#i love when a trans persons name is stolen from a character. especially when its recognizable. hi percy. hi vash. hi dave. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

moth--blood · 2 years

Text

i give you: hcs with my favorite horror characters

part 1 probably

featuring: the sawyer brothers, og/rz michael myers, tiffany ray valentine, vincent sinclair, billy lenz, brahms heelshire, randy meeks

the Sawyers (Nubbins, Choptop, Bubba, Drayton)

nubbins is ratgender, and uses rat/he pronouns! rat doesnt really know what xenogender or ratgender is honestly. he just knows that being called rat makes him feel good about ratself so the others have no problem going with it

choptop is trans, and uses he/him!

nubbin's blue shirt was originally drayton's, and he's had it entirely too long. regardless how many times it gets ripped or gross nubbins refuses to get rid of it

jumping off that; chop's sweater was also from Drayton. he takes better care of it than rat does (i.e doesnt deface graveyards with it yk). it still gets ripped often but thats when we ask bubba to sew it lol

nubbin's is asexual! rat's not exactly sex-repulsed, but definitely not favorable. he doesnt see the appeal.

the twins bracelets and jewelry are all either handmade or stolen from victims/the people nubbins hitchhikes with

the name "choptop" came as a slight jab to his head injury, and he never really minded too much. eventually it just stuck.

nubbins doesn't identify with the trans label, but regardless "nubbins" is rat's chosen name. he got the idea once choptop came out and if rat's honest, he doesn't remember where he got nubbins from. just that it stuck and rat likes it :)

bubba's genderfluid! they dont really mind what pronouns you use for her, as long as its not it/its.

he loves sewing! they picked it up just after choptop left for vietnam, and has a bunch of little patches sewn into her apron even if it was never ripped

drayton uses he/him!

he's gay and asexual! definitely sex-repulsed.

Randy Meeks

randy's gay and trans (ftm) and uses he/they pronouns! he realized after stu and billy came out in middle school, but randy waited til their freshman year.

they're aegosexual! similar to nubbins he's not really repulsed but definitely not favorable by a long shot.

he has/had a thing for everyone in the group, excluding casey who wasnt really around that long. he has mild tourettes, and has a few verbal tics from movies; the majority of them are physical.

he has a lot of trouble controlling their volume when excited and goes nonverbal when they're stressed

Tiffany Ray Valentine

tif uses she/they!! she's probably experimented with heart or doll centered xenos, but they never stuck

pansexual!!! i love her sm

definitely had a thing for Martha Stewart or Jennifer Tilly. celebrity crush type thing yk

i mean, okay- you cant tell me she didnt have a thing for tilly. she literally was like "i HAVE to have jennifer tilly, charles. it is a need :((".

uses a kitchen knife to do her eyeliner :)

a very good baker

Michael Myers (og)

this man does not know what pronouns are dude

hes the type to go ",,,im a guy"

ESPECIALLY old myers.

i love him but its TRUE (╥ w ╥)

definitely aro-ace

he probably doesnt know what that means either tbh.

Michael Myers (rz)

he/it!

hes also asexual! :D

it's bisexual, probably has a preference to men

he has tourettes!

making/wearing his masks is a giant comfort, regardless of how old he is. mans wore those things year-round, including to school

unlike og myers, he actually know what his labels mean ಥ‿ಥ and he likes them! they're the most accurate to him and make him comfortable

Vincent Sinclair

they/he

aegosexual! pretty sex-repulsed ngl

trans!! :D ftm!

selectively mute; when they do talk, he's never loud

sweater paws. i will not elaborate.

likes having his hair down while hes working, even if its a hazard. it's a mix of the weight/blinder effect is comforting, and so his mask is hidden from victims

that being said they are a GOD at braiding.

very good at painting, too!

Billy Lenz:

he/it

sex-favorable asexual

pansexual!

is a whore for weirdly flavored candy canes

is THAT person who plays christmas music year-round.

it'll be dead quiet in the house and the girls just hear a very quiet "all i want for christmas is youu" and none of them can find the source

it thinks barb is the funniest to annoy, mainly because she actually gives him reactions

Brahms Heelshire

ace!!!

uses he/they pronouns!

a straight man sobs

he genuinely did like gretta (even though she SUCKED) and her leaving was a bitch to get over

has eaten a rat before.

17 notes · View notes

literatelove-blog1 · 5 years

Text

Top 10 Anticipated LGBT Reads of 2019

1. Willa & Hesper by Amy Feltman

Release Date: February 5th

What It’s About: Two women, Willa and Hesper fall in love in a whirlwind romance. However, when the romance begins to fall apart they turn to their roots for comfort. For Hesper, this means returning to her grandfather’s home of Tbilisi, Georgia and trying to fill in the gaps of her family history. Willa joins a Jewish group to visit some of the Holocaust sights in Germany and Poland. Through looking to their pasts, both women find a way to look towards their future.

Why I’m Interested: Jewish!! Lesbians!! Beyond that, I’m interested in the complicated relationship between the women and the way they explore their relationships with each other as well as their past and culture. It sounds beautiful and heartbreaking I can’t wait to read it!

2. Real Queer America by Samantha Allen

Release Date: March 1st

What It’s About: Samantha Allen, a once Mormon missionary now turned Daily Beast reporter and happily married to a woman, has always had a deep love for the ‘Red States’ in America and the American South. In this novel she takes a road-trip of sorts to introduce us to real life LGBT people in said states in order to give them a voice and chance to tell their stories.

Why I’m Interested: This is a collection of true stories about LGBT people in the Bible Belt written and compiled by an ex-Mormon trans woman and I’m a lesbian who grew up Mormon and now lives in Utah, so there’s definitely a personal connection for me here. Beyond that, I love getting to see/hear the voices and stories of actual LGBT people because it’s just such a comforting reminder that there are so many LGBT people out there.

3. The Parting Glass by Gina Marie Guadagnino

Release Date: March 5th

What It’s About: It’s the 19th century in New York and Mary Ballard is a ladies’ maid to wealthy socialite, Charlotte Walden. Little known to Charlotte, Mary is actually Irish immigrant Marie O’Farren whose feelings for her go far beyond the platonic. Meanwhile, Mary’s brother, a stable groom, is also enamored with Charlotte. Between Mary’s night escapades in New York and the class-breaking love her brother holds for Charlotte, The Parting Glass explores class, race, and sexuality in 19th century America in a way that feels new and fresh.

Why I’m Interested: The summary of this reminds me a lot of a Sarah Waters novel, who is like the queen of lesbian historical fiction. I love complicated relationships, vintage gay ladies, and drama and this book promises to have it all! I recently bought a copy of it so now it’s all just a matter of actually reading it!

4. Crossing by Pajtim Statovci (trans. David Hackston)

Release Date: April 2nd

What It’s About: Bujar and Agim, two friends growing up in the shadow of post-communist Albania decide to move past their individual hardships and struggles by moving to Italy. However, Italy poses its own difficulties for each boy as they explore their connections to home and history as they search to forge new identities and find belonging.

Why I’m Interested: This is the first of two translations on this list and I honestly can’t tell you how happy I am to get some more foreign LGBT literature. I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel about Albanian characters, which is thrilling enough but there are LGBT Albanian characters?! Sign me up! It sounds like it’s going to be hopeful and maybe a little heartbreaking and I’m here for it all.

5. Courting Mr. Lincoln by Louis Bayard

Release Date: April 23rd

What It’s About: Told in alternating voices between the two people who knew and loved him most, Louis Bayard paints a portrait of the famed president that few have seen before. When Mary Todd, a quick-witted debutant, meets potential presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln, mutual love and appreciation between the two grow rapidly. Watching in the middle of it all is Joseph Steed, Abraham’s roommate and closest friend, who also cares deeply for the soon-to-be president. A warm, meticulously researched novel that introduces the reader to the lesser known aspects of Lincoln’s life and the people who loved him.

Why I’m Interested: I must confess, I don’t actually know how gay this is going to be. However, the summary does mention that it will be exploring Steed’s perspective as well, and addressing the complicated nature of his and Lincoln’s friendship. Hopefully, we’ll get a glimpse of something more than just platonic in terms of feelings between them, whether those feelings are acted upon or not. Either way, I’ve heard the perspective of Mary is super well written and I really want to see that. It’ll be an interesting read and I’m excited to get my hands on it!

6. Lie With Me by Philippe Besson (trans. Molly Ringwald)

Release Date: April 30th

What It’s About: A chance encounter with a man outside a hotel causes our narrator, Philippe, to turn to the past to remember his first love, Thomas. The relationship began and blossomed their senior year in 1984, hidden in the shadows due to the nature of the time. However, their passionate, stolen moments continue to haunt Philippe to this day. Well loved and critically acclaimed in France, Molly Ringwald brings the story of first love to life for American audiences for the first time.

Why I’m Interested: Yes, it is translated by that Molly Ringwald and if that’s not intriguing enough, the plot sounds right up my alley: a (potentially) tragic love story, set in a different time period, and in a foreign country. This novel was very well received in Besson’s home country, France, and it’s definitely on the top of my hype list!

7. Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett

Release Date: June 4th

What It’s About: The suicide of Jessa’s taxidermist father hits her family pretty hard. Jessa is left to keep the family business afloat, her mother keeps making sexual art with the taxidermied animals, her brother withdraws from the family after his wife, who Jessa has secretly been in love with, bails. Mostly Dead Things is a darkly funny exploration of family and loss and one of the most anticipated debuts of 2019.

Why I’m Interested: The lead is a lesbian taxidermist - how can I say no to that? I’ve also heard this is wildly weird and charming and honestly there’s not quite enough LGBT novels that are just bonkers to read so thank god we’re getting some weird gay literature! This has gotten a lot of early hype and I’m hoping it will follow through for me!

8. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

Release Date: June 4th

What It’s About: Little Dog, a man in his late 20’s, writes a letter to his mother who cannot read. In it he describes the history of his family and their connections to Vietnam. Poetic and tender, Vuong explores the complicated love between mothers and sons and the connections to the past as well as presenting a deep, timely discussion of masculinity and race.

Why I’m Interested: I own Ocean Vuong’s poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds and while I haven’t finished it quite yet the poems I have read are beautiful and dreamlike. Hopefully this will translate well into his first foray into prose and I cannot wait to read it!

9. Cantoras: A Novel by Carolina de Robertis

Release Date: September 30th

What It’s About: Beginning in Uruguay in 1977, Cantoras traces the history of five women who discover a hidden cape, Cabo Polonio, that becomes a sanctuary for the women in a time of political dissent and turmoil. Throughout the next 35 years their lives shift and change in radical ways, but they all inevitably find themselves drawn towards the cape as they move through life and the challenges it brings.

Why I’m Interested: This checks two of my favorite boxes: a historical setting and a foreign country. Also, the summary makes it sound like it’s exploring the relationship between multiple women. I’m thrilled that so many 2019 novels are about exploring relationships between women, and this book adding wlw voices into the conversation is such a great bonus. De Robertis’s last novel, The Gods of Tango, dealt with similar themes and was extremely well received so fingers crossed this is this same!

10. On Swift Horses by Shannon Pufahl

Release Date: November 5th

What It’s About: In postwar America Muriel, a newlywed, moves with her husband from Kansas to San Diego, where she grows lonely and misses home, her mother who died before she turned 19, and her brother-in-law Julien. Julien, a thief and a free spirit, has taken to Las Vegas, where he works as a dealer, and falls in love with Henry, a devious card cheat. To escape the crushing realities of her new life Muriel begins visiting her local racetrack as Julian explores the Tijuana nightlife after Henry is run out of town.

Why I’m Interested: This sounds like a wild and exciting historical epic of sorts. We’re talking about thieves, Vegas, betting on horses, and extended family relationships and I really don’t know what’s not to love about this novel so far. This will be an exciting read, already compared to great western writers like Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx, and November frankly is starting to seem like too far away.

+1 Leading Men by Christopher Castellani

Release Date: February 12th

What It’s About: It’s July, 1953 when Tennessee Williams and his lover, Frank Merlo, first meet Anja Blomgren. Even in the glamour of Truman Capote’s Italian party, the (fictional) Swedish actress makes a lasting impression on the famed playwright and their chance encounter will drastically change the rest of their lives. Ten years later Frank is dying and Anja now lives as a recluse but both of them each have strong connections to that summer that they cannot let go.

Why I’m Interested: I’m a deep lover of Tennessee Williams and his work; I have been ever since I saw the film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire when I was a young girl. I’m intrigued to see how Castellani explores the life of and loves of a great artist, especially because while I love Tennessee I don’t actually know much about his life, as well as seeing how well he mixes both fact and fiction. This has already been released and has gotten great reviews so far, so needless to say I’m excited!

#anticipated releases #lgbt literature #queer literature

56 notes · View notes

thecinephale · 6 years

Photo

Redefining Romance with The Shape of Water and On Body and Soul

By the time Katharine and I met in November of 2015 I didn’t care about romance. This word that had consumed me since I was a child no longer made any sense. My celibate adolescence was spent scribbling love poems and consuming movies like (500) Days of Summer, Beginners, and Annie Hall. But I’d since realized my poetry sucked and that Woody Allen’s body of work was nothing to admire. I was casually sleeping with a close friend and grappling with the absence of a core part of my identity. Ever since I was four and told my sister’s best friend I had a crush on her, liking girls and turning that like into a personal narrative was part of me. It was my way of being close to women and how I’d come to terms with what kind of man I could be. I wasn’t effeminate, I was sensitive. I wasn’t girly, I was romantic.

And yet after years of crafting yarns from ordinary, or even non-existent, experiences, I was about to have my first truly cinematic meet-cute. Katharine and I met at Sleep No More during her very first performance. A friend of mine who worked there had been trying to get me to go for nearly a year and finally this night, for some reason, I caved. During the show I had four one-on-ones, immersive show lingo for private moments with performers, and I was more than satisfied with my experience. The show was just about over when I saw her, sitting on a suitcase at the end of an empty hall. Unsure if she was a performer or a tired audience member I slowly crept toward her. She stood up, took my hand, and we had a one-on-one. Later at the bar, my friend introduced us and we spent the rest of the night talking. A week later we were on a train together headed upstate.

This story is romantic in every way I could’ve hoped for as a teenager. And yet what I remember most from these weeks is the joy I felt getting to know Katharine. I was honestly a bit embarrassed having met her at Sleep No More since that place thrives off of people’s sometimes toxic fantasies. Especially because none of it felt that grand. I didn’t even think our first conversation could possibly be romantic until my friend asked me why I didn’t get her number. Our first date was upstate because she mentioned wanting to get out of the city before it got too cold and it seemed like a good idea. I didn’t know that she was the one. It was a date. I’d been on many first dates and planned to go on more. And while I did like her, I wasn’t obsessive. I liked her more on our second date than our first, and on our third date than our second, and today I’m more obsessed with her than I’ve ever been before.

There is a really simple explanation for this. Something about maturity and real, adult relationships. But this alone assumes that what I’d grown out of was romance, when in fact what I was really grappling with was male, heteronormative romance. I’d confronted the behaviors I’d copied for so long and realized they didn’t fit with who I was. But now what? A year and a half after Katharine and I met I came out to her and began transitioning.

***

It’s been a relief coming out, like I was holding my breath my entire life and can finally inhale and exhale like everyone else. So much of my life makes sense now in a way that it never did and I never thought it would. And one of the most rewarding aspects of my personal transition has been transitioning Katharine and I’s relationship as well, going from a seemingly heterosexual relationship to an openly lesbian one. There’s both liberation and emptiness in a relationship that is free from the vast majority of messaging received. Everything from fairy tales to Cosmo to the oeuvre of a known child molester has a lot less power when none of that stuff was ever meant to represent you. But there’s a reason why people enjoy that stuff. It feels good to be seen and it’s a relief to sink into fantasy. And while I’ve embraced the general umbrella by binge watching The L Word with Katharine and finally understanding my deep connection to Fun Home, Carol, and The Watermelon Woman, there’s still a searching for a love story like ours. A love story that feels outside of normalcy, that feels confusing and difficult and complicated yet ultimately just as fantastical and lovely. And it can’t just be solved by, say, a trans love story. I’d certainly welcome more of those (for now shout out to Sense8 and Her Story), but it’s deeper than that.

***

Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water is a ridiculous movie. That it’s currently the Oscar frontrunner is honestly astounding. Yes, it’s impeccably shot, designed, scored, written, and acted, but it’s also a movie that I’m at a loss to defend. On his podcast Keep It wonderful culture writer Ira Madison III was making fun of the movie and impersonated Octavia Spencer’s character with a simple “You fucking that fish?” I burst out laughing. Because it’s hilarious and because the scene in the movie isn’t actually that far off!

For anyone who hasn’t seen it, the film is about a mute woman named Eliza (the always great Sally Hawkins) who works as a cleaner at a government facility during the Cold War. The US attains a creature simply called “Amphibian Man” and Eliza falls in love with him (them?). So it’s sort of like Beauty and the Beast if Beast never really spoke, there was explicit sex, and Belle had a black best friend and a gay neighbor. There’s also a subplot with some Russians. And a musical number.

It’s goofy as hell and yet I spent a large portion of the movie in tears. It reached its scaly arm down my throat and grabbed my heart. Any moment where the Amphibian Man was on screen I had a voice in my head that just kept repeating, “That’s me. That’s me.” Now I don’t know what it says about where I’m at in my transition that I have an easier time relating to a fish man than Jamie Clayton’s awesome trans hacker on Sense8, but alas it’s the truth. Because if I’m being honest, I usually don’t feel like I’m being perceived as a woman, I rarely even feel like I’m being perceived as trans, but I do feel like I’m being perceived as a creature.

Watching Eliza not only fall in love with Amphibian Man but be the instigator of the relationship felt revolutionary and comforting in equal measure. Returning to Beauty and the Beast (also King Kong, also everything like this), it’s usually the creature that kidnaps or captures the virginal lady and has to convince her to love him. This always feels a little gross and undercuts the message of acceptance. But here Eliza is a sexual woman. From the beginning it’s shown that masturbation is a part of her daily routine. She doesn’t fall for the Amphibian Man because of a repressed desire. She falls for the creature because she feels a connection. She wants to help them live a life of freedom alongside her. She wants to teach the Amphibian Man how to live in her world because it would bring her happiness.

Katharine didn’t rescue me from a lab. But she has helped me escape… something. She has helped introduce me to a confusing world of feminine expectations and desires that feel comfortable and natural and also confusing and impossible. And above all else she has done this because she loves me. She isn’t still dating me because she’s a good person (no matter what other cis-es like to suggest). She’s still dating me because she sees me for who I am and loves me. I’m insecure about a lot of things, but I know this to be true and it means everything to me.

***

Ildikó Enyedi’s On Body and Soul, another Oscar nominee (a longshot in the Foreign Film category) has faced a similar reaction to Del Toro’s film. It won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, yet almost every review even when positive points out the film’s silly weirdness. Also a love story, this time between two humans, Enyedi’s first film in 18 years is about a pair of employees at a slaughterhouse who realize that they’re somehow having the exact same dream about two deer. The people are Endre, the emotionally detached manager with a disabled left arm, and Mária, the new quality control inspector who is autistic and quickly becomes the butt of her coworkers’ jokes.

Again, I understand the reaction. The very concept of a love story at a slaughterhouse (featuring graphic scenes of slaughter) is already a stretch. Add the hokiness of nocturnal destiny, a subplot involving stolen bull Viagra, some deeply unpleasant narrative turns, and a formal approach as reserved as its leads, it’s unsurprising that many don’t know how to receive this film. It’s too open-hearted for the arthouse yet it’s not exactly fine-tuned for Nicholas Sparks. But for me, this film lived up to its title and infiltrated my body and soul, I connected deeply, and wept softly. And I’ve been unable to shake it, that initial feeling only growing since the first viewing.

There is an obvious contrast between the dream sequences with Endre and Mária as deer and the real life sequences of animals in cages having their guts torn out. It’s easy to read this simply as a statement between the purity of their love and the harshness of the rest of the world. But this ignores the unreality of the deer scenes and the specificity of animal imagery. Because a main thread through the film is that Mária and Endre don’t know how to be animals. Or in other words: Endre does not know how to be a man and Mária does not know how to be a woman.

The two male foils to Endre are his best friend, Jenö, and a new hire, Sanyi. Jenö is married and despite proselytizing the merits of keeping women in their place he does whatever his wife wants. Endre watches with the remove of a scientist as Jenö carries out a charade where he is able to assert his supposed masculinity while filling his more passive role. Sanyi, on the other hand, is naturally alpha, flirting with every female co-worker and ignoring his male superiors. Endre seems to pity Jenö and resent Sanyi, but it quickly becomes clear that who he has the most disgust for is himself. He grows wildly defensive when he is caught ogling a woman, insisting that he simply looked like all men would. The woman didn’t even seem to notice and doesn’t seem to care. He then declares multiple times later in the film that he would prefer to remove love and sex from his life rather than deal with the impossibility of filling the role of “man” in these encounters. He’s given up on it all until he meets Mária.

Mária also has two foils, Klára, a voluptuous psychologist who interviews everyone after the bull Viagra incident, and Zsóka, the oldest employee at the slaughterhouse. Klára is everything Mária is not. She’s comfortable in her body and comfortable around men. She expresses her feelings, sometimes even to the point of aggression. When Mária retells Endre’s dream, she is unable to push back against Klára’s anger or defend herself. Zsóka, who is even more comfortable with her sexuality than Klára, is much kinder to Mária. Instead of judging, she attempts to coach her in the ways of womanhood. This, of course, means posture, how to walk and talk, and, most importantly, what clothes to wear. Mária attempts to master these skills, like she does later with sex, with an obsessive precision.

Mária’s experience of gender is intrinsically tied to her autism. Her lack of awareness in how to act as a woman is similar to her struggle to generally fit in as a person. I’m hesitant to find symbolism in her character or draw parallels between our lives since her experience is so different from my own. But in my unqualified opinion the film treats Mária with a respect and fullness that leaves her as open to analysis and connection as any other character. It’s not autism that becomes ingrained in the semiotics of the film but rather the world around this one autistic character, the world around Mária. And I couldn’t help but feel parallels both to Endre’s attempts at manhood and Mária’s learning of womanhood. I couldn’t help but watch this relationship unfolding in a harsh world and think of my own. Mária and Endre’s budding romance faces plenty of conflict throughout the film but there’s an overwhelming feeling of destiny between them. The conflicts are not a result of their incongruity but rather the difficulties and pressures of their surroundings. Any conflicts within themselves are related to their individual difficulties with the world at large.

The dream sequences aren’t just beautiful and serene. They are otherworldly. Literally. The plane on which Mária and Endre connect is outside of real life. Their connection is dependent on both of them finding it within themselves to detach from their discomfort with society. In their dreams it is easy, but in life that’s really hard. Because it’s not healthy to completely detach (as fun as rainy days cuddling can be). The necessity is being able to carry on normal life with your partner and face a mutual unbelonging from our world. From our ableist world. From our gendered world. From our heteronormative world. From our transphobic world.

My connection to this film is reliant both on its silly romanticism and its severe honesty. Because that’s how I feel. Being with Katharine feels like it’s on another plane of being, in how I feel about her, in how happy it makes me to be near her, and yet real life can be really hard. This film shows the beauty in getting through that hardship with another person, the pressures it can place on a relationship, and the ultimate reward of working through it all together.

***

The Shape of Water and On Body and Soul have allowed me to articulate something about myself and my relationship that I’d previously failed to do. They taught me that romance, not just love but gooey-eyed, goofy capital R Romance, can be for all of us. That romantic doesn’t have to mean arrogant poems or chasing after girls in the rain. It can mean connecting with somebody when you feel less than human, it can mean facing a society that doesn’t want you with the help of another. And, most importantly, that this can all be silly and over-the-top in a way that will make half the audience laugh and half the audience cry. These films destroyed a line between romance and mature relationship that I’d taken as fact even though my own relationship is such an obvious combination of the two. They allowed me to see myself in a new way, to see Katharine in a new way, and to appreciate our relationship even more than I already did.

So I’ll say it here. On social media, like an adolescent that will someday regret such an embarrassing overshare. I’m deeply, madly, overwhelmingly in love.

Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all.

#Valentine's Day #The Shape of Water #On Body and Soul #love stories #queer love #Guillermo Del Toro #Ildikó Enyedi #LGBTQIA #trans #transgender

36 notes · View notes

theconservativebrief · 6 years

Link

After more than eight years of shenanigans involving candy people, alternate universes, vampires, nearly 3,000 wiki pages’ worth of lore, some highly unusual exclamations (“Mathematical!”), and bacon pancakes, Cartoon Network’s beloved Adventure Time is coming to a close.

Since its debut in 2010, the series has evolved into one of the most popular and influential programs in the channel’s history. Despite being first and foremost a kids’ show, it built a sizable fan base among older audiences and gained mounting psychological and even philosophical weight over its 10-season run. The September 3 series finale marks the end of an era in imagining new storytelling possibilities, not just for cartoons but for TV in general.

Adventure Time spans nearly 300 11-minute episodes involving hundreds of distinct characters — so it’s no easy feat to describe. But in brief, it takes place 1,000 years after a nuclear apocalypse known as the “Mushroom War” warps the Earth into a fantasy landscape; its main setting, the Land of Ooo, is populated by offbeat creatures and people made of candy, fire, or “lumpy space,” among other things.

A young boy named Finn (Jeremy Shada) is apparently the last human being on the planet, and he and his foster brother/best friend — a shape-shifting dog named Jake (John DiMaggio) — have taken it upon themselves to be as helpful around Ooo as possible. They lend their treasure-hunting, monster-fighting, errand-running prowess to their many friends and neighbors, and along the way, the complex backstory of Adventure Time’s characters and their world is unspooled.

That supremely odd summary belies the fact that Adventure Time has sneakily persisted as one of the most critically acclaimed shows of the 2010s. When considering the recent “Golden Age” of TV, few would rank it alongside the likes of Breaking Bad, Mad Men, or Game of Thrones. And yet it has received high praise from sources as wide-ranging as the A.V. Club, the New Yorker, NPR, and this very site.

In addition to being aimed at kids, Adventure Time lies at the intersection of multiple artistic categories that often struggle to attract serious critical consideration — namely, animation, fantasy, and short-form episodic TV (which for a long time was mainly the playground of experimental Adult Swim shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force). Still, it has won over many critics. And though its erratic airing schedule has led to a decline in viewership and prestige in its later years, it has maintained a consistent standard of quality nonetheless.

With its series finale now on the horizon, let’s take a look back at the brilliance of Adventure Time, both as a singular achievement and as a show that has left a lasting impact on the TV landscape.

Adventure Time began as a short film made for Nicktoons. After the short leaked online and subsequently went viral, creator Pendleton Ward was able to successfully pitch it to Cartoon Network as a series. Produced in 2006, it exemplifies the “random” style of internet humor of that time, pioneered by the likes of Homestar Runner, eBaum’s World, and Newgrounds.

[embedded content]

In just under seven minutes, a boy and his dog fight an ice-powered, princess-abducting king, with a brief dream excursion to Mars for a pep talk from Abraham Lincoln, before ultimately running off to confront some ninjas who have stolen an old man’s diamonds (ninjas were to internet comedy in the mid-2000s what bacon would be to it in the early 2010s). Millions of people loved it when it hit (the then-young) YouTube, and the short was eventually nominated for an Annie Award.

Once Adventure Time the show made its Cartoon Network debut, it found instant success and regularly drew millions of viewers per episode for many years. Examining the phenomenon, critics have often cited the show’s broad appeal for both kids and adults as a big reason for its popularity.

Cartoons have long embraced an anything-goes sensibility, but Adventure Time took the approach to a new level. Every single episode would pack its brief running time with strange new characters, places, and ideas: A vampire who drinks the color red. A pack of sentient balloons eager to die. An imaginative robot that “switches places” with its reflection. And to fit within the 11-minute runtime of each episode, it all came at the audience at a breathless pace.

Animated shorts are as old as television itself, but Adventure Time spurred a revival of the format, especially on Cartoon Network. The show also led the way in turning “random” humor and world-building from a niche interest into what is now practically an industry standard, not just for animated series aimed at kids but for adult-oriented ones as well. Shows like BoJack Horseman and Rick and Morty demonstrate a common willingness to indulge the strange, an instinct that Adventure Time arguably introduced to the mainstream.

It didn’t stop there. Even as Adventure Time told bizarre tales of trickster gods from Mars and penguins that turned out to be world-threatening alien abominations, it worked hard to incorporate them into its complicated backstory and world, maintaining dense continuity through multiple long-running story arcs. In the grand tradition of prestige TV, it featured overarching plots about Finn’s search for his birth parents, or the recurring threat of the fearsome undead sorcerer the Lich. And yet it also made time for many standalone episodes, sometimes ultimately folding them into the larger picture, with major characters like Marceline the Vampire Queen being introduced in apparent one-off installments.

Adventure Time’s penchant for experimentation was both admirable and skillfully executed. The show didn’t hesitate to hand over multiple episodes to guest directors simply to riff on a different animation style. It occasionally adopted an idiosyncratic airing schedule, where several new episodes would drop over the course of a single week and then months would go by with nothing new. While the inconsistency sometimes hurt Adventure Time’s ratings, the show’s creative team used the “episode bomb” approach to produce several miniseries that featured some of its most ambitious ideas and set pieces.

Despite the show’s overall comedic tone, it handled its biggest ideas with gravitas and sincere emotion. And for all the manic energy it could indulge, Adventure Time never hesitated to slow down for a scene or two, or even a whole episode. American animation sometimes has trouble simply putting breathing space into shows and movies — superfluous gestures, brief pauses, and other moments that aren’t necessarily propelling the plot forward. Hayao Miyazaki once explained this to Roger Ebert as ma, the soundless beats between claps of the hand. Adventure Time had lots of ma.

Look at this scene from the “Stakes” miniseries, in the episode “Everything Stays.” In less than a minute, the episode creates an extraordinary evocation of intimacy between a parent and child. The animators inject dozens of little gestures to establish this feeling — note the brief shot in which young Marceline strokes her mother’s arm. And then the scene is over, and it’s on to the next beat.

[embedded content]

This kind of formal economy, doing a lot in precious little time, is rare in television. Today, many prestige shows are running longer with each installment yet still struggle to carve out time for characters to simply be. They could learn something from Adventure Time, a show that used its 11-minute episodes to explore myriad genre ideas and flights of fancy, and to demonstrate the endless potential of simply being artistically open and flexible.

Every single character on Adventure Time, from the regulars to the one-episode guests, had a distinct voice. And I don’t mean in terms of acting (though the show’s voice acting was excellent), but in how each person spoke. The writers gave everyone a unique slang, or attitude, or cadence to work with.

Finn and Jake had their own adolescence-inflected goofy rapport and strange swears (“Aw, dingle!” “Algebraic!”). Marceline was a laid-back slacker punk rocker. Princess Bubblegum was officious and scientifically minded. Finn and Jake’s parents, who only appeared in a few episodes, had ’30s-style trans-Atlantic accents (“Make like there’s egg in your shoe and beat it!”). One episode set in an alternate universe introduced an entirely different future lingo. No character was too minor to be considered as a distinct individual.

Adventure Time frequently devoted entire episodes to fleshing out secondary characters, sometimes shining a spotlight on someone who had only existed in the background for the entire show up to that point. It drew up complex inner lives for the likes of characters with names like “Root Beer Guy” — a sentient, walking mug of soda — and “Cinnamon Bun.”

And what it could do for its main characters was even more impressive. Some of them were hundreds of years old, with a few of them predating the Mushroom War, and as we got to know them better, we came to understand a long history of regrets, which stemmed first from the act of survival and then from trying to build a new society out of the ruins. Their arcs were contrasted with the subtle but definable trajectories of Finn and Jake, who slowly matured over the course of the show from goofballs to responsible figures.

Many episodes of Adventure Time took detours to toss out different philosophical challenges, aiming them at both the characters and the audience. In one, Finn got trapped in another world and lived an entire lifetime there before returning to his own as a child again. In another, Finn and Jake confronted a population of people willingly submitting to a Matrix-like virtual reality existence. In a sequence emblematic of the series’ simultaneous whimsical tone and intellectual seriousness, one character mused: “What’s real? Your eyes think the sky is blue, but that’s just sun rays farting apart in the barf of our atmosphere. The sky is black.”

Adventure Time dared to be anything and everything, often at the same time. It was a silly, plotless kids’ show. It was an epic fantasy adventure. It was a long-term coming-of-age story. It was an experimental exercise. It was a stoner’s dream. It was a relationship drama. It was a heartbreaker.

Episodic television offers a canvas unique among the arts: time. The best shows make use of this canvas to tell their stories as creatively and ambitiously as they can; Adventure Time used it to become one of the best television series of its day.

Adventure Time’s four-part finale, “Come Along With Me,” airs Monday, September 3, on Cartoon Network.

Original Source -> An ode to Adventure Time, one of TV’s most ambitious — and, yes, most adventurous — shows

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

0 notes