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raimispiderman · 3 years

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From the booklet which comes with the Spider-Man Trilogy Limited Edition Collection blu-ray!

This talks about the making of Spider-Man 2, here’s the bit about the first Spider-Man movie.

Click for a transcript:

THE EVOLUTION OF A SUPERHERO

“It was truly gratifying and even a bit overwhelming to witness how strongly moviegoers around the world reacted to Spider-Man,” said director Sam Raimi. “As a filmmaker, I always want people to really enjoy my movies, and on that level, Spider-Man exceeded my expectations.”

After the triumph of the first Spider-Man, Raimi knew he had a responsibility to follow it up with a story that justified the fans’ enthusiasm and their built-in expectations for the next adventure. “There’s great interest in this movie, following the success of the first one,” he acknowledged. “For the kids who come to see it, Spider-Man is their hero. So while the job of making this movie is to provide entertainment, it is also to create a story that shows them a moral character, someone who has to make tough choices and the right decisions in order to continue to be worthy of their admiration.”

The wealth of detailed stories and characters in the Spider-Man comic book series provided a mother lode from which to cull the plot for Spider-Man 2. “The Marvel artists and writers have done a great job through the decades – I know, because I’m a big fan myself – so there’s a tremendous amount of good material to draw upon,” noted Raimi. “Finding a storyline wasn’t that difficult. It was finding the right story, the one that made for a proper follow-up installment, and provided a logical progression for the audience and a logical growth for the character. For the, I relied on the terrific storytelling instincts of my very fine producers Laura Ziskin and Avi Arad. Together with the contributions of our great writers, we found a plot line with ideas that reverberated.”

With the storyline of the new adventure locked, Arad looked forward to the reunion of the Spider-Man filmmaking family, not the least of which was Tobey Maguire. “Tobey was so happy to be Spider-Man again and to be Peter Parker,” said Arad. “As an actor Tobey relished deepening the audience’s understanding of who Peter Parker is and who is becoming,” added Ziskin. “Peter’s a man who is transition, someone who’s struggling with the choices he is making.”

Maguire added, “The theme ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ is never lost on Peter. It’s difficult to be a young man and have to sacrifice as much as he has – presumably for the greater good – and to neglect his personal desires. The struggle continues here and it’s quite complicated, because Peter’s searching desperately for a way to achieve some balance in his life.”

As Peter becomes more immersed in his dilemma, it creates a rift between him and the important people in his life. Though his love for MJ is stronger than ever, she has moved on with her life, pursuing an acting career, living in Manhattan and moving in new social circles. “In this film, Peter is off in his own world and not a reliable presence in MJ’s life,” explained Kirsten Dunst. “She still loves him a great deal, so it has become painful for her to be around him. Though they’ve both done a lot of growing up in the past two years, at the same time, they’ve drifted apart.”

Then, as if Peter’s life were not complicated enough, the situation moves from bad to worse – much worse. Enter Doc Ock.

Dr. Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina) is a brilliant scientist whose life work has been dedicated to experiments utilizing fusion as a new source of energy. Charming, vibrant and energetic, Dr. Octavius is introduced to Peter by Harry Osborn.

“This movie is the story of Peter’s life, which is out of balance, and Dr. Octavius who, for Peter, represents someone who has achieved that balance,” explained Raimi.

“Peter sees Octavius as somebody who has mastered both his gifts – in this case science, through which he can serve the good of mankind, while also maintaining a personal life, a loving relationship with his wife Rosie (Donna Murphy). This leads Peter to the conclusion that it’s possible to have both.” Dr. Octavius, with the support of his wife, has been working diligently in his home laboratory, trying to perfect his groundbreaking fusion theory. But when a demonstration of his creation goes horribly wrong, Dr. Octavius undergoes a terrible transformation – evolving into the powerful, multi-tentacled Doc Ock.

In Spider-Man 2, the talented and versatile Molina brings this powerful adversary to terrifying life. “He is a formidable enemy for Spider-Man,” said Arad. “He can climb walls faster and better than Spider-Man. In fact, there’s nothing Spider-Man can do that Ock cannot counteract.”

Doc Ock, one of the most popular villains of the Spider-Man comic book series, first appeared in “The Amazing Spider-Man #3,” which was published in 1963. He immediately became one of Spider-Man’s most formidable foes. According to comic lore, each of Ock’s limbs can move at speeds of up to 90 feet per second and strike with the force of a jackhammer. The extremely powerful tentacles enable him to lift a vehicle off the ground, pulverize bricks, claw through concrete walls and hover above his victims by rising into the air.

The filmmakers were eager to attract Molina for the central role. “We needed someone who brought a palpable reality to the part, and who was also sincere, had a great sense of humor and personal warmth,” said Raimi. “Alfred is a brilliant actor, and what he’s brought so effectively to the character of Doc Ock is the sense of him as a misunderstood man who has turned into a beast.”

Molina confessed, “I’ve always been a Marvel Comic fan because their characters are so interesting. They have problems. They’re very realistic.” From him, the mechanics behind the role of Doc Ock was a true education. “It was mind-boggling, the breadth and the imagination that went into how each of my character’s actions – flying across the room, crashing through a plate glass window, smashing a taxicab – was to be executed. It’s a unique way of filming that’s not like anything most of us get to do really. It’s a very particular way of working, and absolutely fascinating.”

J.K. Simmons also returns in Spider-Man 2 as Peter’s gruff boss at the Daily Bugle, J Jonah Jameson. “I fire Peter several times in this movie. Every time I see him, I fire him,” laughed Simmons. “And then I re-hire him because there’s always some pressing need for his services.”

Principal photography on Spider-Man 2 began on April 12, 2003, in New York City, where the production spent approximately three weeks shooting at various locations in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn, as well as on a Yonkers stage. From ground-level street shots to rooftops high above the city, the filmmakers efficiently utilized the time they spent in New York, giving them the opportunity to expand on the city’s unique environment, which had lent such vibrancy to the first Spider-Man.

“In the first film we established New York as a character in the movie. With Spider-Man 2, we went even further,” said production designer Neil Spisak. “We used a lot more of the city, including [photographic] plates of real buildings and real streets. Improvements in technology over the past three years enabled [visual effects designer] John Dykstra and I to marry existing buildings to scenery buildings to CG buildings even better than the first time around. It’s a much more complete experience.”

“We got more of a feeling of New York in this movie,” added Ziskin. “The movie is being shot in widescreen, which is appropriate because this is a different story, so it required a different approach.”

Production began on the campus of Columbia University in uptown Manhattan, which served as the university Peter Parker attends while he struggles with the responsibilities of his academic workload and his superhero duties. The rooftop of the Hotel Intercontinental, across from the Waldorf Astoria, was the location where Spider-Man contemplates his next move, while downtown, in the Wall Street area, another rooftop served as the “launch-pad” for the Spydercam camera, as it dipped and swooped over several blocks to replicate one of Spider-Man’s high-stakes aerial journeys through the city.

“We executed one of the longest wire shots the Spydercam has ever done,” said executive producer Joseph M. Maracciolo. “The Wall Street shot was around 2,400 feet. I’m an ex New Yorker, so I didn’t find the location shoot particularly daunting. But there are always difficulties when you’re doing wire work in New York, including the placement of the cranes on the buildings, the movement of the cast, crew and equipment, and of course, the crowds.”

“It was a challenge for us to move our production to the tops of buildings, but we couldn’t have been happier, because rooftops are Spider-Man’s world and that is his view of the city as he swings through it,” noted co-producer Grant Curtis. “It was breathtaking to see the world from 70 stories up – a world unto itself. You can’t fully really appreciate the beautiful architecture of New York’s skyscrapers from ground level. We showed some of that in the first film, but we wanted to show more of Spider-Man’s vertiginous world, and I think we really captured that with this film.”

In Spider-Man 2, Doc Ock sweeps Aunt May off her feet – literally – and takes her up several stories of a tall building. Rosemary Harris performed her stunts in a variety of harnesses, but only after she had managed to talk the filmmakers into letting her give her stunt double a rest. “I was a bit miffed at first, because my wonderful stunt double was going to do a lot of these harness maneuvers,” recalled Harris. “So I asked Sam and Laura, ‘Why not let me have a go at it?’ At first they were reluctant. But I begged them to at least let me try and they finally relented.”

Returning to Los Angeles, Spider-Man 2 shot on several stages on the Sony Pictures Studios lot in Culver City. Stage 15 was home to the Daily Bugle offices, as well as Peter’s tiny apartment and Dr. Octavius’ elaborate home laboratory. On Stage 29, the Osborn mansion, where Harry Osborn now lives, was recreated. Stage 27 housed MJ’s apartment set, a giant spider web, the interior of the Planetarium, the massive clock tower set as well as various other set pieces. A series of elevated trains were built on Stage 14, where Spider-Man and Doc Ock match wits.

One of the most elaborate sets for Spider-Man 2 was the pier set, designed by Spisak and built over the course of 15 weeks on Soundstage 30. “In contrast to Dr. Octavius’ lab, which was part of his apartment – a streamlined, organized and clean space – the pier is a maniacal, decaying, decrepit space,” explained Spisak. “It follows his character development in terms of his becoming a wilder, more dangerous and more formidable adversary for Spider-Man.”

The set, approximately 60 feet wide by 120 feet long and 40 feet tall, was constructed over a water tank and enhanced by several different components, including CG/plate work and miniatures.

“Before we built the set, we created an exact ¾ scale model of it, about 7 feet long and 4 feet wide, from drawings and blueprints. The model was extremely useful to the carpenters, who could take measurements to help them construct the full-sized pier, as well as for the miniatures team, so they could ascertain the dimensions, textures and materials that were used,” explained art director Tom Wilkins. “We shot plates down in San Pedro, where we panned from a real pier to the water. In post-production a New York background was added. We also built a miniature pier – interiors and exteriors – to complete the composition on the East River.” The art department team designed a 136 foot by 40 foot-high vinyl backing to represent Ock’s view of Manhattan through a large window at the end of the pier set. Wave machines were rigged in the water to create movement under the pier.

The production then moved to the Universal backlot for two weeks of shooting. Several city streets were transformed into a variety of New York neighborhoods including the exterior of the Lyric Theatre where MJ performances in an off-Broadway production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Ari’s Village Deli and Bakery became the site of an extremely complex scene involving a quiet conversation between Peter and MJ, which is interrupted by Peter’s “spider sense” – and a car careening through the plate glass window, followed by the arrival of Doc Ock.

“It was a great luxury to be able to build that set from every aspect, so that we could do everything we needed for the scene,” said Spisak. “The walls were made of french plate so that when the car smashed through it, the buildings around it were protected. We were able to design what we thought it should look like visually, then as tricks, gags and stunts became clearer, we were able to add them to the set before it was completely finished.”

“The deli was a full, 360 degree set, with a kitchen, deli counters, pastries, ceiling fans and chandeliers,” added art director Steve Saklad, who worked closely with Spisak. “We dressed the exterior streets so that you could look out of the window and see the intersection of Lafayette Street and Astor Place. It required an enormous amount of signage, billboards, street dressing, trees and traffic lights.”

For Raimi, “The diner was a complex technical scene, because it brought together so many different departments, each relying on the other to fulfil their function and communicate with each other so that each individual shot would work. We utilized mechanical effects and the stunt department had to take an automobile, spin it and flip it through the deli window, with the prop department providing the breakaway items. What made it even more complex was that we had to fly Doc Ock in, using something we dubbed the “walk rig.”

The “walk rig” was created for Doc Ock, because the character not only moves himself, but his tentacles move him around as well. When he walks on the tentacles, they support his weight, so a device was constructed to harness him and move him through space as if the tentacles were supporting him. The visual effects department also created “virtual” tentacles where practical ones weren’t feasible.

When he was in full costume, Molina’s tentacles weighed between 75 to 100 pounds, depending upon the action required for the scene. Each of the tentacles was fully articulated. In their expanded, 13-foot length, each upper tentacle consisted of approximately 76 individual pieces Each vertabra was handmade, hand molded, sanded, individually hand painted, chromed, then painted again and assembled by hand. The entire collection of Doc Ock tentacles, bases, heads and wrists, if laid end to end, would be taller than a 20-story building.

Academy Award winning costume designer James Acheson welcomed the opportunity to further explore and improve upon the already classic Spider-Man costume for Spider-Man 2. “Creating the Spider-Man suit for the first film was a real challenge since we were designing for a kind of Cirque du Soleil acrobat, someone who had a unbelievable kinetic spiraling ability,” he said. “So the suit had to be extremely flexible. For the new installment we made several improvements, though you’d have to be a real enthusiast to spot them. The colors are slightly different, and we have made subtle changes in terms of the movement inside the costume’s hood. We also adjusted the eyepieces of Spider-Man’s mask as well as certain aspects of the spider design on the front and the back of the suit.”

For Spider-Man 2’s Doc Ock, Acheson and Raimi spent close to a year collaborating with Spisak and visual effects designer John Dykstra and working with Edge FX in what began as a series of “group think” sessions, according to Raimi. “I needed John Dykstra’s input, because it was John who was going to have to handle Doc Ock’s movements in CG, so he had to be involved in designing the character, along with Jim, who was going to determine the look of the character,” recalled Raimi. “Part of the look determined the movement, and what the arms look like began to govern how it functioned. Neil was involved because Ock had to be a part of Neil’s world in the film. A great interdependence developed among the department heads in order to achieve the complex nature and physicality of the character,”

“The challenge with Doc Ock is to visually create a believable world, focusing on a man with four tentacles growing out of his back,” said Spisak. “Now, that can be a tough swallow. So, in creating Ock and his world, we needed to design and play it so that everything was credible. Ove the course of several months, it became clear what was physically possible for Ock and what would have to be achieved via CG. We conceptualized the look and only then did we deal with the physical limitations, rather than letting them stop us at the beginning.”

Added Dykstra: “It was a huge challenge to make Doc Ock come to life. His tentacles had to meet several criteria. They had to be appropriate with regard to the world Neil had created for Spider-Man and Ock. The components of the costume – the texture and the weight – had to bed something an actor could actually wear. Since using the tentacles wasn’t always practical, we had to create ‘virtual’ versions with Edge FX. In the end, integrating the tentacles into the story was a marriage of all those components and the collaboration of everyone involved.”

Spisak and his team designed and dressed more than 100 sets and locations for Spider-Man 2. “There are probably 10 enormous sets, while some are simply street corners. We covered eleven blocks in downtown Los Angeles and used many rooftops, streets and buildings in New Yorj City,” noted Spisak. “This is certainly the biggest film I’ve ever done.”

Spisak worked with director of photography Bill Pope on the color palette for the sets, and they pored over research and location pictures to inspire them for the story’s lighting requirements. “In the first film, Peter Parker was younger, less aware and just beginning to discover his new powers. That was reflected in the overall look of the movie,” said Spisak. “With this film, he has been Spider-Man for a while, so his frustration over how to deal with his life versus his duty is more complex. That’s reflected in the color palette and the tone of this film – it’s a little more sophisticated, more complicated and deeper, in terms of color and look.”

Among the tools Dykstra and his team utilized to achieve the shots presenting Spider-Man’s point-of-view, while he is soaring over the city, was Earl Wiggins’ Spydercam. During the New York portion of the shoot, the specialized camera was launched using a remote-controlled computer suspended on a cable from a Wall Street-area rooftop more than 30 stories in the air, which recorded what DSpider-Man saw as he swung over the city. The camera traveled along a line suspended over four blocks, dipping down into the street and over the tops of several blocks of vehicles and background art that had been placed for the sequence.

“We were dropping the camera and moving it up and down over the course of the shot to follow Spider-Man’s trajectory as he swings through the arch, releasing a web, and shooting a new web as he swings into the traffic below,” explained Dykstra.

“One of the successes of the first film was the empathy the audience had for the main character. He was very sympathetic,” Dykstra said, “This movie explores the character in greater depth, and in terms of the visual effects, we’re hoping to give audiences an event more intimate sense of what it’s like to be Spider-Man. In the first film, we get to fly with him. The idea here is to make the flying sequences poetic enough and evocative enough that you will get an even stronger sense of what it’s like to fly like Spider-Man.”

That approach is reinforced by Raimi, said Ziskin, “One of the really striking aspects about Sam is that he is the audience for this film. He makes the movie for the audience, identifies with the characters and is always aware of the rhythms and how each sequence will play – both to him and the other members of the audience. That makes him the perfect director for this kind of material. Also, he’s at a point in his directing career where he’s at the top of his game. He is brilliant technically, but also works extraordinarily well with the actors. Ultimately, his personal connection to Peter Parker and the other main characters is a great gift to the audience.”

“These are tough, scary times and during such periods we look to heroic stories to give us hope,” noted Raimi. “Maybe that has something to do with why the audience was so taken with Spider-Man when he first appeared two years ago. With Spider-Man 2, I truly hope that audiences will feel that they’re seeing a love story, that they’re participating in another episode of Peter Parker’s life and are seeing the challenges and conflicts he faces and how he overcomes them. I hope it will leave them feeling uplifted and exhilarated.”

#spider-man #spider-man 2 #sam raimi #avi arad #laura ziskin #tobey maguire #kirsten dunst #alfred molina #rosemary harris #jk simmons #interviews #behind the scenes #concept art #peter parker #aunt may parker #mary jane watson #doc ock #j jonah jameson #set design

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shemakesmusic-uk · 3 years

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Texan-born, Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter and TikTok personality Allison Ponthier makes a splash with 'Cowboy' – it's the enthralling first taste of her upcoming EP. Finding a path away from her conservative upbringing, queer singer-songwriter Allison Ponthier is another artist making country music her own. Taking references from Kacey Musgraves and Orville Peck, Ponthier's take on the genre is high camp and features a kaleidoscopic visual world too. Growing a huge following on TikTok, 'Cowboy' marks the start of a whole new chapter for Ponthier with her debut release with Interscope and Polydor. The track itself references her move from the bible belt to New York City and her journey accepting her sexuality. Warm and inviting 'Cowboy' is cinematic pop with some real heart-on-sleeve confessional songwriting. Complete with a masterful music video that runs like a mini-movie complete with impressive special effects, on reflection, cinematic is an understatement. The video itself is a striking and exciting introduction to this new artist, “I probably watch movies more than I listen to music,” Ponthier says of the video. The clip, directed by Jordan Bahat (Christine and the Queens) adds a whole new cosmic energy to the track and aims to amplify the lyrics' detailed storytelling. As she unveils more of her forthcoming debut EP, Ponthier explains what we can expect from her; “a lot of my songs are about being uncomfortable in your own skin but getting to know yourself better, figuring out who you really are.” [via the Line Of Best Fit]

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Miley Cyrus has shared the full video for 'Angels Like You'. The pop rebel returned in 2020 with her excellent album Plastic Hearts, a series of superb empowerment anthems. Album highlight 'Angels Like You' has received the video treatment, shot at the Superbowl in front of an audience of fully vaccinated healthcare workers. Miley has also provided a note for the video describing her feelings of gratitude to these workers. [via Clash]

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LA punk four-piece The Paranoyds have dropped a new video for track 'Egg Salad', taken from their album Carnage Bargain which is out now on Suicide Squeeze. The video's director Nicole Stunwyck comments "The video presents the glitzy & glamorous world of a teenage girl who, after accidentally catching a beauty pageant on TV, dreams of her rise to stardom & subsequent downfall... It’s not a commentary on anything but an experimental depiction of my own personal fascination for young tragic starlets alà Valley of The Dolls."

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Noga Erez and collaborative partner ROUSSO have shared a fifth compelling new single from forthcoming album KIDS which is set for release on March 26 via City Slang. 'Story' is a snappy, addictive song about how couples relationships are always a relationship between two people’s past and present. "Everyone brings their past experiences to the relationship even if things are great" Erez comments. "Sometimes past situations come in and take over." As with the album's previous singles 'Story' is brought to life with a captivating video, starring Erez and ROUSSO, who also provides vocals on the track. "ROUSSO is my partner in music as well as my partner in life" she explains. "This is the first time we tell a story about our relationship in a song and video. It’s a song about a couple fighting and how, in that situation, sometimes what you hear the other person say is not what they actually said. The making of this video was a 10-day couples therapy session for us. As we rehearsed the pretend fighting and martial arts moves we knew that, at times, one of us would get punched just a little too hard. It was so intense and interesting to live in this world, where our relationship comes alive in the most physical way."

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After announcing Detritus with lead outing 'Stories' last month, Sarah Neufeld has unveiled the album's second single 'With Love and Blindness'. Neufeld says of the song and Jason Last-directed video, "The video for 'With Love and Blindness' came together through a long-time collaboration between myself and videographer Jason Last. I knew that Jason and I would work together again on some visual aspect for my third solo release, and it so happened that before I even began recording the album, we were presented with the opportunity to do a mini residence on Corsica with Providenza; an amazing collective with a farm, cultural laboratory, festival and residency program." She continues, "I was doing a short solo tour in Europe in the summer of 2019 in order to re-work some of the pieces from the dance collaboration to begin to find a shape for the album that was to be recorded in the Fall. In the middle of that tour, Jason and I travelled to Corsica for several days (graced once again with a suitcase containing Esteban Cortazar’s unique and beautiful creations). Besides performing in Providenza’s outdoor amphitheater, we were immersed in nature, literally staying in a treehouse perched on the side of a mountain, overlooking the dramatic coastline." Neufeld adds, "I found that the pulse of the landscape resonated with the essence of the music, especially "With Love and Blindness"; a sense of rawness, of sensuality, of a strange gravity intensified by the hypnotic summer heat and the general otherworldliness of the place." [via the Line Of Best Fit]

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Molly Burman was brought up around music. At every family event, every party, the soundtrack would resonate with her, providing an education in itself. Both parents were gigging musicians, and she always wanted to follow in their footsteps, to use performance as a means of self-expression. Lockdown brought the time and space to bring these ideas into focus, and she's working to unveil a series of one off singles. Her debut single proper 'Fool Me With Flattery' is out now, a blissfully melodic piece of indie pop with some whip-smart lyricism. There's a tongue in cheek element to her sound that is fantastically endearing, matched by the subtle lo-fi elements of her bedroom pop confection. She comments: "I wrote the song after a long day of feeling overlooked and ignored by some of the guys in my life. I was fed up, angry and used the stereotype of a mansplaining misogynist to let it all out. This song is for anyone who feels belittled and like they’re being made to shrink themselves; be as big as you possibly can, and don’t let anyone fool you with flattery." The video is a hilarious showcase for Molly's offbeat sense of humour. [via Clash]

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Punk provocateurs Pussy Riot have unveiled their latest song 'Panic Attack', as well as a music video that features a hologram of singer Nadya Tolokonnikova. This is the final release from Pussy Riot’s new Panic Attack EP, a collection of three linked songs that, for now, can only be streamed as separate singles. The title track features punk guitars underneath a tinkling music box melody, as Tolokonnikova turns anxiety into a sports cheer. “Gimme an A,” she says, “Gimme a T/ Gimme a T/ Gimme an A/ Gimme a C/ Gimme a K/ Okay? Okay.” While upbeat and seemingly cheerful, the synth-punk song comes out of the trauma she experienced in a Russian prison camp. As she explained in a statement, “After serving 2 years in a labor camp, I’m still struggling with mental health issues. Trauma, fear and insecurity never fully go away, causing depression episodes and deep anxiety. ‘PANIC ATTACK’ was born as the result of me staring at the wall for 24 hours in the middle of the pandemic, feeling 100% helpless. I was trying to write something uplifting to encourage people to get through the tough times. But I was just failing and failing. Magically, at the second I allowed myself to be honest and write about despair I was experiencing, I wrote the track in like a half an hour. Depression is a plague of the 21st century, and it tells me that there’s something broken in the way we treat each other. The video ‘PANIC ATTACK’ reflects on objectification of human beings, loneliness, disconnection from the environment that causes us to feel small and powerless. And it’s us who caused it with our own hands – that’s why in the end of the video I’m fighting with my own clone.” The music video for 'Panic Attack' was directed by Asad J. Malik. He used 106 cameras to capture all angles of Tolokonnikova, then converted that information into a photoreal hologram. Afterwards, Tokyo-based creative technologist Ruben Fro built out landscapes reminiscent of video games through which the virtual Tolokonnikova could frolic. But as the visuals progress, those idyllic settings give way to a hellscape, and the singer faces off against a clone of herself. [via Consequence of Sound]

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The wait is finally over. BLACKPINK’s Rosé shines like the star she is with her official solo debut. On Friday, she released two solo songs on her debut single album titled R, 'On the Ground' and 'Gone.' With its deep lyrics, angelic bridge, and Rosé’s high note at the end, 'On the Ground' is an exemplary song for her solo debut. Add the fact that Rosé is credited as a writer for the song, and one can really tell how much time she spent perfecting it for release. The accompanying music video, meanwhile, expands the story of life and growth. Rosé starts off looking lost and trying to find herself amidst all the wildness of life; she eventually encounters past and present versions of herself while searching for answers and purpose. By the end, she finds herself and her path forward, and one can’t help but smile as she sings an explosive outro. [via Teen Vogue]

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On Ellise's latest alt-pop concoction the rising pop star gets gothic as 'Feeling Something Bad...' transforms a crush into an obsession. An expert at catastrophising everyday experiences, the LA-based artist has arrived fully formed with not only a consistent and cohesive sound but a striking visual identity too. That's even more clear when you press play on the accompanying video for her latest infectiously catchy track. With the clip directed by Joakim Carlsson we get to see Ellise in her absolute element as she brings "Feeling Something Bad..." to life in a macabre world of its own. “I just love dramatising little everyday feelings in life, so this is my big dramatic ‘I have a crush on you’ song,” Ellise explains – it's a song she wrote about a boy she barely knew. [via the Line Of Best Fit]

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With President Biden determined to get the majority of American adults vaccinated by summer, bands are earnestly beginning to look forward to the return of live music. Purity Ring are the latest to announce 2021 tour dates, which they’ve shared alongside the video for their track 'sinew'. The song comes from WOMB, the synth-pop duo’s first album in five years that was released just before the pandemic struck. Directed by Toby Stretch, the clip brings back the abstract graphics and costumes that featured in the 'stardew' music video, continuing the enigmatic story of the domed bicyclist and their sun-headed sidecar companion. [via Consequence of Sound]

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Australian Pop Princess, Peach PRC releases the official music video for her debut single 'Josh'. Peach PRC comments on the official 'Josh' visuals, “The music video was inspired by growing up watching the same five infomercials, morning news channels and old movies on my little pink box tv when I was a kid and couldn’t sleep on a school night. The idea was to have “josh” feel just as harassed the more he tries to call. Every creative step along the way was entirely my vision, from writing the music video script, to the lyrics and everything in between. I’m so happy and hope all the girls, gays and theys who dated “josh” will sing along.”

#videos of the week #allison ponthier #miley cyrus #the paranoyds #noga erez #sarah neufeld #molly burman #pussy riot #rose #ellise #purity ring #peach prc

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tuiyla · 4 years

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She-Ra’s like, really good, people

It’s been over a week since She-Ra season 5 came out and I binged it and this is not going to be coherent but I just want to rant about it a bit before writing some more structured metas. I deffo wanna write about Catradora and how I think SPoP is the true spiritual successor to the Avatar.

But first, let me just scream about how good this show is. I already started rewatching it, pretty much straight after finishing it, and I don’t rewatch tv shows often. The exception is Avatar (seen it like 15 times) and sitcoms. But She-Ra is so layered that I felt like I needed to watch it again just to appreciate the dynamics even more.

I already enjoyed the first season but it kept getting better and better. I’m not in love with the art style and it’s definitely for a younger demographic overall than my other favourite animated shows, but like any good kids’ show it balances tone well. It doesn’t talk down to its target demographic but also includes more traditionally mature themes in a digestible and entertaining way. Not all the jokes landed for me but as the series went on I learned to appreciate the tone and the type of humour She-Ra goes for.

It’s funny to me because this is definitely the type of show I would have rejected as a kid, with all the princesses I would have deemed it “too girly” and therefore not for me because screw gender roles. There’s a degree of internalized sexism to that, for sure, a rejection of the feminine because it’s always been seen as less somehow. But there’s also a truth that, at least in my childhood of the late 90s and early 00s, children’s media targeted at girls often had a poor quality to it, at least when compared to “boys’ stuff”.

She-Ra is not only a clever, heartfelt, complex story, it also transcends that binary of having to be either for girls or boys. I know most of modern animation rejects that as well, but She-Ra embraces so many traditionally feminine qualities while also going beyond gender roles and even the gender binary. This show is so queer, man, and I love it. It’s especially impressive when you consider the source material that was literally just the girly version of He-Man. I have no beef with 80s She-Ra, haven’t seen much of it, but this is such an upgrade.

That being said, I would have loved to watch She-Ra as a kid. I’m so incredibly envious of kids, aged around 10, who get to watch this show as they’re growing up. But I am so, so, so happy for them and for the future of animation that shows like She-Ra can be made now, that they’re being made. I’m going to go into spoilers soon, but just before that: She-Ra’s a perfectly enjoyable show in many aspects. I think the worldbuilding’s pretty cool, the story feels coherent and planned out, it’s lighthearted and so genuine. That’s the word that I ultimately choose to describe the series: genuine.

I feel like so much of TV aims to be dark and gritty nowadays, animation included, and though that’s slowly turning to dark comedy or a balance between fun and serious, it’s still the norm. At some point in the last decade, creators became terrified of being judged as cheesy. Even something like the MCU bathes in bathos to avoid being cheesy. But She-Ra proves that creators shouldn’t be afraid of being genuine, of basing characters and storylines on the simple power of love. Like, it’s such a cliché trope but I think that’s mostly because it has become stale.

Noelle Stevenson has talked about the importance of love in her story and I’m so grateful for that. Through, She-Ra, she’s truly proven how powerful love can be in a story and how it doesn’t have to be cheesy. It’s just so unabashedly genuine. The power of love and friendship literally saves the day several times but it’s always so genuine and more importantly it always makes sense that it doesn’t get boring. If the foundation wasn’t there, then I’d say “well this is just super cheesy”. But the show makes a point of building relationships and making them the focal point of the story.

Alright, so, spoilers because I need to talk about character arcs and THAT KISS and just everything. I really need to write more in depth about Adora and Catra and their relationship but for now I feel like it’s so important to appreciate how they’re developed. Everything from their shared childhood to their trauma with Shadow Weaver and the finding their way back to each other, it’s just *chef’s kiss*. It’s so well-written and believable. Ngl, I do have some minor issues with Catra’s redemption arc. Let’s just say that on a scale from Kylo Ren to Zuko, she’s definitely closer to Zuko. I also appreciate Shadow Weaver’s death scene and how it allows them to move on. I didn’t see that one as Death as Redemption and it shouldn’t be. Again and again the show made it clear that she was abuse towards both girls and nothing will negate that.

From what I can tell, the fandom really latched onto Catra, even when it wasn’t clear whether she’d get a redemption arc. I think that’s important, because unlike some characters in animation, Catra’s actions were almost always framed appropriately. There was always an understanding as to where she’s coming from, how she’s acting from a place of hurt, and yet her actions weren’t justified. They weren’t suddenly all okay just because she’s hurt, too. I especially loved in the season 3 finale when Adora was allowed to finally say no, to say that Catra’s actions were not her fault. That season as a whole was beautiful, like, episode three when Adora’s struggling so much and Catra has the opportunity for a better life but she still fails to choose her own happiness because she’s too bitter over SW and Adora? It’s poetic cinema. I love that angst, so well done.

It would be so easy to misfire in Catra’s storyline and either a) write off all the awful things she does because she’s just “misunderstood” or b) irredeemably stuck in her abusive environment with no hope of escape. They balanced quite well there and managed to handle such a complex character with delicacy. I’m quite happy with how Catra was portrayed because on the one hand, she’s painfully relatable to me and I assume to many others. The audience can see their own mistakes reflected in her character because we’ve all been too stubborn, done things out of spite, refused to acknowledge that we were wrong because we were hurting so much. At the same time, I always felt like the show gave me enough space to judge Catra’s actions and acknowledge that she was in the wrong. I honestly think I would have been a better adjusted teenager is if saw this show just before my angsty years, lol.

I’m going to write more about Adora at some other point but I love how vulnerable she’s allowed to be. Protagonists never used to be my favourite characters because they all seemed the same, with two major categories: the stereotypical male hero who can do no wrong or the angsty boi who can be shitty and the text still frames him as awesome. It’s only recently with series like The Legend of Korra and She-Ra that I go “damn, protagonists can be like that, huh.” Adora is a dumb jock who tries so hard and she deserves all the hugs in the world.

Also, Catradora? Breathtaking, amazing, groundbreaking. No doubt She-Ra needed shows like Adventure Time, LoK, Steven Universe and the likes to pave the way but still, it went there. I saw people be anxious about whether they were gonna be queerbaited, but I always, idk, knew? Trusted? That She-Ra would follow through. I didn’t wait six years for Bubbline to happen for Catradora to not get their big damn kiss. The series has been so effortlessly queer from the get-go that it just made sense that they were always heading there. I did see a gif of the kiss before watching s5 and ngl, that spoiler kind of bummed me out in a way that I wanted to be surprised. But even before I saw that I wasn’t worried. And the context of their journey in season 5? That cannot be spoiled by a simple gif. You have to experience that to fully appreciate it and that is the marker of good storytelling.

I understand that, though this should be the norm by now, Noelle Stevenson still had to be smart about how she approached the execs and she wasn’t sure this could happen. I cannot tell you how happy I am about what she said regarding how Catradora was so integral to the story that the execs couldn’t not allow it. That’s so brilliant, and it feels so natural in the story. Queer love saves the day and it’s not ambiguous, it cannot be censored because you lose a part of the story without it. You did it, Noelle, you funky little lesbian, what an icon. I can’t wait to see more stuff from her.

In other news, I appreciated other characters as well, like how all the princesses got to be different and awesome in their own unique way. Season 5 was great for so many characters, Mermista got so much to work with and Spinnerella and Netossa got so much more characterization than in previous seasons. Glimmer continued to be the third most important character in the story and I’m happy about all the relationships that also got to be canon. Good characters and dynamics all around, no wonder since the show is built on that.

Such a satisfying conclusion and one that makes you feel like this is just part one of a much bigger story. Such genuine, heartfelt moments, well-developed characters, complex themes explored in a respectful and digestible way, and such an unapologetically fun show. Melissa Fumero as a side character? Yes please. Catra’s new haircut? Heck yeah! She-Ra’s new design? Oh my.

I’m not even like, super into She-Ra, and I usually don’t write so much about things I only watch casually. But this show is so good and important that I had to rant. And I will write more about it eventually, but for now I needed to get all of this out. I’d give it a better structure but if I really get into I might never end up posting it so for now here, have this ramble of love. She-Ra, of all shows, deserves that.

#she-ra #spop #she-ra and the princesses of power #catradora #spop spoilers #my thoughts #that's pretty much it for now

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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15 Best SNES Platformers Ever

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Platformers have long been an entry point for new gamers. Video games may have greatly expanded in scope over the years and now offer so many different genres and experiences that it’s nearly impossible to keep track of them, but that’s actually a big part of the reason why it’s still so much fun to look back at these timeless games where the main objective was often to simply jump from one place to the next.

There is no console that celebrated the brilliance of the platformer better than the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The SNES may be best known for expanding the adventure and RPG genres, as well as raising a generation’s expectations for video game graphics, but few consoles have come close to rivaling the Super Nintendo’s library of classic platforming titles.

It’s hard to narrow this list down to just 15 games, but from action-based platformers to pure platforming classics, these are the best examples of this timeless genre that the SNES gifted the gaming world.

15. Jelly Boy

Putting you in control of a jelly baby (a candy that is popular in the U.K. and surrounding areas), Jelly Boy was only released in Europe when it debuted in 1994. The game has a colorful aesthetic and some unique platforming elements built around the main character’s ability to transform into a myriad of vehicles, tools, and other objects. Those metamorphoses will be familiar to anyone who has played a Wario Land title or Kirby’s Epic Yarn.

Admittedly, Jelly Boy‘s mechanics can be a little clunky and the controls are deficient compared to some of the later games on this list. Still, you will be hard-pressed to find a more original platformer on the console that isn’t made by Nintendo themselves. You can even play it now via the Nintendo Switch Online service.

14. Demon’s Crest

Released by Capcom in 1994 as the third game featuring the character Firebrand (who debuted in the Ghosts ‘n Goblins series), Demon’s Crest is a forgotten gem in the SNES catalog. It adds some variety to the traditional action-platformer by giving the playable protagonist the ability to fly and shoot fireballs as well as access other upgradeable attacks and maneuvers as their quest rolls along. That feature adds a little Zelda-like adventuring to the mix, and you’ll certainly need those late-game power-ups because this platformer means business.

There are many difficult platformers on this list, but few boast the plethora of boss battles seen in this one. It’s actually similar to Mega Man in terms of its fighting style and jumping requirements, so if you are looking for an alternative to the Blue Bomber that keeps the basics of the genre intact, you’ll have a hard time doing better than Demon’s Crest.

13. Joe & Mac

Joe & Mac is honestly a fairly basic platformer for its era. What gets it onto this list of the best games in that genre, though, is the creativity and execution of its setting.

The game sees you control two different cavemen who rely on basic prehistoric items such as fire, bats, bones, etc. The bosses are pretty cool (dinosaurs are fun for all ages) and the controls hold up well enough that you won’t ever feel like you have to force the avatar into doing something that the interface simply won’t allow for. The game spawned a sequel that was also released on SNES, but the original is unique enough to get the nod here.

12. Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts

Despite what the title may suggest, Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts is actually the third game in the Ghosts ‘n Goblins series. Like the previous games, this classic sees you battle various monsters and bosses that fit the setting nicely. Although the game is maybe a little too action-heavy to get the nod over the SNES’ best platformers, it uses its platforming elements to elevate the entire experience.

The difficulty is insanely high and the sheer amount of sprites on screen at once can lead to some lag that only adds to the frustrations of this arduous journey, but the game has a way of keeping things light and humorous when the frustration sets in. How many other games see the protagonist stripped of their armor, quite literally, when he takes too many hits?

11. Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble!

The third installment in the beloved Donkey Kong Country trilogy certainly isn’t hated by many, but it is usually viewed as a step down from the first two games. Whether that has to do with a change in composer for the soundtrack, the inability to play as Donkey or Diddy, or the fact it was released after the Nintendo 64 was on the market, the title’s sometimes mixed reputation often prevents it from being appreciated as a divine platforming experience.

The environments and storytelling in this game are well-executed. If you’re observant, you may even notice that the developers were trying to say something about the sad state of ape habitats and pollution in the wild. Even if you didn’t dive too deep into that surprising bit of social commentary, you’ll likely find that the platforming in this one remains top-notch and that the overall experience remains severely underrated.

10. DoReMi Fantasy: Milon’s DokiDoki Adventure

As the only game on this list that wasn’t initially released outside of Japan, many gamers may not know that DoReMi Fantasy is a whimsical experience that features some of the key elements of Mario and Kirby’s best adventures in terms of gameplay and graphics. Starring a young child whose objective is to reclaim music for the forest, DoReMi utilizes some clever puzzles that may not be unusual for the platformer genre but certainly add to the fun.

The game got a Virtual Console release in North America in 2008, but that’s sadly the best chance many gamers have had in recent years to take a chance on this title. It’s a great example of how people should be more open to experiencing games that weren’t localized the first time around.

9. Donkey Kong Country

Perhaps the most famous game starring Nintendo’s lovable ape, the original Donkey Kong Country was Rare’s first big title for the SNES and practically started their decade-plus long relationship as a second-party developer with the Big N. Tasked with showing off off the console’s pre-rendered graphics system, the crew from Britain proved to be up to the task. Honestly, this game still looks halfway decent in 2021.

While the actual platforming is not as good as the Super Mario games on the SNES, it offered a different flavor of jumping that is still very much appreciated. The “weight” of Donkey Kong and Diddy means that the platforming is less flighty than in Super Mario games, and the rideable animal buddies you encounter along the way add a little flair to the experience.

8. ActRaiser

As a game that serves as both an action-platformer and a God simulator, this underrated and forgotten gem from Enix and developer Quintet showed off the visual and audio capabilities of the SNES in the early days of the console. You play as the “Master” who is tasked with building towns around the world and fending off the evils that threaten them. It’s hard to juggle two completely different genres like that, but ActRaiser finds a great balance.

The game was re-released for the Wii Virtual Console in 2007 but has otherwise been paid little attention in the years since its release. That’s unfortunate because there aren’t many games from 30 years ago that provide this much depth and versatility. Both parts of the experience are extremely solid in their own right, and together add up to become something truly special.

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7. Kirby Super Star

Even the most ardent Kirby fans would probably agree that the franchise can get a little stale at times. There are only so many ways Kirby can suck an enemy up, transform his powers to match theirs, and ultimately defeat King Dedede. That’s why Kirby Super Star is still arguably the best game that the pink cutie pie has ever starred in.

Featuring eight different games within the game, the genre-mixing in this one is really off the charts. There are racing elements, adventure tones, and shooting sequences amongst the different sections of the playthrough. The experience was so beloved that it was eventually remade for the Nintendo DS as Kirby Super Star Deluxe. There is something for everyone in this package, and it shows the best parts of Kirby’s history.

6. Mega Man X

The original run of NES Mega Man titles are arguably still more famous than all of the others, but Mega Man X just has more of what makes those games great. It retains the eight bosses and weapon upgrades that can be completed/acquired in whatever order the player chooses, and it even has that same incredible soundtrack that the Blue Bomber’s adventures are always famous for.

Mega Man X‘s graphical upgrades admittedly take some of that eight-bit nostalgia out of the experience, but the game ultimately makes up for it by offering new gameplay experiences. Jumping on walls and acquiring upgrades to defensive maneuvers gives Mega Man an even more badass skillset, and the game generally does an excellent job of emphasizing the “platforming” parts of its action-platformer mix.

5. Super Castlevania 4

Super Castlevania 4 is actually a kind of soft remake of the original game, and the developers at Konami did a great job of making that game more digestible for newcomers while keeping all of the iconic elements from the classic NES title.

The Castlevania basics are all here (you still control Simon Belmont, equipped with his famous whip and ax, and battle through the game’s 11 stages before reaching Dracula), but an ideal mix of combat and platforming makes this one of the most irreplaceable platformers in the SNES catalog. It’s still an airtight action-platformer experience in 2021.

4. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest

The second game in the DKC trilogy took all of the best parts of the first title and refined them to create a truly unique platforming game that was a lot more than fancy graphics (a reputation the original game has had a hard time shaking). Diddy’s Kong Quest expanded upon the game design that fans loved while keeping the jungle hijinx, masterful soundtrack, and weighted platforming intact.

That last part is what truly separates the middle installment of this franchise from the other two. Many people have said that these games were sometimes more style than substance, but after playing through the myriad of environments on display in DKC 2, it becomes clear that this title has endured over the years because its tight mechanics are executed at a high level.

3. Super Metroid

If this list were just a ranking of 2D games or if it encapsulated the entire SNES library regardless of genre, Super Metroid would most likely take the top spot. Alas, this icon of game design settles in the third spot because it isn’t the best example of a “pure platformer.” It’s more of an action/adventure affair, though the game’s platforming elements are still as satisfying now as they were in the 1990s.

What separates this game from so many that have tried to emulate it in the nearly three decades since release is that every ability upgrade and every part of the map fits together with nearly flawless foresight and execution. It’s never a hassle to re-explore a section that you’ve already seen. The game has a masterful flow that is incredibly modern and perhaps even more popular today because of the prominence of this design style on the indie game scene.

2. Super Mario World

With its flawless controls, colorful sprites, cheerful soundtrack, and ageless platforming, Super Mario World is the title that all other 2D games in the genre are still compared to. The extra graphical power of the SNES gave Nintendo the opportunity to expand upon Super Mario Bros. 3‘s best ideas while exploring new concepts that simply weren’t possible before.

That is why this game remains so playable. Super Mario World combines the most enjoyable elements of the NES Super Mario classics and then elevates them to fully realize the world that Miyamoto imagined when this basic concept was created. It still doesn’t make sense to have a plumber jumping on top of turtles and occasionally getting lost inside of a house full of ghosts (those damn Boo mansions still haunt me), but when you combine this much creativity into one package, you have no choice but to admit how special it all is.

1. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island

Shigeru Miyamoto and his team knew that it was futile to try and surpass Super Mario World simply by emulating it. So when developing the sequel, they made the decision to craft an entirely different type of platformer in which Mario isn’t even the main protagonist. The concept was bold, but the execution needed to be flawless if the game was ever going to be more than another disappointing follow-up.

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It’s safe to say Yoshi’s Island exceeded all expectations. Putting Yoshi at the forefront of a platformer that included mini-games, evasion, puzzle-solving, item collection, and the most timeless color palette in gaming history was brilliance personified. Yoshi’s Island is not as famous as its older sibling, but its daring creativity and irreplaceable charm have inspired many to argue that it is the better game in retrospect. Whatever your opinion is, the fun and escapism of the green dinosaur’s finest hour (as well as the horrors of Baby Mario’s screams) will be remembered until the end of gaming.

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tbonechessor · 4 years

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There have probably been video essays done about this that can say this better than I can but I'm gonna try and articulate it anyway.

There a common response to the notion of giving a game like darksouls an 'easy mode'. That being: it wouldn't really be Darksouls.

What I think that statement somewhat fails to fully explain is that the nature of Dark souls design is fundamentally challenging.

Alot of the time when people think of a hard game they think of enemies who hit really hard and have alot of health. And while dark souls has plenty of hard-hitting and strong enemies, what makes the common encounters so dangerous is that; more often than not, it is the nature of the mechanics, environment and enemy composition that come together to create the true difficulty.

There's actually not that many enemies that can stand up to the player character in a one on one fight on flat, open ground when you know the enemy moveset and your own. The real challenge is facing multiple enemies with different movesets (see Orenstein and Smaugh)

In fact, encountering new enemies, sometimes several different ones at once, while also trying to mind surroundings where you might fall or take damage, THAT is a true darksouls encounter that can really shake your confidence whilst also giving you a sense of almost horrific discovery.

"Who is THIS guy?"

"What is he doing!?"

"How do I AVOID that?"

Etc etc.

When you strip these "difficult" elements away, the deadly environment, the simple to understand, yet difficult to master, slow and steady combat, and the enemy composition that makes a true, earnest attempt at KILLING the player every chance it can rather than simply inconveniencing them, what do you have left?

Do you have the masterful level design and composition that loops back around in ways you didn't expect and uses vertical elements to assist you in memorizing its complex design? No, you get something straightforward, easy to follow. But nothing that sticks out. Nothing memorable.

Or do you have enemy encounters that use that environment to their advantage to teach you how to handle even more convoluted situations later in the game and create multiple, layered experiences with only a handful of enemies? No, you get repetition that teaches you how to handle a single enemy on a common basis instead of how YOU might use that environment to YOUR advantage.

Which only makes the world around you even MORE memorable as it becomes a personal part of your victory.

When you take these elements away, you strip the game of it's creativity bestowed to it by its developers and designers. Dark souls's difficulty is what makes it unique, fun and immersive and actually has alot of care put into making that difficulty feel real. It's not a simple matter of removing that difficulty because it's something that ist literally BUILT into that experience.

It's not "Elitism" to want that uniqueness preserved. The difficulty is a core part of the storytelling experience and enjoyment of the game. Just as simplicity and goal management are core parts of games like minecraft, animal crossing, and star dew valley.

Video-games SHOULD exist on a spectrum like that, the same way people do.

#dark souls #darksouls #Ds #essay #ramblings

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ghoultyrant · 5 years

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I've tried a few times to write Samus' pov before and I've had a lot of trouble. I feel like she is fairly inscrutable as characters go, being largely voiceless, and taciturn even when she does speak (not counting Other M). A lot of her dialogue is also removed from social interactions, being internal memos in scan logs. Idk. Maybe this is just me.

Samus as a character isn’t so much a cipher as an archaeological mystery.

The point of that comparison being that the Metroid series actually tends to tell a large fraction of its story through its environments, and does so quite well. Metroid II makes it clear that the endgame area is some manner of laboratory where the Metroids were apparently created, probably by the Chozo, but at some point control was lost. The laboratory is their nest because that’s where their existence as a species started, rather than the Metroid Queen selecting it as a good brooding ground for some other reason. Notably, the laboratory is unusually isolated and difficult to reach, even by Metroid II’s standards of travel distance, suggesting that the lab was deliberately cut off from the rest of the planet, and also probably explaining why the Metroid Queen didn’t wander off elsewhere to nest; she very possibly couldn’t.

In turn, this grounds a detail many players probably never questioned, but which is slightly odd on its own: that Metroids can apparently only grow into their Alpha and so on forms on SR388. As a consequence of natural evolution, this is certainly possible, but seems odd. But given that they’re clearly artificial, it’s easy to guess that the Chozo put that in as an artificial constraint; most likely the Chozo had plans for shipping them out to other worlds, and for some reason or another didn’t want them to change form once they were off the planet. (There’s a lot of plausible reasons for why they’d want this, but that’s a bit of a tangent)

Furthermore, this also grounds the Metroid Queen itself. Most players probably never question the fact that there’s literally only one Metroid Queen on an entire planet, because after all she’s the final boss. There’s obvious video game design reasons involved. But actually, it makes perfect sense in-universe: while fandom frequently assumes that any Metroid could potentially molt all the way to being a Metroid Queen, and that’s not an unreasonable assumption, it’s also entirely possible the Metroid Queen was one-of-a-kind because the Chozo carefully designed things so she’d be unique; that the Metroid Queen was built to be a Queen from the ground up, and is not supposed to be capable of producing more Queen-capable Metroids. That would be a logical thing to do to limit the damage in the event of a containment failure, and neatly explains why the planet has only one Metroid Queen even though Metroids themselves are running rampant across the planet.

Speaking of the Chozo and environmental storytelling, the fact that we saw their statues on two different planets back in the original trilogy was already a strong indication that the Chozo were a spacefaring species. Metroid Prime using scan logs to spell it out was a confirmation of an already-likely-true thing, not a state of canon invented by that particular entry. Again, I imagine a lot of players never questioned it because there’s game design reasons that are obviously applicable (eg that Chozo statues are frequently used to mark Important Power-Ups), but it’s extremely good environmental storytelling.

Anyway, that’s just some bits from Metroid II. Aside Other M and let me be brutally honest Samus Returns (I enjoyed it, but it mostly doesn’t try to do environmental storytelling, and probably-accidentally heavily retcons things, with the Metroid Queen’s nest no longer being set deep inside a laboratory being the most blatant example), the Metroid series does this heavily and constantly. The player is expected, if they care about the story and the world it takes place in, to look at the details they can see and make inferences.

And if they don’t care about any of that, it’s not intruding on their experience: they can just play a fun little game with blasting aliens and whatever.

Looping this back to Samus, though: yeah, we mostly don’t get Samus’ voice, both in a literal sense and in the writing sense. What we get is a ton of secondary information hinting at the kind of person she is, supplemented with concrete facts (eg that she was substantially raised by the Chozo), and then are expected to draw inferences.

As one of the more obvious examples: the first two games implicitly establish that Samus has to have a high degree of confidence in her abilities, or if she doesn’t she’s got a literally suicidal streak. She twice accepts missions to travel alone, deep into hostile territory, with the interstellar bounty hunter equivalent of nothing but the clothes on her back. Metroid II’s manual tells us that some elite corps of soldiers was sent to SR388 and never heard from again, and this didn’t dissuade Samus from going in completely alone.

This strongly implies she earnestly believes she can do the job when a literal small army couldn’t even survive: it’s not just that the Egenoid Star Marines failed at the mission, it’s that they were so completely out of their depth that none of them were able to escape the planet to report their failure!

Important and related is that starting from Metroid Ii it’s very normal for Samus to unambiguously have the option of just turning around and leaving. Her ship is on-planet, she uses it to leave at the end of a given game, and nonetheless she sticks each given mission out. She doesn’t encounter Omega Metroids and go ‘no, this is too dangerous, I’m out’. She doesn’t rampage across half of Zebes in Super Metroid and give up in disgust when she fails to find the stolen Metroid reasonably quickly. She doesn’t report the Space Pirates on Tallon IV to the Federation and leave them to clean up that particular mess while she goes to get a drink. Echoes and Fusion are the only games that actually trap Samus on-site temporarily to justify her ongoing presence, and even then if you bother to visit and scan her ship regularly in Echoes you’ll discover it’s ready for liftoff well before it’s time for the endgame, while in Fusion it actually doesn’t take that long to get back access to the Main Deck and thus her ship.

A lot of games that place a player character alone and far from civilization are very careful to explain that the player character was stranded in this strange place, and implicitly or explicitly sets the player character’s goal as escape back to civilization. The implication is generally that these are people who would never willingly inflict such a situation on themselves, and if they ever accidentally found themselves in such a situation with the ability to back out, they’d take it in a heartbeat.

Samus, meanwhile, keeps ending up in these situations and sticking them out. She doesn’t mind being alone with her thoughts for long periods of time.

It’s worth mentioning that the Japanese version of the original Metroid tracked how long you’d played, only your hours of play were presented as how many days Samus had been on Zebes. If you treat this ratio as canonical to all future games, which are generally designed so a first-time player will beat them in 4-20 hours... yeah. Samus has repeatedly spent several days or weeks in a row far away from civilization, and is just fine with sticking those situations out, and even inflicting them fairly spontaneously on herself if she has a specific reason for doing so. (eg she goes to Tallon IV in pursuit of Ridley)

Now, since this is inference there’s a fundamental ambiguity here. I personally tend to interpret Samus as being someone who finds socializing with her fellow sentients to be a stressful experience, such that going out into the wild for a week is a form of decompression and relaxation, but this isn’t the only plausible interpretation, and honestly I probably go to that interpretation because I don’t cope well with that kind of social interaction, rather than it actually being a better interpretation. One could plausibly interpret Samus as someone who, say, is actually fairly intensely social and just rates (Insert mission objective here) as more important than her own personal comfort. (In this interpretation, it would be assumed she instead decompresses from her missions by partying with her must-exist-in-this-interpretation large circle of friends) That’s certainly an excellent justification for her chasing Ridley in Metroid Prime, for example, and if we ignore Other M entirely I can’t think of a Metroid game that could be said to contradict that particular interpretation. (And Other M doesn’t count because it contradicts literally every other game on so many levels; if one game doesn’t fit while the rest are consistent with each other, you toss that one game as an inconsistency)

(Well, actually, another reason I take my interpretation of Samus is that she was raised by Ascetic Space Bird Monks, but then again plenty of people rebel against their upbringing. It’s perfectly possible to say Intensely Social Samus was driven crazy by the Chozo expecting her to be an Ascetic Space Bird Monk But As A Tiny Human, and even suggest that she takes being Intensely Social even farther than she would’ve otherwise as pushback against that whole thing)

BUT

While there’s room for interpretation and murkiness on details, Samus across the games has a fairly clear sketch of a certain range of plausible personalities. This range is also further reduced if we actually, for example, acknowledge Samus’ monologues from Fusion, which make it clear Samus concerns herself with the big picture (Suggesting that she sticks out her missions at least in part because often The Fate Of The Galaxy hinges on them kind of thing), and also seems to indicate (Consistent with her observed behavior), that Samus isn’t someone inclined toward negotiation as a problem-solving mechanism -that is, she doesn’t even countenance the possibility of trying to talk the incoming Federation goons into not trying to weaponize the X, going straight to ‘I need to make sure it’s not possible for them to try’- and that she’s got a bit of a philosophical streak to her, of exactly the sort one might expect of someone raised by Ascetic Space Bird Monks.

But even without the Fusion monologues, it’s not actually that hard to dig up a coherent personality for Samus, consistent with what we see across most of the games and compelling in its own right. It just takes a mentality that, while unusual for most writing/reading, is completely consistent with how the Metroid series prefers to convey its stories.

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newmoneytrash · 5 years

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Death Stranding

I had to write about Death Stranding to get this not very good game out of my head and soul

(this has spoilers I guess but honestly who cares)

I was going to wait to play Death Stranding, if I ever even played it at all. I had barely seen any trailers outside of the first couple. I remember seeing them and thinking “this isn’t going to be the crazy, weird experience everyone thinks it’s going to be”. I didn’t think that I knew better than anyone else, or that the people who were excited were stupid to feel that way. I just felt like I could see what it was and knew that, having played the majority of Kojima’s work, that this probably wasn’t going to be the experience that people thought it was going to be.

And I was comfortable with my disinterest, content to know that this thing existed, that I was fine with it existing away from me. But then a week before release when the review embargo lifted and people started posting their impressions and experiences and reviews my interest was piqued in a way that no trailer or announcement had interested me before. It wasn’t the glowing and fawning reviews that drew me to the game, the people who played and loved the game. It was, weirdly, the negative ones that changed me from not having any interest in playing Death Stranding to going to the store on the Friday morning it was released and standing in the rain waiting too long for an Uber so I could get home as fast as possible to start playing.

The reason the negative reviews drew me to the game so much is not because they were negative, it’s not that I was taking some joy in getting to play something that I thought was going to be bad and now I had an opportunity to be vindicated by seeing for myself that it is bad. It was the things that they were negative about that sounded so interesting. The idea that a group of people would spend so much time and effort and money in creating a large premier video game experience where the main crux seemed to be tedium is an inherently fascinating concept.

The kind of elevator pitch descriptor that interested me the most (that was used by people both derisively and positively) was that it was a post-apocalyptic truck simulator. Travelling a dead or dying world as a UPS driver. Mad Max meets King of Queens (that’s a comparison that I made and I’m too proud of it not to use it). What if a development team who made one of the great action games on the last decade (Metal Gear Solid V might be a terribly lacking narrative experience with some frustrating mission design, but the core gameplay is extremely good) and funnelled all of that energy into something intentionally boring and monotonous?

Not only did that help reset my expectations of what this would be, it made me feel excitement for something that I had previously thought I wouldn’t be able to feel excitement or anticipation for.

I spent 40 hours with it over the course of a week. That might not sound like a lot of time in video game speak, but I don’t remember the last time I spent that much time with a game over such a short period of time. Over the first weekend I had it I played for just over 20 hours. Twenty hours. I don’t know if I’ve ever been that focused on a game in my life. But still when I reflect on my time with it, and especially when I try to recall those initial 20 hours which were far and away the most fun I had with the game, I feel nothing. It’s like static, like someone has gone back and just erased that time from my memory.

That’s maybe not entirely fair. I remember general things, just not specific gameplay moments.

I remember the gameplay loop. It’s less a truck simulator game and more of a hiking game, at least initially. And this was appealing to me. You’re slowly traversing across these barren, empty environments delivering packages to and from outposts and shelters. You’re packing a huge amount of garbage on your back and climbing up mountains and down cliffs and wading through rivers. You’re given ropes and ladders to try and ease your journey, and later you’re able to build greater structures like bridges and towers to help you more easily navigate the environment and scout your path ahead. Eventually you’re given access to motorbikes and trucks that can both help and hinder your deliveries, depending on the paths you take and forge. You even get a chance to help rebuild an actual honest to goodness highway, creating it piece by piece by providing an increasing amount of materials to each section. Maybe the greatest accomplishment I felt playing this game was spending a few hours creating large sections of the highway and then getting to just fly down it on a motorbike. It really did feel like I hate created something big, that I not only radically changed the world by creating this, but that I had bettered it.

And there’s there community aspect of the game. Having others donate materials to your structures as well as seeing structures others have built and abandoned vehicles and packages in your world is all really neat and interesting. Everything positive I have to say about this game is wrapped up in these systems, because there is a lot of the game that feels like you’re on a genuine journey. Taking a package over the peak of a snow capped mountain for the first time can feel like a legitimate achievement, it was rewarding just walking from one place to the next. Seeing a bridge helpfully placed in a frustrating location made me feel real gratitude toward that person, and receiving feedback that other people were using and liking things that I had built made me feel good, as if I was paying forward the help that I had received.

For a long time I didn’t even think there would be combat in the game but it gradually increases as you go along and, while it’s never good, it’s still serviceable and easy enough to never really get in the way. The shooting and melee combat feels off, and I might have had a better time if it wasn’t there at all, but a few boss encounters and combat vignettes were interesting and would occasionally help when the monotony of just delivering packages started to grow.

But after 20 hours of this nothing really stood out to me, there’s no one gameplay moment that will stay with me. I won’t reflect on this game and think “wow, remember that one journey I took by following the coastline?” It’s all just a long, sustained blur.

And it’s not that I don’t remember the story or the characters either. Those are all easy to recall. The story is especially easy to recall because, over 40 hours, it’s just basically telling you one thing over and over and over. It’s hard not to recall it, because there is only one thing to recall.

The thing that I was worried about before the game came out was that the story was just going to be a huge mess. Kojima’s games are always functionally good to great, that’s never really been an issue I’ve had with his work, it’s always been the stories he tries to tell and how he tries to tell them. From the first Metal Gear Solid through to The Phantom Pain there are always misgivings I’ve had with character representation, general themes, and just the delivery of that narrative. I know this isn’t a unique position to have regarding his work (sexism and his consistently awful portrayal of women is a pretty famous issue he has, even among his biggest fans), but beyond that I just never felt that anything he was doing was particularly special. They were different and almost always interesting, but a lot of people would like to tell you that Kojima was doing masterful video game storytelling that no one else was capable, that he was single-handedly raising the medium of video games to something as artistically valid and viable as cinema or art. But, to me, he was never doing that. He was making fun and compelling video games, but they were inconsistent and messy and overly verbose and self-righteous.

So my concern was that, now that he was the head of an independent studio that for all intents and purposes answered to no one, he would let that his storytelling get further away from him. In an attempt to prove his level of creativity, maybe to even prove his worth, he was going to put all of his ideas on the table and the result was going to be an indecipherable mess. When they would release a trailer of a naked Norman Reedus on a beach holding a baby attached to him with an artificial umbilical cord, or Guillermo Del Toro standing in a sewer holding a baby in a jar while Mads Mikkelsen is covered in black tar leading a bunch of skeleton soldiers a lot of people responding with a variant of “wow Kojima is going to make something crazy, this is going to blow my mind”. But all I saw was a giant red flag.

So when I finally experienced the story of Death Stranding I was kind of taken aback. Not by how crazy or nonsensical it is, but by kind of how… boring and one note it is? There isn’t really any room for interpretation in this story. It’s all very, very literal. It tells you how and why things are happening, and if you missed the exposition the first time don’t worry! Here is another twenty minute info dump reiterating the same boring, one note narrative over and over.

The game just tricks you into thinking it’s being more creative than it is because it’s filled with endless jargon. There is timefall, void outs, BTs, BBs, Beaches, repatriates, chiral energy, and extinction entities. Ha and ka. But it’s all in service of creating a world and a narrative that ultimately says nothing, and spends dozens of hours painfully and slowly telling you nothing. It’s borderline torturous.

There is also some high school art level social commentary on social media. Likes are a huge commodity in this world, with people becoming addicted to the feeling you get when they receive one. And instead of having a smart phone or whatever you have Cuff Links, which is a literal pair of handcuffs that, when strapped to your wrist, functions as a way to communicate with people through the Codec or email. Because our phones are a prison, right guys? Pretty deep. In Kojima’s world we truly do live in a society.

But it’s not just the small stuff like that that’s so literal, every part of the game is literal. You’re Sam Porter Bridges, a porter who has a contract with the organisations Bridges, created by someone named Bridget, to create bridges with people across America (both figuratively and literally) to create a network across the continent that will bridge everyone together. Every metaphor and theme in the game is so painfully literal that the game never gives you the opportunity to interpret anything else. The only time there are moments in the game when you don’t know what is happening is when characters start talking about things that you could have no way of knowing about as if you did know about them, but even then these moments of mystery are immediately undone because they always immediately explain the thing that you missed. You will have a cryptic conversation with someone about something you have had no opportunity to deduce or discover on your own, but it never matters because it’s followed up a few minutes later with a flashback or exposition that lays everything out on the table.

Instead of Kojima creating something nonsensical and imaginative and impossible to follow, he managed to make the world’s most shallow metaphor about really nothing in particular. When he said that the game was inspired by Donald Trump and Brexit he meant that it was inspired by the division that these things caused between people and how we need to create Bridges to reconnect with people.

That’s it, that’s the game. That is its message. And it’s not interestingly presented, there’s nothing more to it than that.

One of the podcast conversations I listened to before released (that was largely critical of the game) that drew me toward playing it ended with one of the people saying “It is a game that I think everyone should experience, but not one that I could ever recommend” which is a perfect way of articulating how I feel. It’s a unique experience that does things that a game of its size has never really done before. I don’t think there’s merit in being different for differences’ sake, but this isn’t that. The gameplay is considered and deliberate and purposeful, but that doesn’t mean that it’s fun and it doesn’t negate the parts that are tedious and tiring. Just because you make something boring and annoying on purpose that doesn’t make it good.

If you had asked me six months ago if I think I would like Death Stranding I would have said no. I probably would have qualified it by saying I hope that I was wrong, that I would like it to be good, but that I was probably more likely to hate it.

I didn’t love it, and I don’t like it. I don’t even hate it, but in a weird way I wish that I could. Because then at least I would feel something toward it. Instead Death Stranding leaves me feeling something much, much worse.

It makes me feel nothing.

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theblueskyphoenix · 5 years

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Aileen Animation Fangirling: Don’t Starve Together: Next of Kin

Okay I just... need to take a moment to just break down exactly my thoughts and analysis of the recent Don’t Starve Together short. I’m really blown away at how all out Klei went with this and I really want to express how amazed I am. (I might do this for the other shorts to come but we’ll see but for now, fangirling time!)

More below the cut!

Can I just say the opening sequence is just amazing? Just... AH! What a good way to give us insight into things! We see Charlie and Winona’s family (which by the way tiny Nona and Charlie are just adorable.), images from the Final Act, hints about other characters (I see you sneaking around the corner Wickerbottom. I’m convinced that New York Library is yours.) and so on.

Then we transition into the factory via the photo of it which is just so freaking smooth and I love it. Also, as someone who had been brushing up on her environment designs can I just squeal over how well designed this building is too? I LOVE the fact it resembles the infamous radio that was built here and it’s just... gah. Perfect, perfect, perfect. Well played Klei!

And of course the inside is very well designed as well. It’s so humble looking inside and I just love all the small details, like the diagrams, the tools, etc. It just feels... real, for lack of a better word.

Also I love the other characters we see in the factory. I love the designs and they all feel unique in their own way. (Especially that girl Winona helped out. Her design is my favorite.)

And hello mystery person that isn’t totally Wagstaff (Yes it is), fancy meeting you here. I loved how well composed this scene was. Just gaaaaah so much tension.

Also, what an interesting portal design. Way different from the one Wilson built. I have to wonder if Charlie gave him the idea or something else is at work. The design just reminds me a lot of the portals in The Constant. Also, can I just dub Winona a bad ace for being able to figure out how to fix it in a matter of moments? Because that’s super bad ace.

Oh THIS scene. THIS WAS FLAWLESSLY animated. The transitions, the composition, the facial expressions are just freaking PERFECT. And now we have context as to why Winona said it was a one way ticket when examining a portal. It was because that’s what literally happened. And also, Charlie’s switch from herself to her Grue side. It’s really evident that her actual self and the grue side have very different intentions. Charlie wanting to be free and Grue Charlie wanting Winona to be another victim in her game. Just... I don’t even need dialogue. The facial expressions alone are just enough to tell a story.

And this last scene is just heartbreaking. Seems Nona and that girl from earlier were close friends. I can’t imagine what might be going through that girl’s head right now. That pose and reaction is just... Hnnnn.

Overall, this short is amazing, the storytelling is so fascinating and I can’t wait to see more and maybe do more entries like this in the future.

What are your thoughts? Please feel free to share!

#don't starve #don't starve together #don't starve winona #winona #aileen animation fangirling

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recentanimenews · 5 years

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Music in Anime: The Song is the Story

Hey all, and welcome back to Why It Works! Today, I’ve got music on the mind, and can’t stop listening to tracks from Shinichiro Watanabe’s Carole & Tuesday. Though it’s still trapped in streaming limbo, even just performance excerpts make it clear that Watanabe’s latest production is embracing a very unique style of storytelling. Focused on a pair of girls hoping to make it as musicians, the course of their journey is illustrated not only through the overt narrative, but the actual songs the two of them write and perform. In Carole & Tuesday, musical performance itself is a way of conveying character development.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to dedicated fans of Watanabe. After all, his earlier adaptation Kids on the Slope also used musical performances to convey character emotions, with the bond of Slope leads Kaoru and Sentaro often being most clearly illustrated in the playful interplay of their drums and piano. And even when his protagonists aren’t literally musicians, music often informs the most impactful, emotionally resonant moments of their lives. Spike Spiegel trudging to pay back past debts as a mournful dirge plays, Lisa Mishima’s laughter fading into the song as she embraces freedom; Watanabe’s works are all built on an understanding of the transformative power of music, and how it can convey an experience beyond the power of words to describe.

This power strikes at the heart of art and storytelling’s ability to connect with and move us. One of the great strengths of music and animation is that they are able to convey emotional sentiment even more directly than communication. When conveyed through music, we don’t just intellectually understand some emotional turn, we actually feel it for ourselves, articulated through a language more elemental than overt dialogue. Music is a universal language, and the best anime directors are able to turn music into a clear vehicle for emotional expression.

Kyoto Animation’s Naoko Yamada is a master at employing music for emotional catharsis, and it’s no surprise that many of her best works actually focus on musicians as well. In K-On!, the songs that Yui and her friends play serve as a concrete validation of their bond, and the meaning of the time they spent together. We in the audience don’t have to be told how well they’ve come to know each other, because we can see and hear it in the fond interplay of their live performance.

Yamada’s later co-production Sound! Euphonium uses music even more directly, with not just its ensemble tournament-focused drama, but also its individual character arcs relying on musical expression for their resolution. In the first season, long episodes of club drama and resentment ultimately resolve in a face-off audition for a trumpet solo, where heroine Reina’s passion, pride and talent are articulated not through any intellectual argument, but through the thundering voice of her trumpet. The desire to stand above the crowd which has fueled her all season long is realized in song, as she proves the strength of her voice without a word. In the show’s second season, club senior Asuka’s arc resolves in a very different performance, as she plays her beloved euphonium for an audience of one. Her song is almost mournful, a tender love letter to an instrument that has caused her both joy and pain, and its sound speaks to her feelings on a more fundamental level than words could ever describe.

Of course, shows don’t actually have to be about musicians in order to rely on music and sound design for conveying their emotional intent. Just look at the works of Hiroshi Nagahama, whose tenure on shows like Mushishi and Flowers of Evil demonstrate a keen understanding of how music dictates our emotional experience. There are episodes of Mushishi that convey the sensation of being caught in a muffling snow drift like nothing else in anime, an effect that almost entirely comes down to his careful focus on how heavy snowfall impacts all other sounds in the environment. Meanwhile, the grinding nerves and paralyzing anxieties of Flowers of Evil’s protagonists is perfectly illustrated through stringed instruments drawn so taut they feel on the verge of breaking, held notes turning to atonal screeching in a sonic echo of an anxiety attack.

There are plenty of other shows that turn their sound design into an indispensable part of the narrative and emotional experience, from overtly musician-focused works like Your Lie in April to the musically inspired works of Masaaki Yuasa. Great art uses all of the tools of its medium to convey a more cohesive, immersive experience, and there are few artistic tools more powerful than music. Songs possess an ability to connect with us that goes beyond rational thought, gripping us in the personal, emotional sense that makes art a truly transformative experience. I hope you’ve enjoyed this exploration of sound design, and please let me know all your own favorite music-centric shows in the comments!

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Nick Creamer has been writing about cartoons for too many years now, and is always ready to cry about Madoka. You can find more of his work at his blog Wrong Every Time, or follow him on Twitter.

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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mittensmorgul · 6 years

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1/2 I think the endgame issue is so difficult because the feelings about it often come from two different mindsets. People want to see what a relationship would look like between Dean and Cas, but also see a same sex couple represented. Also, people are gun-shy from past experiences where there's been the same kind of subtextual story only for there to be no resolution or confirmation. Or just flat out queerbaiting. People are tired of largely subtextual queer relationships.

2/2 This is taking destiel to a very general, bigger, more complicated conversation about queer representation and media. But on a smaller scale, focusing just on SPN, the show is just going by the formula and format they want to go by. Why are they waiting until endgame? Because they just are. Yet it's often spoken about on that larger scale when the actual issue is about SPN specifically and how they're choosing to do this. It's not always about grander scale, sometimes it's individual.(same anon) Not that i'm invalidating the people who's issues about destiel revolve around the much weightier "queer representation in media" thing. It's just that sometimes you gotta look at the specific, individual show and what it's doing and not necessarily "it's doing the same things those other shows did so it must mean (whatever)." It's tough. And we just don't know and won't know until we know.

Hi there, first off. :D And yeah, it is one of those “zoomed into the specific context of this one show and how they’re telling this story” versus the “zoomed all the way out to a very specific issue in the larger scope of media representation.” The frustrating thing is when the two are conflated specifically for the purposes of generating wank about one specific show and how they are seemingly progressing toward what could potentially be an unprecedented and absolutely unique sort of representation that’s practically impossible to even begin in this exact way in this day and age.

A while back (and I can’t remember who wrote it, so apologies...) I read a spectacular assessment of this exact situation. When Supernatural began, nearly thirteen years ago, the environment was very, very different from how it is today. The way queer stories were told in general was very, very different. Hollywood was only barely beginning the shift away from clinging to the Hays Code with regard to how non-straight characters and relationships were handled on tv, and we were only about seven years post-Ellen coming out (which essentially ended up sinking her sitcom). Queer characters were almost universally tragic characters, and they didn’t get happy endings, if they could even be portrayed as canonically queer and not only subtextually so.

And when Supernatural started, even in 2005 it was very much rooted in themes of the past-- everything from the ‘67 Impala to classic rock to the Winchester Brothers living in the eternal shadow of the tragedy that had touched their family in 1983. The entire concept of “Star Wars in truckstop America” evokes a very specific and gritty flavor of the past. This is what the show was built on-- classic horror tropes and uncovering the truth about urban legends and monsters. Even the “On The Road” references from Dean and Sam’s names to the concept of Sam’s “magical qualities” being paralleled to Dean’s more subtle queercoding right from the pilot episode have long been meta’d into the ground.

The thing is, Supernatural has now been running long enough for the general media culture to have made substantial inroads into progressively more honest queer representation. At any point, Supernatural could’ve made a genuine leap into canonizing Dean’s sexuality as something other than perfectly heterodudebro straight. Because if that’s what the subtext has actually been implying all these years (which from the pov of “queer reading” and “queercoding” of the past-- again, see the Hays Code-- it’s obvious they have been), then why are they hesitating in this modern era where shows are not only actively portraying queer characters more and more frequently, but are receiving critical acclaim and public praise for doing so? I mean, it sounds logical that if they actually intended to “take the story there,” then they should just go ahead and make it so. Right?

But for a show like Supernatural, that’s rooted in this “old school” format, and a narrative consistently told through that same lens, with the same applicable tropes, and the same genre conventions regarding queerness and horror that it was built on back in 2005, this would literally defy the integrity of the narrative.

And therein lies the frustration. This is why people shout queerbaiting. This is why people have quit the show in frustration of feeling like if they really intended to go there, there’s very little reason to hold back at this point.

Well, except for Authorial Integrity.

That’s a big one.

It’s also one I’d hate for the show to compromise on. Because pulling out core subtextual character traits after thirteen years of consistently yet very slowly dragging them into the light, and making them fully textual before the run up to the series end would absolutely compromise the entire structure of the narrative.

As a viewer and a queer person, yes I would LOVE to see a textualization of Dean’s queerness as a “coming out later in life” and “it’s never too late to openly acknowledge who you really are” narrative, because that would be incredibly powerful at this point. The fact that I am actively seeing this happen (albeit in glacial slow motion compared to how it might happen in more “modernly rooted” shows where characters are often textually queer from the word go) and happening within the same narrative conventions that Supernatural has always been written within is more than enough to sustain my interest for now.

I sincerely HOPE that the show will eventually “do the right thing” with this subtext. I HOPE that the eventual endgame will finally textualize this, but it is literally the endgame goal of this series. I don’t know how else to explain that even while newer series will have characters come out and then just carry on under this “new normal” for the character, this is something so completely rooted into Dean’s “endgame character goals” that at this point to make it textual would bring far too much of his own core character development to a premature conclusion.

In writing, when you create a character, you start out by asking questions:

Who is this person?

What essential traits make him who he is?

What does he fear?

What does he love?

What does he hope for?

What is the source of his happiness?

How can I keep him from achieving his goals in a believable way?

How does he hobble himself from achieving his own goals?

What is his ultimate endgame goal?

In tv writing, this is part of what’s known as the “Show Bible,” or the guide to characterization so that the characters and plots and general narrative structure of the series can remain consistent from writer to writer. That’s why we have consistently seen Dean progress from where he was in s1 to where he is now. He’s clearly become more and more comfortable with himself, more and more open about things he loves (think “no chick flick moments” in 1.01 and “you love chick flicks-- yeah I do” in 11.23). But they aren’t going to bring his character’s Major Personal Arc to fruition when the show is still being written without a concrete endpoint in place.

Because that’s being true and honest to the narrative structure and character development of both the genre of the show (classic horror) and the evolution of media in general since Supernatural began.

I know not everyone is comfortable watching the show continue as it always has with no guarantee of paying off more than a decade worth of subtext. Not everyone is willing to remain emotionally invested in a show that may eventually end on a huge queerbaity rug pull. But there’s an increasingly real chance that it won’t, either. I mean... if you can maintain expectations and understand there’s always a potential for disappointment in the end, it’s a lot easier to enjoy the story as it unfolds.

For other folks it’s probably easier to wait and see how everything turns out before emotionally committing to the show, and that’s fine too.

But I’m really tired of the blatantly unfair comparison of Supernatural-- a 13-year-old show being told through the conventions of the traditional horror genre that’s maintained a consistent narrative for thirteen years regarding the character development arcs and the specific way they’ve been telling this story this entire time-- and brand new shows that can essentially set up entirely different characters and write from a different baseline from the start, where a character’s sexual orientation hasn’t been sculpted into what has always been connected with the closing of that character’s narrative arc.

Yes, technically Supernatural could defy genre, defy their own storytelling, and explicitly make this textual right away, but that’s like... the dictionary definition of jumping the shark in this specific case. And that’s not something I want for Supernatural, or for Dean, or for Destiel.

#superantural #destiel #the scheherazade of supernatural #queercoding #this is how stories work #Anonymous

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patelmansii · 3 years

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How to Use VR/AR to Unlock your Brand’s Potential

What comes to your mind when you think of a Virtual Reality Experience? In truth, there is no single answer — A Virtual Reality Experience (or a 360° Experience) can be anything from a Virtual Tour of a house to a self-guided 3D Walk-through of a manufacturing unit.

During Covid, most businesses got in touch with the concept of Virtual Reality (and Augmented Reality) while also learning the fact that it could be used in areas other than Gaming and Entertainment.

For retail, VR/AR has become an alternative to 2D brochures and images, while in manufacturing, it has replaced the traditional ways of prototyping and collaboration. And it’s no longer a nice-to-have feature on your business website. It’s much of a necessity for retaining customers online.

If you’re looking for creating your own Virtual & Augmented Reality experiences for your brand, maybe you should ask yourself — What makes a good VR/AR experience?

Here are some VR/AR content ideas that can help your marketing strategy generate greater revenue.

Use Virtual Reality for Immersive Storytelling

Storytelling is by far the most important part of your brand — whether online or offline. It defines your brand vision. It shows your audiences how your product differs from your competitors. And it enforces customer loyalty — something which is especially rare in the virtual age.

But using ordinary images on an ordinary website is just not enough when you’re dying for everyone’s attention on social media.

Creating a Virtual Tour for your business can do the work for you. People love seeing the behind-the-scenes of your company — the people, the tech, the offices, and the locations. The only key here is to keep your audience at the center of your Virtual Tour. For real estate agents, this could be a profound way of showing what their properties look like. For property developers, it could be an immersive walk-through of their project — whether old or new. Architects and Interior designers can use it to showcase their in-construction buildings.

An excellent example of this is Casa Rivera — Gujarat’s Tallest Residential Building With All River View Flats. The project was still under construction when this 360° virtual tour was made. However, you can see the realism VR brought to their design. Rendered and developed using kalaa.melzo.com (a DIY virtual tour software), the virtual tour was created stitching 3D renders and 360° photographs (with aerial views captured using a drone camera).

Take a look at the balcony. The scenery that overviews from here was photographed but the balcony itself wasn’t built at the time.

That’s the magic of virtual reality. It can help you market properties even before they’re built.

For schools and colleges, a customized virtual experience will help you present your school’s unique facilities, whether it’s an architectural feature or a landmark on campus that is proof of your college’s history. Moreover, it allows users to explore your campuses and educational facilities as if they’re physically there in real-time, giving them a unique insight into your environments first hand.

For tourism agencies, a 360º Virtual Walk-through helps you bring out the beauty of your hotels & the city itself. Take a look this virtual tour of Courtyard Marriott, Surat: https://mlz.gg/cym-talkbot

Their signature poolside Indian barbeque restaurant, Charcoal has an interactive live kitchen that serves delectable grills of superior quality meat & seafood in harmony with their vegetarian counterparts.

Use 3D Virtual Events to reach a bigger audience.

According to statistics, the event industry lost approximately $30 Billion last year alone, and it seems like it’ll need years to get on its feet again. And that’s where virtual events came into picture.

Since the pandemic, virtual events have been the life-saving alternative for all. When meetings were getting delayed, expos were getting cancelled, and business summits, concerts, workshops, events — everything had to be second guessed, going virtual felt like the only option to survive.

Between 2019 to 2021, we’ve helped organizations like Credai, SalesMax, Auro University, Pinclick, Three Sixty Events (UAE), Being Exporter, Apparel Export Promotion Council (AEPC) India and many more host large scale multinational events and expos.

And they weren’t just live broadcasts or presentations. They were fun, interactive, and able to support the company’s business goals.

It also managed to replicate the experience of a physical event, online — everything from the venue, big screens, sponsor booths, expo stalls, auditoriums, to food courts.

Never intended to replace an in-person event though, I mean what are the chances? Well, consider these results — 48,389 Visitors with 60 Exhibitors in a total of 8 days at Credai Surat Virtual Property Exhibition 2021.

Or how about, 2,44,250 visitors and 160 exhibitors at Credai MCHI’s Virtual Property Expo. Seems pretty powerful if you ask me.

Leverage the Power of AR for a Better Customer Experience.

Gone are the days when 3D brochures were just about looking fancy. After Covid, many retail businesses had to permanently close their factory outlets and stores. Brands were forced to rethink their online strategies and selling perspectives.

That’s where AR proved to be the game changer. Companies who were already on this bandwagon saw a 40% higher conversion rate with AR. If you don’t understand how, let me break it down to you.

The reason why Live Augmented Reality Try-Ons work is that they’re realistic and captivating — visually and literally. Offering Virtual Try-ons for Jewelry, Shoes, Clothes, and other accessories, or AR try-ons for retail (furniture, decor items, bicycles & automobiles, etc.) can help you dig into the untapped revenue from your online engagement.

With such an AR experience, you can also add lead generation forms to collect data, run marketing campaigns, and use 3D designs to increase the potential sale of a specific product. Check out noor.melzo.com and udyog.melzo.com to see how that works.

Create Virtual & Augmented Reality Content to Enhance Your Marketing Strategy with Melzo.

If you’re someone who wants to explore VR/AR for your business, we can help. melzo.com is made up of business-minded tech people and tech-minded business people who can help you integrate such 360° experiences for your business — from VR tours, virtual events & expos, to augmented reality try-ons, 3D model visualization and more.

#virtualreality #virtualtours #virtual real estate #virtualevents #virtualexhibition #augmented reality #businessstrategy #marketingtips

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indd40041020202021 · 4 years

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Prev blog - Oct 20 2020

STANDING BOOK LIST

OCTOBER 20, 2020

LAUREN THU

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EDIT

I figure that I should write down all of my reference work/books here as I am the king of tsundoku, and always forget what I have on the go. I also like to write the quotes from a good book into a separate file so they’re easy to find when I think of them. I’ll copy those here as well. I will keep this list updated and current.

CURRENTLY READING The Dispossessed – Ursula K Le Guin Design for the Pluriverse – Arturo Escobar The Spell of the Sensuous – David Abrham

WAITING TO BE READ: Braiding Sweetgrass – Robin Wall Kimmerer Humankind, solidarity with non-humans – Timothy Morton Shock of the Anthropocene – Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz What’s the Use? – Sarah Ahmed Infrahumanisms – Glick The Mushroom at the end of the World – Tsing

ALREADY READ: Critical Fabulations – Rosner Staying with the Trouble – Haraway The new Dark Age – Bridle

___________________________________ BOOK QUOTES:

James Bridle – A New Dark Age Citations

“Computation does not merely govern our actions in the present, but constructs a future that best fits its parameters. That which is possible becomes that which is computable.” p. 44

“The more obsessively we attempt to compute the world, the more unknowable complex it appears.” p. 46

“The philosopher Timothy Morton calls global warming a ‘hyperobject’; a thing that surrounds us, envelops and entangles us, but that is literally too big to see in its entirety. Mostly, we perceive hyperobjects through their influence on other things, a melting ice sheet, a dying sea, the buffecting of a transatlantic flight. Hyperobjects happen everywhere at once, but we can only experience them in the local environment. We may perceive hyperobjects as personal because they affect us directly, or imagine them as products of scientific theory; in fact, they stand outside both our perception and our measurement. They exist without us. Because they are so close and yet so hard to see, they defy our ability to describe them rationally, and to master or overcome them in any traditional sense. Climate change is a hyperobject, but so is nuclear radiation, evolution, and the internet” p. 73

“Such histories give the lie to the heroic narrative of history – the lone genius toiling away to produce a unique insight. History is networked and atemporal” p. 78

“The way we think the world is shaped by the tools at our disposal.” p. 102

“This awareness of historic injustice is crucial to understanding the dangers of the mindless implementation of new technologies that uncritically ingest yesterday’s mistakes.” p. 144

“Any strategy other than mindful, thoughtful cooperation is a form of disengagement: a retreat that cannot hold. We cannot reject contemporary technology anymore than we can ultimately and utterly reject our neighbours in society and the world; we are all entangled. An ethics of cooperation in the present need not be limited to machines either: with other nonhuman entities, animate and non-animate, it becomes another form of stewardship, emphasising acts of universal justice not in an unknowable, uncomputable future, but in the here and now.” p. 160

In talking about a “‘smoking gun’: the single source or piece of evidence that would bring down authority”(183): “The problem of the smoking gun besets every strategy that depends on revelation to move opinion.” p. 183

“Consensus – such as the broad scientific agreement around the urgency of the climate crisis – is disregarded in the face of the smallest quantum of uncertainty.” p. 184

“Computational knowing requires surveillance, because it can only produce its truth from the data available to it directly. In turn, all knowling is reduced to that which is computationally knowable, so all knowing becomes a form of surveillance. Thus computational logic denies our ability to think the situation, and to act rationally in the absence of certainty. It is also purely reactive, permitting action only after sufficient evidence has been gathered and forbidding action in the present, when it is most needed.” p. 184

“But the network has changed how we establish and shape cultures: people in distant locales can gather online to share their experiences and beliefs and form cultures all their own.” p. 208

“We’re all looking at the same world and seeing radically different things.” p. 211

_______________________________________________________

Citations: Staying with the Trouble – Donna Haraway

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

“[M. Beth Dempster] suggested the term sympoesis for “collectively-producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries. Information and control are distributed among components. The systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change.” By contrast, autopoetic systems are “self-producing” autonomous units “with self defined spatial or temporal boundaries that tend to be centrally controlled, homeostatic, and predictable.”” p. 33

“The reality, however, is that there is no avoiding the necessity of the difficult cultural work of reflection and mourning. This work is not opposed to practical action, rather it is the foundation of any sustainable and informed response.” p. 39

“Without sustained remembrance, we cannot learn to live with ghosts and so cannot think” p. 39

“Storying cannot any longer be put into the box of human exceptionalism” p. 39

Latour quote: “Some are reading themselves to live as Earthbound in the Anthropocene; others decided to remain as Humans in the Holocene” p. 41

Speaking of Latour: “He is a compositionist intent on understanding how a common world, how collectives, are built-with each other, where all the builders are not human beings.” p. 41

“Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Strangers note that denunciation has been singularly ineffective, or capitalism would have long ago vanished from the earth. A dark bewitched commitment to the lure of Progress (and its polar opposite) lashes us to endless infernal alternatives, as if we had no other ways to reworld, reimagine, relive, and reconnect with each other, in multispecies well-being.” p. 50-51

“To be animal is to become-with bacteria (and, no doubt, viruses and many other sores of critters; a basic aspect of sympoesis is its expandable set of players). [..] Next, I hold out a tasty model system for studying developmental symbioses. The question here is not how animals hold themselves together at all, but rather, how they craft developmental patternings that take them through time in astonishing morphogeneses. My favourite model is the diminutive Hawaiian bobtail squid, Euprymna scolopes, and its bacterial smybionts, vibrio fischeri, which are essential for the squid’s constructing its ventral pouch that houses luminescing bacteria, so that the hunting squid can look like a starry sky to its prey below on dark nights, or appear not to cast a shadow on moonlit nights.” p. 65-66 “It is time to turn to sympoietic worldings, to vital models crafted in SF patterns in each zone, where ordinary stories, ordinary becoming “involved in each other’s lives,” propose ways to stay with the trouble in order to nurture well-being on a damaged planet. Symchthonic stories are not the tales of heroes; they are the tales of the ongoing.” p. 76

“Intimacy without proximity is not “wirtual” presence; it is “real” presence, but in loopy materialities. […] The crochet reef is a practice of caring without the neediness of touching by camera or hand in yet another voyage of discovery.” p. 79

Quote: “But what good are old stories if the wisdom they contain is not shared?” p. 86

“Even though the models of sympoiesis are expandable, it is critical not to once again raid situated indegenous stories as resources for the woes of colonizing projects and peoples.” p. 87

“Jason Moore [argues] that cheap nature is at an end; cheapening nature cannot work much longer to sustain extraction and production in and of the contemporary world because most of the reserves of the earth have been drained, burned, depleted, poisoned, exterminated, and otherwise exhausted.” p. 100

“My Chthulucene […] entangles myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages – including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus.” p. 101

“Who and whatever we are, we need to make-with – become-with, compose-with – the earth-bound.” p. 102

“Recuperation is still possible, but only in multispecies alliance, across the killing divisions of nature, culture, and technology and of organism, language, and machine.” p. 118

______________________________

Critical Fabulations – Daniela K Rosner

ROSNER, D. K. (2020). CRITICAL FABULATIONS: Reworking the methods and margins of design. S.l.: MIT PRESS.

“Herbert Simon’s definition covers nearly all imaginable instances of design. To design, Simon writes, is to “devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (Simon, The scienses of the artificial, 1982 p 129). Design, properly defined,is the entire process across the full range of domains required for any given outcome.” (p. x)

“At stake in this renewed discourse of design through creative empowerment is the ferishization of technological progress and the further entrenchment of power hierarchies. […] Who benefits from technical labour and who loses out gets little attention within mainstream narratives of design and technology development.” (p. 11)

“Comparing theoretical pillars of dominant design paradigm to tactics of critical fabulation: Individualism >> Alliances Objectivism >> Recuperations Universalism >> Interferences Solutionism >> Extensions” (p. 15)

“Critical fabulations are ways of storytelling that rework how things that we design come into being and what they do in the world. They deconstruct design methods to open different understandings of the past that reconfigure the present, creating new opportunities for a just future.” (p. 17)

“Dewey recognized that society cannot simply return to a “primitive” time before technology. Rather, people must acknowledge the presence of technology within society and use science to understand how it affects a peron’s entire character. Only then can people produce appropriate structures (pedagogies, policies, conditions of labour) for working collaboratively.” (p. 27)

“With probes, designers thus pointed to an important distinction between universalistic assumptions of access versus response. The radical move to provoke design insights through embodied encounters came with a recognition that universal responses may never exist.” (p. 37)

A quote from Lucy Suchman “”I became very interested in challenges to traditional sociology that were based on the idea that social structure is not a given, it’s ongoingly and actively constituted and reproduced”” (p. 45)

“For Haraway, the cyborg described an “imploded” figure who worked against a theorizing of technology in terms of natural and artificial, categories that erased the question of what kinds of relationships get produced and for whom they get made.” (p. 51)

“Technology of enchantment” – symbolic power inherent in not fully understanding how things work (the magic of design, tonkenwise?) – (p. 77)

Re: Alliances “In what ways can you cultivate collective action?” (p. 86) “How can you inquire in concert with those in the design setting?” (p. 87)

Re: Recuperations “Who’s invisible work underpins your own? How might it inform your inquiry?” (p. 88) “What histories of practice have been suppressed or elided?” (p. 88)

Re: Interferences “What representations feed a prevailing design narrative? Whom do they represent?” (p. 92) “What opportunities exist for examining the responses generated by interferences?” (p. 92)

Re: Extensions “What forms of knowledge exchange already exist within the design setting?” (p. 96) “What forms of collective authorship do people gather around?” (p. 96)

Katherine Hayles quote: “”Shifting the emphasis from technological determinism to competing, contingent, embodied narratives about the scientific developments is one way to liberate the resources of narrative”” (p. 102)

Charles Briggs quote: “”Silencing the stories that challenge dominant views embeds inequality more powerfully and invisibly in the work of even the best and most high-minded practitioners”” (p. 119)

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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How The Nevers Weathered COVID Delays and Joss Whedon’s Departure

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

For a show called The Nevers, HBO’s latest fantasy endeavor doesn’t say no to a lot.

The series, developed by erstwhile TV titan Joss Whedon, brings quite a few competing elements to the table. For starters, it’s set in a steampunk version of Victorian-era London. Ladies wear corsets, men wear bowlers, and everyone wears the same dour expression as they smell the rancid air around them.

Then, in addition to its steampunk leanings, The Nevers goes full on X-Men with its hook. Due to a mysterious event, a sizable percentage of London society (though predominantly women) have developed supernatural mutant-like abilities. Lead character Amalia True (Laura Donnelly) is precognitive, briefly experiencing certain events before they happen as a warning. Her closest friend Penance Adair (Ann Skelly) can sense the potential energy within objects, leading her to create fantastical inventions like an old-timey quartermistress.

Amalia, Penance, and many more of these superpowered individuals reside in Charles Xavier’s ma…we mean Lavinia Bidlow’s (Olivia Williams) Orphanage. Just like in Professor X’s world, Amalia, Penance, and their kind are viewed with suspicion and distrust. In fact, the uniquely abled of The Nevers’ world are referred to as “The Touched.”

The word “touched” is dripping with historical resonance. The term can indelicately refer to someone who is perceived as crazy. The Nevers leans so far into this interpretation of the word that it nearly falls over. Several of The Touched are carted off to Victorian era lunatic asylums, some before they even exhibit supernatural abilities like series antagonist Maladie (Amy Manson). Even those who are allowed to remain behind in polite society are viewed as untrustworthy and unserious, which surely sounds familiar to many a gaslit female viewer even today.

The Nevers is the latest in the long line of fantasy series that wears its themes on its frilly Victorian sleeve. The storytelling goals of the show are so apparent that one may wonder why any of the supernatural elements were necessary, when a far more literal interpretation of 19th Century Western society may have sufficed.

That’s where Amalia True actress Laura Donnelly (Outlander) comes in with an apt metaphor.

“They say that when something rhymes, it sounds more true to the human ear,” Donnelly says. “I think there’s a similar thing that goes on a lot of the time with fantasy. You can, in fact, explore fundamental human truths and it will feel even more true for that.”

The Nevers creator Joss Whedon has made a career of crafting fantasy projects that “rhyme.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer used its vampire slaying premise to examine what society expects and demands from young women. Firefly crafted a swashbuckling space opera to ask what freedom really means and whether it’s ever truly attainable. Whedon’s version of The Nevers was set to be a return to TV form for the showrunner after years spent shepherding blockbusters like Marvel’s Avengers, and the theatrical version of Justice League.

But of course, that return proved to be fairly short lived. Whedon stepped down as showrunner of the show he developed in November of last year, citing the physical demands of “making such a huge show during a global pandemic.” HBO’s statement on the matter was a terse “We have parted ways with Joss Whedon. We remain excited about the future of The Nevers and look forward to its premiere in the summer of 2021.”

An important bit of context here is that over the past several years, Whedon has been accused of inappropriate and abusive behavior on his sets. Justice League actor Ray Fisher reported that Whedon’s conduct during filming of that movie was “gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable.” That led to an investigation by WarnerMedia, which culminated in unspecified “remedial action.” In February, Buffy the Vampire Slayer actress Charisma Carpenter similarly tweeted that Whedon abused his power on that set.

Though Whedon may be gone from The Nevers (and thoroughly scrubbed from the show’s marketing material), his original vision will remain intact for at least the first six episodes. In addition to the uncomfortable showrunner departure, The Nevers had to deal with a production schedule severely interrupted by COVID-19 that turned a 10-episode first season order into two blocks of six and four episodes. Episodes five and six of Whedon’s version of the show were filmed and wrapped under HBO’s new COVID guidelines.

“When we went back to film I think HBO was really ahead of the game,” Penance Adair actress Ann Skelly says. “They installed whole new air ventilation system in the studios. They built a set that was supposed to be in a Greenwich location in one of our studios. They made it work somehow.”

Amy Manson, who plays the villainess Maladie, notes the irony in a show about “The Touched” filming during an era in which human touch could be dangerous.

“We’re a tactile bunch,” she says. “But, I think we all felt safe. Everyone from your driver to the brilliant chefs, to producers, were all being tested three times a week. That made it easier for the cast to be able to be on set minus masks, do our jobs, and not feel unsafe.”

The Nevers certainly wasn’t the first series to emerge from a COVID production environment and it won’t be the last, but it might be the first major test case of how a big pay cable endeavor can adapt its process. It’s also a test case for how television can navigate a Joss Whedon property without Joss Whedon.

Tasked with tackling the scale that Whedon left behind now is British screenwriter Philippa Goslett, writer of How To Talk to Girls at Parties and 2018’s Mary Magdalene.

Donnelly, for one, believes that the fictional world already set in motion should be big enough to accommodate new imaginations.

“These first six episodes are only really scratching the surface,” Donnelly says. “Having spoken to Philippa, she’s given me a rough idea of the arc for the next six episodes as she sees them. The ideas that are coming through there and how much more that’s expanding the world of the characters further.”

The back half of The Nevers first season does not yet have a release date. When it returns, however, it will be coming from a British and female showrunner perspective that more closely matches the series’ central characters. In the meantime, The Nevers cast is confident that the show can make do with episode 6 as an unexpected midseason finale.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

“It couldn’t be more brilliant if it tried. It’s the perfect place to just have a mid season hiatus, for sure,” Manson says.

The Nevers premieres Sunday, April 11 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.

The post How The Nevers Weathered COVID Delays and Joss Whedon’s Departure appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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illegiblewords · 7 years

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Doing work rn but a few more Ergo Proxy thoughts very quickly:

- I personally believe, for a number of reasons, that the proxy who killed Donov Mayer and whose arm Re-L shot off was Proxy One and not Ergo Proxy--that said this is one of the points I am extremely unsure about in analysis and I can see it being arguable either way. First, I think the complete lack of speech from the proxy in that scene is there to make it deliberately ambiguous. When Vincent speaks to the body of Monad and to REAL we know that it is him for his mannerisms, for his self-assessment, for his confusion. There is some consistency with who he is as we the viewers have come to know him, although it is possible that it could be Proxy One as he is in many ways a stranger and the base from which Vincent sprung. Of Proxy One we the viewers can know (although the way the narrative is presented makes it fucking hellish to figure out) that Proxy One was in fact clinging to his own city unlike Kazkis or Senex, who destroyed theirs. Proxy One’s city died because of the intervention of MCQ and Raul specifically, not because of his own choice. In response, the first thing Proxy One did was destroy Amnesia, cutting Vincent off from his memories as Ergo Proxy. This was a calculated revenge.

I would argue that it is extremely significant that Ergo Proxy is not blindly murderous as an entity, before or after Vincent gains awareness of him. Ergo Proxy is the Id and the Jungian Shadow of Vincent, his selfishness and his desires and his fears and hatreds but above all else his survival instinct. He makes his choice, repeatedly, not to kill Re-L even when she is a threat to him. This involves integration of the conscious self, the Freudian Ego, and his Superego which involves active consideration of his own identity and values.

Donov Mayer with all of his autoreives worships Ergo Proxy as a god, as something perfect and a means to abandon personal responsibility, choice, and the self. This is something both dangerous and a path to losing humanity, to becoming something truly derivative and empty and dangerous. From this angle, especially given Ergo Proxy’s memories returning and his personal failings as a creator, it would be extremely painful and might make sense for Vincent himself to kill Donov. Additionally, Re-L has foreshadowed throughout the series that she will shoot Vincent, so that poetry is also possible and fitting. And Donov destroyed Mosk, destroyed Monad, rejected Vincent time and time again as an anonymous immigrant.

However, I think frankly that Vincent’s identity as a simple human seeing the purely human aspect of the scene was not sufficiently present for it to make sense being him. In losing his memories Vincent actually severed himself from the purely postmodern and his role within a world built on postmodernism, allowing him to see the reality of life and existence and direct personal experience stripped of symbolism. It allowed him to connect to other people and to understand them only as people, not as flawed creations or test subjects. On a literal level, Donov Mayer is Re-L’s grandfather on whose behalf she was pleading, and he was a broken man victim of the schemes of departed humans no less than Ergo Proxy himself, and he was ancient and dying and desperate and had lost himself utterly.

I could see Proxy One killing Donov as revenge for his own city, as an attempt to destroy the postmodern doom that reigned over himself and the cloned humans of all cities, of despair in the false-godhood he and Ergo Proxy share, of a sign of spite against Re-L who he does not love and whose bond with Vincent he is incapable of understanding as a creature of postmodernism. And I could see him sparing Re-L to make her wonder, for the rest of her life, just who she shot and if Vincent is capable of murder born from hate and of lying to her. In this way it is also a gesture of spite against Vincent, who he wants to succeed but who he also is overwhelmingly jealous of. Because Vincent has the possibility of survival and faith and reality while Proxy One never will.

I think Vincent has too much compassion for the simple, shared experience of living to have killed Donov. I don’t think Proxy One is capable of understanding that. And I think Vincent being integrated in all the ways that matter, having both his identity as Vincent and at least pieces of himself as Ergo Proxy, by necessity cannot be without the literal understanding and his empathy.

That said, again cases can be made for either reading lol. The storytellers were deliberately vague on that scene.

- Jung sort of talks about this but contemporary psychology definitely does, human beings are not tabula rassas like John Locke theorized. Our memories make a very large part of who we are but they are not actually everything and we are not born empty to be shaped solely by society. Our very genetics might make some of us more talkative while others are more withdrawn, some disposed toward this illness and others not, some of us having personality disorders and others healthy, and so on to massive degrees. We inherit from those who came before and we reconfigure ourselves into something new from their genes in a unique sequence. There is a particular line I might actually reblog later from Ergo Proxy that talks about how we are the sum of our memories and if we have no memories we are not ourselves. Scientifically this is actually incorrect and I think it is something that would be interesting to see examined in fic or a prequel or a sequel to be honest.

Ergo Proxy was intellectually bound to his role and had his identity under horrible artificially imposed pressures, but it’s very reasonable and even realistic to believe that Ergo Proxy pre-amnesia would have had a lot in common with Vincent at his base personality. He probably did get embarrassed about things and had a high level of sincerity, he probably overthought a lot and worked very hard, he probably had points he withdrew, he probably tried to push his personal self aside to fulfill the role he thought he was meant for. I’d bet money he was left-handed, too. I think the presence of a highly intellectual voice in Vincent’s head trying to remind him of the practicality of certain things and the impossibility of others is consistent with Ergo Proxy as well. How much various traits manifested proportionally probably reflected memories and environment, but I don’t think the Ergo Proxy would have seemed like a complete stranger or a blindly murderous monster the way Vincent feared at times. Honestly, Monad probably shared qualities with Re-L and REAL too, although that might take closer scrutiny. For them, I think truth and compassion are probably heavily intertwined values consistent across all three but manifesting differently due to experience.

- I actually think it’s very ambiguous what Vincent plans to do with respect to the returning humans. Proxy One wanted revenge, and Vincent calls himself the proxy of death in his last line, but I think Vincent impulsively complying with a scheme someone else made for him would detract in a way. The humans returning are the descendants of the humans who left rather than the same specific people, and holding them responsible for an inherited crime is not honest or spiritually human behavior. It would be like blaming clones, or autoreives, or proxies. I think what Vincent is as the proxy of death ties more to say, death in tarot. He tears down the structures that exist (in this case artificial postmodern structures) so that something new can be born from the ashes. This parallels off of the role of proxies in ending the polluted, artificially corrupted world so that true life and habitable nature can return. Ergo Proxy is the equalizer, he is change, he is biology and inevitable traditions.

- I think Re-L leaving in a final battle she could not make a physical difference in shows her faith in Vincent and her acknowledgment that it is his fight to win or lose, not hers. She tells him to find her again as a mark of confidence. I think it’s relevant that she also goes to try and first see if she can make a difference for Romdeau, then when that fails to wrap up her own affairs with Daedalus and ensure her own survival rather than being a burden. Tradition, faith (Re-L’s last line is even “I have faith” in the dub, this is not strictly religious so much as belief in some greater force than herself or any one individual), and communal bonds are not broken IMO by her trusting Vincent to his fight. She has responsibilities of her own. As a series Ergo Proxy is simultaneously postmodern and a vocal rejection of postmodernism IMO, from start to finish. Pino’s choice not to wait around uselessly but to address her own responsibilities and loose ends parallels in a similar way. All people have responsibilities to themselves as well as to one another, and there are some situations that we can only face ourselves. Re-L, Vincent, and Pino all have trust in each other’s strength to face the individual obstacles and to still be there for each other in their aftermath. And by each facing individual struggles alone, Vincent, Re-L, and Pino are also cut from the same cloth of humanity and are shown to be very similar after all. That’s how it is in real life, after all--we can lean on each other and offer advice, but ultimately we do all have our own choices to make.

#Ergo Proxy #sometimes gotta talk deep shit yo #seriously though this is where my college degree went haha

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