what r ur thoughts on tim..
Oh boy I should be working, but...
First listening, I was really frustrated with Tim (for the same reason I was frustrated with Basira). We know that Jon’s really, really going through it, that he’s doing his best, and it’s not strictly his fault that his best isn’t very good. Tim does not know this. Tim’s a hypocrite, rude, mean, and doesn’t really help anybody because he’s too wrapped up in his own pain. It’s all understandable, born from trauma, and really good and nuanced character work. He’s a good person in shit circumstances. Most TMA characters are like this - but most of them got the chance to move past and get better (Melanie, Jon, Daisy). Tim never did, so he kind of died a jerk. I didn’t have a good sense of him for a while, which is why he’s such a background character in BBC and MATDB. HR was almost frustrating to write, because Sasha cared a lot about Tim while I really didn’t. But as a result I was forced to actually find an approach to him.
The way I interpret him in fic (which is not supposed to be exact with canon)is that he is the hero. Legitimately. He is the most heroic character in most of the stuff I write. This is most obvious in No Sin But Ignorance, but it crops up relentlessly in Human Relations and Space Cadet/Minesweeper. He is loyal, kind, dedicated, masculine, gregarious, selfless, attractive, and has a strong sense of morality and justice. Tim is a Good Guy (TM).
Jon is a Bad Guy (TM). He is rude, intrusive, monstrous, prickly, and throws himself down the bad decisions tree hitting every branch on the way down. But, for some reason, every trait of Tim’s that makes him a good guy also makes him the antagonist, and every trait of Jon’s that makes him a bad guy makes him the protagonist. It’s Jon’s story, the bad guy, so his villain is the good guy, Tim. But it’s not that simple. Who’s really doing the right thing?
I find it really, really interesting to talk about how ‘good’ traits can be bad, and ‘bad’ traits can be good. BBC is the story of how one terrible person willingly destroyed the universe just to keep a few people safe. It was also about how one person gave up being selfless and decided to be selfish, and how that saved the world. All of Tim’s good traits, everything that made him the hero of a less interesting story, made him a terrible person in SC, made him the idiot who kicked off the terrible downer ending of HR, and that made him an incredibly confrontational yet loving and protective asshole who got in the way of our cute romcom in NSBI (In NSBI it is painfully obvious that Tim thinks of himself as the protagonist and Jon as the waify damsel in distress). Tim is incredibly masculine, and in HR that is the stupidest possible thing to be. In SC Tim thinks that, because he is a Good Guy (TM), that makes everything he do justified - even if some of the stuff he does is awful, he is a Good Person, so that makes it good. Good is a thing you are, not a thing you do.
That’s why Tim is one of my favorite characters to write! He’s just so interesting and nuanced. He’s such a good antagonist - character wise, for the reasons mentioned above, and narrative wise for a lot of other much more boring reasons (he’s very active and tends to act while other characters are more passive and tend to react). I never like writing villains (actually, I find chessmaster/mastermind villains very boring, which is why I always gloss over Elias). I like writing people whose greatest enemies are themselves. I also like writing antagonists (different from villains!) who are convinced that they’re doing the right thing, who do the right thing because they’re a good person, and who are at heart loving, kind, good people, but who don’t have the full picture and whose trauma and fear gets in the way of doing the right thing.
Thanks for the ask!
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I’ve been tagged a lot lately, which is awesome and I want to thank you all for that! :) To this one I was tagged by @charlotte-lancer.
Play time: List your five favourite movies and why, then tag some more players.
This is actually extremely hard question as I’m a massive movie freak. I watch so many movies and I pretty much watch anything that is not a) romantic movie b) romantic comedy or c) a horror movie. Thrillers are okay, but I don’t like movies that build up a certain tension. I have anxiety disorder of my own so I don’t need anything to add more fuel into it.
I also own so many dvds and blurays that I had to go and see my collection to remember what I even like and I still feel like there’s tens of movies that should make to the list but I don’t want to remove any of the existing ones because they should be on the list as well! But I will mention here 5 movies that mean something to me or that I have attached to for whatever reason, but I’d say only the first one in the list is actually the favouriteFAVOURITE movie, the rest are in just a random order. I’ll put this under the read more link as this is gonna be a veeeery long post!
Beetlejuice (1988)
I am a fan of Tim Burton. I have seen his movies so many times and I love Danny Elfman’s scores especially in his movies. In fact, when I was a kid, Burton’s movies were always my fave ones but I was probably a teenager when I finally started to connect the dots and realized my favorites were always from the same man. And so were the scores too! This is also one of those movies from my childhood that I have seen so, so many times and I have called different Burton movies as my favourite movies but somehow I just always go back to Beetlejuice and then one day I just realized that hey, why do I even try to choose the one as this apparently IS the favourite one! So, this is my fave from Burton AND from all the movies I have seen.
And why? The humour is just perfect here, I live from dark humour and there’s so much of that in the movie! And I have also always been so fascinated by the idea of death not being permanent, makes my fear of death a lot easier. As you might know already, this movie is about a couple who die and become ghosts and try to survive with the family moving into their old house, trying to make them move out but failing. And I just LOVE how Burton has imagined what death is like! There is so much to see and I feel like I see something new every time I watch that movie and I just love it when movies or any media has so much details in it. And I have always been saying that if death is like the one in Beetlejuice (I said it for the third time now, whooooops), I’m really happy to die one day.
The Dark Knight (2008)
This I just HAVE TO include into this list because of memories. I was 17 when this movie came out. I remember not being interested in the newer Batman movies at all but then one day I watched Batman Begins (2005) from tv and the last frame of that movie caused me to go crazy and I knew that the next movie would be even more interesting. Then it was confirmed that TDK will have the Joker in it and I’ve been a Batman fan since I was 7-8 years old and Joker has always been my fave villain from the Batman universe. I was watching the 60s tv show as a kid and I had seen Burton’s Batman (1989) many times before as well, and that movie also has the Joker in it.
A remember following the news of the movie so closely all the time and I remember the news about hem casting Heath Ledger, who was a new name for me but seemed very interesting for the role, but sadly passed away before the movie even came out. When the movie finally did come out, I was so blown away by Ledger’s work as the Joker that I still cannot decide who has been my favorite Joker of all times. But he’s at the very top of that list, for sure. And that whole movie was just the best thing the 17-years-old me had seen in a while that I actually did go to see it 3 times in the movies. I even drew kind of fan art of the movie and I had 2 TDK Posters on my walls, as well as 2 Joker posters on my walls and I still plan on hanging the Why so serious? poster to somewhere one day.
As a side note, I also like Christopher Nolan’s other movies a lot but TDK is definitely a favorite from them. I have seen almost all of his other movies and they all are really fascinating and interesting and I just love Hans Zimmer’s music and the combination is so perfect. I have to mention that my other favorites are definitely Interstellar (2014), The Prestige (2006) and Inception (2010).
Life of Brian (1979)
I’m a Monty Python fan and this movie is yet again a part of my childhood. I have seen this movie millions of times and I never get bored with it and I never get over how funny the jokes are. I will laugh for the same jokes every time, no matter how many times I would watch this movie. My favorite scene is simply the one where Brian jumps into this pit and the man there starts jumping and finally notices the crowd and hides again. I cannot explain why, but I just find things like that way too funny :DDDDDDDDDD And it’s not even close as funny when I try to explain it, so look for yourself. I’m still losing it during that scene XD
And it’s not only funny, but it also has some really smart, hmmmm, perceptions of the world to it. I love that scene where Brian is trying to tell the people not to follow him because they don’t need to follow anyone and they’re individuals and should use their own brains, and these people just don’t understand a thing, they will just praise the ground under Brian’s feet no matter what he would say.
Breakfast on Pluto (2005)
With this one I’m not exactly sure what happened with this one. I was just quitting my antidepressants when I saw this movie and I had just got all my emotions and ability to feel back so I don’t know if I fell in love with this movie because of my brain chemicals trying to get their shit together, or if I would have fallen in love with this movie anyway if I saw it some other time. But this one still gives me so strong reactions every time I watch it and especially the starting and ending music causes me so strong wave of happiness that I feel like exploding and I wanna cry from happiness. Oh and I watched that movie 3 times within one week back then. I feel like the antidepressant did have something to do with this.
Amadeus (1984) / Se7en (1995) / Donnie Darko (2001) / A Beautiful Mind (2001) / Joker (2019)
The last one is actually impossible to name now. There’s so many good movies out there and I’m already leaving out some of the best ones. Some are classics and some are just movies from my childhood that I grew up with and attached to. TV was pretty much my biggest friend when I was growing up! So here’s a bunch of movies that I wanted to mention as they also tell a little bit of the movie genres as well. Shortly:
Amadeus - Another one from my childhood and it’s a biography film over Mozart. I don’t know why I grew to attached to this film but I feel like ever since I’ve had this need to rewatch this every once in a while. Because of this movie I get chills every time some of the Mozart music pieces used in the movie play somewhere. I don’t know if I like the music or if they just remind me of this movie. And for some reason, after seeing the movie millions of times, at the age of 9 or so I suddenly was so upset after a character’s death.
Se7en - I was bit older when I saw this (thank gods) and this is a good example of the type of thrillers I like to watch. And this movie’s plot is insane and it has one of the best endings to a movie that I know. I won’t say what kind of feelings it wakes up, but some very strong feelings. And this reminds of the fact now that I forgot to mention The Green Mile, which is also one of the best movies I know. Gosh this post is failing so badly already :D
Donnie Darko; A Beautiful Mind - Both have a plot that is wrapped around a mental illness. I actually like to watch movies about mental illness a lot, “Girl, interrupted” is also one of those movies that I like a lot. These movies are nothing like each other but both basically do a portrayal of schizophrenia. Donnie Darko is of course a bit more scifi and A Beautiful Mind is a biographical movie. I actually saw Donnie Darko for the first time several years ago, I was to school and watched it from Netflix and wanted to rewatch it so badly but it got deleted from Netflix and finally I was able to find it on a blueray and now it’s in my shelf and I love that movie.
Joker - This is definitely the best movie of the 2019 imho. Again, pretty much a movie about mental illness. I was bit afraid first that it would make the treatment of mentally ill people take a turn back(?) and would make healthy people be afraid of us instead of make them open their eyes, but I’m happy it didn’t turn out that way. But I feel like the people who got upset after the movie are actually relating to the groups attacked in the movie as maybe they finally (subconsciously?) realized what COULD happen in the world if things keep going like they’ve been going so far. But as a mentally ill person, I just got so attached to this movie. Plus I’m still a Batman fan whose fave villain ever is Joker and this was another great version and even greater portrayal of the character.
And that’s it, no more text. No idea if anyone found this even slightly interesting but oh well, I don’t care, it was still fun writing all that. And I’m so tired after this now that I don’t really have energy for tagging anyone but I guess I could tag at least someone or some people... let’s see... okay, @hanhan156, I’m gonna tag you! :D I have no idea if you watch movies and how often/many if so, but do this if you want! (And you tagged me so many times today so here’s something back ::D)
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