#he actually has a really interesting bit of dialogue in there. to paraphrase- ‘if you can hear me then maybe i’m real’ | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kyliafanfiction · 2 years

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Thinking about the tags I put on this gifset by @gothamstreetcat.

It’s been said - by both @lilah-morgan and @gothamstreetcat on this post here: (X) that Lilah - who always keeps herself poised, tidy and controlled, even after she’s been beaten up by Gavin in “Billy” that in contexts with Wesley, Lilah allows herself to relax, be messy, be untidy, and let the mask slip a little - and of course, how it slams back in place any time Wesley hurts her (Which is all too often because Wesley

Now, even some of the times with Wesley, she’s still controlling how she presents herself, but still. When with Wesley, when caring about Wesley, when upset because Wesley is breaking her heart (and he did) she does let everything slip and she loses that control just a little, just a moment.

Lilah is rarely loud, and she is, outside of Wesley, rarely Messy. There are really two times when she is messy, is uncontrolled, and is loud (there’s another moment, in Billy, when she’s loud, but she’s not Messy) 1.the scene in Dead End where the higher ups are about to promote Lindsey and... terminate her - the infamous ‘Evil Hand’ Scene - as she grabs at her purse (we never do find out what is in there, but based on some of Lindsey’s dialogue, we can presume perhaps proof of her files on Nathan and Ronnie) and the way she flinches - the only time I think she ever does - when Lindsey raises his hand. Given that she’s facing death, and probably a pretty cruel and horrifying death it’s understandable.

2. Cavalry. She’s a bit Messy in the whole Episode, and given that she’s been bleeding from a wound in her Abdomen for the last day or two, even if only slowly, has been driven out of Wolfram and Hart by the Beast and without all her nice things, that checks out.

But ultimately, she is at her messiest, loudest and most passionate when she’s ranting at Fred.

Like, Lilah... usually plays detached, unconcerned, uninvolved. Like she doesn’t believe in anything. Lindsey gets a thesis statement in “Blind Date” where he says that someone either does the stepping, or gets stepped on (I am paraphrasing here, of course). But Lilah never gets that, until this episode. Apart from just ‘I like nice things and I like living’, she never seems to show any significant ‘first principle’ or foundational idea. As she says, she became the Mask a long time ago. Becoming the mask is usually to imply a sort of hollowness - if you take off the Mask, there’s nothing there.

But in Cavalry - I would argue that we actually do get to see what Lilah believes, deep down. To the very core of her being, Lilah believes - and I mean believes in the cold indifference of the Universe. She believes there is no real hope, and she believes that there is no champion coming to save you.

She says it herself:

You don’t get it, do you, twinkie? I’m what I believe in. And you think I got this far by sticking my head in the sand? The Beast that eviscerated me has a boss and that boss is going to end life as we know it and nobody is coming to save us! Not Angel, not the Powers That Be and not the Forty-damned-second Cavalry!

In this scene, she’s loud, she’s messy, she not controlled, or poised. But more than that, she’s passionate about something. She’s not playing games or being smug and smirking, she’s not manipulating anyone. She doesn’t get anything out of saying this, she doesn’t have anything to gain - for the first time, this is just her. Lilah, unvarnished, on full display.

This is what she believes at the core of her being. When told she is too scared to hope, she says ‘no, I just know there is no hope!’.

Nobody is coming to save them. It’s a cold, cruel and indifferent world. This is Lilah’s Thesis Statement. And it’s interesting, because I would argue that it also is the perfect foil to the thesis statement to the entire Season, which Angel says in “Deep Down”

Nothing in the world is the way it ought to be. - It's harsh, and cruel. - But that's why there's us. Champions. It doesn't matter where we come from, what we've done or suffered, or even if we make a difference. We live as though the world was what it should be, to show it what it can be.

This too, is framed as the world being indifferent, cold, cruel, harsh. But Angel takes that in a different direction. To borrow a concept that didn’t have a word then, Angel’s position here (and I would argue the position of the whole show, until the tail end of Season 5 kind of ruins it) is basically Hopepunk. And it clashes directly with Lilah’s view of the world, which is basically Grimdark.

And this theme got specifically echoed and resaid in part by Connor, in Angel’s dream world/perfect day scenario in “Awakening”.

For Angel and for the entire AI team, the world may suck, but that doesn’t mean you stop trying to save the world. As Doyle says in the pilot episode of the whole show: “"It’s not all about fighting and gadgets and stuff. It’s about reaching out to people, showing them that there’s love and hope still left in the world...It’s not about saving lives; it’s about saving souls.”

Even if the cause is futile, even if you can fix everything, even if no one else cares, you’ll keep going, you’ll keep fighting, you’re going to show people, show the world, that hope exists.

Lilah, being an antagonist, is a foil to the cast, and here too, even in the most fundamental of ways, the very core of who Lilah is is antithethical to that notion. Lilah isn’t ‘dog eat dog’, because that requires more meaning. Lilah simply believes - simply knows - that this is just the whole fucking world

And the interesting thing here, is who Lilah says her rant to. Cordelia. Except that by this point, Cordelia isn’t running the show in there. Jasmine is. Jasmine, who wants so much to make the world better, to create world peace - sure, at the cost of free will and a few people to eat a day, but still. Bargain, right? A small price to pay for a perfect world?

Jasmine’s entire thing runs on the desire for, that hope for, the need for a better world. She berates Lilah for being ‘too scared’ to hope, because she can’t comprehend that Lilah doesn’t want better. Lilah doesn’t want better, because there isn’t better, can’t be better.

I think Jasmine killed Lilah specifically because Lilah offended her, offended the very reason for her existence on this plane, and threatened her entire project. Connor is one of the few people who, without exposure to Jasmine’s blood, never fell for Jasmine’s control. Because like Lilah... I don’t think Connor really had hope. He went along with her anyway, but I don’t think he actually believed in a better world either.

I’m not saying that if Lilah had lived she would have been immune to Jasmine (though I am actually kind of saying that), but... I mean, there’s a reason Jasmine killed Wolfram and Hart rather than just take control of all the employees as they physically met her or got affected by her power.

Lilah is not just loud and messy in this scene because of everything that’s happened to her, everything that she’s lost. She’s loud and messy because for the first time in a long time, she’s let all the barriers fall and revealed what she believes, down to her very core.

It clashes directly with the motives of the Big Bad, and with the underlying principles of the Heroes, each in different ways.

Lilah’s view of the world is a threat to Jasmine - in some ways the greatest defense against the Knight Templar who will build a better future on a mountain of dead bodies, who will build as desert and call it peace, is arguably not actually a hero who still believes in a better world, who believes in peace, and just thinks there’s a better way to get there.

No. In a lot of ways, the jaded cynic who thinks it won’t get any better is - if they really believe in their cynicism - is immune to the idealist who promises that “if we just build a big enough mountain of dead bodies, if we just get rid of enough of the wrong people, we’ll have our better world.” Cynics can do a lot of awful stuff, but in almost every case it takes an idealist with vision to kill a truly impressive number of people.

Now, in the end, AtS never fully embraces Lilah’s brand of cynicism - AtS as a show is significantly more cynical and less optimistic than BtVS, which is one of the reasons I love it so much - but it does have to acknowledge some truths of Lilah’s POV.

Angel, in defeating Jasmin, accepts that yea, nobody is coming to save them. That you can’t just create hope into existence. That there is no hope.

But Angel doesn’t give up, doesn’t let that stop him. Because he will still keep fighting to show the world what it can be.

He kills Jasmine, kills a being that basically runs on the Hope of a better world, because he sees the cost. But he doesn’t let that stop his core desire for a better world - Angel as a show, and as a character, is cynicism alloyed with optimism, hope in the face of despair.

Everything may suck, the world may be cold, cruel and indifferent. You can be like Lilah, and accept that and become the game face, or you can be like Angel, and say ‘yeah, it sucks. But let’s get to work.’

#Angel the Series #Lilah Morgan #Angel #Jasmine #Hopepunk #This Went Places I Didn't Intend #But I Stand By Every Word #Only Idealists Build The Future On A Mountain Of Dead

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felassan · 3 years

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Zero To Play podcast episode: John Epler, Narrative Director at BioWare

In the most recent episode of Zero To Play podcast the guest was John Epler, Narrative Director on DA4. He talked about narrative games, how they fit inside an industry leaning towards games as a service, his experience being at BioWare for almost 14 years, and advice that he has for aspiring devs who want to create memorable, impactful and transformative moments in games.

The episode summary read as follows:

In this episode John brings his 13+ year experience being at BioWare and working on titles like Mass Effect & Dragon Age: Inquisition to explain how he believes storytelling will evolve and develop through the medium of games.

He shares some of his favorite moments and why he thinks games are the most powerful and interesting medium to be exploring in this generation.

It’s a good and interesting interview, so worth checking out if you can! You can listen to it here or on Spotify.

This post contains some notes on what was talked about in the episode, in case a text format is better for anyone (for example folks that can’t listen to it due to accessibility reasons). It’s under a cut due to length.

A bit of paraphrasing.

The average dev stays with a game company/studio for about 5 years. John joined BioWare right after the EA acquisition happened.

[on going into Trespasser] “Myself and the Lead Writer Patrick Weekes both knew that we needed to wrap up at least this part of the Inquisitor’s story, and set up where we want to go next with the franchise, with the IP. We learned a lot of lessons from DAI itself. DAI was a game with a lot of exploration and open-world content, and while we stand by that (I still think it was the right call for the game), one of the pieces of feedback we got from the fans was that they really wanted some more directed storytelling. Jaws of Hakkon was more of a continuation of open-world, more free-from exploration and free-form design. Trespasser was our opportunity to tell a story in a much more linear and focused way. [this way of telling stories] really does help to be able to create that sense of pacing and emotional escalation. It’s a lot harder to do that when you’re mixing up storybeats with big, wide open-worlds. Trespasser was a project where everyone was kind of in sync, we were all building [towards] the same thing.”

“There were [story]beats [in Trespasser] that I don't think we would have been able to get away with in basegame DAI, one of those being the - quite frankly - incredibly lengthy conversation you have with Solas at the end. Because by this point we knew that if someone is playing this DLC then they are in it - they’ve been in it for the last two DLCs, they’ve played through the entire game, they want something incredibly story-focused. And we were able to really dive deep into that, some of the deep lore, some of the narrative. This was one of the only conversations that I’d worked on which, due to limitations of the engine, we actually had to break into two different conversation styles because it was so massive. We also got opportunities to do some fun callbacks. One of my favorite ones was one Patrick suggested which was, ‘What if I [didn’t like Solas much and] spent the entire basegame telling Solas I didn't want to hear anything he had to say?’ So we had the option that if you never chose ‘Investigate’ or a dialogue option that implied that you wanted to hear him blather on, there was one dialogue option that you could pick which was basically ‘Solas, when have I ever wanted to hear any of the shit you have to say?’ And it just kind of wrapped up the conversation super quickly, and Solas looked exasperated. It was fun because it’s not the kind of thing you can necessarily do in the main game, but in a DLC which is entirely for those core fans, you have a lot more options as to what you can do.”

John has an understanding of games as an interactive medium.

“Choice of combat, choice of mechanics, all of that does have an impact on the storytelling and on the narrative that you’re trying to put through. A lot of storytelling in games is trying to make sure that the - there’s a phrase, ludonarrative dissonance - [for example, say] I’m making a game where I’m trying to make the player feel powerful. How do you [do that?] [...] In games, this is kind of the challenge. Interactivity is so key to it. [...] It’s a lot harder [compared to characters in film] to put the player in a situation that they are going to lose, because as soon as you take away that autonomy, you’re taking away some of that interactivity. [...] If as a player I'm making you feel strong and powerful, and then I pull you into a cutscene and suddenly you’re losing the fight, you’re losing what’s going. That is a much different sensation, that is something movies can get away with that games can’t.”

“What are [players/our audience] actually meaning when they say that they ‘want choice’? I think that in a lot of cases we conflate that with ‘Oh, they want to make a big decision that changes the world’. But in a lot of cases what players want is the game to react to what they’re doing and the choices that they’re making in a way that feels organic and natural. I think this is something CD Projekt Red and the Telltale games did really well - of making it clear when the game is actually going to pay attention to what you said or did, so that when you see it later you’re like ‘Oh right yeah, I made that choice, the game said it was going to remember it, and it remembered, this is cool’.

And it doesn't always mean completely changing the course of events. The Telltale writers, as they got on through the games, they realized that the better way to address choice - and something we’ve done too - is, if we make the game have three endings, four or five - like DAO had an absolute massive amount of ways that it could turn out. How do you pay that off if you want to do a sequel? There's basically two choices. One is that you make an incredibly short game because you have to account for these very different branches, OR you collapse them and say ‘Sorry, this is what we’re going with’. And I don't think either of those are necessarily satisfying. For me it’s about making the players feel like their time and the choices they made have been respected. More than anything else that's the key, it comes down to understanding your fanbase, what it is they’re looking for, what it is they’re asking for, because there is that desire for choice, reactivity, consequences. And it’s something that BioWare, that we’re especially sensitive to because it’s always been a big pillar of the games we make. It’s just about understanding what this actually means from a practical standpoint and how you execute on that in a way that makes your fans feel satisfied, while still not writing yourself an impossible check to cash, because, you know, you can react to anything, but if you have a game that ends in three separate ways, you have to go with one of those two options and neither of them is going to be intensely satisfying to the player.”

“A phrase I’ve been using is, what I'm describing as - the half life of quantum. ‘Quantum’ is what we say when it could be like, one of six different things. The half life of this is how long before you actually resolve that down to a single point. Like, provide the player with that reactivity, but collapse those into a way that you can proceed forward. This is 100% a lesson learned from Dragon Age, for all the games. ‘Ok, what do we do with this? Holy shit, that is huge, how are we actually going to pay that off?’ Reactivity, but without putting yourself in an impossible-to-win situation [from a story/writing standpoint].”

“More than anything else, the advice I would give [to aspiring devs] is, come up with some fundamental pillars of your story and of your design. There's a misunderstanding that we plan out the exact story for years in advance. We know what we want to get to, we kinda know how we’re going to get there, and a lot of it is just making sure that you have those pillars and those razors. So as you go through development and find, ‘Oh this piece is not working, this piece is clunking’, you’ll always have principles that you can go back to. What is important about this story? Does the piece that isn't working satisfy any of those things? If no, then we have to change it or get rid of it.”

[more advice] “Don’t be afraid to fail (I say fail here as a good thing). Don't be afraid to put something out there and have it absolutely torn to shreds. Feedback is your best friend, having people that you trust to provide that feedback. If I were building a big epic narrative, a big epic franchise, [I’d advise that you] start with your principles and the core of what you want to do, and then just start putting out ideas. ‘Here’s my idea for this story’. It’s easier for me, I'm inheriting a lot of work that's already been done, a lot of ground that's already laid - I have a Lead Writer that has been doing this longer than I have, PW is fantastic. But for myself, it’s just been a lot of like, okay, taking this stuff that's already been built, and making sure that I know what we want to do with whatever the next project is. It sounds overly reductive and overly simplistic, but it really is about just having a really strong sense of what is important to your franchise, what’s important to your brand. If you’re coming up with a new IP, it’s a little trickier. You need to spend some time thinking: what’s the tone, what’s the setting, what kind of story do we want to tell.”

[more advice] Don’t be afraid to heavily reference existing media [as actual razors, internally]. But that's not something you ever want to have go out to the public, because people go like ‘Oh, you’re just being derivative’. It’s like no, we’re just leaning on cultural touchstones that people know, so that when you’re communicating with people outside your discipline, or with people above you like executives, they can at least get a sense like, ‘Oh I kinda get what you’re doing, okay that makes sense’, versus ‘Let me first of all explain the entire history of the world’. My experience with executives is that they don't have time for that and justifiably so. But if I tell them we’re doing X but with Y and Z it’s like, ‘Ok cool, we get that’. [...] It’s a tiered approach. You have levels of detail that you provide to different people based on what they need to know. You yourself may need to know the history of these characters and how they relate to each other and the thousands of years of history for that, but the person building combat probably doesn't need all that detail and just needs to know ‘What am I working with, how do these characters fight.”

“A razor is a statement that you use to slice away what doesn't fit. The narrative razor for Trespasser was, I can’t remember exactly, we were basically trying to go for the Avengers meets Indiana Jones, Winter Soldier. Avengers meets Winter Soldier. [a razor is] a statement that you take all the content [by], ‘Okay, does this actually fit this statement? No? Okay, get rid of it’. It’s about focusing your game. Cutting away the ideas that don't really fit is how you avoid scope-loading and people crunching, and how you keep your project focused.

Trespasser was an intensely-focused DLC, in that it focused on basically two main core things, Solas and the fate of the Inquisition. Everything kind of wrapped into those two razors. As we were going through content, we had stuff like - I said this at a GDC presentation in 2016 - the Qunari are farming lyrium to make Qunari templars. And then we looked at it like, how does that apply to either razor? It doesn't, it doesn't fit either one of them. So we simplified it to, ‘Okay, what actually makes this work in the context of what we’re building?’. [a razor is] a statement that you use to slice off what doesn't fit into the game that you’re building. It can be painful, but having strong razors means that it never comes across as a personal thing.”

Narrative does not mean story.

Two of his least favorite mechanics in games [not including Stalker and DayZ] are weight limits and weapon degradation.

On games as a service:

Interviewer/host: “Talking about games as a service, it’s definitely something that is talked about a lot in gaming in terms of the most successful games. With Dragon Age, putting DLCs out is kind of maybe that same influence, but games that are launched and then iterated on and updated and pushed with content every month, like Fortnite, Riot Games, League of Legends, Valorant etc, that's kind of I feel where the trend of games are trying to go and make the most of those interactions between other people, to make replayability possible and easier. How do you see narrative, do you see it being forgotten with this increase of games as a service? [...] Do you see that as a positive part of narrative in games or do you think there’s still work to be done in that space?”

John: “[...] The place we start to see some confusion, a lot of people think it’s one or the other, but to me, it’s another way, another option for telling stories that by their nature have to be different. I think that's where you need to be, again, very cognizant of what you’re building and of the genre you’re working in, because a story that works for a more traditional box product is not necessarily the kind of story that would work for a games as a service product. [...] Games as a service, understanding what the cadence is that you’re planning to deliver to and what kinds of stories best fit that cadence - some games are better at it than others.

One game that did a pretty decent job of it is Destiny 2, through patches. Final Fantasy 14 is another example, they do a lot of their storytelling between the big expansion releases as part of their free patches. They always know that they have - I think, five big patches? - between each expansion, and they’ve structured their stories to fit into that very specific five-act structure. If they tried to do it weekly or bi-weekly it would be a very different experience. I think there’s always room for narrative. It’s about knowing that there are different lessons to learn and not being afraid to learn those lessons, as opposed to trying to fit the traditional box product square-peg narrative into a live service round hole. And that’s why you need to have a strong vision and why you need to have somebody at the Director level who understands and plays the kinds of games that you’re building, so they kind of understand what works and what doesn't - ‘This type of story worked really well for this game, and I'm not saying you should copy it, but you should at least be willing to learn those lessons and not reinvent the wheel every time.’

We’ve been making games for a long time now, there’s lots of lessons to learn, we should be trying to learn from them and not trying to like, change everything every single time.”

[on length of narrative] “In a lot of cases you know how long your game should be and the hardest part is sticking to that. [...] There is always a worry that fans are going to see a number and be like ‘That’s not big enough or that’s not long enough.’ I do think that there is sometimes a lack of confidence in what you're building, and a desire to make it shorter or longer, but I think at the core, the people building [a] game know how long it’s going to take to tell this story that they want to tell. I say this specifically for narrative, but even stuff like progression, you know how long you want it to take. For myself, I will always take a short but well-executed game over a long game that feels that it has a lot of [useless/boring] padding. It’s about identifying the kind of game you’re building. Open-world games are always going to be bigger and longer than more linear games. Being confident in that number and recognizing when you’re adding time and space for no other purpose than just to make that number on the back of the box longer [is important]. Fans don’t love that, they can see right through that.”

“It was nice to see the amount of hard work that went into DAI rewarded by the press [with the Game of the Year award]. There are definitely parts of it that didn't land that we wish we could have done differently, but it was a project that felt like we were all pulling in the same direction and when we started getting that positive feedback, it was definitely a sense of relief. Especially because a lot of us had been on DA2, and while we were proud of that project, it obviously didn't get the reception that we wanted at that time.

[when they were watching DAI’s release and tracking its reception] We’re keeping a running tally, like ‘Okay, this is really looking like we did something special here’. I’m proud of every project that I’ve worked on but DAI is definitely one that I’m especially proud of.”

“Part of the advantage to being at a company for as long as I have, I've worked with a lot of the other people [responsible for things in other departments like art, writing, audio etc], so while there is that anxiety like ‘I reeeally hope that this works out’, I know it’s going to, because I know that everyone who is doing these roles, like our Animation Director, our Audio Director, Levels, all those other people on the project know what they’re doing and they know their shit better than I could ever hope to. So I’m just kind of standing here like ‘Hey y’all this is what we need’, and it’s coming in. And when it does come in, when you see the pieces together - I think for myself, on DAI, the moment that I first finally started feeling like it was really all coming together was, one of our music designers, going into one of the moments at the end of Redcliffe, doing the music/audio pass, and me finally seeing this scene that I’d been staring at and banging my head against for months - turn into something that actually conveyed emotion, that actually was something that I was excited for our fans to get to see and get to experience. That’s always a special feeling.”

Cinematics is one of the last things to come in, which means that audio is always waiting for them to come in: “They always did an amazing job with very little time, I will never not praise our audio and music designers.”

“Patrick Weekes is the Lead Writer, which means ultimately PW is responsible for the writing side of the game. As Narrative Director, I’m there to offer, to basically take the vision of the project and interpret the part that focuses on narrative and then provide that to my team - because I work with writing, cinematics, level designers and everyone - I’m there to be like ‘Hey this is the narrative we want to achieve’, which sometimes involves getting involved in the story side of things. But a lot of that is PW’s job as Lead Writer, they’ve been doing it for a long time, they’ve been in the industry longer than I have. It’s a really good working relationship. We worked together when I was in cinematics and they were in writing, we worked together on the Iron Bull, then we were both leads on Trespasser, so we have a trust.

I think what’s been really helpful is that they know that if I tell them something’s not working, it’s not coming from ‘I wanna do it my way, you better just do it my way because I’m the boss’, it’s coming from ‘This is something I think we need to do for the project’. And vice versa, if they push back on me about something, I know it’s not coming from ‘Screw you I'm the Lead Writer, I make the decisions’, they’re saying it because this is an actual concern. I do writing, I’m a writer on the project too but I will fully admit PW is a way better writer than I am, so I'm comfortable leaning on them for that stuff, and then I’m the person who can provide that ‘Okay, we know that gameplay is providing this, we know levels is providing this, let’s shift the priorities'.

It’s also about knowing, being able to take that back from any one discipline and say ‘Okay, what is the right decision for the project as a whole’, and sometimes that means telling PW something that they may not think is their favorite thing to do, but they will listen because they trust me and I trust them. I don't know how it works at other studios, there are places where Narrative Director is also the Lead Writer, or where there is Narrative Director and Lead Writer is the highest authority on narrative that exists, but it’s worked for us again because we have that lengthy experience. It would be interesting to see how it would work if we didn’t know each other for a while before this. It’s largely a relationship of trusting each other to know our areas of expertise and also just understanding what’s important to the narrative vision of the project.”

When they did Tevinter Nights it was ‘extracurricular’ work: “It was fun, I got to do some writing, I got published, which was really fun”.

[source]

[☕ found this post or blog interesting or useful? my ko-fi is here if you feel inclined. thank you 🙏]

#dragon age 4 #the dread wolf rises #da4 #dragon age #bioware #video games #solas #long post #longpost

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mrfutureboy · 3 years

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(bttf wip anon) what about talking about the ones with titles? Cute redhead, I waited up all night, jukebox heroes, and who is the man I see?

hi anon welcome back! i want to of course give the disclaimer that these are wips, so any snippets i share are very unlikely to be perfectly worked out haha. but thank you so much for the interest! ^_^

cute redhead:

yeahhh, so this one is definitely one of the crackiest of all the wips on my list. and it's a bttf: the game fic! basically, it's the part in the first episode (iirc) where doc's in jail and gives marty the idea to recruit doc's younger self to help him...except marty meets young emmett and is infatuated bc goddammit marty's got a weakness for red heads. honestly, i cant remember if that idea is based off something said in the games or if i read it in a fic and then was like "yep that tracks" lmfaoo.

anyway. it's so stupid but it's funny to me cuz marty says what he says and then doc goes into panic mode like "marty! you can't fuck my past self!" and starts going on and on about the ramifications to the spacetime continuum and marty's like "welp i dont really have much of a choice here do i". i haven't solidified how i want doc's rant to go so right now i have 2 versions of it. this is only like a 300 word fic (or at least it will be if i finish it)

here's a peek at the beginning, before doc has his rant i havent fully committed to yet:

“Psst, Doc!”

Doc popped up behind the bars of his jail cell. “Marty! Have you found my younger self yet?”

“Yeah, Doc, but ah, jeez,” Marty trailed off, rubbing the back of his neck. “You never told me you were a cute redhead.”

“If I had known I was one, I surely would’ve told you,” Doc assured him with a slight upturn of his lips.

Marty chuckled nervously. “I wish you had, because this poses a, uh, unforeseen problem.”

“I’m sure whatever it is, we can figure out how to bypass it!” Doc waved his hand around. “What is it, Marty?”

“I have to fuck you, Doc. Younger you, that is.”

i waited up all night but i never saw the light:

the title (bc this is likely to be the actual title: as you could tell from my wip list, i have a lot of placeholders lol) is a lyric from "spiralling" by keane. it's a very marty song imo!

the premise of the fic is that the marty we follow in the movie returns to 1985 an hour or so earlier and heads to his house to sneakily do...something, honestly i dunno yet, and in the process ends up accidentally waking up the version of himself thats asleep in bed. twin pine marty finds out that life is different for lone pine marty and he ends up asking a lot of questions. it's actually told form the perspective of lone pine marty atm but idk i've thought about making it the other way around.

originally, it was going to be a songfic of sorts, with direct quotations from the song. i could potentially still do that but as i worked on it i kinda got away from that. with that original idea, twin pine marty was going to be a bit of an egomaniac when he realized he could bend things to his will via time travel (even tho he totally did it on accident). here's a snippet of that part atm that quotes/slightly paraphrases the song lyrics (the "other Marty" is twin pine marty bc pov):

“I made you. Fashioned you from jewels and stone, as it were. Made you in the image of myself. I gave you…everything you wanted, so you’d never know anything else,” the other Marty [verb], hands reaching out towards Marty’s face. The teen recoiled from the gesture. “Tell me, Marty, did you wanna be a winner? An icon? You wanna be famous? The president? Hell, you wanna start a war? You wanna have a family? Did you wanna be in love?”

“Do I wanna be in love?”

“Did you wanna be in love!”

Also, as noted in the original wip masterlist, this wip has a companion called "i fashioned you from jewels and stone" (which you can see from the snippet above that it's also titled after a lyric from spiralling). At the moment, the only real difference is that it has some dialogue w twin pine marty asking about george and lorraine, while this wip hasn't really gotten past marty getting caught by lone pine marty. and then that bit of dialogue up there, and the very ending, which i will also share here:

“Don’t bother going back to sleep,” Marty chuffed, standing with one leg out of the window. “Doc’s about to call you. He forgot his camera.”

The other Marty blinked in confusion, and before he could say anything, the phone started to ring. Both Marties stared at each other as the one in bed slowly picked up the phone. “H-hello?”

“Marty!” Doc’s voice boomed in the receiver. “You didn’t fall asleep did you?”

“…No, of course not,” he answered, his eyes wide.

The Marty in the window climbed the rest of the way out. He stood and waited for his counterpart to finish up on the phone, then finally said, “I’ll just leave this open for you, then. See you in the future,” he said cheekily, offering a short wave before heading off.

jukebox heroes:

this is just a silly little thing that's not very fleshed out, but the idea is that doc and marty are just chillin at doc's place (post trilogy i guess or maybe post bttf1 but 2&3 didnt happen? post bttf game? doesn't matter; doc's there) and "johnny b. goode" comes on the jukebox and marty's like "oh hey this is the song i played at the enchantment under the sea dance" and doc's like "what u were on stage?" and then marty basically explains what happened bc i imagine doc doesnt actually know the story lol. i will share a little snippet as a treat even tho there's not much to share:

“After they kissed? Marty, you were supposed to get out of there as soon as they kissed and you and your siblings’ fates were sealed!”

“Doc, you gotta understand, they were begging for an encore! I couldn’t just leave em’ hanging!”

Doc shook his head fondly. “No wonder you were late for our rendezvous. You’re just lucky you weren’t too late!”

who is the man i see where i'm supposed to be:

this is that fic i would keep referring to as my "big project" two summers ago but is probably going to end up being fewer words than "deal with god" which i basically wrote the entirety of in one night. and ive been working on THIS fic for HOW long?? yikes

the title is from "crystal ball" by keane bc it is my #1 marty song. there is also a companion thing in my notes app called "FOR CRYSTAL BALL (maybe)" which is basically just some ideas of dialogue for this fic that i havent added in yet. also this fic used to be called crystal ball.

the premise is that it's been about a week since marty returned from 1885 and he's been having constant nightmares. it's another one of those nights, so he goes to the bathroom to splash his face with cold water and take some painkillers, but when he lifts his head, his reflection isn't himself, but stoltz!marty ! whoa! maybe it's just a figment of our poor kid's imagination but the reflection is talking to him about how marty stole his life and blah blah blah. ends with george and lorraine finding marty on the floor in the bathroom (ALIVE DONT WORRY) and marty incessantly apologizing. imma be honest that scene rips my cold little heart right out of my chest lmao i'd love to share it but i will refrain atm. just cuz ideally i want y'all to suffer through the whole of the fic before getting to that punch in the gut :D

the reason this fic has been taking me so long is that i have the WORST time trying to write the dialogue between marty and his reflection! the whole beginning and end are done but the middle, the MEAT, is just never up to my standards when i try to write it.

even tho it's not finished and at this point i'll never fucking finish it to my liking, this fic is my baby. here's marty first meeting the man in the mirror:

He thought to lift his head before he accidentally drowned himself in the sink. He blindly reached for the hand towel to pat his face dry, letting out a heaving sigh into the soft fabric. Much softer than the towels we used to have, he remarked to himself. Jesus Christ, was life really that disappointing before, if the damn towels are an improvement? The towel fell into the sink alongside the pill bottle, and he yelped in surprise when he looked back in the mirror.

The face that stared back at him wasn’t his own. The reflection towered over him, piercing blue eyes boring into Marty’s own. There was no life behind these eyes, and they stared down at him like they could see right through him. A sudden shiver racked him; he could feel the cold gaze piercing his body, turning all of his blood to ice. Its eyebrows suddenly knit together, and it frowned deeply in contempt, eyes flitting about as it took in the sight of Marty. Marty could feel himself trembling under the reflection’s scrutiny.

as much as i kinda want to, i don't just want to post the entire beginning of the fic, so here's some of their first bits of dialogue, cuz i like the thing with the pills:

“How did you…I didn’t say that out loud.”

“You didn’t have to. I’m in your head, Marty. I can hear everything you’re thinking.”

Marty’s hand trembled as he reached for the pill bottle in the sink. His internal monologue was running a mile a minute as he frantically searched for the expiration date. No, you can’t. You can’t hear what I’m thinking because you’re not real. I’m just having a bad reaction to the pills. They have to be expired; they just have to. Where’s the damn expiration date? Good ‘til 1988…What year is it now? No, there has to be a mistake. This isn’t real. You’re not real, you don’t know what I’m thinking, you don’t know my name—Wait. You know my name; how do you know my name?

The reflection cut off Marty’s train of thought. “It’s because I’m you, Marty. The you that doesn’t exist anymore.”

this got long as hell but thank you again SO MUCH, anon, for showing interest in my wips!! let me know if there's any others you'd like to hear about! i didnt want to overwhelm you in the first ask by talking about EVERYTHING lol but i'm very willing to talk about the others as well

#signed sealed delivered #anon #my fic #bttf #thank you so much ahhh sorry it took me so long to write out this message but i was so excited to ramble!!#bttf posting

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officialleotolstoy · 3 years

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Oh Natasha/Andrei brainrot we’re really in it now, aka Natasha/Andrei playlist annotations!

Honestly the age gap is so inherently uncomfortable it’s difficult for me to really ship this but I think in terms of the REALLY low bar of W&P marriages/almost-marriages, it’s one of the better ones because they at least mutually care about each other. It’s also just devastating on principle!

There are several distinct sections of song on here, this is one of the few I’ve actually put in a significant order, so I’m going to break it down into that.

Part 1: Initial Meeting/Falling In Love The First Time/General

Absolutely Smitten - dodie

“She wants to dance around the room, kiss you until her lips turn blue”

This song really reminds me of their first meeting when they’re both like 👀 at each other. I like how it captures the excitement but also nerves of the girl, which I feel like is an important feature of Natasha’s part of the relationship.

Helpless - Philippa Soo

“Tryin' to catch your eye from the side of the ballroom”

Sorry to all the ex-Hamilton stans I jumpscared with this, but it’s about the Philippa Soo Singing About Falling In Love vibe. Also the quoted lyric reminds me of their iconic dance scene, or at least the bits leading up to that.

To Noise Making (Sing) - Hozier

“Honey, the look of it was as sweet as the sound; Your head tilt back, your funny mouth to the clouds”

This reminds me of the scene where she sings for him and he’s like WAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH im in love! I paraphrase, but you get the idea.

Golden Years - David Bowie

“Look at that sky, life's begun”

This is objectively the stupidest song on here. It’s here because I think it’s funny to imagine the iconic Natasha/Andrei dance just being the Golden Years dance from A Knight’s Tale, HOWEVER the quoted lyric is in fact Andreicore.

Stop The World I Wanna Get Off With You - The Arctic Monkeys

“And I know we got places to go, we got people to see/Think we both oughta put 'em on hold”

‘Wren there are several songs that are on this playlist AND your Andrei/Pierre playlist’ Thank you for noticing it’s because if Tolstoy can recycle the same lines of dialogue for these relationships I can recycle the same songs! This song is just. I Hate Everyone Except You :) which is deeply Andrei @ both of them. But also like wanting life to stop so you can just hang out with Your People.

Strawberry Blond - Mitski

“I love everybody because I love you”

I’m pretty sure someone once pointed out how this lyric fit Andrei/Natasha once in a post and I cannot for the life of me remember who but that made an impression on me. Mystery person, thanks <3 Also I forgot this was a Mitski song??

The Anchor - Bastille

“Bring me some hope by wandering into my mind”

One of Thee things about their relationship that sticks out to me is how Natasha is so lifelike and her very existence gives Andrei hope for the world. It’s so. It’s so much!

Something After All - Starry

“You’ve turned my world around”

Like I said above, falling in love with Natasha really changes Andrei’s entire worldview! I also think “I've spent years building up walls” is very Andrei, and Natasha kind of brought them down, like what happens in the song.

Cosmic Love - Florence + The Machine

“A falling star fell from your heart and landed in my eyes”

IT’S ABOUT THE SPACE METAPHORS FOR LOVE. THIS IS NO ONE ELSE FROM GREAT COMET’S FAULT.

Cold Cold Man - Saint Motel

“I know I am a cold cold man: quite slow to pay you compliments or public displayed affections”

It’s about being generally not very emotional or expressive but being devoted to the person anyway...very Andrei-ish.

Ophelia - The Lumineers

“I don't feel nothing at all and you can't feel nothing small”

The quoted lyric just seems like a really good summary of their dynamic, but I also think “Heaven help a fool who falls in love” works well for bitter post-elopement vibes, so this song was difficult to place.

Part 2: Andrei Leaving For Abroad

Misbehavin’ - Pentatonix

For some reason this is on both the Nat/Andrei and Natasha playlists and I’m too lazy to change it. Just go look at those annotations.

No One Else - Great Comet

Duh

To a Poet - First Aid Kit

“I got on a plane and flew far away from you, though unwillingly I left”

This song makes me think of Andrei abroad missing Natasha :( Honey you’ve got a big storm coming

Part 3: Post-Elopement Breakup Songs

I Hope Your Husband Dies - Amigo The Devil

“All the distance that we've spent apart will never have to mean a thing”

This song is VERY much Andrei about Anatole. “Now you're with this asshole, you expect me to believe it's going to last” really works because her relationship with Anatole was never going to last, whether or not she knew that. And “I'm not so much afraid of being alone, just kind of feel I've had enough/And time and time again, time reminds me you'll never be my own/We'll never have a house to decorate, a place that we can call our home” as an Andrei thing makes me very sad!!!

Ruins - First Aid Kit

“Ruins, all the things we built assured that they would last”

I think you can safely say their relationship was in ruins after the elopement attempt. I also think “I lost you, didn't I? First I think I lost myself” is something Natasha would think about the whole scenario

Half of My Heart - John Mayer

“Half of my heart's got the right mind to tell you that I can't keep loving you with half of my heart”

I think this is supposed to be more of an “I don’t love you anymore and that’s on me” song, but I like to mentally frame it in the context of Andrei after the elopement refusing to take back Natasha. I also think all the bits about the singer’s love interest changing the singer’s outlook on life before really fits, like “Lonely was the song I sang 'til the day you came, showing me another way”

Love Like Ghosts - Lord Huron

“You don't want me baby please don't lie/Oh but if you're leaving, I gotta know why”

It’s all about the singer being haunted by a love that doesn’t necessarily reciprocate on the same level, and I think that really fits Andrei’s mindset. It breaks my heart to think about him trying to figure out what he did wrong, why he wasn’t enough for Natasha, and so that quoted lyric really makes me just. :(

Cold Day In Heaven - Delta Rae

“Keep thinking bout when we started, so innocent/Your heart was a mess and I was lost in it”

This whole song is so good for them, it’s essentially just a couple being disappointed that their relationship didn’t work out well. The quoted lyric is so. AAAAHHH. because both of their hearts were messes but for different reasons, Andrei was so hopeless and bleak but Natasha was so naive and not ready for it and it’s so. It’s so Much. Also “We watched, the stars fell, and oh you know we let them/We said it’ll never happen, we said it’ll never happen to us/But it’s a cold day in heaven my love” gets me because 1) star/sky references :( and 2) Natasha especially did say it’d never happen to them, she was adamant that she’d love Andrei forever and that uh. I think we all know how well that worked out!

2 Months. - Zach Adkins

Someone You Loved - Lewis Capaldi

“I let my guard down and then you pulled the rug”

This is kind of a generic betrayal/breakup/I-miss-you song, but I think it works. Especially with “I kinda liked the way you numbed all the pain” and the focus on the singer’s lover getting them through difficult times and then abandoning them.

The Night We Met - Lord Huron

“Take me back to the night we met”

I think people are legally obligated to have this song on any playlist for a couple that doesn’t end well. It’s generic but it’s good! The entire Strange Trails album my BELOVED!

Careless Whisper - George Michael

“I should have known better than to cheat a friend and waste a chance that I'd been given, so I'm never gonna dance again the way I danced with you”

UNIRONICALLY THIS SONG. I think it’s the focus on dancing as like a significant marker of the relationship for me, especially given how heavily adaptations focus on their dance at that ball. The quoted lyric reminds me of Natasha’s mindset after all of this. Also “We could have been so good together, we could have lived this dance forever, but now, who's gonna dance with me? Please stay” reminds me of Natasha asking him to forgive her. Not to actually get sad over Careless Whisper but. :,(

With Or Without You - U2

“And you give yourself away”

The quoted lyric is in reference to the elopement in my head, and “I can’t live with or without you” is like. Andrei can’t continue on and let her back into his life, he admits that he can’t forgive her, but he also has no real will to live after she betrays him and goes off to die in war.

Atlantis - Seafret

“We've built this town on shaky ground”

“This town” is in reference to their relationship, and I like the acknowledgment that there was never a great foundation to begin with. And “maybe I’m not built for love” as an Andrei lyric is a little heartbreaking! Other than that it’s just a Breakup Song.

I Don’t Wanna See You Cryin’ Anymore - Adam Melchor

“I don't wanna be the reason you can't trust me like before/My head's in my hands as I'm shaking on the bathroom floor”

This reminds me of Natasha’s deep guilt over her betrayal of Andrei. The implication that Andrei would ever let anyone see him cry is a bit much for me, just ignore that HFJAHDHSH

Part 4: Reconciling While Andrei ✨Dies✨

Fake It - Bastille

“We can never go back, we can only do our best to recreate”

This whole is song is about trying to move forward from bad things in the past with your lover which is the whole vibe! But I also think it shows some reluctance on the part of the singer to forget, and a bit of a desperation to be able to leave the mistakes in the past. “Help me turn a blind eye” really captures that. I like this as the early stages of them reconnecting, because I think it’s realistic to have Andrei especially be wary but wanting it to get better.

Bad Blood - Bastille

“All this bad blood here, won’t you let it dry?”

Letting go of a grudge and trying to move on vibes!

Let It All Go - Birdy, Alvaro Soler

“We’re strong enough to let it go”

All their hurt surrounding the elopement is the Thing they’re letting go of in this case.

Flaws - Bastille

“You have always worn your flaws upon your sleeve and I have always buried them deep beneath the ground”

The quoted lyric just feels like their general dynamic to me. Natasha is so open about everything and does indeed wear her heart on her sleeve whereas Andrei represses every emotion he’s ever felt. I think this is a post-elopement song because of “Dig them up; let’s finish what we started”. That feels like them reexamining their relationship and what went wrong and trying again.

Moscow - Autoheart

“All I need’s a fraction of your happy heart”

This song is so 🥺. “We both know what we’ve got to do: head back to where the magic grew” reminds me of them accepting their reconnection and moving on and trying to rekindle whatever was between them. And “Let’s get a dog, an Irish red setter, it’s all we need to get better” feels emblematic of them looking forward to domestic happiness as the solution. And the quoted lyric screams Andrei about Natasha.

The Heart Is A Muscle - Gang of Youths

“I will look at love as more than just an instrument of pain”

Not to be off topic but this whole album is so good every single song makes me feel SHRIMP EMOTIONS god. Also the whole thing is very Andreicore and I had to stop myself from adding every song to his playlist. But I digress. This song is all about having been hurt by love in the past (“I let bad love betray me once”) but deciding to open your heart again which is very them! “I haven't had enough and I wanna love someone” AAAAHHHH. “I am human now and terrified, but want it all the same” Mr. GangOfYouths im going INSANE! “I just ask you to be patient if you’ll have me still” HELLO? Not to quote the whole song but “I wanna be loved, I wanna be whole again, so tuck my hair behind my ears and touch my soul again” as an Andrei/Natasha lyric...I need to sit down. Can you all tell this song makes me go all kinds of crazy. And this isn’t even my favorite song off the album!

Shrike - Hozier

“I couldn’t utter my love when it counted, ah but I’m flying like a bird to you now”

This song feels very “we tried to have a relationship a while ago and it didn’t work out that well but I still love you we could try again” to me which fits this time very well!

Part 5: Andrei Goes Splat :( [And The Aftermath]

Work Song - Hozier

“No grave can hold my body down, I’ll crawl home to her”

I can’t say what it is exactly, but something about persistent love framed around the death motif works for me here.

Dancing After Death - Matt Maeson

“As the sun waits to eclipse and the taste teases my lips, I'm too tired to wrestle with it”

The quoted lyric reminds me of Andrei giving up and shutting down when he realizes he’s gonna die :( oh ALSO my brain always mentally fills in “and no one else” after the “you and I” that ends the chorus which does NOT help with my depression!

One Last Time - Jaymes Young

“Could I feel your skin on mine before I have to say goodbye?”

SCREAMS SO LOUDLY. The whole song is like. Someone dying and wanting to see their person one last time and AAAAAAAAAAA. I am a little incoherent maybe. “I'm leavin' this cold world of mine, no pleadin' is gonna turn back time” really Gets Me in the context of Andrei accepting his own death and withdrawing and it’s so. Anyway.

Oblivion - Bastille

“When oblivion is calling out your name, you always take it further than I ever can”

I don’t think this is exactly what the song is talking about, but the quoted lyric in the context of Andrei dying and Natasha watching him fade and withdraw...good Lord. I need emotional support.

Haunt - Bastille

“I’ll come back to haunt you/Memories will taunt you”

Natasha being haunted by the memory of Andrei!!! Help me!!!! Also “I will try to love you/It’s not like I’m above you” as a callback to Andrei’s feelings for Natasha when they start to reconnect is so mental illness inducing. OOOH and “Questioning why as you look to the sky that is cloudless up above our heads and thoughts come to mind that our short little lives haven't left the path that they will tread” any lyric ever about looking at the sky is Andrei’s now.

Without You - for KING & COUNTRY

“What do you do when you don't get better/Strong arms get too, get too weak to hold her”

:( :( :( :( :( Also “I’m not ready to live without you” I am so sad.

Good Grief - Bastille

“Every minute and every hour I miss you, I miss you, I miss you more”

Pain! Agony, even!

I made myself SO sad writing the entire last half of these annotations geez

#im so sad im so sad im so sad!#war and peace #great comet #natasha rostova #andrei bolkonksy #uhhh whats their ship name?#w&p playlists #my post #figured out how to do a read more bc this post is so LONG

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bellaslilpapercut · 3 years

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Eclipse reread part 2! This is gonna cover a lot of chapters because I forgot to include stuff from chapters 4, 5, and 6 in part 1 (in my defense your honor, this book is very grating to read). Awayyy we go:

1. so chapters 4-6 really could have been one chapter tbh since the plot is: Bella ditches work at Newton’s Outfitters to hang with Jake and then writes some graduation invites with Angela. She pushes her rusty old behemoth as fast as it can go through driving rain but then hangs outside with Jake the whole time so I don’t really know where the rain went. She also manages to hear Jake gasp through her closed car door! Super sonic! Anyway, Bella insists that Edward is a good guy, Jake makes Bella hold his hand, Jake explains imprinting (yuck we can skip that), and then Edward drives threateningly past Bella while she’s on her way to Angela’s house. Angela reminds Bella that, at his core, Edward is a teen boy who is Totally Jealous of how Ripped and Sexy her 16 year old best friend is. Then Alice kidnaps Bella. Fun times!

2. During the imprinting convo it becomes very apparent that Meyer thinks the worst thing that can happen to a girl is getting broken up with. Somehow Leah got the “worst end” of the Sam/Emily/Leah fiasco despite Sam turning into a “monster” and Emily getting literally mauled in the face. What’s worse is later in the book, during the “Legends” chapter, when Bella wonders if Leah thinks Emily’s scars are a form of “justice.” Yea, Bella, that’s justice.

3. I love this Rosalie quote but hate the entirety of they way meyer writes her story. Others have mentioned it before but Meyer writes Rose's dialogue there as if Rose is an author and not like...a person telling a story. An easy fix would be to format Rosalie's story "flash back" style rather than have her narrate all the way through. Then you can include all the superfluous details of exactly what everyone's voice sounded like and all the excessive dialogue tags you want.

I also Violently Abhor this quote here:

Yea, meyer, the Hot Girl hates your self-insert because her stupid ass brother didn't have the hots for her. It just reads like weird middle school revenge fantasy "I only hated you because you were so Special!!!" Sure, sure. Also "all those females!" People don't talk like that @stephanie

4. I do love the scene when Bella “escapes” from Alice with Jake (I don’t know why i put escape in quotes, Alice could definitely murk Bella) but then that whole adventure ends with Jake telling Bella he’d rather she die than turn into a vampire. And yeah, fair buddy, but also you’ve known Bella for a long time. This should not be a surprise to you at all even a little bit. a) she mentioned it before, b) you knew she would never get over Edward even if your plan in NM had worked, and c) you’ve known that she’s fully obsessed with the Cullen’s since you started hanging out with her again. The last time you guys hung out she went on an impassioned rampage about how lovely and good and fantastic Edward is (footage not found) I really don’t know why you’re surprised that this hard-headed girl is prepared to commit to vampirism for him. She is not normal lmfao.

5. The legends chapter. Oh boy. Stephanie, Meyer, Smeyer. Honestly it might have been less offensive if she had just made up a whole new tribe to give these backstories to, for all that they have in common with real Quileute legends but actually that would still be offensive and terrible anyway. I don’t know how to describe this adequately but if you’ve ever seen G.I. Joe’s portrayal of indigenous people that’s exactly what meyer made Old Quil and Billy’s dialogue sound like. Just absolutely dripping with Mystical Native/ Magical Native trope from the content to the tone. https://mthg.org/ Because it can’t be plugged enough.

6. The legends chapter ends with this Wuthering Heights quote:

I have no qualms with it's inclusion, if you really want to push the Edward is Heathcliff and Bella is Cathy agenda, I don't believe it but fine, whatever. But those last two paragraphs are such a dumb way to end a chapter. Every chapter ending should make the reader want to turn the page: this makes me want to shut the book (actually I did take a long break after this lmfao). Anyway, just end the quote on "drank his blood," bold those three words, and end the chapter there. Don't go back and say "the three words that stood out were... Anyway it could have fallen to any page I believe in coincidence teehee!!" That's just annoying.

7. Okay guys I hate to say it but Edward does get a lil bit of ~character growth after the first few chapters. He comes home after having Bella kidnapped (she decides not to be angry, surprise surprise) and is all "so I've been thinking about it and you're right my Beloved Angel Face or whatever, please hang out with Jacob but also wear a helmet on your motorcycle my Beloved Dumb Idiot or whatever" (paraphrase). And he also says this in chapter 12:

Which is like, man I hate when I agree with Edward but I agree with Edward here. Now I know from MS that he only wants Bella to stay human because he's creating an Unfolding Drama in his head but this bit of dialogue is really sweet. And it's funny that he thought Bella didn't want to marry him because she just wanted to use him for immortality but it's also a Dark Reminder that he's literally only romantic with her because he can't read her mind and can't tell that she's just as obsessed with his looks as the other Teen Girls TM.

8. uuuh Jasper’s Backstory Time. This is so infuriating to read for so many reasons. So we know that smeyer got Jasper’s name from a confederate memorial/ listing (from a New Moon Q&A but the link isn’t secure so I can’t share) so I know that his backstory was always meant to be Confederate Soldier which makes everything else about his characterization just baffling. Again, he was the only Cullen that was genuinely kind to Bella besides Carlisle for the entire first book and he’s still incredibly kind during Eclipse (which is another issue I have though because no one mentions again that Jasper tried to eat Bella and they stand close to each other and hang out and Bella’s never like “this is scary, this dude tried to kill me” but i digress). The point is: smeyer knew he was going to be a confederate from book 1. She never addresses that this was bad, she never has Jasper mention that he regrets his role in the war, he is the only Cullen that’s actually capable of empathizing with humans anymore (Carlisle cares but I would not categorize him as empathetic), it just... None of these pieces fit together. This is a fraught and bloody history that smeyer throws in with no thought to how it might alienate black readers (though tbh she constantly emphasizes “white beauty” throughout the series so I doubt she cares) and the editors don’t question it either. No one, at any point in time, said “Hey, steph, you know confederates fought for slavery, right?” Every black american deserves reparations. White women and men who glorify the civil war should be the first to pay up.

9. I’m gonna jump back to chapters 9 & 10 here (target & scent, respectively) to say: no tension is being effectively built. I get it, someone stole your clothes. You’re annoyed because you have nothing to wear and Victoria is scary. But where is she? Where is the volturi? Move it along, please! This is one of the challenges of 1st person narrative because the author is stuck in the eyes of, usually, the person who knows the least. Meyer is not a talented enough author to make this interesting. Not to bring up THG again but Suzanne Collins really knew how to work 1st person. Everything that Katniss asserts with certainty throughout the series gets either confirmed or denied by the narrative, keeping it interesting. She assumes the worst of the people around her so we’re pleasantly surprised when people violate those assumptions. We’re kept on edge by how little Katniss knows and SC never gifts Katniss with more knowledge than she could be expected to have. Bella is constantly gifted with knowledge and her assumptions are rarely proven wrong. You can dig into the canon a little bit more, read the lexicon and the guide, and find all the examples of Bella being unreliable or making wrong assumptions. But within the narrative she is rarely incorrect. She doesn’t get opportunities to grow out of her false assumptions (while Edward does, at least in Eclipse). So to keep the Victoria debacle interesting, smeyer has to plant seeds like- during these two chapters- Bella thinking of Laurent and Victoria while the cullens discuss who could have been in Bella’s room. That just doesn’t cut it for me.

This is hella long and I’m only halfway through the book. I probably should split the second half into two parts as well but based on how talented smeyer is at stretching out the mundane, especially just before the climax, I probably wont need to.

#eclipse reread #saga reread #the twilight saga #twilight meta #twilight renaissance #long post

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mantra4ia · 3 years

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Debris 1x13 "Celestial Body": rewatch Reaction'd, questions and comments

So if all those people are experiencing emotional convergence, who are they converging from? Who's sending the emotional signal that the debris is channeling, or is it the debris manifesting it's "consciousness" in a way that we can understand it by way of human conduits?

Maddox is clearly trading debris pieces with Irina (perhaps the piece that he took out of storage off the books), and Irina is on the phone with presumably her handler/ boss to negotiate this trade. She gives him lateral (which I assume means latitudinal) readings and then he asks for longitudinal readings which we don't get to hear. They are: Lateral 105, 112, 115, 120, 113, 110, 109

What's the significance of these measures? Latitude goes from 0° to 90° from the equator, so that doesn't track unless the scene is cut wrong and they're meant to be longitudinal (E/W) readings, which go to 180° relative to the prime meridian. That would make more sense, because after Irina is done with the first set of readings, the unknown caller on the phone says "drop to level two for vertical" and latitudes are North/South.

If we're talking Western longitudes, notable landmarks include: Denver, Salt Lake City UT / Phoenix AZ / nearly Sedona AZ - aka where the telesphere went, Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe/ Nevada border, Great Salt Lake, Alberta-Saskatchewan border, and the Utah-Arizona border.

Or perhaps they're not part of terrestrial measurement at all. The act of "lateral reading" could just mean verifying your sources/accuracy as you go, where as vertical reading is reading for content first to see if something is worth evaluating for sources.

However, if they are part of coordinates, then is the fragment that Maddox is trading with Irina a legitimate "mapmaker" piece like George previously said Influx was seeking? Ya know, when he lied to his daughter. Can a mapmaker piece track moving/animate debris akin to the telesphere? Are those black dust cloud beings George is running from made up of animate debris?

Bryan: After becoming a parent you're in a heightened emotional state, emotionally raw.

George: Higher highs, lower lows, the joy of having a child, the postpartum depression, and the fear of getting it wrong.

Me: Are we in a pensive, self-reflective mood, George? Are you practicing your pub trivia Bryan, delivering exposition, or are you speaking from personal character experience? Seriously, how would you know?!

John Noble as Otto, man why does he always make such a good villain?

What is with the cryptic vagueness when Maddox tells Irina, "You know I can't let you leave with that case right? I mean you know that. There's another door for you Irina, one that only you can go through." They seemed almost on good terms in a previous episode, like friends or something more in a past life "nice car, i almost left / no you didn't", he wouldn't kill her, would he? Or is it more like a code between them, a sort of "I'm being watched, take the back exit"?

Hey, so why is it that sometimes George's eye seems opaque and damaged from the debris implant, but then when he's talking to Finola after he distracts Bryan while being Debris whisperer, his eye seems fine? PS: I googled Tyrone Benskin just to see what he looks like when he's not playing George Jones and I didn't know he's a former member of Canadian Parliament. Don't trust the government, eh?

George: "You're such a compassionate person, you always have been. So much of your mother in you." That's the second time that Finola's mother has been mentioned in the series, back from the pilot. Is it a coincidence that the first piece of debris that chose to interact with Finola resonated her mom? More than just Finola's desire being reflected by the debris, but the debris emoting it's first impression of her as someone compassionate that it can trust?

It also raises my heckles that George repeats, almost word for word, something that Finola said in episode 3. "If we can't help people, we do not deserve this debris / if we don't use this debris on these people, we are not worthy to have it." Are father and daughter that ideologically similar, or has he been spying on her progress this whole time, or both?

George: "I took my life to allow myself a rebirth, I paid the price. I want you to know that not one day goes by that I don't think of you and your sister. I want you to know this." This coincides with my initial impression that George staged his death to get away from Orbital after he assessed how his research was being used/abused.

George: "You never wanted to go into the pool, I had to throw you in, and you kicked and screamed, but you always did better that way." Immabout to throw you George, just keep talking!!!! I'm sorry, this charicature of absentee father reminiscing about the good old days really ticks me off from personal experience.

Also, as a person with a disability, I am not particularly pleased with the use of Dario as a plot device instead of a thoughtful character with a backstory at this point in the show for 13 whole episodes now. Pretty pissed off actually, so they better do something phenomenal and pivotal with Christian Rose (Dario) in season 2 [maybe have his character interact with debris in a similar way to Caroline]. But that's another rant about ableism in screenwriting for another angry day....

George: "A telesphere was born yesterday. It came from a pocket dimension inside Orbital. I think it's birth may have triggered the debris." This is perhaps the one-ish episode that I find George remotely interesting and also infuriating, particularly because of the way he speaks, like he's finally taken off the guise of the old, well-meaning eccentric and turned into a sharp, cunning, and at times calculatingly ruthless individual. I find it peculiar that he says a telesphere is born. Makes me think that the debris is not just part of a spacecraft, but a hybrid of the beings piloting that craft.

I get tremendous satisfaction from Finola head-butting people. This should continue.

I'm not familiar with all of the work of JH Wyman to know if this is a running theme or an ongoing joke. But does he keep his writing staff in a constant state of starvation? Is that why pieces of debris are called "Nachos", and why Influx has "Beans" to shield them from debris side effects, and why Bryan is always eating junk food? Should I be worried about the writer's room and start sending them healthy snacks?!? Just give me an SOS in the credit roll.

Speaking of: is the "Bean" that Finola ingested a piece of debris? Similar to the pieces of debris that fused with Anson Ash? Will it impart some physical benefits to her moving forward?

"I won't lose you again...you belong with me." What are you talking about George Jones, you made the conscious decision to leave your family. You didn't lose Finola, she lost you. In this version of reality at least. Or (unscripted backstory) did Jones and his wife separate prior to her death / was Finola brought up mostly by her mother? That doesn't seem the case if she was buying her father birthday presents and took it upon herself to settle his affairs after his death.

Why do the Influx Operatives Otto and Anson have tattoos on their hands, but not Loeb? Is he like the low end of the totem pole FNG who hasn't earned his stripes, hence why Otto gives him s***: aka "Careful you cretin. All the finesse of a butcher."

What is the hierarchy of Influx anyway? Despite being an anti-government "for the people/ elevate the human consciousness" organization they do still seem to have a governing hierarchy and Otto and George seem to be on the same level, pretty high in rank / they talk with confidence to each other like they go back a while.

What is that weird thing that Otto does with his hands to Bryan's head? What are all the weird things Otto does, including his massacre at the petrol station? Ick.

Why is it that Leob and George are freaked out by the black smoke (debris particle?) man, but Anson and Otto aren't? They seem to see them(?), but don't overtly react.

Bryan: "It seems like we're entering some kind of new phase." Gee where have I heard that one before? Oh yeah, the story of "Blackwater grandfather" and the black wind that they're still teasing endlessly while refusing to tether it into some kind of world building lore. Agggghh!

Lololol, Bryan and Finola's dynamic even in the midst of a very serious episode makes me laugh. "Devon Reese / two e's? / Two e's!" "This one smells like baby diapers. Almost as bad as the tech section of the plane/ You mean your section of the plane. / Almost." That zinger 👍

Paraphrasing Bryan: "[recapping, recap, and did I mention recap]...something about George doesn't feel right." Personal pet peeve: I HATE IT when episodes have intentional explanatory lines like this to point out the fact that we as audience are privy to information that the main characters aren't. Not only does it make the main characters seem less intelligent, it breaks the fourth wall a little bit and gives the impression that the audience, which is ahead of the plot, is not as intelligent and needs a reminder that we're ahead. Lackadaisical writing drives me nuts!!! I can't outright say that it's "bad" dialogue, but it's not a choice I would make if I wanted uninterrupted viewer immersion.

Finola: "My instincts are good" Me: You are an emotionally intelligent decision maker with gaping personal blind spots.

George: You belong with me, your father.

Finola: My father died six months ago, and you are not him.

Me: Chef's kiss 👏👏👏

Otto: "It would never have worked out with that girl [Finola], not in any iteration." Definitely makes me lean towards the fan theory that the alt!Finola in (presumably) suspensia in Sedona Arizona got plucked from another reality.

Surprisingly, the ending credit roll has no voiceover as all the previous episodes of the season have. Disappointed that there's no potential teaser to a season 2 if the show gets renewed. But I find it curious that the extras who were demonstrating emotional convergence were credited as: chess board persons. Not sure if that's relevant, but I definitely feel like this show is playing games with me and my emotions.

#nbc debris #debris 1x13 #debris spoilers #george jones #finola jones #bryan beneventi #celestial body #sci fi #high concept sci fi #questionable execution #this show guys #renew debris #but also I need to talk with JH Wyman

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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How TCM Resurrects Plan 9 from Outer Space for Ghoulish Table Read

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UFOs are often visible, but not always. Sometimes they make noise, sometimes they are silent. If you’ve never seen a flying saucer, that is proof they are everywhere. This is one of the many amazing things we learn in TCM’s upcoming table read of Ed Wood’s masterwork, Plan 9 from Outer Space.

We once laughed at the horseless carriage, the aero-plane, the telephone, the electric light, vitamins, radio, and even television. But it took a while to get the joke about Plan 9 from Outer Space. Written and directed by Edward D. Wood Jr. in 1959, it was a little-known independent film with a direct line through directors who carried on the DIY-filmmaking spirit like John Cassavetes, Melvin Van Peebles and John Waters. The Cult of Plan 9 began when Ed Wood was posthumously awarded a Golden Turkey Award for Worst Director of All Time in 1980. Though this has been disputed.

Turner Classic Movies is the go-to channel for prestigious films. You can always count on a showing of The Treasure of Sierra Madre or The Public Enemy, or Citizen Kane. But top prize in the Golden Turkey awards carries its own prestige.

“This isn’t ‘Plans One Through Eight from Outer Space,’” Jerry Seinfeld proclaimed at the Chinese restaurant in a 1991 episode of Seinfeld. “This is Plan 9. The one that worked. The worst movie ever made.”

The SF Sketchfest presentation was adapted for the stage and virtual stage by former The Simpsons writer, and self-proclaimed Ed Wood superfan, Dana Gould. He and his Stan Against Evil co-star Janet Varney have been acting in live staged reads with a revolving cast of eager comic actors for over three years. The Zoom production also features Kat Aagesen, Bob Odenkirk, Bobcat Goldthwait, Oscar Nuñez, Deborah Baker Jr., Maria Bamford, David Koechner, Jonah Ray, Paul F. Tompkins, Baron Vaughn, and Gary Anthony Williams. The miniature visual effects, which are by no means just cardboard cutouts, were done by Mike Carano, and the sounds of musical accompaniment came out of Eban Schletter.

Laraine Newman is the narrator. She brings Gould’s adapted stage directions to such vivid life they can reanimate the dead, which is a key element of the actual plan at the center of the cult movie. Originally titled “Grave Robbers from Outer Space,” the film marked the last appearance of Bela Lugosi, who had also acted in Wood’s 1953 feature Glen or Glenda.

Lugosi’s footage for Wood’s unmade film “The Vampire’s Tomb,” was repurposed for Plan 9. Lugosi died of a heart attack on Aug. 16, 1956. To complete the film, Wood cast his chiropractor, Tom Mason, who in spite of his professional familiarity with the human skeletal structure, somehow believed he could mask the fact that he was much taller than the horror icon by pulling his cape over his face.

The table read of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space is part of TCM’s Classic Film Festival weekend, which runs through May 9. For easy comparisons, the original film will air directly after the event. Dana Gold and Janet Varney spoke with Den of Geek about refurbishing the low-budget cult classic, and how, like their predecessor, they proudly spared every expense on its new décor.

Den of Geek: I watched the table read a second time while playing Plan 9 in another window, and I just have to say, recreating those sets must’ve cost a fortune.

Janet Varney: Yeah, just like it cost Ed Wood a fortune.

Dana Gould: That’s the genius of, of Mike Carano. All those things were this big. You can see, I have the Bela Lugosi statue and the saucer. What he did was so amazing, and it really brought [the production] up to be better than it had a right to be. When Janet and I discussed doing this on Zoom, we were like, “Well, how do we take the limits of Zoom and turn them to our advantage? Why is it on Zoom?” By doing it, one, it allowed us to get a cast that we might not be able to get. Got people in different places. Maria Bamford was in Minnesota. Bob Odenkirk was in Vancouver. So, we could get people that normally we couldn’t get. Doing it in black and white helped. And then what Mike Marano did, it made it something unique.

Janet Varney: I would just also add, as a tribute to Ed Wood, we’ve never had anyone that we’ve asked to do the show who hasn’t wanted to do the show. Whether or not they’ve been in town for the live version, every person that we love that we’ve asked to be a part of the cast at one time or another is like, “Oh, my God, I need to do that. I want to do it. When is it? Please say it’s not a date I’m out of town. Please say it’s not. Will you ask me on the next one?”

Everyone knows this movie. And the idea of getting to step into its shoes in any kind of iteration is really exciting for every single person that we’ve ever asked.

Dana Gould: And it’s great to see how different people play different parts. Joel Murray plays the General different than David Koechner plays the General. Bob Odenkirk plays Eros differently than Patton Oswalt plays Eros. It’s always great. And Janet and I, we don’t want to know what you’re going to do. Just do it.

For this production, you assembled the all-star team. But were you ever tempted to use the same kind of players Wood used: wrestlers, tap dancing accordion players, chiropractors, and radio psychics?

Janet Varney: That’s a great question. I feel like we also have pretty good access to all those folks. So maybe that will get the next variety version. Because our friend, Jim Turner, is just about to do a fundraiser for the kind of variety acts who have been struggling in this last year, because of the many myriad things that they do.

So, I actually love that idea, Tony. And you’re right, it would be a totally different experience. That’s an interesting idea too, because we do come at it with a bunch of people who love the movie, but there’s also some major winking going on, as all the comedians and actors try to lean into being: “It’s my first time on stage, maybe my first time saying words,” really playing that up.

In the future, do you hope to see this performance eviscerated on Mystery Science Fiction Theater 3000?

Dana Gould: That would be great. If they did this.

Janet Varney: Especially because Bill and Kevin have done it. They have been in our production of Plan 9. Bill had been what Laraine [Newman] did. Bill did the narration at a show, at SketchFest, and it was great.

Dana Gould: I would like to see Jonah making fun of himself.

Janet Varney: Yeah. Let’s get meta. Our fans can handle it. Fans of MST3K can handle it. Plant 9 fans can handle it. Everybody could handle it.

I know I’m paraphrasing Seinfeld, but as the person who’s trusted with Plan 9 and all that comes with that, did you get to see the first eight plans from outer space?

Janet Varney: And are you allowed to talk about it if you did?

Dana Gould: Exactly. What were they?

Janet Varney: So many questions.

Dana Gould: So many questions.

Were the first eight plans rejected?

Janet Varney: Or were they all executed? And I use that word purposefully. Were all of those plans executed and they didn’t have great results?

Dana Gould: That’s a drunk man at a typewriter, “Plan 9 sounds good.” I remember showing Plan 9 to somebody who’d never seen it before. And they turned to me afterwards and said, “Did he not have any friends he could have shown this to and gotten notes?” He didn’t have those kinds of friends.

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What are some of your favorite mistakes from the movie?

Janet Varney: Oh, God. I was going to say Dana had mentioned that the first time he saw the movie was on a video cassette that Tom Kenny and Dan Spencer, and Bobcat Goldthwait showed him. And I was actually going to ask, did you think it was the tape glitching at the end when the monologue goes from, blip to [makes a noise]? And you’re like, “Wait a minute. Back that up, hold on. Is somebody going to fix this?”

That’s definitely one. That’s a spectacularly new, weird problem in a movie that was not a consistent problem. So, you’re like, “Wait, how did that happen one time, in this very, very overt way?” So good.

Dana Gould: From the very beginning, it’s like the first time you saw William Shatner do “Rocket Man.” I remember, I had a party at my house, and I was working on The Ben Stiller Show, and everybody was there. And back then, there was no YouTube. You would just have these cassette tapes with all of the weird stuff that you had collected on it, like the farting priest and all these weird things that you had, and “Rocket Man.” And I remember showing “Rocket Man” at this thing and Bob Odenkirk just shouting at my television, “You’re a grown man. You’re a grown man.”

I always thought Shatner gave the same line reading for “Mr. Tambourine Man” as he did for “Kahn.”

Dana Gould: Yes, he did. He did. He had a couple of tricks, and he used them. Yeah. There’s one direction he doesn’t get a lot, “You want to just try one big? You want to just see how it goes?” “Take the chains off and let it rip?”

Was some of the background music in this reading, especially the oxidation bit, inspired by The Simpsons?

Dana Gould: That’s all Eban [Schletter, the musical accompanist], you have to ask Eban. But again, that’s great, especially the Solaronite song. Necessity being the mother of invention, that is a brutal chunk of dialogue for anybody, a thankless, brutal chunk. And every time I give it to Paul, I say, “I’m apologizing ahead of time. I give it to you because I don’t want anybody else to do it. Because if it was anybody else, it would be death.”

Eban came up with that. And we were just like, “Maybe we can break this up. Maybe there’s a way to break this up.” And then Eban came up with that kind of thing. And it is one of those things that I love, that it’s like a mutant. It’s grown into its own weird thing to solve its inherent problems. You can’t describe it to anybody. It’s just like, you have to see it.

I used to remember describing Kevin Meaney, the comedian. I used to just tell people, “I can’t describe what he does. You just have to see him, but then you’ll know. You only need a minute, and you’ll get it. But I can’t describe it to you.” That’s really a good analogy.

Laraine Newman, I believe, steals this as the narrator. How much of that is improvised and how much of that is written by you? Because I know that you wrote the stage directions.

Dana Gould: It’s written, but Laraine, I call it “newscaster flat.” Laraine knows how the notes need to be played. It’s like the Wrecking Crew, you have a guitar behind you. I don’t know what Tommy Tedesco is going to play, but I know it’s going to be good. I don’t know what Carol Kaye is going to play, but I trust it. It’s the same thing. It’s a murderers’ row, and I wouldn’t have the gall to tell them what to do.

Janet Varney: It takes a very specific kind of confidence as a performer to be that deadpan. It’s such a specific skill. And it’s a skill, I think, born out of a type of bravado and expertise that’s all just tightly contained in this tiny space, where she’s not trying to sell any of it. And that is the genius behind what she does is just letting it lay out there like that. I mean, it’s hard.

When you have something that you know is funny and you would be laughing yourself, if you were listening to someone else read it, it’s so hard not to want to sell it. Like, can I make this even funnier? And she’s like, “No, I need to take it all the way back, to the back of the house just like, who me, who me? I’m just reading these things.” And it’s just so brilliant.

Dana Gould: This is a person that did sketches on live television with John Belushi and Bill Murray. So she definitely knows where her center of gravity is.

Janet Varney: That’s right. Well said.

Dana Gould: And yeah, again, unflinching. And that takes, as a performer, just like a little inside baseball, a lot of control and to really, to have control of your own ego, to know that I’m going to get what I want by stepping way back. I mean, Sterling Hayden is the only person I’ve ever seen blow Peter Sellers off the screen. And he does it just by, he’s like a statue, but there’s so much weight to it.

In the original movie, I love the “Criswell Predicts.” So I wanted to ask, Janet, do you get asked to do bathroom readings?

Janet Varney: I would if asked, I would love to. That’s one of the things that’s great about Ed Wood in general too, is just having this a sort of fascination with the occult and that kind of thing. And the way that it fits into camp is so appealing. And so, yeah, I would very happily jump back into some bad psychic practices if I could. Hopefully, I will someday.

Dana Gould: And an unerring dedication to Wicker furnishings.

Janet Varney: That’s right. Always that. Paula and her wicker.

Because the table read is done during COVID and everyone feels an immediacy to Zoom calls, were you ever at all concerned about an Orson Welles’ scenario, where the residents of San Fernando Valley will believe they’re under attack by flying saucers from outer space?

Janet Varney: If only.

Dana Gould: Yeah. That’s the least of our problems out here. I don’t know when you visited last time, but the walking dead, they’re around.

The table read of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space airs on Friday, May 7 at 8pm on TCM. Plan 9 from Outer Space airs at 9:30pm.

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oosteven-universe · 3 years

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Phantom on the Scan #3

Phantom on the Scan #3 Aftershock Comics 2021 Written by Cullen Bunn Illustrated by Mark Torres Lettered by Dave Sharpe With the body count rising around them, a group of doomed psychics confronts a telekinetic murderer who is venting his rage against anyone in his path. Their mental gifts are both the key to their survival and the path to their own destruction, as they move ever closer to uncover-ng the awful secrets the Trellux Institute is protecting. I finally figured out what this reminded me of and that’s James D. Hudnall’s Espers. Though I must say Cullen’s is much darker and more violent it still has shades of that series, just shades mind you and with Mark’s interiors it really made me wistful . i will say that I love the fact that I hadn’t seen the opening coming. Last issue Victor was approaching the house and here we see exactly what he had in mind though he didn’t harm any of the group that was assembled, something about kindred spirits which is my phrase and paraphrasing than anything that was actually said. I do like this because it gives us a chance to see another of them in action with their psychic ability as they try to learn more about the quickly fading doc. I am an absolutely huge fan of the way that this is being told. The story & plot development that we see through how the sequence of event unfold as well as how the reader learns information is presented perfectly. The character development that we see is bloody perfect as well thanks to the dialogue the character interaction and how they act ad react to the situations and circumstances they encounter. It should also be noted that with the use of their abilities helps in fleshing them out even further. The pacing is superb and as it takes us through the pages revealing more and more of the story we are caught up in this thrilling race against time as the group struggles to learn more about what’s happened to them. I am really impressed with the way that we see this being structured and how the layers within the story continue to grow, evolve and emerge as the situations dictate. The layers contain bits of backstory and intense characterisation some of which strengthens the main arc while other swirl around it supplementing it. This brings us some great depth and complexity to the story. How everything works together to create the story’s ebb & flow as well as how it moves the story forward is achieved exceedingly well. I love the interiors here. There is something about Matt’s style that really fits this story so beautifully and I can’t see anyone else nailing this the way he does. The backgrounds here are utilised judiciously and it’s all about how everything works within the composition of the panels which shows the depth perception, sense of scale and the overall sense of size and scope to the book. This makes the panels feel fuller and utilised to their max and it’s pretty damn impressive to me. The utilisation of the page layout and how we see the angles and perspective in the panels show a truly gifted eye for storytelling. The colour work is equally as brilliantly rendered. The various hues and tones within the colours being utilised to create the shading, highlights and shadow work are magnificent to see. There is a real mastery of colour happening within these pages and that it feels like watercolour at times and near realistic, computer generated?, at others demonstrates that understanding of how to use colour to its maximum effect. This is a great modern supernatural horror story. The group is currently living on borrowed time unless they can find the people who made them this way. Along the way it’ll be interesting to see who lives and who dies and if they do indeed learn the truth will it be something they can live with knowing? This will engage your mind with its exceptional writing and characterisation that’s wrapped up in these absolutely mind blowing interiors.

#Comic Books #Comics Reviews #Aftershock Comics

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pinkysfaultorbrainsfault · 4 years

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animaniacs - s1e40: puppet rulers

episode summary: after seeing how small children react to the characters on their favourite tv show, brain decides that he and pinky will be children’s tv characters, too, before cryogenically freezing themselves for long enough that nostalgia tricks everyone into loving them enough to... elect them world leaders.

because people are totally thinking about old cartoons thirty years after they came off the air, right? that’s a thing normal people do.

the rundown:

we open in 1954.

nobody knows when in 1954 though, because whoever owns this calender isn’t ticking off the days. never mind! i’m sure they have more important things to do.

like welding some shit together, or whatever, like this guy is doing. “there. albert einstien’s latest experiment will be a powerful success.” if it’s albert einstien’s experiment, i don’t know why he hired this guy to do it, but i guess that’s between the big man and himself.

turns out the experiment only needs to be “powerful enough to pull five boxcars and a little caboose”, which is fine. fair enough if albert einstien wants to outsource production of his trainset. he’s probably busy being photographed for ridiculous facebook memes that say shit like “masks give you HIV”. 🙄

meanwhile, as the music swells and the theme tune comes into the musical layers, we see pinky walking towards brain, who is preparing his coffin. it has a little alarm clock on it so he doesn’t miss bill nye the science guy.

“i’m finished, pinky.” he proclaims. he sure is. “with this cryonic capsule, we shall freeze ourselves and awaken fourty years in the future.” which i suppose is a little less morbid than, yknow, being dead. and bill nye should still be on tv, so it isn’t all bad.+

“egad, brain. what will we do in the future?”

“i don’t know, pinky, but it has to be better than what we’re doing now.”

i feel for him. i have never seen these mice in a well equipped cage. would it kill y’all to put some fucking climbers in there??? jesus.

suddenly, some children appear.

“uncle albert,” they cry. “uncle albert, it’s time.” ominous.

“but kiddies, uncle albert is doing an experiment and did you say it’s time.”

ominous! fortunately, “time” here means “time to sit down and watch tv.”

“hey kids!” says the friendly propellor worm on screen. “what time is it?” it is in fact “TIME FOR MEANIE!” as uncle albert and his fluffy brood proudly complain. yaaaay!

YAAAAAAAAAY.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY.

anyway turns out meany’s a bit of a dick.

pinky and brain watch on as the worm gets beaten to death. they are not particularly interested in the violence taking place, until Tiny Einstien Boy Edition (tinestien?) mentions that he wishes “treacle and meanie was president.”

to which brain makes this face.

hm. this is the face i make at my dentist when he asks to see if i’ve been maintaining my crown. sorry that my last dentist exploded my teeth or whatever. that’s kind of why i’m here.

“pinky, are you pondering what i’m pondering?” i want to take a moment out here to point out how fucking tiny brain is pinky is laying on his chest. horizontal and he is still taller than brain i just/?? he’s so fucking small. pinky could just pick him up. he couldn’t do anything. pinky could fucking yeet him like a basketball. or maybe just give him a nice hug.

anyway it turns out brain finally has a use for his cryochamber! he wants to get himself on Time For Meany and “endear himself in the hearts of children.”

anyway so once those kids grow up and become world leaders, they will remember brain fondly enough in their hearts so that... when he thaws out, they’ll, uh, elect him president. not entirely... foolproof, perhaps? but on the other hand if the nice couple from out of the box ran for joint prime minister i’d be pretty hype about it. out of the box doot doot out of the box.

pinky wants his show name to be “big ears.”

brain is more into the idea of being The Iconoclast, an Unconventional Eccentric Who Marches To A Different Drummer. privately that sounds like every single half-bearded nerd man at uni who basically accused me of having my boyfriend do all my coursework for me. does brain intend to hang around cardboard forbidden planet and tell the puppet girls that they don’t have the right to be into guardians of the galaxy? is brain going to be passive aggressive about that 2:2 i got in sculpting and rigging, thomas?????

“oh. i thought maybe you could be noodle noggin.”

we then cut to the studio, where the Fat Ceo Man wants the puppeteer to come up with new puppet characters for the next show. unfortunately, the next show is in three minutes, so he’s not very happy.

good thing he gets this suspicious package in the mail, eh?

as expected, it’s full of mice.

“oh my gosh!” cries our man, who has never seen a mouse before, apparently. “talking puppets!”

“actually we are two laboratory mice who wish to be on your show as part of an intricate plan to take over the world.”

“oh, wow, these are really good.”

so the boys make it on! they probably gave mr puppet man a religious experience, but we don’t see him again, so it’s fine.

“hold it, meany! everyone must meet our two new friends! this is big ears! take a bow, big ears!”

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY.

“and i am the iconoclast, an unconventional eccentric who marches to a different drummer--”

“but you may call me noodle noggin.”

you can’t see it very well in the last image, because uncle albert’s calender is in the way, but this is basically every episode. big ears says something, noodle noggin says something else that’s slightly more pretentious, meany hits him with a big stick.

everyone fucking loves it.

(fuck me. i never actually looked at this screencap close up before. why is pinky in a mousetrap?? why does it have their real names on it???? and why the FUCK do i not have a little brain toy in his own tiny wagon??? hello??? socialist police????)

unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and all projects with talking mice in it must be cancelled absurdly early. and an elmyra reboot of big ears and noodle noggin would be pointless, because brain already gets hit on the head in every episode, so eventually brain has to make the announcement.

“this program has been our last show.” he just sort of... says it, and you can tell pinky definitely wasn’t expecting it. he looks genuinely sad.

but not as sad as the children. even mousetrap pinky looks distraught.

the mice don’t care, obviously, and waste no time in jetting back to the Studio Fridge to activate their cryonic chamber, where pinky makes a very interesting point.

“but brain, why are we freezing ourselves at the height of our popularity?

“to stay fresh in their memory, pinky. we must, to paraphrase milton berle, ‘leave them wanting more’. i’ll see you in the future, pinky.”

there are no good frames for that portion of dialogue but whatever! let’s see how well that goes for them.

conclusion:

so the first thing the boys do upon waking up from ice and dust is to broadcast themselves on tv. “remember me?” asks brain. “it’s your old pal, the iconoclast.”

“and his old pal! zort! big ears!”

it’s very cute.

unfortunately these people are less impressed. they just sort of point, in a scary way. brain invites them all down to the tv station to “shower us in praise and material gifts,” and waits for the fans’ inevitable arrival.

“at last, we can write our own ticket, pinky. no longer in glorious suffering.” alright, hubert von vestra! calm down.

which is when the fans show up. hopefully the fact that they are all morbidly obese is like... coincidental, or to show off the fact that they’re all wearing kid tshirts, right? surely pinky and the brain wouldn’t tell me, a disabled person, that fat people are Bad And Losers? surely not.

“at last, my public has come to shower me with gifts.”

“guess again, noodle noggin!”

“huh.”

“you abandoned us!” cries the crowd. “you went away! you ruined our lives!” as brain tries to grapple with the fact that they are not, in fact, worshipping his image (and uploading pictures of him in the garden of mindy dress to e621) they present him with inordinately expensive therapy bills, because america be that way.

“PAY EM.” yells a gruff man with terrible facial hair. pinky and brain decide they would rather not.

honestly, i’m going to have to give this one to brain. sorry, brain. pinky did make the point earlier, and maybe if brain had thought about it, they might have been able to edit the plan a little and have things work out differently?

or maybe he was just tired of getting hit on the head all the time. ask pinky about that one, b.

brain: 3 pinky: 3 outside influence: 5

“quickly, pinky, we have work to do.”

“you mean taking over the world?”

“no. like finding a good hiding place.”

#patb #a!#pinky and the brain #animaniacs #this was a good episode #i believe the next one is........... equally memorable #if memory serves correctly

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aqvarius · 4 years

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Masquerade Kiss: Do Bad Girls Like to Self-pleasure? Kazuomi Shido - otona love - chapter 5 summary/translation

this is the cutest, fluffiest chapter that we get before all the steamy stuff begins. sorry it’s coming a bit later than usual, i was super tired and decided to sleep and finish it the next day. basically this entire chapter is just a conversation between you and kazuomi which is both great and terrible for me because my dialogue translations are so boring, but i think the content of this chapter is cute and sweet enough that i hope it’ll satisfy you.

the chapter begins with a quick recap of what just happened at the end of chapter 4 which you can read here, or check out my translations page to read from the start. kazuomi is hugging you from behind and you start to speak, telling him that he’s been so busy lately and you didn’t want him to overdo it, so you didn’t let yourself get “tired out” to your full capacity.

“you were thinking about such a thing?”

“because... i haven’t been able to contact you recently,” you say. “when i turn on the tv, there’s nothing but news about you. it’s not bad news, but it’s all you.”

“it’s like that whenever there’s a new resort project,” kazu explains. “the mass media follows me.”

“that’s because it’s your specialty,” you say. you thought that he would be tired from being so busy, but that might not be the case.

kazuomi thinks that as you said, this degree of busyness is nothing new. however, it’s also true that he was tired without realising it.

“i never thought you’d take a whole day off for my sake like this,” you say. “all the more, i wanted you to relax”

you: “today, i wanted to restfully spend time doing nothing”

meanwhile, kazuomi had thought you wanted to spend a more concentrated* day together.

*濃い - i’m not really sure how else to translate this but it’s a word that’s used to mean when something is deeper/darker (in colour), denser/stronger or thicker/richer (as in a more concentrated soup/sauce). i previously used “enriching” but essentially i think kazuomi means a day that’s more busy or packed with activities/events.

“that’s why you just snuggled up without doing anything, huh”

“hm...? in other words, you did “that” at that time because you were concerned about me?”

“at that time? what are you talking about?” you ask.

“the energy that i use to embrace you runs on a different tank**. don’t worry about me getting tired”

**this is kind of paraphrasing but basically what he is saying is that the physical strength he uses to have sex with you is a separate issue.

at first you stare at him, mystified, as you turn around. suddenly, you leap out of his arms to a good distance away.

“what’s wrong?”

(come on kazuomi don’t do this, you know exactly what’s wrong lmao)

you: “wha...!? eh? i-it can’t be...”

kazu says it seems like you were feeling it on your own without him (as in feeling [good], not literally feeling yourself up).

“that face you have when you’re feeling good... if i can, i’d like the satisfaction of making you make it in my arms”

(lskdf sorry i tried 5 times to phrase this in a way that captures even a little bit of how suave kazuomi is but i just can’t because there are so many parts to that sentence lol)

your face turns red with a vigour that kazuomi has never seen before.

you: “ah, ummm, that’s....!”

“it’s not like you need to hide it. it’s my responsibility that i couldn’t satisfy you”

“...or so i thought... but it seems like i was mistaken”

you stutter some more and then say, “that morning, i thought i was going to tire you out again...”

“i mean... did you see it!?” you ask.

kazuomi explains that he was going to call out to you to take a shower with him.

“you just be joking...! i don’t believe it!” you exclaim. “i-in the first place, you shouldn’t...!”

“considerably agitated, mc is completely flustered.”

“what, is it my fault after all?”

you: “you’re, you... you”

you: “...you do it well...” (😔)

btw i’m only posting these particular screenshots bc it’s hysterical to me how incoherent she is

this is another answer outside of his expectations, and his head tilts.

you: “...i couldn’t forget your fingers... even after waking up, my body... that is...”

“i see. you wanted me”

you: “...i would have been fine if you weren’t in front of me though”

you: “that is... no matter what, i was horny***...”

***this word also means in agony/anguished but i looked it up and it’s also slang for horny, thanks weblio for helping me yet again lmao

"now that you mention it, i thought you kept looking this way that time,” kazuomi thinks. “it seems as though the thing i was curious about [that caused her to keep looking my way that morning] was my fingers that had pleasured her the night before”

“what’s that about. you should have just told me honestly”

(not sure how to translate the tone when he says “なんだ” here but i hope you get it)

“if it’s what you desire, can’t i provide you with as much satisfaction you as much as you like?”

“didn’t i just say... i didn’t want you to get tired?” you say. “if i said the word, you would definitely indulge my every selfish whim no matter the situation”

“it’s my pleasure”

(like the present tense version of “that would be my pleasure”. ugha;slkfjds kazu loves spoiling his mc so much. this is literally the best version of him and we are so blessed to see it)

kazuomi explains that it’s the only time that you can “melt” since you can't leave any gaps open during your usual work (melt here meaning like be ravished/in [sexual] ecstasy). i’m not sure if he’s referring to the busyness of her job or the fact that she’s always playing a tightly controlled persona, but likely the latter.

“don’t you think that seeing that face would blow away the fatigue of my work?”

you: “no way... you would never think of such a sentimental thing”

(lmao girl if only you could see his internal dialogue like we can!!)

“heh, i would never? well, that’s been the case so far”

“but i would say... you’re special?”

he captures you, who had escaped, again and hugs you tightly from behind.

you: “shido...?”

“do you love**** me that much?”

****he actually says “like” but voltage tends to translate this as love, although it’s not as heavy/deep as 愛してる which is super serious

“how did you get that from this situation?” you reply.

after wriggling a little in his arms, you quickly become docile.

you: “...i love you”

kazuomi: “yeah. i know”

same thing with the like/love as above. you also say it in kind of a slightly petulant way.

ALSO i’m here to interrupt because can you BELIEVE shido “worried about this for days and gave his friends all the sordid details and planned the most uncharacteristic day off because he was worried he wasn’t enough for you” kazuomi had the AUDACITY to just han solo you like that????

“i know that you know, but... i love you,” you say.

“...i see. you wanted me so much that you couldn’t be settled until you took care of yourself”

“but still, you worried about me and didn’t say anything...”

“...i’m glad,” kazuomi says.

“my love was properly transmitted to you”

(🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰 BEST BOY KAZUOMI)

you: “about that... isn’t it obvious?”

“to say that it’s not conveyed that i’m being loved that much, i’m not obtuse” (i think this is what she’s trying to say, basically that she can feel that his love for her is being communicated properly?)

“that’s right. you’re that kind of a woman”

kazuomi thinks that you’re always a step ahead of his thoughts, saying things that show how much you understand him.

“there’s no way such a woman couldn’t receive my love.”

“could it be that you thought i did ... something like that because i wasn’t satisfied with you?” you ask.

kazuomi replies that that would be the ordinary train of thought, adding that while he’s still on the topic, he thinks there’s still something you’re not satisfied with.

you tell him you’ve accepted his feelings with all of your might, you’re not dissatisfied...

“but that wasn’t the case at that time, right?” questions kazuomi.

you turn in his direction, and he looks down into your face. you cast your eyes down, embarrassed. he tries to catch your gaze and you look down further.

you: “asshole*****...”

*****other options i was playing with were “meanie” or “jerk” but they didn’t have the right feel. imagine her calling him a knobhead tho.

“i want to make all your wishes come true”

“it’s a foul to not have concern [for your partner]. in that case, i’d have to do the same thing”

basically he’s saying since you were so concerned about me, i’m going to have to return the favour. look at him, making it out like it’s a game of equals when he’s really just a fool in love...

“the same thing... meaning...” you say.

“if you won’t get tired, i’ll embrace you as much as you like”

i’m trying to keep the sentences quite concise but he’s basically saying if you’re still not worn out (from the copious amounts of lovemaking) and want more, he’ll have sex with you as many times as you want. in case you didn’t already know, often when you see mcs get flustered bc their love interest talks about “holding/embracing” them, it’s because the same word can be used to mean sleeping/having sex with.

“but... i always want to [make] love [to] you”

..........!

(he’s saying no matter when, he always wants to love you, which in this case means “make love to” but i guess can maybe also be read in the emotional sense? idk we all know kazu is secretly a huge romantic)

finally, you raise your face. kazuomi doesn’t miss the heat flaring in your eyes when you see his expression.

you: “in that case... i... want you to hold***** me”

*****same situation re: the hold/embrace thing. she’s saying “then have sex with me” lmao.

also lkajsflks i’m crying bc kazuomi will give you anything you ever wished for (and probably delights in being able to provide it), you just have to dare to ask him

“okay”

kazuomi is giving off an aura that he thinks would make you pull back if you were on mission (i think this is what it’s trying to say lol but not 100%), but at times like this, you always get embarrassed and show a shy and troubled face.

“the one who lights my fire is always “you””

basically he’s talking about the true you, not arisa. alksdfj kazuomi is so in love i can’t BEAR IT

“whether you’re being bold or honest, or even when we’re bargaining******...”

“i’m in trouble because of how fascinated i am by all of it.”

******he’s talking about all the bets and negotiations and challenges and banter between you two. actually there’s a lot more i want to explain here. i chose to use “bold”, but it also refers to when you’re being audacious (like if you’re cheekily talking back to him). honest in this case also means frank/straightforward (about your feelings), but can also imply docility/obedience. essentially the two have very different (almost contrary) vibes.

that’s it for chapter 5! hope you are keeping your teeth brushed to prevent all the cavities this chapter will inevitably give you. i’m floored by how much of a lovestruck fool kazuomi is. maybe it’s just the poor quality of my translations even though i tried somewhat to preserve some tone in cases where i felt it really needed it, but i feel like his internal dialogue here is a lot sweeter and straightforward than his external dialogue? i’m glad they sorted out the misunderstanding though, and how sweet of his mc to be so concerned about his health. i love seeing them be all cheesy for each other but sometimes disguising it as banter because let’s be real, both of them are total love virgins and don’t know how to just straightforwardly talk about the true depth of their affections for each other.

in the next chapter, kazuomi returns the favour, things get reaaaal smutty, and i get a headache from trying to understand sexual euphemisms. please let me know what you thought of this chapter!

i’ve set up a ko-fi page here and would be incredibly grateful if you would like to support me for translations and being able to purchase more routes to recap in english!

click here for chapter 6

#kazuomi shido #masquerade kiss #voltage smut #otona love #otkoi #summary #translation #voltage inc #otome game #voltage otome #otome romance #悪女はセルフプレジャーがお好き？#マスカレード・キス〜危険な駆け引き〜

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munchiezxx · 4 years

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kingdom keepers book 2 rerelease changes

i finally finished the second kingdom keepers rerelease! this one took a lot longer to read because like i expected, this one has a LOT more changed compared to the first. overall, i would say that if you were recommending the series to someone younger, give them the rewrite. if you’re a long-time fan, it’s probably not necessary for you to buy again unless you’re curious.

if you’re nitpicky like me, i have everything under the cut! this one’s gonna be a lot longer than the first, though.

i’m not sure where to start with this, so i’m just gonna start with the overall and then go into the details.

- first of all, the rewrite is 42 pages shorter than the original. there were only a few places where large chunks were taken out, but i’ll go over anything major when it comes up. the majority of what was taken out was just a lot of extra detail. the book feels very consolidated, ESPECIALLY the last third. it seems like as the book goes on, it gets more and more paraphrased. this can be good and bad, because the original book has a tendency to overexplain sometimes, but you do lose some character. most of the details that were taken out weren’t anything necessary, but it does make the book seem a little more juvenile than it already was.

a lot of sentences were spliced, shortened, and paraphrased. sometimes doing more ‘tell’ rather than ‘show.’ i assume this is to make it fit a younger grade level, but it does make the book seemed a little more dumbed down. this happens a bit in the dialogue, too, like a piece of dialogue would be changed to “willa explained (original dialogue).”

for some reason, every few chapters, a chapter would be almost completely rewritten with the exact same things happening. i have no idea why they did this, because a lot of times it would just be a reworded version of a perfectly fine sentence, just using different synonyms.

the dialogue is also changed quite a bit to make the characters nicer. (especially maybeck.) some was also changed to sound a little more ‘normal,’ but occasionally it made the book seem a little less dated. overall, it’s less ‘quippy’. one big example i saw of this was during finn’s fight with maleficent in chapter 49:

i’m not really sure how to explain all of this any further, so if you’re curious, i’d recommend just reading the book. it was pretty interesting to see what was changed even though it felt unnecessary at times. i spent the last half of the book reading one on top of the other, it took a few days.

now with that out of the way, we can get into the details!

- this is my number one favorite change: JEZ WAS FINALLY CHANGED TO JESS!! this bothered me for YEARS and i know it’s a change that people really wanted.

- the VMK situation is handled by explaining that VMK was an old video game that was shut down used by the imagineers and operates in the same way that it did in the original. i’m not sure why they used that terrible workaround in the first rewrite, but oh well.

- obviously, the DSs are no longer and they communicate through text. the biggest tragedy of this is that their usernames were taken away. RIP to willatree, mybest, philitup, angelface13, and panda. the messaging dialogue has been changed by a LOT, they type in the same way that they would speak. no more shorthand, all proper punctuation. i would like to say this a good thing but there are some quips that will be dearly missed

- cameras are accessed by a DVC booth instead of the animalcam.

- flights of wonder was mentioned, which closed in 2018

- apparently deVine (the character) has actually been spelled ‘diVine’ this whole time? they didn’t change it for this one but i didn’t know it was spelled wrong all this time so i guess it doesn’t matter

- our first iconic dialogue casualty is “devine,” “thank you.” i don’t know why

- the mention of maybeck’s supposed little sister was left in, which i know was a big mistake that always bothered people. however, the scene where he mentions being an only child was cut down by a lot and the sentence is removed, so i guess that means maybeck canonically has a younger sister now ??? i don’t remember if he mentions being an only child in any other books or not, but if you know, let me know so i can look out for it in the future rewrites

- the sorcerer’s hat is still in dhs. in the next paragraph, a kodak booth is changed to a photopass booth. i do not know how that is the one thing that got changed on that page. also, no more HSM show and GMR is changed to MMRR

- maybeck can no longer allowed to swear. instead of “son of a ___” (that’s what the actual dialogue bubble says, they’re not allowed to say bitch in a disney novel) he says “sands of a beach.” the line “only he didn’t say dang” is cut. so is “only he didn’t say freaking.” is this for better or for worse i can not say, but i wish they had at LEAST let him say bitch

- chapter 44, where they get the fob from the trash can, takes place in pandora instead and he just grabs it from a plant. this is the only scene in pandora which is kinda sad but also i don’t know what else they could have done

- around here is where i wasn’t able to keep track of what scenes were cut down besides the major cuts, so i’d say the last 100 pages are paraphrased the most.

- in chapter 49, the scene where finn fights by maleficent that i used as example earlier, is changed quite a bit. there’s less shouting, the scene seems a lot more calm and it’s strange. less quips.

- when it’s revealed that jess is in the tiger yard, “willa gasped” is changed to “willa coughed.” this was so weird that i had to include it

- every scene where philby and wayne are fighting overtakers in VMK are cut down by a LOT. the first chapter of this scene is changed from 6 1/2 pages to 2 1/2. this was always a weird plot point to me, but it didn’t really help clarify it, either

- chapter 60, with maybeck and willa in dinosaur, is also cut by quite a bit. 14 pages to 7 1/2. it’s mostly the last half of the scene, they find the server quickly and don’t describe cutting the wires, it just cuts off when willa finds the server. they don’t get to hug at the end. :(

- in ch 61, a paragraph is added in where charlene misquotes “if you can dream it” as a walt disney quote, which is just a personal pet peeve

- the final fight with maleficent and chernabog is nearly word-for-word the same, which was surprising considering most of the scenes leading up to it were changed drastically.

- finally, my number one most anticipated change that probably isn’t important to anyone else... maleficent is no longer misspelled as “maleficant”!!!!! when i was a kid this was THE funniest thing in the world to me. i’m a little sad

and that’s all i’ve got for you! phew that was a LOT. if there’s anything else i didn’t mention that you’re curious about, feel free to ask! this one actually felt like a rewrite, so there were some other changes i didn’t find significant enough to mention. i’ll be picking up disney in shadow today so that should be...interesting. thanks for reading!

#kingdom keepers #dear god this took so much effort i hope someone reads this #long post

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timeagainreviews · 4 years

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The Chibnall Masterplan

Back in 2018 when the episode "The Ghost Monument," aired, we got our first mention of "The Timeless Child," as uttered by bog rolls floating above the Doctor’s head. My initial reaction to this was dread. In fact, I can even quote my reaction from the review I wrote- "I’ll be honest, I have zero interest in that storyline. It’s called Doctor Who, not Doctor Who was Once a Little Kid Known as the Timeless Child." I got all of that from a single line of seemingly throwaway dialogue. Two years later, it would appear that my first guess was the truth. It turns out that when the Master said "Everything you think you know is a lie," was a lie. Evidently, I knew all along.

If you follow this blog closely, you’ll know that my reaction to the Timeless Child storyline has softened over time. I went from not giving a damn, to being fairly excited. That is until last week’s episode sent me spiralling back into that initial sense of dread. Sadly, this is the energy I brought into tonight’s episode. As opposed to bracing for excitement, I was bracing for disappointment. This is unfortunate as I always try and temper my expectations. I, like the rest of you, would love to be surprised. Even if I am worried about the trajectory of an episode, I always try and keep an open mind. After all, Doctor Who is pretty great.

After last week’s episode, I expected this one to be jam-packed with exposition. Oddly though, this one suffered from its own heaping dose of fluff as well. Once again, the companions spend most of their time on the sidelines. Right away they kill off that Rose Tyler looking girl, so I guess she wasn’t important. Which is a lot of how the episode treats our human characters. We’re given a scene wherein Yaz and Graham have a heart to heart, leading us to believe one of them may be departing at the end of the episode. However, this expectation is subverted by instead having nothing happen. Like last week, Chibnall has opted toward writing hollow character development in place of plot. Because of this, the scenes with the companions felt more like distractions from the actual story.

We get more of this when Ryan, Ethan, and Ko Sharmus are fighting off Cybermen with the power of busywork. Ryan’s attitude toward weapons has shifted since "The Ghost Monument." His interaction with the Doctor has turned him into a bit of a pacifist. Much like Chibnall’s writing, Ko Sharmus muddies this philosophy for Ryan by convincing him to take up arms against the Cybermen. I expected this to play into Yaz and Graham’s conversation, which felt like a foreshadowing of death. Ryan might shoot one of them as they are dressed in their Cybermen disguises, leading him to regret breaking his pacifism. But none of that happens. While it would have been a bit cliched and overly dark to do such a thing, at least it would have been something.

The Master takes the Doctor into the portal to Gallifrey where they stand within the Time Lord citadel. The Master traps the Doctor in a device which may as well be named the Agency Stripper™, as that’s what it, and this episode does to her throughout most of its run. Using the Time Lord Matrix, he illustrates the story of the Time Lord’s origins. All the while in the real world, he invites Ashad, the Lone Cyberman to set up shop on Gallifrey.

The Master tells the Doctor the story about a Shobogan scientist named Tecteun. She was the first of her kind to achieve space flight, which is incredible when you consider the thousands of people that were necessary just to get humans to the moon. During her travels through space, she discovers an odd gateway containing a little girl. She takes this girl home and raises her as her own. During a freak accident, much like Brendan from last week, she falls off a cliff. Damn kids, always playing by rocky cliffsides. However, instead of dying, she regenerates.

Tecteun goes a bit mad scientist trying to unlock the secrets behind regeneration, leading her to do experiments on this timeless child. She even appears to force regenerations on her as well. Eventually, she unlocks the secret of regenerations and successfully uses it on herself. This establishes what would become Time Lord society. At this point, we’re now waiting for the Master to tell the Doctor exactly what we all know- that the Timeless Child is the Doctor. However, there was a moment when it almost seemed like the Master was going to say he was the Timeless Child, which honestly, I would have found far more compelling. It would have informed so much of the Master’s past actions, and his recent relapse in character development after Missy’s change of hearts.

Instead, I found myself rolling my eyes at this "big reveal." It really was that simple. The story I wrote in my head after a single line of dialogue is exactly what we got. We learn that the number of regenerations was placed upon future Time Lords, which is weird because Clara had to plead for the Time Lords to give the Eleventh Doctor more. I guess along with unlocking the secret to the Timeless Child’s regenerations, they were also able to limit their number. That or Chibnall didn’t even think about it.

When considering the wanton destruction of Gallifrey by the Master’s hand, you suspect whatever it was the Time Lords did to this child was heinous. And while, yes, forcing regenerations upon the kid is a bit cruel, they always looked serene (see: bored) while sitting there in Tecteun’s lab. I expected it to be something like Rassilon and Omega destroyed a child to harness her time travelling ability to create the first TARDIS. Turns out, that the thing that really pissed off the Master was knowing that he had a little bit of the Doctor inside of him. While the Master has always been a bit of a maniac, even this felt like a bit excessive.

Back on the Cybership, the humans have stowed themselves away in Cyberman armour. I rather liked this bit as it reminded me of the very first Dalek story where Ian hides away inside a Dalek carapace. While I feel like they could have done more with this, at least they were having a bit of fun. After saving Ryan, Ethan, and Ko Sharmus from the Cybermen, the humans make their way into the portal to Gallifrey. The Cybermen land above the Time Lord citadel where they hover above, ready to make Gallifrey their new home.

The Master does the Doctor dirty and leaves her inside the Matrix to fend for herself, while he goes off to broker a deal with Ashad. We find out that Ashad, with the guidance of the Cyberium coursing through his mind, has created a death particle capable of undoing all organic life in the universe. His big plan is to basically turn the Cybermen into robots, which much like the Master, I found boring. Thankfully the Master is always up to his dirty tricks as he kills Ashad and uses the Cyberium to create a race of Cyberman/Time Lords known as Cyber-Masters. I was a bit disappointed they weren’t called Cyber Lords. However, I suppose the Master naming them after himself is on-brand at least. After all, he did once make an entire planet’s population into himself.

The Doctor is now forced to deal with the new information she’s been given by the Master. She rejects it at first, but the imagery of Brendan in her mind keeps giving her cause to doubt. It’s then that she sees the Ruth Doctor who helps her through her identity crisis long enough to help her escape the Matrix. Her plan to escape is to basically run through every life in her mind until it shorts out and forces the Matrix to release her. This entire sequence is rather silly when you consider the Matrix holds the entire lives of countless other Time Lords. No matter how many lives she had before the First Doctor, it’s not more than the Matrix can handle. What’s even sillier is the way in which they shot it, which was basically by having Jodie Whittaker squeeze her eyes shut and wince while holding her head. I was reminded of hacking scenes in movies where they throw a montage of symbols over the scene to make up for the fact that we’re basically watching some guy on a computer.

The montage is what is really worth mentioning, as it touched upon quite a few things from the Doctor’s past. Some of these things have been mysteries from as far back as the Tom Baker era. I’m speaking of course about the Morbius Doctors. For those of you not in the know, the Morbius Doctors were a series of images projected from the Doctor’s mind during a battle of wits between the Fourth Doctor and an evil Time Lord named Morbius. I had always assumed they were Morbius’ previous regenerations, but many have speculated that they were versions of the Doctor from before William Hartnell. Well, it would appear that this age-old debate can now be put to rest- those were definitely images of the Doctor.

I’d be lying if the nerd in me doesn’t kind of love this. Like I said, I try and keep an open mind. It’s even easier when the concept of Doctors existing before the First Doctor has been around for rather a long time. Andrew Cartmel’s "masterplan," was to introduce the idea of "the Other," which would be a Time Lord on par with Rassilon and Omega that was eventually "cloned," in a genetic loom into the First Doctor. However, the idea was paired back as it was decided the doing such a thing would reveal too much about the Doctor’s past, thus answering too much of the show’s central question- "Doctor Who?"

Was it too much? That’s really hard for me to say at this point. It’s a bit early to know for sure. It does certainly complicate things a bit. To paraphrase something Andrew Cartmel once said at a public appearance- these story elements are like barnacles on a ship. Each one of them attaches to the hull over time. They seem small at first, but they eventually begin to slow the ship down. Take the aforementioned regeneration limitation placed upon Time Lords back in 1976’s "The Deadly Assassin." While it worked for the story at the time, it gave Steven Moffat the unruly task of finding new ways for the Doctor to keep on regenerating. You’ll forgive the guy for not doing the Valeyard.

While the nerd in me does love that they touched upon some deep Doctor Who lore, part of me was also lamenting the introduction of so many new versions of the Doctor. I’ve got a special love for each incarnation of the Doctor. This is why I love the Eighth Doctor audios so much, as it gives us an even deeper understanding of his character, despite his limited screentime. Even the War Doctor was given the chance to develop. Where will the Ruth Doctor play into all of this? Why did she have a police box if she is pre-Hartnell? Is this “Division,” an actual division of the Timeless Child into multiple entities? Will we get to experience her Doctor in a deeper way that feels as fulfilling as the first Doctor of colour deserves? While I hold out some hope for her, what about the montage of children in Tecteun’s lab? Are we going to get comics and Big Finish audios starring some kid you saw for two seconds? (I kid, you know they will) On one hand, we see the first Asian Doctor, on the other hand, they don’t even get a speaking role. Even with so much being added to the Doctor’s history, I can’t help but feel slightly short-changed.

Speaking of short-changed, let’s talk about that ending. The Doctor’s plan actually works, releasing her from the Matrix’s hold, which oddly also releases her from the Agency Stripper™. Convenient! Her companions find her as she’s lying there unconscious. They managed to find her rather quickly considering the city is in ruins. Convenient! The Doctor finds Ashad’s death particle, which has been shrunk down by the Master’s tissue compression device. I’m not sure, but I think this is the reason the death particle is no longer a threat to the entire universe. It now only seems to pose a threat to the organic life on Gallifrey. Maybe this is because Gallifrey is still in its own pocket universe? Either way, it wasn’t very clear. The Doctor makes contact with the Master and pinpoints his location. Convenient! She calls him to the citadel like it was Friday Night Wrestling and they have their little showdown. I swear if they’d have started making out, I wouldn’t have batted an eye, those two.

After forcing her companions to stay behind on a TARDIS set for Earth, the Doctor heads back to have a final showdown with the Master. With the tiny Cyberman attached to an explosive device resembling a torch, the Doctor decides she must kill the Master and this new race of Cyber-Masters before they can kill all of humanity. Having the ability to regenerate, the only way to take these mechanoids down is with the death particle. This is a far cry from the Doctor we’ve seen in "Genesis of the Daleks," or even "Daleks Take Manhattan," where the Doctor would consider such things "genocide." However, the Doctor gets a total cop-out moment as Ko Sharmus shows up long enough to detonate the device himself. After very little prompting, the Doctor allows him to sacrifice himself as she flees.

This, for me at least, is a longstanding problem with Chris Chibnall’s morality. It’s the Thirteenth Doctor’s weird relationship with guns all over again. As if to prove Davros’ point from "Journey’s End," this Doctor feels all too comfortable with allowing others to do her dirty work. Imagine the scene from "The Day of the Doctor," when Clara is standing there looking of the Doctors about to collectively blow up Gallifrey. It’s as if when she said "I never pictured you doing it," instead of changing his mind, the Doctor would say "You know, you’re right. You do it!” There’s a kind of mean spirited morality lurking beneath Chibnall’s writing. Or as my friend Adro jokingly put it- "I would not want to be his S&M partner."

The Doctor sends her companions and the last humans in the galaxy back to the 21st century. Surely no bootstrap paradoxes will come from Yedlarmi or Ethan making future generations of their own ancestors. Time Lords have bigger things to worry about than time anomalies. Right? Oh right. Graham and Ravio still seem perfectly capable of continuing their relationship, so that’s at least something. I also highly doubt either of them are likely to sire any paradoxical offspring any time soon. Though they are still fully capable of raising the sheep that go on to start the Wooly Rebellion. After finding herself pleasantly surprised to be alive, the Doctor finds her way back to her own TARDIS. However, before she can scoop up her companions, she’s intercepted by an angry Judoon who arrests her and throws her into space jail. I imagine this has something to do with why the Ruth Doctor was a "Fugitive of the Judoon."

After all is said and done, it’s really hard to pin down exactly how I feel about this episode. I do applaud the bold move of expanding the Doctor’s canon to include previous regenerations. I’ve always said that Doctor Who does occasionally need a showrunner willing to put their neck on the line. For better or worse, John Nathan-Turner was great for doing exactly that. Sometimes it’s a good thing to shake things up, and really dust off the cobwebs. Though strangely, a lot of tonight’s episode was very non-committal. The Master could very well have been lying. Gallifrey could also still very easily be restored by using the Matrix’s memory. I personally would appreciate that as I love both Romana and Leela. The idea of the two of them dead and eaten away by the death particle is rather distressing. While I liked watching Jodie get a bit snippy and knocking the Master to the ground, I feel like a she never got a moment to be the Doctor. Her “Aha!” moment was short-lived and not very clever. She spends most of the episode either locked up or feeling helpless.

Also, where the hell was Captain Jack? What the hell Chibnall? How are they going to just give us five minutes of John Barrowman? It seems weird to introduce him only to put it off until the next series. However, the most egregious of sins for "The Timeless Children," is how utterly predictable it all was. As I illustrated above, I was able to imagine the entire concept of the Timeless Child the very first time I heard it mentioned. I put no deep effort into it either. It seemed like the most obvious storyline. The same could be said about people’s Ruth theories. Some of which were even better. The only way in which the episode could have surprised me was by making the Master the Timeless Child. It was the one point where I really perked up and began to feel a real interest in the plot. But alas, no, they went the incredibly obvious route. This isn’t to say they won’t be able to do interesting things with this in the future. The issue I’m having is that if I am able to figure out the plot just by hearing a single line of dialogue, did I even need to watch it?

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felassan · 3 years

Text

Highlights and insights from the MELE launch cast & crew reunion panel

[rewatch link] [highlights & insights from the N7 Day 2020 reunion]

In case a text format is better for anyone (in terms of accessibility for example). Cut for length.

Some paraphrasing.

If anyone’s interested in just the line-reading session, it starts at timestamp ~1:04:45.

In addition to the cast and crew from the N7 Day reunion, at this reunion also in attendance were:

Mac Walters (Project Director for MELE, Lead Writer of the og MET)

Melanie Faulknor (Lead Producer for MELE)

Crystal McCord (Producer for MELE)

Fred Tatasciore (Saren)

Seth Green (Joker)

Kimberly Brooks (Ash)

Ash Sroka (Tali)

This was the biggest reunion / meetup of the cast so far, and some of the cast and crew were meeting for the first time here.

It’s been so long since the og MET that PW & KW are getting to watch their kids experience playing it for the first time

JHale doesn’t play but since MELE she’s been sneaking around Twitch jumping into peoples’ MELE livestreams to lurk, watch and comment a bit

What drew Seth to the character of Joker? The whole concept of the game. He likes games and MET’s mechanics (different trees of adventure, stacking reputation, choices carrying between games) at the time were the most sophisticated that he’d ever heard pitched. He thought this was new and exciting and wanted to be a part of it. For the character they cast him based on his personality traits (i.e. he sounds quite similar to Joker personality-wise)

Would Seth ever want to play Joker again if the opportunity presented itself? Sure, he loves the character, and if the writers ever had more things to explore/expand with Joker he’d be down for it.

Seth said that it’s a different kind of fan that approach him about this project. The fans have spent many many hours in an intimate exchange with “him” that he hasn’t been a part of, but they experienced it nonetheless. “I’ve hugged a lot of strangers, you know what I’m saying? It’s great, you get an interaction with fans that you never get as a performer in any other experience”

Seth has been a space guy since he was little, it inspires him

With the state of the world the way it is now [covid, masks etc], does Ash think Tali’s story will be more impactful now than it was before? Ash hopes so, and that anything they do here will have a positive impact on a bigger level. Ultimately that’s why most of them do what they do, they want to reach people in deep ways. She hopes Tali is an inspiration in courage, bravery, standing up for what’s right and thinking about the greater good

The [MELE I think] dev team had a last team meeting with Greg Zeschuk, one of the founders of BioWare, who they had invited to it. He was regaling them with stories of the inception of Mass Effect. “You would imagine this sort of well-laid out, drawing boards everywhere... [but] it was basically just a napkin sketch in a Greek taverna with him and Casey going ‘We wanna do a space opera’, and then it took off”

The process of creating lore through development is very organic. A lot of it comes from character and story development. It builds up over the course of the game’s development. They did the codex entries at the end, the idea being that if they saved them for as late as they could, then they could pull from the story, characters and meaningful moments, and build them from there

PW wrote a bunch of the codex entries, elevator banter & lots of little bits of lore. They describe their time on the og MET as being a “baby writer”. They originally came in after Mac had back surgery and a junior writer was needed to fill in. “It was really fun, it was us sitting in a room together going ‘What do you think a hanar or a krogan thinks about this or that’?” For a first project for them this was an amazing experience - the world building itself creatively with all these awesome people

They tried to add multiplayer in every game but only got it to work in ME3

They had a lot of plots laid out in ME1 that they called “global plots”. These were outside the core critical path and would take players from planet to planet, and were sprawling stories. They pulled out a lot of really interesting concepts and ideas from these that did make it into the game, but all of the global plots ended up getting cut due to time. Mac still has old diagrams and spreadsheets which detailed how all of these would have come together

Q. If you all had to take a long-distance road-trip with two squadmates, who would you take and why? PW: “Jack and Mordin. Mordin because the drive would never lack for things to talk about at length quickly, Jack because you know you wouldn’t pay for the room. You wouldn’t know how you’d get the room, but you wouldn’t be paying for it.” Courtenay: “I’d take Mordin because there’d be singing, and FemShep just to have this thing - happen. In the room that I get for free.” JHale at this point fistpumped while saying “Yeess” [then I think what she said was “steaming hot”]

Seeing as asari are long-lived, how open is Ali to one day reprising her role as Liara? “She’s a character very close to my heart, it was such a great opportunity. In some games that we work on the character has already been created or voiced by someone else, but this was really a group effort. When I first went into the booth, the only thing I’d seen of her was a sort of like, rendering, and we slowly kind of came to her voice and presence. I would love to bring Liara back any time... hey, she can live a really long time guys. :D”

Caroline and people who do what she does (Creative Performance Director) are so critical to the quality of games. Caroline: “This group of people are extraordinary. We were lucky to have such an extraordinary cast. Every [recording] session was new and challenging. It was a labor of love. I’m tearing up right now thinking about it. I’m remembering my last session with Jen, she was the last session, just sobbing and sobbing”. When JHale was trying to say the lines of Shepard’s goodbye with Garrus, a line hit her like a tonne of bricks and she was in tears and was like “Shepard does not cry”. “It took me a second, I got it out and took another run at it, it was in there but stuffed down as it should have been, and I finished the line [and there was silence in the booth when usually Caroline would have been talking to give direction or instruction] Did we lose her? Did Skype crash?” and it transpired that what had happened was that Caroline was in floods of tears

ME was the first time Keythe had ever come across branching dialogue. “Normally when we work on a script and it’s from page 1 to 100. In this it was get to page 5, then go back to page 2 and play it a little differently. The skill and the fun and joy of it was to be able to go back and play a scene in a different way, with different writing, with different outcomes. This was not only a challenge but a real treat. So to all the writers who dreamed up how this build-your-own-adventure plays out, you have my undying respect. It was a real pleasure”

VEDA is a proprietary system that BW use to record the dialogue, which is the closest way of having it feel like having people in the booth together (it’s all digital and VAs get to hear the line someone else has done in that scene). Caroline really pushed for this because of the amount of time etc that was wasted due to lack of this sort of thing on ME1. William: “It was a god send for me, thank you, getting to hear a cue from Jen or Mark.” Ali: “Us being able to bounce off each other helps make it more real. This for me was the most real acting experience on a game I had ever had - the writing being so good, Caroline helping us through, being able to hear each other.” JHale was always early coming in to record relative to the others so only got to use VEDA a few times - a bit of Liara content and the scene with Anderson towards the end. “Those two times, oh my god it was amazing”. VEDA being a thing also helps from a scheduling standpoint

Seth and Tricia Helfer (EDI) only got to be in the booth actually together 1 time, to record/shoot a piece of promotional video. “We actually got to record a scene together and we were like ‘oh my god this is the best thing ever’. It was great, even though I had to stand on a stool. She’s the best”

Seth: “As an actor, the kind of opportunity to do this kind of material in games just didn’t exist.” Fred: “Oh, never! I had never had a villain part that was complicated like that. In a game? Never before, it was really interesting”

Raphael always goes back to the fact that ME brought more women into gaming than any other game before it. “The writing and the complexity of the relationships gave us so much ballast”. “This set this apart from running, shooting, gunning, looting”

JHale: “What I noticed in the times before when I got to be around fans, there was a huge hunger among women in the gaming world for something they could really jump into. They were starving for something which fed them what they deserved and needed”

Mac: “[praising Caroline] Caroline would often come to us as writers and challenge us and say, as an example, ‘Do we really need another male character to do this? Why are we writing another male character for this?’ She pushed that very early and to the betterment of everything we created”

PW: “Karin and Cookie and all of the editors across the trilogy, [were critical in] making sure that Shepard sounded consistent - [especially since] we had a large writing team, writers came and went, Mac is the only one with a significant writing contribution on each of the games”

PW: “[on game dev] It’s a process of getting hundreds of people pointed in the same direction, all believing that this is something worth doing”

Ash: “Having all the different possibilities and avenues, going back to play them all out in the different ways [really helped to round the character of Tali out and make her feel like a natural person]”.

VAs only get paid for the original recording sessions, not again (as in they don’t any royalties or anything from something like the remaster)

In MELE, they left all the original credits at the end of each game in

Fred: “It’s creating in five dimensions [because of all the outcomes and relationships etc]”. Seth: “The cool thing is that the audience feels that. They’re immediately struck by how dense, thought-out, prepared and planned the entire universe is”

How was it for the new MELE devs coming onto this? Crystal: “I knew it [the series and fans’ love for it] was big, but I didn’t know it was BIG! Working on MELE there was this infectious excitement. Being part of it was so exciting.” Melanie: “I came on at ME3, I had a 3 or 4 year honeymoon period with BioWare. Coming onto MELE, I’m getting really emotional. One of my first meetings originally was going into a cinematic review for an epic Tali scene in ME3”. Crystal: “On MELE, we had an hour or 2 every day where the team came together to play the game. In those reviews, a lot of the devs who worked on the original would tell all these stories. It was really fun to hear all the inside stories on ME’s creation and be a part of that”

DC: “Should this unit get vaccinated?” Ash: “Of course”

How do they think ME will be viewed in the next 10-20 years, what do they think its legacy will be? A piece of history, ground-breaking. It broke down some barriers and opened doors for people. It’s a powerful, powerful community. It’ll continue to age quite well and be enjoyed by a new generation, it’s original and evergreen and there’s a lot in it that people go back to. There’s a lot of universal things in it (personal experiences, like there will always be love, people fighting to belong, trying to make sense of their pasts etc)

JHale and Alix did the “I love you Shepard, now go save the world again” Shep-Sam exchange and both got teary. It was then Seth’s turn to line-read: “Jesus Christ, now that I’m good and choked up, fucking mess”. Ali was also actually crying from it

Seth: “It can’t be overstated, this community is so large and global, it is one of the most powerful fandoms that I’ve ever been greeted with. Thank you”. Ash: “It’s the most amazing group of fans ever. We’re all so grateful”

Some funny anecdotes/stories:

PW didn’t realize that Alix could do different accents. They remember a time when they were listening in the booth and an Alliance soldier was complaining about the gear had been given. They said “Wow that’s really good, who is that?” and the VO producer said “That’s Alix, Patrick”, “because she wasn’t doing her [normal British accent but was doing a Californian accent instead]. Alix roasted me later for not recognizing her voice and never let me heard the end of it”

Alix: “[on Sam’s toothbrush] Caroline’s like, ‘So then she pulls her toothbrush’ and I’m like ‘What? Sorry? A toothbrush?’ and obviously it’s funny now as everyone knows that Sam’s thing is her toothbrush. Caroline’s like ‘Yeah, you’ve gotta like, flirt, over the toothbrush’ and I’m like ‘Who wrote this - a frickin toothbrush, are you kidding me? Really guys?’ ANYWAY. I was wrong and it worked. :D”

Fred: “I remember a 12 year old kid coming up to me and being like [flat tone] ‘Oh yeah. I killed you’.”

Keythe: “The other assasin I play is Kellogg in Fallout 4. People come up to me like ‘Omg. I love you so much. And then I fucking KILLED you!’”

Courtenay once went out to dinner in NZ with a few prominent people from the Game of Thrones cast. “Everyone around was making a big deal out of it like ‘Omg, it’s so-and-so from GoT’. I was feeling a bit like ‘Hi, I’m here, just nobody’. And I looked around in the restaurant and there's one guy in the corner and he’s got an N7 shirt on and he’s just looking at me like [knowing look, does a peace sign]. And I’m like ‘I got one! I love you guys!’”

PW: “I have a question for the cast members, because I don’t know if JHale has done this to all of you or if she just does it to the devs. Show of hands if Jen has ever made you do push-ups.” JHale: “It’s just you guys”

Karin: “One of my favorite editing files that I ever had was a ME file. It was before Seth was coming in for a session. I opened it up and it was just 20, 25 lines with the word ‘Shit’, over and over again, and I was like, ‘This file is perfect, I don’t need to do anything to it, have fun!’”

Seth: “Didn’t we do a track that’s like 60 seconds of laughing? Escalating laughing? I don’t know about other actors but for me getting into a laughing fit is kind of like trying to get into a crying fit, it takes the same level of commitment, you start to follow a path until like you’re hysterically uncontrollably laughing. I remember looking through the glass, and I’m deep in it at this point, and I make eye contact, and I can see from the other side of the booth and they’re like [making ‘okay you can stop’ now gestures] - ‘Like that’s plenty, we got it’ and I was like ‘okay, okay [dying]’”

JHale: “The craziest thing Mark and I had to deal with was how many times we had to say ‘I should go’”. Mark: “We also, Caroline and I tended to use that as short hand when I needed to go to the bathroom”

The panel host: “The first time I interviewed Ali was a decade ago. She did the ‘I’ll flay you alive with my mind’ line halfway through, it was my first interview and I literally fell out of my seat [from being star-struck]”

Ash line-read Tali’s drunk omni-tattoo scene and in response DC said “I totally get why people wanna romanticize all these characters :D”. Karin: “We’ve had more than one person come up to us and show us actual tattoos that looked like that”

[source]

#bioware #mass effect #video games #covid mention #long post #longpost #garrus vakarian #best boy #feels #lul

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