#and then in the last 40 pages we got: three character deaths (two major; all murders); a sex scene (first time sex scene too);

[buzzdixonwriter]

Compare & Contrast: ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD Movie vs Novel

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is my favorite Quentin Tarantino film, a love letter to late 1960s Los Angeles / Hollywood, an alternate history where the wicked (or at least three of them) are punished and the virtuous are spared and rewarded.

Tarantino has since expanded his basic story into a new novel, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood and it’s interesting to compare & contrast the two approaches to the material.

Movie tie-in novelizations are not unusual, of course, but it’s the rare example when the original creator (writer or director) takes a whack at it.  Ian Fleming famously turned an unsold screenplay, James Bond Of The Secret Service, (written with Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, Ivar Bryce, and Ernest Cuneo) into the novel Thunderball and a busted TV pilot, Commander Jamaica, into Dr. No, while Ed McBain (a.k.a. Evan Hunter ne Salvatore Albert Lombino) adapted a couple of original 87th Precinct movie scripts into novels.  

Here Tarantino takes his stab at it, and the results are…well, let’s cut to the chase…

Which is better, movie or book?

Good movie, okay novel.

For those who want a more detailed analysis…

[SPOILERS GALORE]

Story Structure

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood the novel is just barely a standalone story; it’s really enhanced by seeing the movie first.

The story flow is roughly the same, and it’s clear a lot of the material in the book are from early drafts of the screenplay (with a few callbacks to earlier Tarantino films).  There’s also a lot of material missing that was in the movie (the immediate aftermath of Cliff visiting George Spahn, f’r instance).

However, the main plot and many major scenes from the movie are described as almost asides, hints at things seen on screen that aren’t elaborated on in the movie.

In one sense, this works to the novel’s advantage; there’s little point in reiterating already familiar scenes.  On the other hand, scenes in the book that expand on scenes from the movie can benefit only by seeing the movie first.

While Once Upon A Time In Hollywood the movie features a pretty clear if typically erratic Tarantino timeline, the book’s timeline is less easy to track (but more on that later).

This isn’t a deal breaker in terms of enjoyment, but it occasionally does get in the way of the story telling.

Characters

What I liked most about Once Upon A Time In Hollywood the movie was that the Rick Dalton character is presented as a self-involved / over anxious / ot-nay oo-tay ight-bray actor who, despite his very apparent shortcomings, also demonstrates a truly professional dedication to his craft and an ability to listen and learn and grow.

Taking part in the big fight at the end cements his hero status in the framework of the movie.

He’s not nearly as likeable or as admirable in the book.

A big hunk of this is leaving out those crucial action beats mentioned above.  Another hunk is letting us peek too deeply into Rick’s head, and learning what happens to him after the climax of the film.

Instead of moving into the quality artsy A-list movie world as the film version intimates at the end, Rick becomes a John Wayne-like figure with similar intolerant attitudes, popular with middle American audiences.

He does come across as clear headed when it comes to his career and his place in the Hollywood pecking order, as demonstrated in his own analysis of why he would never have gotten Steve McQueen’s role in The Great Escape.

Sharon Tate is still the delightfully airy character shown in the movie, though Tarantino gives her a broader emotional palette to play with.  She comes across as more fully rounded than the movie version but is still the wonderful, life-loving character of the film.

Cliff Booth, on the other hand, suffers badly.

First off, Cliff’s character in the film is already extremely problematic.  The movie deliberately makes the circumstances around his wife’s death vague enough to be read in a variety of ways:  He could have deliberately murdered her and got away with it, it could have been justifiable homicide in self-defense, it could have been an accident, it could have been something else.

We never know and that works to give Cliff a Schrodinger’s cat-like characterization:  We can’t know until we open the box and look in.

Well, Tarantino flings open the box and boy, what’s inside is stupid.

I can absolutely believe Cliff killed his wife in a momentary fit of rage, I do not believe the speargun cut her in half and he held the two halves together so they could have a long lovey-dovey talk until the Coast Guard shows up and she literally falls apart.

If Tarantino’s intent was to hint Cliff had a psychotic fugue after he killed his wife and thought he was holding her together and talking to her, he didn’t make that clear.

Considering how often Tarantino employs the omniscient third person point of view in this story, I don’t think it’s a failure style but of plotting.

That would be bad enough, but there’s a lot of other problems with Cliff in the book.

He flat out murders four people by the time of the novel:  Two petty gangsters back east, his wife, and the guy who offered him a share of Brandy’s prize money from dog fights.

Yeah, Cliff is plugged into the dog fighting world and really enjoys it.  He shows enough affection and appreciation for Brandy the pit bull to recognize when her career is over, and he’s ruthless enough to kill Brandy’s co-owner when the guy insists on sending her to her almost certain death in one last dog fight.

[Sidebar: Elsewhere Tarantino has told aspiring writers to leave morality out of their character’s motives and despite this sounding counterintuitive, it’s actually solid advice.  Morality forces good guys to act like good guys, it never gives the characters room to think and breathe and act as real people.  Tarantino isn’t saying characters can’t make moral choices, but those moral choices must come from who they are, not from some arbitrary code or editorial fiat.  To this degree the novel Once Upon A Time In Hollywood depicts Cliff in a wholly believable light, a natural born survivor who will do whatever’s necessary to stay alive.]

Book Cliff is depicted as a far more unpleasant person than Rick, lightyears more unpleasant than movie Cliff.  Part of this is a deliberate choice on Tarantino’s part as his omniscient third person point of view frequently mediates on the meaning of likeability vs believability in movie terms; he certainly strives to makes Rick and Cliff as unlikeable as possible (Sharon, too, but she’s basically too sweet a character for any negativity to rub off on her).

Cliff also demonstrates a considerable amount of bigotry and prejudice, in particular his opinions on Bruce Lee.  The substance of those opinions re Lee’s martial arts abilities is not the problem, it’s the way in which they are expressed.

Does this sound believable coming from a near 50 year old WWII vet?  Yeah, it does.  That doesn’t mean the book benefits from it.

Which leads to the single biggest problem with Cliff, however, is his age and background.

Tarantino envisions him as a WWII vet, a survivor of the Sicily campaign reassigned to the Philippines (as with Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino really doesn’t care about what actually happened in WWII), taken prisoner by the Japanese, escaping to the jungles to lead a guerilla force against the Imperial Army, recipient of two “Medals of Valor” (who knows what Tarantino means by this as no such award exists in the US military.  Medal of Honor?  Distinguished Service Cross?  Silver Star?  Bronze Star?), and record holder for the most confirmed Japanese killed by a single individual who wasn’t a crew member of the Enola Gay.

Okay, so that makes him what, mid-20s at the youngest in 1945?  

He’d be 49 at the time of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, not an unheard of age for Hollywood stunt men but certainly pushing the edge of the envelope.

Playing Rick’s double?  That sounds quite a bit more farfetched.  Rick’s exact age is never mentioned but from the way others treat him, he’s somewhere between Cliff’s age and that of James Stacy, the real life actor who starred in the Lancer pilot Rick is filming in 1968 when Stacy would be 32 years old.

That would make Rick roughly 40 at the time, and there’s an aside in the book that reveals one of Rick’s early roles was in 1959’s  Away All Boats, the latter with Tom Laughlin (who in real life later directed and starred in Billy Jack), and since Rick and Laughlin are presented as contemporaries and Laughlin was born in 1931, this would make Rick 28 when Bounty Law started airing that same year and he and Cliff, then age 40, first started working together.

Cliff saves Rick’s life from a stunt gone wrong early in the filming of Bounty Law, so one understands how their bond formed and why Rick continues to keep Cliff around even after Cliff kills his wife.

Missing from the novel is the voice of Randy Miller, the stunt director (played by Kurt Russell in the film) who narrates much of the movie.  I can’t recall if Randy is even mentioned by name in the book, but he certainly isn’t featured prominently in it.  Sometimes the narrative voice of the novel seems to be his, sometimes it seems to be Tarantino’s (and we’ll discuss that below, too).

Not all the characters in the movie make it to the pages of the book, and likewise quite a few characters appear who never showed up in the film version of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood or any other Tarantino film.

Sharon Tate first appears in the book hitchhiking and accepting a ride from rodeo cowboy Ace Woody, originally slated to be one of the assorted baddies in Django Unchained but later melded into another character.

On the other hand, many minor and obscure real life Hollywood players and personalities and hangers on do appear in the novel.  Tarantino is careful to put dialog in the mouths of only certifiably dead personalities, however, and as we’ll go into down below, that’s a wise move.

(BTW, Tarantino works himself into his own story a couple of times, mentioning himself as the director of a remake of John Sayles’ The Lady In Red featuring a grown up Trudi Fraser a.k.a. Mirabella Lancer in the Lancer pilot Rick is starring in, and as the son of piano player Curt Zastoupil, Tarantino’s real life step-father, who asks Rick for an autographed photo for his son Quentin.)

The Hollywood Stuff

Which leads us to the real hook of the book, a glimpse behind the scenes of Hollywood circa 1969.

If, like me, you’re fascinated by this sort of stuff, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is a fun read.

Tarantino is a devourer of pop culture and dedicates his book in part to Bruce Dern, David Carradine, Burt Reynolds, Robert Blake, Michael parks, Robert Forester, and Kurt Russell, thanking them for the stories they told him about “old time” Hollywood (i.e., the 1950s and 60s from Tarantino’s reckoning).

A lot of the book rings true in attitudes and opinions expressed back in that era, and some of the stories included are jaw-dropping (the Aldo Ray one especially).

The examinations of various maneuverings and strategies in the entertainment industry are also illuminating.

However, this raises a fair question about what the intent of any given work is, and how well documented a work of fiction needs to be.

There’s a trio of actors (all dead so none can sue Tarantino for libel) labeled in derogatory terms as homosexuals in two or three places in the book.

There’s some observations on race that sound absolutely authentic coming from the mouths of those particular characters at that particular time, but one questions the need for using those exact terms today; it’s not that difficult to show the character speaking is bigoted without letting them sling all the slurs they want.

Speaking of terms, I’ve never heard “ringer” used before in the film industry in the context of this book, so if it’s fake, Tarantino did an absolutely convincing job presenting it as real.

But here’s where we start heading into some problematic areas, not problematic in undermining the enjoyment of the book, but problematic in the sense of understanding what Tarantino is trying to convey.

Cliff’s story is awfully close to Robert Blake’s story, and you’d be hard pressed to find many people in town today who don’t think he got away with murder.

And of all the TV show’s to pick for Rick to be playing the villain in the pilot episode, why Lancer?

Few people today remember the series, and Tarantino taking liberties with the actual pilot episode plot isn’t noteworthy…

…or is it?

The actual series starred Andrew Duggan as Murdoch Lancer, patriarch of the Lancer family, with Wayne Maunder played Scott Lancer, the upscale older son, and James Stacy as his half-brother, gunslinger Johnny Madrid Lancer. Elizabeth Baur played Teresa O'Brien, Murdoch Lancer's teenage ward. 

For Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Tarantino replaced the real life Elizabeth Baur / Teresa O’Brien with “8 year old” Trudi Frazer (in the book; Fraser in the movie) / Mirabella Lancer (played in the film by 10 year old Julia Butters).

Why Lancer?  Why this particular change?

Lancer’s Johnny Madrid Lancer was played by James Stacy, a brief appearance in the film, but far more substantial scenes in the book (as well as the reader getting to see what he’s thinking and feeling).  Tarantino uses these scenes in the book to explain a bit about on set etiquette.

James Stacy was an actual person, and he actually played Johnny Madrid Lancer in the series.

In September of 1973, he was maimed in a motorcycle accident, losing his left arm and leg.

He refused to let his disability sideline him, and in 1975 appeared in Posse as a newspaper man, then went on to play numerous supporting roles in films and TV shows until 1995.

That was the year he was arrested, tried, and convicted of molesting an 11 year old girl.

He didn’t show up for his sentencing hearing, choosing instead to fly to Hawaii and attempt suicide.  Arrested and returned to California, instead of probation he received a 6 year prison sentence when it was learned he’d been arrested twice after the first crime on prowling charges in which he approached two other young girls.

Quentin Tarantino, the all time grand master maven of pop culture didn’t know this?

And in the book, Trudi calls Rick for a later night conversation about their day on the set.

This is an 8 year old child calling an adult after midnight.

To their credit, Tarantino and Rick both tell Trudi up front this is not an appropriate thing to do…

…but the call continues.

It doesn’t veer off into creepy territory, and when it ends it actually puts Rick’s character back on an upward trajectory, one in which he no longer feels he’s screwed up his life.

But still…

This is a really weird context.

(The scene was filmed for the movie but didn’t make the final cut.  Look closely on the movie poster under Brad Pitt’s chin and you’ll see an image of Julia Butters holding a teddy bear and talking on the phone.)

Style

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood the movie is consistent and spot on.  It uses cinematic language to maximum effect.

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood the book is all over the map.

It manages to stay entertaining even at its most erratic, but the inconsistency works against it.

As noted before, the point of view is constantly shifting, sometimes seen through a character’s eyes, sometimes through an omniscient third person point of view, sometimes in what appears to be uncredited narration from Randy, and in several chapters exploring the Lancer story-within-a-story as mediocre pulp fiction typical of movie and TV tie-ins of the era.

Tarantino does not stay consistent with his characters, either.  This indicates adapting scenes from earlier drafts without really smoothing out the fit.

Another point of view issue is Tarantino’s own.

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood the novel reads like the work of an older, very culturally conservative writer.

Many writers will argue that the evils their characters do in their books are not reflections on the author but simply the character acting consistently with who they are.

Kinda true…but that character comes from the writer’s imagination, and the writer needs to think up all those terrible things the character thinks and does and say, so somewhere deep down inside the dungeons of that writer’s mind…those things live and breed.

Rick is depicted as out of step with the new Hollywood and the hippie era in both film and book, but the book reinforces and rewards him for being out of step, unlike the movie whree he finds an entrance to the future.

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood the novel now makes me reexamine all of Tarantino’s earlier efforts, in particular Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained and The Hateful 8 and see if his world view has changed, or if its been there all the time only he concealed it better in the past.

Presentation

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood the book is packaged to look like a mass market paperback from the late 1960s to 1980s (in fact, very specifically 1980s style mass market paperbacks).

It even closes with ads for Oliver’s Story, Serpico, and The Switch, all bona fide movie tie-ins books, as well as Ride A Wild Bronc, a fictitious title, written by Marvin H. Albert.

Albert was a bona fide popular fiction writer under his own name and several pseudonyms, as well as screenplays based on his books for Duel At Diablo, Rough Night In Jericho, Lady In Cement, and The Don Is Dead.  Tony Rome, played by Frank Sinatra in two movies, is probably his best known character.  Several of the books he wrote were movie and TV tie-ins including The Pink Panther and The Untouchables.

The last ad is for the deluxe hardcover edition of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, promising new material and previously unreleased photos.

The editing and copyediting of the book are subpar.  As noted above, tone and consistency fluctuate throughout the book.  A sharper editor would have removed redundancies, smoothed out clunky scenes.

Typographical errors abound throughout.  Early on they mention the Mannix TV show in italics (the book’s standard style for movie and TV show titles) then sloppily put the character’s name, Mannix, in italics as well and, to add further insult to injury, Mannix’ secretary Peggy also gets her name italicized.  Song titles are listed either in italics or unitalicized in quotes; pick a style and stick with it, guys…

Finally, Quentin baby, I gotta say ya missed a bet by not having a cardboard center insert ad for Red Apple cigarettes; that would have completely nailed the retro look.

  © Buzz Dixon

#Once Upon A Time In Hollywood #writing #Quentin Tarantino #Compare And Contrast

[f4liveblogarchives]

Fantastic Four Vol 1 #171

Mon Aug 12 2019 [11:20 PM] Wack'd: Early titles for "Love is a Battlefield" did not inspire confidence

[11:20 PM] Bocaj: Pfft [11:20 PM] Bocaj: Also. Thats just a really striking title [11:20 PM] Bocaj: And I kind of want to make it a truism that people say [11:20 PM] Umbramatic: i would like a golden gorilla to snap my spine, killing me instantly [11:21 PM] Bocaj: "Take care of yourself, Jim. Death is a golden gorilla!" "Hey, it sure is!" [11:21 PM] maxwellelvis: "Death is a Golden Gorilla" almost sounds like something a Venture Bros. character would say. [11:21 PM] Wack'd: So uh, slight problem. This is Rich Buckler's last issue until 1989...buuuuuuuut he's gone inside of three pages, replaced with Pérez. [11:21 PM] maxwellelvis: Though they'd probably throw in a "glorious" in there as well. [11:21 PM] Wack'd: So I guess I do the post-mortem now? [11:22 PM] Bocaj: RIP Rick Buckler. I'll never forget your stick figures [11:23 PM] Bocaj: I shouldn't joke since I just googled and he actually is dead 😐 [11:23 PM] Wack'd: 😟 [11:23 PM] Umbramatic: oh [11:23 PM] Wack'd: So what is there to say about Rich Buckler? He's a good artist. He's pretty expressive. I like the way he draws the Thing. His two-page spreads and collage pages are really neat looking. He handles Kirbyisms pretty well. [11:23 PM] maxwellelvis: But he died in 2017 so he at least didn't die while in the middle of this issue. [11:24 PM] Bocaj: "Buckler drew virtually every major character at Marvel and DC, often as a cover artist" He was mad prolific [11:24 PM] maxwellelvis: Instead he probably either quit or got yanked [11:24 PM] Wack'd: A fundamental problem with doing postmortems for artists at this point is that everybody is still beholden to a house style. Being indistinguishable from your peers is a kind of strength. Any innovations you bring is just either neat new poses, like the Buscema punch, or new layouts. [11:25 PM] Wack'd: Like, I could rag on him for making Reed so beefy, but so what? So does everybody [11:25 PM] maxwellelvis: So now you can get a bit why people fell all over themselves praising guys like Todd McFarlane or Rob Liefeld? [11:25 PM] maxwellelvis: Maybe not Liefeld? [11:25 PM] Wack'd: As a Fantastic Four artist, he's good at drawing things the way they're supposed to be drawn, and finding new things to do in the margins. [11:25 PM] Bocaj: I assume it was an industry wide case of mass hysteria [11:25 PM] maxwellelvis: But McFarlane, Jim Lee, the Savage Dragon guy? [11:25 PM] Bocaj: Like when fifty people see a UFO [11:25 PM] Wack'd: I suspect until we hit the 80s, that's the best I'll be able to say of anybody. [11:26 PM] Bocaj: But its just swamp gas reflecting off of a weather balloon on Venus [11:27 PM] Wack'd: Here's Ben on page three, drawn by Buckler...

[11:27 PM] Bocaj: Thank god that in these modern 2010s we have a diversity of styles but nothing that looks like a pen threw up like some Image stuff being touted as the hotness. Except attempts at photorealism which look like shit [11:27 PM] Wack'd: And here's Ben on page 4, drawn by Pérez.

[11:27 PM] Bocaj: He combed his hair [11:27 PM] Bocaj: And his pecs [11:27 PM] Umbramatic: shiny [11:27 PM] maxwellelvis: And his chin [11:27 PM] Bocaj: He combed his chin [11:28 PM] Wack'd: Yeah. The differences are very slight. [11:29 PM] Wack'd: So anyway, we're doing danger room shenanigans. Ben is cheesed that he's falling down the power rankings [11:29 PM] Wack'd: Sure, Hulk was always a problem, but now he's losing to Thor and Hercules [11:29 PM] Wack'd: "Next thing ya know, a punk like Spider-Man will be mopping the floor with me!" [11:30 PM] Bocaj: The Avengers also had a danger room like room very briefly in the either 60s or 70s. They called it the Toy Box and then never mentioned it by name again [11:30 PM] Wack'd: "Andy's coming!" *Avengers collapse to the floor* [11:31 PM] Bocaj: Pfffft [11:31 PM] Bocaj: Incredible [11:31 PM] Umbramatic: pffff [11:31 PM] Wack'd: Another new power for Sue! She can now collapse numerous separate items into one force field [11:32 PM] Wack'd: Sue also tells Ben that Alicia has really taken to babysitting--"maybe she's trying to tell you something" [11:32 PM] Wack'd: And now I'm wondering if Ben can conceive while he's in Thing form, so thanks for that [11:33 PM] maxwellelvis: They could always adopt. [11:33 PM] Wack'd: True! [11:33 PM] Wack'd: Meanwhile Johnny and Frankie have reconciled, and Frankie says it's too early in the relationship for him to consider leaving the superhero life for her [11:33 PM] Wack'd: And she's okay with it in the meantime [11:34 PM] Wack'd: AND THEN A SPACESHIP CRASHES [11:34 PM] Wack'd: Johnny wants to go see if anybody's hurt, but Frankie asks him not to get involved, since the police have just showed up [11:35 PM] Wack'd: *michael bluth voice* I don't know what I expected

[11:35 PM] maxwellelvis: Frankie, Frankie, this is a comic book and that's a UFO. When cops show up, they tend to get vaporized. [11:35 PM] maxwellelvis: GIR! Unleash The Monkey! [11:36 PM] Wack'd: Golden Gorilla quickly jumps to giant size, and Johnny almost intervenes before remembering that flaming on freaks Frankie out [11:37 PM] Wack'd: And then it decides to climb the Baxter Building [11:37 PM] maxwellelvis: Because of course it does [11:37 PM] Wack'd: Also it grabs Sue [11:38 PM] maxwellelvis: I was just about to say, too bad there aren't any dark-haired women in this comic the gorilla could kidnap. [11:38 PM] Wack'd: Isn't that character traditionally a blonde? [11:38 PM] maxwellelvis: Yeah, but here the GORILLA is a blonde. [11:38 PM] Wack'd: Oooooooh [11:38 PM] Wack'd: Good goof [11:39 PM] maxwellelvis: 

REED: "Well, looks like he's the Avengers' problem now." JAN: "HEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLPPPPPPP!"

[11:39 PM] Wack'd: Anyway something about the golden gorilla's glow is weakening Sue's powers [11:40 PM] Wack'd: Johnny, hearing about what happened on the radio, realizes that he can't keep himself from intervening just because his new girl doesn't like it [11:40 PM] Wack'd: "Why does every man I date eventually ditch me to go fight giant gorillas from space?"

[11:41 PM] maxwellelvis: I hope they have a good explanation for this, because this otherwise feels like a MAJOR overreaction on Frankie's part. [11:41 PM] Umbramatic: that's why i can never get a date [11:42 PM] Umbramatic: damn space gorillas [11:42 PM] maxwellelvis: Like, lady, it's not like he has a secret identity, you knew what you were getting into up front. [11:43 PM] Wack'd: I looked it up and we do eventually get a suitably convoluted explanation [11:46 PM] Wack'd: In the meantime, back to the story at hand [11:46 PM] Wack'd: Sue does a neat thing

[11:46 PM] maxwellelvis: Where'd that apron come from? [11:47 PM] Wack'd: She was making lunch earlier [11:47 PM] maxwellelvis: Ahh [11:47 PM] Wack'd: "I said lunch, not giant gorilla attack!" [11:48 PM] Wack'd: Anyway, Sue closes a force field around the gorilla, forcing it to shrink [11:48 PM] Bocaj: Sure [11:48 PM] Wack'd: I mean keep in mind we've already established that it can alter its size [11:48 PM] Wack'd: As far as Fantastic Four plots go this holds together pretty well [11:49 PM] maxwellelvis: I just remembered Ben Grimm's voice actor for the 1994/1996 cartoon was one of the Far-Out Space Nuts, @Wack'd [11:49 PM] Wack'd: Yes. I totally did that on purpose. You can't prove otherwise [11:50 PM] Wack'd: Anyway, the Four get the gorilla contained and--

[11:50 PM] Wack'd: I'm going to level with you! I did not see this coming!

#1976 #Roy Thomas #Rich Buckler #George Pérez #The Main Book

[racefortheironthrone]

Thoughts on Powers of X #1

Well, I did this for the one, might as well do it for t’other...

Well, any thought that this mini-series might be less weird than its companion was completely blown away by the very first page, which revealed that Powers of X (pronounced Powers of Ten) is going to be taking place in four different times:

Year One (X^0)

Year Ten (X^1)

Year One Hundred (X^2)

Year One Thousand (X^3)

...with each segment increasing by a power of ten, because apparently Hickman has decided he’d like to drive us all mad with math puzzles. That first page is a doozy of design, I must say, laying out four key moments (and four or three key players) in the past and future of mutant-kind, with the layout suggesting a parallel between all of these characters (as well as a suggestion that the guy in the Cerebro mask shares Charles’ lower facial features exactly.

Year One

We then get an un-interrupted six page sequence which, on the surface, seems the most normal but is anything but. The first page shows Charles Xavier strolling through a fair and sitting down on a bench to enjoy the weather and his good mood, although the symbolic connection between the dwarf ringmaster and the strongman and Xavier’s dream of mutantkind is quite ominous. Then someone who looks a lot like Moira McTaggart sits down next to Xavier, and this is where x-fan’s expectations all of the sudden get flipped upside-down. On the face of it, Charles meeting Moira around the same time that he first has his Dream of mutant/human co-existence would be quite normal...except that Moira’s tarot cards are depicting people and places in the Year One Hundred (more on this in a bit), and Moira is talking to Charles very familiarly, but he hasn’t actually met her yet. 

This is where a little alarum bell goes off in my mind shouting “TIME-TRAVEL SHENANIGANS!” 

This much-hyped scene turns out to be Charles reading Moira’s mind, but it’s very clear from what we’ve just seen that this is not the Moira we know. And if this Moira is a clone from the future (I’ll get into that in a bit), the publicity tag-line would make sense: after all, time travel to avert a bad future goes way back in X-Men, and often that time travel has involved things happening to Charles Xavier before he could get his X-Men off the ground. 

However, we’ve never see anyone go back just to tell Charles what happens in the future, even though that would profoundly change the timeline just by changing his mind. Is this what turns Charles Xavier into the be-helmeted man in Year Ten with the very different dream? Or would informing him of the future change or prevent the events of Year Ten?

Year Ten

Probably the most straightforward sequence - and the best argument for why HoX and PoX should be viewed as two halves of the same story - this sequence shows us exactly what happened to Mystique after she went through the Krakoa portal in Washington Square Park in HoX #1. 

It turns out that, as much as even Magneto is feeling the “hope-y, change-y” vibes, he, Mystique, and Professor X all have their own agendas regarding the information - note the running theme of the issue - that she pulled out of Damage Control’s servers. 

Further ominous notes: Charles Xavier has never been a telekinetic, and yet here he clearly uses telekinesis to grab Mystique’s thumb drive. That’s very ominous, especially given what we learn about cloned mutants have multiple, spliced-in mutant powers. Also, Professor X’s comment about “everyone who would live in...a better mutant world...owes something” echoes ominously with the interstitial material’s description of Omega class mutants as a natural resource for the state.

Year One Hundred

The most conventionally super-heroic segment, this section shows us an all-too familiar dystopian scenario, with cyborgized humans and cerberus-like sentinels working together to not merely kill mutants but violate their minds and bodies. Further signs of what they’ve been up to comes in the literally black-brained ex-Hound who was genetically designed for infiltration and subversion of her own people. 

A sign that mutants have adapted to this conflict by abandoning moral principles as well comes in the fact that the dead mutant in question is not only programmed to mind-wipe on death, but is repeating Professor X’s speech from Year 10. In a parallel to that era, it turns out that the mutant group who’ve been interecepted were downloading information from the Nexus 

We also meet our two main characters in this epoch - the red-skinned Nightcrawler lookalike Cardinal (whose Tarot card is the Devil, “the red god and the lost cardinal of the last religion” (no idea what that means)) and the metal-skinned Soulsword-slinging Rasputin (whose Tarot card is the Magician, “the metal metapmorph, the great sword, and the girl with one foot in two worlds” (no idea what that means)). As we will learn later, these are not names but clone-types, because war has its own way of getting us to dehumanize ourselves in the pursuit of victory. 

Important Interstitial #1: The Sinister Line

It wouldn’t be a Hickman comic without infographics, and this one was a doozy: at some point after Year 10, a crisis rocked the mutant nation which caused “the almost universal death or disappearance of senior leaders.” This crisis apears to have been engineered by none other than Mister Sinister in order to motivate the remaining mutant leadership into approving “breeding pits” located on Mars, where he could breed and clone mutants for “aggressive, militaristic traits,” to counter-balance the humans’ HOUND program. That’s a hell of a fall from grace.

We then learn that there were four generations of Sinister clones before the whole thing fell apart in a horrific calamity and yet further declension occurred:

First generation: straight-up clones of existing x-men, although the language of “divergent copies of a...pure, uncompromised X-gene” is as disturbing as you might expect from a Victorian eugenicist. (Are these the mass-produced units following from the prototypes we saw emerging from Krakoan cocoons in HoX #1?) Anyway, they all got turned into child soldiers to defend Krakoa until it eventually fell 30 years later. (Keep this date in mind.)

Second generation: combinations of only two x-genes, “mostly predictable.”

Third generation: combinations of up to five x-genes, apparently were wildly successful against the “Man-Machine Supremacy” and about to win the war, when...

Fourth generation: apparently were “produced with a corrupted hive-mind,” went rogue, destroyed 40% of all mutants, destroyed Krakoa, and then killed themselves taking out Mars and the Sinister pits therein.

And now we learn what our protagonists are: Rasputin is (seemingly) a fourth generation mutant with the combined powers of Quentin Quire, Piotr Rasputin, Unus the Untouchable, Kitty Pryde, and Laura Kinney, rather than Kitty and Colossus’ kid as some had feared. Notably, however, Rasputin doesn’t have the same gifts in the same strength as her progenitors: she’s half as strong a telepath as Quire, half as good as phasing as Kitty, half as good at healing as Laura, and about half as good at force-fields as Unus. The only places where she equals them is in turning into organic steel. BTW, if those powers seem somewhat redundant - why would you need to be intangible, made of organic steel, force-fielded, and self-healing all at the same time rather than focusing on just a few of those - well, clearly the intent was to create a tank and a half.

Meanwhile, Cardinal is a (seemingly third-generation) “outlier,” a failure in the breeding program that gradually got worse and worse. All Cardinals - and it’s not clear whether all Cardinals look like Nightcrawler - are pacifists and have “an obsession with creation myths,” and are extreme communitarians who reject individual identity. (Incidentally, Cardinal is where we get the religious through-line of the issue.)  One question: if he’s a pacifist, why is he carrying a rapier? Genetic holdover from Kurt Wagner?

Which raises an important question...given that more than 60% of generation four were pacifists, how exactly did they carry out so thorough a massacre of their own people?

And finally we learn that all of this was Mister Sinister’s plan...which ended with his execution. I remain skeptical, because while I absolutely buy that Mister Sinister would arrange things so that he could run his eugenics programs, I don’t get why he’d self-sabotage in order to defect to such an unrelentingly hostile enemy. 

Year One Hundred, Part 2

Here’s where we see the structure described as “the ower, the axis, the pillar of collapse and rebirth, the monolith of ascension.” (Keep your eye on that word.) Here we meet Nimrod the Lesser and Omega, and see the other side.

And what we find is a society where the machine is clearly beginning to become the dominant part of the Supremacy, despite a formal pretense at equality, a society where Nimrod makes polite noises at decency (”I am embarrassed and ashamed at what we did in the name of both expediency and annihiliation”), but then claps with childlike glee at the thought of getting to turn mutants into biological databanks.

(In a much less important interstitial, we learn that the HOUND program turned out to be a failure, with the scary ones being “ineffective hunters of their own kind,” and the majority of the black brains defecting en masse.)

Finally, we see an old man Wolverine, along with a green-suited Magneto, a very tree-like Black Tom Cassidy, and a Xorn, rendezvousing with the team to receive the data and bring them in touch with “the Old Man.” Which raises all kinds of questions as to when this happened vis-a-vis Mister Sinister’s betrayal.

Important Interstitial #2

In the wake of the fall of Krakoa, we learn that the once-burgeoning mutant population has been reduced to less than 10,000 refugees living in Shiar protected territory, with only 8 mutants left in the solar system...presumably the group we saw in part 2. 

Year One Thousand

And now we find out what happened to our poor Hound, namely that she’s been stuck in a tube for 900 years, a crumbling historical manuscript beyond the ability of the Librarian to preserve.

As we move outside, we learn something critically important: that the “human-machine-mutant war” ended, with humans reduced to zoo animals kept in a nature preserve. Does this mean mutants won? Or did the machines do away with both their enemies and their allies? 

#xmen #xmen meta #powers of x #spoilers #hoxpox

[blessed-but-distressed]

Cross My Heart (3/31)

All Sheriff Emma Swan wanted was a bit of the quiet life. Why else would she take a job in Storybrooke, Maine, where deer outnumber people? But when a local woman turns up murdered, Emma quickly realizes she might be out of her depth. Enter Killian Jones, 17th century buccaneer turned vampire, who might just have the kind of unique perspective on the crime she is looking for. It’s a shaky alliance, but when Emma’s past comes back to bite her, she might just discover how handy having a vampire around can be. 

A Captain Swan Supernatural Summer AU.

also on ff.net and ao3 

Rated M for Mature Readers. Trigger warnings for blood, gore, violence, sexual references, blood sharing, mental manipulation and major character deaths.

This here is a murder mystery with vampires in it, and it plays out accordingly. You get what you pay for.

This is my contribution to the Captain Swan Supernatural Summer event. Many thanks to my pseudo-attorney @distant-rose for her art, her positivity, and her commitment to getting the gross details just about right. A big thank you also to @kmomof4 for putting the @cssns together, and for asking me to take part. And thanks to Eric Northman, for some inspiration.

Chapter Three

On the whole, Emma tried to avoid spending too much time in morgues.

It wasn’t just the cloying smell of formaldehyde, which clung to her clothes for the rest of the day. Or the thermostat set at a chilly 40 degrees. It wasn’t even the idea of being trapped in a windowless basement with a whole bunch of dead people. Though, gross.

For your garden variety deaths, your heart attacks and car accidents, the body was usually farmed out to the funeral parlor the next town over, who would handle everything. For the more interesting cases though, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner would get involved, transferring the body down South for an autopsy.

Kathryn Nolan’s was an interesting case.

Which meant if Emma didn’t want to wait a month for the official autopsy report, she would have to get in good with the Medical Examiner. The Medical Examiner who was currently dodging her calls.

“I’ll flip you for it?” she pleaded, as Graham rummaged in the break room cabinet in search of more coffee filters.

“You already owe me for the press conference,” he pointed out, emerging from the cabinet empty handed and scowling. “Do we still have that paper towel in the storage closet?”

“They have a Dunks in Augusta…” Emma cajoled.

She sensed a flicker of interest from him, but only a flicker. In the end, his principles won out, and he shook his head defiantly. “I’ve been pulling doubles for you all week. I’m not driving to Augusta and back just because you want to avoid seeing one of your old hook ups.”

She really needed to stop telling him things.

She held his gaze for a long moment, but his resolve didn’t break. Son of a bitch.

“Fine!” Emma relented, reaching over to grab the keys for the patrol car off their hook. “I’ll go. But don’t think I’m bringing you back any Boston Kremes. You’ve shown where your loyalties really lie.”

Graham seemed to realize his grave error then, face contorting in pain at the very mention of his favorite treat.

“Nuh, uh,” Emma warned, waggling a finger in front of his face. “You had your chance. I hope you like jelly, you traitor.”

To call Dr Victor Whale an old hook up was pushing it. It was a one time thing, ages ago. A darkened bar, two counties from home. He was just a charming smile after a long line of shots. It wasn’t her fault he worked at the State Police Crime Lab. It wasn’t like he’d volunteered that information at the time. There hadn’t been a whole lot of talking, from what she remembered. Though if she was being honest, that wasn’t a lot.

He must’ve remembered at least a little, though, because a definite look of panic crossed his face when he saw her standing by the door to the laboratory, file in hand.

“Relax, Doctor,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “I’m not here for a paternity suit.”

He chuckled, but the way his shoulders relaxed underneath his lab coat convinced Emma she’d been right on the money with that one.

“Emma Swan,” she said, reaching over to shake his hand, saving him the trouble of having to remember her name. “I’m actually here about a dead woman.”

“No shortage of those here,” Whale said, breaking contact to stretch his arms wide. “We’ve got every make and model. Cheerleaders. Housewives. Grandmas. Society queens. Or if you’re looking for something a touch more exotic, our night time receptionist is of the walking, talking, bloodsucking variety. So, what can I do you for, Sheriff?”

He’d clocked her badge at her hip, then. Always a good sign to have a medical examiner who noticed the little details.

“You’ll remember mine. Kathryn Nolan? She had her heart missing. I heard you were the one who did the autopsy?”

It was almost comical, how fast his devil-may-care grin slid into a grimace.

“Kathryn,” he nodded solemnly. “Of course.”

“Great. Feel like answering some of my questions?”

He hesitated, running a hand through his short platinum hair. “I feel like I should warn you my full report won’t be ready for a couple weeks. The labs are still backed up from Christmas, and…”

“And I’ve got someone in my town who likes to carve out women's hearts,” Emma interrupted. “I’ll take your work-in-progress.”

He blinked. Just once.

“Alright then. She’s down in the freezer. Follow me.”

The building was labyrinthine, and Emma quickly lost her bearings amidst the institutional grey speckled walls, and rows of identical white doors. But as they descended the stairs down into the sub-basement, she came to understand why they called it “the freezer.” She hugged her arms more tightly around herself as the good doctor led her into a pristine white examination room that had never known the joys of central heating.

Probably for the best, all things considered.

“Kathryn Nolan,” Whale repeated to himself, picking up a clipboard and running his finger down the page. “Seems to be behind door number 3. You want a look at her?”

In Emma’s mind, want didn’t really come into it. Fighting her better instincts, she nodded, then stood back as Whale tucked the clipboard under his arm and pulled open the nearest cold storage locker. With a small grunt of effort he slid the steel drawer free until the figure under the white sheet lay between them.

Dragging her eyes from the shape beneath the sheet, Emma looked up to see Whale watching her. Waiting for some sign of distress, maybe. She figured this was probably the juncture where most people would start with the hyperventilating and the vomiting. Fortunately, Emma was not most people. This wasn’t her first rodeo. And even it is had been, she would never give him the satisfaction.

She held his gaze firmly as he pulled back the sheet.

“This your girl?”

Kathryn looked better than the last time Emma had seen her. Not that that was all that hard. But someone had definitely cleaned her up, removed all the river debris and brushed her hair out.   

“I’m guessing you’ve established cause of death, Doctor?”

His grin was wry. “Well, I might’ve gone to a State School, but even I couldn’t miss the gaping hole in her chest where her heart used to be.”

Emma blanched. “They took out the heart while she was still alive?”

“That’s my working theory. Massive chest trauma. She was definitely dead before she hit the water, anyway. The condition she arrived in made it a little hard to determine whether her other injuries were sustained before or after her swim in the river, but I didn’t spot anything else that looked particularly lethal.”

Seeing the look on Emma’s face, Whale hurriedly continued.

“Of course, there’s every chance she wasn’t conscious at the time. We’re still waiting on the toxicology to come back, but she might’ve been drugged. There weren’t any ligature marks on her wrists or ankles, and that’s rather telling. I doubt your girl would’ve just kept still while someone hacked into her.”

Emma remembered the woman who outpaced her on the treadmill, week after week. No, that didn’t seem like Kathryn’s MO.

“So they used a knife? Like a hunting knife?”

“That’s probably a good bet. I’ve taken some moulds of the grooves left in the ribs. I might be able to narrow that down for you. But my best guess at the moment is you’re looking at a substantial blade. 10 inches maybe. They weren’t fucking around.”

Emma wondered if that was the medically appropriate term.

“Good news is,” Whale pointed out, “whoever your killer is, they probably aren’t too smart, and they’re definitely not medically trained. I did some reading about this. It isn’t easy to rip out a human heart directly from the chest. There’s the sternum and the ribs to contend with. It takes a lot of strength to cut or break through them, and a lot of  time. It’s messy. The victim doesn’t die right away. Compare that with, say, the Aztecs, who practised heart-extraction as part of some rituals. They’d slice below the ribs with a sharp rock, and rip the heart out from below. It’s fast, efficient, and relatively easy to accomplish with little more than a scalpel and your hand.”

He indicated the angry wound marring Kathryn’s chest. “That’s not the route your killer chose to take. Ergo, not too bright.”

Or maybe they just appreciated the spectacle of it.

“You get anything I could use to find this guy?”

Whale shrugged, lifting the sheet back over Kathryn’s face. “After a couple of days in that river, you’d be lucky to find any useful trace evidence. We sent everything we had off for analysis, but I don’t like your odds. ”

Emma frowned. “You think she was in the water the whole time, then? She was killed the day she disappeared?”

“That’s my opinion. It’s hard to say for sure. The decaying process is delayed when the body is submerged in water, especially when it’s this cold. But the body was already showing signs of putrefaction, so she’d probably been out there the full five days. That’s not forgetting the lack of ligature marks, which suggest she wasn’t held for any length of time. If you’re thinking this was a kidnapping, then I’d say they used some kind of drug to incapacitate her, in the short term. Unfortunately, the condition of the body makes it hard to determine how it might’ve entered her system. You’d have to wait for the tox screen to know what you’re dealing with.”

“So you’re saying it could be anyone?” Emma sighed, rubbing her eyes with the heel of her hand.

“Well,” Whale considered. “Anyone with a hunting knife and a certain amount of patience. They didn’t do this by accident. They meant to rip her heart out. If you consider how much strength it would take to saw through the sternum, you’re probably looking at a male, or especially strong woman. Hard to gauge height by the angle of grooves in the ribs, because she was probably on her back at the time, but the marks definitely skew left. So he was probably right-handed.”

“So he’s strong, right-handed man, then?” Emma summed up.

It didn’t really narrow down the field much, and the apologetic look Whale shot her way said he knew it.

“And he probably knew her,” Whale added. “Or surprised her. I didn’t spot a lot of obvious defensive wounds. So whoever they are, they must’ve gotten pretty close before they incapacitated her.”

A strong, right-handed man, who was familiar to her, then.

As if that didn’t describe nearly the entire male population of Storybrooke to a T.

Swallowing back her disappointment, Emma extended her hand again. “Thanks for your time, Doc. I look forward to your full report.”

He looked at her hand, but he didn’t accept it. Instead he let his lips curve into what could only be described a salacious grin. “I get off in an hour. I don’t suppose you-”

“I think that would be a spectacularly bad idea,” Emma said firmly, snatching her hand back and cutting him off before he could dig himself any further. And then, because she couldn’t help herself, “Do you normally try to seduce the police officers investigating the deaths of your patients?”

“Only the hot ones,” he replied, maybe a little too honestly. “And I seem to remember we had fun together.”

Emma doubted he remembered that much. She certainly didn’t.

“Yeah, I’m not really interested in jeopardizing my murder investigation with a repeat performance.”

Whale held a finger to his lips, letting loose what she was sure someone had once told him was a panty dropping smile. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

The next time Emma got it into her head to take a man to bed, she was going to make sure she was across state lines first. Hell, maybe even across the border. Anything to ensure she never, ever found herself in this situation again.

“As tempting as that sounds,” she said, with forced sincerity, “I think I’m gonna pass. No,” she said, holding up a hand as he moved closer. “It’s okay. I can see myself out.”

Twenty minutes and a few wrong turns later, Emma was back in the patrol car again, heater blasting, scrolling through her contacts with numb fingers.

“Graham, hey. Bad time?”

“Is there any other time?” he drawled.

Emma stifled her eye roll. “You’re funny, you know that? I knew I kept you around for a reason.”

“That and my charming personality,” he pointed out.

“Of course,” she agreed. “Can’t forget that. Any chance you put those charms to work and got Michael Tillman to open the garage for you?”

“Yeah, but I don’t know what I’m looking for. Didn’t we already dust and bag everything in Kathryn’s car?”

“We thought so, but back then this was just a disappearance. Now it’s a murder. Check again. Especially the backseat.”

“The backseat?” Graham repeated.

“Kathryn was driving from home to the office when she disappeared. It’s a straight line, and she had no reason to deviate. So either she stopped for someone, or they were already in the car when she got in. Check the backseat.”

“If I find anything, do I earn myself a Boston Kreme?” he asked hopefully.

“You find anything, I’ll buy you a whole box.”

#cssns #cs ff #cs au #cross my heart #cs au ff

[ayearofpike]

The 2010s reprints, all at once

So if Simon & Schuster is going back to the well for Pike’s vampire books, what’s stopping them from bringing back other stories from their one-time best-selling young adult author? Form factor, perhaps. It’s the twenty-first century now, and no self-respecting teen would be caught dead reading a pocket-sized paperback. We need something big and beefy to show that we’re Serious About Literature even as we read about murderous insane girls. Fortunately, he’s written more than a couple continuations that will link together into a handy packaged bind-up. But a lot of these books were originally written twenty years ago or more, when the absence of technology and communications wasn’t something that needed to be addressed to explain why these bastards weren’t better informed. Indeed, new audiences (the ones we in education call “digital natives”) might not even understand the characters’ rationales for action without being able to step back in time and forget what they take for granted.

Is it worth rereading these new editions? How different are they from the originals? Lucky for you, I’ve decided to find out.

Remember Me

Compiles Remember Me, The Return, and The Last Story Simon Pulse, 2010 789 pages ISBN 978-1-4424-0596-7 LOC: PZ7.P626 Re 2010 OCLC: 646299604 Released July 6, 2010 (per B&N)

Since this was the magical bestseller that made Pike who he was in the first place, it shouldn’t be too surprising that not much is changed or updated in this edition. Still, the very nature of the YA market having morphed into the vehicle that allows these stories to be reprinted throws a pretty massive wrinkle (like, even worse than the fact she’s publishing under her white name) into Shari’s expectation that her mom will never read Remember Me. Come on, dude — I guarantee she already read about the vampires. 

The only changes I found through all three stories were giving Lenny the Latino gangbanger a CD player rather than a cassette (because 2010), saving the final story on a jump drive rather than a floppy disk (again, 2010), and swapping Shari’s green pants for blue jeans (I guess to match the outfit Jean is wearing when she falls off the balcony?). One thing that hasn’t changed: Third Book Whitewashin’ Shari is still an asshole. You’re lucky I’m so determined to be thorough, otherwise I would have never reread this shit.

To Die For

Compiles Slumber Party and Weekend Point, 2010 408 pages ISBN 978-0-545-26432-1 LOC: not listed OCLC: 679759450 Released September 1, 2010 (per B&N)

Little weirdness here, as this is a Scholastic joint rather than Simon & Schuster, but the covers are all coordinated, down to the typeface. Not sure whether the two houses worked together to try to sell their books (at Pike’s agent’s suggestion?) or whether Point saw an opportunity to mine some back catalog and tried to copy the existing presentation as close as possible.

The oldest viable stories (read: not Cheerleaders) must have some major rewrites pending for a modern audience, you’d think, but it’s not that drastic. The main complication would be these kids being able to reach someone outside the immediate group and report problems, so Pike quickly writes around that with a single line in each story establishing the locale as beyond cell service. They also both turn emergency CB radios into walkie-talkies, which isn’t even close to the same thing. It’s a little hinky at times, especially in accepting that Lara Johnson has packed an alarm clock instead of a phone, but it does the job.

Most of the rest of the changes hinge on contemporary references. Slumber Party loses its Richard-Pryor-lighting-himself-aflame-while-freebasing joke, but keeps the kids watching Dr. Zhivago at the first fateful party. Weekend has to adjust a lot more — party music is no longer on record, David Bowie becomes Bono (replacing a ten-year-old reference in 1985 with a ten-year-old reference in 2010), Angie’s Datsun is now a Camry, and song leaders are finally just cheerleaders. At times, he’s just wiped out a reference altogether: gone are Pat Benatar, Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw, Fonzie, Michael Jackson, and most tragically the Carpenters, which undoes a joke at Sol’s expense and removes any understandable sense from the passage they once were in. Oh well. At least he spelled “gringo” correctly in this edition.

Until the End

Compiles the Final Friends trilogy (The Party, The Dance, and The Graduation) Simon Pulse, 2011 846 pages ISBN 978-1-4424-2252-0 LOC: PZ7.P626 Unt 2011 OCLC: 693810612 Released August 30, 2011 (per B&N)

I’ll be honest: I’m not sure what this compilation is doing here. Did anybody clamor at the bit for Final Friends even back in the day? I mean, there must have been some demand to let our boy write a trilogy, but even as a teenager I saw the problems embedded in this tale. Simple time-shifting adjustments weren’t gonna fix those. And this is the beefiest book of the lot, maybe to appeal to young readers who like the huge format and want to show off how much they can read. (I had it in the waiting room of my kid’s doctor this week and another dad said it was the biggest book he’d ever seen.) It’s a lot to plow through for the sake of completeness. Still, we’re committed, right?

I got like 200 pages in and did not see a single change — not even in the computer lab where Bubba is “hacking” into the district grade data bank — which made me worried I was going to just be rereading the same stories over again. And 650 pages later, GUESS WHAT. Literally the only difference is that Jessica, in bemoaning her travails with Bill, says she was “trying to seduce a gay guy” instead of merely “a gay.” Like, even the part about it taking all day to transfer 40 megabytes via modem and filling up a school computer’s hard drive is still there. This was NOT done for new fans. But reading it so fast and soon and smushed together did help me realize that The Rock does indeed have a given name. (I’ll save you the research time: Theodore Gordon.)

Bound to You

Compiles Spellbound and See You Later Simon Pulse, 2012 490 pages ISBN 978-1-4424-5971-7 LOC: PZ7.P626 Bo 2012 OCLC: 777602521 Released August 7, 2012 (per B&N)

Maybe this is the only bind-up where the two stories could have been anything. (The Point book: those were his only two under Scholastic, so it makes sense.) There’s a back catalog of literally two dozen books not otherwise committed that they could compile. So why these two together? OK, sure, we’re four years away from the phrase “sexy lizard teens” entering the lexicon, but for sure Scavenger Hunt is better paired with Spellbound than a story about nuclear war survivors time traveling out of regret. See You Later seems like a really obtuse deep cut to me, but if he was committed to it why not pair it with The Midnight Club, which is similarly about love lost to inevitable death? I don’t really see the connection, and am too lazy to do any rationale research. But I’m not actually mad at the books — they’ve shown as two of my favorites in this reread. 

Spellbound, being the oldest of the S&S catalog, does need a little reworking, particularly in the racist elements of an African shaman going to a podunk Old West high school. Pike didn’t take them all out, of course, because we have to know what a dick the boyfriend is by his connection of the dude to savage cavemen. However, the lack of cell phones is very glaring in the bits where they’re trying to find the brother/potential murder victim, and Cindy has to sit around the hospital waiting to be paged. In 2012 it’s inconceivable that high school kids wouldn’t have SOMETHING. You tried to reach the brother at his house, at his friend’s, at his girlfriend’s ... did you call him directly? Such a simple fix: “He’s not answering his cell.” It probably would have made the unease even stronger.

See You Later, hinging as it does on the main character understanding a video game, has its own needs for updating, and does it better than the Final Friends remake. Still, it’s a little slapdash. Becky works in an electronics store instead of a record store, but do these places even sell physical media computer games anymore? Even six years ago that shit was all download-only. And Ray STILL works in a bookstore ... do those still exist? Mervyn’s definitely doesn’t; they went bankrupt in 2008. As for the game itself, it requires 12 gigs of RAM rather than the paltry megabyte, which is what my newish machine runs six years later. (At the time I had ... two gigs?) Also, in the original Mark asked who won the 2010 World Series, which isn’t the future anymore in 2012 ... but it’s weird that he’s now asking about 2020, just eight years off rather than twenty. Most unsettling, though, is how the tenor of international violence rhetoric still rings true for the setting of this story, even though we’re not worried about Communists anymore. The Cold War is long over, but we’ve swung through tolerance and hope and are right back on fear.

Chain Letter

Compiles Chain Letter and The Ancient Evil Simon Pulse, 2013 456 pages ISBN 978-1-4424-7215-0 LOC: PZ7.P626 Ch 2013 OCLC: 852941511 Released July 23, 2013 (per B&N)

Chain Letter was also not originally published by S&S, so it’s interesting that they’ve gotten the rights to print it in this volume. (Though they were compiled in the UK in 1994, so maybe it wasn’t too hard.) By now, though, it feels like they’re reaching, as the teen fiction world shifts yet again to futuristic dystopias and Pike doesn’t really have anything like that. Thirst was on its way out too; the fifth book appeared just before this, and we’ll note that even though Pike didn’t finish the story the sixth has yet to emerge. Curse you, unpredictable teen girls!

Not too much is different from the original editions here. Obviously Pike was throwing in his timely references that had to be cut for understandability (Nastassja Kinski?), but by Chain Letter 2 he’d learned to rein that in. Also, there’s a moment in the first one where Alison yells “Hate you!” at the attacking Caretaker, which always struck me as awkward. This version changes it to “Screw you!” which makes me think Pike originally wrote it as “Fuck you!” and had to bowdlerize for YA. Of course they have to throw some shade at snail mail, too, since that’s how the letters arrive in the first place. 

But the main differences are cassette recorders and phones. Obviously the kids aren’t going to tote around a whole bunch of old-school tools when we are now six years into the smartphone era. There’s some nice cleaning up in The Ancient Evil, writing around the idea that people need to (or even CAN) look numbers up in the phone book, but in lots of cases it just makes things awkward. Like, why is Joan going after the driving controls to turn the incriminating recording off if it’s on Kipp’s phone in the backseat? Why do Alison and Brenda have to sit around the kitchen waiting for a return call? Why is Kipp waiting until he gets home to check his voicemail? Did he seriously leave his phone in his room while he ran to the store and left a seven-year-old sister alone at the house? It just makes less and less sense.

You might have seen somewhere online a mention of another compilation, collecting Last Act and Master of Murder. This book does not actually exist. The ISBN and OCLC numbers associated with the title both lead to a British printing of the second half of Final Friends, by Hodder Publishing. I emailed the house just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, and they responded that they’ve never printed these two stories together. There’s no record of it anywhere else, certainly not on Simon & Schuster’s Pike page, and reviews I’ve found where people have attempted to buy this collection attest to the fact that they’ve actually received a copy of Final Friends Part 2 But Not Book 2 Even Though the Second Half of Book 2 Is In It.

There also used to be another one named on Wikipedia called Time of Death, which was supposed to compile Bury Me Deep and Chain Letter, but why the hell would they do that when Chain Letter has its own sequel already? There’s not any verifiable record of such a book anywhere online, not even a flawed cross-listing like the first. 

So fuhgeddaboudit. I’m done reading compilations.

[thebeatles-world]

Patrick Swayze's Unknown Son

The alleged son is Jason Whittle, who was born in 1973 and now is 44 years old. The following two pictures show, first, Whittle and, second, Swayze.

Whittle grew up not knowing he was Swayze's son. His mother, Bonnie Kay Whittle, was 15 years old when she allegedly had a one-night stand with 20-year-old Swayze in 1972. Bonnie Kay died of cancer in 2012, and the article seems to indicate that she informed Jason only a short time before she died.

Swayze died in 2009, so it seems likely that he never knew about Jason Whittle. If Swayze had known, then his estate lawyer surely would have advised him to give Jason Whittle at least a token $1 in the will to prevent him from challenging the will. Swayze left his entire estate to his wife Lisa and left nothing to his other Swayze relatives. Now Whittle is claiming a big part -- perhaps half -- of Swayze's estate, which is estimated to be $40 million.

The other Swayze relatives claim that Lisa used abusive methods to coerce Patrick to change his will seven weeks before his death to give everything to her.

Globe

reports that some of those stiffed relatives now feel gratified that Whittle might take much of the estate from Lisa.

======

I have a copy of Swayze's autobiography

The Time of My Life

, and I intend to write an article about it for this blog. The book says that in 1972 he was in a touring ice-skating show called Disney on Parade. That's how in 1972 he would have visited Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri, where Bonnie Kay lived. Jason Whittle probably can prove that Disney on Parade was in that location exactly nine months before he was born.

The book includes the following passages about Swayze's experiences in 1972 (pages 30-32).

The dancers made $125 a week, which felt like a lot of money, especially since we all doubled, tripled, and quadrupled up in our living arrangements on the road. Most of the dancers were women, and of the few who were men, even fewer were straight men. So the opportunities for me in terms of finding women to date were just about endless. Unfortunately, I still didn't know how to communicate with women, or anybody else. I just sounded like an egotistical ass whenever I talked, as I couldn't stop going on and on about myself. For one thing, my knee [injured in a high-school football game] kept blowing up after each performance, the joint swelling painfully due to the rigors of the show. .... It got so bad that I had to go to the hospital in every city to get the fluid drained from my knee. And the more knee trouble I had, the more I had to talk about it. But after I had initially alienated just about everyone with my incessant blathering, people started realizing that I wasn't really egotistical, just insecure.

Apparently, Swayze was extraordinarily promiscuous during this 1972 tour. He hit on many girls who crossed his path and managed to seduce many of them.

Although Swayze was an extraordinarily handsome and talented young man, I think that he didn't study much in high school and felt intellectually inadequate. He was too busy with dance and athletics to read and study. I think that he often felt stupid in conversations with women in conversations about general knowledge -- history, current events and so forth.

In this regard, Swayze was quite similar to the character Johnny Castle in

Dirty Dancing

in his relationship with intellectual Baby Houseman. His personal experience and feelings of intellectual inferiority enabled him to play the role so well.

I think that Swayze's insecurity was a major reason why in 1972 he involved himself with much younger girls, such as 15-year-old Bonnie Kay. He was intellectually inhibited by older, more sophisticated and sarcastic women.

I began dating one woman who was in the show, a good-looking blonde who had a party-queen reputation. She was a wild one, the kind of girl who liked trouble, and at first I was drawn to her dangerous air. Part of me just wanted to see if I could win her, but once I did, I realized she wasn't at all the kind of woman I was looking for. It sounds corny, but I really did believe in Snow White and Prince Charming -- I wanted to find a woman whom I could ride off into the sunset and share my life with.

While Swayze was touring in 1972, he maintained also a long-distance platonic relationship with Lisa Haapaniemi, a 16-year-old girl, a dance student in his mother's dance school in Houston, Texas.

I'm not sure I as even aware of it at the time, but subconsciously I was comparing all the women I met to Lisa.

Beyond sharing Patrick's love of dance, Lisa did not threaten him intellectually, because she was so young and was likewise a poor student.

Lisa was back in Houston having problems of her own. She'd been having a lot of trouble sleeping, and her insomnia eventually got so bad she had to drop out of high school. She'd always had trouble fitting in, and now, with the onset of a creeping depression, she felt even more alienated. This was the beginning of what she later called her "blue period".

Lisa argued with her parents and so came to live for two weeks with Patrick's mother, who was Lisa's dance teacher. During those two weeks, Patrick happened to come home from his tour for several days. Lisa and Patrick already knew each other from their participation in his mother's dance school.

During those two weeks, Patrick dated other girls but also became sexually involved with Lisa in his home.

My mom didn't know it, but the attraction between Lisa and me had been growing for some time. She had seemed indifferent to me all those months [of Disney on Parade], but it turned out she was interested in me, too -- she was just shy, and acting like she didn't care was her way of covering it up. But during those two weeks when Lisa stayed with us, and and I took every opportunity to steal time together. When Mom was in the kitchen, we'd be behind the swinging door in the dining room, making out. After everyone n the house had gone to sleep, we'd sneak out to the living room and fool around on the couch. We still weren't technically "dating", but, man, we couldn't get enough of each other. In fact, I had been seeing other girls -- and the very day Lisa came to stay at our house I had a date with a girl named Mimi, which led to an uncomfortable moment. ... I'd asked Mimi out for that Saturday night, to go to the Houston Rodeo. When Lisa moved into our house that afternoon, Mom expected me to give her a ride to the rodeo too.  .... To my embarrassment, Mimi kept tickling my ear and kissing me all the way to the rodeo, as Lisa sat silently. ...

Soon, however, Patrick settled down with Lisa. As far as the public knows, he ended this promiscuous period of his life. Patrick married Lisa in 1975 and they remained married until his death in 2009.

========

When 15-year-old Bonnie Kay happened to cross paths with 20-year-old Patrick Swayze in Missouri, their encounter might have had nothing to do with Disney on Parade. Perhaps she was a

Candy Stripe

volunteer at a hospital where he had fluid drained from his knee. Since he hit on girls everywhere and was becoming a pickup artist through frequent practice, he might have seduced Bonnie Kay in one day -- and she never even saw the Disney on Parade show. (This is just my idle speculation.)

Her [Bonnie Kay's] mom, Lebetta Whittle, tells Globe, ... "She [Bonnie Kay] told me he [Patrick] wanted her to run away with him," Lebetta recalls. "But she was way too young and told him he could get in trouble for doing that. It was a short relationship, and she said she stayed there all night."

The fact that Bonnie Kay's mother has the last name Whittle indicates that Bonnie Kay never married.

When 15-year-old Bonnie Kay became pregnant in 1972, abortion still was illegal in Missouri. On January 22, 1973, the US Supreme Court ruled that abortion would henceforth be legal during at least the first three months of pregnancy. The

Globe

article does not specify Whittle's birthday, but it's likely that Bonnie Kay was a little more than three months pregnant on January 22, 1973. If so, then abortion remained illegal for her.

Although Bonnie Kay's fling with Swayze lasted only about one day, she did learn his identify. Her brother Ron told the

Globe

that she had Swayze's name and phone number written her arm when she came home from her night with him. At that time, though, Swayze was a nobody -- not worth the trouble of tracking him down to try to prove his paternity and collect child-support payments. Bonnie Kay kept Patrick's identify secret through the years, but sometimes was heard to remark that her seducer Patrick "was doing acting".

It's quite possible that she deliberately passed on any abortion possibilities anyway, because she considered an abortion to be a murder of a baby. That was an opinion to which many young women adhered even when they become unhappily pregnant -- and that still is true.

Many such young women who got pregnant dropped out of high school, gave birth, kept the child, and eventually married another man who adopted the child. The child was taught to respect that other man as the family's father. Such women considered such a difficult solution to their problem to be the moral solution.

The fact that Bonnie Kay kept the identity of Jason's biological father until perhaps her deathbed -- even though she knew that he was famous and rich Patrick Swayze -- suggests to me that she adhered stubbornly to some very strong moral convictions. It seems that she blamed herself for her foolish teenage fling and did not want to cause trouble for her own relationships or for the Swayzes' marriage.

======

The story of Jason Whittle is an ironic counter-point to the movie

Dirty Dancing,

which portrayed sexual flings and subsequent abortions positively -- and which made Patrick Swayze an international star. If Baby Houseman had become pregnant from her fling with Johnny Castle, she certainly would have obtained an abortion and continued on with her planned life, graduating from college and becoming a career woman.

In contrast, Bonnie Kay probably dropped out of high school and lived a lower-middle-class life as an unmarried mother -- or as a common-law wife to another high-school dropout. Even after she realized, many years later, that her son's biological father was the actor Patrick Swayze, she kept that secret to herself out of respect for her family.

Swayze did not became even moderately famous until 1985, when he starred in the televised historical drama

North and South

. By that time, Jason was already about 12 years old. When Swayze became a superstar from

Dirty Dancing

in 1987, Jason was already about 14 years old.

After Jason became an adult, he probably began to hear comments that he looked like the now famous actor Patrick Swayze. However, Jason might have suspected that his biological father was another man in the vicinity who had similar looks.

Jason would not have imagined any possibility that his mother ever crossed paths with Swayze -- much less ever had sex with him -- when she was a 15-year-old girl living with her parents in a Missouri town.

Decades would pass before the adult Jason would be able to sit down at a computer and google "Patrick Swayze" and instantly receive a wealth of information about Swayze's life. Before Google, Jason would not have been able to discover that Swayze was touring with Disney on Parade throughout the USA in 1972, when Jason was conceived.

======

Because Swayze died not knowing about this biological son, Swayze left his entire $40 million estate to his wife Lisa and did not even mention this unknown son in his will. Swayze did not explicitly exclude Jason from his estate.

Because Bonnie Kay did not inform Jason until after Swayze had died, Jason eventually might able to acquire as much as half of Swayze's $40 million estate.

article here: http://dirty-dancing-analysis.blogspot.com/2017/07/patrick-swayzes-unknown-son.html

let me know if you guys think it’s true or not, I decided to share this since this seemed interesting to read... 

#the outsiders fandom #patrick swayze #Ponyboy Curtis #darry curtis #sodapop curtis #dally winston #johnny cade #steve randle #two-bit mathews

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

I got some things to say about Child Within and Death of Vermin

Back when ASM v5 #2 got released I had problems with how Peter and the Lizard were characterized, specifically due to the shadow of Shed and it’s infanticide cannibalism. To dive deeper I looked at the Child Within and Death of Vermin story arcs by DeMatteis. My thinking was we are discussing Spider-Man’s reactions to a character who was a man mutated into an animal hybrid who engaged in cannibalism and well, there was already a precedent for that in Vermin.

 However in diving into the stories there were other things I wanted to say about the stories more generally.

 The big thing I should qualify is that these are good storylines but those come with certain qualifyers.

 They are not badly written on a craftsmanship level per se but that is dependent upon whether you look at the stories in isolation vs. within the broader context of Spider-Man’s history or from the which particular character’s perspective.

 The thing is DeMatteis who authored both stories (as well as KLH which Child Within is a pseudo sequel to) created Vermin and he was plainly an author’s pet character. I dunno from where DeMatteis’ affection for Vermin comes from but it’s plainly obvious from KLH, Child Within, Death of Vermin and his Captain America run from which Vermin originated.

 And that’s the big deal when it comes to Death of Vermin. The Death of Vermin is kind of a Vermin and Ashley Kafka story first and a Spider-Man story second. It isn’t that Spider-Man doesn’t appear, or is passive within the story or unimportant. Its more like it’s not his story, it’s Vermin’s and Ashley Kafka’s. Whilst DeMatteis’ later invention of Judas Traveller was an example of an author indulging themselves most of the Traveller stories still were rooted in their focus upon Peter and/or Ben Reilly’s characters and used Traveller as an opponent or plot device for exploration of said characters. Death of Vermin provides a weird reversal wherein it is better written than...well every scene Traveller showed up in, possibly better written than every story featuring Traveller (except stories where he appears only briefly, e.g. ASM #400). And yet it places the majority of focus upon characters other than Spider-Man himself.

In truth the story could be regarded more as a wrap up arc for Captain America than a Spider-Man story, but even that’d not be wholly accurate. There is greater resonance offered to Spider-Man’s presence via his connection to Ashley Kafka via Child Within and to Vermin via Kraven’s Last Hunt. However Cap could’ve arguably had resonance with Vermin too from his interactions with him and of course Zemo’s presence in the arc makes much more sense if this was Captain America.

Possibly the solution would’ve been if Death of Vermin was a mini-series/crossover that featured both heroes. But in truth either way it just underscores the fact that this wasn’t truly Spider-Man’s story, nor Cap’s. It was Zemo’s (a non-Spider-Man character), Ashley Kafka’s (a then very new addition to Spidey’s word) and most of all Vermin’s (a Captain America character then recently adopted into Spider-Man).

So in truth Death of Vermin was...a DeMatteis pet project arc.

And hey if you like Kafka, if you like Vermin, if you like Zemo and if you liked Dematteis Cap run then this is for you. Problem is apart from those last two I don’t think the audience for those first two was big enough or enthusiastic enough to warrant a story like this. More poignantly if you are telling a multi-part story arc within the pages of a main monthly Spider-Man title...shouldn’t Spider-Man himself be the main point? Shouldn’t aiming it for an audience who first and foremost want to see Spider-Man and important/notable Spider-Man characters get focus be the point?

All this in spite of the story again not being bad per se. It’s more that it’s bad from a certain point of view. But that point of view is from the pov of a Spider-Man fan/reader wanting to read about Spider-Man in a Spider-Man title.

That being said this was just one arc and at the time there were after all 3 other monthly Spider-Man titles to choose from. Perhaps the mentality at the time was that there was space to do more different stuff. If you didn’t want to read a story arc where Vermin and/or Ashley Kafka to all intents and purposes are the main characters and would rather read a story where it was in fact Spider-Man then you had the chance to do that every three weeks before or after the publication of any given part of Death of Vermin.

If you do feel it’s bad though or at least overly indulgent of DeMatteis remember that even the best writers make mistakes or are prone to that from time to time. Unlike with Slott DeMatteis didn’t do that stuff routinely, Vermin, Scrier and Judas Traveller were basically it. And for Ashley Kafka specifically it did add a lot of character development to her to be fair, character development pissed away by Slott when he killed her off.

Moving on we have Child Within.

Again...an incredibly mixed bag.

There are two major retcons to Child Within and one works great the other not so great.

The gist of Child Within is that DeMatteis compares and contrasts Peter, Harry Osborn and Vermin in terms of them coming face-to-face with traumatic childhood memories they’ve been repressing.

For Vermin this is the realization that he was sexually abused by his father. This is another example of DeMatteis wanting to develop Vermin because he loves the character but in context of the story it works as effectively as the ways in which Kraven and Peter and Mary Jane are contrasted against one another along with Vermin in KLH.

For Harry, he realizes that his father was physically and verbally abusive towards him, even before he got the Goblin formula. Additionally Harry remembers Peter’s identity as Spider-Man and comes to grips with the fact that his father killed his friend Gwen Stacy.

For Peter he realizes that he’s always had a guilt complex even pre-dating Uncle Ben’s death stemming from the internalized blame and guilt he felt over his parents’ deaths. I also suspect this story choice was connected to the soon to be published return of Peter’s parents in ASM #365.

It is Harry and Peter’s revelations that are specifically retcons.

Ironically both (more or less) date back to the same moment from the same issue: ASM #39 (the first Romita Senior issue and reveal of Norman as the Goblin). In that issue Peter and Harry bond over their childhoods, with Harry telling Peter he and his father were pals up until a few years ago (the subtext being that his Dad changed due to the Goblin formula). Peter for his part claims he doesn’t even remember his father since he died when he was too young to remember.

Later stories would further explore Peter’s childhood with varying levels of contradictions. Half the time (such as when Howard Mackie or Paul Jenkins were writing the series) it seemed Peter was a young boy in the 4-7 age range when his parents died and he came to live with Ben and May. The other half the time Peter was a baby or a toddler when that happened.

Confusing matters more is the fact that even the stories that put Peter in roughly the same age range don’t jive with one another. Roberto Aguirre Sacasa and Stan Lee both wrote stories depicting Peter as a baby or a toddler but whilst Lee claimed that the Parkers died whilst Peter was in May and Ben’s care (prompting them to continue that as his guardians), Sacasa depicts them as picking Peter up from somewhere after the fact and resolving to raise him. Yet other writers (like Michelinie) depict Peter as not remembering his parents yet still apparently knowing certain details of his life with them.

As far as canon goes though I think it only really makes sense to side with Stan on this one. He established Peter as not remembering his parents in ASM #39 and his account of Peter’s early years from ASM Annual #5 was the first such account and jives with issue #39. Plus you know...he created Spider-Man.

DeMatteis’ retcons in Child Within thus contradict both peter and Harry’s established childhoods but whilst Harry’s is workable and enriching, Peter’s is nonsensical and reductive. DeMatteis is a superb writer and Spider-Scribe but like I said, nobody’s perfect. Even Stan and Steve had the odd faux pas with the characters.

With Harry Child Within was the start of DeMatteis’ character arc for him which would culminate in Spec #200, with the issue and arc over all regarded as the best Harry centric story of all time, and one of the best Spidey stories of all time to boot. The storyline developed Harry beautifully as a character, making him a complex yet sympathetic villain.

At the same time it’s contradictions to ASM #39 and what we thought we knew of Harry made sense. He was repressing all this stuff so of course there would be contradictions. More poignantly ASM #40 depicted flashbacks wherein Norman himself is clearly out of touch with the reality of his past relationship with his son and the picture they paint doesn’t exactly showcase Harry and Norman as pals either.

So there was already something of a precedent for Harry or the Osborns in general having major memory problems, drugs, goblin formulas or blows to the head or not.

And you know thematically this worked really well for Harry. Painting him as this messed up helped explain his outings prior to that as a villain, his initial antagonism towards Peter, his drug abuses and his devotion to his father and even his own family. After all he was a devoted father to his own son Normie. Could he perhaps have been seeking subconsciously a more positive relationship with his own son than he had with his father (a father who his son was named for)?

If you take Child Within in isolation the retcons to Peter’s own past and how Harry was key to awakening them work really beautifully in symmetry and contrast with Harry. These two friends inadvertently unearthed painful childhood memories connected to their parents which had subconsciously shaped them into who they were today. And in awakening those memories it had set them on a path towards their futures to. In Peter’s case it was a form of closure, or at least the start of a healing process wherein he could walk forwards in life more whole than he was before, more able to be a god family man. In Harry’s case it started him on a road to madness as self destruction that would scar his family. This is of course summed up in the closing pages of part 6 wherein we get complimenting splash pages of Peter brightly and triumphantly swinging away from his parents’ graves whilst Harry scared and sad flies away from his living wife and child.

Great writing. Beautiful writing.

In isolation.

The problems then arise when you put the story within the wider context of Spider-Man’s established history, the defining themes of the character and the genre considerations for a superhero series like Spider-Man.

See it is theoretically possible for Peter to have blamed himself for his parents’ deaths and then repressed that blame creating the examples of guilt we’d seen for 30 odd years by that point.

If he was old enough.

But as I said ASM #39 established Peter didn’t remember his parents because he was too young and the very next elaboration upon that we see is in ASM Annual #5 where Peter is at a humungous push maybe 3 years old tops. Both written by the same person before anyone else says anything about Peter’s early years and that same person happens to be the co-creator of Spider-Man himself.  

At which point you have to say “This makes no sense, of course he wouldn’t blame himself he wouldn’t be old enough for that to have happened.”

In fact in Spec #254, DeMatteis does another psychedelic story in which Peter symbolically revisits the moment Uncle Ben informed him of his parents’ deaths and in said scene Peter is in a crib, which again would render him too young to remember his parents.

Spec #254

You could always explain this one away as a glorified dream sequence but it’s food for thought.

There is an even more pressing problem with the retcon though.

The retcon clearly leans hard upon the interpretation that Spider-Man is defined by guilt. That in fact guilt is the root of his motivations to be a hero. This story goes further as to essentially say up until now Peter has essentially been a hero due to...well....not getting enough therapy over the years.

Child Within inadvertently codifies that Spider-Man is Spider-Man not because Uncle Ben died so much as because Spider-Man has if not a mental illness then very serious unresolved childhood issues which have unhealthily manifested in his internalizing blame and guilt and alleviating those feelings by...risking his life all the time...

...er...can you see how this is something of a problem within the big picture of the series?

This isn’t saying Spider-Man is a hero in spite of some serious condition he has or he is able to take the unfortunate circumstances of an illness and use it to propel him into something positive.

This story essentially (though perhaps unintentionally) spelled out that Peter has been suffering with something very serious for the entire time we’ve known him and that is the actual reason he is a superhero. The idea being that if Peter was to treat this, was to make himself well or had been well the entire time he WOULDN’T have been a hero in the first place. Because he’d have lost the root of the thing that compelled him to be Spider-Man in the first place.

I adore DeMatteis but in this respect Child Within can be seen as his most reductive Spider-Man story.

This retcon invalidates/undermines Uncle Ben’s death and Spider-Man’s actual origin story and the central message of great power=great responsibility.

It presumes Spider-Man’s sense of responsibility is interchangeable with or stems from a inherent sense of guilt when this is just plain not the case and goes against the ‘rules’ of the superhero genre. Or at least the rules as they apply to a character like Spider-Man.

Spidey is supposed to be an everyman, someone to relate to and be inspired by. In this sense codifying his motivation and central message as one about learning to use the powers you have responsibility to help others makes sense and is powerful and resonant. When it’s actually nothing more than the by-product of a serious personal issue that he’s unhealthily left unresolved you seriously mess with the foundation and heart of the character.

It is the same kind of nonsense which presupposes Batman must be insane and traumatized and have unresolved issues to go about being a crime fighter in a bat costume, as opposed to someone who went through something bad and used his pain to safeguard innocent people from the source of that pain, using his costume as a (highly effective) battle tactic.

To be honest I think this change to Spider-Man’s early years and driving emotions came from again a place of indulgence on DeMatteis’ part. I have spoken at length about how Slott indulged himself so much during his run so I want to make it clear I don’t mean DeMatteis indulged himself in that sort of way.

Rather I think he was maybe putting a lot of himself or people he knew or stories he’d encountered which struck deep within him into Peter’s backstory as seen in Child Within. It was a sincere attempt to develop the character and dive into who he is and why, he just came at it from an ill considered and problematic angle.

Moreover the story talks at length about needing to admit to and deal with these repressed childhood memories and get help to cope with them.

But then...DeMatteis doesn’t depict Spider-Man doing that. There is no ongoing subplot of Spider-Man coping with this newfound knowledge that the root of his tendency to blame himself for everything stems from this messed up childhood trauma. It comes up a little bit in DeMatteis’ run as throwaway lines but it essentially goes uncommented upon in consequent Spider-Man stories in other titles and even within the same run by DeMatteis that established it. I don’t even recall it coming up much when his parents seemingly come back after being presumed dead, though I admit it’s been a long while since I checked those stories out.

Is that a faux pas on the part of later writers and editors. Kind of but this is also a case of something that really doesn’t belong in Spider-Man lore being essentially ignored because it has to be for the character to function properly. But if you buy into the Child Within retcon (which I do not advise you on doing) it paints the horrible picture that Spider-Man basically didn’t address this trauma and backslide into old habits of blaming himself and repressing the root of why that was the case.

To be honest, this is honestly why I always advise against doing stories with the main or highly recurring supporting characters who essentially show up every issue wherein you put them in situations where they’d need a lot of therapy over a long period of time. It’s just not practical to do a story like that when you got to put out a monthly (in this case basically weekly) action adventure series.

Mini-series like Lost Years with characters who exist for that story alone or with infrequently recurring villains like Vermin or less vital supporting characters ever, where you can park them and let us presume they will be getting better off panel, is fine.

But this just wasn’t practical at all for Spider-Man.

What compounds the issue is that we see in Death of Vermin the deep scars childhood trauma results in and how it takes a lot of time, effort and hardship to recover from them. But here Spider-Man is basically fine a few months (publishing time, less time in-universe) later just...over it.

Both stories are ultimate a gigantic testament to how great writers can still make missteps, even ones born out of good intentions and creative instincts, whilst the end results can still possess plenty of merit nevertheless.

#Spider-Man #peter parker #J.M. DeMatteis #Vermin #Edward Whelan #Marvel #marvel comics #Ben Reilly

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #499

Top Ten Everything Ever

Four hundred and ninety-nine. That’s how many weeks I’ve been doing this four. Four hundred and ninety-nine.

Next week is the big five-oh-oh and I’m doing something typically stupid, but I wanted to make it a real celebration. That means for the next three weeks you’re going to get some rather meaningful and special Tops Ten; lists that have been long in the making, or that are just bonkers-level awkward for me to do. Like this one.

I mean, I’ve ranked films, games, fictional guns, and robots that made me cry. How much longer can I do this for? How many more weeks am I going to put myself through this?

Give me a barrel with bottom unscrap’d.

There’s nowhere to go but up, ladies and germs, and so I present to you the list to end all lists. The most definitive list possible. A list of everything. A list of my favourite things in all of time and space. A list of the official best things ever.

I mean, what more is there to say? This covers everything. I’ve tried to avoid it being really specific to one film or one person. And, of course, it doesn’t include people I know in real life, or events that have happened to me. These are, in their own way, big, sweeping things; film series, franchises, bands, stories that have in their own way changed my life. Just the greatest things I’ve come across in my nearly 40 years on this planet.

And you can’t say fairer than that.

The Transformers comic: this should be obvious to anyone who knows me well, but there’s no greater influence in my life, in terms of storytelling or entertainment, than Transformers. And of all the variants branching off from the Prime Timeline (pun very much intended), it’s the comic that’s greatest. Whether it’s the melodrama of Simon Furman or the intricate plotting of James Roberts, I’ve been addicted to the Transformers comic for the vast majority of my life. It has fundamentally shaped how I consume fiction and the sorts of things I’m into. It’s also really changed how I write, and, in fact, the original Marvel run is at least partly responsible for the fact that I write at all. I drew Transformers comics as a kid. I planned out elaborate multi-issue arcs before I was a teenager. I wrote detailed synopses and snatches of scripts for Transformers movies that would never be made. And I robbed, wholesale, motifs and lines of dialogue for the original books and comics I was working on too. It changed my life. It’s not hyperbole to say Transformers is the single biggest piece of fiction I’ve ever touched. Till all are one indeed.

The films of Steven Spielberg, 1975-1982: Spielberg is my favourite filmmaker, but it felt a bit weird to just say “Steven!” as one of the entries here. So instead I’ve decided to hone in on his early career, despite the fact that knocks out one of the biggest influences of my life, Jurassic Park. But everything I love about Spielberg is in these movies. His skill with a camera, his love of light, his great eye for casting, his way with actors; I mean, Close Encounters, which I probably first saw aged about twelve, is just a microcosm of all my interests in my teens: aliens, government conspiracies, determined men going on a crazed quest, and above all a pervasive sense of hope and optimism. Spielberg’s craft is exemplary, but that’s also true of many of his peers. His flair for action scenes and love of spectacle is entertaining, but there are many directors of whom you could say the same. What I love about him – what keeps bringing me back to him – is his warmth and optimism, his belief in the best of us. Even in his darkest movies, in Schindler’s List and A.I. and Munich (which has one of the bleakest endings of his career), there’s still joy and warmth and something worthwhile and wholesome to fight for. And whilst Raiders is a thrill-ride and E.T. an emotional tour-de-force, all of his preoccupations are encapsulated in Jaws, a tense horror film, a buddy-comedy, an entertaining rollercoaster, an acting masterclass. But it’s still Jurassic Park that made me want to make a movie.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe: so when I was a kid I was reading Transformers and Ghostbusters and other Marvel-published adaptations, but not really any actual Marvel comics. However, as a result, I became very loosely familiar with who Iron Man and Doctor Strange were (and Spidey of course) through references and back-up strips, and that time Death’s Head fought Tony’s nephew Arno Stark. No, when I started reading “proper” comics – mainstream superhero stuff – it was DC. I loved Batman, so I bought Batman, and that was a gateway to the rest of the DCU. However, despite the successes of the various DC movie adaptations, it’s the MCU that really, really got its hooks into me. For one, they’re really good adaptations, well-cast, with some great set-pieces. But the interconnected stuff is what really sings. Not just the characters popping up in each others’ movies, or even the overall arc leading up the crossover events; no, it was the actual shared-ness of it, the way the destruction of SHIELD had an impact, or the Sokovia Accords, or Asgard, Skrulls, magic… everything has an impact, an effect. And sure, it’s incredibly good fun to follow the breadcrumbs and try to work out where things are heading. As we enter a new phase – literally and figuratively – I just can’t wait to find out what’s next.

Grant Morrison’s Batman: talking about interconnectivity, no one does it better – or weirder – than Morrison. His Batman arc – and I’m referring to the character not the title, as it spans multiple series and even, arguably, includes work he did on JLA years earlier – is a web of connected theories, images, themes, events, and references. What does the Zur-En-Arrh graffiti in Gotham mean, not just in the here-and-now, but also as a long-standing reference to decades of Batman’s past? The anticipation of uncovering the next breadcrumb, the excitement of deciphering the next reference; it was long-form storytelling as a form of existential theatre, and it was sublime. But he also did two things that have utterly changed my view of the character. On the meta level, he presented a Batman where everything was canon; the grim thirties Shadow-inspired vigilante, the goofy fifties space adventures, the hairy-chested love-god of the seventies… it all happened to one man over a span of about 15-20 years. Fair enough; that’s cool storytelling. But his idea that Batman was not a miserable, psychopathic loner, that he was not insane or struggling to cope or still traumatised by his parents’ death, that Bruce Wayne was a nice guy with friends and family, who’d used his pain as a weapon, who’d gotten past his rage and grief and turned all the negative stuff outwards. Batman was what was built from all that, and Batman allowed Bruce to grow. And what did he do? He found other lost children and saved their lives, allowing Dick Grayson to take over. Batman is a force for good, in a similar way to Superman in Morrison’s All-Star book, making people better by association. And his confrontation with Darkseid in Final Crisis is extraordinary; brilliant as-is, as a piece of comicbook badassery on the page, but the metatextual resonance it’s given – Batman as a good man versus the font of all evil, David versus Goliath, Theseus and the Minotaur – is brilliant. How it ties in to Morrison’s wider Bat-epic, the whole Black Glove stuff and the devil and time travel and the myth of Batman’s creation and all of it… and just the simple thing of Batman’s last act being shooting the embodiment of evil, saving a human life, and then saying “Gotcha,” before dying, is perfect. Perfect.

The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge: when I was little, I played Spectrum and C64 games at my cousins’ house. Then I got an Amiga – I think maybe I was ten? – and I started playing Amiga games. And it was fun and all, but then I read a review in Amiga Action, and my life changed. It was something called an “adventure game”, and it let you walk around chatting to people and interacting with the world, with great big colourful graphics and characters whose mouths moved when they spoke. And then I played it. My love of the medium and its possibilities was cemented then; and, fittingly, it was through the wordy, hilarious dialogue and comedy antics of a wannabe pirate who may, or may not, be selling these fine leather jackets. It’s not overstating things that my gaming tastes were defined by this game and its technically superior sequel. The quirky set-pieces, the weird puzzles, the playing with form (like when you “die” in Monkey 2), and the smart use of Lucasfilm in-jokery. The first game’s “How to Get Ahead in Navigating” gag/puzzle will live with me forever, as will the second game’s bonkers, nightmarish, beautifully constructed ending. As good as they were, none of the subsequent games could hold a candle to it, especially as the whole aesthetic changed into something much more cartoony. But these two? They’re my Big Whoop.

Star Wars: I imagine I know a lot of people in real life who would be surprised – nay, astounded – that I would list my ten favourite Things of all time, and yet Star Wars would not manage to break the Top Five. That’s because that as much as I love Star Wars – and I do, I really do – it didn’t hit me, didn’t speak to me, apart from one brief and weird moment in my late teens. It was games that made me fall in love, I think; games and toys. And, I have to confess, it was the prequels; the intricate digital visions of gleaming cities and impossibly acrobatic Jedi. I love the goofiness and ultra-seriousness of Lucas’ vision, sadly muddled now by the earthy chaos of the sequels. Star Wars is cool; for a while, it defined my idea of cool in cinema. An exciting sci-fi reimagining of ancient and endless myths, a confusing smorgasbord of weird stories and arcane philosophy. Plus spaceships and rapscallions and laser swords. So yes: whilst it was never my faith, so to speak, it’s still one of the coolest and most original pieces of fiction in my lifetime, and to this day there are very few things at all that I find more exciting and evocative than the thought of a Jedi pirouetting through the air with their ‘saber lit.

Middle-Earth, in print and film: one of my most vivid memories of childhood is my mum reading me The Hobbit (and also Macbeth, funnily enough). Then I bought myself my own copy, read it as a kid, read it again as a teenager, wrote (aged about 12 or 13) a sequel in which Gollum comes back to reclaim the ring. I remain to this day baffled that my teacher did not think to tell me that there actually was a sequel to The Hobbit. Eventually I did hear about it, watched the Ralph Bakshi version, and – when I read in Empire that it was gonna be a film and Sean Connery, of all people, was gonna be Gandalf – I thought it best to take the plunge. And I adored it. whilst there’s something about the lyrical simplicity of The Hobbit that I prefer, the depth and scope of The Lord of the Rings – and Tolkien’s subsequent, more disparate writing – that moves me on a profound level. It’s not just the epic nature of the work – the story itself, with its grandiose tales of heroism and adventure – but the sheer balls of the man to make such a thing, to craft wholesale an entire mythological ecosystem. And then the films! I can’t believe they managed to do that; it was pure lightning in a bottle, and we know that because they didn’t quite manage to do it a second time with the Hobbit movies. But all those glorious moments: “Fly, you fools”, “For Frodo”, “I can carry you”, “Go away and never come back” – bloody hell.

Empire magazine: it feels a bit weird, for some reason, citing a magazine as a Favourite Thing. It’s a magazine, a periodical, a journal; it tells you the news and recommends films. it’s not supposed to be part of the culture, part of the fabric of one’s being. But whilst you could debate whether criticism itself is culture, Empire definitely has a culture. It’s a club, nay, a family; something that has been entrenched in recent years through its podcasts and live shows. But for me it began as an education. I started reading it, really, to find out more about Jurassic Park (there we are again, the secret eleventh part of this list). But it went on, showing me more films and filmmakers, introducing me to esoteric industry concepts, broadening my horizons. I always liked film, but Empire made me love film. It reflected my tastes but then it enriched them, codified them, offered me new flavours. It was the first magazine to put Lord of the Rings on the cover; it celebrates Spielberg and the MCU; it had articles about The Greasy Strangler, for goodness’ sake. So much of what I love about film I learned from Empire over the last (nearly) thirty years, and so much of what I love about Empire now is because of what I learned. Bangily-bang.

Traveller’s Tales’ LEGO games: the games that did not make this list, I don’t know. Halo; man, I love Halo. Or what about classics like Lemmings, Worms, or SWOS? What about Mass Effect, Deus Ex, or Fable? What about Mario Kart, what about Civilization? They all deserved a place, really. But there’s something esoteric, timeless even, about the heights of the LEGO games. I remember playing a demo – on the first Xbox, I think – of the first LEGO Star Wars, and being blown away by the fact that, well, it was good. When the games started coming out on the 360 – Star Wars II, Batman, Indiana Jones – I was in the gloriously fortunate position of getting a lot of them for free at CITV, and I devoured them. The simple mechanics, the generous, forgiving gameplay, the satisfying tactile feel of smashing objects and collecting studs. There was something just so rewarding about playing them. And the fan-service! Giving you all those beloved characters, all those worlds, all those genuinely funny in-jokes, references, and cut-scenes. Plus they’re great to play with kids. Time went on, some games were better than others; I feel they reached their peak with the first LEGO Marvel Super-Heroes game, presenting us with an open world New York to play in and a collection of comic book characters that fitted the gameplay perfectly. Subsequent games have either put new restrictions on play, or given us more complicated stories and mechanics, or – really – just over-egged the pudding slightly. I’m really, really optimistic and excited for The Skywalker Saga, long overdue, and promising something of an overhaul. it began, really, with Star Wars; and I feel with Star Wars they’ll have their greatest hour.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: fun fact: finding the tenth spot on these lists is very hard. How about a brand I love, like Xbox, or the BBC, or even Disney? Or another writer or director – what about Aaron Sorkin? Or a TV show – Doctor Who, perhaps, or Star Trek? Or how about, oh I dunno, Shakespeare? I like him. But I’ve not talked about music, so let’s do that; we’ll go out on a number. I’m not a musical person; I didn’t grow up frequenting record shops or listening to mix tapes in my room. I liked songs, but mostly I came to music through film. That was even true with Nick Cave, who I first heard in an episode of The X-Files, and read about in the X-Files magazine. But he remains one of the few artists, The Bad Seeds one of the few bands, that I continue to seek out and listen to regularly (rather than just saying “Alexa, play nineties rock”). I love the different styles, from the distorted noise of the early, post-Birthday Party years through the sombre melodies of Nocturama. I love Cave’s lyricism; his evocation of myth, his use of imagery. I love how he manages to get phrases like “morally culpable” into a song. I love the humour as well as the tragedy, the references to things both real and mythological, the sadness and eloquence of it all. I love how so many of his songs are about sex but are also really moving and meaningful; how much of the music is infused with pain and sorrow but is also uplifting. The horrible evocations of Cave’s own abuse in Do You Love Me, through to the references to his son’s death in Girl in Amber. I love Cave’s voice. I don’t know if this has come through in this list, but something I really like is stuff that makes me cry but isn’t necessarily sad. I cry when I read Sandman, when he wins the Oldest Game by challenging the end of everything by becoming “hope”; I cry when Donna tells Josh, “if you were in the hospital I wouldn’t stop for red lights”; I cry when Steve Rogers jumps on that dummy grenade. I think it’s hope and heroism and love. And that’s something that I get constantly, mainlined, intravenous, from Nick Cave. As Morgan Freeman says in Seven, “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for – I agree with the second part.”

God, there’s so much stuff not listed here. So many things I love that I feel are core; no Pixar, no West Wing, no other filmmakers cited, really, apart from Spielberg. But ten’s not a big number, and I contain multitudes.

Thanks for reading.

#top ten #everything #499 #nine years #lists #my life

[aion-rsa]

Liam Neeson on Big Rigs, Driving The Ice Road, and Star Wars

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Liam Neeson has a simple test he does to see if a script is working for him when he first reads it. “It’s a cup of tea test I do,” says the 69-year-old Irish actor. “If I get to page five and I think, oh, I must put the kettle on for a cup of tea, that’s not a good sign. But occasionally I’ll get a script, like The Ice Road, where I was able to finish it. It felt that good.”

The Ice Road is Neeson’s latest film, arriving this week on Netflix, and it continues his career’s somewhat improbable second act as an action hero. Neeson stars here as Mike McCann, a trucker who is one of several drivers recruited to transport three large, heavy drills to a remote northern Canada mine in order to free miners trapped in a collapse.

To get there on time, McCann and the others must drive their 18-wheelers over the region’s treacherous ice roads — highways literally made of ice that has frozen over the surface of vast lakes, with anything from a particularly strong sun to a slightly sharp turn likely to make the ice crack and plunge the big rigs into the deadly cold water beneath.

Mike is accompanied in his truck by his brother Gurty (Marcus Thomas), an Iraq veteran who’s a genius with engines but who suffers from aphasia, while team leader Jim Goldenrod (Laurence Fishburne) drives the second rig. Behind the wheel of the third is Tantoo (Amber Midthunder), whose brother is trapped in the mine, accompanied by insurance agent Varnay (Benjamin Walker). The crew soon discovers that not all the obstacles stacked against them are coming from the ice below.

The Ice Road was written and directed by Jonathan Hensleigh, who directed the 2004 version of The Punisher but is more widely known for screenplays like Armageddon, Die Hard with a Vengeance and the original Jumanji.

“I do love writers, I always did,” says Neeson. “I knew Jonathan Hensleigh as a writer, he’s also a good director, and I thought, okay, we’ve got Laurence Fishburne, we’ve got a lovely actress called Amber Midthunder that I was in a little scene with in The Marksman, so I knew Amber a little bit. So this was like, ‘Yeah, I want to be involved in this, big time.’”

Although the culture of ice drivers is not necessarily something a lot of people would know about, Neeson says that he stuck primarily to what was in the script and didn’t do a lot of outside research on his own to play the part.

“The script is the foundation for me,” he affirms. “I know there was, or there is a reality TV show about ice truckers. I watched a couple of those, but [it was mostly] just being there with these amazing 18-wheeler trucks that the Kenworth organization were extraordinary in renting to us and were of enormous help.”

Long before he was an actor of any note, Neeson actually had a job as a truck driver — but the vehicle he drove back then was nothing like the rigs you see in The Ice Road.

“I was a forklift truck driver in the Guinness bottling plant,” he recalls. “Great job, actually, I loved it. But they were small — Lansing Bagnall, I think, was the company that made these forklift trucks. These 18-wheeler Kenworths, they’re monsters — very sensitive, but beautiful monsters. They are big, man. They’re the other major important characters in the film.”

The massive Kenworths, which are decked out with cabins that Neeson says are “the size of small New York apartments” are indeed three additional members of the cast. Neeson was given instruction by experts from the Kenworth company in the art of handling the massive rigs, which were driven on real ice roads during the movie’s production. “Actually being on the ice, which then was about 30 to 40 inches thick — so it was fairly safe, but still scary — and driving these things was an amazing experience.”

Neeson says he went out on the ice in the rig “two or three times” with a Kenworth driver. “Listen, I’m not an expert,” the actor explains, “but I roughly knew what to do, and could change the gears, and when to change the gears.”

One of the dangers of driving on the ice roads are pressure waves, which is the basis of one especially harrowing sequence in the film.

“If these trucks go too fast, it creates these pressure waves underneath the ice that when they hit the opposite shore, they bounce back and buckle the ice,” Neeson says. “The drivers, if they’re going too fast, hit this ice, and they go down, and they die. That happens quite regularly on these ice roads. So we had to drive at a particular speed and stay within that speed limit.”

Much of the driving during the scenes in the movie was handled by stunt drivers hidden in a compartment below the cab, freeing the actors up to pretend to drive in the cabins, which were also the setting for some brutal fight scenes.

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Because of the space afforded long-haul drivers in the Kenworth cabs, Neeson says that filming close-contact fight scenes in the trucks was not as difficult as one might expect. “The space could hold a minimum crew, including the director of photography, the camera operator, the focus puller, the director, and two actors, and we weren’t cramped,” he says. “We were able to get incredible shots over our shoulders, so that we could see this expansive ice. There was no CGI there at all, it was real.”

The driving sequences for The Ice Road were in fact filmed on Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada, on real ice roads and in freezing temperatures, and Neeson recalls shooting one sequence in which his character is forced to jump into a hole that has emerged in the ice, plunging into the frigid waters below.

“At one point something happens, and I have to dive into this icy water where the ice has been broken to try and save someone,” says Neeson. “We had dry suits on underneath our costumes, but no gloves, and we had to be under the surface of the water for a good 10 to 12 seconds, so that the level of the surface of the water was still, and then we break through it.”

Neeson continues, “I was holding my fellow actor underneath [the water], but all I could think about were the victims of the Titanic, how quick their deaths must have been. Because we were told by the experts before we did our scene that even though we have dry suits on, you have to control your breath. You have maybe 45 seconds to 60 seconds, and if you don’t control your breath, death is imminent.”

Still, while Neeson says that acting in real and even dangerous conditions is much different from working in a mostly digital environment — like, say, a Star Wars movie — he also concedes that every effort is made to minimize the risk and discomfort for him and the other cast members.

“Listen, we’re actors,” he says. “One hundred yards away they built a hut. They had a huge hot tub. Once we completed the scene, we dashed over there and just dove into this hot water, costumes, everything on, the rest, and sat for 20 minutes.”

Even with that tiny peek behind the curtain of just how a movie like The Ice Road is made, the effort to make the movie seem as realistic as possible — from the location shooting to the giant trucks, to Neeson jumping into frigid water — is a far cry from the digitally created spectacles we’ve been watching for a quarter century now.

And speaking of digitally created spectacles, we’d be remiss if we didn’t spend our last moment or two with Neeson asking him about Star Wars. It’s been 22 years since he appeared as Jedi Knight Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace alongside Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi. And even though the latter is returning as Obi-Wan in a highly anticipated show of his own, Neeson insists he doesn’t know of any plans to bring back Qui-Gon, as a Force ghost or otherwise.

Neeson says that even in the Episode I days, George Lucas never broached the subject of doing something more with Qui-Gon. “In a word, no, absolutely not,” he says. “I haven’t seen George for years. God love him, he sends me a Christmas card every year since we did the first one. But no, I heard Ewan was doing the spinoff series, but I haven’t been approached.”

The Ice Road premieres on Netflix this Friday, June 25.

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[thefreelanceangel]

In Defense of "Said"

said  /sed/

1. past and past participle of say.

One of the most misconstrued pieces of writing advice I've ever seen is "don't use said!" There seems to be an absolute terror of using "said" more than once in a piece of writing, whether it's an RP log, a short story or a novel.

And you will find dozens of lists providing a ton of verbs all touted as the solution to the "said" problem. "Use these instead of said!" How many lists have you seen based off of this principle? Probably at least one.

These lists occasionally break themselves down by the insinuation or meaning of the verbs you're being told to replace "said" with--that is helpful. However, telling budding writers to avoid using "said" on pain of death?

Not helpful.

So why is this single participle being labeled the mark of an unimaginative, boring writer?

Because people, I think, don't realize the value of "said" and very often, writers do NOT think like readers. They're focused on perfecting their craft, which means pouncing on any possible flaw and rending themselves asunder for committing such sins as using "big" instead of "gigantic" "enormous" or "massive."

{Which is something else we need to address...}

So What Are Readers Thinking About Said?

Here's a little tip from someone who is 60% Reader/40% Writer --Your readers do not notice the majority of the minute flaws you're beating yourself up for. And using "said" three times in a page of dialogue is not a hanging offense. [Incidentally, for some amazing dialogue advice, check this post. It's A+ and demonstrates, at the beginning, where most people get their terror of the word "said."]

If you have a page of character interaction and "said" is scattered throughout, I can guarantee you that the Constant Reader is not going to give a flying fuck. If your characters are interacting, if the pacing is dynamic, if the story is INTERESTING, you can use said fearlessly. The basic building blocks of grammar aren’t actually that noticeable. We’re so used to them forming the construction of a sentence that when you’re reading, you skim right through them.

Other than a misspelling or incorrect grammar, when was the last time you noticed every “to” or “and” on a page...? Hmmmm???

Slowing down your writing just to sit and pick through a list of words that the internet is telling you to use in place of said is going to throw your entire flow off. The Constant Reader is not going to judge your book/story/RP based off of how often you use a participle that EXISTS FOR A REASON.

What reason is that? Well, let's see.

Why "Said" Then?

Here's the thing that honestly enrages me about all of those "replacement verb" lists. Every single one of the verbs on those lists carries its own specific definition and connotation. Every single verb creates an individual mood and should only be used when that is the emotion you want to convey. 

Should you use emotional verbs in your dialogue? Absolutely. They help you create a scene, show tension and help us understand that a character is being affected by the events of the story.

HOWEVER!

You need to establish a baseline first. 

We love examples, don’t we? Here we come with an example of what can happen if you take that “don’t use said” as gospel. 

“I don’t care what you think,” she snapped, tossing her head. “Nothing about this is how it should be!” 

“Really, is that where you’re going with this,” he growled, propping his chin on his hand. 

“Yes,” she stated, hands on her hips. “That is exactly where I’m going with this.”

“Well, you go wherever you want with this,” he barked. Shoving his chair back, he jumped to his feet. “I’ve had enough of this!” 

This is clearly an emotional scene. There is something going on between these two people that is causing a lot of tension and they’re expressing it with every word they say. 

Now imagine an entire book of nothing but this. It’d be exhausting. And you’d genuinely wonder who these people are that can maintain such a heightened emotional state for so long. Are these characters you can identify with? I certainly can’t. I am an excitable little creature, but even I have long periods where there’s no emotion gripping me by the throat. 

And even though story thrives on conflict and you want to see characters experience events that change their lives, you also can’t make it through a book and want to read it again if you feel like you’ve been dragged facefirst through a patch of goatheads. 

Let’s look at this scene again, albeit with the usage of our oft-maligned “said.”

“I don’t care what you think,” she said, tossing her head. “Nothing about this is how it should be.” 

“Really, is that where you’re going with this,” he said, propping his chin on his hand.

“Yes,” she snapped, hands on her hips. “That is exactly where I’m going with this!”

“Well, you go wherever you want with this,” he barked. Shoving his chair back, he jumped to his feet. “I’ve had enough of this!” 

Here, there’s a clear build-up of tension. By using “said” at the beginning and using some physical expression to show what state of mind both parties are in, you’re able to step back from active emotion to create a mental image. 

Now you can see the red-checked tablecloth on the linoleum table, the clean kitchen and her white apron. (Don’t ask me why I’m suddenly going for 1950s sitcom, just work with me here.) There’s no explosive emotion happening yet; you’ve stepped into the scene and you have a moment to look around and get your bearings. 

And then the emotion peaks. She snapped, he barked. This is a direct variance with the placid, non-disruptive “said” that pulls your attention along immediately. Now that you have a baseline for the scene, the sudden change in pacing provided by using those powerful verbs is striking. It catches your eye and keeps you invested in following where this scene goes. 

And that is the beauty of “said.” It’s a baseline, it’s where a character lives their daily life. You want to see a character change, you want to see them in a dynamic state, but if all you ever see is that character “growling,” “hissing,” “whispering,” or “murmuring” are you really seeing that character change? Or just explosively react to the world around them and the plot they’re in?

Think of “said” like the character’s calm expression. Your face isn’t always contorted into emotive looks; you don’t always speak in snaps, statements or groans. Your character is the same. 

If the Constant Reader never has a chance to see what your character is like on their baseline days, they won’t be impressed or surprised when something dramatically changes your character. 

And you want the Constant Reader to be startled when your character shrieks, leaning in when your character whispers, pouting with sympathy when your character sobs. 

Using “said” to develop that baseline also gives your Constant Reader a chance to develop that emotional bond that makes reading so extremely entertaining. And then when things abruptly change and your character has to snarl his response to a question, your Constant Reader’s upper lip with curl right along with them. 

But I’ve Seen Good Writers Not Use It!

No, what you’ve seen is good writers avoid the first example in the post by T.L. Bodine that I linked. 

“I want to go out,” he said. 

“It’s too cold outside,” she said.

“But I’ve got a coat,” he said.

^ THAT is “said” used very, very poorly. And yes, I’ve seen it in published books, RP scenes, etc. And yes, it is very, very jarring. You will notice “said” when it’s used in this flat, tedious manner. 

But let’s be honest--you wouldn’t read much further, would you? 

Now, what about this?

“Of course, I was only explaining to... to...” Capricia snapped her fingers repeatedly, glancing at the ceiling.

“Ashton,” he said. 

“Yes, Ashton,” the blonde replied, smiling placidly. “I was simply explaining to Ashcan t-”

“Ashton.”

A smattering of discreet giggles swept through the parlor, ladies raising fans and lowering their heads to avoid the thoroughly annoyed glance he shot in their direction.

“My apologies,” Capricia said, reaching out to pat his forearm lightly. “I was explaining to Ashton that we certainly aren’t that sort of society here.”

“Really? You could’ve fooled me.” Harold looked between them, noted how tensely Ashton held his shoulders. “I’m sorry, I really should be going,” he said, backing away a step.

Because this entire thing is about “said,” I suspect you were on the lookout for it, weren’t you? And you counted to see how often it was used. {Three times.} But were you more interested in that single participle? Or in seeing if Ashton was going to turn around and smack Capricia’s punch cup right out of her hand? 

Character interactions, snappy dialogue and interesting story will pull you right through a scene that has “said” scattered right through it. Why? Because it’s a utilitarian participle that we’ve kept in the English language for a reason; there’s no more reason to reject it than there is to throw out all usage of commas.

Sure, you could get fancy with semicolons, en-dashes and em-dashes. But you could also simply use a comma when the sentence calls for it. 

TL;DR

“Said” on a page is not really going to be noticed by your reader if you’re creating an engaging story

Don’t exhaust your readers with constant high emotion; let them get into the scene first

“Said” is a baseline that lets us recognize when something has genuinely affected your character’s emotional state

Write your dialogue well, but don’t sacrifice the utility of “said” in favor of fancy trappings that drag your story down

#On RP #RP Advice #On Writing #Writing Advice #Angel #OOC #I will defend said to the death

[canaryatlaw]

Alright, well today was overall pretty good. I woke up around 11:24 I think, I had my late alarm set for 1pm but figured I’d wake up before then. I had a weird craving for chocolate chip pancakes, which is kinda odd because I’ve literally never made them before in my life, but I had a hershey bar and some m&ms I could use, so I was like hey, let’s do this. So I chopped up the hershey bar and started making them, then moved to the m&ms when I ran out of the chopped chocolate. my pancakes haven’t always been cooperating with me lately, but I was trying to do smaller ones today and I think that worked a lot better, so that’s good to know. And they were really freaking good. So after I finished eating I knew I should get to work, so I pulled up the two things I had for the legal drafting assignment and started doing my final edits before turning it in tonight. I knew it wasn’t perfect, but honestly at this point I just don’t give a fuck anymore, I don’t care if I get one fucking C in my last damn semester, it can’t affect my GPA that much, and who the fuck cares anyway??? I just don’t anymore. but I made some edits and changed a few things around. The thing is I know my arguments are really solid, really damn good arguments, but I know that’s not gonna be what matters because with this prof it’s all about procedure and format and bullshit that doesn’t even matter in the real world. Like legit when I was talking with her last week looking over my past assignment she was like “oh you’re doing this like they taught you at the courthouse, but we’re doing it like this” and I was like ???? these hypothetical projects are *literally* supposed to be from the damn courthouse I worked at, like literally working for the cook county public guardian’s office, and you’re telling me what I learned actually being there was wrong??? I’m just so fucking done, this class should’ve been a breeze for me but it became a massive pain in the ass instead. And I really don't give a fuck if she doesn’t like my writing, the people I’ve actually worked under in the real world have always loved it, my one supervisor still gushes about the motion I wrote from the child death case as one of the best he’s ever seen, and I really, really don’t give a fuck about this goddamn class anymore. I’m ranting, I know. But anyway. I made my edits and printed it out, ended up having to print two copies of each because something didn’t turn out right in the first version of each, stupid staples (they’ll literally dock you points if your stapling doesn’t look good) and temporarily forget to use page numbers. But I got all that done and headed out to school a little early, there was supposed to be a PAD transition team meeting at 5:30 so I thought I’d come for a bit before class, except nobody actually doing the meeting showed up on time, and I had class at 5:50, so I left at 5:40, and I apparently didn’t miss much. We turned in our assignment, and then had class for about half an hour, talking mostly about factors regarding appeals and what you should take into consideration when deciding if you’re going to appeal or not. Good stuff I guess. But we ended around 6:20, and the PAD event we had for tonight didn’t start till 7 and it was right across the street so I chilled in the PAD office for a bit before going over. The event is supposed to be an official introduction to the new executive board, with alumni coming and networking and all that good shit, it’s called “Story Time” because we’re “Story Chapter” (all of the chapters are named after Supreme Court justices, since our chapter was founded in the 1890s it was after a very old justice, Joseph Story). So I headed over there and mingled for a bit, pretty good food, they had chicken tenders that were like, really damn good chicken tenders lol and they had grilled cheese, which is like, perfect, so I was pleased with that. I spent a while chatting with one of the older alums about work and life and all that good stuff. He’s looking for a law clerk, but since I’m a 3L he said I need to focus on studying for the bar, and worry about jobs later, which is valid, lol. After that I just went to where my friends are and hung out with them for a bit more, just having fun. The event ended around 9, and since we were the ones throwing it we ended up being the last people there, and they had a buffet style food set up and the staff put out to go boxes and were like “hey if you want to take any of this home go for it because it’s just gonna get thrown out” so I may have gone to town on the chicken tenders and shoved 20 of them into a to go box (I counted) which I expect will go to good use over the next couple of weeks (weeks because I’ll probably freeze some of them at some point, chicken tenders aren’t really a food that’s like, cooked one time, because most of them come pre-cooked, and they were warmed up today, but I can just warm them up again and they’ll be the same lol so that’s useful. I’m sure Jess will be having some this weekend because she hasn't eaten shit all week (sigh). But yeah, I went home, dropped my stuff and decided to watch Arrow. It was......odd. Not really an episode they’ve ever done before, mostly just because there was almost no Oliver in it. And I felt like the whole time they were trying to get us to like Diaz and like, I just don’t??? I don’t find him to be a very compelling character and the whole time I was just like Dinah honey why are you hanging out with this asshole?? I don’t get it. I will say though I did like the plot between Oliver and Felicity and the moment they had at the end of the episode, so that was good. After that the only other show I had left to watch was Riverdale, which I put on because we decided we’re going to “Riverdale Con” (god that sounds so absurd) next weekend because it’s in Chicago and we can, and plus we’re already going two weekends without a con, we definitely couldn’t go three. Riverdale was the musical episode of course, and I had fairly mixed feelings about it. I wasn’t familiar with the music of Carrie, I knew the plot obviously but hadn’t heard any of the songs before. Most of my feelings were that the majority of the cast really cannot sing and were very, very autotuned, and like the only one who could actually sing was the actor who plays Kevin, and they only let him sing like two fucking lines??? I mean wtf was that about, bad choice there. But yeah, I guess the episode itself was fine, and I did walk away with Veronica’s song stuck in my head. I also ended up looking up the plot on wiki because I wanted to see how the songs fit in, which was an interested read at least....lot of death. It was funny though because I know Christy Altomare and Derek Klena had played Sue and Tommy opposite each other in the 2012 production, and then of course they’re currently playing Anastasia and Dimitri in Anastasia right now. And yeah, I finished watching that then basically started getting ready for bed. Other things that have been on my mind though, I read an article talking about how Christians are becoming disillusioned with the term Evangelical because it’s come to be associated with the Trump idiots and everything that comes with that. And like, it’s so interesting for me to see this because I was thinking through all of this back in 2014 when I decided that I was no longer identifying with that term. Because what does it even mean?? Nothing, really. There’s no set definition that would make one an “evangelical.” I broke with the movement way before everyone else did though, over the “World Vision Incident” that left me so incredibly incensed at everyone who caused that horrific event to happen- basically, World Vision announced that as a non-denominational Christian organization they would be hiring Christian employees in same sex relationships since some denominations are now affirming. One of World Vision’s main programs is about sponsoring a child, send like $30 a month to go to the life of this specific child you’re matched up with. And when this happened, a lot of evangelical leaders protested which led to a huge number of people cancelling their child sponsorships, to the point where World Vision was forced to capitulate or they would suffer such a horrific loss in the work they are doing. Overall, the entire event resulted in 10,000 people dropping their sponsorships, and many did not renew them when they changed positions (incidentally, I immediately called up and started a sponsorship right after this happened). And like, for me that was such a clear line in the sand that was drawn. When you’re fighting your culture wars using the lives of children living in poverty as bargaining chips to force a company not to hire people you disapprove of, that keeping these people out of your organizations is more important to you than the literal lives of children, when that is what you believe in, I’m sorry but you and I do not believe in the same God. I believe in the God who said let the little children come on to me, and admonished the adults to be more like the children. The Jesus who never uttered a word about the culture issues evangelicals are obsessed with pressing. The God who said it was better that you throw a millstone around your neck and jump into the water than to lead a child astray, to hurt a child like that. That’s my God, I don’t know what bastardized version of a god (small g) that you believe in, but he’s certainly not the one I know. The one who gave me such a drive to change the world for children, to help the most vulnerable of the most vulnerable, those shoved into horrible situations and desperately need love and assurance from those around them. The God that created me to have steel in my veins when it comes to dealing with the child abuse I willingly engage with, the God that made me for this purpose, so much that I can feel it in my bones, this is what I was meant to do with my life, nothing else could ever feel right. The God who won’t let me stop until I make a difference, until I’m saving the lives of children in the system every day, no matter how difficult and traumatic that might be. The God who never turned his back on me when I doubted he was there, when I couldn't see him then, but looking back I can see he never left me, he was there the whole time, carrying me through the hard times while I was kicking and screaming and was furious with him for putting me through all I had to deal with. The God who used all of that to create a deep passion in me to save children, so they never have to go through that. This is my purpose in life, and that’s the God I believe in, I don’t know the one you’re praising who cares more about making gay people outcasts than the literal lives of children.

okay, that turned into a massive rant that went a little off the wheels, but I hope I got my point across. My faith is so, so important to me, and it hurts me so much to see the name of Christ being dragged through the mud by those claiming his name and acting as if they’ve never opened a bible. But anyway. That’s about it for my day. No official plans for tomorrow, I might do a short grocery run to stock up on a few things, and maybe small group at night, we’ll see. I mean, I should probably start studying at some point, but my first final isn’t until May 2nd, which is still a week and a half away, and it’s the easiest one, so I’ll have time. Alright, I’m done now. That was a massive rant about my many frustrations that I will hopefully feel better about now. It’s past 1:30 am so I’m going to get to bed now. Goodnight my dearies. If you made it all the way through this post, bless you for caring about my life enough to do that. ❤️

#daily journal #April 2018 #Rachel watches Arrow

[sorayahigashikata]

Chapter 81: "You snooze, you lose."

#Paula reads SBR #Chapter 81 #nobody tell him about C Moon! #Y U SO SLOW MISTER PRESIDENT #the Steels are alive huh? #I give 'em three more chapters #Steel Ball Run spoilers #Part 7 spoilers

[loufiiii]

The Chaotic Evil in me says TO ASK YOU TO ANSWER -ALL- OF THE QUESTIONS FROM THAT POST?????? YIKES

Hannah ur lucky I love u lol1. What is you middle//full name?Middle name is Brook2. How old are you?163. What is your birthday?Nov. 54. What is your zodiac sign?Scorpio5. What is your favorite color?This is very hard bc i like all the colors but I guess cyan or indigo6. What’s your lucky number?Nine7. Do you have any pets?Yes, many, but not quite as many add I've has in the past.8. Where are you from?Delanowhere9. How tall are you?5'2'(｡･ω･｡)10. What shoe size are you?Six or seven11. How many pairs of shoes do you own?That are wearable? Maybe like two or three.12. What was your last dream about?Rather not say.13. What talents do you have?I can sing, act, and draw fairly well.14. Are you psychic in any way?Not really15. Favorite song?Of all time, Bohemian Raphsody. Though I've been listening to Death of A Bachelor a lot lately.16. Favorite movie?Moana currently17. Who would be your ideal partner?Are u asking for a specific person or characteristics I find appealing in a romantic partner?18. Do you want children?No19. Do you want a church wedding?Not really but I guess I'd have one if my partner wanted one20. Are you religious?A little21. Have you ever been to the hospital?HAHAHAHAHAhahahahaha......... yes22. Have you ever got in trouble with the law?Not on paper23. Have you ever met any celebrities?I've met Tom Brady, Nancy Kerrigan, and Vic Mignogna.24. Baths or showers?Both25. What color socks are you wearing?One of them is white with hearts on it and the other is pink with a blue and magenta diamond pattern26. Have you ever been famous?I've been in the local newspaper like five times and was on the front page for three.27. Would you like to be a big celebrity?I'm not planning on it, but I wouldn't turn it down if given the chance.28. What type of music do you like?Anything but country™29. Have you ever been skinny dippingNo30. How many pillows do you sleep withIt depends on my mood.31. What position do you usually sleep inCurled up on my side or flat on my stomach.32. How big is your house?Not big33. What do you typically have for breakfast?Whatever's already made or in the fridge. It's rare I make something just for breakfast.34. Have you ever fired a gun?Do water guns count?35. Have you ever tried archery?Yes36. Favorite clean word?Magenta37. Favorite swear word?Fuck38. What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without sleep?78 1/2 hours39. Do you have any scars?Yes40. Have you ever had a secret admirerYeah.41. Are you a good liar?I don't like lying, but I am very good at it.42. Are you a good judge of character?Usually43. Can you do any other accents other than your own?Without offending anyone, probably not. Lol the one I'm least likely to get slapped with is English.44. Do you have a strong accent?Not really.45. What is your favorite accent?Russian or Italian46. What is your personality type?INTP or INFP. I get different answers depending on the test.47. What is your most expensive piece of clothing?Either the dress I wore to the home school prom I was invited to, or my choir uniform.48. Can you curl your tongue?Yes49. Are you an innie or an outie?Innie50. Left or right handed?I'm ambidextrous, but I trained myself to use my right hand more because society told me I was supposed to growing up.51. Are you scared of spiders?No, I love spiders! I was the little girl who chased boys around the playground with them and asked for a pet tarantula.52. Favorite food?Blueberry muffins53. Favorite foreign food?Churros54. Are you a clean or messy person?I'm clean but very disorganized.55. Most used phrase?Why are you like this56. Most used word?Same57. How long does it take for you to get ready?15-20 minutes without makeup or anything fancy58. Do you have much of an ego?Not usually59. Do you suck or bite lollipops?Succ60. Do you talk to yourself?Sometimes61. Do you sing to yourself?Yes62. Are you a good singer?I think so, otherwise I wouldn't be going to Mexico in two months.63. Biggest Fear?Being feared by people I love64. Are you a gossip?Not really65. Best dramatic movie you’ve seen?I'm not going to put too much thought into it but I guess Sweeny Todd66. Do you like long or short hair?Why not both67. Can you name all 50 states of America?If I weren't this tired, probably.68. Favorite school subject?If I can't pick art, it's science.69. Extrovert or Introvert?Ambivert70. Have you ever been scuba diving?No, but I'm actually planning to take lessons soon.71. What makes you nervous? Auditioning, talking to new people, trying to ask someone out, and many others.72. Are you scared of the dark?Yes and no73. Do you correct people when they make mistakes?It depends on how big it is.74. Are you ticklish?................. maybe75. Have you ever started a rumor?No76. Have you ever been in a position of authority?Yes77. Have you ever drank underage?I've tasted some things. I'm allowed to have a small glass of wine on major holidays, but usually turn it down.78. Have you ever done drugs?Nope.79. Who was your first real crush?My friend Sean80. How many piercings do you have?Two, one in each ear. they've probably closed by now though.81. Can you roll your Rs?Yes82. How fast can you type?Medium I guess83. How fast can you run?Also medium I guess84. What color is your hair?Blonde with faded blue underneath. The blue kinda looks pastel now.85. What color is your eyes?Blue with a golden ring around the pupil86. What are you allergic to?Grass87. Do you keep a journal?No88. What do your parents do?My step dad is a heavy machinery mechanic89. Do you like your age?.... I guess?90. What makes you angry?Ignorant people, homophobes, being mocked or underestimated, ect.91. Do you like your own name?I guess. If I could change my name it would be Lisandre.92. Have you already thought of baby names, and if so what are they?Nope, not having kids. 93. Do you want a boy a girl for a childNeither.94. What are you strengths?Drawing, singing, acting, I'm emotionally strong, I'm pretty intelligent,a genius on paper actually, ect.95. What are your weaknesses?I'm lazy, unorganized, find it hard to stay focused, bad at socializing with new people unless I already know we have similar interests, awkward unless I'm very comfortable with that person, bad at staying in touch, doubt myself, ect.96. How did you get your name?My biological father just came through the doorway one day and said "We're naming it Hailey" we have no idea why and I don't plan on asking him97. Were your ancestors royalty?There's a chance I'm related to Vlad the Impaler 98. Color of your room?Cyan99. Color of your bedspread?Pink, black, gray, and white.100. Make up your own question: what time is it right now and what should you be doing?It's 1:10am right now and I should very much be sleeping.

[ciathyzareposts]

Abandoned Places: Empty Frame

Spider webs posed a (mild) obstacle on some of this session’s dungeons.

           A second session with Abandoned Places has shown it to be an adequate but unmemorable Dungeon Master clone. Most of the things I initially liked about it–elements in which it departed from the usual Dungeon Master template–have not really compensated for a certain lack of imagination and challenge.

You’ll recall that the plot involved the resurrection of four long-dead heroes to save the land of Kalynthia from a new threat posed by a threatening figure named Bronakh. It turns out that I was missing a large part of the backstory, kept in a book separate from the game manual called The 23rd Chronicles of Kalynthia. The 40 pages of this book tell a Tolkienesque history, full of allusions, partial biographies, and heroes lost to history except for their names. It’s an impressive effort, one that suggests epic ambitions for the series that were frustrated by poor sales or lack of interest.

It’s probably not worth trying to summarize all of it, but I’ll cover it in broad strokes. Thousands of years ago, Kalynthia was an icy world with a technologically advanced population. The manual is written from the perspective of someone who doesn’t understand the ancient technology (“armored carriages that could release explosions of fire”), but the population clearly had firearms, bombs, airplanes, and tanks. Some leader named Zander united this world through a combination of diplomacy and conquest. A million-year peace followed in which the population built shining cities and fortresses, tunneled deep into the earth and built entire cities underground, and mastered the art of magic.             

A long backstory is delivered in a 40-page book with thick text and no illustrations.

              A warming of the world caused this ancient population to decline and vanished, replaced in dominance by the human creations of two gods, Kiri-Sam and Gardi. After several thousand years of tribal living, a figure named Drexel the Great established the first major civilization. Guilds of craftsmen and storytellers thrived in this civilization, and the most powerful of the guildmasters became the world’s first kings and queens.

Several generations later, a queen named Solara ruled a Camelot-like kingdom when a mysterious, dark, charismatic stranger named Zorin became her steward. Her husband died under mysterious circumstances, and she remarried Zorin, bearing from him a child named Bronakh. A “strange and willful” child, Bronakh exerted a power over his mother that caused her to disown her previous children and make one desperate attempt after another to please him. As she descended into insanity, Bronakh was raised by his wetnurse, a gypsy witch named Xonia. As he grew, he became lovers with Xonia’s daughter, Ellida. Anyone who spoke against him or Xonia suffered a mysterious death.           

Here’s a random shot of the guy who runs the jewelry shop in town.

           When Solara died, Bronakh declared himself king and Ellida used enchantments to help him win the support of the people. Solara’s older sons (Nikor, Igon, Drel, and Erik) raised an army to oppose Bronakh, but Ellida filled their heads with mistrust for each other, so that when the battle came, the brothers’ armies turned on each other and left Bronakh unharmed and victorious. However, Bronakh was mentally exhausted by the many glamours that he’d cast to get this far, and he ended up retreating to an island in the northwest and establishing his kingdom there. On the mainland, with the help of a great Council, the four brothers established four separate kingdoms.

Generations passed and peace reigned for a while, but eventually Bronakh stirred and began sending abominations to the mainland to threaten the populace. The citizenry had to retreat into walled cities to avoid certain death. The rulers of the four kingdoms decided to commission warriors and mages to clear the world of these monsters. Lacking the resources to establish a true army, they selected the 12 most talented specialists in war, magic, and healing, commissioning a Great Contest to suss them out. Bronakh tried to sabotage the contest by sending his own son, Ignis, to compete, but King Soron discovered the plot and destroyed Ignis by pouring a jug of holy water on his head. The 12 heroes did their jobs, and ultimately Bronakh was bound and tossed into a volcano. But the rulers knew that he was immortal and would eventually return, and thus they used magic to turn the 12 heroes to stone and stuck them in the Temple of Heaven’s Light to await the world’s need.         So this is all nice to know, but what strikes me more is how little it would have affected my experience of the game if I’d never found this document. Because as with Dungeon Master, the story is simply a framing story. Telling a more elaborate framing story is like putting a more ornate frame around a painting–it may be an interesting object in and of itself, but it doesn’t fundamentally change the experience of the central piece. What’s annoying is that Abandoned Places at first shows every intent of abandoning the framing story as the main plot device. It has an overworld with numerous interesting-looking locations. Wouldn’t it be nice if visiting those locations produced NPCs and encounters that referred back to the story? Perhaps a couple of places where knowledge of the story helps you solve a puzzle? Alas, the story hardly references actual locations on the map (it mostly contradicts it), and the places you can visit either have generic menu towns or nothing at all. You can’t even visit the different dungeons out of order. Thus, the overworld just becomes an interlude between dungeon levels in a game that otherwise plays like most other games in its sub-genre.         

I forgot to include the overworld map int he last entry. Here it is.

           We began last session with four of the heroes awakened. It is unclear why there were only four, who awakened them, and what happened to him. The four heroes had to fight their way out of the Tempe, make their way to the mainland, and visit over a dozen locations before finding anything to do at Souls Abbey. There, it wasn’t even clear that the (unidentified) person who greeted them knew who they were or why they were there; he simply sent them on a “prove yourself” quest to clear out monsters from a dungeon.

      The dungeon was a single 22 x 22 level with the same sort of navigation puzzles already described: buttons and levers on the walls, keys and keyed doors, squares of fire or water that you must avoid or take damage crossing, pressure plates, and illusory walls. There were enemies in the form of flying skulls and zombie-like humanoids.          

How did skulls acquire wings? How do they affix?

        When I cleared the monsters and returned to the abbey, the unidentified representative–again not suggesting that he knew anything about us–suggested we go seek the Book of the World in the “old library” at Kal Kalon. Kal Kalon is the capital of the land, with a full set of services, so I certainly didn’t mind the visit. I sold some excess equipment and leveled up before clicking on the “sage” icon option. There, another unidentified old man gave me permission to enter the library.          

Souls Abbey.

            The library was three levels, but fragmented so that they really only took up two 22 x 22 level spaces. Other than the textures suggesting books at certain points, the only thing the dungeon introduced was furniture that I had to push out of the way and cobwebs that I had to destroy. (The only way I could find to do it was with the priest’s “Fire Path” spell, but I feel like there must be other options.) Enemies included what looked like ghosts of priests and hairy monsters with long claws and razor teeth. In the end, I got the Book of Worlds and returned to the abbey.          

I don’t even have a placeholder name for these guys.

          It turns out that when you activate the Book of Worlds, it activates a little auto-map in the lower right corner. But it shows only a small space and doesn’t annotate puzzles or anything. I haven’t been mapping very faithfully for reasons I’ll discuss below, but if this were the sort of game where you really had to map, I don’t think the automap would do much to help you.           

Note the automap in the lower right window.

        Back at the abbey, the priest finally figured out that we were four of the 12 heroes from hundreds of years ago. He then said we’d find a valuable scroll at the Steps and sent us away again.

The Steps are a mountain range southeast of the abbey. From the manual, I learned that when searching for a dungeon entrance over a large area, you need to turn the “search” option on in the overworld interface. From a commenter, I learned that you needed to be dismounted for this to work. Eventually, we found the dungeon entrance.                

The Steps featured the first pit, and thus the first use of a rope.

             It was another pair of 22 x 22s. This dungeon introduced a pit that we had to climb down, explore for a while, and climb back up. Ropes we’d found plus my fighters’ “climbing” skills did the trick.     Finally, in this dungeon, we found our first item of armor–a suit of ringmail. I had begun to wonder if the game even had armor given that there’s no explicit slot for it. It turns out that the character figure in the inventory section has been reflecting armor all along. When I dropped the ringmail on a fighter, he gave up his previous suit of leather.           

My fighter wears a fancy new set of ringmail as we fight some kind of warrior.

            Enemies in the Steps were mostly skeletons and large, armored warriors. The culmination was a scroll that I couldn’t read. I took it back to the abbey, and the priest couldn’t read it either. He told me to take it to the “wise” at Kal Kalon. He, in turn, said that the scroll discussed the Ruling Symbols.             

The Ruling Symbols are some kind of magical items. They were created by a group of powerful spell casters to keep evil from Kalynthia. The work was completed too late. Evil got to them. Then after an adventurous fight of mighty heroes the items were brought back to the Council of Elders. They decided that these items may help forthcoming generations. So they cut the items into pieces, and hid the around the empire. Only the worthy ones can find them. You will need all of these artifacts to destroy Bronakh.

            The Ruling Symbols turn out to be three items: the Sword of Darkness, the Staff of Supremacy, and the Globe of Forthcoming. Each is in three pieces, leaving nine total pieces to find. For each piece, the first one will somehow lead me to the others. The scroll describes the location of each first piece: the Broken Isles, the Sands of Fire, and Seers Point. So it appears I have a bit of freedom at this point. I can start in any of those three locations and then either finish finding an entire item before moving on to the next, or find all “first pieces” before the seconds, and so on.             

The wise man doesn’t seem to care one way or another if I save the world.

           We’ve seen that Abandoned Places doesn’t break much new ground, although it initially seems to, in its narrative or game world. That leaves how it plays as a dungeon crawler, and as I said before, it distinguishes itself in neither mechanics nor challenge. To start, I haven’t suffered a single character death the entire game so far. In fact, I don’t think any of my characters have seen their hit points drop below 50%. Enemies hardly ever hit, and when they do, they don’t hit that hard.     Combat itself is unsatisfying. The cool-down period for attacks is just a little too long, so a lot of the time you and the enemy are just standing there looking at each other. Even if combat was faster and harder, the game lacks many of Dungeon Master‘s tactics. Closing them in doors doesn’t work. Combat waltzing (check the glossary!) doesn’t work because enemies are always facing you. Enemies have fixed patrol zones, so you can’t do the backpedal.           

Fighting a ghostly librarian in the library. Trying to close the door to crush him just closed it behind him.

          Meanwhile, the puzzles have also lacked any real challenge. They’ve all been of the find-the-switch-here-to-open-the-wall-there variety. I’ve been stuck a couple of times, but mostly because I failed to note a wall switch, or because I hadn’t yet tested every wall to see if it was illusory. As the game has progressed, the puzzles haven’t gotten harder so much as more distant, so a switch might open a wall on the other end of the dungeon, or even another dungeon level. Usually in games like this, I map everything I can without touching anything, then start experimenting witch switches and plates. I do it carefully because you never know when a switch might be temporary, or a plate might open one door but close another. But here, the causes and effects are so rudimentary that I’ve started activating every switch the moment I find it.           

The brick above the cursor is a button.

           Abandoned Places retains two quirks of Dungeon Master that have always annoyed me: inability to see the names of your enemies and inability to see weapon statistics. At least in Dungeon Master, you could track the damage done to enemies and basically figure out which item was better, but in Abandoned Places, the only feedback you get is whether you hit or missed. Naturally, the ease of combat makes it a lesser consideration for now. My characters have upgraded from clubs and daggers to short swords, maces, and axes. I’ve found two magic weapons: a magic club and a magic dagger. I gave the club to my cleric, who almost never gets to act in combat and thus has the lowest experience point total of the group (he gets most of his experience from “Minor Cure Wounds” and “Create Food” spells). To help him get more, I have him attack to the rear. After my fighters attack forward in combat, I spin around and give the cleric an attack or two. My mage remains aiming forward, as she can cast offensive spells past the fighters.  

Opening a chest with a key. You can see the mage’s spell list here.

         Miscellaneous notes:       

So far, no dungeons have allowed enemies to respawn. If I did end up feeling I needed a little grinding, I’d have to do it with random encounters in the overworld.

The game’s font makes a w look like an m. It’s driving me crazy.

             The mise maits the scroll before telling me what is mritten.

              I’ve found some missile weapons, including a bunch of shurikens, but picking them up after battle is annoying even in games where you desperately need them. There’s no chance I’m doing that here. 

I found a reasonable amount of gold in the last dungeon, plus lots of items to sell for more gold. I’m just hesitant to spend any of it.

               This dungeon room had piles of gold on the floor.

            Food depletes very fast, and “Create Food” doesn’t create much. I probably have to spend 5 minutes casting “Create Food” multiple times, passing it around, and eating it to get 15 interrupted minutes of dungeon crawling. Once characters are starving, they periodically lose 1 hit point, accompanied by an “oof!” I’m not sure, but I think the standard hit point regeneration might be faster than the 1 point they’re losing by starving, but the “oof!” is so annoying that I feed them. The whole system exists only to annoy you.

Half the time you try to visit some place in town, you get a screen saying that it’s “closed now.” Most of the time, if you acknowledge the message and try again a couple times, you can get in. Yet another thing that seems to exist solely to annoy.

Spellcasters get spells automatically on leveling up. So far, I’ve been relying heavily on the mage’s “Mage Bolt” and “Mage Cloud.”  My priest has a spell called “Death Clow”; I don’t know if it was supposed to be “claw” or “glow,” but either way it doesn’t seem to do anything. There are some other mysterious ones, such as the priest’s “Create Water” (characters don’t need water separately from food) and the mage’s “Teleport,” which seems to be the “recall” part of a “mark/recall” spell except I can’t figure out how to specify the “mark” part.

            Moving from the abbey to Kal Kalon.

             Late in this session, I was Googling around to see if I’d missed any documentation on spells. I took note of a walkthrough, checking out only what it said for the parts that I’d already played, and I realized that an entire facet of the game had escaped my notice. The Soul Abbey is one of only three possible places that you can wind up where they give you the initial series of quests. The other two are the castle called Twilight and Vo Marris on the Isle of Mists. Each one of them sends you to a different starter dungeon. The library at Kal Kalon is the same for all three, but then each sends you to a different place to look for the scroll. The three potential paths converge at the point where I am now. It’s an interesting approach that enhances replayability.

         I’m considering whether to declare that I’ve explored this one enough and just move on, not because it’s bad, but because it seems likely to take another 20 hours without offering anything substantially different. I’ll give it at least one more session and perhaps a quick scout of other sites to see if someone else has documented the endgame.

         Time so far: 9 hours       

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/abandoned-places-empty-frame/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Poul Anderson and D&D, Gollum, Castle of Llyr, Insanity’s Children

RPG (Goodman Games): Although most fans of fantasy fiction and RPGs assume that the classic “old school” alignments of Law, Neutrality, and Chaos are derived from Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion series of stories, some will be shocked to discover that Moorcock openly borrowed that concept from Anderson. In his novel, Three Hearts and Three Lions (a book that, as we’ll see, had a huge impact on D&D), Anderson tells of a battle between the forces of Law and Chaos. Law is represented by humanity and the medieval Church.

Comic Books (Paint Monk): Conan and the Kushite queen Tananda are at a stand-off. The queen is determined to torture Diana, who she suspects of being a political tool and a spy of the cunning Tuthmes. But Conan, her new captain-of-the-guard, isn’t having it. He barks at her, telling her to put down the whip. The political climate in Tananda’s city is tense, and punishing Diana will only rile up rival nobles.

Art (Dark Worlds Quarterly): If you are like just about every person on the planet you have this great sculpture in your office or den. We all got them when we bought the first set of DVDs for The Fellowship of the Ring. Anyway, this got me thinking of all the versions of the “nasty little stinker” before the film. Unfortunately, JRR never drew him first. Tolkien was a good self-taught artist but he preferred the landscapes of his world to the characters.

Black Friday Picks (DMR Books): The three sword and sorcery anthologies that DMR released in the last few months must take precedence. S&S started out at the short story/sub-novel length and that is—arguably—still the sweet spot when it comes to tales of bloody mayhem and dark magic. The two-fisted release of Death Dealers & Diabolists—with Warlords, Warlocks & Witches following close upon its blood-stained heels—is possibly the most devastating one-two punch in the history of S&S anthologies. If I had to pick one to buy, it would be DD&D, but don’t short yourself. Buy both.

Warhammer Fiction (Track of Words): Reading Nate Crowley’s fantastic 40k novella Severed I was reminded that Warhammer fiction isn’t generally known for its humour. The clue is in the title, really (WARhammer), and certainly Warhammer 40,000 is renowned for being properly dark. The commonly-used term grimdark comes from a core tenet of 40k, after all – “in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war”. In amongst the grim, the dark and the downright nasty, however, I think there’s room for a bit of humour now and then, and certain authors – Nate included – seem to have the knack for adding a little (or a lot, in some cases) of levity into some ot their Warhammer stories.

History (Karavansara): Yes, say it aloud… The Women’s Black Hussars of Death. Why they never taught me this sort of stuff when I was in school? The Women’s Battalions of Death were all-female units formed in 1917 by volunteers serving on the side of the Russian Provisional Government, after the February Revolution. The woman who had dreamed up this brilliant idea – with the purpose of upholding the revolution and shaming men into action – was Maria ‘Yashka’ Leontevna Botchkareva, by all means a formidable woman.

Fiction (Matthew Constantine): The third book in Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, The Castle of Llyr finds Taran and Eilonwy about to set off on a journey.  It seems that Eilonwy is to be taught how to be a proper princess and eventually be married off.  Taran is conflicted, which by the previous book seems to be his wont. We meet some new characters and familiar characters make their return. One of the things I like about this book is how Alexander flips the script on Taran’s relationship with a potential romantic rival.

Fiction (Mewsings): George MacDonald is a key figure in the development of modern fantasy. A friend of Lewis Carroll (whose Alice in Wonderland he read to his children in manuscript, and encouraged the Reverend Dodgson to publish), and an influence on the Inklings (C S Lewis first read Phantastes in 1916 and went on to champion MacDonald’s writings; Tolkien’s Smith of Wootton Major was the result of his trying, and failing, to write an introduction to MacDonald’s The Golden Key).

Fiction (DMR Books): It has been noted over and over and over that Brackett was a lifelong fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs. That’s cool. I can say the same about my ownself. Proud of it. However, we know that Leigh was also a fan of one A. Merritt, an author who loomed just as large over the SFF scene of the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s of Brackett’s youth as ERB. In fact, it can definitely be argued that Merritt was the stronger horse in that scene during the ‘30s and ‘40s when Leigh was finding herself as a writer.

Awards (Kairos): we’ve now gained enough distance from the Sad/Rabid Puppies campaigns to do a proper postmortem on the Hugos. To recap, author Larry Correia started the Campaign to End Puppy-Related Sadness when he smelled something rotten among the oldpub clique that hands out the Hugo Awards. He set out to prove that winning a Hugo has less to do with literary merit and almost everything to do with scratching the right backs while having the right politics.

RPG (Pits Perilous): Sorcery.  The Dark Arts.  These words conjure up images of occult knowledge wrestled from forgotten old tomes and worked in guilty secrecy.  Magic is sinister.  Evil.  It comes with a whiff of brimstone at great personal cost; but such is its price.  Magic is a deal with the devil, a Faustian bargain that underscores the sometimes corrupting force of ambition.  But D&D has turned magic into a neutral energy to be manipulated, an undiscovered science exploited by studious and charming magicians to fight evil.  Quasi-Christian clerics work cheerily alongside wizened spell casters despite the adversarial nature of their occupations, and there’s nothing wrong with this except that magic loses some of its edge and, shall we say, much of its danger.

Book Review (Men of the West): One thing about which every single one of us agrees is that Rolf Nelson’s books are fantastic. His The Stars Came Back  is one of the finest stories ever written. Yes, it is written in screenplay format, but that does not matter. It takes a couple of pages to get used to it, and then – BOOM. You are whisked away into one of the most intriguing sci-fi stories penned in the past 50 years He followed that up with a prequel of sorts, The Heretics of St. Possenti, which is less sci-fi, and more foundational to the overall world that these stories inhabit. Though not really a sci-fi book, it is fantastic,and should be read by everyone.

Greyhawk (Grodog’s AD&D blog): The first question* to ask about this topic may be, “How does Allan (or anyone else) know what constitutes a rare item in the world of Greyhawk publishing?”  Well, Ant “Echohawk” Brooks maintains a Greyhawk Collector’s Guide on ENWorld, and it’s amazingly comprehensive.  I link to it on my Greyhawk Links page, and while there are still bits and pieces of info that trickle in with new discoveries, new versions or editions of books, additional Living Greyhawk tourney scenarios catalogued, and new titles written by and for Greyhawk fans being published each year, Echohawk’s work is my go-to guide whenever

Cinema (Jon Mollison): Every once in a while Hollywood accidentally does something great on purpose. It’s basically cowboys versus cannibals with the sensibility of a Cormac McCarthy film.  The basic plot of a townswoman kidnapped and dragged back to the cave of the wild west CHUDS doesn’t do this thing justice.  The meat of the film is the story of four civilized men who step up to the plate to fight for civilization and push back against the ravenous hordes.  To do so, they must set aside petty differences, lift up the weaker members of their little posse, and trust to good sense, gunpowder, and cold steel.

Sensor Sweep: Poul Anderson and D&D, Gollum, Castle of Llyr, Insanity’s Children published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

Once upon a time a certain big name within the Spider-Man fandom spoke upon issue #500 and how it wasn’t a good issue, specifically talking about the ending involving Uncle Ben and how it was ‘banal’.

 This is my rebuttal to that.

 First lets look at the scene in question and give a little context. It’s Spider-Man’s birthday and he’s spent his time on a trip through his life.

 He’s seen a possible future where his identity has been compromised, where he’s wanted by the law and where he is ultimately killed in a last stand with the authorities. Then he’s witnessed his origin as a teenager and had to essentially sporadically hop to random points along his timeline in order to get back to where he started and avert a demonic invasion.

  In typical Spider-Man fashion the moments of his life he finds himself returning to are far from pleasant ones as he finds himself in the midst of his battles with various foes, or trapped under machinery in Doc Ock’s underwater base, or even at the Brooklyn Bridge trying and again failing to save Gwen Stacy.

 All of this is courtesy of Doctor Strange who inspires Spider-Man to keep on fighting after the latter incident.

And when I say he has to keep fighting...I mean he has to do all of this:

 Bad ass.

 Anyway by the end of the issue Spider-Man opens up a box from Doctor Strange with a note saying he has just five minutes. And its a doozy!

 Okay so the main points of contention from this particular Spider-Man fan, when commenting on this issue, boiled down to:

 1)      This was underwhelming for a 500th issue of a historic title, with ASM #600 being better on that front

2)      It’s almost like another Doctor Strange story because Spider-Man is up against Dormammu and Doctor Strange is involved

3)      You expect a big ass battle, perhaps with all of his villains as the cover depicted

4)      You never feel like its a personal enough story for Spider-Man because its cluttered with other stuff

5)      The conversation between Peter and Uncle Ben is banal and says nothing of importance, not addressing Peter’s role in Ben’s death. Particularly this Spider-Man fan notes how if his father was alive again their conversation would be a lot more substantial.

So let’s address these criticisms one by one.

 1)      This was underwhelming for a 500th issue of a historic title.

I don’t entirely disagree with this.

 For a $3.50 comic book in 2004 that was almost (despite the cover’s claim to the contrary) double length the story was mostly just a clipshow. For an issue which is a milestone amongst milestones (being halfway to issue #1000) something more seismic should’ve been in order. As was though the issue was something of a clipshow comic book which isn’t really acceptable when you consider other centennial Spider-Man issues have had stuff like a rematch between Spidey and the Burglar, the death of Harry Osborn, the death of Aunt May or even in ASM #700’s case a big status quo shift. Okay it was shifting into a bad status quo but that’s not my point.

 My point is a centennial issue should carry weight to it. it should either be the culmination of something or the beginning of something that’d matter going forward. ASM #500 was the end of a three issue arc that had only one consequence thereafter, the setting up of another short arc involving Loki. Really the story was fairly skippable which for a centennial issue isn’t good enough.

 However that being said the story should be evaluated unto itself and not just on the basis of how it marks a milestone.

 2)      It’s almost like another Doctor Strange story because Spider-Man is up against Dormammu and Doctor Strange is involved

 Arguably, this point might be true of the three part story overall. However it is not true of ASM #500 in isolation.

 Yes the main impetus is to stop Dormammu and yes Doctor Strange is involved and the one sending Spider-Man on his journey down memory lane.

 However they are nothing more than the excuses to get the story going. The story being a highlighting of Spider-Man’s struggles, the cost of the costume and how Peter feels about that at the end of the day.

 That’s what the story is really about and it’s not only squarely based on Peter but it is also most definitely by it’s introspective nature a Spider-Man story.

 Really Dormammu and Doctor Strange could’ve been switched out for Doctor Doom and Reed Richards and it would’ve amounted to the same thing. Stopping Dormammu is the destination Doctor Strange is the vehicle getting us to that destination but the story is about the guy in that vehicle and his journey to reach that destination and what he feels about the journey once it is over.

 3)      You expect a big ass battle, perhaps with all of his villains as the cover depicted

 We got that. See the splash page above. More poignantly seeing Spider-Man be thrown into all of his old battles at random with little respite and endlessly fight and fight and fight some more, triumphing over each of them and getting back home to help save the whole damn world is a pretty big feat of Spider-Man’s strength and willpower. It’s yet another ‘lift the wreckage off your back’ moment but done differently.

 4)      You never feel like its a personal enough story for Spider-Man because its cluttered with other stuff

 See my rebuttal to point 2) and also take another look at those conversations I posted between Peter and Doctor Strange and Peter and Uncle Ben, not to mention these scenes.

This isn’t personal?

 Also amongst the 38 pages of this issue do you know how many feature the Mindless Ones, Dormammu or none Spider-Man characters (exempting instances like the Juggernaut) and have mostly not been about Spider-Man’s main personal journey in the story? 7 tops. And two of those was setting up the mechanics of the story to allow Spider-Man to return to his own timeline.

 So the story is cluttered by all those things being in...less than 19% of the story? So...egregiously less than even ¼ of the overall story?

 Okay.

  5)      The conversation between Peter and Uncle Ben is banal and says nothing of importance, not addressing Peter’s role in Ben’s death. Particularly this Spider-Man fan notes how if his father was alive again their conversation would be a lot more substantial.

  This is probably my biggest bone to pick for various reasons because it speaks to frankly looking at the story far too superficially and also allowing personal life stuff to cloud your judgement. And also because, as you will hear me repeat going forward, this scene was ingenious.

 First of all let’s get a little messy here and talk about the commenter and their father. I do not know the commenter very well and know even less of their father. But I do not need to in order to make my point because it is incredibly basic and obvious.

 The commenter isn’t Spider-Man, their father wasn’t like Uncle Ben and their relationship with one another wasn’t like Peter and Ben’s.

 I know this because

 a)      No one in real life is like Spider-Man or Uncle Ben

b)      No one’s life experiences is like Spider-Man’s, not even police officers who have maybe the closest equivalent to Spider-Man’s life (and from what I know of the commenter they have never been a police officer)

c)       No two people are identical on this earth in their personalities which by definition means no two people’s relationship will be identical to any other two people’s relationship. Especially when it comes to a relationship between a parent and child which is about as personal as you could get.

 All of which renders the criticism that they would’ve said something different or more substantial to their briefly resurrected father entirely invalid.

 Frankly, anyone seeking to truly analyze the scene or critique it should not be asking what THEY would’ve done in Peter’s position and instead be asking what made sense for Peter in the context of his life, personality and history would do. And at the same time what BEN would’ve done, something the commenter entirely neglected.

 Which is in fact the real genius of the scene. It flips the script quite a bit to instead of having Peter seek a lot of answers from Ben, it actually shows us that Ben has somethings he wants to ask Peter.

 Which is ingenious because after 40+ years we are entirely aware that Peter misses uncle Ben and wants to see him again. But the scene in ASM #500 makes the point that actually Ben would miss Peter too and would need to get a certain amount of closure from him, which I will get into a bit more shortly.

 I think if Uncle Ben returned we’d all expect Peter to want to confess and ask Ben for forgiveness for his part in Ben’s death. And the thing is...he did that, or rather he tried too. Because JMS opted to take things a step further. He had Peter begin to ask Ben for forgiveness and for Ben to cut him off before specifics were said.

 Which is again ingenious. Let’s be real here, based upon everything we’ve ever known about Uncle Ben (and putting aside how the Ben in this story clearly is aware he’s dead), he’d obviously forgive his nephew for his lack of action when he was 15 years old, especially in light of all he’s done since.

 What JMS did was subvert that expectation and have Ben not forgive Peter, but go so far as to say that he doesn’t even consider what Peter did as something his nephew needs forgiveness for, not from him anyway. In one stroke Ben conveys to Peter and the reader that Peter is not atoned for his original sin but rather he never needed that atonement in the first place. Which had writers really paid attention, should have ended any BS guilt tripping Peter visited upon himself going forward when you think about it.

 So off the top the issue not only addresses one of the major points of discussion everyone would’ve envisioned for this sort of scenario.

 In fact, really as far as Peter is concerned what else is there really to talk about with Ben?

 Remember by all accounts Peter and Ben had a very positive and fulfilling parent/child relationship. Peter and Ben’s last interaction wasn’t an argumentative or negative one from what we know. So there is no ‘unfinished business’ left to settle between them like there was between Harry and Norman when either of them were depicted to have died.

 What else does Peter, within the mere five minutes he has with Uncle Ben, really  got to say to his Uncle? Especially when you consider from his experiences with this stuff Ben is probably able to know or observe the stuff that goes on in Peter’s life. Like Peter really doesn’t have to tell Ben he’s married, or that he’s a teacher or even that he’s Spider-Man.

 What else from a storytelling perspective does the specific character of Peter Parker (not you, me, the commenter or anyone else) need to say to Ben once the issue of his guilt over his death has been addressed? The answer is nothing really, at least nothing that we the readers really need to see him saying.

 Returning to what I said above, JMS further subverts the expectations in this scenario by having Ben be the one who asks the questions. Cleverly though the focus is still on Peter. Ben is shown to be the one with concern for his son but in asking the questions we get to examine Peter.

 Now this is not only brilliant for the reasons I’ve outlines, but because it is also touchingly realistic despite the fantastical scenario.

 Whilst there are some shitty parents out there, most parents love their children, regard them as the most important things in their life and make their well-being their top priority.

 In this issue we have a man who was the adoptive father of this kid who involuntarily had to leave his son when he was just 15 and still in need of parental guidance as he grew up. Now for a mere 5 minutes he gets the chance to see his son again when he’s all grown up. Even ignoring how he’s literally dead, Ben’s window of opportunity to raise and shape Peter, his son, closed a long time ago.

 So instead (as discussed above) he does assuages Peter’s concerns and proceeds to do what frankly MOST parents in that situation would do. He seeks reassurance. Not for Peter’s sake but for his own.

 He asks Peter two questions, the first of which boils down to

 Have you tried to live a meaningful life?

 Now granted Peter somewhat lies in his answer because when Ben asks if he ever walked away from what he believed ‘even once’ he says he never has when ASM #50 and ASM #100 alone are proof that that isn’t true. But then again earlier on Ben did comment that we all stumble and I suppose when you get right down to it, it’s more important that Peter kept coming back to his responsibilities as Spider-Man than the fact that on occasion he walked away from it for, at most, like a few months.

 So Peter’s life is reaffirmed as one of meaning, which is a poignant question for a parent to have answered of their child. And also a poignant one for anyone to have to dig deep and answer of themselves as Peter did in that moment.

 However it is not as poignant as Ben’s second question, one which goes to the heart of essentially every human being who’s ever lived.

 Are you happy?

  Let me break that down for you a little bit.

 Uncle Ben is a man who never got to finish his job as a parent to his son Peter and never got to see the specifics of how his life unfolded.

 Now in a very brief window of time he has the chance to find out first hand from his fully grown son if his efforts as a parent paid off.

 And more pressingly he has the opportunity to know the thing virtually EVERY parent across the planet and all time has wanted to know.

 Is my child happy?

 Is the person whom I love more than anyone in my life or in the whole world, the person whom I can’t help anymore after years of trying to help them, are they happy?

 Can I go back to where I came from, where I can’t see them or interact with them, with my mind at ease knowing that they are okay?

 This is an entirely realistic thing for Ben to ask and something that fans probably considered a Hell of a lot less than Peter’s side of the scenario.

 But the real brilliance of the scene is not in the fact that Ben as a parent would ask the question. But that it makes Peter ask it of himself.

 Keep in mind the context of the scene.

 Peter has just relived his life, or rather all the crazy super hero parts of it, i.e. the parts which have caused the most pain and problems in his life. The parts which do mostly amount to violence that’s gotten under his skin and threatened to break him. The parts which he has recently learned might possibly lead him down a dark path where he is falsely accused of a crime and killed by the very forces of justice he’s striven to help throughout his career.

And now Uncle Ben, his father, the man who’s death set him down that path which has cost him so much, the man whom miraculously he can see again for a mere five minutes and whom he would deny almost nothing to is asking him this question. The same question which, if you take a look back above, Doctor Strange was hinting at.

 And it’s a question I think we’ve all asked of ourselves at one point or another. Hell you could go so far as to say it’s a question which hits right at the heart of life itself.

 And in this milestone issue set on the anniversary of his very birth, Peter Parker tells the one man he could never lie to (and by extension the readers as a whole) that...yes.

 Actually, despite all his suffering and talk of the ‘Parker Luck’, he feels he is very lucky and ultimately happy.

 And that my friends is why the commenter was so very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very wrong in his assessment of this scene being unimportant and banal.

 How on Earth could a scene which forces Spider-Man to take a hard look at his life, a life which he’s just revisited the worst highlights of, a life which has been published across 40+ years, and emerge saying that he is deep down happy and content, be meaningless?

 How could it be anything even resembling banal?

 That my friends is why for all it’s flaws and despite maybe not being enough of a milestone, Amazing Spider-Man #500 is most definitely a GOOD Spider-Man comic.

#Spider-Man #Peter Parker #uncle ben #ben parker #marvel #marvel comics #Doctor Strange #stephen strange #Dormammu #mindless ones #j michael straczynski