine that manifest into this world and the pattern they are depicted in is also like a tree so the evil version makes the ‘Qliphoth’ a metaphysical demonic tree.

If we look at Urizen he looks like tree-like husk encasing another figure, connecting them to this tree. Trailers and promo material have also shown people encased in husks feeding the tree and the theme is repeated with Cavaliere Angelo being powered by Trish.

Does this hint that Vergil’s true nature is being obscured by Urizen or that, like in DMC 3 his pride and lust for power still obscure his caring side like the husks in Kabbalah?

In a Korean interview the dev team said DMC 5 will return to DMC 1′s theme of love (something I’m absolutely crazy about.) Sparda’s choice to protect humanity and love a human woman, Eva’s sacrifice for her sons and Dante and Vergil literally embodying the two human ways of dealing with the pain of that trauma have always been the most captivating aspect for me. Hopefully this means we will finally get the conclusion we lacked from DMC 1 and DMC 3 to that essential dilemma - is the best way of life via compassion and altruism or domination and control via dispassionate reason?

Or maybe a combo of both?

Love, Lust and Nero’s Mother

The DMC team have been remarkably coy about Nero’s mother which has always irritated me. It fridges another mother/lover character as well as denying us juicy( and I’d argue) essential story details aka why Captain ‘I Hate Humanity and Repress My Emotions’ would ever deign to sleep with a human.

But since the Korean interview hints at the theme of love perhaps we will get an insight at last, especially if we get the long awaited confrontation between father and son.

Blake’s writing gives us an interesting hint to this. In his mythos Urizen’s female counterpart is Ahania who stands for pleasure and the desire for intelligence. They have many children including a rebellious son called Fuzon who fights against his father’s repressive ways (Nero anyone?). But the crucial part is Urizen separating himself from Ahania because he believes pleasure is sinful or limiting - just as Vergil separated himself from human desires and emotions because he thought of them as weak. But also like Vergil, Urizen becomes weaker as a result, losing his intuition, for the path to Divine Wisdom accord to Blake was passion and reason - something Dante grew into, becoming more balanced and mature as the series has progressed.

It wouldn’t surprise me if we get some callous remark from Vergil about Nero’s mother at first - was he with her out of lust which disgusted him afterwards (wasn’t Nero’s mother hinted at being a prostitute?), or was it an experiment as someone else has suggested to see if he could recreate Sparda’s power via his connection with Eva or ven some creepy deal with the Order of the Sword to continue Sparda’s bloodline despite his intention to raise Temen-ni-gru and show them ‘this devil’s power’?

Whatever he says it will cause more of a rift, but I believe at the end Vergil will be forced to confront her importance even just as the mother of his child, along with other significant figures like Nero, Dante and Eva.

Nero and Urizen’s son Fuzon

"1: Fuzon, on a chariot iron-wing'd On spiked flames rose; his hot visage Flam'd furious! sparkles his hair & beard Shot down his wide bosom and shoulders. On clouds of smoke rages his chariot And his right hand burns red in its cloud Moulding into a vast globe, his wrath As the thunder-stone is moulded. Son of Urizens silent burnings

Blake

‘As the element of fire, the element symbolizing the energy Urizen wishes to subdue, Fuzon rebels against Urizen...battling him for control of the world’ Fuzon Wikipedia

This sounds much like Nero’s reckless and impassioned battle with DMC’s Urizen for control of the Human World.

Unfortunately for Fuzon he is eventually defeated by his father and crucified on the Tree of Mystery - yet another powerful tree symbol.

This is not looking good for Nero...but since Blake’s works develop, the element of passionate rebellion and the quest for the reunion of reason and imaginative emotion continue and I can’t see Nero dying at the end of DMC 5 so perhaps there will be a resurrection of sorts?

Dante and Luvah/Orc

But where does Dante figure in all of this? Can Blake’s mythology give us some potential answers? He does in the double figure of Luvah/Orc (no, not that sort of orc...)

Orc. William Blake

As Luvah - ‘he represents love, passion, and rebellious energy..’ he is also known ‘as the Prince of Love, and his name may be connected to the word "lover". Love is the supreme emotion, and it is connected to all others, including hate...his fallen form is Orc. Throughout Blake's mythological system, he is opposed to Urizen, the representation of reason.’

Orc is also ‘the embodiment of rebellion, and stands opposed to Urizen, the embodiment of tradition...’ He is a ‘"Lover of Wild Rebellion, and transgressor of God's Law"... Orcus is also the Latin word for Hell, and Orc is presented as a rebellious, Luciferian character.’

We can see Dante’s human and demonic aspects in these quotes.

Urizen and Luvah/Orc engage in a complex battle across the cycle of ages as a metaphor for the conflict between reason and the emotions - just like Dante and Vergil. He also gets crucified to a tree (not looking good for Dante either then...) but resurrects in various forms including (Blake being a Christian) Jesus. In this resurrected form Urizen is afraid of the new Luvah - perhaps in DMC terms this is when we see Dante’s Majin form? Either way I think both Nero and Dante are going to be called on to make some sort of sacrifice fighting Vergil as Urizen, hopefully to bring him back to the light and free him from the evil husk of hatred.

Healing the Division

‘Later in Vala, Orc describes the divided aspects of the soul, which, in Blake's mythological system, God has a twofold essence that is capable of good and evil. This idea parallels Blake's personal belief that there was a division within himself..’.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orc_(Blake)

The symbolism of divided aspects of God and the soul within Blake’s system hark back again to the division between Dante and Vergil and Vergil and Nero. In the manga Vergil reflects on Dante and him being one being split in two. The aspects of their all-powerful father were also split between them as Sparda was also known as being calm like Vergil and rebellious like Dante as reflected in his two swords given to each respective son. And of course there’s that ‘pesky’ human nature from Eva.

Nero too has grown into his own, arguably as some have said being more like Sparda than either of his sons, willing to sacrifice his power because of his love for a human and protect other humans for her sake. Hopefully as hinted in both the Korean interview, the works of Blake and the core of Devil May Cry, it will be the theme of Love that will finally bring the family of Sparda together and heal at long last that division.

V and the Poetry of Blake

Despite being the mouthpiece for a lot of Blake��s poetry I’m not going to talk much about V except to refer you to this great post from la-vita which lists alot of his quotes.

https://la-vita.tumblr.com/post/182731950816/two-of-the-poems-v-reads-during-battle

It says that V’s book may refer to the ‘V’ of DMC V, Blake’s Plate 5 he is reading, however...

‘Urizen is described as having multiple books: Gold, Silver, Iron, and Brass. They represent science, love, war, and sociology, which are four aspects of life.’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urizen

Hmm...

Thanks for reading if you got this far!

#dmc 5 #devil may cry 5 #dmc #devil may cry #Vergil #dante #nero #v #meta #my meta #william blake #long post is long

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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Elizabeth Warren Is Completely Serious https://nyti.ms/2KlW3oV

PLEASE READ and SHARE this FASCINATING, IN-DEPTH expose on Elizabeth Warren's life, her DEEPLY HELD BELIEFS and excellent POLICY prescriptions to ADDRESS INCOME INEQUALITY, CORPORATE POWER and CORRUPTION in policies. She is an AMAZINGLY INTELLIGENT strong woman.

#2020PresidentalCandidates

#2020Vision #VoteBlue2020 #2020PresidentialElection

Elizabeth Warren Is Completely Serious

About income inequality. About corporate power. About corrupt politics. And about being America’s next president.

By Emily Bazelon | Published June 17, 2019 | New York Times | Posted June 17, 2019 |

The first time I met Elizabeth Warren, she had just come home from a walk with her husband and her dog at Fresh Pond, the reservoir near her house in Cambridge, Mass. It was a sunny day in February, a couple of weeks after Warren announced her candidacy for president, and she was wearing a navy North Face jacket and black sneakers with, as usual, rimless glasses and small gold earrings. Her hair had drifted a bit out of place.

The dog, Bailey, is a golden retriever who had already been deployed by her presidential campaign in a tweet a week earlier, a pink-tongued snapshot with the caption “Bailey will be your Valentine.” Warren started toweling off his paws and fur, which were coated in mud and ice from the reservoir, when she seemed to realize that it made more sense to hand this task over to her husband, Bruce Mann.

In the kitchen, Warren opened a cupboard to reveal an array of boxes and canisters of tea. She drinks many cups a day (her favorite morning blend is English breakfast). Pouring us each a mug, she said, “This is a fantasy.” She was talking about the enormous platform she has, now that she’s running for president, to propagate policy proposals that she has been thinking about for decades. “It’s this moment of being able to talk about these ideas, and everybody says, ‘Oh, wait, I better pay attention to this.’” She went on: “It’s not about me; it’s about those ideas. We’ve moved the Overton window” — the range of ideas deemed to merit serious consideration — “on how we think about taxes. And I think, I think we’re about to move it on child care.”

Her plan, announced in January, would raise $2.75 trillion in revenue over 10 years through a 2 percent tax on assets over $50 million and a higher rate for billionaires. Warren wants to use some of that money to pay for universal child care on a sliding scale. As she talked, she shifted around in her chair — her hands, her arms, her whole body leaning forward and moving back. Onstage, including at TV town halls, she prefers to stand and pace rather than sit (she tries to record six miles a day on her Fitbit), and sometimes she comes across as a little frenetic, like a darting bird. One on one, though, she seemed relaxed, intent.

Warren moved to Cambridge in 1995 when she took a tenured job at Harvard Law School, and 11 years later, Mann, who is a legal historian, got a job there, too. By then they had bought their house; Warren’s two children from a previous marriage, her daughter, Amelia, and son, Alexander, were already grown. The first floor is impeccable, with a formal living room — elegant decorative boxes arranged on a handsome coffee table — a cozy sunroom and a gleaming kitchen with green tile countertops. When Warren taught classes at Harvard, she would invite her students over for barbecue and peach cobbler during the semester. Some of them marveled at the polish and order, which tends not to be the norm in faculty homes. Warren says she scoops up dog toys before people come over.

For her entire career, Warren’s singular focus has been the growing fragility of America’s middle class. She made the unusual choice as a law professor to concentrate relentlessly on data, and the data that alarms her shows corporate profits creeping up over the last 40 years while employees’ share of the pie shrinks. This shift occurred, Warren argues, because in the 1980s, politicians began reworking the rules for the market to the specifications of corporations that effectively owned the politicians. In Warren’s view of history, “The constant tension in a democracy is that those with money will try to capture the government to turn it to their own purposes.” Over the last four decades, people with money have been winning, in a million ways, many cleverly hidden from view. That’s why economists have estimated that the wealthiest top 0.1 percent of Americans now own nearly as much as the bottom 90 percent.

As a presidential candidate, Warren has rolled out proposal after proposal to rewrite the rules again, this time on behalf of a majority of American families. On the trail, she says “I have a plan for that” so often that it has turned into a T-shirt slogan. Warren has plans (about 20 so far, detailed and multipart) for making housing and child care affordable, forgiving college-loan debt, tackling the opioid crisis, protecting public lands, manufacturing green products, cracking down on lobbying in Washington and giving workers a voice in selecting corporate board members. Her grand overarching ambition is to end America’s second Gilded Age.

[Elizabeth Warren has lots of plans.Together, they would remake the economy.]

“Ask me who my favorite president is,” Warren said. When I paused, she said, “Teddy Roosevelt.” Warren admires Roosevelt for his efforts to break up the giant corporations of his day — Standard Oil and railroad holding companies — in the name of increasing competition. She thinks that today that model would increase hiring and productivity. Warren, who has called herself “a capitalist to my bones,” appreciated Roosevelt’s argument that trustbusting was helpful, not hostile, to the functioning of the market and the government. She brought up his warning that monopolies can use their wealth and power to strangle democracy. “If you go back and read his stuff, it’s not only about the economic dominance; it’s the political influence,” she said.

What’s crucial, Roosevelt believed, is to make the market serve “the public good.” Warren puts it like this: “It’s structural change that interests me. And when I say structural, the point is to say if you get the structures right, then the markets start to work to produce value across the board, not just sucking it all up to the top.”

But will people respond? Warren has been a politician for only seven years, since she announced her run for the Senate in 2011 at age 62. She’s still thinking through how she communicates her ideas with voters. “The only thing that worries me is I won’t describe it in a way that — ” she trailed off. “It’s like teaching class. ‘Is everybody in here getting this?’ And that’s what I just struggle with all the time. How do I get better at this? How do I do more of this in a way that lets people see it, hear it and say, ‘Oh, yeah.’”

In the months after Donald Trump’s stunning victory in 2016, Warren staked out territory as a fierce opponent of the president’s who saw larger forces at play in her party’s defeat. While many Democratic leaders focused on Trump himself as the problem, Warren gave a series of look-in-the-mirror speeches. In the first, to the executive council of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. on Nov. 10, she said that although there could be “no compromise” on standing up to Trump’s bigotry, millions of Americans had voted for him “despite the hate” — out of their deep frustration with “an economy and a government that doesn’t work for them.” Later that month, she gave a second speech behind closed doors to a group that included wealthy liberal donors and went hard at her fellow Democrats for bailing out banks rather than homeowners after the 2008 financial crisis. In another speech, in February 2017, to her ideological allies in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Warren said: “No matter how extreme Republicans in Washington became, Democrats might grumble or whine, but when it came time for action, our party hesitated and pushed back only with great reluctance. Far too often, Democrats have been unwilling to get out there and fight.”

Warren fought in those early months by showing up at the Women’s March and at Logan Airport in Boston to protest Trump’s travel ban. On the Senate floor, opposing the nomination of Jeff Sessions to be Trump’s first attorney general, she read a letter by Coretta Scott King criticizing Sessions for his record of suppressing the black vote in Alabama, and Republican leaders rebuked her and ordered her to stop. The moment became a symbol of the resistance, with the feminist meme “Nevertheless, She Persisted,” a quote from the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, defending the move to silence her. Warren helped take down Trump’s first choice for labor secretary, the fast-food magnate Andy Puzder (he called his own employees the “bottom of the pool”), and she called for an investigation of the Trump administration’s botched recovery efforts in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

But somewhere along the way to announcing her candidacy, Warren’s influence faded. She was no longer the kingmaker or queenmaker whose endorsement Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders avidly sought during their 2016 primary battle. When Warren failed to endorse Sanders, the left saw her decision as an act of betrayal, accusing her of propping up the Democratic establishment instead of trying to take it down. (When I asked Warren if she had regrets, she said she wasn’t going to revisit 2016.) Sanders emerged as the standard-bearer of the emboldened progressive movement.

Trump, meanwhile, was going after Warren by using the slur “Pocahontas” to deride her self-identification in the 1980s and ’90s as part Native American. In the summer of 2018, he said that if she agreed to take a DNA test in the middle of a televised debate, he would donate $1 million to her favorite charity. Warren shot back on Twitter by condemning Trump’s practice of separating immigrant children from their parents at the border (“While you obsess over my genes, your Admin is conducting DNA tests on little kids because you ripped them from their mamas”). But a few months later, she released a videosaying she had done the DNA analysis, and it showed that she had distant Native American ancestry. The announcement backfired, prompting gleeful mockery from Trump (“I have more Indian blood than she has!”) and sharp criticism from the Cherokee Nation, who faulted her for confusing the issue of tribal membership with blood lines. Warren apologized, but she seemed weaker for having taken Trump’s bait.

Sanders is still the Democratic candidate with a guru’s following and a magic touch for small-donor fund-raising, the one who can inspire some 4,500 house parties in a single weekend. And he has used his big policy idea, Medicare for All, to great effect, setting the terms of debate on the future of health care in his party.

With four more years of Trump on the line, though, it’s Joe Biden — the party’s most known quantity — who is far out in front in the polls. Challenging Biden from the left, Warren and Sanders are not calling wealthy donors or participating in big-money fund-raisers. Sanders has been leading Warren in the polls, but his support remains flat, while her numbers have been rising, even besting his in a few polls in mid-June. Warren and Sanders are old friends, which makes it awkward when her gain is assumed to be his loss. Early in June, an unnamed Sanders adviser ridiculed Warren’s electability by calling her DNA announcement a “debacle” that “killed her,” according to U.S. News & World Report. A couple of weeks before the first Democratic primary debates, on June 26 and 27, I asked her what it was like to run against a friend. “You know, I don’t think of this as competing,” she responded. It was the least plausible thing she said to me.

In March, Warren demonstrated her appetite for challenging the economic and political dominance of corporate titans by going directly at America’s biggest tech companies. In a speech in Long Island City, Queens — where local protesters demanded that Amazon drop its plan to build a big new campus — Warren connected the companies’ success at smothering start-up rivals to their influence in Washington. She remarked dryly that the large amounts that businesses like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple spend on lobbying is a “good return on investment if they can keep Washington from enforcing the antitrust laws.” She wants to use those laws to break up the companies instead — a move that no other major American politician had proposed.

After Warren started talking about the four tech giants, along with other critics, the Trump administration let it be known that it was scrutinizing them for potential antitrust violations. Conservatives have suspected social media platforms of bias against them for years, and with concerns about privacy violations escalating, big tech was suddenly a bipartisan target. Warren has specifics about how to reduce their influence; she wants to undo the mergers that allowed Facebook, for example, to snap up WhatsApp, rather than compete with it for users. Warren could unleash the power to bring major antitrust prosecutions without Congress — an answer to gridlock in Washington that’s crucially woven into some of her other plans too. (Warren also favors ending the filibuster in the Senate.) Warren wants to prevent companies that offer an online marketplace and have annual revenue of $25 billion or more from owning other companies that sell products on that platform. In other words, Amazon could no longer sell shoes and diapers and promote them over everyone else’s shoes and diapers — giving a small business a fair chance to break in.

“There’s a concerted effort to equate Warren with Bernie, to make her seem more radical,” says Luigi Zingales, a University of Chicago economist and co-host of the podcast Capitalisn’t. But Wall Street and its allies “are more afraid of her than Bernie,” Zingales continued, “because when she says she’ll change the rules, she’s the one who knows how to do it.”

Warren’s theory of American capitalism rests on two turning points in the 20th century. The first came in the wake of the Great Depression, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt seized the chance to protect workers and consumers from future economic collapse. While the New Deal is mostly remembered for creating much of the nation’s social safety net, Warren also emphasizes the significance of the legislation (like the Glass-Steagall Act) that Democrats passed to rein in bankers and lenders and the agencies (the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) that they put in place to enforce those limits. Warren credits this new regulatory regime, along with labor unions, with producing a golden era for many workers over the next four and a half decades. Income rose along with union membership, and 70 percent of the increase went to the bottom 90 percent. That shared prosperity built, in Warren’s telling, “the greatest middle class the world had ever known.”

Then came Warren’s second turning point: President Ronald Reagan’s assault on government. Warren argues that Reagan’s skill in the 1980s at selling the country on deregulation allowed the safeguards erected in the 1930s to erode. Republicans seized on the opening Reagan created, and Democrats at times aided them. (Bill Clinton signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999.) That’s how the country arrived at its current stark level of inequality. “The system is as rigged as we think,” Warren wrote in her 2017 book “This Fight Is Our Fight”— in a riposte to Barack Obama, who insisted it was not, even as he recognized the influence of money in politics. This, Warren believes, is what Trump, who also blasted a rigged system, got right and what the Democratic establishment — Obama, both Clintons, Biden — gets wrong.

The challenge for Warren, going up against Trump, is that his slogan “drain the swamp” furthers the longstanding Republican goal of discrediting government, whereas Warren criticizes government as “a tool for the wealthy and well connected,” while asking voters to believe that she can remake it to help solve their problems. Hers is the trickier, paradoxical sell.

Warren faces a similar challenge when she tries to address the fear some white voters have that their economic and social status is in decline. Trump directs his supporters to blame the people they see every day on TV if they’re watching Fox News: immigrants and condescending liberal elites. Warren takes aim at corporate executives while pressing for class solidarity among workers across race and immigration status. Trump’s brand of right-wing populism is on the rise around the world. As more people from the global south move north, it’s harder than ever to make the case to all workers that they should unite.

It’s a classic problem for liberals like Warren: Workers often turn on other workers rather than their bosses and the shadowy forces behind them. “Populism is such a slippery concept,” Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University and author of “The Populist Persuasion: An American History,” told me. “The only real test is whether you can be the person who convinces people you understand their resentment against the elites. Trump did enough of that to win. Bernie Sanders has shown he can do it among young people. Can Elizabeth Warren pull it off? I’m not sure.”

It’s an inconvenient political fact for Warren that she’s far more associated with Harvard and Massachusetts, where she has lived for the last 25 years, than with Oklahoma, the childhood home that shaped her and where her three brothers still live and her family’s roots are multigenerational. If you include Texas, where Warren lived in her early 20s and for most of her 30s, she spent three formative decades far from the Northeast.

When she was growing up, Warren’s father worked as a salesman at Montgomery Ward and later as a janitor; neither of her parents went to college. (White women in this group broke for Trump by 61 percent in 2016, and white men supported him by 71 percent.) In the early 1960s, when Warren was 12, her father had a heart attack and lost his job in Oklahoma City. One day, after the family’s station wagon was repossessed, her mother put on the one formal dress she owned, walked to an interview at Sears and got a job answering phones for minimum wage. This has become the story that Warren tells in every stump speech. She uses it to identify with people who feel squeezed.

There’s another story that Warren tells in her book about the implications, for her own life, of her family’s brush with financial ruin. Warren was going to George Washington University on a scholarship — “I loved college,” she told me. “I was having a great time” — when an old high school boyfriend, Jim Warren, reappeared in her life.

He asked her to marry him and go to Texas, where he had a job at IBM. Warren knew her mother wanted her to say yes. “It was the whole future, come on,” she told me. “I had lived in a family for years that was behind on the mortgage. And a secure future was a good man — not what you might be able to do on your own.”

Warren dropped out of college to move to Houston with her new husband. “It was either-or,” she said. Many women who make this choice never go back to school. But Warren was determined to become a teacher, so she persuaded Jim to let her finish college as a commuter student at the University of Houston for $50 a semester. After her graduation, they moved to New Jersey for Jim’s next IBM posting, and she started working as a speech therapist for special-needs children.

Warren was laid off when she became pregnant, and after her daughter was born, she talked Jim into letting her go to law school at Rutgers University in Newark (this time the cost was $450 a semester). After she had her son, she came to terms with the fact that she wasn’t cut out to stay home. “I wanted to be good at it, but I just wasn’t,” she told me.

In the late 1970s, she got a job at the University of Houston law school. She and her husband moved back to Texas. A couple of years later, when their daughter was in elementary school and their son was a toddler, the Warrens divorced. In her book, Warren writes about this from Jim’s perspective: “He had married a 19-year-old girl, and she hadn’t grown into the woman we both expected.” (Jim Warren died in 2003.)

Two years later, Warren asked Mann, whom she had met at a conference, to marry her. He gave up his job at the University of Connecticut to join her in Houston. At the university, Warren decided to teach practical classes, finance and business. In 1981, she added a bankruptcy class and discovered a question that she wanted to answer empirically: Why were personal bankruptcy rates rising even when the economy was on the upswing?

At first, Warren accepted the assumption that people were causing their own financial ruin. Too much “Tommy, Ralph, Gucci and Prada,” a story in Newsweek called “Maxed Out”later declared. Along with two other scholars, Jay Westbrook and Teresa Sullivan, Warren flew around the country and collected thousands of bankruptcy-court filings in several states. “I was going to expose these people who were taking advantage of the rest of us by hauling off to bankruptcy and just charging debts that they really could repay,” she said in a 2007 interview with Harry Kreisler, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley. But Warren, Westbrook and Sullivan found that 90 percent of consumer bankruptcies were due to a job loss, a medical problem or the breakup of a family through divorce or the death of a spouse. “I did the research, and the data just took me to a totally different place,” Warren said.

That research led to a job at the University of Texas at Austin, despite the doubts some faculty members had about her nonselective university degrees. (Mann worked at Washington University in St. Louis.) They finally managed to get joint appointments at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987, and she stayed there until 1995.

During this period, Warren was registered as a Republican. (Earlier, in Texas, she was an independent.) Her political affiliation shifted around the time she began working on bankruptcy in Washington. More than one million families a year were going bankrupt in the mid-’90s, and Congress established the National Bankruptcy Review Commission to suggest how to change the bankruptcy code. The commission’s chairman, former Representative Mike Synar of Oklahoma, asked Warren, now at Harvard Law School, to be his chief policy adviser. “I said, ‘No, not a chance, that’s political,’” Warren said in her interview with Kreisler. “I want to be pure. I want to be pristine. I don’t want to muddy what I do with political implications.”

But Synar persuaded Warren to join his team. It was a critical juncture. Big banks and credit-card companies were pushing Congress to raise the barriers for consumers to file for bankruptcy and harder for families to write off debt. Bill Clinton was president. He had run — much as Warren is running now — as a champion of the middle class, but early in his first term he began courting Wall Street. He didn’t want to fight the banks.

Warren flew back and forth from Boston to Washington and to cities where the commission held hearings. It was her political education, and the imbalance of influence she saw disturbed her. The banks and lenders paid people to go to the hearings, wrote campaign checks and employed an army of lobbyists. People who went bankrupt often didn’t want to draw attention to themselves, and by definition, they had no money to fight back.

By 1997, Warren had become a Democrat, but she was battling within the party as well as outside it. In particular, she clashed with Joe Biden, then a senator from Delaware. Biden’s tiny state, which allowed credit-card companies to charge any interest rate they chose beginning in 1981, would become home to half the national market. One giant lender, MBNA, contributed more than $200,000 to Biden’s campaigns over the years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Biden strongly supported a bill, a version of which was first introduced in 1998, to make it more expensive to file for bankruptcy and more difficult to leave behind debt. He was unpersuaded by Warren’s charts and graphs showing how the change would increase the financial burden on families. “I am so sick of this self-righteous sheen put on anybody who wants to tighten up bankruptcy,” Biden said during a Senate hearing in 2001.

The bankruptcy battles continued, and when Warren testified against the proposed changes to the bankruptcy code before the Senate in 2005, Biden called her argument “very compelling and mildly demagogic,” suggesting that her problem was really with the high interest rates that credit-card companies were allowed to charge. “But senator,” Warren answered, “if you are not going to fix that problem” — by capping interest rates — “you can’t take away the last shred of protection from these families” that access to bankruptcy offers. The bill passed two months later.

Biden’s team now argues that he stepped in to win “important concessions for middle-class families,” like prioritizing payments for child support and alimony ahead of other debt. When I asked Warren in June about Biden’s claim, she pursed her lips, looked out the window, paused for a long beat and said, “You may want to check the record on that.” The record shows that Warren’s focus throughout was on the plight of families who were going bankrupt and that Biden’s was on getting a bill through. He supported tweaking it to make it a little less harmful to those facing bankruptcy, and the changes allowed it to pass.

In the years since it became law, the bankruptcy bill has allowed credit-card companies to recover more money from families than they did before. That shift had two effects, Matthew Yglesias argued recently in Vox. As Biden hoped, borrowers over all benefited when the credit-card companies offered slightly lowered interest rates. But as Warren feared, the new law hit people reeling from medical emergencies and other unexpected setbacks. Blocked from filing for bankruptcy, they have remained worse off for years. And a major effort to narrow the path to bankruptcy may have an unintended effect, according to a 2019 working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, by making it harder for the country to recover from a financial crisis.

In 2001, a Harvard student named Jessica Pishko, an editor of The Harvard Women’s Law Journal, approached Warren about contributing to a special issue. She didn’t expect Warren to say yes. Students saw Warren as an example of female achievement but not as a professional feminist. “She didn’t write about anything that could seem girlie,” Pishko remembers. “She wasn’t your go-to for feminist issues, and she was from that era when you didn’t put pictures of your kids on your desk” to show that you were serious about your work. But Warren wanted to contribute. “She said: ‘I’m doing all this research on bankruptcy, and I want to talk about why that’s a women’s issue. Can I do that?’”

The paper Warren produced, “What Is a Women’s Issue?” was aggressive and heterodox. In it, she criticized the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund for singling out Biden for praise in its annual report because he championed the Violence Against Women Act, which made it easier to prosecute domestic abusers. Warren thought his support for that law did not compensate for his role in pushing through the bankruptcy legislation, which she believed hurt women far more. “Why isn’t Senator Biden in trouble with grass-roots women’s groups all over the country and with the millions of women whose lives will be directly affected by the legislation he sponsors?” she asked. The answer raised “a troubling specter of women exercising powerful political influence within a limited scope, such as rape laws or equal educational opportunity statutes.

Warren wanted feminism to be wider in scope and centered on economic injustice. She urged students to take business-law classes. “If few students interested in women’s issues train themselves in commercial areas, the effects of the commercial laws will not be diminished, but there will be few effective advocates around to influence those policy outcomes,” she wrote. “If women are to achieve true economic equality, a far more inclusive definition of a women’s issue must emerge.”

She challenged standard feminist thinking again when she published her first book for a lay audience (written with her daughter), “The Two-Income Trap,” in 2003. Warren argued that in the wake of the women’s movement of the 1970s, millions of mothers streamed into the workplace without increasing the financial security of their families. Her main point was that a family’s additional income, when a second parent went to work, was eaten up by the cost of housing, and by child care, education and health insurance.

Conservatives embraced her critique more enthusiastically than liberals. Warren even opposed universal day care for fear of “increasing the pressure” to send both parents to work. She has shifted on that point. The child-care proposal she announced this February puts funds into creating high-quality child care but doesn’t offer equivalent subsidies to parents who stay home with their children. Warren says she’s responding to the biggest needs she now sees. More and more families are squeezed by the cost of child care; not enough of it is high quality; the pay for providers is too low. Warren is framing child care as a collective good, like public schools or roads and bridges.

“The Two-Income Trap” got Warren onto “Dr. Phil,” giving her a taste of minor stardom and the appeal of a larger platform. When the financial crisis hit, she moved to Washington’s main stage. At the invitation of Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader at the time, Warren led the congressional oversight panel tasked with overseeing the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program that Congress created to save the financial system. In public hearings, Warren called out Timothy Geithner, Obama’s Treasury secretary, for focusing on bailing out banks rather than small businesses and homeowners. Through a spokeswoman, Geithner declined to comment for this article. In his memoir, he called the oversight hearings “more like made-for-YouTube inquisitions than serious inquiries.”

But Warren could see the value of the viral video clip. In 2009, Jon Stewart invited her on “The Daily Show.” After throwing up from nerves backstage, she went on air and got a little lost in the weeds — repeating the abbreviation P.P.I.P. (the Public-Private Investment Program) and at first forgetting what it stood for. She felt as though she blew her opportunity to speak to millions of viewers. Stewart brought her back after the break for five more minutes, and she performed well, clearly explaining how the country forgot the lessons of the Great Depression and the dangers of deregulation. “We start pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric,” Warren said. She listed the upheavals that followed — the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, the collapse of the giant hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998 and the Enron scandal a few years later. “And what is our repeated response?” Warren said. “We just keep pulling the threads.” Now that the government was trying to save the whole economy from falling off the cliff, there were two choices: “We’re going to decide, basically: Hey, we don’t need regulation. You know, it’s fine, boom and bust, boom and bust, boom and bust, and good luck with your 401(k). Or alternatively, we’re going to say, You know, we’re going to put in some smart regulations ... and what we’re going to have, going forward, is we’re going to have stability and some real prosperity for ordinary folks.”

Stewart leaned forward and told Warren she had made him feel better than he had in months. “I don’t know what it is that you just did right there, but for a second that was like financial chicken soup for me,” he said.

“That moment changed my life,” Warren later said. Stewart kept inviting her back. In 2010, Congress overhauled and tightened financial regulation with the Dodd-Frank Act. In the push for its passage, Warren found that she had the leverage to persuade Democratic leaders to create a new agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Its job is to safeguard people from malfunctioning financial products (like predatory loans), much as the government protects them from — to borrow Warren’s favorite analogy — toasters that burst into flames. Warren spent a year setting up the C.F.P.B. When Obama chose Richard Cordray over her as the first director because he had an easier path to Senate confirmation, progressives were furious.

Warren was an unusual political phenomenon by then: a policy wonk who was also a force and a symbol. In 2012, she was the natural choice for Democrats recruiting a candidate to run against Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, a Republican who had slipped into office, after Ted Kennedy’s death, against a weak opponent. Warren had another viral moment when a supporter released a homemade video of her speaking to a group in Andover. “You built a factory out there?” Warren said, defending raising taxes on the wealthy. “Good for you. But I want to be clear: You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.” Brown called Warren “anti-free enterprise,” and Obama, running for re-election, distanced himself in an ad shot from the White House (“Of course Americans build their own businesses,” he said). But Warren’s pitch succeeded. She came from behind in the race against Brown and won with nearly 54 percent of the vote.

Voters of color could determine the results of the 2020 presidential election. In the primaries, African-Americans constitute a large share of Democrats in the early-voting state of South Carolina and on Super Tuesday, when many other states vote. In the general election, the path to the presidency for a Democrat will depend in part on turning out large numbers of people of color in Southern states (North Carolina, Virginia, possibly Florida) and also in the Rust Belt, where the post-Obama dip in turnout among African-Americans contributed to Hillary Clinton’s squeaker losses in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Warren has work to do to persuade people of color to support her. In the last couple of Democratic primaries, these voters started out favoring candidates who they thought would be most likely to win, not those who were the most liberal. Black voters backed Hillary Clinton in 2008 until they were sure Barack Obama had enough support to beat her, and in 2016 they stuck with her over Bernie Sanders. This time, they have black candidates — Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Wayne Messam — to choose from. And voters of color may be skeptical of Warren’s vision of class solidarity transcending racial division. As it turned out, Warren’s case that most white people voted for Trump because of economic distress, and “despite the hate,” as she said right after the election, didn’t really hold up. A study published last year found that among white voters, perceived racial or global threats explained their shift toward Trump better than financial concerns did. What does that say about the chances of winning as a liberal who tries to take the racism out of populism?

When Warren makes the case about what needs to change in America by leaning on the period from 1935 to 1980, she’s talking about a time of greater economic equality — but also a period when people of color were excluded from the benefits of government policies that buoyed the white middle class. In a video announcing that she was exploring a presidential bid, Warren acknowledged that history by saying that families of color today face “a path made even harder by generations of discrimination.” For example, the federal agency created during the New Deal drew red lines around mostly black neighborhoods on maps to deny mortgage loans to people who lived in them.

Warren spoke about this problem years before she went into politics. Redlining contributed to the racial wealth gap, and that had consequences Warren saw in her bankruptcy studies — black families were more vulnerable to financial collapse. Their vulnerability was further heightened by subprime and predatory lending. In “The Two-Income Trap,” Warren called these kinds of loans “legally sanctioned corporate plans to steal from minorities.”

In March, Warren took a three-day trip to the South. She started on a Sunday afternoon, with a town hall — one of 101 she has done across the country — at a high school in a mostly black neighborhood in Memphis. It’s her format of choice; the questions she fields help sharpen her message. The local politicians who showed up that day were African-American, but most of the crowd was white.

The next morning, Warren drove to the Mississippi Delta. Her husband, Mann, was on spring break from teaching and along for the trip. Warren’s staff welcomes his presence because Warren loves having him with her and because he’s willing to chat up voters (who often call him “Mr. Warren”). In the small town of Cleveland, Miss., Warren sprang out of her black minivan in the parking lot of a church to shake the hand of an African-American state senator, Willie Simmons. They were meeting for the first time: He had agreed to take her on a walking tour after her campaign got in touch and said she wanted to learn about housing in the Delta.

Simmons and Warren set off down a block of modest ranch houses, some freshly painted, others peeling, preceded by TV crews and trailed by the rest of the press as her aides darted in to keep us out of the shot. The scrum made conversation stagy, but Simmons gradually eased into answering Warren’s questions. He pointed out cracks in the foundations of some houses; the lack of money to repair old buildings was a problem in the Delta. They stopped at a vacant lot. The neighbors wanted to turn it into a playground, but there was no money for that either.

Warren nodded and then took a stab at communicating her ideas to the local viewers who might catch a few of her words that night. She hit the highlights of the affordable housing bill she released in the Senate months earlier — 3.2 million new homes over 10 years, an increase in supply that Moody’s estimated would reduce projected rents by 10 percent. When the tour ended, Simmons told the assembled reporters that he didn’t know whom he would support for president, but Warren got points for showing up and being easy to talk to — “touchable,” he said.

That night, Warren did a CNN town hall at Jackson State University, the third historically black college she has visited this year. Warren moved toward the audience at the first opportunity, walking past the chair placed for her onstage. She laid out the basics of her housing bill, stressing that it addressed the effects of discrimination. “Not just a passive discrimination,” Warren said. “Realize that into the 1960s in America, the federal government was subsidizing the purchase of homes for white families and discriminating against black families.” Her bill included funds to help people from redlined areas, or who had been harmed by subprime loans, buy houses. The audience applauded.

Warren also said that night that she supported a “national full-blown conversation” about reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. She saw this as a necessary response to the stark wealth gap between black and white families. “Today in America — because of housing discrimination, because of employment discrimination — we live in a world where the average white family has $100 and the average black family has about $5.” Several Democratic candidates have said they support a commission to study reparations. Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the influential 2014 Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations,” said in a recent interview with The New Yorker that Warren was the candidate whose commitment seemed real because she had asked him to talk with her about his article when it came out years ago. “She was deeply serious,” Coates said.

Warren is often serious and doesn’t hesitate to convey her moral outrage. “I’ll own it,” she told me about her anger. She talked about women expressing to her their distress about sexual harassment and assault. “Well, yeah,” Warren said. “No kidding that a woman might be angry about that. Women have a right to be angry about being treated badly.”

Trump gets angry all the time; whether a woman can do the same and win remains a question. Warren’s campaign is simultaneously working in another register. On Twitter, it has been posting videos of Warren calling donors who have given as little as $3. They can’t believe it’s her. When the comedian and actress Ashley Nicole Black tweeted, “Do you think Elizabeth Warren has a plan to fix my love life?” Warren tweeted back and then called Black, who finished the exchange with a fan-girl note: “Guess who’s crying and shaking and just talked to Elizabeth Warren on the phone?!?!? We have a plan to get my mom grandkids, it’s very comprehensive, and it does involve raising taxes on billionaires.”

After Trump’s election, Warren and Sanders said that if Trump followed through on his promise to rebuild the economy for workers and their families, they would help. If Trump had championed labor over corporations, he could have scrambled American politics by creating new alliances. But that version of his presidency didn’t come to pass. Instead, by waging trade wars that hurt farm states and manufacturing regions more than the rest of the country, Trump has punished his base economically (even if they take satisfaction in his irreverence and his judicial appointments).

Warren has been speaking to those voters. In June, she put out an “economic patriotism” plan filled with ideas about helping American industries. By stepping into the vacuum for economic populism the president has left, Warren forced a reckoning on Fox News, Trump’s safe space on TV, from the host Tucker Carlson. Usually a Trump loyalist, he has recently styled himself a voice for the white working class.

Carlson opened his show by using more than two minutes of airtime to quote Warren’s analysis of how giant American companies are abandoning American workers. Carlson has warned that immigrants make the country “poorer and dirtier” and laced his show with racism, but now he told his mostly Republican viewers: “Ask yourself, what part of the statement you just heard did you disagree with?” He continued, “Here’s the depressing part: Nobody you voted for said that or would ever say it.” The next day, a new conservative Never Trump website called The Bulwark ran a long and respectful essay called “Why Elizabeth Warren Matters.”

A month earlier in Mingo County, W.Va., where more than 80 percent of voters cast a ballot for Trump, Warren went to a local fire station to talk about her plan for addressing the opioid crisis. It’s big: She wants to spend $100 billion over 10 years, including $50 million annually for West Virginia, the state with the highest rate of deaths from drug overdoses. In Trump’s latest budget, he has requested an increase of $1.5 billion to respond directly to the epidemic. Against a backdrop of firefighters’ coats hanging in cinder-block cubbies, Warren moved among a crowd of about 150. Many hands went up when she asked who knew someone struggling with opioids. She brought up the role of “corporations that made big money off getting people addicted and keeping them addicted.” People with “Make America Great Again” stickers nodded and clapped, according to Politico.

If Warren competes for rural voters in the general election (if not to win a red state then to peel off enough of them to make a difference in a purple one), her strong support for abortion rights and gun control will stand in her way. Lately, she has framed her argument for keeping abortion clinics open in economic terms, too. “Women of means will still have access to abortions,” she said at a town hall on MSNBC hosted by Chris Hayes of the effects of new state laws aimed at closing clinics. “Who won’t will be poor women, will be working women, will be women who can’t afford to take off three days from work, will be very young women.” She finished by saying, “We do not pass laws that take away that freedom from the women who are most vulnerable.”

Biden and Sanders have been polling better with non-college-educated white voters than Warren has. David Axelrod, the former Obama strategist and political commentator, thinks that even if her ideas resonate, she has yet to master the challenge of communicating with this group. “She’s lecturing,” he said. “There’s a lot of resistance, because people feel like she’s talking down to them.”

Warren didn’t sound to me like a law professor on the trail, but she did sound like a teacher. Trying to educate people isn’t the easiest way to connect with them. “Maybe she could bring it down a level,” Lola Sewell, a community organizer in Selma, Ala., suggested. “A lot of us aren’t involved with Wall Street and those places.”

Warren may also confront a double bind for professional women: To command respect, they have to prove that they’re experts, but once they do, they’re often seen as less likable. At one point, I asked Warren whether there was anything good about running for president as a woman. “It is what it is,” she said.

When I first talked with Warren in February, when her poll numbers were low, I wondered whether she was content with simply forcing Democratic candidates to engage with her ideas. During the 2016 primaries, when Warren did not endorse Sanders, she wanted influence over Hillary Clinton’s economic appointments should she win the presidency. Cleaving the Democratic administration from Wall Street — that was enough at the time. She could make a similar decision in 2020 or try to get her own appointment. If Warren became Treasury secretary, she could resuscitate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Trump has worked to declaw, and tip all kinds of decisions away from banks and toward the families who come to her town halls and tell her about the loans they can’t pay.

By mid-June, however, when I went to Washington to talk to Warren for the last time, she was very much in the race. New polls showed her in second place in California and Nevada. She had more to lose, and perhaps as a result, her answers were more scripted, more like her speeches.

Warren, like everyone in the race, has yet to prove that she has the political skills and broad-enough support to become president. But a parallel from another country suggests that perhaps bearing down on policy is the best strategy against right-wing populism. Luigi Zingales, the University of Chicago economist, comes from Italy, and he feared Trump’s rise back in 2011, having watched the ascension of Silvio Berlusconi, the corrupt billionaire tycoon who was elected prime minister of Italy in the 2000s as a right-wing populist. After Trump’s victory in 2016, Zingales pointed out in a New York Times Op-Ed that the two candidates who defeated Berlusconi treated him as “an ordinary opponent,” focusing on policy issues rather than his character. “The Democratic Party should learn this lesson,” Zingales wrote. He now thinks that Warren is positioned to mount that kind of challenge. “I think so,” he said, “if she does not fall for his provocations.”

Warren and I met in her Washington apartment. The floor at the entrance had been damaged by a leak in the building, and the vacuum cleaner was standing next to the kitchen counter. I said I was a bit relieved by the slight disarray because her house in Cambridge was so supremely uncluttered, and she burst out laughing. She sat on the couch as we spoke about the indignities to come, the way in which her opponents — Biden, Trump, who knew who else — would try to make her unrecognizable to herself. What would she do about that? Warren leaned back and stretched her feet out, comfortable in gray wool socks. “The answer is, we’ve got time,” she said. “I’ll just keep talking to people — I like talking to people.”

Emily Bazelon is a staff writer for the magazine and the author of “Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration.”

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essenceoffilm · 6 years

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“Is She Real?” and Other Distant Dreams within Dreams: Fifteen Films Which Are Completely Their Own Thing

There are films which stick to one’s mind due to their greatness as well as those which do the same for their extreme inferiority. Mediocre films have a tendency to leave one’s mind like an uneventful day once the night falls. Then there are films which one keeps coming back to because they are completely their own thing. These are films which stay in memory due to their striking originality. They might be masterpieces, and thus greatness could be among the explanans for the phenomenon of preservation, but they do not have to be. In terms of quality or personal preference, these films might be somewhere in the middle. They elude the nightfall of oblivion on other grounds. Although their survival of the test of time can thus be explained by reference to uniqueness, it should be emphasized that uniqueness in this case does not mean any conventional weirdness or doing the extraordinary. The notion I am interested here is not what you might call in-your-face uniqueness (feel free to insert a list of contemporary “indie” directors). Rather, I am interested in the unique unique. I am talking about films which stay with you, but you can’t really point your finger at them and say why; they stay with you not because of quirkiness, of artistic mastery, of historical significance, of intricate story or peculiar characters, but because of an utterly original approach to cinematic discourse -- which might, of course, include all of these to altering degrees. Such originality might be less obvious, but it is there, it is real, and it is singular.

The following list of fifteen unique films will not include the obvious candidates from the first films which did this or that to the weird-for-the-sake-of-being-weird adventures. I have tried to resist the urge to go where the fence is lowest and make a list of “weird movies”; instead I have tried to focus on a more subtle notion of uniqueness. The challenge as well as the allure of list-making are the constant limitations one sets for oneself. That is also the reason why no director pops up twice in the list. Another yardstick for a unique film of this kind is that the film in question cannot really be compared to anything else. Or if it can, the comparison remains loose at best. Hence the absence of films from auteurs whose bodies of work form distinct unique wholes but precisely as wholes, not singular parts. Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, Robert Bresson, Douglas Sirk, Howard Hawks, Yasujiro Ozu, Jean Rouch, Michelangelo Antonioni, you name it. All of them managed to craft an original cinematic discourse, but they developed the execution of that discourse in countless films that form an admirable whole of aesthetic consistency.

So, here, I am not interested in cultural peculiarity, a director’s originality, or uniqueness within a genre. I am interested in a slightly different kind of personality with regard to cinematic discourse. Although each of the following fifteen films exemplifying this unique uniqueness obviously belong to a director’s oeuvre, I believe that all of them stick out in one way or another. They have not been listed in order of personal preference or quality but in terms of uniqueness (which is, of course, a notion difficult to define, and which is a notion not completely free from personal preference and quality, I’m sure). As such, they tell another story, perhaps unique by nature, about the enigma of the seventh art.

15. Cria cuervos (1976, Carlos Saura, SPAIN)

It is an indescribable delight to witness Carlos Saura’s magnum opus Cria cuervos (1976) unfold before you for the very first time. Since the film, which tells the story about a young girl and her two sisters who try to cope with growing up after the death of their parents, was released one year after Francisco Franco’s death, it has become something of a standard interpretation to watch Cria cuervos as an allegorical tale of "the children of Spain” coping with the loss of their patriarchal leader in a new social reality. Yet any serious spectator will tell you that this is just one side of the film’s multi-layered coin of meanings. Its ambiguous structure might tie in with the prevalent narrative tendencies of Saura’s generation of left-wing Spanish directors, but it also works as a metaphor for the vague human mind. Not only cutting but also panning between the present, the past, and an imagined future, the film unfolds as a poignant story about loss and longing, the desire to be somewhere else, something else, some other time. One of the best films about childhood ever made, Cria cuervos denies romantic innocence without falling into the trap of naive pessimism. It embraces childhood as a part of being human, being mortal, being without something, being toward loss, being as always losing something.

The most famous scene from the film -- and an example of just this -- is definitely the scene where the young girl, played by the unforgettable Ana Torrent, listens to a pop song “Porque te vas” by Jeanette, a nostalgic love song about leaving that reminds the girl of her mother’s death. A touching moment beyond words that can only happen in the cinema, this scene exemplifies beautifully the tendency of children to cling onto seemingly insignificant objects that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives. The images where the girl quietly moves her lips in synchronization with the song are breath-taking and heart-breaking. The way how Saura executes this brief scene, in one sequence shot, is just so original, so inimitable, and so Saura. The emotions are not clearly visible on the child’s face, most likely because she is unable to understand let alone express them, but they come from another place that lies somewhere in between of sound and image. The context for this scene is her frustration with her aunt, who she briefly impersonates (”turn down the music”), which further pushes the obvious meanings and the obvious feelings outside. Maybe it is just a random pop song? What is left is the ambiguity of meaning and feeling. And that resonates. Powerfully. I have never seen anything quite like it. These are unique images which speak loudly about the power of cinema. Some might say that what makes Cria cuervos as unique as it is are Ana Torrent’s dark button eyes, but, in reality, it is how Saura frames them, how he lights them, and how he cuts from them. Cria cuervos has no single detail which would exhaust Saura’s style; yet his sense of composition, his choice of shot scale, his sense of color, sound, and movement are in every second of the film; they are characterized by the subtlest nuances which distinguish an ordinary beautiful object from a true work of art.

14. Nema-ye Nazdik (1990, Abbas Kiarostami, IRAN)

Abbas Kiarostami’s penchant for meta-cinematic discourse, which addresses enduring human themes through postmodern questioning of the possibilities of representation, reaches a peak in Nema-ye Nazdik (1990, Close-Up). Based on true events, it tells the peculiar story about a poor Iranian man, Hossain Sabzian (played by himself, like all the performers in the film) who pretended to be the famous Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf for the Ahankas, an upper-class Iranian family to whom Sabzian told that he wanted to use them and their house for his next film. When Sabzian’s hoax was revealed, the Ahankha family sued him only to drop charges after Sabzian’s intentions proved out to be more complex than those of a traditional impostor. Kiarostami mixes documentary footage with staged scenes of what happened to the extent that it is impossible for the spectator to make a distinction. Not because of slyness, or Kiarostami’s talent to cover his tracks, but precisely because the distinction disappears: when the people involved are placed in front of the camera, acting out what has happened in the not-so-distant past, there is no longer a sense of staging but of being.

In a marvelous moment of poetic intuition and cinematic genius, Kiarostami’s camera picks up an empty spray can rolling downhill on asphalt. In the spirit of the “phenomenological realism” of the Italian neorealists, Kiarostami’s objets trouvés, like the empty spray can, are not symbols for something else. It might be juicy to see meaning written in the code of the empty spray can, say, in terms of the looming void behind the roles we all play, but Kiarostami’s camera uncovers it as a mere abandoned tool. Heidegger would call it Vorhanden, a being present-at-hand, whose factual existence is obvious to us after it has lost its functional purpose in its appropriate context, its primordial being as Zuhanden, a being ready-to-hand that one surrounds oneself with in the everyday reality of practical life. Even if this coarsely rolling empty spray can was the postmodern alternative to Sisyphus’ rock, it would be more a metonymy than a metaphor. It is a desolate, cast-off tool whose lonely mundane being paradoxically charms us in its banality. It is, what we might call in the spirit of anticipation, the taste of cherry.

Here, in the peculiar zone between metaphor and metonomy, meaning and the lack of it (or independent meaning), inhabited by empty spray cans, lies the uniqueness of Nema-ye Nazdik. There is nothing holy or sacred in Kiarostami’s images. The material density of the rough texture of the depicted reality drains from them. The close-ups of the film -- whether in actual shot scale or in narrative intimacy achieved by precisely restrictive framing and extensive use of the off-screen space -- startle us with this banality of the facticity of being and the phenomenal surface of reality. The final close-up of the film shows us Sabzian, looking down, holding a bouquet at the gate of the Ahanka residence where Makhmalbaf has taken him to make amends. One senses the Chaplinesque tragedy of life in close-up. It is tragic because there is no comfort from contextualization; there is a factual detail thrown at us in its strange existential disclosure. A rolling empty spray can or a structured identity at ruins -- revealed, stripped, naked. The human theme of longing coalesces with the meta-cinematic theme of the possibility of representation as one feels the unquenchable thirst for escape, the yearning to be someone else in this banal world of objects-at-present. Where else in the cinema does one find all of this?

13. The Wrong Man (1956, Alfred Hitchcock, USA)

Although Hitchcock is definitely a genre director, meaning that he really devoted his whole career to the genre of suspense (whether in thriller, horror, espionage, or adventure), he made a lot of films which pushed the limits of genre aesthetics, conventional narration, and classical style toward unexplored territories in the land of film. Hitchcock’s legacy is in fact constituted precisely by his relentless desire to look for new ways of cinematic expression. The most obvious example would probably be the “trilogy” in which Hitchcock tested -- and, perhaps to popular opinion, failed -- the slow aesthetics of the long take: Rope (1948), Under Capricorn (1949), and Stage Fright (1950). Their uniqueness is admirable, and the two latter border on masterpiece, but the most unique of Hitchcock’s films is, I believe, The Wrong Man (1956).

If Hitchcock, the great manipulator of his audience whose “buttons” he loved to push, is placed in the group of directors who mastered formalist montage over realist mise-en-scène, following a heavily Bazinian distinction, we might conclude that The Wrong Man is the closest Hitchcock ever got to cinematic realism. Although the film does manipulate the spectator, guiding their gaze throughout rather than giving them the freedom of deep focus and multiplanar composition (the cardinal virtues of Bazin’s theory), its austere mise-en-scène, economic narration, and minimalist editing make it Hitchcock’s most Bressonian film. Interestingly enough, and this will bring us to the film’s uniqueness in a moment, Hitchcock’s biggest fan and André Bazin’s most famous disciple, François Truffaut first expressed great appreciation for The Wrong Man when it came out and later disowned the film in his famous interview book with Hitchcock [1].

The passage where Truffaut challenges Hitchcock, not in order to humiliate him but in order to get him to defend his artistic choices, is among the best parts of the whole interview book. Their discussion concerns the scene where the protagonist, played by Henry Fonda, is taken to his prison cell where he does not belong to because he really has not committed the crime he is being accused of committing. There is no dialogue or voice-over narration to tell us what the character is going through, but Hitchcock’s cinematic narration still visually focalizes into his internal, first-person point of view, while switching to an external, non-focalized third-person perspective in medium shots of the character in captivity. Hitchcock cuts between these medium close-ups of the character’s face as he is looking at something and point of view shots of the austere cell that serves as the object of his gaze. There is no music, no sound -- just stark images of a narrow, grey space. The calm cutting between these two types of shots manages to reflect the character’s inner life which becomes, so to speak, externalized by cinematic means. It is as though his mind extended to the space whose austerity became to articulate his experience of imprisonment, isolation, and, ultimately, loss of self. The non-subjective space turns subjective; its concrete features start to channel the character’s mental states in ways which contemporary directors like Lucrecia Martel have mastered.

The problem Truffaut has with the scene is its ending. The scene concludes with a medium shot where the protagonist leans against the wall of his cell, eyes closed, distraught, powerless. Suddenly, non-diegetic music starts playing on the soundtrack and the camera begins swirling in a circular loop around the character. As the movement of the camera accelerates, the music intensifies and finally reaches a crescendo coinciding with a fade-to-black to the next scene. Truffaut disliked this shot because it seemed to break with the Bressonian asceticism that Hitchcock had been practicing prior to it. It is also noteworthy to add that never again is there anything like this in the rest of the film (and thus the shot does break against the norm of consistency): The Wrong Man returns to its minimalist, Bressonian roots, letting go of the striking expressivity of such camera movement (which is not used to follow a character or reveal further details of narrative significance in the diegetic space). One might recall, for example, the unforgettable shot which dissolves the praying protagonist’s face with the “right man’s” face, and what a completely different feel that shot has to it -- it is something Bresson would never do, but it is something the Bressonian side of Hitchcock does.

Despite Truffaut’s challenge, Hitchcock refused to defend his film, disappointingly noticing that it was not that important to him. That might be the case, but it might also be that Hitchcock was not sure of his artistic choice, or he didn’t know how to explain his intuition, or he didn’t want to argue about such matters. Maybe he thought he had failed in his experiment. Either way, it is this moment which always gets me. It feels a little awkward, and it always pushes me just a little away from the film, to a strange borderline zone of cringe -- but, at the same time, it feels wonderful. It’s the moment where one can so clearly see Hitchcock’s legacy as an innovator and a re-generator, looking for new ways to make films -- and not always with success. It’s the moment when you realize that you are not watching Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956, A Man Escaped) but The Wrong Man. It goes against the realist style which avoids blatant and outspoken expression, but it goes so well with Hitchcock’s own style where a sudden cut to an extreme long shot from an extreme high-angle on the top of the United Nations building is completely natural. It’s also one of those moments, definitely alongside the great dissolve of the two faces, where one can sense the presence of cinematic uniqueness. Although I think Un condamné à mort s’est échappé is a better film, there is really nothing like The Wrong Man. From Hitchcock’s startling opening monologue to the inexplicable happy end, bordering on Sirkian irony, The Wrong Man is really its own idiosyncratic thing.

12. Lola Montès (1955, Max Ophüls, FRANCE)

Master director Max Ophüls’ final film and cinematic legacy Lola Montès (1955) is the definitive cult film. It’s strange, it’s wild, and its off-the-rails uniqueness made it a massive flop. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of... the dreams in cult film land. A lavishly told story about a woman with hundreds of lovers, who is now presented to us as a circus attraction, did not resonate with contemporary audiences. With the exception of the new film critics of Cahiers du Cinéma, who were to define the cinema of the following decade, everybody hated the film. To those who understood the magic, however, it was wonderful. To those who still do, it is beyond divine. The combination of box-office and critical failure with a huge budget and an unprecedented desire to challenge convention from the 50-year-old director, who was soon to pass away, turned Ophüls into a martyr figure for the new generation of French filmmakers. Like Orson Welles, Ophüls was -- to them in their own land -- a misunderstood genius, a maestro who died two years after the release of his final film that found too few kindred spirits.

What makes the case of Ophüls’ martyrdom so fascinating is the fact that on paper Lola Montès sounds like everything Truffaut et co. hated. It is based on a novel, its script has other writers in addition to Ophüls, it has an all-star cast (and without the obvious choice, the Ophüls favorite of the 50′s, Danielle Darrieux!), and it has lavish production values backed by a big budget. Does this not sound like le cinéma de qualité par excellence?

The fact that Lola Montès sounds like dull quality cinema on paper, however, does not mean that it looks like it on celluloid. And that’s what makes it unique. Known for his penchant for sumptuously elaborate camera movement (to the extent that a camera which is not moving on tracks simply looks naked in the Ophüls universe), Ophüls went an extra mile to make his forward-tracking dolly shots work in a wide circus arena without revealing the tracks. Resonating with the width of the diegetic space and the volume brought to it by such cinematography, Ophüls also widened his film into color and the CinemaScope aspect ratio for the first time in his career. Unlike anyone prior to him and few after, during a time when CinemaScope had not been around for longer than two years, Ophüls made the unexpected decision to play with the aspect ratio. For most of the screen time, we see the events unfold in 2.55:1, but, every now and then, when mood or character identification so requires, Ophüls narrows the aspect ratio back to the Academy ratio by placing curtains on both sides of the lens. The peculiar technique of altering the aspect ratio within shots in itself is enough to make Lola Montès unique, but the way it connects to the theme of the theater -- not only as the circus milieu but also as the publicization of the private sphere -- and the surprising yet accurate (which never feel too much on-the-nose) choices Ophüls makes in using it turn Lola Montès into a bizarre marvel.

11. Daisy Kenyon (1947, Otto Preminger, USA)

On paper, again, Otto Preminger’s Daisy Kenyon (1947) seems like nothing but a love triangle done to death. Joan Crawford plays a woman who is having an affair with a married man, played by the impeccable Dana Andrews, but in the middle of their troubled affair -- that would suffice to constitute a love triangle -- enters a returning war veteran, played by Henry Fonda (the only actor to appear twice on this list!), who also catches the woman’s eye. The film unfolds as a series of moments which push the female protagonist to the embrace of one man or the other. What makes the film so unique, however, is its original cinematic discourse, its use of style and narration. In his admirably insightful new book on 40′s Hollywood, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling (2018), professor of film studies, David Bordwell calls Daisy Kenyon “one of the most psychologically opaque films of 1940′s” [2]. Preminger’s cinematic narration is characteristically restrictive of narrative information. There is no voice-over, which would provide the spectator information about the characters’ inner motivations and feelings, but this is only made more ambiguous by the dialogue where the characters keep making contradictory statements about themselves and others. It is difficult to keep track of their mood swings as well as their cognitive discontinuities, and make any cohesive conception of their true motivations and feelings. This was yet to become the dominant characteristic of modern European cinema (mainly Antonioni, above all), but here it blends with classical Hollywood.

The film is filled with strange moments of peculiar, recurring pauses in dialogue which enhance an ambiguity that starts to feel bigger than the characters and their petty worries. Fonda’s character suddenly ends a moment of conversation with Crawford’s by saying “my wife’s dead” without receiving a response of any kind from his romantic interlocutor. Similarly, he nonchalantly proclaims his love to her -- “I love you” -- but gets no response in another passing moment of indifferent quietude. There are no typical responses nor are there typical initiatives. There are only words that try to grab onto something but most often miss their targets that perhaps never even existed.

The lack of conventional non-diegetic music, the use of deep-focus cinematography, deep space compositions, and lingering shots create a mood of emptiness and despair, which reflect a deeper difficulty in expressing oneself. This theme is articulated on the formal level of style and narration, but it also becomes knitted into the story world toward the end when the courtroom sequence plays with the ideas of illogical human behavior and the impossibilities of finding out what people have done and felt. When one of the two men and the Crawford character embrace one another in the film's final shot, it is equally impossible for the spectator to believe that this is the stable, happy end of a typical Hollywood romance. It is merely another dumbfounded pause, another pointless initiative, another unnoticed response, which will soon be followed by quietude, distance, and alienation.

10. Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975, Peter Weir, AUSTRALIA)

Australian director Peter Weir has made a lot of weak films (I am not a fan of the sentimental Dead Poets Society [1989] or the pseudo-intellectual The Truman Show [1998] -- though I do have a little thing for Fearless [1993]), but his breakthrough film, based on the novel by Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) is a real treat. A fictional account of the disappearance of three schoolgirls and their teacher during an all-girls boarding school’s picnic on St. Valentine’s Day in 1900, Picnic at Hanging Rock begins with a quasi-documentary opening text and concludes with an extra-diegetic voice-over discussing the case, making it seem as if the story was true. More than fooling the audience, this device guides them into another world, where something like this might have happened, and into the hypnotic trance of a mystery, all of which is enhanced, of course, by the first images of a foggy landscape and the girl’s words in voice-over:

What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream.

Weir’s greatest film leaves a lasting impression with its unique, impressionist aesthetics of pale colors, quiet sounds, soft focus, lush cinematography, eerie panpipes music, and an often strictly limited field of focus. It is as if the film had been shot through lace or a veil, giving the effect of the faded fantasy image of the romantic belle époque. The final jaded slow-motion shots of the group before the disappearance have an otherworldly quality. They bear a resemblance to impressionist paintings, but the jaded pace of the visual stream of the images emphasizes their mechanic artificiality as though these were paintings made with the first motion picture cameras. Weir’s narrative structure is likewise closer to poetry or painting than to prose as the focalization of the narration is constantly switching, the characters remain a mystery with their inner world and their psychological motives left completely in the dark, the relations between the diegetic events are vague to say the least, and Weir cuts between them in an unconventional fashion. It is nothing short of cinematic uniqueness which stays with the spectator for the rest of their life. One of the most sensitive and clever mystery films of all time, Picnic at Hanging Rock keeps astonishing with its whimsical combination of mystery and reportage, impressionism and mystique, the fantastical and the real.

9. A Canterbury Tale (1944, Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, UK)

Made in the days of Capra’s wartime propaganda series Why We Fight (1942-1945), whose patriotic spirit spread across the Atlantic to films calling for Anglo-American solidarity, Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944) defies tired cliches and patriotic sentiments in its utterly unique rhythm and tone. Taking Chaucer’s classic as an inter-textual framework, A Canterbury Tale focuses on three characters who, on their way to Canterbury, stop at a small village where a mysterious “glue-man” is terrorizing young women who dare to date soldiers. In contrast to most of the wartime productions of the time, Powell and Pressburger’s film turns its gaze from the grandiose to the minuscule, a small village that is unafraid to show its quirky silliness but as such grows into a metaphor for western civilization.

One of the famous director duo’s biggest critical and commercial flops, A Canterbury Tale defies easy classifications. What makes the film unique in a timeless sense lies in its tone and rhythm that are hard to describe. The set-up could mark the beginning of a frivolous farce, and the film is definitely not lost on moments of genuine hilarity, but, as a whole, A Canterbury Tale develops toward the area of peculiar pathos, humanistic tenderness, and profound melancholy. The mythic and the mundane, the romantic and the realist, the everyday and the sublime, the eternal and the transient all find their strange fusion in the film’s rendez-vous of distinct tones, moods, and ideas. Classical studio artificiality gets mixed with on-location authenticity, which is characterized by historical uniqueness as the contemporary spectator realizes that these places are no longer there, creating a tone like no other. In terms of rhythm, the film is always flowing without a hurry, yet never too slowly to announce itself as different or weird. The film’s uniqueness seems so simple, encapsulated in the smallest of things (the co-presence of the past and the present, the smell of the countryside that is imagined through the images, the allure of the any-space-whatevers), but it is so difficult to describe let alone achieve. It must be seen to be believed...

8. Dong (1998, Tsai Ming-Liang, TAIWAN)

The late 1990′s attracted some filmmakers to imagine eschatological scenarios and project them on the big screen. The approaching arrival of the new millennium generated visions of both anxiety and hope, but man’s relentless tendency toward end-of-the-world nightmares drew him closer to the former. These cinematic efforts on the brink of the new millennium usually vary between downright awful (Armageddon, 1998; End of Days, 1999) and surprisingly tolerable (12 Monkeys, 1995), but Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang’s -- who had made a reputation for himself with the understated tale of eroticism Ai qing wan sui(1994, Vive L’Amour), whose final shot in itself might earn its own prize of uniqueness -- Dong (1998, The Hole) shows not only genuine originality and imagination before new times but also a unique tonal combination of both emotions associated with the historic transition: fear and hope.

These emotions are tied together in the film’s thematic nexus of encountering something new, a theme that is treated by Ming-Liang appropriately in an utterly novel fashion. The story takes place in a block of flats in the semi-urban outskirts of a Taiwanese city where people live in quarantine due to the lack of clean water, a problem that has some dire consequences, fitting for the new millennium: without water, people turn into cockroach-like entities that crawl in the dark spaces of moist dirt and dry trash. Two people, a man and a woman, who try to survive in this situation, are united when a hole appears on the man’s floor (being the woman’s roof) due to plumbing renovations. This hole, which is both physical and emotional -- concrete to the point that we can sense its material urgency and abstract to the point that words are not enough to express it -- begins to generate unprecedented intimacy between the two. The characters rarely communicate. At best, they might yell at each other when the woman, the neighbor beneath, finds her ceiling leaking. But there is a more tender connection, one that cannot be expressed by them. In a stroke of charming genius, Ming-Liang uses 50′s-style musical sequences, where well-dressed characters sing Grace Chang’s songs and perform dance numbers that convey the introverted characters silent feelings in a manner that obfuscates more than it clarifies (there is no aha-moment tailored for the spectator). As these musical sequences take place in the same desolate urban spaces where the characters exist, Ming-Liang’s realist aesthetics of the long take, deep space compositions, and a detailed naturalist mise-en-scène of faded colors and flickering lights are challenged by romantic artifice. The space, which turns into its own character, starts dreaming. It dreams of becoming something else, somewhere else, far and away, safe from the arrival of the new.

As the world prepares for never-before-seen destruction, the holes in the characters’ souls become tangible in the form of a narrow gap, not only the grey chasm between the two apartments but also the distinction between these two diegetic dimensions (the world of song and the world of silence). As the new both anxiety-inducing and hope-awakening millennium approaches, the two characters encounter love, something they had not expected, something they had forgotten, something that appears in a totally unprecedented form -- to them as well as to us, the audience. This unique story provides us with an interlude to reflect. Where are we going? New times are coming. We can always look back to the past. We can find solace in its embrace. What is collapsing? What can be recovered? What will the abyss of the hole engulf? And what will it bring about in times of chaos? A new connection, a new intimacy, a new cinema?

7. Herz aus Glas (1976, Werner Herzog, GERMANY)

Shot mainly in director Werner Herzog’s home environment of Bavaria, accompanied with gorgeous landscape shots from all over the world which still merge with the same central milieu, as well as Popol Vuh’s score, Swiss yodeling, and medieval music, Herz aus Glas (1976, Heart of Glass) is the shining ruby in Herzog’s prolific yet familiar oeuvre. Although Herzog is often celebrated as an eccentric filmmaker whose cinema constitutes an entirely unique thing of its own, his films are usually quite clearly connected to one another, and one knows what to expect from them (which is also a compliment to Herzog’s auteur caliber). Herz aus Glas, however, brings a breath of fresh air into a catalog that already seems to be as fresh as fresh can be. It is definitely the film that sticks out. No other Herzog film employs his unquenchable desire to pursue new profound images as strongly and startlingly.

The story concerns a Bavarian town in late 18th century whose main source of income comes from blowing a rare type of ruby glass. When the secret of the ruby glass passes away with the town’s deceased master, a prophetic seer from the hills descends to the townspeople and foresees their destruction. To anyone who has seen the film, it is quite clear that the story is secondary to the film’s strange, private discourse which might be better left unanalyzed since its mere verbal description seems to aggregate an insult at worst and a failure at best.

While there are certainly more than one factor which explain the film’s incomparable uniqueness (the presence of seemingly unrelated landscape shots as an additional level of discourse, the ambiguous story as well as its elusive structure, the extremely stylized mise-en-scène that creates a sense of alienation and distance), the raison d’être for the film’s reputation obviously derives from Herzog’s exceptional decision to shoot the whole film with the actors under hypnosis. Consequently, the film is rife with images of hypnotized people who stare very attentively at something in the off-screen space -- something, an object, a sight, an event, something that remains a mystery to the hopelessly unaware spectator. In the physical space, the actors are obviously looking at something Herzog the hypnotist has guided them to look at, but in the diegetic space, the characters are looking with great attention and focus on their pre-determined doom. Their focus is startling because, despite their attentiveness, they do nothing but walk towards their demise. This works because, though pre-determined, their doom is indeterminate in the sense that they cannot really make any sense out of it. A stroke of genius on Herzog’s part, this heavily stylized acting turns into a metaphorical framework for a community which is under collective hypnosis heading out to the horizon of destruction with a sense of blind determination.

The film is totally alienated from classical story-telling, and many of its scenes take place in spaces which we might see only once and whose relations to the rest of the spaces remain unclear. Mapmakers of fictive worlds, beware. They are places which Herzog remembers from his childhood, or places which he has imagined for his past or future. There are many elements which would annoy the regular movie-goer from the slowly developing cry of a woman as she witnesses two seemingly dead men on the ground to the inexplicable bursts of laughter from the old man. There are plenty of scenes which seem to serve no clear purpose. There is a scene where a painting falls from the wall behind a man after which he tries to lift it, fails, and then returns to his original posture as if nothing had happened. There is also a sequence shot of a glassblower making a glass horse out of the melt matter. This scene has no obvious meaning in the film, nor should it; the shot is just there. It is there for us to marvel at it and to reflect on the beauty of craftsmanship, the art of glassblowing.

If the quest of Herzog’s cinema is to always look for new images, then Herz aus Glas delivers more than any of his films. One of the many peculiarities of the film are the recurring landscape shots from all over the world which remind one of Herzog’s brilliant documentary Fata Morgana (1971). These landscapes might be the visions of the attentively looking townspeople or not. As such, they might be images of destruction, of the end, or of the beginning -- or not. They might be an imagined landscape of origins. My personal favorite is the shot, which has been done mechanically by a frame-by-frame technique, of a river of clouds on the top of a forest. There is an enchanting mystique to this hypnotic image. When we look at it, we might think that it is about something, but we should not make the mistake of trying to explain what that something is. Nor should we find an external point of reference to call it a metaphor for something else. We should embrace its mere cinematic aboutness.

6. The Quiet Man (1952, John Ford, USA)

John Ford, the man who made westerns, is to modern America what Homer is to ancient Greece. Beyond the genre of lonely travelers in the wild west, Ford took his cinematic myth-making to other worlds. They Were Expendable (1944) provided the first signs of Ford’s unadorned and unsung sensitivities beyond the desert, which, after initial opposition, he was able to appreciate (sort of) after Lindsay Anderson pressed him on the emotional depth of the film in his celebrated interview book. The real deal when it comes to Ford’s hidden personality, his artistic ambition, and his aesthetic sensitivity, however, is The Quiet Man (1952), a film like no other if there ever was one. It is a unique, poetic fable of pastoral idyll, understated modern anxieties, battling dialectics of reality and fantasy.

A classical love story where a man, Sean Thornton, played by Ford soulmate John Wayne, returns to Ireland from America where he falls in love with Mary, played by Maureen O’Hara, The Quiet Man is like an idyllic postcard, a tale of the fantastical countryside that is presented in an overly romanticized fashion. Its humor, varying between masculine slapstick and battle-of-the-sexes screwball comedy, would make the advocates of the me-too era cringe. However, I believe that Peter von Bagh was right in seeing the film as greater than life. To him, its scenes of love carry “metaphysical might.” [3] There is more to them than the eye can see. When Sean pulls Mary away from the door opened by ferocious wind to kiss her for the first time, there is a sense of baroque awe as Mary’s hems bend against her rigid legs in a gust of divine wind. Perhaps telling of its uniqueness, the film’s closest kindred spirit seems to be a film that looks totally different, Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), which carries similar “metaphysical might.”

The Quiet Man was not received well during its initial release. Its fable-like illusions threw away all hopes of Ford’s return to the realist cinema of Hollywood he helped establish in the late 30′s and early 40′s. The far landscapes of the wild west were replaced by a postcard idyllic Irish village of Inisfree where trains are late, chores can be put on a halt to chit-chat, and traditions persevere. From the beginning locus amoreus of a boat by lakeside at dusk to pastoral iconography of a redhead shepherding sheep, a priest fooling fish, and drunkards playing the accordion, The Quiet Man is Irish pastoral of 50′s American optimism. Despite the film’s idyllic nature and the romantic mise-en-scène that gives birth to it, one would be making the mistake if one concluded that The Quiet Man was completely lost on realism. “Inisfree is far from heaven, Mr. Thornton!,” reminds one character. It is rather that in it Ford manages to find a totally unique combination of realism and romanticism, the modern and the traditional, the American and the Irish, in a fashion that reminds me of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Sean escapes America, the land of freedom and opportunities, to his home country of Ireland. Although never stated explicitly in the film, one can see a social undertone, as noticed by von Bagh: during the Korean War, which was still going on, disillusions scattered throughout America. Inisfree’s distance from heaven might be lost on Sean’s nostalgic eyes, but he seems to imply something about the looming vicinity of realism to us when, upon seeing Mary for the first time, his yet undiscovered love interest and wife-to-be, he states: “is she real?”

It is, in fact, this scene, this first encounter between the lovers-to-be, that always gets me. Its uniqueness escapes words. The scene begins with a long full shot of Mary amid sheep, which is motivated as Sean’s point of view shot as the scene progresses. There is a cut to a low-angle medium shot of Mary, which is followed by a reverse shot of Sean and then another low-angle medium shot of Mary, as she slowly vanishes beyond the frames of the screen space. A return to the long full shot of Mary amid sheep is followed by a medium shot of Sean. Dumbfounded, amazed, looking afar, and hopelessly in love, he says: “Is she real?” Ford’s brilliant choices in montage and shot scale articulate the distance between the characters, which will be a recurring theme in the film -- “There’ll be no locks or bolts between us, Mary Kate!” -- while also bringing them in close intimacy that still remains a mystery to both of them. There is a heavenly feeling to all of this. Where are we? The modern Sean, escaping the disillusions of 50′s American optimism, might be asking himself: “Is this -- Inisfree -- real?” We, the viewers, we, the lovers of the film, we, the lovers of cinema, might be asking ourselves: “Is this -- The Quiet Man -- real?”

5. Tini zabutykh predkiv (1964, Sergei Parajanov, USSR/UKRAINE)

Ukraine-born director, Sergei Parajanov’s breakthrough film Tini zabutykh predkiv (1964, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors) is on fire. It is on fire like a mixture of jazz and opera, a blend of ancient epic and modernist poem, a mishmash of waltz and jitterbug that never, for some odd unfathomable reason, feels haphazard. It feels eternal, timeless, and archaic, but, at the same time, contemporary and modern. The truly marvelous thing about all this is the fact that the story itself is a fairly traditional love story. Ivan and Marichka, whose families are rivals by heart, fall in love at a young age. After Marichka drowns in an accident, Ivan falls into depression but then remarries. In his new life of work and dull everyday chores, he is tormented by the memory of his first love. In the end, he dies either due to a hit from a sorcerer, who has made passes at Ivan’s new wife, or due to his incurable loneliness in a void universe without love.

Such a classical romantic tale acquires an unprecedented energy from Parajanov’s cinematography that is characteristically free and mobile -- in stark contrast to that of Sayat Nova (1969, The Color of Pomegranates), the director’s best-known film. The handheld camera is always on the move. It does not shake in the sense that the contemporary spectator has become accustomed to identify “handheld camerawork;” in fact, it can be very steady at times, but it moves quickly and ferociously. It pans so fast from one place to another that the eye does not register the spaces between the two steady screen spaces before and after the pan. It can appear to be fixed on a spot, but then it starts gliding or flying as in the amazing shot of Ivan lying on the large raft on the river. Watching the film unfold on the big screen is like having your head dislocated in some strange non-physical sense. One might think that such energy is distracting and makes one pay too much attention to the cinematography. The effect, however, is the opposite. It’s hypnotic. Everything feels intuitive and natural. One simply feels bewildered before this film to the extent that one starts imagining new images to the film. It is as if the camera found freedom and was liberated from its physical ties, becoming a disembodied eye whose movements are impossible to be predicted. The spectator never knows where the camera is going to move next, what the next angle will be, or in which scale the next shot shall be.

As such, the camera turns into a lyrical speaker of a poem or a stream-of-consciousness narrator of prose who identifies with the characters’ experience that cannot be accessed unambiguously. The most obvious example is not surprisingly the use of point of view shot when Ivan’s father is axed to death: red blood fills the screen, which is followed by a strange image of red silhouettes of running horses. Less obviously subjectivized stylistic decisions, where the camera identifies with characters’ experience, include the beginning scene where there is a “point of view shot” from a falling tree’s perspective, which is followed by a hypnotic spin of the camera as though it detached from material reality after a character dies under the tree. During the first embrace of Ivan and Marichka, Parajanov’s camera keeps the characters in focus and in a tight medium close-up, but the intimacy is complicated by implied visual distance: the use of the telephoto lens coalesces multiple layers of tree branches and other flora as a soft, flat veil enfolding the lovers in their natural innocence as the camera encircles them in eternity. When Ivan falls into depression after Marichka’s death, not only are the colors replaced by a surprising shift to black-and-white but also the movement of the camera becomes significantly calmer and slower. When Ivan starts feeling the presence of the dead Marichka -- as a ghost, as a memory -- there is a series of jump cuts showing Marichka behind Ivan’s window, rather than a return to the previous stylistic program. All of these exemplify cinema’s ability to subjectivize without the use of point of view shot or voice-over. Parajanov realizes this potentiality beautifully and uses different cinematic means without restriction but never without a consistent vision.

There are shadows from the past which obstruct Ivan and Marichka’s innocent love, but there are also shadows from the new past which prevent Ivan from moving on with his life. In an unforgettable scene that is still unparalleled in film history, Marichka’s ghost entices the delirious Ivan, recently struck by the sorcerer, to death in a wintry forest. Both characters move toward each other, but they do not seem to be walking in the medium shots that only show their heads moving against the background of the white forest as their voices sing a song of love without their lips moving. There is a strange sense of movement and ceased time. There is a touching sense of the wonderful yet painful grip of love. There it is, unshadowed, unforgotten, now.

4. Sud pralad (2004, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, THAILAND)

In terms of mere structure, this film is bonkers. Hardly ever has a film dropped as many jaws as Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s breakthrough feature Sud pralad (2004, Tropical Malady) during its initial festival release. At first glance, it might be tedious, it might be irritating, it might be, well, just too mysterious. It might feel too private. As one allows the images and the sounds to sink in, however, this masterful, dualistically structured film starts to make sense like Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001). Even more so than Lynch’s, I believe, Weerasethakul’s film is one of the best and most unique films ever made about love.

What begins as a love story between two men, a soldier and a country boy working at an ice factory, ending in an unexplained break-up, suddenly turns into a silent fable about a shape-shifting shaman and a soldier. The second part can be seen as an allegory for the first -- or vice versa. They comment on one another. They are co-dependent. They are lovers. There isn’t one without the other. What is more important than the logical connections between the two parts (one can either see them as flip sides of the same story or as a continuous story in the same fictive world) are their sensual and emotional resonances. Being a love story, the film’s English title (which is not a direct translation, one might add) already suggests a peculiar vision of love: not as a cure or as a utopia but as a malady, a sickness, something that consumes one’s body and soul. As the two men separate, they first devour each other. There is a sense of mystery in the air. What happened? Exactly. Who knows. Who’s to say?

Since their feelings -- both in initial infatuation and in the out-of-the-blue separation -- cannot be explained in words, they are articulated by the fable. The soldier is being consumed by the shaman, he is dying because of him, but he is also dependent on the shaman and must approach him. As the shaman shifts into a tiger, the aspect of consumption becomes poignantly discernible. Weerasethakul uses many lingering shots in the dark forest that suggest a fluctuation between the two characters. There is movement in the screen space, but is it the soldier or the tiger? They finally face each other in a bigger-than-life scene of intense stares that will haunt you for an eternity. The stare of the tiger occupies the screen space, dominating, hypnotizing the audience. There’s a strange sense of fear but also of lust; there’s an inexplicable desire to surrender as the malady takes over. Weerasethakul’s long take allows the tiger’s stare to sink in, to drill down to the spectator’s spine where its sensuous force begins to fester. The moment of devouring is at hand. This scene breaks hearts and sews them back together.

Weerasethakul’s inimitable cinematic discourse, which operates on the immediate level of senses and sensations, uncovers animals and other natural entities in their own right, as they appear, rather than as conventional metaphors for something else. They are embraced as the Other. Indeed: Sud pralad is a film about primordial otherness of everything else beyond oneself, a theme that Weerasethakul tackles by telling a love story. Because in love one experiences otherness most intimately but also most painfully. One might be very close to the other, but one also experiences the growing distance. One must confront the insurmountable challenge to understand the other. There is one’s own mind to keep one company, and then there is the rest of the world. There is the man devouring one’s hand and then going away for good. There are street lights in the night. There is music in the air. There is a sense of heartrending wonder. There is the intensely staring tiger ready to devour the one. And there is the one ready to take the plunge.

3. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988, Terence Davies, UK)

By its enigmatic title alone, Terence Davies’ heavily autobiographical film Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) invites expectations of originality, and those expectations are not disappointed to the slightest. The ambiguous title is rife with meaning, but at the most direct level it works as a structural point of reference since the film is distinctly divided into two separate parts. A story about a working-class family living in Liverpool, the film’s first part, “Distant Voices” focuses on the power the family’s father has on their co-existence in 1940′s, while the second part, “Still Lives” portrays the lives of the children in their early adulthood in the 1950′s -- away from the presence of the war but still far from the new youth culture that was about to emerge. Under the father’s abusive influence, they cried and sang in a bomb shelter; now, safe from heavy rain in a cinema, they cry as they watch Henry King’s Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955). This is but one parallel in a film where things get entangled, where popular culture, communal singing, historical events, universal themes, and extremely personal memories fuse in an unprecedented network of cinematic thinking.

The peculiar two-part structure, made striking by the two-year gap in production and inevitable change in some of the crew, would be enough to mark the film as singular, but this narrative division is only one element in an idiosyncratic whole that constantly draws the spectator’s attention to the artificial nature of the cinematic representation in question. The film’s narration itself is self-aware to the extent that the spectator inevitably pays attention to it: the non-linear representation of past events in an order that seems associative at best is bound to make the spectator ponder representation. Davies thematizes representation or, more accurately put, memory, its mechanics, and the possibility of representing and remembering. On an immediately stylistic level, Davies employs heavy use of light coming from an off-screen source as well as over-exposed light in the screen space which, together with the pale and tainted colors that filter every image, give a peculiar, golden hue to the sepia-like, nostalgic mise-en-scène reminiscent of scuffed photographs. The cinematography, which varies between utter stillness and slow pans and dolly shots, often gives a strong impression of tableaux vivants from early cinema, which remind one of old family photographs. The same goes for the film’s strikingly exact and centralized compositions: never has a symmetrical two-shot felt this precise and powerful, static and dynamic at the same time -- artificial and proud of it.

On both levels of narration and style, Davies draws the spectator’s attention to the artificiality of everything: that all this has been “produced” -- structured and conditioned by a mind that is reminiscing something. That something belongs to a world that no longer is, and that never was just like this. It is an utterly unique world that is only here and now, in the moment one is watching this film and remembering it in their own mind. There is a sense of discipline and order which always leave something outside, making it absent, outside of memory’s reach, while encapsulating something, making it present, within memory’s constituted and conditioned sphere. On both levels, Davies’ film is strongly characterized by elements of distance and stillness as his filmic portrayal of family leaves his characters relatively distant, beyond our absolute reach, in picturesque mobile paintings that invite us to reflect what lies beyond their frames of stillness and distance, sight and sound.

2. Zerkalo (1975, Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR)

It’s nothing. Everything will be alright. Everything will be...

A monumental yet intimate masterpiece of memory, undoubtedly the best film on this list, if not simply the best film ever made, and one of the few films I have seen more than ten times, Andrei Tarkovsky’s most personal film Zerkalo (1975, Mirror) is beyond flawless. Like Bresson, Tarkovsky certainly has a very distinctive oeuvre that feels consistent in its stylistic unity, but there is something intensely singular about Zerkalo that elevates it above a body of six other masterpieces or fringe-masterpieces. Some directors have tried to follow Tarkovsky in creating their own mirrors, but none have achieved either the same level of quality or of uniqueness. The beautiful thing about the film is, and this is key to its uniqueness as well, that Tarkovsky manages to bring the private to the public (not only by juxtaposing his own experiences with Russian history but also by uncovering the universal structure in human experience) without ever coming close to sacrificing the innate privacy of some of his images at the altar of effortless intelligibility.

The first time viewer is bound to be confused by the enigma. In the course of repeated viewings, however, the fuzzy reflection begins to take shape. A dying poet recalls his life which unfolds in sequences that take place in three different time frames: his childhood in the early 30′s, his adolescence during WWII in the early 40′s, and his parenthood in the late 60′s. He ventures into the abyss of his suffering as well as that of his nation and humankind in general, but, in the midst of pain, a vague promise of peace is discovered. Mixing archival footage with traditional scenes of dialogue on different time frames, reciting poems and playing music, using oneiric images as well as concrete motifs of mirrors and fire, juxtaposing colors with sepia and black-and-white, Zerkalo coalesces the personal with the collective and the dreamlike with the material. It creates an unparalleled rhythm that has an eerie, otherworldly feel to it, which, nevertheless, feels so intimately tied to nature and sensation that one can almost touch it. But when you reach your hand toward the mirror, it once again reveals its elusive shape that escapes your grasp.

In its stream of impressions and ideas, the poetically flowing narrative of Zerkalo works as a lucid parable of the human mind. The mere viewing experience of the film works as a cheap form of psychoanalysis for some. Film scholar and programmer Antti Alanen calls it “a space odyssey into the interior of the psyche” [4]. The ambiguously focalized narration flows in ways which resemble free association. There is an event and there is another; there is an image, then a sound; there are pauses and gaps, inexplicable connections of heart and soul, lines drawn by a tormented mind trying to comprehend and grasp something that, as he himself puts it, cannot be expressed by words. From grand sights such as the collapse of the house and the flight of a bird through a window to tender details of a human hand before a flame, a redhead with a blistered lip in the snow, and a cut from one gaze to another, the film’s narrative flow follows a logic of its own, a logic on a higher level, a logic that feels consistent but cannot be laid out in non-cinematic terms. To some, there is spiritual force in this, the power of both the subconscious and the Hegelian Weltgeist traversing across the images.

Zerkalo tackles questions that are no less than the biggest but also the simplest in life: What is human life? What is its meaning? What is its meaning to us as individuals and as mankind? Why and how is it experienced as meaningful? There are no answers, there is no great revelation, and how could there be, but there are little junctures of awe, touches with the world, small manifestations of fire before us. The protagonist’s ex-wife wonders why something like the burning bush never appeared to her. We might wonder the same. In Tarkovsky’s mind, it seems to me, this is due to the loss of connection to something transcendent to us and our petty affairs -- not necessarily to god but perhaps to nature, to values as such, to what really matter, to our primordial origin. Or, perhaps, more modestly, there is a loss of connection to the mirrors around us, manifesting as the inability to accept bewilderment and live in lack of comprehension. The film is full of moments of such transcendence: the bird landing on the boy’s head in a strikingly beautiful composition of Brueghelian proportions, the massive gust of wind blowing over the departing man on the serene field after a chance encounter, the mysterious fall of an oil lamp from the table on the wooden floor, and the disappearance of a faint ring stain on a table as the lady vanishes. What are these magical moments, these manifestations of burning bushes, other than Ereignisse that ask us to accept irrationality, to look into the mirror and marvel? The great revelation to the big questions might never come, but the reflection on the mirror keeps getting clearer only to be beclouded again and vice versa.

1. Sans soleil (1983, Chris Marker, FRANCE)

Contrarily to what people say, the use of the first person in films tends to be a sign of humility: all I have to offer is myself. [5]

These are the words of Chris Marker. A private recluse, a documentarian, a poet and a reporter of the cinema, Marker escapes easy classification. The creator of the most unique short film La jétée (1962), Marker is also celebrated as the father of subjective documentary. After making what is most likely the best depiction of the political turmoil in the second half of the 20th century in Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977, A Grin without a Cat), Marker turned inward -- or did he? -- in the pioneer piece of whatever you want to call it, poetic essay film or subjective documentary, Sans soleil (1983, Sunless). “I could tell you that the film intended to be,” Marker affirms, “and is nothing more than a home movie. I really think that my main talent has been to find people to pay for my home movies.“ [6]

Anybody can make home movies, and everybody does in these pathetic days of YouTube vlogging, but only Marker can make home movies that are simultaneously ultimately his and ultimately ours. A home movie for the ages, Sans soleil tackles the perennial topic of French cinema (think of the whole oeuvre of Alain Resnais), the difficulty of memory, which has both individual and social implications for the representation of the past. In the beginning, there is an image of children in Iceland. Happiness signified. Is this a memory? Images signifying a happy childhood memory, any-memory-whatever. “How can you remember thirst,” asks the man behind the camera, whose letters the female voice-over, the alleged receiver of these letters with an alleged sender, another disembodied character like the man, reads out loud.

Marker’s Sans soleil does not develop ordinary motifs or conventional techniques in dealing with memory. No matter how innovative -- and groundbreaking -- Resnais’ methods are, they are no match for Marker’s meta-approach. Rather than thematizing memory with a device, Marker deals with the theme through itself, by trying to remember it, by trying to become conscious of itself. The man wonders how have people been able to remember anything without pictures. Pictures are the memory. Montage is the memory. Viewing the film is memory.

While timeless, Sans soleil is also absolutely a film of its time. It comes right out of the postmodern era when man’s relationship with history, time, memory, and space was challenged on all fronts of human thought and creativity. The history of the documentary film is filled with numerous travelogues -- from the ghost train films of early cinema to Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) and Wright’s The Song of Ceylon (1934) -- but Marker’s Sans soleil challenges the whole possibility and meaningfulness of the travelogue. In his mind, in the mind of Sans soleil, time and space cannot be conveyed over individual, experienced knowledge. The poetic narration of Sans soleil constantly turns to itself and challenges its representation. The film consists of shots, which are more or less separate from one another, that are organized by the letters read by the woman, letters that she has received from a man, the man behind the camera. Thus there is a double focalization, the word and the image. When the levels of the image and the words of the letters occasionally coincide, the spectator is tempted to think of the images as shot by the man from his point of view, but Marker’s film seems to escape such an easy way out of the puzzle. Marker takes man’s relationship with history and the past by dealing with the relation between real and reconstructed memory. Is there a difference? Is there a difference between our collective history and our personal histories? Is there a difference between a home movie and a movie? Is knowledge of the world possible?

We know little of Marker’s private life. His most private and personal film, Sans soleil, perhaps paradoxically, adds nothing to this lack of knowledge. In a strange way, it achieves an extremely intimate level by creating a peculiar distance. It hides behind images and words. We never see the central characters. We see reconstruction. We see implications. We see conclusions without premises. We see the end of the road but not the road.

There are no clichés in Sans soleil because it is beyond the definition of cliché and convention. The man behind the camera has seen so much that at the moment only banality interests him, as he states in a letter. The unique and the original have become dull. The banal is the new unique. He preys banality like a bounty hunter. In this quest, banality turns into something else -- or does it? In a synthesis of banal moments, the montage of images becomes its own living thing.

A filmic version of stream of consciousness, the only structure of Sans soleil is its lack of structure. There is fragmentation on both the level of the whole and the level of the part. The words stop and random notes put a pause on a flow that, for a moment, seemed to have a clear structure. “By the way, did I tell you that there are emus in the Île de France?” The images freeze, the words stop, the images continue, the images give rise to a continuation into an unprecedented series of separate images. Yet, despite all of this, the film has a rhythm like no other, and it never feels scattered. It is cohesive on another level. It follows the unknown logic of its private internal auteur. Sans soleil is not remembered for its words nor for its images, but for the synthesis of it all -- and, most importantly, the impressions and feelings that arise from this synthesis. We do not remember individual shots, individual sentences, or at least we do not think of them. We remember the film.

I remember the cut from the Japanese dancing to an emu. I remember the abrupt cuts from the serene desert to the chaotic Hong Kong. I remember the cats in the temple. I remember. I remember the electronic sounds accompanying swans in a lake. I remember the counterpoint. I remember the tension, the voltage, the trance of it all. I remember the lack and the absence. I remember the presence and the richness. I remember the unique, the one and only, Sans soleil, the distant voice that both fades and stays in memory.

Some runner-uppers, or the mandatory honorable mentions: Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983), Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934), Dziga Vertov’s Chelovek s kino apparatom (1929), Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen (1987), Leos Carax’s Mauvais sang (1986), Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or (1930), Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (1994), David Lynch’s Dune (1984), Frank Perry’s The Swimmer (1968), Edward Dmytryk’s The Sniper (1952). Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955).

Notes:

[1] Truffaut, François. 1984. Hitchcock. Revised Edition. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, p. 239-243.

[2] Bordwell, David. 2018. Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling. Chicago: Chicago University Press, p. 220.

[3] Bagh, Peter von. 1989. Elämää suuremmat elokuvat [Films Bigger Than Life]. Otava, p. 405. My own translation.

[4] https://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/sightandsoundpoll2012/voter/785.

[5] https://chrismarker.org/chris-marker/notes-to-theresa-on-sans-soleil-by-chris-marker/.

[6] Ibid.

#General posts on film

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the-truth-behind-redacted · 6 years

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Red light; Blue light

I shall be treating my writings as an official documentation of events that have happened and those that will. Therefore, I will be writing as if I was reporting information to someone then that of a regular journal. If I make it out of this place, it will be easier and much simpler to turn in this journal than give a full mouth recount. Not only will it be more accurate as I'm writing things down as they happen but it will save time. If I'm to die before I can make it, at least people will have an easy account to read as it was already formatted with the expectation that someone will read it if ever found.

Dear Locket, Entry 1

When I awoke today everything seemed the same but I'm sure it wasn't what it was before. All I can see around me is a vast empty black space as I lay on a solitary purple path. I searched through the assortment of items in a bag attached to my waist with a familiar but unknown language inscribed onto it but I found nothing of use. On my body, I wear a set of crystalline armor of unknown make or build with no marking to suggest who or what made it, where, and how. I've looked through this very journal I write in and found 32 pages worth or writings that I can no longer read or recognize that I know were written by me. What I write now is in the form of strange runic symbols which I do not know how I know or how I can read and speak it. Something had changed, most likely for the worst.

I wracked myself on what happened before I arrived at this void and what I remember only compounds the mystery. The last thing I remember was entering what seemed to be a "castle" constructed from the flesh of the dead and damned. The screams of agony and writhing faces of those just consumed were clear as day as me and a group of soldier I no longer recognize entered. Creatures that looked like a mix of real-world animals and misshapen lumps of gore and teeth bombarded us as we slowly gain ground. The smell of rancid meat, the constant blood dripping from the ceiling, the sound of the shifting flesh, and the stress of the never-ending attack made the experience, and the recollection, terrible.

When we entered well over two hundred of us were together. When we reached the throne about 15 of us remained. Much unlike the rest of the "castle", the throne was something, bearable. Constructed of what seemed like grey marble, great pillars climbed up hundreds of feet. The entire surface of the room was entangled with a red string that reaches the very peak of the room and twisted together to form a massive chandler. A palpitating chamber loosely hung from the chandler with an amber liquid dripping. At the very back of the room sat a dainty man in a formal black shirt. His pants were a solid black with black shoes. Compared to the solid fleshy red and pink from before, the change to completely black ignoring the strings was a pleasant shift. The relief was short lived.

The enigmatic being spoke at the time gibberish I now know, "I apologize for the bleak chamber. I had little time to prepare this abode. I'm simply here for the final curtain but I did grow weary of the wait. Mind to provide a prelude?" After his words were spoken, the palpitating sack bust and a flood of the amber liquid come down. A small slab of flesh fell and violently flopped on the ground. 12 of us 15 let down our guard while the man spoke and this cost dearly. The flab stopped flopping then quickly expanding letting our more of the red string to go forward. The three of us ready turned on our shields which burned the tentacles that tried to grab us.

Those who weren't on guard were instantly disemboweled and assembled into the slab. The substance those bodies provided created our final challenge for what it was worth. At first, the slab consumed and expanded into a weird ball of flesh, bone, and the metal of the people's armor and weapons then began to take form. Two appendages launched forward and stilted the ball balancing it's unstable "body." It elongated and randomly reorganized it's shape until it favored something. The stilts thickened and plasma claws encased in metal formed at their ends. The clawed flesh lifted the mass up and allowed two more extensions to form underneath the main mass.

The legs coiled and then split 1/4 it's total length to the ground, about a meter. The front part split again and form two hoofed looking feet. The backs at first looked the be just another hoof but a massive metal talon formed at the very back. The to be "arms" positioned themselves properly. The metallic parts at the surface of the unformed mass sunk underneath and a bulk of flesh became the surface. The back then had bone burst out which quickly got covered by flesh and muscle and formed two more outward extensions. Metal then come around and formed a funnel that plasma energy blasted from at first then sealed. As the body finished its shifting it had broad shoulders with an open center. Its center was very dense in muscle and tendons. The flesh moved to a wide open space at its center. A weird jelly looking liquid rushed and filled the core of the tendons and a singular eye with a messy pupil color formed. Plating then quickly covered its body with a strange hatch being created to protect the eye.

An abnormal bone structure came from the top which, as everything before, was then covered in muscles, flesh, then metal. With what little flesh that hadn't found a final form, a head was created. The rushing bone was molded to create first a jaw. It bent upwards allowing an empty space then encased over the top. At the top antlers looking extension went up and created a jagged crown. The flesh moved and finished its head. No eyes or nose were noticeable on the head. It had two mouths, one near its neck and the other as the majority of its face. The one nearest to the neck had jacked outcropping teeth. A long slender bladed tongue loosely hung out. The face mouth caved in with hooks. As it straightened itself on its abnormal legs the lower mouth let out a cackle as the other widen and expanded showing a great funnel with teeth squirming attempting to drag whatever gets caught inside to the stomach.

The admonition stood around a towering 10 meters. While not quite as horrific as the things outside and not even the tallest, it would certainly be the strongest with our own technology against us, it seemed. The person to my right quickly charged the monster and was dispatched quickly. The man in his charge winded his hand axe to his back and ready a large ark. Responding quicker than what you would think possible of it, the beast jumped back as the man reached rang and swung his axe down. I could catch the quick moment of horror on his face realizing his mistake.

The beast crashed its claws downwards, flaying his armor and sending him to the ground. Then in an unexpected move, one of the two funnels on it's back, flipping at a joint and pointed down at the center of the man. The sound of the man's gasp was cut short as his midsection got blasted in two by a contracted beam of plasma. Picking up the upper half of his body it dropped it into the face mouth. The hatch on the stomach opened and focused on us.

I fired at the eye but the hatch sealed before I pull the trigger. The beast was sent down from the force and let out a manic cry. The other person now moved forward but didn't rush it. Lifting itself using its arm the monster regained footing and attempted opening the hatch. At first, it seemed as if it was going to move but it failed. Already distressed the monster let out a crazed call as the blade from the other guy removed one of its thin legs. While the other guy backed away from the spazzing arms I aimed a shot at its head killing it. While it appeared scary, it was body form was impractical making it very vulnerable.

I then heard the sounds of a person in pain and turned to see the other man was being hailed in a torrent of blazing hot needles seemingly from the ether. As his life was snuffed out the man in the back spoke again.

"It was as I feared it appears. The base didn't have enough time to mature. The liquid was still amber. The construction was retarded." I looked at him, aimed and fired. The recoil pushed back on my arms and a stream of light burst forward. A flash blinded me and the sound of marble being destroyed filled my ears. Over in an instant, I regained vision only to see the man was unharmed and a hole had been blasted into the wall on his left side. I aimed once more and kept firing until my gun was near overheating. He had to be the source of the hell, he had to die.

"It's all so primitive. You're not even free of your form. What hope do you have against us transcendent? Here, let me something you could never believe." From there I felt my lungs flood with something. A crushing force pushed against all my body and an unspeakable agony flared inside me. All air left me and my vision blurred. I desperately fought to stay conscious but the more I tried to breathe the more pain I felt and the more my vision loss.

"Tell me what you saw. Once we meet again, of course." Then everything went black and I awoke in this strange world. If there is anything I can draw relief from, it is that I already know what to expect from a world by that being's making. Though, honestly, I'm not sure how much comfort that does give as I never want to see another one of those damned things ever again. The silence is welcomed despite everything. Anything is better than the flexing of flesh.

...

Dear Locket, Entry 2

I am unsure of the time here. Some kind of cycle exists as it's far brighter now than what it was when I first awoke. Of course, that may all be a farse due to the increase of paths I can see. At the current moment, 52 different paths are noticeable though I can't tell for how long they go, and more importantly, where. It feels as if I wonder a labyrinth, but instead of a giant room with countless walls, it's an entire dimension of walkways. I'd almost wish it was a dimension of winding walls instead of open paths. At any moment a creature can come at me from any angle and who knows what they can do? It doesn't even seem that the strange man from that hell knows. This leads me to some things that have been bothering me.

That man said that "...what hope do you have against us transcendent." If he can send me to this place why does he want me to tell him, "What I saw," when we meet again? He had to be the one who summoned those red needles so why didn't he kill me? What was it exactly he did to me that made me feel all that pain? He mentioned that the monster we killed in his throne formation was retarded because it was underdeveloped, so, what would it have been if it was fully formed? He seems to have control over those monstrosities but looked normal himself. Why is that? Was it magic he was using to deflect my shots and if it was, how did he learn a dead art that has been forgotten? What does he mean that he was merely there for the "final curtain?" Why was he so human despite everything else around him? Finally, I remember looking directly at his face but I can't remember a single detail beside one dead glossy eye with no feeling or expression inside.

Needless to say, there are many questions that need to be answered and that is only from that moment. I've also come to remember more about the castle. There were too many oddities and question to list that that "castle" gave. It wasn't entirely constructed of flesh as there were rooms that seemed to be constructed to relate to some of our feelings, memories, and fates. The material to create the rooms varied from basic metals, woods, and dense weaves of plants. Some showed a person's darkest secrets, other showed a minimized version of how they are to die, and others were simply there to mess with their heads. While anomalous, we came to appreciate them.

The castle was large and enigmatic about its size, like everything else there, and it took what felt like weeks to actually get through. However, the terrors that lived in almost all of the castle didn't dare enter the rooms nor send anything inside meaning we had a safe space to rest and create a plan to get through the next floor. There was about one of them per floor and we entered I'd say around thirty. At first, we moved through the floors quickly, well rested and armed to the teeth. This didn't last long as the deeper we got the more there was and the longer we went on the slower we got. The semi-final floor was when everything came to head with the monster merging with one another because there simply wasn't enough space despite how massive everything was for the beasts to move.

The final floor was an oddity, even among this inexplicable place. Everything was dead, metaphorically. All the flesh the floor was made out of stopped squirming. Not a single scream or moan from the damned assimilated to the walls. No blood dripped from the ceiling, and not a single monster to be seen. All there was was the vast open rooms and a single feminine voice recounting a story in the language I no longer understand. There are three words I could recognize. These words are "Fall," "Child," and "hero." While I do not write them in their regular transcript but the words that share their meaning of this language I now know, it's still effectively the same.

As for when I write these entries. I have no need to use basic facilities anymore. The feelings for sleep, food, or restroom are lost on me. Nor the effects of exhaustion or fatigue. The weight of the equipment I carry is surely hefty. With my armor being made of a pure crystal substance, weapon, and other equipment such as writing utensils, it would only make sense me feeling the effect of having them. However, as I can tell they aren't weightless, their push against me feels that of a feather dropping onto a hand. Without any means to inspect me, with the armor having no obvious way to get it off without destroying it, I have no way of knowing if I'm still the same old me that I've always been.

I don't feel like I've been here for long but between the endless walking and the writing of these entries, I must have been here for a few days at least. I can't help but wonder what has happened to my home. For now, all I can do is ask "what if's" and that'll get me a momentous nowhere. I have nowhere else to be or go so I guess I'll just have to keep walking. I fear that I've already got bored of walking in this strange place. Though I know to be careful of what you wish for, especially since all that's happened, but I hope I encounter something other than endless roads. Sadly, there is no wood to knock on.

...

Dear Locket, Entry 3

There's still been a lot of nothing but I still have a few things to note. The first and most obvious is that the amount of paths has increased massively. Some of these paths are beginning to get uncomfortably close to one another. There have been a few instances where I've had to climb over another path and jump down back onto the one I'm currently walking to move on. With everything I'm wearing it's asinine to try and go under as if I get caught between two, I have no one to help me out. Of course, I have all the time in the where ever the fuck I am to get out but I'm not sure I would like to get stuck now that I know I'm not alone.

While I haven't directly seen anything I have heard plenty. The horrific cries of a thing(s) that sound like a pack of rabid demons. I honestly can't tell if it's one or many things that are making that cry because, for all I know, it might be one thing with a thousand heads. It sounded angry and I did hear the sound of distant explosions meaning that it might have been attacking something. Of course, it might be the only other thing in here that's gone mad but I for some reason highly doubt I'm that lucky. If you can call being put in this situation lucky, anyway.

Another terrifying thought to haunt decided to grace me as I jumped over another colliding path. What happens if I fall off the trail. It seems almost mandatory to fly to get anywhere of substance in this place so, what if I fall into the void below. I have no wings. I can't be too sure that there's any kind of ground and how far down would it be. Gravity seems to be in effect or else I would've floated off somewhere in the deep black above. The only light I've encountered are the paths themselves and if the black has a ground then why the paths that clearly aren't a help in finding the way here. A labyrinth this is.

As for theories to where I am. As crazy as this may seem but I feel that this is some kind of purgatory. With the pain, I felt before awakening here, I can't help but think I died. To why the strange man sent me here instead of assimilating me to the castle I don't know. There is clearly great importance in him telling me to tell him what I saw. He seemed to speak only in past tense which I can't help but think a bit strange. Almost as if he's feigning ignorance. If he is feigning ignorance, however, why make it so obvious? It's like I'm trapped in some kind of game or story but that can't be right...right?

An odd thought just came to me. What if that odd man originates from this world. If he really is feigning ignorance then he already knows what's in this place and it would fit with this weird game like the setup. The castle could represent the struggle of life. The death, if that is what it was, shows that I lived through all of life. All the struggles, actions of others, pain and joy. Of course, this doesn't fit with everything of the castle but right now this is the best I got.

Where I am now is purgatory or the journey to the afterlife. The in-between of mortality and eternity. Maybe the long expanse I'm wondering is allowing me to relive all the time of my life, remembering everything back from the end to beginning. Once I've gone the distance I'll end up in my final judgment which I can't help but think will be Hell. There I will re-meet that strange man and I'll be cast to torment for the rest of time. This all sounds crazy! Completely and totally. All this time to myself can't be good.

If my theory is correct that would make that man the Devil himself. That would kind of explain his odd demeanor, why this would be like a game to him and the hellish place he exited. It could also cover what he means by being there for the "Final Curtain." The Rapture. What if the story the female voice told was the tale of Jesus. Maybe Adam and Eve would fit the roles a bit more than Jesus. Maybe not. I have lost my mind, clearly.

Just as the last touch on this me forgetting everything and then slowly remembering is me having my life flash before me. Though I wouldn't exactly call this a "flash", more like a slow and equally drawn out recollection of my life in real time. I wonder if I will remember things that I've forgotten. This raises the somewhat obvious question, how can I be sure what I'm remembering is correct or, if it is, how do I know if I'd forgotten it? Will I be aware that I had forgotten it when I remember. I mean, I'm aware that the castle's events are recent unless that's a lie too? I guess I can add this to the tally of questions.

#Purple #Writing #First entry #Story #Update #Story Tag: New born Essence #Story Tag: Beginnings of Rapture #Story Tag: Locket account #Time tag: Uncertain #Area Tag: ?!?#Chapter 1: You were better off not knowing #The casting wires #Echo echo #Am I who I think I am #Impurity #Devil?#Understanding Chaos #Life passage #Purgatory

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italicwatches · 6 years

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Megalobox - Episode 06

Alright, photos taken, now I just need to work on them. And then, I’ve got plans. So many plans. But first, it’s Megalobox, episode 06! Here we GO!

-We begin in the past, with a younger Aragaki. Nanbu’s wisdom worked its way into his mind, into his body…

-And in the Now, all that wisdom has crashed across Joe’s fucking jaw…But on the nine count, he only use manages to rise, and put Aragaki’s attention back on him full out…! The old man isn’t your opponent, HE IS!

-Opening!

-The match is on proper once more, as both men keep exchanging blocked blows…And Nanbu is realizing just what kind of crazy tricks Aragaki’s worked into his boxing. His prosthetics have a spring to them, a bounce to make walking and running easier…And Aragaki uses that springiness to speed up his footwork, to be able to bob and weave out of the way without having to take his body out of prime punching position!

-Things go from punching into a grapple, as Joe tries to force Aragaki’s hand, but Aragaki manages to force him back into the ropes, and start the beatdown…Joe tries to respond, but he just gets countered…!

-And it’s only the ring of the bell that saves his life. Joe just about collapses into his corner chair, and Nanbu’s about ready to literally throw in the towel… They can get another match, a better match, Joe! They don’t need this…

-Yeah fuck that. They’re doing this. The next bell rings, and Joe’s back in the ring…But things have changed. He’s remembering Nanbu’s ring advice, splitting his weight more evenly…And he’s mumbling about it to himself. Just loud enough for Aragaki to hear.

-And enough to put Aragaki off-balance. He starts throwing too much into it, and manages to clip Joe’s chin and put him back on the mat…

-But the fight isn’t over, still. Even as it turns into a fucking slobberknocker, just fists flying on both sides, as both men try to wear each other down…Until the bell rings again. Second round, done.

-And back in his corner, Aragaki flashes back to Nanbu’s wisdom back in the day…And he’s scarcely even listening to his caretaker back in the Now.

-While in Joe’s corner, he’s thinking. Aragaki’s…Holding awful close to the rules, for a man full of hate. He’s not in this to torture you. He’s in this to win the fight. The third round begins, and Aragaki’s on Joe in a flash! But Joe can see he’s slowing down, getting sloppy…He’s an older boxer. They say you lose power last…But that means your speed and your stamina go first.

-Nanbu watches this all, and realizes what a fool he’s been…How much of this is his fault….As Joe’s luck starts to run out. He takes a hard body blow that has him coughing up blood and spitting out his mouthguard…

-And yet, one more time. One, more, time, Joe RISES. Because he’s not doing this for Nanbu. He’s not doing this for anyone’s past. He’s doing this because a man put up his fists in front of him, and the only thing Joe knows how to do is to wreck anyone who does that…

-Even as Aragaki delivers blow after blow, Joe manages to force himself to stay up through it all, to keep his weight balanced and keep himself on his feet, as Aragaki’s fury comes out…Way too hard…He remembers the day he shattered Nanbu’s old gym window and crawled in…And he leaves himself open to one quick, hard punch to the jaw. One that has so much of his own weight going into it, that he drops.

-And the count starts.

-Megalobox, Round 06: Until the Last Dog DIES

-He manages to rise on the eight count, shaking the cobwebs out of his head…But Joe’s on him immediately, pushing him back bit by bit, until the bell rings…

-Back in his corner, Joe gets patched up bit by bit, while Aragaki’s shaken by that one shot.

-It’s round four, and Joe’s moving like a completely different man, one with a stronger stance, a firmer will…Aragaki keeps coming at him, keeps trying, but Joe’s able to hold out against Aragaki’s speedy Gear with ease…And when Aragaki over-extends, Joe’s there in a flash, dropping punch after punch! The man’s getting desperate, he’s getting tired, and he’s getting sloppy. He’s on tilt, and Joe’s singular, most potent ability is that he does, not, tilt.

-Aragaki finds himself against the ropes, his war and post-war flashbacks haunting him as the match turns south for him…And to make it worse, his footwork isn’t going right. His leg isn’t locked in right. Something he took unseated his knee, and he’s forced to work against it, to just go in for raw power and blow after blow…But the more power he throws in, the slower he gets, and the more open he gets, as Joe just punishes everything…

-Blood from both men spills across the mat as they just try to beat each other into the ground…Until the fourth round bell rings, moments before they can cross-counter each other.

-Back to the chairs. Joe’s still got it in him. Aragaki doesn’t. And when the bell rings, Joe’s up…And Aragaki is still in his chair. He’s forfeited the match. The crowd erupts into cheers…And Joe collapses as soon as the adrenaline leaves him, while Aragaki’s got to be carried out of there.

-Aragaki tries to apologize for throwing the match…But the caretaker would’ve called it if you hadn’t. He saw what was going on with your leg. The last thing he needs is for you to be down for good.

-In the aftermath, Aragaki’s taking a long breather on a bench, as Nanbu comes in to talk…Aragaki’s prosthetic is bloodied and disconnected, and both men are just…Silent for a long time. Until Aragaki admits…This isn’t the first time. He’s been overworking these prosthetics. He was at risk of being outright bedridden, and the doctors were insisting he retire…

-And then he saw Nanbu. And his new boxer. And…He was so confused, Nanbu, so unsure what he wanted to do…But seeing Joe, fighting him, and doing that match…With tears in his eyes, Aragaki admits he’s finally ready to hang it up. To live a new life. All he’s done…It was enough, wasn’t it, coach?

-It was so much more than anyone could have asked. You did…You did amazingly, Aragaki. And Aragaki hands him a slip, something to give to Joe…

-…The old betting slip. The lost slip. Back on Aragaki’s last day, Nanbu bet all he had, trying to get enough to treat his boxer to a nice dinner. It of course failed, and he gave Aragaki the slip as a luck charm. A symbol that he was worth taking the risk on, and that Nanbu had his back out there. That he’d be waiting for Aragaki…

-Back in the Now. Aragaki admits, that ticket saved his life, Nanbu. He was…He was close to ending his own life, when it fell out of his old gloves. If it hadn’t…

-Nanbu starts to get misty-eyed himself…But listen, Nanbu. The goal is Megalonia, right? Be sure to tell Joe that he’s got people rooting for him…And Aragaki’s gonna be cheering the kid on, too.

-Far away, Yuri stands on a balcony, as the third competitor to enter the Megalonia tournament is announced…Glen Burroughs of the Killer Bomb Crew! Known as the “Bloody Lion”, a heavyweight who’s all ferocious and terrifying force, using his massive body to overcome the advantages of middleweight boxers…There’s less than a month to go at this point, and a fourth competitor will be announced soon…

-Of course, by this point, people want to know if Gearless Joe will be entering…And out on the balcony, a man by the name of Mikio comes to chat with Yuri. Tough luck for Glen back there. Everyone’s more interested in seeing if this gimmick fighter will be entering, than talking about Glen’s actual entry.

-Yuri, of course, recognizes Gearless Joe when he sees the highlights on a TV billboard…And both men wonder if this stray dog can get in…

-Credits.

God damn. That got so heavy…What the hell will Joe’s last pre-Megalonia match look like, let alone Megalonia itself? I guess the only way to find out is to push forward, and see what happens next time, in episode SEVEN of Megalobox! Wait for it!

#where I watch #recap #anime #boxing #megalobox

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synnematic · 7 years

Text

DAY 3: Letters to A Loved One

for @saboace-week

TWO PARTS:

Letters to No One ( written by me ) multiple chapters

a03: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13955610/chapters/32125773

A Couple Years Too Late ( written by @reiji--san ) single chapter

a03: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13955889

Summary:

A collection of letters written over time with no set destination, but always a person in mind.

Letters to No One

Dear Sabo,

This is stupid.

Makinos got this idea in her head that I’m sad. Which I’m not. Im not sad anymore at all. I’m not. Its just hard. Youre not When you died FUCK. Whatever. fuck spelling and whatnot too. not like you can read this anymore anyway. look. this is suposed to help i guess. a coping mechi mechen method. i write this letter and she stops naging at me. whatever it takes to make them all stop loking at me like im going to snap any second or try to run off again. not like i would anyway.

i know youre not coming back.

you’re dead

you left and you died and theres nothin i can do to turn back time or bring you back or get revenge becus the people that killed you are already GONE and i didnt even know until it was already to late

but im fine

im fine

im not fine

luffy is well hes been better but hes always been a crybaby so he’ll get better. im supposed to be strong now, stronger but i dont really i don’t know how to handle the emotions and whatnot. not like you did. you always seemed to just GET it always sayin the right things, calmin me us him down. i can’t do that but im trying. im getting better i think.

we’ll get thrugh it

fuck this is stupid

what’s the point in writing a letter youl never read? or writing at all damn it

you taght me how to do this bulshit but i never thought id have to use it like this

fuck im not supposed to cry. messed up the ink now. not that it matters but still i wanted to fuck i dont know what i wanted anymore

sorry

im sorry sabo. i should have been i dunno. something. its different without you. too quiet and theres this pain in my chest all the time. like i’m the one that got shot. don’t get it but i hate it and it hurts and i just i wish you were here. i really wish you were here

i miss you

ace

sabo,

hey i uhh found the other letter. never ended up giving it to makino but i think she knew i wrote it at least. luffy did but i don’t know what he did with his. i kept mine in the tree house, under one of the loose boards. its a little water damaged but i don’t think you really care huh?

this is still weird, talking to you like this. even though its not really a talk if its only one way. just like talking to an empty room but not even talking out loud

sorry

its been two years now to the day. maybe thats why i ended up finding the old letter in the first place. havent really been to the tree house much since then anyway because

well you know

went to the cliff tho. the one we used to sit at? i went there first yknow when i got youre letter. took me a while since im still not great at reading. getting better tho. it was quiet. always kinda is but really quiet this time with just a little wind. I think it would be a good day to go sailing. was it like this when you left too? dogma said it was a nice day but i dont really remember it that way.

i dont know why i do this to myself. same as last time i always get i dunno. my chest still hurts. theres a doctor in foosha i went to once a while ago. thought maybe something was wrong with me. he said it was heart break. youd think this is something id get over but i guess not

youre still dead and im still breaking

i dont know when its gonna stop

if it does at all

ace

sabo,

Is it nice where you are?

Overheard some people talking about it today. Talking about death and what comes after. It sounds nice. Heaven. If thats where you went. I think it should be. Where you went, that is, but nice too I guess.

It sounds warm.

I wonder sometimes if my mom went there too. Still dont really know much about her but she sounded nice. Maybe youve met? Is my d Nah it doesn’t matter. I hope its nice there. I dont really beleive in that kinda stuff normaly, still kinda dont but i hope its true and youre happy there. Happier than you were here

I know its probably a stupid thing to ask but do you think ill ever be able to join you there?

The waves were choppy at the cliff today. Almost angry. Theres a storm comin but i think ill still go there later. Maybe

Ive been thinking about death a lot lately

ace

Hey

I didn’t jump, obviously, since i’m writing to you now. Again. Sorry for the silence. Sometimes I just— I dont know. Everything rushes to my head all at once. It helps, occasionally, but then there are the times where my head fills with one singular drive or emotion and thats it, that’s all I can focus on. It used to be anger. So much anger. That was easier than the sadness though. Or the guilt.

There’s things I haven’t really told you. A lot of things actually. I was trying to be strong I guess. Still am. But Makino was right about one thing. It does help, these letters. I like to think sometimes that you just know. That you can read them or that my words somehow magically transfer to you. Wherever you are. But I know that kinda stuff doesnt happen. Not really. So this is more me talking to myself then. That I can do.

So for starters I guess, I had a dream about you last night. I used to have dreams about you a lot. Nightmares too. It’s been a while though, at least a few months since the last one. Normally the dreams are the same, extended memories or something small but usually just the two of us, sometimes luffy. Last night you turned to me in my dream but your face wasn’t right. And I think that’s more terrifying than any of the nightmares i’ve had.

I’m starting to forget what you look like, what you sound like.

It’s been six years now. Longer than the time I knew you. All I have left is the flag Luffy and I found in the wreckage of your ship. I tried to look for more but most of it’s been buried now and i’m afraid. I don’t know what Id do if I found your bones there.

We never took any pictures, never saved enough for something as meaningless as a camera and i regret that now.

I think i’m going to get a tattoo soon. Before I leave the island. Even if I forget what you look like and the sound of your laugh I still want to take you with me somehow. So you can sail the seas instead of — well.

I just don’t want to forget you sabo

Ace

Me again,

I got that tattoo that I said I would in my last letter. It’s been a while now but it still itches every once in a while. Hah, you should have seen the guys face when I explained what I wanted done. People still keep mistaking it for a mispelling. As if I didn’t know how to spell my own name.

Anyway, got that done a little before I left Dawn and a lot has happened since then. I have my own crew! And a devil fruit too, though man was that a surprise. Still don’t really have the best of control over it and I set random things on fire sometimes but I think I’m starting to get the hang of it. I’m a CAPTAIN now! Got my own flag and everything. We’re the Spade pirates. Isn’t that cool? The Ace of Spades is supposed to be a card that symbolizes death but I don’t think we’re so bad. Hell, we’ve actually helped a lot of people so I hope you’re proud of me. Still wish you could have been my navigator but we probably would have ended up fighting all the time huh? Can’t have two people that want to be captain in the same crew obviously. You would have loved this life though.

I know you’re probably in a pretty nice place yourself right now but the open sea on a clear day is the most beautiful thing. And the STARS Sabo — when the sun sets down low you don’t even need the moon to see, the stars are so bright. Brighter than they ever were on the island.

You’re up there somewhere huh?

Is the view better than the one I’ve got right now?

Seven years is a long time my friend. I’ve grown a lot since I last saw you. Do you grow at all where you are? I bet I’d still be taller than you.

Wish you were here

Ace

Hey Sabo

I think I need some advice right about now.

It’s been 103 days since Whitebeard defeated me and took me onto his flagship. Yeah, uhh, probably should have updated you on that sooner, huh? My bad. My crew was defeated not that long after I was too. We’re all here now but we’re fine I promise. Actually, that’s kinda my problem.

I want No, I wanted to kill him at first. Whitebeard. All this time hearing about my dad and all he accomplished in life, all he did. So many people that respected or hated him and I just — I don’t know. I heard that Whitebeard was around and I figured if I could just be the one to take him down, the one to kill him even when Roger couldn’t then maybe — Maybe I could prove myself. Prove that I’m stronger than him, than Roger. That I’m better somehow. Or at least different.

Not that that really worked out.

Could have killed me but instead he took me here and made this stupid speech about family and trust and wanting me to be his son or something and I told him no. Obviously. I don’t need a family after all, or at least more family. I’ve got Luffy. And you. Plus I wasn’t I’m not about to just throw away my own ambitions yknow? I promised you, I PROMISED you that we’d go out to sea and live free lives, the life of pirates. I don’t want that to end, not when I wanted to take you with me on that journey, the life you never got to live.

So I kept fighting and fighting and fighting over and over again, new tactics, new plans. But Sabo I’m so tired now.

So tired.

And they’re really starting to grow on me. As much as I’ve tried to avoid the crew or even piss them off. There’s this one guy, Thatch, in particular that is just too god damn nice ALL THE TIME. And Marco too though he’s kinda stuck up. And they keep talking about family. About belonging and — I don’t know.

Is it bad that a part of me wants that? To have an actual home? To belong?

They don’t know though, not yet at least. They don’t know who I am and maybe — FUCK I don’t know. I don’t know how they’d react to knowing who I am, what I am. I’m scared to find out. But is it worth trying?

Would you hate me if I gave up a part of my freedom for something more?

I feel like I’m betraying you somehow. But at the same time I think you would want me to be happy too.

I don’t know yet for sure but maybe, maybe this is my one chance.

Ace

He KILLED him.

One of the few genuine friends I have and he’s dead. All because of GREED. Why does this keep happening. Every time I grow attached and start to feel safe something like this happens again just to prove how messed up the world really is. Over a stupid FRUIT and now thatch is dead and— fuck. A member of my own division too. My responsibility and I failed again. Just like I failed you.

I can’t protect ANYONE. Even after all the training and the fighting, the missions and responsibilities. But when it actually matters I’m not even there and my friend gets stabbed in the back and left to DIE.

The blood’s on my hands. I should have known. Should have picked up on the signs and done something — anything . But I was too late. Again. And now he’s gone and that TRAITOR is who knows where.

Well not this time.

This isn’t going to be like what happened with you, with an enemy I never knew and had no chance of finding.

This time I’m going to find him and I’m going to make him pay.

I don’t care if I’m cursed. Maybe I brought this on them in the first place, just by being here. But I’m not going to just sit by and let this happen again. I couldn’t take revenge for you but I can for Thatch.

I can at least do that.

Sabo,

I’m getting close.

I know you probably don’t care, but writing to you like this is the only thing that seems to be keeping me sane recently. It’s like I’m chasing a damn shadow. Every time I get close or feel like I’ve finally caught up the bastard does something to out maneuver me or fuck me up somehow. It’s been months now but this time I think I’ve finally cornered him. Teach is apparently on his way to Water 7 now and there’s a little island, Banaro, that he’s sure to stop at. If I can get there before he leaves then I can finally avenge Thatch. I can make up for my own failures and make sure that he never hurts anyone from my family again.

I dunno how it’s going to go yet but he hasn’t had much time to master his new fruit yet so I should have the upper hand regardless of whatever that rat has planned.

Short letter this time, I know, but I don’t really have a lotta time to waste right now. I’ll be reaching port soon and from there — well, who knows. Guess I’ll probably update you again afterwards though, or whenever I get back to the rest of my crew.

It’s nice to know that I’ll finally be able to avenge someone important to me. Risky, but I know you’d do the same.

Ace

Sabo,

I’m being executed today.

Guess that’s a solid way to start off my last this letter, huh? Yeah, nice going Ace, well done. I really know how to keep things upbeat in these damn things don’t I?

Damn it.

Teach, well he, FUCK— sorry.

I don’t want to do this.

He beat me. I don’t have any excuses, nothin I can say to make up for what happened or explain it in anyway. He just did. Just another reason to hate him I guess, but if the alternative was joining him then this is better. Much better, Still, uhh, it hasn’t exactly been fun. Impel Down was just about as bad as I expected, maybe worse even. There’s— you know what, it doesn’t matter what it was like. You don’t need to know that.

Maybe I’m just stalling now.

They don’t really give a lot of time for these things apparently, even when they’re last requests. Bullshit, but I think they just don’t want me to be late for my closeup. Gol D. Roger’s only son means I’m about to broadcasted all around the world. Thanks dad. Great perks. Though, I expected as much. Just proving what I always feared.

ANYWAY, at least I’ve had a lot of time to think lately. Don’t actually know how long I was locked up in there but the silence does things to people, to me. I didn’t dream much while I was there, kinda hard to sleep, but I thought about you a lot. Actually, been thinkin about you a lot for a while but this was different I suppose.

The guys down there like to talk a lot. It helps pass the time but most of them are kinda shit people so I didn’t reply much. Still listened though.

Y’know, in twenty years, I’ve done a lot, seen a lot, experienced a lot— more than most my age, but there’s a lot I didn’t get to do too, didn’t learn about.

I never really thought about love until recently. It’s not really a pirate thing, huh? High seas and all that nonsense but life moves fast and a lot happens all at once. Not a lotta time to sit around and, I dunno, dream?

Whatever. Well, the guys down there talked a surprising amount about it, like it’s something magical, better than any other treasure, and it got me thinkin. I’ve never really cared about that stuff, haven’t since I was a kid. But I guess that’s because I figured no one would be able to stand me for long, no one would actually accept me for who I am. But, that’s not really right, huh? Since you did that right from the start. I’ve known that for ages but guess it didn’t really sink in until now.

Call it childish innocence or whatever, but you accepted me even back then when I was broody and angry and maybe a little murderous. You knew who I was, my history, my dreams, and you didn’t laugh or run away or anything like that. You smiled that stupid smile of yours and just accepted me, all of me.

Here I am about to— about to leave , and it’s because there’s a whole fucking WORLD out there that can’t seem to do the same thing a five year old noble brat could — no offense.

And y’know, if that’s the closest I get to love then I’ll take it. Hell, maybe I even love you too. Actually, no. I don’t think maybe is even a factor anymore. Seems stupid now that I think about it, but I probably loved you even back then. From the very start. Little late to be figuring that out now, huh?

They’re rushing me. Marine bastards.

I know I’ve talked a lot about, well, death. So many years spent just thinkin that I deserve it, just because of who my father was, but now that there’s this whole messed up world agreeing with me, is it wrong that I’m— fuck — I’m scared Sabo. Absolutely terrified and there’s nothing I can do about it. All these years I’ve practically asked for it and now—

I know it’s late to start saying this, way too late now, but Sabo, I want to live.

I want to do so much with my life than this. I want to explore more, see more. I want— I want what I can’t have anymore. And it sucks. It really fucking sucks, but this is how it ends for me. Goin out the same way my shitty pops did. Apparently. What a sick joke this all is.

But I'm running out of time now. Guess I’ve spent what time I had. Garp knows what to do with this after... after everything. I know it won't matter in the end, but I think all of these should be together, y'know? Just in case. It's nice to know that he still considered me family, even now. He's the only one here that seems to actually care. You would think these assholes would cut me a little slack now that we’re here but I just… I don’t think it matters to them that I'm about to die. Not even a little bit. Shouldn’t hurt, but it does. I’m still human after all. Just like them. But maybe they don’t see it like that.

I’d pray for miracles but I don’t think there are any gods out there to help me. I still don’t think there are any gods at all. Doesn't really bode well for what comes after, huh?

Luffy’s going to be mad at me. I promised him that I wouldn’t die.

Maybe we can both watch over him though? You’ll probably be mad at me for saying this but a part of me is a little relieved. At the end. At least I’ll get to see you again, right? I don’t even know if we’ll both end up in the same place, but I can hope. I really, really hope. It’s selfish but I’m glad that I won’t be alone. I don’t want to be alone anymore.

Ace

A Couple Years Too Late

Dear Ace,

It’s been a while, has it not? I’m sorry, but man do I have some things to tell you.

If only I could tell you.

I got your letters. Well, more like I found your letters. Stored away in a box at our old tree house. Can you believe it’s still intact after all these years? Pretty good for a couple of kids huh?

Dear Ace,

I’m sorry. I can’t believe I stopped so soon. Not even a couple sentences in and I had to leave the room. What an idiot. Let me start again.

Hey Ace. How are you? Are you eating well? Getting enough rest? You have to make sure to take care of yourself, I’m not there to nag at you anymore now. You’re all grown up. I sound like such a parent I’m sorry. I just care and want the best for you. I got your letters. I’m sorry the delivery took so long. Way too long. It’s a shame this is how we reunite. I hoped I could have seen you at least once before

Dear Ace,

I did it again. At this rate I’ll clean out Headquarter’s paper supply. I’m sorry. It’s just, every time I write, my vision gets blurry and I can’t see anymore. How can I properly reply to you if I don’t know what I’m writing? Would be embarrassing if I had a bunch of spelling mistakes especially since I’m the one that taught you how to write.

Speaking of which, you’ve gotten a lot better! I can see from the different letters you wrote. It makes me happy to see that, shows you practiced a lot. Did you help Luffy too? I only taught him so much before I left, I’m sorry. It must’ve been hard on you.

It must have been really hard on you…

I’m sorry. I keep speaking nonsense. I just don’t know where to begin, what to say. This is the third time I’m trying to write to you and you are right—it’s pretty stupid. Maybe a part of me is just hoping that the same thing will happen with you. That you’ll get this letter in 10 years or so and then maybe we could meet again, somewhere in this wide ocean.

Or maybe somewhere in skies up above.

I can dream, right?

Hey Ace, Is this how you felt? When you wrote every one of those letters, did it hurt this badly each time? I’m sorry, I should’ve come to get them sooner. Maybe I wouldn’t even be writing this right now if I had. Maybe you wouldn’t have had to write them if I had come sooner. I’m sorry. I really made it hard for you huh? I’m happy you wrote though. It feels as if you are here, talking to me. Telling me of your struggles, your adventures. All the good and the bad—even though I already knew some of this. I’m happy for you Ace. Truly I am. I wish I could’ve been there when you sailed out to sea, we could’ve sailed out together. Met your first crew, that I wouldn’t be a part of because I would have had a better crew.

When you found a family .

I’ll have to visit them one day, and properly thank them. It’s the least I can do.

Hey, remember the declarations we made back at the cliff? I still haven’t done mine, been busy, it’ll probably take a while. Still, you did yours did you not? You let the whole world know who you were. Fire Fist Ace, that’s a pretty cool name they gave you. You were always the better big brother so I’m not surprised you beat me to it. Mine’s a little bit harder so cut me some slack okay?

Weird how the past couple days I struggled to write and now it’s all just pouring out, I’m sorry it’s such a mess of words. I still don’t know what to really say. My vision is still blurry but I’m fighting through it. I’m sorry the paper may be a little wet.

…I’m sorry.

Twelve times. Twelve times I’ve said those two words but nothing changes, nothing will change. I’ve come to that conclusion. Took me a while.

A long while.

It’s been two years or so since you left. Every night I have the same dream. And every time you’re always out of reach. Every single night I wonder “Would things have been different if I was there?” People kept telling me there’s no right answer to that.

Would you be alive right now if I had remembered just a little sooner?

Ah that’s right. I haven’t told you. I didn’t think it would matter if you knew since it wouldn't change anything, I’m sorry. Thirteen. I lost my memories. Pretty shitty thing for me to do right? I know. While you were suffering I didn’t even know you were a part of my life. While you died, I paid no mind because I didn’t know. You must be really mad at me. For forgetting so easily.

And then life rewards me my memories when I see your death mention in the papers. That’s pretty fucked up huh? Maybe I should’ve looked at the papers sooner.

Hey Ace, do you know now? Is it pretty up there where you are? Have you met your mom? She’s up there too right? I’m sure she is. If there is a Heaven I know you’re there. Regardless of what people say, what they may have called you, Heaven is where you belong. The image of an angel truly suits you, you know. Maybe you always were an angel, and god sent you down to me. Can I let you in on a little secret? Thanks to you, I was able to become who I am today. If I hadn’t met you that day you pulled me out of the Grey Terminal I probably would’ve been back in that castle, suffering. You changed my life for the better and I’m eternally grateful. And seeing as you brought it up first; I love you too. Always did. Even during my amnesiac years, I’m sure that part of me was still there. Loving you even if it didn’t remember you. Sad that we’re sharing such things now huh? It’s almost laughable. Yet not even a smile comes to my face right now… What am I saying? I’m sorry, I ramble a lot.

Fourteen.

It’s been almost two years since then Ace and the pain just gets worse. Does it ever go away? Did it ever go away for you? It’s like a nail is constantly being hammered into my chest. Some days they slam the hammer harder than others. Some days they slam it so hard I can barely breathe… I can cover it up better than before at least, can function in my daily life. Oh yeah—I’m a Revolutionary, have I told you that yet?

Do you think if this world was different, you would still be alive? I wonder.

Are these letters really supposed to help? The only thing it’s helping with is making the pain worse. Will you even read this? Maybe if I send it flying high enough, will it reach you? Or maybe you're watching me right now as I write it? If you are then well…

I miss you.

God I miss you so much.

It’s not fair. Why did you have to be the one to leave? My first friend, best friend, my partner, my brother, my… There are so many things I want to share with you. I want to see you again. See you smiling, laughing, angry—I just want to see you. Even if it’s just one more time.

Would it have been better if I had died that day? Would I be with you right now? I’ve had that thought so many times. And maybe I tried to join you…so many times.

But I’ve thought a lot. Luffy is still out there is he not? I can’t just leave our little brother like that. I’ve already fucked up enough as it is. Even if he hates me, pushes me away and never wants to see me again—I’ll protect him. I asked you to take care of him before, now it’s my turn.

By the way, I’ll be visiting you soon—no, not like that. Sadly. I’ve avoided doing it for a while because I didn’t want to believe it but I think it’s time now.

I’m sorry…that I can’t be with you, not yet. But you aren’t alone. I may not be next to you, but I’m always thinking of you. Every waking moment and every time I close my eyes. You’re there.

Fifteen.

We’ll meet again soon. There are just some things I have to take care of here first. It may sound a little selfish but please wait for me okay? Just a little longer.

Sabo

#saboace #acesabo #saboaceweek2018 #I REAAAAALLLYYYY HOPE WE HAVEN'T HYPED THIS UP TO MUCH #BUT I'VE BEEN WAITING TO RELEASE THIS PROMPT FOR /MONTHS/#I HOPE YOU ALL ENJOY

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journal-of-a-gamer · 6 years

Text

Who Am I

Chapter 10 : Overly Zealous

We slid into the bridge after Evana, a look of concern being washed from everyone’s faces till the door closed behind us, “where’s Doctor Valentine? Is she not with you?” Hayden stared at the door wide eyed hopeful that it would open and with growing dread that it was shut. Evana sniffled, she couldn't cry anymore her eyes were bloodshot and dry, “Doctor Valentine was, exposed to an alien contaminant upon the impact that the Alexia suffered shortly after landing, this contaminant is all over the med bay,” he sniffles each pause with her voice carrying across the room above the computers but quivering with sadness. “Doctor Valentine is dead…her…her body has gotten back up but I assure you that it is not my Valentine,” with this Evana made her way over to a seat and buried her face into her hands, her entire body shook while everyone besides me and Ewan stood as tho they had been victim to a static surge. “Ewan, whats your assessment of the damage to the med bay?” “Critical mam, the contaminant as Doctor Evana stated is everywhere and the entity in the room appears to be hostile in nature, so in short out of use until a way to deal with the contaminant is discovered and applied.”

Hayden curled her hands into fists and slammed both onto the briefing table, “god ducking damn this planet and this job, I'm going to glass this planet and then that entire moon with him on it when we get back!” Hayden screamed losing her composure for a rage filled moment before straightening up and walking to the front of the bridge to look outside. “Muther…fuckers…” Hayden exclaimed and her shoulders slumped as a direct communication began to flare up on the screen of the main desk, the symbol of the state of science flickered across the screen for several moments before a voice boomed over the speakers, “I am the Arch Confessor Sloan DeVolantes,” he paused briefly before smirking, “here to settle the score with me Captain Hayden Dogma? Or, maybe to join my ranks like you did on Mars hmmm?” Hayden’s face went from slightly annoyed to red with flustered rage, everyone’s attention had shifted from the main screen to the captain.

Surveying the situation, Hayden quickly shot her eyes across the room in one build sweep. No one had drawn a gun on her yet and were staring in almost disbelief her left hand swept up from her side fingers dancing on the small leather latch on her holster, her thumb placing itself around the grip using the momentum all while her back arched as she lowered her profile to an aggressive lean, ready to dodge; she stopped there for a moment waiting for someone else to draw or place their hand on their weapon. No one did. In a room in which she had been outed as a terrorist, a zealot even, everyone should have tried to kill her instantly, the bounty out on zealots was nice and high. Unit_L3.w15 looked up at the captain from the device he had been monitoring, “Captain I think I speak for all of us in that we trust you more than we do a stranger,” with that L3w1s turned off the inbound broadcast and the deranged zealot vocalised ramblings with the device he was holding.

Her hand dropped from the pistol, her back straightened and she was left with a flushed embarrassed look on her usually pale face, “okay, thank you Lewis, I guess I owe you all explanation as to why that zealot knows me.” “Nah, not really,” Jenny interjected, “you’re my captain and thats that, I’ll shoot anyone who says otherwise.” while in that last bit making sure everyone could see her stroking her right leg with her heavy blaster holstered to it; Jerome followed her hands with his eyes a little too long and far too eagerly if you asked me then following her up with, “If Jenny’s with you, I’m there too Captain.” Ewan let out a heavy sigh and lowered his head into his hands briefly, “I knew something was up,” raising his head he shrugged, “what needs fixing Captain.” Evana simply raised her head from her hands briefly to look at the captain, her face wet from her silent tears, eyes clear; she coughed to clear her throat, “I’m not about to commit mutiny Captain,” with that she dragged her sleeve across her face sniffling as she wiped away mucous and tears from her face. I simply looked at Hayden smiled a wide smile and nodded, “I’ll stay by your side till the end Captain.”

“What did I ever do to deserve a crew as good as you guys…” Hayden reached up to her face and wiped away a singular tear, “OoKay, let’s get to it, we’re here to steal an artefact from these zealots and return it to the buyer, from what I've been told it’s used in burial rights.” She looked at Ewan raised her wrist across her body pressed a few buttons, “that’s what I've got Ewan, see if you and Clark can make any sense of that and help us find it and get off this rock A S A P, thank you.” With that me and Ewan turned to leave the room, briefly stopping by Evana to make sure she was okay; she wasn’t, not really.

Ewan reached for the panel to open the door, when suddenly something slammed off the door again. Thud, thud, thudthudthud. Noticeably taken aback Ewan pulled himself from the door panel losing his balance and lading on his back side in the motion of his being startled. Jenny cocked an eyebrow and raised her gun toward the door, the safety made a satisfying bing as the gun readied itself to blast a hole in a target after having not been needed for well over a month now.

The slamming of the door stopped, in its place there was a loud scraping sound like nails on a chalkboard, I covered my ears to save myself from the prolonged discomfort, nobody else seemed bothered enough by the sound to bother protecting their ears. Then just as I thought it couldn't get any worse, in the small window of the door into the hall what was Valentine raised it’s head into full view. “Fuck that,” Jenny shot through the glass once where it’s head was; the glass didn't shatter as much as there was a perfect circle three centimetres in diameter burned through the glass. The molten glass residue blistered up and poured over the edges turning black as it cooled, the wall across from where Jenny took the shot had a black burn on it three centimetres in diameter.

“Open that door now, I want that thing found and removed from my ship alive or dead!” Hayden barked to which Jerome and Jenny set off out the door, guns at the ready for running into the remains of Valentine. I turned towards Evana and could see her visibly shaking with fear, I put my hand on her shoulder to try to comfort her but she shrugged me off and staggered out the words, “her forehead, the needle, no wounds.” She just stared at the area where the thing had raised it’s head clutching the sides of her head, pulling at her brown hair in a distressed manner.

I didn't know what she meant and just looked at Ewan, “I think it’s been a hard day for our poor Doctor,” turning then to Hayden I stood up straight, “permission to take Evana with us, doors locked till told otherwise?” She looked at me her features relaxing from the stern angered face she had ten seconds ago when giving the order to hunt down an ex member of the crew, “yes, look after her for me Clark, she’ll be in safe hands if she’s with you.”

With that me and Ewan grabbed the doctor each with one arm around her sides and made our way out of the bridge and back towards the engineering deck. As we left the room we could just glimpse Jerome and Jenny turning the corner guns poised to blast the first thing they seen into charcoal.

On the way back to our deck, nothing much happened, we could hear the occasional discharge of weapons somewhere on the ship and when we tuned into Jerome and Jenny’s security frequency it was just them chasing whatever was on the ship into a corner only for it to ‘slither’ away and the captain would egg them on after it. The only other thing that we really noticed was the slow mental degradation Evana seemed to be going through as she just kept muttering to herself as she walked either being held by us or for at least some of the way back without support, neither of us could make out what she was saying and decided with a look that it would be better to just get her into a comfortable pod as soon as possible.

The door was shut, and on opening it we were greeted by the massive mess that had been left in the wake of the earlier crash, tools and bits and bobs were littered across the room, collectively we let out a sigh as we both knew that we’d had to tidy this shit up before long and it was going to be a pain in the ass. “Lets just put her in your pod? It seems to be the least messy and already has a few pillows in it from when you curl up in there for a nap when you think I'm not looking.” I turned to Ewan with a rather red and embarrassed face, “you knew I went for naps in there?” He just chortled to himself as he led Evana into the comfortable pod, “lock the main door for me will ya?” Letting out a sigh as he’d found out my best spot to nap I let my shoulders sink a little in relaxation, turned and keyed in the lock code for the door and then moved towards the holo station and keyed in the code to lock down the entire deck, “There, secure, the only things in this deck are us.” “Well…unless there was anything else already on this deck…” Ewan chipped in grimly.

Just as if to spook us more than Ewan had, a plaz welder fell from it’s precarious position on a work surface and clattered off it’s canister on the floor. “O my fucking god, lets clean this bucket of lasers and tinnitus before I slip on a cutter and slice y knee open.” With that we got to work, rummaging through the mess of the work area sorting the junk into the correct areas between, canisters of fluid, gases, screws, blots, transistors, resistors, conductors, tools and many more bits and pieces that we went through.

With the collection of bits put away Ewan unclipped his rotary plasma cutter from his utility belt, pulled up a chair and inspected it over the now empty work top, “You see this part here? It’s a circuit I made myself, I dunno how well it’ll work but it should overheat the plaz almost to its gaseous state, so it should cut well burn through most things, or it’ll just fry the circuit and I’ll get a nasty shock and a good burn from the blow back” he laughed at the thought while gesturing to his hand which already had a few burn scars on its surface.

After a while just resting we both decided that we should check out the rest of the deck, make sure that nothing was broken or loose, the air purifier and hydroponics being a main point of interest. That’s what we told ourselves we were looking for, but really we were uneasy; we didn't know where the thing was, we asked Jerome if they had caught it yet but he just said that they had lost it and were still looking. Bastard could've just told us that they’d got rid of it so we could rest easy for a bit before we had to fix the ship up.

I headed for the air purifier room since I figured if that was to get fucked we would all be fucked, I forgot how dark the way around here was even with working fucking lights. After bumping off everything that was inhumanly possible to bump into and checking over my shoulder every tenth to twentieth second out of pure anxiety and fear that Valentine could have hidden in the dark down here and came out behind me without me noticing till it was too late and she was nibbling my giblets. Fortunately this didn't happen, though I think I found the experiment six to six scurrying around, must’ve escaped Evana’s mouse colony experiment, it wasn't uncommon for Ewan to find the escapists and give them refuge. I let out a sigh; for the fact that a mouse gave me a fright when there was an actual monster running around on the ship somewhere; as I punched in the code to the open the purification room.

The room was light in its usual deep crimson lighting, it was nice to know that this room was still getting power. No sooner had I door open for more than ten seconds and the refugee mouse ran between my legs into the room, “fuck, no you don't you little shit, if you nibble on any of these wires it’ll take me most a day to fix any damage you do.” I swore as a hurried into the room after it to catch it before it fucked me up.

“Gottcha you slippery little bastard, now be good and don't make me send you back to your buddies.” I held him firmly but not tightly so as not to panic him, I don't want him biting me let alone wires and then promptly slid him into my left breast pocket for safe keeping, I’ll put the little guy in the pod with Evana when I get back to the main room.

“Eeeeeeeevvvvaaaannnneeea…” a breathy voice spoke from behind me, I froze. “Whare mi Evvveeeeee,” I felt the hot breath on the back on the neck, my hairs pricked up. An icy hand with long chalky fingers placed itself on my left shoulder and the face leaned in towards my right ear, “take me her,” the breath was a mixture blood and necrosis, if I wasn’t so stricken with fear I felt that the stomach would've moved itself up into my throat and emptied itself through my nose, ears and mouth. I gulped, my throat was drier than a planet after being glassed. “Evee…nnoowwww,” it hissed. It retracted its head from my shoulder and in its place came the right hand, except this one didn't stop at my shoulder. It passed my shoulder up towards my throat and grasped, the deathly cold, long white fingers pressed tightly against my throat, it forcibly moved me out the door.

My legs moved back the way they had came, my heart was reaching a crescendo, the veins in body were screaming run; run run run run run run. I walked. The soft sickly padding of bare, sticky but most definitely wet feet moving close behind me as I led it towards Evana one step at a time. I kept my hands away from the weapon i had in a sling around my midsection, I hadn’t fired it yet and while I wanted to kill this thing than let it get to Evana I didn't really have a good opportunity with the icy vice that was what passed for it’s hands.

The walk back was sightly faster than the walk down to the purification room, I wasn't looking for the monster anymore, I had really stepped in it this time. I wished that I hadn’t gotten caught by this shambling corpse doctor.

We had reached the last door, all I needed to do was input the passcode and wham, the door’d be open and I had no idea what’d happen after that, it wouldn't need me anymore I guess. Numbness filled my head like a void. I went limp, I stared with wide eyes at the floor as I slumped my body only being held up by the unfriendly hand holding my throat.

I grant wishes.

My vision faded, my breathing slowed along with my heart; I blacked out.

#writing #reading #book #scifi #Sci-Fi & Fantasy #Adventure #who am i #chapter 10 #horror

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chiseler · 6 years

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SWEET YOUNG INNOCENT

Coleen Gray and Sterling Hayden in The Killing

Long before Coleen Gray arrived in Hollywood, when she was still a teenager named Doris Bernice Jensen living in Staplehurst, Nebraska, doppelgängers playing the Coleen Gray role were already appearing on the big screen. In the 1940 RKO programmer The Ape, Maris Wrixon took a Coleen Gray turn as a sweet and innocent young woman with a spinal defect who becomes the focus of Boris Karloff’s affections. Unfortunately, being a mad doctor, Karloff’s efforts to find a cure for the poor girl drive him to kill a whole bunch of people. A year later in John Huston’s High Sierra, it was Joan Leslie in the Coleen Gray role, as the good hearted young woman with a club foot who very nearly convinces Bogart’s Roy Earle to change his criminal ways. Then she makes the mistake of telling him she’s engaged to someone else. And in an oddly prescient move, three years after Coleen Gray earned her first major role, Jean Hagen played Sterling Hayden’s lonely, desperate and long-suffering girlfriend in Huston’s Asphalt Jungle, some six years before Gray would at long last play the role herself in The Killing.

For all the doppelgängers who came along before and after—and there were plenty—none of them could top Gray herself as the embodiment of lovely, wide-eyed, corn-fed All American innocence—though an innocence, while incorruptible, that often wandered unknowingly into some shadowy territory and the company of some pretty rough characters.

After getting her BA in Dramatic Arts from Hamline University, Gray (still Doris Jensen at that point) set out to see more of the country, stopping first in La Jolla. She worked as a waitress for a few weeks before making the headlong plunge into Hollywood. She enrolled in an acting school, began appearing in some small theatrical productions around L.A., and, as the classic story goes, was spotted by a talent agent who offered her a contract with 20th Century Fox. In an early magazine interview, gray told the reporter of her girlhood dreams of being a movie star, particularly how she would decorate her dressing room and buy gifts for her staff—all the standard dreams of a typical Coleen Gray character. But as so often happened with her characters, after getting what she wanted she soon realized it wasn’t nearly as glamorous as the movie magazines would have us believe.

First came the name change, from Doris Jensen to Coleen Gray, the single “l” to make her unique, and the “Gray” to subconsciously remind people of Betty Grable.

After an uncredited role in 1945’s State Fair was followed by two other uncredited roles, in 1947, the year film noir really came into its own, the newcomer Gray established herself as a genre stalwart, nearly as inescapable as Ida Lupino, but with her own unique character and persona. In counterpoint to all those devious, dime-a-dozen femme fatales out there, and counter even to Lupino’s streetwise and world wary dames, Gray was redemption, a sign of hope within a dark and nihilistic world.

Her big break came as the narrator and co-star of Henry Hathaway’s seminal and groundbreaking Kiss of Death. Working opposite Victor Mature and a young Richard Widmark (making his unforgettable screen debut as sociopath Tommy Udo), it was Gray’s opening narration that established her screen persona for time immemorial.

Over shots of the snow falling on Midtown Manhattan, her gentle Midwestern voice explains:

“Nick Bianco hadn't worked for a year. He had a record - a prison record. They say it shouldn't count against you but when Nick tried to get a job the same thing always happened: ‘Very sorry. No prejudice, of course, but no job either.’ So this is how Nick went Christmas shopping for his kids.”

While most Noir Era opening narration tended to be stern and authoritarian, warning audiences about the scourge of crime, the dangers to be found in the shadows of the big city and what have you, Gray’s voice is empathetic and, yes, innocent, the voice of a young woman in love, and so willing to overlook a few of her beau’s minor character glitches. She understands nick’s circumstances and makes no moral judgment about his decision to rob a jewelry store in the Chrysler Building in order to buy Christmas presents for his family. What we don’t learn until later is that our narrator, Nettie, was actually the criminally young Bianco family babysitter when the events of the opening scene take place.

Gray herself doesn’t appear onscreen until much later, when she shows up at the prison and breaks down, telling nick his wife has killed herself, his daughters have been put in an orphanage and, oh, yes, she’s been in love with him for years.

That seems A-OK with Nick, and through the narrative economy that so marked Hathaway’s film. The moment he’s sprung we jump months, even a couple years ahead to find Nick and Nettie married, settled down and living a deliriously happy suburban existence. Nick’s finally found work as a bricklayer, and Nettie has given her inner Midwestern girl free reign, keeping house and making dinner in a dress and apron. Even as things go to hell soon afterward, with Nick drawn back into the shadows to try and ensnare that cackling Tommy Udo, Netti’s perhaps naive optimism never falters.

It was a very good year for Gray, who also found herself co-starring opposite Tyrone Power in another, much darker noir touchstone. Her role in Edmund Golding’s Nightmare Alley (based on the William Gresham novel) would at first blush seem a radical departure from the sweet young innocence of Nettie, but you watch closely, and there’s still plenty of Nettie in Molly. Yes, Molly is a carny working a sideshow electric chair gag in a seedy traveling show , but for all the men lusting after her she remains sweet and virginal. Even when she takes up with the mercenary con man Stanton Carlisle (Power) and the two split the carnival to shoot for the big time with a mentalist act, her conscience comes with her. Once the act morphs from a simple nightclub routine into a spiritualist scam preying on the fragile emotions of the mourning and desperate, pretending to offer comforting contact with lost loved ones, that conscience rears up and Molly splits the show. She returns at film’s end, however, back at the sane carnival where Stanton himself lands after falling as hard and low as a man can manage. While all the other women Stanton has dealt with along the way proved themselves just as conniving and wicked as he is, Molly reappears as a singular symbol of possible redemption. Unlike the book, her presence offers that hope, however slim, Stan might pull himself together yet.

Five years later in Phil Karlson’s Kansas City Confidential (with Lee Van Cleef, Neville Brand, Jack Elam and John Payne), Gray doesn’t appear until late in the film, but works the same redemptive magic. Sweet and innocent as ever, she’s unaware that her retired cop father has turned criminal mastermind. She’s also wholly unaware her father’s about to settle a score with his three cronies while the patsy he framed for a million dollar armored car heist is closing in to settle a few scores of his own. She just decides to pay a visit, like any loving daughter, because she hadn’t seen her dad in awhile. Worse, during her unwittingly ill-timed visit, she falls for the patsy in question (Payne) even though she knows he’s already got a recored, because as ever she can see beyond such trifles.

The crowning jewel, and the perfect bookend to her role as noir’s ever-present symbol of goodness and light and hope within the darkness came in 1956 with Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing.

Losing the chewing gum and the cheap eyelashes, Gray essentially reprises Jean Hagen’s role in Asphalt Jungle, but with a certain melancholy purity that makes the role all her own. Kubrick made it clear he signed Sterling Hayden specifically on account of his performance in Asphalt Jungle, and yes, Fay’s relationship with Johnny Clay (Hayden) echoes the relationship in the Huston film in many ways—the sad young woman yearning for little more out of life than a scrap of attention from her outlaw boyfriend. More interesting within the context of the film is how the relationship acts as a mirror image of that scheming Sherry (Marie Windsor) and her sap of a husband George (Elisha Cook) across town. Sherry endlessly belittles George, having not the slightest inkling he’s involved in planning a massive heist. Fay, meanwhile, is a simple kid who—like Nettie in Kiss of Death—knows full well what Johnny’s business is, and loves him anyway. Again, all she wants is a little attention in return, but knows she’ll have to wait to get it. Despite the company she keeps, she’s as wide-eyed and innocent as ever, and at film’s end, when everything goes to hell, she doesn’t run, doesn’t scream or panic. She offers a few gentle suggestions about possible escape, but when a clearly defeated Johnny shrugs off her suggestions, she waits again as he turns to face the cops, and you know she’ll keep waiting until he gets out of prison.

For noir nuts, that was the high water mark, though afterward gray was busier than ever, mostly on television and mostly in Westerns, where her midwestern beauty made her a natural. There were a few weirdies dropped in along the way, including her starring role in the 1960 low-budget drive-in hit The leech Woman. Essentially a knockoff of the previous year’s The Wasp Woman, and one of her very few villainous turns, Gray plays a middle aged woman who learns the secret to eternal youth lay in a formula that calls for the pineal gland of a male. Given the serum’s youth-restoring properties are only temporary, well, that means she’s going to have to start collecting a lot of pineal glands. In another less than wholesome turn in 1962’s The Phantom Planet, she plays the blond and manipulative daughter of a…well, to be honest it’s a bit too much and too mind boggling to get into here, but Gray does seem to be having fun playing against type.

In an era when such a thing wasn’t the kiss of death (so to speak), Gray was an outspoken political conservative and Christian, and as early as 1964 was lobbying Congress for a Constitutional amendment allowing prayer in public schools. She continued working steadily into the mid-Eighties, retiring from show business while only in her sixties. Along with her third husband Joseph Fritz Ziesier, she devoted the last three decades of her life to social work, from the Red Cross and Girl Scouts to an evangelical fellowship group aimed at prison inmates. Which is pretty much what you’d expect from a Coleen Gray character.

by Jim Knipfel

#Jim Knipfel #Coleen Gray #Sterling Hayden #The Chiseler

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clonerightsagenda · 7 years

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We were joking about this again last night and I didn’t want to work on research was bored so here’s a relatively unpolished thing of the Game Over kids coming up with a (in hindsight) blindingly obvious solution to their problem. I remain stupefied by this apparent oversight.

Starring Nepeta, because she’s earned it.

After what you've been through, the silence of the dream bubbles is comforting. You sit still and hug your knees. It's nice to be just you, in your own skin, with nothing else in the way.

"I'm going to be sick," says the human you were imprisoned with, and he is. Nothing comes up.

You can't blame him. It had been suffocating, and he'd been throwing a fit for most of it. You'd kept quiet, but not because you didn't care. You didn't see the point of screaming when it didn't help. Instead you waited, watched, and at the right moment finally struggled just hard enough that the entity that you'd become hesitated as the Furthest Ring cracked apart and the growing void sucked you in. At least your ghosts woke up here, instead of being trapped in the singularity forever.

Wherever you are now, the black hole hasn't eaten it. The darkness is still illuminated by glittering cracks, but the surface beneath you is whole. There's no sign of Lord English, or the army. Is anyone nearby?

You didn't need to learn much about Heart during your session. Your existing combat skills were enough. Once you'd been out here for a while, you started to think it was about souls. About who people are, deep down. Maybe that's why you can handle a place where you're stripped down to your Self with a thousand others vying for the title. Maybe that's why you're recovering faster from being crushed beneath some other consciousness and buried under an aggregate of other lives. You know who you are. You're the Rogue of Heart, and here, you are useful.

There's a cluster of bright sparks in your inner vision. Souls, glowing with the dim luminescence of the dreaming dead. Part of you would love some solitude, but you also want to interact with people as yourself, to hear people call you by your name. It'll help you settle more firmly back into your skin.

"I feel some spirits not far away," you say. "I think they're friends." Dave doesn't look at you at first. Maybe you should just leave, but you feel some level of loyalty after what you've been through. "Want to come?"

It takes him a few tries to stand, but he does.

You see Karkat and Kanaya with a cluster of the humans. You shouldn't know all their names, but the entity that possessed you rifled through the memories of all Nepetas everywhen, picking whatever scraps it felt like plastering onto itself in an off-key impression. The remnants had been left scattered through your thinkpan, and so you vaguely remember being a sprite in their session. Terezi is there too, sitting next to Vriska. They're leaning into each other's shoulders. Equius isn’t there. He must still be mixed with that AI who does most of the talking. You don’t see Gamzee either, for which you are grateful.

When you approach, Jade grabs Dave by the shirt and starts asking questions about her brother that you know from your time together he can't answer. Kanaya approaches you a little more slowly. "Nepeta," she says. "It's good to see you again. I wish we were meeting under better circumstances."

"Yeah." You tuck a strand of hair behind your ears, a nervous habit you fall back on sometimes during conversation. It’s been a while since you’ve seen these people. They’re older than you now. "It's not so bad for me, but I thought you guys might win. I'm sorry you didn’t."

"Have you seen Rose out there?" she asks.

You remember Rose, the human who'd been nice enough to let you talk to her cat-lusus. It would've been hard to miss her, considering her brother screaming "That's my sister, leave her alone, don't touch her" what felt like right into your auditory sponge. "She was like us," you say. "Made into a sprite, and then prototyped too many times. So... she's still alive. Sort of.”

"She's trapped," says Dave, smoothing out the front of his shirt. He looks relieved to be able to change the subject. "And she must be pissed as hell. It's like some Lovecraftian nightmare with a sugar high sets up shop in your brain to make a mockery of everything you hold dear. Thank god none of you saw us, I'd never live it down. Figuratively."

"Then we have to get her out," Kanaya says firmly.

"Hey, I'd be right behind you," Dirk says. The others have drifted over to listen in. It’s not like there’s much else to do – this part of the bubbles doesn’t have much in the way of scenery. "I could yank her soul out and everything; that's a thing I can do. Problem is, our mobility is limited due to us all being fucking dead."

Jake scratches his head. "Ghosts can come back. That Aranea did."

"The ring," Vriska says, looking up from whatever quiet communion she and Terezi had been locked in. "She stole the ring of life from John somehow."

"That piece of shit?" Dave exchanges a look with Jade. "Did you know about that?"

"I didn't know it was magic," she says. "I just thought it was something he'd found somewhere. He didn't like to talk about it." She frowns. "He didn't talk to me a lot that last year."

"Well, there's only one of those," Karkat snaps. "So that's not very useful, unless we want to elect an ambassador to the world of the living or draw up a schedule."

"Roxy might be able to make more..." Jade says slowly. "Where is she, anyway?"

You shrug. You would have looked for her, you like Roxy, but you didn't see much of the new session, and you don't have many memories of what went wrong in the old one.

"She's alive," Terezi says. "Her and John. I saw them before I died. They were going to fix things."

The other Dave, the one that traveled on the meteor, looks around at the shattered dreamscape, the crowd of ghosts. "Not to criticize, but things don't look fixed."

"They're setting things right in a new timeline," she explains. "We're stuck here as rejects from the old one."

"A new timeline," Kanaya repeats. "Going how far back?"

"Our problems really kicked in as soon as your crew arrived," Jake says. "Although I suppose we could have dealt with things if only that troll hadn't gotten her mitts on the ring. That's the crucial moment that truly sealed our fates. As long as you stop that, I’m sure we could manage."

Terezi shakes her head. "Think further. I told them to save Vriska."

Even Vriska looks confused by that. Karkat is the first to speak. "You undid whole sweeps of our lives? Why the fuck would you do that?"

Terezi spreads her hands out. "Look, maybe it wasn't the most rational decision in hindsight, but it's not like you've never made calls based on some sort of emotional impulse."

"And look how that turned out." He shakes his head. "We should've talked to you about that guilt complex earlier so you didn't change the entire universe just to try to deal with it."

"Yeah," meteor-Dave deadpans. "If you'd sat backwards on a chair earlier this could've all been avoided."

"Shut the fuck up," he says without real rancor. "Well, good luck to those poor bastards."

"I'm right here," Vriska says.

"I notice you haven't actually disagreed."

"No.” She shakes her head, and her long braids – unraveling at the end – shudder. “I met the new me. She's a bitch."

"Good. We're all on the same page here. I'm almost glad I'm dead."

"You know..." you say.

Terezi glances at you and then away again to continue their squabble. They've never taken you seriously because you were the silly shy girl, who spent her time having fun and playing games while the others made important decisions. But you have memories of time spent with a Life player, and you'd know that color scheme anywhere. "You know," you say again, louder. "I don't think you need a ring to come back to life."

"What do you mean?" That's Dirk. He might not know you well, but he looks desperate enough to look anywhere for input.

"Well...." You shrug. "You've got a Life player right there."

The Life player in question stares at you for a moment and then down at the symbol on her chest, like she’s checking to make sure it’s still there. "You mean...?"

"That can't work, can it?" Jake asks. "It would be too easy."

"Feferi helped us once," Karkat says. "A dead one from a doomed timeline. Her powers still worked. I don't know why I didn't remember sooner."

Jane looks down at her hands. "With a body, I know I could do it. But with a ghost... I don’t know. I guess I could try."

"Just a moment," Kanaya interrupts. "I wasn't convinced by your threats earlier that Life abilities could harm the undead, but if that principle does hold, you might hurt us instead of helping."

"I volunteer," Dirk says immediately.

Jane sighs. "Dirk, really."

"I'm serious. I glitched myself into fucking pixels and I'm still here. I'm indestructible. Do your worst."

"Well in that case…” It takes Jane a moment to catch up with herself. “Wait. You did what? Are you saying the way you got here... you did it to yourself?"

Before Dirk can respond, Terezi interjects. "Save that for later. As the Seer here, I say you give it your best shot. It's a good idea."

"We're not through talking about this," Jane growls. Then she points a blue-laced hand at Dirk and gives it her best shot.

"Well?" Kanaya asks after a moment. "Did it work?"

Dirk looks himself up and down. "I don't feel any different."

"We can't see through your shades, Strider," Jake says.

Dirk hesitates (whether out of reluctance or for theatrical effect you’re not sure) and then pushes the pointy glasses on his face up. You get a good look, as does everybody else. Orange. Humans have such strange eye colors.

"It worked," Jane breathes. “Isn't that something. Gather round, everyone. I'll fix us right up." She turns, looks at Karkat, and then her face changes. "Oh. Oh no."

"What?" Jade follows her gaze and then puts a hand to her mouth. "Ohhhh."

"What?" Karkat's voice rises. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"I can only do this once," Jane says. "Once per person. And I've already done you."

"What are you talking about?" Terezi asks. "Karkat, are you telling me you got yourself killed that quickly? And I missed it?"

"Don't blame me!" He points at Jane, who takes a step back. "Blame her. Jade too, it was her idea. Crocker here was just the willing hand with the fork.”

"The two of them decided to demonstrate Jane's abilities," Kanaya explains. "They were following the Empress's orders at the time."

"That's right," Jade says quickly. "I was bad then. And." She bites her lip. "And I was angry."

"So we can't hold that against them, right?" Jake says, with a smile that looks unnaturally stiff. "Let bygones be bygones, right Jane? After all, I've already forgotten that little interaction in the jail cell. In fact, forget I mentioned it!"

"What did Jane do?" Dirk asks. Jane groans and covers her eyes. "What the hell are you all talking about?"

"That's what I want to know," meteor-Dave adds. "Jade, you killed someone because "you were mad"? What the fuck happened to you in the last three years?"

"What happened to you, defending the aliens?" Dave snaps back. "Since when are they really on our side? No offense," he adds, glancing over at you. "You seem ok, I guess."

You roll your eyes. "I appreciate it, human scum."

Meteor-Dave has ignored this aside. "I know you were off bleeding instead of being useful during our game, but they are on our side, you outdated fucking museum specimen."

"The tiara top," you hear Jane saying to no one in particular. "I was going to apologize and explain, we just didn't have time-"

"Will all of you shut up?" Karkat demands. "I'm a little more preoccupied with the pressing matter of my mortality than whatever hangups you've got with each other. You can all pile into the confession booth later if that'll make you happy."

"But Karkat," Terezi says, "it's like watching one of your memos in real life."

"Will you ever let the memos go?"

"Like I said," Vriska interrupts, "there's the ring."

You took a step back when she spoke - your last memories of her aren't great. But this one seems milder, though maybe that's the dreambubbles nipping at the edges of her soul, like they do to everyone eventually.

"That's right," Terezi says. "The ring. The Empress killed Aranea, I saw that much. So it might be up for grabs again. It likes to vanish and reappear."

"But where?" Dirk asks. "Do you think it would be near her ghost?"

Jake balls his hands up. "Are you saying we could go beat up that spider troll's ghost? Because I am ALL for a rematch. Don't bring me back yet, Jane. That way if she tries to kill me again she won't be able to."

"I could find her, maybe," Terezi says. "This place is made of memories, so if I follow her mind... With the ring so smashed up, there aren’t that many places to hide."

"How do we tell she's the right one?" Jade asks. She’s latched onto this new subject eagerly, probably to escape the last one. "We can't just jump on every version of this troll, can we?"

"I can tell," you say. You have a knack for that out here. You can strike up a conversation with one Tavros and later pick him out of a crowd of twenty, even if his outfit is different. Once you know a little bit about how the person has changed, they don't wear their face the same. This Aranea - what she did will show.

“Sounds like a plan,” Dirk says. “I like it."

"You'll have to sit this one out," Jane says. "You're mortal again, and I can only save you once. Perils of being the guinea pig, I'm afraid. And I am officially team leader. I think it's time I actually lived up to that. Metaphorically, if I must."

He scowls but doesn't argue.

Jade turns to Terezi. "You said there's a new timeline, right? Does that mean there’s a new group of all of us?"

"That's right. It's up to that set to win now."

"I doubt they'd like us crashing the party," Dirk says. "God knows I have enough problems fighting myself, and it looks like that's a family trait."

"Can't do it no matter what," says Dave. "The Furthest Ring is neutral territory, but once we're in the same Skaia-supervised universe, doomed double rules apply. We'll get picked off."

"Great, more complications." Karkat throws up his hands. "Then where do we go, even if we do come back?"

"It's a big multiverse," Kanaya says. "There must be somewhere."

"There must be somewhere," Jake agrees. "I'm not going to sit here in the dark for eternity because some troll got a bee in her bonnet about how our story was supposed to go. I was never that concerned about winning the game on its terms anyway, as long as we made it out ok. I don't even know what the victory state is supposed to be."

"Then it's agreed," Jane says. "We find Aranea, get that ring, I bring us all back, and we go somewhere. Somewhere better."

"And we find Rose," Kanaya adds.

"Definitely," says meteor-Dave. "We can call up John and Rose's mom too, see if they want to hang out with us losers or stick with the winning team. Maybe we can get shared custody."

“If we see other people…” You almost trail off, but they’re looking at you, so you complete the thought. “Maybe we should let them come too, if they want. It seems fair.”

Jane nods. “I’m willing to try. The one time rule might not count for different versions of the same person.”

"Can I come?" Vriska asks. You’re surprised she was polite enough to ask. She really has changed.

Terezi links arms with her. "Wouldn't have it any other way, sister."

"Hold on," Karkat says. "I’m still technically leader of the Alternian band of chucklefucks, which means I get to make that kind of decision. You're not going to try another megalomaniacal plot as soon as our backs are turned, are you? If I recall correctly, you got killed for a reason.”

She juts her chin forward, a bit of her old vigor returning to her voice. "I'm not like that anymore.”

"I guess we can keep an eye on you if you’re lying."

Terezi pinches the bridge of her nose with her free hand. "Karkat, do you think you could be a little bit less of a dick if you really tried?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, I'm a little on edge. I've been murdered."

"We've all been murdered," Kanaya says. "Or most of us, at least. Just establishing that for the record."

"And it sucks.”

"I don't blame him for not trusting me," Vriska says quietly, which shuts even Karkat up. You look her over. You don't know what she's been doing since you saw her last, but the person behind the face is different now. It makes you think of a drawing in that smudgy, formless state when you’re still working out the details. On its way to being something, but not there yet, tenuous enough that a stray line would ruin the entire picture. It’s the point where you have to make a decision about what the final product ought to be.

"Well," Terezi says at last. "That's settled, then. We'll get some vengeance, and then we'll figure out what to do next. How's that for a plan?"

"It's actually three quarters of a plan, because some leetspeaking weirdo wrote a four instead of an A, but otherwise it sounds good," says meteor-Dave. She sticks her tongue out at him.

Jane nods and uncaptchalogues an enormous fork. That’s right – she is an heiress, technically, and she handles the official weapon with ease. "It sounds good to me too. Let's go win this game on our terms."

#homestuck//#kat writes fic #bluh bluh huge bitching alert #i guess #AU #also I guess #you can't actually prove this didn't happen

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