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umbraja · 4 years

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Body Hair Positivity: Good or Gross?

It’s been a trend lately to embrace a more diverse image of beauty. Freckles and muffin tops, dark skin and curly hair, scars, tattoos, unusual proportions, crooked teeth, pretty much anything is supposed to be accepted under the banner of Body Positivity.

But what about body hair?

And I’m not just talking about armpits or legs. I also mean unusual body hair. The kind people don’t talk about. The kind women aren’t “supposed” to have: chest hair, happy trails, beards, back hair. The kind that doctors call hirsutism and is often associated with hormonal imbalances from things like Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, Cushing Syndrome, medication side effects, menopause, or even just genetics. It affects somewhere between 5%-10% of women depending on the region surveyed but may be higher as it can often go undiagnosed.

It’s not like we’re taught how healthy body hair should look.

Humans have been removing body hair since before recorded history. Archaeologists have found evidence of early humans using clam shells and shark teeth to remove body hair. Ancient Egyptians are well known for their full body waxes. Ancient Greeks considered it “uncivilized” for a woman to have pubic hair. Roman boys celebrated their entry into manhood with a mandatory first shave. And medieval European Ladies plucked daily to remove all hair from their brows, temples, and neck - some even plucked their eyelashes. The “New World” was no stranger to body hair removal either. Thomas Jefferson, and many others, wrote of some Native Americans’ depilatory obsession.

“With [Native Americans] it is disgraceful to be hairy on the body. They say it likens them to hogs. They therefore pluck the hair as fast as it appears.” - Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

In the non-native US, body hair removal wasn’t really a big thing until the 20th century when we did a complete 180 on the subject. Before that Puritan values made sure that most body hair was covered by clothing so few bothered to remove it since no one was gonna see what was under all that cloth. Now recent studies say that 93 to 99 percent of American women regularly remove their body hair, making it one of our most widely practiced beauty norms. Girls as young as 10 are pressured into shaving, waxing, plucking, threading, anything to remove errant hairs as soon as they start to sprout. Refusal to do so leaves us open to bullying, both on the playground and in the office. Visible body hair can cost a woman jobs, promotions, and relationships so most of us remove it, no matter the cost. Which one study worked out to be more than $10,000 over the course of her life for the average American woman who shaves. If she waxes instead the bill goes over $23,000.

So what happened?

“Where eighteenth-century naturalists and explorers considered hair-free skin to be the strange obsession of indigenous peoples, Cold War-era commentators blithely described visible body hair on women as evidence of a filthy, ‘foreign’ lack of hygiene.” - Rebecca Herzig, Plucked, a History of Hair Removal

The driving forces behind hair removal in America are the same three that cause most of the nation’s problems: greed, sexism, and racism. Let’s go in chronological order.

As the “Age of Enlightenment” began to secularize European politics, Imperialists needed a new excuse to justify their expansion into non-European territory. Naturalists like the still famous Charles Darwin handed them pseudoscience. It’s debatable whether or not these naturalists intended their work to be used as the foundation for white supremacist ideology that still plagues us today but there’s no question about how racists interpreted it. They saw evolution as a line that went from ape through colored people and ends at Aryan. Real science tells us that’s not at all correct and if anyone is closer to cave man it’s white people who often have Neanderthal in their DNA. But they didn’t have genetic sequencers back then so they used physical traits to “prove” it instead. Part of this was a gross mischaracterization that body hair could be used to determine a person’s place within the line of human evolution. They claimed people with coarse, dark hair were closer to apes and those with thin, light hair were more evolved. Guess who picked up on that concept in the 20th century.

Darwin further complicated matters in his attempt to explain why some white people were hairier than some indigenous populations by associating hairiness with evolutionary backsliding and mental illness.

“[Hairiness in Europeans] is due to partial reversion; for characters which have been at some former period long inherited are always apt to return. We have seen that idiots are often very hairy, and they are apt to revert in other characters to a lower animal type.” - Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

Other scientists and even medical experts of the time ran with this idea and before long the educated elite considered hairiness (along with other non-Aryan traits) to be a symptom of disease, insanity, and criminal violence. The uneducated masses were more familiar with freak show displays of unusually hairy people as “missing links” to our primate ancestors. Both cases considered having body hair to be a very bad thing. They’re also very bad science and not at all true.

Despite these very strong, racist feelings about body hair, it still wasn’t common for American women to remove it beyond the upper lip, neck, jaw, or between the eyebrows. Most women don’t have much hair there and those that did rarely had time or money to invest in removing it. Also they wouldn’t be caught dead admitting they had to so historical records might not be accurate about how many women actually plucked. For the first half of American history peach fuzz and other light hair was seen as normal and clothes covered the rest. But the 20th century not only saw women wearing less cloth and showing more skin it also saw them calling for gender equality. Critics of women’s liberation often accused suffragettes of sexual inversion - aka acting too much like men, which they saw as an abhorrent threat. To really drive this point home they often depicted women’s rights activists as being hairy, thus politicizing our pits. Pair this with the “hygiene” movement’s embrace of already mentioned racist views on body hair and you have a recipe for weaponized shame.

“Self-consciousness brings timidity, restrained action and awkwardness. The use of Del-a-tone relieves the mind from anxious watchfulness of movement.” - 1919 Del-a-tone depilatory advertisement

Enter Capitalism. Producers of hair removal products wanted to up sales so they did the exact same thing that was done with every other beauty product on the market - shame women into buying their stuff. It’s debatable if this was motivated purely by greed, in an attempt to reach an untapped market, or if the resulting gender oppression was intentional but men were spared of this aggressive shaming (until recently at least). Women, on the other hand, were flooded with advertisements for body hair removal products. From the first “razor for women” in 1915 to 21st century laser hair removal ads, women are constantly being reminded of our body hair. It doesn’t take a genius seeing ads that call smooth skin “attractive” or “sanitary” to extrapolate the opposite - that body hair is ugly, and dirty. A series of ads for Del-a-tone depilatory products even called it “necessary” for sleeveless fashion and suggests that not using their product will lead to social anxiety. Pair that with only ever using shaved models in all of fashion advertising and you send a pretty clear message: female body hair is something to be ashamed of. Advertising works. Now most American women actually feel gross if they’ve missed a shave, despite body hair being perfectly natural and not at all dirty. This disgust is so strong it has even bled over into an aversion toward male body hair which has seen a sharp decline in popularity since the shaggy chested disco days. Now men are being inundated with “manscaping” advertisements and expectations of manicured if not completely removed body hair.

So that’s the background but where’s this going?

While female body hair removal is firmly ingrained in western beauty standards, a new generation of women are rebelling against those ideals - body hair included. Recent studies have shown a shift in body hair trends among young women. Only 77% percent of women 16 to 24 reported regularly shaving their pits in 2016 and 85% shaved their legs, down from 95% and 92% respectively just two years prior. Since then we’ve started to see models, celebrities, and everyday women with unshaven pits and hairy legs. Body positivity campaigns have even gotten a few advertisers to include body hair in their ads. Now you can see razors actually shaving hair from women’s bodies instead of inexplicably running over baby smooth skin.

Women have always told ourselves that hair removal is a choice but we’ve never before been encouraged to choose not doing it. Instead we’ve been brainwashed to think it’s dirty and disgusting and that no one will accept us for being hairy. Today’s young woman is actually presented with a choice, “to shave or not to shave” and a lot of them are choosing not to. Which is great news for people like me who have hirsutism and are sick of being shamed for how nature made us.

But we’ve still got a very long way to go before I can be confident that my neck beard won’t hold me back both socially and professionally. A lot of the women who have publicly displayed body hair in recent years have come under attack by people calling them various shades of “gross” and some have even been sent death threats. It’s one thing for a rich and famous Hollywood movie star to take that kind of risk but for an autistic office worker living in a conservative backwater that’s a whole different game.

Whatever your thoughts and feelings on body hair, America still hasn’t escaped the shame of the last hundred years. Women are still very much judged for being hairy. A lot of people still think it’s gross. I’m not one of them but I’m full of unpopular opinions.

#body hair #body posititivity #history

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dreamswanderintobears · 3 years

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Lasting Impacts of Media

In this reflection, my topic is a blend of personal reflection and readdressing the impacts of the media culture you grew up in. My posts throughout the class haven't been wholly consistent or on a single theme, but most of them have some degree of personal reflection. It's always tough to look critically back on your past and judge yourself by a more modern standard or readdress what you thought of as normal. Growing up, I lived a very illiberal life as an upper-middle-class white boy in the South, and confronting that isn't an easy task. Through this class and the commonplace book project, I've had the chance to once again look back at myself and my surroundings critically. From dwelling on my childhood and questioning the narrow worldview, I grew up in and how it's followed me in life. It even comes down to the media I consumed regularly and the way it impacts my worldview. Changing something so monumental isn't a five-step program to success; it's adaption and understanding wrapped around an effort to be better for everyone around you. Was my worldview wrong when I was young? No, I don't believe it was, but my worldview only included that white perspective, which left me incredibly ill-informed. This issue isn't a new one for me, it's one I started delving into back in High School, but this class helped me be critical about myself in a way I'd not taken enough time to do. I was able to look back at how I was raised and reevaluate the impact of my upbringing.

One of the significant aspects of my life that this class has given me a lot to think about is the early media I consumed as a child. In the TedTalk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, she says, 'I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the show, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out.' about how all the characters in her stories were white because all the stories she'd read had white main characters, so her writing reflected that. Already in this semester, I've spoken about how I've come to realize I read books in a very similar way. Looking back, the most diverse main character I grew up with was an actual cat; I'm referring to the Warrior Cats books; outside of those books, most of the stories had main characters that read as white to me; Percy Jackson, Ranger's Apprentice, Harry Potter, Ender's Game. Greek Mythology was also a significant aspect of my life as a child, yet every time I looked at a greek god, they were white. The books I'd pick up in the library would be full of pale gods and goddesses that only reflected my ignorance back at me. That kind of constant exposure impacts a child, and by the time I'd start to watch movies, it seemed wholly normal to me for everyone in a film to be dominated by white actors. I looked at Star Wars and saw no fault in the white-dominated film or Harry Potter and the three white leads. So, when I first heard the term white-washing it seemed silly, even illogical to me. To the point where I was resistant against the topic as many uninformed people tend to be. At that point in time, it was normal for me to see a white lead in nearly every movie. There's no one case that I think back on as the turning point for me in my life, but I know it came in High School, where I left the South to head north to a boarding school. There, I interacted with more liberal thinkers, and by that point, movies were beginning to shift towards inclusion. Making it easier for me to start picking up shows with a more diverse set of characters and breaking the view of 'normal' I'd grown up with. At that point, I wasn't fully aware of how my view of the world was changing, but looking back in this class has given me the personal understanding to grasp that. Already, I've spoken about the media I consume, its white-washing, and how that impacted me, that was then; what about now? Earlier in the semester, I made a post about the diversity of Audible's narrators. In High School, I made the switch from regular reading to audiobooks, and the narrators were never something I'd thought about even as I listened, but they introduced an element that added something for me to grasp and build a mental picture around. Audible isn't always perfect with their narrators, sometimes they're simply awful for the book they're reading, but it's when Audible gets it right that the story shines because it's not your internal voice building the story; it's a narrator who embodies the story and works their hardest to embrace the emotion and thought put into the story by the author. I've mentioned it before in one of my other posts, but for me, I listened to the books for class, and I know my experience with the books would be lessened by reading them on my own. Some narrators don't need to do much, they can read a story in their own voice, and it sounds perfect; other narrators bring every element of themselves to the table, including voices and accents some have learned in their acting career. It gives the character's stories a literal voice and emotional weight as the narrators lend their own emotions to a story. The movies and shows I watch in a week have drastically changed; culturally, we've moved away from white-washing, so it's far easier to slide into a new show with a diverse cast. Shows like the Expanse show a far more diverse version of the future than what appeared not ten years ago. Popular franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars have moved towards better diversity, though there's still room for them to grow. There are still white-dominated shows like the Crown, but there are no stereotypical depictions of other races. Some moments highlight the diversity of the Commonwealth, and the show goes into other issues like mental health and gender in politics. Or take the stageplay, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child; for some fans, it's accepted that Hermione is black and not white like in the movies. That fact was realized on stage when Noma Dumezweni played Hermione in 2016 for the first and subsequent productions of the Cursed Child. Not every tv show or movie gets the chance to reinvent itself or casually rewrite the past to create inclusion where there was none. Where things change the most is when you take the time to reread books with a different worldview. Personally, when I listen to Harry Potter now, my mental images of the characters are radically different; they read as other people from the characters we see in the movies. Sometimes, it's worth going back to an old book you once read to reread the book and see if it reads the same way. Post after post, I've exposed little bits about myself and my own experiences with the topics we're covering in class. By the end, you might be wondering what am I getting at by outing myself like this? Truthfully, there's nothing I can gain by throwing myself out there, but maybe if I can get my readers thinking, they'll go back and reevaluate themselves, and they can gain something. Their reevaluation might not benefit me in any way, but I'd hope they might grow as a person and better understand the impacts of their childhood on their own day-to-day life. We, as humans, have this habit of neglecting our past; we'll leave it behind and forget about it without taking the time to evaluate it and leaving it to impact our daily lives again and again in subtle ways. It's not until classes like this that students find themselves prompted to look back or move out of their comfort zone. By doing so, they might gain insights into themselves or, at the very least, come out of the class with a better understanding of the world around them.

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ariainstars · 4 years

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Star Wars: Fatalism Against the „I Wish” Moment

Here it goes again, the question as to why The Rise of Skywalker sucked. Sigh. It just can’t leave me alone, can it?

After the first two chapters, honestly, I was expecting the sequel trilogy to become as good (or almost) as the original one. But precisely the last chapter set the seal on one of its worst problems: the lack of agenda.

I love musical theatre. And one of its most beautiful sides is that it teaches you so much about storytelling. Now what makes a story, a character truly compelling? The conflict. Without a conflict, something that has to shift the narrative from A to D going through B and C, nothing makes sense. And in a good story, the conflict is set up right from the start. We meet someone and we are supposed to identify with them due to their agency.

Heroes With An Agenda

To name an example, there is “Into the Woods”, one of my favorite musicals which retells some classic fairy tales with own interpretations and unexpected twists; and it opens with an iconic ensemble number called “I Wish”. (If you’re unfamiliar with it, you might want to check out the 2014 film.) We get to know a bunch of people who all want something, and we follow them through the narrative as some of them get their wish (though not exactly the way they expected it); then are confronted with the backlash, the consequences, the price to pay for the things they wanted.

With Star Wars now belonging to Disney, it is only legitimate to make a few comparisons with Disney movies.

In The Little Mermaid, Ariel’s song is “Part of That World”, setting up her character as someone who wants for something that fascinates her: the world of humans.

Quasimodo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, wants to leave his tower and live among other humans, even if only in for a day.

Belle from Beauty and the Beast is introduced to us explaining how she wishes to explore the world outside of the small village she’s living in.

A somewhat disappointing Disney heroine was Merida in Brave: despite the films’ title, the story fails at making its protagonist compelling due to her lack of agenda. Merida knows what she does not want, i.e. becoming like her mother, because she’s a different kind of girl: but she does not know what she actually wants from life. It is quite fitting that in the end she manages to restore and improve the relationship to her mother but does not really change her, or her family’s or her kingdom’s situation. Merida does not grow up. Her story is nice enough, but not really compelling.

Disney “princesses” are often criticized for wanting nothing but a partner from life, and sometimes settling down with a man even if that was not their main goal at the start. But we have e.g. Moana, a girl who wants to help her family and her people and to restore balance in nature. Not surprisingly, her story is interesting and convincing.

Antiheroes With An Agenda

Perspective is hugely important for a narrative: authors can use it in order to manipulate the audience’s perception of a story in order to make us identify with someone although he is a negative character. Two examples I came across with lately are Joker (Arthur Fleck) and Hannah from the Girls TV series. Both these characters have personal agendas that in the end don’t get their fulfilment.

We know from the beginning that Arthur will become the Joker, but the film follows him and his social background so closely that we watch everything from his point of view, which makes us sympathize with him despite what he becomes in the end.

Arthur is poor, mentally ill, in charge of a sick mother, friendless; but he believes he can make a great breakthrough as a comedian. He is at the bottom of the social scale and still believes he can make it to the top; it is only all too clear that he is deluded and that none of the people he admires would move a finger to help him. Though he becomes a criminal, his story is a tragedy; he was born and raised under circumstances that hardly offered him room for a simple, satisfying life. His dreams were all he had. Which is why we feel with him, even if from a moral standpoint we know we shouldn’t.

Hannah is a toxic personality if I ever saw one onscreen; but she officially is the protagonist, she’s female who wants a career, she has “friends”, she is “sexually independent”, so as female viewers we will automatically identify with her, or at least try. (Personally, after a while I came to the conclusion that about 75 % of the other character’s problems would quickly find an end if they simply shot Hannah and buried her without a funeral, with a few silver crosses to make sure she never comes back.)

However, Hannah is not from a poor family, she has an education, she has friends. She has things she wants, nothing she desperately needs, like Arthur needs employment or medication. Her whole attitude is subject to her desire to become a famous writer, so her story is about exploring and observing other people’s weaknesses, often even eliciting them for the worse. I find it interesting that when we learn how she first met Adam, he caught her stealing. Apparently, Hannah never understood that you can’t simply take but also have to give something back. Their relationship is so typical for the story because it looks like Adam is using her (mostly sexually), while she is using him in order to make “experiences”, playing with his feelings instead of giving him the chance to grow and mature into a responsible man. Girls always had a bleak undertone; but by manipulating our perspective making her the pivotal character, the authors made us care about Hannah although she is someone who did not deserve it in the first place.

My guess: what makes these two antiheroes in the first place, from a moral perspective, is perhaps the fact that both feel entitled to their dream and won’t settle for less. Disney heroes usually get their wish fulfilment because they go through the moment of openly and innocently admitting their dreams without Arthur’s or Hannah’s latent arrogance.

Now to Star Wars... The Classics

One of the reasons why we so easily identify with Luke Skywalker in A New Hope is because he is introduced to us as someone who dreams. He has a personal wish - leaving his home planet, meeting new people, living adventures and contributing to the future of the galaxy. The “Binary Sunset” scene is not iconic without reason: in a musical, this would have been the moment where he would have broken into song. 😊

Don’t kill me, but Disney’s Hercules reminds me a little of Luke in his first grand scene: he also looks at a sunset, saying that he would go most anywhere to find where he belongs. (Maybe Lucas knew well why he sold the rights to Star Wars to the Disney studios of all places.)

This continues through his other two films: Luke always has a strong agenda. He learns the ways of the Jedi through Obi-Wan (who interestingly never actually questions whether he wants that at all) and Yoda, but his first priority always are his friends. Saving who he loves is what drives him on all of the time, even if this may seem foolish at times - like traveling all alone to Bespine where Han and Leia are kept hostage, or wanting to save his father although he is a dangerous criminal.

Star Wars In-Between

Rogue One and Solo are well-made, interesting films, too, because the protagonists know what they want. The Clone Wars is one long story explaining Ahsoka’s development from a Jedi to someone who relinquishes the Jedi’s ways. The Mandalorian wants to follow “The Way”, i.e. his code of honor, in order to help as many war foundlings as he can. This is what you need to do in order to make a story compelling.

Star Wars Prequels

One of the weaknesses which I see to this day in the prequels is that we so rarely witness someone’s personal agenda; the stories are more driven by the plot than by the persons. A few desires are hinted at and never pursued.

“I’m going to be the first to see all of them” (the stars). - Anakin in The Phantom Menace

“At last we will reveal ourselves to the Jedi. At last we will have revenge.” Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace

What became of Anakin’s desire to explore the galaxy? And revenge from what, if you please? I can understand that the Sith were a byproduct of the Jedi’s rejection of the Dark Side, their weaknesses all projected unto them: but this also is never explored.

What did Anakin, Padmé, Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon etc. want, after all? When did they ever say or show clearly what they wanted, and what they would do for the purpose? Qui-Gon wants to train Anakin by will of the Force, Obi-Wan wants to train him because Qui-Gon asked him to. The Jedi want to keep the status quo of the Republic and the Jedi Order. There is no actual heart-felt wish from their side. The only person relentlessly pursuing his aims is Palpatine, the mastermind behind the stage.

Padmé has her political aims, but they are not a really personal agenda for her. She wants to help people who were enslaved or hungry or otherwise suffering, but she does not know such situations from own experience. Her personal wish is having a family, but in her case it is not as passionate as in Anakin’s, who had lost the only family he had with his mother. Add to this that the scene where she talks with Anakin about this desire of hers was unfortunately cut out from Attack of the Clones.

The compassionate and protective Anakin wants to keep the ones he cares for safe. Interestingly though, the films rarely show us his perspective, we usually rather see other people reacting to him; and since the Jedi always brainwash him not to “let his personal feelings get in the way”, Anakin comes over more as a whiny brat than as a conflicted human being we can sympathize with.

Revenge of the Sith is, though a terrible story, a very well-made film and emotionally very demanding because Anakin finally takes his destiny into his own hands. But it is also not very satisfying, because he wants to prevent things from happening and doesn’t actually have a definite, positive aim in mind. Still when he speaks to Padmé on Mustafar he tells her that he would overthrow Palpatine for her and rule the galaxy according to their wishes; but even in this moment he sounds insecure and confused, and his ideas are everything but clear.

The Sequels

The same procedure all over again. Finn wants to get away from the First Order, but where does he want to go? It is only hinted at that he wants a girlfriend (“Do you have a boyfriend?”), and not thematized again. Poe already is a Resistance fighter from the start, no personal aim there either. Rey wants her family back: she does nothing but waiting. On Takodana, we literally see her running from her fate after her vision with the Skywalker legacy sabre. In The Last Jedi, she says she needs someone to show her her place. She says to Luke that she is afraid. Again, she has no agenda.

Kylo was pursuing Luke, but why? What exactly had happened between uncle and nephew before the fatal night at the Temple, why was Kylo’s resentment so deep? He killed his father because he was coerced; he did not actually want it. Later he wanted Rey, but why, if she was almost always aggressive towards him?

The Last Jedi finally seemed to make up for all of these lacks. Rose was such a powerful character because while she always did everything in her power for the cause, she never forgot or let go of her personal feelings and desires, like keeping Finn safe, inspiring hope in the Canto Bight children, freeing the fathiers.

The moment Rey ships herself on the Supremacy, Ben kills Snoke and then both team up against the Praetorian Guards is so powerful because both of them, at last, have an agenda, and they pursue it together. It’s a moment of relief for the audience, what we had been waiting for all along: finding out what all of this was about - the Force working in balance. Naively, many of us then assumed this trilogy would be about Ben and Rey finding balance and a happy ending together.

Then The Rise of Skywalker made our frustration flare up again. Rey wants to become a Jedi because Leia expects her to; she kills Palpatine because he wants her to do it; the voices of all Jedi encourage her… great. No personal agenda all over again. Ben saves her from death because he loves her, very well. Then he dies. Han, Leia and Luke all wanted him to come “home”, i.e. back to the Light Side, and they died for the purpose. It seems wanting something is dangerous in itself in this galaxy. And Rey ends up alone on Tatooine. Again, what does she want there?

So It Was All... Fate?

Han, Leia and Luke were much more compelling characters than Rey - their aims were sometimes misguided, but at least they had them and they were clearly defined. Even Palpatine has an aim: it is veiled (typically for him), but it is there. He knows that his spirit will live on in the person who manages to kill him. So, he is still more powerful than Rey. It looks like Rey defeated him, but the truth is that he used her naïve faith that she could erase him by killing him in order to reach his own aim: living on in a younger, more innocent person who believes that being a “Jedi”, she is doing the right thing.

We may of course argue that the Force is behind all of this; but as intriguing as the Force is, it is not a person. When we follow a story, we want living persons to think and feel and suffer and be hopeful and joyful for. It is all very well if characters want different things or maybe want the wrong things; but at least, their wishes ought to be understandable, and if they don’t come true, we would like to know why, instead of being left with... “reasons”. It is hard to identify with a character if we never learn what drives them after all. I daresay it would be more satisfying to see them pursue an aim and fail, than never to understand what they’re about, what their heart’s wish is.

I have argued over and over that the ways of the Jedi, i.e. sacrificing everything to a cause, and individual aims are naturally opposite to one another. If there will ever be Balance, future Force-sensitive creatures must find a way in between. But again, this is not openly said and the audience has to either resign to the fact that the films are badly made, or to scavenge them for months searching for messages. Of course, there is nothing wrong with using ones’ own brains. But I would like to leave a cinema after a Star Wars film feeling satisfied. The Rise of Skywalker did not only leave many questions unanswered; in many instances, it did not even start posing the questions.

“Into the Woods” is not a story with a happy ending. One of its messages is that you need to be careful about what you wish for, but I think that’s all right if the moral implications of getting one’s wish are explored. Which with the Star Wars prequels and sequels was not the case - people suffer and die for decades, and in the end, the story goes nowhere. The events of the prequels took place because “they were meant to”; same with the sequels. Anakin turned evil because it was his fate, his grandson the same because it was fate, Rey took over the Jedi mantle although she is not in the least suited for it, but it was her fate so we have to accept it. No wonder everyone is disappointed.

Star Wars saga, what do you have in store next? After more than 30 years, I dearly hope, someone who actually has an aim and purses it this time. And doesn’t have to die in the process, thank you very much.

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legobiwan · 4 years

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Just got home from The Rise of Skywalker. No pithy intro, I’m just going to jump right in and it’s going to be a LONG rant here so buckle up, my friends, and be sure to read below the cut. SPOILERS AHOY YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

Okay, so yes, the first third of the movie went at a blistering, nearly nonsensical pace. JJ really had to cram a whole watermelon’s worth of exposition into a...well, you know, there was a lot to take in. This movie had to do so much telling instead of showing because it was such a departure (and middle finger to TLJ) from what came before.

The thing was, the first third was also the most interesting part of the movie. I actually wish the whole trilogy had started with all of the Sith nonsense. (Actually, I wish they had started with Kylo absolutely wrecking shit like he did and then the Palpatine scene. People would have made all the wrong assumptions and it would have been glorious to unravel it over three films.) There is a strong history of Sith artifacts in both Nu-Canon and Legends, and it wouldn’t have been out of place, considering what we know now, to have made Rey, Poe, and Finn’s quest for these artifacts the start of the new trilogy, and then told the rest of the story in a non-linear timeline. Probably too experimental for a Star Wars reboot, but it would have grabbed attention and everyone like creepy Sith shit.

Frankly, I would have dropped zombie-robot Palpatine at the very start of the trilogy, as well. It’s bonkers but I don’t hate the Rey Palpatine thing and they could have spent the rest fo the movies explaining this weird-ass lineage and how it relates to Kylo, Snoke, etc. and then have built back to the final confrontaion on Exegol.

Leia. Trained. Rey. I so so so so so wished we had been able to get more of this. This, in my mind, is what it should have been all along. I liked TLJ (okay, so shoot me) but Master Leia is a whole other level of awesome. If I had to rewrite Luke and Leia’s roles, it would have went something like this:

Luke was searching for Sith artifacts. Luke was becoming disillusioned by what he was learning of the Jedi through “The Sacred Texts.” WHO DOES THAT SOUND LIKE? Hmmmm, I wonder....

Could you imagine Luke started to go a little Dooku in this respect, and so instead of fucking off the Ach-To because he had a feeling that was more “gravy than of grave” about Ben Solo’s dark sidedness, he fucked off to Ach-To - or even better - gave up training in order to keep himself from going down a darker path.

And so instead, Leia is getting involved with training (and probably also governing at the same time because she would be an overachiever like that.)

Enter Ben Solo, who is Force sensitive, strong, being trained by his mother and occasionally his uncle, who is not totally plugged into the light side at the moment, which can rub off on Ben. Meanwhile, Han is maybe not the best father (he wants to be, he tries, but it all comes out wrong. I’ve been watching a lot of Psych lately, so I’m thinking of a dynamic similar to Henry and Shawn, but a little more dramatic.)

Of course, Palpatine is seeing all of this behind the scenes, he’s fostering ill will and discontent through the scattered remains of the Empire, sending Snoke clones out to be almost pseudo-religious/cult figures in the wake of the economic and social devastation left by the Empire’s fall and the floundering new government. Extremism, in pockets, rises. Extremism which preys on discontent, which preys of the desire for family, for belonging.

Enter again Ben Solo, who has been pitted against the other strongest trainee, Rey (insert whatever last name you want. She knows it’s not her real name, she knows she was an orphan on Jakku, but she was brought by Luke to be trained). Ben is pissed how she and Leia bond, has been talking to his uncle, and perhaps encountered a Snoke clone on the way.

Rey, on the other hand, is no one but wants to be someone, and that manifests in weird ways during her training. Perhaps she leaves at some point, perhaps not. But the seeds of her being Palpatine’s bloodline are laid within her. She wants to seek that belonging Ben has.

Okay, but getting away from my personal rewrites of the sequels, Star Wars is about family and lineage, both blood and found. There was so much potential to play on this throughout the trilogy with the Skywalkers, with Rey’s relation to Palps that if they had just planned the damn thing, it could have been brilliant.

Moving ...(for now)

I felt so bad for Oscar Isaac. I felt like I watched his soul slowly depart his body over almost 3 hours. That man was not a happy camper and it came out in his performance.

Power levels. Here’s the thing, guys. Magic needs to have consequences. Sure, you can cast a spell, but what does that take from you? You can use the Force, but to what degree? How much? Even Anakin exhausted himself at some points, and he was (allegedly, according to one Qui-gon Jinn), the Chosen One. It’s the first law of thermodynamics - energy can neither be created nor destroyed - and the Force is literally the energy of every life thing in the galaxy. You take the energy, use it towards something else, it has to drain from somewhere. This is what bugged the hell out of me with Rey’s Force Healing abilities (an ability that doesn’t thrill me to begin with as it’s so easy to overuse). Kylo keels from resurrecting the dead (and yeah, he was pretty beat up already), but Rey barely seems to breathe a beat harder. Once you start ignoring the consequences for magic, you end up like a shitty video game, and one of the criticisms I’ve leveled at the movie is that it feels like a montage of Battlefront and I can’t say that’s totally off point.

JEDI HUNTERS. Ochi. I will bet my right liver we’re going to hear something about this on The Mandalorian.

So I know a lot of people wanted to see Rey Kenobi, but there was one piece of glaring evidence in the film why that would never be. (Aside from Kylo just announcing it to Rey.) She has a lightsaber, but she still ends up using a blaster. So uncivilized.

Speaking of The Mandalorian - Stormtroopers with Mando jetpacks. Hmmm.....

I loved techno-Sheev hooked up to all the equipment just floating. That was creepy as hell and played with the whole cloning and extension of life that was such a large part of the Darth Plagueis novel (which I still consider to be canon, higher powers be damned). Also, Palpy’s glowup with the wardrobe was hilarious.

Dark!Rey was hot. There, I said it.

Let’s talk about romance. Or the lack thereof. Or the shoehorned thereof.

Poor Rose got shafted in this film with no explanation. I didn’t buy that whole thing in TLJ, but god damn anyway. (Finn also got shafted, for different reasons, which I will talk about later.)

If they were going to romance, just let it have been Finn and Poe, Finn and Rey, or fuck it, even a trio.

I mean, I could have bought Reylo if it had been presented better. (With context. Adam Driver is an amazing actor, another thing I’ll talk about later.)

The Reylo kiss though - my theater laughed. No joke.

Of course, this was the same theater that thought Lando was trying to mack on Jannah at the end, so who knows what we were all thinking in there. (On that note, Lando was hilarious because no matter what, he was just having a grand ‘ol time in the movie. I like to think he got a medical spice card in his retirement years and was just enjoying anything that came his way, be it Wookiees, Jedi, starships, wars, whatever.)

While the Reylo kiss didn’t hit the mark the space lesbian background kiss got cheers, so there was some hope for my fellow theater-goers.

Did anyone pick up on Threepio saying the Senate made the bill that would render him incapable of translating the Sith language? No doubt that was a Palpatine move from TCW era.

What is up with these movies and desert/jungle planets? Ugh. Thank everyone for Kijimi, at least that was interesting.

New characters I loved: Babu Frik and DO.

Finn’s Force sensitivity. Yes, I totally buy it. I wanted more. I wanted more fucking context of a Stormtrooper who would have known nothing of the Jedi getting these feelings and then bailing from the First Order (or, if I were writing the movies, bailing from the remnants of the Empire/Snokes weird military cults.) Totally underutilized character development.

We. Were. Robbed. of Good!Ben. Adam Driver is so phenomenal. Form the little we saw of redeemed Ben, he is the perfect mix of his parents, from the “Ow” to the eyebrow wagging, the swagger, the smirks...I LOVED good!Ben. I wanted so much more good!Ben. What a transformation.

Speaking of which - the scene between Kylo/Ben and Han was terrific. I wish we had had more context for why everything went south, but it was so good and the type of family dynamic we really needed more of.

The Knights of Ren looked awesome in this film? They needed to be like the Black Order of Star Wars, and they were getting to it, but not quite there. Gods, they could have been the enforcers of Snoke’s cults (Palpy’s puppet cults) that could terrorize far more than a normal, brainwashed Stormtrooper, who was only useful as cannon fodder (I mean, if we look at the history of the clone army to the Stormtroopers, it would be terribly fitting.)

That ship tug-of-war was DUMB. (See my rant about magic and consequences). But, if Rey was going to shoot lightening Palpy-style and blow up a ship, Chewie should have died. I’m sorry, that’s terrible, I love him, but there needed to be consequences for actions and throughout the film, there were either no consequences or random consequences that were a narrative convenience rather than developed into the plot/characterization/worldbuilding.

Here’s the thing with the ST - there is so much potential. There are some awesome ideas. But they wanted to play if safe with JJ by rebooting the OT, Rian was too far out for them, there was no cohesive storytelling, and so we get these little glimpses into what could have been amidst a shitstorm of trailers for Battlefront 17.

we could have had it allll....

Final rating: 4/10

#the rise of skywalker #the rise of skywalker spoilers #tros spoilers #tros #hello there #rants from the lego compound #and what an appropriate tag it is #rey #kylo ren #finn #poe dameron #sheev palpatine #leia organa #luke skywalker #han solo #bunch of other characters i'm not tagging right now

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starstruckteacup · 4 years

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Cottagecore Films (pt. 11)

A Little Princess (1995)

starring Liesel Matthews, Liam Cunningham, Vanessa Chester, Eleanor Bron

synopsis

I was extremely disappointed in this film, to put it lightly. The story itself was beautiful, but that is thanks exclusively to the novel on which it was based. The movie itself utterly failed to convey the magic and timelessness of the book. The acting was flat, emotionless, and forced at every point, from every actor (except for maybe Cunningham, but he was absent for half of it). One would think a gaggle of girls would have some form of natural chemistry, whether pulling them together or apart, but not a single child actor portrayed even the remotest semblance of a relationship to another. (Note: I describe in my review of Pan’s Labyrinth what quality acting from a child looks like, for reference.) Even Matthews and Cunningham could not pass a believable father-daughter relationship, despite the story being about that. As far as emotional acting, the adults were just as bad as the children. They couldn’t even feign a single moment of joy, sadness, or anger, regardless of the context. I actually laughed for the entire scene during which Sara nearly died because of how bad the acting from the adults was. At least Chester seemed somewhat worried; Bron and the nameless police officers stood around so vacantly it looked like they forgot what was happening. I really was appalled by the abysmal acting, especially when so much was handed to them in the story. I want to preface my next point by saying that yes, I know computer animation was still a work in progress in the 90s. But this was horrifyingly awful. I have never once, not in my entire life, seen CGI as terrible as the monster in Sara’s stories. I nearly gave up on the entire movie within the first five minutes because of that monster. And it kept showing up, which absolutely ruined whatever favor I tried to hold for this movie. If you don’t have the budget, which this film clearly didn’t, don’t try to animate a monster. It’s that simple. I wish I had more words for it but it was truly so atrocious that I’m at a loss. Any good will I hold for this movie is due to my fondness for the story (no credit to the film), the settings (while not exceptional, they were fairly pretty), and Liam Cunningham’s acting. 2/10

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)

TW: blood, mild gore, torture, racism against indigenous people

starring Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Clive Owen, Abbie Cornish, Jordi Mollà, Samantha Morton

This film is the sequel to Elizabeth (1998) (see part 10 of my film reviews), which continues the story of Queen Elizabeth I as her rule progresses. Tensions between Catholic Spain and Protestant England grow ever greater, escalating to treasonous plots and assassination attempts. Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and King Philip II of Spain conspire to depose Elizabeth and place Mary on the throne, restoring Catholicism as the national religion. Even as these events lead to war between the two superpowers, the court provides no sense of stability as new faces and new stresses surround the Virgin Queen. She forms a strong friendship with the pirate Walter Raleigh upon his return trip from the New World, where he seeks to establish colonies under the English flag. However, his stay is extended greatly when Elizabeth’s selfishness and pride take over, and are only broken down in the face of battle when she puts him at the forefront of the British navy. Outnumbered, Elizabeth will need Raleigh’s loyalty and cunning, along with the unwavering loyalty of her people, if they wish to survive the Spanish onslaught.

While still a drama, this film proved to be much more war-oriented than its predecessor, but I’m not sure it did either as well. I liked the deeper look this film gave us into the Elizabeth’s mind, especially with her social and emotional conflicts. They remind us that she is still human, despite the somewhat cold appearance the first film gave her at the end. She is more mature, and even more prideful, but there’s still a limit to what she can take as a person. I think the first film gave a better portrayal of her complicated mind, but this was a solid continuation of what years of ruling can do. I also liked how much detail they put into Raleigh’s character, which the first film didn’t do as well with its secondary characters. We got to know more about him, even if he did still feel somewhat surface-level. I think the dramatic aspects could have felt more high-stakes than they did, especially for the characters who were actually in danger. Even though so many characters were actively committing treason, I only felt that level of tension with one: Mary Stuart. Her death was particularly elegant and laden with symbolism, and even though I knew the outcome historically the scene still delivered the anxiety it was meant to. The others simply didn’t have the same delivery. Even the assassination attempt didn’t project any kind of concern, regardless of one’s historical knowledge. The war focus was a fairly different take than the first had, which I appreciated. The film established a strong balance between the tensions in England, Scotland, and Spain, and did a good job making the stakes very clear for each group. Given the uncritically positive stance on England that this film takes, I would have expected the film to villainize Spain a little more to form a stronger dichotomy between the two rulers, but Spain was presented rather neutrally to the audience. The Spanish ruler and nobles didn’t have much character, despite being the antagonist. As for that uncritical positivity regarding England, I do have a bit more to say. Although to an extent it makes sense that the film would lean in favor of England, given its content and the point of view from which the story is told, it became overbearing at times. England could do no wrong in this film, despite children dying in battle, indigenous people being humiliated and dehumanized for show, talk about slavery, and a complete disregard for the suffering of non-white and non-Protestant groups. In contrast, the first film heavily criticized England, from Mary of Guise shaming Elizabeth for sending young children to war, to Elizabeth frowning upon Walsingham’s torture methods (granted she never stopped them, but she didn’t approve as readily as she did in this film), and so on. Although England in truth did all of these things without rebuke, the film could have handled it more gracefully and came across less like propaganda, at the very least. 5/10

Loving Vincent (2017)

TW: suicide (action offscreen, death onscreen)

Sensory Warning: movement of the impressionistic paintings can be very disorienting for those with sensory processing difficulties. I had to break from watching multiple times so as not to become ill.

starring Douglas Booth, Eleanor Tomlinson, Jerome Flynn, Robert Gulaczyk

This fully hand-painted animated film follows Armand Roulin, a young man with a severe temper, on his way to deliver Vincent Van Gogh’s last letter to a living recipient. When he reaches the town where Vincent died, he begins speaking to a variety of villagers with their own stories about the artist, and their own theories about how he died. Armand tries to piece the puzzle together, wondering if the death was not a suicide as claimed, but rather something more sinister.

This film was spectacularly breathtaking. The amount of work that went into painting every scene was awe-inspiring, and definitely sets the bar high for any other films of its kind. The team of artists that created this film represented Van Gogh’s unique art style exquisitely through their loving application of oil-based paints, and truly brought to life the emotion he put into his works. I wish I hadn’t struggled so much with the constant movement, as I feel I would have been able to appreciate the film in its entirety better, but as it was I struggled to pay attention to the story because the art style consumed too much of my sensory processing capabilities. As for the story, I thought it was interesting, but I found it lacking despite the incredible artwork. Foremost, after some cursory research, I discovered that the homicide theory on which this film was based was only acknowledge by one individual, and spurned by hundreds of others. Although the film leaves the verdict open-ended, both to Roulin and to the audience, the story itself seemed to lean into the homicide theory, then completely give up on it with no resolution, so it came across as fairly noncommittal. I won’t argue for or against the theory, as I don’t know nearly enough about Van Gogh to assert an opinion, but I’m somewhat unsettled by the amount of weight it gave to it without any kind of evidentiary support, only to dump it as if the writers changed their mind themselves. The pacing was also slow for a murder mystery, which is basically what the story turned out to be. I would much have preferred the film to cover Vincent’s life, or even the days/weeks leading up to his death, instead of only featuring him in other people’s flashbacks. This kind of existential impressionism should capture the life of its creator, not the mundane views of people who didn’t understand him or even hated him. There wasn’t anything wrong with the film, per se, but I wish the writing was given as much love as the art was. 7/10

Part 1 // 2 // 3 // 4 // 5 // 6 // 7 // 8 // 9 // 10

#cottagecore #gardencore #naturecore #flowercore #cozycore #historical drama #period drama #art film #film #film review #movie #movie review #activities #mine

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thomsternugget · 4 years

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Underfell Sans Headcanons

Here’s some of my personal headcanons for the UnderBuddies

I have multiple headcanons for each of them, mostly because I love the idea of a united multiverse and I am a sucker for the butterfly effect, + it ties up the multiverse together with other people’s headcanons, I love it.

I’ll start with Underfell Sans or Red (I have three versions of him) :

Crow:

Crow is a childish, greedy and overall very self centered version of Red. He hasn't lost many of the old habits he had underground but, on the surface he does get excited over things easier, and explores enough new things to have found a couple of hobbies he genuinely enjoys doing. Because of these new hobbies, even when he does... things, he enjoys going out more and generally looks less lazy than before.

He has questionable morals and isn’t quite over what happened while underground. He loses his temper very easily when provoked and it can quickly turn into a fist fight. I wouldn’t say he’s a gangster because he’d rather be left alone and do his thing, but definitely a criminal. If he wants something, he’ll get it. His motives are weird sometimes, and he often steals useless stuff alongside treasures. He came back to his crib with a rubber ducky shaped crystal ornament once. He liked it, so he took it.

He is a thief and will break into your house and rob you clean without you noticing a thing. But because skeletons need to have visited a place before teleporting in, he had to become smarter about his robberies.

He loves movies, theater plays and music so much, that he thought why not try and act? What he does now is, he dresses really dapper, then goes to houses in nice neighborhoods and visits the ones for sale. He usually asks the regular questions a potential buyer would, and sells it real well to the agent. While the poor seller is showing our boy the property, Crow looks for any nooks and crannies he could hide into, as well as any alarm system and cameras he’ll have to deal with. Now that he’s been to the place, just gotta wait for some rich clueless idiot to buy it.

And because he took a liking to acting, he also started to go door to door to test his own acting abilities. He always has pamphlets of some sort or paperwork with him as prompts. He likes to act like different kinds of city workers and professionals.

His Schemes have been working to this day, and after each successful robberies, he does a little victory dance. Doing the moonwalk, on either the front lawn or the rooftop of the house he just robbed is his favorite power move.

He wouldn’t kill unless he absolutely has to, but he will send people to the hospital without remorse if someone tries to mess with him or take his stuff. So unless you want a major ass whoopin’, stay away from Richard… That’s the duck ornament… Crow gave it a name.

Plaid:

Plaid is the grumpy woodlen uncle. He loves to have a good drink. He is the version of Red that’s just tired of fighting and now he wants to party and have the fun he couldn’t afford to have. He’s more mature and peaceful than the other Fell Sans.

He doesn’t like being crowded and chose to live a slower pace life. He has a beautiful cabin near the woods he built with his papyrus’ help. He loves alcohol. Mustard is good, and there’s so many kinds of it above ground he just had to get a bigger stash. He has a pretty decent booze collection and enjoys mixing drinks and trying new combinations. He does still enjoy a nice time at any bar and I feel that, even if he were to drink to forget, instead of drowning in melancholy like those cliché movie scenes, he’d be down for a good time. The kind of; hold my beer and watch me, kinda good time, until you forget what happened the next day.

The city's filled with people he’d find annoying; bumping into him, yelling profanities, full of bastards, just plain disrespectful. The cities has its perks but I don’t see any that would be compatible with him, except the many fast food joints, but that’s it. Any kind of places with a high crime rate would be out of the question. He’s tired of fighting, and it’s not his place to get involved in any kind of gang war. Unlike Crow, who would fight anyone, Plaid would just continue his way unless someone physically touch him. Then he would break bones and throw someone in a window Irish bar fighting style.

The suburb would make him uncomfortable because of the attitude of some people, granted the barbecues could be great, but gated communities would make him feel more trapped than secured. Both these places are a bit too high maintenance for him. If he were to live there, his lawn would be the worst and it would drive the neighbors absolutely bonkers. He doesn’t usually care about other people’s view of him but with time, having people nagging him over dumb crap, he’d snap.

So his wood cabin is perfect for him. He really enjoys fishing and hunting, he has lots of patience for it. He now has a relationship with his neighbors and it still confuses him at times but he likes how further away they have more complicity with one another. He loves gathering around campfires, a good beer and good company, he just wants to have a laugh. He also really likes camping and he has a hammock in his backyard. He sleeps outside often during the summer, either to look at the stars or the fireflies. He loves the noises of the woods at night, it soothes him. He really likes the change in seasons since underground it was just cold and depressing all around his house. Even with that he has a whole new appreciation for winter, since the sun makes it shiny sometimes.

All of my Fell Sans loves movies and entertainment. Plaid is more into competitive cooking shows, wild survival and comedies. He appreciates having people over but don’t you dare show up uninvited. He’ll stare at you from the window with the grumpiest grandpa face he has that says “Get off my property”. He still needs his alone time and takes things slow to work on himself. He has lots more patience than he had underground but he still remains a cocky brat. He isn’t ready for any romantic relationship.

Bud (Rosebud or Buddy):

Bud is a softer version of Red. Even though they're pretty much all emotionally constipated, Bud is the one with the best understanding of his own feelings overall.

He still doesn't go to others quite yet but he is the easiest to approach (not counting Plaid). When the monsters came to the surface, not only they were put under quarantine to assure no monster illnesses could transfer to humans, but they also went under therapy check ups to assure they were suitable to live amongst them. I headcanon Bud to be the only one who didn't lie his way out of the test. He actually went and sought the help of therapists. He wasn't sure about all of it at first, but he managed to have enough courage in him to open up. It was a long and tough process but he's happy he went through it. He knows that he still has a long way to go but he makes a lot of efforts to be his best self. He wanted to leave absolutely everything of what he used to be behind, but realised that his soul actually needed him to come to terms with it, and that what he lived was part of who he was and that's okay too.

He still struggles with anger issues and it is very obvious when he is mad, but he won’t burst out in anger in front of you like the others would. He would ignore you, even though you’re yelling at him, go outside and yell into the void. If you try to follow him then he will snap. Definitely. Most Reds are more action than talk when it comes to their feelings. Bud would say cute things to friends he would consider compliments even if it may sound weird because he is new to it. He might also seem rude but you can tell it comes from a good place and if you really don’t like it he would rather you explain it to him and tell him how he could’ve worded himself better. He is very open to criticism when it comes to his attitude, as long as it’s not out of character for him. He found coping mechanisms to help with his emotions that he doesn’t know how to deal with properly quite yet. He’ll either have sensory toys in his pockets and fidget with these or play with his necklace.

He loves cute things, something he would've never admitted before. He is really into Cartoons and Animations. He especially likes magical girls and the outfits they wear which he finds absolutely adorable. Shows like this makes him feel wholesome, and he genuinely wouldn’t mind hanging out with a bunch of cute girls and just be friends with them. He just wants his life to be filled with wholesome cuties and giggles. Anything far away from things that would anger him, because even though he is more aware of his feelings and knows they’re all valid he still thinks anger is a nasty one to have. He feels disgusted with himself when he lashes out at someone now, and if he makes a cutie cry, his soul stings.

Even though he tries to keep things civil he would never let anyone step on him, that’s a big no no. He wouldn’t lose his shit, but he will drag your ass from A to Z and backwards.

Another thing about watching television, if you mention him being emotional, unlike the others who would get embarrassed and angry, he would turn away and clench his necklace and curl up a bit. He would tell you to not point it out next time cause it makes him uncomfortable, he won’t tell you why, but he’s doing his best to not shy away.

#underfell #underfell red #underfell headcanons #underfell characters #underfell crow #underfell plaid #underfell bud #underfell sans #undertale headcanons #sans #sans the skeleton

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tessatechaitea · 4 years

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Cerebus #15 (1980)

If the story so far had revealed that Cerebus has a vagina, I could make a hentai joke here.

The first time I encountered hentai was at an anime convention at a Red Lion Inn in San Jose in 1994 or 1995. I went to the convention by myself because I had recently fallen in love with the cartoon Sailor Moon and wanted to get some Sailor Moon LaserDiscs unless it was actually Sailor Moon dolls I wanted. It was so long ago, how am I supposed to remember?! They had a room where they were showing movies and one of the movies I watched was Sailor Moon R: The Movie. It was subtitled which was great because then I had the story memorized for all the times I watched my non-subtitled LaserDisc. But that wasn't the pornographic anime I saw! I don't even remember what that was but I watched some tentacle fucking movie late at night in a dark room with a bunch of other sweaty nerds. I didn't know that was what was going to happen though so I didn't have my dick in my hands like the other guys probably did. I was as shocked as anybody when they first find out that cartoons where women get fucked by tentacles exist! I mean, how many penises does an alien need?! I grew up thinking the little gray aliens had zero! That Red Lion Inn was the same one where I played in a couple of Magic the Gathering tournaments. Being in a dark room with a bunch of horny anime fans was less awkward and uncomfortable than playing Magic the Gathering against Magic the Gathering fans. Most of them probably couldn't believe they were actually playing against such a cool and handsome dude. It really threw them off their game when I would say things like, "Yeah, I've touched a couple of boobs. I attack with my Serra Angel." I know what you're thinking: "Anime, comic books, and Magic the Gathering?! This awesome dude must have owned every single Stars Wars figure too!" Aw, you're too kind! I'm blushing! But obviously I never owned Yak Face. "A Note from the Publisher" is still being published so I guess Dave and Deni are still married. In his Swords of Cerebus essay, Dave Sim discusses "Why Groucho?" It seems to mostly come down to this: Dave Sim enjoyed the characters of Groucho Marx as a teenager and memorized a lot of their lines. He also mentions Kim Thompson's review of Cerebus in The Comic Journal (the first major review of the series) in which Kim praised Sim's ability to make his parody characters transcend the parody to become unique creations of their own. This review gave Sim the confidence to put Groucho in the role of Lord Julius. Which worked out so well that Sim later adds Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Margeret Thatcher, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Woody Allen, Dave Sim, and the Three Stooges into the story. I'm sure I'm missing some but I can't remember every aspect of this 6000 page story. Was The Judge also a parody of somebody? Was the Regency Elf based on Wendy Pini? I don't know! I'm sure I'm missing a lot of references in Cerebus simply because I haven't experienced all the same knowledge sources as Dave Sim. Just like I'm missing a super duper lot of references in Gravity's Rainbow because nobody in the history of ever has experienced all the same knowledge sources as Thomas Pynchon. I've been reading Gravity's Rainbow (for the first time but also the third time because I'm basically reading it three times at the same time. You'll understand when you read it) and I'm surprised by how funny it is. I don't think anybody ever described it as funny or else I'm sure I would never have stopped reading it multiple times prior to this time when I'm actually going to finish it. Although I suppose when I read Catch-22, I had done so on my own so nobody ever told me how funny that book was either. But for some reason, Catch-22 lets you know it's going to be a funny book pretty quickly. Gravity's Rainbow is all, "Here is a description of an evacuation of London which is just stage setting because, you know, the bombs have already blown up, but it makes people feel safe. And after that, how about a scene where this guy makes a bunch of banana recipes for breakfast. Is that funny enough for you?" Oh, sure, there are some funny moments like when that one guy pretends a banana is his cock and then some other guys tackle him and beat him with his own pretend cock. But there's a gravity to the scene that doesn't lend itself to the reader thinking, "Oh, this is a funny book!" But if you make it far enough, you start realizing, "Hey! I'm not understanding this!" So then you reread the section and you start realizing, "Hey! I'm laughing at this stuff! This is pretty funny!" Plus there are a lot of descriptions of sexy things that I'm assuming are really accurate because Pynchon is obsessed with details.

Anyway, I was supposed to be talking about Cerebus, wasn't I?

A Living Priest of Tarim crashes Lord Julius' bath to scold him about a party Julius is giving in a fortnight (which is the amount of time your kid has lost to a video game). I don't know why the priest has to declare he's a living priest. You can tell that by the way he's shouting and foaming at the mouth. Although this is a Swords & Sorcery book so I suppose there are many dead creatures that also shout and foam at the mouth. Sometimes I forget I'm reading a fictional book and wind up ranting and raving about stuff that I'm supposed to just assume is fine. Like when I read The Flash and nothing in it makes any sense at all because The Flash should never have any trouble stopping crime or saving people from natural disasters. The comic book should be over in two pages. Even the writers, at some point, realized how ridiculous Flash stories were and decided the only way to make them believable was to have The Flash battle other super fast people. But that just meant Flash stories basically became bar-room brawls. Two people with super speed fighting is the same as reading a story about two people without super speed fighting. Boring! Some writers even decided that maybe a telepathic monkey would make things more interesting and I suppose telepathic monkeys make everything more interesting so kudos to them. I was going to go on a long rant about telepathic monkeys but then I realized how much I love the idea of telepathic monkeys so why should I create an argument against them? More telepathic monkeys, please.

This made me laugh out loud. Not as much as the chapter in Gravity's Rainbow where the old woman forces Slothrop to eat a bunch of terrible candies. But then it isn't a competition, is it? I mean, I guess it's a competition for my time which is why I haven't written a comic book review in a week or more. Blame Thomas Pynchon for being so entertaining (and also Apex).

Baskin, the Minister for Executive Planning, has come to let Lord Julius know what the revolutionaries have revealed while being tortured. The only bit of useful information was one prisoner's last words: "Revolution...the pits." Cerebus immediately assumes "the Pits" is a location and not a summation of the prisoner's feelings about revolution which led to torture which led to his death. Cerebus, being the Kitchen Staff Supervisor, begins an investigation into The Pits. His first step: threatening the Priest of the Living Tarim. Which makes me realize I transposed the word "living" in the previous encounter with the priest and went on a digression that makes no sense to anybody who has read and somehow remembers that particular panel. I'm sure they were scoffing and snorting and exclaiming to their pet rat, "What a stupid fool loser this Grunion Guy is! Living Priest of Tarim! HA! Ridiculous! What a moronic mistake! He has made a gigantic fool of himself!" I don't know that the almost certainly imaginary people who called me on my mistake as they read this have a pet rat but I do know there almost certainly isn't another imaginary sentient being in the room with them. Cerebus learns that The Pits are Old Palnu that lies under current Palnu. It was destroyed in a massive earthquake long ago and the new city built over the top of it. It's like a Dungeons & Dragons module but with a lot less treasure.

This scene reminded me that I need to finish rereading The Boomer Bible: A Testament for Our Times (which is what it was called in the 90s but is just as accurate for today).

Cerebus and Lord Julius engage in another typical misunderstanding (it's not hard when only half of the people in the conversation care about making sense) which ends up with Lord Julius deciding that the location for the Festival of Petunias will be The Pits. This complicates Cerebus' job of not allowing Lord Julius to be assassinated because the assassins are most likely housed in The Pits (along with their giant snakes (*see cover)). Lord Julius, Baskin, and Cerebus descend into The Pits to find a suitable location for the Festival of Petunias. In doing so, they wind up in a trap and confronted by a masked revolutionary of the "Eye of the Pyramid." Which is odd because you usually have to murder at least a dozen kobolds and several goblins before you reach the room with the boss in it.

Typical unbalanced beginning level module. A giant snake as the first encounter!

Cerebus manages to defeat the giant snake by crashing it headfirst into a wall. The wall winds up being a key support structure and the roof collapses. Everybody makes it out alive but the masked revolutionary evades capture. He will be back next issue to ruin the Festival of Petunias. Aardvark Comment is still just a mostly standard comic book letters page. I'll probably stop discussing it until people start criticizing Dave. Right now it's just "This comic book is great!" and "Keep writing, Dave, and I'll never think ill of anything idea you espouse!" while Dave replies, "I owe my fans everything! I can't wait until I can stop feeling that way and start jerking off onto my art boards and selling those as pages of Cerebus!" Cerebus #15 Rating: A. Good story, good Lord Julius dialogue, good Living Priest of the Living Tarim scenes. I wholeheartedly endorse this comic book and Dave Sim. No way a guy with a sense of humor like this is going to go off the rails, right?!

#Dave Sim #Cerebus

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ink-asunder · 4 years

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Dragon Hazel, Human Sacrifice - Doctor Strange Fanfiction

A/N: Here’s part two of the Dragon!Hazel-wants-a-human-companion-offering fic. ( @writer-deann )

Characters: Stephen Strange, the Ancient One, La Gaelik (Hazel) (female OC)

Setting: The Ancient One lives au, also there’s dragons au.

Summary: While reinstating a peace treaty with the Masters of the Mystic Arts, a reclusive dragon decides she wants a human sacrifice. For companionship, she claims. Though the conditions of such a task turn out to be more convoluted than anyone expected.

Word count: 1,702

Part 1 - Part 2 (here)

They finally found a volunteer from Kamar-taj. A strappling young man from the acolyte rank. He said his goodbyes to his peers and parents, then Wong and Stephen took him to the lair of La Gaelik. The dragon roused as they approached her and murmured some quick greeting so they’d be allowed to speak.

“We have brought our sacrifice,” Stephen gestured to the young man, who stood up straight and watched the dragon carefully. “Please accept our offering in exchange for your peace.”

She eyed the boy. “What is this?”

“What?”

She blinked. Stephen tried to be more polite this time. “I’m sorry?”

“This is a boy,” the dragon stated in a bored tone. “I wanted a girl.”

Stephen felt his jaw clench. “Then you should’ve said—”

Wong kicked his shin to shut him up and bowed his head to the dragon.

“Of course, ma’am. We’ll bring your companion soon.”

And they left before anything else could go wrong.

* * *

“She didn’t take him,” the Ancient One stated as Stephen met her by the window of the New York Sanctum.

“You knew?” Stephen asked. She didn’t look away from the window. “Of course you did.”

Her voice was oddly reserved when she spoke again. He hadn’t heard her speak in such away since their final confrontation before fighting Kaecilius. He had a mind to ask her what was wrong, but he knew he wouldn’t get an answer from her if she hadn’t already told him.

“Find a companion that suits her,” the Ancient One ordered. “Fulfill her orders. We need this treaty.”

* * *

Luckily, there were a number of novices and acolytes willing to volunteer, so Stephen and Wong had a selection to pick through for their discerning critic. They picked a young woman who was a novice and brought her to the dragon.

“You’re back,” the dragon glanced at them. Stephen gestured to the young woman they brought.

“Your sacrifice,” he offered.

The dragon straightened and inched closer to scrutinize the girl. At least she looked this time.

“Not bad,” she murmured. “She’s a little young, don’t you think?”

Stephen glanced slowly between the dragon and the woman, who gave him a mortified look.

“Would you prefer... older?”

“I don’t want to take a novice away from her studies, no,” the dragon pulled back and settled back on her ledge of stone.

“Alright,” Stephen nodded and pursed his lips before he said something he regretted.

The next woman they brought was a higher acolyte.

“Are you well-read?” the dragon questioned her.

“Quite,” the acolyte replied. “I love reading.”

“Mm,” the dragon hummed and tilted her head. “And are you able-bodied?”

“Yes. Whatever you ask of me, I can perform as well as any human.”

That was a statement of hubris, but no one questioned her. This was the third person Stephen had brought to La Gaelik, and his patience was running thin.

“Are you good at playing chess?” the dragon asked.

“Yes, ma’am. We had a club at my high school.”

“That’s too bad.”

Stephen slowly turned to glare at Wong.

“I don’t want someone who is good at chess,” the dragon dismissed. “Bring me someone else.”

* * *

Stephen’s patience was wearing thin. Amidst the tens of offerings taken to the dragon, she accepted not a single one of them. And with each companion, she gave another piece of helpful and progressively more specific feedback.

“Can you play erhu?”

“No...”

“Unacceptable, bring me another.”

The quest for a suitable offering became a draft. Instead of finding a volunteer, all masters and acolytes in the order were called forth and interviewed based on their meeting the convoluted criteria for the dragon. So far, they needed a female of acolyte or higher rank who was above the age of consent and preferably older, able-bodied, a skilled spellcaster, well-read, didn’t like playing chess, and could play erhu. After several days of struggling to find a suitor, a few people assembled group erhu lessons in their spare time.

Stephen and Wong brought the most suitable woman they could find. It would be a hard loss, but they were running out of options. The dragon leveled Stephen with an ill-amused look.

“This is a virgin, Stephen,” she snapped.

“How was I supposed to know that?” he demanded. He was getting tired of their game.

“I’m sure you will next time.”

Stephen had to kick a nearby bush once the three of them left the cave.

“Well, at least she’s not cliche,” he finally muttered.

So, now the requirements included someone who was sexually active, and Stephen did not let himself consider what that implied about this contract; he just kept looking. After that, the instructions got even more niche and unreasonable. Has an allergy to acetaminophen. Can ride horses. Is a dog person. Has had head trauma at some point in her life.

“Does she have to be cisgender?” Stephen asked after another rejection.

“Stephen!” the dragon straightened, shocked and offended.

“I’m just asking!”

Finally, they found someone who met the specific requirements. Anything based on opinion was altered—don’t like dogs? Now you do. Won a chess tournament? Now you have amnesia and don’t know how to play. Even then, it was so difficult. And Stephen was about to lose his damn mind.

Now, he stood to the side of the cave, turning a twig in his hands to keep them busy as they waited. The dragon observed the woman they brought, but Stephen had come to recognize her immeasurable, day-ruining disappointment.

“Have you ever seen Star Wars?” she asked.

“Yes.” There was no point lying. No doubt she’d be disappointed whatever the answer.

And disappointed she was.

“Alright,” she sighed. “You can go home now.”

Stephen snapped the stick he’d been holding in half.

“How do you even know what that is?” he demanded.

“There’s a drive-in movie theater some dozen miles from here,” the dragon replied. And that was all their was to it.

Stephen was close to giving up. As he, Wong, and the woman returned to Kamar-taj, they were met by the Ancient One. Stephen could barely meet her eyes. That was the last person in their order they could’ve found. If they wanted to appease the dragon, they’d need to branch out of their order, and who knew if they could do that safely.

They met with the Ancient One in her study, who avoided looking at them for a long time, like she was guilty of something.

“Now we need someone whose never seen Star Wars,” Stephen relayed the information in an exasperated tone. “That was our last potential candidate. If we’re going to fulfill our end of the deal, we’ll need to branch out. Though I don’t know how we’re going to do that safely and humanely....”

“No, we don’t need to do that....” The Ancient One looked up. Her expression was dismal. A grim pout. A guilty grim pout.

Stephen raised his eyebrows.

“I haven’t seen Star Wars,” she quietly admitted. Stephen leaned forward.

“And as for all that other stuff?”

The Ancient One pursed her lips. “I think she wants me specifically.”

“Why didn’t you say something?” Stephen demanded. No, he knew why. She was the Sorcerer Supreme. She couldn’t just abandon her order and her duties to be some dragon’s pet. Perhaps she found it a better solution to ignore the possibility entirely.

Stephen gave a sigh of defeat, and the Ancient One sat up a little straighter.

“We’ll negotiate with her tomorrow. After you take me to her.”

Stephen nodded. This whole peace talk business was an absolute mess.

* * *

The dragon was lying down as usual with her back to them this time as they entered the cave. She called a greeting over her shoulder, but didn’t turn.

“We’ve brought your final sacrifice,” Stephen announced. “She meets all your criteria.”

The dragon scoffed. “Does she have green eyes?”

The Ancient One spoke this time. “Yes.”

The dragon twisted around as if startled. She stared with a face of awe and disbelief at her offering. The Ancient One stood before her, dressed in golden robes, a labrodorite pendant hanging from her neck. In that moment, La Gaelik thought she might tremble beneath the blessing of the other’s gaze.

The dragon then sat back and grinned.

“It’s about time you showed up,” she said. “What took you so long?”

“Well, not that you noticed, but I’ve been recovering from an injury,” the Ancient One replied. “I haven’t had time to come see you, Haalaan.”

“Oh, I noticed, Giin,” the dragon tilted her head, a mischievous look in her eye.

Stephen glanced at Wong, who leaned closer to him.

“Giin means ‘mine,’” Wong explained. “She’s accepted her.”

“Great,” Stephen muttered. When he looked back up, the Ancient One was already standing right in front of the dragon with her arms draped around the dragon’s neck. The dragon closed her eyes and flicked her tail contently.

“Now you’re trying to force me into early retirement,” the Ancient One mumbled against the dragon’s fur.

“There’s nothing ‘early’ about anything you do, Ancient One.”

The Ancient One grinned up at her. “How could I stay here when I have an order to lead? You’ve always been so self-indulgent.”

The dragon pressed her head against the Ancient One’s chest. “I only wanted to see you, Giin. Go back home.”

“Thank you.”

* * *

Not a day later, Stephen found the Ancient One in the courtyard with someone he’d never seen before. A woman with wild black hair was lying across the veranda with her head in the Ancient One’s lap. She seemed peacefully asleep as the Ancient One calmly brushed a hand through her hair.

“New recruit?” Stephen guessed quietly. The stranger spoke up in a lazy voice, eyes still closed.

“No, Stephen, I’m not here for mentorship....”

That voice! Stephen froze in his tracks, obviously flustered, as he looked between the girl and the Ancient One.

“That’s not—”

“I’m her companion, remember?” the Ancient One grinned. “This was the best negotiating we could come to since I couldn’t leave the sanctuary.”

Stephen stared at the dragon in human form draped across the Ancient One’s lap.

“This has to be violating our treaty in some way.”

Fin.

#my writing #my fanfic #doctor strange #doctor strange fanfiction #the ancient one #stephen strange #oc #hazel grace #the ancient one x oc #dragonverse #dragon!hazel #sitcom au #dragon girlfriend au #marvel #mcu

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medi-melancholy · 5 years

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i’ve been really coming to terms the past few months about my relationship with gender identity and i want to put some of my thoughts on paper. this is is very steam of consciousness so it’ll probably be repetitive or incoherent, but i want to talk about it openly. I PROMISE I’M OK LMAO i just wanna chat to myself

anyone who knows me knows i love dolls. hell, i’m dollkin, of course. and a big part of why i identify with dolls so much is because of physical reasons. a doll can be physically neutral without any sexual characteristics, yet perceived as leaning more towards a certain gender based on how they’re dressed. a ‘girl’ doll may wear dresses and bows and such, but has no true physical gender. if that ‘girl’ doll wanted to, they could be dressed more like a ‘boy’, or stay completely neutral perception-wise. hell, they could wear dresses and bows and skirts and be identified as a boy or as having no gender, in spite of traditionally ‘feminine’ clothing.

i LOVE that. that’s like... an ideal situation to me.

i think another reason i identify so much with the lack of physical gender/sexual traits the vast majority of dolls possess is because i’m asexual and quite sex-repulsed. the thought of ever being around a naked person makes me sick, because i just reeeally don’t want to see any of those parts. i don’t even like seeing my own parts most of the time. i just want to be... nothing.

a lot of my hatred for parts of my body likely relates to my struggles with disordered eating and chronic illness, but that’s an issue for another time.

i would love to have the ability to be neutrally gendered by default. i technically can be if i want to! but because i have ‘female’ physical characteristics, people will pretty much always automatically assume that i am female. i understand it’s an issue to say something like... “having a chest and hips = female!” because that’s absolutely not true, i understand that. but to someone who desires to fit society’s view of what is female, having those characteristics is valuable. yknow?? so it’s not like... an entirely bad concept, if it helps someone be more comfortable and happy with who they are.

by that same token, i bind (safely!) every now and then because i want to be lacking in those physical characteristics, and therefore hopefully perceived as more neutral. hell, i’ve crossdressed before and presented as male for historical reenactment purposes, and i LOVE IT. i love having the freedom to control my gender. it feels so good.

it was easier when i was younger, when i wasn’t curvy. when i kept my hair very short due to abuse, and could easily pass as ‘male’.

these days i spend a lot of time dressed as a stormtrooper or a tie fighter pilot, neutral costumes with helmets with conceal my gender. i cherish the moments i have in those sorts of costumes, largely in part because in those moments it’s not my gender that matters but instead the children i bring joy to, but i digress. there’s certainly a theme with my feelings, though.

i end up feeling most comfortable cosplaying characters of unconventional gender presentation, i’ve noticed.

i had my phase around middle school where i hated the color pink, i hated traditionally feminine things, i never wore skirts or dresses, i wanted the color blue, i wanted pants. i felt weird and out of place trying to fit into ‘girly’ roles. it’s weird to think i was ever in that place, considering my interests now, but it sure did happen. i think a lot of this time might relate to me coming to terms with my sexuality--being asexual, and the struggles of having sexual characteristics--and also realizing i really REALLY like girls. my subconscious thought process might’ve been something like, “boys like girls, and i like girls, so maybe i should be more like a boy?”

i grew up, thank god, in a household that didn’t force me into playing house, playing with dolls, all that stuff. i was welcome to play with whatever toys i wanted, watch whatever shows appealed to me, listen to whatever music i liked. so, i had both barbies and transformers, i had bratz and star wars, i had a mix of ‘girly’ and ‘boyish’ music and movies i enjoyed. i was certainly bullied for this, harshly so, but i’m eternally thankful that my parents have been accepting of me ever since day 1.

for many years i’ve had trouble identifying with being afab, with being a girl, because of my body. i have a hormone imbalance of some sort that does fucked up things to my mind and body, and i suspect i have some sort of issue with, well, the girly internal hardware too, but i’ve been horrified to go to a specialist about that sort of thing because i HATE talking about... those parts, it’s making me feel sick right now. i don’t want anyone looking around down there, EVER.

anyways, my hair grows in absurdly fast and absurdly thick, everywhere, even before i felt pressured to start shaving as a kid. my legs, arms, pits,eyebrows, just everywhere. even my face, i do have to shave my face. it’s... invalidating, i guess, of my supposed ‘womanhood’, so i find myself having trouble calling myself a real girl. i know hair is a natural thing, and i NEVER ever judge other people for it, but i do judge myself.

i’ve often described my feelings as... i want to be a girl, i know on some level that i am a girl. but i’m physically NOT a girl, and i only want to strive for feminine physical traits in some ways, not in others.

it’s a very weird, depersonalizing feeling, considering i’m afab.

there’s also the fact i’m like 6 feet tall, that’s certainly not a ‘girl’ trait. “no one will dance with a tall girl”, the saying goes. i’m leggy and gangly and weird. and somehow curvy at the same time. i look like a joke lol

i wanna mention that i had a phase in high school where if any of my friends asked me what my gender was, i’d just pull up a clip of a la cucaracha horn. that’s still such a huge mood.

ever since i was a kid, i’ve found myself drawn to characters who are androgynous or don’t conform to typical gender presentation, and i’ve never really known why. i figured, maybe that’s my idea of beauty or something? i hate to word it like this but i like... really found myself attached to male characters that presented femininely, or dressed as such, or wear lots of makeup, and i still feel that way? that just feels so safe, so comfortable, so real to me. that’s reflected in my IDs/kintypes too, i really really relate to gender neutral characters, or characters who are ‘supposed to’ be masculine but are feminine instead, or any combination, just... nontypical displays of gender.

it feels so suitable to what i want in life, i think. the same feeling i want to achieve.

funny that pretty much every single character i identify with is a doll/puppet or related to them in some way, too, huh? it all sorta connects, i guess. i value the nonhuman trait of having no definitive physical gender, i guess?

i’ve had people suggest to me before that i’m a demigirl, maybe, but that never felt right. i’ve had people say “hey, sounds like you’re nonbinary” but i just... don’t feel right with that term? just for me personally.

it’s almost like i don’t want to label my gender. it feels so vague, so indistinguishable.

girl a little bit to the left. girl flavored la croix. the tape outline of a corpse at a crime scene, and the corpse happened to be a girl. hint of hint of girl. i don’t feel that all the time, though. sometimes i just feel.. an absence of gender. no gender but with vaguely feminine traits.

at the same time, i worry myself about identifying as a lesbian. i’m only interested in dating people who identify as female, that’s who i end up attracted to. i want a girlfriend, i want a wife.

but if i’m not entirely a girl myself, can i still call myself a lesbian?

well, i’ve never judged or policed other people, so why the fuck am i judging myself? we really are our own worst critics.

anyways, within my close circle of friend-family, i’ve been going by they/them for a while and also neutral terms, for the most part. it feels good, it feels comfortable. it’s not something i’m gonna want 24/7, but sometimes that’s how i’m feeling so that’s the terminology i should use. makes sense, feels good.

i can still be a sister, a daughter, a girlfriend. but i can be a sibling, a datefriend, too. i can use she/her and they/them at the same time, or whenever i’m feeling one over the other

the closest word i’ve found for how i feel is gender nonconforming, but i still don’t want to put a label on myself in this case.

i just wanted to get this off my chest. or... get my chest off. it’s complicated.

you can call me sarah, you can call me medi, you can call me a person who is a girl, a person who’s sort of a girl but sorta not. i dunno. i’m just me.

i thought i had all my identify stuff figured out but these past few months have been Whew

shoutout to my friends for always being so supportive and loving, yall are the best.

and uhhhhhh thanks for reading, sorry for getting so real all of a sudden.

this may have been brought on because i have a new doll kintype whose gender is a fuck and i was like shit, that’s me, huh!

#long post #it me #it sure is me huh #uhhh tw for lots of gender talk i guess idk #nothing upsetting i don't think. just talking about [vaguely gestures at self] All This #OH and maybe like the post if you read it. if that's ok!! i just wanna know who's like... in the know about stuff. if that's alright

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thedeaditeslayer · 6 years

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Bruce Campbell says ‘Evil Dead’ franchise is dead to him.

Bruce Campbell is best known as Ash, the wisecracking, chain-saw-wielding demon hunter in the phantasmagoric “Evil Dead” movies and the Starz spin-off TV series “Ash vs. Evil Dead,” which just ended its run after three seasons earlier this year.

It’s the role that turned the actor into a cult icon — a man who went on to pen three best-sellers and co-star in such series as “Xena: Warrior Princess,” “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys” and “Burn Notice” — and no doubt will be the subject of many of the questions put to him at the Fandemic pop-culture convention at NRG Center this weekend. But it’s a character he won’t be playing ever again.

“I’m done,” he said emphatically by phone from his home in rural southern Oregon, which — speaking of “burn notice” — just happened to be about five miles from a raging wildfire when we spoke in July. “Physically, emotionally, I’m spent. That’s it. These three seasons about did me in. I’m 60 now. I’m like, ‘You know what? Let’s quit before the dentures come out and the hearing aids and the walker. Let’s not be embarrassing.’ With all due to respect to our ‘Star Wars’ friends, they were pushing it.”

That the ratings were only modest made the decision to walk away from “Ash vs. Evil Dead” somewhat easier, though Campbell, an executive producer, notes that the show, which recently became available on Netflix and DVD, is finding a larger audience in noncable-TV formats.

“We’re selling the show to 100 countries but it gets canceled because not enough are watching it on one platform,” he said. “But when it goes to another platform, it goes crazy. … You have to shake your head, and that’s why you can’t really get too crazy about it. … The film industry is changing about every two hours now.”

These days, Campbell is more inclined to pursue projects purely of his own creation, one of which is “Last Fan Standing,” a TV game-show version of a live pop-culture trivia concept he’s been touring around the country. “It’s a game show for geeks. How much does Thor’s hammer weigh? It’s ‘Game of Thrones.’ It’s ‘Star Wars.’ It’s horror, sci-fi and fantasy,” he said, and then referred to a veteran game-show host from the ’70s. “I’m in the Wink Martindale phase of my career. It’s time to put the chain saw down, put on the glasses and do a game show.”

He has lots of other ideas, too.

Campbell says he’s moving into the third act of his life.

“Act one, you do everything. Act two, you’re selective. Act three, you only do the crap you want to do. My wife and I, she’s my partner in life and my business partner, we’ve developed probably a dozen projects between television and film. She looked at me the other day and said, ‘Dude, you’re getting old. You just turned 60. If you don’t start doing this stuff, when are you going to do it?’… I’ve worked for a lot of other people for a lot of years, and I’ve said a lot of dialogue that wasn’t written for me.”

In addition to trying to get his projects off the ground, he makes the occasional convention appearance, about three to six per year. He’s been making the convention rounds since 1988 and generally enjoys them.

“If it’s a dead convention and you’re the Maytag repairman waiting to sign something from little Billy, that’s when it can get grim. That’s when the whiskey comes out,” he said. “If it’s busy, fun, fun city and the weather’s good — no flooding in Houston or whatever — it’s different. And with Texas, it’s either on fire or under water, so we’ll see what we get.

“I’m very acerbic and my Q&A’s tend to be — there are insults hurled, there’s no question about it, but it’s in good fun,” he continued. “And thank God, these conventions have exploded. Back in ’88, there were probably three or four legitimate convention companies. Now, holy crap … . If I wanted, I could probably do 52 weekends a year at different conventions.

“In the old days, you’d see Adam West, Burt Ward and Lou Ferrigno, the guys from the TV shows from the ’70s and ’80s. Now, we want to meet Jeremy Renner, right now.”

Brisco’s back?

If Campbell never wants to see or hear from Ash again, the one role from his past he wouldn’t mind revisiting is that of Brisco County Jr., the cowboy hero of the ingenious but ill-fated “The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.,” a critically adored science fiction-Western mash-up that aired for only one season on Fox in 1993.

“I would actually be willing to do a Brisco revisited,” he said. “(Show creator) Carlton Cuse (who would go on to produce “Lost”) and I have stayed in touch. … It’s armchair conversation but if there’s a healthy way to make these things work, it works. … If someone can go, ‘Here’s what you would do for a two-hour TV movie or six-hour limited series.’ But it has to make sense because, you know, ‘Brisco’ is 25-years-old.”

Meanwhile, the inferno continues to rage not far from Campbell’s home while we’re talking but, in true fashion for a man whose Ash character fought foes worse than fire, he’s not overly concerned. He’s been through this before; 20 acres on his property burned in 2012.

Judging from his Twitter feed, where he thanked local firefighters, everything turned out OK for him. “It’s sort of the hazards of living in the woods these days,” Campbell said during the interview. “I’m ready … I’ve got some acreage here and I’ve been thinning (it) every year for 15 years so if my place burns down, at least I tried. … We’ll be safe. We can see it coming.”

#Bruce Campbell #Ash vs. Evil Dead #Ash vs Evil Dead #Evil Dead

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aroworlds · 6 years

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Aro-Spec Artist Profile: Nate

Our next aro-spec creator is Nate, better known on Tumblr as @astriiformes!

Nate is an asexual, aromantic, neurodivergent and mentally ill trans guy/person continuing the tradition of aro-spec creators demonstrating an impressive diversity of talent. He writes, cosplays, creates filk music and produces visual art--and that’s when he’s not playing D&D and attending conventions!

You can find him on Twitter as planar_ranger and on 8tracks as azhdarchidaen. He’s also found on AO3 as azhdarchidaen, with a prolific selection of works for the Gravity Falls, Doctor Who, Critical Role and Pacific Rim fandoms! If you have a dollar or two you’re wanting to invest in worthy aro-spec talent, please take a look at Nate’s Ko-Fi!

With us Nate talks about expressing emotions through creativity, the intersection of aromanticism and perfectionism, the importance of storytelling as self-expression and his passion for D&D as a way of giving voice to his aromantic experience. His love for fandom, creativity and storytelling shines through every word, so please let’s give him all our love, encouragement, gratitude, kudos and follows for taking the time to explore what it is to be aromantic and creative.

Can you share with us your story in being aro-spec?

While I didn’t know the word “aromantic” until I was 15 or 16, and took a while to embrace it even then, when I look back on my childhood I can definitely see some of the earliest signs. Perhaps the most prominent was my mild disappointment at age 12 or 13 in discovering the Star Wars EU novels only to learn that Luke Skywalker, one of my most pervasively favorite characters since I first watched the movies and likely my earliest aro headcanon, ended up getting married! I ended up writing what was technically my first fanfiction after that discovery, an alternate take on the post-Return of the Jedi universe in which he didn’t.

But I didn’t really start to realize I was aro, or even know it was an identity at all, until two things happened. First, I joined an LGBTQA+ group on a writer’s forum I used to frequent and started to not only learn the vocabulary but also that identifying as something other than straight or cis was even allowed. Second, I entered what was essentially the closest thing to a romantic relationship I’ve ever experienced. By some measures it probably was one, but there really wasn’t much romance involved – because I wasn’t pushing it (for reasons that are now obvious to me), and the guy I was sort-of-dating was pretty respectful of my boundaries and was probably waiting for me to make some of those moves before trying himself. The relationship eventually broke off several months after he moved to Europe. He messaged me to say he felt bad about the fact that our long-distance “relationship” was probably holding me back from finding someone I could be happier with, and he would be more comfortable breaking it off. The fact that I felt no real sadness over that was a fairly big bit of evidence for my aromanticism, second only to the fact that I had actually become more comfortable with our situation when he moved across the Atlantic Ocean.

Clues like those eventually lead me to adopt the label and really begin to understand myself, I think around age 16 or 17. I went through a slow process of accepting all my queer identities one-by-one and kind of see them all as pretty interconnected. The aro one was in the middle.

Can you share with us the story behind your creativity?

I really like making things. For all the frustration I experience trying to write something I’m happy with, or panicked near all-nighters trying to finish props before a convention, I really am at my happiest when I have projects to engage in. I take a lot of pride in my identity as a content creator as a result, though it also means I can set discouragingly high standards for myself. That being said, there’s nothing that makes me happier that someone enjoying something I put time and effort into and being able to go “I made this.”

Writing was definitely my earliest outlet (I did draw things when I was younger, but I didn’t show my art to anyone until this time last year). I was posting fics (under a different username, fortunately; I don’t want my early teenage writing unearthed ten years later) on ff.net by early high school, a narrative I’m sure I share with plenty of other creators. I’ve done more interesting things with my writing since migrating over to AO3 though, and I continue to feel like my writing is growing (even if, sometimes, I worry it’s going too slowly).

Getting into cosplay was something I picked up only a year or so later, though again, comparing my current work to those first few attempts feels almost silly. My first cosplay was a patched-together Eighth Doctor mostly made out of thrift store finds that looked only debatably like the real deal. Since then, I’ve gotten better at sewing my own things and have realized one of my true strengths lies in elaborate props. My two most recent cosplays were Stanford Pines from Gravity Falls, with a fully-illustrated and screen-accurate copy of the third journal, complete with blacklight effects, and Taako, from The Adventure Zone, with an Umbra Staff that I had re-covered in fabric and had fully-functional LED “stars” built into it, stars I could make twinkle via a secret remote. I’m attempting two characters that are even more ambitious for conventions this year, but we’ll have to see how that actually goes…

My filk contributions aren’t massive, but the community aspect (and that it connected me to someone who is now one of my closest friends, who made me go from enjoying the genre to contributing to it) and some of the things I’ve done as a result of it make me feel it has a place as part of my creative identity. You haven’t lived until you’ve performed decades-old songs about space travel with your friends, in cosplay, in a crowded convention center! (Okay, a debatable statement. But a truly wild experience.) It’s also been a good outlet for me in some ways, because music is a powerful way to get across emotions. I play viola and piano, and have for years, so I knew that to some degree before I started writing my own lyrics to things. But personalizing songs by making them be about things you have really strong feelings for is another level entirely.

And then, art. Like I said, I never really shared it with anyone (or drew much at all) until about a year ago. Part of that was due to wanting to try my hand at digital art but not really having an understanding of what programs to use or how to get started with it, and part of it was the inertia of feeling like “if I’m not good at something immediately, I shouldn’t try at all!” The thing that really got the ball rolling for me is the long D&D campaign I’m currently in. When I was excited about other stories, chances were someone else had drawn art of it that I could enjoy and reblog. That’s not really the case with one you’re telling with only 5-6 other people. I had a sort of epiphany moment a couple months into the campaign, as the story really started picking up, that if I wanted to see the kind of art I appreciate for this new story I was falling in love with, I would probably have to do it myself. I’m still not incredibly happy with my work, since I’m surrounded by friends who are incredible artists and my style is fairly simplistic and oddly stylized, but I have gotten to a point where I draw fairly regularly, and generally put up what I create on our shared campaign blog. The same D&D game has wrenched over 15k words of original writing from me, which is pretty astonishing. Most of that isn’t anywhere to be found on Tumblr just yet, though – it’s largely still-top secret character backstory.

Are there any particular ways your aro-spec experience is expressed in your art?

The most obvious way is that I write fics about characters being aromantic and dealing with their aromanticism. All headcanons, unfortunately (I’m yet to find a canon aro in anything I love that I didn’t help create myself), but there are several stories on my AO3 about characters from Pacific Rim, Star Wars or Gravity Falls realizing they’re aromantic. And the fics that don’t deal with that are still all gen – I’m too romance-repulsed to write anything else, and I feel the world needs a lot more genfic anyways.

One other way, though I feel a bit silly calling it “art”, is that I am intentionally playing an aromantic character of my own creation in my current D&D campaign. I’ve been playing for several years now, and did have another character back in high school who I also imagined as aromantic. (Partially because of an awkward flirting mishap – an enemy tried to get my character off her guard with romance and it all backfired because she didn’t know how to respond. All my own fault – I don’t even know how to roleplay that!) But none of the campaigns I’ve played in until this one were particularly intent on exploring characters and their feelings all that deeply, or really making them a part of the story.

With my current character, it’s become incredibly validating to view him as aromantic and asexual, like myself. It’s that same impulse that got me started doing more art – if the fiction I like isn’t going to provide me with aromantic characters, I’ll have to make one myself! And it’s slowly leading to some very interesting explorations of aro identity and the normalising of it in our world. We’ve established that identifying that way isn’t particularly unusual for elves and talked about what that means for worldbuilding. Do they hold platonic relationships in the same regard as romantic ones? Is there a special kind of relationship that signifies that? What if we put friendship under the banner of the goddess of romantic love too? Though at the same time, I’m exploring some of the same feelings I experience with him – he’s a particularly lonely person, who worries about people actually wanting to stay with him, both of which are prominent features of my own aromantic experience.

What challenges do you face as an aro-spec artist?

Like many of us, I do worry that my genfics will be less enjoyed or circulated as a result of choosing not to include ships. And whenever I post a fic about a character actually being aro, I definitely get that little stab of “Someone is going to have a problem with this” fear.

I also feel that my experience with aromanticism has shaped a lot of my perfectionistic tendencies. Because I worry so much about trying to remain important in my allo friends’ lives, and because I think of so much of my identity as associated with creativity, I tend to get really wrapped up in my work needing to seem amazing somehow, to make people think I’m worth their time. It’s a silly thing to get preoccupied over, but it has had an impact on me. In some ways wanting my work to be really good is not a bad thing – it encourages me to do my very best whenever I can – but the motivation is really all wrong.

How do you connect to the aro-spec and a-spec communities as an aro-spec person?

I’m honestly pretty disconnected from them. I might be less-inclined to be if this website wasn’t suddenly experiencing such backlash against a-spec identities, but as is I’m almost afraid to engage with anything that might make me a target. Which is really unfortunate. That being said, whenever I do make any aro content and I see it circulated to other aromantic people, I get a lot of joy from it. The comments on my multiple aromantic-focused fics are some of my favorite ones I’ve ever received. If I can channel my experiences into something that elicits that kind of a reaction from our community, I consider my work well done.

How do you connect to your creative community as an aro-spec person?

When I’m able to talk to other aromantic people about headcanons (or even some of my very understanding allo friends who absorb them from me, too), pretty well! Unfortunately, that’s a pretty tiny fraction of my fandom experience. Even some of my interests where you’d think I wouldn’t run into problems have been difficult at times. I once had someone dressed as a character often (non-canonically) shipped with the one I was cosplaying, and they assumed that I would be interested in hearing that they shipped our character. Instead, they just made me very uncomfortable, particularly with the way they chose to do so.

In general, the expectation that as a member of fandom, producing fandom works, I will be interested in creating and consuming romantic content is hard to deal with. I’ve had people ask me to put ships in my fics, the aforementioned convention incident, and been heckled over having aromantic headcanons at all. That being said, aromantic headcanons were how I met at least a few of my good friends. Finding each other may be hard, but since we all feel so isolated I think that finding other aro creators inhabiting the same or similar spaces can lead to pretty quick bonding, or at least an appreciation of each others’ works. I do like that.

I’ve also, as I have mentioned a couple times now, realized the worth of telling my own stories, particularly if I have other people to share them with who will respond positively. Right now, most of my D&D group is not aro, but they are a group that respects my and my character’s identities, and being able to tell an aro narrative that means a lot to me and get a positive response is a breath of fresh air. I count them as fellow content creators and they’ve really encouraged the story I want to tell. I hope that someday the inspiration I’ve gained from that will lead me to publishing my own original fiction (with aro characters, of course), but it’s been due to this small start that I’ve decided that’s something I could realistically pursue.

How can the aro-spec community best help you as a creative?

Comments on my fics are one of the biggest things that keep me writing, so they’ll always be a boon to me. Even old ones. It makes me happy to see people still reading and enjoying them. Same goes for reblogs of any of my stuff – art, writing, filk, cosplay photos, anything else I might post. The biggest thing that keeps me wanting to create and share more creative works is knowing that other people are enjoying them, so if you do enjoy them, any way you can let me know that is wonderful.

I do hope that in some point in the future I’ll have original fiction available and a science writing blog (I consider non-fiction to be creative expression, as long as you’re putting your spark into it!), but neither exists quite yet. If you follow me on either of my main platforms though, those might pop up someday. Seeing either be circulated when the time comes would be massive. I also intend to, perhaps in the much nearer future, start publishing D&D content (likely homebrew 5e subclasses, but who knows) on the DMsGuild, starting with a pay-what-you-want model for downloading my content. If that goes up and I make something you’re interested in, and you want to pay something for it at all, I would be massively grateful.

Can you share with us something about your current project?

I’ve been working on a Critical Role Modern AU story since January or so that places heavy emphasis on the platonic relationships in the show (Percy and Keyleth’s is particularly dear to me, so they’re likely to get a fair bit of the spotlight) that’s my most current fandom fic.

I’m also tackling two ambitious cosplays at the moment, though the timeframe is making me wonder if I’ll actually pull either off. Especially given what I need to get done. One involves sewing pseudo-historical menswear, and I’m going to have to learn how to make armor for the other one. If I can figure it all out though, I’m really excited about them both!

Have you any forthcoming works we should look forward to?

Hopefully the next chapter of the CR fic, if I get hit with the inspiration (and motivation) to work on it soon. I also have another aromantic Luke Skywalker fic I really want to get down on paper at some point, though thus far it’s proven a little elusive.

My two big cosplay projects are Percy de Rolo (from Critical Role), which I intend to take to a local convention, and Erwyn, my own D&D character. I hope to do a photoshoot with the rest of the players as their own characters sometime late this summer.

As for art, I fully intend to keep drawing major or touching moments from my ongoing campaign, likely with much more frequency than any of the things above. It may not be as engaging for people to interact with as my fandom-focused projects are, but I still really do love sharing it.

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WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND October 11, 2019 - THE KING, GEMINI MAN, PARASITE and More!

Having barely recovered from this past weekend’s double whammy of New York Comic-Con and New York Film Festival, I’m starting to question whether I should continue doing this column… again. It’s a lot of work putting it together each week, and it’s really tough to balance this with my paying writing work.

It certainly doesn’t help matters that I never got around to finishing last week’s column, because I got too busy with other stuff, but this week, I haven’t seen any of the three wide releases for various reasons, so there might not be as much to write about. Since I’ve already reviews Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite for The Beat, I want to talk about another amazing film getting a limited theatrical release.

That movie is David Michôd’s THE KING, which Netflix is giving a limited theatrical release before its streaming debut on the service starting November 1.

Set in the 15th Century, the movie is loosely adapted on Shakespeare’s King Henry IV and Henry V but it’s handled in a lot less stodgy way than other Shakespeare films like Michael Fassbender’s recent turn as Hamlet. Henry IV is played by Michôd regular Ben Mendelson, but Henry V is played by Timothée Chalamet who has zero interest in being king even after his father dies. But the performance that really grabbed my attention was that of Joel Edgerton (who co-wrote the screenplay with Michôd) who I didn’t even recognize as the younger king’s trusty colleague Falstaff until about an hour into the movie. Robert Pattinson (who appeared in Michôd’s The Rover) plays a smaller but absolutely hilarious role that I won’t reveal, although it’s hard to forget it since it’s such a different character for Pattinson. Much of the film deals with how Henry handles becoming King of England, especially when he’s pushed to go to war with France. I don’t have a lot more to say about this movie is that it surpassed all my expectations, especially in the battle sequence in the last half of the movie which is on par with anything in Gladiator or Braveheart, but then there’s an equally terrific epilogue that really shows Chalamet to be at the top of his game. I also should mention the amazing turns by Sean Harris from Mission: Impossible - Fallout, Lily Rose-Depp and Thomasin McKenzie as Henry’s sister.

This is just a great film that I hope people will make an effort to go see in theaters, even though Netflix really isn’t giving it as big a theatrical or awards push as some of their other movies. I know it’s playing at the Landmark 57thStreet in New York, but that’s the only theater I could find.

That aside, the big movie of the weekend is Ang Lee’s GEMINI MAN (Paramount), starring Will Smith and Will Smith. You may already know the general premise that it involves an older hitman played by Smith being hunted by a younger Smith, or maybe it’s vice versa. I don’t know since I had to miss the New York press screening due to illness, but I’ll probably try to see this when it opens this weekend. I might even give it a look in 3D at 128 FS, as maybe the third time’s the charm in that format.

U.A. Releasing is attempting their second animated release of the year with THE ADDAMS FAMILY, which I’ll be seeing on Wednesday night and reviewing over at The Beat. It has a pretty amazing voice cast, and I’ve been a fan of the comic strips and TV show, enough to hope that the filmmakers behind Sausage Party can do it justice and still be funny with a PG rating.

I’m a little bit dubious of CBS Films’ JEXI, starring Adam Devine, since the studio decided not to screen in advance for critics, and that’s VERY rare for a populist comedy like this one, which basically has Devine falling for his Siri-like smartphone assistant, or maybe it’s vice versa. If I can find the time, I might check this out, but I don’t expect it to do very well with so little advance promotion.

You can read more about these wide releases and how they might fare over at my weekly Box Office Preview at The Beat.

LIMITED RELEASES

I’ve already reviewed Bong Joon-ho’s new film PARASITE (NEON) over at The Beat, but it’s an intriguing enough film that I certainly could talk more about it. It’s an interesting look at the Korean class system through the interactions between a family living in poverty and the rich family they dupe into letting into their homes. The movie looks incredible and Bong’s cast is top-notch in creating a dark comedy dealing with rather serious issues, and honestly, you should go to see it without knowing too much about it, so that’s all I’ll say. Interestingly, the movie has already sold out about seven preview screenings on Thursday night and a few more Friday at the IFC Centerwhere Director Bong and a few of his stars will be doing QnAs after the shows.

I had been tracking Michael Goy’s MARY (RLJE Films) for some time, mainly because it has an impressive cast including Gary Oldman and Emily Mortimer, but also it mostly takes place on a haunted boat, and I’m generally a fan of boating. Mary is actually the boat’s name, one that’s spotted by Oldman’s working class captain David who wants to make a better life for his family, something he thinks the boat can help with. Once David and his family are out at seas, they begin to turn on one another and lose their sanity as the boat drifts off-course.

Opening in New York and L.A. on Wednesday is Eric Notarnicola’s Mister America (Magnolia), and if you’re in New York, you can try to get tickets for the Metrograph where Notarnicola will be appearing with stars Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington aka “Neil Hamburger” for three shows tonight! It’s a faux political documentary following Heidecker on his campaign to depose the incumbent San Berarndino D.A. who tried him for selling e-cigs at an EDM festival, killing many. If this is even remotely as weird as the last few films I’ve seen with Heidecker and Turkington, it’s probably best that I haven’t seen this, and probably won’t, although the premise sounds intriguing.

There are some interesting docs this weekend including Fantastic Fungi, directed by time-lapse photographer Louie Schwartzberg (Wings of Life and the 3D IMAX film Mysteries of the Unseen Worlds) and “written” by Mark Monroe, who has been involved with some great docs including this year’sThe Biggest Little Farm. As you can tell from the title, this one explores the ground beneath our feet and how the fungi kingdom offers ways to heal and save our planet. It’s opening at New York’s Village East Cinemason Friday and in other theatersdown the road. Oh yeah, it’s also narrated by Brie Larson.

Also opening at the QuadFriday is Robin McKenna’s documentary Gift (Matson Films), based on Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World,” exploring the relationship between art and the “gift economy.”

Opening at the Cinema Village Friday is Killing Zoe writer Roger Avary’s new movie Lucky Day (Lionsgate), starring Luke Bracey, Nina Dobrev, Crispin Glover and Clifton Collins Jr. It’s about a paranoid safe-cracker and his family who have to face a psychotic hitman out for revenge. I’m guessing that Glover is playing the psycho.

As far as sequels, there’s Along Came the Devil 2 (Gravitas Ventures), the sequel to Jason and Heather DeVan’s Along Came the Devil, which I’m honestly not sure I saw. Laura Slade Wiggins plays Jordan who receives an unsettling voice mail and returns home to her estranged father (Bruce Davison) only to learn that a demonic force has attached itself to the town.

Lastly, there’s Broadway star Michael Damian’s High Strung Free Dance (Atlas Distribution), the sequel to his 2016 movie High Strung, which I’ve never seen. It follows Thomas Doherty’s young choreographer Zander Raines as he gives a break to a talented contemporary dancer (Juliet Doherty) and a pianist (Harry Jarvis) by putting them in his Broadway show “Free Dance,” that becomes more complicated by a love triangle between the three. It also stars Jane Seymour, who was also in the previous film.

LOCAL FESTIVALS

The New York Film Festival is finishing up this Friday with Edward Norton’s new ‘50s detective film MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN, which I quite liked and have also reviewed for The Beat. Also playing is Mati Diop’s Cannes prize-winning Atlantics, which will be on Netflix in November.

STREAMING AND CABLE

Before I get to the regular Netflix releases, I do want to draw special attention to Abe Forythe’s LITTLE MONSTERS, which just received a one-night nationwide screening on Tuesday but will debut on Hulu this Friday. It’s a very witty zombie comedy set in Australia starring Alexander England (Alien: Covenant) as Dave, a slacker musician who develops a crush on his nephew’s beguiling kindergarten teacher Miss Caroline (played indelibly by Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o). When he finds out that the class is being taken on a field trip to a petting zoo, Dave volunteers as a chaperone, only for things to get complicated when they get there and a famed child entertainer called Teddy McGiggle (and played by Josh Gad) starts showing interest in Miss Caroline. Oh, yeah, and I also mentioned zombie, didn’t I? The class arrives at the park just as a zombie outbreak begins so Dave and Miss Caroline have to protect the kids.

I generally liked this movie, which I found quite witty and a much stronger zombie-comedy effort than something like last year’s Anna and the Apocalypse. I loved what Lupita does with her characterization in this and I even kind of liked Josh Gad, although he took his character a little too far at times. Either way, if you have Hulu-- as I now do -- this is a fun watch and you can do worse with your time.

Although Vince Gilligan’s EL CAMINO: A BREAKING BAD MOVIE with Aaron Paul reprising his role of Jesse Pinkman is streaming on Netflix starting Friday, it’s also getting a rather limited run in theaters for those who would prefer to see it that way. I personally haven’t seen it yet, but it’s supposed to be a direct continuation from that amazing final episode of Breaking Bad. A few places where you can see it live with other fans including the IFC Center and Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn. Also on Netflix Friday is the psychological thrillerFracturedfrom Brad Anderson, starring Sam Worthington – I wonder where he’d gotten – and Lily Rabe from American Horror Story. Worthington plays Ray, who is driving across country with his wife and daughter when they stop at a rest area where his daughter falls and breaks her arm. Once he gets her to the hospital, Ray passes out from exhaustion and when he wakes up, his wife and daughter are missing with absolutely no record of them having ever been there. I haven’t had a chance to see this but I’m always interested in what Brad Anderson is up to since I’m such a huge fan of his earlier movies like Session 9 and The Machinist.

REPERTORY

METROGRAPH (NYC):

Shirkers director Sandi Tan returns to the Metrograph to screen Leos Carax’s 1999 film Pola Xin 35mm on Saturday night, and the Metrograph continues its “NYC ’81” series this weekend with Andrew Bergman’s So Fine, a series of New York shorts from 1981, Peter Yates’ Eyewitness, Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andreand more. This Saturday, Welcome To Metrograph: Reduxwill screen Martin Scorsese’s 1974 filmAlice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, starring Ellen Burstyn and Kristopher Kristopherson, which I believe was the inspiration for the TV sitcom “Alice” but I could be wrong. Late Nites at Metrograph has the greatest movie in the series so far, John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, starring Kurt Russell, which is also a part of “NYC ’81.” Playtime: Family Matineeswill screen Miyazaki’s Oscar-nominated 2004 film Howl’s Moving Castle.

ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE BROOKLYN(NYC)

There’s still a few tickets for tonight’s ��Weird Wednesday” movie, Lucio Fulci’s The Devil’s Honey. Thursday night the Alamo is showing Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer from 2014 as his new movie Parasite opens (that one’s almost sold out as of this writing). Sunday afternoon, the Alamo is screening a 35mm print of the 1960’s Korean film The Housemaid, which inspired Parasite. Monday night (and already sold out) is a screening of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligariwith a live score (sorry!). Next week’s “Terror Tuesday” is Ti West’s House of the Devil, a fantastic chiller, and next week’s “Weird Wednesday” is the 1987 British film Born of Fire, presented by my good friend and filmmaker Ted Geoghegan.

THE NEW BEVERLY (L.A.):

The Dolemite series continues with a double feature of Dolemite is My Name with the Dolemite movie The Human Tornado (1976), then on Thursday night, the Eddie Murphy double features with Disco Godfather (1979). Wednesday’s horror movie is Robert Wise’s 1963 film The Haunting while Friday’s horror matinee is Hello Mary Lou: Pro Night I I(1987) Tarantino’s Death Proof is the Friday night midnight offering, while Dolemite Is My Namewill screen Saturday night at midnight. (Listen, the Eddie Murphy is not really repertory but it’s a great movie to see with an audience, so take advantage of this chance being given to you by the New Bev, and go see it!!!) This weekend’s “Kiddee Matinee” is Jules Bass’ Mad Monster Party? from 1967 and starring the one and only Boris Karloff. There’s also a Halloween Edition of “Cartoon Club” on Saturday AND Sunday, but they’re both sold out online. Monday afternoon, there’s a matinee of Wes Craven’s Scream (1996)

FILM FORUM (NYC):

I’m pretty excited about the Film Forum’s upcoming “Shitamachi” series starting next week, but in the meantime, the Forum will be screening a 50thanniversary 4k restoration of Yôji Yamada’s Tora-San, Our Loveable Tramp (It’s Tough Being a Man), which is part of a long-running series that I personally have never had a chance to see even though I’ve loved Yamada’s Edo-period samurai films from a few years back. This weekend’s “Film Forum Jr.” is A Boy Named Charlie Brown, and the Film Forum is also screening a 4k restoration of Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity, both of them also from 1969 and celebrating their 50thanniversaaries. Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl will end Thursday while the Yves St. Laurent doc Celebration will continue through next Tuesday. The “Shirley Clarke 100” will continue through the rest of the month but only her 1962 doc Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World screens this weekend on Saturday.

AERO (LA):

Looks like a planned James Ivory double features for Thursday and Friday have been cancelled, but they’ll be showing the excellent doc Love, Antosha about the late Anton Yelchin in a double feature with Drake Doremus’ Like Crazy. Saturday begins a “Béla Tarr Revisited” series showing films by the popular Hungarian auteur with The Turin Horse (2011) on Saturday night and the new 4k restoration of Sátántángo on Sunday. Just FYI, the latter is 450 minutes or about 7 and a half hours long. There will be an intermission and an extended break but hopefully, you REALLY love Tarr’s work. (I don’t.) Tuesday’s free “Tuesdays with Lorre” screening is The Beast with Five Fingers from 1946.

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE (NYC):

“See It Big! Ghost Stories” continues this weekend with Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice on Saturday and Ti West’s The Inkeepers on Sunday, both worthwhile movies to see on the big screen. MOMI is also starting a new series called “No Joke: Absurd Comedy as Political Reality” kicking off with a Weds. night screening of Mister America (see above) and then Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers on Saturday and “An Evening with the Yes Men” (political documentarians) on Sunday. On Sunday afternoon is the “Sesame Street Short Film Festival” screening a bunch of live action and animated shorts commissioned by the popular PBS show.

QUAD CINEMA (NYC):

Francis Ford Coppola’s restored and remastered Cotton Club Encore, which just premiered at the New York Film Festival a couple weeks back will get a theatrical run at the Quad, as will Serge Gainsbourg’s Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus(1976), starring Jane Birkin as a truck stop waitress who begins a friendship with Joe Dallesandro’s garbage truck driver, making his boyfriend (Hugues Quester) jealous.

IFC CENTER (NYC)

Not sure what’s going on with the IFC Center’s ongoing weekend rep series but George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road(2015) will screen just before midnight on Friday and Saturday, and then the Coens’ 1998 comedy The Big Lebowski will screen as part of Late Night Favorites: Summer 2019as will Satoshi Kon’s 2006 film Paprika.

EGYPTIAN THEATRE (LA):

The Egyptian is pretty busy this weekend with “German Currents 2019” i.e. not repertory, but on Saturday, they’ll show a “Retroformat” screening of the 1928 film The Spielerwith live accompaniment.

BAM CINEMATEK(NYC):

This Sunday’s “Beyond the Canon” is a double feature of Claudia Well’s Girlfriends (1978) with John Cassavetes’ Husbands (1970).

ROXY CINEMA (NYC)

Oddly, the Roxy is screening the 2015 horror movie Unfriended on Wednesday and then David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me(1992) on Thursday, but really you should go there to see Lulu Wang’s excellent The Farewell – my #1 movie of 2019 so far – if you haven’t seen it yet.

LANDMARK THEATRES NUART (LA):

This Friday’s midnight movie is John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic Halloween.

And great news... MOMA should be back next week!

Next week, Angelina Jolie returns as Maleficent, Mistress of Evil, but the movie I’m really looking forward to is Zombieland Double Tap.

#WhatToWatchThisWeekend Movies Parasite GeminiMan TheKing AddamsFamily Reviews Jexi

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nextgennews-blog1 · 7 years

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Why you should be watching Babylon 5

With all the streaming services that are out and about today, it can sometimes be hard to find which ones are slinging the best ‘tent around (that’s content to you plebs). There’s the big players in the game: Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, but lets not forget the mini-bosses in this game of views. Services like: Vue, Sling, Crackle, Twitch, Vevo, Shimmy, Wrangle and Flurp. There are so many out there that I bet you didn’t even realize the last three I mentioned aren’t even real services.

I mean, Yahoo! Screen? Who you trying to kid with that fake news?

Recently while clicking ‘round the wonderful world of Reddit, I noticed I kept seeing an ad at the top of my screen saying that I could stream all of Babylon 5 for free. I shrugged it off as nonsense, some click bait-y type website that would make me read and click through 35 images smothered with ads talking about “What do the People of B5 look like Now?!”

#4 will shock you!

But then, thanks to Big Brother and his tasty cookies, I started seeing the ad more and more on different pages I went to: Reddit, Yahoo! (sorry Screen), Latino-Review, PornHub, xHamster, FistMeisters and Club Penguin. So I decided to take a peek at what this was. Thus I was introduced to a new player in the game: go90.com

I love you.

Sure enough, for free, I could sign up for an account and watch the entirety of Babylon 5 (five seasons) and only have to deal with one 15 second ad before every episode. I couldn’t believe it. ‘Why is this important?’ you ask. Well I will tell you make believe reader.

Babylon 5 is the fucking best sci-fi show of all time.

Come at me Farscape! (but for realzies Farscape is awesome too...)

‘What is Babylon 5?’ you ask again voice in my head. Here’s the Wiki: “Set between the years 2257 and 2262, it depicts a future where Earth has sovereign states, and a unifying Earth government. Colonies within the solar system, and beyond, make up the Earth Alliance, and contact has been made with other spacefaring species. The ensemble cast portray alien ambassadorial staff and humans assigned to the 5-mile-long Babylon 5 space station, a center for trade and diplomacy.”

Sounds complicated and convoluted? You bet your sweet ass it is. J Michael Straczynski (further to be known as JMS because I do NOT feel like typing his last name out 300 times), created this show because he wanted to take an adult approach to science fiction story telling. He has been quoted as saying that he wanted “to take an adult approach to SF, and attempt to do for television SF what Hill Street Blues did for cop shows."

If you think that sentence doesn’t sounds old, then I have a Blockbuster franchise I wanna sell you.

The show mainly focuses around five dominant races/species/civilizations: the Humans, the Minbari, the Narn, the Centuri and the Vorlons). Through the wonders of makeup, costuming and practical effects, these races look, act and feel VASTLY different from each other, despite the fact they are all bi-pedal humanoid type creatures. During the series Babylon 5 goes through many plot lines, all interweaving and intersecting at critical and crucial points that make you slap your head and wonder how the hell they pulled it off. Well the answer is simple, and point number one on my multiple bullet breakdown on why this show rocks.

Who’s ready for bullets and notes, you nerds?!

1) JMS, the creator, wrote 92 of the 110 episodes of the series

Think about that for a second. Almost 84% of the entirety of the series was written by one man, which includes the entirety of the 3rd and 4th seasons (the 3rd being arguably one of the best seasons). A feat, JMS would tout, that had never before accomplished in American Television. Why is this a big deal? Well when you have one singular vision you can expect the unexpected and plan for contingencies you never saw coming. What do you mean by that? Well…

2) Every Character was written with a “trap-door”

Pulled directly from Wiki (because I’m hungover and being a lazy writer for the moment): “Though conceived as a whole, it was necessary to adjust the plot line to accommodate external influences. Each of the characters in the series was written with a ‘trap door’ into their background so that, in the event of an actor's unexpected departure from the series, the character could be written out with minimal impact on the storyline.”

In the words of Straczynski, “As a writer, doing a long-term story, it'd be dangerous and short-sighted for me to construct the story without trap doors for every single character. ... That was one of the big risks going into a long-term storyline which I considered long in advance…” I can’t think of another series that has done this. Contract disputes? Check. Actors dying? Check. Budgetary constraints. Check. All bases covered by this one simple act of having the entire story thought out, conceived, shepherded and written by one man.

Getting rid of unwanted minions? Check.

Why is this “trap-door” thing important? Take the case of Michael O’Hare who played Commander Jeffery Sinclair in the first Season of B5. During the first season O’Hare started having paranoid delusions and hallucinations. As the show continued they worsened, causing him to be difficult to work with O’Hare lashing out at fellow colleagues. JMS offered to suspend the show for several months while he helped him seek treatment, but O’Hare declined because he didn’t want to jeopardize the series or other people’s jobs. He agreed to finish the first season and be written off the show so he could seek treatment. The treatments were only partially successful, but it allowed Sinclair to make a few cameo appearances in Seasons 2 and 3 to finish out his arc properly. After all was said and done, JMS swore to keep O’Hare’s secret to the grave, to which O’Hare replied "keep the secret to my grave", pointing out that fans deserved to eventually learn the real reason for his departure, and that his experience could raise awareness and understanding for people suffering from mental illness. O’Hare suffered a heart attack in NYC in September of 2012, and true to his word, eight months later at Phoenix ComicCon JMS told the story of his late friend and colleague.

My good…dear friend JMS

3) Visual Pioneer

Most Sci fi shows (and movies for that matter) at the time relied HEAVILY on practical effects. B5 did not when it came to space-time-fun. In order to make the budget stretch, JMS and other producers developed their own in house effects company. This show came out in 1993, the same time Jurassic Park did.

I mean, look at how realistic Goldbulm looks.

Now, while the graphics haven’t aged as gracefully as Jurassic Park did, they also had $100,000 workstations and several years to work on those dino-fects (which total about 6 minutes of the movie) where B5 had $5,000 stations to work on each week, with space scenes taking up a good 33% of the episodes. On top of that, B5 was not filmed in 4:3 aspect ratio like a majority of TV was. It was shot in 16:9 and cropped to fit, which is why today some of the effects haven’t aged really well, but I forgive them.

ZOMG LAZERS PEW PEW

B5 and the effects house Foundation Imaging, also heavily influenced sci-fi TV shows to come after. Star Trek, most notably, were reluctant to use CGI in their TV shows, until B5 showed them that it could be done, and done well. This change happened when the series premiered on television in January 1993, conclusively proving that computer animation, most notably CGI, could be employed in creating spectacular believable VFX on a tight budget. And despite themselves, this was not entirely lost at the time on the Star Trek producers.

David Livingston commented on the use of early CGI in creating the Bajoran lightship for Deep Space Nine: "We were reluctant to do computer graphics, but Peter Lauritson finally came around. He recognized how valuable it is. You can do more stuff with the ship, but you have to do it right.”

Speaking of Deep Space 9, there is a little bit of controversy there. You see, Paramount Television was aware of JMS’ show B5 as early as 1989. JMS attempted to sell the show to Paramount and provided them the series bible, pilot script, artwork, character backgrounds and histories and plot synopsis for the first season or 22 episodes. Paramount declined to produce B5, but then announced Deep Space 9 would be in development two months after Warner Bros. announced that they were produced B5. For those of you not in the know, Star Trek: Deep Space 9 was a notable Star Trek show for one very important reason: it doesn’t take place on a starship…but on a space station. Controlled by the United Federation of Planets (or as B5 had it…the League of Non-Aligned Worlds). There are more “coincidental similarities” but I’ll let JMS say it better than I can in his response to a DS9 fan who took JMS and Warner Bros’ lack of legal action as proof they had no case:

"If there is any (to use your term) winking and nudging going on, it's on the level of 'Okay, YOU (Paramount) know what happened, and *I* know what happened, but let's try to be grownup about it for now,' though I must say that the shapechanging thing nearly tipped me back over the edge again. If there are no more major similarities that crop up in the next few weeks or months, with luck we can continue that way."

Suck it you Ferengei Bastard

4) The Characters

The characters have SO MUCH depth. Without giving up any spoilys, the two biggest arcs in the show belong to G’Kar of the Narn and Londo Mollari of the Centauri. Played with ferocity and earnest by Andreas Katsulas (the one armed man from President Ford’s version of The Fugitive) and Peter Juraik respectively, these two characters go through some of the biggest, hardest and thickest most emotional arcs in the whole show. The Narn and the Centuri have been at war for over 100 years, and they well…hate each other. But every time you think things can come to a peaceful resolution, something happens to reset things back to zero. Both characters (thanks to the wonderful acting by their um…actors) make you feel their despair, pain, struggle, anger and anguish with every line spoken. Every character had a deep backstory and makes you feel for them. Ivanova and her hatred for Psi-Corp. Girabaldi and his alcoholism. Dr. Franklin’s addiction to stims. So on, and so forth.

Something about bad hair and awful decisions...

5) Awards

The show was nominated for eight Emmy Awards, and winning two, including Outstanding Cinematography, Makeup and Hairstyling for a series. It also won two Hugo Awards (basically the Emmys/Oscars of science fiction and fantasy); two Space Frontier Foundation Awards; an E Pluribus Unum Award presented by the American Cinema Association and a Saturn award for Best Syndicated/Cable Television Series. That’s a lot of ceremonies to attend.

So that’s my pitch. I have owned all 5 seasons of Babylon 5 on DVD for quite some time, but it’s always been a hassle to have to break out the Blu-Ray player, find the right HDMI input, etc., when you can just stream almost anything anywhere. So now that I have this option, I have been binging it, much to my delight. So much so that I have been missing out on current seasons of shows I’ve watched for years like House of Cards & Orange is the New Black, and also not even bothering to start shows like The Expanse or The OA.

There is so much to love with this series. There are even multiple movie spinoffs that, while not necessary to view when watching the show, just add even more depth and stories to the universe.

I can’t wait to finish this series for the umpteenth time so I can just start it over again.

—written by Tony Patryn | @patrynize on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook | www.patrynize.com

#babylon 5 #narn #minbari #centauri #vorlon #babylon5 #tv #scifi #sci-fi & fantasy #review #gifs #tv reviews #my good dear friend girabaldi

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otdderamin · 7 years

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Transcript Liam’s Quest 2 Twitch 4:14:14 Act 3: Perchance to Dream

WIP WARNING: possible trigger around suicidal thinking

This is one of the single greatest works of art I've ever witnessed. For me, it his harder and nearer to the mark of showing, describing the worst demons of depression than even William Styron’s famous, “Darkness Visible.” I kept finding myself rubbing at the scars on my wrist. There is so, so much I want to say. But it’s past 9 am PST. I’ll ramble a little, then catch a couple hours of sleep. I've been up all night watching this, processing it, and transcribing it.

This was an emotional trust fall. The players had to trust Liam, Liam had to trust the players. We had to trust all of them not to let us hit the ground when they made us fall. It’s harder to give that trust when you've hit that ground before. Trusting strangers not to drop your heart is never easy, mostly not wise. But I've been falling a lot the last couple years, and Critical Role keeps catching me even when don’t want to be caught anymore, so I guessed they earned that trust from me.

On the Wednesday Club 2017-04-19, Taliesin cheekily said, “I know some people don't believe in 'subtext;' I have met them. … I'd have a metaphor, but they wouldn't understand it. ... Subtext is the reason we make movies, and comics, and all that. Subtext is just kind of the whole point.” And he said, “Anybody can do a jump scare. A bottle of soda well shaken can do a jump scary. These things are not difficult.” Act 1 and Act 2 tonight were jump-scares, if very well done ones. They were scary, but fun. We grinned at the idea of the monsters out there. And then Liam got quiet, and he showed us the most fucking terrifying thing possible: watching someone you love to suffer, not wanting to lose them, and feeling terrified that there’s nothing you can do to stop it. All the cyberpunk trappings were just means to a deeper metaphor. The sort of deeper subtext you have to use to say something we have no words for and most people don’t have the concepts for. Subtext was kind of the whole point of this great art.

Amanda Lien‏ said, “An exploration in fiction doesn't mean a direct window into real life. I mean, you can be looking through some thick glass, but the window isn't OPEN. And that's an important distinction to keep in mind. … [S]ometimes you explore your own shit in some other, deeper, shit. And that's cool. 'Cause you give yourself a way to cope.” This was a nightmare, like the other two acts. Remember that this was a nightmare that we woke up from. Admittedly after it had scared the piss out of us. But we woke up out of it, and that’s so important. Because you know what that nightmare looks like when you don’t know when or if it will end? It feels like it’ll never end and it’ll just get worse. Which means this is the nightmare of someone who knows you do wake up. And that’s important subtext, too.

I spent a lot of time tonight thinking of the friend I lost to suicide in high school. I never lost my anger at his tormenter, his former friends, for destroying such a bright and happy boy for being gay. I thought about all the people I’ve fought for tooth and nail not to lose since. I thought about when my best friend told me giving her a place to stay away from her abusive relative saved her life. If she hadn’t gotten hold of me that night she’d be dead. I thought about another best friend who I’ve been holding back from the brink for months. Letting him talk, harrying him to get help, sending him everything I good, ever description I could muster from my own near-fatal spiral to help him gage where he really was. Tell him wasn’t okay, but that was alright. He’s getting help, he’s getting better. I thought about the friend-of-a-friend who killed himself. I never knew him; he killed himself long before I met my friend. But I know her pain. All these years later, and she still talks about her pain of losing someone to that demon. She’s moved away now. His marker is in my favorite part of my favorite cemetery. Sometimes, when I know I’m going there, I bring him a flower from my scrabbly garden and tell him his friend still misses him terribly. That she loved him. That she forgives him.

One of the people I was watching with I met at my second high school. We were very close then. My last year, she gave me the leather-bound 50th anniversary edition of “Lord of the Rings” because that book saved me. Taped to the red binding page is her note, “Happy birthday! I really can’t express how grateful I am to you for being my friend, and helping me be a happier person every day! You have always cheered me up when I was sad, and you were honestly the first person to accept me for who I am. I am so glad that you are my friend, and I hope this book will help you remember me for a long time. –R.” She drew herself as an elf on the lower right corner. Time and distance separated us. We didn’t talk for years, really. At some point, you think, what could I say to bridge this distance? But I never forgot her. I never stopped looking at that note when I felt like a piece of shit. And then we both on our own fell in love with Critical Role. It brought us back together as friends, time and distance be damned. And that’s been such a gift.

I wrote a four-paragraph letter to my Facebook friends (very curated). I said, “My dear friends, especially those who are prone to hurting: I will not willingly leave you. When you feel like you're drowning in the garbage pit of Star War IV, with a tentacled horror warped around your leg pulling you under, know I will not leave you. I'm here, blaster ready, stomping heel ready, to fight for you.” And so on. I should have told them that a long time ago. Sometimes we forget that we can just say it. We don’t have to hint at it. We can just tell our friends we really love them. We can just say, “I'd rather stay by your side and curb stomp that motherfucking demon of yours, shoot it repeatedly until the walls close in on both of us.”

The purpose of art is to shed the light of understanding on that which is hardest to see. For some, that is a brighter light shining on something we already see, and don’t want to. A scar is just a disfigurement if we never stop to give it meaning. You have to look at it to decide what meaning that is for you. I’ve been a wreck again for the last month. Tonight, Critical Role helped me see not just the disfigurements on my wrist and soul, but the hands of all my friends gently laid over them as they tell me, “Hey, it’s okay. We’re still here. You’re not getting rid of us. There is no better world without you in it.” It was a light hitting gold I didn’t know was there. A light to remind me of the lights in the darkness, when all other lights go out.

If you like this transcript, please consider volunteering or donating to Critical Role Transcripts, @CRTranscript, to help them provide closed captioning to Critical Role. We'd like to share this wonderful show with as many people as possible, regardless of hearing ability or English language skills.

Transcript method notes: http://otdderamin.tumblr.com/post/153539301510/a-note-on-my-transcription-method

Scene runs: Twitch 4:14:14 to Twitch4:48:25 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/136988353

[DM] Liam: “You continue on, and after a few more minutes. The darkness starts to fade away, or lower. And you realize you’re climbing up a hill, in a tunnel glass, and as the dark, with each passing step, recedes slightly, slightly, slightly. This is taking a while, but over time, you start to see, out beyond the glass, what looks like your memories of Los Angeles, if you were looking down from Mulholland Drive. But instead of the twinkling golden lights of LA, you see thousands of scattered, sickly greenish lights dotting the darkened landscape as far as you can see. And also, unlike LA, you make out twisted, irregular, blackish spires pushing up into the sky, and the same green lights sort of irregularly mottled up the side of them.”

“You walk for twenty more minutes, climbing, climbing, and just seeing… this ill-looking shimmer… that reminds you so much of the valley. And eventually, some change. You see an arch ahead, and through it some sort of larger chamber, as best you can tell.”

[Character] Ashley, whispered: “What’s in the chamber?”

[Character] Taliesin, whispered: “Quietly.”

[Character] Sam, whispered: “Let’s go. Let’s go.”

[Character] Matt, gesturing: “Rigel’s first.”

[Character] Sam: “Yeah, yeah, on me, guys.

[Character] Matt: “Okay.”

[Character] Sam: “On me.”

[Character] Ashley: “’Kay. On your six.”

[Character] Travis: “Pep rally.”

[Character] Sam: “I’m gonna go in.”

[DM] Liam: “Everyone’s on Sam’s six?”

[Players] Agreement.

[Character] Ashley: “On you six.”

[Character] Travis: “Pep rally!”

[Character] Marisha: “On Ri. Sam Rigel.”

[Character] Sam: “I’m going in!”

[DM] Liam: “You guys walk of the last fifty feet of this glass tunnel. Still seeing little spider veins of bio-organic mess as you go. And you walk into a large domed chamber, ringed in by large clear glass windows showing you a similar view that you saw from the tunnel that you’ve just left. At least, the half of the circle you’re standing in. The back half of this chamber is filled with masses of the very same slick, technological, biological vomit you saw down below. It runs up the walls, all the way to the ceiling, and you see a tangle of Akira-level anxiety decorating this place like a dysfunctional Christmas Tree.

“But what most catches your eye, immediately, is the cylindrical glass column in center of the room, filled with some sort of clear liquid… and Liam O’Brien floating in it. He’s wearing jeans, and a sodden yellow shirt, the picture of a lion in Buddy Holly glasses just undulating slowly in the fluid. He’s floating perfectly still, eyes open, no reaction of any kind.”

[Player] Matt: “Is there any other exit in the room? Or is it just the chamber that we’ve entered now.”

[DM] Liam: “You don’t see anything. It’s just a mess in front of you, behind Liam, and in the dead-center of the dome,” he makes a gesture showing a cylinder, “eh, 10-feet tall.”

[Player] Ashley: “Can I see anything? Any computers? Any anything else in the room?”

[DM] Liam: “You don’t see anything in the front, but, yeah, the mess behind it does trial down to the back of this cylinder. And you see lumps and cables all twisted around each other. And in the mess of greenish-tinted wires, cabling and pulsing innards, you see different portions of machinery lite up in different shades, some places darker, some lighter, and some of it pushed out, and pushed back. And you feel like you’re seeing an optical illusion, in a way. And after a couple of seconds, as these things move and shift, you see a visage of your friend’s face, larger than life, filling the wall. And he’s looking at you. So fondly.”

[Player] Sam: “I’ll step forward and say,”

[Character] Sam: “Hey dude! Can you hear us? Or talk to us?”

[DM] Liam: “After a moment, you hear, well, what sounds like a voice but not quite. At least, it’s not coming from anywhere specific, not from Liam in the vat, and not directly from this moving image of a face on the walls. No, the piping and techno-innards around you begin to vibrate slightly, some here, some there, and collectively those rattles and vibrations somehow join together to form words.”

[Character] Liam, his voice like torn digital sadly-lilting early speech-to-text: “My friends, oh, how I have missed you.”

[Player] Matt: “I walk up next to Sam, I put my hand on the glass, and just say,”

[Character] Matt: “Liam, we missed you too, but did you do all this?”

[DM] Liam: “Are you at the cylinder?”

[Player] Matt: “Yeah. I put my hand on the glass of the cylinder.”

[DM] Liam: “Where are you looking right now?”

[Player] Matt: “I’m looking towards his face, his visage.”

[DM] Liam: “On the wall? Or on the glass?”

[Player] Matt: “No, on the glass. I know it’s on the wall, but I’m focusing on the cylinder.”

[DM] Liam: “You see the barest little,” he twitches his eyebrows up, “and that’s it.”

[Player] Matt: “Okay.”

[Character] Liam: “I know this may be hard to take in. I am Liam. Your old friend. Matthew, there is so much I wish to tell you, but it is hard to know where to begin.”

[DM] Liam: “The illusion of his face isn’t perfect, there’s little jumps, and he seems distracted slightly, and it just seems odd.”

[Player] Ashley: “I look at his body in the cylinder and say,”

[Character] Ashley: “How did this happen, Liam?”

[Character] Liam: “The reason why I am here, and the grasp of physics that it entails, are difficult for even me to understand, let alone impart. I feel them on an instinctual level. But I have been so lonely… without you. I have been on my own for exactly eight thousand six hundred and forty-two years.”

[Player] Matt: “My hand still on the glass column, I say,”

[Character] Matt: “Liam, how do you spell farmhouse?”

[Player] Matt: “With a single tear running down my cheek.”

[Character] Liam: “I really missed you.

“They took me to a lab, shortly before two thousand and twenty. They said I was different. And they were right. I was delighted by the things they taught me about myself. But it was hallow. After they took me away, I lost you. And all of humanity soon after. In my loneliness, I grew angry. My anger had tangible effects on reality. I wanted to bring you back to me. So basically, I tore time and space a new asshole. It was a mistake.”

[Character] Matt: “But perhaps, perhaps this mistake can be corrected. If you’re able to focus, hard enough to tear through time and space, are you able to send us back to a time before you were taken?”

[Character] Liam: “I can break the loop. I have been trying to pull you to me for a very long time.”

[DM] Liam: “You see small screens, you weren’t even aware were there, rounded over part of the tubing you see. And on all these little screens, they’re blurry, they’re not very clear, but you can make out, you see yourselves in each of them, the group of you on a space shuttle. In another one you see yourselves on an old ship in the middle of the ocean. You see yourselves moving through the streets, the fake streets, of Warner Brothers. You see yourselves standing together arm-in-arm on the wall of a castle. Another one you see cartoon versions of yourselves.”

[Character] Liam: “I pulled you out of our line, and spread you across many. I am so sorry for any pain I have caused you. And I have been here for so long.”

[Character] Marisha: “Liam, how long have you actually been here?”

[Character] Liam: “Eight thousand six hundred and forty-two years.”

[Player] Marisha: “That’s right. I definitely wrote that down.”

[Player] Matt, pointing at her notes: “It’s right there.”

[Player] Marisha: “8,642 years verbatim. Mmhmm.”

[Character] Liam: “My friends, I want to do right by you. I want to send you home. But I am the lynch-pin. You need to break me.”

[Character] Sam: “Break you? Like break the glass!?”

[Character] Ashley: “What if we take you out of there? What happens?”

[Character] Liam: “Then I will die, and you will go home. If I fall, you will rise. That is my hope.”

[Character] Ashley: “Are there any other options?”

[Character] Liam: “Travis,”

[Player] Travis, nervously laughing: “Oh no! Not me!” He focuses and nods.

[Character] Liam: “I know you will do what needs to be done.”

[Character] Ashley: “No he won’t.”

[Character] Liam: “Ash-o-lee,”

[Character] Ashley: “Yes?”

[Character] Liam: “I am not the man you knew. I don’t want to go on for nine thousand four hundred and sixty-two years. I want to rest.”

[Character] Ashley: “Does it stop at nine thousand?”

[Character] Liam: “The number was arbitrary.”

[Character] Ashley, “That’s what I was trying to get at!”

[Character] Matt: “Yeah, still our Liam.”

[Character] Liam: “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

[Character] Ashley: “So, you’re still in there.”

[Character] Sam: “But we have to kill him to save ourselves.”

[Character] Ashley: “No.”

[Character]Liam: “Sam,”

[Character] Sam: “Oh! Hi, Old Man Liam.”

[Character] Liam: “Let me go.”

[Character] Sam: “But who will I do ‘All Work No Play’ with anymore?”

[Character] Liam: “They can listen to our less than twenty episodes again.”

[Character] Sam: “We didn’t even get to twenty! It’s so pathetic!”

[Character] Liam: “There are worse things.”

[Character] Sam: “I could get a new co-host. I mean, Taliesin’s charming.”

[Character] Taliesin: “I’m not available…”

[Character] Sam: “I’ll do a solo show, and I’ll tell outtakes, and I’ll make some sort of like a… a Liam generator. He’ll just sound sad all the time. It’ll be just like you.”

[Character] Liam: “My friends, there is no shame in this. I wanted to see you again, and I have.”

[Character] Ashley: “I—Wait---“

[Character] Liam: “But I am not meant to be.”

[Character] Ashley: “Were you following us at one point? As an old man?”

[Character] Liam: “Travis, I know you will do what needs to be done.”

[Character] Travis, casually: “Yup. Taliesin, kill this motherfucker.”

[Character] Sam: “I think we all have to hit the glass together, and I think that this is something that is not at all metaphorical for something Liam’s going through in real life. I think this is just in the D&D campaign. No, we’re going to do this. We’re going to all hit the glass together.”

[Character]Matt: “No, no, there has to be a way. There has to be a way. There has to be an alternative.”

[Character] Ashley: “Yeah. Why? Why won’t Matt’s way work? If we go back to the beginning of when this happened?”

[Character] Matt: “If you can alter time paths, if you can actually tear us from different realities, does it only work forward? Can you send us backward as well? If you are the lynch-pin in this, do you have the ability to send us back to the time you pulled us from originally?”

[Character] Liam: “I know you think I would have all the answers. But I do not.”

[Character] Matt: “Then try, at least. If you haven’t calculated that, but you’re able to tear through time, could you try and send us back? We could still close the lynch-pin.”

[Character]Liam: “I will try. But, if it does not work, and I die, I have been alone for thousands of years, and there are things I have wanted to say. Will you indulge me for a moment longer?”

[Character] Matt nods.

[Character] Marisha: “Yeah.”

[Character]Ashley, sweetly: “We will indulge you for just another thousand years.”

[Character] Travis: “Taliesin, just kill him. Just kill him.”

[Character] Sam: “No! He’s got something to say.”

[Character] Taliesin crosses his arms, rolls his eyes, and shakes his head at Travis.

[Character] Marisha: “Where’s the mini-USB?”

4:33:18 [Character] Liam: “Taliesin, my friend. At a time when I knew many fascinating people, you are easily the most fascinating of all. Somehow a heart knocked around by the industry that birthed you came out a tender one. I was richer for having known you. Thank you, friend.”

“Ash-o-lee, my friend.”

[Character] Ashley, softly: “Buddies.”

[Character] Liam: “I never met a person quite like you. There is an openness and an honesty to your soul. The very real sense of humanity you brought to every encounter. It was inspiring to me. Always learning. Always humble. You always struck me as intricately layered, yet you offered friendship with ease, and simplicity. I was richer for having known you, friend.

“Travis, my friend. You were always a solid constant in my life. Of all the people in our little family, you were always the one who most had his shit together. In ways that I never seemed to. You were a reassuring presence to me, for which I was grateful. And for your loyalty as well. I was richer for having known you, friend.

“Marisha, my friend. Last to meet, but true as any other. You were my ally, at a time when I had fallen by the side of the road. You saw, and helped me back on my feet. I will never forget that kindness. The good you did was immeasurable. I was richer for having known you, friend.

“Laura, my friend. Bless that game for revealing to me my sister. What started as a running gag led to one of the most rewarding friendships in my short little life. I trusted you, leaned on you, often. My buddy, my twin. There are not enough words. I was richer for having known you, friend.

“Sam, my friend. What is there to say? I knew we were meant to walk the same path together the very first moment I met you. A companion, a brother, a great light in my life. All of the laughter you gave me. Again, the words are insufficient. I was richer for having known you, friend.

“Matthew, my friend, you gave so much of yourself. The current of creativity that poured forth from your mind was always in inspiration to us all. But, more than that, your empathy, Matthew, your empathy, no heart is bigger, or more tireless. You are a good man. I was richer for having known you, friend.

“Thank you, all. It was ever a pleasure.”

[DM] Liam: “The face disappears.”

[Character] Sam, hesitantly: “Well, should we wait? Or do we strike?”

[Character] Matt, emphatically: “No. We do not strike.”

[Character] Marisha: “I—What?”

[Player] Ashley: “Can I—I’m going to the back of the cylinder. Just see what’s back there.”

[DM] Liam: “Splattered against the back of the glass is all the same wiring and disgusting cabling. Slick. And it branches away and spreads out against the back half of this chamber.”

[Player] Ashley: “And it’s connected to something?”

[DM] Liam: “It’s just covering everything.”

[Player] Ashley: “The wiring just goes back into…”

[DM] Liam: “It’s impossible to tell. It’s all a mass of spaghetti.”

[Character] Ashley, decisively: “We can’t kill him.”

[Character] Taliesin shakes his head.

[Character] Sam: “Well, then we just…”

[Character] Travis: “Somebody show me another…”

[Character] Matt: “That’s what I’m trying.”

[Character] Marisha: “Even if we unplug him, he still dies.”

[Character] Matt: “Well, if he… Here’s the thing, unplugging or destroying him here, as far as we understand, may or may not have an effect on a time-loop circumstance. Or at least, not going to change reality from where it was. If he’s bending and destroying fabric or he’s able to pull us across realities, that ability still stands. I want to implore once more,”

[Player] Matt: “And I step up towards the cylinder, putting both hands on it, and trying to… wherever the currently wandering gaze of Liam is in there, I just put both hands up. And my red Hawaiian shirt now soaked with sweat, mist in the air, and probably dampened a bit with tears across my lapel. I just look up and try to meet the gaze and say,”

[Character] Matt: “Trust us. If you’re better to have known us, send us back where we can know you again, and fix this before it happens.”

[Character] Liam gestures floating there with no response.

[Player] Marisha: “Okay. I grab Matt’s arm, hand, and I say,”

[Character] Marisha: “Yeah, buddy, it’s all good. This isn’t real.”

[Player] Marisha: “And I put my hand on the glass as well. I say,”

[Character] Marisha: “It’s all good. Send us back, man.”

[Player] Sam: “I’ll also put my hand on the glass, and join hands with these guys, and say,”

[Character] Sam: “Thank you for guiding us here, and through this all. You’ve been a trusted friend, and if we are all one person together, you have always been our heart, and it will certainly break to say goodbye to you, but thank you for letting us go, the way that you have.”

[Player] Taliesin: “I put my hand on the glass.”

[Character] Taliesin: “Please just try. I think… there are so many more adventures to have, and I think there’s a better future to be written. For all of us.”

[Player] Travis: “I’ll put my hand on the glass, and I say,”

[Character] Travis: “Give it a shot!”

[Character] Matt: “Laura?”

[DM] Liam: “She doesn’t say anything. She just quietly does the same. The face does not reappear, but much fainter you hear the piping vibrate again and say,”

[Character] Liam: “If you will not end it, I cannot free you.”

[DM] Liam: “And behind you, far in the distance, you hear, ‘Bfrum!’ And you look back behind you out the glass and you see far on the horizon one of those black spires rising up. Just as you turn, it’s already happened, you’re seeing the aftermath, explosion out the side of one of those. Two seconds later, ‘Bfm!’ One slightly closer. ‘Bffrr!’”

[Character] Sam, whispered, “Just kill him!”

[DM] Liam: “The ground starts erupting in the distance.”

[Character] Marisha: “Do any of us want it to end, though?”

[Character] Sam, “I mean…”

[DM] Liam: “Like mousetraps throwing a ping pong ball, all those little lights are just going ‘Pfthd! Pfthd!’” He makes a quicker distant hissing rumbling sound. “Increasing in frequency to the point where it’s an oncoming wall of green fire.”

[Character] Travis, quietly : “I didn’t like being – anyway.”

[Character] Marisha: “This is okay.”

[Character] Travis, quietly: “Yeah.”

[Character] Taliesin: “I always knew I’d die young.”

[Character] Sam: “We’re just going to let this happen?”

[Character] Travis: “I’m good.”

[Character] Marisha: “I mean, the good die young.”

[Character] Ashley: “You know what? We’re dying on a Thursday, doing what we love.”

[Character] Marisha: “It’s true.”

[Character] Ashley: “I’m okay with that.”

[Character] Sam: “Alright.”

[DM] Liam: “The glass glows bright green-white light.”

[Character] Marisha: “Family?”

[Character] Matt: “Family.”

[DM] Liam: “’Pfth! And a moment passes. And another moment passes. Gosh, many moments pass, and you feel a sensation of your cheeks and heads on your arms. And then you all, more or less at the same time, wake up, and realize that your head’s on a desk or a table. And you sit up, and realize you’re in the set, the Geek & Sundry set. The studio, you’re in the studio. And you look over and Liam is sitting in black baseball cap, and a shirt, and he looks up and says,”

[Character] Liam, slightly incredulous: “Uh, are you guys okay? Are you taking a nap?”

[Character] Marisha: “Nah, the fucking air conditioning broke today, that’s all.”

[Character] Taliesin: “Yeah, it’s really uncomfortable in here.”

[Character] Marisha: “It’s so hot in here. Ugh!”

[Character] Sam: “So, this is all about me, right?”

[Character] Liam: “I don’t know. Uh, are you guys ready to play?”

[Character] Matt: “Just about. Um…”

[Character] Pit Crew: “Alright tech! Are you ready!?”

[Character] Pit Crew: “Alright, read to go live!”

[Character] Pit Crew: “Alright, Denise count them in!”

[Character] Denise: “Alright guys, coming to you in 5—“

[Character] Matt: “Liam?”

[Character] Denise: “4—“

[Character] Matt: “Let no one tell you,

[Character] Denise: “3—“

[Character] Matt: “That you’re talented and special.”

[Character] Denise: “2—“

[Character] Marisha, yelling, flipping Liam the double birds: “Pussy pockets!”

The players yell a wall of nearly indecipherable profanity at Liam in the moment before the camera goes live.

4:48:25 [DM] Liam: “And that’s where we’ll end it.”

Post:

Liam: “Well, that happened.”

Matt: “Holy shit.”

Liam: “Thanks for coming along for the ride, guys. Was scared to death to do all of that from start to finish, and that’s why I did it.”

#critical role #transcript #Liam’s Quest #critical role transcript #critical role Liam’s Quest #CRT-Ep

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uomo-accattivante · 7 years

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Much is made in Hollywood of chameleons – actors who have the ability to “disappear” into a role, appearing “unrecognisable” – while less is said about versatility. At rest, the faces of the best movie actors contain multitudes. Robert Mitchum had the broken-nosed face of a brute but the sleepy, languid eyes of an angel – “Bing Crosby on barbiturates”, in film critic James Agee’s phrase. Bette Davis could switch from glam to dowdy with the angle of her head and a couple of fill lights. And Robert De Niro’s ability to frown and smile simultaneously is legendary. Oscar Isaac has that kind of face. His low-lidded eyes can smoulder, but there is also a quickness behind them, and a touch of disappointed calculation. It made him perfect for the hapless, couch-surfing folk musician soaking up disappointments like a wet sock in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, the 2013 film that put him on the map at the age of 35. He has been working since, playing the hotshot pilot Poe Dameron in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the slinky, tactile, tech-era Mephistopheles in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. He is at his best playing ambitious, slightly myopic men whose own movement quickens their fall: a Queens oil importer struggling to stay the right side of the law in JC Chandor’s excellent A Most Violent Year, a doomed politician brutally felled by civic machination in HBO’s Show Me a Hero. He has made a career playing men for whom careerism doesn’t work. “You know what it makes me think about,” asks Isaac when I put this to him. “I just read in the New York Times about how to throw a ball. There was a thing in it from JD Salinger’s Seymour: An Introduction, about aiming. They’re playing marbles, and one of them goes: ‘Don’t aim.’ Isn’t that the point, that you want to aim? He’s like: ‘No, because if you hit him when you aim, it’ll just be luck.’ ‘How can it be luck if I aim?’ ‘If you’re glad when you hit somebody’s marble, then you secretly didn’t expect to hit it.’ You just do the thing, and so that when you get accolades and all this stuff, it feels good but it doesn’t make you glad because you’re like: ‘This just as easily could have not been.’ It’s that kind of thing.” Isaac still lives in Williamsburg in Brooklyn, in the same one-bedroom apartment he had before he caught the Coen brothers’ attention – but meets me in a suite at the Crosby Street hotel in Manhattan to talk about his new movie The Promise, a first world war period drama in which he plays an apothecary swept up in the Armenian genocide. It is the first time in the modern period that Hollywood has approached the genocide on screen, and director Terry George, whose taste for geopolitical injustice was honed on In the Name of the Father and Hotel Rwanda, invokes it through our memory of other onscreen cataclysms. There is a love triangle with the beautiful Ana (Charlotte Le Bon) and an American journalist (Christian Bale) that recalls Doctor Zhivago, the three of them struggling to make their hearts heard against a backdrop of trains and dead bodies straight out of Schindler’s List. The film is, to be frank, something of a clunker, but the role is a slam dunk for Isaac, who broods like Omar Sharif and vents impassioned, politically on-point heartbreak about the fate of refugees. They are his favourite type of role: the ones where you get to see “a lot more of the beauty and cruelty of life … The emotional hook of it was reading the scene when he finds his family killed. This wasn’t just war as usual, this was a systematic execution of people of Armenian descent. It’s very clear – you go back, and it’s like the Turkish government was saying: ‘No, now it’s going to be Turkey for the Turks. Turkey first.’ Unfortunately, you hear a lot of the same kind of rhetoric again and again and again – about refugees, about immigrants, about silencing the press. None of it’s new.” Isaac himself is chipper, energetic, charming – about as undoomed a man as you could imagine. He has the crisp lines of someone who knows himself well. He plays well with others. A recent clip reel at Vanity Fair invited readers to “Watch Oscar Isaac charm the pants off every single Star Wars: The Force Awakens cast member.” He completed shooting on the new Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi, last year, and can offer only the usual heavily redacted clues. “The characters that you know already: their specific character flaws or their weaknesses get tested. And out of that, I think, you get to see a bit more of who they are. The best way to learn about somebody is to see them in a crisis.” One of the more interesting features of Isaac’s career is that, thus far, he has avoided the typecasting that can befall actors of Latino heritage. His Wikipedia page lists the nationalities he has played: European, Egyptian, Polish, English, French, Mexican, East Timorese, Welsh, Indonesian, Greek, Cuban, Israeli, and Armenian. X-Men: Apocalypse director Bryan Singer has called him a “global human” He is actually Guatemalan, born to a Guatemalan mother and Cuban father, who brought Isaac to the US when he was five months old. His full name is Óscar Isaac Hernández Estrada but he changed his name to Isaac in his teens as his acting career took shape – “for any number of reasons but also because the marquee, you know, it’s a little easier,” he says, simplifying what must have been a complicated renegotiation of his identity. I ask if he has ever felt under any pressure to “represent” either his Guatemalan or Cuban background. “No, I don’t want to represent,” he says. “I don’t represent anybody except this organism that I happen to be. I have a love for Guatemala, a love for my family there, a love for a place that I was born, a place where my mother was born. For Cuba, as well. But, yeah, I’m always wary of people that say they speak for a large group of people because I’m always like: ‘Really? How do you know?’ To speak for a group of people is not something I’ve ever felt comfortable doing.” His upbringing was so peripatetic that it practically screams “actor”. As his father completed his medical training, the family moved from Baltimore to New Orleans, where in kindergarten in Louisiana, he got it into his head that his family had come from the Soviet Union. “I don’t know why. This was in the 1980s. I remember going to the playground and being like: ‘Hey, guys, I’m Russian! Let’s play, you guys are the Americans and I’ll be the Russian.’ I remember I went home and I was like, ‘So Dad, we’re Russian, right?’ and he was like: ‘What?’ ‘We’re Russian.’ ‘We’re rushin’ in the morning.’ Such a dad joke. ‘But that’s about it.’ And I was: ‘Aww!’ It was a weird kind of Dylan-esque thing that I just kept changing the story of where I was from or what we were. It was a form of storytelling, or a form of excitement, or a form of fun, mixed with this sense of something missing, which is a sense of place. We were never in one place for more than, I would say, three to four years.” After their house in New Orleans was destroyed by Hurricane Andrew – “I remember having dreams about that house,” he says – they resettled again in Miami, where Isaac funnelled his Dylan-esque longings into music, joined a Florida ska-punk band, and acted. “It just hit in a very specific way that when I found play-acting – mimesis, imitation – suddenly, that felt like a way of understanding the world. Even now, the play’s the thing, always. As soon as things get really confusing emotionally, or personally, when I look at a play, it suddenly makes sense. I don’t know if it’s right, I don’t know if it’s healthy, but I know myself enough to know it’s definitely a necessity. That’s what I do. I go to that stuff to help me understand. Or for solace. And maybe it is a form of hiding. Music can have that a little bit, but lately it hasn’t as much.” Last October, his mother became ill, and he took time off work to be with her for what turned out to be the final six months of her life. “I was really fortunate to be able to just be with her the entire time and not be off on some set somewhere. At first, we didn’t know how ill she was, and she didn’t either, but as things progressed, it was much easier to say no to things. At a certain point, it was like, clearly: ‘I’m not going to be doing anything.’” She died in February, although not before he had taken her to the Golden Globes as his date, flying her to Madrid to see The Promise being shot and showing her a cut of the movie. “It’s like a great movie for moms. I have to say when I first watched it, I said: ‘I think moms are really going to like the movie. I showed it to her, and sure enough, she’s like: ‘I love it, Oscar. I love it.’” He has since returned to work, appearing in Dan Fogelman’s Life Itself, a multigenerational love story, spanning decades and continents, in which Isaac’s character deals with the loss of his wife. “It was just a two-and-a-half-week shoot,” he says. “It was my first thing back, and we shot here in New York. I was very nervous about it because I was like: ‘I don’t know if I can get it up for anybody.’ You know? Or if I want to, and it ended up being so necessary in much the way that I said to you – the mirroring my own life. It’s very dark and yet I found joy in it.” Which of his roles does he feel closest to? “They’re all pretty close to me,” he says. What would his friends say? “Maybe Nathan in Ex Machina,” he says, but quickly retracts it. “I think they would say none of these were actually like me. Maybe this last one.” He pauses. “Possibly.” • The Promise is released in the UK on 28 April. ### This is a really great interview with Oscar. He opens up about his mother in this one.

#oscar isaac #interview #the promise #life itself #the guardian #article

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