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violet-moonstone · 5 months

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the MCU's rhetoric about political resistance/change is often so insidious. the only time we see people who want to change the status quo, theyre destructive and often incapable of feeling compassion for anyone outside of the group theyre fighting for. so the only two options are siding with the cruel antagonist who wants real change and the heroes who will make small concessions so that the audience feels good but ultimately they uphold the harmful status quo. I'm not saying this doesn't happen in real life, but when a trope pretty much becomes the default, you start to see the writer's political messages coming out. ESPECIALLY when the primary threat comes from exploited working class people/oppressed minorities and not the colonialist powers and corporations that put them in that position.

sidenote: when i watched black panther 2 and realized that the primary conflict was going to be black people fighting indigenous people and that western hegemony and exploitation of resources was just a side plot, I immediately lost all hope for that film. I loved the music, the visuals and the fight scenes, but the writing?? i was so disappointed. All the dissatisfaction I felt from Black Panther 1 came flooding back. Before they were pitting us against each other, this time it was against another oppressed group...hhhhhhh. anyway jokes on me for expecting different. I really just need to read The Deep (and if its anything like the song its based on, its probably much better executed than wakanda forever).

anyway, yes, the audience has the freedom to see things with nuance but i dont think most people will (because "its just a fun superhero move, why are you taking it so seriously?"), and I dont think the writers want them to - otherwise they'd start including more nuanced characters rather than villains who we are shown have to be defeated for the greater good, no matter how valid their arguments may be. and I understand that the vast majority of people are not watching superhero movies looking for nuance and depth but thats all the more reason why so much of the MCU's writing is concerning. Every time we're faced with a troubling political/ecological debate, the conclusion is that whoever tried to change things was in the wrong, and we'll make a small concession at the end so everyone feels somewhat satisfied and doesn't really have to confront any uncomfortable implications.

ex: infinity war shows us Thanos' eco fascism as the main (and only?) criticism of the overconsumption of resources. I may be wrong but I don't remember anyone talking about sustainability as vital solution or anything...and in FATWS the conversation is STILL about the pros and cons of the Snap - not anything to do with sustainability...because that would require the audience to be confronted with real life political implications that are bit too close to home. Even to have one or a few characters suggest an alternative and for Thanos to shoot it down because he doesn't trust people to be sustainable, and because he truly thinks killing people is the best possible plan (which makes no sense btw because it implies that all species are overpopulated at the same and that every single species in the universe consumes resources in the same way..they made movie!Thanos *seem* so intelligent but his thought process literally makes no sense. and fans bend over backwards to justify it because "hes the mad titan" even though you clearly cant use that defense based on the way he's written in the film. The writers clearly want us to see him as rational but cruel...anyway its not 2018 so let me stop beating the dead horse of this tired topic)

basically, theres rarely (if ever) a middle between the two extremes, because theres no room for that. There has to be a good guy and a bad guy...perhaps a well intentioned and misguided bad guy, but ultimately still a bad guy. The options are: pretty much nothing but minor things change and the problem still exists OR everything changes but it would require the violent villain getting their way and killing innocent people in the process.

anyway thank god for the spiderverse , which actually does the opposite (and thank god spiderverse is not directly part of the MCU and the writers actually have something to say). I think the loki show may be doing something similar but im not caught up so idk. loki to me feels like spiderverse but with less narrative cohesion

#mcu criticism #marvel criticism #say what you will about the boys but at least it has a message thats not half as wishy washy as the mcu

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meteorherd · 2 years

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no pressure to answer rn but What r those opinions on representation in the experimental era owo

YESSS okay well if i went through each film individually i think id be here for a good few days. so i'll try to keep it brief as possible. also since we're talking about people of color im probably only gonna mention emperors new groove, atlantis, lilo and stitch, and brother bear since everything else was either exclusively white or about like. animals or something. though im sure something can also be said about coding john silver to be considerably darker than the other characters in treasure planet but i'll have to think about that a little more

a very general trend, i would say, is that since a lot of experimental era stories are characterized by NOT being based on public domain content or fairytales, so the decision to make the characters be of color seems less like an obligation as it did with their older films like mulan or aladdin. and i think that sort of lends itself to how pretty much NONE of these four movies seem like classic "disney" movies or even by the same studio when you put them side by side. there was a looot more experimentation with style instead of disneys sameface so a lot of the characters actually seemed to HAVE ethnic features instead of being the same cgi template that sort of just looks like elsa or rapunzel but Brown. i really love this era in general specifically because all the movies seemed to be doing their own thing stylistically. id argue that creative freedom also ended up bleeding into showing different cultures in their stories too for this era at least

ohhh man okay well im gonna talk about atlantis first because it is SHIT when it comes to representation its a horrible white savior narrative. i do still like the art style, a lot of the side characters are interesting but they are all ultimately just that. side characters. kida herself is horribly sexualized and reduced to a plot device + love interest DESPITE initially showing hints of a personality before turning into said plot device but you know. anyways representation-wise atlantis is a white savior story through and through but i think what makes that sting more is that an INSANE amount of thought was put into literally every other aspect of the film. they literally got the guy who invented klingon for star trek to make up the entire language of atlantean for their 90-something-minute movie, only to have it barely show up or even get mentioned in the final thing. the first two acts of the movie and original script were 2 hours and 150 pages long, respectively. but they didnt give a shit researching about any specific culture for the atlanteans it makes me so mad. BUT i think atlantis is important to address talking about representation in this era of disney because its just a really good lesson on what not to do lmao especially in the sense of making a character ambiguously brown.

OK emperors new groove. i could go on forever actually. especially considering the original version was supposed to be kingdom of the sun which was this huuuge fancy traditional disney-style musical about kuzco falling in love with some peasant girl (if youre curious about that btw definitely check out the documentary the sweatbox! its on youtube), and i think ultimately turning the movie into a comedy is what saved it. i think there would have been a lot of issues with representation had it actually tried to be a renaissance-style story. but INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH. this movie actually sparked a debate on indigenous land rights, because the original ending had kuzco raze a rainforest to build kuzcotopia, and sting, who worked on the soundtrack, ended up pointing out how insensitive that is particularly because the story features indigenous south americans even if the movie's not a "serious" one. i absolutely hate when this movie gets compared to el dorado just because they came out the same year and feature indigenous south americans and theyre both "haha funny" because emperors new groove actually Did end up sparking a meaningful discussion on indigenous portrayals, surprisingly, AND it doesnt have a horrible white savior story or sexualize any brown people. that being said though it does still have the trope of a person of color becoming an animal. i think its like...easier to forgive here given the story context but like. still a tiring trope. -_- SO YEAH while this movie is obviously NOT a pinnacle of representation i find it really interesting how it basically set the stage for turning to cultures that arent white for their stories even before lilo and stitch ended up truly opening the gates for that in mainstream animated films.

and lilo and stitch i believe ive already sort of given a rundown on hfkjghkj but i do always contrast it with brother bear in the sense that lilo and stitch had a story that was built around the culture they decided for the movie, while brother bear quite LITERALLY had the inuit culture slapped onto the story. like would you believe me if i said the original story for brother bear was based off king lear. and it was about actual bears, not a guy who turned into one. one thing especially that i compare with these two movies is that lilo and stitch had an actual hawaiian chorus for their songs, while brother bear had phil collins and a BULGARIAN WOMEN'S CHOIR for the transformation sequence. because they thought it sounded "mystical" and "foreign" enough it makes me sooo mad. and of course the trope of a person of color becoming an animal again. yeah i dont have tooo too much to say about brother bear's rep mostly because of how last minute a lot of the movie's decisions regarding it were. i also need to point out this is michael eisner's fault as well. he wanted more films about animals because he wanted to relive the success of the lion king, so we ended up with something that was made even worse in context because it was supposed to be about Just Animals and then the idea of putting people of color in there was added in afterwards.

UMMM so my general consensus of representation in the experimental era is that i think emperors new groove actually surprisingly opened up the idea for it but then lilo and stitch ultimately ended up bringing it more mainstream. but atlantis and brother bear are both important to look at too because they show how ultimately, this era was about disney trying to relive its renaissance glory INCLUDING the racism from that era. but more creative freedom in the 2d departments because of the supposed "death" of 2d animation ended up allowing for some freedom in storytelling too even if it wasnt always necessarily Good representation. okay hopefully this all makes sense bye <3

#antanpilot #ty arya ^_^ im so sorry for how long this is btw.#mailbox

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brw · 3 years

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Tony Stark and Reed Richards for the character ask thing

TONY STARK

how i feel about this character: 😬 ngl i... don't care for him. at all. i don't vehemently hate him, there's definitely times where i appreciate him & his personality but it's few and far between and i... genuinely do not get the hype. i think its mostly mcu fans' fault for my dislike, its just he's fucking EVERYWHERE now, it's impossible to miss him? like he plays a big role in EVERY avengers comic now, he gets ongoing titles all the time, and it's just so frustrating especially when you consider characters who used to be more or less on the same level on them (like hank pym! who, by the way, has been dead for 6 consecutive years! that would never happen with tony!) or even more popular than him now get streamlined because of the mcu's popularity. by himself, i don't really mind him that much, but with how famous he is now and how large and frankly annoying his fan base is i just... now really do not like the character.

all the people i ship romantically with this character: short list here; reed, because i find their dymanic of reed as someone who does everything for his family and will do everything and anything he can to protect their interests above everyone else but also wants to keep his hands clean and believes, genuinely, in the good of the world, and tony as someone who will do horrendous things in the name of the greater good who always has the bigger picture in mind interesting. i also don't know a lot about it but he seems cute with rhodey? even if i think rhodey deserves a bigger chance to be his own character away from tony as is sometimes denied i can always appreciate a good best friends to lovers dymanic :)

my non romantic otp for this character: um? i honestly don't know 😭 i don't like him enough to say, i guess him n reed again? him n rhodey again? help 😭😭😭

my unpopular opinion of this character: he does not deserve the fame he has. like, i dont mean to sound jealous or whatever but pre 2007 movie he was not the most well liked character or even that popular. like obviously he had fans because he had solo series on and off for a very long time but it just feels SO ridiculous that tony stark has a bigger fandom than the fucking fantastic four. THE FANTASTIC FOUR. marvel's first superhero team, and yet??? like okay. he might have things to offer i don't see. he obviously does, i mean, he got three movies and multiple solo series. but he has most certainly not got enough as a character to overshadow the fantastic four, the x-men, etc and i will never forgive the mcu & mcu fans (and mark miller, he deserves blame too) for making it so. again, by himself he's fine but it is ridiculous to me that a one note white character that appeared in his third film (harley keener or... whatever) has 2000s more fics than THE PROTAGONIST OF INTO THE SPIDERVERSE, MILES MORALES. it is just... so vile and frustrating to me.

one thing i wish would happen/had happened with this character in canon: he didn't exist <3 jk jk um i'm not sure? i guess it would be funny if he was like... stick thin underneath the armour. like idk. he's in the armour 24/7 it makes sense to me for him to be a skinny little nerd under there. like completely fucking small. like you can't be a superhero AND be a billionaire and avoid all those taxes AND run the avengers AND run multiple massive corporations and still work out... even if you take away eating and sleeping there's just not enough time... it would be funny if he was just a tiny little boy underneath all that djndndbf

my otp: gonna say him and rhodey again. like i say, can never resist a good best friends to lovers dymanic.

my cross over ship: jdjshdhdh literally none i don't think about him enough to consider it <3

headcanon fact: 100% think he was the one to offer reed that money to star in a p*rno it's just so funny to me to imagine dhsnndnd

REED RICHARDS

how i feel about this character: HE'S MY BOY! I LOVE HIM SO MUCH! like i guess it's paradoxical considering how similar he is to tony in some ways but man i just love reed so much. i so genuinely think reed richards is what tony stark fans want him to be. like they (mcu fans) make up elaborate headcanons of him being a good dad and an ethical billionaire and its like no that's reed richards? canonically he's gone broke bc he refuses to get money off his inventions... u have the wrong man... anyway he's also an asexual LEGEND i do not take criticism and ofc. autistic icon. literally he's so autistic it makes me <3 i love him dearly.

all the people i ship romantically with this character: it would be easier to list the people i DON'T ship with him lol. sue, obviously, victor ofc, and ben are the big ones, but i just LOVE his dymanic with t'challa and i think they would rlly work it... i also love the idea of him with namor, idk with victor it's just so funny to imagine reed as like. bizarrely attractive to rulers of foreign countries. blackagar faces the same problem <3 i also do believe him n hank pym dated in college for a bit... all their weird little microaggressions towards each other just makes me feel that way... again i do like him w/ tony and i made this weird au where he and emma frost got together which if prompted i WILL talk about. probably. more but yeah <3

my non romantic otp for this character: while i do LOVE them together as lovers i just love. benreed generally <3 like they're LITERALLY besties they love each other sm and i'm tired of pretending they don't????? so many people ignore this relationship and it makes me so sad!!! they're best friends they love each other fight for each other fight with each other theyre literally besties... smh put some respect on the benreed name 😤

my unpopular opinion of this character: i don't think this is that unpopular but it is in certain circles so! i genuinely think reed is the best marvel dad! like you can talk abt others all u want but the fact is that reed is the only character i can think of who has always been there in his kid's lives and has consistently put their needs first. like not saying other characters are bad but even at his worst writing he's always done his best for his kids and certainly has been full of love for them. other characters at their worse have. murdered their own kids <3 genuinely he's the best marvel dad and sure there's not a lot of competition but. yeah <3

one thing i wish would happen/had happened with this character: I WANT A CANONICAL AUTISM DIAGNOSIS NOW. literally he is SO autistic & there are... no big autistic marvel characters! at all! literally none! the closest we have is legion (who was written in an incredible ableist way and autism hasnt been used to describe him in a solid 30 years) and monet (and it turned out it wasn't monet but one of her twin sisters impersonating her :/) so it would just mean so much to see a canonically autistic character like reed who is older & has a wife and kids who he loves and who they love in return on panel. like so much of the rep we DO have is like, young kids or teens and idk an autistic adult would just mean so much to me. especially one like reed who is as selfless & loving as he is.

my otp: tie between doomreed and reedsue! any option that gets this noodle nerd lots of love i'm good for tbh

my cross over ship: him and ralph dibney from dc should date... they have so much in common... stretchy autistic man who's very smart and kind of silly who loves his wife sue who pegs him 🥴 they'd have so much to talk about sjbdhdhd also imagining the look on ben's face realising there's TWO of them is. so funny.

headcanon fact: he's aromantic he's asexual and neither of these stop him from his very meaningful & passionate relationship with his wife :)

assorted character ask game!

#oh boy i do not shut up.#long post #thank you for asking!#esteicy-blog #tony stark #anti tony stark #i guess?? idk dhdjdh #ch: i believe we endure #ask games} answers

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fun-without-lubricant · 3 years

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i’ve been thinking about saw .5

more accurately, ive been thinking about david.

now i know saw .5 is in essence just a cute short film that eventually became a scene in saw 1, but in canon it has some interesting implications, and by that i mean im going to read into it in a way that makes no sense in order to create a batshit headcanon <3

basically (based on, might i add, zero evidence) i like to think adam and david are the same person, seeing as theyre played by the same guy, have the same accent (which was an intentional choice seeing as leigh whannell is british), and more or less the same personality. theyre even both smokers. now a normal person would say that saw .5′s “david” character is what eventually evolved into the character of adam, but i am not a normal person!

what i like to think is that “david” is his middle name. his nickname. (yes that would make his full name adam david faulkner stanheight) he used to use it because he thought ‘adam’ sounded lame, especially as he was big in the alternative/grunge scene at the time and david was just ultimately more bangin of a name than adam. after escaping the trap jigsaw placed him in, he decided he couldnt trust anyone, since the (near) killer was never caught, and thus he moved away, cut everyone off, and stopped going by his old name. He wanted to run from who he was not only because it dragged up horrible memories for him, but because he thought if he rebuilt himself into someone who “appreciated life” then hed be good enough to avoid getting caught again.

still though, hes haunted by the idea of people watching him, and the reason he becomes a PI is to ease that feeling. he cant be watched if he’s the one doing the watching, and he cant be tested if its his camera bringing others to justice, making him ultimately good. thats how he thought it worked, anyway.

anyway this hc makes legitimately no sense according to all we know about adam in canon but i do not care you can suck my fat balls david is adam

#not even putting this in the main tags so i dont get humiliated

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masonsystem · 3 years

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the only things i really liked about advent children were marlene characterization, addition of denzel(although his character was regrettably less fleshed out), cool fight scenes and vincent being absolutely hilarious. aside from that everything is so fucking WACK. i know advent children was like completely money-motivated which is why they just fiddled the canon to get another sephiroth vs cloud. but like having sephiroth resurrect in canon after the og plot really undermines the og ending like mannn seeing cloud banish sephiroth from his mind(and apparently the lifestream? idk a video said thats what happened) was a very berry good, Final ending. that finality is just pulled under the rug when hes bought back thru some wishy washy geostigma shit...

also aeris and zacks depiction in the film pisses me off lol. like not the way they appear but the fact theyre like fuckin communicating with cloud somehow.... like WOT. (the one instance i will forgive is when zack offers cloud help during the seph fight cuz that was thematically fitting and cuz like. since cloud embraced zacks dreams it makes sense that hes like. "talking to himself/talking to himself which is based of zack". if u get it then you get it.) like what made aeris death so effective(and by extension zack) was that it was realistic. we dont meet her fucking ghost or anything after her death(yes i know theres that easter egg in the church BUT THATS NOT WHAT I MEAN...), the last words u hear from here are those in that dream. once she dies u never ever get to hear her speak, shes missing from the whole showdown with sephiroth, bc she is DEAD. shes gone. it can be argued that zack communicates with cloud after his death as those voices in his head, but that could be much more easily be viewed as an allusion of clouds severe trauma. zack and aeris gets no parting words in the og(my man zack doesnt even get an fmv LMAO), no reappearance in the ending(aside from the last thematic shot of aeris), nothing like that... that is death. that is loss. they are gone and there will always be that missing piece and its not going to get filled, bc death is final.

BUT THEN ADVENT CHILDREN SPITS ON THAT AND IS LIKE huwaowkakwhw ACTUALLY aeris is still conscious and ~Kind Of Alive~ in the lifestream because she is an ✨Ancient✨and consciousness never ends if ur a cetra i guess. and she can talk to cloud sumtimes because WHYYYYY NOT and also ZACK CAN TOO because. uh. hes friends with aeris? 🙃 like ok that completely ruins all the finality and messages about death the og game conveyed UGHHHHHHHH ok. Ok

BUT PUTTING THAT SHIT ASIDE.... geostigma is sooooo fucking weird??? like i get what it is jenovas infection in the lifestream bla blah bla but like. WHAT DOES THIS BRING TO THE TABLE. its just like "wow life after meteor sure does suck!" like yes it does BUT WHY DOES IT HAVE TOO.... literally i cant understand what geostigma does to the story aside from building a premise to have the climatic seph and cloud fight. like i honestly think they were like 'we gotta animate seph and cloud fighting' and just built a barely held together storyline that let that happen.. yeesh

#and im not even getting started with the whole wacko shit with the remnants MANNNNNN this shit is so wack

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dumbdancemomssideblog · 4 years

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S1E1: The Competition Begins

okie dokie first ever episode of dance moms rewatch starts now :0 i actually remember watching this the very first time it aired on lifetime because i was channel surfing and saw a commercial for it earlier that day. that was the summer between 8th and 9th grade. ah memories... i didnt know what to expect because i did dance when i was a kid but not on a competition team and it was mostly ballet so i was pretty unfamiliar with this whole world.

anyway lets begin. this is probably gonna be a longer post than what i’ll end up writing for the other episodes in season 1 bc the first episode introduces so much info, just a heads up

Act 1: (aside: yes its insufferable to divide this into “acts” when its really just like “segments separated by commercial breaks” but thats how they’re called in actual tv scripts so im just going with that cuz i cant think of a better/easier way uwu)

god this is so fucking early 2010s lmao

i miss these days where they were just talented nobodies from pittsburgh on a low budget reality tv show that nobody even knew would be successful. and the bad hair and makeup but idk if that was also just a 2011 thing lol

THE REAL HOUSEWIVES GREEN SCREEN INTROS IM DYING

the chalkboard !!!! they werent doing the pyramid on the mirror yet

(apparently abby never did anything similar to the pyramid thing but the producers made her and it became a whole Thing on the show and thats why the moms were like wtf is this bullshit the first week)

mackenzie looks like a toddler. chloe is so tiny. theyre the 2 who changed the most physically over the course of the show

i remember watching this for the first time being used to ballet lyrical and jazz but never having done or really seen acro/gymnastics in dance choreo and being SO flabbergasted. i was thinking “a chin stand is not dancing what the actual hell” and yknow what? i was right

melissa: “my boyfriend knows how much i spend on dance because he signs the checks...............hermehhemrherrmehermh” (the most awkward laugh omg)

maddie is wearing a fucking bumpit in her hair i cannot

melissa deadass just said out loud “im here for my daughter im not here to make friends” ok everybody mark that one off on your catty women’s reality tv show bingo card!

camera man accidentally getting in the shot filming right in front of the huge wall-mirror.... what is this, amateur hour? i’ll let it slide since its the first day of filming rehearsal but step it up, boys

aw i forgot about maddie getting sick and crying :/ poor kid

melissa saying “i cant stand a chid that’s sick” sounds so edited like the intonation made it seem to me like they just cut her off mid-sentence i love lifetime

oh this was still when they were wearing normal stuff to class/rehearsal like black leotards bc they werent getting sent a trillion crazy 2-piece dancewear outfits for free yet bc they werent famous, man those were the days

Act 2:

[obligatory b-roll footage of downtown pittsburgh]

the maddie chloe paige trio !!!! this is making me feel so nostalgic

“knees together, paige. you’re bow-legged, you need to fix that”

“you’re tall, you’re skinny, you’re a beautiful girl, you can do better than this. FOCUS” shes like 10 abby what the hell

“people think im tough and i guess i am but i would rather be the one to make your kid cry in the privacy of my studio than at an open-call audition in front of hundreds of people”

okay unpopular opinion alert: i agree with a lot of what abby says about stuff like this but her delivery is flawed, to but it euphemistically, that being said i think the production team of the show and the fame inflating her ego changed all of this somewhere over the course of the second season and its really sad to see :/ i can expand on that thought later tho

aw paige crying bc abby correcting her (but not saying anything personal or out of line, just technique corrections (at based on what we were shown, we dont know everything she said oop)) shes a sensitive kid she never should have been put on this show :(

paige looks exactly like her mom i didnt realize that before

nia and holly were done so dirty throughout the whole series in terms of the narrative the producers set up about nia being the weakest link :/

Act 3:

cathy’s entire involvement in the show from the very beginning was so painfully obviously scripted (or at least heavily staged)

vivi was also done dirty by the show’s narrative and she was only 6 and they presented her as like the butt of the joke bc her mom’s “character” was crazy and also she wasnt good at dance. i wonder how she feels about the show now that shes a teenager hmm. she really seemed not to give a fuck about dance for better or for worse when she was a kid tho so maybe she doesnt care ?

in what universe would an owner of another competitive dance studio bring her own kid to another studio more than an hour’s drive away, AND be under the impression that she could compete with them in a week, especially when they showed the kids’ and moms’ shocked reaction at the start of the episode to having to learn a dance in a week and compete it? like really what is the point of cathy and vivi being a part of this show im so ????

Act 4:

THE MINISTER DAWN OUTBURST HOW DID I FORGET ABOUT THIS

this fight is about 50% of what got them a full season 1 and then things took off from there tbh. the other 50% was the electricity dance but thats a point for next episode..... :)

“you’re a minister act like one” “YOU’RE RIGHT I AM A MINISTER! LET’S PLAY THE BIBLE GAME ABBY, WHEN JESUS SAW THINGS THAT WERE WRONG HE WENT AFTER THEM, AND YOU’RE NOT GOING TO DO THIS TO MY KID” ma’am i think the wrongs jesus addressed were of slightly more importance than a preteen being told she cant take a dance class if shes violating the studio’s dress code

this is so good bc it wasnt staged afaik and there are regular students all throughout the building just STARING at them like lmao what even is going on, so im pretty sure this is real???

regardless, yeah dont wear socks and a tshirt to an acrobatics class, thats common fucking sense

another cameraman-in-mirror sighting, but its hard to think about angles when filming spontaneous drama like this, so i wont count it against them

“you called me fat” (i remember that being in the episode but thats not on the episode available through lifetime on demand that im watching from my moms tv hmmmmmm) “i told you to close and tuck in your two-piece costume, theres a big difference. HOW CAN YOU REMEMBER THAT BUT YOU CAN’T REMEMBER TO TURN YOUR FEET OUT” uh scream

she really called the police on this woman i cannot handle this. can you imagine being a police officer responding to this call?

“we have a parent thats out of control. pardon? no shes doesnt have weapons, just her mouth” iconic

im sorry im still not over the hair and makeup. the flat hair with the side bangs. the black pencil eyeliner applied all the way around the eye. why did any of us think this was a look :( why did we do this :(

Act 5:

they went all the way to phoenix to compete 3 numbers, only 2 of which are shown in the episode.

i think this is the only time they ever went to west coast dance explosion because its an actual competition and they wouldnt allow filming after this lol i think they did go to wcde one weekend in addition to a competition where they were filming but it wasnt shown or mentioned at all

abby not wanting brooke and paige to have a french manicure on stage if theyre the only ones in the group with the french tips is perfectly valid idk why it was framed as some crazy micromanaging shit

i also am really not a fan of the whole “high functioning alcoholic wine mom/crazy stage mom” schtick they were pushing for the first few episodes of this show

in retrospect i feel like so many of the quips in this episode were intentionally fucking crazy just to get the audience engaged enough to want to watch more episodes...

“see those girls down there, those girls with the legs? thats who you’re up against, so step it up”

abby warning them that its dangerous for their little party hats to slip when they’re doing aerials and pirouettes and stuff: “what if you were at radio city music hall and they had the ice rink out and you were doing a side aerial and fell 13 stories down and died, huh?” fantastic point abby thank you for saying that to 5 girls ages 8-12 less than 5 minutes before they went on stage. perfect time for a teaching moment like that :)

i forgot how bad the camera work was in the first few episodes for footage of their performances. like they really didnt think the show’s audience would actually want to watch the kids dance, the producers and editors thought we just wanted to see stage mothers yelling at each other lol

also the mic feed over the music of abby talking to herself giving them corrections while watching them dance on stage.... im so glad they quit doing that. i dont remember them doing it like that for any other episode, i hope im right

this choreo is very basic and its a cute dance i guess but its very cringe in some places and for the first episode this is such a forgettable group routine

their scandalized reaction to placing third and the sad piano music is so funny honestly

and maddies reaction in the interview which was almost definitely fed to her by the producers where shes like “i win all the time i dont really know what its like to LOSE i always win or get runner up” so many of maddies lines from season 1 interviews sound so fake and she was probably too naive to know they were getting her to say that stuff so they could paint her as a conceited brat (she was EIGHT)

the trio costume was so ugly im sorry (is it supposed to be like a 50s pinup bathing suit?) (and the headband thing looks so bad) and also the music is bad but they had no real authority over that bc of copyright stuff

chloe’s headpiece coming forward and the ensuing drama was another moment in the episode that really solidified public interest in the show imho....

“YOU’RE IN THE BAR HAVING A DRINK AND YOUR KID’S HEADPIECE IS FALLING OFF” “it did not FALL OFF it CAME FORWARD it was FINE!!!”

“mistakes happen, we’re human.” “YOU are. mistakes like that dont happen to me”

and then the “next time on dance moms” with the WILDLY INAPPROPRIATE electricity dance, of course. genuinely that was really smart of the producers in terms of structuring things to generate intrigue lol. and obviously it ended up working....

#dance moms #s1e1 #season 1

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oscarwinneropinions · 4 years

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Green Book (2018, dir. Peter Farelly)

Yeah this is a weird movie too. It was definitely a controversial winner for best picture the year it won and its still...an odd movie. Theres a lot to say about it, both from a film perspective and from a real world perspective.

First off, the movie is very well made. It’s based on the true story of musician Dr Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) meeting and befriending a white driver, Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen) as he goes on tour into the deep south, and, as far as biopics go, it does what it sets out to do! Its only based on a specific short period of a person’s life, which helps the movie tell a story in a much more organic way than many other biopics end up doing- the characters as theyre portrayed have arcs, and we can see their own personal growth and change as they grow closer together and learn more about each other. In that sense, its a lot like a buddy cop movie, and it takes a lot of narrative strength from that fact- by the end of the movie we can really see that these two people have become friends, and have each learned something from each other.

With that said...the implications and underlying situation behind this film are. Difficult to talk about, and difficult to criticise, because as ive mentioned, this film does what it sets out to do, and it does it well! The issue here is what it sets out to do is provide a lens into racism for a white audience to identify with and understand as it applies to themselves and others. The film in that sense, isnt about racism, its about how a white character learns to empathise with one specific Black person, and by extension, all Black people. Tony is the main focus of the film, and the entire narrative is from his perspective, and about how he specifically gets over his inital disgust of Black people. I could of course get into the issues inherently present within the white savior trope and how suspect it is that this movie Supposedly about a Black Musician has to center itself around a white protagonist, BUT. This movie set out to portray a white person’s personal story with racism, and thats what it did. It did what it set out to do, and thats it.

Ultimately, this movie wasnt The Worst thing in the world, and at the very least, it wasn’t boring! It told a good story, but it wasn’t really any grand or even particularly important statement about racism or race relations in America. Certainly not a Best Picture winner on the merit of its own filmmaking alone.

6/10; Perfectly Fine, but its not about Racism. Its just not.

#film #cinema #green book #2018

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storywriting · 4 years

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[ Bc yall have foolishly greenlit my Nirvash Headcanon production, here is a general discussion of who I think Nirvash is and I’ll thank you to give me excuses to be more specific. ]

First things first. The Nirvash is the first creature Eureka ever had a conversation with or considered her friend. While Eureka had to learn to speak to people, the ability to communicate with her own kind is one of the few things she was born knowing, so she took to Nirvash right away. The Nirvash is unfortunately one of the main factors that ended up landing her as an emotionally stunted military dog instead of having a normal life where she is nurtured and fully educated by humans. I honestly think if the folks in the lab hadn’t realized her piloting potential, Eureka would have been raised as a completely different person. Since science had never been able to crack the Nirvash typeZERO, she was very valuable to have. They didn’t waste their budget on anything else once they knew that.

I also think the Nirvash had never been called Nirvash by people prior to the discovery of Eureka. Nirvash was exclusively called the typeZERO until Eureka was able to communicate enough to tell humans the name.

Vaguely related, Eureka’s name is also not human given because she is named after an event experienced by the scub coral and it doesn’t make sense to me that humans in 11005 or whatever would think to name her after something that happened in like 2005. Eureka’s name comes from the very first time Scub Coral entered Earth’s atmosphere, where it crashed into a satellite and was forced to make a home in the Earth’s oceans. Based on what Sakuya says, it’s likely that the whole of the coralian system became aware when it was decided Eureka would be born. Nirvash likely told Eureka her own name if she didn’t already know it herself.

Archetypes are sexless, so as one might expect, Nirvash doesn’t have a particular concept or interest in gender identity. Eureka calls Nirvash “he” in the original series dub and “she” in all future adaptations. I suspect that using “he” might have originally been a mistake by the localization team since Nirvash isn’t voiced until the very end and the Japanese language doesn't really ever require a speaker to designate a gendered pronoun. Whether it was a mistake or on purpose, I tend to explain this by just saying that Eureka copied the words other people used whenever she would personify the Nirvash to them. That would be in line with her character.

Eureka also speaks about Nirvash like a child quite often even though Nirvash is most certainly an older life form than she is. I suspect this is to do with a difference in experience and the higher barriers of understanding for a creature like Nirvash. Put simply, Nirvash is a less developed creature than Eureka is.

In the AU movie archetypes arent the same type of creature as in the main series--they were made or evolved differently. In the film, the Larval Nirvash is somewhat intelligent. Larval Nirvash pays attention to people and tries to participate in conversations despite being unable speak. 10/10 very tiny and cute and runs around, always doing their best.

I honestly believe that main series Nirvash has a similar temperament and level of intelligence to this AU iteration. Also, the way Eureka speaks about Nirvash, like a child, in my mind supports the idea that the Nirvash is capable only of very simple thoughts and ideas early on. Nirvash isn't enlightened, per se. At least not at the beginning. Nirvash is a failed attempt at making a person. It makes sense that Nirvash would be less advanced. If we could hear Nirvash's early conversations with Eureka, I suspect Nirvash's interests and concerns would sound pretty simplistic. I hesitate to compare Nirvash to any stage of human development tbh, mostly because it seems like Nirvash is very intelligent about certain things (like in battle, Nirvash makes very strategic choices), but probably couldn't even match a toddler on other things. Emotional intelligence, for example, is probably something that takes a while for Nirvash to pick up even the tiniest shred of. Still, Nirvash's wants and feelings do seem to become slightly less simplistic over time. Still simple compared to a person, but the feedback Eureka gives originally is like "nirvash is happy" and by the end it's more like "nirvash feels x complex way because of what they did when x happened and how it turned out". Put simply, Nirvash knows what Nirvash knows, but not much else. Nirvash is maybe like Eureka in that regard. They're in their own weird stage of development where some of their stats are maxed and some of them are like...what are you even doing. I also pretty strongly headcanon that, like Eureka, Nirvash's understanding of the world and of humans is growing as the series progresses, which I think is fairly substantiated but rarely addressed directly.

As the audience we don't get to see the way Nirvash communicates very often, especially not in any direct easy-to-be-understood-by-people fashion. If you want to learn anything about Nirvash as a viewer you have to speculate based on the few times Nirvash displays some will of her own, or go by the very little information Eureka gives about what Nirvash is thinking. Eureka is somewhat private about her relationship with Nirvash at times, which I find interesting, but that’s a topic for another post.

I pretty strongly headcanon that Nirvash sort of dislikes people, or at the very least, mistrusts the ones she doesn’t know. I believe this because Nirvash outright refuses to be piloted, even by people with compac drives. Compac drives are the "keys" humans use to communicate with LFOs, but LFOs cant really communicate back. We know that Nirvash for whatever reason really didnt want to be piloted, but then Nirvash met Eureka and felt willing to activate for her because they could converse and agree on things. No compac drive required for that. Nirvash will fly for Eureka because they can have a relationship that is a two way street. It doesn’t require the kind of faith Nirvash would need to let a human do whatever they wanted.

I suspect when Eureka is piloting there is a lot of give and take. They're discussing what they should do. They compromise on a course of action by combining their understanding. The trouble any time there is something going on between the Nirvash and Eureka is that it's not a conversation the audience gets to hear. We just have to watch and do our best to interpret

I think that over time Nirvash comes to appreciate and even like some humans and seeks methods of communication with ones she vibes with. Ultimately the Nirvash does become more able to understand and commune with people because Eureka acts as a cultural bridge between them. I really like the idea that Nirvash becomes interested in communicating with humans in the limited ways available to her, but only after spending a lot of time with Eureka and taking a shine to Renton. I also know the show gives Nirvash a clear human sounding voice that makes understandable words but I honestly hc that Nirvash sounds more abstract than that in most situation. Like idk, machine noises, Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites™ or something like that. I think if a human was able to hear Nirvash in any passive sort of way, it probably wouldn’t really sound like language. Eureka can always understand Nirvash but if you're Renton or maybe Ao just hanging around and are somehow catching bits and pieces of that consciousness floating in the air it's gonna feel weird and garbled in your brain unless you're able to make that more direct connection with the Nirvash somehow. It's just not natural to humans, it's not their first language.

On the subject of Nirvash getting on with humans, there is eventually a situation where Renton has to pilot the Nirvash himself. This is on the tail end of Eureka being really down and not really explaining why. Sometimes when she touches the Nirvash she starts to bleed and it becomes clear that The Girls Are Fighting™️. When Eureka sees Renton piloting she is taken aback by the fact that Nirvash would allow somebody other than her to pilot alone. Also, she comments on how that's 'not Nirvash's style'. It's left ambiguous what exactly her meaning is there, but she becomes pretty upset. There are a few ways I've interpreted it, though it's hard to pin down exactly. One possibility is that she’s upset because Renton and Nirvash Did A Violence. Alternatively it could be because the fighting Eureka saw from them was obviously more of Renton's own will than the give and take she prefers with the Nirvash. Another option is that Renton is not imposing his will, but rather bringing out something in Nirvash Eureka doesn't recognize and isn't comfortable with being a stranger to. Eureka is at this point very stressed that the Nirvash wont talk to her. She seems to go from very excited that Renton makes the Nirvash happy to very distressed that Renton is changing her relationship with the Nirvash. Nirvash is probably one of the only relationships Eureka has where she is comfortable and feels she is on the same page nearly all the time, so it's jarring for that to be challenged or changed.

A lot of the conflict with nirvash is never clarified in stone, but we know for sure that Renton causes Eureka to change and that's a big deal for everybody involved. Nirvash and Eureka don't really know change before this. In terms of Nirvash’s opinion, we know mostly about the parts Eureka reacts to, but if you think about it we dont really find out why Nirvash likes Renton in the first place or what initially caused Nirvash to becomes less open with Eureka. It's hard to place exactly what the conflict is. Just that it involves Renton and it involves this change. Despite Eureka being the best creature humanty has for communicating with Archetypes there are still certain barriers between them. They are the same creature, but theyre vastly different versions of the same creature with vastly different capabilities and experiences. Nirvash and Eureka will inevitably end up in situations where they don’t see eye to eye if for no other reason than their mental and sensory experience is vastly different from one another. I suspect that Nirvash is at times jealous of Eureka going off and having experiences and relationships with others, in the same way Eureka gets jealous when Nirvash seems to prefer Renton over her.

That all said, I do think Nirvash does have some sense of right and wrong even without Eureka’s guidance, but Eureka shows evidence of chiding or suggesting morality to the Nirvash throughout. Things like compassion and a moral compass seem to be way more pronounced for Nirvash later on in the series, after like 40 episodes of bonding and getting into and out of trouble together. Again, we can’t know all the details because the audience doesn’t get any unfiltered version of Nirvash’s perspective, but we know for sure that Eureka (and eventually Renton) is very very important to her even when the they are in conflict. In turn, Eureka regularly demonstrates that she trusts Nirvash implicitly and seems to respect Nirvash's judgement in many kinds of situations. The Nirvash is a member of the family through and through. She’s always down to help the cause, and she appreciates the great privilege involved in having a front row seat to Eureka’s experience. The Nivash has had an unprecedented opportunity to become enlightened about other creatures in ways the rest of the Scub Coral could not. In another life Nirvash could have had any number of destinies, possibly even safer ones with less strife and less change. She was never essential to the plan of putting yet another humanoid coralian into the world and could have moved for anybody else and had a completely different life. Maybe in times of conflict Nirvash thinks about that, but if there’s one thing that’s canon as hell I know that Nirvash would never trade away being loved by the Storywriter.

We stan a queen.

#∘⡊ ☾ ˚⊹Tabula Rasa⊹ — 「 Headcanon 」#∘⡊ ☾ ˚⊹To Be Continued⊹ — 「 OOC 」#∘⡊ ☾ ˚⊹Little One⊹ — 「 Nirvash 」#cut bc #long post

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bi-dazai · 5 years

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2000 words on soukoku romance-coding in episode 26

i’ve talked a lot on here about how there’s a lot of romance-coding in the canon content featuring dazai and chuuya. here’s a rundown of my base theories here

i didnt add this in my original above post, but ill say now that diegetically chuuya and dazai are usually quite levelheaded and manipulative - both are the two youngest port mafia executives in history. even when dazai is annoyed with other characters (such as kunikida or atsushi) it is clear that he is play-acting. chuuya, meanwhile, is extremely level-headed and doesnt get upset at all - even when yosano and kenji appeared heavily armed. dazai is only slightly upset by shibusawa and dostoyevsky. the only person to genuinely get a rise out of both chuuya and dazai are each other. even so, their arguing has, from the beginning, been petty on the surface, yet upon reading into dialogue and animated/written/illustrated facial expressions show deep hurt at each others actions, particularly on their 4 year separation and dazai covering up his loyalty to chuuya by betraying his trust in episode 21.

i have two more points to add on concerning their non-diegetic relationship. firstly, that official merchandise and posters almost always depict chuuya and dazai either ogling each other (theres a trend of dazai ogling chuuya’s ass in particular) or doing something romantic together (for example there’s a poster where they are depicted hanging around together with no other characters near a christmas tree - christmas is considered a romantic holiday in japan. the same coding is given to many canon fictional couples in japan, and to another studio bones production pairing in bnha kiribaku, which has a similar level of gaycoding).

the second non-diegetic point you should understand about soukoku: it’s one of the most popular ships in japan, and japan’s anime industry tends to be a lot more open about showing same-sex relationships/gay-coding than the west is.

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and for a note on my authorship - i admit that i do ship soukoku, and that this gives me a bias. i am also bisexual and am much more sensitive to noticing homoeroticism than many straight audiences. however, to counter this point id like to clarify that it takes a lot to make me believe a same-sex ship has even the slightest chance of being canon. also, id like to say that i am an author in my second year of a creative writing degree and my first year of a film studies minor. these degrees both involve analysing text within production and authorial context (a lot...). in my free time i read a lot of papers and articles on the production context and general views of lgbt representation in different countries’ media, in particular the usa, australia, and japan. i consume every piece of media i view with an intensely critical eye and i specialise in connected diegetic elements with non-diegetic elements in terms of production, authorial, and social context

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*NOTE* im going to be doing things out of order here for no other reason than that i realised them in that order as i thought about the episode analytically

today i want to talk about something extremely specific that came up in episode 26, and it has to do with the use of symbolism and shot composition. it’s just a short, short sequence but to me it speaks volumes, both for their canon relationship and their coded romantic relationship.

specifically this sequence. this is just one shot and to me it portrays soukoku’s dynamic as explicitly romantic in a mise-en-scene sense.

before we like to go in, id like to clarify that the dialogue doesnt matter - it’s mainly expository stuff.

the first sc is the first shot we see of dazai and chuuya ‘alone’ in this scene. it’s unclear where mori is exactly. even though mori is clearly orchestrating the two of them and this entire scene’s dialogue, he isn’t in this shot until the very end. this defines the soukoku relationship, as well as their first meeting being entirely incidental, as being something that was supposedly orchestrated by mori but on a deeper level something they created and grow themselves. it is their relationship from the beginning, not mori’s. even though we know that mori is orchestrating this, we are told that this story will be about chuuya and dazai, not mori’s plans. along with that, it’s also the first shot of open sky we get in this scene, and it’s with just chuuya and dazai looking at each other, silent. it’s open and refreshing and new, but there’s something there already - which i will discuss now.

so. let’s talk about the vapour trail. the vapour trail has no real relationship to the scene or story at all. it would be perfectly logical to just place clouds here, or even place the vapour trail somewhere else. but this vapour trail is very specifically placed to form an arrow to comes from dazai’s heart and reaches towards chuuya, passing over mori’s head narrowly. mori watches the trail, dazai and chuuya watch each other. mori knows the middle part - that they will be tied together to be a device of violence of his own making. but at the other ends dazai and chuuya are tied together in a way that goes above and below mori’s knowledge. this symbolises their future together, and indicates a subtextual level to their dynamic.

the choice i want to focus on here, however, is the choice to have this arrow reach from dazai’s heart. as a writer, if i was trying to symbolise the general strategic soukoku dynamic i would have this arrow go from dazai’s head (the brains) to chuuya (the recipient and conductor of dazai’s plans). in fact, i have a dynamic im writing right now that is similar to this, in which one is defense and one is agility. however, these two also end up in a same-sex romantic relationship together later on. in order to code and foreshadow this, as well as add romantic subtext, often when using symbology i adjust my symbols to fit a romantic context subtly. as an author myself, this shot is a clear hint of adjusted symbolism in order to code dazai’s feelings for chuuya.

and if i’m to read further, i would even say that the fact that the arrow flies over chuuya’s head suggests that dazai currently has romantic feelings for chuuya that chuuya does not yet return (but comes to, something that i have discussed in my linked post above).

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secondly, tumblr user @cream-and-punishment made a fun joke post about dazai and chuuya “exchanging wedding vows” at their first meeting. firstly, it’s funny as fuck and when i first saw the post my reaction was just “haha it does sound like that!”. however, i keep looking at that post, keep returning to the script and that scene, and my reaction is now “wow. it does sound like that. like. exactly what soukoku wedding vows sound like. huh.”

for the lazy here’s the script (translated by the funimation subtitle team):

Dazai: You’re a cocky, overconfident child. You’re the kind of person I hate the most.

Chuuya: And I hate condescending pricks like you more than anything in this world.

and because im thorough, i ignored my english subs and listened the original japanese script as well (with my limited japanese to basically check for anything that could be translated differently or means something in japanese that is culturally untranslatable). what i found was that the english subs are right, and capture the original lines quite well.

dialogue can function as a tool for multiple results. in this two-line exchange, neither of the lines are meant as views into the character’s true interiors. instead, the purpose of this interchange is meant to be foreshadowing, specifically into the fact that this is how chuuya and dazai spend the rest of their relationship (up until the current point in the canon manga plot) expressing their opinion towards each other. it mirrors the kind of dialogue we see in episode 10 in which dazai and chuuya’s dialogue works as exposition for their past and their base dynamic, and here it is used to foreshadow what is considered backstory in the main plot (if that makes any sense?).

however, chuuya’s response to dazai is where im interested. im gonna pull my writer’s card here and say that if i was, again, just foreshadowing hatred and frustration as well as cooperation, i would cut chuuya’s line to something like this:

Chuuya: And I hate condescending pricks like you the most/just as much/etc.

“more than anything in this world”, of course, could just be incidental. but considering how a lot of soukoku’s dialogue is clearly double-entendre (read my original post linked above), it makes me consider a second option: that we are already putting that romantic double-entendre into their dynamic. if we refer to the future soukoku dynamic, in particular in episode 21, we are shown multiple times that chuuya genuinely cares for dazai’s well-being (secondary to rimbaud’s hat of course hahaha). chuuya would be genuinely upset if dazai died, and its implied (though still up to interpretation as opposed to the explicitness of chuuya’s shown feelings, however i would argue that dead apple is fairly explicit in dazai’s trust and feelings) the vice versa is also true.

going off that, often how both of them express concern for each other is by making ‘hateful’ comments towards each other. in episode 9, it’s clear there is uncomfortable tension in the room. there is 4 years of unspoken confusion lingering and chuuya is clearly, clearly upset. so dazai, in referencing an unchanging nature of what makes them them, calls back to one of his first mocking entries - how short chuuya is. it’s funny and it’s mocking, but the blows they trade are familiar and even when theyre brawling, despite being on opposite sides they take genuine pleasure in each others company. considering both of their personalities and histories as well as their trauma, both of them tend to struggle with interpersonal relationships and opening up. but chuuya and dazai canonically feel comfortable with each other, and know how to read each other well enough to both bounce off each other while also understanding what lies beneath.

so when chuuya says something like “i hate you more than anything in this world” we are pulled back to the present (in the plot), where chuuya says these things but moments later is concerned or worried for dazai’s wellbeing. chuuya in this line prioritises dazai as the foremost person in his life within minutes of meeting each other. diegetically (to the characters) we know this is them exchanging tense negotiation. non-diegetically (to what we know of the script and their future, as well as this entire exchange being mostly foreshadowing), we are clearly meant to interpret this to mean that chuuya will, eventually, hold dazai to be incredibly important to him, and vice versa.

of course, we also have the fact that the phrase “more than anything in this world” is yet another soukoku romantic double-entendre. as i mentioned with things such as “the silent treatment” and mentioning drinking heavily when someone abruptly leaves you, it’s clear that these are used almost entirely as romantic tropes. i’ve discussed this before so i wont get too much into it, but just say that this scene adds yet another line to that long list of soukoku double-entendres.

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considering at least the first 3 episodes will be related to exploring the soukoku backstory, ill be trying to post an analytic of soukoku for each episode of the 15 adaptation. furthermore, these posts won’t be explicitly about the potential of canon romantic chuuya/dazai, but will analyse soukoku scenes in a focus that i see fit for each episode. whether this is examining it like this post again, or examining it for foreshadowing or cinematographic details etc, will be decided once i watch each episode.

anyway lol! yet another rambling analytical of something nobody cares about haha

#long post #skk #soukoku #double black #bsd #bungo stray dogs #bungou stray dogs #damn i feel like a hack fraud tagging for attention but i wrote all this out so

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marsixm · 5 years

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edit sorry this post is both long (if the readmore fails i am truly truly sorry) & longwinded im just reflecting and thinking; (another edit: u can probably just read the tl dr and get it)

anyway allow me to spin some very personally based theory here for a mo while i put off/warm my fingers up from the cold in preparation to email my therapist

so growing up i had, i think only, het ships, but i never quite had the ones you were (narratively speaking) “supposed to” have

in most media i recall when i was a kid, there were like, 2 diff structures of character romance plot arcs in media i consumed, there was the main lead and 2 best friends model, where thered be the star of the show who had outside romantic leads and the 2 best friends (who were always a boy and a girl) would have their secondary romance, OR there were ensemble shows where there was a more clear romance set up between the main boy and main girl, then side characters whod pair off in whatever ways ended up happening. in the first, see: hannah montana, the second, see: zoey 101. obv this isnt a hard rule and there were loads of exceptions but like, lets just say i tended not to care for the romances set up for the main girls in the trio models, or quite as hard for the main boy and girl in the ensembles, and in general if there was an obvious romance between two leads i either didnt care or outright hated it

basically i never liked the ships they set up for us in straight media, as a kid (namely, a girl) i liked being that “ew pink!” “i hate valentines day” sort of contrarian, but what i remember actually disliking was the predictability of it, because i clearly still shipped characters, so it wasnt /really/ that i hated romance, per se

looking back on it i think it was probably or at least to a degree more like that i hated the hetero expectation of it- i can nit pick down to more specific examples of why i disliked the main pairings (kataang, for example, i thought was weird bc katara acted like a mother/older sister figure to aang, and i didnt feel like there was romance between them at all except where it felt shoehorned in) - maybe it was also that i thought it made more sense for a main character to be with someone they clearly already spent a lot of time with and not some random new hot boy in town (i very distinctly remember shipping miley and oliver on hannah montana, and i believe that was the first time i ever read fanfiction @ age like... 11 lol) as is often the case w like these things.

theres another level to this though, which is that i notice i tended to ship characters who were more vaguely similar to each other, like, physically (ie, similar heights, or hair colors mainly) obviously this is funny now since my main pairing is johnlock which is such a physically different ship we can construct them from basic shapes and colors and theyre still recognizable as who they are, but i have some thoughts about this- but i think there might be two interesting things about this again in retrospect

first of all, this sounds silly ik, but shipping the vaguely similar ones as a child’s way of queering heterosexuality is an interesting concept and not that difficult, like, two boys are also vaguely similar to each other in a similar way a boy and a girl with the same hair color and height might be, which is something i thought of a while ago

the other way in which this is really interesting to me now, that i think might have been more actually pertinent to myself as a trans child, is that i think i shipped the characters i did in an attempt to morph the concept of boy and girl? to find the boy counterpart to every girl??? that second one makes more sense actually. anyway, i digress

2 start off i definitely had gender feelings starting from a very young age so i think these observations ring more true than just reflections, PERHAPS

so the first thing i remember shipping, ie wanting them to be together, thinking about it an inordinate amount of time outside watching the films, even imagining them eating ice cream together in their pjs (i was NINE DHFJGghfkg) was jack sparrow & elizabeth swan from potc (basically my franchise of choice as a kid bc i never read harry potter) now this doesnt quite fit the “visually similar” thing bc actually orlando bloom looks more like kiera knightly and is prob due to them like making out in one movie, but i think this works for the “shipping as gender expression” theory, because elizabeth swan dressed up as a boy, spent most of that movie wearing boy’s clothes, etc- meanwhile jack was a wacky pirate which like hello duh i’d want to be. so i wonder if beyond the fact that they kissed and flirted, there was something to this concept of me wanting two characters to be together, meant i wanted to marry together two conceptual things happening with two characters, or absorb the cool dude and the boyish girl characters into each other to make one whole archetype for myself? i likewise shipped aang and toph (toph who, normally doesnt really have anyone to be shipped with, since she likes sokka but he has a gf) who we all know is the VERY boyish girl character, so boyish im p sure her actually being a trans dude later in life is a p decently accepted headcanon (i dont actually delve into aatla fandom though so i can only hope)

another thing about this ship thing, is most of my ships had brown hair (like miley and oliver), just like i always have, and in certain cases the girl character would look a LOT like me (i also shipped logan and quinn on zoey 101, which to my surprise n delight actually came true later (although looking back im like... 11 yr old me is glad they made out a lot but adult me is like uhhh why were the kids on this show making out a lot? anyway thats another issue) and i def was a weirdo girl with glasses and long brown wavy hair) which sort of further fuels my feeling that this was an attempt by my brain to do 1 of 2 things, if my own involvement really was a greater motivating factor in this thing, 1. ship MYSELF with a boy (which is like def possible for my gay kinnie ass, but not quite my thesis here) or 2. morph these boy and girl counterparts by imagining them together, seeing them together, etc

for example, i realize now, when i was a kid i drew an avatar sona for myself and said sona looked an awful lot like how id imagine a katara/zuko fusion would be, and the fact that i shipped zutara (very hard lol) was what lead me down this thought path rn

i feel like even to me this concept sounds weird and far fetched but like, gem fusion made enough sense for someone to write with its clearly, usually, romantic implications and we all “get” that, so whom knows???

another thing ive noticed while writing this is for a good few of these ships you can argue the boys in them can be read gay, like jack sparrow and zuko and aang, which feels even more strongly like me trying to marry my gay boy feelings to my tomboy realities [thinking emoji]

the biggest reason i think this makes sense to me is because when i was 10 i became obsessed with the idea that this boy i was friends with and i were secretly twins separated at birth, like i was so into the concept that we looked alike, i like hoped and wished so hard for it to be true, i wished a christmas miracle would happen for fucking real and a magic door in my house would open and be his new room and itd all work out perfectly! and you might think this was a manifestation of my difficulties with my family and wishing to leave it, but in my dream world my parents were still my parents and he came to live with us- which makes me think the obsession of ME looking like this BOY was a manifestation of my gender feelings, which i think can maybe be traced to this concept of pairing a visually similar, possibly gay, brunette boy to every brunette and/or tomboyish girl

anyway. if you actually read all of this id love it if you lmk somehow (doesnt need to be a like) like this is clearly very long and strange but i hope it makes sense. i think i stop myself a lot from ever commenting on gender or theory or whatever but i am a living breathing trans person who has experienced things and i have opinions and i dont think im claiming anything destructive with this lol i think its not unusual to reflect on the way you interacted with the world as a gay/trans kid

also im obviously not saying that shipping straight things is somehow inherently queer, im not trying to retroactively claim something about straight ships, like, those two characters are still functionally straight, and i definitely also shipped probably all of them for normal shipping reasons (although, kid ones, so less “oh theres a lot of ACTUAL romantic subtext between these two” but rather “oh theyre friends and would be cute together!” (or like they kissed and i was like O: )) but im just trying to theorize about something its possible my tiny trans brain was trying to express- and who knows maybe im not the only one!

anyway i guess the TL;DR is: when i was a kid i had a lot of “unconventional” straight ships- i already observed that i eschewed the main canon pairings in kids media in what was probably my tiny baby brains rejection of hetero culture, but i also actively shipped side characters who looked like me, and also looked like each other (ie, both tall and brunette, a boy and girl counterpart of Each Other) OR characters who seemed to be a gayish boy and a tomboyish girl, and im theorizing that maybe the reason that was was my tiny trans brain wanting to gem fusion those two together because of my Gender Feelings and fuse the boy with the girl and this desire manifested in shipping therefore thinking about a lot these pairings of boy and girl counterparts

#please dont be weird about this post i hope its like understandable what im trying to think about here?#like i dont think its that weird to consider nor am i claiming anything bad or destructive about ppls lives n genders n whatever #purely an observation about myself and the way i consumed media ages like 8-12 #in reflection as a gay/trans adult and thinking about what those things might have potentially been expressing or something #i dont know any official queer theory stuff n i dont think that should stop me from thinking my own thoughts so here u go #also i am TRULY sorry if this readmore doesnt work

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saints-row-2 · 6 years

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film watch day 31: Every Halloween Film

happy Halloween today i watched every Halloween film currently available to me. i couldnt get to rewatch Halloween 2018 but i already wrote about it a couple of weeks back so feel free to revisit that post. anyway, i watched ten Halloween movies today. It took around 17 hours. i started at 11:15am and im writing this now at 6 am.

so lets get to the post. for the most part i went in chronological order, except i chose to start with Rob Zombie’s remakes because i knew if i didnt id be finishing the day by watching them at the break of dawn and the idea of doing that was so fucking putrid to me that i decided to get them out of the way first.

Halloween (2007)

i hate this fucking movie. i mentioned in an ask the other day but im happy to repeat here, i dont hate the idea of expanding on Michael’s backstory. like the fact is we largely know his backstory, the issue is how this film chose to portray it. the original Halloween is frightening because its based around the idea that the seemingly safe, quiet suburbs are not as safe as they seem; you can be on a street youve known your entire life, only a few metres from your own home, and still at risk. the whole idea of showing Michael as a murderer when he was six is to tell us that anyone could be a threat, that our conventions that all killers are a particular kind of person is false.

Halloween 2007 says fuck that, we know what serial killers are, and theyre those poor kids who come from shitty neighbourhoods and have abusive parents and mothers who are sex workers. everything that Halloween brings to the table is fucking tedious, played out, and massively uninspired. it wants to bring us the truth about why Michael is like he is, but Rob Zombie’s only understanding of serial killers is in the cliche and exploitative. he has nothing honest about human nature to show us, only the exact same stories that have been fed to us by crime and horror movies past.

this film is incredibly loud and in fucking constant motion. even on steady shots of still scenes the camera constantly shakes, and in every other scene its always whirling around from tracking shot to panning over the scene to just idly zooming in and out of nothing. Zombie’s favourite shot is to have something large and out of focus in the foreground -- like some plants -- and to shoot the characters standing about six feet away muttering to themselves. every single fucking shot in this movie lingers too long, every scene drags a little longer than it needs to. this film moves with the pace that i would describe as “family guy gag”.

and this film is so loud. people are always talking or screaming, largely about nothing important or interesting. theres always music, but it never particularly adds anything; for reasons i fail to fucking understand the entirety of the original theme plays over mostly uninteresting tracking shots of a minor character walking around yelling filler lines about nothing.

the writing is horseshit. everyone in this film is vile, no one talks or behaves like real human beings. almost every exchange in this movie is the characters saying the exact same thing back and forth inanely, frequently punctuated by screaming FUCK as loudly as possible and talking about sex in a way that 40 year old men really really wished teenage girls talk about sex. Halloween (2007) is thoughtlessly gross and mean and nasty, disconnected from any kind of human sensitivity and empathy. it wants to be complicated and to be deep but its crushingly simplistic and stupid. the only thing that redeems it is that its not Halloween II (2009). speaking of which...

Halloween II (2009)

jesus christ this movie is so fucking boring. Halloween II is two hours long but feels like its about twenty hours long. i felt like i was watching this film for twenty days and twenty nights. i was trapped in an eternal purgatory with this movie.

i really cant fucking emphasise how boring this film is. endless scene after scene of nothing of consequence happening, uninteresting death scenes that add nothing, and Michael wandering around doing jack shit. Halloween II fucking made Michael Myers boring, and im saying this as someone who (as i repeat once every 8 seconds) has a tattoo of him. this film couldnt hold MY interest in two of my favourite characters of all time.

the big fun new addition from the first movie is the presence of Michael and Laurie’s mother as a kind of weird goth ghost guiding Michael to kill. i dont know why Michael had to be Jason Voorhees and be a mommy’s boy all of a sudden, but this addition brings absolutely nothing of interest to the film or to his character. its meant to be symbolic of fucking... something im sure, but it feels meaningless. somehow Michael and Laurie are both able to see and interact with this ghost and the ghost has an agenda to do... something? it feels about as intelligent and coherent as the bullshit cult of thorne shit from 6, but a lot less fun. at some point Michael Myers apparently has mind control powers?

not to repeat myself a hundred fucking times but this film is insanely unpleasant to watch. every scene someone is screaming, generally wailing “fuck you bitch” at anyone in their vicinity. this is two hours of people howling swear words at each other and not infrequently making rape jokes. Rob Zombie loves rape jokes! almost as much as he loves putting sexual assault in his movies over and over again for no reason.

there is nothing to enjoy in this film. theres nothing to gain. there is too much slow-mo and far too many strobe lights and absolutely nothing of any intelligence or grace. Halloween II is a thirteen year old boy in a korn T-shirt calling his mom a bitch while he draws zombies on the back of his homework, which he will get an F for because the only thing he wrote was “reading is for faggots”.

Halloween (1978)

what the fuck can i say. this is one of the greatest horror movies ever made, if not the greatest. its one of my favourite movies. its forty years old and still just as chilling and frightening as it ever was. it has some shot composition and cinematography thats up with the best ive ever seen, all while being shot on a budget of $300,000. it does more with less than just about any film, launched the slasher genre, shot Jamie Lee Curtis to stardom and created a pop culture icon that stayed strong for decades. its a masterclass in tension and suspense, a lean-cut perfectly paced film with heaps of atmosphere and character.

i love this film with a frantic passion that makes me unable to talk about it in a particularly helpful way. i cant “review” Halloween. I love this film beyond reason and sense and you either get it or you dont.

Halloween II (1981)

Halloween II is largely one of the less remembered entries in the franchise; its a decent enough movie, neither matching up to the highs of the original or the lows of the later films. its a pretty enjoyable little film, created under the logic of ‘well the first one did well, lets do the same thing again’. Carpenter wrote the script but didn’t direct, and while the film has a solid story, the directing lacks his signature flair. its hard to pinpoint, because the film is generally fairly well-shot, but lacks a kind of eye for shot composition that Carpenter made look easy, doesnt have as much patience for suspense.

on its own merits, theres still some great shots and great scenes in the movie. and a lot of really cool kills; II got a lot more creative with what Michael was capable of, and i think the boiling water drowning kill is rightfully pretty infamous.

this was the last Halloween movie Carpenter wrote, and it was the film where the idea of Laurie and Michael being siblings was introduced. and believe me ill defend this fucking decision to the grave. adding the human connection between Michael and Laurie gives a whole other layer to their relationship thats so fascinating to me, and i love that other films try to expand on the themes of family. in general, deciding that this film would continue to focus on Laurie and not do what later slashers did with bouncing around between different casts was a great fucking move, ironically for a franchise that was intended to be an anthology.

quietly exploring the aftermath of the first film was a good idea for a follow-up, and i especially really enjoy Loomis’ role in this movie, and his discussion about who Myers is. the biggest disappointment for me personally is that Laurie lacks a lot of presence in this film. Curtis is great, as always, but the movie dawdles on some side characters who are too disconnected from her to get a sense of what shes going through.

all that being said, Halloween II is decent. the ending is really great, with some really powerful shots. Michael bleeding from the eyes of his mask after Laurie shoots him is one of the best fucking images in horror and him swinging blindly as Laurie and Loomis slowly orchestrate his death is a fucking amazing scene. i have an immense fondness for this movie, with all its flaws. it brings a lot of really cool concepts to the table, and i think it deserves some appreciation.

heres a question tho; where the fuck were Laurie’s parents. theres a suggestion theyre missing, but theres no explanation why and we never hear from them. did michael kill them too? hello? mr and mrs strode? your daughter just fucking killed a guy and all her friends are dead. where the fuck are you.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch

Halloween III is infamous as being the Halloween movie that isn’t about Michael Myers at all. when it first released it was wildly unpopular and remained so for quite a while, but has had a surge in popularity over the last few years. i think just about every horror critic i know now considers Halloween III one of the best in the franchise. and to be fair to it, its a great little movie. not a slasher at all but rather a conspiracy thriller, Halloween III is all about the mystery of what the Silver Shamrock mask-making company are really up to, and why people are disappearing. its a weird and creative little movie, with some really fucking great practical effects that turn it from just being a thriller to being an all-out horror film. it has a few too many ineffective jumpscares and some of the plot twists are kind of disappointing and feel a little too much like the easy option -- and then others are so wildly bizarre no one would see them coming because theyre fucking completely out there. but i kind of love that sort of nonsense in a horror movie. like lets just have a fucking good time in here for once in our fucking lives.

Halloween III is not a perfect or even a really great movie, but yknow, fuck it. the idea that only perfect films are worth watching is dumb. i appreciate the weird shit this film tried and i think it deserves a lot more respect than what it got; if it had been released under another title it probably would have gone down as a classic instead of being derided for years, you ask me.

now things start going rapidly downhill

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers

Halloween 4 is when Jamie is introduced as the new final girl; Laurie’s seven year old daughter, after Laurie herself died off-screen in a fucking car crash. the decision to kill off Laurie came from Jamie Lee Curtis decided not to return to the character and instead of recasting her, they went with just having her… die. off-screen. in the franchise where the previous two movies were about her triumph and determination to stay alive. like its the casual thoughtlessness of this that, the idea no one would give a shit a character returned, that in my eyes epitomises how fucking little anyone cared about this franchise going forward.

man the idea of Laurie dying completely irrelevant to Michael… thats a lot. anyway continuing on his quest to erase anyone related to him, Michael starts targeting his niece Jamie for the three movies in the franchise. this is where the series started rapidly losing any grip on reality. while Michael always had some kind of superhuman elements to him (he took six bullets to the chest and survived in the first movie) these became increasingly wildly exaggerated. now hes crushing peoples skulls with his bare hands shit like what the fuck. first of all do that to me and secondly, it was this kind of slide into unreality that let the supernatural elements of the series creep in further until you end up with the shitshow that is Halloween 6. like it was the decrease in the impact of violence and human life that really fucked this franchise over.

this film is not great. its a definite decline in quality after 2 and was on the slippery slope downwards. it has some high points, primarily in Dr Loomis. Donald Pleasance is a better actor than most movies deserve and brings gravitas to a role that in the hands of a less capable actor would be laughable. his sincere plea to Michael at one point to just kill him instead of going after Jamie is honestly fucking tragic.

outside of that, the film isnt massively interesting. Michael himself isnt particularly threatening or engaging, and his mask looks like shit in this film. the characters in this film are largely very stupid, also, which doesnt help anything much.

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers

if theres a Halloween movie people talk about the least, its this one. II has the sibling twist, III is the black sheep, 4 is the return, even 6 gets talked about for its troubled production history. no one has anything to say about Halloween 5. and thats mostly because there is fucking nothing to say about Halloween 5. it is a relentlessly fucking dull movie that pads out its 100 minute run time with endless unnecessary scenes of shit that does… nothing. this film is dull in a way that i find incredibly detestable. i cant even watch it through a haze of impassioned anger like i can with the also incredible dull Halloween II (2009). its just fucking boring. every single scene drags like its trying to walk on two broken legs. the plot is so bare bones its nonsensical. it constantly adds new characters and new elements but all that does is makes it more incoherent and confusing. watching this movie i literally found my fucking eyes glazing over in my skull. if this film was edited correctly it would be twenty minutes long. i cannot fucking emphasise enough how much of relentless slog it is. Halloween 4 was dull but even that had the lifeline of ‘some cool ideas’. Halloween 5 is nothing. Halloween 5 is puddle dirt water.

Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers

if Halloween 5 is puddle dirt water Halloween 6 is just a fresh hot glass of piss. there are two versions of Halloween 6, the director’s cut and the theatrical release, and both are wretched. this film went full ham with introducing the supernatural elements, telling us that Michael was his whole life psychically controlled by a pagan cult called the Cult of Thorne in order to make Halloween scary again or summon the devil or who fucking cares. this movie is fucking insufferably dull, totally absurd, and wildly unsympathetic. i loathe Halloween 6 and every terrible, stupid plot decision it makes. Paul Rudd defeats Michael Myers by drawing druid symbols on the ground and Michael just gives up and lies down. theres a baby that does nothing and serves no purpose. Halloween is apparently banned in Haddonfield, which makes this more closely related to Footloose than Halloween i think. this film takes itself incredibly seriously while spouting nothing but total fucking bullshit drivel and i dont believe that anyone involved in this movie, from the cast to the cameraman to the guy who served the lunch had any faith in this movie outside of the vague hope it might make money and i wish this movie had been burned at the stake. also i hate Paul Rudd.

Halloween H20: 20 Years Later

oh thank fucking god finally some good fucking food. Halloween H20 took the decision to retcon all the sequels (except II) twenty years before Halloween 2018, proving that everyone knew 5 and 6 were fucking mistakes.

this film loses a lot of the Halloween feeling in favour of making a more generic late 1990s/early 2000s style horror. theres nothing particularly interesting about the way this movie is directed or shot, the music is largely very generic, it has a generally uninteresting glossy quality to it that studio movies always do. its very obvious this movie was inspired by Scream and it looks a lot more like Scream than it does Halloween. all of this makes me kind of sad, but other films in the franchise have proved that other directors generally are not capable of imitating Carpenter’s style so maybe its better they dont really try.

what H20 does so well, and the reason i love it so much, is that it explores the relationship between Michael and Laurie, which is something im endlessly fascinated with. this was the first movie to have Laurie shake off her fear and rise up against Michael, and while it doesnt do it with quite as much depth and intelligence as Halloween 2018, it still has a fucking good crack at Laurie’s character, and its still powerful watching her turn on the man who terrorised her for years. Michael is great in this movie too; while he has a terrible mask, watching him back on his shit as a furious force of nature who wants nothing more than to destroy anyone who gets in his way.

honestly i kind of enjoy having a Halloween in a different style; theres something fun about seeing characters recontextualised and done with justice and empathy. most of the Halloween sequels before this one (and after, looking at Resurrection) are shallow, unconcerned with any kind of emotional depth or personality. and while a lot of the stock filler characters in H20 who are lined up for the chopping block arent that interesting and dont particularly standout, watching Jamie Lee Curtis’ performance and seeing her interplay with Michael is enough. and most of the side characters arent particularly annoying, which is more than i can say for half this franchise.

this film also has what is one of my absolute favourite endings in a movie ever; the final confrontation between Michael and Laurie has a particular interaction between them that i absolutely adore and that alone is enough to make this movie one of my favourites.

H20 isnt perfect; it weirdly feels like a blueprint that Halloween 2018 would later refine into a better movie, but the idea its going to be completely disregarded for Halloween 2018 in the future makes me a little sad. in the face of so many fucking mediocre and awful Halloween sequels it did the right thing in trying to focus on what actually mattered; the connection between Michael and Laurie, although i dont feel like it succeeded in making Michael as scary as 2018 would much later. that said, the shot where Michael and Laurie just stare at each other through the glass of a window? that gives me chills every time. and hearing the Halloween theme kick in as Laurie marches off into the school with an axe looking for Michael is so fucking triumphant.

i love H20 even if Michael’s mask looks like his hair was dunked in a bucket of water and then gently blow-dried. i have no idea why it looks so fucking stupid in this movie. why is it so hard to get Michael’s mask right. you wouldnt think it was that fucking hard. anyway, i really fucking love Laurie Strode a lot, which didnt help to make Resurrection any easier to swallow.

Halloween: Resurrection

so whats the obvious thing to do after you have a movie where the power and emotion all comes from the emotional catharsis of seeing a woman get her vengeance on her tormentor? you, uh, make a sequel in which she is immediately defeated and pointlessly killed after its revealed her victory at the end of the previous film was entirely false, and then you never return to focus on her and instead introduce a horde of entirely uninteresting stock characters. yeah, makes sense.

Resurrection is fucking incredibly stupid, in the kind of fucking hysterical way only really bad horror movies can capture. theres absolutely nothing of Halloween in this other than the presence of Michael, who just as easily could have been replaced with anyone or anything. the story has a group of people on a reality show staying in the Myers house to… stay there? its not entirely clear what the challenge is meant to be, other than to just be inside the house, which i imagine gets to be pretty dull viewing pretty quickly. theres no suggestion theyre like, hunting for ghosts or something along those lines, theyre just… looking at stuff.

Michael slopes around this movie like he doesnt fucking understand where he is or whats going on, an entirely out of place relic of better times past while the cast cavorts around him doing nothing of interest and having no plots or characterisation to speak of. the film has exactly two or three funny moments, including the legendary ‘Michael Myers getting electrocuted in the dick by Busta Rhymes’, but youre way, way better off just looking that up on youtube instead of watching this movie. there is an hour of pointless plot development about characters no one cares about until Michael starts fucking killing people. this movie shouldnt exist and we should all go back to pretending it doesnt.

and thats it. thats all the halloween films. i can die now.

#rantsfilmwatch #this is around 4000 words long so yknow consider yourself warned

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curly-q-reviews · 5 years

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ROAD TO THE OSCAR MAYER WIENER AWARDS 2K19

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, 2018 (dir. Joel Coen, Ethan Coen)

Nominated for: Best Original Song, Best Costume Design, Best Adapted Screenplay

SPOILER ALERT THAR BE SPOILERS AHEAD ME HEARTIES BE YE WARNED

wowee what a cool film!! i went into this not knowing much about it except it was directed by the Coen brothers (directors of Fargo and The Big Lebowski) which set real high expectations for me. these guys are real masters of storytelling and what immediately come to mind when i think of movies that know how to effectively use dark humor. i also love the kinds of stories they tell in general, how they take subjects and settings that seem kinda mundane and just give them this little extra spark.

so is this newest film just as good as their other work??? well id say yeah for sure!!! it reminds me a lot of a film they did shortly after The Big Lebowski called O Brother, Where Art Thou?, because theyre both period pieces AND because they both feature a myriad of eclectic and interesting characters. the one thing that makes The Ballad of Buster Scruggs really stand out from their other films however is the fact that this is actually an anthology made up of six different stories, all set during the same time period in The Wild West. its also worth mentioning that this movie was made to premiere on Netflix, which is something ive started to see more and more as the streaming platform becomes the new go-to source of media content. its very exciting to see such prolific directors go the Netflix route and have great success with it, because it means that the platform really is capable of creating high-quality movies and TV shows and working with big-name talent. im sure the big hollywood production companies are all quaking in their lil booties cause this means big BIG changes are on the horizon

ok so ive reviewed anthology series before, notably Black Mirror, and with those reviews i ranked the short stories in order of least to most favorite. so i guess in this case ill do the same, although its hard to really rank these cause i truly enjoyed all of them in different ways. there was one however that didnt really tickle my fancy much, which was “Near Algodones”. this one stars james franco as a bank robber who seems to have met his match in a fiery (probably crazy) bank teller. he gets caught and hung from a tree by the town’s sheriff, but nearly manages to escape death when a Native American tribe swoops in and kills the sheriff and his crew. james franco is saved by a cattle driver, only to be caught again by the next town’s sheriff for allegedly trying to hawk the cattle (which was not the case at all). right before they kick the chair out from under him at the hanging, he sees a beautiful woman in blue, who at first smiles at him but then looks unnerved as he stares back at her.

i think with this one the ending really didnt do much for me, i kinda didnt get it. i did understand the whole irony behind surviving punishment for a crime he DID commit but getting hanged for a crime he never committed, and the bank teller was pretty hilarious, but everything else about the segment was just ok. james franco didnt really blow me away (he never really does but thats besides the point), the rest of the performances were fine, and the story just kinda zipped on through. maybe ill give this one another watch to see if the ending makes any more sense to me, or if theres any sense to be made from it at all

next up for me would be “The Gal Who Got Rattled”, and this segment i have mixed feelings over. its about this brother and sister who set out on the Oregon trail so that the brother can get his sister to marry his business partner in Oregon. the sister seems like a kind of wishy-washy, subdued character who just kinda goes along with whatever her brother says without giving much of her own opinion. i gotta give credit to zoe kazan (who starred in The Big Sick) cause she does a great job with this character, totally spot-on performance. ok so turns out the brother is a fucken HORRIBLE businessman who screws up all his business deals all the time, and he tragically dies like two days into being on the oregon trail. he has this annoying-ass dog that barks all the time and everyone else on the caravan is sick of it, so when the brother dies the sister just lets one of the trail leaders put it down. turns out the sister like did not like her brother at all but was always too afraid to say anything. now getting back to the bad businessman thing, apparently he had promised the helper boy that is helping move their covered wagon a large sum of money, half of it halfway through the journey and the rest when they get to oregon. problem is, the sister doesnt have the money, so it was either left in the brothers pocket when he was buried or there wasnt actually any money at all and he lied, y’know, like a bad businessman does. the trail leader who put the annoying dog down offers to help her, and the two start to get close. so now its like a pseudo love story thing. except it ends pretty tragically (the sister dies its a long story and pretty ironic just watch it if u wanna know)

so uuuhhhhh this one was long as shit, like a lot longer than the other segments when it didnt really need to be??? like it just kept going and going, and again the ending didnt really make up for how long it was. i really liked zoe kazan in this, but otherwise nothing to write home about.

number four on my list would have to go to “All Gold Canyon”, which basically just follows the story of a gold miner in the mountains trying to get that money honey. this segment is the simplest one out of the bunch, but i gotta say its absolutely gorgeous. what beautiful scenery and cinematography. it provides a nice contrast to our disheveled, run-down gold miner who is just tearing up the beautiful grassy fields trying to get to this gold. there seems to be a theme in this one of man’s relationship to nature, and how the gold miner does put in effort to respect it but still takes advantage of it for his own benefit. and i guess theres a broader theme of greed, or the ruthless and endless pursuit of wealth which can drive people to do crazy and desperate things. i definitely really enjoyed this one, especially the gold miner character played by tom waits. but otherwise it didnt stand out as much to me as the other segments im gonna talk about

SPEAKING OF WHICH heres number three!! “The Mortal Remains” is right up my alley, and has some more mythical elements to it than the other segments ive talked about so far. so we have a wagon full of passengers all going to this hotel for various reasons, and its a really diverse cast of characters: we have the older wife of a prolific religious lecturer, a rich Frenchman, a trapper, a foppish Englishman, and a cheery laid-back Irishman, the last two seeming to be companions of some sort. they all get on the topic of the true nature of mankind, and the three characters opposite of the strange pair all have something different to say. the trapper believes that all people are inherently the same, with the same basic needs. the older woman disagrees and insists that there are two kinds of people, upright and sinning. and then the Frenchman says that both of them are wrong, that human existence is much more complicated and nuanced than that; no one persons life is exactly the same as another’s. and then we have the Englishman and the Irishman, who turn out to be bounty hunters of some sort (is heavily alluded that they are grim reaper-type figures). they explain their method of completing their kills, and talk about how they enjoy watching their victims “try to make sense of it all” in their death throes. these two clearly have a much more cold and sinister idea of the nature of mankind, and the rest become very unsettled all the way to the hotel. no one else even dares to step out of the carriage while the bounty hunters drag their latest victim through the front entrance and up the stairs.

oh man this segment was great! i think the reason its third on my list is cause i really wish there was more to it, like if the Coen brothers spent more time on this one instead of “The Gal Who Got Rattled” it would be perfect. Jonjo O’Neill and Brendan Gleeson as the bounty hunters were so enthralling, and i loved watching them play off of each other. hell, i couldve had a whole movie featuring those two. and the screenwriting really shines in this segment too. this segment almost feels like a fable or something, which is really fitting for the time period. makes me wonder if they had based it off of an actual fable. but anyway yeah this ones awesome!

i had a hard time choosing between “The Mortal Remains” and this next segment for second place cause i liked them both equally, but in the end “Meal Ticket” gets #2 purely because of the utterly fantastic performance by Harry Melling, who plays a quadriplegic actor in a traveling show run by liam neesons character, an irish traveling entertainer. the story itself is really simple, we just see this disabled actor be carted from one town to the next, doing the same stage show which is basically just him reciting famous prose throughout the ages. meanwhile liam neeson is trying to get as much money as he can out of the audience members. he doesnt interact much with harry melling outside of feeding him and helping him piss and get dressed. u get the sense that he doesnt really see his disabled actor as an actual person, but more of an entertaining object or a pet. and this becomes even more apparent when the irishman gets some competition from another traveling entertainer who has a chicken that can do math. he sees this chicken getting more money than him, so he buys it off of the other guy and takes it with him. and finally, the poor limbless actor is literally and figuratively tossed aside for the next best thing.

man oh man what a great segment! harry melling blew me away with his performance, the fact that he was able to get such a nuanced range of emotion out of the few lines he was given (basically he had to recite the same shit over and over again) was so impressive to me. and his non-verbal communication was really solid too. liam neeson did really well in his role too. and again the story itself is really great, simple but effective and really gets the point across without having to beat the audience over the head with its message. OH YEAH ITS REAL GOOD LOVE IT

and finally we have my #1 pick, which i think the directors knew this was the best one out of the bunch too cause its the first segment as well as the title of the whole movie. “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” has that signature Coen brothers wit and dark humor that i love, it plays off of typical Western movie tropes and is very tongue-in-cheek and i ate that shit up. tim blake nelson as the titular buster is just so fucken perfect for this role, he really shines in this and its kind of a shame that its one of the shorter segments cause it really is the best one and he knocks it out of the park. we got some great music in this segment too, which is where that Best Original Song nom comes in. this one also has some strong fable-y vibes to it, like this story could be amongst the likes of American folklore like Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed. i wont get much into the plot of this one but i highly recommend watching it, even if you dont wanna see the rest of the segments.

the segments fit together pretty well overall, although the tone of each of them differs slightly the fact that the setting and time period are the same is enough to firmly knit all these stories together. its a really unique idea for a movie, and is so far the best attempt at an anthology movie that ive ever seen purely because the stories really all make sense together and play off of each other well. in other anthology movies ive seen like The ABC’s of Death the segments usually dont have much at all to do with each other, except that they all fall in the same genre. so overall id say give this a watch, especially if ur a Coen brothers fan, cause theres some real good stuff in here.

well thats all i got for now cowboys!! i watched Roma the other day and CRIED REAL HARD so get ready for me to kiss that movies ass in a review that should be done in the next few days. until then go uuhhhhhh lasso a cow or something. chew some tobaccy. fondle a barmaids titties. die of dysentery. y’know just old west things~

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steviesays · 6 years

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In depth analysis of Solo: a Star Wars Story

wow that title makes it look like this wasn’t just me rambling for 4 whole ass pages on word, but I wanted to give you guys all of my thoughts and reactions on the movie. All of the spoilers are going to be under the cut and I’ll continue to tag spoilers for solo for the next two weeks, so until JUNE 8TH so none of you are allowed to yell at me for spoiling the movie.

alright yall here we go im going to start with the plot and move into the characters the same way I did for tlj.

After coming out of this movie, it took me the entire ride home to process and think about whether I even liked it or not. When I got home, I had a two hour long conversation with my brother on the purpose of all of these movies rather than on what the movie is about because hes a fake fan and didn’t go see it last night. But anyway, after giving a brief synopsis with as little spoilers as possible, we kind of came to the consensus that this movie didn’t really matter, plot wise. It was kind of just made to sell tickets (even though they didn’t even sell tickets because there was no promo). Literally the whole movie was just an adventure that Han Solo went on, there was no real character arc, Han was the same person he was at the end as he was at the beginning, the only real development was him meeting chewie and lando and getting the millennium falcon. Did we really HAVE to see the kessel run, like yeah it was cool, but having the whole movie based around that? I feel like we were all kind of expecting more of a backstory, which is what it was kind of advertised as, and I think it would have been more effective, at least from a fan perspective, to have seen what Han’s life was when he was a child on Correlia. We still have no information on his parents, except for his dad was apparently a mechanic that wanted to be a pilot. We don’t know how he became orphaned or how he ended up with that fucking lizard monster thing, how he met Qi’ra, or how any of this affected him. I think they just started the movie at a bad spot, but that decision was made to maximize profit. I guess no casual movie goer would want to see han solo roughing it through some angst, but for people that are fully invested in star wars? It was just kind of a pointless action movie.

Other than that, it was a decent movie overall. I didn’t walk out of it pissed like I did with tlj, it kind of just made me feel nothing. Like I knew all this shit before, I didn’t need to see it in a two hour film. Him meeting chewie and lando, getting the falcon and doing the kessel run in 12 parsecs were things that were already established. There was nothing really spectacular about this movie it kind of just exists as a plot extender, rather than something that moves the plot forward or gives us major insights. I guess they can get away with it being useful to plot by the scene at the end that establishes to everyone that Darth Maul is still alive and fucking up the galaxy, but they could have just made their own damn darth maul movie, which is probably coming anyway based on that scene.

But now that I’ve dragged the movie enough, lets get into the characters because I have a lot to say. There were characters that I really liked, characters that had a lot of potential, and characters that I hated.

Lets start with han. I really liked him in this movie and I like the actor they got for him, I think he did a really great job showing han’s snark and egoism while also keeping his inner goodness and making sure the audience was sympathetic. As I said before, he didn’t really develop much as a character, he was born a scoundrel and stayed that way. His quest to do whatever he could to get home so he could save Qi’ra was something we all would have expected out of him. I did like that we were able to see his street smarts and ability to strategize more than we have in other movies. I guess we have a bit of development, in that he learns to be even less trusting than he already was at the beginning through all of the betrayals in the movie, but like …. He was already distrustful in the beginning from the life he had already lived. Also, this has nothing to do with what I was just saying but I just remembered, this is during the time of the empire. Didn’t the empire use cloned Stormtroopers as their infantry and navy with humans only being officers …………………… like correct me if im wrong, but im like 90% sure that’s right. Because the first order were the ones that used human Stormtroopers. And even so like, what are these infantry men even doing. Aren’t Stormtroopers the ones that have always invaded planets for the empire, these people weren’t wearing any type of armor or cohesive uniforms and I just remember being confused as fuck during this whole sequence. In a ‘this is a major plot hole’ kind of way. Were they running out of clones ?????? like just make more ???????????? like the whole reason they used clones was because using actual humans to do grunt work was barbaric and clones aren’t really seen as people. Also now that I’m thinking about it what happened to all of the clones once the war ended. I haven’t watched or read many of the side stories or books, so I don’t know if it’s just me that’s missing something, but idk having han join the empire as an infantryman just didn’t make sense to me. Also having an imperial officer be the one to give him his last name was just kind of yikes. Like they couldn’t have just had him come up with one himself in that moment. Whatever.

Now lets talk about Qi’ra aka fake bitch. I fucking hated her so much through this entire movie and not just because I called her fake leia in the lead up to it coming out (tell me han doesn’t have a type). Like what the hell honestly. She was the WORST. And its kind of sad because she really had the potential to be a better character, but it just did not happen. Like she was gone for three years and just happened to appear back at some sketch party? And the only explanation for it was “yeah ive been through some shit don’t ask.” And what killed me is that she just never fucking explained!!! Like han asked her multiple times to tell him what happened in the in-between time and they have this whole ass history, he was doing all this shit FOR YOU, and he doesn’t even get an explanation ???? at the very least give the viewers an explanation. Like I guess it was implied that she did some dark shit, slept her way to the top, killed a few people on the way there, but HOW ??? WHY ??? WHEN ???? how long has she been involved in this shit to be at the position she has and to be so changed by it? Her character was the one that changed the most, from being careful of people other than the one she trusted (han), but still having hope for a better life, to just being like fuck everyone, I’m here for me and I don’t care how many people I have to kill or betray to survive. But we never got that character development in the film so she just came off as a terrible human being. We never got the chance to be sympathetic for her, and tbh im about to get even more angry because this whole film was centered around M E N yes I said it im being that bitch right now because the women in this movie were paid DUST.

And on that note lets talk about fucking Val. Another character with so much potential that was just …………………. hnjdklsbckdsbcbsdlv. She was the literal embodiment of the angry black woman trope and it pissed me the fuck off. She was the one that refused to bend on bringing han into the group and continued to antagonize him the whole mission, which the audience obviously took as a damn joke because duh its han fucking solo. We all know that she’s wrong, but when everyone else jumped on board with han she stayed adamant in her position, making her the odd one out of the group. Every time she opened her damn mouth I got mad because she just kept putting han and chewie down and it was just so cringey because I knew that this would make her either a hated or a forgotten character. AND THEN SHE JUST FUCKING DIED. I was like oh ok, 20 minutes in and the whole squad is dead already god damn. Which brings me into my analysis of tobias.

I love woody harrelson and he did a great job but there were a few scenes that just annoyed me, one of them being after his squad dies. Like hes sad for like 5 seconds, punches han which is an understandable reaction considering the fact that it was his fault everyone died for no reason, and then hes just fine again? Like it was never brought up again that two people he was obviously very close to, especially Val, just died pointless deaths. Even the night before the mission he was like ‘yeah you got to get someone you can trust I got my girl val’ and then they kiss and im like oh ok theyre in love that’s cute we love representation of interracial couples, but then she dies and he never mentions her name again. He doesn’t even grieve for longer than 2 minutes ??? he gives han another chance even though this was 100000% his fault and everyone knows it ??? it was kind of like oh, ok why the fuck did we even do that, why did I have to watch all of this happen if there are no consequences. His character didn’t change at all throughout the movie either. He’s just as distrustful and self-centered as he was, he just has less friends now and he’s dead. He was a good fatherly/mentor-y figure for han throughout the movie, but that’s about it.

I don’t really have much to say about Lando other than the fact that Donald glover did a great job, but I really didn’t expect much else. B U T last week I reblogged a post about him confirming that lando was pan and in the tags I was like lol watch him still be in a het relationship and GUESS FUCKING WHAT. Like its as if they thought making him be in love with a robot that has a female voice, a female build, and people that address her with she/her pronouns would be enough for people to be like come on it’s a fucking robot they don’t have gender …. hsdakbckdsla and while we’re on this subject lets talk about L3 because her (it? I don’t even know) character probably made me the most angry while watching the movie.

L3 being like an advocate for droids was an obvious parallel to other civil rights movements like womens rights or even African American rights and the way it was handled made me so fucking angry. Everything the droid said was used as comic relief or made to be received as a joke because obviously shes talking about fucking robots. But honestly, let me get deep for a moment here, droids in the star wars universe ARE sentient. They have minds of their own and are put into the story like characters, but theyre treated as lesser because theyre not made of flesh and blood. I understand and identify with the things L3 was saying because she’s right, but through the whole movie it was made to be a joke, because you know droids don’t need rights theyre droids. But that was the same thing people in the fucking 60s were saying about black people we’re ‘just n******’ (im sorry I cant even type the word it makes me uncomfortable). And her revolutionary spirit mirrors that of women’s rights revolutionaries today. Being a black woman that’s involved in social justice in America, the characterization of L3 just made me upset because everyone was treating everything she said as a joke, and there was no rectification of it. After L3 died, there was no ‘hmmm maybe she was right maybe we should start thinking of droids more as people’ she was another wasted character whose only use was her navigation system when they could have taken a completely different route and addressed something that was actually wrong with the star wars universe rather than just enforcing it. And when she started to give the droids a mind of their own in the control room I knew it was going to dissolve into chaos and make a horrible situation because it was such a predictable moment that completely undermined social justice actions and it pissed me off.

I guess the plot twist that effys nest (is that how you spell her name? probably not it doesn’t really matter) and her squad were working with the revolution was cute. I deadass thought for a second she was gonna be like ‘what up tobias or should I call you DAD’ cause that would have been a 100% star wars thing to do. The bad guy was a generic bad guy so I really don’t have much to say about him. I loved the scenes between han and chewie which showed why they became so close.

This is really all I have to say about solo for know, nothing huge is coming to mind. Overall, it was a good movie if you’re not a fan, but kind of a wasted opportunity for everyone else. This movie had a lot of potential to deliver and im pretty disappointed that it didn’t. If you don't agree on anything I’ve said or you just want to talk about the movie with me PLEASE dont hesitate to slide into my dms I love discourse

#solo #solo spoilers #solo analysis #sorry you had to read my word vomit I needed it to be out in the world #this was 2300 WORDS #and I got a b in my film class this semester lmfaooo #If we were talking about Star Wars it would have been lit

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emperorren · 6 years

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Even after this movie i see people either saying that reylo is finished now or just straight up denying that their force bond had romantic coding in it and im just like ??? I have no clue where theyre gonna go from here but i wouldnt say the ending is a nail in the coffin. Theyve established kylo as the main antagonist now but i dont think redemption is out of the realm. People forget vader wasnt redeemed till the last possible second i guess lol. Nothings impossible

The ending is the opposite of a nail in the coffin.

We should be more worried if Rey and Kylo had ended TLJ on a high note (such as defecting together, which was often misconstrued by the reylo fandom as a sufficiently “bleak” ending for the second act of the trilogy… but it’s not. It’s not bleak, because we are supposed to root for Rey and Kylo, not dread their union. So them defecting together would be a high point, which of course is why we’re getting the opposite of that).

There’s going to be a whole movie after TLJ, a movie that will subvert the status quo and change the dynamics again, just as TLJ did with TFA. As others put it, saying that Reylo is over is just as stupid as saying that Han/Leia was over at the end of Empire because Han was stuck in carbonite. Stupid and ignorant of how storytelling works. Storytelling is based on cycles of ups and downs. If the story sinks and reaches the bottom, the only direction it can go in the next installment is up. And viceversa (this is why TFA destroyed the original trilogy’s happy ending. It had to).

Antis are going to desperately cling to the idea that TLJ was written to “deal” with Reylo, as in “sink” it and move on (presumably reverting to less compelling dynamics like f nnr y and d am r ey). Not only they seem to think that dropping the central dynamic between the hero and the villain would be good storytelling, they’re still willfully blind to the fact that The Force Awakens established Reylo in the first place—-Rian Johnson didn’t “come up with Reylo” from nowhere. The Last Jedi developed the first part of a central relationship whose seeds were CLEARLY planted in the first chapter of the trilogy. (People need to realize that the films of this trilogy are following a basic structure that was conceived YEARS ago—otherwise it wouldn’t be possible for JJ Abrams to pitch the script for IX when VIII has been barely released, and for Rian to be writing the script for TLJ while TFA WAS STILL BEING FILMED.)So we have:

first movie: set up. Rey and Kylo are introduced, the major conflict between them is created, the seed for a future attraction is planted, while the two are developed as individual characters because they’re complete strangers to the audience and the audience needs to learn who they are, see them as people. So we have Kylo dealing with San Tekka, Snoke, Hux, and Han while Rey develops a great friendship with Finn and finds a surrogate father in Han. Because it’s important that we see Kylo and Rey as full fledged people independently of their interactions, in order to make their actual interactions great;

second movie: development. the dynamic, so far only suggested / subtextual, becomes finally text. We’re doing the enemies to friends at this stage, but with more than a spark of romantic, even sexual tension. Basically, it’s the dynamic of our dreams, the way anidala should have been done, the way EVERYTHING should be done. And then it comes to a brutal halt. Because THAT’S WHAT YOU DO TO KEEP YOUR AUDIENCE HOOKED. Literally every good fanfic author knows this! The heart of this dynamic is the tension between opposites, between good and evil, damnation and redemption, compassion and hatred. To keep that tension alive and sizzling, we’re temporary reverting to the /mutual hatred/ stage, which is what left us wanting more at the end of TFA. Except a) it’s different now because they tasted each other (they really did, even if just metaphorically), and b) the audience is now more hooked than ever, thanks to this beautiful thing named Force Bond that is still alive even though they broke up in the worst possible way and to a fight scene that was basically a Giant Sexual Metaphor.

and that’s already 2/3 of the trilogy. That’s a LOT of narrative capital invested in these two, and it became EVIDENT in TLJ but, again, it was already there in TFA. There’s no way IX isn’t going to deliver more development and a resolution. Their outrageous break up in TLJ is not a resolution, because so much between then remains unresolved. The Force Bond. Their mutual thirst attraction. The visions they had of each other. The reason why the Force keeps binding them (it was always the Force, Snoke be damned. Their bond was born during the interrogation, and they created by penetrating each other’s mind at the same time). The fact that Rey almost succeeded where everyone failed (as acknowledged by Luke, eventually). THEIR LAST SCENE. Do you know when in horror movies you get a happy ending and it’s almost too good and then when peace seems to be restored, you realize that the demon only faked its death and IT TAKES YOU? That’s Reylo at the end of the movie.

What Rian did, his vision, was making sure that at the end of the central movie Kylo would be his own master, in charge and being able to make independent decisions (and also: fully, unambiguously responsible for his actions), while ALSO having a complex relationship with our hero, Rey, one that isn’t simply hatred and antagonism (x). That’s a lot to unpack for JJ, admittedly, but it’s also explosive material; it makes Kylo’s redemption both harder to achieve (with Snoke out of the picture, there will probably be no “redemption by destroying a greater evil” cop out. There’s no ~~greater evil~~ than Kylo now, and while this definitely makes me anxious and confused, I also have faith in the story because the people who are writing it are FAR BETTER STORYTELLERS THAN ME), and potentially more convincing (whatever good Kylo starts doing from this point on, it will be his doing, and a free choice, not a reaction against his former abuser, not a way to seek agency for himself—not that those things aren’t good, but they aren’t necessarily redemptive in the truest sense, which is often the objection you have to most villains’ redemption arcs).

In short: it’s always darkest before the dawn, and a huge franchise like Star Wars doesn’t drop the central dynamic between the hero and the villain like a sack of potatoes, especially as it has been made clear over and over again how much of a protagonist—though a villainous one—Kylo Ren is.

Seriously, they’ve invested too much (money, narrative capital) in him and in this relationship with Rey, and they wouldn’t be backpedaling even if the audience and the critics alike weren’t head over heels over this dynamic and literally screaming from every media outlet how HOT their interactions were, lol. This story has already been written.

#anon #asks #reylo #*#//#//////#tlj spoilers #sw spoilers

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