#emphasis on everyone HATES how them being a couple is crucial to the story

[docheros]

i think seán could do dapperanti for canon events. like those toxic couples that kinda work out sometimes and it's not like "he's mad and beats me but i love him <3" no they're both toxic and awful people and their story is tragic and full of twisted times and them being a couple is necessary to the story bc it's an important element and everyone hates it and makes fix it fics with jameson with anyone else and they misread jj's entire character but at the end of the day he still loves anti and anti loves him and they both try to kill each other every day

#AS IN: thinking about the kinda couples florence likes #peak toxic romance #emphasis on everyone HATES how them being a couple is crucial to the story #and any fanfic trying to erase this part don't work out #anyways this is too complex so ig seán will just go with the old black and white #i'm talking!! #jj #anti #dapperanti my beloved

[hockeyboysiguess]

Countdown

a/n: what’s up everyone? i’m new in town because i found one stupid hockey boy which led me to another and you know how it goes. let me know if you want me to continue writing!

warnings: some swearing, a little bit of drinking.

Your feet were killing you, and you’d definitely had a couple more than you set out to have when the night started, but it was New Year’s Eve, you told yourself. It was the kind of night you could have a little too much. You rocked a little forward on your heels, trying to relieve some of the pressure on the arches of your feet, but it threw you off balance. Luckily, Mat was there with a steady arm to keep you to your feet. You could’ve done without the chirping that immediately followed the incident.

“You know, you could just take the shoes off if they’re bothering you that much,” he said, with a laugh edging at each word as he spoke.

“I’ve definitely explained this to you before,” you sighed. “You look at the shoe, you look at your feet, you tell yourself that your shoes and your feet are married tonight and nothing in the world will separate you. You can’t get divorced after two hours, would look bad for my next husband.”

“You are more committed to those shoes than you were with your last boyfriend,” Mat retorts, never the one to stop the banter first.

“He couldn’t support me like these babies can.” You point your toes and jut one foot out for emphasis, “He didn’t make my legs look this killer either.”

Mat rolled his eyes at you and laughed, a constant combination in your friendship that had become one of the most crucial in your life this past year. You’d met him towards the beginning of the year, and you got along instantly due to your identical senses of humor. Your friendship solidified with his willingness to try practically every restaurant in New York City with you and the fact that you always let him be the DJ whenever you were together. You tried to go through the timeline of your friendship, trying to find the moment something shifted and he stopped being your friend Mat and started being the reason you said no to dates with other guys when they approached you and why you refused to let any of you other friends set you up with anyone. You glanced over at the clock to distract yourself from your thoughts, 11:50pm. Ten minutes to midnight.

“Hey, I was just thinking about the day we met,” Mat told you, a smile on his face carrying over to yours as you remembered the first time you met him.

Ten.

- Months ago, you were at a party pretty similar to this where everyone was a little less dressed up and the alcohol was a lot worse. You were standing with two of your friends, debating on if you wanted to stay longer or head out to the bars when a ping pong ball landed in your cup.

“Hey! My buddy needs a partner for pong. Can you play? Doesn’t matter if you’re shit; he’s probably worse.”

You shrugged, said, “Why not?” and stepped up to the table next to him. You set your cup down on the table and turned to your new partner for the evening, “If I have to carry this team, now’s the time to let me know that you’re dead weight.”

His face was a little taken aback for a second, but then a wide smile formed across his face. He nodded softly.

“I like you,” he said. “You’re right, I am totally about to be dead weight. My name’s Mat by the way.”

You introduced yourself to him and proceeded to win the next two rounds of beer pong with Mat making three cups the entire time. You made fun of his accent. He pretended to be upset that you got away with breaking the elbows rule because you had boobs and they distracted Tito, but the distraction was to his advantage so he said he’d let the rule breaking slide as long as you promised to be his pong partner for the night. You agreed to take him on as charity case for the night if he tried a Thai-Greek fusion brunch with you tomorrow morning that none of your other friends we’re willing to go it. He took the deal and your friendship began.

Nine.

“– seasons of How I Met Your Mother? Jesus, is this even going to be worth it?” Mat complained

“Get the popcorn, sit down, and shut up,” you told him. “I cannot believe you haven’t seen this before. It’s a classic.

“Friends is a classic,” he sighs as he sits down on the couch, dropping the popcorn bowl between you. “This is a cheap imitation. Besides, I thought you would hate this. Isn’t Barney like very anti your whole super feminist thing or something and doesn’t Ted just suck?”

“If you don’t realize you have to take everything in this world with a grain of salt yet, then you are beyond help, Barzy.”

You binged it in under three weeks. While you’d lived the last episode premiering live with your family, you didn’t think you’d ever seen anyone as pissed off at the ending of the show than Mat was. Your sides hurt from laughing so much at his insane ranting about how they could have possibly done that to him, with all of the time he invested in this show. He took it personally and swore he’d never watch another episode again. You still couldn’t bring it up without making him start a whole diatribe. It was your party trick together even though Mat wasn’t quite in on the joke.

Eight.

- Days in Spain in June. Mat insisted on you joining him on his post season tour of Europe. By tour he meant never leaving Spain but going on a lot of wine tours and pretending he knew a lot about wine even though he couldn’t tell the difference between a three-hundred-dollar bottle of age merlot and a bottle of Barefoot if his life depended on it.

“Oh, isn’t this a fabulous red vintage?” Mat said to you, doing an impossibly bad British accent in an attempt to sound fancy. “I can taste floral,” he sipped the wine again, smacking his tongue against his lips loudly, “and citrus notes in this one. You’ll quite like it, madam.”

“You’re gonna get us kicked out,” you sang softly to him as you noticed the daggers he was getting from your tour guide.

Mat slung his arm around your shoulders, pulling you in tight to him. You could feel his muscles tense under his thin t-shirt, and your breath caught in your throat. Some part of you had known he was attractive this whole time; you’d just never been forced to pay attention until this exact moment when you were pressed up against him. You pushed the thoughts to a far corner of your mind. This was your friend Mat and you didn’t need anything more than that from him. You didn’t want it, you told yourself.

Seven.

- Seconds left on the clock. You were pretty sure you hadn’t breathed for the last 5 minutes of the game and you were gripping your seat so hard that your knuckles were starting to go numb. The Islanders were down by one going into the last two minutes against Tampa Bay. Tito had scored to create a 3-3 game with just over a minute on the clock to play. You didn’t want this to go into overtime and neither did the guys. They wanted to complete the comeback win here and now.

You watched as Mat shifted the puck side to side on the ice. You saw him glance up at the clock for a brief second, then he looked back towards the net and he saw his shot. He took it without any hesitation. You were on your feet before the puck hit the back of the net. Mat was immediately engulfed by his teammates, swallowed up in a sea of blue and orange jerseys. His games practically gave you a heart attack, but you’d never turn him down if he asked you to come and he asked you to come a lot.

“Hey there, superstar,” you said, the smile in your voice obvious as you met Mat in the tunnel after he’d finished up his interviews and changed.

“Hey there,” he laughed, giving your shoulder a little shove

You looked around as you walked out with him. He was walking you through that final shot, second by second, but you couldn’t focus on his story. You saw the girlfriends, fiancées, and wives of the other players greeting their respective partners and for a split second you let yourself imagine that with Mat. You hadn’t really thought about it before, but as soon as let that wall down and the flood gates opened, and your feelings for Mat hit you square in the stomach. You wanted to be like them, have what they have, and for a split second, you let yourself want that with him. You wanted him to look at you like the other guys looked at their girlfriends and wives.

“Um, hello?” Mat’s large hang waving in front of your face pulled you out of your moment.

“Oh, sorry. Can you start over? I got a little sidetracked.”

“You okay?” he asked, concern coating the words and his brows furrowing.

“Super-duper, superstar. Try me again.”  

Six.

“-Entrées is way too many. Look, I know you’re practically a championship level competitive eater for fun, but this feels like an exercise of your skills we don’t need to practice.”

“Two things. One, calling pancakes an entrée is a little much. It’s just pancakes,” you retorted, “and two, they serve six different kinds of pancakes here, so I’m getting six kinds of pancakes. Join me or get the hell out.”

Mat’s nose scrunched up as he laughed at your response. God, you loved his laugh. You loved it most when you were responsible for it, not the girl he met at the bar last night who was definitely responsible for the marks peeking out from under his shirt. Seeing those when he sat down made you felt like all the air had left the room. You shrugged off your thoughts as best as you could. Mat wasn’t yours to be possessive of, but that didn’t make the pit in your stomach settle either. You took a sip of your orange juice as Mat’s laughter slowed.

“God, how do I still think you’re cool even though that was super lame?” he asked you, stealing your water since his hungover self practically chugged his when he arrived

“Barzy, some things in the world are magical and they’re better left unexplored and unexplained.”

“Like all women,” he said proudly, like he’d discovered something profound.

You rolled your eyes at him. Even when he was an idiot, you still wished he was your idiot and not some girl at the bar’s idiot, but you wouldn’t risk this. This friendship was too important to you to jeopardize for your stupid middle school girl pinning. You put your feelings back in the box they’d let themselves out of just as the pancakes arrived.

Five.

“You think you’d had five drinks tonight?” Your eyebrow is arched as you look back at an incredibly hammered Barzy. You knew he had to be at least eight deep, more like ten, but instead you said, “Are you sure it’s five?”

Mat nodded profusely, looking more like his bobblehead then himself in that moment. You turned your palms up at him and shrugged a bit, giving him a look of complete disbelief. He proudly put down his beer and yanked his sleeve up to show you his wrist. On his wrist were five incredibly smudged tally marks of various lengths. He hadn’t even managed to realize you were supposed to cross the last one across the other four for every set of five, so there were just five incredibly crooked lines drawn on his wrist in Sharpie.

“See? Five tally marks, five drinks,” he told you, like you were the idiot in this situation.

You nodded in fake understanding as an incredible drunk Mat reached for you. He was significantly touchier with you when he was drunk, his large hands always finding your skin and making a series of thoughts you shouldn’t have run through your brain as your heartbeat picked up in your chest. His hands rested on your upper arms this time as he lined himself up with you, forcing you to make eye contact.

“I’m fine. Don’t you worry about ol’ Barzy here,” he slurred.

“You’re twenty-two,” you laughed. “Hardly makes you an old man, my friend. Come on, I called an Uber. Let’s go.”

You took on of his hands from your arm and held it, dragging him slowly out of the party. He had the attention span of a golden retriever puppy when he was drunk, so it was a good thing you had some practice with this and started your journey to the car ten minutes before your Uber was supposed to arrive. By the time you made it outside, it was already waiting for you. You gave him one small shove and he practically fell right into the car.

“You know,” Mat told you as the car started to roll away from the party, “you’re a really good friend, ya know.”  

You smiled at him but turned your face away quickly as you felt the tears start to sting in your eyes. Maybe it’s the few drinks you’d had yourself, but Mat calling you a good friend was definitely supposed to feel good, but all it was make your heart clench inside your chest. It confirmed everything you were feeling. You and Mat were friends, good to great friends even, but that’s how he saw you, his friend. You never wanted to be the kind of person that complained about someone not liking them back, but you finally understood where everyone else was coming from. This feeling was awful in a way you couldn’t quite describe. It was like a hand had reached into you, found the place where your feelings for Mat where, and squeezed hard, except that hand wasn’t actually all too careful to target that one spot and instead squeezed everything inside your chest until you could barely catch your breath and the tears were rolling down your cheeks. Thank god that Mat had way more than five drinks and was already asleep against the opposite window because you couldn’t keep it together the entire ride home.

Four.

“You really want four dogs at once?” The disagreement coated Mat’s voice. “That’s a lot of dogs at once. I think you need to reconsider this part of your life plan.”

“Four is a very reasonable number,” you replied, not even bothering to look up from your phone. “And this is my twenty-year plan here, Mat, not yours. You don’t get a say.”

“I’m your best friend. I deserve a say here if I think you’re going to screw up part of your life,” he countered. “You’re going to be beholden to these creatures. And you’re gonna have four of them! They’re going to need you constantly. You’re not going to have time for anything else.”

“I do plan on like, having someone around at some point,” you reminded him. “Step nine of this plan was to find that man, finally, and one of the key criteria is that is likes dogs, so he’ll help share the workload.”

“And then you really only have two dogs,” Mat mumbles under his breath as he start to nod in understanding. “Okay, okay, I concede. You’re right, four is the correct number of dogs.”

You laughed in response to his agreement, “Now I’ve just got to find a man and convince him like I convinced you.”

“Took you all of a minute to get me on board with your plan here. I’d sign up to co-parent four dogs with you. You’re gonna be a killer pet parent. I’m sure you can get some other schmuck to agree with you. He’s not going to be as hot as me though, so that’s going to be a downgrade for you right there.” You didn’t let his words sink in. You let them flow right out of your head as soon as they came in. It was for the best, you told yourself.

Three.

- Hours into your co-worker’s engagement party and you were about ready to scream. If one more platter of engagement cookies with their initials and faces came past you, you were going to explode. The only reason you’d make it this long was Mat and the fact he tipped the bartender big time when you got your first drink, so he was making you doubles and triples when he was only supposed to pour singles at the open bar.

“This sucks,” you sighed to him, taking a swig of your drink.

“This party is fucking pathetic,” he said to you. “How are people this boring before they’re thirty? I just don’t understand. If I ever get engaged to someone who wants to have cookies with our faces on them at our engagement party, please shoot me.”

“I expect you to do the same if I ever think that’s a good idea,” you laughed as your spoke.

“You know what,” Mat paused only to down the remaining third of his drink in one go, “it’s time to blow this popsicle stand.”

“Jesus, Mat, they haven’t even made a toast yet or anything. We can’t leave yet,” you tried to remind him, even though it was completely half-assed since you might have been more miserable than him.

“Oh, come on, be irresponsible. Let’s go do something actually fun,” Mat said, leaning into you as he spoke. “You’re in a killer dress. You look incredible. There’s this cool bar down the road I’ve been wanting to try, and we’re dressed for the occasion.”

You scrunched up your nose as you thought. You wanted out, but you also really didn’t want to be rude since you’d have to show up to work on Monday regardless. Mat took your drink from you as you thought, taking care of the rest of your glass with ease even though the bottom quarter was definitely straight vodka due to how slow you’d been drinking. He looked at you, his eyes softly begging for you to get the hell out of here with him. You sighed and grabbed one of his hands, making your way towards the back exit. You couldn’t see the smile on his face, but you felt his fingers slide between yours as he gave your hand an appreciative squeeze.

Two.  

- Times that you’ve almost told him how you feel in the last month. The holiday season had you feeling particularly emotional in general due to a combination of Hallmark movies and the holiday parties’ people were having were giving you a few too many opportunities to be drunk around Mat. Drunk you was a little looser lipped than sober you. Both times started and ended the same way.

“Hey, Mat, can I talk to you for a quick sec?”

You placed your hand on his shoulder as he spoke, pulling him slightly so he’d turn to face you. Each time he agreed and followed you away from the crowd, tucked away in a less traffic area of the party.

“What’s up? Are you too drunk? Do you need to head out? I can call an Uber. Or should I call a Lyft?” he asked in rapid succession.

“No, no,” you shook your head. “I, uh, I wanted to tell you something actually.”

“Okay, shoot,” he replied instantly. “You know you can tell me anything.”

Your mouth went dry as the desert and your carefully rehearsed speech dissolved in your mind. You looked at him, his eyes dark as his traced over your face, trying to figure out what could have been important enough for you to pull him away from the party. Your eyes danced across his face, his strong jawline, his kind eyes, his soft lips. You wanted him. You wanted him so badly it hurt, but the idea of losing him from your life kept your mouth shut both times.

“You know what. Actually, it’s nothing. I figured it out myself. Let’s go get another drink.”

One.

You snapped back to the current moment, pulling your head out of the past. You watched the clock turn to 11:59pm.

“Sorry, I zoned out there,” you told him.

“It’s alright. Tito dropped in when you faded off, so no hard feelings,” he laughed as he spoke, “Um, actually, there’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about and I guess, why not start the new year off with a bang?”

You took a deep breath in as you looked over Mat’s face curiously. He was nervous. His hands were fidgeting with his cup. He was shuffling from side to side, foot to foot, transferring his weight with each movement. He looked down at the ground, unable to meet your eyes and mumbled something you couldn’t hear. The countdown for the last twenty seconds had already started, so there was too much background noise to catch his words.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you?” You had to shout to make sure he heard you.

“I like you!” he screamed back. “Fuck that, I’m in love you with and I really, really fucking don’t want to see you kiss anyone else at ten seconds because I’m pretty sure it’ll break me at this point.”

Ten. Your mind was racing. Nine. Mat wanted to kiss you. Eight. Mat liked you like you liked him. Seven. No, Mat loved you. Six. He took a step closer to you. Five. He was so nervous, nervous he’d just ruined everything because you still hadn’t said anything. Four. Your feelings burst out from the box you’d put them in, running through your body, making your heart rate kick up in your chest. Three. Mat leaned his face closer to yours. Two. Your eyes locked with his. One. You rocked up on your toes and pressed your lips against his.

His hands found your hips, pulling you desperately closer to him, practically crushing you against his chest, but his lips were soft and gentle against yours. The room exploded into cheers around you, everyone celebrating the ball drop and the new year, but you barely noticed them, until you pulled back from Mat. His eyes scanned your face, trying to figure out exactly what you were feeling.

“I love you too, Mat.”

“Thank God,” he chuckled to himself as he leaned down to kiss you again, “and happy fucking New Year to me.”

#mat barzal #mat barzal imagine #mat barzal fic #nhl imagine #nhl fic #nhl fanfic #nhl fanfiction #hockey imagine

[dangan-meme-palace]

Analysis – Kokichi's Plan in Chapter 4

The concept, the execution, and the failure.

Before we start, it's my personal recommendation that you read this analysis before rewatching the chapter 4 trial, and then reading it as you rewatch it. Unfortunately, due to tumblr limiting the number of pictures I can put in a single post, I've decided to refrain from adding screenshots as I just have too many I want to add. However, my points are evidenced by the trial itself if you watch carefully with them in mind, and so I'm encouraging you to do so. Please, please do so.

Concept

By my analysis, Kokichi's plan was to implicate himself as the culprit and for Gonta to get away with the murder in order to mercy kill the rest of the students and save them from despair.

Kokichi mentions this much before and after the trial, most people remembering the moments after and not the moments before; probably because between subtle admittance and loud screaming and crying, you'll remember the screaming and crying more. This analysis is based on the fact that his words pre- and post-trial are true, which is backed by several canon instances and also it just makes sense.

Execution

Now! This plan required a few things to work:

It required Kokichi to make everyone hate and be suspicious of him

It required Gonta to cooperate

It required Kokichi to be able to get around Shuichi's deductive reasoning in some way

It required a majority of the class to vote for Kokichi

If that wording seems specific, it's because it is!

I'll be talking about each major component of this plan and how each factor (almost) worked together to create a perfect storm + when, how, and why this plan failed despite quite frankly being a fantastic display of Kokichi's talent as the Ultimate (Supreme) Leader.

The 1st component is pretty much accomplished before the chapter even begins, he is a self-proclaimed liar that annoys people regularly after all, but in order for the 3rd and 4th components to really work he needed to sink his reputation even lower. He does this in a multitude of ways both before and during the trial: making sinister faces or looking nervous at appropriate times, antagonizing everyone (but most importantly Gonta and Kaito), and just in general being a lying nuisance that no one really wants to listen to.

The 2nd component was accomplished inside the Virtual World... and then immediately undone as soon as Gonta logged out due to a couple of crossed wires. The fact that Gonta forgot remaining undiscovered by everyone (including Kokichi) until two-thirds of the way through the trial is important to how the plan failed and adds perspective in areas, but I'll hold off on explaining why until it's time to talk about it in-depth. Make a mental note and let's move on.

The 3rd component explains why during the investigation every single surviving member of the cast told Shuichi that they trusted him but then when we get really into the trial we start seeing them doubt him immensely, Kaito being among the people that doubted Shuichi the most. Why is that? How did everyone go from relying on Shuichi to thinking for themselves and doubting his reasoning, and what does it have to do with Kokichi? It's simple: Kokichi lead the others into doing so.

We see this a lot during the investigation period, or at least the prep work of it. Kokichi constantly encourages the others to say things like: "We can't leave this all to Shuichi, we have to work hard too!" by telling them that they should all rely on Shuichi and to never doubt his judgment. Kokichi was using his bad reputation to make them come to a conclusion that is the exact opposite of what he said. More on that a little later as well!

Kokichi knows his reputation, he's the one that made it that way after all, and frequently you will see him use it to his advantage. Whether he's trying to cover up an emotional outburst or he's trying to make someone admit something, you will often see him use his reputation as someone untrustworthy to lead conversations in subtle ways.

I use the word "lead" with great emphasis as that is his Talent. He is the very best of the best at leading people; The Ultimate (Supreme) Leader. When he wants someone to think a certain way or do something they end up doing it whether they realize it or not, because he is extremely talented in his field. I cannot stress enough how good this man is at leading conversations and people into going where he wants them to go. Oh shit back to the point–!

During this time we also see Kokichi acting strange, so strange that Shuichi mentions it four times in his internal dialogue. Following him, being helpful, offering advice and hints... it seems nice until you realize his intention wasn't to become good partners with Shuichi, but to instead ruin Shuichi's reputation with the others by having them associate Shuichi with Kokichi, who they already hate thanks to component 1.

During the trial you'll see this subtle manipulation working as soon as Kokichi starts calling Shuichi partner and making Shuichi agree with his points, putting on a false show of partnership. To the others it seemed that Shuichi was picking Kokichi over all of his friends even when Shuichi himself tries to explain otherwise, and this is absolutely no coincidence.

Kaito is especially affected by this because Kaito and Kokichi are sworn enemies, and in Kaito's mind, Shuichi just picked his enemy over him. It really hurt him to be "betrayed" like this, causing Kaito to turn his back on Shuichi despite the numerous promises that he would never do such a thing he made prior to this trial. Kokichi really focuses on breaking their friendship too, interrupting Shuichi multiple times when he tries to tell Kaito that it's not personal and making sinister faces while saying that Shuichi is his partner now, taunting and gloating to Kaito's face about the loss of his sidekick. Breaking them apart was actually key to how Kokichi used Kaito's influence to his advantage in component 4.

Focus on Kaito aside, everyone else also refuses to agree with Kokichi –and Shuichi by association– which means that no matter what Shuichi says or how hard he tries to prove it, as long as Kokichi interrupts him and spins the story to make it look like he was somehow involved in that deduction, no one will agree with Shuichi no matter how much logic he throws at them. He has placed Shuichi's deductions in a permanent state of check. No matter what Shuichi says or does, Kokichi can and will get in the way of it immediately to control the narrative of the trial.

During this time Kokichi also says that Gonta is the culprit and I know that it tripped a lot of people up so I'll elaborate on what he was doing before we get to the next component. You have to remember that Kokichi's style of lying for this trial has predominantly been him saying the exact opposite of what he means in order to make the others do it. If Kokichi says "go left" they will all go right, that is how he uses his reputation. Notice how when he says Gonta is the culprit everyone's immediate reaction is to defend Gonta and persecute Kokichi even more than they were before, effectively framing himself by making it look like he was framing Gonta. When looking at Kokichi's lies it is sometimes essential to analyze the reaction he got than the lie on it's own because what he wants out of people is just as important as what he says to make them do it.

This leads into the 4th component: Kokichi getting the majority vote.

Kaito unquestionably holds the most influence in the trial after Shuichi loses all of his, gaining more by spearheading the hate campaign against Kokichi, and because of this everyone almost lost their lives in a mass execution.

After Shuichi's reputation in the eyes of the others is seen as being led astray and therefore less trustworthy, Kaito is the one that causes and loudly encourages everyone to rally against Kokichi, and by extension, doubt Shuichi's deductions. Kaito doing this more out of a hatred/distrust of Kokichi than anything related to Shuichi, with the rest following suit because they can't trust Kokichi, who they've been lead to hate so much in this trial by both Kaito and, unbeknownst to them, Kokichi. Kokichi essentially created his own witch hunt, with the cast's irrational anger without proof almost leading to a false conviction.

Allow me to further emphasize the fact that everyone but Shuichi was convinced that "Kokichi was a cold-hearted murderer trying to frame poor Gonta for his own crimes." Also allow me to remind you that according to the rules you don't need everyone to vote for the same person in order to win, you just need a majority. Kokichi had that majority and was about to "win" the trial.

...So why didn't he?

Failure

Two. Crossed. Wires.

That's it. All it took was one little piece to be out of place and Kokichi's astonishingly brilliant strategy crumbled in an instant. Allow me to clarify:

Everyone remembers the moment when Kokichi yelled at Gonta, right? The big, bad moment? That one? Good. I'm about to explain to you what Kokichi was thinking while he yelled.

In Kokichi's mind, his plan was almost complete. He had done the impossible! Everything had gone according to keikaku! He had gotten Gonta's cooperation, he made everyone blame him, he made everyone stop listening to the Ultimate Detective, all that was left was for Gonta to condemn him in front of the others and they would all vote for the wrong man. That one little nudge at this very crucial turning point and the plan would finally be complete, his effort made to bear fruit...

Except... Gonta never condemned Kokichi with any sort of evidence, all he said was "I don't know!" and "I didn't do it!" Gonta was about to trip them at the finish line and so Kokichi, as subtly as he could, told Gonta to blame him, the "culprit". Once, twice, a third time... he really tried to explain to Gonta what he was meant to do without alerting the others. It didn't even have to be true, as long as Gonta denounced Kokichi with even the slightest bit of evidence, the others were in enough of a frenzy to believe anything that pinned Kokichi as the culprit. Still, Gonta doesn't catch the hints from his collaborator. How could he? He didn't remember ever becoming partners in the first place. However, Kokichi doesn't know that and gets very frustrated that Gonta is about to throw away their one ticket to stopping the game, so he screams "Just make up an excuse or whatever" in his anger, still trying to get his point across. Gonta can't fuck up now. This is their only shot. Despite this, once more Gonta doesn't know what's going on and misses his cue.

Shuichi finally notices this as well, coming to the conclusion that Gonta's avatar had been the one with the error. Kokichi quickly realizes that his partner isn't available to him anymore, his memories lost in a bundle of wires and code. The moment is over, the frenzy has cooled off by the time Shuichi was done explaining and there was no way for him to lead the conversation again after ruining his own reputation like that. The plan failed.

All because of two little wires.

From here on out we see Kokichi visibly withdraw. There isn't anything left for him to do but complete the trial and think of a new plan. He's less motivated than before, insults everyone less than before, offers his input less than before, and generally seems like he can barely keep up his facade. You can't blame him though, with everything that happened that day and the fact that it was all in vain anyway really must have taken it's toll on Kokichi. From his friend trying to kill him to trying and failing to plan around his own murder to orchestrate and get away with a mass mercy kill... it's an unbelievable understatement to say he was having a bad day.

He speeds the trial up as much as he can with Kaito stubbornly getting in the way, forcing Shuichi to cross everyone off the suspect list except for Gonta, the unwitting blackened. Whether it was out of pity for Gonta's confusion or just him wanting the trial to be over already due to emotional exhaustion, or perhaps even both, doesn't neccesarily matter. Shuichi ends the trial regardless, and it's all over. Kokichi wasn't able to save anyone from despair and two of his friends died for nothing. He has no one to rely on now and no one left would ever consider letting him close to them. Roll credits... until he comes up with a new plan moments after Gonta is executed because if there is one thing about Kokichi you can always bet on, it's his quick wit.

Afterword

Now that we're at the end, I would like to make something very clear because with how much emphasis I put on Kokichi's capabilities as a leader I'm worried that I might be misunderstood.

I do not believe Gonta was manipulated into murdering Miu. Canon proves that Gonta was a willing collaborator due to external factors not relating to Kokichi's talent as a Leader, but instead because of despair and his own desire to protect everyone and that's that.

It's not really related to this anaylsis, however if I see someone using my own analysis to try and prove that Kokichi was anything but friends with Gonta I will go apeshit. Do not fucking do that.

#kokitea #danganronpa analysis #drv3 analysis #kokichi analysis #not sure what to tag this because i dont wanna put it in the main tags... #sorry for the sheer length of the post and the fact that im unable to add a read more because im on mobile #its not d1sc 0urs3 and its not criticism so idk what i should tag this as

[hongism]

analysis of storge

hi so yes hello this is gonna be something that you’ll see following each part of colours of love. the primary purpose of this is gonna be to show you guys my process and how i work through scenes in my stories, and i can do these for other works if you’d like, you can just drop by my inbox and say ‘hey could we please see an analysis of [fic]??’ i’d love to give you guys some more insight on my process and how i figure out my own writing as well as just plot questions and things like that. if you wanna see these for a series that i have, rather than asking for the whole series to be analyzed, just ask for a chapter!! that way it’s easier on me to write the analysis and you guys to read the analysis!!

but anyway let’s get into an analysis from my perspective as the writer of colour of love part one: storge

So first off I’m just going to talk about Storge as a term and the type of love it is.

The word Storge comes from the Greek term στοργή (storgē). The most simple definition can be boiled down to ‘familiar love’. It is an instinctual and familiar love that looks and feels a lot like another type of love called philia (affectionate love felt between friends). Often times storge is more related to a couple kinds of relationships: parent-child and childhood friends. Just like philia, there is not a physical or sexual attraction shared between people, but there is a strong bond, kinship, and familiarity between people.

And although storge closely resembles philia in that it is a love without physical attraction, storge is primarily to do with kinship and familiarity. It is a natural form of affection.

So how does this apply to Colours of Love: Storge?

The relationship Mingi and the reader share is a childhood friendship. They have a strong bond, kinship, and a familiarity between the two of them. Throughout their relationship, they have been sharing an affectionate love. The reader continues to maintain this familiar love with Mingi – her storge – whereas Mingi’s feelings develop into something else.

The reader’s storge is the main catalyst of the story. She maintains this love throughout the progression of her relationship with Mingi – which in the fic lasts three months in total – and that familiarity she feels through her love for Mingi is what makes her feel comfortable exploring things with Mingi.

Now there are many things that Mingi does throughout the fic that are both frustrating and anger-inducing. This is purposeful and intentional, especially since you are reading from the reader’s perspective. There are subtleties throughout the story that show Mingi misunderstanding situations and emotions, as well as times where you as the reader are supposed to feel for him.

“I’m transferring to another school at the end of the week. There is no girl I’m into. Min Hyerin is just a random classmate that I thought could pass as a crush. I-I’ve kinda, uh, I’ve liked you this whole time.”

This passage from near the end of the fic is both Mingi’s confession about his feelings as well as his confession about his lies. This is the huge turning point of the story, and it is definitely the most anger-inducing part in the fic, I believe.

The immediate response I’ve seen to this part is “Woah he used her?”. On one hand, yes he did. However, taking a step back and looking at their original agreement:

“I-I don’t have any experience either so that’s holding me back from doing anything. So, why not… why not just learn together?”

Both reader and Mingi agreed to try things out with each other. This is really the start of bad relationship practices and decisions. They didn’t set proper boundaries or define what the relationship was; however, Mingi clearly stated on multiple occasions that if the reader was not comfortable or happy, she could cut it off at any time. He left an open invitation for her to end things. He continued being comfortable in the agreement while Reader did. What Mingi did by lying and tricking Reader into starting this relationship was wrong, but Reader carries much of the blame as well because the responsibility fell onto her shoulders once Mingi told her that she could end things.

Moving onto the other side of things, I wanna chat a bit about Mingi’s love throughout the story because his is not storge as the reader’s is. Mingi toggles between eros (erotic and passionate love) and ludus (playful love filled with infatuation). His actions are driven by a passion and infatuation with the reader. He’s exploring these newfound feelings for her and realizing that it is not just merely friendly feelings. During the first month of their relationship, the reader says this:

Yes, well, here you are a month later in his kitchen yet again (how many times this week?).

The ‘how many times this week’ is a nod to both eros and ludus. These things are happening in Mingi’s apartment so the assumption to be drawn is that Mingi is the one inviting the reader over to partake in more of these experiments. He is constantly wanting more and he is infatuated with the idea of progressing the agreement.

The reader also experiences these kinds of playful and erotic types of love while actively partaking in sexual interactions. Unlike Mingi though, she only experiences it in those moments. All other times, she experiences the familiar love storge that she is used to.

Throughout the story, I aimed to depict each character as a certain ‘desire’. I’ll go into a bit of detail as to what those desires are and why I depicted them in that way, but as a whole the story is a look at desire. It is meant to explore three types of desire - with more emphasis on Mingi’s and the reader’s desires - and show the consequences of each. This is a theme that will be prevalent in each part of Colours of Love.

Mingi: the desire for change

Mingi represents an unhappiness with things remaining the same. Partially due to his feelings for the reader, and hinted at in his lack of interest in the people who like him, Mingi finds routine to be fun for a time then boring after. He demands progress and change, and he is the kind of person who wants to initiate. However, he knew that the reader had her eye on someone else, so his plans for initiating things ended up changing when he learned that.

The Reader: the desire for things to remain the same

The reader represents a comfort in the ways things are. She does not like change and especially hates being the person who initiates the change. 

“No, you’re not. You’re going to watch him from afar like you always do and secretly pine after him in the desperate hopes that he might notice you or talk to you at some point without putting in any effort into making an actual move yourself.”

This passage from Mingi depicts how the reader has a routine in her life. She does the same thing over and over again because that is her comfort zone, and she hates branching out of that comfort zone. A common theme is this fic is that Mingi is constantly the one making the big decisions. The reader sets some ground rules -- not dating, no sex -- but Mingi is the initiator and he is the one pushing for change. 

So if the reader wants things to remain the same, then why did she agree to the arrangement with Mingi? It’s a matter of having those ‘firsts’, things you’ve done for the first time and who you did them with. Reader indicates that the lists of firsts she’s had with Mingi is not that long but entertains the idea of experiencing more firsts with him because of her storge again. She has a familiar love with Mingi and since things feel familiar with him, she is comfortable letting him push the boundaries a little.

Yeosang: the desire for balance and peace

Yeosang’s desire is not as prevalent or detailed as the reader’s or Mingi’s, primarily because he is not the main character of this part of the series. However, he represents the desire to keep the scales balanced. He is constantly flipping between being on Mingi’s side and the reader’s side. He seeks a balance and seeks the solution that will bring that to everyone involved. He is that smart part of your consciousness that warns you when something bad is about to happen or when you are about to make a bad decision. His constant interruptions happen when the reader starts thinking about when something is a bad idea. 

There are limits to how he shows this desire, however, and he doesn’t always express it. You can see this in these paragraphs from the third part of the story:

Last week, Mingi fingered you during movie night with Yeosang.

Two days ago, you gave Mingi a handjob in the back of a lecture hall. Yeosang was one seat over.

Yeosang is present and aware of the situation, he has already talked through things with the reader, and the assumption is that he has talked over things with Mingi as well. When these things are happening, he is not expressing his desire for balance or peace. This is something that will be detailed and become very crucial during his part of the series. I merely hinted at it here, but his desires and how he expresses them are both things that are crucial to his character.

This is kinda the end of my analysis but I wanted to just share some other ideas that I had while writing and why they didn’t make it into the final draft of the fic.

First: Reader asking if Mingi wants to have sex to get his mind off Min Hyerin having a boyfriend

Prior to finding out that his crush on Min Hyerin is nonexistent, the original scene included the reader asking if Mingi wanted sex to get his mind off things. It was meant to represent an absolute fall from grace and fall from what she valued and held dear. Mingi was supposed to agree and things were to progress. However just before having sex, the reader was supposed to have an epiphany and realize that this isn’t what she wanted at all.

The reason it wasn’t included in the final draft:

Two reasons, the first being that I didn’t think it would fit or flow well following the reader and Mingi’s argument in the car. That was a big turning point in the story, and I didn’t want to minimize the feelings off guilt or frustration by including the reader’s offer.

Secondly, I wanted to continue emphasizing how the reader was not the one initiating things. Her offering up the idea of sex would have directly contradicted that and made her prior choices irrelevant and unimportant, and that was something I tried hard to avoid. 

Second: the reader and Mingi going out on ‘dates’

Before I realized how long the fic was gonna be, I had the idea of including these softer and more pg moments of going to the movies, the park, a diner, any sort of date that was intended to be ‘practice’ for a real date. 

The reason it wasn’t included in the final draft:

The main reason I nixed those ideas was the length of the fic. I was already at 7k when I was trying to include the first softer date moment, and I decided that I should save myself the trouble and cut down on some things.

The other reason was because I really wanted this fic to focus on the Bad parts of their relationship. I didn’t want to try to justify what they were doing or make it seem like their arrangement was okay by including soft and happy moments. While they had those moments for sure, the intention was to show you guys as readers what was going wrong in the relationship and why. 

This whole series is an exploration of the good and bad parts of love, and some with be fluffy and happy, some with be angsty and painful, but that is all part of love and finding love. You can see the progression of the eight types of love on the masterlist for the series, and if you know what each type of love is and what they represent, you might be able to figure out which ones could end happily or which could end sadly. Frankly, I don’t even know how all of them end or what will happen in them. Storge turned out different than I thought it would in the best possible way, and I am happy with the final draft and what I was able to achieve in the fic. As this fic was written literally over the course of eight months, I would hope that you can see bits and pieces of my growth over time, even though I edited the fic heavily before posting. I also hope that you guys enjoy this insight and look into my process and how I wrote the fic as I had a ton of fun writing this analysis!! Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you at the next part of Colours of Love!

#colours of love #colours of love: storge #fic analysis #CoL analysis #ateez

[a-duck-with-a-book]

REVIEW // Seven Blades in Black (The Grave of Empires #1) by Sam Sykes

★☆☆☆☆

Disclaimer: while I was reading this book, I found out that Sam Sykes has been accused by numerous women of sexual harassment. You can find more information about it below: - a post listing several accusations of misconduct - twitter post responding to the situation - one of the accusations against Sam Sykes - his quickly-deleted apology Suffice to say, I have no intention of continuing this series or reading any more of his books.

I have a lot to say about this novel, so I’ll begin by making a quick bullet point list outlining what I liked and disliked:

Liked:

Cavric <3

Lisette deserved better

Some interesting concepts in the world building

Disliked:

Sal as a narrator

Sal as an antihero

Sal as a person in general

Writing style

Constant interruptions

Meandering narrative

The “narrator knows something but the writer avoids revealing it until the end for the drama” trope

This is a Big Tough World and Nobody Gets To Be Happy

Lesbians written by a man who harasses women

Unnecessarily long

// image: official cover art Jeremy Wilson //

Let’s begin with the full review by starting with the (few) positives, shall we?

First and foremost, I genuinely enjoyed Cavric and Lisette. It is unfortunate that they had to deal with Sal for the entirety of the novel, but we’ll get to her later. If this book had been a buddy adventure with these two, in which Cavric slowly shows Lisette that she is in a toxic relationships and deserves to move on and find someone better for herself, I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more. Secondly (and finally), Sykes introduced some genuinely interesting world building. The background of the Empire and the Scar was fascinating to read, but unfortunately did not save the rest of this mess.

Alright now let’s rant.

I have 35 notes and 52 highlights from this book, so this might get block quote heavy. (Go check out my notes if you want to see me slowly lose my sanity)

Sal is awful. I know she’s meant to be awful, but she’s not flawed in the way that I think Sykes was trying to write her. I believe she was intended to be a scruffy, lovable antihero who fought her way through a dangerous landscape with her sharp blade and even sharper tongue. A girl who had wrongs committed against her in the past, who did terrible things but is now on the road to an epic redemption arc. She shoots bad guys, she says f*ck and a*s a lot, and she is morally complex. That’s the character that Sykes was trying to make. The one he created, however, is a genuinely terrible person who I had no desire to see come out on top. I have a myriad of issues with her, but let’s outline a couple below: (1) She is incredibly toxic for Lisette. Am I getting a bit too heated about a fictional relationship? Sure. Was I happy to read a toxic lesbian romance written by a man who sexually harasses women? Nope. It kind of grossed me out, actually. Anyway, let me give you a run down of their relationship. Sal arrives. Sal and Lisette sleep together. Sal asks Lisette to give her weapons and or fix things for her. Sal sneaks away, telling herself no good will come of this relationship and they will only cause each other pain. Sal needs something. Sal comes back. Repeat over and over. She constantly says, throughout the book, that it would be better if they just left each other, but then again Sal is the one who goes back to Lisette over and over, causing her renewed heartbreak. I don’t know if Sykes thought that simply making Sal aware of how terrible this behavior was was enough, but it just made me incredibly frustrated. At one point Sal says:

”Intellect like hers is a curse. The more you understand of the world, the less of it you trust.”

Yes, Sal, that’s what’s giving her trust issues. Her intelligence. Nice. By the end of the book, it seems that they are on the mend-I’m getting end-game vibes from these two. But honestly, I spent the entire time thinking that Lisette deserved so much better than Sal. Like literally a chicken would have provided healthier companionship. I’ll end with this quote, in which Lisette outlines perfectly why Sal does not deserve her:

“What am I doing wrong that you’d choose this over me?”

(2) Sal is annoying. Really, really annoying. I kid you not, half of this book is made up of Sal’s snarky comments. She is badass. She has a gun. She is an outlaw. And she will never, EVER shut up about it. Imagine a quirky line after an otherwise dark or action-packed sequence. Funny, right? Might break the tension, make the narrator more endearing, etc. Now imagine one such line after every. Single. Paragraph. Picture a violent battle scene where the protagonist is fighting for their lives against a ruthless opponent. Now insert a snarky comment after every other paragraph and watch the entire flow of the scene fall apart with constant interruptions. That’s what this book is-which brings me to my next point.

The writing isn’t great. There are constant interruptions, meandering narratives, and the trope that haunts me in nearly every dark fantasy novel I read-This is a Big Tough World and Nobody Gets To Be Happy-is shoved repeatedly in your face. Let’s start with the interruptions, returning to my previous point (ie. Sal never shuts up), by looking at this sequence:

I  followed the shrieking wind. I had come here prepared for something bad. But I wasn’t prepared for just how bad it was. I rounded the corner of the hall, came out atop a battlement. The wind struck me with a screaming gale, forcing me to shield my face and cling to the stone for purchase. My eyes squinted against the harshness of the light, the kind of offensive pale you only see in your nightmares. And through them, I could see the bowed shapes of towers sagging, the flayed flesh of banners whipping in a wind that wouldn’t cease, the shadows of figures frozen in a death that had brought no peace. And I knew where I was. There was nothing that had ever made Fort Dogsjaw special. It had never been crucial for defense, never a hub for trade, it hadn’t even been named for anything special—the commander just liked the sound of it. It lived its whole life a regular, boring Imperial fort on the edge of the Husks. It only got important at the time of its death. Over three hundred mages and a few thousand regulars had assembled here in one day—some to receive assignments, some to man the garrison, some to head back to Cathama on leave. They had been laughing, cursing, drinking when the news came that the new Emperor of Cathama was a nul, born with no magic. And then there had been a moment of silence.

I’ve bolded for emphasis, but do you see what I’m talking about? The paragraph-line-paragraph-line format is so annoying to read, I had to put the book down at certain points because of how frustrated I got. It interrupted the forward movement of the story, making the novel drag on and on.

You know what else makes this feel like the nightmare version of the Never-ending Story? The page count. I don’t mind long books-The Priory of the Orange Tree is one of my favorite reads so far this year, and it’s longer than this one-but they have to have a reason for being so hefty. As I mentioned earlier, a considerable chunk of Seven Blades of Black is Sal making her awful, awful, AWFUL asides. I literally cannot express how much I despise those comments. Okay, let’s move on before I get hung up on THOSE STUPID COM-*cough*

This novel is marred by unnecessary lines and a meandering plot that drag out the story. One instance is the amount of times that Sal is a second away from killing someone and, for some reason (usually not a good one), fails in her goal. She places a gun at someone’s head and goes through a whole monologue in her head until the person miraculously escapes. This type of subversion of expectations is fine every once in a while, but if you are going to build up to a crucial moment and then take away the satisfaction of the defeat of some villain (or mini-boss, as many of the antagonists in this book feel like), then you need to have a good reason for doing it upwards of twenty times in ONE BOOK. Secondly, if you spend almost the entire novel setting up more and more villains and stressing how hard they are to kill and how dangerous their powers are (and presenting them separately and isolated), then when you have them all in one place at the end, at which point the protagonists starts going through them like a plate of french fries at a seagull convention, then you’re kind of taking away the satisfaction of the death. Somehow, this book manages to do both. We are constantly teased with almost-kills, then at the end Sal just blows through everyone in five seconds, easy-peasy.

I’m almost done, I swear-just two more gripes.

So much of the tension of this book rests on the fact that Sal, our narrator and our main viewpoint into the story, knows something that we don’t. I’ll be upfront with you-I hate this trope. If our POV character, the one whose mind we are in constantly, is entirely aware of something that happened before the beginning of the novel, and the author keeps from revealing that something for the entirety of the story solely to add drama, then I will not be a happy reader. Where is the logic. We are in this person’s mind. Just show us already and add tension ELSEWHERE.

And FINALLY (as painful as it was for you to read this, it was worse for me to write it), another issue I have with a lot of dark fantasy (see my review of Nevernight) is that the author really, really wants us to know that this is an incredibly dangerous and dark world by filling it to the brim with edge lord narrators, Big Guns, and, usually, women being harrased-because why not force all your female readers to constantly have to read about women getting assaulted? Apart from Sal’s 300,000 comments explaining to us that she is an asshole, that the Scar is Dangerous, and that she has Killed A Lot of People, we as readers must sit through hundreds of lines of dialogue and exposition that beat us over the head with the fact that this is DARK fantasy. This isn’t your nice little fairy adventure-no sir. Here we have Swear Words and Violence and Men writing Queer Women. To emphasize just how blatant Sykes is with the dark part of dark fantasy, let me tell you about an exchange Sal has with three old ladies who run a criminal empire. In the 2-3 pages that these women appear in, we are told, in some form or other, that they are grandmas who kill people, a grand total of, I kid you not, ELEVEN TIMES. Here are some excerpts from that whole situation:

”“Now, now.” Yoc, old and white haired and sweet as a grandmother—if that grandmother also had people killed on the regular—smiled at me. “I’m sure she has a good reason for being here.” She raised the hand that had signed the contracts that had killed a thousand men and women and took up her whiskey glass. “After all, I’m sure she knows how much we don’t like having our game interrupted.”” *I counted this as one since it’s in the same exchange but technically he mentions it TWICE

”…one didn’t waste the Three’s time if one didn’t want to end up with their teeth pried out.”

”How often do you meet the three old ladies who have people killed for money?”

”I said we should kill her on principle.”

”“But you know how many orphans I’ve made, don’t you, dear?””

”“He’s not so unlike us, is he? A murderer, yes. A monster to some. But, at his heart, a businessman.”

”Theirs were the hands that signed a thousand death contracts a year.”

”When they could be bothered to look up from their game, they decided who lived and died with a stroke of their pen.”

”At a word, they could have me stripped, tied, tortured, and cut up…”

”the Three don’t lie. Their assassins do. Their thieves do. But they don’t.”

”I had already wasted their time and I knew the Three were being generous just letting me fuck off instead of having me killed for the effort.”

TL;DR - Sal is annoying, Sykes is a bad writer, and Someone should have stopped me from reading this book

#bookblr #bookish #bookworm #goodreads #book review #review #a duck with a book #ya #ya fantasy #young adult #fantasy #lgbtq #lgbt #f/f #seven blades i black #sam sykes #grave of empires #jeremy wilson #onestar #star #cover artist

[the-face-in-the-mirror]

Stranger Things 4 Theory/Prediction: The Clocks Symbolize Memories

Well shit, here we go again.

So obviously everybody has been going off about the recently released Season 4 announcement, with that crazy heckin’ video with the Upside Down, and the clock, and the light in the distance, and all that good stuff. And naturally, people have been making theories, so I decided to make one of my own, using evidence and clues from the announcement trailer, and evidence from previous theories (about the current three seasons) made by other theorists in the fandom.

So, obviously, the most prominent theory in the Fandom at this point (concerning Season 4) is that there’s going to be a time travel element. And I can see how some people would think that, especially with the clock in the trailer, the Twitter account posting the tweet with the clock, Back To The Future in Season 3, and Hopper’s speech mentioning that he wishes he could “turn back the clock.” However, I myself don’t see how this could make any sense, and time travel would inevitably serve to only make the show more unnecessarily complicated and filled with holes, as time travel is not an easy thing to get right and can be portrayed poorly without very careful planning.

My theory, on the other hand, is that Season 4, and all the clues about clocks and turning back the clock, has nothing to do with time travel, but rather Will’s plotline and his relationship with Mike.

Hear me out:

First, let’s examine this still from the announcement trailer.

Obviously this isn’t the best quality, but there are a few key things that we can single out: the clock, the Welcome To Hawkins sign, Will’s bike (in the iconic position that everyone has known since Season 1), and what appears to be a newspaper strewn across it. There’s also the light in the distance which could either be Hopper’s cabin, or Hopper himself, but I’ll refrain from talking about that since that’s not what this theory is about.

So the clock is obvious, and it’s been hinted that we are directly supposed to focus on the clock and that clocks and time have something significant to do with this season, primarily due to this tweet:

Now let’s talk about this tweet.

Again, there’s the clock - this clock coupled with the other clock shows that they’re important somehow, which is obvious by this point. But there’s one thing from this tweet that I never see anyone talking about, and that’s what is placed right next to the clock: an upside-down smiley face.

The announcement trailer takes place in the Upside Down, where we already know time to be somewhat skewed. Mr. Clarke even said himself in Season 1 that the Gate can affect magnetic fields (the magnets and compasses), the environment (the dying crops), gravity, and even time itself. This is very subtly touched on in Season 2 when Will sees the Mind Flayer at his house for the first time, where the clock on the wall is shown to be ticking rapidly - much faster than it should be.

This could possibly be in relation to what has been happening with Hopper and his time in the Upside Down, but again, that’s not what this theory is about.

Now, this is all well in good, but I think it means something else aside from that. And sure, Time Travel theory is slightly plausible, but, personally, I don’t think that’s what these clues are hinting towards at all - or at least not in the traditional sense. So here’s my theory: the clock and all the hints of turning it back have nothing to do with literal time travel, but rather a way of “turning back the clock” that is far more intimate and relevant to Stranger Things itself - memory.

Ever since Season 2, and even in elements of Season 1, memory has played a big part in fighting against the Mind Flayer. While he was in the Upside Down, Will sung Should I Stay Or Should I Go to himself for comfort, clinging to the memory of listening to it with Jonathan to keep himself sane. When Will was possessed by the Mind Flayer it was the memories of his childhood from Joyce, Jonathan, and Mike that allowed him to continue fighting the Mind Flayer as much as he did. The same method is applicable to Billy, who is able to break free of the Mind Flayer’s control when he is reminded of his happiest memory with his mother. Not to mention that El is able to actively look into peoples’ memories, as she does with both Billy and her own mother.

Memory plays an important part in this show, and it especially plays a key role with Will and his relationship with Mike, and how it’s going to develop in Season 4.

Let’s start with my first point: memories being important to Will’s storyline.

Warning: Mentions of abuse and sexual assault ahead.

For the purpose of this theory, I’m going off of @kaypeace21​‘s theory that the Mind Flayer represents Will's dad, and that a grand majority of the events on the show represent the past sexual abuse that Will can’t remember due to dissociative amnesia. You can read more about that here and here. Kaypeace does an amazing job on it and goes super in-depth into details I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise, so I would definitely suggest reading it if you haven’t.

Throughout season 2 Will constantly references what he says are “like old memories, in the back of [his] head,” and that his Now Memories from the Mind Flayer are “like when you have a dream” and “you can’t remember it unless you think really hard.” This is quite common with survivors of sexual assault, especially if the abuse occurred when they were children. I don’t think I even need to point out the r*pe parallels of Will getting possessed at this stage, so we’ll move on. The point is that Will’s memories of his abuse are there, he just can’t remember them properly - he’s “forgotten” them, in a sense; stored them so deep in the back of his psyche that he can’t bring them back up - and they’re represented with the Mind Flayer who abstractly plays out scenarios that parallel abuse; abuse that Will has gone through in the past.

So in terms of memory, here’s what I theorize is going to happen:

El - likely with her powers returned - is going to end up looking into Will’s memories, just as she did with Terry and Billy, and he’s going to end up remembering everything he repressed.

This definitely isn’t a pleasant idea, not in the slightest, especially with how that will affect Will in the long run; however, recovering repressed memories through clinical hypnotism is an actual method used by therapists for treating people with dissociative disorders. It definitely isn’t the best method of therapy, and is even known to be controversial due to the possibility of creating false memories, but, at times, it still helps people with dissociative disorders to come to terms with what happened in their past and begin to heal from it. Hypnotism is even slightly related to the show with the concept of MKUltra, even if we never directly see it. You can read more about Dissociative Amnesia and treatments for it here.

And why do I think this will happen? Because of another thing I haven’t yet seen people talking about in their posts concerning the announcement teaser: Will’s bike.

Will crashing his bike in Season 1 marks a moment where everything changes - where he’s dragged into the Upside Down, representing his own trauma as a whole along with El’s. And when his bike is found, that changes everything for both his family and his friends - to realize that something happened to him, that he didn’t just skip school or run away. The (what seems to be) newspaper strewn across it is representative of Will’s life changing as well; suddenly everyone in Hawkins knows who he is. He’s the boy who died in the quarry, and then the boy who came back to life, and people are paying attention to him (both good and bad) whether he likes it or not. He’s the most interesting thing that has ever happened in Hawkins, a mystery, a spectacle, and it’s clear that he hates it. Hawkins has never been welcoming to him, and with the Upside Down and everyone looking at him like he’s even “more of a freak” due to his disappearance, Hawkins is the last place he wants to be welcomed back to.

Will’s bike being in the Upside Down in the trailer shows us that, as hard as he is trying to recover and move on, he’s still stuck in that moment. He’s still between the View-Master slides, both in the Upside Down and not, and as much as he’s trying to move on he can’t, not until he’s finally able to face his abuser (the Mind Flayer/his dad).

This leads to my second point:

How memories are important in Mike and Will’s relationship.

Of everyone that shares memories in the shed in Season 2, Mike’s memory of when he first met Will is the one that really gets through to him, allowing him to break free of the Mind Flayer’s control just enough to send a message. From the camera angles, the lighting, and the acting of it alone, it’s obvious that it’s a very intimate moment between the two of them,

where Mike is at his most vulnerable

to bring Will back -

he’s sharing the most personal memory he has, the one that means the most to him.

And that is significant.

That scene gives us insight into how long Mike and Will have been friends, an indication of

how deep their story goes

, how close they were with each other. It’s not a memory that includes Dustin, or Lucas, or even any of their family members - it’s just them. The scene itself reflects that. They’re close, and they always have been.

And it isnt just that scene either; there are many instances, from Mike going through Will’s drawings after they pull the fake body out of the quarry to a photo - a tangible memory - of the Party (with emphasis on Mike and Will) being what makes Mike realize that El could be the key to finding Will.

Their memories are important to them - their past and their story are important to them; and, therefore, they’re important to the show. Crucial to the show.

Now fast-forward to Season 3, where Mike has done almost a complete 180 and focuses all of his time on El due to his perception that that’s what he has to do - he has a girlfriend now, he’s grown up (in his own eyes), and that’s all that matters. Mike’s main theme in the season is “we’re not kids anymore,” which he says to Will in the carport - Will, who wants to go back to their younger days; Will, who wants to relive a little bit of what he lost due to his trauma; Will, who wants to turn back that clock, who misses playing board games every night, who doesn’t want things to change.

Hopper, in his speech, wishes he could go back to a simpler time where he and El were closer than they are in Season 3 - when they spent more time together, weren’t distant from each other, talked to each other. And that’s what Will wants, too, throughout the entirety of the third season. He wants to go back to a simpler time where he wasn’t distant from everyone, and didn’t have to worry about the Upside Down or the Mind Flayer, or his friends - Mike - leaving him because they’re getting girlfriends and growing up and he’s stuck by himself - the lonely little gay kid in love with his best friend.

And it’s Mike’s words, and Will looking at the picture - the memory - of them from Halloween when Mike promised that he and Will would “go crazy together,” that finally send Will past his breaking point, causing him to rip the picture directly in half, symbolizing the rift between him and Mike.

With all this damage done, Mike and Will are a tattered reflection of what they used to be - what we were told about in Season 1 and what we saw in Season 2 - and Season 3 never truly takes the time to amend it. The end of the season shows that they’re clearly on good terms again (what with Will’s flirting and Mike’s fond smile towards him), but that’s not good enough. Not after that catastrophic fight that led to the destruction of Castle Byers and a clear rift in their friendship - that’s not something you can resolve offscreen.

Therefore, I believe that Season 4 will see the proper reparation of Mike and Will’s relationship.

Finally, they’ll talk. They’ll talk about everything - growing distant from each other, barely talking to each other, and the feelings that both of them, Mike especially, have been trying to ignore for years. They can fix the picture, fix the tear between them; the picture will never be exactly the same, but it’ll still be there, and Mike will retell the memory of when he first met Will, paralleling the scene in the shed, but without the Mind Flayer, and without the impending doom. And through this, they can turn back the clock, go back, in a way, to how things once were. They can recreate a time when they were closer, when it was just the two them sitting on the swings, and they can bring back what was so special about their relationship to begin with.

And with the two of them back together and stronger than ever before, Will can finally fully accept himself as he is, for his past and his present, and face the Mind Flayer (his father) once and for all.

This was a really long theory, and one that took me a bit to fully put together myself, but after a lot of research and rereading of multiple theories from Kaypeace, I think I’ve got something pretty solid here. It’s a lot, especially considering that I’m going off of a singular tweet and a 30-second announcement trailer, and there are a couple things that might be a reach, but I think it still has some weight to it. 

Obviously it’s way too early to tell if any of this could be true, so we’ll have to wait for more content, but after all of the theories I’ve read from some of you guys I have no doubt that it’s entirely plausible for some of this theory to be true. Now let’s just hope the Duffers don’t screw us over (which they might, but I will choose to believe they still have half a braincell between them), and pray that we’re on to something. Which, inevitably, we are.

#Stranger Things #Stranger Things Theory #Stranger Things 4 #Stranger Things 4 Theory #st4 #Byler #Byler Theory #Byler Is Endgame #Long Post #Allie Has Thoughts #Allie Has Coherent Thoughts #Look you guys I actually put my braincells together to come up with a thing! #And a thing that even makes sense! #This took me three days to write I'm not gonna lie #You cannot imagine what I went through trying to write and post this it was a fucking mess #Here is the fruit of my struggles!

[bookloverfeministnerdthings]

Okay so I just finished re-reading the ACOTAR series (except a Court of Frost and Starlight) and there are sooo many things about this series that I absolutely love and now, of course, have to type here lest I annoy my friends by spamming them with my thoughts. 

(There are many spoilers below)

Feyre and Ryshand’s Relationship

I love their relationship for sooo many reasons, but mainly because it is a great depiction of a healthy relationship.Their relationship doesn’t take away from either of them as characters and also allows them opportunities to grow together as well as separately. Below is a summarised list of some of the reasons their relationship stood out to me.

They continue to function individually after becoming a couple: I hate books (and movies) where after getting together, the characters cease to function as individual beings. However, this is not the case with Feyre and Rhysand. They remain independent after getting together and frequently function independently of each other. Only a few days after Feyre is sworn in as High Lady, she goes off to the Spring Court to try and destroy it from the inside. And Rhysand goes off to prepare against Hybern back at the Night Court. Separately. And they continue to do things separately throughout the rest of the series. 

They don’t instantly become a couple; they’re friends first: Ugh, I have read too many books where there is an awkward practice fight-dance (I’m being serious) and then with almost no conversation the characters are miraculously together. Which is why it’s so refreshing to ready the flirty banter between Rhysand and Feyre as Feyre is questioning “are we just doing this to relieve some stress and tension and have fun or do I like Rhys but how can I tell how he feels about this?” I don’t know if I’m just sadistic but I love reading all the squirming and confusion and flirting as Feyre and Rhysand transition from being friends to a couple. And all this occurs after they’ve already developed a friendship and Feyre has left the Spring Court.

They view themselves as equals: Feyre is High Lady!! I absolutely love that Rhysand’s just like “No, I don’t care about tradition you’re gonna be High Lady”. I also love that Rhysand is always reminding Feyre that the Night Court is hers as well (even though I do find it sad that she is always referring to the court as “his” and stuff). Even at the end of ACOWAR Feyre asks “Is Amren still your second?” to which Rhysand replies “Our second”. I hate the sexism that still exists in their fantasy world leads to Feyre still sometimes deferring to Rhys about their court but I also love that Rhysand doesn’t just let it go and makes sure she realises that it is equally her court

Rhysand doesn’t try to force Feyre into a relationship even though he knows they are ‘mates’: Ok so on the other hand, he also hid and important fact about her and their relationship from Feyre but I think telling her would have been worse. It’s up for debate. But either way I think that that Rhys was ultimately trying to let Feyre be happy and make her own decisions even if that meant she married Tamlin. Rhys didn’t want to try and manipulate her to leave by telling her about the mating bond. There are definitely some dodgy aspects to all of it, for example, if Feyre didn’t know about the mating bond how could she have made a fully-informed decision about marrying Tamlin? Would she have left him sooner if she knew that he wasn’t her mate? Did Rhys inadvertently extend how long she stayed with Tamlin because she believed that the she and Tamlin would be mates? All of these questions are valid and raise interesting points but ultimately I think that Rhys didn’t want to try and force a relationship with Feyre or pressure her in any way.

There is more about their relationship and definitely more examples but I’m tired :/ I need to reserve my ranting energy for other subjects. 

Classism in the Series

So the classism in the series is less topical in ACOWAR because, you know, war is kinda at the forefront of everyone’s minds but in the earlier books the topic is raised a few times. The main classism in the series is the difference between the High Fae and the lesser faeries. Even the names illustrate the prejudice that lesser faeries may face. Tarquin and Feyre discuss breaking down the class sytem before she uhhh... robs him. Classism is interwoven in the series without affecting the plot and it ultimately adds to the world-building. The examples of classism add to the depth of the world. None of the classism really effects the main plot but it fleshes out the world and serves as a reminder of the classism present in our own society. Ultimately, although the classism isn’t explored fully and doesn’t affect the plot much I love that different issues can be explored sub-contextually via literature. 

Mor

Morrigan (Mor) is one of my favourite characters in the series. She has such an amazing background story. Honestly, such a role-model. 

During her childhood she was so powerful, more powerful than anyone else in her family but instead of being given opportunities to use of expand her strength she was just seen as a prize mare by her family. Her family was only focused on how they could use her strength to gain reputation and social standing by marrying her off to someone with influence. But instead of letting herself be used like a bargaining chip by her family, Mor makes her own choices that, although risky, give her some freedom. Instead of letting her virginity be sold to Eris, Mor chooses to lose it to her friend Cassian thus rendering her “spoiled” and useless to Eris, his family and Mor’s family. Mor’s family is so furious with her that they send her to the edge of the Autumn Court border (Eris’s court) with a note nailed to her stomach, telling Eris that Mor is his problem. Despite all this trauma, Mor endures and finds a crucial role in Rhysand’s court by overseeing both the Court of Dreams and the Court of Nightmares (where her family presides).

But another thing I love about the series is that Mor’s traumatic experiences don’t undermine Feyre’s own experience’s with Tamlin, or that of any other character. Neither is positioned to be viewed as “more traumatic” or “more important”; in fact, there is a huge emphasis placed on healing together and being able to understand what the other went through.   

There is sooo much more about Mor that is also exemplary (includingthe conversation between her and Feyre that reveals she prefers females over males) but I don’t have time to give it the attention she deserves.

Rhys

I just want to quickly highlight something about Rhys that stood out to me:

The sexual and emotional abuse he suffered from Amarantha: Different stories of abuse are interwoven throughout the series but I find it important that a male, main character is also shown as the victim of sexual and emotional abuse. It is also important that Rhys is extremely physically strong but was still subjected to sexual and emotional abuse because it highlights how men who have been abused aren’t necessarily physically or emotionally weak. This portrayal of a male victim of sexual abuse also diversifies the series without taking away or belittling the experiences of other characters.

Ok so there is so much more that I haven’t written about, mainly due to time but these are a few of the things that stood out to me.

#sarahmaas #acotar #feminsim #acotar series #feyreandrhysand #feyre #rhys #mor #classism #literature

[howling--fantods]

An Excerpt of the Essay: David Lynch Keeps His Head by David Foster Wallace

I know a lot of you love David Lynch and this is an EXCELLENT defense and deconstruction of his work. The full essay is largely about the film Lost Highway, which was about to be released, and is 67 pages with 61 footnotes. The whole essay is incredibly entertaining and if you like to read, is worth it. You can find it here: x. This excerpt mainly concerns Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. I put the footnotes at the end, I know it isn’t ideal, but it is hard when there aren’t pages.

9A. The cinematic tradition it’s curious that nobody seems to have observed Lynch comes right out of (w/ an epigraph)

“It has been said that the admirers of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari are usually painters, or people who think and remember graphically. This is a mistaken conception.”

—Paul Rotha, “The German Film”

Since Lynch was trained as a painter (an Ab-Exp painter at that), it seems curious that no film critics or scholars(42) have ever treated of his movies’ clear relation to the classical Expressionist cinema tradition of Wiene, Kobe, early Lang, etc. And I am talking here about the very simplest and most straightforward sort of definition of Expressionist, viz. “Using objects and characters not as representations but as transmitters for the director’s own internal impressions and moods.”

Certainly plenty of critics have observed, with Kael, that in Lynch’s movies “There’s very little art between you and the filmmaker’s psyche…because there’s less than the usual amount of inhibition.” They’ve noted the preponderance of fetishes and fixations in Lynch’s work, his characters’ lack of conventional introspection (an introspection which in film equals “subjectivity”), his sexualization of everything from an amputated limb to a bathrobe’s sash, from a skull to a “heart plug,”(43) from split lockets to length-cut timber. They’ve noted the elaboration of Freudian motifs that tremble on the edge of parodic cliche—the way Marietta’s invitation to Sailor to “fuck Mommy” takes place in a bathroom and produces a rage that’s then displaced onto Bob Ray Lemon; the way Merrick’s opening dream-fantasy of his mother supine before a rampaging elephant has her face working in what’s interpretable as either terror or orgasm; the way Lynch structures Dune’s labrynthian plot to highlight Paul Eutrades’s “escape” with his “witch-mother” after Paul’s father’s “death” and “betrayal.” They have noted with particular emphasis what’s pretty much Lynch’s most famous scene, Blue Velvet’s Jeffrey Beaumont peering through a closet’s slats as Frank Booth rapes Dorothy while referring to himself as “Daddy” and to her as “Mommy” and promising dire punishments for “looking at me” and breathing through an unexplained gas mask that’s overtly similar to the O2-mask we’d just seen Jeffrey’s own dying Dad breathing through.

They’ve noted all this, critics have, and they’ve noted how, despite its heaviness, this Freudian stuff tends to give Lynch’s movies an enormous psychological power; and yet they don’t seem to make the obvious point that these very heavy Freudian riffs are powerful instead of ridiculous because they are deployed Expressionistically, which among other things means they’re deployed in an old-fashioned, pre-postmodern way, I.e. nakedly, sincerely, without postmodernism’s abstraction or irony. Jeffrey Beaumont’s interslat voyeurism may be a sick parody of the Primal Scene, but neither he (a “college boy”) nor anybody else in the movie ever shows any inclination to say something like “Gee, this is sort of like a sick parody of the good old Primal Scene” or even betrays any awareness that a lot of what’s going on is—both symbolically and psychoanalytically—heavy as hell. Lynch’s movies, for all their unsubtle archetypes and symbols and intertextual references and c., have about them the remarkable unselfish-consciousness that’s kind of the hallmark of Expressionist art—nobody in Lynch’s movies analyzes or metacriticizes or hermenteuticizes or anything(44), including Lynch himself. This set of restrictions makes Lynch’s movies fundamentally unironic, and I submit that Lynch’s lack of irony is the real reason some cineastes—in this age when ironic self-consciousness is the one and only universally recognized badge of sophistication—see him as a naif or a buffoon. In fact, Lynch is neither—though nor is he any kind of genius of visual coding or tertiary symbolism or anything. What he is is a weird hybrid blend of classical Expressionist and contemporary postmodernist, an artist whose own “internal impressions and moods” are (like ours) an olla podrida of neurogenic predisposition and phylogenic myth and psychoanalytic schema and pop-cultural iconography—in other words, Lynch is sort of G. W. Pabst with an Elvis ducktail.

This kind of contemporary Expressionist art, in order to be any good, seems like it needs to avoid two pitfalls. The first is a self-consciousness of form where everything gets very mannered and refers cutely to itself.(45) The second pitfall, more complicated, might be called “terminal idiosyncrasy” or “antiempathetic solipsism” or something: here the artist’s own perceptions and moods and impressions and obsessions come off as just too particular to him alone. Art, after all, is supposed to be a kind of communication, and “personal expression” is cinematically interesting only to the extent that what’s expressed finds and strikes chords within the viewer. The difference between experiencing art that succeeds as communication and art that doesn’t is rather like the difference between being sexually intimate with a person and watching that person masturbate. In terms of literature, richly communicative Expressionism is epitomized by Kafka, bad and onanistic Expressionism by the average Graduate Writing Program avant-garde story.

It’s the second pitfall that’s especially bottomless and dreadful, and Lynch’s best movie, Blue Velvet, avoided it so spectacularly that seeing the movie when it first came out was a kind of revelation for me. It was such a big deal that ten years later I remember the date—30 March 1986, a Wednesday night—and what the whole group of us MFA Program(46) students did after we left the theater, which was to go to a coffeehouse and talk about how the movie was a revelation. Our Graduate MFA Program had been pretty much of a downer so far: most of us wanted to see ourselves as avant-garde writers, and our professors were all traditional commercial Realists of the New Yorker school, and while we loathed these teachers and resented the chilly reception our “experimental” writing received from them, we were also starting to recognize that most of our own avant-garde stuff really was solipsistic and pretentious and self-conscious and masturbatory and bad, and so that year we went around hating ourselves and everyone else and with no clue about how to get experimentally better without caving in to loathsome commercial-Realistic pressure, etc. This was the context in which Blue Velvet made such an impression on us. The movie’s obvious “themes”—the evil flip side to picket-fence respectability, the conjunctions of sadism and sexuality and parental authority and voyeurism and cheesy ‘50s pop and Coming of Age, etc.—were for us less revelatory than the way the movie’s surrealism and dream-logic felt: the felt true, real. And the couple things just slightly but marvelously off in every shot—the Yellow Man literally dead on his feet, Frank’s unexplained gas mask, the eerie industrial thrum on the stairway outside Dorothy’s apartment, the weird dentate-vagina sculpture(47) hanging on an otherwise bare wall over Jeffrey’s bed at home, the dog drinking from the hose in the stricken dad’s hand—it wasn’t just that these touches seemed eccentrically cool or experimental or arty, but that they communicated things that felt true. Blue Velvet captured something crucial about the way the U.S. present acted on our nerve endings, something crucial that couldn’t be analyzed or reduced to a system of codes or aesthetic principles or workshop techniques.

This was what was epiphanic for us about Blue Velvet in grad school, when we saw it: the movie helped us realize that first-rate experimentalism was a way not to “transcend” or “rebel against” the truth but actually to honor it. It brought home to us—via images, the medium we were suckled on and most credulous of—that the very most important artistic communications took place at a level that not only wasn’t intellectual but wasn’t even fully conscious, that the unconscious’s true medium wasn’t verbal but imagistic, and that whether the images were Realistic or Postmodern of Expressionistic of Surreal of what-the-hell-ever was less important than whether they felt true, whether they rang psychic cherries in the communicatee.

I don’t know whether any of this makes sense. But it’s basically why David Lynch the filmmaker is important to me. I felt like he showed me something genuine and important on 3/30/86. And he couldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been thoroughly, nakedly, unpretentiously, unsophisticatedly himself, a self that communicates primarily itself—an Expressionist. Whether he is an Expressionist naively or pathologically or ultra-pomo-sophisticatedly is of little importance to me. What is important is that Blue Velvet rang cherries, and it remains for me an example of contemporary artistic heroism.

10A (w/ an epigraph)

“All of Lynch’s work can be described as emotionally infantile…Lynch likes to ride his camera into orifices (a burlap hood’s eyehole or a severed ear), to plumb the blackness beyond. There, id-deep, he fans out his deck of dirty pictures…”—Kathleen Murphy of Film Comment

One reason it’s sort of heroic tot be a contemporary Expressionist is that it all but invites people who don’t like your art to make an ad hominem move from the art to the artist. A fair number of critics(48) object to David Lynch’s movies on the grounds that they are “sick” and “dirty” or “infantile,” then proceed to claim that the movies are themselves revelatory of various deficiencies in Lynch’s own character, (49) troubles that range from developmental arrest to misogyny to sadism. It’s not just the fact that twisted people do hideous things to one another in Lynch’s films, these critics will argue, but rather the “moral attitude” implied by the way Lynch’s camera records hideous behavior. In a way, his detractors have a point. Moral atrocities in Lynch movies are never staged to elicit outrage or even disapproval. The directorial attitude when hideousness occurs seems to range between clinical neutrality and an almost voyeuristic ogling. It’s not an accident that Frank Booth, Bobby Peru, and Leland/“Bob” steal the show in Lynch’s last three films, that there is almost a tropism about our pull toward these characters, because Lynch’s camera is obsessed with them, loves them; they are his movies’ heart.

Some of the ad hominem criticism is harmless, and the director himself has to a certain extent dined out on his “Master of Weird”/“Czar of Bizarre” image, see for example Lynch making his eyes go in two different directions for the cover of Time. The claim, though, that because Lynch’s movies pass no overt “judgement” on hideousness/evil/sickness and in fact make the stuff riveting to watch, the movies are themselves a-or immoral, even evil—this is bullshit of the rankest vintage, and not just because it’s sloppy logic but because it’s symptomatic of the impoverished moral assumptions we seem not to bring to the movies we watch.

I’m going to claim that evil is what David Lynch’s movies are essentially about, and that Lynch’s explorations of human beings’ various relationships to evil are, if idiosyncratic and Expressionistic, nevertheless sensitive and insightful and true. I’m going to submit that the real “moral problem” a lot of cineastes have with Lynch is that we find his truth morally uncomfortable, and that we do not like, when watching movies, to be made uncomfortable. (Unless, of course, our discomfort is used to set up some kind of commercial catharsis—the retribution, the bloodbath, the romantic victory of the misunderstood heroine, etc.—I.e. unless the discomfort serves a conclusion that flatters the same comfortable moral certainties we came into the theater with.)

The fact is that David Lynch treats the subject of evil better than just about anybody else making movies today—better and also differently. His movies aren’t anti-moral, but they are definitely anti-formulaic. Evil-ridden though his filmic world is, please notice that responsibility for evil never in his films devolves easily onto greedy corporations or corrupt politicians or faceless serial kooks. Lynch is not interested in the devolution of responsibility, and he’s not interested in moral judgments of characters. Rather, he’s interested in the psychic spaces in which people are capable of evil. He is interested in Darkness. And Darkness, in David Lynch’s movies, always wears more than one face. Recall, for example, how Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth is both Frank Booth and “the Well-Dressed Man.” How Eraserhead’s whole postapocalyptic world of demonic conceptions and teratoid offspring and summary decapitations is evil…yet how it’s “poor” Henry Spencer who ends up a baby-killer. How in both TV’s Twin Peaks and cinema’s Fire Walk with Me, “Bob” is also Leland Palmer, how they are, “spiritually,” both two and one. The Elephant Man’s sideshow barker is evil in his exploitation of Merrick, but so too is good old kindly Dr. Treeves—and Lynch carefully has Treeves admit this aloud. And if Wild at Heart’s coherence suffered because its myriad villains seemed fuzzy and interchangeable, it was because they were all basically the same thing, I.e. they were all in the service of the same force or spirit. Characters are not themselves evil in Lynch movies—evil wears them.

This point is worth emphasizing. Lynch’s movies are not about monsters (i.e. people whose intrinsic natures are evil) but about hauntings, about evil environment, possibility, force. This helps explain Lynch’s constant deployment of noirish lighting and eerie sound-carpets and grotesque figurants: in his movies’ world, a kind of ambient spiritual antimatter hangs just overhead. It also explains why Lynch’s villains seem not merely wicked or sick but ecstatic, transported: they are, literally, possessed. Think here of Dennis Hopper’s exultant “I’LL FUCK ANYTHING THAT MOVES” in Blue Velvet, or of the incredible scene in Wild at Heart when Diane Ladd smears her face with lipstick until it’s devil-red and then screams at herself in the mirror, or of “Bob”’s look of total demonic ebullience in Fire Walk with Me when Laura discovers him at her dresser going through her diary and just about dies of fright. The bad guys in Lynch movies are always exultant, orgasmic, most fully present at their evilest moments, and this in turn is because they are not only actuated by evil but literally inspired(50): they have yielded themselves up to a Darkness way bigger than any one person. And if these villains are, at their worst moments, riveting for both the camera and the audience, it’s not because Lynch is “endorsing” or “romanticizing” evil but because he’s diagnosing it—diagnosing it without the comfortable carapace of disapproval and with an open acknowledgment of the fact that one reason why evil is so powerful is that it’s hideously vital and robust and usually impossible to look away from.

Lynch’s idea that evil is a force has unsettling implications. People can be good or bad, but forces simply are. And forces are—at least potentially—everywhere. Evil for Lynch thus moves and shifts, (51) pervades; Darkness is in everything, all the time—not “lurking below” or “lying in wait” or “hovering on the horizon”: evil is here, right now. And so are Light, love, redemption (since these phenomena are also, in Lynch’s work, forces and spirits), etc. In fact, in a Lynchian moral scheme it doesn’t make much sense to talk about either Darkness or about Light in isolation from its opposite. It’s not just that evil is “implied by” good or Darkness by Light or whatever, but that the evil stuff is contained within the good stuff too, encoded in it.

You could call this idea of evil Gnostic, or Taoist, or neo-Hegelian, but it’s also Lynchian, because what Lynch’s movies(52) are all about is creating a narrative space where this idea can be worked out in its fullest detail and to its most uncomfortable consequences.

And Lynch pays a heavy price—both critically and financially—for trying to explore worlds like this. Because we Americans like our art’s moral world to be cleanly limned and clearly demarcated, neat and tidy. In many respects it seems we need our art to be morally comfortable, and the intellectual gymnastics we’ll go through to extract a black-and-white ethics from a piece of art we like are shocking if you stop and look closely at them. For example, the supposed ethical structure Lynch is most applauded for is the “Seamy Underside” structure, the idea that dark forces roil and passions seethe beneath the green lawns and PTA potlucks of Anytown, USA.(53) American critics who like Lynch applaud his “genius for penetrating the civilized surface of everyday life to discover the strange, perverse passions beneath” and his movies are providing “the password to an inner sanctum of horror and desire” and “evocations of the malevolent forces at work beneath nostalgic constructs.”

It’s little wonder that Lynch gets accused of voyeurism: critics have to make Lynch a voyeur in order to approve something like Blue Velvet from within a conventional moral framework that has Good on top/outside and Evil below/within. The fact is that critics grotesquely misread Lynch when they see this idea of perversity “beneath” and horror “hidden” as central to his movies’ moral structure.

Interpreting Blue Velvet, for example, as a film centrally concerned with “a boy discovering corruption in the heart of a town”(54) is about as obtuse as looking at the robin perched on the Beaumonts’ windowsill at the movie’s end and ignoring the writhing beetle the robin’s got in its beak.(55) The fact is that Blue Velvet is basically a coming-of-age movie, and, while the brutal rape Jeffrey watches from Dorothy’s closet might be the movie’s most horrifying scene, the real horror in the movie surrounds discoveries that Jeffrey makes about himself—for example, the discovery that part of him is excited by what he sees Frank Booth do to Dorothy Vallens. (56) Frank’s use, during the rape, of the words “Mommy” and “Daddy,” the similarity between the gas mask Frank breathes through in extremis and the oxygen mask we’ve just seen Jeffrey’s dad wearing in the hospital—this kind of stuff isn’t there just to reinforce the Primal Scene aspect of the rape. The stuff’s also there to clearly suggest that Frank Booth is, in a certain way, Jeffrey’s “father,” that the Darkness inside Frank is also encoded in Jeffrey. Gee-whiz Jeffrey’s discovery not of dark Frank but of his own dark affinities with Frank is the engine of the movie’s anxiety. Note for example that the long and somewhat heavy angst-dream Jeffrey suffers in the film’s second act occurs not after he has watched Frank brutalize Dorothy but after he, Jeffrey, has consented to hit Dorothy during sex.

There are enough heavy clues like this to set up, for any marginally attentive viewer, what is Blue Velvet’s real climax, and its point. The climax comes unusually early,(57) near the end of the film’s second act. It’s the moment when Frank turns around to look at Jeffrey in the back seat of the car and says “You’re like me.” This moment is shot from Jeffrey’s visual perspective, so that when Frank turns around in the seat he speaks both to Jeffrey and to us. And here Jeffrey—who’s whacked Dorothy and liked it—is made exceedingly uncomfortable indeed; and so—if we recall that we too peeked through those close-vents at Frank’s feast of sexual fascism, and regarded, with critics, this scene as the film’s most riveting—are we. When Frank says “You’re like me,” Jeffrey’s response is to lunge wildly forward in the back seat and punch Frank in the nose—a brutally primal response that seems rather more typical of Frank than of Jeffrey, notice. In the film’s audience, I, to whom Frank has also just claimed kinship, have no such luxury of violent release; I pretty much just have to sit there and feel uncomfortable.(58)

And I emphatically do not like to be made uncomfortable when I go to see a movie. I like my heroes virtuous and my victims pathetic and my villains’ villainy clearly established and primly disapproved of by both plot and camera. When I go to movies that have various kinds of hideousness in them, I like to have my own fundamental difference from sadists and fascists and voyeurs and psychos and Bad People unambiguously confirmed and assured by those movies. I like to judge. I like to be allowed to root for Justice To Be Done without a slight squirmy suspicion (so prevalent and depressing in real moral life) that Justice probably wouldn’t be all that keen on certain parts of my character, either.

I don’t know whether you are like me in these regards or not…though from the characterizations and moral structures in the U.S. movies that do well at the box-office I deduce that there must be a lot of Americans who are exactly like me.

I submit that we also, as an audience, really like the idea of secret and scandalous immoralities unearthed and dragged into the light and exposed. We like this stuff because secrets’ exposure in a movie creates in us impressions of epistemological privilege, of “penetrating the civilized surface of everyday life to discover the strange, perverse passions beneath.” This isn’t surprising: knowledge is power, and we (I, anyway) like to feel powerful. But we also like the idea of “secrets,” “of malevolent forces at work beneath…” so much because we like to see confirmed our fervent hope that most bad and seamy stuff really is secret, “locked away” or “under the surface.” We hope fervently that this is so because we need to be able to believe that our own hideousnesses and Darkness are secret. Otherwise we get uncomfortable. And, as part of an audience, if a movie is structured in such a way that the distinction between surface/Light/good and secret/Dark/evil is messed with—in other words, not a structure whereby Dark Secrets are winched ex machina up to the Lit Surface to be purified by my judgement, but rather a structure in which Respectable Surfaces and Seamy Undersides are mingled, integrated, literally mixed up—I am going to be made acutely uncomfortable. And in response to my discomfort I’m going to do one of two things: I’m either going to find some way to punish the movie for making me uncomfortable, or I’m going to find a way to interpret the movie that eliminates as much of the discomfort as possible. From my survey of published work on Lynch’s films, I can assure you that just about every established professional reviewer and critic has chosen one or the other of these responses.

I know this all looks kind of abstract and general. Consider the specific example of Twin Peaks’s career. Its basic structure was the good old murder-whose-investigation-opens-a-can-of-worms formula right out of Noir 101—the search for Laura Palmer’s killer yields postmortem revelations of a double life (Laura Palmer=Homecoming Queen & Laura Palmer=Tormented Coke-Whore by Night) that mirrored the whole town’s moral schizophrenia. The show’s first season, in which the plot movement consisted mostly of more and more subsurface hideousnesses being uncovered and exposed, was a huge smash. By the second season, though, the mystery-and-investigation structure’s own logic began to compel the show to start getting more focused and explicit about who or what was actually responsible for Laura’s murder. And the more explicit Twin Peaks tried to get, the less popular the series became. The mystery’s final “resolution,” in particular, was felt by critics and audiences alike to be deeply unsatisfying. And it was. The “Bob”/Leland/Evil Owl stuff was fuzzy and not very well rendered,(59) but the really deep dissatisfaction—the one that made audiences feel screwed and betrayed and fueled the critical backlash against the idea of Lynch as Genius Auteur—was, I submit, a moral one. I submit that Laura Palmer’s exhaustively revealed “sins” required, by the moral logic of American mass entertainment, that the circumstances of her death turn out to be causally related to those sins. We as an audience have certain core certainties about sowing and reaping, and these certainties need to be affirmed and massaged.(60) When they were not, and as it became increasingly clear that they were not going to be, Twin Peaks’s ratings fell off the shelf, and critics began to bemoan this once “daring” and “imaginative” series’ decline into “self-reference” and “mannered incoherence.”

And then Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lynch’s theatrical “prequel” to the TV series, and his biggest box-office bomb since Dune, committed a much worse offense. It sought to transform Laura Palmer from dramatic object to dramatic subject. As a dead person, Laura’s existence on the television show had been entirely verbal, and it was fairly easy to conceive her as a schizoid black/white construct—Good by Day, Naughty by Night, etc. But the movie in which Ms. Sheryl Lee as Laura is on-screen more or less constantly, attempts to present this multivalent system of objectified personas—plaid-skirted coed/bare-breasted roadhouse slut/tormented exorcism-candidate/molested daughter—as an integrated and living whole: these different identities were all, the movie tried to claim, the same person. In Fire Walk with Me, Laura was no longer “an enigma” or “the password to an inner sanctum of horror.” She now embodied, in full view, all the Dark Secrets that on the series had been the stuff of significant glances and delicious whispers.

This transformation of Laura from object/occasion to subject/person was actually the most morally ambitious thing a Lynch movie has ever tried to do—maybe an impossible thing, given the psychological text of the series and the fact that you had to be familiar with the series to make even marginal sense of the movie—and it required complex and contradictory and probably impossible things from Ms. Lee, who in my opinion deserved an Oscar nomination just for showing up and trying.

The novelist Steve Erickson, in a 1992 review of Fire Walk with Me, is one of the few critics who gave any indication of even trying to understand what the movie was trying to do: “We always knew Laura was a wild girl, the homecoming femme fatale who was crazy for cocaine and fucked roadhouse drunks less for the money than the sheer depravity of it, but the movie is finally not so much interested in the titillation of that depravity as [in] her torment, depicted in a performance by Sheryl Lee so vixenish and demonic it’s hard to know whether it’s terrible or a de force. [But not trying too terribly hard, because now watch:] Her fit of the giggles over the body of a man whose head has just been blown off might be an act of innocence or damnation [get ready:] or both.” Or both? Of course both. This is what Lynch is about in this movie: both innocence and damnation; both sinned-against and sinning. Laura Palmer in Fire Walk with Me is both “good” and “bad,” and yet also neither: she’s complex, contradictory, real. And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate the “both” shit. “Both” comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. At any rate that’s what we criticized Fire Walk with Me’s Laura for.(61) But I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch’s Laura’s muddy bothness is that it required of us empathetic confrontation with the exact muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours’ fucking relief from. A movie that requires that these features of ourselves and the world not be dreamed away or judges away or massaged away but acknowledged, and not just acknowledged but drawn upon in our emotional relationship to the heroine herself—this movie is going to make us feel uncomfortable, pissed off; we’re going to feel, in Premiere magazine’s own head editor’s word, “Betrayed.”

I am not suggesting that Lynch entirely succeeded at the project he set for himself in Fire Walk with Me. (He didn’t.) What I am suggesting is that the withering critical reception the movie received (this movie, whose director’s previous film had won a Palme d’Or, was booed at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival) had less to do with its failing in the project than with its attempting it at all. And I am suggesting that if Lost Highway gets similarly savaged—or, worse, ignored—by the American art-assessment machine of which Premiere magazine is a wonderful working part, you might want to keep all this in mind.

Premiere Magazine, 1995

42. (Not even the Lynch-crazy French film pundits who’ve made his movies subject of more than two dozen essays in Cahiers du Cinema— the French apparently regard Lynch as God, though the fact they also regard Jerry Lewis as God might salt the compliment a bit…) 43. (Q.v. Baron Harkonen’s “cardiac rape” of the servant boy in Dune’s first act) 44. Here’s one reason why Lynch’s characters have this weird opacity about them, a narcotized over-earnestness that’s reminiscent of lead-poisoned kids in Midwestern trailer parks. The truth is that Lynch needs his characters stolid to the point of retardation; otherwise they’d be doing all this ironic eyebrow-raising and finger-steepling about the overt symbolism of what’s going on, which is the very last thing he wants his characters doing. 45. Lynch did a one-and-a-half-gainer into this pitfall in Wild at Heart, which is one reason the movie comes off so pomo-cute, another being the ironic intertextual self-consciousness (q.v. Wizard of Oz, Fugitive Kind) that Lynch’s better Expressionist movies have mostly avoided. 46. (=Master of Fine Arts Program, which is usually a two-year thing for graduate students who want to write fiction and poetry professionally) 47. (I’m hoping now in retrospect this wasn’t something Lynch’s ex-wife did…) 48. (E.g.: Kathleen Murphy, Tom Carson, Steve Erickson, Laurent Varchaud) 49. This critical two-step, a blend of New Criticism and pop pyschology, might be termed the Unintentional Fallacy. 50. (I.e. “in-spired,”=“affected, guided, aroused by divine influence,” from the Latin inpsirare, “breathed into”) 51. It’s possible to decode Lynch’s fetish for floating/flying entities—witches on broomsticks, sprites and fairies and Good Witches, angels dangling overhead—along these lines. Likewise his use of robins=Light in BV and owl=Darkness in TP: the whole point of these animals is that they’re mobile. 52. (With the exception of Dune, in which the good and bad guys practically wear color-coded hats—but Dune wasn’t really Lynch’s film anyway) 53. This sort of interpretation informed most of the positive reviews of both Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. 54. (Which most admiring critics did—the quotation is from a 1/90 piece on Lynch in the New York Times Magazine) 55. (Not to mention ignoring the fact that Frances Bay, as Jeffrey’s Aunt Barbara, standing right next to Jeffrey and Sandy at the window and making an icky-face at the robin and saying “Who could eat a bug?” Then—as far as I can tell, and I’ve seen the movie like eight times—proceeds to PUT A BUG IN HER MOUTH. Or at least if it’s not a bug she puts in her mouth it’s a tidbit of sufficiently buggy-looking to let you be sure Lynch means something by having her do it right after she’s criticized the robin for its diet. (Friends I’ve surveyed are evenly split on whether Aunt Barbara eats a bug in this scene—have a look for yourself.)) 56. As, to be honest, is a part of us, the audience. Excited, I mean. And Lynch clearly sets the rape scene up to be both horrifying and exciting. This is why the colors are so lush and the mise en scene is so detailed and sensual, why the camera lingers on the rape, fetishizes it: not because Lynch is sickly or naively excited by the scene but because he—like us—is humanly, complexly excited by the scene. The camera’s ogling is designed to implicate Frank and Jeffrey and the director and the audience all at the same time. 57. (Prematurely!) 58. I don’t think it’s an accident that of the grad-school friends I first say Blue Velvet with in 1986, the two who were most disturbed by the movie—the two who said they felt like either the movie was really sick or they were really sick or both they and the movie were really sick, the two who acknowledged the movie’s artistic power but declared that as God was their witness you’d never catch them sitting through that particular sickness-fest again—were both male, nor that both singled out Frank’s smiling slowly while pinching Dorothy’s nipple and looking out past Wall 4 and saying “You’re like me” as possibly the creepiest and least pleasant moment in their personal moviegoing history. 59. Worse, actually. Like most storytellers who use mystery as a structural device and not a thematic device, Lynch is way better at deepening and complicating mysteries than he is at wrapping them up. And the series’ second season showed that he was aware of this and that it was making him really nervous. By its thirtieth episode the show had degenerated into tics and shticks and mannerisms and red herrings, and part of the explanation for this was that Lynch was trying to divert our attention from the fact that he really had no idea how to wrap the central murder case up. Part of the reason I actually preferred Twin Peaks’s second season to its first was the fascinating spectacle of watching a narrative structure disintegrate and a narrative artist freeze up and try to shuck and jive when the plot reached a point where his own weaknesses as an artist were going to be exposed (just imagine the fear: this disintegration was happening on national TV). 60. This is inarguable, axiomatic. In fact what’s striking about most U.S. mystery and suspense and crime and horror films isn’t these films’ escalating violence but their enduring and fanatical allegiance to moral verities that come right out of the nursery: the virtuous heroine will not be serial-killed; the honest cop, who will not know his partner is corrupt until it’s too late to keep the partner from getting the drop on him, will nevertheless somehow turn the tables and kill the partner in a wrenching confrontation; the predator stalking the hero/hero’s family will, no matter how rational and ingenious he’s been in his stalking tactics throughout the film, nevertheless turn into a raging lunatic at the end and will mount a suicidal frontal assault; etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. The truth is that a major component of the felt suspense in contemporary U.S. suspense movies concerns how the filmmaker is going to manipulate various plot and character elements in order to engineer the required massage of our moral certainties. This is why the discomfort we feel at “suspense” movies is perceived as a pleasant discomfort. And this is why, when a filmmaker fails to wrap his product up in the appropriate verity-confirming fashion, we feel not disinterest or even offense but anger, a sense of betrayal—we feel that an unspoken but very important covenant has been violated. 61. (Not to mention for being (from various reviews) “overwrought,” “incoherent,” “too much”)

#i hope this post isnt horrifyingly long and doesnt annoy anymore #im gonna tag it #long post #cause i know some people filter that tag #BUT THIS IS SO FREAKING AMAZING AND ABOUT THE ESSENCE OF FILM AND ART IN GENERAL #and is a great example of how wallace was able to write in a way that makes the reader feel more intelligent rather than intimidated #by his intelligence #david foster wallace #david lynch #a supposedly fun thing i'll never do again

[semiconducting]

okay so i wanna give my share of thoughts on wonder woman!!

spoilers under the cut lmao

alright so? holy shit first of all i absolutely loved it to death i was sitting there talking to my best friend who went to see it with me the entire time and just. screaming abt it honestly my mom told me to quiet down a couple of times lmao

so i suppose like it’s a very similar story to the 2009 animated film (though im sure this is kind of a staple plotline for wonder woman leaving themyscira and all, it’s been done a lot, it’s just a part of her story) except it was like. actually done well.

so to begin i really do love how they portrayed the amazons and themyscira, it was so beautiful and i loooove all the diverse women of all colours there. like it made my heart sing thank GOD. i do wish more of them had speaking roles, but i suppose i understand it being partially focused strictly on diana and her becoming a warrior or w/e between antiope’s encouragement and hippolyta’s dismay. but it would have been nice. i do wish to see more of the amazon mythos in films honestly because as entertaining as her adventures with the justice league and such are, i really want there to be more emphasize how crucial they are to who she is! she’s the child of the amazons my dude

also the island itself does remind me of living/touring in europe and i also really hope they based some of it off of turkish architecture? since themyscira is placed in turkey. but idk man.

the scenes with the germans coming to themyscira and how they portrayed the mirage/cloak/whatever was super cool, honestly. cheesy-ish but fun. i loved introducing steve and showing the amazons ready to fight. the bit with the first bullet killing one of them literally got a verbal reaction out of me and the battle was sooooo fucking COOL. as much as i hate war/brutal death scenes, just for my own reasons, it was quick and also just. really what it should have been.

antiope’s death really kinda pissed me off but i just am not a fan of death so early in a film to fuel a character idk. idk man. i guess i should’ve expected especially bc i recognized her tiara as the one diana wears so it. it was there.

i’m glad that she got a role, for sure, but ngl i thought she was supposed to be artemis at first and im kinda disappointed that artemis wasn’t. there. but i mean i love artemis so dsfjd

steve was genuinely good in this film. and i mean really, really good. i’ve never really liked steve trevor, a lot of the times because hes just a boring “charming” soldier (thinking dcau justice league) or a sexist, not-all-men type fucker (ww 2009) and just. ew. but in this film he was like, genuinely funny and sweet and really worth being the love interest. i love that he never took her naivety to take advantage of her, as simple a concept it sounds but it was something that made me smile especially because i just. tensed up at every opportunity that it could have happened. and it didn’t. bless.

the romance was so gradual, it wasn’t a priority, it didn’t take over the plot and the little bits were so cute and it was like? actually likable? holy shit

i REALLY loved doctor poison and god i wish she got so much more screentime than fucken. ludendorf? :/ but every scene with her was amazing i LOOOOVE her mask design and shit, i really wish we could’ve expanded more on her and i would soooo appreciate having just. extra scenes with more on her working/the experiments because that was SO fucked up and well done. a perfect placement for world war i, too, since chemical warfare a huge part of it and all

also i dig the wwi backdrop? wonder woman fighting in a world war is always something that i need in my wondy mythos, though i always figured it was world war ii because of the comics originating in that time period and whatnot.

it, however, was a great choice as a background for the grey-morality plotline, and showing that all sides of war are flawed. instead of world war ii, which, frankly, the nazis should and always should be seen as objectively bad from any standpoint, and standing against them is not.

but yes! grey-morality was very well done here and it’s great to pair with a newly-introduced-to-the-world wonder woman. like GOD i hate born-sexy-yesterday troped wonder woman because it is so so so easy to paint her that way, but just so wrong. she’s not stupid or clueless, and it bugs the hell out of me because it just. throws her as a man-hating violent “feminist” or w/e and just. hlfgh.

however they didnt do that here, while still keeping her naive to introduce that whole grey morality and choosing whats right for yourself, not because everyone is objectively good and one bad man can be stopped to save everyone. her innocence wasnt just because she was amazonian in “man’s world,” because she was shown to be naive and ideological with the amazons themselves as well. it made all the difference and settled one of my biggest fears for this movie

by the way! the clothes scenes and bits with etta were so cute! etta candy was ABSOLUTELY adorable and such a good part of the film, thank god.

also in general it was so pretty? the scenes were so well done and the cinematography was GORGEOUS especially the fight scenes. fuck man fight scenes are so good on the eyes. the choreography was great, i digged the occasional cartoony punch-drop bit? im sure theres a name for the trope but idk how to describe it. also i know so many people have issues with the slo-mo but honestly it didn’t bother me at all, it didn’t feel cheesy to me and i actually thought they did wonderfully by timing it right to place such good emphasis on it? also all the flips and take downs and fUCK man im jsut. oooo i cant wait to watch that again.

also the jumping on shields/that shingle the boys were holding up for her? good fuckin. fuck. AAAAAAAAAA

and goodness diana was so cute. her gasping and going “a babyyyy!!” made me smile oomg. and the ice cream bit. i love the wonder woman ice cream bit she’s so fucking cute. mhm. i love her constant protesting and not quieting the fuck down when steve was trying to reason with her, like she just. it’s so refreshing to see, yknow? and always proving everyone wrong and choosing to save everyone when she’s told she can’t. goooooood that’s a wonder woman i love.

her saving the village and all the celebration was adorable too. but it made the death all the more heartbreaking and just. :(

i’m so glad they made diana a bringer of peace, because any war-mongering wonder woman just isnt her in my books. like i dont mind her not having a no-kill rule? it is necessary sometimes. but she won’t perpetuate an unnecessary fight. war must be stopped. all that. yeah.

which brings me to ares. i feel like the plot twist could’ve brought more hints, because there was no indication that the peace-brokering brit should’ve been the god of war. it kinda made me just. :/ it was pretty clear ludendorf wasnt gonna be him, but i didnt like whatshisface to be ares. sure i dont mind the whole, he inspires war but doesnt control it i suppose, but to literally be a peace-advocate? kinda defeats his purpose imo.

also good guy zeus. lmfao. anyway

speaking of zeus fuck did i not enjoy diana ~ACTUALLY BEING THE DAUGHTER OF ZEUS~ i was afraid it would come and i was so sad to see them take being molded from clay away from her. it made me roll my eyes. stop doing this to her tbh let her not have a ~manly~ influence, tbh? like i just read someone else’s review that mentioned a better take would’ve been to make her an incarnate of athena and like. yeah? yeah. no look i want my wonder woman completely originating free of any man’s influence.

oo and also. the guys she ran around with. idk what to call them but sameer the chief and charlie. they were absolutely adorable, honestly? they were well rounded, enjoyable characters with depth and i appreciate them being flawed. best sidekicks she could have for this movie, tbh. i really REALLY enjoyed sameer being there, because shit! not a total translation but any bit of representation of a race similar to mine is greatly appreciated. also the over-exaggerated stereotype when they were sneaking into the party? great. loved it. made me laugh so hard. 

also they were REALLY daring with recognizing the whole, fuckin, white man taking from the native americans shit? damn. that was unexpected but appreciated. 

and charlie was cute, the whole singing part was so sweet a bit of his character and i love how they portrayed his ptsd. it’s ugly, it’s not poetic or anything, it’s very realistic and i love what they did with it.

also the music was absolutely beautiful and i lost my mind every time wonder woman’s theme came up. dude. good shit.

anyway i’ve run out of steam and coherence but it was a fantastic movie, 9.5/10, i definitely recommend going to watch it. it was such a satisfying way to finally place her on the big screen and just incredibly well done. bravo to everyone who was involved.

#also i got a free poster and some free comics so that was awesome #dc #wonder woman #wonder woman movie #idk how im gonna tag it i might change it later #anyway #gggggggg this is mostly me rambling about things i thought but in short #it was VERY good #my posts #shut up megan