#(which are usually more performative than actually meaningful but that's a separate issue) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fyeah-bangtan7 · 3 years

Text

V: “I have a desire to perfect one cool thing about myself”

As he’s being interviewed, V speaks his mind at a relaxed pace. But there was one moment where he kept on speaking without taking a breath. Look for that moment in the interview below. You listen to a lot of old music on vinyl. Has any particular artist’s music excited you since your last interview with Weverse Magazine? V: I was listening to Louis Armstrong’s music again. And I picked up some albums with a pretty jacket that’s also got a lot of really good hits on it.

How do you feel when you’re listening to those classics? V: I feel like I’m beginning to relax a bit. If I listen to a song when I’m feeling depressed and then really get thinking, the things that are frustrating me disappear, and I can feel myself becoming more peaceful. And it makes me picture things in my head. For example, some songs might make me think of seeing something in front of me while walking down the road somewhere at night when I listen to them. I think setting the mood for listeners is the most important thing. The mood will presumably be different for everyone, but for me, those songs are the ones that are good at setting a really beautiful mood in the moment.

You said that you got inspiration from artists of the past like Sammy Davis Jr. for your performance in “Dynamite.” Was there any artist who inspired you for “Butter”? V: Well, there was Billy Joel. When I shoot a music video, I think of a movie more than any one artist. And when I perform on stage, for some songs I think of the way movies like Reservoir Dogs look. For “Butter,” I watched a lot of teen movies. And musicals. After that I randomly ended up seeing a video on YouTube of some scenes from an old teen movie Johnny Depp did [which turned out to be the movie Cry-Baby]. The image I got from that was really intense. That’s the look I used in “Butter.”

“Butter” felt like a teen musical to me and now I know why. V: I did it like a teen musical, just like you say. When we shot the “Butter” music video, I really, really tried to shoot the part in the elevator so it would feel like a teen movie. Although a lot of takes were edited, so not all of it’s there. (laughs)

What kind of feeling do you get from that kind of teen movie that you find so charming? V: For me, teen movies show a youthfulness that’s appropriate for the age. I think there’s an appropriate mix of emotion, energy, and a completely different and peculiar mood that everyone necessarily experiences at that age. If you watch teen movies, they’re overflowing with energy and full of sunny emotion, but behind it all they’re not as bright as they seem. They are really bright, but the color itself almost feels like some kind of filter. They feel like they have a different filter than other movies, so I tried thinking of teen movies when we shot the music video and put on performances.

That teen movie feeling seems to be divided in two between “Butter” and “Permission to Dance.” By the looks of the thumbnails for the fancam focus videos uploaded to the BANGTANTV YouTube channel, “Butter” seems to showcase a really cool character, while “Permission to Dance” is more teenagers smiling brightly for children. V: The teen movie vibe in “Butter” and “Permission to Dance” are different from one another. We showed the sunny image people usually think of when they think of teen movies in “Permission to Dance.”

Do you think that going with the teen movie vibe influenced your vocals to be the new style that you used? In “Butter,” you still had your signature vocals but without the deep notes, giving them a new feeling. V: That’s because, when we’re given a concept, we have to come up with vocals that fit with the concept. I think my singing style matched up with the concept, so I feel relatively satisfied. There was nothing majorly difficult about actually changing the style itself, since unlike changing your voice, you only have to change your vocal technique. Having said that, even though the notes in “Butter” were high for me, I still hit them! (laughs)

I guess hitting the high notes was your assignment this time around as a vocalist. V: I’ve been working a long time to make up for my weak points. For example, I thought I was weak when it comes to high notes because I sing low parts a lot and I tend to sing in a flowing way. But I had trouble when we were recording “Dynamite” and I had to sing the high notes during the chorus. I got so mad (laughs) so I practiced a lot.

How does it feel to see the results you’re seeing with “Butter” now after all that effort? V: I’m just trying not to rest on my laurels. Like instead of savoring the feeling, I feel like I should go to bed early for everything I have to do the next day? Getting back in tiptop shape quickly is what’s important, so I haven’t really had time to bask in the joy very much. I’m just working hard at the work I had like I always do.In your

New Year’s greeting on YouTube, you said you regretted not being able to put on the show for ARMY you wanted, and that your 2021 resolution is to “follow my own pace and pattern” when you work on music. Do you think your personal pace and your professional pace are in step this year? V: No. [My professional pace is] fast, so fast. (laughs) We have a lot we have to get ready for since we’re always promoting. It can be challenging sometimes, but in a way, I think it’s also given me a good opportunity to become a little stronger.

I imagine it’s meaningful to do the work for your own songs, because you can slip into your own world. You also made “Blue & Grey” when you were having a hard time, and it consequently became a song that allowed you to empathize with many people and vice versa. Looking back now, what kind of song do you think “Blue & Grey” will be remembered as? V: I think with “Blue & Grey” I just wanted the song to let people know how I was feeling, and how we were feeling, at that time a little better. Obviously everyone was having a hard time, but I think I wanted to share those emotions with ARMY as-is, including the pains we went through in our growth process. And, to put it another way, I think I just felt like making it obvious. (laughs) I thought it was okay to be that obvious, seeing as I couldn’t put those feelings into words. I just hope people could understand how I was feeling; it’s okay if it becomes forgotten later on.

In the “BE-hind Story” interview on YouTube, you talked about the first line of “Blue & Grey”: “Where is my angel?” You explained how, when you have any kind of issue, you close your eyes and wish for your angel to come and think. Are there times when it seems like your angel understands your feelings, as you just mentioned? V: I get a ton of answers by doing it. I’m not religious, but whenever I have some kind of issue, I close my eyes and think about it. Is this right, the way I’m thinking about this, or not? They’re just yes or no questions, like, Does my outfit look good today? Instead of just worrying about what you should do, if you tackle it in the form of a question, you get a response with the answer.

I guess it could work when you’re looking for inspiration in your life, but what about for your music? In your previous Weverse Magazine interview, you said you make a note whenever you feel something. V: I write in my diary in hopes that it’ll help with writing lyrics and so I don’t forget those feelings. I do it constantly—I open up my diary whenever something comes up. I copy melodies that pop up in my mind, lyrics, and other things from my diary to my notes app temporarily, and when I’m taking a break or I get the urge to work, I open my notes and say, Let’s try this out today, and run over to the studio.

You released “Snow Flower,” featuring Peakboy by V, on Christmas Day. Is that another song you ran to the studio to work on after the feeling came to you? V: For that song, when I was drinking with some older musicians, we were talking about doing a song together, and then we were like, Well, do you think we’ll have time to do that? So we decided to do it right then since everyone was available. My mixtape was delayed, so I at least wanted to play a different song for ARMY, and I thought, since I’m a bit tipsy (laughs) I thought I should try writing something. So I made the song really quickly. In maybe three hours.

Even though you made it quickly, the composition is somewhat complex and it has the same unique atmosphere that “Blue & Grey” did. V: There’s times when I’m, like, in the zone (laughs) and can make a song all in one sitting, but when I’m not feeling it, I end up revising it more and more. And I don’t want the composition to be too obvious, so I try to change up the way the melody flows. With that kind of sharp image coming to you almost immediately, what were you imagining for that song? V: You might think “Snow Flower” is about a type of snowflake, but I was actually thinking about snow and flowers separately. I started hoping that flowers wouldn’t wither away and just keep on blooming on snowy days. But in reality, when it snowed, all the flowers were crushed, the world became blanketed in snow, and I felt like the flower buds turned into snow flowers. I wrote that song about how I felt after watching that happen.

It must be important to feel things intuitively when you’re trying to express yourself through song. V: If it sounds pretty to me: approved. (laughs)

On the other hand, as a member of BTS, you have a job where you have to deal with a packed schedule and keep various situations in mind. How does that make you feel? When you celebrated your Billboard Hot 100 win on V LIVE and the topic of your clothes came up, you joked that you wore them to give off an idol vibe. V: It’s fun. It’s fun, but I could also say it’s hard. The performances are fun. I think idols should shine in a way that’s suitable for their age, and it’s important to do lots of things for fans like ARMY. Not just performances, but also posting pictures, having conversations on social media, making content. We’re artists and idols, so we think each and every one of those things is important. That sentiment won’t change just because we’ve achieved so much success.

You recently held an impromptu event on Weverse for ARMY. V: I’m sure there’s lots of ARMY out there who are tired of not being able to see us in person. But since the only thing we can do for them is to be on stage and stuff, I was worried that we’re not doing enough for them. And I love being able to talk with ARMY so much that now it’s like a habit that I read their posts. I have a thing today. I have a test today. I’m moving today. Somehow I feel better when I hear their stories. When I end up reading things like about how ARMY are living or what kind of lives ARMY have, I can’t help but write a response, and because of that ARMY respond, so I try to become friendlier in a more fun way, too. I want us to be more than the Billboard number one Bangtanies—I want to be ARMY’s partner, their best friend, the friend who’s always by their side when we’re not on stage. It feels like business when I talk about communicating with ARMY. (laughs) I just want to talk with a close friend. I wanna talk with a close friend—that’s exactly how I feel. It’s been a long time since I could see my friend, ARMY. Usually when friends can’t see each other they keep in touch all the time. I can talk about all kinds of things like that with ARMY thanks to the Weverse platform, and because I can hear all about their lives, I think I was able to go on Weverse and hold that kind of event.

You’ve been talking about ARMY nonstop for a few minutes. I was going to ask you how you feel about ARMY, but I think you already answered the question. (laughs) V: They’re just, well, friends I would hate to lose. Friends who seriously give me strength whenever they’re around. Sometimes you find friends like that in life. It’s like that with the other members, and I have other friends who I can share my feelings with. And I have ARMY. So I can’t help but do whatever I can do to make those people smile and make them feel happy.

Well then, is there a song you’ve heard that you want to let ARMY know about? A song that shares your feelings. V: Umm, recently … “No. 1 Party Anthem” by Arctic Monkeys. When I hear that song … I get emotional, somehow. I don’t usually listen to a lot of rock music, but I can instantly feel the band’s emotions with that song. I seriously get goosebumps listening to it, and emotional, and just all kinds of feelings. It’s to the point that, as soon as I hear that song, I think about how I really want to live well.

That song really means a lot to you. V: Actually, I don’t really know what’s up with that song. I don’t even know the lyrics, but I’m quite clear on what sort of emotions the melody and the band’s performance give me.

Don’t you feel like that’s an emotion you want to express to people, as an artist? Like you don’t have to explain your messages in detail? V: I don’t know. I just want to exchange the good, and be the one to embrace the bad. So I have a desire to perfect one cool thing about myself.

So how close do you think you are right now to becoming an artist who has perfected something cool? V: I’ll say 2%. It’ll go up someday later. (laughs)

#bangtan #v #m:weverse magazine #210729

30 notes · View notes

yurimother · 4 years

Text

LGBTQ Visual Novel Review - OshiRabu: Waifus Over Husbandos

If you are at all interested in Yuri or visual novels, you will have undoubtedly heard of OshiRabu: Waifus Over Husbandos. The Yuri rom-com was one of Steam’s top 20 February releases, and it hit the trending page on the platform. These accomplishments are incredible, and it is lovely to see both a visual novel and a Yuri game get so much love and recognition. However, whenever a title succeeds and manages to make an impact outside of the Yuri community, it always brings up a few questions. Mainly, does it deserve to be one of the few Yuri titles to obtain “mainstream success” and is it a positive ambassador for the genre, one which can further Yuri’s popularity and pull new consumers into it? These concerns boil down to one question, is it good? Usually, this inquiry is pretty quickly answered, with most elements of a product either being positive or negative. However, OshiRabu delivers more of a challenge. There are some fantastic parts to this game which I applaud and gush over, yet there are also several problems, both major and minor. The dichotomy between OshiRabu’s highs and lows is possibly the strongest I have ever seen in a Yuri title.

OshiRabu: Waifus Over Husbandos is the debut game of SukeraSomero, the new sister brand of the excellent Yuri studio, SukeraSparo. The plot follows Akuru Hayahoshi, an otaku with an obsession with her “husbandos” from gacha games and seriously bad luck. One day she bumps into a cute and bubbly student, Ren Furutachi. After Ren shows off her uncanny good luck to Akuru, a miscommunication sees Ren believing that Akuru confesses to her. For Ren, it is love at first sight, and she persistently negotiates her way into living with the older woman.

The rest of the game flits between comedic moments as Akuru and Ren live together. Examples include the girls shopping for a new bed, since Ren insists on sleeping next to Akuru, and Akuru creating boys’ love doujinshi with her friend Shino. There is, of course, a climax, which will not be spoiled in this review, and three possible endings, depending on two-player choices. An optional 18+ DLC expands on one of the endings and offers several explicit scenes.

There are some enjoyable aspects of this plot. For one, it is light and pleasant, never letting itself settle too much or grow stale. The situations are not hilarious but enjoyable and well suited to the with the characters’ personalities, and establishing several recurring themes and jokes, such as Shino teasing Ren and Ren accusing Akuru of cheating. There is an excessive amount of adorable fluff, which matches well with the overall tone of the game. These delightful moments cater to a variety of interests and fixations, so every reader is likely to find something they like. My personal favorite was a brief imagination sequence where Ren and Akuru have a child together, cute Yuri stories about women raising a kid are one of my weaknesses, and the reason Voltage’s Lovestruck has stolen hundreds of dollars from me.

The writing is also fantastic. The descriptive prose makes me laugh at the poor quality English translations we had a decade ago, and sometimes still unfortunately get. SukeraSomero deserves a great deal of praise for the simultaneous English, Japanese, and Chinese release. It is amazing that everyone got to experience this game together all over the world, without having to wait years for a possible license and translation. English translator Meru is one of the best in the business, and her work shines here. Her adaptation is amazing and fits the games’ modern setting and feel. I personally do not care for the amount of internet culture language included, such as Ren calling Akuru a “thot,” simply because such terminology tends to become dated quickly. However, I will defend the creative choices as accurate to Oguri Aya’s original story.

There is one more major compliment I have to give this game, and it is a big one. OshiRabu is extremely queer. While most Yuri titles exist as lesbian or lesbian adjacent content with little construction of LGBTQ identity, for example naming, displaying meaningful sexual and romantic relationships, or showing any aspect of queer culture, OshiRabu does all of these. I was floored when, early on in the story, Ren confesses to Akuru that she is a “lesbian.” The word lesbian is actually used directly in the visual novel, an unfortunate rarity for the Yuri genre. I even swapped the game into the original Japanese to confirm, and there again was the coming-out moment; the word “lesbian,” in all its glory, was planted right on the screen. This fantastic scene was not a one-off occurrence either.

Throughout OshiRabu, Ren continuously mentioned her homosexuality, which is usually juxtaposed by Akuru pondering her own sexuality, which she defines as an attraction to 2D men and nothing else. Although, her identity obviously changes because you know the women must end up together by the end. Some other excellent scenes feature queer representation. For example, at one point in the game, Akuru goes to a gay bookstore where another woman approaches her. When trying to explain that she is not interested, Akuru almost exclaims, “I’m normal,” a sentiment which she quickly realizes is hurtful and prejudice with some spectacular self-reflected narration. Moments like these offer nuanced and thoughtful presentations of LGBT culture and are the definite highlight of the game.

Sadly, not every aspect of the visual novel is as fantastic as these. In fact, many parts of it range from unfortunate to downright atrocious. First, the characters, while not awful or unlikeable, have some harmful qualities to them. Akuru is distant and introverted, which often leads to her being cold or even rude to Ren, which is never confronted or resolved. On her part, Ren is sadly the stereotypical aggressive lesbian, and frequently invades Akuru’s personal space, a topic which is again never reconciled. It is fine to have a character make problematic choices, but when their actions do not have consequences and conflicts have no resolution, it is a significant issue. The only character I unequivocally enjoyed was Shino, as she spends the whole game humorously teasing the two.

Speaking of conflicts, the final dramatic twist comes about as a result of Ren running away and refusing to communicate with Akuru. It turns out, minor spoilers, that she was testing her, which is a pathetic and ridiculous action which in real life can and should have serious repercussions or even end the partnership. Additionally, the topic of Akuru’s shared affection for Ren and her virtual husbandos, which is an immense source of stress for Ren, is not addressed in the base game, only the DLC. The extra content has its own set of problems too.

It is not uncommon for visual novels to include adult content in a separate patch so they can sell the base game on Steam. However, such adult patches are usually free, and OshiRabu’s is not, instead it sells for $4.99. This price is on top of the $24.99 base game, which means you are shelling out 30 dollars for the complete experience. An experience which, mind you. only clocks in at about 3 hours, hardly what I would call a value. It is an additional shame because the adult content is really well done. All the 18+ scenes, except for maybe the brief first one, showcase a tender loving relationship and skillfully written erotic content, although one or two metaphors did not land very well. However, not every player will want the 18+ content, and OshiRabu essentially forces them to play through it if they are going to see all the base game’s conflicts resolved.

There is also an unfortunate amount of service. While most of OshiRabu’s service is just sweet and cute moments between the characters, there is plenty of exploitative artwork designed to cater to specific players of a more perverted persuasion. Ren is usually the subject of such content, with shots featuring her panties and one extremely revealing cosplay outfit consisting of little more than two strips of cloth. Obviously, some players will enjoy these aspects of the game, but they did not work well for me, especially when I compared such clumsy service with the robust adult content.

However, this exploitative artwork, along with the rest of the game’s art, is phenomenally well crafted. Artist and character designer DSmile creates detailed and colorful illustrations that match the light comedic tone of the game. The adorable and vibrant artwork, drawn in a light watercolor style, makes my heart sing! There are also plenty of CG pieces, over 20, including the DLC, which adds six more. Given the games short length, this means you will see a new CG every ten minutes or so. The UI is also incredibly clean, easy to navigate, and blends well with the aesthetics of the art. My only complaint visually is that the sprites are entirely static. Except for different facial expressions and a few outfit changes, they are always the exact same, standing like flat mannequins against a backdrop. There is no animation or even alternative poses for them.

The voice acting is similarly high quality. Voice actors Nekomura Yuki, Kitaooji Yuki, and Waou Kirika all give fantastic performances in Japanese, and the quality of the recordings is consistently amazing. Even the adult scenes are voiced and showcase the range of talent present. The music is not nearly as good, but it does not intrude either. There are enough tracks to prevent the music from getting too dull, although the central theme and one of the tracks, “Let’s Go Out!” push this boundary a little far. Unfortunately, none of them are too memorable either, and I can guarantee that I will never be touching the BGM tab of the extras menu.

OshiRabu: Waifus Over Husbandos is a highly polished and visually impressive experience. The visual novel contains incredible artwork and is well constructed, showing the promise and talent of SukeraSparo. The stellar, although unfortunately necessary, adult DLC, and inclusion of LGBT themes are superb aspects that could have made playing this game a blast. However, a poorly constructed story, weak characters, and a high price tag compared to the amount of content offered severely detract from the game’s success. If you do not mind excessive service or are interested in lots of cute Yuri moments, pick this one up when it goes on sale.

Ratings: Story – 5 (6 with DLC) Characters – 4 Art – 9 Voice – 10 Music – 5 LGBTQ – 10 Sexual Content – 5 (9 with DLC) Final – 5

The visual novel is available on Steam and MangaGamer

#yuri #reviews #lgbt #lgbtq #lgbtq+#queer #gay #lesbian #visual novel #oshirabu #oshirabu: waifus over husbandos #girls love #gl #wlw #video games #gaming #game

918 notes · View notes

comradeclown · 4 years

Text

OK, so in honour of my top posts now being me saying at various degrees of length that Arthur is gay (hashtag mylegacy, lmao…), I thought I should just go for it and actually dive in a bit a lot into why I read the character as gay. Now, usually all the justification I need to read a character as gay is “wouldn’t it be cool if this character I like/relate to/etc were gay like me?” and “it’s OK, officer, I do what I want”, and I’m well aware that 99% of the time it’s me using my own creativity to do a resistant reading + the film/book/whatever bumbling into subtext entirely by accident. And while I definitely don’t think there’s ever any more justification needed for any kind of LGBT reading, lol, as it comes to Arthur, obviously feel free to disagree with me, but I honestly think my read of him as a gay man is entirely textually supported, however unwitting and accidental that might have been on the part of the filmmakers (mind you, I don’t think it was Todd Phillips’ conscious intent, but I’m like… 85% sure Joaquin Phoenix knew exactly what he was doing).

(ETA that this is extremely long, so I’ve put it all under a cut.)

First of all, there’s of course… pretty much the entirety of Joaquin Phoenix’s performance (a very, very small sample can be found in my he gay son tag and just generally in my arthur fleck tag, ha), from his mannerisms to his physicality to the way he interacts with other characters. I know part of it is a function of wanting to go back to the character’s campy roots (which are themselves… you know…), and I know I’m relying on stereotypes to some extent, but first of all, you can’t divorce either camp or gender non-conformity from LGBT history and existence, and secondly this is literally how characters have been coded as gay throughout the entire history of cinema. What I’m saying here is that you can’t have a character who acts like Arthur does, literal limp wrist and all, or says “come on, Muuuurrrayyy, do I look like the kind of girl clown who could start a movement” the way he does, to pick one of many, many examples, and not evoke the long history of cinematic wink emojis at People Like Me.

That in itself would… honestly be plenty, lol, but it could be chalked up to, idk, Joaquin Phoenix doing his own thing, were it not for the fact that it’s completely reinforced at every turn by the filmmaking language, even down to his wardrobe choices, and it’s worth noting at this point that the framing is always one of empathy — albeit with nuance — and affording the character subjectivity, rather than being “ew, look at this gross [homophobic slur]”. Like, the very first time we see Arthur, literally our first impression of the character, he’s at a mirror, putting on make-up and then ruining it by crying, and while the make-up is of course part of his job, this is just not how the inner crises of straight male characters are expressed in the language of cinema. Of note too is the fact that he’s clearly visually separated from his co-workers in all the scenes at Ha-Ha’s, indicating his alienation from them, and while this could be chalked up purely to his disabilities, I don’t buy that that’s the only reason, given that Gary gets shit due to his dwarfism, sure, but at the end of the day he’s clearly “one of the boys” in a way Arthur (can’t be) isn’t.

There are honestly so many examples of the framing working to separate Arthur from conventional masculinity and heterosexuality that I’m just going to pick some highlights, such as: obviously, the way he expresses himself emotionally through dancing (to the point that one of his coworkers explicitly ribs him about it, “if your dancing doesn’t do the trick”), which again is not something that straight male characters do in the language of cinema. The fact that all the media we see him consume is musicals, classic comedies and a talk show he’s obsessively fannish about and watches with his mother — and we know he’s a fan of the show as a whole, not just Murray, hence him saying “I love Dr Sally” (and the way he says it…). Or, speaking of his media habits, when he’s dancing with the gun while watching Shall We Dance, this could have so, so easily been about him ~regaining his lost masculinity~ through, say, fantasies of revenge or badassery, but instead it’s about him being acknowledged as a great dancer and punishing bad dancers, and it all ends in slapstick anyway.

Also, while I’m on this topic, I want to address the nature of Arthur’s dissociative fantasies about Sophie. Honestly, I don’t read them as indicative of genuine romantic/sexual interest at all, because the film frames them as identical to Arthur’s more deliberate daydreams about Murray. I mean, not that I’m adverse to gay readings of that if that’s what you want to do, lmao, but to me they’re both very clearly post-traumatic fantasies of having another person look after you for once, of having someone value and cherish you and take care of you emotionally (which obviously has massive appeal if you’ve been dealing with the after-effects of catastrophic trauma all your life but nobody has given a shit about your suffering and you’ve had to be the one to look after other people to boot). Note that after the get-together with Sophie — which is clearly patterned after all those old comedies and musicals Arthur watches — the Sophie fantasies are incredibly platonic and involve things like having another person be there for you in a crisis, telling you something supportive, getting you a hot drink (in contrast with the reality of the hospital scene, in which Arthur is alone and he’s the one trying to comfort someone else, i.e., holding Penny’s hand), essentially no different from fantasy!Murray hugging Arthur and knowing exactly what to say to make him feel good about himself. Also note that both fantasies involve being the object of someone else’s affection, Murray picks Arthur out of the audience and Sophie comes to him, it’s a pillow princess Cinderella fantasy, more than someone loving you it’s about being loved. (And, once more, this could easily have all been v. v. different, the Murray fantasy could have been the much more conventionally masculine fantasy of being a famous comedian and being invited on Murray’s show, the Sophie fantasies could have had an undeniable sexual component, etc.)

Anyway, to get back to the general point of cinematic framing, again if the movie didn’t want me to read Artie as gay, it shouldn’t have had a pivotal moment in his character arc be him sitting at his mother’s vanity table, doing a new make-up look which involves using her lipstick, and then having a Moment while he’s literally holding a quasi-glamour shot of her.

And the thing is, all these reams of stuff aren’t even the key piece of the puzzle for me, which is the way in which the film as a whole can be read as a gay narrative. I’ve posted before about how part of the emotional catharsis of the film is about Arthur finally shamelessly embracing and even revelling in all his freakishness and socially-despised traits, a big one of which being what is arguably his effeminacy and… honestly I don’t need to explain how that’s a classic gay (and more generally LGBT) narrative, do I? Like, there’s a reason why a pivotal scene is Arthur having his hair-dyeing underwear rave in a flat that’s suddenly incredibly bright and sunny for the first time, it’s about reclaiming the pain and ugliness of your life and your circumstances into a space of potential liberation, which is honestly why this movie is always going to be incredibly personally meaningful to me for so many reasons, but definitely meaningful to me as a gay woman. (Again, this could so, so easily have been about him becoming some stone-cold badass or whatever, but instead the film has him dye his hair, put on a super garish new outfit and new make-up look, dance shamelessly in the street, and be incredibly campy on national television.)

More generally, there’s other aspects of the narrative arc that tie into this general theme and which also serve to continually distance Arthur from the conventional cinematic narratives of heterosexual manhood: for instance, once he starts fully embracing the Joker persona — which is… just Arthur, the crucial difference is in how others perceive him and how he perceives himself — any attraction to women, feigned or real, goes completely out the window and the only genuinely affectionate interaction he has with another human being is with Gary (I know we all love to joke about his first kiss being with Dr Sally, but it’s obviously Comedy Jokes and he doesn’t even kiss her for real, his make-up is completely intact; Arthur’s only real kiss in the movie is when he kisses Gary). Or, when Arthur’s personal narrative finally intersects completely with the larger social narrative — which is itself about upheaval, reclamation and potential liberation — the big triumphant moment is him once again dancing, this time for a cheering crowd, and using blood like lipstick to redraw his smile.

Or even, to a lesser extent, his whole sub-plot with his mother, before I watched the film I was worried that this was going to be the usual narrative about the henpecked guy who finally puts the bitch in her place as part of becoming a Real Man, and it’s not at all, quite the opposite, Arthur is not henpecked and is clearly in charge of the household, he genuinely loves Penny — and is confident she loves him back — and enjoys doing at least some things with her (them watching the Murray Franklin Show together), and up until the reveal any issues he has with her are largely the product of having to look after an ill person with zero social support and while working a physically and emotionally demanding job and dealing with his own disabilities. When he kills her, it’s a deeply sad and self-destructive scene and it’s the result of his profound anguish and sense of betrayal and he frames it as the bitter, trauma-haunted dark half of self-actualisation and self-acceptance (“that’s the real me”, “I haven’t been happy one minute of my entire fucking life”, “now I realise… it’s a fucking comedy”).

Or, at a more meta-textual level, the way the film is unabashedly both a pulpy thriller and a melodrama, just shamelessly embracing all its emotions, its pain and catharsis, without a trace of irony. Like, yeah, part of this is the immense sincerity and compassion Joaquin Phoenix brings to his performance, but it really is the movie’s approach as a whole, and when there is humour — and I do think there’s quite a lot of humour in the movie — it’s not the distancing, let’s-not-feel-anything-too-deeply-bro humour of your typical MCU movie, it’s the camp sensibility of laughing with and at your own tragedy. (Myriad examples down to the use of certain songs in the soundtrack.)

On a final note, you guys know how much I don’t care about authorial intent, but I feel compelled to point out that in his director’s commentary, Todd Phillips says, while discussing Arthur’s journey into becoming Joker, that he reads the larger pop-cultural character of the Joker as someone who doesn’t want women, and like… Again, it’s not like I think that he was deliberately making a gay narrative in any way, it’s just that if you’re creating this journey of a man who eventually becomes a character who’s not interested in women in that sense, you’ve also just ended up stumbling into a gay narrative accidentally on purpose, lmao, what’s the real difference between “at the end of the story, Arthur doesn’t want women because he’s ~da Joker now, baby, he doesn’t want anything~” and “at the end of the story, Arthur doesn’t want women because he’s gay and he’s no longer deeply repressed and closeted”?

Anyway, like I said, feel free to disagree, he’s a fictional character, lol, but this is where I’m coming from, and the reason why if everyone involved in the movie decided to make a statement tomorrow about how much Arthur Fleck wants to bone women I’d just say “shit, idc, I’m afraid you made a gay movie about Arthur Fleck, a gay man, it’s a little too late to retcon this bitch now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. Also this is over 2,000 words long what the fuck I am so sorry

#long post #joker 2019 #class struggle clown movie #arthur fleck #dive down into chuckletown #he gay son #now in the form of 95 theses nailed to my tumblr #gonna make a letterboxd list called 'the author is dead this is lgbt cinema now'

27 notes · View notes

behind-the-screen-of-bangtan · 5 years

Text

The Hip-Hop culture

This post is part of the TSU. It belongs to the third part: Socio-political reflection.

Here are the different parts that will be developed in this post:

Album structure

References to hip-hop in the music

References to hip-hop lyrics

References to hip-hop in MVs and concepts

Being hip-hop

Album structure

While the notion of album structure is not specific to hip-hop, the way BTS organized their works was heavily influenced by the genre.

All of BTS’ albums are structured. Most of the times, we’ll find an intro that’s used in the comeback trailer video, as well as, interludes, and outros. You can find such tracks in several genres of music but it’s something that was heavily used in 90s hip-hop albums, for example, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic.

Concerning the intros, it was explained in the WINGS Concept Book that the boy doing the intro of an album is the guide in this era. Until now, we’ve had:

RM: School trilogy, Persona

Suga: The Most Beautiful Moment in Life

J-Hope: Wings

Jimin: Her

V: Tear

Jungkook/Jin: Wonder/Answer

By checking the lyrics of those different songs, we see that they indeed talk about the main theme of their album and thus introduce us to the world forming the era. Typically, while “Intro: Skool Luv Affair” is about defining love, “Intro: What Am I to You?” is tainted by the doubts of the boy whose love is not returned.

The interludes are usually in the middle of the album - the notable exception being “Interlude: Wings” that ends WINGS and makes the bridge with You Never Walk Alone, in which it evolves into “Outro: Wings”. There are two more interludes. The first one is in 2 Cool 4 Skool and has the particularity to be the only BTS track with no lyrics, it’s only music. The second one is in Dark & Wild and this time it has the least lyrics of all of BTS songs: it’s just Jungkook repeating “What are you doing?” the name of the interlude. Dark & Wild’s interlude makes the separation between the “dark” part and the “wild” part (src).

Almost all albums end with an outro - 2 Cool 4 Skool and Love Yourself 承 Her having the particularity to have two hidden tracks after theirs. It seems the outros can have two purposes: they can conclude the era (”Epilogue: Young Forever”) or open the path towards the new one. A very concrete example of the second case is O!RUL8,2?’s outro “Outro: Luv in Skool”. The song is sampled in Suga’s verse in Skool Luv Affair’s intro (src), which is the next song in BTS’ discography after this outro. This way, the two albums connect with each other.

Several albums are also rhythmed by two other types of songs that are typical of hip-hop: skits and cyphers.

The skits are little comedic plays. They usually serve to fill time but in BTS’ albums, they rather give a glimpse of the boys’ thoughts and lives. The skits have already been discussed in the post about the autobiographic references. If you’re curious, you can learn more about the history of skits here and about their decrease here.

Cyphers are initially improvised performances where rappers compete against each other and tell their story (src). The BTS cyphers are a bit different since they are written in advance and the boys aren’t competing against each other but they still use them to explain their stories and settle accounts with haters. You can learn more in the post about BTS’ relationship with haters and fans.

The intros, interludes, and outros structure the albums just like the 起承轉結 organizes the whole Love Yourself series. Once this frame is set up, the boys can embroider their message on it clearly and efficiently with the other songs. That’s what allows them to consider complex themes and to explore them. It also makes the whole album worth listening, so we can have the full story.

On a side note, the choice to release albums rather than several singles has proven to be safer for the sales. You can refer to this thread by Odie for details: part 1, part 2, part 3.

Lastly, a CuriousCat Anon pertinently pointed out that the choice of starting BTS’ discography with the school trilogy could remind of Kanye’s West College trilogy (made of The College Dropout, Late Registration, and Graduation). Indeed, both series are the first albums released by their artist, and both include lyrics about the artists’ personal life but also about the problems faced by their generation. Also, just like BTS brought socially conscious music in the heavily commercial K-pop world, Kany West linked the socially conscious underground hip-hop with the commercial popular hip-hop. The two projects were planned by their artists since the beginning and both evolved with the situation (BTS added the sequel Dark & Wild while Kanye West changed what was supposed to be the fourth album of a quadrilogy into 808s & Heartbreak, an album influenced by the heavy changes that happened in his private life at that time).

References to hip-hop in the music

The first seconds of the first song in the first BTS album is a reference to hip-hop. Indeed the beginning of “Intro: 2 Cool 4 Skool” is a sample of Epik High’s “GO”, from their 2003 album, Map of the Human Soul.

youtube

“No More Dream”, the title track of 2 Cool 4 Skool, was intentioned to “revive the gangster rap hot in the 90s with the emotion of 2013″ (src). RM cited Dr. Dre’s “Deep Cover” as an example. Actually, through its structure and its music, the whole 2 Cool 4 Skool single could be considered as a 90s hip-hop release.

youtube

“N.O”, the next title track, from O!RUL8,2?, is “an exciting trap music” (src) and “Boy In Luv” in Skool Luv Affair has old school hip-hop’s strong beat and rock sound”(src). The title tracks are not the only hip-hop songs. The whole school trilogy is heavily influenced by the genre. It started changing with Dark & Wild and its rock sound. The boys then started exploring other types of music but without forgetting hip-hop.

Another element typical to hip-hop music, even though it’s not exclusive to it, is the sampling. BTS used samples at different levels. “Coffee” and “Am I Wrong” are complete reinterpretations of existing songs: “Coffee” by Urban Zakapa and “Am I Wrong” by Keb’ Mo’. Another notable cover from Bangtan is “Born Singer”, a song based on “Born Sinner” by J.Cole. Not only is the music originally hip-hop, the lyrics tell the story of the boys and their relation to music - something that relates to the authentic feeling of hip-hop. “Lie” just use a short extract of “La Vida Breve” by Manuel de Falla. “Not Today” and “War of Hormone” have just one particular sound (the yell of the crazy German kid and a sound effect from Super Mario). You can find a quite decent list of the samples used in BTS songs on Who Sampled. While those samples can be seen as homages or inspiration sources, there are two samples with more meaningful use.

“Outro: Tear” uses the same piano as in the Highlight Reel video. It allows linking the two even though the Highlight Reel was released before Love Yourself 承 Her. On a BU related note, it’s interesting to point that the Notes released with Love Yourself 轉 Tear correspond with the events shown in the Highlight Reel, notably on the 30 August.

The other occurrence is even more impressive. “I’m Fine”, the second main track in Love Yourself 結 Answer is an ambigram of “Save Me”, the second main track in 화양연화 Young Forever. A lot of elements, be it in the music or the lyrics, mirror each other between the two songs. It shows the progression of the message, from a cry for help to the ability to stand on their own, while staying the same: the boys didn’t change, they evolved.

References to hip-hop in lyrics

Bangtan referenced their models in several texts, notably “길” (Road/Path) and “힙합성애자” (Hip Hop Lover). We heard the names of:

American rappers

Eminem

Jay-Z

Nas

Gang Starr

Black Star

Eric B

Rakim

Pete Rock

CL Smooth

The Notorious B.I.G.

Tupac

Mac Miller

Kanye West

Kendrick Lamar

A$AP Rocky

Korean rappers:

Garion

Epik High

Dynamic Duo

Verbal Jint

Debut albums:

Nas’ Illmatic

Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle

Pharell Williams’ In My Mind

KRS-One’s KRS-One

The Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready To Die

Dr. Dre’s The Chronic

J.Cole’s Cole World

“길” (Road/Path) and “힙합성애자” (Hip Hop Lover) are also the occasion for the rap line to tell their story and how they discovered hip-hop.

We can add Epik High’s “Fly” mentioned in “Skit: Circle Room Talk”. The white shirt and red necktie Suga talked about are a reference to the MV and to the album cover for “Fly”.

As the lyrics are the part Bangtan is the most invested in, what we have here are the most personal references to hip-hop for the boys.

References to hip-hop in MVs and concepts

Opposite to the lyrics, the boys probably have a lot less to do with all the hip-hop references that can be found in the MVs but they’re still interesting nonetheless.

Both photo concepts for 2 Cool 4 Skool and O!RUL8,2? are inspired by Gangsta rap but with the influence of 2013 fashion.

In the MVs, little nods to hip-hop artists can be seen:

“Can i kick it”, the title of a song by A tribe Called Quest, written on a shelf in “Boy in Luv” JP

The cover of Mos Def’s The New Danger is in the cubicle in “Boy In Luv”

“You think big, you get big in”, a citation from The Notorious B.I.G. is written on the blackboard in “Boy in Luv” JP

Nas’ Life is Good is in “Danger” next to RM

J. Cole on the cover of Billboard in the set of Short Film #4 FIRST LOVE but that actually only appears in Short Film #1 BEGIN and Short Film #2 LIE

There are also several posters about initiatives related to hip-hop:

It’s Bigger Than Hip Hop, a book about the social and political issues faced in the hip-hop field, is in the yellow bus of “No More Dream”

The Temple Of Hip Hop logo can be seen on a custom poster, still on the bus. The Temple Of Hip Hop is a non-violent organization defending the hip-hop culture

In the comeback trailer for O!RUL8,2? several elements you can associate with hip-hop (radio, mic...) assemble together with the BTS logo to form a sort of Bangtan-style hip-hop temple

Hip Hop vs War, a festival against can also be seen in the back of the bus

The Hip Hop Re:Education Project, an album made by young people from New York, is in the hallway in ”Boy In Luv”

Rhythm & Poetry, a documentary about hip-hop in Australia

Lastly, some elements are not hip-hop per se but still relate to the hip-hop culture. It’s the posters from SNEEZE magazine (details in this post) and the graffitis, notably the ones from the JnJ crew that could be seen in “No More Dream”(you can see the list in the glossary).

Being Hip-Hop

Reading articles about hip-hop and its history, there’s a notion that quickly stand out: there’s a whole difference between being hip-hop and doing hip-hop. Simply doing hip-hop without searching to understand the culture, just by imitating what’s been done, is usually very badly perceived and seen as cultural appropriation. Another important element is the idea of authenticity, someone should be sincere about their story and passion.

Interestingly, BTS has been labeled as fake by default because they’re not black Americans and worst, they’re k-pop idols. Add a few mistakes due to youth and ignorance, American Hustle Life, which as any self-respecting reality show put the emphasis on problematic stereotypes and I’ll let you imagine the result. All these problems are discussed in the article “Respect must be earned: BTS’ journey towards gaining its stripes in black America”. You’ll note that no one considered teaching them before hating on them and that everything was taken from an American point of view.

Which is probably where lies the problem since BTS are Korean idols. I won’t develop the subject since I’m not a professional but you can refer to this Vulture article and this one from Medium to know more about K-hip-hop (the Wikipedia page is also well written). You can also read Elliot Sang’s analysis of “Hip Hop phile” to know more about the complicated relationship between Asia and the black culture.

In summary, hip-hop was slowly imported in South Korea after the war. At first, it was dancers then rappers slowly appeared. Two names completely changed the game in the 90s and can be considered as the founders of K-hip-hop: Drunken Tiger and Seo Taiji & Boys. Those two groups helped the development of Korean hip-hop, which later evolved into the K-pop we’re familiar with under the influence of Seo Taiji & Boys.

The members of BTS grew up under the influence of those two groups - as well as all the acts they namedropped in their songs. Hip-hop was something normal for them, totally part of their own culture and not a foreign thing. Concerning RM and Suga, it has actually been a full part of their teenagehood (see baepsayed super complete posts about the pre-debut of RM and Suga for more details). So when Suga says during their first showcase that BTS “will do the most authentic hip-hop music” (in comparison to other idol groups), it’s not a selling argument, it’s the truth. Another argument in favor of the authentic feeling is the goal of the group: protecting the youth of prejudice and denouncing the unfairness of society. The third point doesn’t come from the boys themselves but from their own models: Drunken Tiger (now Tiger JK) and Seo Taiji have acknowledged them. RM featuring on Drunken Tiger’s Timeless and BTS participating to Seo Taiji’s 25th birthday concert is extremely meaningful. And you can add Suga’s collaborations with Dynamic Duo and Epik High. Garion also revealed in an interview they loved BTS and they were thankful for their song “Mutu” inspired RM to start rapping. For a more complete list of interactions between BTS and the K hip-hop scene, you can refer to this thread by @smollyoongs_.

From the Korean point of view, BTS has to be one of the most authentic hip-hop acts possible. Even though pure hip-hop can be mainly felt in the school trilogy era, BTS remained true to their selves when it comes to their lyrics and their passion. As for the sounds, you can still feel a strong hip-hop influence in the rappers’ solo releases. If you want to read more about BTS and authentic hip-hop, you can check this Twitter thread with screenshots of the book Hanguk Hip Hop by Myoungsun Song, in which BTS is included.

I’ll conclude the post with three more articles, the first one appreciating RM’s solo works from 2015, the second about RM being both a k-pop and hip-hop artist and the third about Suga and his storytelling talent. That’s just some more proof that the boys are being acknowledged for their talent and sincerity.

People can criticize as much as they want, the fact remains that BTS has been accepted by the founders of K-hip-hop and by music professionals, they are an authentic hip-hop group.

#BTS #TSU #Hip-Hop #Socio-political narrative

12 notes · View notes

scoutception · 5 years

Text

Shogun: Total War review: musty, crusty fun

The Total War series is one of the most unique strategy game series out there, combining turn based strategy with real time tactics, through a Risk style campaign map and through individual battles, respectively. In its almost 20 years of existence, it’s visited and revisited several different settings, from the First Punic War, to the Napoleonic Wars, to Late Antiquity, to even the world of Warhammer. With its most recent entry taking a foray into the Three Kingdoms era, I’m here to take a look at the humble little game that started it all: Shogun: Total War.

Story:

Shogun: Total War is set during the Sengoku era of Japan, a time when the emperor of Japan’s power was all but completely diminished, and the true rulers, the Ashikaga shogunate, had proven itself incapable of governing Japan via its failure to prevent the earlier Onin War caused by the shogunate’s succession issues. Combined with the already rising power of individual lords, the entire system collapsed, leaving individual provinces to be governed by independent daimyos, leading to over a century of warring between the daimyos, all of whom desired to unify Japan under their leadership and establish a new shogunate. In actual history, after lots of shakeups between major daimyos such as Takeda Shingen, Uesugi Kenshin, Mori Motonari, and especially the legend himself, Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi unified Japan under his rule... only for his death after Japan’s disastrous invasions of Korea to cause another division, though this only lasted about 2 years, with Tokugawa Ieyasu putting an end to any meaningful opposition in 1600, and establishing the Tokugawa Shogunate 3 years later, bringing the era to a permanent end. As Tokugawa Ieyasu belongs to the Imagawa clan in this game, they would be the “official” victors here.

Of course, that’s only what happened in real life. As is often the case with strategy games, you’re more than welcome to toss all of that out the window and lead whoever you want to victory, and if you’re enough of a history nerd, you can definitely get some kicks out some of the possibilities. Creative Assembly hired a historian on Japan to ensure as much historical accuracy as they could, though the game isn’t without its silliness, some due to the limitations of the game engine, like Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who was in real life just a general of Oda Nobunaga, instead being treated as an heir that’s actually born into the clan. Besides the various daiymos and their heirs, which range from famous to obscure, there’s plenty of other significant figures that can show up as random generals, such as Ishida Mitsunari, one of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s generals that was Tokugawa’s main opponent in his unification, or Honda Tadakatsu, one of Tokugawa Ieyasu’s most trusted generals, and they fittingly start out much more capable than normal ones.

Other than the historical context, however, there’s no real story to be found. While there are historical battles and campaigns as a separate mode, which I’ll speak of in more detail later, it’s otherwise about making your own story. The game does, however, make an attempt to emulate the cultural attitude towards all aspects of life from that time period, just to further the atmosphere. War is glorified, and generals and daimyos committing seppuku out of shame is not an uncommon occurrence. Foreigners are referred to as barbarians, and it’s not even pretended they’re tolerated for any reason other than their guns. No sympathy is given for anyone that falls at your hands. The Sengoku period was a dark time, and it captures this aspect wonderfully.

Gameplay:

As mentioned early, Shogun Total War is a unique mixture of turn based strategy and real time tactics, taking place on a campaign map and within individual battles. The turn based strategy part is rather simple, just consisting of queuing actions for your various troops and provinces, such as moving to a different part of the map or starting construction of a building or unit, all of which is commenced at once after ending the turn. The battles, however, are quite a different experience from a real time strategy game. Real time strategy is defined by base building, with worker units, and defense, and more emphasis on exploring the maps to accomplish objectives, often resulting in some rather long missions, not to mention resource managing. Real time tactics, however, is all about the battles, and getting straight to it. You have the units you took into battle, and can’t get more, and the most exploring you’ll do is just to find any left over units that have hidden or run off after the main engagement is over, usually. Battles are short, but sweet, and even an outnumbered enemy can cause serious damage, and casualties continue to have an impact even after the battle is over.

To get a bit more in depth on the map screen, Japan is divided into 60 provinces, with units only being able to move between adjacent provinces. While a good number of them are rather generic, with the main difference being whether they’re highland, making them more defensible at the cost of not being very profitable, lowland, which is harder to defend, but has much richer land, or lowland with rivers, which always contain a bridge which makes a fantastic choking point, and also have very rich land, others have special traits. Some are famous for specific units, and make any of those units produced there stronger than normal, while others have natural harbors, making ports cheaper to build. By far the most valuable are provinces with iron sand deposits, which allow the construction of armories, which not only give a sizeable defense bonus, but open up the production of otherwise unavailable units, which are some of the most valuable in the game. As for the buildings themselves, they consist mostly of dojos, which are needed to produce units in the first place, and support buildings, such as swordsmiths, which give units stronger weapons, the aforementioned armories, and palaces, which improves inherent morale. Most buildings can also be upgraded further to give better bonuses. While simpler buildings only take 2-3 turns to construct, later, and more valuable ones, can take anywhere from 4 to up to 7 turns to make, and only one building can be worked on at once. As for income, aside from the natural wealth of each province, which can be upgraded to up to twice their original value, you can also construct ports in any province facing the ocean, which, Japan being an island country, is the majority of them, and in addition to the income bonus, they also allow units to move to any other province with a port, even ones controlled by the enemy. Lastly, there’s mines, which can be constructed in the few provinces with copper, silver, or gold deposits. Turns are divided into 1 season each, with taxes being collected after ending autumn, and harvests can either be average, giving the base profit, poor, reducing profit by 25%, or good, increasing the profit by 25%.

Economic organization is one of the most important parts of the game. Even basic samurai can take a good deal out of your treasury, and since you only profit from your effort once a year, construction and production has to be thought out carefully. While you can raise taxes, it lowers the loyalty of all your provinces, making them more likely to revolt. In addition, units also take upkeep costs just from existing, so if you have too many units, and not enough provinces, you could bankrupt yourself. Trying to expand too fast and too far in general is one of the worst things you can do. As attractive as taking as a lightly defended or rich province near you may be, there’s always a large risk factor. Aside from the inevitable losses you’ll take in battle, any province conquered needs to be garrisoned by an at least decent sized army, at the risk of the population revolting, spawning hostile rebels that will take back the province. Provinces only naturally become loyal after years of being under your control, so you can’t expect to move on quick either. Any province bordered by provinces you don’t currently control also need to be guarded, at the risk of another faction simply invading and claiming it without a fight, something the aggressive AI is all too happy to do, further limiting the amount of units you can freely send out. Furthermore, just invading any province controlled by a major, organized faction guarantees reprisals, and can easily draw you into a long, costly, drawn out war with a faction that otherwise wouldn’t bother you. Even just fiercely defending every province you own can result in massive losses for minimal gain. Sometimes, the best move is to retreat, and bolster your forces elsewhere, to defend or claim more valuable lands. The long and short of it is, this is a game of patience and manipulation. Knowing when to invade, and where, how long to build up your forces, and who to send with. There can be long segments of nothing happening, but when stuff does get going, it gets interesting.

As for the various units you can recruit, the initial units range from simple ashigaru, conscripted peasants given weapons and thrown on the battlefield, mostly just used as cannon fodder, and thusly have awful morale, making them routing a common occurrence, to archers, who are mediocre in melee, but can serve as an advance unit and retreat behind more durable units, picking off enemies all the while and wrecking their morale, to the basic yarhi (spear) samurai (yes, katanas weren’t even the second choice of weapon during the Sengoku era), with decent offense and defense. The upgrade tech tree isn’t generally too interesting, but there’s a fair interesting few, such as the No Dachi samurai, who serve as powerful shock troopers, and can only be made after a general performs well enough in battle to be deemed a legendary swordsman, the horse archers, obviously much more mobile and efficient archers, the heavy cavalry, who are very powerful defensively and especially offensively, but can only be made with an armory, and the warrior monks, possibly the most unique unit in the game, being fearsome not just in offense, but because of their harnessing of religion in battle, their faith making their morale unshakeable, and their portable lanterns making enemies reluctant to engage them, making them less effective in battle.

As for battle itself, while it’s rather simple generally, selecting your units and selecting where to go and who to attack, the tactics you have to employ are much more complex. Every unit has three formations available: close, which is the standard, general use one, loose, good for avoiding enemy fire, but terrible in melee, and wedge, which is very effective in melee initially, but is horribly vulnerable to ranged fire, and is weaker in drawn out skirmishes. When commanding your units to move or engage, you can either click once to make them march normally, or double click to make them march faster. While this is obviously faster, every unit has stamina, which gradually wears out as they move and engage in battle, more so if they have to go up hills or mountains. Lower stamina not only means slower movement, but they perform worse in battle, and it can’t be restored, so you have to be careful. Forests not only severely hinder cavalry, but it hides your units from visual detection, making them perfect for sneak attacks. Archers are much more effective on high ground, and can retreat easier as the enemy struggles to climb, and bridges are amazing chokepoints for your melee and ranged units. Weather is also a factor; fog keeps the enemy from showing on the minimap, making them much harder to locate, wind interferes with archers, rain makes arquebuses (more on them in a bit), unusable, and impacts units in general, and snow negatively impacts units in general. Obviously, some of the more undesirable weather is much more common, or only available, during certain seasons, and while you can wait 3 or 4 times for the weather to change before beginning each battle, eventually the enemy will force either engagement or retreat, and it’s entirely possible it’ll only worsen, thus further encouraging patience.

Obviously, you’re not alone in your conquest of Japan. There’s 7 major factions in Shogun Total War, all of which, with the possible exception of one, were major factions during the era in real life. There’s the Shimazu, the Mori, the Oda, the Takeda, the Imagawa (the debateably minor one), the Hojo, and the Uesugi. The last faction, originally intended to be filled by the Chosokabe earlier in development, is occupied by generic rebels and ronin, who make up minor clans, rogue Ikko Ikki warrior monks, discontented peasants, and the like. While they are disproportionately strong, they’re fortunately not organized; while they won’t war among themselves, they still believe in every man for himself, and only fend for themselves, which, combined with their relative nonaggression when it comes to actually committing invasions, means not much attention needs to be paid to them, unless you really want the provinces they hold onto. The other factions, however, obviously are organized, and most aren’t content to sit around. The AI is, simply put, very, very aggressive. While the different daimyos do have different personality descriptions, ranging from explicitly untrustworthy and expansionist, to relatively benign and content, in the end this only affects so much. It’s pretty common sight for the allegedly non expansionist Shimazu to conquer all of western Japan as eagerly as the extremely aggressive Mori. Still, getting into a war before you’re well and ready is just a bad idea, so the best thing to do in the early game is forge alliances. While the AI will be glad to ignore it the moment it decides it hates your guts, keeping alliances is still beneficial, as not only will it make your allies lend aid when you invade a hostile province on their provinces is adjacent to, it does make them less likely to attack you out of the blue, provides a small income bonus, and can even cause some of their provinces to join you if the clan collapses, though this happens to the AI’s benefit much more often than to yours. If you get into a war, but decide you can’t commit, you can instead attempt a ceasefire. Again, the AI is only so willing to pay attention to it, but it can take some pressure off you, or even lead into an alliance.

Thankfully, you’re not expected to be completely honest and honorable in all your planning. There exists 4 agent units who serve supportive roles on the campaign map, such as spying on enemy provinces to reveal the exact units present. Firstly, there’s the emissaries, who primarily offer alliances, but can also attempt to bribe enemy units into joining you side, for a healthy amount of money. They are unfortunately rather prone to dying, being visible on the world map for assassins, and being at risk of being murdered if a bribe or ceasefire offer is found too insulting. Secondly, there’s ninjas, who can assassinate generals or daimyos, removing any bonuses they’d give and wrecking the rest of the army’s morale, or open castle gates during sieges, causing automatic victories with minimal losses. However, the less skilled they are, the less likely they’ll succeed at their tasks, causing their death. Thirdly, there’s the shinobis, who can cause dissent in provinces controlled by major factions, making revolt more likely, though multiple are needed to be present for that to happen, or govern your own provinces, raising their loyalty. They however, likely to be killed if another shinobi or a border watch tower is counter spying in an enemy territory, and they can’t affect rebel provinces. Lastly, there’s the most destructive of all, the geishas, who are essentially super ninjas. While they can’t do anything about castle gates, they are much more efficient at assassination, as they will not be killed if they fail. Instead, they will simply keep trying the following turns, and the only way they can be killed is by an enemy ninja, something extremely unlikely once the geisha causes a few deaths, or by another geisha, something even less likely to happen, as the AI will not actually construct geisha houses. Geishas can easily take down entire clans, making them a downright game breaker. Ninjas and Geishas also have the bonus of having cutscenes devoted to their assassination attempts, which are quite entertaining, especially the failure variants.

The strength of units is determined by honor, of which there’s two types: unit honor, with affects each unit personally, raised or lowered by their performance in battle, and general honor, the honor of the general of each army that confers honor bonuses on every unit present the higher it gets, and is raised and lowered by winning or losing battles with said general, respectively. While any general above honor level 1 is worthy of assassination, general honor low enough will actually negatively impact all the units, making it better to keep them alive. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should allow enemy generals to escape with their lives in battle. Unit morale determines their willingness to actually stay in battle. Engagements going poorly will lower it, and if morale goes low enough, the unit will rout and attempt to escape the battlefield outside of your control, losing almost all offensive and defensive capabilities, making them extremely easy targets for any pursuing enemies. While you can rally your units a few times, they can only be pushed so far before crossing the point of no return, and one of the easiest ways of causing that is to kill the enemy general. To compensate for this, as well as the fact that the AI doesn’t actually think to protect its generals, the higher the general and unit honor, the harder they are to kill, which can easily reach downright absurdity, with them eventually being able to challenge armies larger than them by themselves, and win. Outside of the special historical generals, and your own daimyos and heirs, however, it’s uncommon to get a general who starts with more than 1 general honor, and while daimyo and heir honor is downright absurd, with Tokugawa Ieyasu starting with 6 honor, something extremely uncommon to get normally, you may not wish to risk them in battle.

Your daimyos and heirs are the only thing keeping your clan from devolving into petty, unorganized rebels and ronin. While your daimyo is thankfully very virile, heirs are only considered of age once they turn 16, and with the threat of assassination, dying in battle, or dying of illness once they reach their 60′s, though it’s not uncommon to see them live to their 70′s, you want to be extremely protective of your daimyos and heirs until you have at least 2 or 3 to fall back on. Additionally, your daimyo being killed in battle carries the major risk of your conquered provinces using the opportunity to revolt, which at best will badly set you back, and at worst can outright spell your demise. While the other factions also operate under these rules, because the world revolves around you, they get an extra benefit: if a clan collapses, but there were any underage heirs, they can revive the clan once they come of age, as long as they have enough popular support in their former territories, thus forcing you to be wary anytime you seem to wipe out a clan. If you want to guard your daimyo, the best idea is just to keep them inside your best castle. Castles can be constructed in every province, and are needed to construct buildings, and need to be upgraded further to access more buildings, and their upgrades. While you can get away with only a basic castle in most, provinces you want defended better should get a large castle or a fortress, and your most essential provinces, preferably ones with armories, can get citadels, which take a whopping 7 seasons to construct. The better the castle, the better the province can be defended. If you lose in battle, assuming you don’t abandon the province entirely, the remnants of your army will instead retreat to the castle, trapped and under siege by the enemy. As long as any enemy units remain in that province, every turn that passes will incur more and more losses to your forces, at no loss to them, with the only hope being to send outside units to break the siege, or attempt a last stand in the castle, if the enemy wants to end it quicker. Higher level castles are much easier to defend, and come with more supplies, making regular sieges take multiple years to finish, with fortresses and especially citadels nearly outright forcing a manual attack. Additionally, while retreating to a castle will technically give the enemy control of the province, they can’t construct anything without the castle in their hands.

Finally, even if none of the clans decide to make any moves, that doesn’t mean nothing will be going on in Japan. Being Japan, random natural disasters like earthquakes or typhoons (or, taifuns, as the game itself calls them) can happen, destroying or damaging buildings and halving the income of the affected province for that year. The other, and much more interesting, random event is the arrival of foreigners offering to trade guns. The first to appear for a while are from Portugal, and their offers very much have strings attached; they demand you convert to Christianity if you want their guns, causing tons of problems. Loyalty plummets in all your provinces, and it takes years and the presence of churches and priests, a 5th agent that’s more or less the emissary that will never be murdered by a Christian daimyo, to convert the population, and this makes keeping the loyalty of newly conquered provinces even harder. Additionally, you lose access to warrior monks, and trying to make them, or the Buddhist temples that produce them, violates the terms of the deal, losing you access to guns. While you can make independent gun factories that let you reject Christianity while still being able to make guns, this requires a citadel and an armory, and preferably a grand cathedral to let you make the musketeers, higher quality arquebus using units. Later in the game, around 1570, the Dutch arrive, and are much more willing to engage in honest trade. They don’t demand conversion to Christianity, and their regular trading posts can produce musketeers right off the bat too. However, there’s obviously the trade off of having to wait much longer than you would than with the Portuguese.

However, as much of a dilemma as the game tries to make access to arquebuses, it’s really not worth the effort. The balance of this game is not very good, and they are the most obvious example; namely, they’re extremely underpowered. Even with the musketeers, they’re slow to reload, unusable in the rain, and completely useless in melee, to the point they’ll just rout more often than not. More so, the damage they cause just doesn’t make up for the disadvantages. Archers, even being technically weaker, can fire much faster, and while they aren’t amazing in melee, they can do some damage even then. This is far from the only example of the bad balancing, however. Aside from the aforementioned geishas, the yari cavalry, the basic cavalry unit, is also very underpowered, being lightly armored and having a severe disadvantage against yari, the basic weapon that even ashigaru use, make them quick to be slaughtered, more or less only making them useful for catching horse archers or other yari cavalry. It even extends to the faction locations; while the Uesugi, Hojo, Takeda, and Imagawa are primarily focused around eastern Japan, with the Takeda and Imagawa having small holdings in western Japan, the Shimazu and Mori are the main powers in western Japan, while the Oda are around central Japan. While this may seem nicely spread out, it’s anything but; the Oda are quick to be slaughtered by the the many rebel warrior monks surrounding them, in the best case scenario losing most of their provinces for minor gains. The Shimazu and Mori are very quick to drive the Takeda and Imagawa out of their way, and western Japan being almost completely conquered by one of them is almost inevitable if left to their own devices.

For how much information this is to take in, this is actually the least complex game in the series. There’s not a ton of micromanagement, and once you get a general grasp on the mechanics, it’s pretty smooth sailing. Unfortunately, this also makes the game a bit bland, especially in conjunction with a flaw that simply can’t be overlooked: the lack of diversity between the factions. Aside from starting positions and getting discounts on certain units, like the Takeda specializing in cavalry, while the Oda get ashigaru for even cheaper, the factions all play the same. There are zero units exclusive to any one faction, something which absolutely kills the replay value. There’s still some interesting scenarios to be found, like the Imagawa situation, starting with rich provinces in western Japan, and decent provinces in eastern Japan... while being positioned such that every single other faction can make a move on them, forcing them to either pull out of one side and consolidate all forces in one half, or play an extremely careful game of balancing alliances and forces, even more than normally, to keep in the game. It makes for a hectic experience that forces you to always be on your toes, whether it be making a move on some of your weaker neighbors, or constantly fending off attacks from some of the more aggressive and powerful ones. However, in the end, it just doesn’t make up for how samey it gets otherwise. Even with the different campaign scenarios, there’s not much difference. There’s the main, recommended scenario, Sengoku Jidai, starting in 1530, the starting in 1530 scenario, which has a lot of land claimed by the rebels, and the Mori clan plain not present, the starting in 1550 scenario, which has more land claimed than in 1530, but still much less than Sengoku Jidai, sort of a intermediate campaign, and the starting in 1580 scenario, if you want to jump to the chaos of the Dutch being present immediately. You can also set alternative victory goals from the default of conquering every province, such as conquering 40 out of 60 provinces, destroying your rival clans, and keeping your clan alive for 70 years into 1600, when the era would end in real life. Overall, though, sticking with Sengoku Jidai makes for the most consistent experience.

Also included are historical battles and historical campaigns, touching upon some of the Sengoku era’s most significant battles, with the enemy and player side having preset units they must use to the best of their abilities. Counting those added by the expansion, there are 9 individual historical battles, which range from one of the various clashes between Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin, to Tokugawa Ieyasu’s horrible loss at Mikagahara, to even Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s horribly failed invasion of Korea after his temporary unification of Japan. While an interesting idea that be fun sometimes, the majority tend to be “not even masochist would enjoy this” levels of unfair and frustrating, mostly due to outright awful design, such as the Mikatagahara battle, which seems to intend for you to retreat from the initial enemy force and meet up with the rest of your unit, but in practice boils down to rushing the enemy general and hoping he dies and makes the rest of the enemy rout, cause there’s no way you’re getting far enough away before the cavalry slaughters you. The majority also involve attacking through bridges, which nearly inevitably leads to your forces being slaughtered, with the worst case being the Imjin level, putting you against a plainly superior enemy force, both in unit stats and numbers, and forces you through a bridge with a very bad unit roster, with thunderbombers being able to kill hundreds of units while you have no defense against it. It’s not worth the effort. The historical campaigns, on the other hand, focus on connected battles fought by the the three most important people of the Sengoku era: Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, with battles such as Nobunaga’s defining victory as Nagashino and the battle at Sekigahara that ended the Sengoku era. Additionally, there’s an additional campaign focusing on a theoretical campaign of Japan by Kublai Khan. The battles within the historical campaigns are much more interesting than the individual historical battles, featuring scenarios such as taking on two different samurai armies as the Mongols and a castle defense mission, but unfortunately, this only makes them even more broken, to the point that a lot of them rely on outright luck as much as any kind of strategy. All in all, while ambitious, the historical battles are an exercise in frustration more than anything.

Overall, while the gameplay is still fairly solid and decent on its own, every succeeding game would expand on it in sizeable ways, including its own sequel/remake Shogun 2. It should also be noted that, even with the work done to the Steam version, it’s a very unstable game filled with bugs. Audio files on the campaign map cut out prematurely, you can be stuck constantly moving the camera in battle, forcing you to use the arrow keys just to stop it, and it’ll even randomly just crash on you. Obviously, this isn’t very conductive to the experience, and overall results in a game that downright reeks of age.

Graphics:

One of the biggest draws of the Total War series is the sheer spectacle of seeing thousands of soldiers clashing on the battlefield at once, and while that is present even this far back, anyone expecting it to look anywhere near as good in this will be disappointed. While the battlefields are in 3D, the units are instead depicted as sprites, and not very attractive ones. They’re small, even with unit size set to max in the settings, blurry, and don’t even animate that well, with their attack animations consisting of swinging wildly like they’ve never held a weapon before. It hurts the enjoyability of battle quite a bit.

There actually are 3D models used in event cutscenes, and they do look decent for the time, if a bit odd, which makes the battle sprites stand out even more. As for the rest of the game, while the environments look rather flat, there was quite a bit of work put into the menus and other UI elements. The main menu is a scroll, traditional Japanese art is used all over, such as the opening cutscene to the Sengoku Jidai scenario, as well as events such as the annual tax collection. The campaign map is literally a map your daimyo is reading, up to being able to see the table it’s on if you scroll far enough. It certainly feels like a labor of love, and gives quite a bit of charm to the game.

Sound:

The music of the game is quite good, using technology to, as I understand it, simulate traditional Japanese instruments. It’s always atmospheric, and pretty catchy to boot. The voice acting, on the other hand, is plain terrible, at least in English, with extremely thick accents and exaggerated and forced voices, plus awkward delivery. About the only voice that sounds decent is the narrator/advisor, with a deep, calm voice that fits the situations in which he needs to speak quite well, such as reciting a short poem whenever a clan collapses.

Mongol Invasion:

As it happens, Shogun Total War was quite a success, and thus obviously invited an expansion pack, the setting of which is a bit, odd; the Mongol Invasions of Japan.

Story:

In 1274, nearly 200 years before the Onin War that would begin the Sengoku era, the Kamakura Shogunate were the current rulers of Japan, at least on paper, with the Hojo clan essentially ruling as regents. The Mongol hordes, led by Kublai Khan, fresh out of his conquest of China and Korea, decided he wanted to add Japan to his empire too. The first invasion, in 1274, consisted of a few skirmishes between Japan and the Mongols before a typhoon destroyed the Mongol fleet. The second invasion, in 1281, went even worse, thanks to the Japanese making preparations for such an occasion, with the Mongols scoring no victories before another typhoon destroyed the fleet yet again. These marked the first occasions Japan would fight foreign soldiers instead of themselves, the two near miraculous typhoons coined the term kamikaze (divine wind), and even marked early use of explosive bombs.

While interesting, the invasions aren’t exactly the best foundation for an expansion pack. No real fun in a campaign that ends after 1 or 2 turns, after all. So, Creative Assembly decided to plunge this into outright alternate history. The expansion focuses on the 1274 invasion, and omits the devastating typhoon that put it to a stop, instead allowing the Mongols to establish a foothold in Japan. Thus, it’s up to the player to take control of the Hojo clan and expel the invaders, or control the Mongols and take Japan, altering history so that the Mongol empire never dies, Japan, and all its other conquered territories reduced to provinces in the mighty empire.

Gameplay:

Mongol Invasion introduces a new campaign and a brand new, and thankfully unique faction. The campaign focuses, quite obviously, on the attempts by the Mongols to conquer Japan, and Japan’s efforts to fight them off. Instead of the 7, 8 including the rebels, factions of the base campaigns, you have only the Hojo clan and the Mongols, with 3 provinces held by rebels, who are also perfectly capable of spawning from disloyal provinces like normal. Compared to the other campaigns, it’s a straight up conflict from start to finish. There’s no diplomacy, and everything only ends once the Mongols are completely driven out of Japan, or the daiymo and all his heirs are dead. The biggest draw of this expansion is that the Mongols actually have all new units, though a few are a bit derivative of Japan’s units, and admittedly, they only have 6 units in total, though there are some rather unique ones: there’s the Korean Spearmen, essentially stronger ashigaru, Korean Skirmishers, who carry shields to block arrows and have powerful throwing spears, making them the ideal advance unit, Korean Guardsmen, essentially less defensive Naginata samurai, and thunderbombers, who use primitive hand grenades to sow chaos in enemy lines, at the cost of being easily slaughtered. The last two are actual Mongols, compared to their Korean thralls; Mongol light cavalry, cavalry archers who are actually quite decent in melee, and Mongol heavy cavalry, almost literally just Japanese heavy cavalry, though even stronger and faster. The Mongols are meant to use their Korean allies to soften up the enemy before their cavalry moves in, and it’s quite an effective tactic, prone to sending entire armies into a panicky retreat, and as almost every unit available to them are flat out better than their Japanese counterparts, it takes some real cleverness to successfully drive them off, though this also means auto resolve is extremely broken in the Mongols favor.

The most unique thing about the Mongols, however, is how they play on the campaign map. While Hojo clan work as normal, having to construct buildings and units, the Mongols don’t waste their time on that, courtesy of having their main forces away in Korea and China. Instead, every summer, Kublai Khan will send reinforcements, in exchange for tribute in the form of any currency pillaged from conquered provinces, which is sent to Kublai in autumn. The more that’s sent, the more forces that’ll be sent, and it takes a few times for thunderbombers and heavy cavalry to be sent. Due to this, the only building the Mongols can even build are border watch towers and border forts, and since they don’t actively collect tax from the people of their conquered provinces, this gives them a completely different playstyle from every other faction in the game. Instead of patiently waiting around to build up forces, buildings, and ensure loyalty of newly conquered provinces. The Mongols, on the other hand, are in a constant mad dash to claim new provinces. They don’t need nearly as long to ensure the “loyalty” of their new provinces, presumably through sheer terror factor, and even if they do rebel, it’s almost preferable, assuming it only brings small, easily dealt with forces, as it means even more spoils to send to the Khan. If the Hojo clan blows most of its starting forces at the beginning of the campaign and fails to sufficiently cripple the Mongols, it could easily lead to the Mongols steamrolling over any provinces in reach before the Hojo can recruit enough units for a sufficient stand or strike against them. Conversely, this does mean that if the Mongols get crippled enough that can’t claim any more provinces, the Hojo are free to take them out at their leisure, though that’s much easier said than done. Additionally, the Mongols have no daiymo or heir system; Kublai’s too busy eating all that rice sent as tribute (the currency of Shogun, koku, is essentially the amount of rice needed to feed a person for one year). While this does mean one less aspect they need to worry about, it also means they have less naturally powerful generals. Also, while they can’t construct buildings, the Mongols will demolish almost every building a province has, barring castles, once they claim it, which can be rather damaging, as the Hojos don’t start with very many buildings built, especially ports, making transportation difficult.

The sheer contrast to the original campaigns makes for a fast paced and chaotic experience, especially playing as the Mongols, that’s a lot more fun than the base campaigns. The way the Mongols receive units, plus the large amount of units the Hojo start out with, make large battles not only a lot easier to achieve, but more or less inevitable, making for quite a spectacle at times, even with the inferior graphics. If you’re clever enough as the Hojo, you could push the Mongols out of Japan before they even receive reinforcements to drag out the conflict, but otherwise, it makes for a mostly defensive war that can get very hectic and snowball quite fast. Of course, the Hojo didn’t completely get the short end of the stick, as they gained 3 new units in this expansion. Firstly, there’s the ashigaru crossbow men, essentially cheaper versions of samurai archers, which, considering how expensive samurai archers are, was a bit of an odd omission, if just for gameplay reasons. They tend to run the second an enemy gets even slightly close to them, and because crossbows passed simple physics, they can’t arch like regular bows can, making them much more situational. Additionally, they’re actually exclusive to the Mongol invasion campaign, not being backported into the regular campaigns, making their usefulness a bit, limited. The last two units were backported into the regular campaigns, but they’re a bit, silly, is the best way I can describe them. There’s battlefield ninjas, who come in companies of 24 and aren’t exactly great in outright battles, but are fast, very hard to detect, and very suited for sneak attacks. Secondly, and most ridiculous, is the kensai, or sword saint. They come in companies of 2 and are quite slow, but are in pure stats the most powerful units in the game, being able to take on entire lower tech companies by themselves, especially with max weapons and armor.

On the technical side of things, the sprites for the Mongol units look quite a bit better, though still not great, and they also have their own music, which I find even better than the already great soundtrack for the base game. Overall, Mongol Invasion is a pretty fun expansion, if not especially meaty by itself, though the Steam version does come with it anyway.

Conclusion:

As someone who’s played this way more than he’d like to admit, I have to give Shogun: Total War a solid not recommended. Though a solid first effort that would establish a fantastic series, the bugs, the technical limitations of the engine itself, and lack of variety to be found results in a quickly stale experience. You’d be better off starting with pretty much any other game in the series, even the more divisive ones such as Rome 2 and Thrones of Britannia. Still, it’s not a completely unfun experience, and can be an ok introduction to the series. Just try to stop before you get pulled in too far. Till next time.

-Scout

#total war #game review #long post #strategy games

5 notes · View notes

imagitory · 5 years

Text

Review: The Nutcracker and the Four Realms [Spoilers]

Hey, everyone! So today I decided to go see Disney’s newest release, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms!

Some of you may recall that I’m a rather big fan of the original ballet and was quite disappointed about how little the trailers and promotional materials for this film resembled that very ballet, so I went in with my expectations ridiculously low. Because of this, I was able to see some good in the film, which I’ll go into under the cut, but for those of you who wish to avoid spoilers, I must be frank that The Nucracker and the Four Realms is a mixed bag at best. Those who love the original ballet and book will likely hate how little the movie respects its characters and story, and those who don’t love the ballet and book might find it to be a rather standard action-adventure fantasy film for kids with few elements that weren’t done better in other movies. It’s not as god-awful as The Nutcracker: The Untold Story was or anything: there were good ideas here and there...but overall, I’m afraid I can’t recommend The Nutcracker and the Four Realms to anyone.

For those of you who don’t fear spoilers...a cut!

The Good!

+For the most part, the first fifteen minutes of this movie (taking place in London) felt the way a Nutcracker film adaptation should. There were nice Christmas colors, sparkling holiday decor, and an elegant party full of swirling gowns and happy children. Admittedly I probably would’ve preferred it if the story had taken place in Russia (like the ballet) or Germany (like the book), or even a vaguely European-ish setting without naming a specific city, but hey, can’t win ‘em all.

+All of the actors chosen I thought were pretty good choices. Morgan Freeman made a great Drosselmeyer (though I wish he’d had more of a role in the story), Helen Mirren and Keira Knightley are always good talent (though I’ll come back to problems I have with their characters later), and even the actor they chose for the Nutcracker, Jayden Fowora-Knight, was good enough that I wouldn’t mind seeing him in something else. But for me, the actor I loved seeing the most was Matthew Macfadyen as Clara’s father, who was easily one of the best parts of the movie. This could also be considered a bad thing, as he’s criminally underused, but it doesn’t change how nice it was to see him. (I can only hope that Keira and Matthew were happy to see each other on set again, even if they had no scenes together -- garg.)

+The music was pretty well-handled. James Newton Howard did a good job of not just running all of the usual tunes into the ground -- he gave us a nice haunting remix of the Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy during an eerie scene in the Fourth Realm, used the Battle track excellently during a confrontation with the mice, and arranged the Overture perfectly in the opening panning shot (which admittedly looked too CG for my taste, but still communicated the location and mood well).

+Misty Copeland’s ballet performances were excellent. She truly was a joy to watch every second she was on screen.

+The costumes for the most part were well done, as were a lot of the visuals. I have some issues with them that I’ll come back to, but honestly, the majority of them worked well for the characterizations and mood the film was going for.

+Directly connecting Clara to the magical world she enters is, in principle, not a bad idea, nor is the idea of her arrival in that world being more than just a fun finale. A battle in a magical realm will always be more interesting than one done in your living room. I also like the idea that Clara’s facing her real-world problems through her fantasy and that she’s more active in the story...I just would have written those ideas very, very differently.

The Not-So-Good...

+The script. And I mean absolutely everything about it. There is so much wrong with this script and the concept behind it that I will have to make separate bullet points in order to go through all of the problems I had with it:

The characters are beyond underdeveloped. Although I think Helen Mirren, Keira Knightley, and Jayden Fowora-Knight were good casting choices, they honestly had very little to work with. Mother Ginger was supposed to be a villainous sort, but from the very beginning, she never came across that way, despite the script’s and the actors’ best efforts -- hell, in a flashback we see that Clara’s mother actually sort of resembled Ginger! That sure isn’t a hint to who’s really trustworthy or anything. The same can be said for Sugarplum -- honestly, did anyone really not guess that she was the fake-out villain all along, especially after how long Disney has been beating that particular dead horse of a trope? As for our “Nutcracker” Phillip, he really has little autonomy in the story given that he basically follows Clara’s orders as a princess and then, mid-way through the story, we’re supposed to believe that he’s now following her out of real devotion and caring, even though their relationship isn’t given the time and scenes needed to show their growing bond. Drosselmeyer as I said was barely around: we learn that he basically raised Clara’s mother, which you would think means he had a role to play in the Four Realms, but nope! He doesn’t appear anywhere until the end except through his owl familiar that...does absolutely nothing during the entire story. I barely remember any of the side characters in the Four Realms, and I just finished watching this movie about an hour ago. Despite being some kind of a mechanical genius, Clara is amazingly bland. She says she doesn’t know who she is or what her place is, and yet Phillip goes on about how confident she is and basically everyone around Clara showers her with praise. She’s smart enough to teach the great inventor Drosselmeyer himself how to fix something and also tough enough to kick a tin soldier in the face during the climax...but that, in the process, kind of makes her boring and one-note. I never feel like Clara is in any danger or puts herself at any great risk because we never see her in a situation she can’t handle. Even when she’s “trapped” by Sugarplum, it’s at the top of a tower decorated with a chandelier and windows she can easily get out of, so she just jerry-rigs herself and her fellow prisoners a way down after a pointless touch of moping. (I mean seriously, you couldn’t lock her in a dungeon?? With LOCKED DOORS AND WINDOWS??) And really, hasn’t this archetype Clara’s fulfilling been done to death already? Rather than have her be yet another “girl ahead of her time” (one basically just like her mother, which doesn’t exactly make her special, then), why not have her be nothing like her mother? If Clara had been more like her sister Louise and yet expected by everyone around her to be like her mother, wouldn’t it have made her realizing she has everything she needs inside of herself mean that much more? Wouldn’t it have shown her the value of her own worth if she’d failed to live up to everyone’s expectations at first, rather than her be heralded as “truly being her mother’s daughter” and clearly being so from the beginning?

The Four Realms itself doesn’t really make that much sense. Not only does it resemble Narnia (snowy magical forest that you enter through a magical doorway, time moving differently than in our world, lost human ruler returning to ascend to the throne) and Oz (being split into four parts and, like Oz the Great and Powerful, a ruler of one of those lands being painted wrongly as the villain by another who actually wants to take over everything) a little too much for my liking, but I can’t even figure out its rules. For one, the film can’t seem to decide whether Clara’s mother Marie (nice nod to the original book, actually) created the land or discovered it. In all of the summaries I’ve read, it says that Marie created the Four Realms, and her identity as an inventor would seem to justify this, but in the dialogue, Sugarplum says she discovered each land, and brought its citizens to life through her engine invention thing. Yet if they’re all dolls brought to life and made large by the engine, why are they all doll-sized when they go through the clock to peek in on Drosselmeyer’s party? And how much of that world is actually based on our real world? The film at some points tries to make connections to Clara and her mother’s real life by having Clara and Fritz try to catch a mouse in their attic, depicting a Nutcracker ornament in a flashback, and showing Fritz receive a Nutcracker that resembles Phillip for Christmas, but the film drops the ball in having any of those touches actually mean anything. There are ways you can weave the real world into your fantasy land in a meaningful way -- the film could have had Marie taking inspiration from her real life when she made this make-believe world or even represented Clara’s inner turmoil by making the Four Realms completely make-believe, but instead it just comes across as muddled and odd.

Speaking of Clara’s mother Marie, I really don’t like the fact that I have to insult a dead woman, but...screw this woman! She makes this entire world and then, as her dying wish, tells her adopted father to only have her middle child discover it by leaving the key to her music box there? What, did Louise not deserve to be a princess too? Did Fritz not deserve to be a prince? Your husband, who called you the LOVE OF HIS LIFE, doesn’t deserve to know? Oh, but they’re not like Clara -- they’re not clever and special and different like you and Clara. That’s why you told Drosselmeyer that Clara was your greatest invention, because clearly your other two non-main-character children don’t count. Bite me.

The story crafted doesn’t fit the constraints that a Nutcracker tale must operate inside -- namely, the film sets up the fact that this family is mourning the loss of their matriarch, and yet the entire story focuses solely around Clara. Yes, the original Nutcracker tale is supposed to be about Clara, the Nutcracker, and the Mouse King...but by adding the mother’s death and the arc revolving around Clara and her family coming to grips with it, the story’s basically torn between what it should be about versus what it is about. This family is broken and must be fixed: Clara going into another world that has no connection to anyone but her dead mother to “find herself” isn’t going to fix that. Therefore the central conflict and the driving plot have no connection. The film either needed to take out the family part of the plot or have the entire family discover this world together and connect through their adventures in it in order for this choice to make sense.

On the note of focus, “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms” is a misleading title. A better title would be “Clara, Sugarplum, and Their Dead Mother,” because that’s all that gets any real attention here. Phillip, rather than being a prince cursed into the form of a Nutcracker, is a toy brought to life that serves Clara (the real princess) and has no animosity for mice excluding what has been indoctrinated into him by Sugarplum. He even BEFRIENDS the Mouse King at the end. Yes -- THE NUTCRACKER BEFRIENDS THE MOUSE KING. ARE YOU F**KING KIDDING ME --? As for the Mouse King, oh ho ho....wait until you hear this. The Mouse King is not a monstrous, fearsome creature locked in battle with his foe, the Nutcracker: instead he’s just an ordinary mouse that fuses together with his subjects into this monstrous giant mouse shape. But they’re not really the bad guys -- no, they’re underlings of Mother Ginger, who’s a good guy. So the Nutcracker plays second-fiddle to Clara, and the Mouse King plays second fiddle to Mother Ginger. TWO OF THE MAIN CHARACTERS OF THE STORY ARE REDUCED TO GROUNDLINGS OVER HERE.

Sugarplum’s motivation doesn’t really make sense. She claims she’s taking over because Clara’s mother Marie left them and that hurt her, but...how do you go from feeling betrayed by your mother figure to “taking over the world”? Is it because the world is one your mother created and you want to destroy it because it reminds you of her -- wait, no, Marie didn’t create it, though, she discovered it, and you only really seem interested in going after Mother Ginger with any great passion rather than any of the other Regents...okay, is it that you were hurt by your mother figure and so you want to create an army so strong no one could ever hurt you again -- wait, but everyone seems to like and trust you, so there’d be no reason for you to fear that and it’s not like you built up that lack of trust earlier...okay, is it that your mother figure chose her real family over her make-believe family and so you want to get back at the family she chose over you -- wait, no, you locked Clara up but you’ve barely even tried to take any vengeance out on her and you looked almost horrified when Clara outsmarted you... Yeah, what I’m trying to get across is that Sugarplum as a villain really doesn’t jive.

Because of the lack of character development and the many disparate plot elements fighting for your attention, no relationship in this movie comes across as particularly heart-felt or genuine. We get almost no build-up for Clara and her father’s disagreement before they part ways (and that confrontation has very little fall-out, so it feels hollow); Sugarplum’s affection for Clara seems so cloying and she is so obviously the villain that it makes it difficult for the audience to see any kind of bond forming (honestly, wouldn’t a kind of buried-deep resentment been more interesting, given that Sugarplum knows all about Clara but Clara knows nothing about her?); and there are so few moments building up Clara and Phillip as equals and friends that the scene where Phillip encourages Clara to stay by saying he didn’t follow her because she’s the princess basically comes out of left field. Even the relationship between Clara and her mother, which is so central to the movie, doesn’t ring true for me because they are so similar. Everyone remarks on how much Clara is like her mother, but that means that there’s no interesting interactions between them. Clara is just a Marie 2.0, rather than her own person, and Marie’s advice to Clara almost seems obvious: if Clara’s so much like the mother she admired, there’d be no reason for her to be as self-doubting as she is. If the film even just tried to show how much Clara still has to learn at some point, that relationship would’ve been that bit stronger, because it would mean that Marie saw something in Clara that no one else did, not even herself.

+Moving on, even though the ballet routines were pretty, they came out of nowhere. Rather than integrate dance seamlessly into the plot by having Clara be interested in ballet or something, the sequences only served to be fluff pieces plopped down into the middle of scenes that don’t connect to anything else going on. It just felt like the filmmakers were trying to remind you that “oh yeah, this is based on the Nutcracker -- I know it doesn’t resemble the Nutcracker in plot at all, but it’s definitely based on the Nutcracker!! 8D”

+The editing at points in this was really choppy and messy. There were quite a few tracking shots that got way up into the actor’s personal bubble, even in scenes that weren’t supposed to be uncomfortable or weird. For example, there’s a moment when Louise, wearing her mother’s old dress, comes to check in on Clara and their father -- the camera keeps the reveal of what she looks like a surprise until after showing the father’s awed reaction for a long moment, but because we the audience have never seen this dress or even a picture of the mother wearing it, we feel nothing when the dress is finally revealed. There’s no emotional gut-punch that would’ve been there if we saw a familiar dress on someone else, so the editing choice seems pointless.

+Even though most of the costumes were pretty, the hair and make-up choices were sometimes bizarre, even for characters that were supposed to be pretty. When Sugarplum does Clara’s hair up all princess-y, it’s supposed to glamorous, but it just looks ridiculous. I also wish that the Regents for the Flower and Snowflake Kingdoms had looked a little less cartoonish -- did we have to have the Snowflake guy have icicle bangs messily dribbling into his eyes? Admittedly both him and the Flower Regent were pretty useless, but their silly designs didn’t exactly make them more appealing. There were also two unfunny “comic relief soldiers” with their hair drawn badly onto their heads, and I don’t know, it just wasn’t a particularly appealing look for characters we theoretically are supposed to like watching. Louise also has a rather odd hairstyle in her first appearances that doesn’t communicate her supposedly feminine and mature character, which is supposed to be a contrast to Clara, but still likable -- instead it makes her look over-the-top and silly.

+Even though many of the visuals were nice enough to look at, there wasn’t much that I haven’t seen before. If you edited footage of the Four Realms alongside Wonderland from Alice Through the Looking Glass and Oz from Oz the Great and Powerful, I think you’d be hard-pressed to tell where one starts and another begins at points. The Christmasy colors you see in the “real world” really should have been dialed up for the fantasy sequences, but instead, there’s not much of a shift excluding seeing people with pink cotton candy and flowery vines for hair. Many of these supposedly doll characters don’t even . resemble toys with hinges or knobs or anything: they basically look like oddly dressed humans. Even a color palette shift would have been helpful in separating the two worlds -- for instance, having a more white/brown/yellow color scheme with pops of red and green for the real world and more of a pink/purple/blue/white color scheme for the Four Realms might have made each one more visually distinctive. It also would have made Clara pop out more if she’d been dressed in a more “ordinary” color scheme (like a pale yellow) that made her stand apart from the most fantastical backgrounds (perhaps touched with a cool lavender or light blue).

At one point I tried to pretend that this film wasn’t an adaptation of The Nutcracker. I asked myself, “if this wasn’t based on the famous ballet you love so much, would you like it? Could it stand apart as its own thing?” And unfortunately, the answer I kept coming back to was, “...It can’t be its own thing, because it’s taken too many ideas from other sources that did them much better.”

A young girl discovering a magical world while wandering around a strange house? The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

A whimsical land of fantastical creatures that can only be saved by a special child? The Neverending Story.

A coming-of-age story where a girl navigates a world of fantasy and adventure to find herself? Labyrinth.

A world of magic and science where good and evil are not what they seem and an ordinary girl can be the princess of a lost kingdom? Castle in the Sky.

And honestly, if all I can think of when looking back on the movie I just saw are the ballet it took its title from and other better movies...what does that say about The Nutcracker and the Four Realms? It breaks my heart, as I so wanted Disney to adapt this classic story, but I wanted a full-length animated musical -- something in the vein of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty -- where any changes made to the plot and characters enhanced the story as opposed to distracted from it. Maybe someday, way down the road, Disney will realize their mistake and do The Nutcracker the right way...whether they do or don’t, though, I’m afraid this Nutcracker movie is doomed to fade from public consciousness, and even though there clearly was hard work put into it, thanks to the overall vision and script, the finished product is so forgettable that I can’t say it deserves better.

Overall Grade: D

#the nutcracker and the four realms #reviews #disney #spoilers #opinion #oh boy here i go #analysis #the nutcracker #the nutcracker and the mouse king #fairy tales #ballet

24 notes · View notes

highbuttonsports · 3 years

Text

Calgary vs Ottawa (2021) flames senators - Bing images

Resilience

Like a bad Vietnam flashback, the Calgary Flames must have been sitting in the dressing room with pools of sweat on floor wondering what just happened after Thursday nights game against the Ottawa Senators. Things couldn’t have gone much worse on a night where optimism was trending up coming into it. After taking 3 of a possible 4 points to the division leading Maple Leafs the previous 2 games in Toronto, the Flames were feeling good about the direction their game was heading. Sure, it wasn’t a perfect couple games by any means but given what transpired Saturday night against the Edmonton Oilers it was a huge improvement. The Oilers took it to the Flames to a tune of 7-1 and handed them, what at the time was thought to be, their worst loss of the season. That loss left everyone frustrated and wondering how to move forward. Well, they answered that by going into Toronto and shutting out the high-powered Leafs 3-0 behind the stellar goaltending of David Rittich. Big Save Dave was pressed into action after starter Jacob Markstrom couldn’t play due to an upper body injury. That remained the case the following game against Toronto, as Rittich and the Flames would try to carry that momentum into it.

Like the previous game, Calgary’s game plan appeared to be focussed on using tight defence to manufacture offence in transition. It was just as successful as they minimized scoring chances even while having to kill too many penalties. A problem they had all season as they have been short handed the 3rd most times in the league. Thanks to a PK that is operating at 80% (13th in the NHL), they were able to kill all 4 Toronto powerplays. That made for 11 straight successful PK’s against them which usually isn’t a good recipe for success especially when facing the 4th best PP. Of course, to have a good PK it usually comes down to the goaltending. Rittich once again closed the door on everything the Leafs threw at him. The Maple Leafs fired 39 shots and he was up to the task on all of them...almost. David was a minute and a half away from his 2nd consecutive shut out versus them when it all fell apart. With a 1-0 lead on a late period Mangiapane goal, Toronto pulled their goalie for an extra attacker. It almost backfired, but half a puck width is what stood between them and a 2-goal victory. The puck hit the post of an empty net and stayed out giving the Leafs hope. That unfortunate event turned into a game tying goal by William Nylander and forced overtime. It was Willy who scored again and won it in the extra frame for Toronto. That was such a disappointing way to end what was a successful 2 games to build off of. Sometimes those losses hurt more than the blowouts because the team was so close to winning. It can truly feel like something was taken from them or they let it slip away. The key is to not dwell on that missed opportunity and instead focus on all the positives that lead to being so close to victory.

Well, maybe the Flames took the sting of that loss with them to Ottawa the following night. In what can only be described as the worst loss of the season, the whole team decided not to show up for the game. At least that’s what it looked like. They seemed to get beat to every loose puck, lose every puck battle, and couldn’t generate any offence whatsoever. Every time they entered the offensive zone they were pressed to boards and unable to get any separation for a meaningful shot. Even David Rittich couldn’t bail them out as he was forced into playing back-to-back games with Markstrom missing another game. On top of that, all the same issues that plagued Calgary before popped up again. They started slow in finding themselves down 2-0 less than 10 minutes into the game as the Sens scored goals in 1:42. The Flames were yet again playing catch up facing a 1st intermission deficit. The shots on goal heavily favoured the Sens too as they held a 13-5 advantage. It was an awful start against what was suppose to be an inferior opponent that struggles to score. Ottawa is 24th in the NHL in goals for per game at 2.59 while they are the worst at giving up goals at 3.86/game. Calgary is actually worse at scoring coming in at 2.44 goals/game. Yet in the views of the hockey world, they are supposed to be the team more poised for success right now. There they were playing comeback hockey though. The Flames came out better to start the 2nd period, with Lucic scoring 1:41 into the period. It was his 1st goal in 9 games as he continues to drag that $5.25 million cap hit around with him. That put them back in the game, but it was short lived. 3 minutes later Lucic got stripped of the puck by Connor Brown to make it a 2-goal hole again. In fact, Lucic was responsible for giving the puck away on all 3 Ottawa goals. That doesn’t take any blame away from the listless effort of the whole team though. At the halfway mark of the game, they had only 6 SOG! It doesn’t matter how many goals the other team scores if you aren’t going to put any pressure on the opposing goalie. Things went from bad to worse from that moment on. The Sens took a 4-1 lead on what appeared to be a shoot in from just over center ice by Erik Brannstrom. At least that’s what Rittich thought. He tried cheating behind the net to intercept it, only to be fooled with a direct shot on net that he was unable to scramble back into position to stop. That was an ugly was the end an ugly night for him. After a coach’s timeout and then a t.v. timeout, Coach Ward mercifully pulled the frustrated tender. After 2 stellar performances Rittich was unable to make up for all the short comings of the team on this night. It was obvious he didn’t take that lightly either, as he could be seen walking down the tunnel towards the dressing room and smashing his stick. That about summed up the mood of the team and any fan watching this debacle. The only positive from this game is back up goalie Artyom Zagidulin got to see his 1st career NHL action. It’s not how he wanted to see it I am sure, but a nice moment for him regardless. He did give up a couple more goals to make it a 6-1 final, but by that point the game was out of hand anyways. Yes, the goaltending was bad giving up 6 goals on 31 shots but there was enough blame to go around. From the goaltending to the D to the forwards, there just wasn’t enough compete all around. There wasn’t any intensity either in what was billed as the meeting of the Tkachuk brothers. The game featured no penalties, which is a rarity in the modern NHL where penalties are assessed for the simple placing of a stick against the arm of the puck carrier. Maybe that’s exactly how Ottawa wanted to play it. Maybe it was the result of the Flames playing their 3rd game in 4 nights. Maybe they took the Senators for granted. Maybe it was just one of those games. Regardless, how they would answer that performance the next game would show what this team really is all about. If they came out flat once again and lost, the vultures would start circling.

It’s odd to say that after 21 games the Flames were at a point where the next game could decide how the next 35 would go, but here they were. Coming off their worst loss of the season, it was about character and resilience. It was about showing the fight the team had left in it. It would be easy to roll over and feel sorry for themselves. It would be easy to look at the standings and see the gap between them and the top as insurmountable. That’s not what a team with the leadership of captain Mark Giordano and Matthew Tkachuk does though. With 3 of the next 4 against the same Sens an opportunity still presented itself to pile up some points and jump back into a playoff spot. The team ahead of them, in the Montreal Canadiens, was having their own set of problems. There was still plenty of time to turn things around and cause havoc in the divisional hierarchy. However, that had to start the next game.

In Ottawa and without top netminder Jacob Markstrom for a 4th straight game, that would be a challenge. They brought him in for situations just like this. To be the guy to stop the bleeding and right a struggling team. With him out, it’s a lot to ask of backup Rittich to be that guy for long stretches. Even though he had shown back in Toronto he could do it, the team needed to come together. As well, Coach Ward decided to shake the lines up to give the players a fresh look and feel. He moved Lindholm from center to the right side of Monahan and Gaudreau. Backlund moved up to the second line between Tkachuk and Mangiapane. And Same Bennett was moved back to his more natural center position with Lucic and Dube. Those moves paid quick dividends as less than 5 mins into the game it was 2-0. They scored those 2 goals in a span of 37 seconds on the backs of goals from Valamaki (1st of the season) and Backlund. That was just the start they needed to gain confidence and quickly put the doubts seeded from last game behind them. They didn’t let up either, extending their lead to 3-1 after 1 period and a 6-2 lead after 2 periods. The newly formed Tkachuk-Backlund-Mangiapane seen this biggest boost in accounting for half of the goals and 7 points between them. With that type of offensive explosion, I expect these lines will carry forward to the next few games at least. The game was never in doubt from the drop of the puck, but even so Rittich was good when he had to be in stopping 31 of 34 shots. There is hope that Markstrom will be back for Mondays rematch the Ottawa, but if not Rittich will certainly be back between the pipes for a fifth straight start.

So, at .500 and 1 point behind the struggling Canadiens, Calgary would love nothing more than to end their 5-game eastern road trip with another win. That would give them a 7 of a possible 10 points on the trip, turning what was a low mark 6-1 loss during it into a success. Such is the highs and lows of an NHL season. The key is not to get too high on the highs and too low on the lows. It is critical for a team to remain even keeled. If they don’t it can unravel pretty quick and a couple losses can turn into a half dozen. Those types of losing streaks must be avoided in a season where the standings can swing dramatically one way or the other. Much like the way the outlook of this Flames team swung from Thursday to Sunday. Where in the former all seemed lost, now in the latter resilience and hope spring forward.

*all stats provided by NHL.com

By: Jaymee Kitchenham

#hockey #nhl news #sports #calgary flames

0 notes