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aboveallarescuer · 3 years

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Transcripts of D&D’s Inside the Episode segments talking about Dany

This is a post with transcripts of all the Inside the Episode videos where show!Dany’s character and storyline are discussed by D&D.

We’ve already had enough of these two hacks, I know, but:

I still think discussions about the show can be productive, especially when similarities and differences between the book characters and show characters are explored. Comparing and contrasting book!Dany with show!Dany certainly brings to light interesting aspects that I may not have considered otherwise and enriches my understanding and appreciation of both of them (especially the former) in a similar way that comparing and contrasting book!Dany with book!Jon, book!Cersei and all the other book characters does.

I had already written transcripts of most of these Inside the Episode features for a while to comment on them in my books vs show reviews. However, since I’m no longer sure if I have enough energy and motivation to continue writing the reviews, I decided to finish writing the transcripts that were missing and to post them already. Maybe this can help people find more evidence that show!Dany’s ending was retconned at the last minute (which is what I firmly believe was the case).

Anyway, y’all know the drill... Expect a lot of mischaracterizations, inconsistencies, double standards, sexist remarks and implications and so on. Never accept what they say uncritically.

1.1: Winter is Coming

BENIOFF: Daenerys Targaryen, her nickname is Dany, basically went into exile from her homeland when she was so small she doesn't even remember it. She is the youngest child of the Mad King, Aerys Targaryen.

WEISS: She's never known her father, she's never known her family, she's never known her homeland, the only thing she's ever known has been her brother. She's been raised by her brother Viserys and Viserys has had his eyes on one thing and one thing only, and that is on regaining the throne that was taken from his father.

BENIOFF: She's had no stability in her life, the only constant has been this brother Viserys, so even though he is a cruel and sadistic older brother and even though he is really quite abusive to her, it's all she knows and she's been forced to - if not trust him, at least to follow his wishes, because not doing so would just lead to more abuse.

TIM VAN PATTEN: Like a lot of characters in the show, she is looking for an identity and a larger purpose in life. I think there's something deep inside her that's asleep, that's there, that she acknowledges and you see her start to acknowledge it, certainly, when she's thrown in with a Dothraki and she's presented with the dragon eggs. You could see this thought process starting, but there is something larger out there that I'm supposed to be a part of. I think she's on board for going back to the kingdom and to finding out about her culture and to having a home.

1.3: Lord Snow

BENIOFF: One of Dany's characteristics that comes to be incredibly important as the story progresses is her hatred of slavery, and I think part of the reason why she has great sympathy for the slaves is that she's grown up in a situation where she's had no power, she's basically been forced to follow the whims of her brother her entire life. Dany has a great deal of sympathy for those who are in difficult circumstances, for those who are the weak and the oppressed, and I think it comes to be one of the most compelling things about her as a character.

WEISS: She's been propriety for all intents and purposes, she's been her brother's slave and so I think she has an affinity for those people and she can actually look at these people and start to think about what their lives likely feel, the empathy with them that is natural to somebody who's sort of a slave herself and I think that she really kind of starts to realize that being somebody ese's property is no good and starts to show the beginnings of the impulse towards freedom that end up playing a much bigger role in her life and in the lives of the people around her as her story progresses.

1.4: Cripples, Bastards and Broken Things

WEISS: Daenerys lashes out at her brother - it's just something that's been building up inside her probably for years and years as long as she remembers.

BENIOFF: She comes to realize that he is a fool, he thinks he's going to go back and reconquer the Seven Kingdoms, he can't conquer anything, he can't even beat her in the fight. She comes to believe that she's heir to the Iron Throne, she sees within herself the power that she wasn't even aware existed.

1.6: A Golden Crown

WEISS: Daenerys comes into the Dothraki horde as an outsider and a lot of her story up to this point has been her finding her place in that world.

DANIEL MINAHAN: Eating this stallion's heart becomes a symbol that she's actually carrying the person who's gonna be the savior of that Dothraki people.

WEISS: This is really the place where, in front of the tribe, she becomes one of them. She disconnects from her brother and her brother sees that and that, in turn, pushes him over the edge. Any importance and love or respect that she draws from these people is respect that he's not gonna be getting, so he's alone.

BENIOFF: After he threatens her unborn child and puts the sword point on her pregnant belly, from that point on, he's dead to her, I mean, quite literally dead to her.

WEISS: When Viserys gets his golden crown, you can see in her face that it doesn't mean anything to her.

BENIOFF: She doesn't look like a little girl anymore.

1.9: Baelor

BENIOFF: Dany's high point with the horde is probably when she eats the stallion's heart and they're really behind their queen and then she starts doing things that they frown upon. For instance, when Drogo gets sick, people start to blame her, because she had this sorceress treat him and, you know, blood magic is very magic against the Dothraki code.

WEISS: Magic is pushed to the periphery of this world and, literally, it's way across the narrow sea in the east and it's way north of the Wall and also, it's very peripheral to people's daily lives. This isn't a world where a wizard shows up with a big pointy hat and a staff and creates all sorts of magical displays. This is a world that is more like our own world in terms of the role that the supernatural has in it, but Mirri is a source of actual magic.

1.10: Fire and Blood

BENIOFF: Mirri Maz Duur is a priestess of the lamb people and she sees a chance to get revenge, not only to avenge her people, but also to prevent this guy from doing it again to other people. From her point of view, it's completely just what she does.

WEISS: She has a pretty good point... I mean, these people did come in, completely rape, pillage and murder her entire village.

BENIOFF: Of course, from Daenerys's point of view, this woman betrayed her. She put her trust in this woman after showing her kindness and now the woman has turned around and betrayed that kindness and, again, it's a theme throughout the story that no good deed goes unpunished.

WEISS: We have people doing terrible things to people that you love and yet, if you were in their shoes and you knew what they know, you would probably do the same thing. Everybody is doing what they're doing for reasons that are grounded in the real human psychology and not in the fact that they're wearing a white hat or that they're wearing the black hat. Daenerys has an understanding that she has to give herself over to something larger than herself without knowing exactly what's going to happen, but she knows that, when she walks into that pyre, she's not going to burn up. Never in her mind is it an act of suicide, even though, in the minds of everybody around her, that's, of course, what it looks like.

BENIOFF: It's the crucial climax and Daenerys is standing there in the pyre and she's become the mother of dragons and the woman you would follow to the ends of the world because that's what those remaining followers are going to do.

WEISS: Dragons in this world are the ultimate source of power and, in a world where authority is directly derived from power, they're the ultimate source of authority and the people who had dragons were the people who shaped the world.

BENIOFF: Dragons are magical, but they're also supposed to be, in this world, real creatures and so, we're looking at bats and pterodactyls and other kind of great flying creatures like that for inspiration and always wanting them to look real, we don't want them to just look like magical creatures that have just popped up.

WEISS: If they survive to maturity and they grow to the size of school buses or however large they end up getting, as their mother, she becomes a very different person than the frightened little girl we saw being sold off to a barbarian in the first episode.

2.6: The Old Gods and the New

WEISS: This whole season is really the season where Dany learns the lesson of self-reliance, she's never, it's a very painful lesson for her to learn, I mean, she's lost all her people, she's lost her husband, she's lost her bloodriders. The temptation for her has always been to lean on someone else, a man of one kind or another. So, I think for her, what she's learning in this episode, especially, is that she can't trust in other people, ultimately, she ends up in a place where she needs to do things for herself and she needs to do things that nobody in the world could possibly do, except her.

BENIOFF: Dany is so defined by her dragons, they're so much a part of her identity at this point, they define her so much that when they're taken from her, it's almost like she reverts to the pre-dragon Daenerys, you know, everyone is a bit defined by who they were when they were an adolescent, you know, no matter how old you get, no matter how powerful you get, and Daenerys was a scared, timid, abused adolescent and I think when her dragons are taken for her, all those feelings, all those memories and emotions are triggered and come back and all the confidence that she's won over the last several months, it's as if that just evaporates and she's back to being a really frightened little girl.

2.10: Valar Morghulis

BENIOFF: I think there's a real, fairly radical change in Daenerys that happens over the course of the last couple episodes of the season, which is... For most of this season, she's been looking for help from others, you know, and asking for help and, by the end of the season, she realizes that she has to do it herself, she's got to help herself and that she's, she can't ask others to give her power, she's got to take it and that she can't rely on anyone else, really. You know, Daenerys Targaryen is not in a position where she can inherit the Iron Throne, the only way she's going to take the Iron Throne and take back the Seven Kingdoms is to conquer them and she's starting to learn what that means, I don't think she really knew before, even when she's asking Khal Drogo to conquer them for her, I don't think she really knew what that meant and she's starting to and it's gonna mean warfare, it's gonna mean slaughter, it's gonna mean a lot of people dying because that's, you know, the only way to conquer anything is through destruction and, I think by the end of the second season, you're seeing her really start to come into her own as the Mother of Dragons and the last of the Targaryens.

3.1: Valar Dohaeris

BENIOFF: For a great leader who is doing something unpopular for a certain segment, whether it's the Warlocks or the slave masters or whatnot, she's creating a lot of enemies, and powerful enemies, and those people are going to try to stop her regardless of how powerful she becomes, and it's something she's actually, in a weird way, used to, because she grew up running from assassins with her brother, you know, from the time, from the earliest time she can remember, she was being spirited from one city to another one step ahead of Robert Baratheon and the assassins, because there were so many people who wanted to destroy the Targaryen family and make King Robert happy and now there are thousands out there for all sorts of different reasons because she's made even more enemies, but, I think in her mind this is just the price you pay for being Daenerys Targaryen, for being the last of the Targaryens, and it's not going to stop her.

Anatomy of a Scene: Daenerys Meets the Unsullied

WEISS: Dany spent the first two seasons of the show leaning on men - her brother, Drogo, Jorah Mormont, Xaro Xhoan Daxos. She came out of season two realizing that the only person that she can completely trust is herself.

BENIOFF: Dany has her lovable side, but she is also ruthless, and she is also fiercely ambitious. What she wants, more than anything, is to return home and to reclaim her birthright.

CLARKE: She needs the manpower to go back and conquer the Iron Throne and to be able to right the wrongs that she sees going on around her.

MINAHAN: She's been brought to Astapor, where she's reluctantly going to meet with slave traders. Her quest in this is to build an army without taking slaves.

Comments from Charlie Somers (location manager) and Christina Moore (supervising art director) that don't have anything to do with the storyline

BENIOFF: The Unsullied were kidnapped as babies from their home countries and brought to Astapor and trained in the ways of the spear and castrated.

EMMANUEL: They won't do anything without the command to do so first.

Comment from Tommy Dunne (weapons master) that doesn't have anything to do with the storyline

CLARKE: She's being introduced to the Unsullied by Kraznys, the slave master in control of them.

EMMANUEL: Kraznys is being quite insulting to Daenerys. And Missandei very cleverly smoothes out her translation, just her initiative doing that shows her intelligence.

CLARKE: Dany sees a lot of herself in her and can kind of see that it's a young girl who's capable of much more than the position she's in. She's his No 1 slave. If you were in the UN, she would be the translator for everyone.

WEISS: Kraznys speaks a version of Valyrian that's been bastardized and mixed with other local languages.

Comment from Majella Hurley (dialect coach) that doesn't have anything to do with the storyline

CLARKE: She's struggling with the moral aspect of the way that these cities are run. And it's something she's been grappling with because they are an army of slaves, which she fundamentally has moral issues with due to the fact that she herself was a slave.

WEISS: The only way she can make the world a better place is to become the biggest slaveowner in the world.

BENIOFF: She's put into a difficult position, and she's got her advisors whispering in her ears.

GLEN: Jorah encourages her to get over her moral scrupules, with taking an army that were duty-bound to follow whatever leader it was, and that could change in an instant.

BENIOFF: Idealism is wonderful, but it's not gonna happen if you're idealistic, you gotta be a realist. She feels like she has this almost divine mission and nothing is gonna prevent her from achieving it.

WEISS: What she wants to do isn't just conquest for the sake of conquest, but it's really conquest for the sake of making the world a better place, and she's a revolutionary in that sense.

BENIOFF: For Daenerys to win, ultimately, she's gonna have to be just as ruthless as the others, and maybe even moreso.

3.3: Walk of Punishment

BENIOFF: Dany has her lovable side, but she is also ruthless, and she is also fiercely ambitious and, funnily, like a Littlefinger style ambition where she's trying to climb this, you know, the social ladder. It's almost like a Joan of Arc kind of ambition where she feels like she has this almost divine mission and nothing's going to prevent her from achieving it, and that might mean sacrificing those who are closest to her.

WEISS: Giving away one of the dragons seems like a completely insane thing to do, especially the biggest one. I mean, we know that, historically, the biggest dragons were those bigger than school buses and they were weapons of mass destruction and able to lay cities to waste in minutes, and no matter how big or effective your army of 8,000 soldiers is. Taking even a small city is going to be a kind of a dangerous prospect for them, and the idea that she's going to give away what they see is her real future for a chance at a small army now seems insane to them.

3.4: And Now His Watch is Ended

WEISS: We never really got this, a sense of her capacity for cruelty. She's surrounded by people who are terrible people, but haven't done anything to her personally, and it's interesting to me that, as the sphere of her empathy widens, the sphere of her cruelty widens as well.

BENIOFF: I think she becomes harder to dismiss, you know, for a long time people have been saying, even if she was alive, you know, really, the only threat she poses is her name, she's a Targaryen, great, but she's a little girl in the edge of the world, so she's starting to knock on people's doors a little bit.

WEISS: All at once she becomes a major force to be reckoned with, she spent a lot of time kind of banging her fists on the doors and declaring that she was owed the Iron Throne by right, but now she's stepped in her own as a conqueror.

BENIOFF: Dany is becoming more and more viable as a threat, you know, both, you know, in attaining an army and because she's the mother of these three dragons who are only gonna get more and more fearsome.

3.7: The Bear and the Maiden Fair

WEISS: Daenerys is coming into her own in a powerful way in the season. She's always been very negatively predisposed towards slavery because she knows what it feels like to be property, I mean, she was a very fancy slave for all intents and purposes, she was somebody who was sold to another man, taken against her will and I think that her feelings about slavery have started to really inform her reasons for wanting the Iron Throne, it's finally started to occur to her that, if I want to take on this responsibility, it's almost - it's incumbent upon me to do something with it, and she sees this great wrong, probably the greatest possible wrong surrounding her, and she's decided that she's not just going to take back the Iron Throne because it's her right, she's gonna take back the Iron Throne because she is the person to make the world a better place than it is. She is going to not just take it, she's gonna use it for something greater than herself.

3.10: Mhysa

BENIOFF: We see her get an army in episode four, and here in the finale you see her get her people, really, because she's got, she has her Dothraki followers that don't number very many, and she's got the people she's freed from the other cities, but now she is, it's not just - it's something even more, something almost even more religious about it than just a queen, I mean, she's the mother of these people.

WEISS: And it creates a whole new dynamic between her and the people that she's fighting for that she's gonna have to deal with in the future.

BENIOFF: The way they treat her, the way they lift her up and she is... something that has its... A revelation from a prophecy and that glorious destiny is coming true.

WEISS: Here it seemed like it was really important to let us know just how many people were counting on her to see the full extent of, mostly, the full extent of her army and the tens of thousands of people who flooded out of these gates to pay tribute to her. And then, keeping the dragons in play because they're always such an important part of her identity, we just want to tie all of that together in one great shot.

4.5: First of His Name

WEISS: This scene shows Dany learning a lesson that all revolutionaries learn at one point or another, which is that conquering in many ways is a whole lot easier than ruling.

BENIOFF: This is the pivotal moment for Daenerys because, for so long, her sole goal was getting back to Westeros, conquering Westeros and sitting on the Iron Throne and becoming the queen that she believes she has every right to be, now she has the opportunity.

WEISS: She is driven by a kind of a deep empathy, a much deeper empathy than probably anybody else in the show. It's something that makes her as charismatic as she is to people, because they get a sense of that sincerity of it. Her empathy allows her to look at the people of Westeros and say, why the hell would they follow me if I haven't proven myself through my actions to be somebody worth following, why would they let me rule if I hadn't proven myself to be somebody who has ruled well somewhere else?

4.7: Mockingbird

WEISS: In season one, Dany's sexuality was central to her transformation from basically a piece of propriety into a full-fledged human being and with Drogo the first thing that she took charge of was the only thing that was available to her at the time, which was her own body, and she came into her own as an adult, really, amongst the Dothraki, who were not shy about their bodies in any way. That Dany is not really cut out to be a virgin queen and Daario is a bad boy who seems like a good idea to her at this moment, and she takes her prerogatives as a powerful person as powerful people sometimes do, and yet he's made himself more than available. She didn't ever expect Jorah to find out, she loves Jorah in her own way, she makes it very clear to him that he's far more important to her means, far more to her than a person like Daario ever could, just not in the way that Jorah might like.

BENIOFF: He's been in love with Dany from pretty much her wedding day and now he sees this young upstart, who just entered her life relatively recently, come into his world and sweep her off her feet. I think he's both incredibly jealous and also a little bit angry at Dany that she would fall for a man who he considers so unworthy of her.

4.8: The Mountain and the Viper

WEISS: It's hard to keep a thing like that covered up forever, especially when your enemies are so invested in putting a wedge between you, I mean, they are a good team, they compliment each other nicely in lots of ways that are really troublesome to the Lannisters especially, so it shouldn't be a surprise, I think it's just one of those things that, in hindsight, he probably should've told her a long time ago, and it's more the fact that he kept it from her than the fact that he did it, which seals his fate. I think, from Dany's perspective, this is the most earth-shattering thing that could possibly happen to her. He's her rock and her anchor, the way in which he stops her from flying off into potentially dangerous directions, and when someone that important to you, that central to you, is shown to be not just a liar, but when their entire relationship to you is shown to be based upon a lie, I think it poisons every corner of her world with doubt and mistrust. From his perspective, he may have started as an informer, but she is his whole reason for being, at this point, I mean, he's completely given up on his desire to return to Westeros in any way except by her side. His home now is wherever she happens to be, so this is really like being expelled from the Garden for him, this is the worst thing that could happen to either of them. For her, it's her child; when Viserys put her child in danger and pointed the sword at her stomach, you saw some switch flipping her, you saw something change and she watched him die without blinking an eye, even though he was her family and the other family she had ever known, and when she realizes that Jorah was also responsible for putting that child in danger, I think that's what closes the door on him forever.

4.10: The Children

WEISS: Ruling is about maintaining order and creating an environment for your people that is safe and her dragons, which were such an asset for scaring the shit out of everybody and making people throw down their shores and run in the other direction when she would come knocking as a conqueror, they're becoming a liability that she can't afford anymore. It's one thing to be killing people's goats and you can pay off a goat herder for his goats, you can't pay off a goat herder for his children. So, she realizes that she has to put the interests of her people ahead of her dragons, who are the only real children she's ever going to have.

5.2: The House of Black and White

BENIOFF: There always seemed to be this sense of "manifest destiny" with Dany and that she was going to take what was hers with fire and blood, and she has, but there's a difference between taking and keeping and there's a difference between conquering and ruling and she's finding out that the latter is much more complicated. It's impossible to rule over a city as large as Meereen without infuriating certain people.

WEISS: Dany is trying her very best to do the right thing, to be a good ruler, and sometimes, within the context of this world, being a good ruler means doing things like executing Mossador, it's about laying down a justice that's blind and impartial and applying it evenly to everybody, former master or former slave.

BENIOFF: And, in this case, with Mossador, it's very complicated for her because she has a great deal of affection for this young man who was a slave until she came and that's the reason he was selected to represent the free people on her council and he's been a strong ally of hers and yet he disobeyed her and so, from her mind, she's making a very hard-headed but fair decision, and in the minds of the freedmen and freedwomen watching this execution, she's turning on them and she's executing one of her children, one of the people who called her a mhysa.

WEISS: When she steps up and actually does that, of course, she finds that she doesn't win any friends for her blind justice and her commitment to the law that she alienates her supporters and the people who hated her hate her as much as they did before, so it's one of those things where doing the right thing doesn't have any immediate rewards associated with it, it just leads to a riot that almost gets her head caved in with a bunch of rocks.

5.6: Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken

(Dany doesn't appear in this episode; D&D discuss events from episode 5.5 here.)

BENIOFF: Looking at Dany in Meereen, she's facing a real tricky dilemma so far in that she's trying to create stability in the city where she's a foreigner, she's an outside power who's coming with a foreign army and she seizes power and about half the city hates her, so the way she's trying to stem the civil war is in part by police action and in part by marrying the head of an ancient family and creating an alliance with those old families and actually trying to bring them onto her side by marrying Hizdahr.

WEISS: She doesn't like Hizdahr, she doesn't trust Hizdahr, but she has enough wisdom to understand that she's not going to get this done by smashing heads alone, she's going to need to create ties to this world that she wants to be a part of and to rule, and she understands that marriage is the way to do that.

5.7: The Gift

BENIOFF: I think Dany is still not quite at that cynical level yet, she still believes that there's a higher purpose that she's there for, it's not just about power, it's about using that power to make humanity better.

WEISS: If somebody is telling you that one of those horrible things that's all the more horrible because you suspect that it's true, and she's an idealist who desperately wants to believe that that's not the case, but, in their relationship, Daario is one of the only people - the only person around her now - who tells her all the things she doesn't want to hear.

BENIOFF: So she's not yet convinced that she needs to be a butcher. At the same time, she realizes that, the longer the season goes on, that she has to be ruthless sometimes in order to maintain security, in order to keep herself in power, so that means some bastards are going to get sacrificed to her dragons, then so be it.

5.8: Hardhome

WEISS: Over the course of their conversation, the similarities in their experiences start to come to the fore, maybe the similarities in their worldview start to come to the fore.

BENIOFF: Tyrion has a lot of empathy for another orphan out there who had another terrible father, y'know, it certainly links that bond them. He realizes maybe Varys was right about her that she's the last chance for Westeros and this is someone who could cross the Narrow Sea and not only bring me back into power, because Tyrion still has his own ambitions, but create a better world for the people over there because, depite everything, despite his occasional cynicism and his lack of sentimentality, Tyrion is one of the few players in this game who believes that it's possible to make things a little bit better for people.

WEISS: Dany talks a good game and she's very charismatic and she's a very impressive young woman, but he's heard lots of people say lots of pretty words over the course of his life and he's seen how those plans go awry when they meet with reality. Like revolutionaries in our own world, she has every intention to change things, even if that means knocking everything down to do it.

5.9: The Dance of Dragons

BENIOFF: Even before we put it in the paper, I remember reading this scene in the book and saying "holy shit" and actually I remember emailing George right after I read the scene, even before I finished the book just after reading the scene and saying: "that's one of the best scenes in any of your books and I have no idea how we're going to do it". This seems like a big scene for a feature movie, let alone a TV show.

WEISS: It's one of the most powerful and seamless allusions we've ever created on the show; we've never had anything remotely like this before.

BENIOFF: Dany could stop this at any moment, as Tyrion says at the moment when it looks like Jorah is going to die, and she can, she's the queen, she can stop anything, right, and she doesn't, because, even if she is the queen, she is, as she says earlier, if I don't keep my word, why would anyone trust me? And she's exiled him from the city twice now, he's come back twice, so, from her perspective, she's not gonna step in and protect him, I mean, he's not worthy of her protection; but, at the same time, as tough as she is, she's watching this man that she's had great affection for for so long and it looks like she might lose him, it looks like he really might die, so there's just this witches' brew of conflicting emotions in Dany's head and Jorah, I think, is really hoping for her to stop and you know, at certain points, like, look what I'm willing to do to get back to you.

WEISS: The look he gives her in that moment, you can just feel how intensely it just digs into her and how it says volumes to her across that dusty arena without ever speaking a word.

WEISS: [the Sons' attack on the arena] It's one of my favorite moments in the scene and the season and in this series, that moment where she realizes this is over and she resigns herself to that faith.

BENIOFF: This isn't the way she saw it happening, it's not the way she wants it to end, but if it's going to happen, she doesn't want to die screaming, she doesn't to die in terror, she wants to have a moment of peace before it's over and then, at that moment, when all seems lost, Drogon comes. There seems to be a connection between them, it's been talked about before on the show and in the books, there's this very deep connection between the Targaryens and their dragons, and certainly that's true with Dany and Drogon, it's more than just a pet of hers, they are in a real sense for her her adopted children and so this is just evidence of Drogon's ability to sense when his mother is in great peril. Jorah has this conversation with Tyrion halfway through the season where he says, I used to be cynical like you, but then I saw this girl step out of the fire with three baby dragons and, if you've ever heard baby dragons singing, it's hard to be cynical after that, and it's the same thing happening here for Tyrion, it's hard to be cynical after watching this young queen fly off on a dragon and it's very hard not to believe that she really is the chosen one.

WEISS: I think at that point it's pretty hard for Tyrion to keep a grip on his cynicism. His expression watching her fly away completely captured what we wanted to capture in the moment, which is he's never seen a girl like this before.

5.10: Mother’s Mercy

WEISS: Daenerys is stuck on this beautiful, but isolated, plateau without any food and a dragon that mostly wants to sleep and get better, so she's got to find her on way, which is fine, except she encounters a group of people she probably didn't expect to encounter again anytime soon. When she sees the Dothraki, she knows what that means, and her relationship with Drogo was one thing, but Drogo is gone and she knows, in a way, that he was sort of an anomaly. She drops the ring because she's smart; that ring is the breadcrumb that's gonna point in the direction that she's being taken and somebody down the line hopefully who means her less harm than the Dothraki will notice.

6.1: The Red Woman

WEISS: Tyrion is very much in the situation along with Varys where they're sitting on a volatile powder keg of a society.

BENIOFF: The enemies of Daenerys see a city ripe to be overthrown and it's going to test Tyrion's political skills, his diplomatic skills, all of his experience.

WEISS: He's optimistic in a strange way for him, he's not generally an optimistic person, but I think he feels inspired for the first time and he feels equal to the challenge that's facing him when it comes to Meereen.

6.3: Oathbreaker

WEISS: I think when Dany returns to Vaes Dothrak it's obviously with a certain sense of dread, because she knows that these widows of the former khals are not likely to welcome her with open arms, it's not like a "long-lost sister, where have you been?", it's "here's a funny-looking, white-haired girl who has put herself on a record as thinking she's all that" and stringing a bunch of highfalutin titles after her name. But the High Priestess of the Dosh Khaleen is not coming at it from the perspective of somebody who's looking to punish this young person with inflated ideas of her own greatness, I think she remembers what it was like to think that a glorious destiny awaited her and to find out that that wasn't the case. I think the High Priestess has a certain amount of empathy with Dany's position, which you see in the way that she relates to her, which is stern, but not quite as awful as anybody might have expected it to be.

6.4: Book of the Stranger

BENIOFF: The historical examples that we looked to in writing these scenes was, oddly, that was Abraham Lincoln, because Lincoln was trying desperately to stave off a civil war between the North and the South and he wasn't ready to get rid of slavery quite as quickly as people think. I mean, he was trying to talk to the southerners and work out some kind of compromise at first and, you know, with Tyrion it's, as he says to Grey Worm and Missandei, slavery is an evil, war is an evil, and I can't have both at once, so what's the solution here? The whole point of diplomacy is compromise. He's proposed compromise, which he thinks of as a good idea, is incredibly offensive to Missandei and Grey Worm, who were slaves and, you know, from their point of view, you don't make a compromise with slavers because that's making a deal with the devil, so they're entering into these negotiations with slavers with deep skepticism, but Daenerys did choose this man to advise her, so if he's saying there's a chance, they're willing to try it, but with great suspicions.

BENIOFF: One of the things that was interesting for us was, you know, seeing how Dany can be strong when she is not in a position of power, you know, all the khals of all the gathered khalasars were within the temple of the Dosh Khaleen and Dany, an unarmed little woman, killed them all, by herself. You know, she didn't have a dragon flying and doing it, it was all Dany.

WEISS: The end of episode 604 definitely meant consciously to echo the end of episode 110. It's Dany stepping out of a flame to great effect; this time it was just on a much, much larger scale.

BENIOFF: Rebirth is clearly a theme this season, whether it's Jon Snow or Dany emerging again from the fires. When she did it the first time, only, you know, a few score people witnessed this miracle of Daenerys Targaryen emerging unscathed from the flames. Now it's the Dothraki as a people who witnessed this.

WEISS: The act of stepping out of that burning temple, in which all the Dothraki power structure had just perished, pretty much makes her the queen of the Dothraki in one fell swoop.

BENIOFF: And, of course, it's hard not to be impressed when you see her emerging from the fires unscathed. It's like a god being reborn, and that's why they all bow to her.

6.6: Blood of my Blood

BENIOFF: Daenerys talks about the dragons being her children and that the dragons are the only children she'll have. Of her three children, she's always been closest to Drogon, and they clearly have some kind of connection that goes beyond words and she just senses that he's out there in the scene. One of our favorite moments from season one was watching Khal Drogo deliver a speech to his gathered khalasar. That speech lingered in Daenerys's mind and she's echoing almost the exact same language when she's talking to the Dothraki now. So she's basically telling them the promise that one of the great khals had made years before and saying now's the time to live up to that promise and to fulfill it. It's something that's been set up for quite a long time and now we're seeing it come to pass.

6.9: Battle of the Bastards

WEISS: Daenerys, when she comes back to that situation, she has no idea what to expect, she doesn't know what's happened in Meereen. In a way, you feel for Tyrion because she left him with a terrible situation; the city was under siege from within and without and he really did, for so long, an excellent job of making things better there and, unfortunately, what she comes back to find is exactly what she would have expected to find when she left, and the fact that she has a city at all still is due to him.

BENIOFF: I think Dany's been becoming a Targaryen ever since the end of season one.

WEISS: She's not her father and she's not insane and she's not a sadist, but there's a Targaryen ruthlessness that comes with even the good Targaryens.

BENIOFF: If you're one of the lords of Westeros or one of her potential opponents in the wars to come and you get word of what happened here in Meereen, you have to be pretty nervous because this is an unprecedented threat, you got a woman who's somehow formed an alliance where she's got a Dothraki horde, a legion of Unsullied, she's got the mercenary army of the Second Sons and she's got three dragons who are now pretty close to full-grown, so if she can make it all the way across the Narrow Sea and get to Westeros, who's gonna stand in her way?

6.10: The Winds of Winter

WEISS: Tyrion had a very steep slope to climb to win Dany's trust. His family played an integral part in nearly exterminating her family, but, at this point, especially given the hand he was dealt with Meereen after she left, he's earned her trust. One of the few people in this world at this point who's willing to speak the truth to her face.

BENIOFF: Mainly, he's proven himself to be very loyal, you know, she's gone for most of the season, but he didn't abandon her, he didn't go off looking for the next person to rule him, he was clearly trying to serve her interest while she was gone. Dany's not gonna do anything she doesn't want to do, she's not gonna take anyone's advice if it seems against her interests and so, when he recommends that she cut ties with Daario, she does it because she thinks he's right. The truth is, Tyrion's logic makes a lot of sense to her, you know, he's not gonna be a help for her when she gets to Westeros, she comes over there unencumbered and, as a queen without a king, that could be really useful in the future. You know, Tyrion has become a very capable adviser in a relatively short time, she clearly respects his intelligence and she now respects his loyalty. I think, especially given that she knows where they're heading, they're going back to Westeros, most of the people on her team have never been there, but Tyrion spent his whole life there, served as Hand of the King before, defended King's Landing during an attack, he knows these families, the ruling family, better than anyone, he certainly knows Cersei better than anyone, so, as long as she can trust him, which she does, he's the perfect adviser for her in this war for Westeros. He's the perfect Hand to the Queen and that's why she names him such.

WEISS: That shot of Dany's fleet with all of her newly arrayed allies making its way out of the Slaver's Bay towards the Narrow Sea and home, it's probably the biggest thing that's happened on the show thus far, it's the thing we've been waiting for since the pilot episode of the first season. The person she is now is very, very different from the person she was then. It hasn't been a smooth road, feels like she has earned it at this point.

BENIOFF: It's the shot that we're gonna leave everyone with.

WEISS: It was a real thrill to see her on the bow of that ship, with Tyrion by her side heading west. The ruthlessness that comes with even the good Targaryens, I mean, these are the people who came over from across the narrow sea and conquered the known world. It'll be very interesting to see how that plays out going forward.

7.1: Dragonstone

BENIOFF: For [Cersei] now at this point, it's about survival, and the way to survive is to defeat her enemy. She will do whatever she has to do to win, she'll blow up the sept if that will allow her to win, even if that means killing hundreds, probably thousands of innocent people. She's capable of anything, unlike Dany, who is constrained a little bit by her morality and her fear of hurting innocents. For those of us who have been with the story from the beginning and really followed Dany's journey, coming home is such a massive, game-changer on so many levels, and we just wanted to see that.

WEISS: There is so much weight on that arrival that we felt that a bunch of dialogue was completely unnecessary, it would only step on the emotion of the moment.

BENIOFF: Everyone is giving her a little bit of distance; Tyrion, who is usually the most loquacious of people, he's not talking because he wants her to experience it and, at one point, Grey Worm is about to walk up alongside Dany to guard her and Missandei holds him back because she wants Dany to experience it on her own. And then she has that time and she's ready to begin.

7.2: Stormborn

WEISS: I don't think they're that many situations in film or television where you see four women sitting around a table discussing power and strategy and war. We didn't really plan it that way, but once it landed on that we knew that these things had to be discussed, we knew the plan to take Casterly Rock had to be put out there. I think it's a scene that, had it been the exact same information, situation being put forward by a bunch of old grizzled guys with gray beards, it would have been a lot less interesting to have it be Emilia at one end of the table and Diana at the other end of the table. To me, that just is such a breath of fresh air, and made writing it a lot more fun. The end, after all has been said and done, then Olenna sits her down and tells her to ignore all of that.

Show!Olenna: You're a dragon. Be a dragon.

WEISS: When Diana tells you to do that you start to... go outside the scene and wonder if that applies to every aspect of your life and not just the scene you happen to be shooting.

7.3: The Queen’s Justice

WEISS: The spine of the episode is about their meeting. It was an exciting, thrilling thing to watch happening even as we were shooting it. Once we realized that we're kind of getting a charge out of just seeing this happen on a set, which is a notoriously boring place, we had a sense that it would carry over to the finished version of the scene.

BENIOFF: That audience chamber was built by Aegon Targaryen to intimidate anyone who came there.

WEISS: He doesn't have much insight into what she's gone through. So, I think he sees a rich girl with a fancy name sitting in a big chair with a fancy dress on, proclaiming herself the queen of the world. So, I don't think he's looking upon her with as much respect as she has come to take as her due.

BENIOFF: He's a very strong-willed person. He didn't come down there to bend the knee. He didn't come down there to join her in her fight against Cersei. None of that matters at this point, though. All that matters is... fighting the dead.

WEISS: She looks at him, and she thinks this is some unwashed barbarian from the North and a bastard. His name is Jon Snow, yet he's calling himself king. If she knew what he'd seen, she'd be looking very, very differently... at what he's telling her, but at this moment in time, she only sees somebody who's trying to carve up her piece of her kingdom for himself. And if what this guy is saying is true, then it really is an issue, and she has... her own very serious issues to deal with in the shape of the woman who's now sitting on the throne.

7.4: The Spoils of War

BENIOFF: There's tension on two sides. One is the political, where Jon Snow has his own very specific purpose here on Dragonstone, and that's to get the Dragonglass and, if possible, to convince Dany to fight with him. And Dany has her own very specific purpose, which is to get Jon to bend the knee. There's conflict, and it's conflict between powerful people. And then to make it all even more complicated, they're starting to be attracted to each other. And so much of it is not from dialogue or anything we wrote, it's just the two of them in a small space standing near each other, and us just watching that and feeling the heat of that.

WEISS: She had a nicely triumphant return to Dragonstone, which nobody contested or got in the way of. From that point on, she's lost two of her principle allies, she's lost a lot of her fleet. She's in a position where if she doesn't step up soon and come up with a big win for her side, she's gonna lose this fight before it even begins. I think she really feels the pressure of her situation more than she ever has before. This is the fight she's been waiting for her whole life.

BENIOFF: I think there are several stories interplaying here. Part of it is that Dany's finally cutting loose. The whole first part of the season, she's been frustrated. In following Tyrion's counsel, she's been fighting with one hand behind her back, and so she hasn't really unleashed the Dothraki horde. She hasn't really set the dragons into combat yet.

WEISS: With the loot train battle, one of the things that's most exciting about it for us... This is the first time we've ever had two sets of main characters on opposite sides of the battlefield. And it's impossible to really want any one of them to win, and impossible to want any one of them to lose.

WEISS: This dragon flies up. That makes it a totally different situation. It's almost like, "What if somebody had an F-16 that they brought to a medieval battle?" You start to scrap the history of it a bit, and just think about how would those things interact with each other in a way that's exciting and believable to the extent that dragons are believable?

BENIOFF: Qyburn realized that the dragons were vulnerable. They might be fearsome beasts, but they are mortal and they can be hurt, and they can be killed. We see the scorpion come into play, manned by Bronn. And we see Drogon wounded. Things turn out okay for them, but I think it also changes the calculation a little bit, because now they know these weapons are on the board. This ongoing war with Cersei is entering into a dangerous territory.

WEISS: Jaime's charge at Daenerys is a hard thing to top for me in that sequence, only because when you have a principle character trying to murder another principle character, that doesn't happen all that often.

7.5: Eastwatch

BENIOFF: One of the things that Dany has found immensely frustrating in the beginnings of this war against Cersei is that she is being asked to fight on a certain moral standard and... Cersei isn't. Because of that, Cersei has an advantage over her. The more ruthless opponent will often win. I wouldn't say she's acting like the Mad King because it's rational. She's given them a choice and they choose not to bend the knee to her and she accepts that choice and she does exactly what she told them she would do. And from her standpoint, she's not acting insane in any way. She's just being tough, which is what she needs to be to win. That's one perspective. Tyrion has a different perspective and hopefully people watching will have their own and they'll decide for themselves whether they think what she did was just or immoral.

7.6: Beyond the Wall

BENIOFF: At a certain point, they're just fighting for their survival. Once they retreat all the way to the middle of the lake, there's nowhere farther to run. She's always been willing to risk her life to do what she thinks is right. And in terms of going North to rescue them, a number of people up there have different claims on her heart. And Jorah's been by her side from the beginning, and he saved her life so many times, I think she would feel as if it was a betrayal if she didn't at least try to save him. And then of course, there's Jon Snow. You definitely get the sense that he's become quite important to her in a pretty short amount of time. He sees that they're all gonna die if the dragon doesn't take off. The rational decision at that point is, "You guys go to safety, and I'll try to keep them off you as long as I can." He's the guy who jumps on the grenade to save the rest of the platoon. That's always been Jon.

WEISS: I think that when she sees him return on the back of Coldhand's horse, that's a big moment for her in terms of the way she feels about him.

BENIOFF: I don't think either one of them really knew exactly how powerful their feelings were towards each other until these moments. Just the notion of falling for someone, that involves weakness. It's not something a queen does. But she feels that happening, and he feels it happening for her. I think both of them are on, kinda, unfamiliar ground. And especially because it's with an equal. It's kind of hard for her at that point, I think not to look at this guy, and realize this is not like the other boys.

WEISS: What was fun about the sequence, you know, awful way to us is that up until the end, it's very close to one of those battles where all the good guys get out the other side, and, more or less, scot-free. But we knew that killing the dragon was gonna have a tremendous emotional impact, 'cause over the seasons and seasons of the show it's really been emphasized what they are to Dany. We knew that the Night King would see and seize this opportunity. I'd like to think that when the dragon dies, that it's kind of a one-two punch, 'cause on the one hand, you've just seen the horror of one of these three amazing beings like this in the world going under the water and not coming up again, and processing that. Then you're processing something that's even worse, which is when it comes back out from under the water again, and we see in the last shot of the episode, what it becomes.

7.7: The Dragon and the Wolf

BENIOFF: Jon's not Jon Sand. He's actually, as Bran finally overhears from Lyanna, Aegon Targaryen. And that means he's the rightful heir to the Iron Throne. That changes everything.

WEISS: I would say the challenge with this sequence was finding a way to present information that at least a good portion of the audience already had in a way that was dramatic and exciting, also had a new element to it. Part of the answer as to how to go about doing that was in the montage, inter-cut nature of it. It was about making it clear that this was almost like an information bomb that Jon was heading towards.

Show!Bran: Robert's rebellion was built on a lie.

WEISS: The only way to really emphasize that was to tie those two worlds together cinematically, and to have Bran actually narrating these facts over the footage of Jon and of Dany.

Show!Bran: He's the heir to the Iron Throne.

WEISS: Just as we're seeing these two people come together, we're hearing the information that will inevitably, if not tear them apart, at least cause real problems in their relationship. And she's his aunt.

BENIOFF: It complicates everything on a political level, on a personal level, and it just makes everything that could have been so neat and kind of perfect for Jon and Dany, and it really muddies the waters.

Show!Bran: We need to tell him.

BENIOFF: We tried to contrast the various season endings so that they don't feel too similar. So last season we had a pretty triumphant ending with Dany finally sailing west towards Westeros. This one is definitely much more horrific.

8.1: Winterfell

BENIOFF: It's a whole new procession, and so instead of Robert arriving with Queen Cersei and Jamie Lannister and The Hound, it's Daenerys coming with Jon Snow. I don't think the North is the most welcoming place to outsiders. Dany's smart. She senses that distrust, and she's... gonna make the best of a bad situation, but that doesn't mean that she likes it or she's happy.

WEISS: When you're doing something good for people, and you get met with what Sansa gives her when they meet in the courtyard, it's understandable that she would be upset.

WEISS: I think that if Tyrion were to have shown up on his own to Winterfell, he would've gotten a much different reception from Sansa than he did coming as the Hand of the Queen, Daenerys Targaryen.

BENIOFF: No one's ever ridden a dragon except for Dany. Only Targaryens can ride dragons, and that should be a sign for Jon. Jon's not always the quickest on the uptake, but eventually gets there.

WEISS: We wanted to kind of re-anchor their relationship. It seemed important for it to involve the dragons, since the dragons play such an important role.

BENIOFF: It's a major thing for her when she sees they have some kind of connection to him, they allow him to be around them. And when he flies up with her and shows her where he used to hunt as a kid, I think she falls even farther in love with him.

WEISS: Seeing Jon and Dany on the dragons together, it's a Jon and Dany moment, but it also seeds in the idea that these creatures will accept Jon Snow as one of their riders.

BENIOFF: One of the challenges, but also one of the exciting things about this episode, this whole season, is bringing together characters who have never met. Sam has long been one of the more important characters in the story. But he's never seen Queen Daenerys, and yet they're connected by various threads. The obvious one, which we know from the beginning of the scene, is Jorah. Sam saved him, and so Jorah owes him this great debt. What none of them realize until midway through this scene is that they have another, horrible connection.

WEISS: There are all these things that you know about those characters that the other characters don't know. And some of them are very important. Dany murdered Samwell's father and brother.

BENIOFF: That's a really complicated thing for Sam because he had a really fraught relationship with his father. Yet Sam's older brother was not a bad person, and died, really, quite bravely, standing by his father's side.

WEISS: John Bradley did an excellent job. The difference between the way he takes the news of his father's death and the way he takes the news of his brother's death, it was a subtle thing that he does with very few words. It's the kind of thing that he could find out in a number of different ways, but it seemed like a very ineffective preamble and way into that later moment.

WEISS: The fact that Jon's real parents were who Jon's real parents were is not news to us at this point, but what we don't know is the way that Jon is going to take this. How's the explosion gonna look?

BENIOFF: Sam, as a brother of the Night's Watch, and Jon are more brothers than Bran and Jon ever really were. He knows it's gonna hurt Jon and it's going to shatter his whole worldview. For all they know, the Army of the Dead could attack the next day, and someone has to tell Jon before that.

WEISS: He's being told something that he both knows is true and can't handle. So he tries to throw things in front of it to prevent him from having to deal with the-- the truth of what he's being told. The thing he throws in front of it here is the fact that it means his father was lying to him his whole life. The truth that Samwell tells Jon is probably the most incendiary fact in the entire world of the show. We chose to play the whole thing on Jon's face because, as great a job as John Bradley is doing presenting this information, he's really just presenting information we know already.

8.2: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

WEISS: When Jaime shows up to Winterfell, it's very difficult for almost anybody to know how to feel about it. On the one hand, Dany looks at him as the person who murdered her father, and even if she has come to terms with who her father was and what her father really was, it probably doesn't entirely erase the sting of her father's murderer showing up on her doorstep.

BENIOFF: Tyrion has made a number of mistakes now, and Dany's really at the end of her patience. Because she has a lot of fondness and respect for Tyrion, but many of his plans have really gone awry. And now Jaime Lannister's here, but not with the Lannister army. Tyrion can't really fight back because he knows she's right. I mean, he really did make a grievous mistake. If Tyrion has a flaw, he's a very clever man, but sometimes clever people overestimate their own cleverness.

BENIOFF: Dany comes to Sansa with a bit of an olive branch, trying to find a way inside that kind of cool exterior that Sansa presents. And one commonality between them is they both love Jon. Dany's his lover and Sansa's his sister. It's very much coming at it from the point of view of a monarch trying to make peace with her subject, and Sansa's not quite willing to accept Dany as her monarch yet. She's suspicious of people for a reason. She's had too many hard experiences not to be suspicious of people. And she sees Dany as possibly a tyrant, as somebody who has a lot of power and is seeking to get even more.

8.3: The Long Night

WEISS: We wanted our characters to feel, like, that this-- maybe this is all gonna work out, maybe things are all gonna be okay. We've seen how devastating a Dothraki charge can be just with their regular swords, and now when they're galloping into combat with, uh, flaming arakhs, it's-- it's-- Uh... What could possibly stand against that?

BENIOFF: What they see is just the end of the Dothraki, essentially.

WEISS: They have a plan, and it's important to wait for the Night King to reveal himself, and then have two dragons against one dragon, and a really good chance of-- of defeating him. One thing that they couldn't have foreseen was Dany's reaction to seeing the Dothraki decimated. Jon is the person who wants to stick to the plan, but the Dothraki are not Jon's; they're not loyal to Jon, they're loyal to Dany, and I think that Dany can't bring herself to just watch them die, and so the plan starts to fall apart the second she gets on her dragon, so he does too, and then we take it from there.

BENIOFF: We knew this episode was gonna be almost entirely battle, and that can get really boring really quickly. You can watch it for a certain number of minutes before the effect starts to dampen. Part of it was making sure that we really stayed focused on the characters, and so whether it's Arya's storyline, or Sansa and Tyrion down the crypt, or Jon Snow and Dany up on the dragons. Kinda like all these separate little battles within the... within the greater battle.

BENIOFF: I mean, we talked about various endings for Jorah for a long time, but, you know, you think about Jorah, from the very first time we met him, he was with Dany, and from that time, he's been mostly by her side. Part of Jorah's tragedy is that he was in love with a woman who couldn't love him back, but he's accepted that for quite a long time, at the same time he was going to fight for her as long as he could and as well as he could.

WEISS: There'd never been a moment where she more needed someone to fight to protect her than this moment. And if he could've chosen a way to die, this is how he would've chosen to die. So, it was something we thought would be powerful to give him.

8.4: The Last of the Starks

WEISS: Dany kind of structures the feast scene, in a way. I mean, she's really the person whose emotions and choices are guiding the scene.

BENIOFF: And things start to shift a little bit when Daenerys calls for Gendry and-- and names him the new Lord of Storm's End.

WEISS: It's almost like, as the queen, she's giving people... permission to-- to celebrate what they've done.

BENIOFF: Things start to relax a little bit, and these people did survive and they-- they won, and they emerged victorious. And so what started as a very funereal scene gradually starts to shift into more of a party atmosphere as people get drunker and drunker. That shift does not happen with Daenerys; she's scarred by the events that just took place, but she's also very much thinking about... what Jon Snow told her, and she's really shaken when she sees everyone celebrating with him, and talking about what a mad man and what a king he is for getting on a dragon.

WEISS: He has love and respect from these people that, even with the gesture that she just made, she can't ever equal.

BENIOFF: She realizes that his true identity is a real threat to her if it comes out. So, she's in a fairly dark place and while other people are starting to try to celebrate their survival and their victory, Dany's not in a celebratory mood.

WEISS: After the feast, she comes to talk to him and... with the intention of-- of... of making this all work out, and of bringing things back to the way they were before.

BENIOFF: There's a moment when they're kissing, and-- and it seems like things are kind of getting back to where they were, but... it's almost as if he remembers all of a sudden what she really is. It's tense for him. For her, she grew up hearing all these stories about how their ancestors who were related to each other were also lovers, and it doesn't seem that strange to her. For him, it is a strange thing.

WEISS: Once Dany introduces the idea that everything can be as it was if... Jon... keeps this secret buttoned down and tells no one, she's introducing a conflict that plays forward.

BENIOFF: From his standpoint, he's already declared his loyalty to her. He's promised her and he's a man of his word. But he's also, you know, a family man, and so, the idea that he wouldn't tell Sansa and Arya about his true identity, it just seems very wrong to him.

BENIOFF: He thinks he can have it both ways; that he can tell Arya and Sansa the truth about who he really is, and he can maintain his loyalty to Dany and everyone's gonna learn to live together.

WEISS: One thing everybody who... comes into contact with this information seems to understand is how incendiary the information is. Sansa's left with a very difficult decision, 'cause she promises Jon that she won't tell anyone, and yet when she's sitting up there on that wall with Tyrion, she knows... what will happen if she gives Tyrion this information. She's a student of Littlefinger, and she knows how information travels, and she can think many steps ahead into the game, the way Littlefinger did, and know that if she tells Tyrion, it's almost impossible for Tyrion not to tell Varys, and if you tell-- I think these are all things that have been occurring to Sansa between the time we see her get that information and the time she passes the message on.

BENIOFF: Part of the story here is that while we've been concentrating on Winterfell and the fight against the army of the dead, Dany's other enemies have not been just sitting still; they've been planning for-- for the final battle. We saw in season seven that Qyburn had invented this giant dragon-killing scorpion and it didn't quite work. Qyburn went back to the drawing board and he made even larger, more powerful scorpions. Dozens of them are now lining the walls of King's Landing, and dozens more are mounted on the decks of the Iron Fleet. While Dany kind of forgot about the Iron fleet and Euron's forces, they certainly haven't forgotten about her, and they're just waiting for her to come back. By this point, they would have gotten news that her army's emerged victorious and were gonna head south, and so they're just waiting in ambush for her return.

WEISS: In some ways, the most important thing that happens... to Daenerys in four, is the death of her second dragon. Now she's got one dragon, and that dragon presumably is just as vulnerable... as Rhaegal was. So, there's this-- the mourning of a child, which is very real to her, and then their best friend is taken. Dany knows that once Cersei has Missandei that she's not going to see Missandei alive again.

BENIOFF: This is a moment for Cersei where she has a chance to... maybe to flee and get away if she surrenders, but that's-- I think anyone who knows Cersei knows she's not gonna make that choice. Her feeling is, "If I give up the throne, I'm dead, and so, my only chance now is to win." And that's what she says to Ned Stark in season one. Dany is this young queen coming to try to usurp her, and Cersei's not gonna give up the throne that easily. She's captured an enemy, and this is how Cersei deals with enemies. Tyrion's perspective is-- is, you know, while we have these various wars for supremacy and everything, let's not forget about the people who are gonna suffer the most from it. He can envision what will happen to King's Landing if these two armies clash and dragons are involved, and it's an obvious catastrophe. She feels like the odds are actually pretty good on-- on-- for her at this point, and she's willing to roll the dice. I think for Cersei, the only good prisoner is a dead prisoner.

WEISS: She's really back... where she was... at the very beginning. Emotionally, she's alone in the world, and she can't really trust anybody.

BENIOFF: People have underestimated Dany's strength many times before, and-- and... no one's really done very well underestimating her strengths.

WEISS: Unlike them, she's extremely powerful, and unlike them, she's filled with a rage that's aimed at one person specifically.

BENIOFF: I think what's probably echoing in Dany's head in those final moments would be Missandei's final words. Dracarys is clearly meant for Dany. Missandei knows that her life is over, and she is saying, you know, "Light them up."

8.5: The Bells

BENIOFF: Dany's an incredibly strong person, she's also someone who has had really close friendships and close advisors for her entire run of the show. You look at these people who have been closest to her for such a long time, and almost of them have either turned on her or died, and she's very much alone. And that's a dangerous thing for someone who's got so much power, to feel that isolated. So at the very time when she needs guidance and those kind of close friendships and advice the most, everyone's gone.

WEISS: I think that Varys knew that it was unlikely that he would survive the attempt to overthrow Dany in favor of Jon. And he also knew that he ethically, in his mind, had no choice but to... try to do that anyway. I think that Tyrion is saying goodbye to his best friend in the world outside of his brother. And the amount of guilt that he feels over being the cause for his best friend's imminent death, it's hard to really get your head around.

BENIOFF: Jon Snow is someone that she's fallen in love with. And as far as she's concerned, by this point, Jon has betrayed her by telling people about his true identity, and also the fact he's unable to return her affections at this point.

WEISS: I think that when she says, "Let it be fear," she's resigning herself to the fact that she may have to get things done in a way that isn't pleasant. And she may have to get things done in a way that is horrible for lots of people.

BENIOFF: She chose violence. A Targaryen choosing violence is a pretty terrifying thing.

BENIOFF: Even when you look back to season one, when Khal Drogo gives the golden crown to Viserys, and her reaction of watching her brother's head melted off ...and he was a terrible brother, you know, so I don't think anyone out there was-- was crying when Viserys died, but... there is something kind of chilling about the way that Dany has responded to the death of her enemies. And if circumstances had been different, I don't think this side of Dany ever would've come out. If Cersei hadn't betrayed her, if Cersei hadn't executed Missandei, if Jon hadn't told her the truth. Like, if all of these things had happened in any different way, then I don't think we'd be seeing this side of Daenerys Targaryen.

WEISS: I don't think she decided ahead of time that she was... going to do what she did. And then she sees the Red Keep, which is, to her, the home that her family built when they first came over to this country 300 years ago. It's in that moment, on the walls of King's Landing, where she's looking at that symbol of everything that was taken from her, when she makes the decision to-- to make this personal. We wanted her to be just death from above, as seen from the perspective of the people who are on the business end of that dragon. In most large stories like this, it seems like there's a tendency to focus on the heroic figures and not pay much attention to the people who may be suffering the repercussions of the decisions made by those heroic people, and we-- we really wanted to keep our perspective and our-- our sympathies on the ground at this moment 'cause those are the people who are really paying the price for the decisions that she's making.

WEISS: I think that Jon is also in a kind of denial. At first, the siege is a war, soldiers killing soldiers. That's what war is. I think Jon is someone who's always been a very good soldier, who has never enjoyed being a soldier. He's been trained as a fighter from the time he was a little boy, and he's quite good at it, he's quite good at leading men into battle, and he also hates it. I think, for him, it all starts out seeming like it's gonna work out, and then it turns into a nightmare.

WEISS: When she takes off and starts burning the city, the Unsullied on the ground and the Northmen on the ground, take that as their cue that it's a moral free-for-all. The good guys are behaving like the bad guys, and the bad guys in this shot are the ones who are doing all of these horrific things around him, who are his own men. The moral lines that he's drawn, for himself, in his own life, can't be maintained for everyone in all situations.

WEISS: Feels like you needed a perspective to carry you through this horror. Like you need a Virgil to take you through the hell that Dany's building.

BENIOFF: The reason we decided to follow Arya out of King's Landing and to see the fall of King's Landing through her eyes is... something that we talked about with an earlier episode. You just care a lot more when you're with a character that you care about. So if we saw a lot of extras running around on fire and buildings falling apart, it might've been visually interesting, but it wouldn't have had much of an emotional impact. But when you're there on the ground with Arya, who's one of the people we care the most about, then everything takes on that much more of an edge.

WEISS: We knew that the Hound would be convincing her to part ways with him and to not go to her death. And once she decides she needs to get out of the city, well, she's in-- she's in the worst possible place you can be. So she's gotta get from that central point all the way outside the walls of the city. It's the longest, hardest journey anybody has to make in the entire episode.

8.6: The Iron Throne

WEISS: Dany has been above it all, literally, throughout this entire battle, she's fought the whole thing from the air, so, when she's in the plaza, all she's seeing is her own army's triumph in the city that she came to conquer for all the best reasons, and I think the idea of spreading her brand of revolution around the entire world is a very attractive idea to her at this moment in her mind, it's a very ethical idea because she's not seeing the cost the way Jon and the way Tyrion have seen the cost.

BENIOFF: What's interesting about it is that she's been making similar kinds of speeches for a long time and we've always been rooting for her and this is kind of a natural outcome of that philosophy and that willingness to go forth and conquer all your enemies and it's just not quite as fun anymore.

WEISS: I think the final scene between Jon and Daenerys is something we came up with sometime, in the midst of the third season of the show? The broad strokes of it anyway. But there was a tremendous amount of pressure to get it right because we know this is not a scene that is giving people what they want.

BENIOFF: We got there and were like, oh my God this is gonna be so emotional and then it was realizing that we actually had to do so much work to get all those shots that we needed.

WEISS: There’s this discussion through the whole show of whether or not Daenerys is like her father, who was insane. Throughout the whole conversation they have, she maintains, like, a reasonable approach to the thing that she’s done and there are only a few places where something peaks out that tells him what’s really coming.

WEISS: The big question in people’s minds seem to be who’s going to end up on the Iron Throne. One of the things we decided about the same time we decided what would happen in the scene is that the throne would not survive, that the thing that everybody wanted, the thing that caused everybody to be so horrible to each other to everybody else over the course of the past eight seasons was going to melt away. The dragon flying away with Dany’s lifeless body, that’s the climax of the show.

#daenerys targaryen #got #resources #d&d #s1 #s2 #s3 #s4 #s5 #s6 #s7 #s8

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codynaomiswire · 3 years

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TTS/RTA Egyptian Mythology AU

Also known as the Uraeus AU!

Several months ago, I made a post about a developing idea for an Egyptian mythology AU for TTS/RTA. The idea was prompted in large part by the snake-hair Varian (“Snakian”) scene from the series’ finale, and the concept of the uraeus in Egyptian mythology. Since first posting about this AU, Xiel and I have really been developing the idea further on the Discord, and here’s what we’ve come up with so far. Hope you all enjoy it!

Note: As a fan AU, this is of course subject to change and variations, so things may change or develop differently as time goes on and more new ideas spring up. This is just what we have in mind so far! :D

Champions and Friends:

Varian - The kingdom’s seer and champion of Wadjet (aka “the Uraeus”). In this AU, Varian was born to Quirin and Ulla with his “twin brother” Ka - a living uraeus bestowed upon him by the snake goddess Wadjet. (More on Ka and Wadjet down below.) Having grown up with Ka, Varian is not (usually) bothered with having a snake attached to his head, and sees Ka as being like a brother to him. Varian also grew up being told by Quirin and Ulla to keep Ka a secret, as the family was worried Varian and Ka would be taken away from them if anyone knew about them. So for many years, whenever Varian would go outside, he would wear a head covering so Ka would remain hidden from the world. Once he did try to show Ka to some of the kids in his village, but they all ran away screaming, and he got in trouble with the parents for “pulling a mean prank with a snake.” So he and Ka never tried that again. However, things start to get trickier as Varian enters his early teens, and he starts to get visions about events to come, and has a couple episodes of sleepwalking in the middle of the night. Despite Quirin’s best efforts to keep the two safe, things finally come to a head when some kidnappers (led by Andrew) are hired by Set’s cult to capture Varian and Ka, and bring them back to be dealt with. Out of self-defense, Ka ends up landing a venomous bite on Andrew, who nearly dies from the poison. However, Varian has also taken an interest in alchemy by this time in his life, and learned how to create an antivenom for Ka’s bites. (While Varian himself is immune to snake venom due to his connection with Ka and Wadjet, he learned how to make it in case there was ever an accident involving someone else.) Varian manages to make the antivenom in time and save Andrew’s life, but this incident ended up taking place out in the open, and thus Varian and Ka have their cover blown. Quirin tries to prevent Varian and Ka from being taken away, but the next day the pharaoh’s soldiers come and take Varian and Ka to live in the palace, as the priests of Wadjet are certain that the time has come for the seer to step into his duties for the kingdom. Varian is at first very unhappy with being forced to live at the palace, but is befriended my Rapunzel quite quickly. And when his visions start coming on with even greater intensity, Varian must do what he can to help protect the people from Set’s plans and Apep’s impending return.

Ka - A living uraeus and Wadjet’s other champion. (Note: In this AU, “the Uraeus” refers to Ka, Varian, or the two taken together. The term applies to all three.) His character is inspired by the snake-hair character in the RTA series finale (though Ka has the added feature of a cobra hood), and his name is inspired in large part by the “ka” aspect of the soul in ancient Egyptian philosophy (meaning “double” and known as the protective aspect of the soul). His name is also reminiscent of Kaa from The Jungle Book, though it’s spelled differently. Given to Varian by Wadjet upon his birth, Ka has been with Varian since the beginning. While he and Varian are the same age, Ka grows up faster than Varian mentally, so he tends to be the more mature of the two. However, he isn’t adverse to causing some mischief from time to time. Growing up, Ka was pretty readily accepted by Ulla, but Quirin...was more leery of him. Especially given Quirin’s own past (more on that below), he first saw Ka as an interloper on what was supposed to be a peaceful family life. Despite this attitude, Quirin and Ka did have their moments of reliability from time to time, and Ka grew up seeing Quirin and Ulla as his parents (calling them “Father” and “Mother” respectively). For years Ka had to hide his existence from the outside world, and thus could get very lonely. It seemed that he would have to resign himself to a life of obscurity...until Varian started getting weird visions of things to come, and Ka started getting his own premonitions of things to come in the short term (i.e. waking visions of things close at hand). Ka also learned through his premonitions how to hypnotize people, which he would use mostly for therapeutic purposes, or to compel people to tell the truth if need be (though this function especially can take a lot out of him, so he’s not OP with this ability). Things take the most drastic turn for Ka when he lashes out at would-be kidnappers (as told in Varian’s description above), he becomes known to the wider world, and is then thrust into the champions’ efforts to save the kingdom from ruin. Ka also does that snake thing of prolonging his ‘s’ sounds when he talks, and when he first has the experience of talking to new people he takes to referring to himself in the third person. Just to be fancy I guess. xP

Quirin - Varian and Ka’s father, member of the Brotherhood, and champion of Khonsu. Quirin spent a good portion of his adult life as a member of the Brotherhood in Karnak who - in this AU - are a warrior guild with allegiance to Khonsu, Egyptian god of the moon and time. While serving under Khonsu, Quirin acquired the ability to manipulate time in certain small ways - i.e. stopping time within a certain radius (usually a few yards), or around a certain person or object. This ability is very risky though, as if it’s used too often or too intensely it can have the side affect of “taking time” from the one wielding it (hence why Quirin appears a bit older than Adira and Hector, who are only a few years younger than he). After a good many years of service in the Brotherhood, Quirin decides to leave his service and settles down with his wife Ulla to start a family. However, upon the birth of their son Varian, Quirin is shocked to find that Varian was born with a living uraeus attached to his head (whom Ulla names Ka). After his dealings with the gods while serving Khonsu, Quirin is afraid of what Ka’s presence means for Varian, and does all he can to keep Ka a secret from the wider world. At first, Quirin is very leery of Ka, which does not go unnoticed by the rest of the family. Quirin is never cruel to Ka, never ignores him, nor dotes upon Varian while leaving Ka out of it, but it is clear that he sees Ka differently from Varian. Things become especially hard when Ulla dies when Varian and Ka are about ten years old, and Quirin has to raise the two on his own. Eventually, Quirin and Ka begin to grow closer, and Quirin does all he can to make sure he and Varian don’t get taken away from him. But after their cover is blown, Quirin is left worrying about his sons after they are taken away to live in the palace. As Quirin prays to Khonsu one night asking what can be done, he is informed that his duty as the Uraeus’s protector is not over, and that he will also be called upon to join in the effort to stop Set and Apep in the days to come.

Rapunzel - The princess of Egypt and the champion of Ra. Rapunzel was kidnapped by Mother Gothel as a baby, and was raised learning how to use her sun powers. However, when the champion of Horus comes to save her, Mother Gothel is defeated by her own evil designs, and Rapunzel loses connection with her healing powers in the ensuing struggle. After returning home, life is happy for the princess, and she quickly befriends many in her kingdom. However, when news comes to the palace that Wadjet’s seer has appeared in the land, Rapunzel begins her real journey to find her destiny, and must use her powers to save the land from its deadliest threat yet.

Eugene - The prince of one of Egypt’s major cities, and the champion of Horus. (Naturally, this was inspired by Eugene’s birth name being Horace in the canon series. xD) The son of King Edmund of Karnak, Eugene actually grew up in his family’s palace in this AU. When he was born, Eugene bore a birthmark on his shoulder blades that resembled wings. After consulting with the local priests, Edmund learned that the birthmark was a sign of the blessing of Horus, and that Eugene would come to wield great powers. Afraid for his son, however, Edmund has a hieroglyph painted onto Eugene’s back every few weeks or so to keep the power of the mark at bay. Eventually though, when Eugene is in his early teens, Horus’s blessing breaks through the barrier induced by the hieroglyph, and after a painful first transformation, Eugene has found that he has sprouted giant hawk’s wings from his back. After the initial shock, Eugene learns how to use and control this ability, and after some of Horus’s guidance, he manages to find the lost princess of Egypt and rescues her (while also falling in love of course ^^). After rescuing Rapunzel, Eugene decides to remain living in the capitol at the palace, though he keeps in contact with his family and home city.

Cassandra - Mother Gothel’s daughter, Rapunzel’s best friend and champion of Sekhmet. After being born to Mother Gothel, Cassandra grew up as a child servant in the cult of Set, and was left entirely on her own after Mother Gothel left her to horde Rapunzel’s sun powers for herself. Being miserable in her life situation, Cassandra eventually called out to the other gods asking for their help (she was probably about six or seven years old at this stage). Sekhmet heard her, and gave Cassandra some of her powers so she could don a lioness form and bust her way out. (Although, this blessing also left its mark on Cassandra, as she now permanently sports cat-like eyes, even when not in her lioness form.) After fleeing the cult of Set, Cassandra wanders around for a while until she is found by the Captain of the Guard, who came after he heard reports of a dangerous feral child wandering the desert near the outer villages. The Captain takes pity on Cassandra when he finds her, and takes her in as his own and teaches her how to fight and how to have discipline so she can control her powers. In addition to transforming into a human-lioness hybrid, Cass can also talk to felines and request favors from them, like spying on enemies and scouting and stuff. After gaining the trust of everyone in the capitol, Cass also came to be known by the revered title, The Lioness.

Lance - Eugene’s best friend and fellow resident of Karnak. While Lance is not a chosen champion, he is still a gifted member of the group, and is invaluable as a supportive friend and skilled wordsmith. When Kiera and Catalina travel to the capitol after Catalina becomes a champion, it’s Lance who is the first in the group to befriend the girls. Lance also has a background in being a treasure hunter, which comes in handy when the group needs to locate legendary artifacts, ancient temples and other things that will be vital to the success of their mission.

Catalina - Sister to Kiera/Angry, and Champion of Anubis. (A quick thank you to the Anon who prompted us to consider Catalina as a fellow champion!) Like Cassandra, Catalina’s blessing from Anubis allows her to don a feral form (this time in the form of a werewolf/werejackal) to help fight against the agents of Set and Apep. However, Catalina was chosen to wield Anubis’s blessing specifically because her heart was the only one judged by the scales of Anubis to be able to balance the powers contained within his blessing. As the son of Set and a god of death, Anubis’s blessing is extremely powerful and volatile, and only a certain kind of heart can learn how to balance it and avoid being destroyed by it. While Catalina still struggles with her power (especially during the first few transformations), she is able to gain great control over it with time. While she is considered an outcast from most of the rest of society, Kiera stays by Catalina’s side, and together they travel to the capitol to join the other champions in their mission to stop Set and Apep from destroying the world.

Kiera/Angry - Catalina’s sister. While Kiera/Angry is not a chosen champion, she is still skilled and is a beloved member of the group. After her sister Catalina receives the blessing of Anubis, Kiera stays by her side and travels with her to the capitol to join the rest of the group to help save Egypt and the world from impending doom.

Adira and Hector - Members of the Brotherhood, Quirin’s honorary siblings, and Varian’s “aunt” and “uncle”. While Hector and Adira were also servants of Khonsu like Quirin, neither were given special powers by the deity. Nevertheless, their work as members of the Brotherhood proves invaluable for the group, and they are more than ready to help with their skills and knowledge for whatever may come their way. When Hector isn’t serving at Khonsu’s temple in Karnak, he is the more adventurous of the two, and spends a good chunk of his time being a sellsword for the caravans traveling across the desert. He also has an affinity for animals, and thus relates to Ka very well upon meeting him for the first time.

King Edmund - Ruler of Karnak, head of the Brotherhood, and father of Eugene. A lot of his role was already laid out in Eugene’s description.

Frederic and Arianna - The pharaoh and queen of Egypt in this AU.

Egyptian Deities:

Wadjet - A snake goddess of protection and healing, Wadjet is the deity who chooses Varian and Ka for the mission to stop Set and Apep. In this AU, Wadjet is also a goddess of farsight, and thus allows Varian and Ka to be her seers on earth. While a powerful and graceful deity, Wadjet also has a “soccer mom” kind of personality to her as well. In this AU she has the form of a naga - i.e. human upper body with her lower body being a long snake’s tail.

Khonsu - The god of the moon and time, and the deity served by the Brotherhood. Khonsu is a rather mysterious figure, and while he can see through time and its various possible outcomes, he does not have direct control over how events play out. However, he does impart the ability to manipulate time in small ways to Quirin, though the ability does comes with a price if used to excessively. Khonsu’s personality is quiet, stern, yet also with a touch of levity here and there.

Ra - The god of the sun, and giver of Rapunzel’s powers. Unlike the other deities in this AU, Ra seems strangely absent, despite his sun constantly moving through the sky overhead, and Rapunzel serving as his emissary. He only speaks to her very sparingly throughout their adventure, but when he does it’s always at key moments.

Horus - The son of Ra, protector of the sun, and arch nemesis of Set. Horus chose Eugene to be his champion on earth, and gifted the prince with his wings and ability to fly. (Haven’t really ironed out more of his personality yet to be honest. More may come later!)

Sekhmet - A lion goddess and protector of Egypt. Like Ra, Sekhmet doesn’t make too many appearances in this AU, but she does give Cassandra her incredible lioness warrior powers.

Anubis - A god of death, judgment and the son of Set. Despite commanding a lot of respect, Anubis is a deity that many Egyptians fear and don’t like to talk about. He has a very serious personality (given his job that only seems natural), and really doesn’t like the idea of Set and Apep wreaking havoc on the world and making his job as psychopomp all the harder. (Basically, one of his motivations for wanting to stop the end of the world is so he doesn’t have a ton of more work to do with all the death and destruction that would result. ...Yeah, not the most altruistic reasoning, but guess the guy’s just being practical. xP) When choosing his champion, he weighed the hearts of all in the kingdom to determine which one could balance his powers best, and the scales determined that it would be Catalina, hence him bestowing her with his blessing.

Villains:

Mother Gothel - A former priestess of Set. After learning about the princess’s sun powers, Mother Gothel kidnaps the princess in order to use her powers so that she may remain young forever and never die. However, her evil plans collapse in on her when the champion of Horus comes to save Rapunzel, and Mother Gothel is destroyed in the process. (This is pretty much the extent of Mother Gothel’s role in the story.)

Zhan Tiri - High priestess of Set, and one of the main antagonists of this AU. For many years, Zhan Tiri ran the cult of Set from the underground, and kept her identity as high priestess hidden while posing as an advisor to the pharaoh’s court. However, after her attempt to eliminate the Uraeus fails, Varian and Ka see through her disguise, and she is forced to flee from the capitol and run the cult of Set from the underground in the temples and caves in the Egyptian wilderness. She’s pretty much a generic villain like in the series, where she just kinda craves revenge and destruction because...evil.

Set - The “big bad” of the AU alongside Apep. Where Apep is the brawn of the evil duo, Set is the brains. Set plans on using his cult to help release him and Apep onto the mortal plane, basically wreak as much havoc as possible, and take over the world.

Apep - The “big bad” of the AU alongside Set. Where Set is the brains of the evil duo, Apep is the brawn. As the giant serpent of chaos, Apep’s one goal in life is to destroy the world and all living things. He’s kind of the antithesis of Ka in this AU. His voice sounds a lot like Smaug from The Hobbit movies, and while big, strong and scary, he isn’t super clever.

Aaaaaand I think I’ll leave this post at that for now. Whew! I’ll probably make another post a bit later concerning a general outline of events, and maybe also some other posts with some dialogue snippets that Xiel and I have come up with if there’s enough interest.

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lo-lynx · 4 years

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Laurits/Loki as a queer character in Netflix’s Ragnarok

Spoilers for season one of Netflix’s show Ragnarok!

I binged the first season of the Netflix show Ragnarok yesterday, and felt compelled to write something about it. This is somewhat hastely written, so I apologise if the arguments are not as well thought out as they could be, but I wanted to write something. So here we go:

In the Netflix show Ragnarok we meet the two brothers Magne and Laurits as they move to the Norwegian town of Edda with their mother (Ragnarok 2020a). The audience and the characters soon realise that this town is not quite normal, and something mysterious is afoot… It becomes clear that Magne has been bestowed with some sort of magical powers and has been put in the role of Thor in the battle between Norse gods and giants. However, it is less clear what role Laurits is supposed to play. In this text I will claim that he is the Loki to Magne’s Thor, and that is especially interesting in regards to the queerness of his character.

So, first of all, why do I think Laurits is Loki? I think the first point that should be made here is his and Magne’s physical descriptions.

Here we see Laurits sitting furthest to the left, with a green jacket, and Magne sitting to the right of him (with blue jeans and a red t-shirt). Magne and Laurits very much look like how one would imagine Thor and Loki, especially a contemporary audience who has seen the Marvel version of them:

But even beyond Laurits’ looks and brotherly relation to the Thor character, there are parallels between Loki and Laurits. There is his slightly deceptive and trickster like nature, such as when he plays pranks on Magne (for instance by messing up his essay for class when he was supposed to look over the spelling) (Ragnarok 2020a, 22 min). Then there’s also his affinity with the Jutul family, who are actually giants (the name seems to be a play on the old Norse word for giants, jǫtunn). The Loki of Norse myth is often associated with giants as well and might be giant or half-giant (Hume 2019). In the series it is also hinted at several times that Laurits has some sort of magical connection to the giants, for instance at the school dance (Ragnarok 2002b, 31 min). It is also hinted at that the father of the Jutul family, Vidar, has had an affair with Laurits’ mother Turid previously (for example: Ragnarok 2002b, 11:30 min). This makes me wonder if Laurits’ parents are in fact Turid and Vidar, making him half giant… If that is the case, he would have a sort of double cultural heritage, that of humans and that of giants.

Another cultural aspect that is interesting to look at is the parallels between the Loki of myth and the culture of the indigenous Sámi people in northern Scandinavia and Russia (Laidoner 2012). For one, the land of the giants seems to somewhat resemble the description of the Sámi peoples land, in regards to geographical location (north, on the borderlands). Similar to how Sámi was (and are) seen as “other” by Scandinavian people, so were the jǫtunn seen by the æsir (the gods). Laidoner also sees parallels between Loki and historical Sámi shamanism (noadi). She writes:

Loki’s potential links to the cultural world of the Sámi might perhaps first and foremost lie in his combination of being both a jǫtunn and (possibly) an áss and the fact that he seems to lack a home and a clear cultural background (…). This certainly makes him a very untrustworthy outsider among the æsir who, irrespective of the fact that their own ancestry goes back to the jǫtnar, frequently show hostility towards them. Loki’s jǫtunn background, and the possible connection between the Sámi and the jǫtnar whose headquarters seem to have been placed in an area that corresponded to the Sámi territories, allow us to place the focus of the following discussion on Loki’s potential affiliation with Sámi culture, where ideas of symbolic soul travels, cosmic oppositions and ambiguity seem to form a natural part of human existence, something most clearly reflected in the noaidi-tradition. It is difficult to overlook the fact that many dualistic ideas of the same kind are also embodied in the Loki figure. Besides being borderline jǫtunn and áss, a curious relic of Loki’s possible connection to the Sámi-world can perhaps be found in his everpresent duality. This duality is shown in several contrasting qualities, such as existing in both male and female form and being a father and a mother, representing aspects of both good and evil (to the extent that such clear distinctions existed in pre-Christian times), being a causer and resolver of problems, a thief and a bringer of valuable objects, all of which again seems to be in accordance with the functions of a noaidi. (Laidoner 2012, 69)

So, as we can see, Loki crosses borders between both cultures and genders, and both of these aspects make him seem untrustworthy. We can also see a parallel here to how indigenous people have been seen and are seen still today. Now, to return to Laurits, we can see some of these aspects here. Laurits move between different worlds, from the luxury of the Jutuls and the popular kids at school, to his rather less glamorous home-life. As I mentioned above, I also think there’s a possibility of him being half Jutul. But he also most definitely plays with gender borders.

I have previously written on this blog about characters moving between genders, for instance regarding Varys in ASOIAF/GoT and Alex in the “Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard” series by Rick Riordan. As mentioned in the latter text, in that story Loki is presented as genderfluid for similar reasons as I outlined above with his changing of sex/gender. In the analysis of Varys, I wrote about how he was perceived as a transgressor of both borders of gender and ethnicity, with being a eunuch from “the East”. (I there relied on texts about the historical eunuchs in for instance Ancient Greece (Llewyn-Jones 2002; Nikoloutsos 2008)). Similar to what Laidoner writes about Loki, one can see that the fluidity of Varys is connected to his movement between different gender expressions as well as cultures. Here I want to briefly touch on some more theoretical background that might be useful when understanding the crossing of borders with gender and ethnicity. Emma Bond writes about the experiences of trans people who also crosses borders of nations, and how they are seen as transgressors in double ways (2018, 71). She further writes that those who permanently inhabit this liminal space between borders, this site is often experienced as a place of alienation and violence (2018, 97). So, throughout these different examples we can see that people who cross borders of gender and ethnicity are seen as suspicious, and perhaps doubly queer (in the sense of non-conformity to norms of sex/gender/sexuality, which is of course also bound up with norms of ethnicity).

In the show, Laurits is seen crossing gender borders several times. One clear example is during the school dance, where he shows up with eyeliner, skinny jeans, and his mother’s old shirt (Ragnarok 2020b, 22:30 min). At the same dance it becomes clear that he has somewhat of a crush on the popular boy Fjor Jotul (who might be his half-brother if my theory is correct… but I’m also not sure if the Jutul family is actually related in the way they claim…) (Ragnarok 2020b, 24:36 min). This is of course also a break with gender norms, that dictate that men should be attracted to women. Then in the last episode of season one Laurits shows up to the school’s celebration of the national day dressed as the school’s headmistress Ran Jutul to mock and criticise her (Ragnarok 2020c, 31:40 min). Here he cross-dresses, perhaps in a similar way as the mythological Loki has done at times. He also plays the role of the trickster very well. Throughout the season it has been somewhat unclear on whose side he is on, but here at the end he helps the “good guys” (mainly his brother), but of course in a mocking manner. This illuminates the dualistic nature of Loki that Laidoner describes (2012).

Overall, Laurits can be seen as portraying several aspects of Loki. He is a trickster, but also a somewhat fluid character in regards to his heritage/culture and gender/sexuality. He moves between different spaces, inhabiting the liminal space between borders of good/evil, feminine/masculine, etc. This portrayal of a queer character is very interesting, and I hope in the event that the show is renewed for a second season it will explore this further. I should however mention the risk of showing a queer character as a deceiver, this could of course play into stereotypes about queer and/or trans characters. This is something that I write about in the previously mentioned text about Alex from the Magnus Chase novels. But I also think this can be portrayed well and interestingly if the audience is shown a contrast between how Laurits is perceived and who he is. A similar element was most definitely present with Magne in season one. So overall, this portrayal of a queer Laurits/Loki is quite interesting and promising.

References

Bond, Emma. 2018. Writing Migration through the Body. Springer: Cham

Hume, Kathryn. 2019. “Loki and Odin: Old Gods Repurposed by Neil Gaiman, A. S. Byatt, and Klas Östergren.” Studies in the Novel, (51)2: 237-308.

Laidoner, Triin. “The Flying Noaidi of the North: Sámi Tradition Reflected in the Figure Loki Laufeyjarson in Old Norse Mythology.” Scripta Islandica 63 (2012): 59–91.

Llewellyn-Jones, Lloyd. 2002. “Eunuchs and the royal harem in Achaemenid Persia (559-331 BC)”, in Eunuchs in antiquity and beyond, ed. Tougher, Shaun, 19-50. Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales.

Nikoloutsos, Konstantinos P. 2008. ”The Alexander Bromance: Male Desire and Gender Fluidity in Oliver Stone’s Historical Epic.” Helios, (35)2: 223-251

Ragnarok. 2020a. New Boy. [TV-show] Netflix, 31st of January.

Ragnarok. 2020b. 541 Meters. [TV-show] Netflix, 31st of January.

Ragnarok. 2020c. Yes, we love this country. [TV-show] Netflix, 31st of January.

#ragnarok #ragnarok netflix #ragnarok 2020 #HOW DO I TAG THIS SO PPL DONT THINK I MEAN MARVEL #feminism #queer

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woffordswords · 3 years

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NieR Replicant (Part 2: Themes of Violence and Sacrifice)

In part 1, I examined the doubled narrative form of NieR and suggested that it makes sense to consider the significance of this form as a negotiation of a contemporary desire for stories that exist between myth (timeless, cyclical, and essential) and history (chronological, linear, and causal). In part 2, I wish to deal more directly with some of the themes that began to emerge in my overview of the game’s story in part 1. In my opinion, NieR is notable in the context of contemporary AAA games (big budget games published by one of the industries major publishers) because of it’s concern with the meanings of human behavior. In particular, NieR explores forms of behavior that are commonplace in gaming, but are not often interrogated or placed at the center of gaming narratives. Chief among it’s concerns are the boundaries between the self and other, notably in terms of questions of the distinction between selfish and selfless behaviors. Furthermore, violence and violent impulses are held up and acknowledged as a central aspect of the human character, something that is complex and meaningful and deserving of more careful consideration than what it usually receives in video games, especially given its predominance as a mode of interaction across a wide range of genres.

Starting with the latter, violence in video games is typically treated in one of two ways. Typically it is adopted and embraced as the primary mode of interaction in many games due to it’s exhilarating and demanding forms. In these games, little attention is typically given to the reasons behind engaging in violent behavior or the consequences of such actions. External discourses often celebrate these games as an appropriate release for violent and aggressive impulses that allow the related urges to be sublimated in daily life. Alternatively, critics argue that frequent exposure to violence in these games, especially among children, can lead to an increase in the prevalence of aggressive impulses and a narrowing comprehension of the range of possibilities through which people can interact with others and resolve our conflicts with them.

Violence in video games is typically not scrutinized by the games themselves. It is a means to an end, a way to achieving an engaging interactive experience that emphasizes skill, strategy, and dexterity. However, the alternative trend has been to engage with the critique of violence in video games outlined above in order to tell stories about characters whose violent impulses detract from their ability to function as empathetic, rational, well rounded human beings as well as to present the possibility of desirable alternatives. Two good examples of this sort of game that are roughly contemporary with NieR are the critical darlings Spec Ops: The Line and Undertale.

NieR takes a slightly different tact. Although it too features characters who succumb to violent impulses and are limited and even potentially damaged by the effect of engaging in such behavior, rather than condemn the behavior and the characters who perform it or suggest and provide the opportunity for alternatives, NieR considers violence as a necessary and even essential aspect of a cyclical pattern of behavior that in some ways defines for the game what it means to be human. In other words, the game neither celebrates nor criticizes violence, but instead provides a compelling framework for understanding it that allows us to consider the significance of violence in human nature and contemporary history, as well as in our own behaviors as players of violent video games.

The role that violence plays in NieR is initially one connected to a collectivities prospects for survival. The first creature that the player kills in the game are sheep who wander the plains just north of the protagonist’s village. Killing for food quickly becomes killing for protection as the player is informed of an attack by Shades on a group of human workers attempting to rebuild a bridge that connects several human settlements to the player’s village. From there, killing gradually shifts from something protective and retaliatory to something proactive, capable of fostering greater powers for the protagonist. Once the player has teamed up with Grimoire Weiss and the idea that Shades contain within them “sealed verses”, capable of augmenting the players magical powers and brining an end to the disease that plagues his people, the Shades shift in significance from a menace to resource that must be culled in order to be harvested. The old excuse about needing to protect and/or avenge people still presents itself at different moments of the game, but the player hardly needs a reason to kill. Their violence becomes indiscriminately targeted towards an entire population of creatures, even those that seem to serve no immediate threat and whose elimination fosters the completion of no immediate goal. This process of gradual abstraction where killing becomes detached from more immediate causes and broadly justified by a totalizing mission is a pattern that can be found throughout history, but can immediately and obviously connected with the war on terrorism that Western countries have been waging for the last quarter century.

Along with this evolving rationale for enacting it, violence in NieR also can be connected with a general ignorance and obliviousness to the world one lives in. Throughout the game, strange and unique situations that range from the seemingly evolving intelligence of the shades to the existence of strange and difficult to explain locales and phenomena are hand-waved away by the protagonist in favor of maintaining focus on the more immediately demanding and gratifying violent spectacles in which they are engaged. Even towards the game’s conclusion when information about the circumstances of their world and the consequences of their actions are being directly and forcefully explained to them, the protagonists ignore and block out this information by focusing on the violent acts at hand. There is here a debate about means and ends that can be had such that it could be argued that a focus on the violent means by the characters really reflects their total commitment to their end goals. which are noble. However, it is equally arguable, and in my opinion more convincing given the ways the protagonist’s commitment to their violent actions are demonstrated to be beyond reflection such that even if new information arose that challenged their thinking in terms of how best to reach their goals, they would continue to pursue their violent course because it is the means and not the ends to which they are more committed.

This idea of violence as something so directly engaging that in precludes the accumulation and processing of new knowledge is an interesting one and something that relates back to part one’s discussion of the relationship between myth and history. Violence in NieR seems to have the effect of perpetuating the mythical cycle of extinction and rebirth precisely because it precludes the protagonists becoming aware of the historical context in which they are acting. The protagonist refuses to grasp their role in wiping out a previous form of humanity and it is because they never gain this knowledge about the historical significance of their actions that they are able to carry them out. Violence is, as has often been stated in other contexts, something of a cyclical phenomenon, with patterns of action and retribution that continue in perpetuity across history. However, instead of suggesting that violent atrocities have stood in the way of history, or set society back, it might be more effective to say that violent actions keep people involved at a mythical level of understanding and involvement with the world around them and prevent them from entering into a historical one. Emerging from this, the question that NieR seems to beg is whether or not this mythical level of acting is immoral or not.

The events of NieR are certainly tragic. They concern the extinction of a form of humanity, carried out but another form of humanity that lacks the knowledge of the full significance of their actions. However, the game also seems to suggest that there is little room for alternatives as it relates to this matter. There is no possibility for coexistence between Gestalts and Replicants. Either the Gestalts themselves share this violent predisposition and pose an immediate and unavoidable threat to the Replicants, or else they are as committed to their own survival the the replicants are and rely parasitically on the Replicants to achieve it. This is, of course, most pronounced in the case of the Shadow Lord, who, like the protagonist, will do whatever it takes to save his sister, even if it means committing atrocities against another intelligent form of humanity. Since the parasitism of the Gestalts ultimately leads to madness and the destruction of the intelligence of both Gestalt and Replicant, the elimination of the Gestalt threat is a necessity for intelligent life’s continued survival. While one can empathize with the Gestalt, there is no denying within the system that the game has established, they are, so to speak, on the wrong side of history, which is to say that their existence must come to end for humanity itself to continue. However, their fundamental sameness to the Replicants in terms of their right to be considered human is undeniable. It is this sameness, this inability to distinguish between the moral and human rights of either side that causes a major problem for humanity’s continued existence.

This is where the mythically oriented violent disposition of the protagonist becomes important. The violent outlook is capable of creating dichotomies where none exist, of disrupting markers of commonality and sewing division and discord. While these aspects of violence are rarely celebrated (or worth celebrating) they are capable of allowing life to orient itself by the cyclical form as opposed to the stable form of history. They preclude the definition of the human based on intelligence and consciousness and and preclude rational and emotional connections with others which might break the cycle and establish the alternative trajectories of history. The cycle is a sort of trap or prison, but it is also something that inevitably continues and this may hit closer to the essence of what life actually is than the many ways that historical consciousness allows us to envision life as something that evolves and makes progress, or, alternatively, collapses and comes to an end.

It is in this sense that the game does not render a traditional moral judgment on the actions of its protagonists, what it offers, or at least tries to offer, is an alternative orientation (that of cycle and myth) to view these actions from so as to make sense of them. Moral judgment does not exist in the same way within myth since the cycle is fixed and eternal and thus morality has no weight as a means to determine the direction in which human life should proceed or the means by which it may be judged. However, as stated in part one, the game does not wholly commit itself to myth, nor is the mythical outlook able to supersede the historical. Even if the protagonists fail to grasp the historical weight of their actions, the player has the opportunity to come much closer to doing so. They are torn between two poles, the desire to play the game and the desire to make sense of the story and these poles are roughly aligned with the mythical and the historical respectively.

Playing the game, participating in the thrill of combat, becomes something that supersedes the story world in many games, including NieR. Because combat in games is essentially mechanical, which is to say that it is defined and governed by the rules of an abstract system, it is endlessly repeatable and detachable from its context. It is always possible for the player to detach themselves from the world in which the action takes place and to focus on the combat. NieR itself explores and encourages this relation by encouraging multiple playthroughs in which the details of the story, since they have already become familiar, recede into the background, while the more abstract stimulation of the mechanically challenging combat becomes the focus. However, what is intriguing here is the way that NieR, in a seemingly contradictory manner, ties this mythical and cyclical engagement to gameplay systems into a continued desire for historical understanding. Many games now offer what is commonly known as New Game +, which is basically a mode in which the player can replay the game that they have already completed with the narrative remaining entirely unchaged but allowing them to keep their character/abilities/items/etc. and be faced with more difficult gameplay challenges. New Game + modes obviously place almost exclusive focus on the player’s desire to continue to “play the game”, pushing the story to the background as something that has already been completed and fully experience. However, NieR promises the player small and subtle, yet revealing and significant differences to the narrative upon subsequent playthroughs. As such, in the instances where systems would appear to be the major driver of the experience, NieR doubles down on the desire for story in order to challenge the straightforwardness of this progression towards gameplay focused abstraction.

NieR continues to hold out the prospect of more of the narrative to the players, even after the characters involved and their fates have largely been settled. It conveys the protagonists own imprisonment in the mythical cycle but also delivers to the player the promise of narrative progression. What seems to be the case is that ultimately the pull that NieR makes on the player is undecidable. Instead of narrative receding in the face gameplay as the primary motivating desire upon subsequent playthroughs, it becomes difficult to say at which level the player’s desire is more firmly rooted. NieR offers the possibilty to see its events cyclically by replaying it at the same time that it promises the ability to break that cycle by revealing new aspects of the story. Ultimately, NieR doesn’t restrict its player to either commitment, it asks them to move between the two, to experience the game and its events in both ways, not to judge which is the more proper way to view the game, but rather to suggest that the game is a novel form that allows for the experience and awareness of both.

This seems to me to be one of NieR’s major contentions about video games: that they offer something like an evolution in terms of the way we understand the world as well as tell and experience stories because they lend themselves to this simultaneous mythical and historical engagement with the world in a way that other forms do not. They allow these two forms of desire to coexist without extinguishing one or the other. The player, in the end, does not fully have the means to render a historical-moral judgment on the protagonist because despite their efforts they do not have the full picture. The mythical cycle of the game is incomplete and yet compelling in its form so as to justify itself and its continued existence (similar to the way human life is able to justify its continued existence despite the moral obstacles placed in its way by the narrative predicament NieR poses). However, neither does the protagonist have the ability to fully embrace the myth. There is too much historical and moral weight to knowledge they have accumulated while playing the game to feel that the protagonist and their role in the cycle of extinction and survival can be identified with and accepted. The player finds themselves feeling both inside and outside of this cycle, both related to and estranged from the characters they control. This is a unique position in relation to a story such as this and one that is not entirely satisfying. It presents the player with gaps and contradictions in their own experience as well as in the desires upon which said experience is structured.

If the mythical cycle is a prison that allows life to continue but locks it into an inevitably limited, cyclical awareness of its relation to the world and the historical offers lines of flight that may lead towards shared progress, but are just as likely to lead towards total ruin, NieR puts forward the need for an alternative. This alternative is the perspective of the player, at once within the world and out of it, at once able to know and judge as well as too limited in scope to make such knowledge and judgments definitive. In short, this is a means of experiencing and understanding the world that puts a premium on more immediate involvement in an experience as opposed to more detached contemplation of it, but also wants to include means of contextualizing that experience that are emotionally challenging and thought provoking without being overly moralizing or didactic. As such, what this alternative perspective seems opposed to is the rigidity of uncompromising moral and historical lenses while simultaneously rejecting the atomization and detachment of the cyclical over-investment in direct action (figured predominantly through the figure of violence). It imagines the game as a system for negotiating these two poles and thus for knowing the world differently.

NieR might, in this sense, be seen as functioning dialectically, producing a new means for understanding the world out of a clash between opposed alternatives. In my view, it provides an elegant view of stakes against with humanity threatens to exhaust itself. It offers something fluid yet thought provoking and it leaves us with a sense of these characters and their world that demands more of us in terms of our ability to make sense of it. If neither the mythical outlook nor the historical one can give us a satisfying account of the meaning of NieR, we are spurred to look instead at how we experience the push and pull between these two perspectives in our own experience. This reflexive knowledge that games can create through juxtaposing their systems and narratives with the player’s desires and experiences is, in my view, crucial to getting people to reflect on meaning differently. Whether or not it represents that transcendence necessary for life to mean something more than an a cycle or a linear progression remains unanswered. However, the way it involves the individual and their own negotiation of experience and what can be known about it is important to me, because it involves a fundamentally questioning of how we make sense of things. I hope that it engages people in a way that can’t be resolved by resource to rote ideologies or abstracted patterns of involvement, but instead makes these two domains relative to each other, leaving the player with need to sort through their own sense of how to make these domains most compellingly work together. For myself, as it relates to NieR, this means acknowledging something in my own desire for knowledge of causality that keeps me involved in the mythical cycles of violence that the game depicts. There is something in my experience therefore that cannot be reduced to either one or the other.

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We can establish a contrast between the way violent impulses and violent behavior function for the protagonists of NieR and the way they function for players of the game. Of course, there are many who do play games with the mentality displayed by the protagonists. They play games for the action, they skip cutscenes, they tune out dialogue, they are bored by anything resembling downtime. For people with this approach, NieR is a game whose story recedes into the background. Important dialogue is often conveyed during fights and thus is easy to ignore. Important portions of the dialogue can even be missed entirely if the player completes segments of fights too quickly, something that in my experience occurred fairly often unless I actively held back. In the second playthrough there are totally new segments of dialogue spoken by the boss-shades that the player fights, but they are not spoken in english (or whatever language the player is playing the game in) and must be read via subtitles, something that is difficult and requires conscious effort during a frenetic fight scene. For the player who is keen to focus on the action NieR makes it easy, but for the player who has an interest in the story, these devices create the kind of dissonance that symbolize the conflict between these two desires through setting the players experience of both at odds with each other.

As such, for the player with some sort of desire to understand the narrative, violent action in NieR becomes something like an impediment to receiving the story. An intense focus on the gameplay, something most action games demand, is actively at odds with the player’s experience of the story. Even player’s like myself who do care about the story and desire to understand it may find themselves slipping habitually into preoccupation with the action and only once it is too late realized that they have missed something that they wanted to see or hear regarding the story. This is highly characteristic of a common vein of difference in video games between the habitual nature of gameplay, particularly fast-pace visceral action oriented gameplay, and the unexpected interruptions of story that seek to command the player’s attention with their difference from the usual experience of the game. It also symbolically stands in for the way certain actions, notably those violent in nature, can stand in the way of our ability to understand the wider context of our actions, as I have already discussed above.

However, in NieR, as in most action games with prominent narrative components, violence is not only an distraction from the story, it is also the only means to access it. In a meaningful contradiction, the player forced to perform the violent actions of the gameplay in order to reveal further aspects of the story. Violence is thus depicted as not only as consuming and narrowing the player’s focus, but also as opening up and revealing more and more about the world. Players do not just commit violent acts in games because they enjoy them, although they may, violence is a means to progression in the overall narrative structure of many games, including NieR. It takes the characters to new places, it introduces them to new people and creatures, and it leads to many other moments of revelation, even as it also actively threatens to obscure and destroy what it potentially reveals. The player is perhaps more aware of this double-edged nature of violence than the game’s protagonists are, especially if they have a desire to understand the world of the game, which the characters who live in that world do not. This struggle between knowing what violent actions are capable of revealing and also understanding how they threaten to destroy or deform those revelations is a major characteristic of the experience of playing NieR. It is an uneasy knowledge that the player may sometimes actively suppress in order to feed their desire for kinetic stimulation while at other times it will erupt and confront them with the limitations of their means of interacting with this world.

Ultimately, if one way to read the gaps and ellipses in NieR’s narrative is to see it as a negotiation between different knowledge systems and are conflicting desires to understand the world, another way to read them is as a critique of our limited means of access to understanding that our means of interacting with that world provide. If we had some other means of interacting with this world we might be able to come to a more satisfying means of understanding it. However, for whatever reason, whether it is because of the limitations of our protagonists or because of the limitations of the commercial video game marketplace that allows this game to exist in the first place, we are left with a story filled with gaps and ellipses because the violent action takes precedence and determines the form of the former. This is a more critical and moralizing interpretation of the role of video game violence, but it is certainly a valid one.

Another similar and yet different interpretation of these same points would claim violence as necessary and integral, not just to this game and these characters worldviews, but to human life in general. It would claim violence as something properly human, something essential to our will to survive and protect our sense of self. As such, the game would be less about the limitations of the protagonist’s or the gamer’s perspective on the game world, and more about the limitations of humanity’s perspective on the world in general. Returning to the points above we could see these limitation as an impediment to a more complete form of historical knowledge that we desire, or we might also see them as the reason we become locked into a cyclical form of knowledge that is always relative to our position in a repeated cycle. Or, as I have more affirmatively suggested above, we may take these limitations as affordances and see them as the tools that we are capable of working with, and from them attempt to devise more satisfying and productive means of understanding the world that do not depend on an outright rejection of the violent means by which we as human beings often propel ourselves forward.

In either case, this is a much more complex and ambivalent take on violence than what we are often granted by other video games, one that forces us to reckon with the integral place of violence in our lives and its role in enacting our desires, even as we recognize how it warps and limits us and the world around us.

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The other aspect of NieR worth examining is the question of selfishness and sacrifice. Many video games over the years have purported to have moral choice systems. These often boil down to a rudimentary binary where the player is either able to act selfishly or selflessly and see some sort of impact based on their choices in the events of the story and in changes to the world around them. This trend reached its zenith with the 360/PS3 console generation and was typified by the likes of Mass Effect, Bioshock, and Infamous. Although many classic CRPG’s such as the Fallout series featured a wider range of more nuanced moral choices, the distillation of this concept in these more commercially prominent series has served in large part to define how we think about moral choice, for better or for worse, in contemporary video games. Since many of these games (as well as a plurality of games in general) grant players great and substantial powers in the context of their worlds, games are often dealing with fundamental questions about heroism and its possibility. They often treat on the old theme from Spiderman: “With great power comes great responsibility”, and spur the players to think more about the impact that their desire can have on the world around them.

NieR is an interesting game because it bucks many of the presiding trends in video games related to exploring what effects a powerful, potentially heroic character can have on their world. Generally, It doesn’t give the player choices about their actions. The positive or negative effects that the protagonist’s actions have on those around them, such as the decimation of the Aerie or the eventual destruction of Project Gestalt itself are ultimately outside of the players control, part of an escalating cycle of power-accumulation and violence spurred on by the looming threat of extinction for Gestalts and Replicants alike. The player is swept up in a current of events occurring in the world of NieR, acting before they fully understand the implications of their situation, forced to serve as the catalyst in terrible cycle of death and rebirth, an integral part of an enormous machine whose function is beyond their control. In this way, the protagonist’s involvement in the story of NieR is something like an allegory for the nature of the player’s involvement across the medium of video games. Although player’s of video games often do have a great degree of control as it relates to their interaction with gameplay systems, the same cannot be said about the stories and worlds within which such systems are contextualized. Typically moral choice systems in games work to combat or obscure the sense in which the player’s role in determining the story of a video game is pre-determined and their agency circumscribed. NieR takes the opposite track, reveling in making the player aware of the way that the fate of the world of NieR is almost entirely outside their control, regardless of their intentions for it.

While the mandatory missions at the center of NieR’s story always play out the same way, where the player is given more agency to shape the events of the game’s story is in relation to the game’s side quests. Unlike the main objectives that must be fulfilled for the story to progress, side quests in NieR are entirely optional. (The only exception is that if the player wishes to reach endings D and E there are certain side quests that they must complete in order to collect all the in-game weapons. Endings D and E represent the biggest part of the game’s story where the player does have some degree of agency. I will discuss them in more detail later in this piece.) The greatest sense in which the player has agency has to do with whether or not they are interested in taking part in these side quests to begin with. Since they all tend to revolve around the player taking on errands and requests from people who would be at greater risk from the dangers of the outside world than the protagonist would be, these side quests are an important area where the themes of selflessness/selfishness and heroism are explored.

In RPGs, side quests will range in terms of their significance to the larger themes and stories of the games. Often they can be acknowledged as forms of mindless busywork, intended to allow the player a structured means to gain power and resources, or else a way to pad out the game’s content and serve as an interlude between the more eventful mandatory missions. Other games use side-quests to tell relatively robust stand alone stories that contribute to the player’s overall sense of the world and develop the game’s various themes. NieR falls somewhere between these two poles. In NieR, side quests vary in terms of their subject matter, but are generally relatively mundane in terms of the tasks involved. They often revolve around revisiting previously explored areas to kill a dangerous shade or to track down some missing or needed item for a given NPC. However, they are typically much more interesting in terms of how they contribute to the player’s sense of the game’s world and its central themes. While the tasks themselves are typically quotidian, their meaning often deepens and evolves upon reflection. All contain at least a few extended conversations with the quest giver and usually also include some dialogue between the protagonist and Grimoire Weiss. It is in these instances of dialogue in which the characters are able to reflect on and consider the significance of their actions before and after the fact that surprising and unforeseen aspects of them typically become apparent.

There is something like a general pattern that the side quests in NieR follow that I would summarize as the following: The protagonist receives a fairly innocuous request, Grimoire Weiss comments on the protagonists tendency to involve themselves in the problems of others, despite them having their own more pressing concerns, the task is completed, but something begins to feel off about the whole thing, and, finally, the player returns to the quest giver where they are forced to confront the reality that some other purpose was being served by the protagonist’s actions then the one they thought they would be fulfilling. The general tone of these quests can range from the silly to the serious. In one, for instance, the player helps a family to track down their missing son, only in the end for it to be revealed that said family was a family of criminals and that the son who you tracked down and forced to return home was attempting to flee a life of crime. This ends up feeling strange and slightly comical, a sort of “whoops, perhaps we should have been more careful about what we were getting ourselves involved in,” moment. In another, things become much more serious, when upon delivering letters to an old woman who lives in a lighthouse at edge of the village of Seafront it is revealed that the letters that arrive from the woman’s lover living overseas are an elaborate multi-generational ruse devised by the villagers to protect the woman from learning that her lover is dead and to ensure that she continues to wait in Seafront and continue to operate the lighthouse to the benefit of the entire community. At the conclusion of the quest, the player is given the opportunity to tell the old woman the truth about these letters and the fate of her lover or to continue to perpetuate the lie.

Apart from the choice about whether or not to engage with these side quests in the first place, these sorts of unexpectedly harrowing decisions about whether or not to tell someone the truth about the sinister, deceptive, and/or tragic circumstances of their life are the other major form of agency that the player has in the side quests that they do not have in the main quest. Their decisions ultimately do not substantially change the events of the game or the world around them. Sometimes they lead to the player receiving one reward or another, but more often than not, their only impact is in terms of how the NPCs involved understand the significance of their lives, as well as how the player views the protagonists responsibility to these characters. The player may choose to lie and keep the truth of a situation from an unwitting NPC or they may choose to tell them the truth. However, even in the latter context, the NPCs always reach an acceptance of this revelation that allows them to keep living their lives be at peace with the tragic or unexpected circumstances that have affected them. While the player may have feeling that they express through their choices in these moments about whether these NPCs are better off knowing the truth or remaining blissfully ignorant, ultimately their choices do nothing to alter the fates of the characters involved, nor their own. Telling the NPCs the truth doesn’t do anything to make the player more able to face the truth of their own situation. Neither does choosing to keep the truth from them cause the player to look away from the reality of the circumstances they are in.

Ultimately, the characters in NieR are compelled to live their lives, to fulfill their roles in their societies, whether or not they are given the opportunity by the player to come to terms with the truth. The player may agonize, feeling the weight of the choices that are put in front of them and their responsibility to these NPCs, but ultimately the player and their choices don’t have the ability to change the lives of these characters, for better or for worse. The player may have the desire to act selflessly, to behave heroically, or else they may make choices out of self-interest that best serve themselves. However, despite having the power to be in this position where the player has the ability to imagine themselves as a hero, in truth, if heroism and selflessness are about having the power to make sacrifices that improve the lives of others, then the player is ultimately unable to live up this standard. In this sense, we can see NieR as being about how a powerful and potentially heroic figure remains relatively powerless in the face of larger and more mysterious forces that they fail understand, let alone control, or, alternatively, only understand too late when the opportunity to make a decision that might positively or negatively affect the lives of those around them has already passed.

This “too little” or “too late” sense of heroism is ever-present in NieR and goes a long way towards contributing to the general aesthetic of the game. It is a markedly different experience of having power and aspiring towards heroism than the ones that are typically offered by other video games. It conveys a sense in which having power is not the same as having agency, but instead contributes to a more acute sense of ones limitations. NieR is a game about being trapped in a cycle, about the inevitability of tragic events, and about a desperate desire to resist those things that must remain largely thwarted. What it means to try to act heroically in this context serves as a powerful and enlightening corrective to the sense of heroism put forward by other games and media.

We can explore this sense of heroism in more detail at this point by refocusing on the main narrative of NieR. As previously mentioned, the player has little to no agency as it relates to shaping the events of the larger story. However, the game’s plot deals directly with themes of heroism and sacrifice, as well as their limitations. At the center of the narrative is the protagonist and a few different sets of relationships. Chief among these are the relationship between the protagonist and his sister Yonnah, the relationship between the protagonist and his companions, Kainé and Emil, and finally the protagonist and his relationship with his allies and enemies, notably the games many quest givers.

The protagonists relationship with Yonnah in particular poses interesting questions about heroism, particularly as it relates to the distinction between selfishness and selflessness. A recurrent motif throughout the game, especially the game’s first half, is the idea that acting to protect/cure/save Yonnah means becoming more distant from her. The sense that Yonnah is trapped and imprisoned, even in the game’s first half when she is in the protagonist’s village, not yet captured by the Shadow Lord, is the most prominent aspect of her character in the game. She is imprisoned by her failing body as much as she is by external forces. In the beginning of the game, we see the protagonist taking on minor tasks in service of the villagers, culling sheep, fighting shades, but these do not take the protagonist very far away from Yonnah. However, after Yonnah’s “escape attempt” where she searches in vain for a lunar tear before being captured, the player teams up with Grimoire Weiss, gaining substantially more power and beginning to take on greater responsibility. The quest for greater power that will ostensibly save Yonnah also takes him further and further away from her. This is primarily conveyed through the game’s loading screens which depict excerpts from Yonnah’s diary. These generally convey the sense that Yonnah is lonely, that she misses her brother, and that she wishes she could be more involved with the exciting life that he is living and meet the new companions that he has teamed up with.

The player may begin to feel. as I did, what Yonnah really needs is her brother’s companionship and that his tireless efforts to save her, which extend towards his becoming something like the hero of the land, may ultimately be more about his needs than about hers. It is not at all clear the plan to collect the sealed verses will work. The game is careful to indicate that the ancient song that gives rise to this plan is itself imprecise and not necessarily reliable. Still, the protagonist leaps to the conclusion that murdering shades in service of accumulating power is the right thing to do, precisely, I feel, because he cannot stand the feeling of being trapped and powerless, the same feeling that Yonnah inevitably has to live with. The protagonist has the power to resist this feeling, but in so doing he separates himself from his sister.

At the game’s conclusion, the protagonist successfully slays the Shadow Lord and brings Yonnah back home. The initial A end provides a sense of peace as well as a return to innocence, with the two symbolically reverting to their childhood forms. While this may seem to suggest that, in the end, the protagonist’s actions were justified and that now, with the dark threat eliminated, the two will live happily ever after, this ending is tinged with bitterness. This is because of the fate of the protagonists companions, who are either dead or left behind at the game’s conclusion as well as because of the the fate of the world, which the protagonist willfully ignores in his relentless desire to save his sister. We are left with a sense that by growing more powerful and expanding his horizons outwards, the protagonist had assumed responsibilities to people other than just his sister. In this light, the idyllic return home to a time of innocence reads like another selfish attempt to escape the burdens of caring for the sick and damaged, rather than a culminating reward for the protagonist’s selfless heroism. Saving his sister was ultimately possible because of the many sacrifices the protagonist made with an aim towards selfless devotion, but it is difficult if not impossible to separate these actions from their selfish aspects.

The relationship between the protagonist and his sister Yonnah in which the protagonist neglects her in order to try to save her and distance himself from her and the sense of imprisonment that she represents can be considered as the paradigmatic instance of a dynamic in which selfless and selfish actions are hopelessly intertwined, we can see this dynamic repeated in the relationship between the protagonist and his world. A consequence of the protagonists newfound powers are his ability to travel across his homeland and come to a greater understanding of the problems of others and their relations to his own. Part of the heroes journey is a gradual realization that the world is bigger than oneself and a subsequent willingness to accept responsibility for the problems of others. The protagonists journey in this regard is one of stunted growth. His continued focus on his sister’s problems ultimately lead him towards narrow solutions to the problems of others that benefit him and his smaller worldview. He never truly reaches an awareness of the most important problems of his world, not because he is unable to comprehend them, but because he is unwilling to.

Despite an abundance of evidence that the shades that he fights are intelligent and close to human, the protagonist never considers altering course away from his genocidal campaign of violence. He does not search for more nuanced solutions to the problems that other communities have with shades. As the game progresses, the player is able to see more and more clearly that the shades he’s fighting are not villainous, but rather misunderstood, but the protagonist never comes close to making these same revelations. In the most extreme case, that of the Aerie, the protagonist, although not entirely of his own volition, resorts to annihilating that village in order to defeat a powerful shade. This unconcern with the fate of other living beings speaks to the protagonist singlemindedness as it relates to the growth of his power, a single-mindedness that leads to his greater failures to comprehend his responsibility to the world around him.

This reaches a culmination in the game’s conclusion when the protagonist refuses to understand the information about Project Gestalt that Devola and Popola supply him with. It is not that he accepts what they tell him, that he is essentially committing genocide against the previous iteration of the human race, and decides that there is no turning back at this point. Instead, he simply stubbornly refuses to listen to and consider the meaning of any of it. In the end, it is Yonnah, and more specifically the Gestalt version of Yonnah, that grasps the full truth of the situation that their world has found itself in. It is in her sacrifice of her own life that we see what it means to come to terms with a responsibility to the world around her and to humanity in general. It is only in the depths of her confinement, rather than in the liberatory potential of the power possessed by both the protagonist and the Shadow Lord, that she finds the capacity to acknowledge the reality of the world around her and to truly make a heroic sacrifice.

At the game’s initial conclusion in ending A, despite its idyllic semblance, the ending is tragic because the protagonist’s failure is so pronounced. He has failed to understand anything, and this failure is perhaps most prominently symbolized in the moment where he holds out his hand to the Gestalt Yonnah who procedes to walk right by him. It is in this light that we can see that something in his potential journey towards heroism has failed. However, it is not only in this light. The protagonist can also be seen to fail in his journey in terms of his ability to help and understand his companions. Kainé and Emil are both characters who have their own tremendously impactful struggles and the protagonist’s ultimate ignorance towards them is another black mark that signals his failure to arrive at consciousness of his own situation.

(Mention the episode where Devola and Popola ban Kainé and Emil)

In a sense, NieR is about how a powerful and potentially heroic figure remains relatively powerless in the face of larger and more mysterious forces that they cannot understand, let alone control.

NieR is also a meditation on the difficulty of separating selfless and selfish actions and the ways that intending to change things for others inevitably ends up being about changing one’s own awareness and understanding of themselves. As previously stated, rather than changing the lives of the other characters or the world around them, the players attempts to be a hero only really have an effect on themselves. They aren't able to change the course of the world for worse or for better, but they are able to shape how the player knows and feels about the world. This leads to a different sense of what heroism means in the context of humanity and suggests that the selfish and selfless dichotomies that underly so many of our stories about power and how it ought or ought not to be used are reductive and fail to account for the ways that having power is itself a perspective on the world.

The premise that one can be good or bad, selfless or selfish, with the use of power, suggests that they can have a worldview that they bring with them into their acquisition of power that remains intact. It suggests that what will change when a person becomes powerful is everything around that person, rather than that person themselves. But this focus on selfishness and selflessness obscures the degree to which power is essentially a change in ones own worldview and that how one uses their power is ultimately something that has consequences for the self, not something that changes the world. Power is thus far less liberating than it is often imagined to be and primarily serves as challenge to the individuals sense of themselves, often in a way that brings them closer to their limitation as an ordinary human being, rather than something that allows them to transcend them.

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mtgbracket · 3 years

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Tiebreaker - Mazirek, Kraul Death Priest vs Polukranos, Unchained

Hi folks! Yesterday, these two cards both got 177 votes in Batch 2.3, leading to a tie. I don’t vote in the polls so that I can be the tiebreaking vote when it’s needed. So here I am doing that.

I am going to be using the same format as I did for the ties in the original Magic Bracket - see this old post for an example. Essentially I will provide a written analysis on each card over five categories, and then finish with scores. If the scores also tie then my personal favourite gets the nod. The categories are:

- Quality of design, scored out of 10 - Power level, scored out of 5 (overpowered cards will score lower) - Flavour, scored out of 5 - Art, scored out of 5 (combined across multiple arts if there are any) - Place in Magic history, scored out of 5

Let’s get stuck in.

Mazirek, Kraul Death Priest

Design

Fittingly for a death priest, Mazirek cares about death - specifically, he’s one of the relatively few cards that care about sacrificing. While we’re more used to seeing this on black-red cards in recent years, Mazirek was printed in Commander 2015 and the sacrifice-matters element is perfectly at home in black. While it doesn’t feel green, the reward you get - +1/+1 counters on all your creatures - certainly does, and Mazirek has a solidly black-green feel as a result. And by both caring about death and growth/life, he also feels specifically Golgari - which matters as the Kraul are a Golgari insect group. Sacrifice-matters probably does play better in black-red (where red’s ability to sacrifice its own stuff lines up nicely), but it’s not massively out of place here.

Having flying (which makes sense for an Insect) but a measly 2/2 body for 5 also guides the player to imagining growing him into a massive threat through adding lots of sacrifice effects. The design is also kept light by not having Mazirek provide any inherent way of sacrificing things or making sacrifices happen - the player has to provide their own. This is pretty common for these kinds of designs, but is good because it means the rewards can be a bit juicier, as the player has to provide a sacrifice payoff, an enabler, and likely some fodder - although making your opponent sacrifice things also works!

One ding against the sacrifice trigger is that it does require players to handle a small bit of rules knowledge - specifically, identifying the “sacrifice” keyword action and understand which things are and aren’t sacrifices. And effects that make temporary tokens are annoyingly inconsistent about whether the tokens are exiled or sacrificed, which sets up a bit of a reading debt.

Power level

Fittingly for a card from a Commander precon, Mazirek is pretty potent. He can grow your team quite substantially with a few triggers, even if he doesn’t provide you an in-built way of getting them, and promises unbounded payoff. Combined with a sacrifice outlet and something with Persist can even make infinite combos, which is pretty compelling as a power option. Mazirek is technically legal in Eternal formats, but isn’t up to grade there - but that’s not a mark down on him as few cards are.

Mazirek ranks #278 on EDHREC, as the Commander of 424 decks, and as a card appears in 4% of decks on the platform. This indicates a potent and popular Commander card.

Flavour

Mazirek, as mentioned above, is the leader of the Kraul, the Golgari insect race. His card name certainly conjures up a lot of what’s going on with him - “Death Priest” is quite a title, and gets across both the death-focused aspect of the Golgari as well as the Kraul’s society - Mazirek was the leader of the Kraul race until his death in the War of the Spark storyline. His name is also fun to say - and feels quite insectile. It’s a shame that the “priest” title, which feels more like a Cleric, is not matched with his typeline, where he is a Shaman. There are plenty of green and even black-green Clerics, so this does feel like a minor ding.

Mazirek’s flavour text reinforces the “insect” thing nicely, with talks of clicks and buzz, and the very Metal “incarnation of decay”. Overall the picture of a rotten, death-feeding entity is well sold. Being empowered by death is a flavourful concept, but “sacrificing” specifically is hard to convey as a flavourful concept - it’s a bit too mechanical.

Art

Mathias Kollros’s piece revels in the black-green colour palette we’d expect from a Golgari legend, and shows the central figure suggestively in dark greens and yellow highlights, but with the details hidden by strong green-white backlighting. The posing emphasises the many additional limbs that Mazirek has over a humanoid figure, with his wings and extra legs, as well as his elevated position. Some drippy, slimy looking moss decorates his podium and the darker edges of the piece give us the sense that we’re in the Kraul’s tunnels. After adjusting to the main image we also see the eggs at the edges of the image, adding to the insect / creepy vibe for an overall very effective piece.

Note that the colour palette appears to have been significantly darkened from the original printing for the later Double Masters version for no clear reason. I think the original printing is the superior.

Place in Magic history

Other than a supporting role in the Ravnica / War of the Spark storyline, Mazirek doesn’t have much to write home about here - no particularly unique or interesting things about him.

Polukranos, Unchained

Design

From this year’s Theros: Beyond Death, we have the zombified version of Polukranos. Originally gaining infamy as Polukranos, World Eater, this hydra is now presented in a black-tinged version - our second black-green card. He starts out with square stats as a very undercosted-seeming 4-mana 6/6, before later promising to escape as a 6-mana 12/12. The “permanent damage” drawback here is something originally seen on Judgment’s Phantom creatures, which only ever lost one counter per instance of damage; the counters-per-damage version was premiered on M11′s Protean Hydra as a “heads” metaphor, and was also seen on Ugin’s Conjurant. Conjurant and Polukranos share an important improvement - they only apply the replacement effect while they actually have a +1/+1 counter, which stops them becoming invincible if you raise their toughness some other way.

As well as being a big reservoir of power and toughness, this newer version of Polukranos connects mechanically to the original by including a fight ability - and a very rare repeatable one at that. This opens up some interesting options whereby if Polukranos has shrunk too much, you can fight him off in order to have him die and then be able to escape and reset him with his final Escape ability. Polukranos has the highest card-cost for any Escape card, needing six other cards to come back - justified by his massive size upgrade when you do so.

The design overall hits some of the right notes for the established Polukranos power set - beefy and activated-ability-fighting - while adding some interesting play patterns with the Escape mechanic. It doesn’t do a great job of feeling green-black to me instead of just green however - monogreen has Escape cards and that’s all that black is really bringing to this package other than a generic multicolour power injection and the Zombie creature type. And the design is very busy, with a lot of text and moving parts that is a bit confusing to play.

Power level

While being a Limited powerhouse, Polukranos hasn’t managed to get anywhere in general constructed thanks to competing for resources with the far superior Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath, which is commonly played with black.

In Commander, EDHREC shows Polukranos, Unchained at rank #494 as a Commander of 170 decks, and appearing in 3% of decks. The combo with Vigor is particularly nice - you can choose to apply Vigor’s replacement effect instead of Polukranos’s own one and have him grow every time he fights instead of shrinking!

Flavour

The name is straightforward enough - and connects with the art - but not inspired. The lengthy rules text doesn’t even leave room for Escape reminder text, let alone flavour text. The character of Polukranos is of a dangerous monster that Elspeth had to defeat in the original Theros storyline as the champion of Heliod, but the new version is just “that same guy from before, only he escaped from the Underworld”.

Art

Chris Rahn is one of Magic’s most notable current artists, with a great ability to render detailed fantasy images with beautiful details. The purple-and-grayish hues of the underworld are used here to show the location, and nicely we see the upper purple head of Polukranos blending with the beautiful night sky.

And those purple heads are shown coming from the same root - I believe they are actually regrowing at the time of the art! There are a lot of nice visual indicators of this - a pinkish glow showing where the stump was, the purplish colour of the two new heads, and the fact that those are a little smaller than the other four. The new heads both have collars on so I imagine these are magical collars designed for a hydra - but the art also shows that the chains weren’t strong enough, as the name tells us. A close look shows a loose chain breaking a statue in the foreground - and the other foreground figures help sell the size of the monstrous creature in front of us. The overall mood is “Oh s***, the monster has got loose!”.

Place in Magic history

We have a minor storyline character here and the card has no particular resonance or important part to play, so not looking at a whole lot here.

Final verdict

Mazirek, Kraul Death Priest

Design - 7/10 Power level - 4/5 Flavour - 3/5 Art - 5/5 Place in Magic history - 2/5 TOTAL - 21/30

Polukranos, Unchained

Design - 6/10 Power level - 3/5 Flavour - 2/5 Art - 4/5 Place in Magic history - 2/5 TOTAL - 17/30

Good luck to Mazirek, Kraul Death Priest in Round 3!

#mtg #magic the gathering #mtgbracket #tournamentofchampions #magic bracket tiebreaker

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ggyppt · 3 years

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In my 372nd review I take a look at The Falcon and the Winter Soldier 1x03 "Power Broker"

Spoilers Below

This episode finally feels like this show has settled into the grove of the larger narrative. Most of that has to do with the additions to the cast, most notably Baron Zemo (played by Daniel Brühl from the Alienist). Though, these additions also add a major level of frustration to the proceedings as well, which again, most of this centers around Zemo, they are still very welcome additions that ends up making the dynamics of the group finally feel complete. This, in turn, once again makes the previous episodes feel worse, and makes me actively not want to views those episode again cause they do feel left wanting knowing the places that the interactions go as the show goes forward. That in of itself is a major issue that this show keeps on doing, as rather than feeling like each episode is an improvement on the last, each episode has continually showed that those opening episodes were so much worse than I originally viewed them as, simply by being so much better at the functional aspects of being a show while barely being a better complete product than the previous episode.

Now, all that being said, we have to talk about Sharon Carter (played by Emily VanCamp from Revenge and The Resident) who comes back into the MCU with a splash. She is the star of this episode, between her absolutely amazing screen presence to the way she both feeds into and feeds off of the larger world of Mandripoor that she is existing in. With how naturally she fits into the seedy yet captivating realm of Mandripoor, the shifts that her character has taken offscreen feel natural. On the other hand, the fact that she feels natural in the world as a pre-established character ends up making Mandripoor feel like a grounded place that exists in this world, despite being a completely made up place. This balancing act hinges on the symbiotic relationship between Sharon and Mandripoor, and this show manages to pull it off. On top of that, Sharon is such a better presence in the fight scenes that we actually have the first truly engaging fight scene in the entirety of the series, though that falls away when it becomes a strict gunfight rather than letting Jess Durham’s (Emily VanCamp’s stunt double) skill in the close combat action.

Then we have Zemo, who ends up also working to seal up the hole that has been felt within the action scenes, and some of that credit must go to Daniel Brühl’s stunt actor Caine Sinclair. The character, portrayed by either Daniel or Caine, has such a strong physical presence in the scenes that your eyes are drawn to him even when he isn’t speaking. Then he starts talking and he becomes a fantastic counterpoint for our leads, and in the end, a much more interesting presence. That in of itself ends up exposing a foundational weakness in this show, where the actual characters we are supposed to be rooting for are far less interesting to engage with than the side characters that we know from previous experience that we are supposed to be rooting against. Now, while it is entirely possible for them to do a full face turn for Zemo, I find that highly unlikely, but once again, this is going to be an aspect of the show that will adjust as the full view of the series comes into focus.

Now, I’m going to take a second to explain terminology that I use. Face and Heel are two terms that I have stolen from wrestling, as I have found them to be more useful descriptors than hero and villain when it comes to talking out storytelling. This is because they end up having much simpler meanings that are also devoid of the moral factor that can sometimes make hero and villain bad descriptors. Face is just the person that you are supposed to root for, and the heel is the person you are supposed to be booing.

Thus, when we get into this situation where Karli (played by Erin Kellyman from Solo and Raised by Wolves) who is currently being depicted as a heel, and Zemo, a character who has traditionally been a heel, are both making great points that are important to be heard. In Karli’s case, speaking about how violence is the only way to get your point even heard a point that is a little too true to ignore in the current state of the public news cycle. In Zemo’s case, it’s his small speech on how we make people into icons and forget their faults, something that this society consistently does from the level of influencers all the way up to basically every president we’ve had for my entire lifetime. In turn, by putting the words through the mouths of the heels, they are vilifying them. That in turn, makes me opposed to the viewpoint of the show, in a sense, thus, untethering me from the reality that the show is trying to present. I cannot sink into and just enjoy this show because of the way they present these things, and to be uncritical of these things, alongside other things this show has done like their costuming (which I will not be letting go of) is to be complicit in a non-functional status quo that this show is advocating in favor of.

Now, that isn’t to say that this show isn’t also above villainizing its representation of global power, in the fact that is has continually showed US Agent to be actively at odds with the common people, with the opening scene actively throwing shade at the United States and their habit of playing global police. Instead, the show seeks to push the perspective that the right way is to leave the deciding of global right and wrong in the hands of these symbolic people, aka superheroes, a thing which Zemo has already been actively criticizing in a compelling fashion. This ends up leaving the show at odds with itself in ways that are down to perspective and performance more than anything else, which has caused major issues for this episode.

Then we have the ending, which is the closest to an actually effective cliffhanger that this show has gotten to. While it doesn’t quite have the feel of the actively game changing cliffhangers that WanderVision created, it is still something that leaves a hook behind that will create interesting drama heading into the next episode. The implications of which end up being a lot more, ‘how will they get out of this situation,’ and less the much more compelling, ‘what does this mean and how do we need to reevaluate what we already know’. This show really has been suffering from being the follow-up to WandaVision as it hasn’t lived up in any regard, but this is probably the regard that it has fallen the furthest behind on.

Overall, this is a major improvement in the actual functional aspects of the show, making it feel much more cohesively an actual TV show, rather than just a long movie. Though, this episode ends up creating those improvements at the detriment of it’s previous offerings rather than making this episode an obviously better complete product. Add this too some of the questionable presentation of political ideas that this show has put forward, which don’t work for me but that quality will vary person to person. This barely feels like an adequate episode of television, one with some of the worst foundations of a show that I have seen function as well as this one does, since the two lead characters are the worst part of the show at this point. 7/10

#ggyppt reviews #spoilers #the Falcon and the Winter Soldier

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writing-prompts-for-friends · 4 years

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Notes on Robert McKee’s Story 33: The Principle of Antagonism

I had the hardest time trying to condense this section, so unfortunately this post will be almost entirely direct quotes from the text.

"The principle of antagonism: A protagonist and his story can only be as intellectually fascinating and emotionally compelling as the forces of antagonism make them."

McKee believes that the principle of antagonism is the most important and least understood precept in story design, and this is the primary reason screenplays and the films made from them fail.

"Human nature is fundamentally conservative. We never do more than we have to, expend any energy we don’t have to, take any risks we don’t have to, change if we don’t have to. Why should we? Why do anything the hard way if we can get what we want the easy way? (The “easy way” is, of course, idiosyncratic and subjective.) Therefore, what will cause a protagonist to become a fully realized, multidimensional, and deeply empathetic character? What will bring a dead screenplay to life? The answer to both questions lies on the negative side of the story.

The more powerful and complex the forces of antagonism opposing the character, the more completely realized character and story must become. “Forces of antagonism” doesn’t necessarily refer to a specific antagonist or villain. In appropriate genres arch-villains, like the Terminator, are a delight, but by “forces of antagonism,” we mean the sum total of all forces that oppose the character’s will and desire.

If we study a protagonist at the moment of the Inciting Incident and weigh the sum of his willpower along with his intellectual, emotional, social, and physical capacities against the total forces of antagonism from within his humanity, plus his personal conflicts, antagonistic institutions, and environment, we should see clearly that he’s an underdog. He has a chance to achieve what he wants—but only a chance. Although conflict from one aspect of his life may seem solvable, the totality of all levels should seem overwhelming as he begins his quest.

We pour energy into the negative side of a story not only to bring the protagonist and other characters to full realization—roles to challenge and attract the world’s finest actors—but to take the story itself to the end of the line, to a brilliant and satisfying climax."

To make your protagonist stand out even more, he needs to have a good antagonist that not only pushes him to the very brink of his ability and willpower, but also acts as a fine foil.

Take Story and Character to the End of the Line

“Does your story contain negative forces of such power that the positive side must gain surpassing quality? Below is a technique to guide your self-critique and answer that critical question.

Begin by identifying the primary value at stake in your story. For example, Justice. Generally, the protagonist will represent the positive charge of this value; the forces of antagonism, the negative. Life, however, is subtle and complex, rarely a case of yes/no, good/evil, right/wrong. There are degrees of negativity.

First, the Contradictory value, the direct opposite of the positive. In this case, Injustice. Laws have been broken.

Between the Positive value and its Contradictor, however, is the Contrary: a situation that’s somewhat negative but not fully the opposite. The Contrary of justice is unfairness, a situation that’s negative but not necessarily illegal: nepotism, racism, bureaucratic delay, bias, inequities of all kinds.

Perpetrators of unfairness may not break the law, but they’re neither just nor fair.

The Contradictory, however, is not the limit of human experience. At the end of the line waits the Negation of Negation, a force of antagonism that’s doubly negative.

Our subject is life, not arithmetic. In life two negatives don’t make a positive. In English double negatives are ungrammatical, but Italian uses double and even triple negatives so that a statement feels like its meaning. In anguish an Italian might say, “Non ho niente mia!” (I don’t have nothing never!). Italians know life. Double negatives turn positive only in math and formal logic. In life things just get worse and worse and worse.

A story that progresses to the limit of human experience in depth and breadth of conflict must move through a pattern that includes the Contrary, the Contradictory, and the Negation of Negation.

(The positive mirror image of this negative declension runs from Good to Better to Best to Perfect. But for mysterious reasons, working with this progression is of no help to the storyteller.)

Negation of the Negation means a compound negative in which a life situation turns not just quantitatively but qualitatively worse. The Negation of the Negation is at the limit of the dark powers of human nature. In terms of justice, this state is tyranny. Or, in a phrase that applies to personal as well as social politics: “Might Makes Right.”

Consider TV detective series: Do they go to the limit? The protagonists of Spenser: For Hire, Quincy, Colombo, and Murder, She Wrote represent justice and struggle to preserve this ideal. First, they face unfairness: Bureaucrats won’t let Quincy do the autopsy, a politician pulls strings to get Columbo off the case, Spenser’s client lies to him. After struggling through gaps of expectation powered by forces of unfairness, the cop discovers true injustice: A crime has been committed. He defeats these forces and restores society to justice. The forces of antagonism in most crime dramas rarely reach beyond the Contradictory.

Compare this pattern to MISSING, a fact-based film about American Ed Horman (Jack Lemmon), who searched Chile for a son who disappeared during a coup d’etat. In Act One he meets unfairness: The U.S. ambassador (Richard Venture) feeds him half-truths, hoping to dissuade his search. But Horman preserves. At the Act Two Climax he uncovers a grievous injustice: The junta murdered his son… with the complicity of the U.S. State Department and the CIA. Horman then tries to right this wrong, but in Act Three he reaches the end of the line—persecution without hope of retribution.

Chile is in the grip of tyranny. The generals can make illegal on Tuesday what you did legally on Monday, arrest you for it on Wednesday, execute you on Thursday, and make it legal again Friday morning. Justice does not exist; the tyrant makes it up at his whim. MISSING is a searching revelation of the final limits of injustice… with irony: Although Horman couldn’t indict the tyrants in Chile, he exposed them on screen in front of the world—which may be a sweeter kind of justice.

The principle of the Negation of the Negation applies not only to the tragic but to the comic. The comic world is a chaotic, wild place where actions must go to the limit. If not, the laugh falls flat. Even the light entertainment of Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers films touched the end of the line. They turned on the value of truth as Fred Astaire traditionally played a character suffering form self-deception, telling himself he was in love with the glitzy girl when we knew that his heart really belong to Ginger.”

In Summary

“Fine writers have always understood that opposite values are not the limit of human experience. If a story stops at the Contradictory value, or worse, the Contrary, it echoes the hundreds of mediocrities we suffer every year. For a story that is simply above love/hate, truth/lie, freedom/slavery, courage/cowardice, and the like is almost certain to be trivial. If a story does not reach the Negation of the Negation, it may strike the audience as satisfying--but never brilliant, never sublime.

All other factors of talent, craft, and knowledge being equal, greatness is found in the writer's treatment of the negative side.

If your story seems unsatisfying and lacking in some way, tools are needed to penetrate its confusions and perceive its flaws. When a story is weak, the inevitable cause is that its forces of antagonism are weak. Rather than spending your creativity trying to invent likable, attractive aspects of protagonist and world, build the negative side to create a chain reaction that pays off naturally and honestly on the positive dimensions.

The first step is to question the values at stake and their progression. What are the positive values? What is the preeminent and turns the Story Climax? Do the forces of antagonism explore all shades of negativity? Do they reach the power of the Negation of the Negation at some point?

Generally, progressions run from the Positive to the Contrary in Act One, to the Contradictory in later acts, and finally to the Negation of the Negation in the last act, either ending tragically or going back to the Positive with a profound difference. BIG, on the other hand, leaps to the Negation of the Negation, then illuminates all degrees of immaturity. CASABLANCA is even more radical. It opens at the Negation of the Negation with Rick living in fascist tyranny, suffering self-hatred and self-deception, then works to a positive climax for all three values. Anything is possible, but the end of the line must be reached.”

McKee also breaks down what the positive, negative, contrary, and negation of negation are for many more common values such as love, loyalty, greed, courage, intelligence, etc. But that would make this post entirely too long. I definitely invite you to get this book and check them out yourself.

I found this section incredibly helpful to me. Until now I've always thought of conflict in terms of "good vs. bad" and...not much more than that. I had never contemplated the Contrary, let alone the Negation of the Negation. If I can manage to pull off a conflict of that level, I think I might have a really good story on my hands! This has helped me to shape my antagonistic forces and plot. I hope it helps you too!

Source: McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. York: Methuen, 1998. Print

#writing prompts for friends #writing advice #writing tips #writing resources #creative writing #writing #writer #write #writers block #writing inspiration #writing inspo #creative writing theory #robert mckee #writing fantasy #writing fiction #writing fanfiction #writing novels #writeblr #writing prompts for friends notes on story

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[Transcript] Season 2, Episode 4. Acting, Direction, Editing, Screenplay Nominations - Academy Awards 2021

The Academy Awards 2021 are here! Who's up for Best Acting, Best Supporting Actor, Direction, Film Editing, and Screenplay? Who do the Stereo Geeks think should win? We have so many thoughts about this year's Oscars, we can't even pick our favourites. Who do you think should win these categories?

(L-r) DANIEL KALUUYA as Chairman Fred Hampton, ASHTON SANDERS as Jimmy Palmer, ALGEE SMITH as Jake Winters, DOMINIQUE THORNE as Judy Harmon and LAKEITH STANFIELD as Bill O’Neal in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release.

[Continuum by Audionautix plays]

Ron: Welcome to a new Stereo Geeks Special where we continue our coverage of the Oscars 2021. I'm Ron. Mon: And I'm Mon. Ron: Let's talk about the acting categories. Lead role (Male). We have Riz Ahmed for Sound of Metal. Chadwick Boseman, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Anthony Hopkins for The Father. Gary Oldman, Mank. And Steven Yeun, Minari. Your pick?

Mon: Chadwick.

Ron: My pick, as well. I think this is the year for Chadwick.

Mon: Chadwick’s performance in the Ma Rainey film was compelling, outstanding. It's a real shame that he has not been here to bask in the recognition that he's got. He has swept most of the awards in this category. I'm really hoping that the Oscars don't let down his family. He deserves it.

Ron: Chadwick’s performance is a really strong point for the film. It's full of nuance, and really powerful storytelling. And I think the performance Chadwick put in was, in hindsight, made more powerful because of what we know he was actually going through. If you just look at the performance, it does really stand out. There are so many layers to his character, and that can only come out through a powerful acting performance. I feel like Chadwick could have won this category even if it wasn't a posthumous award.

Mon: I think so too. There's a lot of layers to this character, and he really gave it his all. It would have been outstanding irrespective of the year that this film came out, irrespective of the year that this performance was recognized.

Ron: I feel like it's also high time that Chadwick was recognized for his acting.

Mon: I mean, he's been good in everything that he's performed in. The fact that it has to be Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, it has to be a posthumous recognition, that's kinda sad. But he was always good. The legacy of his acting is gonna continue for a long time.

Ron: Absolutely. Talking about the other performances in this category, there are some hits and misses.

Mon: Yeah. I feel like with Gary Oldman in Mank, it’s probably one that we all expected. It's probably also the least exciting.

Ron: I felt like when I was watching Mank, I was watching Gary Oldman play a different version of his Winston Churchill.

Mon: Right? I felt the same way!

Ron: Okay, so it wasn't just me.

Mon: No, it wasn't, man. That was surprising to me because I feel like Gary Oldman is the kind of person who, when he plays a character, he really adds in so many different layers to it, gives each one a unique take, and this one just felt like, copy-paste.

Ron: Yeah, totally.

Mon: I don't think it helps that Mank, in general, is an underwhelming experience. And with the role, as well, I feel like we’ve seen, not only Gary Oldman do it before, but we've seen this kind of role before. The only thing I'll say is that it's not very obviously Oscar-baity, but it's exactly the kind that the Academy likes.

Ron: I actually think this is very obviously Oscar-baity.

Mon: Oh okay.

Ron: Yeah, totally. This is the exact kind of role that the Oscars love. This difficult man who is larger than life, who inspires and cuts down at the same time, that's exactly what the Oscars love. And that's why I actually hated Mank.

Mon: Yeah.

Ron: Because we have seen this character for aeons, there's nothing new here.

Mon: Yeah, absolutely, it's just change the setting, change the saturation point.

Ron: Absolutely. I would happily have swapped out Gary Oldman for Kingsley Ben-Adir in One Night in Miami.

Mon: That one still hurts me.

Ron: I just don't understand how he’s not in this list.

Mon: He's not in this list at all! That's what annoys me.

Ron: One Night in Miami has not got the noms that it deserves. And it's just driving me crazy.

Mon: The other performance which is definitely Oscar-baity is Anthony Hopkins in The Father.

Ron: Same problem that I had with Gary Oldman. Even in the huge, long career that Anthony Hopkins has had, this is not a good performance!

Mon: Right. There was only one scene where I felt like he'd kind of gone outside his comfort zone. There's this scene where he's meeting his caretaker for the first time, and he's sort of trying to impress her, and there's this natural vivacity that he brings, which I don't think I've seen in Anthony Hopkins, ever. And I love that.

Ron: Yes. Mon: And then it's completely ruined by that last scene. The acting in the last scene is so Oscar-baity. It is so ‘I am doing this so that I can definitely take home the little gold statue’. And it was the one scene that I hated so much because it was so put-on, it was so artificial.

Ron: But I felt like that about the whole movie. I felt, when I was watching this movie, that I was watching Anthony Hopkins.

Mon: Yeah, no, I agree with you on that. I agree with you, completely. And that's a problem because it didn't feel like a performance because it felt like he wasn't doing anything different. And I'm really disappointed because we know this guy can be better.

Ron: This is Anthony Hopkins.

Mon: I know! He puts in his all in a Marvel film. That's how good this guy is, and this film just feels like it's trying too hard and not reaching.

Ron: The play that The Father is based on, the performance was done by Frank Langella. And when I watched this, I was like, oh my god, Frank Langella would have been amazing in this.

Mon: That is so funny considering which role Frank Langella actually did play in the movies that have been nominated in this Academy Awards. Honestly, you could have put in a lot of veteran, white, old actors from Hollywood, they would have played that role the exact same way. Which is why I don't think it deserves a nomination or an award.

Ron: Yeah, agreed. Steven Yeun, Minari.

Mon: I think this was a surprise because a lot of people hadn't seen this film, And he's really known for being in The Walking Dead. You don't expect him to be nominated for the Oscars, but here he is.

Ron: It's such an understated performance. Like throughout the movie I could see myself in him. Which is why I'm really glad that he's got nominated because his Jacob is us.

Mon: Yeah, he's this foolhardy, obstinate kind of guy, but he's just so wistful, and I think I really like that because he's trying so hard, and he really believes in himself and in his dream. And you get all of that in Steven Yeun, just the way he carries himself, just the small little expressions that he makes. He doesn't even have to talk much, it's just him.

Ron: What I really loved about Steven Yeun’s performance was the scene where he is being a ‘dad’. And you know dads, they will be themselves, and then suddenly they will go into dad-mode. Where they’re like, you know what, something has happened and I need to be a ‘dad’ right now. And he is so, so good in that scene. And I was like, oh my god, stop being such a ‘dad’!

Mon: Exactly! Because the dad is putting on the performance of being a ‘dad’, and Steven Yeun is doing an excellent job of being that dad who's trying to be a ‘dad’. It's too good.

Ron: And that's why I'm really happy that he's been nominated because this is what acting is supposed to be.

Mon: It's supposed to be understated but also feel real.

Ron: In any other year, he would have been the top favorite in this category.

Mon: Yeah, I think so too.

Ron: It's just a really good performance.

Mon: Right. And to round it all off is Riz Ahmed from Sound of Metal. This is another very understated performance. There's nothing huge and flashy. It’s really just somebody who is coping with the circumstance that he cannot envisage. And he's really struggling, because his whole life, literally, his whole life, is going to change. It's really hard to rate this performance because it's so natural. It's so effortless. If you haven't seen Riz Ahmed in other stuff, you would think this is just him being him, but there are, of course, like differences to who he probably is as a person.

But I think the recognition of this award really goes to the fact that he put in so much work to make this role look as effortless as it does. He learned how to play the drums, he learned ASL, and both of those, he just does it so naturally in the film. And the performance would have been completely derailed had he not put in that effort of all those months, it would not have been a good performance.

Like when he’s drumming, like the first scene is him drumming, and you can see that it's him. It's not like in the shadows, it's not from the back, it's not like a stunt double. Nope, it's him. And you wouldn't connect with this character if you didn't see him front and center, with those drumsticks, banging on the drums, really like, into that music.

And even with the ASL. It's his language, and that's how you're supposed to feel because that is how the character is going to communicate. And I feel like it's such an important aspect that not only did he learn it, but now he's very keen on people learning how to sign because it is such a valuable language to learn. It was so good. It was so understated. It's hard for me to even say that he actually acted but, I mean we know he did. But’s it’s just so good, so natural.

Ron: I would compare Riz Ahmed’s acting in Sound of Metal to Natalie Portman in Black Swan. That ballet performance and how it made Nina was only possible because she'd done the work of learning ballet. That's the same thing here. The only reason why we believe everything that this character is doing and going through and evolving into is because Riz Ahmed put in all that effort. It comes across as so natural that you don't think you're actually watching an actor; you're watching a person. That's what great acting is.

Again, along with Steven Yeun, any other year, Riz Ahmed definitely would have won this category. But this year, it belongs to Chadwick Boseman. He should 100% get it. What a performance to leave as his legacy.

So, moving on to the ladies. We have Viola Davis from Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Andra Day from The United States vs Billie Holiday. Vanessa Kirby, Pieces of a Woman. Frances McDormand from Nomadland. And Carey Mulligan for Promising Young Woman.

This is a slightly harder category I would say. From the other award shows, it seems that Andra Day might be the front runner here. Unfortunately, we couldn't get to see this movie. Apparently The United States vs Billie Holiday is not a good movie. I read some reviews and it seems to be very exploitative, rather than anything else? And it's literally coasting on Andra Day’s performance.

Mon: Apparently, she sang some of the songs in it?

Ron: Yes.

Mon: I'm excited for any newbie to get awards. And when I say newbie, I mean somebody who's getting recognition for the first time at a big award show like this. I would love to have seen her performance just to rate it against these other very powerful performances. Let's see how that turns out.

My personal favorite, of course, is Viola Davis. She has my whole heart. How performance as Ma Rainey was stunning.

Ron: From that opening scene in the tent, you forget that you're watching Viola Davis. Ma Rainey was such a personality, and the way Viola Davis just embodies that. This is a woman who, when she walks into a room, everybody stands aside so she can walk through.

Mon: Yeah. One of the things that I really like about films being on Netflix is that we do have the after-film show or the after-film interviews. And for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, they talked about bringing this film to life. It's a play and now it's film, and the research that they did, and they learned about this personality who we hadn’t heard about. And how Viola Davis and the makeup artists and the costume artists, they really tried to embody the way she looked in real life. Because with Ma Rainey, you know she's singing for a long time, it’s sweltering heat, that why she looks very greasy. Her makeup is running, but she's got this power and she doesn't care about the glamour, you know, she's got a voice, she is using that, and that's what's entertaining, and that's what's grasping the entire crowd. Viola Davis and her entire team, they really wanted to capture that, which is what they do. They do such a great job. Ma Rainey doesn't have to look like the quintessential, glamorous, polished artist that we’re so used to seeing, because she's working hard. She's got a job to do. You don't have time for all this stuff, so I really love that. And I'm pointing this out mostly because there was a little bit of backlash because of how Ma Rainey looks in the movie. Ron: Oh really.

Mon: Yeah, there were some people saying, oh, why does she have to look so tired and sweaty. Well, that was kind of the point, so that's why I'm pointing it out. It was a deliberate, intentional effort made by the creators for this film. And Viola Davis does an excellent job of encapsulating that presence and that feeling. I really love how you have this character, based on a real person, of course, but you have this character in an era where Black people really struggled to make their voices heard, get anything that they deserved. She's like the exact opposite. And I love how this film turns the tables on that. And it’s only possible because you have somebody with that presence of Viola Davis. I would love her to win this. I don't know if she will. Maybe somebody newer, like Andra Day, deserves it more. But yeah, I've got my heart set.

Ron: You haven't seen Pieces of a Woman, but I did. I think Vanessa Kirby does the job that she has to in this film. I just think that compared to everybody else on this list, I don't get it. We were talking about how Steven Yeun’s acting in Minari was very understated. Vanessa Kirby does the same thing and Pieces of a Woman but her understatedness is so understated that there is no emotion. And I don't think it's her fault. I think it's because of the direction that she was given as an actor.

Pieces of a Woman was not as good a film as I heard that it was, which was surprising to me. I don't expect histrionics all the time, but most of the time, I was like nothing is happening on the screen, and that just did not make sense to me because the writer of the film based this story on what happened to her. And her husband was actually the director of this film. I feel like they weren't on the same page, or something got lost in translation between screenplay and direction.

I think Kirby did a really good job maybe in the first like 30-35 minutes, and then after that, she was probably told just, you know, hold it back, hold it back, hold the emotion back, and she ended up doing that really well, but the final product ended up being bland. And that might also be because they tried to stuff in other bits into a story that didn't need it. What ended up happening was that her performance was overridden by other elements.

We both feel that Yeri Han from Minari should definitely have been nominated.

Mon: Yeri Han plays the wife character in Minari; she plays Monica. She could have easily been a flat character, the long-suffering wife who just does what her husband wants, who somehow survives for her kids, but she is so much more. You can see this person trying desperately to be the supportive glue of this family. You can see this person trying to strive for her own dreams, for her own ambitions, and keep it together. And it's all because of how well Yeri Han, again in an understated fashion, just carries this character. And it is a shame, a complete and utter shame, that she did not get picked as one of the nominations.

Ron: I found myself comparing Yeri Han and Vanessa Kirby so much when I was watching these two movies, and it really made me wonder what the criteria is for the Oscars to nominate people. Both of these are very understated roles, but Yeri Han the way she emotes an entire dialogue without saying a word. That's what I wanted from Vanessa Kirby. I did not get that. And there were these moments in Minari where I was like, this is how I would react. And that's exactly how she reacted. And I was like, oh man, that's the first time that's ever happened! How does that performance not get nominated. Mon: Yeah, I'm really disappointed.

Ron: I think the problem is that we are very used to the ‘wife’ in films. Yeri Han took that and turned it into a role. And I think part of the reason why Steven Yeun has been nominated, not just on the strength of his own performance, but on the strength of Yeri Han’s. Because had she been terrible, nobody would have noticed what was happening with Steven Yeun. It's the same thing that I see with Killing Eve. The only reason why we keep focusing on how good Jodie Comer is, is because Sandra Oh is brilliant. But she never gets nominated, it's always Jodie Comer. I really, really wanted to love Vanessa Kirby's performance. I read so much about how much work she did. It just didn't come across to me.

So, moving on. Frances McDormand, Nomadland. Understated, but the right kind of understated.

Mon: The thing with Frances McDormand is that she's so effortless and natural in her roles that sometimes you think that's exactly who she is as a person. But no, she's acting, and I love that about these roles that she takes. And especially the one that she plays in Nomadland, I think, had she gone melodramatic or larger than life or the other opposite like super-emotional or something, we would not have believed this character and we would not have enjoyed the journey that we were on with her. It's the fact that she's very put-together, but she's also trying very hard to hold it together, and that comes across throughout in every scene. That's what makes it so powerful. That's what makes it so natural and immersive to watch, and it's no wonder that she's been nominated.

Ron: Yeah, I think if Frances McDormand hadn’t been nominated for Nomadland, that would have been a travesty. Again, talking about Pieces of a Woman, you can see how important direction can be for an actor. Because Frances McDormand’s understatedness could have become super-bland, had she not had the director paving her path. And that's why we get a really, really powerful performance in this film. I mean, she pretty much carries the whole thing. She could have a really good chance of winning this. Mon: Yeah, I think so too. Ron: So on the opposite end of the spectrum, we have Carey Mulligan’s Promising Young Woman. This is a very different kind of performance, just in this category. She feels like this person that you don't want to hang out with for a multitude of reasons. I think we’ve seen Carey Mulligan in quite a few films, so this performance does stand out because it's very different from what she usually does. She's kind of like preppy, and peppy. That's not what you expect. She does a really good job, but there's also like so much tension in this one, which she manages to carry very, very well.

Mon: What I like about this film is that it throws you into the middle of this story. There's no preface, and it's important because the story structure is quite a novelty, and I like that. And because we're thrown into the middle of it, we learn more about her character throughout the film, which makes her performance even more captivating. Why is this person who is young and desirable, and honestly, should have the world at her feet, going around with such a sad frame of mind? Why is she carrying herself in this terribly dejected fashion? Well, we find out.

I would say that this performance isn't as understated as some of the others in both these categories. It definitely has its moment where somebody could have gone completely over the top, but it never does. Because a) the writing doesn't allow for it and, b) the role wouldn't work if we were on either spectrum of super-gleeful or super-emotional. It's really somebody who is carrying a hurt inside her that she cannot fix, and you really feel that.

The funny thing about this film is that you’re left feeling so sad by the end of it, because you really understand this kind of, almost this kind of depression, that this character is facing, and you really feel it through her performance. It's a surprisingly captivating performance despite not being the quintessential Oscar-baity kind of thing. I'm not sure she's gonna win though.

Ron: I wonder whether the Oscars will do something completely different and be like, in light of #MeToo, we're just going to give it to this film.

Mon: I didn’t think of that. It could be.

Ron: Like, it says a lot about why #MeToo even exists. So, who knows? I think this is a very tough category. Let's see what happens.

Mon: Yeah.

Ron: So, moving on to the supporting roles. For the men, we have Sacha Baron Cohen for The Trial of the Chicago Seven. Daniel Kaluuya for Judas and the Black Messiah. Leslie Odom Jr for One Night in Miami. Paul Raci from Sound of Metal. And bizarrely, LaKeith Stanfield for Judas and the Black Messiah, even though he's the lead role.

Mon: Yeah, I'm a bit surprised, as well.

Ron: Apparently, they did put his name forward for the lead role and for some reason the Oscars put him and Daniel Kaluuya in the same category.

Mon: Listen, people who have limited screen time have sometimes been in the lead role category, other people, who are pretty much carrying a film have ended up in the supporting category. I've never understood the Oscars and what the criteria for these things are. It's literally like Tic Tac Toe sometimes. I'm actually really disappointed that both Daniel and LaKeith are in the same category, because they are so, so strong. They really deserve to have been not competing against each other, and definitely should have been frontrunners in their own categories. I mean Kaluuya is brilliant, he's always brilliant.

Ron: He is particularly good as Fred Hampton. I was just like, wow this is insane.

Mon: Like, you feel the emotional core of the burden that he's carrying, but you're also like a little bit inspired, maybe even a little bit scared, by the power of his performance and the power of his stage presence. I feel like he was really passionate about this role, but he doesn't go over the top with it. I'm sure he did a lot of research on Fred Hampton and how he carried himself. But it doesn't come across as this very manufactured or artificial kind of performance. And it definitely doesn't feel like some kind of weird, reverential take on this character. Because sometimes, that's also a problem, especially when you're embodying somebody who was a real personality and a very important personality. Sometimes you feel like you should only look at the good things. No one was perfect. And so, you should always approach those people as human beings first, but also respect the legacy that they've left. And I think he does a good job with that.

Ron: Well the thing is that Daniel Kaluuya actually spent time with Fred Hampton’s wife to find out what his personality was from her perspective. Of course, there were tapes and things that he watched so that he could actually get the physicality of the character, and that's why I think that he is a frontrunner in this category. Because we've seen Daniel Kaluuya in a lot of things and the way he plays this person, you forget that it is Daniel Kaluuya. Like, he's done the kind of research that allows him to become a person without actually showing us that he's acting it.

Mon: Listen, I'm never going to forgive the Academy for ignoring his excellent performance in Widows. He was so good in that film. I don't know why this role made me think of him in Widows, but I think it's that intensity? He's brought a very similar kind of intensity and I'm glad this one has been recognized at least. I really hope it does walk off with the award because, yeah, this is too good.

Ron: Absolutely, I agree with that. LaKeith is the lead in this film. I still can’t understand what the Academy is thinking. He is so good in this performance. He is this tortured young man who is just taking it one day at a time because he has no clue what to do. He gets into one scrape after the other. He thinks he has an out, and it's not.

Mon: His character is between a rock and a hard place, and LaKeith plays that to the tee. Like you can really feel it, his desperation to be normal, his desperation to fit in, his desperation to get out, and you just really feel it.

Ron: The thing is that it's very difficult to play a role like this because a lot of people just think of him as the bad guy. But there are so many layers to even bad guys. And LaKeith does it really well. Like there are times when there are emotions on his face, and I'm just like, he's just told us so much. If he was nominated for this role any other year, he would have won this. But I really feel like it's going to be done Daniel Kaluuya’s year.

Mon: Yeah. I hope so, as compared to most of the others.

Ron: Let’s talk about Paul Raci in Sound of Metal.

Mon: This was a surprise, yeah?

Ron: It was. He has a very understated role. He kind of plays like a mentor, and it's almost easy for you to forget that this is a person acting a role in a film. But then there’s this one scene, which was so quietly done. I can imagine that same scene in movies being full of histrionics, and gestures, loud voices…

Mon: Standing up and waving!

Ron: And banging tables, right?

Mon: Right.

Ron: And Paul Raci just keeps the same tone, and it's like a dagger in your heart. I feel like the power of that scene, coupled with the fact that, up until that point we had seen the kind of person he was, that's the reason why he's in this category. Because the only reason why that scene works is because we spent all this time with him. We've heard his tone of voice, we know how he feels about the main character, about their community, and you know where he's coming from. So yeah, this is a surprise, but now when I think about it, it makes sense.

Mon: Agreed.

Ron: Sacha Baron Cohen in The Trial of the Chicago Seven.

Mon: I know that he did a lot of research on the person that he was playing.

Ron: Okay.

Mon: He was concerned about this character, because we’re talking about somebody who was a real-life personality and when we say personality, we mean a personality. I can see he’s trying. The problem is, I could not see anybody but Sasha Baron Cohen when I was watching the movie. It was Cohen with big hair. And that's all I could see. I could not see him being anybody else. Is it a direction problem, is it just the role? He was not the best thing that film had in it.

Compared to the other roles that we've seen, just in this category, it doesn't even reach like halfway there. And it's not for lack of trying. As I said, there's a lot of effort put into it. I've read that he did a lot of research, he watched the tapes, blah blah blah. He was concerned about it. His concerns were warranted.

Ron: I think that was my problem with this entire film. Everybody felt like they were acting. They were acting, very well, but they were acting. Just as you said, I couldn't get past the fact that I was watching Sacha Baron Cohen.

Mon: And especially when he's doing the stand up. It looks like it's Sacha Baron Cohen doing the stand-up and not Abbie Hoffman. And it's just such a problem.

Ron: It would be an unpleasant shock if he were to win.

Mon: I don't want him to win.

Ron: No.

Rounding off the category is Leslie Odom Jr. in One Night in Miami. Leslie Odom Jr plays Sam Cooke. I really liked his performance. I liked everybody’s performances in this movie. Everybody should have been nominated. This movie he should have been nominated. I’m angry that it wasn't but let's talk about Leslie Odom Jr.

Mon: That voice!

Ron: I know!

Mon: How can you argue when you have a voice like that?

Ron: Oh my gosh. He has such an amazing singing voice. And he uses it so well in this film.

Mon: That scene when he sings that song. We know this song, but still.

Ron: Oh my god.

Mon: And again, credit to the way the film is directed that it hits you so hard when he sings that song.

Ron: The Sam Cooke character that we get in this film, he's kind of bombarded with negativity. He's trying to do things a certain way, his friends don't quite agree with that, and you can understand where they're coming from, but you can also understand where he's coming from. We could have had the table-thumping, the standing up and making a statement. But what you get is the finger-pointing.

Mon: [laughs] And understated finger-pointing. Nobody raises their voices. And that's what I really liked about the performances in general. And, of course, it comes down to the direction, doesn't it? We could have had somebody who, because they're so passionate about their points of view, that they could have raised their voices, they could have been punching each other, hitting each other. There are a few moments like that, but they're also being civil because they are friends. And I think when you have that underlying foundation of the characters, then it changes how you come to that performance. And it really comes across in Odom Jr.

Ron: The other aspect of this film is that these people were not only real but they were pillars of the community. They changed the way America lived and breathed. That can get to your head. The fact that none of the performances were affected by that is testament to the actors. I think any of the actors could have easily been nominated. I'm happy that Leslie Odom Jr did get nominated because his performance relies so heavily on reacting to things around him, and it could have gone terribly wrong in another actor's hands. He manages to keep it together, and it ends up being so memorable. But I still think this category belongs to Daniel Kaluuya. Let's see what happens on the day, but that's what I think.

Mon: Agreed.

Ron: So, let's move on to Supporting Role (Female). We have Maria Bakalova from the sequel for Borat. Glenn Close in Hillbilly Elegy. Olivia Coleman in The Father. Amanda Seyfried in Mank. And Yuh-Jung Youn in Minari. I haven't seen two of the performances in this category so that's not going to help.

Mon: There's been a lot of love for Maria Bakalova. This is a comedic performance. The Oscars aren't huge on comedy, so that would be a surprise. Now with Glenn Close in Hillbilly Elegy, I have not seen this film, I have seen stills. She uglies it up, which means she's gonna win.

Ron: Really, you think so?

Mon: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, she's a veteran actor, she's already been nominated several times, she's a favorite among the Academy-goers. So, I'm just like this category is definitely gone.

Ron: I know the Academy really loves it when ladies ugly-up.

Mon: Yeah, because they don't give actual ugly ladies any roles. [laughs]

Ron: [laughs] Oh god, why is that so true?

Mon: Listen. This category is a tough one. You know why? Because I'm not convinced by most of these.

Ron: Yeah, this is true.

Mon: Olivia Colman? I mean come on, she just won for The Favorite, right? Okay, she's hamming it up. She's acting but it's really. Here, she's not doing much.

Ron: You see, this is my problem with everything to do with The Father. I did not feel like I was watching a person; I was watching Anthony Hopkins. I did not feel like I was watching his daughter; I felt like I was watching Olivia Coleman. How does that get nominated?

Mon: I don't have an answer to that. It's unconvincing.

Ron: And the same thing with Amanda Seyfried. Mank, anyway as a film, we had a lot of issues with it. I think Amanda Seyfried tried to do what she could with the role, but the entire time I was like, I'm watching Amanda Seyfried.

Mon: And also, it’s not something new, this kind of role, this kind of character. It's not something new. I think we just want something refreshing which, for the most part, the other categories have really captured. Seyfried in Mank is just…

Ron: Seyfried in Mank.

Mon: Yeah. I mean, I guess the only performance we’re really rooting for is Yuh-Jung Youn in Minari. Because she's so fun!

Ron: She is so great. I think it helps that the role is quite different. Like, you think of grandmothers in a particular kind of way, and she totally is not.

Mon: And that's the whole point. And that's what I really like because she sort of doubles down on being this unconventional grandmom, because ‘grandmom’ is not a category of humanity. She's a person.

Ron: I love how, when her grandchildren are like, what kind of grandmum are you, you can’t bake, you don't do this, you can’t do that and she's like, why does that make me not a grandmom? She just decides that she's going to be her version of a grandmum and if that means sitting down in front of the television and watching it, that's fine! But everybody just has to deal with it. I loved it! It was just such a natural and fun performance.

So, when things kinda go bad, you're so angry at the world, you're just like, please no, no, no, don't let this happen. She's such a wonderful person! And that's why I think she deserves to win because she got all my emotions going so much. As I said earlier, I am a sucker for a grandmum character, and she's so good. She put in an amazing performance that didn’t feel like a performance. I was like, this is my grandmum.

Mon: You’re right. Absolutely. Because how the grandmum is in the second half of the film as compared to the first half of the film, they're the same person, but you would not feel the impact of the second half, if you hadn't met her and gotten to know her in the first half. And again, that's down to the fact that we had this really powerful, but very natural, performance. It feels authentic, and that's the whole point of these awards, isn't it?

Ron: Yes.

Mon: It's to give it to the best people. Yuh-Jung Youn might just be the person.

Ron: She's our pick, for sure. I feel like Maria Bakalova just might win this.

Mon: Oh wow.

Ron: I think the Academy is trying to do things differently. They want to show that they're not, you know, staid, fuddy-duddies who only give serious films all the awards. So, they might be like, it's a comedy, let's give it to her. And also, there was all that stuff about Rudy Giuliani and stuff like that, which I think might just be a reason for them handing the award over to her.

Mon: Okay, that'd be really interesting to see.

Ron: Yeah. The two acting categories for ladies is really hard this time. I think the male categories are very obvious who the winner is. The ladies, no idea.

Mon: Don't prove us wrong.

Ron: Okay, so we just want to touch on directing and film editing. There is some overlap with the Best Picture category. I'm interested to hear your thoughts.

Mon: Honestly, I am so torn between Emerald Fennell and Chloe Zhao. This is the first year the Academy has given to women nominations for the directing category. Let's just remind you guys that this is the 93rd Academy Award. I think both those films are so accomplished, so different…

Ron: So necessary. Either one of them could win.

Mon: Yeah.

Ron: My concern is that because there are two ladies, they're going to be like, they're in a separate category, and the rest of the guys are in the category of their own.

Mon: And that's the default category, so we're actually going to only choose between the three of them. Yeah, I hope not. Because I feel like Chloe Zhao should get it simply because Nomadland actually deals with a topic that is very popular with American film goers, and she's given it a completely new veneer, which I like. So, maybe she is front runner for it.

Ron: I also feel like Nomadland is definitely very well accomplished. I say this because it's not a very easy film to make. They’re on the move; they’re showing these very different kinds of landscapes. We're also going into these very tight interiors. She managed to balance that out very well, while also giving the performances so much room to breathe.

For me my pick would actually be Nomadland.

Mon: Interesting.

Ron: Because Promising Young Woman, another very accomplished film. I think it has a very familiar narrative structure. There are some shots which, when I thought about later on, I was like, ‘it's interesting that she used that angle’, but Nomadland just feels very different.

Mon: The thing about Promising Young Woman, as excited as I am that it's been nominated for so many categories, especially in the directing category, it feels very commercial

Ron: Yes

Mon: And mainstream. Most of these Academy Award nominations are very artsy very indie, or at least they feel like that. So Promising Young Woman with the peppy vibe and the colors and stuff, I think might be too different for what the Academy really likes to think of as cinematic excellence.

Ron: That's a good point, and that might be a reason why it wins.

Mon: Oh, I hope so.

Ron: Yeah.

Mon: You know who I’m surprised is not on here—even though we're not the biggest fans of the film—The Father, directed by Florian Zeller. I am surprised Florian isn't here, you know why? Because, as I mentioned, cinematically, it has such brilliant technique that I'm surprised the Academy didn't recognize it. I mean one of the problems that we had with it was that it's so slick, which should have shoehorned it into this category, but it didn't.

Ron: But I think that's exactly what would have happened, it would have been shoehorned into this category. Because The Father didn't do anything that we haven't already seen a billion times before. I'm sorry, that's not a unique film at all. I'm glad it didn't get nominated.

Mon: I'm surprised that Minari has been nominated. Like Lee Isaac Chung, I would not have thought that he'd be here.

Ron: Why not? Mon: Well, it’s such a personal narrative. It's just so small.

Ron: Yeah.

Mon: The Academy just love something that is larger than life, even when it's something to do with farming, you know. There's no KKK running after these people, so, like, how did this film even get noticed by the Academy. I'm surprised. I'm surprised it's in any category, but the direction I'm really surprised.

Ron: I'm trying to give the Academy the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they're realizing that they've been kind of in one direction this whole time. So we're getting to see people like Emerald Fennell and Chloe Zhao and Lee Isaac Chung actually get nominated for these amazing accomplishments.

Mon: And these varied films.

Ron: Exactly. I think that Minari actually works so well because the direction is really good. He keeps it small. He doesn't aim for something too huge. We just follow this family. And that's why the final product is so good.

One thing I've never understood about the Academy, ever since their changed the Best Picture nomination number to 10, I don't know why the director category hasn't followed suit. It doesn't make any sense to me. Having said that, I am so glad that it's Minari, Nomadland and Promising Young Woman that ended up in this category. They deserve it. As far as I'm concerned, this category is between these three. These are the most innovative films in this category.

Mon: Which is exactly why David Fincher for Mank will win.

Ron: Don’t say that.

Mon: I’m sorry but we know that Hollywood loves films about Hollywood; the Academy loves to recognize films about Hollywood. This is a passion project, it's about a very controversial, personal story that many Academy Award board members are going to feel like it resonates with them...

Ron: Because they were there at the same time.

Mon: You're probably not wrong. I don't actually have any hope for anybody else in this category, I'm sorry, it's true.

Ron: But even amongst David Fincher’s work, this is not a good film.

Mon: Yeah, but tell the Academy that.

Ron: It’s so… blah. The shots are so blah. Everything we see in Mank you've seen a million times before.

Mon: I agree with you. It feels like it’s trying to be of the time that it is portraying, but at the same time, it never looks like it. Just putting a black and white filter on your film, and using the same shots that Orson Welles would have used does not make your film innovative and new.

But we just have to resign ourselves to the truth. Fincher is considered an auteur. So, he's likely to win.

Ron: As far as I'm concerned, auteurs are basically people who do the same thing over and over again. And that's what Mank feels like. You know who I would have really loved to see in this category? Regina King. I was watching One Night in Miami and the entire time I was like, “why didn't this get nominated?” It's not just the shots. It's the way she portrayed the story to us. And this is her first time directing a feature film, it doesn't feel like it. Honestly, I feel like this was the year that you should have been nominating all these people. Why is David Fincher here? I just don't think even in David Fincher’s oeuvre, Mank is not his best work.

Mon: Yeah, the only thing is with One Night in Miami, it's technically very brilliant, especially for a first-time director, but it does feel like a first-time director’s work. There is a safety in how it is created.

That being said, at least it doesn't feel like a play, which is what it's based on. But compared to the others which are nominated, I can see why Regina King was overlooked. Though the film really should have made it to the Best Pictures noms, at least.

Ron: So, Another Round by Thomas Vinterberg. See, this is the thing; how has he been nominated for directing, but his movie was not deemed good enough to be nominated for Best Picture? What is the criteria? Honestly, I just don't understand what is happening!

Because when I watch this film, it's actually very uncomfortable to watch because there's so much shakey cam.

Mon: Oh!

Ron: And I was just like, I know you're trying to set the mood that there's a lot of drinking happening here, but it's just making me feel disoriented, so I'm not enjoying this experience. I don't think he was doing anything that different. In my opinion, it is between Minari, Nomadland and Promising Young Woman because those three are the ones that really stand out in this category. And as far as I'm concerned Minari and Nomadland actually do something completely different. They are the innovators. I'm hoping for Chloe Zhao to win because Nomadland really stood out to me.

Mon: Let's quickly go over editing. This is a tough category to really understand from a lay person's point of view.

Ron: Yeah.

Mon: Because when editing is done well, you will not notice it.

Ron: Which is making me question so many entries in this editing category. Because The Father has editing that is so obvious.

Mon: I agree with you on that.

Ron: I was like, oh look, here's a cut. Oh look, here's a camera change. How is this nominated for film editing? That way, again, Nomadland, edited by Chloe Zhao—who did pretty much everything in this film, oh my gosh, how did she do it—has such good editing, because you don't notice it.

Mon: Yeah, you are on this journey with this character. You feel the land that she is traversing, you get to know the characters that she is meeting.

Ron: You feel that claustrophobia in her trailer, and how it differs from everything that’s happening around her. It's just such good editing because you don't notice anything. It's just an experience.

Mon: Yeah, there's like this moment where Frances McDormand’s character is like a few yards away from her nearest neighbor, who's also in a van, and she sees her neighbor put up a flag. And we don't really understand the significance of that flag till a few scenes later when Frances McDormand needs help and she’s knocking on this person’s door, and her neighbor goes, “didn’t you see the sign?”. You you realize the flag is basically supposed to say do not disturb. And I think that's where editing and direction comes in, because anywhere else you would be told, it would be signposted that yes, this flag is going up because she does not want to be disturbed, go away now. But here it’s backwards, and it's important for us to feel that way because the character may not have known what the flag is about. And we're in her shoes. That's the whole point. And that again addresses why this film has got as many nominations as it has. And why probably it should win.

Ron: Absolutely.

We also have Promising Young Woman here. I think the editing here is pretty commercial, it's not very different. It serves the purpose of narrating the story. So, in that sense, it's pretty technically sound.

Mon: Well, I think there's one scene which has won it the film editing nomination. We can't talk about it but in the hands of any other director, especially a male director, we would have seen that scene in a completely different way.

Ron: I actually think there are two things that have made it, editing-wise, so powerful. And the reason why it's been nominated. And in that scene, I think a lot of directors would have chosen to maybe cut. But here, the director gave her actors so much leeway to play out the scene that the editing, you don't notice it.

Mon: On the basis of just that scene that you just mentioned, I feel like this film should definitely sweep this award. Honestly, the power of that scene really comes across in the use of camera cuts, or the lack thereof.

Ron: Exactly. And that is actually one of the reasons why Promising Young Woman really works, because it knows when not to cut.

Sound of Metal.

Mon: I am truly surprised that it's in the film editing category. Are you?

Ron: I'm glad that it is, I think sound editing, it did a really great job, but I think it's really easy to focus on that aspect of the film, and forget that the actual film editing also makes the story and the sound more important. I'm going to compare it to Another Round where the editing is so jarring. And so obviously edited. I'm glad it's not in this category, but Sound of Metal doesn't do that. It moves the camera away and it cuts at certain points where the audience needs that extra information. I think the way it's edited works for this film, I don't think it's the kind of style that would work for everything else, but because it fits so well with this narrative, I think that's why it's been nominated.

Mon: Yeah, because I think with the film editing, as well as the sound editing, both of them combined, it helps you walk in the shoes of this character, which as you say, is only possible when it's a very personal, individual story like it is with Sound of Metal. I'm kind of glad it's got some technical noms. If nothing else, because we know it's a real long shot for the Best Picture award winner. It could get the technical awards.

What is the Trial of the Chicago 7 doing here?

Ron: I don't know.

Mon: I spent most of that film wondering where the sightlines were.

Ron: Yes.

Mon: Right?

Ron: Yeah.

Mon: There’s this scene where somebody is walking up a flag and the character is looking to the left, but the flag is in the center, and I'm like, “where are you standing?”

Ron: The sightlines weren’t the only problem. We have a chunk of this film taking place in a courtroom, and it felt like I was watching Law and Order. So what is the innovation here? Why has it been nominated?

You know what should have been nominated in both the directing and editing categories? Birds of Prey. Okay, look, we love this movie so we are a bit biased. But Cathy Yan did an amazing job. She should definitely have been in the directing category, and the editing the scene in Gotham PD, come on.

Mon: Well, there are two major reasons why Birds of Prey didn't get any nominations, though, I really feel like it should have. First of all, it's a very comic book-y film, and also structurally, the story is very nonlinear.

Ron: Let us put it out there that Suicide Squad won an Oscar.

Mon: I am currently speechless.

Ron: So, who do you think is going to win this? Honestly, I want Chloe Zhao to get everything.

Mon: Yeah, but I think The Father is going to win.

Ron: I think that would be a mistake.

Mon: It's going to happen.

Ron: So we're going to round off with the screenplay categories. In the adapted section we have the Borat sequel—please don’t make me say the whole name—The Father, Nomadland, One Night in Miami and The The White Tiger.

Mon: We haven't seen the Borat film so we cannot attest to its merits. This is a tough category.

Ron: Ok, so we have two films that are based on plays, The Father and One Night in Miami. I think that we’re both of the same mind that One Night in Miami is definitely superior as an adaptation of a play. The Father feels like a play on film. One Night in Miami feels like a film. So, if it's between those two, it should be One Night in Miami.

Mon: You're going to root for Nomadland, aren't you?

Ron: I am but I have to say, The The White Tiger was a really good adaptation. I thought that was a solid, solid screenplay. I'm actually really annoyed that it didn't get nominated in anything else. As far as I'm concerned, it should have been up for directing, it should have been up for Best Picture, it should have been up for Best Actor. How do these things not happen? I don't understand what the Academy does, really. Like, what is everybody sitting there doing?

Mon: Dude, the fact that a film based in India with Indian actors even got nominated for anything, is like a surprise—in a good way, I guess. It's a film that looks at the poverty and the caste system in India, without actually sensationalizing it or making it completely the norm. There are different kinds of Indians that you will meet in India, as we see in this film. And I'm just surprised that the Academy noticed that.

Ron: You know what irritates me? Slumdog Millionaire won everything, when it was a bad film. And it portrayed India in a really condescending light.

Mon: And considering it was based on a book which was hard-hitting, spoke about the issues that we face in India all the time, but had this sort of fun vibe to it, and Slumdog Millionaire was just an atrocity, as far as I'm concerned.

With The White Tiger, I was very resistant to watching it.

Ron: Me too.

Mon: But yes, while it does portray the abject poverty of sections of society—and it is a little bit scary how people on both sides can treat each other—it also has this updated 21st century mentality that we haven't seen in portrayals of India in Hollywood for a while.

Ron: This was a really good film. I am really irritated that it hasn't got the recognition that it has. I mean, Ava DuVernay was a producer on this, so… But what I loved about The White Tiger was that it didn't coast on the name Ava DuVernay. Everybody else put a lot of work into it.

Mon: And it also didn’t gratuitously show us, you know, the disgusting aspects of India. It also shows you the grandeur that is Delhi and Bangalore, while telling you that yes, there are people living in villages in absolute squalor.

Ron: But what I liked is that doesn't keep throwing that squalor in your face, because people live there. For heaven's sake, you can't just keep saying, “oh my god it's so disgusting”. No, no, this is how people live.

Mon: Respect that.

Ron: Exactly. So I'm irritated, but I really hope that it wins this category.

Mon: Yeah that would be nice, right?

Ron: Yes, I am rooting for Nomadland.

Mon: Why am I not surprised?

Ron: But I would happily let Ramin Bahrani win this for The White Tiger.

So, original screenplay. We have Judas and the Black Messiah, Minari, Promising Young Woman, Sound of Metal and Trial of the Chicago 7. One of these things is not like the others.

Mon: [Laughs]

Ron: I'm sorry, the fact that Aaron Sorkin continues to get recognized and nominated for his writing when he is a bad writer, just drives me up the wall.

Mon: It's sometimes hard to differentiate between entertaining writing, and good writing.

Ron: But is he even entertaining?

Mon: Some people find that banter entertaining.

Is this the subject matter that deserves this kind of banter, this kind of writing? No it doesn't. It requires a deft hand, it requires a respectful hand and we have mentioned this several times and we've talked about this, which is that it does not respect the horrible situation that the people in it were facing.

Ron: It should definitely not win this category.

Mon: It will win this category.

Ron: Oh gosh, your cynicism. I believe that the Academy is going to do things differently.

Mon: I'm a pragmatist and I don't believe that.

Ron: Parasite won last year. Parasite was the best film among all the nominees. There were a lot of other films that should have been nominated, we always are going to be angry about that, but Academy actually recognized how good Parasite was, and it gave it the awards that it deserved. Maybe, maybe, this is the change that we are seeing. And Trial of the Chicago 7, even though it's been nominated to make a certain group of people happy, it won't actually win.

Mon: Well, we will find out.

I think Judas and the Black Messiah has a really good chance here. I think partly because of Daniel Kaluuya’s performance and the fact that Best Picture should kind of belong to it. It just has a really strong story.

Mon: Yeah.

Ron: I know you had issues with the second act; I didn't have that. I feel like it managed to balance these really big, larger than life characters with a story that had you guessing. It was packed full of characters, like, it's very much the opposite of Sound of Metal and Minari which has very small pockets of characters. But Judas and the Black Messiah is much more sweeping, so many people and every single person matters, every single story within the story matters. And cohesively as a whole, the film works because the writing is so strong as well.

Mon: I 100% agree with you on that. I will say that when you Algee Smith men in a role, you give me more of him on screen.

Ron: [Laughing] Ok.

So, Minari.

Mon: I want this one to win.

Ron: Me too.

Mon: Because it's a very simple story. We discussed this when we talked about the film in the Best Picture category, there is a universality to the events of this film that reflects many of our journeys. And I think that's the power of this writing; you can kind of see yourself in different ways. You can see yourself in different characters from the kid to the grandma, right?

And I feel like sometimes the Academy does like these personal stories about the American Dream, which honestly Minari is doing in spades.

Ron: I also feel like the reason why Minari you could win this category is because, you know what I was saying about Pieces of a Woman and how it adds things to make it bigger than it really is. Minari never does that, it’s contained to this one family because even little things can seem big when it's your life and it's people who you love, and that's what a great story, that's what a great writer, does. So yeah, I think it might just win this category as well.

Mon: Well, I think it's funny that you mentioned that things are huge and important when it's somebody that you love, because that ties into Promising Young Woman.

Ron: I mean that entire film is about doing something for somebody that you love, and everything that they felt is amplified because of how you feel about them. But nobody else around you can even imagine it because it doesn't bother them. That person has nothing to do with them.

And I think that's why the writing in this film is quite strong, because it's through the lens of this one character. Of course, the performance that Carey Mulligan puts in does amplify just how terrible she is feeling, just how strong this loss is for her in comparison to how everybody else is actually reacting to it.

And it’s a really strong story because that tension, it’s not just well conveyed on the screen, it had to be there on the page.

It does help that the writing and directing is done by the same person. I think this year we've seen that quite a lot, even with Chloe Zhao, she did the producing, writing, editing, and directing for her film, Nomadland which is a really really accomplished, really powerful, cohesive and memorable product.

Nomadland is not the kind of movie that you and I would watch, and maybe not even enjoy it but this one, my god. And the same thing with Promising Young Woman, she wrote it, directed it, produced it, and you can see the final product.

Mon: It's the ability to translate exactly how you feel on the page to the screen. And I think so often you see that divide because the person who directs a movie, sometimes isn't in sync with the person who wrote it, and that really undercuts important subject matters.

Ron: This is my problem with Pieces of a Woman, and that's why Vanessa Kirby's performance, it's not that good. It just doesn't work because the people around her weren't working together, though I don't know why.

Mon: I'm partial to Promising Young Woman winning as well, because it's a topical issue, and it's well written, it's entertaining in a very scary fashion.

Ron: Exactly. I mean this is a suspense thriller about a topic that a lot of people have had to deal with, but it comes across as a film that is also entertaining, so it's actually a good one for this category.

So finally Sound of Metal.

Mon: This one surprised me.

Rob: The writing for Sound of Metal feels just like a person's story like they're going day by day. That can actually be really hard to write. Again like Minari, this doesn't try too hard, it doesn't go too far, it knows what its aim is, and it stays within that scope. I think the problem with things like The Trial of the Chicago Seven is that the scope was so huge that the final product is, well, it's just not very good, and it doesn't do justice to the characters, or the narrative.

Sound of Metal is exactly the opposite. It takes this one person, his journey, and it just runs with it. And the other thing is that, a lot of films feel like, you know, we shouldn’t be linear because that's cliched or it's been done. But Sound of Metal works so well because of its linear narrative; it doesn't keep going back and forth. You are taking this journey with this person. So yeah, I think it has a pretty good chance as well.

So, I think we want four of these films to win. [laughs] And we don’t care about Aaron Sorkin. I would say the Academy is trying. We have unexpected entries this year in the major categories, which is exciting. The diversity is there. There's room for so much more. But I think one of the biggest problems that the Academy has had this year is by trying to play it safe with certain choices. My hope is that the Academy voters will see the innovation of films like Judas and the Black Messiah, Minari, Promising Young Woman, Nomadland. Sound of Metal and really begin to usher in a whole different way of filmmaking, because we can't be something if we can't see it. We've seen it with Parasite, are we going to see it this year?

Who do you think should win these categories at the Academy Awards 2021? We'd love to hear from you.

You can find us on Twitter @Stereo_Geeks. Or send us an email [email protected]. We hope you enjoyed this episode. And see you next week!

Mon: The Stereo Geeks logo was created using Canva. The music for our podcast comes courtesy Audionautix.

[Continuum by Audionautix plays]

Transcription by Otter.ai, Ron, and Mon.

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some-lists · 4 years

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Ranking all the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers

Go Go Power Rangers! I felt it was time for another 90’s throwback. Today I’m ranking all the Power Rangers from Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. Just about every 90’s kid was obsessed with this show. It was a phenomenon. It started out with the original five in its first season. As the show went on, we saw a number of replacements added to the cast.

As a child, I had my definite favorites based on my childhood memories. I later rewatched the series as an adult and my perspective on the characters really changed. This is my ranking based on what I observed as an adult looking back.

10. Kat Hillard (Pink Ranger)

Kat had the unfortunate task of filling Kimberly’s shoes as the new Pink Ranger. She was doomed from the start. The writers introduced the character as a villain -- a fellow student under an evil spell to undo the Pink Ranger. It made us not like her from the very beginning. Kat eventually grew into her role, especially in the following seasons of Zeo and Turbo. But initially, she felt like an imposter who literally did not fit the suit.

9. Aisha Campbell (Yellow Ranger)

I liked Aisha as a kid. I liked her sassy attitude and that she was girly and short. After watching the show again as an adult, I realized how completely useless she was as a ranger. She had no fighting ability whatsoever, couldn’t do any flips, and didn’t offer any brain power either. I actually felt embarrassed watching her fight scenes.

8. Rocky DeSantos (Red Ranger)

I think Rocky got a raw deal as the new Red Ranger. Many viewers were used to seeing the Red Ranger as a leader. However, when Rocky was introduced, he was just another ranger on the side. I don’t think this was his fault as Jason had already been demoted as leader after Tommy became the White Ranger. As a kid, I liked Rocky. I didn’t mind him as an adult either. His taekwondo skills were actually better than Jason’s. He was faster, more agile, could kick higher, and do more flips. Unfortunately, as one of the replacement rangers, he was always in the background.

7. Jason Lee Scott (Red Ranger)

Ranking Jason this low is gonna shock some die hard fans. As a kid, I absolutely loved Jason. He was one of my favorite rangers. I thought he was a great leader and strong fighter. He was the glue who got his team to work together. I especially preferred him as a leader over Tommy. But when I rewatched the show as an adult, I realized he really didn’t do anything! He had maybe two episodes about him. One was about him bench pressing a world record where he lifted weights the entire episode. That’s pretty much all he ever did. He lifted weights, punched bags, and occasionally taught a karate class or two. Essentially, he was there to flex his muscles and not much else. Even his sword, which I remembered being so cool, was pretty much useless. That was a big eye opener for me. I was also disappointed to see that his taekwondo skills weren’t as great as I remembered them. He was really slow, kinda clunky. Overall, Jason deserved better than what we was given.

6. Billy Cranston (Blue Ranger)

As the resident brain, Billy managed to invent the team’s communicators, which were also teleportation devices, and a flying car. He often operated the computers at the Command Center along with Alpha-5. It’s fair to say he contributed significantly to the team. He was a weak fighter in the beginning, but somehow became a super ripped expert gymnast by the end of his run. The show never explained that, but it was never a realistic show anyway.

5. Adam Park (Black Ranger)

I remember not liking Adam very much as a child. He was so quiet, shy, and often in the back as one of the replacement rangers. In my child mind that meant he was boring. However, as an adult, I realized how awesome he really was. First of all, he was way cute and I didn’t even see it before. He was smart and often operated the Command Center along with Billy (good ole Asian stereotyping). But mostly, he was an incredible fighter. His Shaolin kung fu style was a beauty to behold. His kicks, spins, and flips were so quick, effortless, and graceful. He had the best line in the movie: “I’m a frog,” which turned out to be the best zord as well. As the seasons went on (especially into Zeo and Turbo), he became much stronger, more confident, and a lot funnier too.

4. Zack Taylor (Black Ranger)

Zack is seriously underrated. He had a great personality. He was the life of the party, a great dancer, and funny. He even created his own martial arts style called Hip Hop Kido. He especially shined in the second season as he incorporated his karate with dance moves and incredible acrobatics. In my opinion, he was a way better fighter than Jason. If he had been given the proper treatment, Zack would’ve been on the same level as Tommy. After Zack left the show, the cast wasn’t nearly as fun.

3. Trini Kwan (Yellow Ranger)

Original Yellow Ranger Trini was the best. She was strong, brave, and intelligent. She had a spiritual side to her that was cool, calm, mature, and classy. She had natural leadership skills that were completely overlooked. I’d even say that when unmorphed, she was the true leader. She often stepped up and encouraged the other members no matter what situation they were in. She could understand Billy’s nerd talk and translated for the team. She also kicked serious butt. She became a big role model for many Asian American girls, as she was one of the first Asian American actresses with a visible role on television.

2. Tommy Oliver (Green & White Ranger)

I loved Tommy as the Green Ranger. His karate took the show to the next level. He was super bad ass and totally convincing as a villain. That evil laugh was perfect. Even after becoming good, the writers found a way to keep him around. His weakening powers and ultimately losing his powers gave him a tragic appeal. His relationship with Kimberly was also super cute. He was an exciting fighter and a compelling character. But, I didn’t really like him as the White Ranger. Once he became the White Ranger and the new team leader, he became a lot less interesting. He no longer had a real story. His martial arts was always top notch, but compared to the Green Ranger, White Ranger Tommy was too perfect and a lot more boring. Separately, I would’ve ranked White Ranger Tommy after Adam, but Green Ranger Tommy was awesome. Like I said, he elevated the show.

1. Kimberly Hart (Pink Ranger)

Kimberly was such a popular character. She was loved by girls who wanted to be like her, and by boys who had a crush on her. As an adult, I could easily see why and I was actually really surprised. She was hands down the star of the show. She had the most episodes dedicated to her out of all the rangers. Even when the episode wasn’t about her, she often saved the day with her bow and arrow. Seriously. She saves the team in almost every episode. Even though she wasn’t the strongest fighter unmorphed, her gymnastics skills were crazy impressive. Overall, she was the most valuable and consistent ranger on the team. Without her, they would’ve been toast.

Overall Thoughts

First of all, I couldn’t believe how poor quality the show was. They obviously reused the same footage over and over again. Even more unbelievable is how we all believed it as kids! But that cheesiness is now one of the best aspects of the show.

I was also surprised by how much the show favored certain characters over others. Kimberly had the most spotlight, followed by Billy. When Tommy showed up, it became all about him. Zack and Trini were tied for second to last place for air time. Jason was dead last. He was barely even in the show. It’s no wonder the three were unhappy and left the show when they did.

Rewatching the series also made me realize how much the movies glorified Tommy at the expense of the Pink Ranger. In the first film that meant Kimberly, who I mentioned in this list was an incredibly strong character. In the Turbo movie, they weakened Kat for Tommy to rescue her as well. That’s super disappointing as the show offered some really cool role models for young girls.

One thing I appreciated about the female rangers was how feminine they were. Kimberly was a fashion crazy mall rat, but she was never diminished for it. It just happened to be her personality. It was never a weakness. None of the girls were expected to act like boys in order to be strong. Later in Zeo and Turbo, Tanya was more tomboyish. She naturally excelled at sports and that was really cool too.

Overall, I was impressed by how much stunts these young actors did. The putty scenes were my favorite. We got to see the real actors (not costumed stunt doubles) do all their own stunts. They were all talented martial artists of various styles and masterful gymnasts. As the show progressed, so did the choreography. I can understand why the actors complained about not being paid enough.

Today, most of the newer Power Rangers shows don’t do their own stunts like the originals did. They’re a lot more flashier as well with explosions going off in every episode. Even though the budget is higher and the actors have more rights now, it doesn’t beat the nit and grit or the talent of the original Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.

#90s nostalgia #90s #90s throwback #power rangers #mighty morphin power rangers #red ranger #blue ranger #yellow ranger #black ranger #pink ranger #green ranger

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irinapaleolog · 4 years

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With the Star Wars sequel trilogy now concluded with The Rise of Skywalker, fans everywhere now know how Rey and Kylo Ren’s story comes to a close. Those who have long shipped "Reylo" and yearned to see "Bendemption" finally saw it happen, but the film doesn't quite do the work to earn those moments, and forcing these issues highlights how profound the thematic disconnect between TROS and its predecessors. What started out as a compelling dynamic between protagonist and antagonist in the The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi was unfortunately derailed in the last act, delivering an unsatisfying conclusion to Rey and Kylo Ren's relationship.

A Knight and a Scavenger

Even before we learn exactly how they will be connected, The Force Awakens portrays Rey and Kylo as diametrically opposed. Both are introduced wearing masks, yet Rey’s lasts for barely a minute while Kylo doesn’t take his off until two thirds through. Rey is a scavenger on a backwater planet, scraping by on her own skills to survive, while Kylo is a major leader in an autocratic military organization about to achieve dominance in the galaxy, a position he secured via his connection to his grandfather, Darth Vader. Setting aside how we now know the story ends, as initially presented in TFA, Rey is from nowhere and Kylo is our heir apparent to the Skywalker name.

We understand by the midpoint of the movie that Kylo has a familial connection to all three of the Original Trilogy heroes, and yet he has inherited none of their heroism. Rey, meanwhile, has everything to gain from selling BB-8 and doesn’t, and within seconds of learning his importance to the Resistance is ready to put herself on the line for it. Rey looks to Han Solo as a potential father figure; Kylo cuts him down because he’s his actual father. Their opposing views are even literalized by the massive canyon that tears them apart after their duel in the snow. But there is something that does connect their characters in this film beyond their strength in the Force: their fascination with mythic iconography. Rey, a starry-eyed collector of Star Wars memorabilia (she lives in an AT-AT!), and Kylo, a vindictive child who prays to the burnt husk of Vader’s helmet. Both of them are children of the OT’s legacy, but one pulled to the Light, the other drawn to the Dark.

They spend all of The Force Awakens and most of The Last Jedi being enemies, and as presented on paper in all three films, there’s simply not enough build-up to sell the romance that the final film wants to go for. Not even The Rise of Skywalker fully commits to this concept, because the first half of the film is so focused on Rey’s struggle with her burgeoning Dark Side power, and her big team-up with Ben at the end is cut short because the movie also wants to get to the “all the Jedi live in you” finale, which Ben has nothing to do with. Perhaps moving towards a romance in Episode IX was always the plan, but the way it’s realized here, what’s supposed to be their heartfelt final moments together are lacking the emotional weight they needed.

A Shattered Alliance

Before we ever hear the term “Force Dyad” from Palpatine, The Last Jedi effectively communicates that Rey and Kylo are intrinsically linked just as much as they are fundamentally opposed. The connection Snoke forges between their minds through the Force gives us some of the film’s best scenes, and it’s understandable why they are drawn to each other after Rey’s journey into the Dark Side cave. After learning what might have been the worst possible answer to the driving question of her own existence, Rey lays her cards on the table. “I’ve never felt so alone.” Her emotional vulnerability is conducive to her reaching out to Kylo, a man who feels just as dejected by his origin story as she does by hers, and to mistakenly believing that she can turn him to the Light just as much as he hopes to seduce her to the Dark.

This tension (of multiple varieties) explodes in the throne room, with a lightsaber battle against the Praetorian Guards that glistens with passion and rage. The Light and the Dark, for a dazzling moment, unified in purpose. Yet when the battle ends, both of them believed they’ve won the other to their side. Rey begs for Kylo to tell the First Order to stop firing at the Resistance shuttles, and Kylo asks her to take his hand and help him rule the galaxy. Neither of them have changed. They are still opposing forces, and they once again pull apart, literally tearing the Skywalker saber in two during their struggle. Rey accepts her place as the last Jedi, while Kylo doubles down on his darkness by assuming the mantle of Supreme Leader. At the end of the film, even though they briefly united, they end with Rey closing the door on him. If anything, The Last Jedi reinforces their disparate nature rather than subverting it.

The Force connection they share is exploited further in The Rise of Skywalker, but rather than being used to explore their dynamic, it’s used more for the sake of spectacle. Consider how small moments of physical exchange in TLJ (some drops of water materializing on Kylo’s hand) are replaced with lightsaber duels happening in multiple locations. Cool? Sure. But the deeper meaning of why this bond was even established feels subdued here, particularly when Rey and Kylo destroy Vader’s helmet, not in a conscious cooperative act, but accidentally mid-battle. The thematic coherence of this aspect of their relationship feels lost in the chaos of the film’s frantic plotting and roller coaster pacing. A Broken Promise But with two major plot turns, The Rise of Skywalker tries to get Rey and Kylo back on the path towards not just reconciliation, but romance.

The first is the reveal that Rey is Palpatine’s granddaughter, which once again sends Rey into an existential crisis about her parentage, but this time saddling her with the same issue Kylo had: a grandparent on the Dark Side. Now her bloodline does matter, and it's no coincidence that Kylo is the one who reveals this information to her. After all, he is a tragic example of how the weight of an important lineage can turn someone to the Dark Side -- and now Rey is being crushed by it. While the attempt to create another mirror between the two makes sense in theory, it comes at the cost of being completely divorced from Rey’s character journey in the last two films. The shape of her own destiny she forged across the trilogy, the idea that her origins don’t need to define her capabilities, is destroyed. Becoming the Light Side’s new hero despite “having no place in this story” was powerful. Revealing that she did have a place in it all along feels like a shortcut to ensure Rey has another connection to Kylo rather than a natural evolution.

The second is Kylo’s rushed redemption arc, which makes no sense in the context it appears in. After Rey and Kylo's duel on the Death Star wreckage, a defeated Kylo gets another chance to turn to the Light with some help from the memory of his father, and this time he takes it. However, nothing that has happened to Ben in the previous movies or this one indicates that this would turn him. His opinion of his father hasn’t changed in any way since he murdered him, and his mother reaching out to him through the Force sadly falls flat given that they haven’t shared any scenes across the whole trilogy. Rey says she wanted to “take Ben’s hand” after healing him, and while that is an effective call-back to TLJ that could possibly get him to reconsider his morality, it also feels like a small piece of what should’ve been a larger arc across the movie. Instead, everything related to Ben’s turn has been shoved into this one scene. It’s not enough to communicate why, after all the horrific things he’s done, now is the moment he is redeemed.

Rather than getting us invested in an ending that felt thematically connected to the previous films or even coherent on its own terms, The Rise of Skywalker shuffles its pieces to get where it wants to go without justifying how it gets there. Ben joins Rey in her duel with Palpatine, running in with his father’s blaster, and all of his darkness is simply washed away. The idea of their connection being based on how they were representations of the Light and Dark Sides, how one came from nothing to become the last hope for the Light while the other was born from the Skywalker legacy and still turned to the Dark, is tossed aside. After such a strong first two acts, Rey and Kylo deserved a better conclusion, one that truly solidified the emotional bond these two characters were supposed to share.

Midway through TROS, Rey says “People keep telling me they know me. I’m afraid no one does.”

Maybe she was right.

#the rise of skywalker #kylo ren #rey #reylo

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jovandawkins · 4 years

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Handel: A Musical Life of Devotion

Handel: A life of Musical Devotion A great gift to music entered into the world on 23 January 1685 in Halle, Germany. A life of great musical interest; one filled with an unbelievable talent that is going to become a beacon to many throughout the European continent and span centuries past its lifetime. It is a life that could become centered around a great mystery of how the musical talent would blossom into a recognized and known gift; a life that would alter the musical landscape and the spiritual worship realm in a short 26 days, and a life that would become so influential that it would dictate musical compositions for many years afterwards. Some sort of musical life that in the beginning would find itself struggling to exist; a life that will be forever referred to in George Frideric Handel. It is through Handel that we credit many great musical accomplishments; accomplishments inside mixture of homophonic and polyphonic textures, through the creation of his own unique works through the process of combining Spanish, Italian, French, and English musical traditions into his highly successful English Oratorios. And most importantly in the lasting effects of Handel's single greatest gift to the world, and the world of music: The Messiah. But how does the work of this single musician leave such a strong impression on the music that we have now? What could possibly make the music of Handel something that would be hailed as electric, memorable, unique, and cutting edge? And most importantly how could one person alter the musical idiom through a single twenty-four day formation of a setting of Christ's life? Through these questions I will explore Handel's impact on music in a way that shed's light onto the significance of Handel as a musician, a teacher, and inventor and as a religious preserver. It is with Handel that we credit a great deal of musical advancement. Adversity in Handel's life was something that he or she encountered early on in life. At an early age Handel found himself faced with a father that did not support a profession in music, in fact his father was a person that greatly hated music; noting that it was a entertainment that served the sole purpose of casting a light on the weakness of character found within a person. It was eventually his father that wished he would strive to obtain a career as a lawyer, a position that would come with a great deal of safety measures in position and financial stability. This was something that Handel himself would have to come to terms with, because he himself was born by means of "signs of a fierce ambition, born of an awareness of his superiority as a musician, and with a determination not to lose his independence. " This determination to advance his musical skill became a task that took a substantial amount of hard work and convincing; though it was Handel's mother that provided access to a clavichord hidden in the family's attic. The hours spent hiding from his father in the attic, covering the strings of the clavichord along with cloth to dampen the sound, allowed young George the time to practice his musical development and eventually the data of how to play both the clavichord and the organ. This early study is most likely what saved the play career for Handel, because it was during the time stuck in the attic that a young Duke passing by seen young George playing in the attic and was so moved by what he heard, that he stopped to pay attention. After hearing young George play the organ, the Duke pleaded with George's father to allow your ex to travel to Berlin and begin to take music lessons. The young Handel began taking lessons at the age from eight, and was easily able to conquer learning the violin, composition and theory techniques, harpsichord, and also reinforce the organ playing skills. By the age of 11, there seemed little that any songs teacher could teach George; it was at this point that George's father began angry and again expressed his / her desire for George to cease playing in the music, and to return home and do as he anticipated. Handel at the request of his father did in fact return home, only to arrive at his father's deathbed. This was a dark period of struggle for the young Handel, compelled to honor his father's wishes, George decided that it was best to keep to his studies in law; though during this same time he continuing to also sharpen the musical skills that he knew he possessed. It was during this time that Handel started to write cantatas for the various churches that he was serving in as an organist. It was the service around music that called out to Handel, and by the time he reached the age of eighteen, Handel possessed realized that it was in fact his destiny to become a great musician noting that he was destined to improve his or her musical abilities and his knowledge of music. Leaving his birth city of Halle lead him for a series of travels that would shape the musical aspect of the outlook that Handel would eventually have concerning music. The various travels and cities that Handel was to visit would begin to influence every aspect of song that Handel would come to know and appreciate, and it was his first destination in Hamburg which could lead Handel on the path of musical greatness. It was during his time in Hamburg that Handel came down to introduced to opera, and it took no time before Handel was given a position in the orchestra on second violin. The time at the Opera house playing violin was a period that would bring the birth of what people might come to see as a man that was described as a "large and very portly man", one that was full of a quick temper and one that had a general appearance about him that was "somewhat heavy and sour. " That personality of Handel would be something that many really would see as a double edged sword, in one issue he was a intelligent man that had a good sense of humor, one that show a remarkable sense of condition, reliability, and absolute honesty in all aspects of his life; but at the same time Handel was a person that possessed a brief fuse, and hot temper. He was a man that was short tempered and vocal about is feedback of life in general, and especially music. This personality would be a defining part of Handel's musical career, precisely as it was shortly after he started working in Hamburg at the Opera house, that George was given the opportunity to display the tremendous talent at the harpsichord; though it was also this talent that caused young George (now around age 22) to vocally disagree with composer Johann Mattheson on a composition Mattheson had written. It was that short fuse of Handel's that nearly ended his career, and life; though this spunk Handel exhibited also gave him the opportunity to catch the eye of a young prince, Prince Ferdinando de' Medici, which would become impressed with the music Handel was performing. This lead to Handel being asked to give his home, now Hamburg, and make the journey to Italy where he would again be positioned in a situation of being surrounded by new composers and styles of music. The move to Italy was an exciting period for Handel, as Handel was at a point of where his primary motivation for traveling to innovative areas was that of gaining experience, and in the case of the opportunity to visit Italy, the objective was to learn even though he could from the composers of Italy, and their wonderful operas. It was in Italy that Handel made significant strides in his musical career and overall development. For when Handel made it to help you Italy he was exposed to the world's greatest forms of music consisting of compositions of the likes of Safari, Cantatas, oratorios, chamber cantatas, concertos, and sonatas. This was a period that Handel began the task of refining his knowledge and really defining the compositional talents he had been using to this point. Handel was given the luxury of being able to set no limit on the boundaries of which his music would take because of the comprehensive gift of being surrounded by people that were able to support Handel and his daily needs. As a member of Dictator Francesco Ruspoli court, Handel was given the freedom to explore compositional aspects and dig into the music that so highly intrigued him, though it wasn't until 1710 that Handel's musical world will come to full realization, and would establish Handel as one of the greatest musicians of all times. The year 1710 were included with Handel's move back to Germany where he would fall into the role once held by Steffani in Hanover as Kapellmeister to the Elector, George Louis, who eventually become King George I of England. When in Hanover Handel was quickly convinced to travel to England with Prince George to scout out any music scene in the country as Prince George's mother Sophia was married to the English Elector, meaning that Royal prince George would eventually assume the throne of England (which happened in 1714). During the early outings to London, the young Handel became highly intrigued in London's newest opera house, the Queen's Theater, and it was here that Handel decided that he would produce an opera that was Italian inside nature and composed specifically for London. The opera Rinaldo was thus first produced in 1711, and contains slightly over a dozen performances, all of which were considered a huge success; thus paving the way for Handel's proceed to England, and what was to become the foundation for the overall success of Handel. The move to England was a confident move for Handel overall, leading to his ultimate desire to become a British citizen. Once he was lastly settled into his life in England, Handel was offered and accepted the role of popular music director for the Royal Academy of Music when it opened in 1720. The academy was the guts for operatic studies for many years after opening; credited greatly to the presence of Handel himself and his ability to attract the best singers to perform the works he had written himself. Though as with any worthy job dealing with the biggest and brightest stars, the academy began to see a decline in stature and operation; gained via the high demands the singers were placing on the academy both performance wise and financially. It was only fueled by the internal conflicts among performers, patrons, and rival composers. This was a time when Handel's short fuse and hot temper did not help, as Handel himself was part of many of the quarrels which usually took place, though he was clever enough to lighten the situation and make the tensions eventually found yourself in an end through humor and quick wit. This did not help the academy in the long run as it eventually had been forced to close its doors, but at the same time it only freed Handel to focus on his career, and at last give him the time to prepare for the needed shift in musical direction as the opera itself had arrived at a point to where it was no longer a viable musical performance option in England. The shift because of opera was one that Handel himself was easily able to undertake, for the ambition and determination to succeed in the particular music realm allowed Handel to develop an internal motivator that he looked to for resolve to win popularity and fortune and to "make money; honestly if you can, but-make money. " This was something that would serve Handel himself well because it is Handel's personality and desire to serve the music and the people that gave her the title of "musician of the people. " This afforded Handel the ability to see a great deal of success together with his music and career while in England going through the period of shifting from the Operatic style to that of writing English Oratorios. This also only aided Handel in popularity because may people saw Handel's music since "property of the people, familiar, understood, and loved" and this was related to many English subjects as to the "work of not other great master the wide world over. " The overall history of Handel has the capacity to show that the experience and cultural exposure of his various travels, gave Handel himself a wide range plus palette to work from. It is through the exposure to these cultures and musical styles, compositions, composers, patron, as well as musician employers that Handel was given the tools needed to succeed in the music world, but the experiences themselves don't create a unique character that was what was admired in Handel. It was the personal traits that Handel possessed which will afforded him the opportunity to be loved by many and respected by all. The personality of Handel was a unique blend of every imaginable aspect one could possibly think of, he had a drive; a determination to have success, the ability to make people laugh, a sense of quick wittedness, a familiarity aspect, devotion to religion, trustworthiness, integrity, and an incredible love of music. But most importantly Handel never let anything stand in their way of doing what he loved: serving the people, the music, and his religion. An example comes in the proper execution of the inability of anything to stand in the way of Handel's success. In 1737 Handel suffered a cva that for the most part threatened to end everything. The stroke had left Handel's right arm paralyzed and thus avoided him from being able to perform and also had an affect on his mind. It was during this time that Handel fought to remain active, and did through the writing of Italian operas though the public no longer favored these. Handel pushed through all obstacles that he encountered including eventual blindness that took a toll upon his compositions and eventually left Handel performing his music for organ from memory. It was ironic the fact that Handel had a determination to succeed, because it was this determination that left him a person that was 100 % withdrawal from life and society, though loved by all. He did spend most of his moment and life locked away from society and the daily life in order to focus on his music and thus never married not had any children. He was a man that truly devoted his life to the people, his new music, and changing the world of music. The Influence Handel had on music was immense, the trend and techniques that he was able to incorporate into the daily musical vocabulary was a blending of the major Western european styles that Handel had experienced in his travels from Halle to Hanover, to Hamburg, Malta and England. Simply put, Handel took the best of all the styles and created one Handelian style that would turn into a standard for the musical world, allowing him to "mature as a composer in England, the country then the majority hospitable to foreign composers. " Handel had a solid foundation from the early Lutheran church music that they was around growing up, this attention to the harmonic structure and counterpoint of the music he could adapt a rich lush style in the compositions that he wrote from the sacred cantatas through the opera, and in the end into the English Oratorios. One defining feature of the style that Handel possessed is that he was truly aware of the changing trends of the time, though his style of writing stayed pretty much the same and didn't require much altering for he has such a gift for writing melodies that one would never realize that many times a tranquility was not present under the melodic line. The melodies were bold and self-sustaining and thus needed no help from a harmonic progression to carry it through. A strong feature of Handel's compositional style was the process about "borrowing" materials. It is clear and evident that Handel borrowed musical ideas from others during your partner's life as a way to create a new melting pot of musical ideas. But Handel also employed the manner of borrowing musical material, or re-use of musical material, from his own work; however he did wish to use material from other composers better. He did this in a way that varied, one method was only to take entire pieces, or movements, from one work and reuse them in another, or to borrow product from a composer and then rework it to create an essentially new compositions, as seen in the Choruses coming from Messiah and Belshazzar's feast; using the Italian duet "for unto us a child is born. " The use of typically the borrowing technique is one that is unique to Handel, because it was in the 1930's that it seems as if the practice ceases, though this could be because Handel found the need to shift composition styles, and thus opened himself for a wide range of materials to now pull from, thus making the reference of music harder so that you can pin point. But the fact remains that the "borrowing does not affect his status as a composer" because Handel himself never based his career on any single piece of work that utilized music that was credited to your creation of another person. Thus it is not known if any single composer influenced Handel himself, however it ended up being obvious that Handel left an obvious influence on composer that appeared during his time and surely after his death in 1759. But it was in the 1930's that Handel really would begin to have an impact on and alter the trajectory of music and musical composition through the creation of the new genre with the English Oratorio. The English Oratorio was much like the Italian form of the genre as it set dialogue for lyrical and recitative verses, but then was combined with foreign elements from the French drama, Greek tragedy, A language like german passion, and most importantly the English masque. These characteristics combined together was enough to solidify the reality that Handel was to be the greatest musical figure of all time, and one of the most respected people in all of London and England. One of the most important contributions the Oratorio made was to the vocal setting, and through the addition for the chorus. What made this such a huge success for Handel and for the popularity of his beats was the sheer fact that Handel was able to create unique effects with the orchestration of the vocal score to make a simple form that alternated in the written passages of verses from an open fugal style compared to that of a solid harmonic sound. This added with the orchestra, who normally was scored in a way to support that vocal parts created a work that was not only easy to sing, but also made it accessible to the general public, which makes established that "Handel is the musician of the people. " This form of music was never meant to end up suited for the church, the Oratorios were meant for concert hall performance settings and thus even though the Messiah, one of Handel's most well known piece was written as an Oratorio, it was actually seen more as a "sacred entertainment" piece. But Handel's contribution did not stop at the creation of the new style of music in the English Oratorio, but he actually found a great deal of success in writing instrumental works. The instrumental aspect of Handel's musical productivity was one that garnished him with a great deal of extra income and was a major factor in keeping the name connected with Handel fresh in everyone's mind and in their daily musical dealings. Though true to the nature for Handel, he was dedicated to being as successful as he could in all writing aspects that he started. Thus the two of his works in the instrumental category best know were written for the King, together with were meant to be for the public pleasure during the various outdoor performances and social gatherings. The first, Mineral water Music was written in 1717 and was comprised of three suites for winds and strings that's meant to be played from a boat on the river Thames for the king's pleasure while he was thrilling socially those that he wished to stay in good graces with. The later of the works written in 1749 is the Music for the Royal Fireworks, a staggering piece written for an enormous wind section with strings in the future added in, meant to be played in an outdoor London park during a firework celebration. The work was published for many military instruments and was a work that excluded the use of stringed instruments, something that Handel in the beginning had objections with. These two works directly play into the desire of Handel to continue to push this boundaries of what music was, and what it could do for the people, and how it could be really enjoyed for all, in all aspects of life. The most profound work that Handel ever wrote, one that would become the product work in the sacred realm of composition; one that would receive a great deal of homage by composers from every area of Europe and for many decades, is the now infamous, Messiah. The Messiah is a remarkable piece just from the process in which Handel took to write it. In a short twenty-four day span the work would arrive at existence from a mere thought. A large part of the ability for Handel to become so musically genius was just how he typically broke, or even stretched out traditional styles of composing music in order to make a dramatic impact on the work this individual was involved with. He was able to do this through the way in which he personally lived his life and through the rampacked skills he had developed throughout his extensive travels. He had acquired the ability to take a raw talent and to gloss it up into something of pure beauty and wonder. Since Handel himself typically chose several religious themes for many of his compositions, more and more of the British citizens began to approve using his audio as a method of worshiping their god. It was fitting that Handel made his home in England, since the device is the English that "have always been a Bible-reading... god-fearing nation, with strong religious instincts and a reverence for sacred things". Messiah is Handel's most well known work, and it is the best example of a work that can be used for a creative worship piece. The work is divided into three segments: The coming of the Messiah, The battling and death of Christ, and the Resurrection. This work was composed and contained various features who gave way to a wide range of emotions: joy, sadness, fear, excitement, love, compassion, dramatic, and hopefully; but whatever the the need or feeling that way to be expressed Handel found a way to do it, and the Messiah was the driver to showcase those talents. The Messiah composed in 1742 is seem by many as the best-written oratorio that has ever been written. The extensive piece contains some fifty sections of music and performance that takes nearly three hours to fully perform and celebrate. The most impressive aspect of the piece is the undeniable fact that it was composed in a mere twenty-four days; accomplished by Handel locking himself in his home declining to be interrupted by anyone. During this time it was reported that Handel barely ate anything and slept almost no. This was yet another nod to the dedication that Handel was known to have, and also played into the aspect that will Handel had simply became part of his work, and thus always made sure that his full attention and additionally thought were put into the music as it was composed. It might have been odd for Handel to write a really religiously profound piece considering that he himself was not a very religious person until the later part of his lifetime; though there are accounts that lay claim to a "divine source" as the inspirational and motivational factor for any composition of the work. So profound was the work that Handel himself self stated that "I made see Heaven before me, and the great God himself" when he had finished the widely recognized Hallelujah refrain. The work has had a lasting effect on not only the composer's reputation as one of the greatest advancers of the musical formula spectrum, but also on the works of composers who have been inspired by the works of Handel; Mozart being people that had become extremely influenced by Handel and in particular the Messiah. But there also have ended up effects of this wonderful composition on the tradition of the work, and the performance aspect of how it moves visitors to feel something nearly spiritual every time it is heard. It is reported that during the first performance of this make up in London, that the current King of England, King George II, felt so moved and religiously compelled to stand during the singing of the Hallelujah chorus that others fell in step with the queen (as was protocol of subjects to their king) and stood as well. This is a tradition that continues to this approach very day during the performances of Handel's Messiah. As you can see Handel had an enduring legacy about music and the compositional aspects of music. The dedication that Handel should to his life of tunes and the preservation of a lasting legacy has allowed Handel to really never leave us. His effects are generally felt to this very day through the standing of the audience during the Messiah, to the compositional nods that composers give to Handel in their works. Handel is someone that proved to many that as long as there exists the preference to achieve, the object of their desire can be reached. Handel's life there seemed to be filled with adversity from the beginning. From this father not wanting Handel to participate in a career filled with music, to his struggles with changing music styles, the sometimes-awkward positions that Handel found himself in as it relates to arguments; Handel persevered as a result of it all. It was not until the end of his life that Handel showed signs of a frail person not able to continue on. Blindness was a severe blow to Handel's career being that the production of, in addition to revision of large-scale works was something that could no longer be done. Handel continued to do what he had executed all of his life and find new ways to stay relevant and current with the musical needs, and would so through the use of trusted friends that did most of the dictation work for Handel, however eventual total blindness departed Handel in such poor health that even that had to come to an end. It was finally on April 14, 1759 that Handel left his body form and thus was not the death of Handel, but was your birth of an enduring legacy of Handel on the musical styling's of what was to come.

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