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nemetonisevilpassiton · 5 years ago

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Is Teen Wolf Lovecraftian?

Is Teen Wolf Lovecraftian?

Yes, very much so.

Why?

To understand if Teen Wolf is a Lovecraftian horror we need to start by defining our terms and providing comparisons. Lovecraft stories directly made into movies as a whole are just bad, and most video games too. However, using Lovecraftian ideas and tropes creates a successful narrative in most cases.

Several things define the Lovecraftian horror experience.

Isolation both mentally and physically

Lack of character information which is replaced by character reaction.

Lack of information about the world in which the protagonist finds themselves with a penalty for discovering that information.

The revelation that that which was formerly known is now revealed to be unknown and the consequences thereof

Fear of the unknown, specifically the previously thought known

Body Horror, specifically bodily transformation, from which there is no reversal

The insignificance of the subject in regards to the whole

These look specifically vague and you can apply them around a lot, and people do, but you might also notice a lack of tentacles there.

So before we turn this on Teen Wolf let’s present an example that you can understand the points in question

John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982)

A group of men in an Antarctic station inadvertantly let something other into their base.

Interestingly the least Lovecraftian thing in “The Thing” is the thing itself, and wasn’t that a fun sentence to write.

The Americans [as opposed to the late Norwegians] are already at breaking point, isolation - caused by the weather, their close proximity to each other, boredom and exhaustion have taken their toll, they are a brush fire just waiting for a spark, and that spark is the thing. It is not the spark because it’s hunting them down, because that seems almost incidental in it’s desire to just survive and hide despite it’s otherness, it’s the fact that any of them could BE the thing. I’m going to start calling it the alien - it sounds less like I’ve forgotten the word. This will probably cause problems when I move on to Alien (1979) in a minute.

Combined with that Carpenter uses long empty tracking shots (a technique he used in Halloween [1978] ) which creates a voyeuristic feeling which removes the safety of the base. The way that it works matches “The Strangers” (2008) which removes the feeling of being safe in your own home. The rich white affluent suburb with it’s white clapboard houses and wide green open spaces is invaded by “the shape” as he is called the in the credits, and those shots, in which nothing happen, makes the space unknown and terrifying for it. It removes the illusion of safety.

We know almost nothing about the men in the base, we become invested in them not because of what they are but who, they are charming, funny, tired, and very realistic but it becomes hard to remember their names because those things are ultimately irrelevant. Combined with the discovery of the space ship those men are irrelevant, what they undergo is irrelevant, no one is on the other end of the radio, they will not be saved and their deaths serve no purpose. They and their experience doesn’t matter.

In Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) does the same thing, a random ship encounters something vast and unknowable and is infected, the Xenomorph then picks off the crew for no other reason than to continue it’s own species, it doesn’t choose them for any other reason than they are there. The robot’s betrayal makes them even more meaningless, any ship that encountered alien life would do, it just happened to be that one.

The presence of the Xenomorph makes the ship unknown, it could be anywhere. At first they think it’s something small and don’t learn otherwise until face to face with it. They have to use technology they don’t quite understand and can’t really use to find it in their own safe space. A safe space surrounded on all sides by absence - space itself. All the things on the ship which previously gave them safety, the machines that allow them to exist on the ship, are now dark places for it to hide.

In Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) - the only film not to have aliens - Suzy goes to a place that is grotesquely beautiful and just happens to be in the next room to the girl who is investigating it, when that girl goes missing she looks for her and discovers the old witch and kills her to save her own life.

Yet Suspiria, which might be the most Lovecraftian film of them all, has no exposition, most of the characters aren’t introduced, and the movie is mostly experiential, maggots rain from the ceiling, but we don’t know why, the witches are killing the girls in the academy but we don’t know why, instead we have a lurid oversaturated nightmare of a narrative where the dance academy swerves from mundane to brightly lit Roger Corman-esque interior design fantasy. It is a building that if Ludwig II took acid he might design using only primary colours, art nouveau doors, blood red walls and corridors that seem to ooze menace without doing anything, overlaid with Goblin’s infamous soundtrack. Combined with that the actors filmed the dialogue in their own language and English was dubbed over so the characters are not really communicating.

Suspiria is as close to reading Lovecraft (without the racism) as it is possible to get. And it does also feature body horror when Sarah is resurrected by the witches to act as a weapon, despite her slit throat and the pins in her eyes. It is a nightmare on film.

It is also not a film you watch. It’s a film you experience. [The remake is good but very different and not so Lovecraftian, although most of the characters are played by Tilda Swinton, it’s really squinting are you Tilda Swinton too?]

So having given defintions and examples of what it is - does Teen Wolf fit.

Isolation both mentally and physically

It is impossible for the characters in the know to leave the town, and even if they do then they must return.

We see Scott try to leave twice, once in Motel California and again in Ghosted. Both times they enter a phantasmagoric town which is certainly not the outside world. Other characters are taken by the Wild Hunt. Derek Hale manages to leave, but only after “evolution”.

His trips to Mexico are also phantasmagoric in that it is hard to say that they are not dreams, the Calavera stronghold for example uses a lot of dream logic and wonky camera angles giving the idea that it’s not real. La Iglesia does this as well.

Within the town there are those who know and those who do not. Those who know flock together but have to keep their secret from those who don’t. So Scott doesn’t tell his mother until season 2, Stiles doesn’t tell his Father until 3b, Lydia is still trying to tell her mother in s5.

Characters unaware of the knowledge that others know are completely isolated, without anyone to go to, which usually ends in violence, often against themselves - the Chimera.

With as much as the main characters know it is clear that they know very little about the town, as shown by the family of wendigo who were part of the community.

2. Lack of character information which is replaced by character reaction.

We know almost nothing about any of the characters. We know how they react and how they interact, and how they change, but their histories are completely absent. This is as true of the main characters as it is the victims who only appear in one episode.

3. Lack of information about the world in which the protagonist finds themselves with a penalty for discovering that information.

People know nothing, research can present viable answers which are later proven wrong, characters guess in good faith and are wrong, characters lie, but ultimately they know very little about the world in which they’ve found themselves and those who do know often withhold or manipulate that information.

An easy example is Damnatio Memoriae in which Scott discovers what he believes to be the identity of the original Beast, a serial killer in France, who has nothing to do with the Beast at all. It’s a coincidence that the term has been applied. The knowledge is irrelevant and Scott is left with no more information about the Beast than he did at the start, then the person who does tell him, in Maid of Gevaudan, is Gerard and has every reason to lie, and that’s assuming his guess was correct.

The more characters know in Teen Wolf the more likely they are to end up in Eichen House, and Dr Fenris, in 6b, with the information he has, becomes a mass murderer.

4. The revelation that that which was formerly known is now revealed to be unknown and the consequences thereof

The town is a supernatural hotspot and the revelation of that is the entire plot. I think we can agree that that one certainly applies. Combined with that the use of “safe spaces” as battlegrounds, such as the school, the school bus, the sheriff’s station.

5. Fear of the unknown, specifically the previously thought known

Dr Fenris killed the monsters in his care, the Sheriff nearly has a nervous breakdown with the appearance of the chimera, the possession of Stiles and Scott’s reaction thereafter. These all very much apply, even Stiles fear when Scott attacks him in the locker room in pilot. The more people know the more scared they become.

Traditionally in horror the less people know the more they have to be scared of, but in Lovecraftian horror they know enough to fear it, but not much more, often the creature, by its very existence can induce fear (like the Anuk-Ite) because it is so outside the realms of what the human mind can comprehend.

6. Body Horror, specifically bodily transformation, from which there is no reversal

Werewolves. It is worth mentioning here however that there are anomalies in the transformations, almost all of the werewolves speak of pain during transformation, and Derek uses pain to help control it by overwhelming them with pain, but Scott does not. Just as the protagonist in “The Dunwich Horror” finds himself turned into a fishman there is an inevitability to the transformations in certain cases. Derek is on a path to his inevitable evolution. Scott’s natural evolution is subverted, this might be because he never transforms after his black eyed beast form in season 4. His fear of his transformation holds him back from his inevitable end form, yet there is no way he can be human again, no matter how much he wants it.

7. The insignificance of the subject in regards to the whole

Scott is not important because of who he is. He’s important because he happened to be the person in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is incidental to most of the story despite him being the focus character, the world doesn’t care about Scott McCall, it is interested in the True Alpha, but that could as easily be Chuck Norris. Scott isn’t even the true alpha by virtue but for reasons we do not know, Deucalion had no interest in it, Peter thought it was hilarious, Morell manipulated it to save her own life and Deaton worshipped it. Others use it as a target. When Scott says, “I’m a true alpha you don’t know what I’m capable of” it defines the character. Kincaid tells him he’s not as strong as a normal alpha. There are questions around his biting of Liam. Scott is not the Chosen One, he’s the one that was there and that’s ignoring his questionable behaviour and the very strong argument that he is a villain, and that his narrative was one of fallen messiah and not the hero’s journey.

Frodo was not the Chosen One, he was the guy who had the ring, and many of his successes are because of his party of companions, but Frodo’s quest, which he fails, is of world ending importance.

In Scott’s case, he again succeeds mostly because of his companions, though, unlike Frodo, he is unaware of this, he is not throwing the ring into Mount Doom to defeat Sauron, returning the ring to the jeweller because it needs resized, and might pick up some milk as well while he’s in the area.

So in conclusion is Teen Wolf Lovecraftian = yes

Does it fit the criteria laid out by works accepted to be Lovecraftian = yes

Does it follow the conventions of similar Lovecraftian works = yes

Is it the Lovecraftian conventions spread over such a large scope that cause so much dissatisfaction in the audience = yes

Almost every point in the list is something I’ve seen people complain about, we don’t know about this, we know nothing about that, that makes no sense, I think this episode would make more sense on hallucinogens etc

It is a well written Lovecraftian nightmare, it uses variant realities and isolation, suspicion and distrust well = but it tells us nothing, resolves very little and has a main character who could deliberately be replaced with a well meaning bag of sand.

But at least there were no tentacles.

#teen wolf meta #teen wolf and lovecraft #anti scott mccall

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guneyozsokmenler · 5 years ago

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120 Days of Overexposure - writing #7

About 120 Days of Sodom The famous title of the book written by 18th Century French writer Marquis De Sade refers to the events that took place in a four months period of time when four rich and noble libertines -lets say they are radical hedonists- locks themselves up in an isolated medieval type castle on top of a mountain surrounded by forests with a number of 36, mostly teenage victims of both genders and start performing their sadomasochist fantasies on them.

Now I haven’t read the whole book but I made some research on the time period and found out that the socio-political agenda -as it is an obvious statement- was more complicated than it looked. French Society and the common people of the time period in specific, rates as the highest society that knows how to read in Europe. But the interesting part is that the people were reading pornographic and comedic caricatures about the members of the Monarch and one other category that got the most attention was the erotic novels. Here it goes.

The Libertines are accompanied by four veteran prostitutes. They tell the stories of extreme sexual experiences they've been through with their former partners or customers in graphic detail and in a lustful way. These stories becomes the motivation point for the libertines to perform the same or worse sadomasochist acts on their victims. It's stated by the writer in the book, that the sensations produced by organs of hearing are the most erotic. Actually this is an interesting statement that I want to point out.

What is the nature of these most vile and suppressed desires that human beings possesses? Why they are needed ti be expressed in such savage and primitive ways? We as humankind developed ourselves parallel as we developed our civilizations thereby our culture and morals. But what are those leftovers on the plate that reflects our grotesque selves? Are we like some kind of steam machines that needs to be deflated time to time to work properly? These are the kind of questions wandering around in your head while reading the works of Marquis de Sade. When you look at the language he uses, you wonder how come this guy is any different than those erotic story writers on the adults sites of web? How come we see his name in every bookstore around the world on the shelf of "French Literature" and not necessarily "Erotic Fiction"? De Sade uses his paragraphs as a stop to hold and think what you've been exposed to in past pages of thirsty dialogue. No matter what you've thought or felt reading about the perverted actions of these libertines, you can always recall your intellectual and ethical self while reading the bedroom philosophy of De Sade.

Speaking of philosophy; I think we can agree on that if we properly introduce ourselves to the works of Marquis De Sade, we can easily discriminate his intellectual character from those only capable of providing enough blood pressure for their genitals and not their brains when it comes to subject of lust. I'd like to sympathize with the words of Slavoj Zizek. The Slovenian philosopher once said in an interview that he would like to live in a world where everyone doing whatever they want and living their life in an honest and authentic way. "Just be yourself but don't express yourself too much." He also stated."We are all monsters but I still do believe in proper manners." I'd like to finish with saying if we are talking about the works of one of the greatest controversial writers in history of literature, we should be thinking in the nature of self-judgment.

Can we be held responsible of our thoughts and desires as well as our actions? What is the red line between an innocent urge and deadliest sin? Will we be a mere listener of those prostitutes or become the ruthless torturers of our victims? How ca we overcome our handicapped nature through our human intelligence whilst accepting we're all animals? I dare you to think on those questions 'friendly reader' while reading the 120 Days of Sodom for the following pages are full of dreadful and unnerving events as amazing and exemplary they are. Just like life itself.

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stalwartignoramus · 5 years ago

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Disco Elysium (Review)

Gameplay (8/10) Monsters out, dialogues in

(+2) Innovative take on the RPG genre. The gameplay, skill tree, and level progression of DE is a very fresh take on the classic RPG formula. Instead of traditional combat where you reduce an enemy’s hit points to 0, you need to pass skill checks that are based on your invested skill levels. Instead of gaining exp and leveling up by fighting monsters in an action RPG, you converse with the citizens of Martinaise and interact with the objects scattered around the district. You gain skillpoints when you level up and you invest them in different areas in order to represent what kind of detective you want Harry to portray: The thinker, the psychic, the muscle, or the specialist. It doesn’t play like your standard RPG, but it is built on the same foundations of character customization (you can even dress up Harry in whatever way you want.)

(+1) Failure is part of the game. To my knowledge, you’re not gonna be able to max out all skills so you have to focus on one area of expertise and leave out the rest. If you play as a logic-based detective you’ll probably be on the bottom end when it comes to physical prowess and hence fail a lot of the physical-based tasks. This however doesn’t necessarily mean a game over, as the game gives you many avenues to tackle a problem, some even require you to fail to get the more desirable outcome.

(=) There’s a lot of reading. A LOT. Disco Elysium is basically a more interactive version of a visual novel so 90% of the gameplay would be reading the many dialogues thrown your way. It’s the core gameplay loop of DE and the extensive amount of reading might turn people off or bore the people already playing it, while enticing the hardcore readers to get into it more.

Story (8/10) A journey of redemption or downward spiral

(+2) Decide Harry’s fate. You hold in your hands how Harry will deal with his situation. Will he become sober or stay an alcoholic? Will he solve the case or fail horribly? Will he do drugs or remain clean? Will you sleep in the inn or out on the street? Will you even remember your own name or how you look like or will it disappear into oblivion? All these different options mean that every playthrough of DE will be a unique experience depending on how you built Harry and the choices you make during interactions. If you’re not careful (or if you’re just purposefully diabolical), Harry may meet one of the game’s many game over screens depicted as newspaper headlines, or you may not see one at all throughout your playthrough if you’re really careful.

(+1) Lieutenant Kitsuragi. Enough said. The straight man to your crazy antics, Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi is the down-to-earth partner you need to keep you grounded when your mind floats to strange dimensions. He almost feels like a character being played by another player online. He is patient and understanding when it comes to dealing with Harry’s personal problems, but also knows when to be strict when Harry is going too far with his unorthodox methods.

(+1) Intricate world-building. The world is wonderfully laid out to the player through dialogues and environment design. You can see the extensive damage Martinaise has sustained and you can realize that it was a previous warzone even without asking any of the townsfolk. Conversations with different people reveal all the political struggles Martinaise underwent and the world beyond and how the pale is consuming everything. You can choose to know more about the world at large or just let it slip by you and go on with your investigation. Regardless of which you choose, you’ll still come across very obvious signs of political unrest, corruption, drug trade, and general poverty all over the district which tells you that this is not just the generic town littered with NPCs and interactions, this is a town inhabited and shaped by the people living in it.

(=) Heavy political undertones. As mentioned in the previous statement, there’s a lot of political unrest going on in Martinaise aside from the Union’s strike. If you’re like me and don’t care that much about heavy political jargon, you might find this piece of the game quite undesirable. Nevertheless, you can choose to opt out of most political conversations and avoid all the confusing words they throw around here and there.

(-1) Underwhelming resolution. The ending was very lackluster to say the least. It all culminates in a final showdown with your police investigation unit where you present everything you’ve done throughout the game and depending on how you acted Lieutenant Kitsuragi will vouch for your actions. There’s no resolution as the game just ends after the conversation without knowing how it all went down for the characters after they’ve reported the case to their respective superiors. Not even a cliffhanger hint of a sequel. Arguably, this might tie into one of the game’s themes of not having closure but as a player it didn’t leave the best impression on me.

Visuals (9/10) Flamboyantly grotesque

(+3) Magnificent artwork. The crowning glory of Disco Elysium is the artwork. The drab watercolor-like aesthetic of the game reflects the game’s colorful and creative world plastered with grim filters of reality. It’s something that I think cannot be achieved by going for a hyperrealistic look where things appear as close as possible to real life counterparts, but rather through the lens of a rough and distorted perspective of an alcoholic detective with an abundance of internal struggles. It reminds you that there’s beauty in destruction, and destruction in beauty; as alluded to by one of the quotes found in-game. On top of that, the portraits for the thoughts are overwhelming in a mesmerizing way. Similar to how you just can’t understand what’s going on in an intricate stained glass art, or the thick black strokes of the inkwork on a tarot card, there’s just so much going on and it’s a lot to take in but you still get captivated by the imagery. You can take any still from any moment in the game and present it as a renaissance painting and I’d believe you just because the game’s artwork is that wonderfully made. Truly a testament to the talent of this generation’s artists.

(+1) War-torn Martinaise. This district has lots of stories to tell without even having a mouth to speak. The way Martinaise is presented is very organic. You can still see bullet holes and mortar damage from the war fought over the district many years ago, old arcade machines from a forgotten time litter the establishments, entire buildings with abandoned equipment of their former establishments, and repurposed infrastructures. This wasn’t just built as a place the player has to explore during their playthrough, this was a place with history and has lived way before the player step foot within its bounds.

Audio (7/10) It’s all in the voice

(+2) Superb voice acting. The voice acting gives life to the characters in Martinaise and it comes in all shapes and sizes. Every character has at least one voiced line so you can have an idea of how they sound like. Some of the more important characters have more than one voiced line, which reiterates their importance in the overall narrative. The character’s personalities and idiosyncrasies come alive in the voice acting, from the way they say certain words and their inflections, letting you know that Martinaise is home to more than one group of people as a result of the district’s history.

Final Score (8) Excellent This is Disco, baby

Disco Elysium is more than just a game, it is art first, a visual novel second, and an RPG third. The game accomplishes something more than to entertain you for the few hours you’ll pick it up. It also attempts to educate you on political discourse and warn you on the adverse effects of drug and alcohol abuse, all while being enveloped by the game’s captivating art style. You’ll find yourself appreciating the scenery more than a few times while you scour Martinaise looking for any sort of lead that’ll help you with your case.

(1-2) Terrible (3-4) Bad (5) Average (6-7) Good (8-9) Excellent (10) Masterpiece

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dungeonecologist · 6 years ago

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WILD ARMS 2 - Golgotha Prison

The name is not subtle, but the reference itself is actually oddly superficial. At the end of the dungeon, Ashley is separated briefly from the party and Lilka and Brad are captured and tied to crosses, evoking the characters Dismus and Gestas, the thieves crucified during the same execution as the biblical christ. There is little reference to that actual narrative however, instead seeming to draw from the fact that the name Golgotha is taken to be an epithet to mean literally “A Place of Skulls,” which seems rather appropriate and obvious for an execution field.

Bookending the start and end of this dungeon, we fight the boss monster, Trask. First in a scripted “loss” and then in a solo match with Ashley’s new dark henshin hero form, the “Grotesque Black Knight,” Knightblazer.

“Trask” is yet another transliteration* issue that comes from the juggling between languages. It actually comes from the Tarrasque, another monster most readily identified from its appearance in the original Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, itself originally taken from semi-obscure French myth of Saint Martha of Bethany and the Tarasque of Tarascon.

*(I realize I use this word a lot and it might not be as common use to others. A “translation” lifts meaning between languages; a “transliteration” is to lift written characters between them. Example: “Left” in English translates to 左[the direction] or 残[what remains] but transliterates to レフト. Inversely 左 and 残 both translate back to English as “Left” but transliterate as “hidari” and “zan” respectively; and レフト transliterates back into English as “refuto.”)

Surprisingly, the Wild Arms 2 design (which would also go on to persist as the core design throughout the rest of the Wild Arms series) is based more on the original myth than the D&D representations tend to be: While the end product looks nothing like the depictions of the Tarasque of myth, it retains the spiked turtle shell, the prominent dual horns, poisonous quality, and fins on its head here account for being “half fish.”

Also of note is that the title card identifies it as a “Dragonoid” and it has various metallic and machine-like features. These details are neat because it positions it as being not-quite a dragon, to work around a fact that will pop up much later: That dragons in Filgaia are extinct. And also to play into the fact that Dragons in Wild Arms are semi-mechanical lifeforms.

In any case, our scripted loss to Trask the first time around ends with the team knocked out and imprisoned in what appears to be a disused execution ground and associated holding cells. In our escape we run into monsters fitting the theme, who appear to be natural inhabitants, rather than guards put in place by the Odessa terrorist soldiers who are actually holding us here.

First up is the Wight, a classic undead warrior monster generally taken from D&D, but with a little more behind it than you might expect. The term Wight in English lore actually traces back quite far as an archaic term with little to no real association with monsters. The real intersection with name and subject comes from an early English translation of the Nordic Grettis Saga; In it the zombie-like creatures now better known as Draugr were referred to as apturgangr (lit.”againwalker”) but were translated as Barrow-wight. (lit.”[burial-]mound person”)

This may seem an odd choice, but the translation came at the hands of the eminent bookman William Morris. I say “bookman” because he was not just a prolific author of prose and poetry, but a pioneer of the revival of the British textile and printing industry. He and his wife, Jane Burden, did extensive arts, craft and design work in book and print design, book binding, and wall paper all stemming from the intricate design of modular and tiled printing blocks and stamps. Oh and he translated various works of epic poetry and myth into English, including old Roman epics, French knightly romances, and of course Norse sagas. (all of which he wrote and published what was basically fanfiction of, btw)

His seemingly erroneous “translation” of the Barrow-wight came as an attempt to reflect a comparable agedness to the name: Rather than translating from old Norse into modern English, he chose what he thought a suitable old English equivalent; “Barrow” referring to pre-christian Anglo-Saxon burial mounds, and “Wight” meaning “thing” or “creature” but often used disparagingly to refer to a person. The nuance there is actually quite clever, as the old Wight referred pretty exclusively to those living, even if it didn’t specify by definition, and that uncertainty or contradictory kind of implication uniquely fits a description of the undead.

This term would be picked up by J.R.R. Tolkein for use in Middle-Earth, retaining their lore and function from Norse legend to describe undead warriors. And from there you can follow the usual chain of influence to D&D, where the shortened term Wight really solidified itself as synonymous with the undead, and eventually down to Game of Thrones, where George R.R. Martin cleverly brings the whole thing back around to old risen bodies of northern warriors, not unlike the Draugr of Norse myth.

Anyway in Wild Arms 2 we get some sorta death yeti ¯\_(ツ)_/��

Next up is the Ghoul, which I think we all know is a pretty generic term in modern parlance, but it’s specific origins date back to pre-Islamic Arabia. It entered into English via translations of the original French translation of 1001 Arabian Nights, where it appears in one story as a monster lurking about the cemetery devouring corpses.

The Ghoul identity as a corpse eater quickly broadened into flesh eaters, and the association with lurking about graves in turn marked them as undead themselves until eventually the term became loosely applied to any variety of undead, including the thrall of vampires, supplanting the flesh of the dead with blood of the living and achieving a truly far removed meaning. Even in modern Arabic the term now broadly applies to any number of fantasy monsters.

And so long as we’re dabbling in pop culture transplants; the Arabaian word Ghul is in fact the same used in the name of the Batman villain, R’as al-Ghul, whose name/title has always been erroneously translated as “Head of The Demon.“

I have no idea why it’s a chicken with a mohawk but i love it

And finally the Bone Drake. I don’t know that this one actually has any real specific lineage...

“Drake” is generally a synonym for dragon, although there is some case of fantasy semantics where different settings will try to define distinct body types of dragons each with their own name, in which case Drakes are often either dragons which simply don’t exceed a certain size (generally no bigger than a non-magical animal such as a dog or a horse) or a wingless variation of whatever the setting’s prototypical dragon might be. I don’t know for certain, but I think this distinction in modern fantasy started with Tolkien’s wingless fire breathing dragon, Glaurung, and its offspring who were referred to as fire-drakes.

In any case, the specific term “Bone Drake” Doesn’t seem to appear with any visibility prior to Wild Arms 2, which leads me to believe it was just their name for a generic bone dragon-like creature. It does make for an interesting companion, aesthetically, to Trask being here, although there don’t seem to be any implications that Trask lives in this dungeon at all. Other than just being an obvious combination of cool fantasy things, it may also be pulled from Dungeon & Dragons’ Dracolich/Night Dragon; an undead (often skeletal) dragon raised from the dead, often by their own necromantic spells, hence the term “Lich.” For whatever reason they are oddly reminiscent of shield crested dinosaurs like the Triceratops or Styracosaurus.

The attack Rhodon Breath doesn’t tell me anything either. I think it’s just meant as “Rose Breath,” translating the “Rhodon” bit pretty literally, and references the smell of roses being present as a funeral, or else the palor of the faded pink color also called “Rose Breath.” There is some apocryphal reference to a Rhodon but of no significance that I can tell.

Clearly the theme here is death and the undead, and with some small stretch on part of the Wight, we could even say skulls all befitting Golgotha’s “Place of Skulls” epithet. It’s a really neat way to build this dungeon, albeit a little on the nose. But I really like the idea that the dungeon appears to be abandoned and now haunted by all these reanimated corpses and bones before the villains arrive to use it for their plans. Oddly there isn’t much of a martyrdom theme here, although we’ll get plenty of that a little later once we recruit our second magic user, summoner, christ figure, and perfect beautiful boy, Tim Rhymless to the team...

Anyway we get out, we fight Trask for real. Ashley turns into a saturday morning superhero. Trask gets solo’d. And we all just kinda move along without asking too many questions... Although the game dialogue describes this new form as a “grotesque black knight” the sprite work, 3D model, and even original character art don’t really convey much in the way of “grotesque” but in the context of the tokusatsu, henshin hero elements it’s not too hard to imagine that the design was meant to evoke a similar aesthetic to gruesome suit heroes like Guyver, Kamen Rider Shin, and Devilman. I do love the gill/tendon-like organic vent structure in the pauldrons that stay. And although it’s not visible in any of these images, but the D-Arts model has an exposed segment of vertebrae between the shoulders; that along with the teeth(?)/ribs on the open chest panels really helps bring out more of the “grotesque” quality of the design.

#Wild arms 2 #jrpg #psx #ghoul #wight #dungeons and dragons

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hindbodes · 6 years ago

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The Floods: Lost ...its structural integrity somewhere back there

Colin Thompson has been a great illustrator for children’s books, and occasionally a very neat author. But don’t let that cloud your judgement, because this novel is exactly as bad as it looks. The illustrations here certainly aren’t his best work, but lately they have been his only work, as his art style has morphed into this flat, computer-generated collage of photos and gritty rubber humans.

By the time it was over, this book put into me more than four instances of something in the narrative being overpowered, at least one pretty big continuity error, numerous typos, and even that thing the author sometimes does where he uses the wrong name to address a character. It also, of course, had the usual Belgian racism, because Colin Thompson still hates Belgian people for some reason.

If you’re not familiar with The Floods, it’s a gross children’s novel series about these morally dubious witches and wizards - a family - who do gross and sometimes epic shit, with very few reality-limitations put in place. I’ve been following it for quite some time.

Within the first two pages of the main story of Lost, Colin Thompson abruptly establishes that two of the main characters - and I’ll get back to you on how “main characters” is a weird concept in this series - got married and had a kid, who not only was very developed for a baby, but could literally talk in every word of the English language within a month of birth. Which is something that I expect by the next book to become another thing Colin Thompson completely forgets.

The book is about two women, Edna and Maldegard, keeping themselves occupied by traveling all over the country of Transylvania Waters and giving streets, towns, and mountains their own names. Because there weren’t any before. Which concerns me. I don’t recall the third-book-prequel having no names for anything, and I hope I just didn’t notice. In short, they’re mapping Transylvania Waters for the first time.

One thing I’m quite grateful for is that sometimes Colin Thomspon does designate things that The Floods are incapable of. The list is short, but the things that are on it really help. One of them is this thing in The Floods: Lost where Winchflat is super powerful at creating technology and can make a machine for anything, but there’s a really bizarre shack in the middle of a courtyard that he can’t penetrate or even use X-rays to look into. It’s one of the more Douglas Adamsian parts of CT’s bibliography. One time a paper booklet in a library told me that if you’re looking for more authors like Douglas Adams, try Eoin Colfer or Colin Thompson. The way I see it is more “Eoin Colfer is the poor man’s Douglas Adams, and Colin Thompson is the very poor man’s Eoin Colfer. Colin Thompson is also a very rich man’s surreal weirdo and therefore quite often worth it”.

Colin Thompson has a serious problem with “show, don’t tell”. I know that sounds crazy, because of how this is a book and “that’s how books work”, but I assure you that Colin Thompson still manages to abuse saying what happened instead of describing events like they’re actually happening. The last four Colin Thompson novels I read felt like almost the entire thing was a timelapse of seasons passing, and things end up being incredibly dialogue-driven.

100 pages of saying what happened later, interesting events in the story start to happen. There seem to be a number of villains in this sequel, and an asshole shapeshifter who’s in the form of a house, with a downright cannibalistic monster wife of his who he wants freed from prison, is the first one to make an appearance.

I don’t want to spoil how they take this man down, but it’s partly redundancies in writing and partly some pretty funny ideas that didn’t end up fully-fledged in my opinion. It sounds like a spoiler that I reveal he’s disguised as a house, but don’t worry, the book makes it incredibly obvious before telling the audience the reveal about four paragraphs later.

While that’s going on, there’s this subplot about how Mordonna and Nerlin, the parents, are trying to set up parliament in Transylvania Waters, to give the illusion to tourists that the country is a democracy or something. They live as kings and queens in a castle, and it’s not, but that will become clearer soon.

For some reason, CT goes ahead and chooses nerds as the acceptable target for narrator’s abuse, and the minor characters for the role of trying to set up a political party of the people.

Colin Thompson makes a pretty good point about how parliament sucks, especially when he says it’s because one party spends 3 or 6 years doing one thing, and then somebody else gets voted in and spends the same amount of time doing the opposite, but I don’t think the scene where Mordonna’s seven grotesque children suddenly walk in and get rollcalled just to form a bigger political party - The Royal Party - than the nerds’ one so that the nerds don’t get to have any say, sets a better precedent for the future. These characters? Well, the Floods are a pretty established large family, but they only used to get the spotlight. Nowadays, Colin Thompson always pushes his original main characters out of the spotlight, and other characters become “main” characters, purely as a freak accident. The book doesn’t give a single line to Valla or Merlinmary.

After the shapeshifter thing is resolved, the next villains are all Winchflat’s fault. Using a bunch of bones they found, this overpowered joke of a scientist character uses his cloning machines to bring fossilized creatures back from the extinction of time. Somehow, they are developed and aware enough to function in this new world quite quickly, not going into shock from the changes made to the world or having to relearn the alphabet.

First, Winchflat brings back an intelligent chicken, who starts a conversation with Winchflat. Of course this means Colin Thompson is gonna throw down that Ethel reference, because he sure loves his Chicken Named Ethel. He also brought back a whole bunch of regular chickens, oddly enough.

Basically, the chicken Ethel has delusions of grandeur and wants to be the rightful leader of everything in sight. This is a pretty funny prospect, but if the joke was handled right, it would still be spoiled by the overdose of characters-finding-it-funny-themselves-and-laughing. So I guess it wasn’t handled right then...

Naturally, the chicken gets totally dominated by The Floods, because of course it did. That’s how it works. Winchflat’s next mistake is to bring a four headed accountant - homo calculus - back to life, which actually ends up being a lot scarier than one would expect.

Good Stuff, Bad Stuff

This book isn’t perfect, but there’s at least one thing in there that considerably had an effect on me when I read it. I’ve already said a lot of bad stuff about this book. There is good stuff in it. I will tell you that thing.

As it turns out, that four-headed accountant from the pre-historic ages that Winchflat reanimated wasn’t just a joke about how “accountants suck” but actually something quite sinister, even bringing up a few dark implications about how the world used to be.

The creature’s name is Fiscal Matters, or just Fiscal. He has four bald heads, a cut moustache on each one, and pairs of glasses. Kinda looks like a caveman. His complusion is to count things, regardless of the value of what he’s counting. All homo calculus do that, and earlier on it’s said that many species went extinct because this behaviour bored them to death.

Winchflat talks to Fiscal for a bit, and then some pretty scary revelations happen. First, Fiscal thinks Winchflat is a servant to him, because apparently in the past, all witches and wizards were servants to his race. You can only wonder what kind of batshit insane forces were powerful enough to subdue the race that Winchflat comes from, but anyway...

Fiscal, second, wants Winchflat to open the strange room in the middle of the courtyard. You know, the weird one that Winchflat can’t open. Winchflat tells him about that, but then Fiscal says “I know how to open it.” So whatever’s in that crazy fucking shed, Fiscal knows what it is and wants to get in. It’s made worse by the fact that Fiscal Matters is getting increasingly aggressive with his “servant”.

The last one is that inside the weird room is a thing called The Ark of the Incontinent. The book never reveals exactly what it is, what it looks like, or how it got its name, but Fiscal wants to go in there so he can contact the rest of his species in outer space. They’re still alive and out there.

The resolution to this arc is pretty anticlimactic, but still unsettling. Basically, after Winchflat tells Fiscal to stay there and not open the door so he can walk away and consult his family, he gets back to find Fiscal counting stones on the shack. Counting how many stones are in the wall is the only way to access The Ark of the Incontinent, and Fiscal can’t, because the amount of stones changed over time and there’s no longer as many in the wall as there are supposed to be.

By the end of the book, Fiscal is still there. He’s still counting, and still hasn’t got into the shack. The Flood family just leaves him to his own devices, and feels perfectly secure about letting somebody with membership of an advanced, dangerous race keep trying to open the one doorway to contacting that race and unleashing war on the planet. Mordonna messes with Fiscal by changing the amount of stones in the walls randomly every now and then, but I think you can imagine how eventually that might turn out to be a bad idea. The probability involved sounds very dangerously high to me.

Lost

Guys... I don’t know. I have been reading this book series for a very long time, and wonder sometimes why I put so much effort into it. I always tell myself “this book will be the last one I read” but it never sticks. I guess I just still think there’s something in there that’s entertaining for me, and maybe there is. I don’t know if I want to continue reading until the very last book or not.

Bottom line is, it’s SBIG. SBIG at best, really. You read what I said up there, you know what’s wrong with it. And I think previous Floods books were better. But lately, as I finished reading this book, I’ve felt more interested in reading the next one. Colin Thompson finally gave continuity nods to things like The Knights Intolerant, which is a really big step forward for this series and means future books might have something I want to read. Read the book if you must, but I’ve been down the path of reading a sequel book before reading its pre-books. It doesn’t go well.

Your alternative is to read 9 big-text-novels until your quest to read the comedically-bad Lost pays off, but I think you have to be a pretty big Colin Thompson fanperson to want to do that. You either read one book in the middle and feel confused, or you read all of them in order and feel disappointed.

You know, fuck it. I’ve been told that books will set you free, and my eyesight and quota-for-consuming-fiction aren’t getting any better - I should just borrow the next book. I should borrow The Floods 11 and do something with my time that involves entering a weird and fantastical story. No more days of nothing but videogames, browser feeds and let’s plays...

#Colin Thompson #The Floods #The Floods Lost #talking about a book #full version of this post (in the notes) has amusing pictures from inside the book

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tlbodine · 7 years ago

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Writing Slasher Fic

These days, when you hear "horror," the slasher is one of the first things that probably comes to mind. That's most likely because slasher films absolutely dominated during the 1980s, when many of us were growing up and forming our opinions about the world, and then made a strong resurgence in the 1990s when the younger half of a generation as doing the same thing.

There are a ton of slasher franchises that pop immediately to mind, each centering on an iconic killer: Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Ghostface, etc.

But the slasher genre has, primarily, been confined to the silver screen. You just don't see as many novels in the same vein.

Oh, undoubtedly you find novels about serial killers -- but they tend to be police procedurals and cop thrillers, not the same classic "teenagers getting chopped into pieces" format as we're accustomed to in the movies. What's up with that?

Well. Some thoughts.

What is a Slasher Fic?

Slashers are stories about serial killers who go on murder sprees and wipe out a number of victims one-by-one, often all of them members of the same social group. The most traditional format involves a group of teenagers who are mowed down systematically by a killer while the authorities are useless to intervene. There is generally a moral element wherein the victims "deserve" to die for various on-screen transgressions, whether it's being Too Stupid To Live (tm) or having premarital sex (a classic, but now largely outdated, plot device).

You survive a serial killer, these narratives suggest, through moral superiority rather than force or skill.

And that makes sense, in a way, if you consider that these Hollywood serial killers are really not very much like real serial killers at all. They are the personification of our baser instincts, our animalistic nature: unstoppable killing machines that seem to feel nothing, either physically or emotionally, and whose desire for destruction is relentless. They are all of the worst parts of our nature, and so it makes sense that defeating them would require calling upon the best parts of our nature.

So Why Are There So Few Slasher Novels?

I suspect that part of the reason you don't see the book equivalent of Halloween very often is that, from a technical standpoint, many of the things we find most satisfying about slasher films do not translate very well to print.

The first issue is the violence. Slashers depend on gore and jump-scares; they live firmly in the "shock" camp. Which, as we know, is one of the hardest to write. Seeing someone killed in some particularly gruesome way affects the brain differently than imagining them being killed that way. You can still write the blood and gore, but it won't be quite the same. It's much easier to pull off over-the-top, campy, gleeful-dark-giggles-inducing fountains of blood on the screen than on the page, because you have absolute control over what it looks like. Your reader, on the other hand, will supply the details themselves with their own imaginations, which makes your job a little harder. Not impossible! But harder.

The second issue is narrative structure. Traditionally, novels are told from a single perspective, or at least a single perspective at any given time. Their strength is the ability to get into the head of a character and feel what they feel. Film, by contrast, provides a third party objective view, where the camera serves as a voyeur. That creates tension by putting us one step ahead of the victims at any given time.

In other words, it's a lot harder to shout "He's BEHIND YOU!" to characters in a book.

Therefore, a slasher novel would need to have a more distant omniscient narrator rather than a close-third or close-first person perspective.

But what about first person from the POV of the killer, I hear you asking, and to that I say: Excellent, it can be done, but what you get will not be a horror story in the classic sense. By putting is in the head of the killer, we will inevitably sympathize with him, which makes him not scary. He might be doing awful, grotesque things, but we won't be afraid of him because if we're in his head we know he's not standing right behind us.

To be afraid, we need to be in a position of sympathizing with the victim, and feeling what they're feeling. Otherwise, you're looking at a thriller or a crime novel or a mystery or anything else that's not horror.

(Which is fine, of course, but this is How to Write Horror and not How to Write Gory Thrillers, which would need to be a book of its own)

Okay, Okay, So Does That Mean I Can't Write a Slasher Novel?

Nope! This totally does not mean that.

But you just said....!

I know. I totally did. But just because something is difficult does not mean that it can't be done! There are quite a few young adult authors in particular who have written some classic played-straight slasher novels.

The trick to writing an effective slasher:

- Create a cast of characters who draw strongly on archetypes, but give them a little twist that makes them likable and unique. You want to do this because you'll have a large cast, by necessity (you need a lot of bodies to hit the floor), and you want those characters to be instantly relatable.

- Write from the perspective of your "final girl." You can deviate from this POV sometimes to provide a bit of drama (breaking away to see the killer in action elsewhere, for example) but most of your narrative space is going to be spent on watching the main character encounter the mutilated bodies of her friends and running from danger.

- Add an element of mystery. A slasher plot can feel a little thin. Bump up the cerebral horror by including a mentally engaging subplot or mystery to solve -- such as, perhaps, the killer's identity, or what he wants with the main character. You'll see this pop up time and again in most (but not all) slasher films: what seems to be a random attack turns out not to be so random after all, because the killer is actually deeply entwined in the Final Girl's life in some way. Unraveling that mystery puts some meat on the bones of the narrative.

And of course, remember to keep in mind the other tips and tricks we've discussed already in terms of building suspense, writing gore, handling shock, etc.

Some Required Reading to Get You Started:

I Know What You Did Last Summer by Lois Duncan (it's a child of its times, and has some really painful dialogue, but it's interesting to study alongside the film)

Some of R.L. Stine's Fear Street books are good. For our purposes, I'd recommend starting with Lights Out, The Prom Queen, and Silent Night. The Cheerleader series is pretty good too.

Some of Christopher Pike's novels are in the same vein. Try out Chain Letter, Slumber Party, and Weekend

Survive the Night by Danielle Vega is not strictly a slasher (the monster is an actual monster and not a serial killer) but the format is essentially the same, and it's worth studying.

The above are all young adult novels, because that's what happens when you're writing about teenagers getting carved up. Compare and contrast with these essential slasher-fic movies:

Nightmare on Elm Street

Halloween

Friday the 13th

Scream

Urban Legend

I'm probably missing some recommendations, so toss them in the comments!

#how to write horror #slasher #serial killer #fiction #horror movies #writing advice

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inhumansforever · 8 years ago

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Uncanny Inhumans #19 Review

spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers spoilers

The penultimate issue of Uncanny Inhumans and a continuation of the IvX tie-in from the creative team of Charles Soule, Ario Anindito, Kim Jacinto and Java Tartaglia (with another awesome cover from Fraizer Irving). Full recap and review following the jump.

There’s nothing good ol’ Maximus loves more than chaos. And with his fellow Inhumans embroiled in a war with The X-Men, Max has found the perfect opportunity to stir the pot and sew further mayhem. It’s not yet entirely clear what the mad prince has up his sleeve, but it’s certain to entail a good deal of hurt feelings and and property damage.

Utilizing Lineage’s powers to commune with the sentience of ancient Inhumans, Maximus has learned the secrets of engineering artificial Terrigen Crystals. It is the shortage of Terrigen, coupled with the fact that The Terrigen Cloud has proven poisonous to Mutants, that has led to the Inhuman/Mutant war. Maximus’ plot to create a new source of Terrigen may, in concept, bring about an end to the conflict… at least that is what he has told Triton in recruiting the banished Inhuman into his schemes. What exactly Maximus has in mind, his ulterior motives, however, remain to be seen.

The issue begins off the coast of Vietnam where the unlikely team of Max, Triton, Lineage and The Unspoken begin their venture to collect the various components and ingredients necessary for engineering Terrigen Crystals.

Maximus presents it all as some sort of heroic journey, yet the endeavor does not seem to have anything to do with heroism. Triton is there because he seeks redemption for his crimes; The Unspoken is seeking Terrigen because of the awesome powers it endows in him; Lineage is merely looking for the opportunity to stab Maximus in the back and seize power; and Maximus appears to be simply interested in it all for kicks.

Plunging far into the depths of the South China Sea, the team comes across a gapping maw on the seafloor that is actually a mouth leading to hidden kingdom of undersea creatures. Triton and the others have to fight off an army of these monstrous crustaceans as they proceed further on.

The Unspoken grows increasingly bemused by the situation. It’s not only that the affair has ruined his six thousand dollar Ferragamo loafers, but Maximus’ continued disrespect rankles The Unspoken as an effrontery to his status as royalty. He reminds Maximus that he had been the King of The Inhumans and demands that he be treated as such. Maximus is unmoved by the threat, yet acknowledges that he is quite aware that The Unspoken is indeed a king.

The team makes it further into this strange realm and eventually come across the court of the creatures’ queen. It turns out that the roe this queen produces, her eggs, are a key ingredient in creating Terrigen and Maximus has come to bargain for a cache of this roe.

The Queen (who oddly enough speaks English) is suspicious of Maximus’ intentions. What could he possibly have to offer that would incline her to trade away her precious roe? Well, it proves that Max does indeed have something she wants... something every queen needs, a king. Maximus offers The Unspoken, a true king, as the queen consort in exchange for the roe.

It’s not clear if Maximus is using his psychic powers for manipulation, but the queen accepts his offer. What is clear, however, is that Max very much has to use his powers to coerce The Unspoken to accept the bargain as well…

The Unspoken is left behind to a fate befitting his lousy character and the others leave with their prize in toe.

The ‘heroic journey’ continues on, taking them all over the globe as Maximus collects more of the rare components needed to create Terrigen. It turns out that a good third of these ingredients are unnecessary and Maximus has had the squad collect them simply to keep them guessing and maintain his being the only one who knows the recipe for Terrigen.

They end up in Mumbai, where Maximus procures the final ingredient. They are met there by Banyan, an Inhuman villain Maximus had reached out to in the previous issue. Max has instructed Banyan to make preparations, assemble some sort of machine that can be used to combine the ingredients they’ve collected and transfer it all into Terrigen.

Maximus asks Banyan for word of the Inhuman/X-Men War and Banyan replies that it has been waging on worse than ever. “Excellent,” Maximus says. “For you see, my friends, it is times of greatest adversity that gives rise to the greatest of heroes.”

He then goes on to add, “for example…” At which point the scene shifts back to the shores of the South China Sea where a large prawn-like monster arises from the depths and makes its way to land…

And it’s with this bizarre, unexpected and unexplained turn that the issue comes to an end with the promise of being concluded in the next (and final) installment of The Uncanny Inhumans.

Well, that was different… A fun albeit silly ride. And the silliness of it all leads me to believe this arc will not have a significant impact on the overarching storyline of IvX; that rather it’ll be self-contained and not a central element to the conclusion and resolution of the Inhuman/X-Men War. But that’s not to say it isn’t worth reading. Writer, Charles Soule, really excels at scripting Maximus; offering the character an irreverent and manic charm that is terrific fun to read. And there are a number of especially funny scenes… though it is Lineage who gets the best line of dialogue.

Laughs aside, I’m growing increasingly concerned over Triton’s fate as this chapter of the Inhumans mythos comes to an end. His quest for redemption has a strong tragic air to it, offering credence to the notion that he may be heading toward some sort of heroic, self-sacrifice in order to finally redeem himself.

I kind of hope this is the last we see of The Unspoken. He never clicked for me as a satisfactory villain for The Inhumans. The fate that befalls him in this issue, married off to the grotesque prawn queen, is rather befitting and I kind of hope this proves to be his ultimate fate (although I doubt it).

Really no idea what to make of the last scene. Has the Crustacea Kingdom sent some sort of monster to bedevil the land-living world? Is this related to the Monsters Unleashed event? Is it all a promotion for the restaurant chain, Red Lobster’s never-ending shrimp offer? Time will tell…

It’s mere speculation, but I wonder if the undercurrent of Maximus’ yammering on about the ‘hero’s journey’ is something of a commentary of how The Inhumans have ended up in this terrible conflict with The X-Men. The prevailing theory among many fans and readers is that The Inhumans have been tethered to the X-Men as a means to further propel The Inhumans into the spotlight. In truth, however, the event hasn’t done The Inhumans a whole lot of favors... it’s hard to not see them as the bad guys in IvX. I’m as big of a fan of The Inhumans as it gets and even I cannot really root for them it their victory would entail the demise of the entire Mutant race.

Maximus states, “times of greatest adversity that gives rise to the greatest of heroes,” and it seems as though there may be some meta-commentary to the line. Heroism in the face of adversity has been the guiding principle of the X-Men tales... and the stories has had to manufacture a near endless stream of backs-against-the-wall threats to keep this thematic moving forward. The Terrigen Cloud proving deadly to The Mutants was a retcon that kind of came out of nowhere. It offered up the latest in a long list of adversities needed maintain the X-Men’s constant thematic of being on the edge of extinction. And it’s kind of a pain in the ass because Uncanny Inhumans was trucking along just fine prior to getting tangled up in the whole ordeal of IvX. The cool stories and evolving plot-lines that Soule had been building all got sort of hijacked by this need to provide the X-Men with their latest extinction-level adversity.

The Inhumans will never be as popular as The X-Men. They are simply too weird to garner such a mainstream appeal. If there ever was a secret plot at Marvel to replace The X-Men with the Inhumans, the conspiracy has surely has been abandoned by now. The X-Men will get a whole new initiative following IvX... a large scale relaunch of their various titles that should put to rest the ridiculous notion that Marvel has been secretly trying to kill the X-franchise.

And The Inhumans will be getting a relaunch as well (albeit a considerably smaller one). Uncanny Inhumans will end and be replaced by The Royals. As sad as I am to see Uncanny Inhumans end, The Royals is looking like it’s going to be quite good. Furthermore, it appears as though the effort to make the Royal Inhumans into more standard-fare superheroes will be loosened and the squad will be allowed to re-embrace it’s more fitting science fiction roots.

As for the X-men, hopefully their ResurrXion titles will be good. And hopefully the franchise’s overarching thematic will evolve and innovate. The constant need of ‘great adversity so to give rise to great heroism’ has been overused and become stale. If not, then I feel sorry for the fans of the next group who gets caught up in the X-Men’s orbit... the next sacrificial lamb offered up to provide an extinction-level threat.

right... that went a little darker and more cantankerous than I had intended...

Anyways, the weird cliffhanger ending notwithstanding, Uncanny Inhumans #19 is a madcap romp and very fun read. The art by Ario Anindito, Kim Jacinto and Java Tartaglia is extremely well done.

Definitely recommended. Three out of Five Lockjaws.

#Inhumans #Uncanny Inhumans #IvX #Spoilers #Charles Soule #Ario Anindito #Kim Jacinto #Java Tartaglia #review

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timeflies1007-blog · 5 years ago

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Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, Season 6, p. 2

The Doctor’s Wife: “Bigger on the inside” has been a feature of the TARDIS since the show began, but in this gorgeous episode Neil Gaiman manages to make it look like the show’s creators invented the concept with this story in mind. A love story between a man and a time-space machine has plenty of potential to go awry, but it’s achingly beautiful here, and it brings out the very best in Smith’s Doctor.

I’m not especially enamored of the planet that the Doctor, Amy, and Rory land on, or of House as a villain, because disembodied voices don’t make for great antagonists even when they make cool special effects happen on the TARDIS. (I do like the name, though—it’s appropriate to have a villain named House in an episode that features an attack on the Doctor’s home.) While the eerie atmosphere is very nicely done, both on the planet itself and on the Ponds’ frightening dash through the TARDIS, when thinking back on this episode I mostly forget everything that isn’t centered on the Doctor and the TARDIS in human form.

I thought at first that the human embodiment of the TARDIS was doing a little bit too much of a Helena Bonham Carter impression, but I eventually find Suranne Jones’s performance to be quite distinctive and entirely appropriate for the character she is playing. Her speech patterns look like nonsense at first, but they’re very carefully ordered nonsense, and they proceed according to the kind of logic that a time machine might plausibly have. I can completely believe that tenses would be enormously difficult for someone who spends most of her existence shuttling back and forth across time, and watching her trying to figure out the right expression (“You’re going to steal me. No, you have stolen me. You are stealing me”) is possibly the most enjoyable sequence of verb conjugation ever on television. It’s tremendous fun watching the Doctor and the TARDIS go back and forth in their not-quite-lining-up dialogue for a while, but their interaction gets much more emotional as soon as they start to discuss the origins of their relationship: “Borrowing implies the intention to return the thing that was taken. What makes you think I would ever give you back?” says the TARDIS. They continue to have an adorably quirky exchange of perspectives on their long friendship, including the information that the Doctor has been pushing the TARDIS doors open for hundreds of years in spite of the “Pull to Open” sign. As entertaining as this is, her assertion that she “always took [him] where [he] needed to go” is the heart of their dialogue, and it’s true—as crazy as their adventures have been, she’s always brought him to the right places.

As good as much of the episode is, it’s the absolutely transcendent ending that stays with me. While I don’t love House as a villain, he brings out the Doctor’s anger to a fascinating degree, and the Doctor’s response to House’s boast of killing hundreds of Time Lords (“Fear me, I’ve killed all of them”) is quietly chilling. The TARDIS’s destruction of House is beautifully done, and Gaiman’s script deftly makes the notion of “bigger on the inside,” function not as a description of physical space but as a description of a soul. Her definition of “alive” as something that is “sad when it’s over” already turns the scene into one of the Doctor’s most emotional exchanges ever, and then the scene manages to exceed even those heights as she gives the Doctor a tearful final hello. I think one could make a pretty strong argument that “I just wanted to say…hello” is the best individual line in the 50+ year history of the show; it encapsulates so perfectly both the quirkiness of the Doctor’s relationship with his time machine and the emotional ramifications of personal connections that don’t quite occur in the expected order. The conversations between the Doctor and the TARDIS have proceeded outside of any discernible order for the entire episode, so of course, once they have to part, their conversation concludes with its beginning. It’s not quite the last line, though, because if you listen very carefully, you can hear an “I love you” from the TARDIS, just as she fades away.

The Doctor’s slight shift of his jaw right after she disappears is possibly the saddest he has ever looked, but the episode ends on a much more joyful note, as the Doctor tends to the TARDIS’s newly-restored machine form. (He also creates a new bedroom for Amy and Rory, this time without bunk beds, in spite of his insistence on the coolness of “a bed with a ladder!”) I completely believe his assertion that his attachment to the TARDIS, long after everyone else is gone, is “the best thing there is,” and the TARDIS gives an awfully cute little wobble when he does something with a wire. He looks sad for a moment as he wonders whether or not the TARDIS can hear him, but then she moves a lever on her own and his rush of joy as he whirls around the controls is the perfect ending to an absolutely glorious episode. A+

The Rebel Flesh: The title of the second part of this story is appropriate for the tale as a whole, as its characters almost seem like believable people. I sort of like Cleaves, Jimmy, and the rest of the group, but they never quite gel into completely convincing human beings. It is a huge improvement from the author’s first episode, “Fear Her,” but his writing has basically risen from bad to okay-ish.

The beginning of the episode is promising. I quite like the setting—the combination of the old monastery building, the Dusty Springfield record, and the futuristic technology is oddly appealing. The Flesh is introduced well, in an intriguing scene that sees a character casually grousing while being melted with acid before revealing that the dead body was a Flesh avatar. The use of the Flesh to carry out dangerous missions establishes an interesting set of ethical questions about what constitutes life, and the electrical storm allows these questions to come to the forefront in a meaningful way. The feelings of the Flesh creatures are also interestingly conveyed, particularly in a monologue that sees Jennifer describing her memories of an imagined second self during a childhood catastrophe; it’s a particularly intriguing choice because it sets up the character’s belief in multiple selves as existing even before the electrical storm made this a physical possibility. I don’t really like the Flesh, though, in part because the visual is just so grotesque that it distracts from my enjoyment. The image of Jennifer’s head at the end of a serpent-like neck is particularly disturbing, but there are a lot of moments in which I start to think “ooh, this is interesting!” and then my brain switches over to “nope, they look like yogurt on legs.” I get that this is a show about monsters, and they’re often slimy and unpleasant, but the sight of Flesh extending as the bodies destabilize just comes across as such a poorly-done special effect that I have trouble separating my interest in the concept from my irritation at how silly it looks. It’s an entertaining episode, but one that never feels very high stakes, with the exception of the cliffhanger about having a Flesh Doctor. Other than the weird visuals, there isn’t much to dislike here, but I don’t find it especially memorable. B-/C+

The Almost People: This is maybe a slight step up from part one, but it still never reaches the concept’s potential. I like having two Doctors around, and the Flesh people really do bring about some interesting ethical questions, but there isn’t a particularly imaginative response to those questions. The attention to doppelgangers is interesting as a component of the seasonal arc; you can see the wheels turning in Amy’s head as she remembers the events of “The Impossible Astronaut” and realizes the possibilities inherent in having someone who looks like the Doctor but isn’t the Doctor. The issue of a doppelganger’s humanity is resolved simplistically, though, because the end of the episode leaves us with just one surviving member of each human/doppelganger pairing. I was confused, at first, about why the Doctor was all right with destroying Amy’s flesh avatar after insisting on the humanity of the others throughout the episode, but if I’m understanding it correctly, the electric shock that galvanized the flesh avatars during the storm created a more permanent identity for those creatures, and since Amy was in a different point in the monastery, I don’t think that she got quite the same result. (This would definitely have benefited from greater clarity.) In the end, the response to the question of whether or not the Flesh counted as human boils down to, “I guess so,” which doesn’t give us a memorable resolution.

The minor characters continue to be interesting-ish without being quite as good as I want them to be, and the weird visuals put me off as much as they did in the last episode. (I do still like the monastery, though.) The interaction between the real Doctor and the Flesh Doctor is stronger than their interactions with the rest of the ensemble, but even this is not the best version of the multiple Doctors concept. The most noteworthy thing about this episode is the end, in which we discover that Amy has been a Flesh avatar for the whole season, and her real body has been held captive by Madame Kovarian and is about to give birth. The specifics of the process by which a human consciousness makes the flesh move are a bit unclear to me—the characters throughout the episode have seemed to be conscious of the fact that they are flesh avatars, but she doesn’t seem to be. That aside, it is a genuinely shocking development that I didn’t expect at all, and it works better for me than the sudden death of Rory did as last year’s mid-season twist. After an episode about the same memories being attached to two bodies, it is especially interesting to realize that Amy has spent this entire half-season being detached from her own body, existing as a sort-of embodied, sort-of disembodied avatar. The episode leaves us an in intriguing spot, but it doesn’t do anything remarkable on the way there. B-/C+

A Good Man Goes to War: Much of this episode feels like we might be in the wrong story. The Doctor’s dialogue, the violence, even the physical appearance seems more like a Star Wars-esque saga than the kind of story that we’ve come to expect from this show. This has a lot of potential to be off-putting, and I would say that there are moments when it is, but the episode is careful to set up exactly why this is happening, and to create consequences that are precisely tied to the behavior of the characters. The episode also manages to wring as much fun as possible out of this rather unusual tone; there is an exuberance at work here that holds the episode together even when some rather questionable things occur.

This episode is notable in part because of its inclusion of a variety of important minor characters. It’s our first introduction to Vastra, Jenny, and Strax, and while they’re not quite as fantastic here as they are in later episodes, they are an immediate joy. Vastra gets a particularly good entrance, having just eaten Jack the Ripper. Strax’s comedic nature is also immediately on display here; his opening scene features him telling a military man “I hope some day to meet you in the glory of battle, where I shall crush the life from your worthless human form. Try and get some rest.” Dorium is a fun presence, and I enjoy his self-centered reaction to the Doctor’s plea for help. Lorna Bucket…is a terrific name, but not a terrific character. I do enjoy her very sweet conversation with Amy, but otherwise she’s mostly in the episode to provoke the Doctor’s guilt by tragically dying, which is tiresome. (At least she’s not in a literal refrigerator, like Abigail.) Madame Kovarian, who has appeared for brief moments in previous episodes but steps into a larger role here, is a striking presence. Frances Barber does a great job with the role, and her enjoyment of her own victory is entertaining enough, but she never really acquires the depth that some other villains have. The Silence are such a compelling and interesting presence this season that they seem like the main antagonists much more than she does, and so she can come across as something of a plot device. If we’d seen a little bit more of the factors motivating her need to destroy the Doctor, that would have made her a much more interesting figure, but she gets too caught up in being the conventional evil figure and we never really learn very much about the actual beliefs underlying the Kovarian sect.

This is especially sad because the power structure set up here truly looks fascinating, but we continuously get tiny bits of information, like the Gamma Forests being “heaven neutral,” without getting any kind of elaboration. I keep wanting to get more information about how this theological system works and where the Doctor fits into it, but the glimpses that we get of it are definitely intriguing. While Madame Kovarian lacks depth, she does set up a tremendously energetic plot, in which both of the warring armies put together a dazzling array of attempts to outwit their opponents. The Headless Monks are particularly creepy, and I like that there are patches of genuine intelligence throughout the cast of characters. The Colonel may wind up withdrawing at the Doctor’s command, but I like that he leads his army to disarm themselves immediately after the Doctor’s presence is revealed. It shows that he really has put thought into the kind of enemy he is facing, and he seems, for the time, like a relatively formidable opponent. The constant rush of information about what’s really going on—given to us through a variety of characters’ perspectives—is sometimes bewildering but definitely exhilarating.

The Doctor helps to build this sense of exhilaration, and until the end of the episode, he is pretty clearly enjoying his own efforts to track down and rescue Amy and her baby. With Rory’s assistance, he stages an explosive takedown of some Cybermen, and he clearly plans his appearance to the Headless Monks with its theatrical impact in mind. He’s certainly concerned about Amy, but he’s also doing a lot of swaggering and posing and making grandiose statements about his own need for rules. He has engaged in similar behavior before, such as his intimidation of the Atraxi at the end of “The Eleventh Hour” and his speech to the monsters in “The Pandorica Opens,” but this is probably the most gratuitous display of his ability to engage in spectacle. On both of those previous occasions, frightening the enemy was part of the objective, and so a certain amount of shouting and posturing was understandable. Here, though, he’s basically on a mission to rescue a kidnapping victim, which seems like something ideally accomplished by stealth. If he had snuck inside, he probably could have picked up Amy and maybe even Melody without causing too much of a stir, but he is so intent upon having revenge upon the people who hurt his friends that he practically puts on a Broadway show about how much they should be afraid of him. I sort of alternate between really enjoying Smith’s performance and just wanting to shout at the character for behaving stupidly, but it does seem consistent with the way the character has developed.

This continues until the episode’s memorable ending, which is remarkable in part because of the information that River reveals about herself, but, I would argue, even more so because of her explanation to the Doctor of the problems he has caused. The Doctor isn’t aware, yet, of some of the trouble he will cause for her, but this is the right point in her timeline for River to voice what he’s done to her. The Doctor is the reason why she is spending most of her time in Stormcage, even if she does break out on a regular basis, and his tendency to create a spectacle out of his own world-saving endeavors is the reason why the Kovarian sect felt the need to kidnap and brainwash her in the first place. This is River’s chance to tell the Doctor about what he has done to her, only she can’t really say very much at this point, because…well, spoilers. I was put off, initially, by the fact that “The Wedding of River Song” doesn’t give her the opportunity to express any sort of anger about how the Doctor’s fake death lands her in a very real prison cell, but the truth is that she does get that opportunity here, she just can’t give him the details of what is provoking some of her anger because for him, it hasn’t happened yet. She can’t tell him how much of her life he has uprooted, but she can tell him exactly where he’s gone wrong and just how much he’s departed from his ideals. This has to be an awfully frustrating moment for River, who can’t reveal most of what’s motivating her remarks, but I’m glad she at least gets an opportunity to articulate how many problems the Doctor has caused for her, even if she has to do it in a rather impersonal way. The relationship between these two has never been so thoroughly complicated by its lack of chronological rhyme and reason, and the need to avoid spoilers has never been quite so difficult.

While she still has to withhold some details about future events, River does finally get to tell the Doctor and the Ponds who she is. The reveal of River’s identity works far, far better than it should; I think that many viewers had probably guessed who she was by this point, and I had seen spoilers so I knew for sure, but the lack of surprise has weirdly no impact on the quality of the scene. The Doctor’s delight at what he learns is so vivid and so infectious that it feels like a burst of knowledge even if you already knew everything, and there is something immensely satisfying about watching the secret come to light. River’s name appearing on the scrap of cloth from Lorna is a nice moment, and the soundtrack really is lovely here; the “ooh-ooh-ooh” vocalizations sound similar enough to material that supports Amy’s narrative in other episodes that it feels especially appropriate for her daughter here. It’s sort of a bizarre plot twist, and it could just come across as a shocking moment, but the interaction between the Doctor, River, Amy, and Rory is just so endearing that the scene comes across as charming rather than merely surprising.

The ending is good enough that it generally overcomes the frustrating bits of the episode. While I think that Lorna and Madame Kovarian needed some more development, the assembled cast of characters is generally entertaining enough here that they carry the storyline toward its major revelations in an enjoyable way. The Doctor’s behavior is fun at times, but also can get annoying; that being said, his arrogance is brought to an interesting point in his argument with River, and he is at least limiting himself to shouting at his enemies, rather than his occasional much more irritating tendency to direct his self-centered boasting at his allies. His sense of swagger has helped him to protect and comfort people before—in his very first episode, he pretty much convinced the Atraxi to leave permanently by inflating himself like a giant, bowtie-wearing pufferfish until they got scared. It’s understandable, to some degree, that he would come to rely too much on his own ability to function like a neon warning sign, but I appreciate the attention, here, to the ways in which it affects the well-being of the people around him. I appreciate even more that this ending sets up an exploration of this impact in a way that focuses on their feelings as much as his own. River having to censor her own anger for spoilers is one of the most interesting insights that we get into her experiences, this season, and, as the episode reaches its conclusion, Amy and Rory are finally aware of just how complicated their family is. Amy is clearly emotionally fraught, enough so that she’s willing to demand answers at gunpoint, and the episode ends just as she finally gets those answers. Amy’s general tendency is to assume that time is rewritable, but that confidence has never been so thoroughly challenged; once a timeline involves the kinds of complexities that River Song brings with her, it’s nearly impossible to rewrite. A-

Let’s Kill Hitler: The whole episode is basically a very high stakes screwball comedy, which is already sort of an odd concept and which becomes even odder when it is dropped into Nazi Germany. Major things are happening here, ranging from an attack on Adolf Hitler to the regeneration of River Song to the almost-death of the Doctor. There are pieces of this episode that are borderline disastrous, and others that are phenomenally good, and it’s not easy to figure out how to balance them against each other. I…like the episode a little bit, I guess?

We continue the River-related revelations that began in the previous episode, this time with a focus on what her childhood was like after Madame Kovarian took her away from Amy. I don’t really buy the idea that “Mels is actually Melody, who is also River” is impossibly complicated; if you can describe a situation in a fairly short sentence, it’s not that reliant on convolutions. It does, however, introduce some complexities into the Ponds’ reaction to the loss of their child. Her role in their lives is a bit bizarre, particularly in the sense that she was present for the beginning of her parents’ romantic relationship, but it does at least give us a chance to return to young Amy, this time with the added presence of tiny Rory. Mels is right that, in one sense, they did get to raise her; the childhood sequences in this episode make her seem like a constant presence in their lives, so it’s really not the case that they didn’t get to see their child grow up, they just did so without realizing who she was. They also did so without realizing that she was being brainwashed by Madame Kovarian, and so they’re in the unusual position of finding out that their daughter is someone whom they know well while simultaneously finding out that they didn’t know her that well at all, really.

Amy doesn’t seem like she quite knows how to react to things, which makes sense but also causes some difficulties for viewers trying to connect to Amy’s emotions. Several of the later episodes this season—“The Girl Who Waited,” “The God Complex,” and “The Wedding of River Song”—give us a really specific read on exactly what is happening in Amy’s mind and why it might not be translating into demonstrative emotions in a particularly conventional way. Because they are focused on why she is suppressing or ignoring certain feelings, it makes sense to show her being, essentially, silent about her emotions at this point. I would say that this episode and “Night Terrors” make sense in retrospect, once those later episodes point us toward the nuances of Amy’s psychological state, but both episodes can look sort of unsatisfying for the moment, because she currently seems to be underreacting and we don’t find out why until a couple of episodes later. This sort of delayed gratification isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, but I do think it would have been better if Moffat had found some way to signal the tensions within Amy’s mind at this point, so that viewers wouldn’t have already felt like they were being underplayed by the time the episodes that did flesh out her perspective came around.

The rest of the episode is also a combination of some things that work extremely well and some things that don’t quite manage it. The Tesselecta are much more satisfying doppelgangers than the Flesh were earlier this season, and their cold, meticulous system of copying people in order to deliver punishment is terrifying. Their extremely clinical methods of transforming into other people, then miniaturizing them and leaving them to be killed by antibodies, are also brutal in a weirdly calm, organized way, which makes them even scarier. I don’t find doppelgangers to be the most interesting kinds of Doctor Who creatures in general, but these are, at least, a solid version of the concept.

While it is, in some respects, a very scary episode, it’s also a story with some great pieces of comedy. I particularly like Rory punching Hitler and shoving him into a cupboard, and little Amelia as the matter-of-fact, pessimistic Voice Interface is really cute, as is Amy and Rory using their car to make a crop circle that spells out Doctor in order to get his attention. I would have liked to see a bit more interaction between the Doctor and River, but what we do get is fun, and the business with the gun and the banana is especially delightful. Her regeneration itself is an incredibly odd moment that generally fits quite well into the episode’s zany tone, although River’s immediate reaction to her new appearance is pretty ridiculously oversexualized. It’s sort of nice to see a character regenerate from a twenty-something into a body played by an actress who is nearly fifty and look pleased about it—I would definitely have been much more bothered if River had been lamenting her lost youth—but her raptures about her new body go on for way too long. (And we didn’t really need to know her plans about how much she’s going to wear jodhpurs now.) She has a good time running around Germany and causing chaos, though, and River’s effusive reaction to her own appearance aside, the episode generally does well when it’s giving us a fun glimpse into just how inherently silly time-travel adventures can be.

When we get into more Serious Things, I’m somewhat less happy. The Doctor’s impending doom never feels like something that has any chance of happening, but I still like watching his efforts to cling to life. This goes on a bit too long, though, and so when River makes the decision to use her regenerations to save him, the whole thing feels rushed, and the emotional force doesn’t quite land. I can imagine this episode’s emotional structure actually working quite well if a few of the smaller pieces were more successful; it seems like the intention may have been to give us an unusually topsy-turvy world for much of the episode, and then pull the rug out from under that by turning toward a deeply emotional moment at the end. This is an interesting move, and one that has a huge amount of potential, as emotional revelations can hit even harder when they come out of nowhere and represent a sudden, massive shift in tone. This is a structure that requires a huge amount of finesse in order to pull it off, though, and River’s realization that the Doctor is important to her doesn’t quite create enough of a bridge between the episode’s general absurdity and its more sincere conclusion.

This is an intensely difficult episode, far more so than the fun adventure that preceded it, and Moffat doesn’t quite pull it off. I really do like being swept up into such a madcap story on the heels of the last episode’s revelations, but it needed a lighter touch at the end. I can also imagine this being frustrating for viewers who watched in real time, as the long gap between the air date of this and “A Good Man Goes to War” would have built up a great deal of anticipation about how the characters would react to the revelation of River’s identity. I did not watch these when they first aired, and so was able to watch without the gap in time, but there is still a little bit of a sense of letdown, in spite of my general enjoyment of this story. B/B-

#doctor who #reviews #season 6 #matt smith #karen gillan #arthur darvill #steven moffat #eleventh doctor #amy pond #rory williams #female doctor

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kirsisterjournals · 7 years ago

Photo

Undecim sat alone in her bedroom on a sunny day. She felt unwanted in her own home after her family dismissed her pleads to play. Boredom drove her to reminisce about the toys she used to play with as a child and the games she enjoyed as a preteen.

She recalled Spiffy's Space, an online role-playing game designed for a young audience to explore a colorful universe of cartoon animals. Cartoons, shortened to toons, were at war with anarchists who lost sight of their silly side and mutated into machine hybrids called Cytoons. Their battles consisted of typical cartoon violence or common gags. Undecim shifted her focus to other games but Spiffy's Space dominated her thoughts, the title repeated itself in her head as her heart raced with anxiety.

Undecim typed the link into the address bar. A colorful website featuring Spiffy appeared on the screen, he gestured to the log-in button with a cheesy grin on his face. Spiffy resembled a Border Collie with green fur, a white underbelly, and white markings on his forearms and muzzle. He wore a red cape with a yellow S printed on the back, blue jean shorts, and red boots with yellow soles. Anyone who played the game remembered his habit of ending his sentences with “Awo! Awo!”

Undecim's old username and password filled the fields on the page. Her gaze shifted back to Spiffy, who appeared to be staring at her through the screen with great anticipation.

“That's strange,” Undecim muttered.

Creepie and Undecim's accounts were inactive for three years and were likely terminated. Undecim pressed the log-in button, her screen turned black and her speakers popped as though they shut themselves off. The longer she stared at the monitor the more she struggled to look past her growing discomfort.

Undecim was exposed to a monochromatic image of a defunct amusement park. A Ferris Wheel was in the foreground with Spiffy sitting in the top cart, behind him was a series of rides ready to collapse. This was the character selection screen, which was supposed to be cheery with a bright sun and a roller coaster in the background. Her custom characters no longer existed. Spiffy was her only choice.

Undecim held her breath as she clicked on Spiffy. The game started instantly, it should have taken fifteen minutes to load. Spiffy stood in the middle of a war-torn town surrounded by burning buildings and wilted plants covered in black soot, a desaturated color gradient emphasized the tragedy that struck Funtyme's Square.

Funtyme's Square was inspired by New York. This was the starting point designed with an onslaught of tutorials for players who joined the game, then they could explore the branching neighborhood streets, enter shops, or engage in the mini-games it had to offer. The sun was always shining, the grass was always green, the flowers danced, and players heckled each other among cheerful NPCs. Now Spiffy was the only toon left in the entire town. This realization triggered discordant music to fade in and play in the background. It was a haunting melody created from a warped version of the level's original track.

Undecim looked on in shock as she tried to imagine what could have turned their whimsical world into something so desolate. She swallowed hard and tapped the up key on her keyboard, Spiffy lurched forward and stumbled to a stop. She guided the toon through an avenue and beheld abandoned buildings set ablaze like those in Funtyme's Square. Puddles of oil covered the pavement and sidewalks, accompanied by grotesquely shaped heads with metal plates grafted to them. The most prominent heads belonged to a Cytoon species called Lackey, which was based on a Golden Retriever.

The Lackey had a permanent open-mouthed smile and tightly closed eyes, though its in-game dialogue implied it was depressed or actually hated its boss. The eyes of the deceased Lackeys were wide open and their jaws hung slack to give an impression of terror, their lifeless eyes fixed on Undecim through the monitor. Cytoons were considered another brick in an industrial wall, lifeless beings who were no longer welcome in society after they gave up their individuality for a suit. They were scorned for believing what they were taught in The Academy. These soulless creatures were incapable of emotion but their gruesome expressions made Undecim think twice about their portrayals. Still, she had yet to question what kind of monster actuated others to engage in genocide.

Spiffy turned a corner and came to a halt. He gazed at a burning police station in the middle of a cul-de-sac. Undecim felt her chest tighten when she realized she could no longer move him, he shook his head in silent refusal when she tapped a key. A series of barking sounds brought Undecim's attention to blue text in the bottom left corner of the screen.

Spiffy: Burning.

Undecim moved her mouse to the X at the top of the screen but it did not respond. Sweat ran down her forehead and her breathing intensified, she feared the beast that killed the inhabitants of Spiffy's Space would make itself known.

The location changed when Spiffy turned to face the screen with a sad expression. He stood outside of The Academy, where Cytoons were“manufactured” from toons who wanted a serious approach to life. The level was bleak and foreboding, challenging players to infiltrate an amalgamation of a college institute and a penitentiary. The sun's absence left a dark gray overcast above the establishment and prevented life from sprouting in the dry black soil. Cytoons marched the premises en masse as convenient guards to protect their territory. Now it was quiet, the monochrome color scheme it boasted felt truly depressing.

Spiffy's expression changed. He sprinted after a Lackey who passed by in the background.

What is his fascination with Lackeys? Undecim wondered.

She gritted her teeth when Spiffy turned to face the screen with a glare. This emotion was designed to come with a comical tantrum but Spiffy looked on with an intimidating stare. Text appeared in the bottom left corner.

Spiffy: Faces.

A mischievous smile crept across Spiffy's muzzle. A chill ran down Undecim's spine, her instincts told her to flee from the room but she remained seated and stared at the monitor.

Spiffy caught up to the Lackey with ease. Undecim hoped he would do something silly once he captured it, she uttered a nervous laugh at the thought. Spiffy tackled the Lackey and pinned it to the ground, a sound crossed between a yelping dog and grinding gears emit from the Cytoon as it struggled against him.

Spiffy amputated the Lackey's legs with a saw he pulled from hammerspace, blood sprayed from the wounds instead of oozing oil like its brethren. Undecim watched as Spiffy tied a rope around its neck. He dragged it across the barren land and kicked open the factory door, he was met with anguished screams echoing from the fire inside the building.

Undecim wanted to call for help but she could not find her voice. She watched Spiffy lug the helpless Cytoon up a flight of stairs, orange text entered itself in the corner of the screen as the Lackey pleaded for its life. The staircase led to a small balcony above a roaring pit of fire. Spiffy cornered the Lackey by a metal rail on the balcony and stabbed it with a screwdriver. High-pitched male screams blared from Undecim's speakers and forced her to cover her ears with a gasp. She hyperventilated, the painful throbbing of her heart made her body feel numb. Past the pitch shift, Undecim swore what she heard was true death.

Spiffy pulled a drill from his pocket and pressed it against the Lackey's head. The Cytoon writhed about as its distorted screams mixed with the loud whir of his tool. Spiffy looked on with a dark expression, he held his arm in place as he became drenched in blood. Spiffy dropped the drill when he grew bored and grabbed the end of the rope, he effortlessly swung the Lackey over the rail and held onto it with inhuman strength. Undecim jerked back in her seat when a brutal snap came through her speakers.

Another abrupt change took them to a place that did not exist on the map in the game. It was a grassy plain littered with the bodies of toons and Cytoons surrounded by realistic piles of viscera and pools of blood. A hill with a single tree atop of it could be seen farther away in the distance. Spiffy stood stock-still as he stared at the hellscape before him.

Tears welled in Undecim's eyes and her lip quivered. “Why?” she whimpered. She knew Spiffy could hear her even if she kept her thoughts to herself.

Spiffy's head twisted back as he ran toward the hill. Open wounds riddled his face and a terrible burn marred the right side of his head. His jaw hung slack to the left, exposing rotten, jagged teeth. His large, black eye sockets were surrounded by a gray aura, blood ran from them and seeped into the infected cuts on his muzzle. The corners of Spiffy's mouth managed to turn upward in a grin.

Spiffy: Didn't you think it was funny?

His eyebrows expressed sadness when Undecim shook her head in response. The world's colors faded to gray and grew darker the further he ran, piles of bodies materialized as he came closer to the hill. Spiffy's relentless staring made Undecim squirm in her seat.

Spiffy: Look what you have done to this beautiful place. All of these people.

“I never did anything!” Undecim shouted.

The toon's eyebrows raised and his twisted grin returned.

Spiffy: Accept your fate.

Spiffy made pained grunts as he closed in on the tree. His health points depleted and his body became frail. Spiffy's grunts turned to audio clips of a real dog whimpering by the time he stood five feet away from the base. Spiffy stumbled to a stop, fell to his knees, and flopped onto his stomach. He remained still, surrounded by bodies with hollow eye sockets. Undecim jumped in her seat when fire engulfed the corpses and grass with a loud igniting sound.

Undecim snapped out of her trance when the game closed itself out, she ran down the hall and begged Hekima for his assistance. Undecim gave her father a hasty explanation of what she had witnessed and convinced him to give her computer a complete reboot. The complex process required an electrical box in the wall, which held a “reset laser” inside of it. Hekima shouted for his family to duck as a laser ricocheted off the floor and ceiling. Undecim kept her distance from the laser. The memory of Spiffy's Space would be transferred into a person's mind if they let it come in contact with their eyes. Undecim never wanted to see Spiffy again, nor did she want her family members to suffer the same burden.

Undecim spent the rest of the dream reinstalling her programs. It was an inconvenience but she assured herself it was not so bad compared to what she went through. —- Art by @princesslovelydreams Story Excerpt from The Inner Council: Dream Journal by Casselle and Joyelle King

#The Inner Council #Indie Author #Urban Fantasy #Paranormal #Psychological #creepypasta #Spiffy's Space #Horror #Nightmare #Gore #Murder #Undecim Kir #The Inner Council: Dream Journal #2011 #April 2011 #Spiffy

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caveartfair · 7 years ago

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1960s Chicago Gave Birth to a Colorful, Frenetic Art Style That Is Still Gathering Steam

An Affair In The Islands, 1972. H.C. Westermann galerie 103

The Chicago Imagists of the 1960s and ’70s created colorful, energetic paintings and sculptures that often riffed on vernacular sources (comic books, pinball machines) and the eccentricities of American culture. Barbara Rossi’s colorful, corporeal shapes piled atop each other like jumbles of internal organs. Jim Nutt drew and painted grotesque figures that evoked brightly lit freak shows. Gladys Nilsson rendered overlapping bodies, simultaneously in their own worlds and parts of a larger, chaotic mass. Suellen Rocca created busy, symbol-laden canvases. A flat aesthetic triumphed over any attempt at realism or depth. This work diverged from that of the Imagists’ East Coast contemporaries; as the New York Pop artists developed an impersonal, mass-produced aesthetic, their Midwestern counterparts were making artwork that was more carnival than Campbell’s soup.

It can be complicated to discern who was, and who wasn’t, a Chicago Imagist, but in general, the term applies to a wide swath of artists who lived and made figurative work in the city from around the 1950s through the 1980s. They showed together at the Hyde Park Art Center beginning in 1964, giving each cluster of exhibiting artists its own quirky moniker. Instead of turning to advertising and consumer culture as their East Coast counterparts had, these artists infused a zany, psychic energy into their drawing-driven practices. Indeed, tracing the careers of the Chicago Imagists offers a narrative about American art that diverges from popular New York-centered conceptions—and presents issues that transcended locale.

Summer Salt, 1970. Jim Nutt "Surrealism: The Conjured Life" at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2016

Measure 4 Measure, 1994, Bird, 2001 and Pynkly Furnashed, 2002, . Gladys Nilsson Leslie Hindman Auctioneers

The oldest group, the Monster Roster—a name given by critic Franz Schulze as a nod to the Chicago Bears’ nickname, the Monsters of Midway—responded to the horrors introduced by World War II and the state of post-war America. Some of the men had been soldiers themselves. Leon Golub, who’d served as an army cartographer, infused his work with violence and suffering. Throughout his six-decade career (he died in 2004), Golub rendered beheadings, brawls, and torture scenes. His process itself was brutal—he used a meat cleaver to distress his paintings.

Nancy Spero, to whom Golub was married, similarly manifested an ardent political streak as she depicted mothers, children, and prostitutes through a feminist lens. Fellow artist June Leaf created fine-lined, often nightmarish scenes. In sum, the works were frequently dark, both in style and substance. Subsequent Chicago art diverged in cheerier and more frenetic directions, while still remaining deeply psychological.

According to Tang Museum director Ian Berry and Chicago gallerists John Corbett and Jim Dempsey, the more light-hearted artist H. C. Westermann (known, since around the late 1950s, for his quirky found-object sculptures and dystopian illustrations) provides a link to the younger Imagists. Don Baum, a member of the former group who helped curate the younger Imagists’ shows, offers another connection. This September, Corbett, Dempsey, and Berry will mount “3-D Doings: The Imagist Object in Chicago Art, 1964–1980” at the Tang. For a group of artists traditionally associated with two-dimensional works, the curators offer a more complex, multimedia story.

Gigantomachy II, 1966. Leon Golub The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Many Imagists, says Corbett, were impressed with Westermann’s level of craftsmanship, “the personal touch that he gave to all of the work,” and his “perverse streak.” Diverging from their predecessors, the Imagists who came after the Monster Roster employed an aesthetic more akin to comic books than horror films, though they retained an element of the grotesque (Karl Wirsum’s vivid, cartoonish-yet-disfigured forms are particularly emblematic of this).

“You just feel a sensibility start brewing,” Dempsey says about the particular era that the Tang show focuses on: 1964 to 1980. “We talk about an accent: a collective group of people have a similar accent. Doesn’t really mean they’re thinking about the same things, but there’s an energy that’s pervasive in the air and you can almost tangibly feel that in this date range.”

The Tang exhibition will include Westermann’s Memorial to the Idea of Man If He Was an Idea (1958). Comprised of pine, cast-tin toys, glass, and other various materials, the work appears to be a cabinet with an alien’s one-eyed head on top. Written in bottle caps, Westermann’s initials adorn the inside of the wooden door. The object becomes a kind of personalized fetish, combining kitsch and craft. Similar details distinguished the frames of work by Ed Flood, a younger Imagist. He and Nutt adorned the backs of their paintings with double entendres, stylized notes to preparators, and other secrets that remained between the artists and those who handled and owned the work.

Untitled (Head Study for Awning Series), 1966. Karl Wirsum Derek Eller Gallery

Muscular Alternative, 1979. Christina Ramberg "Surrealism: The Conjured Life" at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2016

“I think all these details foreground the warmth and the intimacy of this work, which makes it stand apart from other work being made in these decades in other cities,” says Berry. Dempsey describes the effect as playfully adversarial. “It’s an interactive relationship, almost like engaging someone in a card game.” These elements also connect the group to the Surrealists, who invoked parlor games, dreams, and subconscious drives in their own practices. According to Berry, both the Imagists and their European predecessors shared a desire to look inward.

This simultaneous coyness and amiability could coincide with darker, more disturbing, obliquely political material. Christina Ramberg painted headless bodies (often female), wrapped in tight or suggestive garments. Ideas about constriction and expectations for women abound in her paintings, which sometimes feature flat, broad swaths of dim colors (no bright yellows or reds here). As Dan Nadel wrote recently, “Until her final series of paintings, Ramberg always kept her distortions ‘clean’—no matter how disturbing the imagery, the surface and the final shape would be immaculately formed and delineated.”

Notably, Ramberg was part of an exhibition group called False Image, showing with her husband, Philip Hanson, as well as Eleanor Dube and Roger Brown. (The Imagists were intensely whimsical in their naming, calling other subsets of the group the Hairy Who, the Nonplussed Some, and Marriage Chicago Style.)

Brown enjoys perhaps the strongest legacy of the False Image artists: his former home, which is still filled with the myriad objects he collected throughout his life, and accessible to today’s public as the Roger Brown Study Collection. Masks, toy cars, figurines, crosses, road signs, baskets, and more relics of everyday life in America are on view throughout the rooms and along the staircase.

Unbelievable Refuge, 1980. Ray Yoshida Leslie Hindman Auctioneers

In fact, many of the Imagists were collectors. According to Corbett, the Maxwell Street Market (Chicago’s major flea) was a treasure trove for Ramberg, Hanson, Wirsum, and Ray Yoshida. Yoshida himself had a unique influence on other Imagists: He taught many of them at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Yoshida amassed large collections of printed matter, from comics to cookbooks. The former, in particular, inspired his “specimens”: collages that resembled a scrapbook page filled with clippings.

Yoshida, born in Hawaii in 1930 to a Japanese immigrant father and a mother of Japanese lineage, was also the only artist of color associated with the Chicago Imagists. Though the group was far more equitable across gender lines than contemporaneous movements centered on the East Coast (Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop art), it was still very white. Yet the Imagists derived plenty of inspiration from the non-white cultural production that surrounded them in Chicago. Perhaps most famously, Karl Wirsum’s Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (1968) depicts the well-known African American singer and performer. Corbett and Berry describe the Imagists’ significant engagement with, and love for, the music and multimedia of their time. “It was a much more complex set of relationships in an insanely segregated city,” says Corbett.

The Tang is just one of many institutions to celebrate the Imagists within the past few years. At Milan’s Fondazione Prada, curator Germano Celant closed a show this past January, “Famous Artists from Chicago. 1965–1975.” The project suggests the Imagists’ widespread appeal and an international interest in a movement that was thriving far from global art centers.

Matthew Marks Gallery exhibited work by the Hairy Who in a 2015 group show, placing the group members in dialogue with San Francisco Funk Art figures such as Peter Saul and the Detroit-based Destroy All Monsters group, which included Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw. Curated by Nadel (who’s become one of the Imagists’ biggest champions with his writing and curation), the show proposed that, operating beyond the mainstream art world, these artists turned to figuration inspired by advertising, primitive art, comic books, and other sources once dismissed as lowbrow.

Installation view of “The Chicago Show” at 56 Downing St., Brooklyn, 2018. Photo by Johannes Berg. Courtesy of Alexandra Fanning Communications.

Placing the Imagists in a contemporary context, Chicago-born curator Madeleine Mermall has curated “The Chicago Show,” an exhibition in a Brooklyn townhouse, on view through May 20th, that pairs the work of Nutt, Yoshida, Westermann, and their ilk with that of emerging Chicago artists who similarly revel in cartoonish figuration. “There’s this strong, special community right now,” Mermall says. “They’re all working together and showing together and putting on DIY shows.”

One of the exhibited artists from the younger generation, Darius Airo, recalls a corner of the Art Institute of Chicago where he first noticed the work of Ed Paschke and Karl Wirsum. His own acrylic painting, Chicago Faucet Venus (2018), features a very pink, heavily distorted female form with a fractured face. Another participant, Jenn Smith, says that what interests her in the Imagists’ work is a feeling of “holding your cards close to the chest. How much information to reveal and how much to conceal. Like a sexual repression.” She also admires their sense of humor and flat treatment of the figure. A third artist, Bryant Worley, is presenting a 2018 work entitled Dic Pics, which features tattooed men in cowboy hats. He goes so far as to call the Imagists “my entryway into painting as I know it today.”

This renewed attention to the Midwestern group seems to only be getting started. Derek Eller, who has shown Wirsum since 2010, says that since then, he’s seen “a lot more interest here in New York, and probably internationally.” While Barbara Rossi recently enjoyed a small solo exhibition at the New Museum, many of the Imagists have yet to receive major museum retrospectives. This fall, however, the Art Institute of Chicago will mount a group show, as will Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art in London in spring 2019. Corbett thinks it’s time, and the recent wave of shows contributes to a certain momentum. “We’ve seen in the last five, six, seven years a whole bunch of small survey shows that have set things up for the opportunity for incredible, career-spanning exhibitions,” he says. Before long, Chicago’s distinct aesthetic accent should be more pervasive than ever.

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