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rachelbethhines · 3 years

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Vintage Shows to Watch While You Wait for the Next Episode of WandaVision - The 60s

So the 60s is the era that Wandavision pulls most heavily from for it’s inspiration. So much so that one could make the argument that each of the first three episodes are all set in the 1960s. Episode one pulls from the early 60s with multiple Dick Van Dyke refences, episode two is very Bewitched inspired, and episode three is aesthetically very similar to The Brady Bunch which started in ‘69. As such it was hard to narrow down the list for this decade and I had to get creative in some ways.

1. The Andy Griffith Show (1960 - 1968)

The Andy Griffith Show gets kind of a bad rap now a days for being, supposedly, a conservative’s wet dream. People claiming it as such have apparently never actually seen the series. Oh yes, it’s very much set in white rural 60s America and will occasionally present the obliviously outdated joke, but the story of a widowed sheriff being the only sane man in a small town full of lovable lunatics, who prefers to solve his and others problems with negotiation and hair brained schemes as opposed to violence has far more in common with modern day Steven Universe than whatever genocidal fantasy fake rednecks have in their heads.

As the gif above shows Andy Griffith was very subtlety progressive for its time. Andy was a stanch pacifist, pro-gun control, treated drug addicts and prisoners with respect, and all the women he would date had careers, ect. and so on. It’s not a satire making any sort of grand political statements but the series had a moral center that was far more left than many realize.

But if it’s not a satire, then what type of comedy is it?

The Andy Griffith Show excels in what I like to call, ‘awkward comedy’. See everyone in Mayberry is far too nice to just come out and tell a character they’re making an ass of themselves, so therefore whoever is the idiot punching bag of the episode’s focus must slowly unravel as everyone looks on in helpless pity until said character realizes the folly of their ways and the townsfolk come together to make them feel happy and accepted once more. Wandavision takes this polite idyllic awkwardness and plays it up for horror instead of laughs.

2. The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961 - 1966)

The creators of Wandavision actually met with Dick Van Dyke himself to pick his brain and learn how sitcoms were made back then. Paul Bentley also took inspiration from Van Dyke in his performance of the sitcom version of Vision, while Olsen stated Mary Tylor Moore had a heavy influence on her character of Wanda. But more than just being a point of homage, The Dick Van Dyke Show was hugely influential in modernizing the family sitcom and breaking a lot of the unspoken traditions and ‘rules’ of the 50s television era. It’s also just really, really funny.

3.The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962 - 1965)

Bit of a cheat here. Alfred Hitchcock Presents actually started in 1955 as a half hour anthology show, but in ‘62 the show got a revamp and was extended into a full hour tv series. I knew I wanted The Twilight Zone to be covered in my episode one recap, but ‘The Master of Suspense’ couldn’t be forgotten. While The Twilight Zone reveled in the surreal and supernatural, Alfred Hitchcock pioneered the thriller genre and made real life seem dangerous, horrifying, and other worldly.

4. Doctor Who (1963 - present day) vs Star Trek (1966 - present day)

Just like how westerns dominated the air waves during the 50s, science fiction was the center of the cultural zeitgeist of the 60s. From Lost in Space to My Favorite Martian, space aliens and robots were everywhere. So naturally I had to name drop the two sci-fi juggernauts that still air to this today. If you thought that the rivalry between Star Wars and Star Trek was bad then you’ve never seen a chat full of Whovians and Trekkies duking it out over who is the better monster, the Borg or the Cyberman. But which one has the more influence over Wandavision?

Well Star Trek owes it’s existence to sitcoms. As with The Twilight Zone before it, Star Trek was produced by Desilu Productions and it’s co-founder and CEO, Lucille Ball, was the series biggest supporter behind the scenes, lobbying for it when it faced early cancelation. As with all things sitcomy, everything ties back to I Love Lucy in the end. However despite that little backstory, it would seem that the series has very little to do with Wandavision itself beyond being quintessentially American.

I would argue that Wandavision owes much to Doctor Who though. Arguably more so than any show mentioned in this retrospective. Time travel, alternate realities, trouble in quite suburbia, brainwashing, people coming back from the dead, ect... just about every trope you can find in Wandavision has also appeared in Doctor Who at some point. As a series that can go anywhere and do anything, Doctor Who was a pioneer of marrying genres in new and interesting ways.

5. Bewitched (1964 - 1972) and I Dream of Jeannie (1965 - 1970)

It’s hard to pick one series over another because they’re essentially the same show. A mortal man falls in love with a magical girl who upends their lives with magic filled hijinks as they try their best not to have their secret discovered by the rest of the world. And both have their fingerprints all over the DNA of Wandavision.

There’s only two core differences; Samantha and Jeannie have completely different personalities, with Sam being confident and knowledgeable and Jeannie being naïve and oblivious, along with their relationships with their respective men, Sam and Darrin being married and in love at the start of the series and Jeannie chasing after Tony in the beginning in a will they/won’t they affair, finally only getting together in the last season.

6. The Munsters (1964 - 1966) vs The Adams Family (1964 - 1966)

Fans of these two shows are forever sadden that there never was a crossover between them. Because they’d fit perfectly together. Both shows are about a surreal and macabre family living in American suburbia and disrupting the lives of their neighbors with their otherworldly hijinks. Sound familiar?

The main difference between the two shows is the way the characters viewed their placement in the world they inhabit.

The Munsters were always oblivious to the fact that didn’t fit in. They just automatically assumed everyone had the same personal tastes as them. Whenever they encountered anyone who behaved strangely around them they would write that person off as being the odd one rather than questioning themselves. As such the main cast was structured like a stereotypical sitcom family who just happened to be classic movie monsters.

The Addams were well aware that they were abnormal and they loved it! They lived life with in their own little world and didn’t care what anyone thought of them. As such the characters were far more colorful and quirky as individuals but there was little in the way of refences to other horror franchises beyond just a general love of the twisted and strange.

7. Green Acres (1965 - 1971) and the Rual-verse (1962 - 1971)

So the MCU is not the first franchise to bring viewers an interconnected universe to the small screen. Far from it, as sitcoms had been doing this for decades, starting with the ‘rualverse’. Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres were all produced by the same company and were treated as spinoffs of each other, complete with crossovers and shared characters and sets.

Of the three, the last show, Green Acres, has the most in common with Wandavision. A well to do businessman and his lovely socialite wife settle down in small town America on a farm in order to get away from the stresses of city life, only to find new stresses in the country. Eva Gabor, herself a natural Hungarian, plays the character of Lisa as Hungarian making her one of the few non-native born Americans on tv screens during the cold war. Despite her posh nature and original protests to the move, Lisa assimilates to the rural life far easier than her husband, Oliver. Who, as the main comedic thread, can’t comprehend his new quirky neighbors’ odd and often illogical behavior.

8. Hogan’s Heroes (1965 - 1971) and Get Smart (1965 - 1969)

So as comic fans have been quick to point out, it’s looking like both A.I.M. (Hydra) and Sword (Shield) will be players in the story of Wandavision. To commemorate that here’s two shows to represent those opposing sides. Although in truth, neither series has anything else in common with each other but I need to condense things down someway.

In Hydra’s corner we got Hogan’s Heroes. A show all about taking down Nazis from within.

I love, love, love, ‘robin hood’ comedies where a group of con artists try week after to week to pull one over the establishment. The Phil Silvers Show, Mchale's Navy, and Top Cat, just to name a few examples are all childhood favorites of mine. However while those shows had a lot of morally ambiguous characters, Hogan’s Heroes has very clear cut good guys and bad guys, cause the bad guys are Nazis and the show relentless makes fun of the third reich as should we all. In fact I was watching Hogan’s Heroes while waiting for the GA run off election results. Fortunately my home state decided to kick out our own brand of Nazis this year.

For Shield, we got the ultimate spy spoof, Get Smart. Starring, Inspector Gadget himself, Don Adams, as the bumbling Maxwell Smart. Get Smart, is a hilarious send up of Cold War espionage but the real selling point of the show, imho, is Max and his co-worker 99′s relationship. You can cut the sexual tension in the air with a knife all while laughing your ass off.

9. Batman (1966 - 1968)

First was Superman and then came Batman. Yet while Superman was a serious action show, Batman was a straight up comedy. Showcasing that superheroes could indeed be funny.

Also shout out for Batman being the only show on this list to have an actual crossover with it’s competitor, The Green Hornet.

10. Julia (1968 - 1971)

Since episode two features the first appearances of Herb and Monica, let’s highlight the first black led sitcom since the cancelation of Amos ‘n Andy over a decade earlier. The show focuses on single mother and military nurse, Julia, as she tries to live her life without her recently decease husband, who was killed in Vietnam, as she tries to raise their six year old son on her own.

The series is cute. It’s more of a throw back to earlier family sitcoms where there’s no fantasy and life lessons are the name of the game. It’s the fact that the main character is a single black woman is what made the show so subversive and important at the time.

Runner Ups

There’s much good stuff in the 60s, so here’s some others that didn’t make the cut but I would recommend anyways.

Car 54, Where Are You? (1961 - 1963)

I call this the Brooklynn 99 of the 1960s. Bumbling but well meaning Officer Toody longs to do good in the world and help anyone in need, but often screws things up with his ill thought out schemes. He often drags his best friend and partner, the competent but anxiety riddled, Muldoon into his escapades.

Mr. Ed (1961 - 1966)

The grandfather of the sarcastic talking pet trope.

The Jetsons (1962 - 1963 and 1985 - 1987)

Hanna-Barbera often took popular sitcoms and just repackaged them as cartoons with a fantasy theme to them. The Jetsons has no singular show that it rips-off but is rather more a grab bag of sitcom tropes that feature, robots, computers, and flying cars.

The Outer Limits (1963 - 1965)

The Outer Limits was The Twilight Zone’s biggest competitor in terms of being a sic-fi/horror anthology series.

Gillian’s Island (1964 - 1967)

The only comparison to WandaVision I could think of was that this is a sitcom about people being trapped in one place. But by that point I was running out of room on the list. Still it’s one of the funniest shows on here.

So yeah, this took longer than expected cause there’s a lot, here. Hopefully the 70s will be easier. Which I’ll post on Friday.

#wandavision #sitcoms #1960s #dick van dyke #bewitched

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a-froger-epic · 3 years

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The Queen fandom, Freddie Mercury and Characterisation

Or: Why are those anons like this? Why are those writers like this? Why don't we understand each other?

In this essay, I will-

No, I’m serious, I will. And this is an essay. It’s roughly 2500 words.

The friction, concerns and hurt in fandom around Freddie’s characterisation - most recently centred around a fic the author tagged as ‘Bisexual Freddie Mercury’, stating in the notes that they have chosen to write Freddie as bisexual - have given me a lot to think about. And if you have been asking yourself the questions above, this here might be of interest to you.

First off, why do I feel like I need to talk about this?

The answer is not: Because I’m so very influential in fandom.

I think my influence in this fandom has been vastly overstated by some people. If I were so influential, everybody would rush to read anything I rec or write. And trust me, they really don’t. My relevance is confined to a very specific part of the fandom. That part is made up of: Freddie fans, Froger shippers, some Roger fans, a handful of writers who like to support each other and like each other’s work, and people who are really into research.

There are many parts of fandom where my opinions are entirely irrelevant. Looking at the big picture, by which I mean only the Queen RPF fandom, I simply am not that important. Looking at the even bigger picture: the Queen fandom as a whole, the majority of which doesn't read or care about RPF - I am literally nobody.

Furthermore, everything I will be talking about here is in relation to the RPF-centred part of Queen fandom.

So why this public essay?

Because I have been deeply involved for two years in a divide of opinions concerning how Freddie ought to be written and how people think of RPF. I think this is in large part because I - like several other authors currently writing for the fandom - absolutely love research. It's my idea or fun. I love to dig into these real people’s lives. Not everybody does that and not everybody is comfortable with that. It’s a personal choice depending on people's levels of comfort surrounding RPF. But this does put me firmly in the camp of Freddie fans who like to explore who this man really was, and track down every last fact about him.

Freddie Mercury vs. Fictional Freddie

I’ll admit that I am one of those people who have the urge to speak up when they see somebody claim that Freddie was bisexual, and sometimes I will say: “Well, actually, we do know that he didn’t see himself that way, because…” For me, these have often been positive exchanges.

I think there is overwhelming evidence that Freddie Mercury identified as gay from his split with Mary to the end of his life (wonderfully curated here by RushingHeadlong). In the niche of fandom I have frequented over the last two years, as far as Freddie the real man is concerned, I have barely ever seen anybody argue with this.

But fanfiction and talking about real Freddie are not one the same thing, and they shouldn't be, and as far as I am concerned they don't have to be. Some writers like to put every last fact and detail they can find into their fic, in an attempt to approach a characterisation that feels authentic to them (and perhaps others), and other writers are simply content to draw inspiration from the real people, writing versions vaguely based on them.

But writing historically and factually accurate RPF is more respectful.

Is it? I've thought about this for a long time, and I really can't agree that it is. This, to me, seems to presume that we know what kind of fiction these real people would prefer to have been written about them. That, in itself, is impossible to know.

However, if I imagine Freddie reading RPF about himself, I think that he might laugh himself silly at an AU with a character merely inspired by him and may be really quite disturbed by a gritty, realistic take full of intimate details of and speculations about his life and psyche. Such as I also tend to write, just by the by, so this is definitely not a criticism of anybody. Freddie is dead. Of all the people to whom the way he is written in fiction matters, Freddie himself is not one. There is no way to know what Freddie would or wouldn't have wanted, in this regard, and so it isn't relevant.

Personally, I can't get behind the idea that speculating and creatively exploring very intimate details of Freddie's life, things he never even spoke of to anybody, is in any way more respectful than writing versions of him which take a lot of creative liberties. As I've said so many times before, I think either all of RPF is disrespectful or none of it is.

So who cares about Freddie characterisation in fiction anyway?

Clearly, a lot of people do. Freddie Mercury was an incredibly inspiring figure and continues to be that to a multitude of very different people for different reasons. There are older fans who have maybe faced the same kind of discrimination because of their sexuality, who saw Freddie's life and persona distorted and attacked by other fans and the media for decades, who have a lot of hurt and resentment connected to such things as calling Freddie bisexual - because this has been used (and in the wider fandom still is used) to discredit his relationship with Jim, to argue that Mary was the love of his life and none of his same sex relationships mattered, to paint a picture where "the gay lifestyle" was the death of him. And that is homophobic. That is not right. I completely understand that upset.

But.

These are not the only people who care about Freddie and for whom Freddie is a source of inspiration and comfort. What about people who simply connect to his struggles with his sexuality from a different angle? What about, for example, somebody who identifies with the Freddie who seemed to be reluctant to label himself, because that, to them, implies a freedom and sexual fluidity that helps them cope with how they see their own sexuality? Is it relevant why Freddie was cagey about labelling himself? Does it matter that it likely had a lot to do with discrimination? Are his reasons important? To some degree, yes. But are other queer people not allowed to see that which helps them in him? Are they not allowed to take empowerment and inspiration from this? Can you imagine Freddie himself ever resenting somebody who, for whatever reason, admired him and whose life he made that little bit brighter through his mere existence, however they interpreted it? I honestly can't say that I can imagine Freddie himself objecting to that.

This is the thing about fame. Anyone who is famous creates a public persona, and this persona belongs to the fans. By choosing that path, this person gives a lot of themselves to their fans. To interpret, to draw inspiration from, to love the way it makes sense to the individual. Please remember, at this point, that we are talking about how people engage with Freddie as a fictional character creatively. This is not about anybody trying to lay down the law regarding who Freddie really was, unequivocally. This is all about writers using his inspiring persona and the imprint he left on this world to explore themes that resonate with them.

This is what we as writers do. We write about things which resonate with us and often touch us deeply.

But don't they care about the real Freddie?

Yes, actually, I would argue that a lot of people care about "the real Freddie". It seems to me that depicting Freddie as gay or with a strong preference for men is what the vast majority of the RPF-centered fandom on AO3 already does. You will find very, very few stories where Freddie is depicted having a good time with women sexually or romantically. That he was mostly all about men is already the majority opinion in this part of fandom.

But another question is, who was the real Freddie? If the last two years in fandom have taught me anything, it is that even things which seem like fact to one person can seem like speculation to another. I have personally had so many discussions with so many people on different sides of the debate about the exact circumstances of Freddie's life and his inner world, that I must say I don't think there is such a thing as one accurate, "real" portrayal of Freddie. Even those of us who are heavily invested in research sometimes disagree quite significantly about the interpretations of sources. So that narrows "You don't care about the real Freddie" down to "You don't care about Freddie because you don't interpret everything we know about his life the exact same way I do". Sure, by that definition, very few people care about Freddie the same way you do.

The bottom line is, there are so many writers and fans who love him, people who are obsessed with him, people who care about him deeply. They might care about who they believe he really was or who he chose to present himself as to the world, the way he wanted to be seen. But ultimately, in my personal opinion, if somebody is inspired to write Freddie as a fictional character they feel that Freddie means a lot to them. And it is hurtful to accuse them of not caring.

But what some people write hurts/triggers me.

Yes, that can happen. Because the nature of AO3 is that everything is permitted. Personally, I am very much in agreement with that. You will also find me in the camp of people who are against any sort of censorship on AO3, no matter how much some of the content goes against my own morals or how distasteful I find it. Some people disagree with that, which is fine. We must agree to disagree then. Here, I would like to quote QuirkySubject from the post she made regarding this whole situation because I cannot put it better myself: “The principle that all fic is valid (even RPF fic that subverts the lived experience of the person the fic is based on) is like the foundation of [AO3]. The suggestion that certain kinds of characterisations aren't allowed will provoke a knee-jerk reaction by many writers.”

No matter how much you may disagree with a story's plot or characterisation, it is allowed on AO3. "But wait," you might say, "the issue is not with it being on the site but with people like yourself - who should care about "the real Freddie" - supporting it."

This is some of what I have taken away from the upset I have seen. And it’s worth deconstructing.

I've already addressed "the real Freddie". Moving on to...

The author is dead.

This is something others might very well disagree on as well, but to me the story itself matters far more than authorial intent. And what may be one thing according to the author’s personal definition, may be another thing to the reader. Let’s use an example. This is an ask I received yesterday:

This author thinks they were writing Freddie as bisexual. However, going by the plot of their story, I would actually say that it is largely very similar to how I see the progression of Freddie’s young adulthood. To me, personally, Freddie would still be gay throughout the story because he arrives - eventually - at the conclusion that he is. The author and I disagree on terminology only. And I think simply disagreements about terminology, given that some terms are so loaded with history in Freddie’s case, trips a lot of people up.

It seems to me that many people still equate bisexuality with a 50/50 attraction to men and women, when in actual fact many - if not most - bi/pan people would say that it is nowhere near that distribution. Some people are of the opinion that anybody who experiences some attraction to the opposite sex, even if they have a strong same-sex preference, could be technically considered bisexual. (However, sexuality isn’t objective, it’s subjective. At least when it comes to real people. What about fictionalised real people? We will get to that.)

Let's briefly return to real Freddie.

What I'm seeing is that there are several ways of thinking here, with regard to his sexuality.

1. Freddie was gay because that seems to be (from everything we know) the conclusion he arrived at and the way he saw himself, once he had stopped dating women. Therefor, he was always gay, it just took him a while to come to terms with it.

2. Freddie can be referred to as bisexual during the time when he was with women because at that time, he may very well have thought of himself thusly - whether that was wishful thinking and he was aware of it or whether he really thought he might be bisexual is not something we can say definitively. He came out as gay to two friends in 1974 on separate occassions, and he talked to his girlfriends about being bisexual. (Personally, I think here it is interesting to look at who exactly he was saying what to, but let's put my own interpretations aside.)

3. Freddie can be seen as bisexual/pansexual because his life indicates that he was able to be in relationships with both men and women and because there is nothing to disprove he didn't experience any attraction to the women he was with. Had he lived in a different time, he may have defined himself differently.

Now, I'm of the first school of thought here, personally, although I understand the second and also, as a thought experiment, the third.

I think all of these approaches have validity, although the historical context of Freddie's life should be kept in mind and is very relevant whenever we speak about the man himself.

But when we return to writing fictionalised versions of Freddie, any of these approaches should absolutely be permissible. Yes, some of them or aspects of them can cause upset to some people.

And this is why AO3 has a tagging system. This is why authors write very clearly worded author's notes. This is the respect authors extend to their readers. This, in turn, has to be respected. Everybody is ultimately responsible for their own experience on the archive.

Nobody has the right to dictate what is or isn't published under the Queen tag. As far as I am concerned, nobody should have that right. As far as I am concerned, everybody has a responsibility to avoid whatever may upset them. I understand where the upset comes from. I also maintain it is every writer's right to engage with Freddie's character creatively the way they choose to.

None of us can control how other people engage with Freddie or the fandom. None of us can control what other people enjoy or dislike about the fandom.

The best way to engage with the content creating part of fandom, in my opinion, has always been to create what brings you joy, to consume the content that brings you joy and to respectfully step away from everything that doesn't.

#Queen fandom #Freddie Mercury #bi Freddie

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notalittlebutalottie · 4 years

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hiiii its me poppin in to ask q's <3 : c, d ( pk ), i, r, u, x

🥰🥰 For you, Kait, I will answer anything (except spoilers for PK)

C: What character do you identify with most?

On TVD, probably Caroline but I think she is (ignoring post season 4/5) the most relatable to most women. She and I have a shared neuroticism, love of organisation and control. However, according to a google search, I have the same personality type as Bonnie (INFJ - though I’m more Ambivert than either I or E) which makes a lot of sense to me but they really never brought out her full potential so I think it would be hard for anyone to fully identify. In the broader world of fiction, though, I’m Lisa Simpson. My mum says it all the time and even that one test puts me as highest correlated with her.

D: Is there a song or a playlist to associate with Psychedelic Kicks?

It’s called To The Beautiful You (아름다운 그대에게) and it’s by Wonder Girls. It’s the reason this fic even exists and the last official release of my first ever K-Pop artist (I’m fine, everything is fine 😫). I made a fake playlist for it though here ✨

I: Do you have a guilty pleasure in fic (reading or writing)?

I really enjoy just the almost moments and there’s plenty of them in PK but it’s so fun to write it like I know all the readers will be suffering but it’s just...the d r a m a

R: Are there any writers (fanfic or otherwise) you consider an influence?

@she-walked-away (Unexpected Exposure + Dirty Little Secret) @galvanizedfriend (We’ll Always Have New Orleans) @supernutellastuff (Picturesque) are definitely the most influential simply because a year ago almost to the very day, I had been considering deleting this account but reading and re-reading (in the case of she-walked-away’s stories) their fics really inspired me to return to writing. It’s crazy to think that if not for them, would I be writing right now? I went through a hiatus that was almost 2 years and I just kinda disappeared and I didn’t write more than a couple thousand words and now this year alone, I’ve written near 200,000 words. So a big thank you is in order for them ❤️

U: Share three of your favorite fic writers and why you like them so much.

I’m just going to gush more about the three already mentioned:

she-walked-away: This writer is just a master at making drama come to life. It never feels forced or over the top and the dialogue revolving conflict feels so natural and realistic. I have read Dirty Little Secret...too many times just because it is such an easy, enjoyable read. I can read it in one day and be like well, ok let’s go back to the beginning and start again! Unexpected Exposure, is my favourite, however. I don’t read it often but it’s because when I do, I really like to savour every single scene. I always bring it up, but there’s this scene where they’re in a club dancing with each other and the sexual chemistry is just through the freaking roof! This could be a non-KC story and I would still regard it as a favourite.

galvanizedfriend: I found this story in the tumblr tags last year. I had finished classes a month before I was set to go home so I had a lot of free time and just ended up re-reading a bunch of fics. When I finished all my usual favourites, I looked in the tumblr tags and stumbled upon We’ll Always Have New Orleans. I am such a picky reader ESPECIALLY when it comes to dialogue and tended to prefer human AUs over canon-divergent stories but this story just blew me away (and now here I am, writing a canon-divergent story). Yokan writes so beautifully and I am in awe of how much she can write in such little time with such quality. The story isn’t available any longer and I will always respect her decision to make it so but from all that I can recall, the characterisation was just wonderful. (spoilers) It honestly broke my heart when they reunite and there’s just the gut-wrenching realisation that for her it had been a day or so but for him it had been like 3 months. I CANNOT EXPRESS THE LEVEL OF GUILT I FELT VICARIOUSLY THROUGH CAROLINE. Heartbreak aside, the romance is so fucking gorgeous and well-built, never forced, always well-timed.

supernutellastuff: I, like Yokan’s story, found Picturesque when I was done re-reading my usuals and I think I found it on a klarolinemagazine list for friends with benefits. This was a story that literally had me like ????? how had I never seen this story before?????? Like I said, I’m picky as fuuuuck and I just fell into this story and it swallowed me whole. The friendships in this story really make it come to life and the first scene (spoilers) where Klaus and Caroline are smoking together, and he’s like well it’ll just be us two left - I SCREAM the chemistry was already overflowing. This story builds upon their relationship gradually and it really feels like two freaking adults in a weird entanglement. It’s not filled with random plot twists and it’s not so true to life that it becomes boring, it is just the perfect balance.

X: A character you enjoy making suffer.

There isn’t really any one character in particular (Damon cough) but I kind of enjoy making them all suffer in some way but mainly because it’s I know the reader will suffer? And if that’s not sadistic, I don’t know what is lmao

#klaroline #klaus mikaelson #caroline forbes #the originals #the vampire diaries #klaroline fanfiction #ask game #ask games #a

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letterboxd · 3 years

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Chameleon.

For Japanuary, J-horror auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa talks to Aaron Yap about upending genre expectations with his dreamy new travelogue To the Ends of the Earth, the unconscious connections between his films, and how it’s time for a proper evaluation of Robert Zemeckis.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s continued, uncontested position as a horror auteur isn’t unjustified. Emerging as a key voice in the J-horror boom of the late ’90s, Kurosawa hypnotized us with his chilly, haunting, atmospheric—and often apocalyptically tinged—visions of baffling serial killers, ghosts in machines, insidious doppelgangers and vengeful apparitions.

Bong Joon-ho once called Kurosawa’s 1997 mind-bender Cure one of the greatest films ever made. Pulse, his terrifyingly prophetic 2001 film, for my money—and many Letterboxd members’—might still be the creepiest of all contemporary horrors. “It is the only film I’ve ever seen in which every single shot feels genuinely haunted,” writes Connor.

Rarely behaving in a traditional scary-movie fashion, Kurosawa’s idiosyncratic horror films often test our expectations of genre, then deliver beyond those boundaries to probe his recurring themes: identity and isolation, humanity’s relationship to technology and nature, and deep-seated anxieties that nibble away at society’s crumbling fabric. Pulse, besides being an exercise in deftly crafted dread, is a great, telling, melancholy movie about the overwhelming loneliness of the digital age.

Yoko (Atsuko Maeda) and her travel show crew in ‘To the Ends of the Earth’.

However, the general focus on his horror “side” tends to eclipse a filmography that’s far richer and more versatile than he’s usually given credit for. Over the past two decades, we’ve seen him seem forge a thrillingly chameleonic, unpredictable path that’s included an ecological thriller (Charisma), an Ozu-esque family drama (Tokyo Sonata), a metaphysical romance (Journey to the Shore) and an alien invasion sci-fi (Before We Vanish). No one is really doing it like Kurosawa, and To the Ends of the Earth is arguably his most exciting and enigmatic left-turn yet.

To the Ends of the Earth is a commissioned piece to celebrate the diplomatic relations between Japan and the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan, but that doesn’t diminish that it’s unmistakably a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film, not a tossed-off, exoticized, postcard-pretty travelogue. His signature languorous pacing, shrewdly slippery tonal calibration, and acute spatial sensitivity are at full bore, servicing a loosely plotted tale of TV travel show host Yoko (former J-pop singer Atsuko Maeda) and her crew attempting to complete shooting an episode in the Uzbekistan capital of Tashkent.

If anything, this movie should really confirm him as a filmmaker of bold, fictive playfulness in a comparable register to Jacques Rivette, Olivier Assayas and Christian Petzold—something that 2013’s hour-long, similarly fish-out-of-water head-rush Seventh Code, also starring Maeda, hinted at. In To the Ends of the Earth, gentleness, compassion and dream-like bursts of song and fantasy percolate through a disquieting maze of displacement—cultural, artistic, gendered—and the result is an adventurous, unpindownable, thoroughly humanistic work of curiosity and imagination.

Some years ago you did a “double feature”-themed interview with the Belfort Entrevues Film Festival where you revealed the sources of inspiration for some of your films. What film, if any, was a chief influence for To the Ends of the Earth, and can you tell us in what way? Kiyoshi Kurosawa: When I make my work, I often consciously refer to films from the past, but that’s usually the case with genre films. For example, Cure was greatly inspired by The Silence of the Lambs. However, To the Ends of the Earth is not a genre movie, so I wasn’t consciously thinking of any specific films. However, the composition of the story, that the main character appears in every scene, is based on films by the Dardenne brothers. Viewing their films The Child and Two Days, One Night, it’s clear to see how the depiction of just one person can turn trivial incidents into something serious and suspenseful.

Atsuko Maeda and Kiyoshi Kurosawa on the set of ‘To the Ends of the Earth’.

Watching Bright Future, To the Ends of the Earth and Creepy back-to-back recently, I noticed several parallels and motifs which may or may not be intentional. For example, a jellyfish makes an appearance in a scene on TV in Creepy, or there’s a TV report of a blaze in To the Ends of the Earth that momentarily hints at a bigger natural catastrophe that echoes the jellyfish swarm in Bright Future, or other apocalyptic moments in your films like Charisma and Before We Vanish. Do you find that some of these motifs work on a subconscious level for you, or were some of them intentionally threaded in? It’s a very interesting point. Some of them were intentional and some were not at all. It’s true about jellyfish, they appear in both Bright Future and Creepy. However, this is the first time I’ve noticed. The endings of Charisma and Before We Vanish were already written in the script by necessity, so of course, it’s intentional. The depiction of the blaze on TV in To the Ends of the Earth was introduced to show something happening in Japan while the main character is taking a small adventure in Uzbekistan. I wanted to show that her boyfriend was in some kind of crisis there. While the fire on the TV is merely an accident, it does appear apocalyptic. I may have overdone that a bit. Perhaps some kind of unconscious thinking was at work.

That amusement park ride scene in To the Ends of the Earth has stayed with me in the way it suggests terror out of something seemingly mundane. What are some scenes from other films that have stayed with you? The amusement park ride scene wasn’t introduced to express terror. What I wanted to show was how crazy the assignment is and Yuko’s professionalism. She takes on the assignment without fear. This may have been a bit overdone as well. However, I thought that Atsuko Maeda, who didn’t hesitate to actually ride it three times, was a real professional. Apart from that, if I think about the movies that force people to experience horror, what comes to me are Roger Corman’s Pit and the Pendulum. Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse, George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road. I also remembered the episode in Freddie Francis’s Torture Garden, where a grand piano has a will to kill people, which was great.

Your films tend to be very location-based; environments and spaces appear to play a significant part. The pandemic has been the ultimate test of our relationship with spaces and each other. How has the pandemic impacted you as a filmmaker, and are there themes and ideas that you are interested in exploring further as a result of Covid? As you pointed out, when I make a movie, I pay great attention to the location. The moment I find a good location, I feel that the script will be transformed into a movie. It is the moment when fiction and reality are fused. It’s hard to say anything though, I haven’t made a movie since the pandemic started. What I can say, at least, is that sitting in front of the computer at home is not cinematic at all. So far, I don’t feel that something new will be born from it. What should I do? After all, I feel that a movie can only be made by going out in the city with a camera after utilizing the best epidemic prevention system possible.

If you had to pick a film that’s a personal favorite, which would you pick, and why? It's too difficult a question. Japanese movies and foreign movies have different viewpoints. Also, there are completely different categories of movies [that] greatly influence me when I make films and the movies I saw when I was young that make me nostalgic. It’s impossible to choose just one. But, well, the one that comes to mind is Sam Peckinpah’s The Ballad of Cable Hogue, which is both nostalgic and heavily influential for me.

You’ve spoken about your fondness for American filmmakers like Tobe Hooper, Robert Aldrich, Steven Spielberg et al. Are there new, or more recent American filmmakers and films that have caught your attention or that you’re particularly excited by? I don’t know much about young American directors, but what I always care about is Alfonso Cuarón. Of course he is not a new, young filmmaker, but an auteur. Also, since this is a good opportunity, I’d like to mention Robert Zemeckis. He made such masterpieces as Cast Away and What Lies Beneath around 2000. For some reason, he has never been properly evaluated at all. For a time he was devoted to animation. However, he made a spectacular return to live-action films with Flight and continues to shoot unique masterpieces like Allied and Welcome to Marwen. Of course, not many people appreciate these works. However, he does not seem to care about public opinion at all and continues to boldly shoot new works. Perhaps Zemeckis is the American film director who makes the most authentic films today.

What are your movie-watching habits like? Do you continue to watch movies on physical media or prefer streaming these days? What was the last movie you saw in a theater? Basically, I like to watch movies at an ordinary movie theater in the city the most. When I can’t go to the movie theater, or even though I know the film is going to be boring but I have to watch a movie for business, I have no choice but to watch it on DVD or Blu-ray. Of course, I also use VOD once in a while. The last movie I saw in the theater, as of today, was the Japanese film The Voice in the Crime. I saw that just yesterday. I saw it with my wife at a cinema complex in Shinjuku, Tokyo. It was the latest work by the director who made the previous masterpiece Flying Colors, and I expected much from it. It was speedy and quite well done until the middle of the film, but by the ending, it was too boring. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a good movie.

What’s a memorable film-related moment from your childhood, perhaps something you experienced with family or friends, or a film that scared you or made you cry? The movies that my generation often watched growing up were mainly monster movies. The most unforgettable one was Matango. Like Godzilla and Mothra, it was directed by Ishirō Honda. I went to see this movie with my friends. It had a rather cute touch in the promotional materials depicting a mushroom with a monstrous appearance. However, the content was completely different from a normal monster movie. Shipwrecked survivors on an uninhabited island encounter monstrous mushroom creatures washed up on the shore. These are not unknown creatures such as Godzilla or Mothra, but the horrifying ending of a human being. The characters are being infected, changing one another into mushroom humans. All of us children trembled from the bottom of our hearts. In retrospect, the work is an extreme horror aiming along the same line as [Howard Hawks and] Christian Nyby’s The Thing from Another World. It was probably the first time I encountered horror which was not “to escape from destruction” but “when a human being becomes something not human”.

Is there a filmmaker or film you think about a lot that you don’t get to talk about much and would like to show some appreciation? I haven’t talked much about the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series directed by Kinji Fukasaku. I don’t know how well this series of Japanese movies is known abroad, but when I was a high-school student I saw this and quickly became a big fan. I’ve watched a variety of yakuza movies since then, and it’s safe to say that nothing beats this series. As the title suggests, the films depict a yakuza world without “Jingi” (yakuza’s moral code), and it was really humorous and exciting to see the betrayals and the destruction. After I saw this, all those traditional yakuza movies dominated by the strange ideology of “Jingi” looked like a childish fantasy.

Related content

The Japanuary Challenge 2021

Explore more J-horror, ’80s J-horror and ’90s J-horror

Follow Aaron on Letterboxd

‘To the Ends of the Earth’ is available for rental in the US via distributor KimStim. From February 5-25, Japan Society’s virtual cinema hosts ‘21st Century Japan: Films from 2001-2020’, featuring films from Hirokazu Kore-eda, Naomi Kawase and Takashi Miike, the online US premieres of Sion Sono’s ‘Red Post on Escher Street’ and Yukiko Mishima’s ‘Shape of Red’, plus a special focus on Kiyoshi Kurosawa (‘Bright Future’, ‘Journey to the Shore’, ‘Real’).

#Kiyoshi kurosawa #to the ends of the earth #j-horror #j-horror films #japanese films #japanese cinema #japanese horror #japan society #japanuary #letterboxd #sion sono #tokyo sonata #robert zemeckis #aaron yap

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rwby-redux · 4 years

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Deconstruction

Worldbuilding: History

In hindsight, I probably should have called this topic political sciences, or social studies, or the humanities. Literally any of those would’ve been more accurate than simply calling it history. Sort of shot myself in the foot with that one. Oh, well. I guess we’ll just have to make do.

History (as it’s defined by the Redux) is an umbrella term for human geography, economics, legal systems, global affairs, anthropology, civil rights, technology, and resources. Its primary concern is analyzing how all of these studies shaped the actions of people in the past, and the ripple effects that carried those societies into the present. Being an interdisciplinary topic, it’s nearly impossible to talk about any of these studies in isolation without accidentally overlooking crucial details. Anyone who’s ever opened a history textbook knows that with that complexity comes controversy, and RWBY isn’t exempt from that trend. As we’re told by Salem in the show’s debut, modern-day Remnant was forged by that forgotten past, by the omission of the gods and monsters that set things in motion.

It’s often said that history is written by the victors. And if history is indeed a book, then you’ll quickly find that RWBY’s has pages missing.

Let’s start by laying our cards on the table and talking about what facts we do have. RWBY’s canon can be roughly divided into three vague time periods: the era of Humanity v1.0, prior to the gods’ exodus; the era where Salem and Ozma’s first host briefly ruled together, several million years after Humanity v2.0 evolved; and the era characterized by the aftermath of the Great War, about several thousand years after the collapse of Salem’s and Ozma’s apotheotic kingdom. Anything in-between is obfuscated by the show, either accidentally (due to a lack of worldbuilding) or intentionally (as an attempt to make the series “mysterious”).

My first instinct is to start calling bullshit left and right. There is no justification for spoon-feeding your audience crucial lore through a spin-off series, and then waving your hand and saying that the show doesn’t have the time for worldbuilding. If I had to start pointing fingers, I’d lay the blame on the writers for prioritizing animating bloated fight scenes that ate up the episodes’ already-stunted runtime. I say this knowing that some people will balk at the accusation, because there exists a demographic of viewers that does prefer watching the fight sequences with their brains turned off. And I’m not above that. (I could spend an hour raving about the choreography of the fight between Cinder and Neo, or about the coordination of the Ace Operatives in their takedown of the Cryo Gigas. Believe me, I’m not knocking the absurd enjoyment of spectacle fighting.)

My problem is that RWBY’s premise is so deeply-entrenched in rule of cool that it left its worldbuilding malnourished by comparison.

But fine. Let’s, for the moment, give RWBY the benefit of the doubt. What in-world reasons would the series have for its history being believably underdeveloped? (And no, we’re not talking about the erasure of the Maidens and magic. We know that information was deliberately expunged from the annals of history. We’re focusing on the parts of Remnant’s history that deal with ancient cultures, defunct countries, and influential past events.)

The immediate solution that comes to mind is the Creatures of Grimm. As we’re told by numerous sources, the Grimm not only prioritize attacking humans and Faunus, but they discriminately destroy any of their creations. [1]

“With every alternative form of communication that was proposed, there seemed to be the perfect obstacle. The destructive nature of the creatures of Grimm severely limited the reliability of ground-based technologies.” | Source: World of Remnant, Volume 3, Episode 3: “Cross Continental Transmit System.”

This leads to the conclusion that Remnant’s past was physically destroyed, and any traces of it were removed by the Grimm. This would include archeological records—artwork, architecture, books, clothing, jewelry, burial sites, tools, ecofacts, and so on.

The issue I have with this explanation is that it’s not consistent. Throughout the show we see ample evidence of immediate-past and distant-past societies. The remains of Mountain Glenn and Oniyuri still stand, despite the high presence of Grimm at the former (and the presumed presence of Grimm at the latter). Brunswick Farms is relatively intact and provisioned with food and fuel, even though the Apathy are quite literally hanging out under the floorboards. The Emerald Forest even has the derelict ruins of an ancient temple that Ozpin incorporated into the Beacon initiation.

Petroglyphs (parietal stone-carving artwork) of early hominids fighting a Death Stalker. | Source: Volume 1, Episode 7: “The Emerald Forest - Part 2.”

If the Grimm are RWBY’s get-out-of-jail-free card, then they’re certainly not being used to their full effect. The examples I provided tell us in no uncertain terms that Remnant does have an accessible history in the form of archeological artifacts. For fuck’s sake, Oobleck is literally an anthropologist. He teaches history classes at Beacon Academy and has a PhD on the subject.

Similarly, if we assume the format of World of Remnant (a classroom lecture given by Qrow) to be applicable in-world, then that means the history of the last few centuries pertaining to the kingdoms is common knowledge. [2] The existence of this information tells us that Remnant has a flourishing history, and yet we see little of it represented in the show.

I chalk up the lack of history to a nasty habit of the writers. You see, CRWBY has this infuriating tendency to treat RWBY like “it’s like our world but…” It’s like our world but with magic; it’s like our world but with Dust; it’s like our world but with bloodthirsty monsters. You get the idea. As I said back in the Worldbuilding: Overview, if you make your fictional world a one-to-one analog of your own, you end up either ignoring, underdeveloping, or erasing the history exclusive to that setting. And RWBY is largely bereft of any historical identity that it could call its own. Here, let me pitch a few examples of what I’m talking about:

If slavery was only outlawed less than eighty years ago, why don’t we see Mistral creating legal loopholes to retain the system, like through indentured servitude or penal labor? An empire built on human rights violations doesn’t lose that disregard overnight. While we see plenty of poverty-stricken neighborhoods in Mistral, [3] and we’re told about its infamous criminal underworld, [4] these aspects of Mistrali culture seem rather disconnected from the recent history of the country, and ultimately have no impact on the main characters or the plot.

The Faunus Rights Revolution was a three-year conflict that (presumably) took place across all four kingdoms, and involved countermanding the reparations made to the Faunus after the Great War. From a chronological perspective, this was extremely recent. I know Rooster Teeth has a track record of poorly handling systemic racism. Usually this manifests in characters doing tokenly racist things, like using slurs or refusing to serve Faunus customers. But here’s the thing: a discrimination-based conflict this recent should have more bearing on current events. We should see examples of things like police profiling, higher incarceration rates, a lack of representation in media, social pressure to conceal Faunus traits or assimilate into human culture, fetishization, inadequate healthcare, forced sterilization, a lack of clothing retailers which stock apparel that accommodates Faunus traits, and so on. To put it bluntly: Faunus are an underprivileged minority, and immediate history should be influencing how that plays out in the show.

To reiterate: the Great War was eighty years ago. Meaning that there are likely still people alive that fought during it. How have their attitudes and beliefs shaped the world in the last few decades? Did they pass on any lingering hostilities or biases to their family members or community? What about in the present-day? Do people from Vale that migrate to Mistral ever deal with bigotry? Do people in Atlas harbor any lingering ideologies from that time? Is authentic pre-war artwork from Mantle considered priceless because most artwork was destroyed during Mantle’s suppression of creative expression? Did immigrants from the other kingdoms help rebuild Atlas’ cultural identity by supplying it with the values that they brought with them? What about shifts in culture? Did kingdoms have to ration resources like sugar or cream? Did this result in cultural paradigms, where nowadays drinking black coffee is more prevalent as a result of adapting to scarcity?

Because Vacuo’s natural resources were heavily depleted by invading countries decades before the Great War, did this have a major bearing on technology? Does modern Vacuo have wind farms or solar arrays to compensate for a lack of Dust? How does this affect their relationship with other kingdoms? Mistral loves to pride itself on its respect for nature. [5] Does this attitude ever anger Vacuites from the perspective of, “Yeah, I can really see how much you ‘respect’ nature. You respected it so much that you invaded our country and destroyed our oases.”

As you can see, history can’t be idly ignored. It has long-lasting impacts on the people who lived through it, and it continues to inform the attitudes, beliefs, and actions of people to come. What we get instead are traditions that only exist within the relevance of the immediate past, like the color-naming trend that emerged in response to artistic censorship. Anything which predates it, though? Remnant might as well have sprung into existence a hundred years ago with how little its history exists beyond that context.

It’s frustrating and disheartening. We know precious little about Remnant because its history either exists separately from the story (and is delivered supplementarily through transmedia worldbuilding), or it wasn’t developed in the first place. This doesn’t even take into consideration how much the writers deliberately withhold for the sake of artificially creating suspense. (A suspense, I might add, that frequently lacks payoff, either because it gets forgotten by the writers, or the characters never bother to seek out knowledge from available sources, like Ozma. Seriously, why do these kids never ask any fucking questions? They did this throughout all of Volume 5—Ruby in particular, who I badly wanted to strangle when she said “I have no more questions” back in V5:E10: “True Colors.”)

RWBY didn’t even bother to give us a calendar era, like the BCE/CE one used today. Hell, if the writers wanted to buck the system, they could’ve gone with something similar to Steven Universe or The Elder Scrolls, where eras are divided by significant historical events.

Sorry. I swear, I’m done dredging up examples. I’ve already made my point. As we talk about the other topics in their respective posts, we’ll be able to analyze these problems in greater detail.

Trust me. We’ve only just scratched the surface.

[1] Volume 1, Episode 1: “Ruby Rose.” Salem: “An inevitable darkness—creatures of destruction—the creatures of Grimm—set their sights on man and all of his creations.”

[2] World of Remnant, Volume 2, Episode 2: “Kingdoms.” Salem: “In the countless years that humanity has roamed the planet, civilizations have grown and fallen. But four have withstood the test of time: Atlas, Mistral, Vacuo, Vale.”

[3] Volume 5, Episode 6: “Known by Its Song.”

[4] Volume 5, Episode 1: “Welcome to Haven.”

[5] World of Remnant, Volume 4, Episode 2: “Mistral.” Qrow: “There's one common thread that links all these people together, though, and that's their respect for nature. Particularly the sea and the sky.”

#deconstruction #worldbuilding #writing #history #this is the second time i've mistakenly posted something under the wrong blog #i was like where the hell is the post i know i didn't delete it #and then it dawned on #man. my followers over on my science blog are gonna be really confused when they see the angry rant about anime on their dashboards

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sol1056 · 4 years

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hey! i noticed that you’ve written a lot about how voltron fails as a mecha series, and it got me curious about what a GOOD mecha series looks like. do you have any recs for someone whose only experience with the genre, quite literally, is voltron?

note: that is NOT where I wanted the cut. who knows what the devs are doing over there at tumblr hq.

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Welp, there’s more than one kind of mecha. There’s super robots -- where (in general) the robots are ultra-powered and relatively indestructible. Then there’s real robots, which will break down and/or run out of ammunition at the most dramatically critical moments. And then there’s a category that at best might be nearly-sentient robots, which have minds and motivations of their own -- but I wouldn’t say that’s a true category (in terms of the genre) so much as a distinction I've noted.

I’ve never been big into the super robot series (with a few exceptions), and I mostly find the combining robot genre to be frustrating. Former mechanic and engineer who currently works with AI, so a lot of the hand-wavey aspects are frustrating for me, especially in super robots where things mysteriously repair themselves and there’s never a struggle to upgrade/repair. (And don’t even get me started on the idea of controlling a bipedal reactive machine with only two foot pedals and a damn joystick.)

Which is all to say, I suppose I should recommend that you watch the classics, except I’m not really sure what they are because I’ve forgotten most of them. And frankly a lot of them are really shoddy animation by today’s standards, and life is too short to waste time on that. I’ll need to refer you along to other mecha fans to add their recommendations, instead.

Well, I can at least recommend Gundam and Macross, but that’s kind of like saying I recommend Doc Martens and Aididas -- that barely narrows it down, since there’s so many options within each brand. Everyone’s got their favorites in each, as do I, but any mecha series that’s stayed with me is one that found a way to either twist the core trope, or explored implications that other series glossed over.

Note: I’ve never seen any version of Eva, and never felt the urge to, either. Sorry. Ask someone else for input on that. Plus there’s also ones I’ll leave off here ‘cause they’re veering over into AI/robots/tech and less what would usually be called mecha, but they’re still worthwhile: Battle Fairy Yukikaze, Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, Broken Blade, Last Exile, and Voices of a Distant Star all come to mind.

Gundam

For me, I adore the technical geeky touches in Gundam F91, but the story is total spaghetti, so you might want to skip that until you’re more familiar with the gundam tropes. (It was meant to be a series, iirc, got shut down, and they took the pieces and made a movie from it, so it’s... kind of compressed, to put it mildly).

Gundam Wing and Gundam 00 are considerably less geeky on the technical (though they do satisfy the mechanic itch, with a bit more real robot, at least on the technicalities). I like the international core cast, and the way each series explores geopolitical dynamics. (That said, skip the second season of Gundam 00. It just goes totally off the rails into some really wild and wacky directions.)

A long-running concept like Gundam is recognizable across the series thanks to core concepts, and in Gundam’s case it’s the conflicts between imperialism and colonialism, war versus justified rebellion, and pacifism versus a first-strike as self-defense. What I liked with Wing and 00, in particular, was its central pilots felt more tied to (and aware of) the political ramifications of their actions.

I did watch about half of Iron-Blooded Orphans, which struck out in a new direction by having Mars as the colony instead of the lagrange points, but didn’t bother finishing. From what I hear, watch it with a box of tissues, as it’s a return to the classic kill-em-all perspective of the original Gundam series.

Macross

I’m sure someone else will tell you to watch the original Macross (the american version being Robotech, albeit highly edited). I know lots of people adore the first Macross series, but it’s just too late-80s for me. (The hair, my god, the hair.)

Personally, I prefer Macross Frontier -- the amination is much improved, though the fact is I also adore the voices of Yuuichi Nakamura and Aya Endō. Macross has some politics, but it’s mostly internal -- that is, the opponents aren’t human, so whatever debate there is about who’s right or wrong is mostly one-sided, since we only ever see humans doing the talking.

I tried to watch Macross Delta but it just didn’t do it for me -- and therein lies some of the issues (for me) with both Gundam and Macross. Because both have some core elements that they tackle in every series, it can start to feel a bit repetitive.

For Macross it’s always music, Valkyries (the mecha type for Macross), and a love triangle -- which sometimes isn’t even resolved. (I’ve read all kinds of debates about whether Alto ends up with Sheryl or with Ranka, but the series leaves it open.)

A good writer can explore these themes over and over, but between the two, I personally think Gundam has done a bit better of pivoting to take a new angle with each series. But at the same time, Gundam is pretty consistent about not building on a previous series -- with a few notable exceptions, most of its series are alternate-universe stories to each other. In Macross, they’re all continuations of the previous -- so if you’re not into its setup about aliens and weird diseases and whatnot, you’re only going to get more of the same in the next series.

Everything else

So here’s the series I like, but I’m not sure all of these would be counted as ‘true’ mecha by other fans (a debate I mostly ignore, so I’ll leave it to others to argue about that).

Escaflowne -- one of the rare breed of fantasy-styled mecha (Broken Blade being another one that comes to mind). The animation is strongly 80s, but the voice acting is superb, the story (originally meant to be longer, then budget cuts forced a much longer story to squeeze into half the episodes it really deserved).

[It’s also a series I’d call a harbinger, similar to tripping over little-known movies from twenty years ago and realizing every single actor including walk-on parts went on to be massive names. Escaflowne’s got that, but that also extends to its animation team, its director, its composer, on and on. All of them went onto work on some of the greatest hits of anime. That makes Escaflowne immensely (if quietly and somewhat subtly) influential, both for the genre and animation overall.]

Eureka Seven -- another not-on-Earth story. At first the mecha movement -- almost like surfing in the sky -- was odd, but they took some interesting physics concepts and made them not just worldbuilding, but integral parts of the story. Okay, I’m not keen on how the female lead gets successively down-graded as the hero ramps up, but there are some emotional implications of Massive Destructive Machines where Eureka Seven lingers that a lot of other series gloss over.

Fafner in the Azure -- another aliens-against-humans, but first off, I’m gonna say it: you either love Hisashi Hirai‘s character designs or you want to torch them with total prejudice. If you can get past that, Fafner is brutal to its characters well beyond most other series, excepting the earliest Gundams. Although (of course) the pilots are all kids, there are in-story reasons, and there are still adults running the show. And there are consequences, small and large.

Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion -- because what would life be if we didn’t have at least one mecha series with character designs from CLAMP. (Which, admittedly, I loathe, but somehow it worked here.) Can’t speak for the second season, but the first season played up something a lot of mecha bypass for just plain banging on each other, which is strategy. It caught me at the time, at least.

Full Metal Panic -- watch this after watching Gundam Wing and/or Gundam 00, to get the tropes they’re playing on with Sousuke Sagara (the ostensible protagonist who just cannot seem to relate to real human beings). I saw one description of him as “about as well-adjusted as a feral child” and that kinda fits. It’s more real robots, and of course parts require some hardcore suspension of disbelief (the commanding officer who looks 14, sounds like she’s 12, and has boobs that never occur in nature on a frame that teeny). But all told, a lot of fun and plenty of explosions.

RahXephon -- this is another oddball one, because the mecha aren’t mecha, they’re golems (as in, creatures made from clay). For all that, there’s a lot of significant mecha influence and tropes at work. It’s held up pretty well, animation-wise, considering its age (from 2002). and while it’s the same ‘strange aliens attack earth’ plotline, it spins all that off in a completely different direction.

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (aka Gurren Lagann) -- don’t watch this one until you’ve seen plenty of others, though, because it’s a fondly affectionate send-up of nearly every possible trope from combining to super to real robots. Cranked up to eleven.

Knights of Sidonia -- of all the ones on this list, KoS is possibly my most favorite. It was an early all-CGI series, and a lot of people were turned off by that, but once you get used to it, the story can carry you along. Like Macross Frontier, it takes place in deep space, where a colony of humans fight for survival with an incomprehensible (and nearly unstoppable) alien foe. But KoS is true science fiction, with a lot of solid science driving its dramatic points. Also--unlike most of the others series--although the characters are technically human, they’ve also evolved as a result of their time in space. For one, they have three genders, for another, they don’t eat; they photosynthesize.

#mecha #sol thinks about stuff #recommendations

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aritany · 4 years

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10 Questions Tag

thanks @lemon-writings for tagging me in this!

Rules: Answer the 10 questions, ask a different 10, and tag 10 people.

1. What weird writing habits do you have?

hmmmm i have several terribly odd habits but i think the main one is that i could not write linearly if my life depended on it. i’ve been told that my writing process is awfully chaotic and not very fun at all to try and follow and that that i am a bastard gremlin for having very fun snippets that exist completely out of context 99% of the time. however. in my defense. it turns out quite well in the end, and i always finish my WIPS.

2. Have you ever read a book you hated so much you couldn’t finish it? What was it? Why?

this is hard because as a rule i don’t make myself finish books i don’t like and then they don’t really stick in my mind. however (and this might be cheating because technically i finished it but i complained the whole time) i just couldn’t get into Flaubert’s Parrot. i had to read it for a class or i wouldn’t have finished it. not my style at all, and i have a hard time reading books that are fiction and focus on one subject matter without having any sort of narrative.

3. What do you listen to while you write?

i have playlists for each WIP! most often i’ll listen to those (you can listen to the playlist for what no one wants to hear here and the playlist for where the trees whisper here) but if i get tired of that i’ll listen to the playlist radio for the playlists or just explore the playlists spotify thinks i’ll groove to.

if i’m feeling like I really want to get into the vibe, MyNoise has hundreds of different customizable soundscapes. i really like the Irish Coast generator and the Cafe Restaurant for if i need to focus and my brain won’t turn off.

4. What does an average day of writing look like for you?

i try to write first thing when i get up after i get ready for the day - not really because i’ve set that as a rule or anything, it’s more that i just genuinely really want to write all the time - because if i do that then it sort of gets things flowing for the rest of the day. once i’ve started it’s much easier to keep going. i don’t have a set schedule for when i write but i do it every day unless i don’t have a spare minute.

5. What is a project you’ve always wanted to start, but haven’t gotten around to yet?

OKAY. okay SO. my cousin and i have this very excellent cool idea for a potential graphic novel that blends the medieval with the modern and it’s very very cool and full of wlw content. it is about a witch living in a modern glass city who is in training to become a mage for the queen, and her love story with an assassin sent to take down the monarchy. it’s currently in the ‘i think about it a lot and oh boy that sure would be cool’ since neither of us have a whole lot of free time but anyways i’m very excited to work on it one day because she is Very Fucking Smart and good at drawing things together in a way i just... *chefs kiss* (s if you’re reading this i’m obsessed with your brain) and we have somehow never worked together on a creative project so i feel that must be remedied.

6. Is there anything about your current WIP that you’re super proud of?

not to toot my own horn but there are LOTS of things in my wip i’m proud of!! i think the symbolism is very cool and it has been difficult to pull of the simultaneous chronological telling of two separate timelines in a way that makes coherent sense but like... it’s happening babey! i think the characterization is also very good in this novel compared to other things i’ve written.

7. What is a trope you absolutely can’t stand?

i know everyone says this but it’s TRUE. fucking HATE love triangles. GOD. like ok it’s one thing if more than one person is interested in a character. that’s just life and it’s realistic. but when. BUT WHEN. when the object of these characters affections waffles back and forth on who to choose twilight style i just... lose all interest in their narrative arc, because that’s usually their defining feature. it’s gross and boring and i’m tired of it.

although i’m a slut for the character THINKING they’re interested in one character and then suddenly realizing they aren’t and that they’re in love with someone else. if it’s done well. that’s the kicker. there’s gotta be room for some nuance here.

8. Do you have an OC that’s more or less just a fantasy version of yourself?

.......................................

... okay. so. there is not a single character that i don’t relate to on some level. i think all of my characters (at least those that I write POV for) exemplify some trait or quirk that i have, in some stretched or exaggerated way. nora from WNOWTH is the closest i have to a self-insert though. she’s funnier than i am though.

9. Have any works inspired your current WIP?

where the trees whisper - yes! i read the raven cycle and got hungry for more ley lines and psychics and magical forests. no welsh kings, though. i think TRC and WTTW are very very different stories but they share those features which overall sound suspiciously similar.

what no one wants to hear - no! this one was inspired by the fact that i haven’t read anything like it and i think it’s an important issue to talk about. mental health and toxic friendships/emotional abuse/manipulation are all very close to my heart so it’s really derived from my own experiences.

sound carries - yes! i’ve wanted to write about opera for AGES but i didn’t have a context for it that made sense until i read The Secret History and If We Were Villains. i thought you know what if we have dark academia for classic lit and shakespeare i also want it for opera students. so. opera and murder.

10. What is your favorite WIP to write for?

right now, what no one wants to hear. i just love first drafts. so much room for mess and feelings and good ideas that make it feel like i’m really doing something. i’m very excited about the subject matter and i am a soft child for my own characters, and i’m just constantly thinking about it so it’s hard not to go a lil crazy. i’ve written 15k for it this week and i feel another big writing day brewing soooo we’ll see what happens.

my questions:

what is your ideal scenario for writing?

which oc is the most difficult for you to write?

what do you love the most about your own writing?

you have 5 individual words to describe your current WIP. what are they?

who has been most influential to you as a writer?

how do you get over writer’s block?

if you were transported into one of your WIPS, which world would you LEAST want to be in and why?

what is your most hated book of all time?

do you outline or prefer to just go with it?

what is your favourite sort of scene to write?

i tag: @lesbianwriteblr @dustylovelyrun @raevenlywrites @nintendonianrose @raenawrites @writemares @evergrcen @whatwordsdidnttouch @marie-writess @llesbianwrites if you guys want to!

#tag game #this was fun!!

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eldritchsurveys · 4 years

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545.

if someone wanted to really understand you, what would they read, watch, and listen to? >> I don’t think reading, watching, or listening to a bunch of things would give anyone proper insight into me as a person -- not without at least a basic understanding of my personal narratives, for context, you see. But provided someone already knew a decent amount about me (for example, they’ve followed either my main or this tumblr for at least a year), I’ll suggest the following: Anthem by Ayn Rand (this is her shortest book, extremely short in fact, so don’t whine), The Fountain, and... well, I don’t know what to pick for albums or whatever. That one’s hard. I’ll have to make you a playlist.

have you ever found a writer who thinks just like you? if so, who? >> No. I’ve found pieces of myself in a variety of authors’ works, of course, but none of them have been comprehensively relatable.

list your fandoms and one character from each that you identify with. >> I don’t even know what my fandoms are anymore. I consume a lot of media, and some of it I’ve even written fan-fiction for, but I’m not going to list it all here. That’d be a prohibitively long list.

do you like your name? is there another name you think would fit you better? >> Yes, I like it. I chose it, after all.

do you think of yourself as a human being or a human doing? do you identify yourself by the things you do? >> I don’t think of myself as either, most of the time. I also have found “identifying” myself as anything to be a disappointingly dry experience. Identification with any sort of label encourages me to bind myself to it, at the expense of any other thing I might become -- for example, if I identify myself as “goth”, then it feels like pressure to... behave quintessentially “goth”, at the expense of any other nuances of my subcultural being. I don’t like to reside in identities, as if they were forever-homes; I like to wear them like gauzy clothing and discard them when I grow weary of their weight.

are you religious/spiritual? >> Something like that. It’s difficult for me to say one way or the other, because I’m not entirely sure what being “religious” or being “spiritual” actually means.

do you care about your ethnicity? >> No. I do sometimes feel pulled towards certain things from the country of my mother’s birth, and I do feel cultural solidarity with other people of Black American experience. I also think ethnicity is interesting because of the idea of “genetic memory”, what is passed down from our ancestors and so forth. But, you know.

what musical artists have you most felt connected to over your lifetime? >> Eddie Vedder and David Bowie, primarily.

are you an artist? >> Sometimes.

do you have a creed? >> No.

describe your ideal day. >> I don’t have an ideal day. Most of the days I have are pretty well-suited for me, and I don’t feel like I need to pursue an “ideal” version of them.

dog person or cat person? >> I can get along with either, but I am usually most interested in dogs.

inside or outdoors? >> I have no preference aside from logistical ones.

are you a musician? >> No.

five most influential books over your lifetime. >> The Fountainhead, The Phantom Tollbooth, American Gods, The Gunslinger, A Wrinkle in Time.

if you’d grown up in a different environment, do you think you’d have turned out the same? >> Of course not.

would you say your tumblr is a fair representation of the “real you”? >> I don’t believe in a “real me” as a concept. My tumblr is definitely “real”, though, in the sense that I’m not putting on a persona when I post on it.

what’s your patronus? >> The Ravenstag from Hannibal, probably.

which Harry Potter house would you be in? or are you a muggle? >> I would be in Slytherin, although I also have Ravenclaw tendencies.

would you rather be in Middle Earth, Narnia, Hogwarts, or somewhere else? >> I don’t really feel like I’d rather be anywhere. Fictional worlds are a lot of fun to spend time in, but that doesn’t mean I want to relocate to them. They all have huge downsides -- some of them even more drastic than the downsides of living on Earth. I’m fine with being on Earth.

do you love easily? >> No. Unless you’re an inworlder.

list the top five things you spend the most time doing, in order. >> I don’t know how to put them in order because I don’t measure how long I spend doing shit, but for the most part I spend my time: playing video games, being on tumblr, watching tv shows and movies, reading, and... more reading, I guess. I can’t think of a fifth thing.

how often would you want to see your family every year? >> ---

have you ever felt like you had a “mind-meld” with someone? >> Yeah. We also did the same drugs, and tripping with someone else (and often) can often encourage that sort of mind-meld-y feeling.

could you live as a hermit? >> I don’t think so. The sweet novelty would wear off and I’d just get bored and restless, like I would in any other low-stimulus situation.

how would you describe your gender/sexuality? >> I wouldn’t, actually. It’s a lot easier for me to just exist in my constant state of liminality than try to pigeonhole these things for the sake of others’ understanding. But for the sake of conversation, I usually just say I’m nonbinary/agender and grey-asexual (the “grey” is mostly because of inworld. and that weird feeling I get when I see two Jeremy Ironses on the screen at once).

do you feel like your outside appearance is a fair representation of the “real you”? >> There is, once again, no such thing as a “real me”. My outside appearance is just whatever it is, I don’t expect it to tell any grand stories about me.

on a scale from 1 to 10, how hard is it for someone to get under your skin? >> (Assuming “1″ is “very easy” and “10″ is “very hard”.) On a good day, a solid 9. On a bad day, somewhere around a 4.

three songs that you connect with right now. >> Map Change by Every Time I Die; I Have Forgiven Jesus by Morrissey; *grumble* Sunlight by Hozier.

pick one of your favorite quotes. >> I should really just make an Evernote file and save quotes in there so I have one ready to go every time I get this question on a survey.

#surveys #survey #random survey

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reconditarmonia · 5 years

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Dear Trick or Treat Author

Hi! Thank you for writing for me! I’m reconditarmonia here and on AO3 (and have been since LJ days, but my LJ is locked down and I only have a DW to see locked things). I have anon messaging off, but mods should be able to contact me if you have any questions.

Far From the Madding Crowd | Simoun | Spinning Silver | The Strange Case of Starship Iris

General likes:

– Relationships that aren’t built on romance or attraction. They can be romantic or sexual as well, but my favorite ships are all ones where it would still be interesting or compelling if the romantic component never materialized.

– Loyalty kink! Trust, affectionate or loving use of titles, gestures of loyalty, replacing one’s situational or ethical judgment with someone else’s, risking oneself (physically or otherwise) for someone else, not doing so on their orders. Can be commander-subordinate or comrades-in-arms.

– Heists, or other stories where there’s a lot of planning and then we see how the plan goes.

– Femslash, complicated or intense relationships between women, and female-centric gen. Women doing “male” stuff (possibly while crossdressing).

– Stories whose emotional climax or resolution isn’t the sex scene, if there is one.

– Uniforms/costumes/clothing.

– Stories, history, and performance. What gets told and how, what doesn’t get told or written down, behavior in a society where everyone’s consuming media and aware of its tropes, how people create their personas and script their own lines.

Smut Likes: clothing, uniforms, sexual tension, breasts, cunnilingus, grinding, informal d/s elements, intensity; stories whose resolution isn’t the sex scene.

General DNW: rape/dubcon, torture, other creative gore; unrequested AUs, including “same setting, different rules” AUs such as soulmates/soulbonds; PWP; food sex; embarrassment; focus on pregnancy; Christmas/Christian themes; focus on unrequested canon or non-canon ships.

—

Fandom: Far From the Madding Crowd

Character(s): Bathsheba Everdene

One thing that always sticks in my mind about this novel is the way Hardy calls Bathsheba “the young farmer” just as he refers to the men as farmers - which, just saying, is more than most people writing about this story can do - and so, that being the case, what I’m most interested in is something about Bathsheba as farmer. One day in the life or four seasons in the life or five plantings/harvests in the life, or pseudo-academic fic about a case study of a woman farmer in the Victorian era, or a conflict between the farm and nature that Bathsheba has to decide how to solve.

Feel free to bring in other characters if it suits what you’re trying to do, but what I’m really looking for is a focus on Bathsheba’s work, determination, and process of learning. (I like how Bathsheba's relationship with Gabriel ends up playing out in canon, but I don't want shipfic.) Other ideas: something like a merchant ship AU (as the first alternate setting that came to mind where it would be not exactly the done thing for her to captain her inherited ship and make commercial decisions herself - although I do have to point out that contrary to popular belief, there were a lot of women on shipboard in the age of sail, may this be useful - but also where nature and luck/fate are as influential as they are in the original setting), or something in which the land, superstition, and ritual are more overtly magical.

I've only requested treats for this fandom, so I would prefer that the outlook of the fic, including if you decide to incorporate non-canon magical or spooky elements, be ultimately positive. A seasonal treat would be right up the alley of this request. I'd also be into interactive fiction.

—

Fandom: Simoun

Character(s): Neviril, Paraietta, Mamiina, Rodoreamon, Yun, Dominuura

This is a perennial request for me and anything would make me very happy. I'm so interested in how the war changes all the characters and their relationships with one another, how Everything is Beautiful and Then Shit Gets Real but amidst the war-is-hell there's still the creation of bonds of trust and loyalty and chances to do what's right (the bits with the Plumbish priestesses, for instance). Every character gets a chance to develop and make choices that are all brave in different ways. Would also be curious about post-canon (what happens if Neviril and Aeru make it back to the main world when war is brewing again, but Neviril has no one from the old cohort to lead because they can’t fly anymore?) and/or about magic and time weirdness retconning character deaths or disappearances.

I've requested either tricks or treats here. For tricks I'd prefer "dark" to "cynical" - throw as much shit at them as you want in terms of war-is-hell and weird magic and time horror, but I believe that the characters mostly want to do what they believe is the right thing and help each other. My treat preferences are, I think, more about thematic focus than content - if it's slice of life, how is that life striving towards their ideals even in small ways? (Helping the war orphans, flying the Simoun, growing a garden?) If it's more about Things Happening, in the war or whatnot, what do those things show about their growth or the changes in their relationships? I would also be super into interactive fiction.

As far as ships go, I'm on board with most of the canon ones (no romantic/sexual Dominuura/Limone, please) but have a small soft spot for postcanon Paraietta/Rodoreamon as well.

—

Fandom: Spinning Silver

Character(s): Miryem Mandelstam

I love hard-headed, practical, ambitious women who get into adventures because of, rather than in spite of, those qualities, and so I love Miryem and her good sense, pride, and rules-lawyering. I’m really interested in what the book does with power - Miryem’s real-world power of accounting and hardheadedness becoming magic in the Staryk world, being a queen in one world while belonging to a disenfranchised minority in another. What happens when Miryem is back in the human world, post-canon? I never got the impression that she’d be happy just avoiding the whole question of the town’s contempt for her by finding power elsewhere - what’s it like if she comes back a queen? (Can she use the mirror from Irina to do an end run around the whole Persephone setup and travel back and forth whenever she wants, and if so, what sorts of plot would make that fun to play with? If not, that’s still fine.) Or, what are some adventures in the Staryk world where she could use her Accounting Powers, other than the post-war rebuilding the book talks about? Or tell me more about Miryem practicing Judaism in the Staryk world, and the application of Judaism to that world and those customs that we get some hints of (that’s a hell of a diaspora - what would the rabbis think of it?).

I'm very uninterested in Miryem's romance with the Staryk Lord unless you feel like making it f/f, so while I don't require you to retcon it or break them up, I don't want a fic focusing on it. If you're interested in shipping her with Irina or Wanda, I have some previous prompts for them in my "dear author letters" tag. (These may also be relevant to platonic fic that includes Irina or Wanda - like Wanda becoming a magical gatekeeper to Miryem's land or having the "magic" of reading/writing that Miryem gave her become magic-magic in the Staryk land, or Irina and Miryem's different ideas of who their commitment as queen is to - but there's more detail and prompts in the tag.)

I'm happy to receive either tricks or treats for this fandom. I'm explicitly okay with a story in either category involving anti-Semitic prejudice, but would prefer that the dark/scary elements in a "trick" fic come from supernatural horror rather than the human capacity for racist violence. I suppose treat fic would be about finding or making one's place in the world, the place where you can use the powers that you've got and make your world safe for yourself and others around you.

—

Fandom: The Strange Case of Starship Iris

Character(s): Sana Tripathi, Arkady Patel, Krejjh, Brian Jeeter, Rumor Crew, Agent Park

I just want MORE of any or all of these people because I love them - Krejjh's dashing pilot thing ("feast on my leavings, mortality! I am danger on wheels and those wheels are rooOOOOLLING!") and what it masks, Brian's geekery and humanist passion, Arkady's tough outside and squishy center and Sana's soft outside and iron center, the crew-as-found-family, Park's fifth-cup-of-cold-coffee burnout and wry edge. Slice of life? Their backstories? Things they like or get excited about? (More about the music they like to listen to/sing/play!) Arkady and/or Sana (or other crew members) on missions off-ship, or the crew all facing a problem or a heist together? Dwarnian customs (and Krejjh introducing Dwarnian customs to their friends and how they maybe pick some of those up - or adopting human customs and how they're different)? Park adjusting to the crew and them adjusting to him (and what's his role going forward)?

I've requested treats only for this fandom, no tricks - I'm totally fine with characters' angsty pasts and angsty present feelings being included, but I'd prefer that the overall mood of a fic that involved angst be one that focused on a better future, bonds with others, a cause to believe in, etc.

I ship Arkady with Sana (that loyalty kink!), but I don't mind if a fic includes Violet/Arkady (after all, it is canon) as long as it's not shipfic/focused on their romance. Brian/Krejjh is good too.

#dear author letters #starship iris #simoun #far from the madding crowd #spinning silver

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cassandraclare · 6 years

Text

Anna, Ariadne, sexuality and genderfludity in the Belle Epoque

SPOILERS (and a mass of text, much under a cut)

jonginflicted said: cassie i loved every exquisite thing so much oh god, i could almost see myself in ariadne, like a sort of refusal to fully be herself (we were born in the same place too!) and i'm wondering, does ariadne really love anna or is this just a time-pass or an experiment for her. she does say that she likes anna a lot, but her willingness to marry charles seems a little off to me (or am i seeing things) as always, thank you so much for writing for us!

-Thank you!

Ariadne is under crushing social pressure to marry a man. She does love Anna

— she’s fallen in love with her the same way Anna has with her, with that sort of sweeping at-first-sight romantic overwhelmingness that sometimes happens, especially when it’s your first time. I really tried to avoid any suggestion this was an “experiment” or anything like that for Ariadne. She’s a lesbian and she knows she’s a lesbian. She just also believes it’s impossible for her to live an authentic life as a lesbian woman in 1901 without being cruelly punished. I don’t think you’re seeing things so much as it’s hard to understand what Ariadne is facing in 1901 (and would face in some places now):

From Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century by Graham Robb: 19th-century homosexuals lived under a cloud...Most of them suffered, not from the cruel machinery of justice, but from the creeping sense of shame, the fear of losing friends, family and reputation, the painful incompatibility of religious belief and sexual desire, the social and mental isolation, and the strain of concealment.

That’s a horrific thing to face. (Not that we live in an LGBT+ utopia now and they lived in an LGBT+ dystopia then: it’s a lot more complicated than that.) Ariadne’s parents, unlike Anna’s, are extremely conservative, and this union with Charles is the thing they want. So it wouldn’t matter much to Ariadne whether it was Charles or some other guy – it’s not going to be the thing she wants except that she doesn’t want to be isolated, to be abandoned, to be rejected by her parents and family, which are totally normal things to be terrified of.

Everyone has layered identities. Ariadne has identities as a woman of color, as a lesbian, as an adopted child, as the daughter of conservative government officials, as a woman who wants children, and in many ways those identities are in conflict for her in ways Anna’s identities are less so. Ariadne isn’t a coward, or a cruel person. She is making the best choices she can within a set of limitations that are oppressive, and that she did not invent or ask for.

ti-bae-rius said: Hello Cassie! Firstly, wow okay turns out I have a huge fiction crush on Anna Lightwood. Hot damn. Secondly - and slightly less flippant/lovestruck - is Anna happy with female pronouns? Is that what Anna identifies with or was it more due to conformity of the time? Basically, is Anna’s gender expression limited by temporal factors? Such a badass character who is seriously fuelling my waistcoat obsession right now. Love the new GOTSM and all the best! x

I'm so happy you enjoyed the new GOTSM and that you like (have a huge crush on) Anna! I would say that Anna is happy with female pronouns, yes, as she's happy with the gift of the necklace that her mother gave her, something she can be comfortable with as she's not with dresses. That said, temporal factors are certainly a part of that! Today Anna would consider and call herself genderfluid, but the term didn't exist at the time, and of course many genderfluid people today refer to themselves by “he” or “she” pronouns, as well as many others, according to what feels most comfortable to them. Anna is a product of her time: had she been born in a different time many things might have been different — but that is the case for every single one of the TID and TLH characters, and for all of us alive today, who express ourselves in ways which would have been extremely unconventional in the past and will likely be considered backward and oppressive in the future. :)

In 1902 (a year after the events of EET) people were academically discussing the idea of a third or “intermediate” sex, but it was a very new thing — not something Shadowhunters would know about, or the average mundane. It was also referred to as “sexual inversion” which was seen as an academic term at the time. The idea of LGBTQ+ sexuality was a taboo topic--sexuality at all was a taboo topic, with people getting arrested for indecency for publishing pamphlets about contraception--and the idea of LGBTQ+ identity was scarcely understood at all.

Anna herself, and those who love and accept her, would find it very hard to conceptualize or articulate gender fluidity. Feelings have always existed long before there were words for them, and many words once used are not the words we use now. I wanted to be accurate and faithful to the time period, but I also wanted to be as sensitive as possible to the modern day, real life readers, and not hurt them by using terms which would have been acceptable then but are certainly not acceptable now. (A whole code for speaking about homosexuality existed at the time, ranging from the gentle “Is he musical?” or “Does she like Achilles?” to words I would just never use whether they’re historically accurate or not.) Anna, as we see, has strong feelings about not only romance with women but friendship and alliance with women, and female pronouns to her feel like another way of expressing that alliance, even while she wants to be true to herself and express her complex and beautiful identity as fully as she can.

ariadnebridgestock said: hello cassie!! I was incredibly touched by how understanding and supportive Cecily and Gabriel were about Anna so I was wondering, will we be seeing other support that Anna receives from the rest of her family, like her brother Christopher, her aunts and uncles and her cousins and family friends like the Fairchilds etc? thank you for taking your time to answer questions!

archerondale said: Hi, Cassie! I was just wondering- what does the Clave think about Anna wearing man's clothes and preferring women?

EET is set two years before TLH, so in 1903 Anna's already openly living a fabulous lifestyle in her own abode in Percy Street, and her family and friends are all fully aware and supportive of her lifestyle. We will see her family support her, though not every single one of their specific reactions to her starting to dress as she prefers, as that's well in the past. Everyone responds with love, in their characteristic ways, so we see Matthew, a loving and fashionable friend, giving her his clothing: Christopher, her sweet and science-minded brother, offering to perform a saving act of science (Christopher would blow up the Tower of London to make Anna feel better, any day of the week). Everyone offers support in their own way. Lucie asks to hear about Anna's scandalous love life so she can write about romance in her novels. James reads up on people like Julie d'Aubigny, who dressed as a man, fought duels, and liberated her lady beloved from a nunnery.

However, the Clave as a whole, and even the Enclave in London, is vaguely horrified by what Anna's up to, but Anna's helped out by the attitude that what Anna's doing can barely be true--there is a myth that Queen Victoria refused to believe in women feeling passion for other women, which reflects the prevailing attitudes of the time (which again, aren't the same as Shadowhunter attitudes, but Shadowhunter attitudes are influenced by the world) that love between women didn't happen, or if it did, didn't count (Unlike sex between men, lesbianism was not illegal in 1903).

That said, in 1902 (after EET, before TLH) society became interested in “sexology”--examining the different kinds of sexual attractions and activities that existed, and the terms sapphic and lesbian came into more common use. Lesbian activity wasn't criminalized in the same way as gay activity (though the denial of women's sexuality is a problem in itself): Oscar Wilde's fate would not happen to a woman, though as we see with Ariadne there was still horrible pressure to conform. During this same period, Vita Sackville-West (later, Virginia Woolf's lover) and Violet Keppel, the daughter of King Edward's mistress, were involved in a schoolgirl romance, but Violet's mother urged concealment and both were to go on to marry men. You can read their love letters here:

Oh, Mitya, come away, let’s fly, Mitya darling — let’s go away and forget the world and all its squalor — let’s forget such things as trains, and trams, and servants, and streets, and shops, and money, and cares and responsibilities. Oh god! how I hate it all — you and I, Mitya, were born 2000 years too late, or 2000 years too soon.

Anna insisting on living openly, dressing the way she wants and publicly loving who she wants, has created something of a sensation in the Enclave society. Sona's worried about Cordelia consorting with the infamous Anna: Mrs Bridgestock is appalled by the idea of Anna, now living so scandalously, approaching Ariadne. Many mothers are whisking aside their children and many proper Shadowhunters are shunning Anna. London society says Anna should be got under control, or that they should stop her from fighting because it's given her ideas: all manner of microaggressions are visited upon Anna, but Anna prefers to steadfastly ignore them (not that they don’t bother her or add up over time — this is just her particular coping strategy). Sometimes she trots off to Paris if they annoy her. But the fact she's learned to just avoid or not think about unpleasantness may become a problem for her, later, since eventually unpleasantness that she can't avoid does come and she has to face it.

Still, the constant love and support from her influential family and friends is very helpful, not just emotionally but socially: it matters that Charlotte's the Consul, that her Uncle Gideon is influential in the Clave, that her beloved Uncle Will is Head of the London Institute and loves and looks out for her. With them standing by her, the Clave has been able to mostly overlook Anna--maybe she's just going through a wild phase! Even the Consul's son Matthew is running wild, what will become of the children! They say nasty things sometimes, and Anna isn't invited to the most proper parties, and Anna DEFINITELY wouldn't be able to wield political power within the Clave or marry a really respectable Shadowhunter boy (luckily...Anna isn't at all in the market for a husband), but Anna's extremely popular with the younger set and well-supported by the older set. Which is all to say: as it has been for people like Anna in many generations and many places, one can create a society within a society where you feel comfortable. She is lucky that her own family home and the homes of her friends are places she can feel comfortable (the same is not true for Ariadne, for instance) but outside of those safe spaces, there are places where she would (and is) stared at, commented on, and subject to prejudice.

* One of the fascinating things about LGBT+ history is the way there have always been subcultural spaces where the non-straight and non-cis were able to carve out networks of neighborhoods, bars, clubs, salons and spaces where they felt safe and were able to be open. I don’t just keep mentioning Paris randomly: neighborhoods in Paris were a lesbian and gay haven during the Belle Epoque — one of those subcultural places I was talking about, where Anna and other non-binary and LGBT+ people could feel comfortable. Fin de siecle society in Paris included bars, restaurants and cafes frequented and owned by lesbians, such as Le Hanneton and le Rat Mort, Private salons, like the one hosted by the American expatriate Nathalie Barney, drew lesbian and bisexual artists and writers of the era, including Romaine Brooks, Renee Vivien, Colette, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, and Radclyffe Hall. One of Barnes's lovers, the courtesan Liane de Pougy, published a best-selling novel based on their romance called l’Idylle Saphique (1901). Descriptions of lesbian salons, cafes and restaurants were included in tourist guides and journalism of the era, as well as mention of houses of prostitution that were uniquely for lesbians. Toulouse Lautrec created paintings of many of the lesbians he met, some of whom frequented or worked at the famed Moulin Rouge. — Wikipedia

Sounds like a great place and we’ll definitely be visiting :)

#anna lightwood #ariadne bridgestock #eet #gotsm #tsc #th

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youngdumbxlit · 6 years

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get to know the writer tag

thanks for the tag @katabasiss (you are amazing)

rules: answer 10 questions, tag 10 people, and write 10 more questions for tagged people to answer.

1. do you have a writing schedule or set deadlines?

I wouldn’t say I have a writing schedule, I just make sure I write at least an hour a day. But I do set goal deadlines (that I rarely follow) for myself often.

2. what music do you tend to listen to when writing?

That totally depends on my mood for the day or the story I’m working on.

3. what have been some influential books or films or tv shows that have shaped what you write?

I try to stay away from getting my writing shaped by outside sources.

4. which cliche or trope is your favorite?

Hmmm. I have a few favorites but I’ll only write about one. I like the “chosen one” trope. Because when you really think about it, we all (possibly) have chosen paths for life. And though they make decisions that effect themselves and the others around them, the chosen path is still their own.

5. do you have a character based off yourself?

Not necessarily. Maybe one day.

6. have you taken any creative writing classes?

I actually have a Bachelors degree in English with a Creative Writing concentration. So, yeah I took MANY creative writing classes.

7. when you write is it by hand or typed up?

Both. If I can’t get to my laptop then I write in my notebook. I do prefer to get my ideas started with pen and paper before typing, though.

8. which of your OCs is likely to be found raiding the fridge in the middle of the night and what would they be eating?

Lee. His go to is ice cream and chopped bananas.

9. what would you say your theme song is?

My theme song is most definitely “Every Day We Lit” by YFN Lucci.

10. how many different genres have you tried writing/have written and which ones are easiest for you?

Being a Creative Writing major, I have literally tried every genre you can possibly think of. And I don’t think any one is particularly easier than the other. For me it just depends on the idea and characters I’m working with.

Tagging: @thegirlandthepen @shehermonroe @the-black-flucking-unicorn @cjjameswriting @writebruh Here are your 10 questions!

1. How easy is it for you to write about a character of the opposite sex from you?

2. Quick! Create a title in five words using the word: Moonlight.

3. What is the name your favorite onscreen adaptation of a fictional work?

4. Are you a fast or slow typer?

5. Do you have a character based off yourself? (Taken from above.)

6. What is your favorite Halloween themed movie?

7. How old are you?

8. Which one of your OCs would likely become President?

9. What would you say your theme song is? (Taken from above.)

10. What is your favorite fall time snack?

#writeblr #writer tag #get to know the writer

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tigerlover16-uk · 6 years

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In a way its really wierd to me how angry people get over Super. It's clearly just trying to be a simple comedy action series aimed at kids. Though I suppose there is the ageold ruining my childhood thing. But it doesn't really strike me as very provocative to inspire such strong negative feelings. Im just mostly looking at what it's trying to be. It doesnt strike me as tryhard either. The most powerful being is a audience selfinsert that just wants to have fun. Its so selfaware on many levels.

A lot of people obsess over Dragon Ball and want it to remain this (In their heads) perfect, untouched work of art I think. I’ve never agreed with that sentiment, but Dragon Ball IS one of the most iconic and influential anime and mangas of all time and has a special place in millions of peoples hearts. With that kind of pedigree, I get a lot of people having very high standards for any kind of a follow up.

There are legitimate grievances to be had with Super, and plenty of things that can theoretically go wrong with continuing Dragon Ball’s story (Just look at GT for proof of that).

So it’s perfectly reasonable to have concerns… but, unfortunately the Dragon Ball fandom has the same problem as the Star Wars fandom, Sonic fandom, and really a lot of other major fandoms out there: They let their nostalgia and obsession with the series get completely out of hand, and treat every mistake, big or small, as a sign that the end times have come and that the series is ruined forever.

Some of this does come from nitpicky aspects of the series that only certain obsessive fans actually care about and the majority of viewers are actually casually ignorant to (Like power scaling), some of it does come from places of genuine concern (Animation issues and messed up production early on, stuff like the Future Trunks saga ending, the show running in circles with certain characters rather than letting them progress further, etc), but a lot of it is, frankly, people just wanting an excuse to complain because “It’s not like Z!”.

As someone who grew up with the Star Wars Prequels and 3D era Sonic games, and prefers them to both franchises earlier outings (Mostly… 06 WAS a complete mess, nostalgia aside), I tend to have little sympathy for people whining about how a flawed sequel has completely ruined their favourite series and thus their childhood forever.

And while I do sympathise with more reasonable fans who have fair reasons for disliking it, I think people in general are being incredibly myopic if they think that Super can actually damage Dragon Ball as a whole.

Like, you want to know why I keep comparing it to the Prequel Trilogy? Because for all the handwringing from petulant manbabies about how their precious (Dated and somewhat overrated, FTR) sacred movies had supposedly been ruined forever… the movies didn’t actually hurt Star Wars much in the long run, let’s be honest.

The Original Trilogy still exists. They’re the same movies they’ve always been, and if you don’t like the Prequels you’re free to ignore them and enjoy the original three movies for what they are, since they do function as a self contained story. There’s still plenty of tie in material from the old and new EU for people who want MORE Star Wars content not related to the Prequels too.

And on that note, we’ve had PLENTY of good Star Wars content since the Prequels came out too, with the tv series Star Wars: The Clone Wars frequently being hailed as one of the greatest works in the entire franchise, if not one of the best cartoons ever made, with some Prequel detractors even arguing it SALVAGED those movies. And let’s not forget how the first installment of the sequel trilogy became the first franchise film to gross over $2 Billion at the box office.

That’s not even getting into the fact that the Prequels also brought in a whole generation of new fans and lead to their love of the franchise, myself included.

For whatever problems the Prequels had (Real, imagined or grossly exaggerated), in the long run… Star Wars was fine.

Even now with the Last Jedi, which many argue is a horrible movie that hurts the overall story of the Star Wars Saga (Funnily enough, I’m actually in that camp this time), I think similar logic applies. I, and other fans may not like it or a lot of stuff the Sequel Trilogy has done, and with stuff like Solo the Star Wars franchise may be going through a bit of a rough patch in terms of public interest at the moment… but honestly, I don’t think things are going to be bad forever.

People will eventually move on with their lives. People who don’t like the Sequel Trilogy can move on and enjoy the old movies while pretending they don’t exist, and enjoying whatever other spin offs they like, while fans who do like the Sequel Trilogy and modern star wars content can look forward to more stuff they enjoy.

I can complain about certain directions the series has taken, but as someone who’s endured having people tell me that my childhood favourites ruined their lives (To which I have to say… please go outside and get some air, for Christ’s sake), I have no interest in wangsting about the state of things when I have a lot of better things I should be doing.

That’s not to say no one should complain of course, there are legitimate failings to the Sequel Trilogy and Last Jedi in particular and people have every right to complain (As long as they’re not the toxic fanbrats whining about the “SJW AGENDA!” And bulling the cast, those people can jump off a cliff along with the people who bullied Jake Lloyd and drove Ahmed Best to contemplate suicide). In fact, it’s a good thing for people to be critical since actually constructive criticism is necessary and good feedback for studios responsible for these pop culture franchises.

Going back to Dragon Ball, I personally enjoy Super. I think it’s done a lot of good things, though also had various missteps along the way. But despite those issues and while I hope future works take steps to fix and improve on things, I’m fairly happy with the current state of the franchise and eager for more.

I do think you have a point too, anon. Super itself isn’t honestly trying to be anything revolutionary or even on Z’s level. If you actually examine the show as a whole, it’s basically extended filler that mostly serves to expand the universe, create a big sandbox for future stories to possibly build on, and further develop several characters. The only time it really tried to do anything particularly ambitious was in the Future Trunks saga, where we had villains who questioned the state of humanity and there was an ideological battle going on between them and our heroes, mostly Future Trunks.

Other than that though? We got two movie retellings that were basically self-contained conflicts, a small-stakes tournament that mostly served to introduce a bunch of new recurring characters, and a multiversal tournament that, while it did do some interesting thematic stuff here and there… was mostly an excuse to introduce EVEN MORE new characters, give old ones a chance to shine and develop some more, and have a lot of cool looking fights.

Super isn’t really trying to be Z. It just wants to be a fun show for kids and which nostalgic fans can hopefully enjoy. If anything, I think it was mostly a test run to see whether continuing the franchise with more stories beyond the occasional movie was viable.

There’s certainly gripes to be had, but really Super’s status as a fill-in for a time gap in the Z anime to me just makes it feel a lot more low risk than an immediate sequel to the end of Z, since things do still end the same way they did regardless at the moment. It exists for fans to enjoy if they want to, but it can be easily ignored for fans who don’t and prefer the previous series.

And personally, I don’t think it’s really possible to truly “Ruin” Dragon Ball because the story already got an ending. The original manga, and the two anime adapting it, are a complete story on their own. One with a very open ending that leaves the door open for future stories, yes, but it’s a complete story nonetheless. Whatever directions future series may take, good or bad, it’ll never truly change the story as it originally was, because that manga and it’s anime will always exist for people to enjoy as it was intended.

I hate GT and I’ve complained about it plenty, but while I have very personal reasons for why it annoys me… at the end of the day, it’s irrelevant now. We got a different continuation that ignores it, it’s divorced enough from the original canon that I can just go about my days pretending it doesn’t exist, and I got my closure over it with that last re-watch sorting out my feelings on the series.

So, really, flawed as it is there’s nothing to be REALLY mad about, is there? It exists, but it doesn’t do me any real harm, and it’s there for people who do enjoy it (For whatever weird reason, lol) to watch at their leisure. So in effect, it’s harmless… or at least it will be once we get another post-EoZ series to prove it didn’t completely close the door on those being made.

Dragon Ball’s kind of lucky in that way. It got to a point where it had a satisfying resolution where it can hopefully stand the test of time as a classic work of fiction, but people who want more still have the opportunity for that.

And people who don’t think it should continue, or just don’t like those continuations, are free to not watch those works and enjoy the series the way they want to. Or, even if they don’t like Super, it’s still possible a better series or other products like movies can be made down the line that they can enjoy better.

Just like with Star Wars and the Sonic games.

I may have issues with Super from time to time, but overall I think it did a lot more good than bad, and most of it’s faults could be improved on in future series. The worst thing it actually did was destroying the original future timeline, but even that’s fixable if they just have another story with Future Trunks coming back and have somebody go “Hey, maybe we can use the Super Dragon Balls to bring your timeline back”.

I get having personal attachment to the series and it’s characters, I do too. And I get people getting emotional when they feel something they like is being disrespected in any way. If people think the show handled Goku’s character badly or did something to hurt the overall ongoing story, then they’re within their right to complain and be upset about that. TO A REASONABLE EXTENT.

I do also get the feeling a lot of people just can’t handle Dragon Ball having a flawed follow up, aswell. Given that Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z are influential classics, it makes sense that a lot of people would be unhappy with anything that didn’t live up to that quality. But I think some people do get overly worked up about it.

Fact is, all franchises have both flawed installments, and a number of duds to show for them. Star Trek has bad movies and the bad series here or there (Enterprise). Doctor Who has had bad seasons. Marvel and DC have had plenty of bad comics and media adaptions. Mario and Sonic and Pokémon and lots of others have had bad games or adaptions. But that hasn’t ruined everything that was good about those series, or stopped them from putting out good new content.

Every piece of media has it’s flaws to be frank, and every franchise will inevitably stumble here or there. Dragon Ball has had plenty of duds before Super. The Broly movies, GT, Return of Cooler, Episode of Bardock, a bunch of bad video games most people don’t even bother to remember, FREAKING DRAGON BALL EVOLUTION. And plenty of stuff about the old series themselves has aged terribly (Especially in early Dragon Ball). But none of that has managed to kill the franchise.

We’ve had bad, mediocre and decent though heavily flawed Dragon Ball stories and products in the past, and we’ll have plenty more in the future. And while there’ll be stuff that is worth griping about, really at the end of the day it’s not the end of the world, and people who do get legitimately angry thinking it is need to relax now and again.

I get people thinking that things should have just stayed the way there were, thinking that Dragon Ball shouldn’t have been continued if that continuation wasn’t going to live up to it’s predecessors. And I’m never going to argue that people shouldn’t complain about things (I certainly do).

But realistically, Dragon Ball was going to have follow ups sooner or later. It’s the biggest franchise Toei and Shueisha have, and one of the most iconic series of all time. Whether I or anyone else thinks Dragon Ball needed a follow up or not, it was bound to happen because we live in a world where milking popular franchises is the name of the game.

People can complain about it, people can and should have issues with flawed products. People can insist on Dragon Ball’s legacy needing to be preserved. But like I’ve said... the series as you loved it isn’t going anywhere. No one is obligated to support everything the franchise does. So I don’t think getting overly angry or worked up about Super or GT or whatever not being everything they wanted them to be is something to freak out over.

Fact is, for all the complaints... a lot of people still love Super and enjoyed it. A lot of people still love Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. Super has brought Toei nothing but monetary success, and interest in the franchise is at the highest it’s been since Z finished airing in the West over a decade ago and the franchise went truly dormant for the most part. If anything, I think Dragon Ball actually gets more respect these days than it did for most of the latter half of the last decade, where it became sort of an internet laughing stock in the West.

We’re still getting plenty of high profile and quality products, like FighterZ, which along with Super itself and the movies preceding it has helped draw in a lot of new fans and brought back a good chunk of lapsed ones. There’s a generation of children the world over that are going to have grown up on Super as their first Dragon Ball series, and it’ll be an important part of helping them get into the franchise and the previous series, much like Kai before it.

And we’ve got a new movie coming out that’s generating a lot of hype and which looks to be giving the franchise a much needed and exceptionally positive visual overhaul, which it’s needed for a while now.

For all the ups and downs, and there have been plenty... Dragon Ball is doing fine. Regardless of what any individual person thinks of Super, Dragon Ball’s legacy isn’t in any danger. The franchise isn’t collapsing, and the overall story and all of it’s characters haven’t been completely ruined beyond repair.

Things could be better. But Z and Dragon Ball could have been better in a lot of places too. It’s okay to be unsatisfied about the current state of things and to voice complaints, as much as it’s okay to be loving the thrill of having Dragon Ball really make a comeback.

Things will be fine. With Super currently off the air, I think now’s the time for everyone to just take a chill and relax. The world didn’t end, and it’s not going to any time soon. (Well, unless Trump throws a hissy fit and launches nukes at everyone but, you know, hopefully that won’t happen).

#dragon ball super #dbs #dragon ball #dragon ball z

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thefaeriereview · 4 years

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Tour: A Perfect Storm

https://ift.tt/3nKciN7

A PERFECT STORM

Mike Martin Mystery

Sgt. Windflower is back, untangling another swirling mystery, this one bringing the meth crisis and biker gangs to the quiet Newfoundland town of Grand Bank, feeling the sting of their deadly tentacles reaching all the way from Las Vegas. He’s working with his familiar crew of RCMP characters – but wait, are some of the faces changing? New challenges for Jones, an unknown side of Smithson reveals itself, and what ever happened to Tizzard? In the midst of putting the pieces of the puzzle together, Windflower and his beloved Sheila also find themselves navigating sorrows and surprises on the family front.

Come back to Grand Bank for more fun, food and cool, clean, Canadian crime fiction with Sgt. Windflower Mysteries.

MY REVIEW

5 out of 5

A Perfect Storm is a great mystery. I really enjoyed this cozy mystery following various members of the RCMP stationed out of Newfoundland. Although this is a cozy mystery, it is far from fluffy. There's a wonderful balance between the hard and rough parts and the softer, sweeter side of life. At first I wasn't sure how much I would like the focus changing between characters, but Martin handled it seamlessly, and I was quickly lost in the story. This definitely made me want to read the other mysteries in the series!

Amazon → https://amzn.to/36sHEBz

Chapter One

Eddie Tizzard passed his card over the sensor and pushed the door open. He flicked on the light. “Holy jumpins,” he said when he saw what was on the bed in his hotel room— thousands of dollars strewn around like confetti. When he looked closer, he saw something else. There, right in the middle of the bed, was a very red, very large bloodstain.

His first instinct was to run. But his years as an RCMP officer got the best of him, and he had another look around. Soon the source of the blood became obvious. It was a man in a suit lying face down in the bathroom with a visible hole in the back of his head. Tizzard should have trusted his first instinct because when he did decide to leave the room, he walked directly into the path of who he would later find out was the head of hotel security.

He was remembering all of this as he sat in a holding cell with a dozen other men in the Las Vegas jail. Tizzard had gone to Vegas for private detective training, having decided on a new career path after leaving the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or the Mounties. Technically, he was on leave for the rest of the year, but he doubted he’d ever return to his old job. He’d applied for and received his firearms license, but he wanted a certificate to put on the walls of his new office, that is when he got an office. That seemed very far away right now, about as far as he could get from his home in Newfoundland on the eastern tip of Canada.

He’d watched enough police shows on TV to know that he could make one phone call. But nobody had said when he could do that. The duty officer kind of smirked when he pushed him into the lock-up with his dozen new friends and told him, “Yeah, yeah, coming right up.”

Tizzard was confused but tried to look like he fit in with his fellow cell mates. They, in turn, looked like they were measuring his clothes to see if they might be a fit. As long as they don’t find out that I used to be a cop, I’ll be OK, thought Tizzard as he backed up as far as he could into a corner.

It seemed like he had waited forever, but as several of his new friends came in for a closer look, he heard his name called, “Tizzard, Tizzard.”

“That’s me,” he said and pushed by the two large men who had got the closest.

The duty cop opened the door, and Tizzard walked along the hallway to an interview room. He was pushed inside, and the door clicked shut behind him. It was a small, windowless room with a camera in the ceiling, a mirror on the wall, a single chair on one side of a table, and two on the other. Tizzard knew the drill and took a seat on the one-chair side. Then he waited, again. Feels like home, he thought. Just not my home.

On the other side of the continent Mayor Sheila Hillier was wrapping up her town council meeting and was on her way to meet Moira Stoodley who was babysitting her daughter, Amelia Louise. The meeting had been made unpleasant by a couple of contentious issues, including whether the older buildings in the downtown core of Grand Bank should be modernized or restored to maintain their historic character. But Sheila also realized that most of the tension was really about who would replace her as mayor in the election only a couple of weeks away.

Jacqueline Wilson was Sheila’s preference, but there was another candidate, Phil Bennett, who was leading the anti-tax faction of council. Every meeting, Bennett would try to disrupt things to show how influential he thought he could be, but Sheila would have none of it and would put him back in line. Bennett’s behaviour in itself was more than enough reason for her to want to leave, she thought.

Sheila had decided to go back to school part-time, eventually do an MBA once she had cleared up her scholastic records and completed the course load for an old degree program she had started several years earlier. Politics had never really been her thing, even though she was very good at it. She had only taken the mayor’s job to try to improve the town’s economy. And she had succeeded, mostly. The Town of Grand Bank’s fish plant was now operating on a regular basis with a quota for crab and the sea urchins considered a delicacy in Japan and China. The town also had a recycling factory and a solar panel fabrication plant.

Half of the town’s people wanted to not just preserve the past but to live in it. The other half wanted to blow it all up and start over. They had no use for the old and wanted everything to be modern, like the way it was in St. John’s or even nearby Marystown. It seemed there was no middle ground for the residents of Grand Bank, yet Sheila was sure you could have the best of both worlds. Getting others to agree with her, though, seemed impossible.

Sheila gathered up her things and drove to the Mug-Up, which was known through much of the province to be the best little café there was in Grand Bank. That it was the only café in Grand Bank was usually not mentioned. Sheila had owned the place years ago but gave it up after a horrific car accident left her with a slight limp and no desire to stand all day. Moira and her husband, Herb, had taken it over, and it was there that she found Amelia Louise sitting at a table with her Poppy Herb.

“Mama, mama,” she shrieked as Sheila’s heart melted. “Ook, ook.”

“I think she’s got talent,” said Herb Stoodley.

Sheila examined the crayon scrawls on the paper and murmured her approval. “It’s so nice,” she said. “Is it Lady, your doggie?” she asked, making a leap of faith based on the fact that there was one small circle on top of a large mass of scratches.

Amelia Louise smiled and nodded her head up and down emphatically. She had always been able to somehow say no, but now the 20-month-old toddler was happy to signify yes with a grand gesture.

“Well, thank you,” said Sheila. “And thank you, Herb. And here’s Moira, too. Thank you, Moira, for looking after her.”

“It’s our pleasure,” said Moira, wiping her hands on her apron. “I was just finishing off some baking.”

“Em,” said Amelia Louise. “Ook, ook,”

“I can see,” said Moira. “Has Poppy Herb been nice to you?”

“She’s like our baby, too,” said Herb. “It’s easy to be nice to her. ‘Those that do teach young babes, do it with gentle means and easy tasks.’”

“Okay, my soon-to-be-famous artist, let’s go,” said Sheila as she put on Amelia Louise’s jacket. Once outside again, Sheila noticed the November air had lost any tinge of summer warmth, and the wind was picking up, making it a bit of an adventure to walk the short distance to their house. Sheila tried to carry her daughter, but Amelia Louise was determined to walk on her own, while examining every leaf that blew their way.

When they got home, Molly the cat watched them carefully as they came up the walkway. The dog, Lady, was more directly affectionate and showed how much she had missed them both by almost knocking them over in the hall. The only one missing from the happy family was Sheila’s husband and the father of Amelia Louise, Sergeant Winston Windflower of the RCMP Grand Bank Detachment. He was at work, but Sheila expected to hear from him soon because his stomach would be rumbling any minute now, and he’d want to know what was on for dinner.

Mike Martin was born in St. John’s, NL on the east coast of Canada and now lives and works in Ottawa, Ontario. He is a long-time freelance writer and his articles and essays have appeared in newspapers, magazines and online across Canada as well as in the United States and New Zealand. He is the author of Change the Things You Can: Dealing with Difficult People and has written a number of short stories that have been published in various publications across North America.

The Walker on the Cape was his first full fiction book and the premiere of the Sgt. Windflower Mystery Series. Other books in the series include The Body on the T, Beneath the Surface, A Twist of Fortune, and A Long Ways from Home, followed by A Tangled Web, which was shortlisted for the 2017 Bony Blithe Light Mystery Award as the best light mystery of the year, and Darkest Before the Dawn, which won the 2018 Bony Blithe Light Mystery Award. Fire, Fog and Water was the eighth in the series. He has also published Christmas in Newfoundland: Memories and Mysteries, a Sgt. Windflower Book of Christmas past and present.

He is Past Chair of the Board of Crime Writers of Canada, a national organization promoting Canadian crime and mystery writers and a member of the Newfoundland Writing Guild and Ottawa Independent Writers.

A Perfect Storm is the latest book in the Sgt. Windflower Mystery series.

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mike54martin

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheWalkerOnTheCapeReviewsAndMore

via Blogger https://ift.tt/3nKmRQb

#Blogger #pumpupyourbook #book review #Book Tour #cozy #Mystery #Mystery & Thrillers #review

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letterboxd · 4 years

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How I Letterboxd #2: Dave Chen

In our second of this series, we put Dave Chen in the Letterboxd spotlight. The podcaster, musician and filmmaker is most famous on Letterboxd for his weirdly specific lists. He tells us how he uses the platform, why every film that exists is miraculous, and why we shouldn’t sleep on Not Another Teen Movie.

Hi Dave! How long have you been on Letterboxd? About eight years. I believe I first signed up when it was in beta. I loved (and still love) the interface: how smooth the user flow is for logging/reviewing films, and how beautiful all that movie art looks as it’s organized on the site.

What do you mainly use Letterboxd for? I love reading the reviews on Letterboxd. On a film’s page, the site surfaces many of the most popular reviews and I find it’s a great way to find some quick, witty, and thoughtful comments on something I might be considering watching. But of course, I also love reading and making funny lists. Finally, I’ve heard Letterboxd is great for keeping track of films at a film festival but sadly I haven’t yet attended one since I started using it again.

Do you rate films? Would you consider yourself a generous or harsh rater? I rate films to remind myself how I felt about them at the time I watched. Of course, my opinions on movies change but it’s sometimes interesting to look back and think back to a time when, “Oh right, I did love that movie in the summer of 2019 when I was going through XYZ”. Our feelings about movies can often reflect what’s going on in our lives.

That said, over time, I’ve come to understand that films are miracles. I don’t think I’m the first person to come up with this observation but they are like miniature plays resulting from the collective work of hundreds or thousands of people that have been preserved for your amusement, and you can just play them on demand. Many of them cost only a few dollars. Some are free! Every film that exists is miraculous.

So, despite some of my harsh reviews, I do try to keep that perspective in mind.

You’ve been a member for a while but most of your reviews are recent. What brought you back? We note that you restarted with your third viewing of 1917! I am pretty active on Twitter and I started seeing a bunch of screen-capped reviews go viral there. But to be honest, much of social media can be exhausting to me these days. What I realized recently about Letterboxd was that much of it is free of the negativity. It’s just a bunch of folks who love movies sharing thoughts on those movies, but it also feels like a real community of people. There are filmmakers on there who share their thoughts on films and their favorites, and that’s of course endlessly fascinating (such as Sean Baker). Even the negative reviews can be fun to read. There’s a lot of pithiness and wit on the site, and its design really helps facilitate that.

Okay, take us way back, what was the film that got you hooked on cinema? My first cinematic true loves were the films of John Woo. I’d watched action movies before but I was introduced to John Woo ironically by a counselor at my church youth group! I became dazzled by movies like The Killer and Hard Boiled. It was then that I realized that things I had seen dozens of times (e.g., a shootout in a warehouse) could be elevated by sheer craftsmanship.

What keeps you from sharing your four favorites on your profile? A few reasons. For me personally, it takes months if not years for my thoughts on a film to really crystallize. My relationship with a movie doesn’t end when the credits roll—its ideas and themes and images are often clanging around in the back of my head for months if not years afterwards. As a result, my favorite films of all time change pretty frequently and I didn’t want to have to think about maintaining my four favorites over time.

Michael Caine in Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Children of Men’ (2006).

Is there any film you could say is your all-time number one? If I had to name one though, it’d probably be Children of Men. It combines all my favorite things into one movie: science fiction, action, Michael Caine and a heartfelt message about how humanity has to be kinder to one another if we are to survive the challenging days ahead.

Your most popular lists are weirdly specific and fun (but true!). What are some other weirdly specific lists on Letterboxd that spoke to you? All the lists I like fall into that category. I love it when people make connections that I never otherwise would’ve thought of. To make a funny list, I think you need to be able to juggle extremely specific pattern recognition with a description that makes people feel like they are learning something about the films or their subjects. While the vast majority of the time these are just for fun, sometimes they actually can lead to insights about filmmakers, actors and the specific themes they try to bring to life in their work.

Also, shout out to Thijs Meuwese, who is leading the way on creative lists.

What is your favorite or most useful feature on Letterboxd? The Stats page [generated for all Pro and Patron members] is a beautiful visualization of the history of my film watching. As I continue to build out my watch history, I’m curious to see the trends that will arise.

What’s a movie where you don’t understand why Letterboxd members love or hate it so much? To answer this question, I took a look at some “worst-rated films on Letterboxd” lists and here’s a totally random one for you: the teen romantic comedy parody Not Another Teen Movie. It’s rated a 2.6 and a lot of the humor of this film has aged poorly but there are some amazing gags in here and it features Chris Evans in a performance that will likely be the apex of the comedic phase of his career. My brother and I still quote this movie to each other. Don’t sleep on it.

Chyler Leigh and Chris Evans in ‘Not Another Teen Movie’ (2001).

Your feature film, Stephen Tobolowsky’s one-man show The Primary Instinct, has a Letterboxd page and a pretty solid rating, congrats! How do you feel having that livestream of instant reactions to it? I’m glad that the ratings are decent, but to be honest, I can’t bring myself to look at them! As part of the filmmaking process, I’m totally open to constructive feedback from people I know and trust, but I’m not sure I can handle the same from strangers. Nonetheless, I’m grateful some Letterboxd members have seen fit to watch the film and take the time to rate it! Perhaps if I make more films in the future, I’ll feel better about checking out the reviews for an individual one.

Among your other skills, you are a talented musician. Can you tell us about some of your favorite film scores? Any cello-heavy scores or composers you find particularly influential? While not really cello-specific, the music of Nicholas Britell makes amazing use of strings (see Moonlight and [TV series] Succession). His music is achingly beautiful and is often in rotation in my playlists.

More generally, Hans Zimmer and John Williams are both legends and I’ve always found their work to be very interesting. In recent days, I’ve been quite taken with the work of Daniel Pemberton, whose work on films like King Arthur and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. have a great populsive energy to them. Finally, when I’m into something more moody, atmospheric or modern, I appreciate the work of Cliff Martinez.

Are you self-isolating right now due to Covid-19? Discovered anything great and new to you to pass the time? We hope everything is alright otherwise! Yes, I'm quarantining due to a “stay safe and healthy” order in Washington State right now. Like many people staying at home, I’ve been watching a lot of TV, which includes things like Tiger King, Devs, Better Call Saul, and Dave (the show on Hulu). These are the things that give me comfort and distraction these days.

Jennifer Ehle in Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Contagion’ (2011).

What are your go-to comfort movies that you recommend to people at this strange and difficult time? This is a weird recommendation, but I’d say Steven Soderberg’s Contagion is a great choice. Contagion depicts a virus far more deadly than Covid-19, and how it eventually leads to the deterioration of the social order. But it’s also a deeply hopeful movie. You see governments come together to try to figure this thing out. You see the people on the front lines risking their lives to fight the fictional virus and I think it’s a great way to help people understand how courageous and valuable all our medical workers are in times like these. It’s “competence porn” in an era where I think we need to be reminded of what competence looks like.

[Editor’s note: Dave isn’t alone, Contagion has consistently been in our 20 most popular films for the past month.]

When the universe is allowed to go back to the cinema, where do you prefer to sit? As close to the center of the theater as possible, with my eyeline at about halfway up the screen.

What’s in your ‘hall of shame’—the movies you haven’t seen and know Letterboxd will boo at you for missing? Don’t worry, we’ll protect you. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Say Anything. Also Firefly, the Joss Whedon show which I don’t think is on your website anywhere. Many people have been complaining to me about this oversight in my viewership for years so I think it’ll do well if we can list it here.

Which film from the past ten years that went by fairly unloved do you think will be a future classic and you’ll fight to the death for loving? I’m going to cheat a little and list a movie that’s eleven years old: Tony Gilroy’s Duplicity. This movie didn’t do super well at the box office when it was first released and currently has a 2.8 on Letterboxd. But it was one of my top ten films that year. I think Clive Owen and Julia Roberts have great chemistry, but I think the film’s depiction of corporate espionage is outlandish, fun and irresistible. These characters are playing a "triple game" and it’s so much fun to see the layers upon layers of deception that they’re creating, and the cascading impacts they have on their relationship. Also, how can you say no to a movie that has Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson as competing CEOs literally going at each other?

And finally, please name three other Letterboxd members you recommend we follow. I collaborate with Melissa on YouTube/podcast reviews and she is incredibly thoughtful and articulate. I always appreciate Khoi’s thoughtfulness. And Mike Ginn—this guy is hilarious.

You can enjoy more Dave on his website; his YouTube channel; and his podcasts The Slashfilmcast and Culturally Relevant. Dave was photographed by Brandon Hill.

#letterboxd #how i letterboxd #dave chen #letterboxd members #letterboxd community #cinephile #film lover

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oliverphisher · 4 years

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Rowena Holloway

Rowena Holloway is an Australian author of supsense fiction. A former academic, she discovered fiction writing was preferable to the real world and now indulges her love of suspense fiction by writing about Fractured Families and Killer Secrets. Pieces of a Lie is one of the popular book of her.

Pieces of a Lie By Rowena Holloway

Her novels have been nominated for the Ned Kelly Award for crime fiction and her short stories have been published in several anthologies including the Anthology of Award Winning Australian Writing. An avid reader, she occasionally reviews fiction and interviews fellow writers.

You can find out more about Rowena at rowenahollowaynovels.com.

What are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?

Oh, so many books! My top three would be Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder, Caught In The Light by Robert Goddard, and A Dark-Adapted Eye by Barbara Vine.

I read Sophie’s World as part of my studies and I have to admit that at first I viewed reading about all those philosophers as a chore, but Sophie’s journey swept me up and of course there’s a good twist to the story. I think that’s where my appreciation of a layered story began. It’s also about that time that I realised writing was a passion I wanted to pursue though I was undecided whether it would be fiction or non-fiction.

Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy (FSG Classics) By Jostein Gaarder

Caught In The Light also left an impression, not just because the story is intriguing but because of the layers to his stories. There is always something else going on beneath the main story line and then around the midpoint that story begins to emerge and you realise the book is about something else and all the clues have been there all along. That was when I decided I liked the freedom of fiction. And that is also when I realised layered stories with twists where my passion.

Caught in the Light By Robert Goddard

A Dark-Adapted Eye was influential because it showed me about character, that all the best characters are flawed and that families can be incredibly cruel to each other under the ‘guise’ of love. Also, Barbara Vine (aka Ruth Rendell) is a brilliant writer. So it was influential for the sheer joy of reading.

A Dark-Adapted Eye (Plume) By Ruth Rendell

What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)?

You know, I think I’m going to have to go with a recent lunch with two of my best friends, one of whom I rarely see because she lives eight hours away. It is always great to catch up with good friends and when those good friends share your passion for writing, among other things, it refills the creative well. Writing is a solitary business. You spend a lot of time inside your head with imaginary people or stuck in research or engaged in that dreaded thing called marketing (!) and so it is important to do those things that refresh and encourage your passion. For me, that means spending time with people I love. And when they share my passion for writing there is nothing better—except spending time with my cavoodle, Alfie. Every writer needs a dog! How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?

Failure—however we define it for ourselves—set me up to be more resilient and to persevere.

I went through several years of bullying at one workplace and it changed me. My confidence fled, I ate my feelings, and became incapable of seeing anything in a positive way. It all came to a head at one particularly awful conference. Alone in my room I drew up a list of pros and cons about my situation. That’s when I realised that I was on the wrong path and that fiction writing was my passion. From that moment on I hatched my ‘escape plan’. Two years later I was physically no healthier, but my bank balance was healthy enough for me to quit a career I had spent ten years and several degrees working towards.

It was a long road back to health, mentally and physically, but during that journey I learned to stop and breath, to be in the moment, and to centre myself. Things can still become overwhelming but now I stop, breathe and go for a long walk. Then I keep moving forward. Are there any quotes you think of often or live your life by?

Probably the most apt one is “Keep Calm and Carry On”. But the one I find myself saying all the time, and which seems to fit most situations is from Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. “Don’t panic.” What is one of the best investment in a writing resource you’ve ever made?

Well a notepad that fits into my shoulder bag and handful of pens is probably the best. It’s cheap, available and very useful for when you find yourself with a bright idea or extra time—like in the waiting room at the dentist!

Other than that, I have to say my Mac Air laptop. I take that everywhere. It’s great when I need to get a change of scene or work around other commitments. Over the last couple of years I spent a lot of time in doctors waiting rooms while my elderly mother saw various specialists. I wrote while she saw her specialists and it saved both of us from feeling stressed.

I actually wrote the better part of my Ashes To Ashes psychological thriller series that way. Books one and two were mostly written in waiting rooms or nearby coffee shops.

What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?

I love my dog, which I realise isn’t absurd, but I also like to sing to him, and about him. And I’m not bothered that I do this while we walk. Not anymore. I’ve been caught a few times by strangers as I sing made up ditties, but I’ve long since learned to ignore my embarrassment.

Anyway, singing to my dog is better than cursing the bullies, which is what I used to do on my walks. In the last five years, what new belief, behaviour, or habit has most improved your life?

Daily walking! It’s helped me get fit and kept me sane.

I’ve walked daily for years and now I get to enjoy with Alfie, who makes me laugh every day. It also gets me out in the sunshine (and rain) and I’ve met many people who have become friends.

And perhaps, now I think about it, it also feeds that belief that everything will be okay once you take a breather.

What advice would you give to a smart, driven aspiring author? What advice should they ignore?

Great question! The hardest lesson to learn—in life and especially as author—is knowing which advice to follow and which to ignore.

First, find your voice before you learn ‘the rules’.This may be a little contentious because often you need to know the rules before you break them in an effective way. However, after years of attending writing courses and writers’ groups I’ve come to the realisation that all those rules can really stifle your voice. So, I recommendthat you write as much as you can until you find your own style, until your unique voice shines through the work. By ‘voice’ I mean the tone, the style and telling the story in a way that honours your characters and the world they inhabit. This differs from your author voice. The difference can be obvious or it can be subtle. Discovering that is part of the journey.

Secondly, I’ll pass on the best advice I ever got: “Don’t mess with your process”. Some people plot and some pants it, some write fast, and some can’t move forward until they perfect what they already have. Most of us are somewhere in between. Honour the way that works best for you. And don’t let anyone mess with your voice. That is what makes you unique.

Finally, surround yourself with people who support your passion. They may not understand it, but if they support it, you are halfway there. Sometimes the most well-meaning people can be the most damaging, and often those people are those closest to you.

What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession often?

People banging on about the rules. Every writing course I ever went to laid out rules they deemed un-breakable. Yet by following these I invariably ended up with a long-winded, stilted and unwieldy story.

Yes, you do need to know what’s accepted and what isn’t in your chosen genre because you need to meet the expectations of your reader. And if you aspire to be traditionally published, you’ll need to meet the expectations of your intended agent or publisher: if they know where your book ‘sits’ in the store, it’s easier for them to sell it—and that helps you get a contract.

But if you focus too early on the rules while trying to write a first draft, it can stifle your creativity. In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to (distractions, invitations, etc.)?

I say no to lots of things these days. I still suffer from FOMO and worry I’ve missed an opportunity, but as a wise friend of mine once said: “You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.”

The biggest ‘distraction’ I’ve said no to—and it took me a long time to let it go—was teaching writing. I love teaching and enjoy interacting with like-minded people, sharing what I know and learning from them, but it is no longer my passion. Writing is my passion. Not just that, but seeing a book come to fruition. Eventually I realised that I was spending a huge chunk of time preparing teaching materials and less and less doing what I really loved: creating fiction.

I also have a Fear Of Putting Myself Out There, so saying no comes with lots of angst and self-reflection. If I’m saying no because of fear, then I try to push myself outside my comfort zone and say yes. But that is always judged against my goals for writing and health—though I rarely say no to lunch with friends! What marketing tactics should authors avoid?

Don’t shout about your book. Talk about it. Talk about your journey, the story, your characters and your research. Make your potential readers curious. While we all want that immediate sale, effective book marketing is mostly about building relationships.

Avoid anyone who promises to have the magic bullet.

There is no magic bullet. The publishing landscape changes all the time, it’s a crowded market run by algorithms and to be successful in marketing you need to stay abreast of all the changes. Follow people like Joanna Penn and Jane Friedman who are active in the industry and have a track record of good advice and insight.

Sadly, there are unscrupulous people who trade on exploiting our dream.Do your research. Check Writers Beware (https://www.sfwa.org/) for known scams, and join communities like the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) who keep on top of scammers and dodgy publishers.

What new realizations and/or approaches have helped you achieve your goals?

There is an old song that has been running through my head and the chorus goes: “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.”

You can’t get much better advice than that.

Of course, the difference between intention and action is planning and it is not enough just to have a goal, you have to plan how to achieve that goal. For writers, it always comes down to putting your bum in a chair and your hands on the keyboard (a pen to your notebook; your mouth to dictation software) and getting the words down. It is not always possible to do daily writing or to carve out long tracts of time alone to write, but the more you do it, the easier it flows, and the quicker you will find your process.

And don’t forget to enjoy it!

When you feel overwhelmed or have lost your focus temporarily, what do you do?

I was going to say I walk, which I do, but mostly my first response is to make coffee! I can always tell how well my writing day has gone by howmany half-finished cups of coffee I’ve left around the house… Any other tips?

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is this: writing is a valid occupation and there is no shame—and it is not selfish—to pursue a dream if it nurtures your soul. Of course, we all have to live, so it might be something you have steal time to do for a while, but if it is truly your passion, do not give up.

________

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source https://www.thecommunitywriter.com/blog/rowena-holloway

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