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paperback-rascal · 2 years

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@kalm5 and I were bouncing this idea between each other for a while.

We dubbed it as Janitor!AU but it’s rather a... JanitorAU!origin story/idea for both Clone Force 99 and 99.

The premise is as follows:

all clones registered as defective (and surviving the whole process despite the defects) are automatically registered as maintenance staff no matter how insignificant the mutations might be.

Once Nala Se decides to release four experimental clones from her lab to the training facility, to her horror, the system/framework immediately categorized them as defective and registers them as maintenance.

The brothers ends up working under 99, who at this time is not the clone we know and love from TCW as he is jealous of his brothers... especially his new “squad”: They have supernatural strength, above-average intelligence, inhuman eyesight, sixth sense, etc. - they are super soldiers who, by accident, ended up sweeping floors.

99 has what? a hump, crooked spine, droopy face and a lame leg.

That turns 99 very bitter towards life, himself and, especially, other abled clones. He is not malicious towards The Bad Batch, but rather cold and aloof: he refuses to show them the ropes or how to efficiently preform certain tasks, gives them the most demeaning jobs, not tell them about shortcuts/ maintenance hallways of the facility, so they have a hard time getting used to their job of being well... janitors, which in turn fills them with resentment. Not to mention they also rebel against the decision as they felt they were denied their heritage as soldiers also they’d get treated harshly by “regs” due to their status quo (because at Kamino maintenance = defective)!

With time, 99 finds his “zen” - he forms a bond with TBB, learns to appreciate his squad and find his own strengths/weaknesses as TBB fight with the system to be approved for missions (with dash of help from Shaak Ti’s Jedi way of handling things and... Nala Se - who well, didn’t spend months/years in her secret lab tweaking clone DNA to produce maintenance staff!).

TBB also plotted to absorb 99 to their team in some way or another, but at the end of the day, 99 matured enough to realize that being a janitor/maintenance personnel is as much needed in war as being on the front lines. At this point TBB consider 99 as integral part of the squad, even though he is on Kamino while they are fighting.

The Clone Force 99 name is not to honor 99 post mortem, but the name of the team they build with him as they mopped grime of landing platforms, scrubbed clogged, piss coated toilets and washed sweat soaked training armor sets.

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On the more humorous note I imagine them still being maintenance staff in the Kamino framework/system despite being approved for combat - once a clone is registered as defective/maintenance, there is no change of the status, because there is not way to actually fix the defect. They could be this fearless Clone Force 99 with 100% success rate and proudly wear black-and-red armor all they want (imagine if it was 99′s aesthetic! like... him always wanted to look super cool/ badass with skulls and such, while black-and-red color scheme came from him hating how unassuming janitor uniform looked), but in their files they will forever belong to a janitor closet....

now that I mentioned it - What if their living space was some sort of maintenance room they cleared out and started to squat in? What if TBB and 99 lived together for a while and what we know as Echo’s hammock in reality belonged to 99?

---

(also that’s why he was so helpful toward Domino squad later - he saw The Bad Batch in them)

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STAR WARS: The Clone Wars/The Bad Batch © George Lucas/ Dave Filoni/ LucasFilm/ Disney

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liesmyth · 1 year

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do you have any book recommendations? anything like the locked tomb or just fantasy/science fiction in general? :)

Hi anon I LOVE GIVING BOOK RECS!

Unfortunately I haven’t found anything quite like TLT, but when you break it into main themes some other series come close. So, if you liked The Locked Tomb for…

Morally ambiguous lesbians and oppressive empires? Try The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson. I love Baru as a character and I love and what the book does with themes of cultural assimilation and how the road to a righteous goal is paved with moral compromises until you’re not sure you’re still on the right path. Content warning for institutional homophobia, which affects the plot and the main character. It’s never gratuitous, but it’s pretty much the opposite of TLT under that point of view so heads up.

Unique worldbuilding, queer characters, distinctive sense of place in a land that was once Earth? Try The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin. This isn’t to everybody’s tastes (usually people love it or hate it) but it does some VERY cool things with scifi and deservedly won a Hugo.

Intricate worldbuilding, necromancy, gothic vibes? Try The Bone Orchard by Sara Mueller. This definitely hits the same “confused and confusing female main character who doesn’t know her own mind” vibes as HtN, which can be good or bad depending on your tastes, but the necromancy bits are fantastic.

Oppressive planetary empires and queer characters? Try A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. This too is about cultural assimilation and has a main murder mystery plot. Space opera about a young diplomat in a precarious position who is sort of sharing her mind space with someone else. Bonus: fun scifi worldbuilding based on some lesser-known historical empires.

Other SFF I read or reread in 2022

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett for worldbuilding, shady empires, female MC, urban fantasy vibes with a strong sense of place and a murder mystery thrown in for flavour.

Deeplight by Frances Hardinge. YA fantasy with horror vibes that I very much enjoyed as an adult not usually keen on YA. There are scary eldritch gods, toxic relationships with a hopeful ending, excellent fantasy worldbuilding, a really solid sense of civilization (especially the Deaf culture of the divers that is really interwoven in the setting). Sea monsters! Secrets! Street urchins! This is one of my all-time favourites.

The Scholomance series by Naomi Novik, starting with A Deadly Education; the third book came out two weeks after Nona and it gave me emotional whiplash, because (spoiler!) the angry goth girl gets to be happy in this one! YA, very vivid very fun worldbuilding, spunky teenage heroine with a cynical disposition and death powers.

Obligatory rec for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell just because it’s one of those books that make me feel like I’m a richer person for having read them. It’s an impressive alternate history fantasy, the writing is masterful, the fae villain is unsettling and inhumanly evil, the mundane villains (pettiness, spite, centuries-old institutions) provide excellent dramatic irony. Everyone is insufferable in a petty way that’s also endlessly entertaining, and the two titular characters are absolutely obsessed with each other. The prose is a pastiche and tremendously well written. My only nitpick is that there are way too many men. I get why, given the setting the premise and the characters, and I loved the book, but since this rec originated with an ask about TLT I feel like I have to clarify that the gender ratio is pretty much the polar opposite.

My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones if you like spunky teenage girl protagonists, poetically described gore, critique of colonialism and indigenous displacement. This is a horror thriller not a sff, sent in the contemporary US, and it’s basically a love letter to the horror movie genre + Native American folk legends. Reccing it anyway because YMMV but to to me it really hit some of the spots that HtN does. (Content warning for off-screen CSA)

The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch. Speculative fiction thriller, lots of jumping between alternate timelines and wondering what exactly is going on. It’s not flawless but it’s unabashedly weird in a very fun, very unique way that I really appreciated.

Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng. Unique worldbuilding, distinct narrative voices, gothic vibes, weird religious imagery. Fantasy historical fiction about cruel inhuman fae, the worldbuilding is brilliant and very vivid (and what an aesthetic it is!), the story is fucked up in a delicious way, and the prose is a delightful Brontë pastiche. Content warnings for consensual sibling incest and Christian missionaries on a mission of “civilization” through faith (it’s not portrayed in a positive way but the colonialism is definitely there).

[I only flagged content warnings that aren't canon-typical for TLT, but definitely more apply. If you need clarification on a specific book HMU]

#reading recs #reading list #the traitor baru cormorant #teixcalaan #the broken earth #the scholomance #ask #anonymous #@anon if you've read any of these and have Opinions whether good or bad lmk #so i can narrow it down to tailor made recs AND have an excuse to do more BookTalk #baru cormorant

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cream-and-tea · 2 years

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[ID: a picture of a group of peaches lying in a pile with a faint border around the edge, white text in the centre reads CREAM-AND-TEA while smaller text below that reads reintro/navigation. END ID]

hi! hello! salutations! my name (at least on the internet) is creme (she/her please and thank you), and this reintro has been... a long time coming, to say the least. let’s get some quick facts out of the way so i can talk about my over abundance of projects!

i tend to write character-driven stories, complicated relationships of all kinds, queer/nerudivergant characters (hey, write what you know), fucked-up magic systems, and basically everything i touch ends up having SOME kind of fantasy element (whether intentionally or not)

i also write poetry! but that tends not to get posted as much bc of just how personal it is to me

i’m pretty active on here but i'm trying to get better at actually Posting My Writing, i do have some stuff up (mostly from my main wip Lay Me Down) but that’s something i’m working on

(i’m working on… a lot)

i’m currently studying journalism and creative writing in university!!!

i’d love to be published one day (primarily with my poetry and maybe a novel) but first i have to actual finish something lol

i am literally up to read/follow anything. anything at all. i do have stuff i look for and some genres i read more than others but if something has a premise i like/tropes i like/a cool vibe/anything remotely interesting at all i tend to jump on it

i love love love being tagged in tag games even if it takes me fucking forever to do them lol

aaaaand i think that’s mostly it! now onto the main event (aka all my stories i couldn’t shut up about so i had to put them under the cut):

LAY ME DOWN.

[ID: an opening between two trees surrounded by ferns and leading into darkness, with text across it that reads LAY ME DOWN in white letters. END ID]

BASICS. drafting/outlining. fantasy/horror, dark academia (sort of). third person present tense, dual POV. book one of the gravespeaker trilogy.

PREMISE. On an earth overtaken by a infectious supernatural forest: a runaway with the ability to see the dead, a star student with far worse than blood staining their hands, the ghost of a murdered girl with a score to settle, and a failed prophet who knows far more than he thinks, must work together to unravel the mysteries and secrets of a deadly library at the end of the world that is just as much prison as it is salvation (that is… if they don’t kill each other first).

CHARACTERS.

Agnes-Maria white [17 and too good for this place. she is made of bruised skin and bleeding flowers, a girl half dying who will do anything to live.]

Pallas [17 and exactly where they think they belong. there is nothing safe or kind or soft about them even though they want to be, both the knife and the open wound.]

Nina Martin [18 and longing to leave. she is an echo of someone a different girl used to be, and death is only the beginning.]

Fiver [25 and looking for something better. he exists as an ichor-toned lie and wishes to scrub the residue of it from his skin, someone desperate to break the chains of the past around his neck.]

TAG. wip: ghost story

comic sans intro

playlist.

pinterest board.

TAGLIST (ask to be +/-). @vellichor-virgo @transmasc-wizard @houndmouthed @muddshadow @just-wublrful @corkywantstowrite @shrunkupthejams @andromedaexists @caninemotiff @lungs-and-gills @lychniscitrus @phantomnations @onomatopiya @deer-in-headlights-stare @arctic-oceans @redbloodprose @definitelynotclayface @cannivalisms @atthenian @dallonwrites

BURN THE STARS

[ID: a photo set in a dark space where a young person stands, face upturned, eyes closed, as their arms reach up, hands cupping an orb of light that casts a golden glow in the space around it. the text across the centre of the image reads BURN THE STARS in white letters. END ID]

BASICS. planning (seriously in the very early stages of planning). sci-fi fantasy. third person past tense (for now), four major POVs (for now). book one of a planned duology.

PREMISE. Exiled from one of the galaxies seven holy ruling families and poisoned with magic she doesn't understand, Apollinaires self-destructive spiral is interrupted by an event that leads her into the path of a sharpshooter with a taste for vengeance and a fervent medic pursuing knowledge no matter the cost. Meanwhile, in the heart of a massive rotating space station known as the Rings, wearing a stolen face and longing for home, reluctant assassin Anandi Alva plans to finally bring the star-spanning church to its knees. While within the palace both a fallen warrior and a girl-king strive to remember what means to be human.

CHARACTERS.

Apollinaire Sibel-Marie Gloria Alphonsine el Belrose, eldest daughter of the house of the seventh saint [the unchosen. the eldest daughter. god-cursed and roiling in flame]

Danny [the trickshot. the wanderer too far from home. saltbitter and stormy-eyed]

Silas Ambose [the “healer”. the seeker of truths. broken heart still beating and trembling hands]

Anandi Alva [the assassin. the tortured idealist. silken tongue and a thousand masks]

Rill [the executioner. the punished. steel bite and starstreaked blood.]

Glorian Apollinaire Alphonsine El Belrose, the first mourner, he who bears the sword and cries with the tears of a thousand people, aka “Alphie” [the chosen. the youngest child. golden crowns and redrimmed eyes]

TAG. wip: burn the stars

pinterest board.

TAGLIST (ask to be +/-). @just-wublrful @transmasc-wizard

MISC PROJECTS

[ID: a backdrop of soft, glittery peach fabric. the text across the centre of the image reads MISC PROJECTS in white letters. END ID ]

aka “things i’m not actively working on but constantly ping-pong around my brain on a day-to-day basis”

SALT BIRDS. low fantasy/slice-of-life audio drama. outlining. follows the lonely keeper of a seaside graveyard when one of the bodies she fishes from the ocean ends up being very much alive. With nowhere else to go the teenager she finds washed up on her shore must stay with her and the two must find a way to live with each other, despite the secrets both are keeping.

guilt, redemption and forgiveness. facing the unknown. stagnation and apathy. isolation. the ocean is real scary you guys (but also cool).

ONE DOWN AT DEVONS MARSH. urban fantasy with heavy litfic elements. planning/sporadically drafting. follows twins Friday and Oliver Walker as they attempt to understand the curse that dictates one of them will die on their seventeenth birthday while also navigating their relationships with each other, their family of witches, the town they live in, and the friends they meet along the way.

family (blood and otherwise). complicated platonic relationships. coming of age, faeries and witchcraft. weird small towns. fate and free will. death and grief. oops! this one is all about MY specific high school trauma!

SUNDOWN LAND. soft fantasy/roadtrip. planning. follows Shrike, a runaway thief slowly dying from a magical disease, and Ariel, an artificial construct who's maker has recently disappeared, as they journey through the ruins of their wartorn country in search of a mystical place both know from a popular childrens story.

finding closure. coming to terms with childhood abuse. generational trauma. personal autonomy. fantasy vs reality. discovering and defining identity. places being personified. it can be a pinocchio retelling if you squint reeeealllly hard.

ALL FALL DOWN. superhero. rewriting and replanning. follows hero and villain duo Tatum and Umbra as their city of New Victoria is plunged into chaos following a series of increasingly violent attacks. forced to work together and battling their own inner demons the two and their rag-tag group of friends are drawn into a much larger conspiracy that could unravel their ideas of themselves, each-other, and the foundation of the very world they live in.

enemies-to-lovers. gray mortality. the dangers of black and white thinking. what makes someone a villain and what makes a someone a hero. found family. the dangers of obsessive hate and revenge. heroes who choose to save the world. healing and recovery. heist bullshit.

GO TO #creme does a writing if you want some examples of my scribblings

GO TO #creme does an art if you want to see my gay little drawings

GO TO #creme does a tag for a look at the tag games i’ve done

GO TO #*stares in podcast rambling* if you want a taste of the OTHER things i obsess over constantly

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purble-gaymer · 11 months

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alright @turtleplushi here’s some evil flavored meta knight

so for starters, this au is based on the simple premise of nightmare cursing galaxia before the gsa gets to it. it came to mind sometime back in october (so some style choices are pretty out of date). that was it for a few days, but the reason i mention i'll throw my emotions away is because i started listening to RIProducer about the same time and this song gave me a million more ideas to work with.

it starts pretty much the same as my normal interpretation of early mk and galaxia, being he hates it. he can't stand looking at it, let alone using it, knowing its retrieval resulted in the death of his friend. he drops it on the floor and kicks it under his cot, where it stays for the next month or so. things proceed as normal until he decides to pull it out one day. he picks it up and strangely finds the ruby a lot more enchanting than it used to be.

from that point on, he starts bringing it everywhere. it doesn't talk much at first, slowly building up mk's trust, and eventually during training it drops this:

now, naturally, he doesn't tell anyone about this. everyone thinks he's doing just fine--except jecra, anyway. he can tell something's wrong, and he's starting to think it's not just grief. if he asks mk about anything, the knight's response is a bit more hostile than it used to be. not always, but enough to notice it. surely he's just in the anger stage, right?

a lot of slow corruption and escalation happens in the middle chunk here, and along the way mk's perception and memories start to change. he thinks--no, he's certain the other members of the gsa don't care about him; they never did. they don't care that this war is putting so many people in danger, they don't care to help, they don't care meta knight lost one of his best friends, one of the greatest star warriors they had. what's stopping them from letting him die, from letting jecra die? he can't bear to lose anyone else. after months of spite and rage building up, he abandons his badge and swears to take revenge the gsa.

and, unfortunately, this eventually culminates in him trying to assassinate arthur. it doesn't go as planned. someone was there waiting for him.

after this, he runs and finds jecra, who was already looking for him. aforementioned blood question, meta knight is acting weirdly calm but also weirdly aggressive about this whole thing? jecra draws his sword and breaks the other's mask, and oops! mk has red eyes. super possessed. they have a big fight that ends with jecra disarming mk and shattering the ruby, breaking the curse.

there's some fallout that i never really got around to thinking about very much. dragato's fine, he's not too angry about the being stabbed thing since mk wasn't really in control. arthur's a fair bit more upset, even if his anger is sort of directionless now that the curse is gone and mk's back to normal. meta knight feels awful about the whole thing for a while. galaxia goes back to sitting stationary under his bed where he can't see it.

after a while, they get the ruby replaced, and to meta knight's horror the thing can still talk. it doesn't seem to be evil anymore, but it'll be a while before he's willing to trust it again.

i drew some things related to this, not too much but here's a couple. it was during a time when i was really unhappy with all my finished pieces, so i never posted anything, but i thought they'd be cool to share.

so that's that. i've got an adjacent 'meta knight doesn't escape from nme until way later' au but that one's just for fun cause evil mk is just a fun guy to write/draw (admittedly he is also deeply traumatized but that's a story for another time)

#long post #cw blood #do i put tags on this #kirby au #rhyn's art

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xenosaurus · 10 months

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NO OKAY BUT THANK YOU FOR GIVING ME THIS CHANCE BECAUSE I NEED TO TALK ABOUT THIS ALWAYS (and this ask will immediately identify me to anyone who knows me bc im literally the only person in the world who cares) but please never read N.K. Jemisin's "The City We Became." She's won three hugos in a row and thats very impressive, nothing but love and respect to my sister who has Made It and Paved the Way for more of us to go forward. I haven't actually read her hugo winners and i'd like to, but unfortunately i started with The City We Became and now i hold a Grudge.

Why:

on the surface this book is a Cool Woke Twist on lovecraftian horror set in new york city. the basic premise is fun: the avatars of the boroughs of new york forming together to help their city become a fully fledged cosmic entity of a sort. the villain here is the literal spirit of gentrification, and while theres a lot of good things that could come from that set up, the actual execution makes it an absolute agony to get through. everything is so hamfisted and somehow smug about recognizing the most basic ideas. its too smug and condescending to appeal to anyone in the center, its ideas too juvenile to appeal to anyone in the left, and its weird flat characterization of the villains as The Most Cartoonishly Evil Cops/N*zis You Can Think Of kind of makes the conflict feel... empty. It's hard to explain without experiencing it, but i cannot recommend anyone actually read it. or maybe u should just so i can finally talk to other people about this, maybe im insane for feeling this way.

some favorite moments of mine, in no particular order:

-the multiple instances of a side character being introduced, having their race and tragic backstory exposited in one sentence, and then they vanish, never to appear in the narrative again

-white supremacists attack the indie art museum on twitter. thankfully they start a counter hashtag and the entire situation wraps up in under 24 hours. they go from "we have to fire all of you bc of pressure from these assholes" to "actually its fine" bc of twitter. i dont even think its supposed to be part of the magic of the city or whatever. its an incredible sequence.

-"he shot out of the pool like a child fired from a hot buttered child cannon"

-theres a bit where the author sets up a neat fight between a character who does a cool transformation and a REALLY neat monster. u will not see that fight play out. that scene isnt in the book. just the leadup and the aftermath. why even bother.

-one of the main characters has a tumblr but its obvious the author hasnt like... used tumblr. this isnt a major sin but it is funny

-really have to state again that theres a line in this book that reads "hot buttered child cannon." this also isnt a sin, this is maybe poetry.

-its labeled as adult fiction, it feels like its trying to go for grit and gore and sex in places, but its also weirdly shy about engaging directly with a lot of that stuff. this one might (MIGHT) actually be a style thing, admittedly most of my nitpicks surround one specific character who has a reason to be Like That, but i also have issues with her as a whole that i do not have space 2 get into here. regardless, a lot of this book feels like ya somehow, but the concepts its playing with and some of the scenes DO also make it feel too adult to really suit that either. its... weird.

its kind of a mess in a lot of places, and honest to god it sort of drags in the middle. if you DO pick it up, i recommend the audiobook. the narrator does a fantastic job, and they do some fun sound design in a few places. unfortunately the story itself is kind of hollow. it has a lot of diversity, but the way so many of those diverse characters are tossed out for brownie points and discarded, the way so many characters go into these preachy little rants about VERY basic ideas like "white supremacy bad" its just...

im sure that the author meant well. this book wouldve raised the bar for its representation in like... 2014. maybe thats when she started writing it, idk. unfortunately it came out in 2020 and i think it just feels Dated in a very strange way.

u dont have 2 publish any of this also ofc, im just always here to Unrecommend this book. unfortunately theres a sequel and some part of me is holding out hope that the author fixed some of the things i took issue with in the intervening years, so im bound to this series via curse. even if i hate this one, i know theres gonna be at least one more, and maybe *that* one will fix it-

do not be like me.

This ask was a ride from start to finish. I feel like I was shot out of a hot buttered child cannon.

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addysfandomdump · 7 months

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I know I'm not that popular so this is probably not gonna get a lot of attention but,

Premises under the cut:

The Finer Things in Life - Rouge pities Shadow's depressingly minimalist living space and takes him out to steal get some stuff to decorate his room. ("Damn bitch, you live like this?")

The World's Most Way-Past-Cool Game Night! - It's game night at Amy's house, and everyone's invited! Chaos ensues within the crowded living room of Amy's apartment. Based on Cover B illustration for IDW Sonic’s Issue #27.

The Sun is Also a Star - Super Sonic and Super Shadow float in an endless void, singing to and comforting each other.

Like a Moth to a Flame - Light and fluffy Super Sonic x Shadow oneshot.

Te Aviso, Te Anuncio - Sonic is attending a celebrity gala for Amy's sake when Team Dark crashes the party to steal a prized treasure being displayed at the gala that Rouge is seeking after. Sonic and Shadow fight/waltz homosexually, playing hot potato with the prize until finally, one of them makes off with it.

Worst Family Reunion Ever - Semi-crack Sonadow fic. Shadow is forced to come to the bicentennial Black Arms Family Reunion that happens once every 50 years lest everyone he knows and loves is killed. Needing a plus-one, Shadow decides to bring Sonic, who pretends to be Shadow's "boyfriend" and be as obnoxious at the family dinner as possible.

This Place is Not a Place of Honor - Rouge is sent on a mission to retrieve old documents on a rickety space colony called the ARK. By the time she realizes the horrors that lie within the ARK, it is already too late.

Steel Pig - Imagine the hit indie horror game Iron Lung but with Sonic the Hedgehog in it. His worst nightmare.

I Love My Enemy - Boom!Sonadow Divorce Arc 💔

A Chaotic Companion - Sonic (Classic) meets a strange and peculiar figure in the Special Zones while trying to collect the Chaos Emeralds.

Where's the Girl? - A chronicled depiction of Maria's life on the ARK, told from her perspective.

God DAMN it, Sonic, where the HELL are we!? - After a freak accident with the Chaos Emeralds, Sonic, Shadow, and Knuckles are transported to another world where there are only humans (our world/real life). They go on the hunt for the Chaos Emeralds, learning to navigate the strange new world they've been thrown into and getting into all sorts of wacky shenanigans.

A mega slow burn Sonknuxadow fic and rewrite of a slightly older Sonadow fic with the same premise that I wrote myself into a corner for. This time, Knuckles is here! This fic is gonna be fucking massive, with 100 chapters (or "episodes") in a screenplay format. One of my most ambitious fics that'll definitely take a looong time to complete. I'll probably write the first 10 episodes, then drop them on a weekly basis, then rinse and repeat for the rest of the fic.

#sth #the cat's column

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cloudmonarch43 · 9 months

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[ID in alt text; copied under the cut]

I am engaged in the drawing part of this exercise to varying levels on different occasions :P I'm including the dates so that you don’t make the reasonable assumption that I've been watching movies gradually and steadily since the last time I posted about them, haha. I also watched half of the D&D movie whenever that was in the theater but I got bored and left.

A Cure for Wellness (2016). Watched 3/8/23. I enjoyed it while I still had hope, but it absolutely collapsed at the end. It looked cool, I was engaged in the mystery, and even though it's a long movie I thought the pacing was pretty good, but once I found out what the story actually was, everything before seemed unfocused and overambitious. (pencil sketch of an eel)

The Babadook (2014). Watched 3/10-11/23. I couldn't watch it all at once because it was so emotionally distressing, but the resolution was wonderful. I like this movie very much. (sketch of the mother reading to her son)

Bernie (2011). Watched 3/12/23. I've got a sort of complicated personal hangup with the premise of this movie and its relationship to real life, which I hadn't grasped going in, but I liked Jack Black's singing. (sketch of Bernie's head)

Dark Star (1974). Watched 7/5/23. I watched this because of John Carpenter, but once I realized who Dan O'Bannon is, I thought yeah that makes sense too. This is a great movie. I like the gentle strangeness. Everything that happens feels appropriate to the situation, and it's got a cool look and sound. (sketch of Bomb 20)

The Wicker Man (1973). Watched 7/6/23. My favorite part of this was the music! I also thought they did a nice job not saying "here is the good religion and here is the bad one," and also not saying that religion in general is just bad or good; the material realities of the situation were involved in interesting and complicated ways. (sketch of Lord Summerisle)

Nimona (2023). Watched 7/7/23. This was a fun movie that made me laugh and cry. I haven't read the comic but I'm interested to. The setting was cool; it was mostly just in the way things looked, but the total embrace of the fairy tale kingdom/futuristic tech crossover was neat. I don't like it when major stakes that affect lots of people in a movie balance on someone's personal relationship and they don't take that seriously. It feels like turning what should be a highlighting parallel into a distractingly literal influence and it happens a lot in movies for younger audiences. I have seen a lot of people say this is a movie they wish they'd had when they were younger which made me notice that I don't really have an idea about stories I wish I'd had, so when it comes to my personal experience I only care about what's relevant to the present. (sketch of Nimona)

The French Dispatch (2021). Watched 7/12/23. I was more interested in the way these stories were told than in the stories themselves. I like the way it was all framed; the actors felt like they were acting rather than being real people, not in a bad way but as an emphasis on the context. I liked the variety of textures to it all, the lighting choices and so on, but the stories didn't connect with me very often. (sketch of the bicycle journalist)

Oculus (2013). Watched 7/18-19/23. One day I will end up watching a horror movie that actually scares me in a theater and then I will find out whether it is better to not be in control and I am making things worse by hitting pause all the time, but they're building up the tension—what can I do! I also think I'm more sensitive to stories with kids in them because often they're not primarily struggling with the horror as much as ordinary traumas like their concerns not being taken seriously and their parents not being safe figures. The music in this movie is boring but it didn't make anything worse. I felt like the characters of the parents fizzled out disappointingly—I couldn't see the significance of their specific actions later in the movie. But I really liked the past and present stuff. That was a cool and interesting use of the idea of a mirror. (sketch of the ornate mirror)

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2010). Watched 7/20/23. This was a good opportunity to investigate what I am actually looking for in a comedic story, because I think this is a pretty good movie that told me what it would do and then did it, and didn't do anything very bad on the side, but it sure wore me down. I believe I don't like it when I have to not take things seriously in order to find them funny. (sketch of Dale)

Barbie (2023). Watched 7/25/23. I'm still not done thinking about this, especially with how active it is in public conversation, but what's certain is my feelings are mixed. There were many funny jokes, and many things other people in the theater laughed at that I wished I could ask them to explain. The exploration of the dolls as characters different from humans, so specifically the ideas of objects, was genuinely quite interesting. The surface-level exploration of gender was unimpressive and disappointingly lacking in nuance for how significant of a theme it was. (sketch of Barbie in her cowgirl outfit)

#movie journal #pencil #2023 #a cure for wellness #the babadook #bernie #dark star #the wicker man #nimona #the french dispatch #oculus #tucker & dale vs. evil #barbie

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absolutebl · 2 years

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I just finished watching Until We Meet Again. The prospect of nice penguin showings lured me in next to the mentions of it being great, but then it failed me on both, unfortunately. .-. In a number of aspects it is good and unique as a BL, I can cognitively see that, but I found it rather extremely painful to watch, and it never wound up doing a U-turn on the elements that salted me badly, sadly. The blushy maiden trope in there and Pharm being this whiny crybaby with basically no competence at all was really really exhausting to watch. In any other BL (or any romance for that matter) I would have just sighed and sucked it up with seeing such a kinda useless wimp who can't take a clear bold stance to fend up a kinda asshole suitor, because it's such a norm by premise (also the "marry me, because I'm too lazy to stop sucking at cooking" wife material trope is such a---). But serving up that Intouch had been very able to go against his natural inclinations and work up and grasp decisive action to get what he wants, only for him to end up in a crying, clingy mess that can't really do anything else anymore. Graaah! It's almost like the narrative wants to say: "See, love takes away all of your autonomy and agency and makes you entirely dependent to this one person, reducing you and your value to this one aspect in life and their willingness to be with you, that making up all of what is you and to make it EVEN WORSE it's like: See, he definitely had too much of all these abilities, therefore we, the narrative, decree they must both die, so he can be reborn as this very conveniently uke innocent reluctant something to chronically tear up and find his value, completeness and safety under the wing of that seme. Also make him traumatized on top of it, just to make sure he doesn't get audacious ideas again. It's entirely like some sort of just because punishment of inadequate magnitudes of consequences. Just why did the series have to serve up basically just about the tropes and narrative contrivances I absolutely most loath? T_T And also combine it with the fated mate/red string of fate trope which I quite like, because it typically comes with a package deal of reflecting and improving on your past history by learning from the mistakes and also about segregating your present identity from the past one, which is a move that forces you to learn self-sustained esteem and sovereignty over your life in the reality that unfolds before your eyes. The latter didn't really happen at all (it did seem to try in a last minute ditch about all that "is it even real?", but that only felt like checkboxing on the forced separation trope, and then he doesn't even manage to come to that conclusion himself but has to be kinda told that in a dream for that?) The only ones that did better on the former were also just the families with hardly very nuanced teary drama and most of it also in exposition dump summary in dialogue-only. In terms of the main couple it definitely propagated totally just a downgrade. Which is just Gnnndfndfhmphf. (Also, why give Intouch's friend this long of a scene all in tears just to have him never show up again in any way ever?)

Me going to do that very pouty sulking in the corner. I had wanted to like this show. ;_;

BUT! Pharm at least did improve on his foodie skills. Your write up on the dishes is cool. Thanks for that!! Those purple dumplings in particular definitely have my attention very much for replication now. (Especially with it being dessert-style pretty but still being savory! It's like I've been looking for something like that forever, with me not liking sweets!)

On another note (and an actual question), on one of the posts to the series you wrote:

(Since it won best picture Oscar as a horror flick, which is a commercial genre category like romance, and everyone knows horror separates from romcom with a very slim line - mostly musical.)

What did you mean by that? Bad romance does inspire the same reactions in me as horror, but I feel like that probably wasn't what you meant...?

I'm sorry UWMA didn't work for you.

HORROR & ROMANCE

So, horror and romance as literary genres (in the western world) both come from the Victorian (AKA Rromantic) Gothic literary movement of the 1800s. It means they use a TON of the same tropes to inspire tension, form the backbone of setting and character, and (eventually) establish themselves as genre fiction. It's just that horror takes them into bloody or creepy spaces, and romance takes them to connection and love.

So take proximity alert, in romance one boy falls into/onto the other, in horror, the damsel falls in the woods and the serial killer gets her.

The trope of cohabitation, which in romance can be tailored down to there's only one bed, that's the same trope as "cabin in the woods" horror. Isolating and forcing a couple to live together inspiring tension and love/sex, is just like isolating and forcing a group together in a haunted house, then picking them off one by one. These two genres naturally default to flips sides of the same narrative techniques, in many ways.

Which isn't to say there should be one-to-one comparisons, but more that they are source in the same basic narrative foundation way back.

Horror is as much about manipulation of notions of intimacy and social relationships (and emotions) as romance (at least good horror is) it's just that in romance it all comes out well, and in horror it... doesn't.

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daja-the-hypnokitten · 1 year

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Jukebox reviews part 40! For context, see my post “A Project” under this same tag. If you want to see a full list of his EMCSA stories, they can be found here, sorted alphabetically.And if you want to see some of his drabbles, check out his blog at @jukeboxemcsa

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