#Presumably this feature length one off was made with an eye to a potential series. It certainly feels that way and the characters played
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RAMifications Chapter 7 - Kiss Me
Book: The Royal Romance (AU)
Pairings: Liam x MC (Ella)
Song Inspiration: Kiss Me by Ed Sheeran
Characters belong to Pixelberry; MC Ella Brooks belongs to me
A/N: This entire idea came from @burnsoslow and her unBEARable series featuring her OTP Drake and Alyssa. This is Ella’s backstory and how she met the love of her life King Liam of Cordonia and became his queen.
Catch up here
Big thank you to my beta reader/snippet looker-overer (?)/my biggest cheerleader @burnsoslow - always catching little details that my mind overlooks.
Warnings: Some swearing; hinting of 🍐 or 🍋?
Words: 2002
“Lady Ella. Might I have a word?”
Ella wasn’t sure about the protocol for inviting the King inside her bedroom … but this was his palace after all. She nodded and stepped back, allowing him to walk past her as she shut the door.
“Hello again, Your Majesty,” Ella put one foot behind the other in an attempt to curtsy when Constantine waved his hand in the air.
“There’s no need for that, dear,” he studied Ella for another moment before speaking again. “How are you feeling about Liam?”
“Your Majesty?” What the hell does that mean?
Constantine blew out a breath. “Are you here for wealth? Fame? A title? Why are you here? Liam needs stability above all right now, Ella. You … joining in the middle of the social season, having not been in Cordonia long and knowing nothing of our traditions … that concerns me. We have suitors that have prepared their entire lives to be queen. This could be potentially dangerous should our enemies see this as a weakness!”
Ella grit her teeth and clenched her jaw in an effort to hide her irritation. What the fuck? “Sir, if I may speak freely?”
He nodded and gestured for her to go ahead.
“Why are you trying to intimidate me?” She spat out.
The King was taken aback at her tone and could only blink as a response. He hadn’t expected this very small woman to behave this way. Ella continued speaking, not even waiting for him to respond. “I may not have prepared my whole life to be a queen of an entire country, but I’ve spent a majority of my adult life studying. Studying diplomacy, trade, investment … how to recognize when someone is going into cardiac arrest and bringing them back to life,” she said the last few words louder than the rest, unable to hide her aggravation. “I have no doubt that these other ladies studied hard to be queen. But did they study how to be a wife? How to console someone when they lost everything they own? How to be compassionate towards people of a lower stature? The people need a Queen that understands them. Liam needs someone that can be a queen AND a wife. I’ve embraced your country, as well as your traditions.”
Constantine gave her a questioning look.
“I know I have because instead of just being with the man I want to be with … I have to parade around with four other women trying to win him.” Ella’s eyes met his, not backing down from his stare.
He was momentarily speechless. No one had ever spoken to him that way, ever. Except maybe his wife, but he hardly paid attention to her and her ramblings anyway. This young woman was fiery, and he wasn’t sure if he liked that or not. “I am not here to intimidate you, Ella,” he finally said slowly. “We will see how the rest of the season goes. I want what’s best for my country, that’s all.”
“What’s best for your country is a successor that has it all. If he’s happy AND can run a country with someone that loves him, then I don’t see the problem … sir.” She had forgotten that she was speaking to the king. He could have her gone and back to California in a hot second if he wanted to.
Constantine carefully took in her words and nodded. “Alright, Ella. We’ll see what happens. You have a good night.” He turned and let himself out of the room.
Ella walked over, locked the door and pressed her back up against it. My mouth might get me in some serious trouble here. She finally went to get ready for bed, slipped into the comforter and fell into a deep sleep.
**
Soft, constant knocks on the door woke up Ella the next morning.
“I’m coming … sheesh,” she mumbled, stumbling out of bed and tripped over her comforter that her foot was caught in. “Oh shit!” She shrieked as she hit the ground and the knocking stopped for a second.
“Ella?”
“Um, yes! Just a second!” Real smooth. Ella picked herself up off the ground, threw the stupid comforter on the bed and rushed to the door to open it.
There stood Liam, leaning on the door frame wearing a white polo shirt that outlined his chest and arm muscles perfectly. She roamed her eyes down further to take in the navy blue slacks and brown loafers. Ohmigod. It’s entirely too early to look that good. She inadvertently sucked her bottom lip into her mouth.
Liam cleared his throat and tried to hide a smile when he noticed she was staring. “Good morning, Lady Ella. I wanted to stop by and see you before I headed in to meetings today. May I come in?”
Ella blinked and quickly nodded. She moved aside so he could walk in the door and she closed it behind him. “Good morning, Your Highness. I’m sorry if I-” She was interrupted by Liam’s mouth on hers. Ella strained on the tips of her toes to meet him so she could kiss him back with fervor. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she pushed her tongue into his mouth and he groaned in response.
He could hardly control himself. As soon as he saw her open the door wearing a tank top - she wasn’t wearing a bra, dear God - and the shortest Hello Kitty pajama shorts known to man, his cock jumped in his pants and his mouth watered. She looked like a goddess, with all her dark hair piled on top of her head, and her sleepy disposition; he was so tempted to just take her right then and there. It took all of the effort he could muster to pull away from those soft lips. “I’m sorry, I … really just came to say good morning,” he said in between breaths.
“Sure … you did,” Ella panted and laughed breathlessly.
“I’m not sure I’ll be able to see you much today,” he said sadly. “My father and I have meetings and things to take care of before we leave.” Liam gulped. “Remember, we have to be, somewhat secretive, just until the social season ends,” he gave her a guilty look. He still kept his arms around her, not wanting to let go just yet. “I’m so sorry about this.”
“It’s alright, I knew what all this entailed. And I know you have things to do today. I have some interview that Bertrand set up so … I’ll be doing that,” she smiled up at him.
“I … can text you though, right?” That sounded so pathetic.
Ella giggled. “You’re so cute. Of course you can.”
Their intimate moment was interrupted by loud knocks at the door. “Ellaaaaaaa! Wake up sleepy heeeeead!”
“That must be Maxwell,” Ella whispered and they laughed. Liam leaned down to kiss her one last time before releasing her.
The door flew open. “Good morning sunshine!” Maxwell bounced into the room and stopped short when he saw Liam. “Hey buddy!” He grinned wide at the both of them.
“Good morning Maxwell,” Liam chuckled. “I need to get going, I’ll see you two later.” He grabbed Ella’s hand and squeezed it before walking out into the hallway.
“He came to … visit you huuuuh?” Max wiggled his eyebrows at Ella and she blushed.
“He just came to say good morning, that’s all.”
“Mmmhmmm. Is that what you crazy kids call it these days?”
She rolled her eyes but ignored his question entirely. “Okay, so I’m assuming you’re here to take me to get breakfast?”
“You are correct! Breakfast, the boutique, and then I’m also supposed to prep you for the interview. Bertrand will be here later to prep you some more!”
“Alright, let me get dressed really quick.”
**
45 minutes later, Max and Ella were eating in the dining hall. “So, what are they going to be asking me anyway?”
Max bit off a piece of bacon. “There’s only one person coming from Trend, her name is Ana de Luca. She’s pretty cool actually, the royal family and the nobles trust her with their interviews. Sometimes she brings Donnie Brine with CBC, but I don’t think he’s coming. She will most likely ask you about where you came from, what you did there, how you met the prince, how you feel about the prince, what would set you apart from the other suitors … things like that.” He shoved another piece of bacon in his mouth and washed it down with some coffee.
“Did you guys want me to be truthful or do you have some script for me to follow?”
Maxwell shook his head. “No, no, no, there’s no script. I’m sure Bertrand will want you to say things about House Beaumont … but, just be yourself. They want to know about Ella! So tell them,” he smiled reassuringly at her and continued eating.
A few hours later, after spending an hour in the boutique with Maxwell throwing all kinds of dresses over the fitting room door, she finally found a dress she loved. A black chiffon midi length dress with purple flowers on the bottom, it had an A-line silhouette and short sleeves. It was elegant enough for a daytime interview with the press, and was also Maxwell and Bertrand approved.
Ella sat in her bedroom with Maxwell, listening to him chatter away next to her about his new awesome playlist that he made. She was feeling her stomach twist with nerves, her hands clasped in her lap and she could feel her palms getting sweaty. She heard footsteps come right outside her door and knew it was Bertrand. Ella took a big breath in and let it out slowly. “You ready, Ella?” Max took her hand and squeezed it. “You’re going to do great!”
They both stood and walked out into the hallway meeting Bertrand and a petite woman with blond hair. “Hello,” Ella smiled.
“Hello, Lady Ella I presume?”
“Yes, Ana, allow me to introduce Lady Ella of House Beaumont. Lady Ella, this is Ana de Luca from Trend Magazine.”
Ella and Ana shook hands. “It’s a pleasure, Lady Ella. We are all very curious to know more about you.”
“Wonderful to meet you, Ana. Where are we having this interview?”
“In one of the ballrooms, I’ve had the crew set up already. Follow me.”
The four headed towards one of the open ballrooms, smaller than the other one Ella had seen a week ago. As they rounded the corner, Ella spotted two women coming towards them. One with jet black hair and the other with flaming red hair. The woman with the dark hair just looked at Ella curiously, while the other woman gave her the death stare. As Ana, Bertrand and Maxwell walked into the ballroom, Ella looked back at both women. The redhead walked up to her and snickered. “Well, well, well, look what we have here.”
#RAMifications#Liam x MC#Liam x Ella#Liam Rys#the royal romance#choices the royal romance#the royal romance fanfic#the royal romance au#choices trr#choices liam x mc#choices trr au#choices liam#pixelberry#play choices#trr fandom#trr fanfic#trr#trr au
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Chapters: 14/?
Fandom: Bridgerton
Rating: T
Warnings: Presumed Character Death
Relationships: Colin Bridgerton/Penelope Featherington, Eloise Bridgerton/Penelope Featherington(besties), Bridgerton Family Dynamics, Simon Hastings/Daphne Bridgerton
Characters: Colin Bridgerton, Penelope Featherington, Eloise Bridgerton, Anthony Featherington, Benedict Bridgerton, Portia Featherington, Violet Bridgerton, Genevieve Delacroix
Additional Tags: Bridgerton, Polin
Summary: Unexpected bad news arrives for the Bridgerton Family (and friends) regarding Colin's travels. This will be a series that is set after "The Duke and I" or season one of the show. It is a companion piece to "Goodbyes".
It had come to pass that Portia Featherington hadn’t been wrong about everything. Penelope couldn’t help but begrudgingly give her mother some credit as she paced the small room she was waiting in for her wedding: the books had ruined her.
Everything that she knew about life and love came from the pages of the damn things. Even if she had always had her doubts whether she would actually get married, the small bit of her that held up hope had this foolish fantasy of what it was supposed to be.
When she’d pictured this day, Colin had always been her romantic lead. It had been that way even before she was old enough to fully understand her feelings. It felt a little bittersweet that he couldn’t at least be part of it.
If he couldn’t be her husband, she would have at least felt better having him there as her friend. Knowing that he fully endorsed her choice would have been important. All she could do now was assume that he would have be happy to see her well-matched with his brother.
She was still anxious about it, as fond as she had become of Benedict in recent weeks. She’d felt as if they’d made progress in transitioning from whatever they had been to what they were going to be. It was all tentative, a bit weird but it was no longer awkward to converse at length or hold hands.
They were both trying.
There was a lot more that would come after the wedding and that was what she was terrified of. Violet in her infinite wisdom had attempted to have an adult conversation with her about wifely duties when her own mother neglected to call on her for such a thing. Then Daphne had made an appearance and attempted her own conversation.
She wasn’t quite sure if she was supposed to be excited at the prospect of her wedding night or terrified.
Either way it went, she knew that there was no real pressure to do something that she didn’t feel comfortable with. Benedict might not have approached the subject but she knew he wasn’t the sort to demand anything.
They were going to do something different and it might take her time but she was going to be happy.
She just had to work past her nerves first.
She was mid-stride through her forty or fiftieth spin around the room when the door opened and in strode her mother.
Penelope had invited her (and her sisters) to the wedding. They were her family even if things had dysfunctional at times. That didn’t necessarily mean that she wanted to open herself to feedback or criticism for her choices or the timeline of them.
She also wasn’t quite sure her nerves could handle a third conversation about her duties as wife.
“Mother,” she said with a polite nod and bow.
Her mother seemed to stand there for a long moment, looking her over as if appraising the situation.
“This dress will do,” she said after a long moment.
Penelope’s dress was one of the new ones that had been purchased in recent weeks. It wasn’t white but it was a pale blue and had white lace over it. It wasn’t as extravagant as the dress she might have worn if it hadn’t burnt but she was pretty content with it. She’d even added little blue flowers to her red curls.
“I appreciate your approval,” Penelope offered after a moment, deciding that she should just be grateful that they decided to show and actively be a part of this. “You should probably find your seat. Anthony will be presenting me.”
It was a bit of a slap in the face. If her father had been alive, he would have been the one to do such a thing. He was long gone and Penelope hadn’t considered herself a member of her mother’s household since she’d left it. Anthony, as misguided and overprotective as he could be at times, was the only person deserving of such an honor.
Portia might have wished to object but she closed her mouth as soon as it opened. Instead she decided to proceed with her original mission for coming.
“I won’t trouble you for long,” she told before snapping her fingers and a servant came with a box. She opened it and inside was a beautiful, ornate veil. “This is a family heirloom of sorts. I’d thought to give it to one of your sisters but your father insisted it be put aside for you.”
Penelope could gloss over all the negative undertones to just see the fact that it was actually quite remarkable. She’d honestly not planned to wear a veil at all but it looked as if it belonged with the dress. Her mother would have sold it if she’d had the inkling. The fact that she was there at all with it said that somewhere she did actually care about her.
It was enough.
She turned to allow her mother to help her pin it properly in her red curls, a light smile playing on her features.
“Thank you for this,” she told her quietly.
--
Benedict was grateful for his mother because Violet had this strange way of making things always come together, even when there was a limited amount of time to do it. Weddings were relatively simple affairs in the great scheme of things. In a family like theirs, it was harder logistically to get everyone around.
As he gazed around the church, he was glad to have all of them. Violet was sitting up front with Gregory and Hyacinth on opposite sides. Eloise was to the right of Hyacinth which brought a smile to his face because she’d joked that she might sit on the other side of the aisle. Francesca was behind them with the Duke and a visibly pregnant Daphne. The only other people were those on the other side – Penelope’s mother and siblings.
The whole situation felt surreal to him. There was literally no scenario where he could imagine wedding Penelope Featherington before recent months. He had always felt like he’d known her but he hadn’t known her at all. He felt as if by getting to know her better, he’d seen her potential.
He could even imagine being happy which was more than he ever thought he could say about most of the other potential matches he could have had in the Ton. It was going to take them time but he liked where they were. There was no rush to become something that they weren’t.
He would be patient and a good husband to her.
He didn’t get married every day though so he did feel a little nervous about the whole situation. He’d definitely had to ease his nerves with a drink beforehand.
As he caught sight of Anthony at the entrance, making a gesture that things were to begin it all begin to set in.
Everyone sat quietly but they all sort of blurred out of space when he saw Penelope move into the entrance with him. He’d never quite had such a visceral reaction to her before but she really was vision.
She seemed nervous so he offered her a smile and she returned it as she approached on Anthony’s arm.
They were both shaking by the time her hand was in his and the clergyman began to speak.
--
The doors crashed open with a thud making such a disturbance that there was no way to ignore it.
Every single head turned including that of the bride and groom.
Colin Bridgerton was a dusty mess of a man but out of the darkness of the hallway, he appeared to the audible sound of gasps.
Everyone was so focused on his appearance that it was only Benedict and Colin who felt Penelope go limp. The shock had caused a fainting spell and it was any wonder that Benedict caught her. Colin couldn’t quite get to her at the moment.
“Colin!” Violet Bridgerton practically screamed, moving from her seat toward her wayward son. She didn’t stop until her arms were around him. He hugged his mother for a moment, shaking off his own disbelief at everything that was happening.
Concern washed over him at what was going on before him. He couldn’t properly even focus on the words that were coming at him from family members as they touched him and made sure that he wasn’t some apparition.
“Mother, I – please, I need to-“ he tried to explain, to get out of her grasp and direction the attention to the person maybe needed a little more attention at the moment.
For her credit, she did let him go long enough for her gaze to realize Penelope was still out cold. The fact her child was back from the dead was temporarily forgotten as the need to care for the problem at hand send her moving with him up toward the front pew, where Benedict has maneuvered the unconscious girl with a little help from Portia Featherington.
Her blue eyes began to flicker back open after a long, quiet moment. She came back to life in a minute, fully prepared to fight. Her body upright, terror on her face.
“I’m dead,” she said after a long moment when she caught sight of Colin and his concerned eyes. “I’m clearly dead because you are dead.”
If he hadn’t been so worried about her, he might have laughed. Instead Colin reached for her wrist, dipping enough for her hand to his chest so she might see that he wasn’t dead.
“I promise you that I’m here,” he told her, eyes finding hers. “I’m alive. I’m here and I’m never leaving again.”
There was clearly a lot that needed to be said. More than just to her but in that moment it was just nice to see her face, to know she was okay even if she’d gone from fainting to crying.
He didn’t quite know if what he wanted to do was appropriate at the moment. Whatever business he had with Benedict could wait, for now the urge for violence was low.
“…I wouldn’t miss your wedding,” he said after a long moment, trying to lighten the mood to make her stop crying. “I just had to be my dramatic flare to things.”
“Wedding?” she asked. Oh God, she’d completely forgotten she’d been in the middle of her own wedding. She shot an apologetic look to Benedict, biting her lip. Colin’s hand was still over her own and she didn’t want to let go of it but she wasn’t sure what was okay anymore. “I just can’t believe you’re actually here. I should have never encouraged you to go. I should have stopped you.”
“It’s okay,” Benedict said, giving her a quiet nod as if reading her thoughts. He turned to the clergyman and politely explained that there wouldn’t be need for his services after all. The wedding wouldn’t be happening today – if ever. As he completely made way for Colin to take back his place in life, Penelope couldn’t help but feel a little sad to lose something she didn’t really know that she wanted.
Whatever she felt about that didn’t lessen how she felt about the fact that Colin was home. He was real and he was there with her. The fact he was touching her and looking at her like that.
“You were only trying to encourage me to do what you thought I needed to be happy,” he told her with a nod. “I maybe could have done a better job communicating after I left.”
It was Daphne who interjected this time, socking him hard in the arm. Simon didn’t even try and stop her.
“You could have communicated with your family that you weren’t dead,” Daphne told him. “We’ve already replaced you with Penelope. We thought giving her your bedroom would be in bad taste though.”
“I don’t know that sorry is going to cut it. I was sort of out of commission for a lot of it – it’s a long story,” he tried to explain. “I am sorry though. Very sorry and – I don’t want to know how I’m going to make it up to all of you.”
Apparently something that had been said triggered something in Penelope because her response was to start looking around, “ANTHONY?” she practically screamed.
Anthony came darting at his name though based on the tone, he wasn’t sure that he wanted to be there.
“Colin sent the dress not some … scorned lover of Benedicts trying to kill me,” she said after a moment.
“Wait, what?” Colin couldn’t help but ask.
“He burnt the dress and everything else in my wardrobe,” Penelope informed Colin.
Colin’s murderous side turned on Anthony. If they hadn’t been in a church, there would have been blood.
“I was trying to protect her,” Anthony said in his defense.
Penelope apparently caught onto the fact, Colin’s ability to keep cool with fleeting because she felt her hand tighten in his and it did calm him down just a little bit.
“It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever owned,” she told him honestly, kindly. “Can you please never have someone send a vague note with no signature again?”
“I promise,” he said after a long moment. “And I’ll buy you whatever your heart desires then keep it far, far away from my idiot brothers.”
Penelope smiled at that.
There was honestly so much to say and it was going to take time.
She definitely couldn’t talk as openly as she might wish with half the family still waiting on their opportunity to chat with the recently returned.
They exchanged an extended gaze that didn’t make giving them that space any easier.
An exaggerated, pained sound coming from Daphne was enough to pull them from their moment. She was too early in her pregnancy to be making any sounds like that but all the excitement couldn’t possibly have been good for her.
“Go be there for your sister,” she said after a long moment.
“We’ll take more later?” Colin asked.
She nodded and that was all he needed to run off to assist the Duke and everyone else in getting Daphne’s needs met.
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Stargate SG1 full series review
How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?
43.6% (ninety-two of two hundred and eleven).
What is the average percentage of female characters with names and lines for the full series?
23.23%
How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?
Thirteen.
How many episodes have a cast that is at least 50% female?
Three.
How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?
Seventy-two.
Positive Content Status:
Well, it’s altogether not impressive - on the plus side, the one (1) original female lead on the show is a legitimately great character and a strong feminist icon who has thus far withstood the test of time, but on the negative side, it’s fucking slim pickings for quality female representation beyond that one character. I’d also like the register my displeasure at all the times when the intense heteronormative male-obsessed writers room churned out content which was so rooted in straight-white-cis-male-Christian-American ideology as to be utterly absurd when applied to alien beings and cultures, but with zero evidence that anyone had reflected in the least on that fact. It’s science fiction, morons. Get a clue (average rating of 2.96).
Which season had the best representation statistics overall?
Season ten has to take it - as the only season with two women in the main cast, it passed the Bechdel 80% of the time (its closest competitor in that regard was season five at 54.54%, the only other season to even make it over 50%). Season ten also scored a 26.93% female cast, which is rubbish compared to most shows, but it’s the second-best score in that category for this show: the season which got the highest female percentage was season two, at just 27.5%. Seasons two and ten also tied for the lowest number of 20%-or-less episodes, and season two had three episodes at 40%+ and one at 50%+ (whereas ten had only the one 40%+, and no fifties), so weird as it seems, we gotta dive back into the nineties to claim season two as the runner-up for best overall statistics.
Which season had the worst representation statistics overall?
It’s a battle between seasons six to nine: season nine had the series-low for Bechdel passes (30%), and for the female cast (an abysmal 19.07%). However, season six barely did better on either score (though it was not second-worst - that was season eight, on both counts), and on the other hand, season six had a below-average positive content score, and the highest number of 20%-or-less episodes for a single season (twelve - though, season nine hardly did better, at eleven - tied with season seven, which also had a below-average positive content score, and only 20.53% for its female cast, which is the ‘best’ score of that latter cluster of seasons, but to such a negligible extent it’s hard to pretend it matters). The only thing in season nine’s favour, really, is that it didn’t tank its positive content score, but coming in at average isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement - it’s gotta take the prize for worst overall statistics, with seasons six, seven, and eight all jumbled in to second-worst, because the numbers are altogether just not that different from each other. It’s a sad showing.
Overall Series Quality:
If you can stomach the absolute overload of white dudes (both onscreen, and making their identities sooo fucking obvious all the way from the writer’s room), it’s...pretty delightful. They really don’t make exciting adventurous shows like this anymore, and more’s the pity, because sometimes the wonder of stepping through the ‘gate and discovering grand, varied, bizarre, and challenging new things on the other side is exactly what we need.
MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:
Woof.
I did say, going in, that I did not expect this show to perform well, but that I was interested to see if maybe it’d do better than it appeared at first glance. It didn’t. Boy oh boy, it did NOT. As I have also said, as I’ve gone along, they increasingly surprised me in a bad way with their escalating inability to conceive of female characters, existing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: they were better at being inclusive of women in the nineties. They weren’t necessarily good at handling those women in respectful or intelligent ways, but they bothered to remember them in a limited capacity, and that was...ok, it wasn’t much of anything. I’m not going to praise the early seasons for having better numbers than the later ones even though ALL of the numbers sucked, any more than I’m gonna praise season ten for pulling the least-crappy scores out when we all know that’s a direct consequence of having two women in the main cast, and nothing more substantive than that, no actual effort or attempt to be better was involved. Early on, I thought that the fact that the Powers That Be had allowed Samantha Carter to move beyond her uncomfortable written-by-men straw-feminist-caricature origins to become a person in her own right was a great positive sign for the future, but that turned out to be a misdiagnosis. Not of Carter - she’s fantastic - but a misdiagnosis of the creative team as men who were willing to learn and develop and expand their intensely narrow perspective. That never happened. These writers did not learn.
To put the numbers in some additional perspective, let’s look at what we got in terms of recurring characters: as established, we had just the one main female character for the entire duration of the series. Vala, our final-season addition (appearing in just shy of thirty episodes out of more than two hundred), was not the second-most prevalent female character on the show: that would be Janet Fraiser, who was killed off in season seven but who appeared in almost half the episodes up to that point (almost half to that point, not for the show in totality, mind). So, we have Carter in over two hundred episodes, Fraiser in less than eighty, and then Vala, in twenty-eight. There are ten male characters who appear in as many episodes as Vala or more - five who appear in over one hundred episodes. After Vala? The next most prominent female character is Carolyn Lam, Fraiser’s eventual replacement, in a measly eleven episodes. Considering the show ran for TWO HUNDRED and eleven (three of those being movie-length episodes, none of which featured any of the female characters mentioned other than Carter)...in at least as many episodes as Lam, we have an additional ten male characters, bringing us to TWENTY recurring males, and four female. Carter, Vala, and the two primary base doctors. That’s IT for recurring female characters who appeared in at least ten episodes of over two hundred. Male characters? Take your pick, we’ve got soldiers, scientists, politicians, aliens, villains and friends and ambiguous third parties on and off Earth, we have a bounty. We’ve got random extras with no story of their own who look exactly the same as all the other random extras (do I mean Reynolds, or Marks? Doesn’t matter, they’re both more prevalent than Lam). Want one more female character, to make it a top five? It’s Adria, who appears in six episodes exclusively in season ten (no wonder that’s the season with the best numbers). You get another thirteen male characters in the process, so we’re at thirty-three to five. You want a top ten for female characters, you gotta get all the way down to the ones who only appeared in three episodes, and it’s a joke to really call that ‘recurring’ on this scale. When I say this show had a male-dominated problem, I am not exaggerating.
Where is the variety? You’re either a female lead (in which case, a primary part of your function is simply to BE female - and traditionally attractive - so that there’s some eye candy for the presumed straight-male audience), or you’re placed in the Compassionate Caregiver role as a doctor, or you...don’t exist. Certainly, you don’t exist in a way that sustains story for multiple episodes. As noted, if you’re a dude you don’t even NEED story, you can be a regular-recurring extra, but a woman? Forget about it. Even the female villains never last more than five episodes, if they manage that (the nameless Priors recurred more often than Adria did). And as the show wore on, episodes in which Carter was the ONLY woman became more and more frequent (until season ten, which just makes a big ol’ last-minute mess of the series-long trends). While this was good news in terms of having less sexy-lamp female guest characters popping in to single episodes to look pretty, be useless, and never appear again, it was bad news for women, existing in the narrative in any way, because evidently, these male writers struggled with the concept of women with actual functions. Even with such a variety of settings, a variety of planets and cultures and walks of life of all the dizzying kinds a person could think of (IT’S SCIENCE FICTION, MORONS), we still somehow get stuck with this itty little version of society that matches the comfortable white-Christian-American illusion of life that has been perpetuated blindly in television since its inception (pro tip: women existing in all different career paths and walks of life have been a thing since before tv shows were a thing). There’s more social variety on this planet in the real world, right now, but these dumb bastards couldn’t muster the effort to be creative with alien cultures. Hell, they failed to even be thoughtful or do basic research into historical social structures in order to reflect those in their transplanted-from-Earth-centuries-ago peoples (who had a lot of different ways of doing things, ya know?). And don’t even get me started on the gendered obsessions of genderless symbiotes...This show could be delightful and weird and wonderful with some of its ideas, but thoughtful, open-minded, PROGRESSIVE? Not at all. When you think about it, it’s actually quite alarming, just how reductive they could be. It’s like they made some minimal effort with Samantha Carter and then decided that’s it for anything or anyone who isn’t a straight-white-cis-Christian-American-man. Our work here is done.
Of course, I’m not inclined to give them credit for Samantha Carter anyway - as I noted back when I reviewed season one, credit goes to Amanda Tapping for sticking up for the integrity of a character who was originally written without any; just like the writers don’t get to take any of the credit for the work Christopher Judge did in making the Jaffa into less racist caricatures (including addressing the misogyny the writers had embedded in Jaffa warrior culture - bless you, Chris Judge), I am not going to pretend that Carter’s success as a feminist icon for the ages belongs to anyone but Amanda Tapping herself. A-Taps saved her character from the trash-heap of history to which she would have been relegated if she had continued in the model that the early episodes laid out, and whatever struggles she had behind the scenes with the kind of content she was handed (in particular I mean He Who Shall Not Be Named, Schmete Schmanahan), she never relaxed her grip on who Samantha Carter is, what she stands for, and what that means for the audience looking up to her. It’s a huge achievement, really, that despite the obvious brainless sexism of the writing staff, and despite the test of time which has claimed so many other nineties feminist icons as ‘good for the era, but actually incredibly problematic’ (we’re talking Dana Scully, Buffy, and their ilk), Carter is still pretty much unblemished; she’s close to a platonic ideal of her archetype. Again, I really don’t think it’s deliberate on behalf of the show-runners, and especially considering the rest of their atrocious track record with female characters it would be a mistake to suggest they actually knew what they were doing with Carter and/or that it mattered to them to make a truly strong female lead. If all they did was occasionally cave to Amanda Tapping when she told them to do better, well. They can have credit for not being too egotistical to listen, even though they failed to extend that ability to being basically receptive to the world outside that one interaction. Excuse me if I still think they’re fucking idiots. Because I do.
The thing about the closed-mindedness of the creative team on this show is that it translates into the storytelling in a very particular way: not just in the obvious sense (where only straight white American (*Canadian*) men are real people), but also in the context of the ethos of the show, the perspective. The characters learn and change as individuals, but the overarching attitude of the series does not develop in self-awareness to encompass the knowledge of the universe achieved by humanity at large, and that’s because, plainly, there is none. For all that the show deals in exploration, discovery, and advancement, these things are framed heavily as being scientific in nature, and just as the writers seem so confident that they know everything about the way the world works to the exclusion of even trying to understand the perspective of anyone different from them within their own culture, so the show itself never goes through self-reflection upon the America(n-military)-knows-best approach to interstellar exploration. While some early episodes - pretty much just in seasons one and two - toy with the idea that Earth knows little about the ways of the galaxy and we’re all ‘very young’, etc, there’s no development or change in approach over time which would be indicative of growth, and as the SGC garners more tech and allies and accelerates into scientific comprehension (largely applied through military enhancement, yay), questions about whether or not the gung-ho charge they lead into other worlds (sometimes with apocalyptic consequences) is really a good idea essentially dry up. There’s an overriding arrogance about this show that seems to be a by-product of that lack of self-reflection, the assumption that the audience will agree with whatever they see because, well, it seemed right to the creators and the fact that there might actually be more nuance to the issue never occurred to them. This can lead to some wild assertions and some truly shocking decision-making that is delivered straight-faced (season ten gave us the good guys committing genocide, in the name of the Ancients whom they uphold as a great species despite THEIR arrogant and terrible coloniser legacy throughout the universe, and somehow no one is troubled by any of that), and it’s a prime example of why an open-minded, considerate and understanding approach (and a diverse creative team to help facilitate that with their naturally different perspectives) is a really important thing in storytelling, even beyond the immediately obvious issue of representation: if everyone in the room has created an echo chamber of the same incredibly limited point of view, you lose the ability to recognise that alternate interpretations exist and that from some angles, what you’re making could be illogical, offensive, propagandistic, or evil.
So, here we are. With me, wrapping this thing up with a reminder that despite just accusing the show of sometimes supporting evil ideologies through the blind ignorance of its self-absorbed show-runners, I actually really enjoy Stargate SG1 and will always hold a special place for it in my heart. On an entertainment level, it is pretty reliable, there are some duds in there for sure (some of them duds for various illogical, offensive, propagandistic, or evil reasons, some of them just fucking boring as Hell), but for the most part it’s solid, and sometimes it digs up a gem and really shines. Every virtue it has is a virtue that could be vastly improved upon (and every flaw is easily solvable with just a little bit of Goddamn thinking), and the full template is there, primed for a remake of the more inclusive sort, something that’ll play the game of alien cultural variance and the intrigue of Earth-based politics and the gravity and wonder of galactic exploration with the seriousness, creativity, and gusto that it all deserves. The heart and soul of SG1, what made it work for ten years and what makes it delightfully re-watchable despite being infuriating upon analysis, that core part of the story is pure. Damned if it doesn’t just need a broader, more considered take on that core, because it ain’t got a bless’d thing to do with being a straight-white-cis-Christian-American dude. That’s not how universality works.
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Dracula (2020) - S01 E01 - The Rules of the Beast
It’s not October already, is it?!
The Beeb’s mini-series game has been really on point in the past few months or so, huh? Whilst I was seeing Zombieland 2 I had a trailer for ‘His Dark Materials’ which looked pretty epic and then I found out about their new version of A Christmas Carol whilst researching the musical one I just watched, spoiler for Christmas marathon 2020 on that BTW. Now, we have the latest in a long line of Dracula adaptations. Apparently there’s another on the way in the form of a Renfield movie directed by Dexter Fletcher.
I say Beeb but they’re making these in conjunction with others, HDM with HBO, Christmas Carol with FX and this with Netflix. Presumably this will lead to Dracula being available worldwide, I know the BBC output doesn’t usually travel outside of the confines of UK Netflix (unless you’re using VPNs) so it’s good that everyone will get to experience this.
This represents not only some unseasonal content for me, it’s also uncharacteristically fresh given that it only aired just a few days ago, with one episode airing each night across the 1st, 2nd and 3rd of January. I must say it’s really strange to be viewing content that you can list as 2020, we’re more used to things marked like 1940 in this house. I could have put it off until October I suppose but why not get in whilst it’s topical? Plus it’s made by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, they of Sherlock fame, so maybe that’s good for some Tumblr clicks. I know you guys love you some Sherlock. There’s also a documentary that aired alongside the series called ‘In Search of Dracula’ in which Gatiss looks at the history of the character so that should make for some interesting viewing too, much like his other looks at horror movies throughout the years that I’ve looked at previously.
Pretty much the first thing you see at the start is a fly, like right up close and personal as it effectively lands on the camera lens. These things are everywhere throughout the episode, not just around food or the rotting bodies that come up later, that would make sense. During the scenes at Dracula’s castle you see them landing on paintings or swarming around what is to be Jonathan Harker’s bed and I’m not sure what the symbolism is meant to be. It’s at that point that Dracula makes explicit reference to them, suggesting they are man’s companion to the end and that where there is flesh, there are flies. Flies are obviously attracted to rotting material so possibly this speaks to how we find Dracula initially, very old and haggard, or just to the history of bloodshed and murder that has existed in the castle over what must be hundreds of years at this point.
There is one moment very early on in which a fly lands on Harker’s eye and actually crawls inside his head, a silhouette of the insect can be seen passing over the back of his eye. Just a really creepy and unsettling visual to see only 3 minutes in.
It’s strange that something as simple as a fly triggered a thought in me that we must be about to meet either the Renfield or Harker character, albeit in a state I wasn’t expecting at this point. I guess the two Renfield performances in the original Universal Dracula and it’s Spanish equivalent just really stuck with me and made me instantly connect the two. Harker finds himself in a convent being interviewed by a pair of nuns about his experiences in Dracula’s castle and how he came to make his escape. He’s actually asked if he and Dracula had sex during this time which is an interesting question.
Putting aside all the potentially shipping and fanfiction that it might inspire, in a rational world that wouldn’t acknowledge the possibility of Dracula or vampires being real, some sort of STI might be a reasonable assumption to make on Harker’s rather sudden and drastic collapse in health. He’s got these scabs all over his face, darkened sunken in eyes, any sembelence of colour completely washed away...guy is pretty much looking like a ghoul or zombie at this point. The other vampires we see later on are more akin to what you expect zombies to be like in other movies, they are the undead after all but I guess vampires are normally portrayed differently, keeping more of their humanity and coming across almost sexy in a brooding, gothic way.
It can be a little jarring at times to go back and forth between the convent and the castle but I suppose that’s a little more in line with how the original novel played out in journal entries and the like. This mini-series approach has given the creators the chance to dedicate much of this feature length runtime to Harker’s story within the castle walls, his first meeting with Dracula and his gradual descent into the husk he’s become now. Going back to the Universal version, it seemed a very brief transition, Renfield arrives and pretty much overnight becomes the gibbering slave to his new master. Here though, Harker never quite reaches that level of insanity but you can see how he might; isolated throughout the day whilst Dracula sleeps and with no one else around, he has this compulsion to search the castle in search of answers for the weird things he’s been seeing.
This is a really cool sequence with Harker’s narration describing the twisting and turning nature of the castle’s construction, with every door he opens somehow leading to another two or three. The images will seemingly repeat with him entering one hallway, making his way through and then coming through the entrance again. It reinforces the maze like quality and the repetition he is going through but also creates a sense of mystery. Sometimes there will be a brief glimpse of a shadowy figure moving through a doorway in the background, is this just another past version of Harker to underline the previous point or are there other people or creatures in this labyrinth?
And whether it’s through exhaustion, the eventual attacks he suffers or just some possible mind altering trick of Dracula’s, there are times when Harker drifts in and out of consciousness. In one moment, he finds himself awakened over his work at a table as Dracula hovers over him, offering him a glass of wine. In a bleary eyed state, Harker comes to find Dracula suddenly looks almost rejuvenated, looking far younger than he had previously. It all gives proceedings a very nightmarish quality.
Dracula benefits also from being immensely more threatening here than I recall him being in the Universal version. Well, aside from the voice of his initial form that is. People will often imitate the Lugosi voice but here he sounds like the bloody Meerkat from the adverts. Most of the most menacing moments come towards the end of this particular episode when his violent nature is truly unleashed but he seems very knowing and calculated early on, almost toying with Harker. It can come across a little cheesy at times because there is some very deliberate language choices that Harker himself is oblivious to but Dracula and we the audience know the true meaning behind. Like, Dracula suggesting that the locals lack ‘flavour’ to which Harker suggests he might mean ‘character’.
There is one frantic scene where Harker stumbles upon Dracula’s coffin and inadvertently awakens him, leading to Dracula setting upon him with bared fangs before the scene abruptly cuts away from the screams of Harker. It’s a very Christopher Lee-esque image, of this one in particular.
As the tides turn, Dracula’s strength and vigor increasing as Harker’s is drained, Dracula becomes a bit more blunt in revealing his motivations but still Harker remains defiant to the end which lends him more sympathy. There’s an almost tender moment when Dracula takes Harker to the ramparts of his castle, laying his enfeebled body in the light so that the morning sun might vanquish him whilst he watches from the shadows, speaking softly of how beautiful the sun is and how Harker should embrace death. As Harker begs to be spared, he does so with the promise that he will do everything within his power to stop Dracula.
With the later revelation about Mina, I did wonder if there would be some ongoing story arc about the struggle for Harker, his want to retain his humanity versus the growing urge to fulfil the desires of the vampire’s curse and his master. But, going by the ending, the struggle is already over. And boy, what an ending.
“They’re not my eyes...”
That’s a really great shot BTW, the rest of her face and pretty much the rest of the frame being in shadow except for her eyes, really lets you focus in on them and her expression as the reality of the situation sinks in.
It really is an exclamation point on what was a very brutal and bloody affair at times. The Christopher Lee reference earlier is quite apt as this is the kind of thing I would expect from those Hammer movies. I’ve always been hesitant to watch those as there’s so many, like 7 Frankenstein and 8 Dracula movies, so to experience something in that style but in a more condensed and standalone format is ideal.
Stay tuned for the next two entries!
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I don’t know all that much about Leonardo beyond what I learned in my survey of art history courses, so don’t know whether he drank alcohol while painting or not, but if the Salvator Mundi is really by him, it’s a drunken master painting, and not in the good sense.
Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, 1500.
It’s also the highest selling work of art in an auction, going for $450 million, which would be an astounding bargain if you consider just one of Jeff Koons’ designer set of hi-polished chrome Balloon Dogs sold for over $58 million, and it’s hardly stood the test of decades of time. The painting was sold to the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and if it really is a bad Leonardo, it’s still a steal, by I strongly suspect it belongs with the 20 other known variations of the work by Leonardo’s students and followers, in which case it’s a rip.
There’s some possibility that in the process of restoring the painting, it got botched, and thus is a highly compromised and misleadingly poor painting by the great Leonardo. What, you may ask, sucks about this painting, and who am I to assess it.
It just so happens that I’ve recently completed over 30 portraits, and was working hard on one last night, so I am highly attuned to all the really difficult aspects of the getting the anatomy and proportions correct, and am struggling with some of those. This painting manages to fail at the same higher-level of difficulty portrait problems that plague the portrait artists of today. I do remember something about Leonardo looking at cadavers and making rather scientific drawings of insides of people, in which case I presume he was very thorough in his analysis of anatomy and technique for rendering it.
These famous drawings come to mind:
This photograph is issued to end-user media only. Single use only. Photographs must not be archived or sold on.
Curiously, This is Leonardo’s Ostensible Only Straight on Portrait
It’s easier to do a straight on portrait than one at an angle because in the former case each side of the face roughly matches the other. IOf you were to look at his Lady with an Ermine of a decade earlier, he’d easily conquered the much more difficult challenge of rendering the model, and the ermine, in three quarter view. This is why we admire him.
The Lady with an Ermine (Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani), 1490.
With a straight on portrait any half-clever artist — let alone possibly the most brilliant of all time — would know they could trace one half the face and place it over the other to see if their proportions were horribly awry, in which case they’d fix it. Not this time! You can see how different the left and right sides of the face are if we mirror them, below:
Left is a mirrored image of the left side of Christ’s face. Right is the right side mirrored. The middle is the original painting.
If we overlap them at 50% — which incidentally also shows that he put the figure smack dab in the center of the canvas [innovative] — we can see how easily it would have been to measure matching areas for the main features, which the artist didn’t bother to do.
It’s one thing to have beginner mistakes, but beginner mistakes that can be corrected with beginner cheats? If it’s not obvious how whoever is responsible for this painting botched the face, keep reading.
The Eyes of Christ Are Wonky
It’s hard to get eyes to correspond to each other correctly, with the pupils looking in the same direction, and capturing the roundness of the ball of the eye, etc… It’s the type of thing where you just keep looking at it and trying to figure out what’s not quite right, coming back to it, making changes and changing them back, etc… Here’s a couple digital paintings where I remember really struggling with the eyes.
I’ve improved modestly since this portrait, and now I can see a few conspicuous problems. But I didn’t botch it as bad as the supposed Leonardo, and I’m not even a blip on the radar of this year’s virtually unknown artists of some interest, let alone on the historical stage.
The left eye is too high up, too far from the nose, and too small, relative to the right eye. Unless the savior was a chameleon, I don’t know why his right eye is looking off in the distance, up and to the right, while his left is looking at us. Maybe there was a delicious fly. If you can’t easily see it, let me ad some visual aids.
I think any professional artist would have made sure that in a full-on frontal portrait, one eye wasn’t higher than the other. You wouldn’t want to make the son of God’s eyes looing cross-eyed, wall-eyed, or otherwise potentially comically afflicted.
There’s the skill necessary to render eyes correctly, which Leonardo had. And then there’s just having an eye to see when something is not at all right, which he undoubtedly had. The struggling apprentice who made this painting, IMO, didn’t even had the eye to catch egregious mistakes.
And Then There’s the Nose
Noses are another really tough one, and you can scroll back up to those two portraits of mine to see if you can see my shortcomings in rendering the nose. [In my defense, other than for the series in question, I’m NOT a portrait artist at all.] But this supposed da Vinci? Woo-wee that’s bad nose.
It’s way too long, too straight and flat, and too flattened (which also allows the fledgling artist to not have to deal with rendering nostrils, either on the inside or outside). Look at the outside of his left nostril, and how short it is vertically. That’s a weird nose, Jesus. It’s also made of Paydo and is pushed to the subject’s left. Leonardo does, stylistically, exaggerate the length of noses, but comes the Christ painting to his Portrait of an Unknown Woman, from 1490-96:
Portrait of an Unknown Woman, from 1490-96.
It’s a much more convincing nose, and the nostrils are hidden because she’s looking down. The Christ has a comapitively bulbous tip of the nose, which is merely the artifact of making it look that was to maks not being able to render nostrils front on. Which brings us to the mouth.
Ew, the Mouth.
You can just look at the pic below and assess the rendering of the mouth yourself.
Your can clearly see in this straight on portrait, again, that the nose veers off to Christ’s left, relative to teh bridge of the nose, and the mouth. It’s narrow for his head, but Leonardo tends to stylize his figures that way. I’m having a lot of trouble with those lips. The upper lip seems too indented and flat, and the whole mouth is a little beaky.
Conclusion
The $450 million Salvator Mundi painting is surely in the style of Leonardo, but everything is fudged to look like Leonardo’s work, but riddled with beginner mistakes and plagued by an untrained eye. I didn’t address the neck, but scroll up and notice how it’s just suggested. Leonardo wouldn’t take vague shortcuts when he could render things much more exactly.
I could be wrong, of course, in which case da Vinci isn’t as good of a portrait artists as I’ve always thought (and I’m not as bad as I think), but I strongly think this is a period fake, a faux da Vinci, or apprentice work. I just can’t believe an artist of his caliber would bungle the saviors eyes, especially after doing superior portraits prior to it.
If this were the case, why are some art critics convinced by it? They aren’t practicing visual artists and aren’t as attuned to the level of difficulty different aspects of anatomy and rendering pose. I love music and could have been a music critic with enough training (not necessarily one of any distinction), but without being able to muddle through a Paganini violin concerto myself, I might not realize when something is just too easy for a virtuoso to flounder over. Or, for a more direct analogy, a Chinese calligraphy artist is going to be much better able to detect a phony or wannabe attempt than I am.
It can’t be a real da Vinci. I can’t even look at those eyes without cringing.
~ Ends
Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi is Hack Work by an Apprentice I don't know all that much about Leonardo beyond what I learned in my survey of art history courses, so don't know whether he drank alcohol while painting or not, but if the Salvator Mundi is really by him, it's a…
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[FN] The Traveler's Journal (setup)
(Authors note: what follows is setup for a fictional series that I've always wanted to write about. Take none of it seriously.)
Printer's note: This addition of the journal is the fiftieth made by the mysterious man known only as 'the Traveler'. As these books are only found every few hundred years, it is obviously very important to everyone that these works are preserved. They are collections of true stories (or as true as can be confirmed) of the world around us, from the epic tales of wars, to the small tales of the silliest pranks the wanderer has ever seen, and everything in between.
Given that the journals have been around for millenia, it has been theorized that the Traveler is in fact multiple people across history, finding curious tales and writing them under the guise of the Traveler. However, the tales that can be confirmed (as they happened in recent enough years to the publishing of the books, records go back on this for a few thousand years) show that a single man, has been present to see all of them, although not in the journals themselves.
The age of the man varies depending on who is reporting the story, sometimes it's an old man, sometimes no more than twenty, but heterochromatic eyes is a constant feature, with one eye green and the other blue. This consistent detail in the stories by the witnesses themselves has led many to believe that it's the same man through history, while others think that perhaps it is a cult of some kind.
What is understood is that the wanderer takes impeccable notes, and that he seems to be a very private man. The Two-eyed man went by different names in many of those stories, and often very common names such as 'Tom', 'Sam', and 'Bill'. If he is the wanderer, or is related to him in some way, then he takes great care to be inconspicuous.
If the wanderer has any magical talent, then it too, remains mysterious. Mages who have studied the original journals see no sign of magical writing (such as voice-quills, or brain ink). Investigations by scholars into the originals, in fact, seem to show that they were written by hand, and by no more than one individual. Quite an impressive feat if true, as these books are sometimes thousands of pages long.
If the wanderer is a single person that has been alive for thousands of years, then that would be of quite some interest to the healers of our society, as even the most extensive magics and medicines have only extended a lifespan to around three-hundred.
A cult of some kind is not off the table, however. There have been several cults throughout history, all with odd rituals and stories of their own. Several cults, notably the Cult of Calldoun and the Order of Cycles, is noted for transfering the soul of its founding member or members into succeeding generations, thus ensuring that "one person" lived for hundreds of years.
This theory is popular among most people, as it has more precedence than an immortal man does. There are several problems with this theory, namely that the transfer of a soul, especially across such a long span of time, is quite difficult, even among master mages. The resources required alone tend to leave some evidence behind. The aforementioned cults, it should be noted, did not perform one-hundred percent successful transfers, losing pieces of soul each time, and the gradual insanity of their leadership is what led to their eventual fall. If the wanderer is of that nature, then there simply is no evidence of any magic happenings, other than of course the length of time this one thing has been writing.
One final theory is that the wanderer could, in fact, be a man seeking the future from many thousands of years ago, writing all of the journals ahead of time to be released on specific dates. An argument for this is that when Augers, and Soothsayers (and presumably Oracles) forsee, they sometimes see things from something else's perspective, such as an animal or another human. This could explain the Two-eyed man, as the Traveler simply foresaw what happened when men with heterochromia saw an interesting story.
Criticism of this theory is nothing new. First, many point to the fact that people have no control over the things they foresee, nor the specific mechanics of how. Some simply have the information planted in their mind, with no senses involved. Secondly, the amount of information written in the books, in such detail, would send anybody into a coma, potentially becoming an Oracle, but as they are unable to write at all, or even speak more than a few words, this wouldn't explain the Traveler's Journal.
It seems that no matter where the Traveler could have come from, there seems to be an innate bewilderment and disbelief about his existence. And yet, he exists. Like a puzzle piece without a clear place on the puzzle, the Traveler seems to exist apart, but also with everything else.
What is clear is that they seem to be around for the long haul, and that they never stay in one spot for very long.
(So, that's the basic concept laid out right there. These stories will be in first person perspective, and try to sound like stories gathered by just one man. Hopefully, this goes well. Please comment if you have questions or suggestions.)
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The Best Cars, Car Tech, and Trends of CES 2020
LAS VEGAS – CES 2020 cemented its role as the most important show for automotive technology, with a handful of new car introductions (and re-introductions) plus lots of standalone technologies this week. Most US auto shows other than perhaps LA don’t generate a critical mass of tech-oriented auto company people, analysts, and journalists. CES certainly did.
Some might snicker when Byton CEO Daniel Kircher called the M-Byte EV “the first smart device on wheels,” but not the people attending this show. Of the vehicle introductions and concept cars, all were electrified – EVs or plug-in hybrids – with no gas-engine-only vehicles introduced.
Here are some highlights from the car and car tech part of CES 2020.
Nissan Ariya EV: Bigger than the Leaf, more range, and an SUV, not a sedan.
Best Debut: Nissan Turns Over a New Leaf
The biggest car debut – of a real car, or one that will be a real car – of CES was the Nissan Ariya. It’s a crossover / SUV intended to replace or (more likely) supplant the 10-year-old Nissan Leaf. The Ariya is bigger than the Leaf, offers two motors where the Leaf has one, and gets up to 300 miles on a charge versus 225 for the Leaf. With even more of the market headed toward SUVs, that’s how the Ariya is styled. The Leaf is a four-door sedan.
All this came down at the same time showgoers got news of how former Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn made good his, ah, departure from Japan, in a shipping box punched full of air holes, on a private jet, and heard Ghosn rail against the accused-is-presumed-guilty system of justice, as he described it. (He also dissed Nissan, his former employer.) The two events had nothing to do with each other, beyond the company being Nissan in both cases.
The Jeep Wrangler gets a PHEV variant. Not many chargers in the Moab Desert, but the e-motor still provides torque for rock-crawling.
Jeep Gets 3 Electrified Vehicles
Fiat Centoventi concept.
FCA (Fiat Chrysler Automobile) plans to electrify its entire iconic Jeep line by 2022. That doesn’t mean EV-only vehicles but plug-in hybrid (PHEV) models with up to 30 miles of battery-power driving before the gas engine kicks in. They’ll have vehicle badges marked “4xe” and include the traditional (Jeep-looking) Wrangler, the tiny Renegade, and Compass SUV. In Europe, Jeep said the vehicles will have an electric motor and 1.3-liter turbo-four engine producing 240 hp. “Electrification … will modernize the Jeep brand as it strives to become the leader in green eco-friendly premium technology,” the company says.
FCA also showed the Fiat Centoventi, a 145-inch, four-seater with suicide doors, and room for one to four batteries (they slide in), allowing 100-500 km of range, or 62-311 miles. An upscale model would get a 20-inch display in addition to the standard 10-incher. The late Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne said Fiat was losing $10,000 a car making the Fiat 500e; hopefully, this has better margins.
Sony Vision-S concept with a wall of LCDs across the dashboard.
Front Seat Displays Get Bigger
The Byton M-Byte is the winner with a 48-inch LCD (one single panel) that includes SPF-30 in the glove box. The display in the Sony Vision-S concept car was only slightly smaller. The tiny Fiat Centoventi concept EV can be had with an optional 20-inch panel. Byton even has an LCD panel in the steering wheel. Pimp-my-ride tuners did that years ago. The difference is Byton’s is legal because the airbag is still there in the lower third of the wheel hub. For Byton, it was a re-introduction of the M-Byte as a production-ready vehicle (first cars, late 2020, US 2021) after a CES 2018 unveiling.
Sony shocked CES – that is, advance word didn’t leak out – with its Vision-S concept car that also had a width of the cockpit array of LCDs, including side mirror / blind spot LCDs on the left and right edges. Not that Sony will build an EV and compete with Tesla; this was a car to remind the automakers that Sony, too, makes a lot of car electronics beyond in-dash radios.
Displays are getting bigger in general. A 7-inch display doesn’t cut it anymore except on the very cheapest cars where navigation is your phone, not a $500-$1,000 navigation package. More instrument panels are now 12 inches and some higher-end vendors pair it with a second 12-inch in the center stack. Mercedes made the small seam between the two fall in with your line of vision and the steering wheel, so it appears as a single panel to the driver. Midsize and bigger cars will need 10-inch center stack displays to remain competitive. The Mustang Mach-E EV gets a 15-inch portrait display.
At the same time, the perceived image size of head-up displays is increasing. This allows for augmented reality HUDs, in this case meaning the car tracks the position of your eyes relative to the HUD, and overlays where-to-turn arrows in your line of sight so it appears to be floating over the actual turn. For this who say “too distracting, too dangerous,” it helps to drive a head-up-display car to see how HUDs reduce distraction.
BMW i Interaction Ease seats: recycled materials, embedded touch surfaces, embedded LED lighting.
BMW Car Seats Become Lounge Chairs
As cars become self-driven cars and the driving controls go away, automakers are imagining big, spacious, amorphous-shape seats for the passengers. BMW fleshed out the concept with not just one but three variants. All three are currently unobtainable; two because they’re concepts, and the third because it will be on the BMW X7 SUV and others in a couple of years and only to those comfortable with a $1,500 lease payment.
The most far-out is the BMW i Interaction Ease concept interior that BMW’s head of development Klaus Froelich described as a “supreme luxury experience … The merger of advanced technology and design creates an almost human bond with the car.” The two seats are joined together (no room for cupholders! Oh, the humanity!), with integrated leg rests. They embed touch surfaces for selecting, say, infotainment, and in this concept, areas light up in order to confirm a selection or provide ambiance. The concepts also provide immense legroom. BMW says the abstract interior of the i Interation Ease interior “underscores the potential of intuitive, almost human-like interaction between passenger and vehicle.”
Got that? In the real world, we wonder if the extra length that adds to the car is compatible with the desire for shorter vehicles in urban areas. But if they’re self-driving, they can just go somewhere else after you dismiss the car for the evening, and parking is not your problem.
ZeroG Lounger in BMW X7.
The ZeroG Lounger is close to production. Fitted in three BMW X7s for CES, the seat tips back 60 degrees, including the seat pan. An entertainment screen drops down from the sunshade location. An integrated seat belt and cocoon airbag protect a reclined passenger. Most cars with recliners today warn you not to use the feature while driving. (Right.) BMW says the “ZeroG Lounger … will be ready for series production vehicles in just a few years in a similar form.” We can hardly wait. (Seriously, for once.) This is the kind of feature that makes a long trip comfortable for the passenger. It would be nice if BMW could fit one in an X5, a more attainable BMW.
Lastly, the BMW i3 Urban Suite: BMW ripped out the interior of the outgoing i3 carbon-fiber EV and turned the right rear passenger space into a sloped back lounging seat (if you want to sit upright, the driver’s seat is off the stock vehicle). The right front seat is a sliding footrest. The left rear seat is a wood table with a securely fastened lamp. It’s cool, it’s impractical, and it keeps our attention while waiting for the 2021 BMW i4 EV with, we hear, a 530-hp motor, 300 miles of range, and the ability to go head to head with the Tesla Model 3.
The Visteon domain controller (lower left) encapsulates dozens of microprocessors; variants scale for more displays or processing power.
Fewer Control Modules Do More Work
This is geeky, so feel free to skip down to the snow-in-Detroit photo. [But isn’t this ExtremeTech? -Ed] As cars do more things electronically, the number of microprocessors is up around 100. Tier 1 suppliers, the big boys such as Visteon, Continental, Bosch, Magna, and Aptiv, are integrating lots of small modules into a couple of uber-modules, or domain controllers: one for safety, one for infotainment, one for the engine room. That reduces the amount of wiring in the car. There are still connections, but only sharing as much data as necessary, between say infotainment and the safety modules. The telematics modem has to provide in-car Wi-Fi and also has to call for help in an accident, which are separate domains.
Visteon advanced tech director Upton Bowden says a supplier can scale up the microprocessor within a domain controller for more or less performance. or to drive additional displays, all as needed. That means the unit doesn’t have to be certified and tested multiple times for slightly different applications. And the Tier 1 supplier takes responsibility for vetting all the parts inside, giving the automaker, in quaint parlance, just one throat to choke if there’s a development issue.
Detroit’s North American Auto Show. It snows there in January. NAIAS never had a chance against CES on the tech front. Or the weather front. The LA show moved to November and also stole Detroit’s thunder. Detroit reboots as a spring/summer show this June.
CES Did Not Kill the Detroit Auto Show
The North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) gave up its January slot for one in June. Some believe CES blew Detroit out of the water. Actually, the shows are different. Every major auto show (LA, New York, Detroit, Chicago, DC) is more about 10 days of showing cars to customers; the press/analysts days tacked on for 2-3 days beforehand are just a way to get the automakers to build fancy booths and then turn them over to the local dealer associations. Meanwhile, the high-end European automakers realized their market share in Michigan rounded off to zero percent and bailed.
And the LA Auto Show, which had been in January a week away from NAIAS, moved to late November, where it has cemented its role as the show for green vehicles (it is in California) with its press days branded AutoMobility LA. Plus, LA has a goodly number of new car intros, and the Audi-BMW-Jaguar-Infiniti-Lexus-Mercedes-Porsche companies know SoCal is fertile hunting ground. NAIAS took a half-hearted stab at being a tech show with something called Automobili-D, but it was too little, too late, and stuck it down in the basement of Cobo Hall (now called TCF Center).
Anyway, CES is way bigger than Detroit or any other US auto show for media and industry participation. The SEMA show in Las Vegas in early November is more of a tuner/parts show. Comdex, the computer show, could have been an auto tech show but it didn’t survive much past Y2K. And Detroit gets to reinvent itself as an auto show / outdoor festival in June. All that’s left of the January show is the freestanding North American Car and Truck of the Year (NACTOY) at TCF Center Monday. Beyond Detroit, auto shows face an uncertain future as automakers question how much money to invest. Mercedes-Benz also pulled out of the New York International Auto Show (NYIAS) for 2020 even though it’s the company’s most lucrative sales turf. That is a bad sign for auto shows.
Consumer Technology Association president Gary Shapiro, left, interviews Counselor to the President Ivanka Trump Tuesday. (Photo: CES)
Ivanka Trump Speaks, World Did Not End
Much was made of the Consumer Technology Association (the CES organizer) inviting first daughter and counselor to the President Ivanka Trump to do a one-on-one keynote interview with CTA President / CEO Gary Shapiro. There was concern Shapiro and CTA were trying to tip the scales Trumpward in an election year. (Maybe. But it’s a long way from election day, and enough Democratic officeholders show up at CES to speak most years.) Some resistance formed around the hashtag #BoycottCES, but it meant giving up paid-for $500-a-night rooms, so if there was a boycott, it was of the one-on-one chat.
For the most part, Ivanka Trump didn’t say anything outlandish in her 40 minutes; she mostly restated the company line. For the most part, there are other more women in tech who would have been better role models. The best criticism was “Ivanka Trump Keynoting At CES Is All That Is Wrong For Women In Tech” by Carolina Milanesi in Forbes.
Nobody booed. Many agreed with Trump that “our immigration system is totally flawed,” although some of her related comments about making visa slots available for skilled workers may go beyond what the administration is doing. Tech and car companies are desperate for highly skilled engineers and computer scientists.
The bottom line is: Many CTA member companies do manufacturing in China. They’d rather not see their products tariffed. If a high-profile, softball interview for Ivanka makes the White House like consumer tech companies and go easy on tariffs, it’s the price you pay to make commerce run smoothly.
The odor of burning leaves in Vegas concentrated on overpasses on the Strip.
Mini-Trends and Gossip From CES Week in Vegas
On the Strip, Las Vegas Boulevard, the smell of weed was almost everywhere. Especially on the overpasses necessary to get you safely over the six-to-eight lanes of roadway. A friend from a software-development firm said, “With all our bio-engineering skills, you’d think someone could weed [yes, a pun] out the smell.”
There were multiple EVs, people-haulers, and transporters of the future — some nicely rounded (Toyota’s concept, top image), others small-and-tall minibusses for a half-dozen commuters. Toyota even envisioned a future Woven City community it will begin building at the base of Mount Fuji in 2021. Mercedes-Benz showed a far-out, doorless AVTR (Avatar) linked to the James Cameron movie. It senses the heartbeat and pulse of the occupant and responds with a welcoming thump on the seatback.
Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) continues to make strides winning converts, especially from the QNX OS. QNX initially took down Microsoft Windows Embedded Automotive when it won over the Ford business to underpin Ford Sync back in 2014. Now it’s pretty much a fight among AGL, QNX, and Android. The AGL consortium announced a reference design to make it easier for automakers to port their cars over.
BMW said it would be the first automaker with 5G in-car telematics, working with telematics partner Samsung, in the 2021 BMW iNext EV. BMW has a long history with Samsung; its now-subsidiary Harman has produced BMW’s last four infotainment head units and BMW’s iDrive system is considered to be the most competent infotainment controller, nearly two decades after the first edition in 2001.
TriEye SWIR camera.
New kinds of sensors may improve driving and self-driving. TriEye showed SWIR, or short-wave infrared lidar, in a camera that improves visibility in dusty, snowy and rainy conditions, the company says. WaveSense talked up ground-penetrating radar for self-driving. Say what – you want to go forward, not down? CTO Byron Stanley says the soil composition, buried pipes, and cables create a unique fingerprint that, once mapped, lets the car know its location within a few inches. And it’s not affected by above-ground weather conditions.
If anything got people upset about CES, it wasn’t the monorail lines (better than in previous years), long waits in cab lines (Lyft and Uber solved that problem), or all the security checks (cursory; you could sneak in a cruise missile). It was paying $25-$50 a day for a “resort” fee. I came in early to see a college hockey tournament at the new T-Mobile Center on the strip when Vegas was still quiet in the days just after New Year’s Eve revelers departed. The first three nights, my $43 (with taxes) daily resort fee was more than the room. (By midweek, some rooms were offered by hoteliers at $2,000 a night.) The resort fee amounted to two bottles of water a day, use of the grandly named health center, and swimming pool access, which in the winter means you can walk out on the patio to admire the drained pool.
CES Las Vegas has always been an international show (and there are consumer electronics shows outside the US). There seemed to be more Asian participants this year, especially from high-level players, but ranging from parts-maker companies with two-person booths to larger companies from Korea (actually, South Korea; not much take coming out of the North), Japan, Taiwan, India, and especially China. Byton (China) had a huge press conference Sunday. Harman, a unit of Samsung (South Korea), took over most of the exhibit hall space at the Hard Rock Hotel (which was bought by Richard Branson and will be rebuilt for CES 2021 as the Virgin Hotel). Car tech, consumer tech, it’s a global business.
Now read:
For Self-Driving Cars, Lidar Amps Up at CES 2020
Behind the Scenes With Aptiv’s Self-Driving Car Nerve Center at CES 2020
In This ‘Avatar’-Themed Mercedes-Benz, Two Hearts Beat as One
from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/304585-the-best-cars-car-tech-and-trends-of-ces-2020
from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-best-cars-car-tech-and-trends-of.html
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