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1nvad3rz1m · 2 years

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You (along with several people) bring up the show bible, when it comes to Zim's age, but even if they originally planned him to be a kid, the show bible was there to give a concept, that was not exactly finalized, the Irkens for example had a different name for their species back then. Also there is an another show, Star VS The Forces of Evil. She was supposed to be a middle schooler in the original premise, but they decided to age her up for the final product: she became a 14 year old, but that doesn't mean they retconned her age and she's still 10-12. Just because you plan something, doesn't mean it can't change into something later that you think fits more with what you want to tell. Although I am not even sure that's the exact case with Zim too, since besides the "two kids" bit, he also gets called a spaceman, if I remember correctly.

What am I saying is that you can headcanon him whatever, but I don't think the show bible counts as an evidence.

(Although, I admit some things are confuse me, like other people pointed out that he is smaller in the begginning of the series and actually has a gradual growth, not just a redesign, like I originally thought, but there is also a cancelled plot for an episode, where he gets drunk on slushies, and it is played for a joke, so... The latter personally leaves a bitter taste in my mouth if I view him as a tween/teen, but the growing confuses me in that regard, so I think I understand the people who say giving Zim a human age ruins it for them.)

Never said that was the case, of course things can change from bible to production but the thing is nothing concretely changed. In the case of star she's given a specific age and wasn't even that far off from the og age. She is specifically said to be 14, zim is specifically said to be nothing.

Things we consider when we talk about zim's age are stuff like: did you grow up with the show, because in that case you're probably more inclined to have aged zim around dib which is usually close to the viewers own age (this is partly my own reasoning).

Also how zim acts and appears, in every human instance he's aged around dib even if he's in disguise he is considered to be a child. irkens dont age him at all, other than gag cutbacks to him destroying things but that proves nothing about age to irkens. it's incredibly easy to argue irkens don't have the same aging system and once they're out of smeethood they're sent to work. No child to adult pipeline, just a working irken citizen regardless of actual age.

I don't want to say "minor coded" but that's kind of the case. visually zim appears to be equivalent to a human child, acts equivalent to a human child, and is overall treated as one. to me it leaves a bad taste in my mouth to try and treat him like an adult as he is in canon. This is partially due to my own feelings having always considered him a kid, but I just could never get with the idea he's the equivalent of a human adult just looking at the show itself. and most new fans seem to agree because its not until they learn jhonen said so that they think zims a similar age to dib.

"spaceman" is generally just another term for alien. He's also called "spaceboy" pretty frequently. He's also called lizard, which indicates nothing at all. Invader zim is a funny haha show, they use whatever is needed to make the joke continuity be damned. i don't think that's enough personally to sell me on the idea zim is an adult, and jhonen just saying so isnt enough either because jhonens said a LOT of thing that fans disregard every day (dib has a third ear, zim cares for no one and nothing especially not gir, etc etc)

To me the dynamic changes drastically if zim is an adult, i dont even like zadf is zim is an adult because it feels really weird. the dynamic is much more endearing if theyre a similar age, going through similar struggles, because thats kind of what the show itself implies. zim and dib are parallels to eachother, and the parallel is ruined if one is just a stupid adult and the other is a misunderstood kid. the bible only helps us provide reasoning but its not a smoking gun, theres a lot more to consider.

#mars talky tag #long response

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blogs-of-our-lives · 5 years

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I’m sorry to say this, but this may very well be the last of the Blogs of Our Lives post.

I’ve had a lot of fun writing for this, but it’s just not what I want to do with my life. And as much as I enjoy it, it’s taking time away from other creative projects. For my tens of viewers, it’s not the end of a chapter, but the beginning of a new one. Thank you all for reading, and believing that I can make something wonderful and funny out of trash. I just want you all to know that deep down, from the bottom of my heart, no matter how much love I have for you all, I will never ever ever love you as much as I hate Brightburn.

Brightburn suuuuuuuucks. It sucks sucks sucks. I couldn’t wait until later in the post to say that. I had to lead with how trash the movie was, and now I’m going to spend the next couple pages explaining why it’s trash. It’s so bad that I – shitty movie connoisseur, who is making himself watch Days of our Lives and write about it – hated the movie so much that I decided to write a whole paper about it just to prevent someone else from being tricked into seeing it.

I will start with the only good thing about the movie. The concept. Brightburn is about a young kid (I’d estimate about sixth grade) who discovers he has super powers akin to that of a god. He has super strength, he has super speed, he can fly, he can shoot lasers out of his eyes, and he’s almost indestructible. Essentially Superman. It’s not a particularly original idea, but I was intrigued with the fact that the kid seemed to almost immediately become evil. This isn’t particularly farfetched. In fact, psychopathic traits are fairly common amongst children. The brain isn’t done developing, and in some senses the child is a psychopath. Kids simply grow out of it. Luckily, kids are small, they’re weak, they can’t drive, they can’t vote, and they can’t even get a movie ticket to an R rated movie like Brightburn, which I refuse to grant the respect of italicization. The amount of damage a kid could do is extremely limited. So the idea of a middle-schooler with superpowers is kind of terrifying. Imagine a child without empathy who you can kick your ass. If you tell them to go to bed, they can throw you through a wall. And it’s not a one in a million chance the kid will be a psychopath. Plus, when I was a kid I used to think when it rained somewhere it rained everywhere. It blew my mind that it was raining in my hometown but not in my friend’s town. When my dad was a kid he was terrified of this movie called Killdozer. About a bulldozer that came to life and killed people. In his words, “What are you going to do, hide from it? It’ll just bulldoze everything.” Kids are idiots.

Side note, I hope it’s not lost on anyone that I italicized Killdozer but not Brightburn. It’s intentional. I respect a movie about a killer bulldozer more than a $12 million movie.

Anyway, that was the only good part of the movie. The concept. Now I’m going to tear it apart, starting with the pacing. Nobody really knows or cares about the pacing when it’s done right. When it’s done wrong, the movies often feel like they stagnate or are rushed in parts. Brightburn is one of the worst examples I can think of. The buildup just drags on and on and on and on. By the time [SPOILER ALERT] Brendon (or whatever the fucking kid’s name is) turns evil, we had been sitting in that theater for a solid hour. Maybe more. That’s two thirds of the movie (including credits) that was spent just building up. So now, when we finally get the action payoff, it felt like the movie was rushing to the end. The kid destroys most of the house, kills four people, and then blows up a plane in like twenty minutes. It’s like trying to write on a piece of paper and running out of room so you have to make the letters smaller and smaller to fit on one page. But it’s a thousand times worse than that, because the paper had a set length. You could plan out where the letters needed to go and how big they can be. A movie isn’t made with a length in mind. So it’s like reading a sentence but the letters get smaller and smaller for no clear reason. It felt like they didn’t know how to end the movie so they just threw some crap together and tried to play it so fast we wouldn’t realize how trash it was.

On to the acting. I have no real complaints. The mom and the dad did pretty good jobs. Even the kid did a decent job. At times it was pretty weak, but I think most of that was on the writing.

Fuck the writing. The Chekov’s guns of the movie were stupid and obvious. In one of the first scenes, the mother whistles during a game of hide and seek in order to get him to whistle back, like an off-brand Marco Polo. My editor literally leaned over to me (like two minutes into the movie) and whispered “I bet that’s going to come back later.” It did. Later on in the movie, the dad comments to the mom that it was strange Braxton had never broken a bone or even got a cut. Like two scenes later, the kid finds his space ship and immediately cuts his hand on the metal. Sure enough, it comes back later in the film, in a way so stupid that I’m going to struggle to put it into words. The mother jumps to freedom from her house and somehow cuts her hand during the fall. She looks at the cut (which is shaped exactly like Bryson’s and positioned in the exact same place), looks at the barn where the spaceship is hidden, looks back at the cut, and says (I’m paraphrasing) “The spaceship! It’s the only thing that can hurt him.” The biggest sign of a bad writer is when the characters think about what they’re about to do, say what they’re about to do, and then do it. JUST DO IT. I remembered the garbage scene from earlier in the film that established the only thing that can hurt him. Who was that line for? Children who weren’t paying attention? The film was rated R. Maybe they assumed the only people they could trick into seeing this trash were too stupid to follow a plot. And yes, I’m one of the idiots they tricked into watching it. Jokes on them, now I’m tearing their movie apart on my blog with tens of readers.

I’ve told you guys about I, Frankenstein. The movie was worse than that. At least the writing in I, Frankenstein, while bad, followed a formula. There was never a point in which I rolled my eyes, it just in generally wasn’t particularly good. Brightburn, on the other hand, was aggressively bad. It was like all the different facets of a movie (acting, special effects, writing, pacing, visuals) had a competition to be the worst part of this dumpster fire of a film. I’m being too hard on the special effects. They were just wildly unmemorable, not actually bad. But somehow, incredibly, Brightburn was even worse than the sum of its parts. At a certain point, I looked up and started watching the blinking light of the fire alarm. There wasn’t really a pattern to it. I was fascinated. At another point, during the resolution of the movie, a man sitting behind me got out his phone and made a phone call. And you know what, I don’t blame him. It wasn’t like he was taking away from the experience. I was glad he was having more fun than me.

Something I didn’t realize until now, when I looked up Brightburn on Wikipedia to trash how much money went into making it ($6-12 million, so honestly they used the money pretty well), was that it’s called a “superhero horror film.” I took a class my last year in college about Horror as a genre, and the running theme of the class was the question what is horror? I’ll define horror as best as I can, and you are all free to agree or disagree as to whether or not it’s true. I personally do not consider Silence of the Lambs to be a horror film, though it is scary. It’s a crime film. Even if the film contained supernatural elements (like, say, if Hannibal Lecter was a ghost and rather than breaking out of prison he comes back to life), it would still be a crime film. On the other hand, I consider the movie Friday the 13th (the 1980 film with Kevin Bacon, not the trash remake) to be horror. Even if the film contained no supernatural elements, it would still be a horror film. Friday the 13th Part 1 doesn’t actually contain anything supernatural, but if I mentioned one that does (Parts 2-12) I wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity to remind everyone that a young Kevin Bacon not only dies in this movie, but also has a sex scene. It’s arguably his strongest performance.

Returning to my point, a universal part of horror seems to be the haunting. It doesn’t need to be a ghost haunting, it could be a human haunting as well. I’m sure it exists, but a movie about a stalker could easily be classified as horror, depending on the tone of the movie. Hell, The Gift was a great horror movie, and nothing supernatural or even particularly out of the ordinary took place. Looking at IMDB’s top 10 horror movies of all time, it lists The Evil Dead, The Exorcist, The Shining, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Alien, The Thing, Nightmare on Elm Street (trash), Psycho, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Of these movies, I haven’t seen Psycho, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or The Exorcist (at least not all the way through). In every single one of the films I have seen, the characters are haunted by some kind of being. In some movies, they’re hunted by it, and in others (particularly the Exorcist), they’re tormented by it. But either way, a haunting is an essential part of every movie. In Silence of the Lambs (IMDB rated it as the 14th best horror movie, naturally), the killer never haunts the characters. He’s a menace, a killer, and a danger to everyone, but he doesn’t haunt them.

Brando from Brightburn never haunts anyone, except for a ten second scene where he spies on his crush, which was honestly more cringey than creepy. So no, it’s not a superhero horror movie. It’s not a horror movie. If you want to call it anything, call it science fiction. The kid’s an alien, for Christ’s sake. Isn’t that like the number one test to see if you’re watching sci-fi? Right now, if you google “horror movies,” Brightburn is one of the first 10 images to appear. THIS IS UNNACEPTABLE.

I’m sure I’ve talked about this before, but horror has always been a trash genre. I don’t want to give off the impression that I’m the horror equivalent of a comic book nerd writing about how The Avengers ruined my childhood and it was all wrong because they got one detail wrong from the source material. [Side note: I really enjoyed Endgame, and at the time of writing this, it is the number one highest grossing film of all time, and honestly it deserves it more than the trash blue cat people movie. It was a really satisfying ending to one of the largest franchises of all time]. Even the golden years of horror, the Friday the 13ths and the Nightmare on Elm Streets and Halloween, are all just… pretty good. The writing was competent, the music and cinematography were original and not bad, but it’s not particularly scary, and it looks like every horror movie will eventually become that way, except for the ones that rely on cheap jump scares. That’s the nature of horror, I suppose. It preys on a current and relevant fear, and as that fear becomes irrelevant, so does the movie. So when I complain about modern horror, I complain about the cheap, shitty writing that goes into by uncreative and unoriginal people that disappoints everyone. Modern horror is an easy paycheck. It’s cheap and it’s surefire. The Brightburn garbage raised $30 million dollars on a budget of $6 million. Pet Semetary, Crawl, and Annabelle Comes Home raised a collective $366 million to a collective budget of $66 million. That is a fucking absurd return on investment. None of these movies (except for Crawl, kinda) did anything different. Pet Semetary was a remake. Annabelle Comes Home is a continuation of the Garbage Cinematic Uni-garbage-verse that spawned from The Conjuring. So horror has become a yearly money-maker for big production companies. Just put out some trash that will surprise (not scare) people, and watch the dollars roll in. Financially, this is the golden age of horror. They can make anything with a jump scare and make MILLIONS.

I don’t know what the point of all this is. I’m not telling the genre to do better, because it’s doing pretty fine. Midsommar and Us both got pretty good reviews. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark looks pretty good. It’s not like all the talent dried up. There’s still plenty of creative and original people working on horror movies, and they’re making some really good stuff. I guess it boils down to me hating Brightburn on a deep, personal level, and I’m not really sure why. I watch tons of trash. As I type this, I’m looking at my collector’s edition DVD set of Under the Dome. It’s garbage. Truly truly terrible. But there are scenes I liked. Shots I liked. It was made by people who were bad at what they do, but they were still creative. There’s this one episode where the government tries to blow up the dome, and everyone inside thinks they’re going to die. All the characters, thinking they have minutes left on earth, all finally do something. The plot unravels into something much, much, much simpler, as all the characters stop lying or trying to hide their motives. Everything untangles for just a moment, and after they survive the blast unharmed, it leaves the question what next? Sure, the conflicts were childish and silly, and the character arcs were (to put it nicely) poorly handled. But they tried to do something well, and for just a moment they struck gold. There’s nothing like that in Brightburn. There’s not a single scene that I can look at in the movie and say you’re on to something there. Keep working. If I were given the script and a blank check and told to write a better one, I would strip it down to the foundation. I wouldn’t rewrite it, I would delete everything except the core premise and start over.

It just really really hurts, having to type out that this movie was worse than Under the Dome.

I know it’s too late to convince anyone not to see Brightburn. And that’s fine. Sometimes the world moves too fast for you to make a change. But I just want you to know deep down how much I hate that movie. I resent it for wasting my time, my energy, and my money. It’s worse than Days of our Lives.

Fuck you, Brightburn.

Thank you for reading. It means a lot to me.

#brightburn #horror #superhero #movies #the end #fuck this movie

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thoughmymindcouldthink · 5 years

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Alright, I sifted through the exercises from September and have consolidated ideas. So the goal for October is to pick out one of these ideas and map it out so I can go into NaNo at least somewhat prepared. Pantsing used to work for me in high school when I had access to all my mental faculties, but adult me needs a framework to work within if I’m gonna get literally anything done. Fingers crossed.

Amber/Jacob chronicles from last year

I recently went back through the snippets I wrote and saw a frame of a plot. It’s a very weak and bent frame, but you know. The pieces are there. I’m actually interested in the character and there’s a bit of a nonlinear element to it, and I can actually still feel the Anastasia inspiration I drew on, so there might be quite a bit to work with there.

RP OC/Backstory

This is essentially what I tried last year but ended up falling apart in the plot department and losing steam. I’ve since created a new character with a very elaborate backstory, and on top of that I’ve got a couple other less fleshed out character ideas. I could try it out again and dip into backstory reserves where the plot is lacking. I’ll also be playing the character in a campaign through October/November so I’ll likely be able to pull ideas from that. Could possible cobble something together?

Zombie Apocalypse

So in my September exercise, I returned to an apocalyptic/zombie idea three times. I also rewatched santa clarita diet and izombie with mom and the latter is one of those that i feel could be improved upon; I just watched an animated kids’ short abt middle schoolers fighting zombies and living through their apocalypse; I also had a rather visceral zombie dream and it’s Halloween Time so maybe this is the way my brain is pulling me. Little low on the list since I’ve got no characters, plot, or setting, but for the exercises I was adapting places I’m familiar with so maybe that’s a place to start.

Steampunk Lady Pirates

This is a rather vivid idea I’ve had since 9th grade with a solid frame of a world – a vampire apocalypse occurs in the nexus of Hollywood and the main character barely escapes with her life, her younger sister kidnapped. The idea is that humans take refuge in the skies, and years after losing her sister, the main character has assembled a sort of sky pirate crew of women and has a plan to save her sister and possible the world. All I’ve really got for this one is the setting, but I wrote a couple pieces for it last month. Previously I’ve been too afraid to attempt it for NaNo bc it feels like such a grounded idea, but maybe it’s time?

Assorted Others

Other general/genre inspiration I drew from this last month were a) a sea tale – pirates, whaling, something nautical, b) a bff roadtrip - which is what my last completed NaNo was, and which is a genre I continue to write on accident so maybe I’ll take a stab at on purpose, c) nature-based horror – a couple of pieces played on a threatening reverence for nature, which I’m intrigued by, and despite not liking the genre, horror is one of the easiest things to write, imo, and d) redneck lady werewolf – I used a moodboard as a prompt last month and I really love the concept and firmly believe the fictional universe needs female werewolf representation.

Current Events

A last resort could be a sort of visceral venting. I’ve been struggling a lot with recent events and my reaction and I’ve been pointedly avoiding walking through them or talking about them or even writing them down, but that doesn’t stop me from replaying the exact same events over and over and over so maybe if I get them down, it’ll help me process and move on or find another step to a solution... but on the other hand it sounds like a very unpleasant writing experience and I’m not sure it’ll keep me hooked for the month rather than chase me away.

#nano 2019 #pb #AJ Chronicles #archive: vaslp

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