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trulyhumblenarcissist · 3 years

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Abourt Rei Himura and BNHA Chapter 301

Now that I've read the official release of chapter 301 I can finally try to gather my thoughts. I think this time the particular rendition of dialogues and inflections provided by Caleb Cook is more crisp and clear than usual, especially in throwing "shade" upon Endeavor as a father figure. But let's do things in order...

Title: THE WRONG WAY TO PUT OUT A FIRE - a simple, but stark message that doesn't leave space for ambiguity. There was a fire, an imminent tragedy that could and should have been avoided, but whoever tried to fix it, did it all wrong and now we have to deal with a huge arson.

CARLESS HANDLING OF FIRE, on the other hand, doesn't quite cut it for me, because it seems like everything was caused by a foolish mistake. "I was carless and now I'm in a pinch"- type of situation, while it's perfectly clear that Endeavor and Rei decided purposefully which "strategy" to use with Touya. A BAD one to say it lightly. Rei's contribution and complicity is debatable, of course, and I'll touch on this later.

Let me get this clear though: I'm not trying in any way to critique the hard work of unofficial translators. I can't say anything relevant because I'm not a translator in the first place (I can barely understand English and my native language on a good day) and also because I am so grateful for everything they do in order to give us really good material FREE OF CHARGE basically a second after the release in Japan. I'm just interested about the different shades of subtext we can catch if we read the story through multiple filters. Every translation is unique because it carries the personal spin of the author even if the bias should be inexistent or ideally undetectable...

However, back to the chapter

REI'S CAGE

The first scene opens on a luxurious classic Japanese villa, with Enji, Rei and her parents discussing the motivation behind Enji's proposal. Or at least we initially think that's what's going on... Because in reality Rei's family couldn't care less about the motivation. Everything these people see is a wealthy, famous guy the next number one hero ready to take their daughter in marriage. I guess the Himuras are pretty broke, thight on cash, their old prestige is definitely gone and all they can do to save themselves from shame and poverty is "to sell" their only remaining asset.

During the whole ordeal, Rei is standing still, silent, cold as ice. She knows she doesn't really have a choice. How mortifying and sad is this? An adult, capable woman has no agency whatsoever, she is used again and again and she stoically accepts this treatment from every single dominant figure in her life until she can't be stoic anymore. I really hope Horikoshi's going to give her a much more proactive role in saving her family and it seems the narrative wants us to expect this type of character development.

I'd like to point out 2 panels in particular:

First one

In this scene the Todorokis are back from their trip to the doc, who clearly said they shouldn't try to conceive a child with a perfect quirk mix because it is dangerous (and morally questionable too). Rei understands this fact and tries to dissuade Enji, but he doesn't listen, because he's projecting all his pent-up resentment and frustration onto Touya. He knows how it feels to crush against an unbreakable wall, since he can't surpass All might and his son can't too. He had to learn this truth the hard way, so Touya needs to do the same. Enji is purposefully throwing upon his son years of failures, self consciousness and despair, just because the boy has to get it into his thick skull that he is a dud, just like his father. This is not a hopeless dad making a mistake bona fide, this is a broken man trying to destroy his self reflection by proxy, annihilating everything Touya is, swiping the kid's identity under the rug. He describes his son's dreams and sadness as something birthed from stubbornness. He is auto-convincing himself however (because Endeavor is not stupid). A little bit later he's basically saying: "Touya let's play make believe! We can go on like everything I had engulfed in your psyche never existed, you're a failed attempt so you don't exist. Your needs and wants are silly and useless, nothing worth dealing with now that I can't make you my prodigy. Why don't you go play with the other failures so that I don't have to look at myself while taking actually care of you. I don't want to see you, because it's too painful, because you're a remainder of my own inadequacy."

Note: If you want to read an incredibly well done analysis about Endeavor's motives and psyche, you can get it on @thyandrawrites , she's dwelt on everything extensively and way better than me.

I really want to talk about Rei though. In the panel I showed above, her expression is a bit tricky to analyse. At first she is very vocal about her position. She doesn't want to put Touya through useless suffering, especially since they have a scientific reason not to. They have no guarantee of success with other children, besides, they could possibly have to deal with other health related issues. However, all it takes to convince her in the end is Enji's half assed attempt at the "It's for Touya's sake" shtick. Is it really? Why doesn't she question her husband anymore?

Well... I think before Natsuo, she was probably hoping Touya would let go "naturally", with time and growth, maybe by taking interest in his other siblings. Rei said she wanted to have more children because in her mind they would have supported and loved each other. Maybe she was naive enough to think that a big family full of kids few years apart from each other was all Touya needed to distract himself from his purposes... BUT and here is the point I want to get across: She was deluding herself too, much like Enji. The ugly truth, in my opinion, is that Rei is a person prone to protect herself by going with everything other people want, especially if said people are capable of hurting her. Yes, she was hurt time and time again, but what would have happened if she really tried to stop Enji?

What I am trying to say is that Rei is the kind of person who endures to survive. She holds a "captive" mentality in which, by indulging her captor's desires, she can continue living with less possibile damage. If I stay still and silent, if I don't make a scene, I can go on, I can hold onto the few things I have that actually make me happy.

Let's think about it... Enji was so obsessed with his psychotic, power-hungry quest that he would have probably disown Rei. She would have been thrown away for a more compliant woman with an ice quirk, or something similar, this resulting in her probably losing everything, the respect and love of her family (the Himuras) and also her own children. Because we know Endeavor can definitely hold a grudge and is vendicative.

So, clarifying, Rei doesn't put up a fight because she is scared for herself in a way... She is scared to be hurt in the worst possible way (by losing her little bit of serenity), so her strategy is to endure and to keep up a facade of control and purpose.

Rei, ironically just like Touya and other characters in mha, doesn't really get what unconditional love is. Her family loves her until she can be useful to the Himura name and status, her husband loves her for her quirk. Her children, however, love her for who she is and she wants to stay with them... Only to be forced to leave them later anyway.

The few times Rei actually smiles are when she is with her babies. She is a deeply loving mother in her core, but her declining mental health makes her a very lacking caregiver.

This panel, in my opinion, shows the point of no return for Rei. She can't keep the glacial facade forever...

After Natsuo's turn to be deemed a failure, Endeavor is crazier than ever, because All Might is as popular and loved as ever and he hasn't make any progress into his eugenetic games. The last two images of Rei are very telling. She is exhausted, but she knows what her husband wants from her this time too. She looks like a lifeless doll and honestly I can easily see Shouto's conception as... Non consensual and I will stop here.

Then Shouto is born, the last, perfect specimen... And Rei isn't doing much for Touya, we can see she's apparently blind towards her eldest son's distress already after Natsuo's birth... But why?

Because she is actively avoiding to face the Touya's problems too.

If Touya is still suffering, is still feeling stressed and worthless, then everything Rei has endured, everything she pretended not to feel for the sake of her family has been completely useless. What Rei cannot look at is her own parental failure, is the concrete proof that while protecting herself and her peace she did not protect her children too, because the two interests were never really aligned, even if she really believed so. She never had a functional family to preserve in the first place and everything she accepted to do was all for the sake of a false sense of belonging.

However is too easy to say she should've rebelled against Enji and dumped his sorry ass. Abuse traps you and your abuser too in a cage tricky to escape.

What I imagine will happen next chapter is one of two things:

Enji stops Touya by using brute force, probably also saying something really scarring to reinforce the notion that Shouto is the only child he cares about.

Rei stops Touya by using her quirk. This act could be considered by Touya another confirmation that even his mother actually does something by her own accord only when Shouto's safety is at risk

Necessary conclusions

I don't blame Rei for her actions too much. She is a victim turned abuser by circumstances, but more importantly she's actually taken mesures to prevent herself from hurting her children again. She's trying to heal for her family's sake, really this time. Ten years spent dealing with guilt and having actual therapy seem a good plan to me. And now she's the one ready to snap Enji back to reality.

Enji, on the other hand, is trying too. It's too little too late, but if he stops avoiding reality and hardly works on understanding his family's point of view I don't think he is completely unredeemable. I don't see him surviving his last confrontation with Touya, thought... But I could be totally wrong.

Obviously everything I've said it's my personal analysis on Rei's character, as I interpret her actions and words, so feel free to contradict me and/or to add anything you might see fit.

#bnha301 #bnha meta #mha #my hero academia #todoroki enji #endevor #todoroki rei #rei himura #todoroki family #tw abuse

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innuendostudios · 3 years

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Thoughts on: Criterion's Neo-Noir Collection

I have written up all 26 films* in the Criterion Channel's Neo-Noir Collection.

Legend: rw - rewatch; a movie I had seen before going through the collection dnrw - did not rewatch; if a movie met two criteria (a. I had seen it within the last 18 months, b. I actively dislike it) I wrote it up from memory.

* in September, Brick leaves the Criterion Channel and is replaced in the collection with Michael Mann's Thief. May add it to the list when that happens.

Note: These are very "what was on my mind after watching." No effort has been made to avoid spoilers, nor to make the plot clear for anyone who hasn't seen the movies in question. Decide for yourself if that's interesting to you.

Cotton Comes to Harlem I feel utterly unequipped to asses this movie. This and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song the following year are regularly cited as the progenitors of the blaxploitation genre. (This is arguably unfair, since both were made by Black men and dealt much more substantively with race than the white-directed films that followed them.) Its heroes are a couple of Black cops who are treated with suspicion both by their white colleagues and by the Black community they're meant to police. I'm not 100% clear on whether they're the good guys? I mean, I think they are. But the community's suspicion of them seems, I dunno... well-founded? They are working for The Man. And there's interesting discussion to the had there - is the the problem that the law is carried out by racists, or is the law itself racist? Can Black cops make anything better? But it feels like the film stacks the deck in Gravedigger and Coffin Ed's favor; the local Black church is run by a conman, the Back-to-Africa movement is, itself, a con, and the local Black Power movement is treated as an obstacle. Black cops really are the only force for justice here. Movie portrays Harlem itself as a warm, thriving, cultured community, but the people that make up that community are disloyal and easily fooled. Felt, to me, like the message was "just because they're cops doesn't mean they don't have Black soul," which, nowadays, we would call copaganda. But, then, do I know what I'm talking about? Do I know how much this played into or off of or against stereotypes from 1970? Was this a radical departure I don't have the context to appreciate? Is there substance I'm too white and too many decades removed to pick up on? Am I wildly overthinking this? I dunno. Seems like everyone involved was having a lot of fun, at least. That bit is contagious.

Across 110th Street And here's the other side of the "race film" equation. Another movie set in Harlem with a Black cop pulled between the police, the criminals, and the public, but this time the film is made by white people. I like it both more and less. Pro: this time the difficult position of Black cop who's treated with suspicion by both white cops and Black Harlemites is interrogated. Con: the Black cop has basically no personality other than "honest cop." Pro: the racism of the police force is explicit and systemic, as opposed to comically ineffectual. Con: the movie is shaped around a racist white cop who beats the shit out of Black people but slowly forms a bond with his Black partner. Pro: the Black criminal at the heart of the movie talks openly about how the white world has stacked the deck against him, and he's soulful and relateable. Con: so of course he dies in the end, because the only way privileged people know to sympathetize with minorities is to make them tragic (see also: The Boys in the Band, Philadelphia, and Brokeback Mountain for gay men). Additional con: this time Harlem is portrayed as a hellhole. Barely any of the community is even seen. At least the shot at the end, where the criminal realizes he's going to die and throws the bag of money off a roof and into a playground so the Black kids can pick it up before the cops reclaim it was powerful. But overall... yech. Cotton Comes to Harlem felt like it wasn't for me; this feels like it was 100% for me and I respect it less for that.

The Long Goodbye (rw) The shaggiest dog. Like much Altman, more compelling than good, but very compelling. Raymond Chandler's story is now set in the 1970's, but Philip Marlowe is the same Philip Marlowe of the 1930's. I get the sense there was always something inherently sad about Marlowe. Classic noir always portrayed its detectives as strong-willed men living on the border between the straightlaced world and its seedy underbelly, crossing back and forth freely but belonging to neither. But Chandler stresses the loneliness of it - or, at least, the people who've adapted Chandler do. Marlowe is a decent man in an indecent world, sorting things out, refusing to profit from misery, but unable to set anything truly right. Being a man out of step is here literalized by putting him forty years from the era where he belongs. His hardboiled internal monologue is now the incessant mutterings of the weird guy across the street who never stops smoking. Like I said: compelling! Kael's observation was spot on: everyone in the movie knows more about the mystery than he does, but he's the only one who cares. The mystery is pretty threadbare - Marlowe doesn't detect so much as end up in places and have people explain things to him. But I've seen it two or three times now, and it does linger.

Chinatown (rw) I confess I've always been impressed by Chinatown more than I've liked it. Its story structure is impeccable, its atmosphere is gorgeous, its noirish fatalism is raw and real, its deconstruction of the noir hero is well-observed, and it's full of clever detective tricks (the pocket watches, the tail light, the ruler). I've just never connected with it. Maybe it's a little too perfectly crafted. (I feel similar about Miller's Crossing.) And I've always been ambivalent about the ending. In Towne's original ending, Evelyn shoots Noah Cross dead and get arrested, and neither she nor Jake can tell the truth of why she did it, so she goes to jail for murder and her daughter is in the wind. Polansky proposed the ending that exists now, where Evelyn just dies, Cross wins, and Jake walks away devastated. It communicates the same thing: Jake's attempt to get smart and play all the sides off each other instead of just helping Evelyn escape blows up in his face at the expense of the woman he cares about and any sense of real justice. And it does this more dramatically and efficiently than Towne's original ending. But it also treats Evelyn as narratively disposable, and hands the daughter over to the man who raped Evelyn and murdered her husband. It makes the women suffer more to punch up the ending. But can I honestly say that Towne's ending is the better one? It is thematically equal, dramatically inferior, but would distract me less. Not sure what the calculus comes out to there. Maybe there should be a third option. Anyway! A perfect little contraption. Belongs under a glass dome.

Night Moves (rw) Ah yeah, the good shit. This is my quintessential 70's noir. This is three movies in a row about detectives. Thing is, the classic era wasn't as chockablock with hardboiled detectives as we think; most of those movies starred criminals, cops, and boring dudes seduced to the darkness by a pair of legs. Gumshoes just left the strongest impressions. (The genre is said to begin with Maltese Falcon and end with Touch of Evil, after all.) So when the post-Code 70's decided to pick the genre back up while picking it apart, it makes sense that they went for the 'tecs first. The Long Goodbye dragged the 30's detective into the 70's, and Chinatown went back to the 30's with a 70's sensibility. But Night Moves was about detecting in the Watergate era, and how that changed the archetype. Harry Moseby is the detective so obsessed with finding the truth that he might just ruin his life looking for it, like the straight story will somehow fix everything that's broken, like it'll bring back a murdered teenager and repair his marriage and give him a reason to forgive the woman who fucked him just to distract him from some smuggling. When he's got time to kill, he takes out a little, magnetic chess set and recreates a famous old game, where three knight moves (get it?) would have led to a beautiful checkmate had the player just seen it. He keeps going, self-destructing, because he can't stand the idea that the perfect move is there if he can just find it. And, no matter how much we see it destroy him, we, the audience, want him to keep going; we expect a satisfying resolution to the mystery. That's what we need from a detective picture; one character flat-out compares Harry to Sam Spade. But what if the truth is just... Watergate? Just some prick ruining things for selfish reasons? Nothing grand, nothing satisfying. Nothing could be more noir, or more neo-, than that.

Farewell, My Lovely Sometimes the only thing that makes a noir neo- is that it's in color and all the blood, tits, and racism from the books they're based on get put back in. This second stab at Chandler is competant but not much more than that. Mitchum works as Philip Marlowe, but Chandler's dialogue feels off here, like lines that worked on the page don't work aloud, even though they did when Bogie said them. I'll chalk it up to workmanlike but uninspired direction. (Dang this looks bland so soon after Chinatown.) Moose Malloy is a great character, and perfectly cast. (Wasn't sure at first, but it's true.) Some other interesting cats show up and vanish - the tough brothel madam based on Brenda Allen comes to mind, though she's treated with oddly more disdain than most of the other hoods and is dispatched quicker. In general, the more overt racism and misogyny doesn't seem to do anything except make the movie "edgier" than earlier attempts at the same material, and it reads kinda try-hard. But it mostly holds together. *shrug*

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (dnrw) Didn't care for this at all. Can't tell if the script was treated as a jumping-off point or if the dialogue is 100% improvised, but it just drags on forever and is never that interesting. Keeps treating us to scenes from the strip club like they're the opera scenes in Amadeus, and, whatever, I don't expect burlesque to be Mozart, but Cosmo keeps saying they're an artful, classy joint, and I keep waiting for the show to be more than cheap, lazy camp. How do you make gratuitious nudity boring? Mind you, none of this is bad as a rule - I love digressions and can enjoy good sleaze, and it's clear the filmmakers care about what they're making. They just did not sell it in a way I wanted to buy. Can't remember what edit I watched; I hope it was the 135 minute one, because I cannot imagine there being a longer edit out there.

The American Friend (dnrw) It's weird that this is Patricia Highsmith, right? That Dennis Hopper is playing Tom Ripley? In a cowboy hat? I gather that Minghella's version wasn't true to the source, but I do love that movie, and this is a long, long way from that. This Mr. Ripley isn't even particularly talented! Anyway, this has one really great sequence, where a regular guy has been coerced by crooks into murdering someone on a train platform, and, when the moment comes to shoot, he doesn't. And what follows is a prolonged sequence of an amateur trying to surreptitiously tail a guy across a train station and onto another train, and all the while you're not sure... is he going to do it? is he going to chicken out? is he going to do it so badly he gets caught? It's hard not to put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, wondering how you would handle the situation, whether you could do it, whether you could act on impulse before your conscience could catch up with you. It drags on a long while and this time it's a good thing. Didn't much like the rest of the movie, it's shapeless and often kind of corny, and the central plot hook is contrived. (It's also very weird that this is the only Wim Wenders I've seen.) But, hey, I got one excellent sequence, not gonna complain.

The Big Sleep Unlike the 1946 film, I can follow the plot of this Big Sleep. But, also unlike the 1946 version, this one isn't any damn fun. Mitchum is back as Marlowe (this is three Marlowes in five years, btw), and this time it's set in the 70's and in England, for some reason. I don't find this offensive, but neither do I see what it accomplishes? Most of the cast is still American. (Hi Jimmy!) Still holds together, but even less well than Farewell, My Lovely. But I do find it interesting that the neo-noir era keeps returning to Chandler while it's pretty much left Hammet behind (inasmuch as someone whose genes are spread wide through the whole genre can be left behind). Spade and the Continental Op, straightshooting tough guys who come out on top in the end, seem antiquated in the (post-)modern era. But Marlowe's goodness being out of sync with the world around him only seems more poignant the further you take him from his own time. Nowadays you can really only do Hammett as pastiche, but I sense that you could still play Chandler straight.

Eyes of Laura Mars The most De Palma movie I've seen not made by De Palma, complete with POV shots, paranormal hoodoo, and fixation with sex, death, and whether images of such are art or exploitation (or both). Laura Mars takes photographs of naked women in violent tableux, and has gotten quite famous doing so, but is it damaging to women? The movie has more than a superficial engagement with this topic, but only slightly more than superficial. Kept imagining a movie that is about 30% less serial killer story and 30% more art conversations. (But, then, I have an art degree and have never murdered anyone, so.) Like, museums are full of Biblical paintings full of nude women and slaughter, sometimes both at once, and they're called masterpieces. Most all of them were painted by men on commission from other men. Now Laura Mars makes similar images in modern trappings, and has models made of flesh and blood rather than paint, and it's scandalous? Why is it only controversial once women are getting paid for it? On the other hand, is this just the master's tools? Is she subverting or challenging the male gaze, or just profiting off of it? Or is a woman profiting off of it, itself, a subversion? Is it subversive enough to account for how it commodifies female bodies? These questions are pretty clearly relevant to the movie itself, and the movies in general, especially after the fall of the Hays Code when people were really unrestrained with the blood and boobies. And, heck, the lead is played by the star of Bonnie and Clyde! All this is to say: I wish the movie were as interested in these questions as I am. What's there is a mildly diverting B-picture. There's one great bit where Laura's seeing through the killer's eyes (that's the hook, she gets visions from the murderer's POV; no, this is never explained) and he's RIGHT BEHIND HER, so there's a chase where she charges across an empty room only able to see her own fleeing self from ten feet behind. That was pretty great! And her first kiss with the detective (because you could see a mile away that the detective and the woman he's supposed to protect are gonna fall in love) is immediately followed by the two freaking out about how nonsensical it is for them to fall in love with each other, because she's literally mourning multiple deaths and he's being wildly unprofessional, and then they go back to making out. That bit was great, too. The rest... enh.

The Onion Field What starts off as a seemingly not-that-noirish cops-vs-crooks procedural turns into an agonizingly protracted look at the legal system, with the ultimate argument that the very idea of the law ever resulting in justice is a lie. Hoo! I have to say, I'm impressed. There's a scene where a lawyer - whom I'm not sure is even named, he's like the seventh of thirteen we've met - literally quits the law over how long this court case about two guys shooting a cop has taken. He says the cop who was murdered has been forgotten, his partner has never gotten to move on because the case has lasted eight years, nothing has been accomplished, and they should let the two criminals walk and jail all the judges and lawyers instead. It's awesome! The script is loaded with digressions and unnecessary details, just the way I like it. Can't say I'm impressed with the execution. Nothing is wrong, exactly, but the performances all seem a tad melodramatic or a tad uninspired. Camerawork is, again, purely functional. It's no masterpiece. But that second half worked for me. (And it's Ted Danson's first movie! He did great.)

Body Heat (rw) Let's say up front that this is a handsomely-made movie. Probably the best looking thing on the list since Night Moves. Nothing I've seen better captures the swelter of an East Coast heatwave, or the lusty feeling of being too hot to bang and going at it regardless. Kathleen Turner sells the hell out of a femme fatale. There are a lot of good lines and good performances (Ted Danson is back and having the time of his life). I want to get all that out of the way, because this is a movie heavily modeled after Double Indemnity, and I wanted to discuss its merits before I get into why inviting that comparison doesn't help the movie out. In a lot of ways, it's the same rules as the Robert Mitchum Marlowe movies - do Double Indemnity but amp up the sex and violence. And, to a degree it works. (At least, the sex does, dunno that Double Indemnity was crying out for explosions.) But the plot is amped as well, and gets downright silly. Yeah, Mrs. Dietrichson seduces Walter Neff so he'll off her husband, but Neff clocks that pretty early and goes along with it anyway. Everything beyond that is two people keeping too big a secret and slowly turning on each other. But here? For the twists to work Matty has to be, from frame one, playing four-dimensional chess on the order of Senator Palpatine, and its about as plausible. (Exactly how did she know, after she rebuffed Ned, he would figure out her local bar and go looking for her at the exact hour she was there?) It's already kind of weird to be using the spider woman trope in 1981, but to make her MORE sexually conniving and mercenary than she was in the 40's is... not great. As lurid trash, it's pretty fun for a while, but some noir stuff can't just be updated, it needs to be subverted or it doesn't justify its existence.

Blow Out Brian De Palma has two categories of movie: he's got his mainstream, director-for-hire fare, where his voice is either reigned in or indulged in isolated sequences that don't always jive with the rest fo the film, and then there's his Brian De Palma movies. My mistake, it seems, is having seen several for-hires from throughout his career - The Untouchables (fine enough), Carlito's Way (ditto, but less), Mission: Impossible (enh) - but had only seen De Palma-ass movies from his late period (Femme Fatale and The Black Dahlia, both of which I think are garbage). All this to say: Blow Out was my first classic-era De Palma, and holy fucking shit dudes. This was (with caveats) my absolute and entire jam. I said I could enjoy good sleaze, and this is good friggin' sleaze. (Though far short of De Palma at his sleaziest, mercifully.) The splitscreens, the diopter shots, the canted angles, how does he make so many shlocky things work?! John Travolta's sound tech goes out to get fresh wind fx for the movie he's working on, and we get this wonderful sequence of visuals following sounds as he turns his attention and his microphone to various noises - a couple on a walk, a frog, an owl, a buzzing street lamp. Later, as he listens back to the footage, the same sequence plays again, but this time from his POV; we're seeing his memory as guided by the same sequence of sounds, now recreated with different shots, as he moves his pencil in the air mimicking the microphone. When he mixes and edits sounds, we hear the literal soundtrack of the movie we are watching get mixed and edited by the person on screen. And as he tries to unravel a murder mystery, he uses what's at hand: magnetic tape, flatbed editors, an animation camera to turn still photos from the crime scene into a film and sync it with the audio he recorded; it's forensics using only the tools of the editing room. As someone who's spent some time in college editing rooms, this is a hoot and a half. Loses a bit of steam as it goes on and the film nerd stuff gives way to a more traditional thriller, but rallies for a sound-tech-centered final setpiece, which steadily builds to such madcap heights you can feel the air thinning, before oddly cutting its own tension and then trying to build it back up again. It doesn't work as well the second time. But then, that shot right after the climax? Damn. Conflicted on how the movie treats the female lead. I get why feminist film theorists are so divided on De Palma. His stuff is full of things feminists (rightly) criticize, full of women getting naked when they're not getting stabbed, but he also clearly finds women fascinating and has them do empowered and unexpected things, and there are many feminist reads of his movies. Call it a mixed bag. But even when he's doing tropey shit, he explores the tropes in unexpected ways. Definitely the best movie so far that I hadn't already seen.

Cutter's Way (rw) Alex Cutter is pitched to us as an obnoxious-but-sympathetic son of a bitch, and, you know, two out of three ain't bad. Watched this during my 2020 neo-noir kick and considered skipping it this time because I really didn't enjoy it. Found it a little more compelling this go around, while being reminded of why my feelings were room temp before. Thematically, I'm onboard: it's about a guy, Cutter, getting it in his head that he's found a murderer and needs to bring him to justice, and his friend, Bone, who intermittently helps him because he feels bad that Cutter lost his arm, leg, and eye in Nam and he also feels guilty for being in love with Cutter's wife. The question of whether the guy they're trying to bring down actually did it is intentionally undefined, and arguably unimportant; they've got personal reasons to see this through. Postmodern and noirish, fixated with the inability to ever fully know the truth of anything, but starring people so broken by society that they're desperate for certainty. (Pretty obvious parallels to Vietnam.) Cutter's a drunk and kind of an asshole, but understandably so. Bone's shiftlessness is the other response to a lack of meaning in the world, to the point where making a decision, any decision, feels like character growth, even if it's maybe killing a guy whose guilt is entirely theoretical. So, yeah, I'm down with all of this! A- in outline form. It's just that Cutter is so uninterestingly unpleasant and no one else on screen is compelling enough to make up for it. His drunken windups are tedious and his sanctimonious speeches about what the war was like are, well, true and accurate but also obviously manipulative. It's two hours with two miserable people, and I think Cutter's constant chatter is supposed to be the comic relief but it's a little too accurate to drunken rambling, which isn't funny if you're not also drunk. He's just tedious, irritating, and periodically racist. Pass.

Blood Simple (rw) I'm pretty cool on the Coens - there are things I've liked, even loved, in every Coen film I've seen, but I always come away dissatisfied. For a while, I kept going to their movies because I was sure eventually I'd love one without qualification. No Country for Old Men came close, the first two acts being master classes in sustained tension. But then the third act is all about denying closure: the protagonist is murdered offscreen, the villain's motives are never explained, and it ends with an existentialist speech about the unfathomable cruelty of the world. And it just doesn't land for me. The archness of the Coen's dialogue, the fussiness of their set design, the kinda-intimate, kinda-awkward, kinda-funny closeness of the camera's singles, it cannot sell me on a devastating meditation about meaninglessness. It's only ever sold me on the Coens' own cleverness. And that archness, that distancing, has typified every one of their movies I've come close to loving. Which is a long-ass preamble to saying, holy heck, I was not prepared for their very first movie to be the one I'd been looking for! I watched it last year and it remains true on rewatch: Blood Simple works like gangbusters. It's kind of Double Indemnity (again) but played as a comedy of errors, minus the comedy: two people romantically involved feeling their trust unravel after a murder. And I think the first thing that works for me is that utter lack of comedy. It's loaded with the Coens' trademark ironies - mostly dramatic in this case - but it's all played straight. Unlike the usual lead/femme fatale relationship, where distrust brews as the movie goes on, the audience knows the two main characters can trust each other. There are no secret duplicitous motives waiting to be revealed. The audience also know why they don't trust each other. (And it's all communicated wordlessly, btw: a character enters a scene and we know, based on the information that character has, how it looks to them and what suspicions it would arouse, even as we know the truth of it). The second thing that works is, weirdly, that the characters aren't very interesting?! Ray and Abby have almost no characterization. Outside of a general likability, they are blank slates. This is a weakness in most films, but, given the agonizingly long, wordless sequences where they dispose of bodies or hide from gunfire, you're left thinking not "what will Ray/Abby do in this scenario," because Ray and Abby are relatively elemental and undefined, but "what would I do in this scenario?" Which creates an exquisite tension but also, weirdly, creates more empathy than I feel for the Coens' usual cast of personalities. It's supposed to work the other way around! Truly enjoyable throughout but absolutely wonderful in the suspenseful-as-hell climax. Good shit right here.

Body Double The thing about erotic thrillers is everything that matters is in the name. Is it thrilling? Is it erotic? Good; all else is secondary. De Palma set out to make the most lurid, voyeuristic, horny, violent, shocking, steamy movie he could come up with, and its success was not strictly dependent on the lead's acting ability or the verisimilitude of the plot. But what are we, the modern audience, to make of it once 37 years have passed and, by today's standards, the eroticism is quite tame and the twists are no longer shocking? Then we're left with a nonsensical riff on Vertigo, a specularization of women that is very hard to justify, and lead actor made of pulped wood. De Palma's obsessions don't cohere into anything more this time; the bits stolen from Hitchcock aren't repurposed to new ends, it really is just Hitch with more tits and less brains. (I mean, I still haven't seen Vertigo, but I feel 100% confident in that statement.) The diopter shots and rear-projections this time look cheap (literally so, apparently; this had 1/3 the budget of Blow Out). There are some mildly interesting setpieces, but nothing compared to Travolta's auditory reconstructions or car chase where he tries to tail a subway train from street level even if it means driving through a frickin parade like an inverted French Connection, goddamn Blow Out was a good movie! Anyway. Melanie Griffith seems to be having fun, at least. I guess I had a little as well, but it was, at best, diverting, and a real letdown.

The Hit Surprised by how much I enjoyed this one. Terrance Stamp flips on the mob and spends ten years living a life of ease in Spain, waiting for the day they find and kill him. Movie kicks off when they do find him, and what follows is a ramshackle road movie as John Hurt and a young Tim Roth attempt to drive him to Paris so they can shoot him in front of his old boss. Stamp is magnetic. He's spent a decade reading philosophy and seems utterly prepared for death, so he spends the trip humming, philosophizing, and being friendly with his captors when he's not winding them up. It remains unclear to the end whether the discord he sews between Roth and Hurt is part of some larger plan of escape or just for shits and giggles. There's also a decent amount of plot for a movie that's not terribly plot-driven - just about every part of the kidnapping has tiny hitches the kidnappers aren't prepared for, and each has film-long repercussions, drawing the cops closer and somehow sticking Laura del Sol in their backseat. The ongoing questions are when Stamp will die, whether del Sol will die, and whether Roth will be able to pull the trigger. In the end, it's actually a meditation on ethics and mortality, but in a quiet and often funny way. It's not going to go down as one of my new favs, but it was a nice way to spend a couple hours.

Trouble in Mind (dnrw) I fucking hated this movie. It's been many months since I watched it, do I remember what I hated most? Was it the bit where a couple of country bumpkins who've come to the city walk into a diner and Mr. Bumpkin clocks that the one Black guy in the back as obviously a criminal despite never having seen him before? Was it the part where Kris Kristofferson won't stop hounding Mrs. Bumpkin no matter how many times she demands to be left alone, and it's played as romantic because obviously he knows what she needs better than she does? Or is it the part where Mr. Bumpkin reluctantly takes a job from the Obvious Criminal (who is, in fact, a criminal, and the only named Black character in the movie if I remember correctly, draw your own conclusions) and, within a week, has become a full-blown hood, which is exemplified by a lot, like, a lot of queer-coding? The answer to all three questions is yes. It's also fucking boring. Even out-of-drag Divine's performance as the villain can't save it.

Manhunter 'sfine? I've still never seen Silence of the Lambs, nor any of the Hopkins Lecter movies, nor, indeed, any full episode of the show. So the unheimlich others get seeing Brian Cox play Hannibal didn't come into play. Cox does a good job with him, but he's barely there. Shame, cuz he's the most interesting part of the movie. Honestly, there's a lot of interesting stuff that's barely there. Will Graham being a guy who gets into the heads of serial killers is explored well enough, and Mann knows how to direct a police procedural such that it's both contemplative and propulsive. But all the other themes it points at? Will's fear that he understands murderers a little too well? Hannibal trying to nudge him towards becoming one? Whatever dance Hannibal and Tooth Fairy are doing? What Tooth Fairy's deal is, anyway? (Why does he wear fake teeth and bite things? Why is he fixated on the red dragon? Does the bit where he says "Francis is gone forever" mean he has DID?) None of it goes anywhere or amounts to anything. I mean, it's certainly more interesting with this stuff than without, but it has that feel of a book that's been pared of its interesting bits to fit the runtime (or, alternately, pulp that's been sloppily elevated). I still haven't made my mind up on Mann's cold, precise camera work, but at least it gives me something to look at. It's fine! This is fine.

Mona Lisa (rw) Gave this one another shot. Bob Hoskins is wonderful as a hood out of his depth in classy places, quick to anger but just as quick to let anger go (the opening sequence where he's screaming on his ex-wife's doorstep, hurling trash cans at her house, and one minute later thrilled to see his old car, is pretty nice). And Cathy Tyson's working girl is a subtler kind of fascinating, exuding a mixture of coldness and kindness. It's just... this is ultimately a story about how heartbreaking it is when the girl you like is gay, right? It's Weezer's Pink Triangle: The Movie. It's not homophobic, exactly - Simone isn't demonized for being a lesbian - but it's still, like, "man, this straight white guy's pain is so much more interesting than the Black queer sex worker's." And when he's yelling "you woulda done it!" at the end, I can't tell if we're supposed to agree with him. Seems pretty clear that she wouldn'ta done it, at least not without there being some reveal about her character that doesn't happen, but I don't think the ending works if we don't agree with him, so... I'm like 70% sure the movie does Simone dirty there. For the first half, their growing relationship feels genuine and natural, and, honestly, the story being about a real bond that unfortunately means different things to each party could work if it didn't end with a gun and a sock in the jaw. Shape feels jagged as well; what feels like the end of the second act or so turns out to be the climax. And some of the symbolism is... well, ok, Simone gives George money to buy more appropriate clothes for hanging out in high end hotels, and he gets a tan leather jacket and a Hawaiian shirt, and their first proper bonding moment is when she takes him out for actual clothes. For the rest of the movie he is rocking double-breasted suits (not sure I agree with the striped tie, but it was the eighties, whaddya gonna do?). Then, in the second half, she sends him off looking for her old streetwalker friend, and now he looks completely out of place in the strip clubs and bordellos. So far so good. But then they have this run-in where her old pimp pulls a knife and cuts George's arm, so, with his nice shirt torn and it not safe going home (I guess?) he starts wearing the Hawaiian shirt again. So around the time he's starting to realize he doesn't really belong in Simone's world or the lowlife world he came from anymore, he's running around with the classy double-breasted suit jacket over the garish Hawaiian shirt, and, yeah, bit on the nose guys. Anyway, it has good bits, I just feel like a movie that asks me to feel for the guy punching a gay, Black woman in the face needs to work harder to earn it. Bit of wasted talent.

The Bedroom Window Starts well. Man starts an affair with his boss' wife, their first night together she witnesses an attempted murder from his window, she worries going to the police will reveal the affair to her husband, so the man reports her testimony to the cops claiming he's the one who saw it. Young Isabelle Huppert is the perfect woman for a guy to risk his career on a crush over, and Young Steve Guttenberg is the perfect balance of affability and amorality. And it flows great - picks just the right media to res. So then he's talking to the cops, telling them what she told him, and they ask questions he forgot to ask her - was the perp's jacket a blazer or a windbreaker? - and he has to guess. Then he gets called into the police lineup, and one guy matches her description really well, but is it just because he's wearing his red hair the way she described it? He can't be sure, doesn't finger any of them. He finds out the cops were pretty certain about one of the guys, so he follows the one he thinks it was around, looking for more evidence, and another girl is attacked right outside a bar he knows the redhead was at. Now he's certain! But he shows the boss' wife the guy and she's not certain, and she reminds him they don't even know if the guy he followed is the same guy the police suspected! And as he feeds more evidence to the cops, he has to lie more, because he can't exactly say he was tailing the guy around the city. So, I'm all in now. Maybe it's because I'd so recently rewatched Night Moves and Cutter's Way, but this seems like another story about uncertainty. He's really certain about the guy because it fits narratively, and we, the audience, feel the same. But he's not actually a witness, he doesn't have actual evidence, he's fitting bits and pieces together like a conspiracy theorist. He's fixating on what he wants to be true. Sign me up! But then it turns out he's 100% correct about who the killer is but his lies are found out and now the cops think he's the killer and I realize, oh, no, this movie isn't nearly as smart as I thought it was. Egg on my face! What transpires for the remaining half of the runtime is goofy as hell, and someone with shlockier sensibilities could have made a meal of it, but Hanson, despite being a Corman protege, takes this silliness seriously in the all wrong ways. Next!

Homicide (rw? I think I saw most of this on TV one time) Homicide centers around the conflicted loyalties of a Jewish cop. It opens with the Jewish cop and his white gentile partner taking over a case with a Black perp from some Black FBI agents. The media is making a big thing about the racial implications of the mostly white cops chasing down a Black man in a Black neighborhood. And inside of 15 minutes the FBI agent is calling the lead a k*ke and the gentile cop is calling the FBI agent a f****t and there's all kinds of invective for Black people. The film is announcing its intentions out the gate: this movie is about race. But the issue here is David Mamet doesn't care about race as anything other than a dramatic device. He's the Ubisoft of filmmakers, having no coherent perspective on social issues but expecting accolades for even bringing them up. Mamet is Jewish (though lead actor Joe Mantegna definitely is not) but what is his position on the Jewish diaspora? The whole deal is Mantegna gets stuck with a petty homicide case instead of the big one they just pinched from the Feds, where a Jewish candy shop owner gets shot in what looks like a stickup. Her family tries to appeal to his Jewishness to get him to take the case seriously, and, after giving them the brush-off for a long time, finally starts following through out of guilt, finding bits and pieces of what may or may not be a conspiracy, with Zionist gun runners and underground neo-Nazis. But, again: all of these are just dramatic devices. Mantegna's Jewishness (those words will never not sound ridiculous together) has always been a liability for him as a cop (we are told, not shown), and taking the case seriously is a reclamation of identity. The Jews he finds community with sold tommyguns to revolutionaries during the founding of Israel. These Jews end up blackmailing him to get a document from the evidence room. So: what is the film's position on placing stock in one's Jewish identity? What is its position on Israel? What is its opinion on Palestine? Because all three come up! And the answer is: Mamet doesn't care. You can read it a lot of different ways. Someone with more context and more patience than me could probably deduce what the de facto message is, the way Chris Franklin deduced the de facto message of Far Cry V despite the game's efforts not to have one, but I'm not going to. Mantegna's attempt to reconnect with his Jewishness gets his partner killed, gets the guy he was supposed to bring in alive shot dead, gets him possibly permanent injuries, gets him on camera blowing up a store that's a front for white nationalists, and all for nothing because the "clues" he found (pretty much exclusively by coincidence) were unconnected nothings. The problem is either his Jewishness, or his lifelong failure to connect with his Jewishness until late in life. Mamet doesn't give a shit. (Like, Mamet canonically doesn't give a shit: he is on record saying social context is meaningless, characters only exist to serve the plot, and there are no deeper meanings in fiction.) Mamet's ping-pong dialogue is fun, as always, and there are some neat ideas and characters, but it's all in service of a big nothing that needed to be a something to work.

Swoon So much I could talk about, let's keep it to the most interesting bits. Hommes Fatales: a thing about classic noir that it was fascinated by the marginal but had to keep it in the margins. Liberated women, queer-coded killers, Black jazz players, broke thieves; they were the main event, they were what audiences wanted to see, they were what made the movies fun. But the ending always had to reassert straightlaced straight, white, middle-class male society as unshakeable. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy demanded, both ideologically and via the Hays Code, that anyone outside these norms be punished, reformed, or dead by the movie's end. The only way to make them the heroes was to play their deaths for tragedy. It is unsurprising that neo-noir would take the queer-coded villains and make them the protagonists. Implicature: This is the story of Leopold and Loeb, murderers famous for being queer, and what's interesting is how the queerness in the first half exists entirely outside of language. Like, it's kind of amazing for a movie from 1992 to be this gay - we watch Nathan and Dickie kiss, undress, masturbate, fuck; hell, they wear wedding rings when they're alone together. But it's never verbalized. Sex is referred to as "your reward" or "what you wanted" or "best time." Dickie says he's going to have "the girls over," and it turns out "the girls" are a bunch of drag queens, but this is never acknowledged. Nathan at one point lists off a bunch of famous men - Oscar Wild, E.M. Forster, Frederick the Great - but, though the commonality between them is obvious (they were all gay), it's left the the audience to recognize it. When their queerness is finally verbalized in the second half, it's first in the language of pathology - a psychiatrist describing their "perversions" and "misuse" of their "organs" before the court, which has to be cleared of women because it's so inappropriate - and then with slurs from the man who murders Dickie in jail (a murder which is written off with no investigation because the victim is a gay prisoner instead of a L&L's victim, a child of a wealthy family). I don't know if I'd have noticed this if I hadn't read Chip Delany describing his experience as a gay man in the 50's existing almost entirely outside of language, the only language at the time being that of heteronormativity. Murder as Love Story: L&L exchange sex as payment for the other commiting crimes; it's foreplay. Their statements to the police where they disagree over who's to blame is a lover's quarrel. Their sentencing is a marriage. Nathan performs his own funeral rites over Dickie's body after he dies on the operating table. They are, in their way, together til death did they part. This is the relationship they can have. That it does all this without romanticizing the murder itself or valorizing L&L as humans is frankly incredible.

Suture (rw) The pitch: at the funeral for his father, wealthy Vincent Towers meets his long lost half brother Clay Arlington. It is implied Clay is a child from out of wedlock, possibly an affair; no one knows Vincent has a half-brother but him and Clay. Vincent invites Clay out to his fancy-ass home in Arizona. Thing is, Vincent is suspected (correctly) by the police of having murdered his father, and, due to a striking family resemblence, he's brought Clay to his home to fake his own death. He finagles Clay into wearing his clothes and driving his car, and then blows the car up and flees the state, leaving the cops to think him dead. Thing is, Clay survives, but with amnesia. The doctors tell him he's Vincent, and he has no reason to disagree. Any discrepancy in the way he looks is dismissed as the result of reconstructive surgery after the explosion. So Clay Arlington resumes Vincent Towers' life, without knowing Clay Arlington even exists. The twist: Clay and Vincent are both white, but Vincent is played by Michael Harris, a white actor, and Clay is played by Dennis Haysbert, a Black actor. "Ian, if there's just the two of them, how do you know it's not Harris playing a Black character?" Glad you asked! It is most explicitly obvious during a scene where Vincent/Clay's surgeon-cum-girlfriend essentially bringing up phrenology to explain how Vincent/Clay couldn't possibly have murdered his father, describing straight hair, thin lips, and a Greco-Roman nose Haysbert very clearly doesn't have. But, let's be honest: we knew well beforehand that the rich-as-fuck asshole living in a huge, modern house and living it up in Arizona high society was white. Though Clay is, canonically, white, he lives an poor and underprivileged life common to Black men in America. Though the film's title officially refers to the many stitches holding Vincent/Clay's face together after the accident, "suture" is a film theory term, referring to the way a film audience gets wrapped up - sutured - in the world of the movie, choosing to forget the outside world and pretend the story is real. The usage is ironic, because the audience cannot be sutured in; we cannot, and are not expected to, suspend our disbelief that Clay is white. We are deliberately distanced. Consequently this is a movie to be thought about, not to to be felt. It has the shape of a Hitchcockian thriller but it can't evoke the emotions of one. You can see the scaffolding - "ah, yes, this is the part of a thriller where one man hides while another stalks him with a gun, clever." I feel ill-suited to comment on what the filmmakers are saying about race. I could venture a guess about the ending, where the psychiatrist, the only one who knows the truth about Clay, says he can never truly be happy living the lie of being Vincent Towers, while we see photographs of Clay/Vincent seemingly living an extremely happy life: society says white men simply belong at the top more than Black men do, but, if the roles could be reversed, the latter would slot in seamlessly. Maybe??? Of all the movies in this collection, this is the one I'd most want to read an essay on (followed by Swoon).

The Last Seduction (dnrw) No, no, no, I am not rewataching this piece of shit movie.

Brick (rw) Here's my weird contention: Brick is in color and in widescreen, but, besides that? There's nothing neo- about this noir. There's no swearing except "hell." (I always thought Tug said "goddamn" at one point but, no, he's calling The Pin "gothed-up.") There's a lot of discussion of sex, but always through implication, and the only deleted scene is the one that removed ambiguity about what Brendan and Laura get up to after kissing. There's nothing postmodern or subversive - yes, the hook is it's set in high school, but the big twist is that it takes this very seriously. It mines it for jokes, yes, but the drama is authentic. In fact, making the gumshoe a high school student, his jadedness an obvious front, still too young to be as hard as he tries to be, just makes the drama hit harder. Sam Spade if Sam Spade were allowed to cry. I've always found it an interesting counterpoint to The Good German, a movie that fastidiously mimics the aesthetics of classic noir - down to even using period-appropriate sound recording - but is wholly neo- in construction. Brick could get approved by the Hays Code. Its vibe, its plot about a detective playing a bunch of criminals against each other, even its slang ("bulls," "yegg," "flopped") are all taken directly from Hammett. It's not even stealing from noir, it's stealing from what noir stole from! It's a perfect curtain call for the collection: the final film is both the most contemporary and the most classic. It's also - but for the strong case you could make for Night Moves - the best movie on the list. It's even more appropriate for me, personally: this was where it all started for me and noir. I saw this in theaters when it came out and loved it. It was probably my favorite movie for some time. It gave me a taste for pulpy crime movies which I only, years later, realized were neo-noir. This is why I looked into Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and In Bruges. I've seen it more times than any film on this list, by a factor of at least 3. It's why I will always adore Rian Johnson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's the best-looking half-million-dollar movie I've ever seen. (Indie filmmakers, take fucking notes.) I even did a script analysis of this, and, yes, it follows the formula, but so tightly and with so much style. Did you notice that he says several of the sequence tensions out loud? ("I just want to find her." "Show of hands.") I notice new things each time I see it - this time it was how "brushing Brendan's hair out of his face" is Em's move, making him look more like he does in the flashback, and how Laura does the same to him as she's seducing him, in the moment when he misses Em the hardest. It isn't perfect. It's recreated noir so faithfully that the Innocent Girl dies, the Femme Fatale uses intimacy as a weapon, and none of the women ever appear in a scene together. 1940's gender politics maybe don't need to be revisited. They say be critical of the media you love, and it applies here most of all: it is a real criticism of something I love immensely.

#film noir #neo-noir #criterion channel

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somehow-progressing · 3 years

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WTNV 182 / 132 Connection

So this isn't the first time Cecil's mother and trees have been connected.

In 132, exactly fifty episodes previously, her bedtime story was about a boy who turned into a tree.

I reviewed this episode to look for connections and..

Oh, boy.

So, first off, the boy's interest in science obviously reminded me of Carlos, right? But then the similarities stop there.

And start leading towards Cecil.

(The rest under the cut)

We now know that there was a time where Cecil's father was in the picture, although it may have been when Cecil was very, very young. The family dynamic in 132's story matches his exactly: a mother, a father, a sister, the youngest son.

My first thought was, "Well, this can't be a parallel to Cecil's family. They're far too loving, which doesn't match up with what we know of Cecil's mother at all." But then I looked closer.

The boy's parents are verbally insistent that they love him, to the point where it comes off as "I'm your parent so I have to love you, it's my job to do everything for you." Putting pressure, and a sense of guilt, on the child while never actually living up to their word.

"He knew he would never need his father to give his life for him. He just wanted his father to show concern for his health. He knew he would never need his mother to give away all of her belongings for him. He just wanted his mother to show interest in his curiosity." - 132, Bedtime Story

His parent's love is very idealistic, while not being one that they actually show or.. Possibly, feel. They don't show concern for his health, or value his interests. He's their son, but he's not anything more.

"My mom seems really proud of me too! She hid from me for three days! Like, the longest ever! And she’s covered all the mirrors in my house. I’m not sure why, but I think it must be because of pride. Being proud does all sorts of things… to a… um… to a person." - 33, Cassettes

Cecil's own experiences parallel this. He interprets her love through ideals, to fill the void of it in actuality. When you're a child, you think that a parent is supposed to be loving. They're supposed to care. When they don't, or they leave you alone in your house, or they ignore you, or they tell you not to cry after you've been injured because "you don't even exist," your brain doesn't know how to process it. Like he did with his memory loss in 182, Cecil tries to rationalize it. Mother abandoned me because she's proud, because she cares about me- because she's my mother and she has to.

The boy's relationship with his sister parallels Cecil's as well.

"His sister would tell him, “I hate you, brother.” But their parents would instruct her to be nice and so she would say sarcastically, “I love you, brother. I would climb the tallest mountain for you." - 132, Bedtime Story

"He knew his sister really loved him. He knew he would never need his sister to climb a mountain for him. He just wanted his sister to believe him that mountains were real." - 132, Bedtime Story

As mentioned in Ghost Stories, Cecil has had a very difficult relationship with his sister.

"See, my mother disappeared when I was only 14. Abby had just started school, but she had to drop out to return home and raise me, and I thought that Mom would be back at any moment, like maybe she was away on business. Our out for a walk. Or just hiding.

But Mom did not come back, not for my entire childhood. And I was petulant and subversive, and Abby was reserved and controlling and she blamed me for having dropped out of school and I blamed her for just… not being Mom.

But in our adulthood, my mother did return home, sick and sorry to two children who barely spoke to each other in the morning." - Ghost Stories

Which would match up with the sister's animosity with him.

The difference here is that, out of the entire family, the boy knows that his sister actually loves him. And in Cecil's life, his sister is the only one he has made amends with. No matter how she treated him in the past, they are part of the same family once again. (As of 182, at least.)

Here, a direct parallel to Cecil is established. This boy's life mirrors his own.

Now, here's where it gets interesting.

Just as Cecil enters the tree, the boy is transformed into one

"He spent a lot of time in those next several months watching his family, their grief at his loss. His parents’ happiness at his sister’s education." - 132, Bedtime Story

There has been a lot of theorizing that Cecil's mother may have been covering the mirrors and leaving flowers because she was mourning Cecil, and not just his father.

"What was it your mother said before she left home when you were a teenager? Did she tell you she was an oracle?" - 171, Go to The Mirror?

It's entirely possible that Cecil's mother knew what would happen after she left, or had enough of an idea to subconsciously work it into a bedtime story.

It's possible that this is a glimpse of a timeline where Cecil really didn't survive entering the tree. His parents mourn, and his sister is allowed to pursue the education she wanted. (Which, in all honesty, a pretty cruel burden to place on Cecil's shoulders. It's not his fault that their mother disappeared, leaving Abby to take care of him.)

Next, we watch the boy slowly lose his humanity as his awareness widens outside of himself.

"Time slowed for him, and his knowledge grew so vast and so expansive, human triumphs and pains became only a small sliver of his interest. There were much larger systems to comprehend than humanity." - 132, Bedtime Story

Cecil is canonically one of the people in Night Vale that time slowed down for. Like Earl, he has been stuck at a certain age for a long, long time.

"He had forgotten what he used to be." - 132, Bedtime Story

Cecil has canonically lost large parts of his past. He no longer remembers them.

"Later that spring, the woman and the man and the child brought a picnic and some games, and the tree was happy, but could not comprehend why. Nor did the tree intend to. The tree was simply happy, and this was a feeling that existed. Years later, the family wore black again and cried. And the tree felt sad, but it did not connect this feeling to any kind of narrative. It was simply sad, and this was a feeling that existed." - 132, Bedtime Story

The boy tree is becoming incredibly distanced from his family. (A woman, man, and child, just like Abby, Steve, and Janice.)

"You know, Cecil and I first met at one of these things. Seems like we should have met earlier than that. I had dated his sister for a while. But Cecil’s busy, he- he serves his community. He really gives himself to his community. Who do you live for, you know? Who do you give yourself to? Those are questions we should all be asking ourselves." - Steve in 100, Toast

Steve confirmed that Cecil was distant from his family and the people around him before Carlos came along, burying himself in his job.

And then an angel cuts down the tree.

"Over a few days, the tree and the fruits and the separated stump died. But the tree retained everything. As its body was planted into boards, as its twigs were ground into mulch, the tree felt the knowledge of each seed it had planted across the valley, each creature it had nourished with its fruits, and each piece of lumber built into a home for generations of humans to come.

The tree felt its branches burned in a fireplace, and it rose up as smoke and dissipated into carbon across the sky, coming down in trillions of molecules to build more soil, more trees, more creatures. The boy could truly learn everything now, cell by cell." - 132, Bedtime Story

Cecil has given himself to his community. This boy, this tree, has been divided and used up as a resource, to serve the community in which he lived. Not to mention the fact that Cassettes Cecil died before becoming the Voice, like this boy/tree was cut down before he could serve/understand his community.

"Cecil, sweet Cecil. Whose life lies directly on the fault lines of this broken reality." - Huntokar in 109, Huntokar

Patching together:

- this quote from Huntokar that gives off the impression of Cecil as the glue keeping the fractures together, and

- the way that Leonard Burton, a deceased Voice, is brought back the moment that Cecil left town, filling the vacant spot, and

- the way that Night Vale fell apart when its citizens rejected their reality, and began to be patched back together along with the narration of their Voice

It all leads to:

The Voice of Night Vale is a significant, needed position.

It’s possible that he holds the fractured town together, in a way, his words reminding the citizens to keep their will and hold onto what is in front of them. (In the case that the cold light is the Smiling God, this gives it a motive. If it takes out Cecil, the town is left vulnerable for it to devour.)

Just like the tree, Cecil is used by his town.

His mother knew that he would become the Voice one day- it was prophesized. That’s the reason he was given the tape recorder, that’s the reason she told this story.

We still don’t know what was in the book in the table.

Then, this very interesting quote from 182:

“I’ve been in this job for a long time. Probably longer than I’ve been alive. I mean: you’ve been alive.”

He says the truth for a moment, then backs up because that doesn’t make sense to him. Coupled the way his mother’s story parallels Cecil’s, with boy becoming the tree, becoming a resource that serves the town and seeing all of it (similar to how Cecil knows what’s happening in the town and what its citizens are thinking without leaving his studio. See: every traffic report and episodes likes A Story About Them.) and Cecil mentioning the odd nature of his job in 182..

I think we’re about to learn exactly what it means to be the Voice.

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ave-on-main · 3 years

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The Butt of a Joke: Wonder Woman vs Nightwing

Humor is subjective. Maybe the scene and what it caused in Nightwing #79 worked for you. It certainly didn’t for me. But the Wonder Woman #771 joke hit home.

Why?

The Set Up

Wonder Woman: There is a clear set up. Diana says she is cautious and before she has even finished her sentence... well, look above.

Nightwing: There is no clear set up. While the wallet is placed on the counter, no attention is put on it. During my first read I didn’t even notice it lying there and was confused as to where the wallet even came from, automatically assuming Dick must have had it on his person.

How does the joke play out?

Wonder Woman: Diana boasts about her skill, stumbles, falls and the story immediately continues. Not only that. Ratatosk falls with her. Merely a little more dignified than Diana. It’s instant Karma.

Nightwing: Dick notices his missing wallet because it’s not lying on the counter anymore. But we don’t see what he sees. He looks around panicked, tells Barbara not to tell the others. She already did. Dick continues to dramatically complain. It’s hyperpole.

How much impact does the joke have inside the story?

Wonder Woman: Diana falls. It’s her boastfulness that causes her fall. But before that she confronted Thor, won a fight against a group of Elves, got information from Dr. Psycho by intimidation, and, after her fall, she makes a deal with Nidhogg, climbs Yggdrasil and trusts Ratatosk to have the right plan to get her inside Nidhogg without her dying. (Yes, you read that correctly.) She would have done all this even without stumbling over a rock. The joke was simply there to lighten the mood and get her in front of Nidhogg’s den creatively and without having to waste pages on a search. The joke is a shortcut.

Nightwing: Dick gets his wallet stolen. Before that he wondered what to do with his inheritance and decided to help the homeless in the area by giving out free pizza. Afterward Babs tracks the wallet, Dick kicks two mafia goons in the face to save the boys that stole his wallet, he follows them to a city of homeless children, he decides to leave the wallet with the boys (without seeing them again), and decides to be Blüdhaven’s safety net. The joke informs the whole story.

The Atmosphere & Background Information

Wonder Woman: The title currently has a very video game-y feel to it. Reading it feels like following the main quest. Diana has partial amnesia. She does not remember being Wonder Woman. It gives her “Fresh off Themyscira” vibes in a believable way. Because of the more pop culture feel to her Infinite Frontier story, Diana being clumsy made me immediately draw a line to shojo heroines. And that comparison feels all the more natural because Diana’s current writers - Becky Cloonan and Michael Conrad - recommend manga from time to time on their twitter, which means they are familiar with the clumsy heroine trope.

Nightwing: Dick was already the victim of a joke last Issue, that made me question how competent he will be written. (My opinion on that here.) To have the same happen again, makes it more than repetitive. It makes it bad. Especially when Taylor keeps praising Dick’s abilities on Twitter without prove in the actual comic. Dick is a great hero, but he can’t secure his apartment, can’t fight off an attacker in his home, and can’t be aware enough of his surroundings to realise three kids are stealing his wallet. His competence isn’t shown anywhere else either. He is a nice guy, but his niceness is reduced to paying for stuff. He can fight, but he hasn’t fought anyone more dangerous than two goons yet.

Conclusion

The Wonder Woman gag works for me because it’s clearly set up, and the narrative doesn’t revolve around her mistake. It’s alright that she tripped. She isn’t perfect. She is rewarded for it by getting to her next narrative stop.

The joke in Nightwing doesn’t work for me because it informs Dick’s whole narrative after it happens. It’s not because of skill that Dick learns Maroni is in Blüdhaven and that a city of homeless children exist. The chase for his wallet is there to give him a reason to invest money into Blüdhaven, but it’s a non-explanation. Because in what else would Dick invest money? He never considers anything else.

What’s worse is that the “meetings by chance” the joke causes are not dealt with either. While Dick recognizes Maroni, he does nothing with the information. Neither does he wonder who the woman opposite the criminal is. Dick doesn’t talk to the boys that stole his wallet and Maroni’s phone. He simply leaves the stolen goods with them. He does not even wonder why the homeless kids ask if he is “the man without a heart”.

But, hey, at least we know there is a bat group chat, right?

Edit: What I labeled as Maroni’s phone might be another wallet. But it’s not outright stated.

#nightwing #wonder woman #dick grayson #diana of themyscira #nightwing 79 #wonder woman 771 #becky cloonan #michael conrad #tom taylor #ramblings #wednesday spoilers #am i salty?#mayhaps #i tried to make my thoughts make sense

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defilerwyrm · 3 years

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⭐️ Bei Mir Bist Du Schön

FIC SPOILERS AHEAD!

Bei Mir Bist Du Schön on AO3

He opened his mouth to thank Essek but what came out instead was, “Deine Augen sind wunderschön.”

Essek stared at him, perfectly neutral save for the subtle rise of stark white eyebrows. “I don’t speak Zemnian,” he said, flashing his customary, placid little smile.

This is early Essek, well before c2e097, so this is a fully calculated move. That stare is him running simulations in his head, as it were, weighing his options, and he finally decides that he can learn more about Caleb if the guy thinks he doesn’t understand these little asides.

And boy did he ever just learn something juicy.

The second time, he was feeling petulant. Essek was normally a very patient and talented teacher, but there came a time when they butted heads over the best way to work a spell: Essek’s experience and Caleb’s contradicted each other, and neither was willing to admit that he was wrong because they weren’t. Caleb couldn’t have said why they were getting spirited over it. It was unlike them to lock horns this way, and the condescension chafed fiercely.

To my understanding, Wildemount never—at least post-Calamity—had a continent-spanning culture like the Roman Empire that would standardize learning across regions, and the Empire and Dynasty have utterly lacked in cultural exchange pretty much throughout their histories; so I reason that their approach to magic must be very damn different right down to the fundamentals. But, I also reason, magic is like math, in that there’s more than one way to come to a given conclusion—so the same spell cast by an Imperial mage might use different theory and somatic/verbal components with the same results.

I love fic that plays homage to cultural differences, so I figured that there must surely come a point where Caleb and Essek quibble about how to do a thing, with the crux being that they’re both right.

In a fit of pique, he muttered, “Du hast Glück, dass du abartig schön bist, denn du bist so ein Arsch.”

Essek’s head whipped up so fast that, for a moment, Caleb thought maybe he understood after all—but Essek just squinted at him without recognition and said, “I beg your pardon?”

Essek’s poker face is doing triple duty here because Caleb just said he’s hot af but also a dick, and this isn’t a sentiment Essek hasn’t heard before, but it hasn’t really gotten under his skin like it does this time.

Caleb passed a hand over his face and scratched at the beard he desperately needed to shave off. “Nothing,” he lied, “just annoyed with myself. This should be a moment of discovery, now that we know this can go either way. A door has unlocked and we’re both pulling it shut. Can we start again?”

The slip, and Essek’s reaction to it, made Caleb realize that they were both being dillweeds about the whole thing and it wasn’t going to move them forward at all.

It was—of course, of fucking course the intonation mattered. “A tonal shift,” he breathed. He took Essek by the lapels of his robe and shook him gently, and blurted out, “Ich könnte dein Gehirn küssen und dann deinen Mund.”

“What the hell is going on,” Nott squeaked at the same time as Essek chuckled almost nervously, “Caleb, I don’t—”

Hot boi damn near let the cat out of the bag right here. It’s certainly not that he specifically did not want to be smooched at all, but more that 1) Nott was RIGHT THERE so it would be mortifying, 2) he’s still very D: about physical contact and this point, and 3) he’s still very privately going “fuck fuck fuck WHY a HUMAN” about his own attraction to Caleb. There is very much a part of him that Wants That, but the rest of him is just not coping with it at all just yet.

The following morning, though, all he could think about was Dein Bett wäre besser and Essek’s careful fingers touching his face.

Both of them are fully mortified with themselves. They’re ridiculous. I see Caleb heading back to the Xhorhaus with shoulders bunched up, brow furrowed, and wide eyes glued to his own feet as his brain screams “DEIN BETT WÄRE BESSER” at him, mockingly, over and over. Slipping up and confessing your attraction to your crush is relatably horrifying (gods, I’ve been there, it’s awful) and Caleb is predisposed to beat himself up to begin with. Add in the rest of the party making a big deal over the fact that he spent the night over at Essek’s towers and you’ve got an abject storm in that little ginger head of his.

It did not help matters that no matter how much he insisted that nothing happened, the Mighty Nein were dead set on believing that he’d slept with his mentor, and they spent the next three days teasing him about it, none of them aware that he was simultaneously tormenting himself.

Okay so I try to be good and not talk shit about my own work these days, but that sentence just landed in a belly flop for me. I’m not sure it actually gets across what I’d meant, which was that Caleb was beating himself up for a different reason than what they all thought.

In the midst of a messy ambush by three of the wolf-cat eye-beasts, one of them managed to get the drop on Caleb, and it pinned him, screaming, to the ground. Its claws dug fiery punctures into either side of his chest. He thrashed, trying to get both hands up to cast, but it would be too late—his reflexes weren’t good enough. His body had never been nearly as sharp as his mind, and he was about to pay the price in the form of massive, dagger-like fangs lunging towards his throat. He screamed again, chest nearly frozen with fear, when—

Adventurers are generally made of tough stock, but I really wanted to dig into the POV of someone who’s being attacked by a terrifying cerature intent on ripping them apart. “You take 12 piercing damage and are knocked prone” is mechanical and dry; I wanted to show the full in-character implications of those mechanics.

Another fic that represents game mechanics narratively to absolutely stunning affect is Hard Mouth by road_rhythm, which I cannot recommend highly enough. I wrote Bei Mir before Hard Mouth started posting but had it been the other way around, it 100% would have been an inspiration in that regard.

He could not help but murmur, “Götter, ich bins so verschossen in dich.”

Fun fact: I got myself the book Talking Dirty German specifically for writing Caleb dialogue, and it really came in handy here. This idiom is from that book, as did abartig schön. The literal translation is “Gods, I am so shot into you,” which coming to think of it sounds a wee bit dirty but is figuratively very sappy.

Speaking of sappy….

“Das Gefühl ist Gegenseitig,” came the warm and sleepy reply.

Part of this is Essek being barely-conscious, but the bulk of it is this—and this is basically giving away the whole way the fic progresses: pretending not to know Zemnian began as a manipulation tactic to get intel, then became a game of “Let’s see how long it takes you to figure this out, smart boy” as their bond grew and Essek stopped deliberately trying to throw Caleb off, and finally when they were a couple he figured it would be cruel and pointless to keep up the ruse, especially since he’d been growing to appreciate pet names in their mother tongues.

Caleb took a deep breath, set his tea aside, and launched himself at Essek, who yelped, laughing, and danced out of his grasp. Essek led him on a merry chase around the kitchen and held out as long as he could before crying mercy at Caleb’s vicious tickling.

You know, I probably shouldn’t point this out in case my readers hadn’t cottoned onto it yet either, but it wasn’t until like a week after publishing this that I stopped and thought, “WTF happened to Essek’s teacup? Did he take the time to set it down? Did it get dropped and shatter? Did he show off and levitate it?? Did he bring it with him and get tea all over the place and himself?!” Smh…. Choose your own explanation, I guess, lmao.

The rolls were a little burnt that morning, but Caleb had no regrets.

Part of me feels like this is kind of a weak ending, but I justify it to myself by remembering how hard Caleb regretted his slip-ups over the course of the fic. He spends a good bit of copy beating himself up over them, so ultimately I think it fits, even if it kinda lacks punch.

#ask box games #shadowgast #before long my song is dying #critical role #plz how do i fandom

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ordinaryschmuck · 3 years

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Why I (Want to) Love Tangled: The Series/Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure

Salutations random people on the internet who most likely won’t read this. I am an Ordinary Schmuck. I write stories and reviews and draw comics and cartoons.

When I heard Disney was making an animated series based on Tangled, acting as a continuation from the original movie, my initial thought was, "Why?"

Sure, Disney is infamous for its unnecessary sequels of the story after happily ever after, with the many, many, many failures that follow suit. Even then, though, most of these continuations were movies that kind of have the potential to tell more of a story. But what more could be said about Tangled? Sorry to spoil a movie that's over ten years old at this point, but by the end of it: Rapunzel lost her golden hair, was reunited with her parents, fell in love, and lived happily ever after. Her losing the golden hair is the most essential part of that list because how can you do a series based on a Disney princess when her most iconic feature is gone? Then I found out that the series forced a way for her hair to come back, and my new initial thought became, "Oh man. This is gonna suck, isn't it?"

Despite the hesitation, I decided to give it a chance anyway. After all, I've been pleasantly surprised before. Things like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, The Mitchells vs. the Machines, and even The Owl House (yes, really), were shows (and a movie) that I didn't think would be that special. Only to find myself enjoying nearly every minute. So after watching Tangled: The Series/Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure, I can certainly say I was surprised...but it was entirely for the wrong reasons.

And to explain how requires spoilers. So if you haven't checked the series out yet, I highly suggest you do it to form your own opinion. Just keep in mind that it's a bit of a mess, but it can be an enjoyable mess...sometimes...let me explain.

WHAT I LIKED

The Animation/Art Style: The series swapping from 3D to 2D might have been the most brilliant decision anyone could have ever made with this series. Usually, when an animated movie gets turned into a show, the most noticeable downgrade is always the animation. Whether it’s not as detailed or not as fluid, it's always subjective that the movie is better animated than the series. But by switching up the styles, the contrast becomes objective instead. 2D and 3D animation each have their pros and cons, so deciding which one is better is nothing more than a matter of opinion. So by changing the style, Tangled: The Series/Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure avoids getting complaints of being a downgrade from the original movie. It also helps that the art style of the series is really unique.

The best way to describe how the show looks is that it's like a coloring book brought to life. At times, everything looks like it was drawn and colored in with crayons, which sounds like an insult, but in actuality, it's one of the best features of the series. As much as I love most animated shows nowadays, I will admit, they all look a little too similar at times. Then here comes Tangled: The Series/Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure, which tries to incorporate a whole new style that successfully sets it apart from most shows.

As for the animation itself, it's really well-made! It's remarkably expressive when required, while the movements are really fluid during the correct scenes. Sure the fighting can be a little floaty during some action set pieces (yes, those exist here), but the dialogue and comedic moments are really where the series shines with its animation. I may have problems with the series as a whole, but I give credit where credit is due for the perfectly executed effort that I see in every episode in terms of animation.

Rapunzel and Eugene’s relationship: This was not something I was expecting to enjoy from the series. In the movie, Rapunzel and Eugene were fine. They were the typical Disney couple that worked off of each other enough that it was always entertaining, even if it was unbelievable that they fell deeply in love with each other after, like, two days. They weren't bad, but they weren't anything to go crazy over.

But the writers for the series said, "You know what, let's make these two adorable in nearly every scene they're in." And they are!

Even though I don't believe in their relationship in the movie, I fully believe it here. Both characters have a large amount of faith in one another on top of having endless love for their partner. Like how Eugene knew Rapunzel would be fine when taking out an airship or how Rapunzel couldn't bring herself to say a bad thing about Eugene when making Cassandra a sparring dummy of him. It's legitimately pleasant to watch, to the point where I put Rapunzel and Eugene in my top ten list of favorite fictional couples. They're that good to me, and it's one of the reasons why I don't jump on the bandwagon of shipping the two main female characters together. I'm all for LGBTQA+ representation, but give Cassandra her own girlfriend. Rapunzel's taken, and most of my enjoyment of this show comes from her and her man. So, you know, keep things as they are.

Cassandra (Seasons One and Two): Seeing how I've already mentioned her, let's talk about Cassandra, shall we? Because when making a series based on a movie that had only four prominent characters, with two of them being comedic animal sidekicks, you're going to need to introduce more members to the main cast to write more potential stories. And Cassandra, in Seasons One and Two (I'll get to Season Three), is a worthy addition. She acts as a strict straight man (I know the irony) who interacts well with Rapunzel and clashes perfectly with Eugene on occasion. She was passably entertaining in Season One and developed amazingly in Season Two. Her growing frustrations with Rapunzel's actions lead to a slow build-up that made her betrayal heartbreaking but somewhat understandable. And as for the results in that betrayal...yeah, I'll get into that later. For now, I'll just say that Cassandra was a pleasant addition to the main cast, especially when she was a part of the main trio, and she's yet another good surprise that the writers supplied for the series.

The Songs: The songs are...not going to be for everyone. Most of them are passable yet kind of generic, while others sound like they belong on Disney Junior (Looking at you, "Bigger Than That"). But when Tangled: The Series/Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure makes a hit, MAN, it is a home run. Numbers like "Ready As I'll Ever Be" and "Nothing Left to Lose" are sung phenomenally, orchestrated well, and are songs I can listen to on repeat multiple times. And "Waiting in the Wings" is not only something I consider to be the best song in the series, but it's also something I'd place as high up on Disney's best due to how f**king incredible it is. "Waiting in the Wings" is a powerful ballad that manages to be both tragic yet inspiring on top of how well it sums up Cassandra as a character. The writers may not always be on top of their game when it comes to music, but songs like these prove that they know how to earn that Disney name.

And that’s all I have for the likes...Oh boy. That’s not a good thing is it?

WHAT I DISLIKED

It Peaked at Season One: It did. It really did.

Season One felt like the writers had a grip on what type of show they wanted: A slice-of-life series with Rapunzel dealing with the issues of her kingdom with a meager threat of these black rocks growing in the background. It was all cute and well-balanced for the most part, but that all disappears in Season Two. Because now it's sort of about this adventure, but because Tangled: The Series/Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure set itself as a slice-of-life series, there need to be these small-scale stories that intertwine the grand narrative being told. The issue is that the story comes to a grinding halt one too many times as fans are forced to sit through these filler episodes that, while not all of them are bad, still feel like a distraction. And by Season Three, the series does feel more focused while having some slice-of-life episodes added to the ongoing story instead of distracting us from it. But the writing isn't as strong, there are several plot holes in the narrative (how did Rapunzel's sunstone get into her dress?), and there is way too much time going back and forth on Cassandra's morality. They claim that she's a villain while arguing that there might still be some good in her, and they continue this train of thought for nine episodes when it really could have been settled in two. For me, it's a bad sign for a series when the first season is the best one. Because if it's all downhill from there, what's the point of even watching?

It Tries to be Epic: This might have been the worst decision the writers could have made.

Now, here's the thing: I don't mind grand epic tales of adventure and battles against demons. If anything, I'm all for them...when it's appropriate and fits with the tone of the series.

Tangled: The Series/Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure suffers a similar problem Frozen II has, in which the writers felt like a big, life-threatening adventure was the perfect continuation of a meager, personal story about the relationships of characters. It isn't. If anything, it's completely missing the mark about what the original story was about. And sure, sometimes writers can succeed in telling personal stories through grand adventures. Just look at The Owl House and parts of Amphibia. But with those shows, it's established within the first few episodes that action and peril will be a series staple. With Tangled, while there was some action and peril, it's all very subdued compared to how high the stakes got raised in later episodes in the show. Especially in the series finale.

And, I mean, c'mon. You're making Rapunzel an action hero?

Judy Hopps? Yes.

Moana? Maybe.

Raya? Most definitely.

But Rapunzel? The character who’s all about optimism and seeing the best of others. That's the character you're going to morph into a hero that fights against an evil demon laid dormant for years? Did you even watch the original movie? Yeah, sorry, but I just don't buy it.

If you want to tell an epic story that gets the blood pumping for fans addicted to adventure, go for it! See where the wind takes you. But make sure to set that tone as early as possible while also making sure that it fits with the characters. If not, the end result is a series that feels like it's trying to be something it’s not.

Eugene is Kind of an Idiot at Times: It should be noted that Movie-Eugene and Series-Eugene are practically two different characters. In the film, Eugene was more or less the straight man, as he often questions the wackiness in the world around him and keeping Rapunzel grounded in reality. For the series, most of that personality got transferred to Cassandra. Thus making Eugene's new role in the series act as the egotistical imbecile. Sure, he had those moments in the film, but not as frequently, and it really pains me when the writers really lean hard into a minor aspect of his personality. Sometimes there are moments when Eugene acts like his original self. But it's all small scenes that are spread apart with entire episodes where he has half a brain cell. I'm sure some people didn't mind this change to the character, but as someone who adores the movie version of Eugene, I can't help but feel disappointed.

The Villains are the Worst: Now, I don't mean the one-off villains that show up, cause some chaos for a bit, and disappear at the end of the episode. Those are characters with fun personalities, occasionally cool designs, and do their job as villains of the week. It doesn't matter if their motivations are laughably simple, as their purpose is to be enjoyable characters above anything else. So I actually enjoy those villains...it's the ones that act as season-long antagonists that really grind my gears.

The purpose behind these types of foes is to build up how evil they are throughout the season. The issue is that the writers try to give these characters, or at least two of them, a point. To be fair, this can work. Just look at Killmonger from Black Panther and sometimes Karli Morgenthau from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. You understand and probably even sympathize with the logic and reasoning these characters have. It's just that their actions couldn't be farther from what you would do. The problem with Varian and Cassandra is that they have the motivation, but it's not written suitably for the story.

Cassandra is a whole can of worms I'll get to in a minute, but Varian is someone I can easily discuss for a brief time. Because while I can comprehend his pain for having his father frozen in yellow rock, I don't think turning evil is the best decision to go with that character. Because A. Everything is his fault. He blames Rapunzel for not helping him, but even if she didn't have a crisis to deal with, there was nothing she could have done to stop it. His frustrations are not only unjustified, but given the fact that this wouldn't have happened if he listened to his father in the first place, it feels like him becoming evil is too drastic of a turn. And B. Varian worked much better as a supporting character rather than a primary antagonist. He was just this hopeful, if not a clumsy scientist who wanted to prove himself, who causes minor catastrophes due to not thinking ahead. Turning a character like Varian into a villain is a bit of a misstep because if the guy acts hilariously incompetent as a good guy, it makes little sense to have him be intelligent and ten steps ahead of Rapunzel when being evil. If he were to become more serious and careful when helping the rest of the main cast, I'd consider that character progression done properly. But becoming a villain is just an overreaction.

However, none of that compares with my issues with the main antagonist of the series: Zhan Tiri. This goes back to my problems with the series making itself too epic. Because if Zhan Tiri existed in any other show, I probably wouldn't have any problem with her. She's built up well throughout all three seasons and is kind of threatening at times. But she doesn't belong in a series based on a movie that dealt with a small, personal issue where it wasn't even the character who killed the villain in the end. It was her love interest and animal sidekick. Even if Zhan Tiri works well as a character, the fact that it doesn't feel like she belongs in the show makes her too distracting to enjoy. And that's why these villains suck. If not poorly written, they don't belong in a series that should focus on small-scale issues. And if you can functionally write an antagonist that appears for only one episode but flounder with ones that show up in several, well, that's just embarrassing.

Cassandra (Season 3): OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH BOY, do I have some words to express with this character. Like with Movie-Eugene and Series-Eugene, Cassandra from Seasons One and Two is frustratingly different from the psychotic IDIOT from Season Three. Basically, just take the issues I have with Varian, multiply them by ten, add them with some bafflingly stupid decisions, and you still wouldn't get how much Season Three-Cassandra frustrates me!

First off, her motivation...what the f**k were the writers thinking? The big reason why Cassandra betrays Rapunzel and motivates all of her misdeeds was that Cassandra's mother was Mother Gothal...EXPLAIN THAT LOGIC TO ME?! Because Cassandra should know what type of woman Mother Gothal was. She should know what Mother Gothal did to Rapunzel in the first eighteen years of her life. So how is Cassandra being abandoned by Gothal the central motivator to cut ties with Rapunzel, who is probably an even bigger victim in this scenario!? Seriously, Rapunzel was cut off from the rest of the world and treated as an unknowing prisoner because she was beneficial to Gothal. Cassandra was adopted into a household with mutual love and got to actually live her life. In no way does it make sense for her to be angry at Rapunzel.

Nor does it make sense that the writers try to play it off as a good thing in the song "Crossing the Line!" Sure, it sounds nice, but thematically, it gives across the opposite feelings that the audience should have. Because if Cassandra cutting ties with Rapunzel is meant to be tragic and awful, why is the music suggesting it's the best possible thing that's ever happened for the character? If you like the song, fine, but even you have to admit that it's thematic nonsense.

But, sure. Cassandra's evil now, and she considers it a good thing. Whatever. I'll take it as long as it leads to good stories...but here's the thing: In the penultimate episode before the three-part series finale, Cassandra asks a question. A question I would have never expected her to ask, despite everything that has happened in the last season. A question that was so baffling, I had to legitimately pause the episode to process the fact that she asked something so stupid. Because Cassandra, the character who is intelligent and grounded in reality, asked, "Am I the bad guy?"

I was honestly shocked to find out she was shocked! How, in the flying, everlasting, cock-a-doodle-doodling F**K does a person like her not pick up that maybe, just maybe, she isn't the hero in this story!? Call me crazy, but endangering the lives of people you once called friends and family, dressing in black, AND HAVING A GIANT EVIL-LOOKING TOWER MADE OUT OF F**KING SPIKES aren't qualities I would give to a hero!

If Cassandra was like Thanos, a character so wrapped up in his ego that he can't even notice how evil he is, I would understand. But she doesn't have an ego. Anger, yes. But for the most part, her personality is based on having logic and reasoning. So turning her into a villain and having her unaware that she's a villain is an act of lunacy that I am incapable of understanding. I don't know who's idea this was, but whoever is to blame...you've got issues.

>Sighs<...This series isn't good, is it?

IN CONCLUSION

I like the animation and some of the characters...but that's not enough. Tangled: The Series/Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure is a mess of a show that tries to do too much for a story that should have so little. Meaning that it's a D+ for me. I want to enjoy it and give it a higher grade, especially with how much I hear people praise this series. And if you do enjoy it, all the power to you. Your opinions are valid, even if I highly disagree with them. Because for me, this is a show that I won't get myself tangled up in again in the future.

#tangled: the series #rapunzel's tangled adventure #rapunzel x eugene #tangled cassandra #tangled varian #zhan tiri #what i thought about

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greenbriar-j · 3 years

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Muscle Memory, full wip, unedited 4.7k, scroll at ur own risk; tagging some people who showed previous interest @halleiswriting @chazzawrites @pe-ersona @druidx and also @pens-swords-stuff this is what I’ve been up to lately

Saint Joseph’s Catholic Church bustles with activity. It’s peculiar, for it being a weekday. More peculiar still that the bustling is being done by young men and women who could very well be engaging in… more satisfying summer indulgences.

The Youth Group’s power couple sweeps in an hour late, ever put together even when, by all rights, they ought to be melting right out of their fancy outfits. Cheers rise from the crowd when they appear, each splitting off in their own directions to their own stations.

Y Nhi beelines for the painters, flicking her sleek ponytail to make sure it’s out of the way. The girls hand her a brush while detailing what’s left to be done. Vinny bustles for the sound technicians - who, really, are already done for the day, but are staying for the social factor.

Two things to note about St. Joseph’s power couple:

Y Nhi isn’t sure she believes in God very much anymore.

They are not a couple, but it’s easier to let everyone think so than to correct it.

“Jude,” Mary says (everyone calls her Jude because she and Vinny made a big deal of it years ago), “Are you sure you can’t help out during the week?”

Y Nhi shrugs. She’s not busy or anything, but it feels wrong to shepherd children into a religion she’s falling out of - even if Vacation Bible School had been one of her favorite summer memories for her entire life. That’s where she met Vinny, after all.

Vinny, laughing with the guys at the sound booth. To be more accurate, Vinny himself is only smirking, but that’s as close to a laugh as he gets around here. Stupid smirk. Stupid boy.

“I have work. Unfortunately,” Y Nhi mutters, dragging her brush across a cardboard cutout. “Vinny’s taking the week off, so I’m picking up his slack.”

Mary grins widely at that. “I swear it’s like you’re married.”

For whatever reason, Y Nhi’s heart clenches at that. Picturing herself and Vinny in wedding attire on the altar sickens her, but putting a faceless someone in her place makes her feel worse. But it’s not like she likes him. She’s sworn to herself that she’d become a cat lady in her old age - her army has already begun with a fluffy black kitten. It’s not looking too good for her future; Toothless likes Vinny more than her. She’s already failed as a parent.

Belatedly, Y Nhi realizes she’s supposed to be engaging in a conversation, not thinking about Vinny and their co-parenting of a cat. If it can be called that.

“Don’t hold your breath. The wedding is a long way off,” she says tightly. Like. Never. Never is a long, long way off.

“I wouldn’t be too sure.”

This time, Y Nhi lets the comment slide. She paints while singing under her breath, as she always does. A long time ago, she had no qualms about belting it out, but time has weathered away her volume, reducing it to only this. No one’s noticed the change or found it strange.

The conversation turns to something - anything - else. Degrees, internships, other boys who don’t dress in all black and aren’t named Vincent Truong. Y Nhi listens, but doesn’t contribute.

By the time the call goes out for a lunch break, Y Nhi is finishing three tasks at once. One of the other girls brings her a burger, slathered with ketchup and mayo and tomatoes. Y Nhi thanks her and continues wrapping one of the white pillars in cardboard paper to simulate a palm tree.

Not long after, someone nudges her. Eyes flickering upward, she’s met with the bored eyes of her very best friend. “Bite.”

She doesn’t, not yet.

Vinny wiggles the burger he’s holding in front of her mouth. “Only half a slice of cheese. No tomatoes. Freshest patty of the batch. Eat.”

She still doesn’t take the bait, even though he’s tailored this burger to her weirdly specific tastes.

Vinny sighs. “Jude. No one’s watching you. I promise all they can see is my back.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about.” It’s true she had a complex about eating in public for a while, for reasons she’s never told anyone including him. “Just not hungry.”

“Not very Gucci of you to lie in the house of God.”

“Not very Gucci of you to breathe.”

“Jude! The fuck, man.” But he’s grinning. Not the half-assed grin he gives everyone else, but an honest, mirthful grin reserved for Toothless and Y Nhi only (usually Toothless. Damn cat).“Just eat this, okay? I’ll eat the other one.” His whole demeanor softens as he picks up the burger she had ignored - the one that is surely cold by now.

She is hungry. After all, the reason they were late is because Vinny had to coax her to every step of getting ready this morning. He even applied her eyeliner with the even strokes of a practiced hand - so practiced that even Y Nhi admits it looks like her own work. If she had a choice, she would waste away in bed for the day, but Vinny has never been much of a fan of that plan.

According to her own plan, Y Nhi had been wasting away since before yesterday’s dinner. Famished might be a better word to describe her present state.

But today is one of those days that she feels guilty cementing the married couple narrative any more than it needs to be. They’re not getting any younger, Vinny and Y Nhi, and just because she’s sworn off marriage doesn’t mean he has. How’s he supposed to get a nice girlfriend if she keeps hanging around?

Objectively, it’s a stupid reason to risk passing out in a church of all places, but something about him just makes her stupid. Always has.

The longer she ignores his peace offering, the twitcher he gets. He finishes his own burger in ten massive bites. When Y Nhi still doesn’t eat hers, he eats that whole thing too. “We’re leaving early. Say an hour? Think about what you want to eat.”

With that, he’s gone. Y Nhi is not hyper aware of his presence as it moves through the open space. She does not miss having him next to her. Not even a little.

Y Nhi writes, appetite??? in her journal when she gets home. It’s the third time something of this nature has appeared on its list which isn’t titled - but if it was it would be something like “Things About Vinny T. that Don’t Make Sense.”

Even after inhaling two burgers, he took her out for pho and Thai tea, and he ate so slow that his noodles expanded in the broth. Still, he finished a medium bowl with relative ease, and Y Nhi was content after she’d finished a small.

How does someone who eats like that look like that? It has to be some sort of stupid freaky metabolism. Genetic polymorphism, she thinks, then adds that she might be incorrectly using the term she’d heard in class about two semesters ago.

She writes freeloading on the list. It’s not technically true, but he spends enough time at her place to make it feel like it. Right this minute, he’s setting up the living room to sleep in, awaiting her delivery of the overnight bag he always leaves stocked in her apartment for emergencies.

That goes on the list too. Definition of ‘emergency.’

According to recent months, an alarming amount of things fit under this category of Vinny’s mind. It might be nearing time to stage an intervention, but who’s Y Nhi to tell him to relax when she’s the one bordering on anxiety attacks all the time? Only god knows how many times he’s clutched her shaking hands until they stopped.

Y Nhi closes the journal. Snaps the band over the cover. Shoves it under her pillow. Vinny wouldn’t dare read it to begin with, but for some reason, she doesn’t even want him to know of its existence.

Quickly divesting herself of the impeccable outfit she’d worn for the day, she slips easily into one of Vinny’s large, large shirts and the shorts she affectionately calls game day shorts. Ever since high school, she’s worn them for events that require equal amounts of comfort and courage - or just for comfort, to be honest.

“Hey, loser,” she greets Vinny, emerging from her room. He’s got her guitar in hand, and is humming some tune that she recognizes but can’t place. “Your stuff is on my bed. Have you seen Toothless?”

He nods, and keeps playing. It’s in experience, being stared at with such intense eyes while trying not to stare at the other party’s stupid pretty hands playing her guitar. Fuck him, honestly, she thinks angrily.

Leaving him there, she pours each of them a glass of water in the kitchen. A shadow looms on top of the fridge, and she jumps. “Toothless, baby. Please stop napping on the fridge.”

Toothless is not napping. He stands up, shakes his tiny body and hops to the counter, then to the floor, twining around Y Nhi’s feet before scuttling off.

Vinny is singing now. It’s a new song, she supposes, and it sounds like a love song.

Slowly, Y Nhi moves around the kitchen, making as little noise as possible while doing absolutely nothing. She just wants to listen to Vinny and his new love song without him watching her reaction.

Once she gets past the lyrics about gentle touches and midnight escapades, she realizes something. Re-entering the living room, she deposits his water on the table. “Is that my melody? Why would you steal it?”

The guitar is placed awkwardly on the floor, the neck of it leaning on the couch. “Oh, is that where it’s from? Thought it was familiar,” he says with mild disinterest. “Well, I wasn’t that attached to it anyway.”

“Are you saying it sucks?” Y Nhi settles on the floor on the other side of the table, pulling her knees into her chest. Glancing through her lashes, Y Nhi watches Vinny’s expressions.

“I’m saying I’m not taking your work, you brat.” Then he hesitates. “I mean. Can I, just for one person?”

“What the fuck.”

Vinny twitches, finally. “I… Wrote the song for someone… So I’d like to sing it for her, just once.”

Something vile rises in her throat, and she wishes Toothless would notice her distress. Hugging the cat might make her feel a little better about the fact that Vinny’s written a song about a girl using her melody - and it’s not about herself and for some odd reason, that bothers her.

“Can- Can I hear it?” Y Nhi asks in a tiny voice. It’s easier than No, you cannot take my song to sing to some other girl who will take you away from me.

“Haven’t you been hearing it?”

“Vincent.” Because that’s easier than You colossal idiot, what shit are you pulling after two years?

“Jude-”

She stands suddenly, fleeing to her room. Shutting the door, locking it, she tries to breathe. Of all people, Vinny should be the last person to push her to this reaction. She doesn’t know what to think.

Vinny knows.

Vinny knows where her hard limits are. Technically, he hasn’t passed them. But he’s pretty damn close.

Y Nhi slips into the shower, leaving it on the hottest setting to boil the emotions out.

For the next two days, Y Nhi doesn’t emerge from her room. Her phone dies, and she lets it. Her body self-destructs in hunger and dehydration from crying, and she lets it. She stays in bed for most of it. Whether Vinny continues to sleep on the other side of the wall for those nights, she doesn’t know. Nor care.

It’s punishment for believing she might be ready to give love another chance.

The third day, a letter slips under her door.

She almost flushes it down the toilet without reading it. Everything is in position to do so, paper fluttering in unsteady hands above the toilet bowl. But she wants to know. What can Vinny possibly say for himself?

Jude. I wrote the song for you. I didn’t mean to steal your tune - honest to god, I didn’t. But when I found out, I thought it was fitting that we’d worked on it together. (“Together”)

Jude, the song is up to your interpretation, but it’s yours. I wrote it from my core, and it’s yours. Charge your fucking phone and check the lyrics I sent you.

Take a shower, and call me when you’re ready. You have a few days’ worth of takeout in the fridge. Please take care of your health; I know you’re not right now. I mean it in the best way.

It cuts off there. Unceremonious and blunt, and so very him. She hates it very much.

Y Nhi charges her phone while she showers. Working quickly because she’s so unsteady on her feet, she does the bare minimum before stumbling into the kitchen for food.

While she nibbles on the stir fried noodles he left, she pens her own note.

Vinny,

I will not read the lyrics. I don’t want to know, and you don’t have to pretend it’s about me.

Your joke took two years to reach completion. Congratulations. I hope I was amusing and that my downfall wall be the stunning conclusion you wanted.

She tapes it on her front door so he’ll see it the next time he comes over. Soon, probably.

Momentarily, she wonders if she’s being rash. Is it so impossible to think that he could find romantic attraction to her?

Then she remembers. Y Nhi is not built to be loved, if her history is anything to go by. Even if she’s wrong, even if Vinny loves her for real, she will resist. Losing him this way is better than the alternative: watching him dissolve to some monstrosity while loving her.

Nothing changes after that. Apart from Vinny’s absence from her apartment, they interact in exactly the same way.

Vinny says something borderline rude.

Y Nhi retorts with something blatantly rude.

They laugh about it and move along.

There are no gentle touches to avoid because Vinny rarely touched her to begin with - despite the way he slings his arm around everyone else, he wasn’t like that with her. No arm around her shoulder, no hugs, not even extended contact with her hair.

Y Nhi pretends not to notice when he goes through a full dinner with an arm draped over the back of his friend Justin’s chair. He leans on it, adding the tiniest space between himself and Y Nhi. He still passes her the condiments and spices she likes before she asks for them. He takes her home at the end of it.

This should be enough. Up until now, it always had been. These tiny acts were his long distance hugs. It had always been enough, but now it isn’t, and Y Nhi doesn’t know what to do.

Isn’t this what you wanted? For him to get a life away from you?

“How’s that girl?” She asks on the way home, just because the silence is killing her and perhaps because she’s a masochist. “The one you wrote the song for?”

Vinny looks at her for a brief moment, something like grief in his eyes. It’s a confusing expression. “She hasn’t really talked to me since.”

Y Nhi tries not to sit straighter at this revelation. “Oh, really? Hm. That sucks.”

“Yeah.”

Something about the word is profoundly heartbroken. She can almost feel the emotions hurtling off him in waves, but he doesn’t lash out at her. All it does is enclose each passenger of the car in a separate bubble. This is the closest they’ve been in a long time, but Y Nhi has never felt so isolated.

Her throat constricts, and her hands start to shake. “Do you… Know why?”

Vinny thinks for a moment, tapping his fingers on the wheel. “I think she doesn’t believe me. But I don’t really think it’s me, I think she thinks that love is meant for everyone except herself. She’s pretty bent on self-destruction now, as far as I can tell - No, don’t say anything yet.”

Every girl Vinny’s talked to in the last week pops up in her mind. Which of them seems most self-destructive? If she can’t keep herself by his side, he should at least have someone who can care for him. She could talk to them, probably, if she knew who it was.

“I… She thinks this is sudden, but I’ve been in love with her since I was fifteen. Or something. Like it kind of just happened over time, and I thought she knew.”

Fifteen means Vinny’s been futilely in love with someone else while she fell for the guy who ended up cheating on her.

They were happy in high school. It was college that broke them. Distance. The communications became less frequent in an inverse relationship to Y Nhi’s alcohol intake. Her grades suffered, and she convinced herself that she was too stupid for higher education. On his birthday, she drove for hours to his dorm to surprise him, only to find him making out with another girl. Sober.

Not that any level of inebriation could excuse him, but perhaps it would’ve hurt a little less.

Vinny isn’t done. “I fucking cut fruit for her every time we hung out. I did her dishes sometimes. I don’t know, I- I thought I did everything right. My mom thought I was doing everything right.”

“You tell your mom about your love life?”

Y Nhi doesn’t. Her parents don’t care enough to know anything about it beyond that she let go of a future doctor and that she’ll never find another because she’s past her prime. That’s what it feels like, anyway.

She’s literally twenty four. She has time.

“Not really. But they’ve met.” Vinny parks the car in front of her apartment, but he makes no move to get out or to let Y Nhi get out. “Jude, listen to me.”

“I’m listening,” she says. Training her eyes on her kitchen window, she thinks about the dishes she hasn’t done yet, the fruit she hasn’t cut yet, and how she hates thinking about it because it reminds her Vinny is fading.

Human adaptability is a remarkable thing. One more week, and this new normalcy will cement itself.

“The girl I love is you. Okay? I’ve walked around the topic for years, and I understand if you’re still not ready for it. But I know you’re getting the wrong idea in that head of yours. It’s you, and it’s always been you, and I’ll spend the rest of my life proving it if you let me. I’ll also bow out forever if that’s what you need from me. But I need you to talk to me. I-”

Holy shit, is he about to cry? With wild eyes, she glances at him. If she’s made him cry, he’ll return the favor five-fold. No, she backtracks. That’s not Vinny. That’s the behavior of her second ex, the one that reduced her to a stiff puppet of a girl.

“Come back to me,” he says in a small, strangled voice. “I don’t even care if you break me in the process, but please come back to me. You can do whatever you want, as long as you do it by my side.”

For the longest moment, they say nothing. Then Y Nhi opens the car door. “Can you cut my strawberries for me? They taste better when you cut them.”

Vinny washes her dishes and her strawberries and quarters the already small fruit for her. He deposits the snacks in front of her and watches her eat - slowly, since they’ve just come back from dinner, after all.

“So it’s me?”

“Always has been.”

“And you never said anything.”

“I did. You ignored it on purpose.”

“No, I’m just a stupid hoe.”

“You’re not stupid. Or a hoe.”

“You’re always calling me stupid.”

“Not like that, stupid.”

“You’re going to have to undo a lot of damage if we date.”

“I know. I’ve been working on it already, didn’t you notice?”

“Yeah, but it’s gonna get worse if we date.”

“Have you considered therapy?”

“Vinny, I’ll be a pariah.”

“A happy one, maybe.” Hesitantly, he reaches for one of her hands. Halfway, he flips the palm up and waits for her to complete the gesture on her own. “You don’t have to decide right away. It’s just a thought.”

She puts her hand in his a little too eagerly, then pulls back a little too harshly. It feels like touching the flame of a candle.

A defeated look momentarily crosses Vinny’s eyes, but Y Nhi barely has the time to look at it before she steels her nerves and takes hold of his hand again. The coldness of his rings grounds her somehow. “We need a list,” Y Nhi says, “of things. First, you’re going to Google touch starvation.”

Her best friend jerks in a little victorious motion, jamming his knee unceremoniously on the table leg as he does. “Fuck, that hurt.”

“What was that about?”

“I wasn’t sure if you were actually touch starved or if you didn’t like men touching you.”

“And you didn’t ask?” Y Nhi is incredulous.

“How am I supposed to ask? ‘Jude, when I touch you, does it remind you of your sleazy ex boyfriends?’ You’d say no. Like a liar. Or so I thought.” He pauses. “Anyway, this means I can hug you now, right? 24/7.”

“If you ease into it.”

“And you’ll stop wearing those gigantic shirts that literally drown you.”

“...No. What?”

“Okay, never mind, nothing. What else? What other boundaries do we have?”

Of all questions she’s been asked today, this one is probably the most confusing. Her previous relationships are no help; she hasn’t exactly had the best exposure to “healthy relationships.” She’s aware that the bare minimum counts as decadence for her, so the question has her a little frozen.

After watching her face flicker through whatever emotions it’s displaying, Vinny rubs a thumb over her knuckles. “How about this: I have a specific thing I want your help with, and when things come up, we can talk about it.”

Y Nhi nods, though they both know she won’t talk about shit. But perhaps watching Vinny sort out whatever issue he needs sorted will give her inspiration on how to approach this. “Can we-?” She starts and stops abruptly.

Vinny blinks, then feeds her a strawberry slice. “Go ahead.” It’s a tactful move. Putting food in her mouth means she has to chew, meaning she has a few more seconds to gather herself and her thoughts, or at the very least, the desire to continue speaking.

“Can we not label this?” She finishes. “Whatever is between us.”

To her surprise, Vinny nods and acts like she hasn’t asked the bitchiest question of the night. “Sure.” You can do whatever you want, he’d said, as long as you do it by my side.

“And… Get rid of Jude.”

“What?”

“Jude. You remember why I picked that name?”

“Because of some fictional fairy queen that had the same name? You thought she was a conniving boss ass bitch and-”

“Shut up. Saint Jude. Patron saint of?”

Technically speaking, he hasn’t been wrong about the fairy queen bit. Unlike the suckers who fell for Cardan Greenbriar, Y Nhi’s wimpy ass was all in for Jude Duarte, mortal queen of the fae. And it was easier to admit that than to admit the truth that was dawning on Vinny’s face in 3… 2...

“Hopeless causes,” Vinny answers easily. Then his expression sobers. “Oh.”

Y Nhi nods. “But the me with you isn’t a hopeless cause. I don’t want her to be, anyway.”

There’s a lot that goes unsaid, but she’s certain Vinny hears it. Logically, she can’t keep relying on whatever instinct says, He’ll understand because he’s Vinny, but up to this point, it should work out okay.

Gently, he says, “Y Nhi,” reacquainting himself with the syllables of her given name. “Y Nhi.”

“Yes, Vinny?” She says just as gently.

He lowers his voice to a husky whisper, “You’ve never been a hopeless cause. You were a cause for hope.”

Vinny’s request is this: that Y Nhi teach him to be soft again.

The request makes her question if she and Vinny exist in the same dimension because who the hell convinced him he wasn’t soft? Hardened, prickly souls don’t master winged eyeliner for the sake of their loved ones. They don’t volunteer extra hours at Vacation Bible School while working graveyard shifts at the hospital. Don’t do the dishes because as much as they hate them, their roommate hates them more.

Vinny is soft, and Y Nhi is out for blood. “I need names, Vincent. And addresses if you have them.”

“My ex,” he says.

An awkward sound emerges from Y Nhi’s throat.

He raises an eyebrow at her. “What? I dated around. Didn’t think I should be hung up on you, but nothing ever went as planned. Anyway, my one ex did a really good job making me become someone I wasn’t. I didn’t like the person she made me, but it was kind of too late to turn around.”

Again, Y Nhi is confused. The narrative is promising, though, so she lets him continue in hopes that it’ll clear something up.

“If you don’t know me, how would you describe me?”

“Vinny.” She doesn’t have an answer, she just doesn’t want to say it. It’s not all good, and they just came back from an awkward fight. Was it a fight?

They’ve slipped back into their normal existence so easily. Nothing has changed, but at the same time, everything has.

“Just- The rings and the black and the tattoos. You’d think I drove a motorcycle or something, right?”

“You drive a Lexus. It’s the same in terms of your fuck boy vibes.”

“Y Nhi!”

“BMW would’ve sealed the deal. How many Hennessys do you drink a night, again?”

A pout settles on his face. She likes this version of him. “I see you get my point. I look like a baddie.”

“Yeah. Bad at life.”

“I swear to god.”

“Don’t do that, that’s a sin. Don’t use the lord’s name in vain and all.”

“Anyway. You of all people know I am soft, actually. She didn’t like that. And so I gained a second personality and-”

It’s rude, the way Y Nhi interrupts, but Vinny doesn’t seem to mind at all. “So if you’re always soft, what’s left for me to help you with?”

“You’ll see,” he says. “Actually. No, I’m going to tell you. I get embarrassed about my relationships. So if it ever looks like I’m pushing you away… I’m just really fucking embarrassed, at least for this first stage. Do what you will with that.”

- bonus/epilogue -

They return home for Y Nhi’s mom’s birthday. They’ve always rode home together, since they are neighbors no matter where they are. No one finds it odd that they hold hands more than before, that Y Nhi is still averse to touching everyone but him.

They appear at social events hanging on each other’s arms. Commentary about their status as a “married couple” breeze over their heads, but they never confirm nor deny anything. In public, they remain aloof to each other. They show tenderness in only the smallest of gestures.

In private, they are as they ever were. Vinny still does her eyeliner on her bad days, but now she cuddles him on the couch on his bad days. Between the two of them, there are a lot of bad days, days when they almost threw in the towel.

But they didn’t. Instead, they’ve introduced all manner of pet names (Vinny’s favorites to use are love, darling, and lately, em. Y Nhi’s favorites are Vinny and anh). They write songs to each other, for each other, with each other. Every morning, they make the choice to keep loving each other the way they have since they were fifteen - and while they joke that they wasted so much time, it was a necessary time for them to spend apart to learn how to exist together and how to choose each other even when it’s the harder choice than letting go.

Even I get lonely too

It’s not hard

Every question’s got an answer

And mine is you

Where you go then I will follow

All my life

You’re the name that I will whisper to the night

#musclememory.wip #it turned out differently than planned #but I hope you enjoy it!

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cto10121 · 3 years

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Mercutio and Romeo’s Battle of Wits: Or, the Mercutio-Romeo-Benvolio brOTP

Or, Mercutio Misses Romeo Something Fierce As His Main Bro Because Romeo Is Not A Whiny Wimpy Stick-In-the-Mud and Is Actually Very Fun To Be Around and Benvolio Is Good and All, but He’s Just Not The Same(tm), You Know?

So the first half of Act 2, Scene 4, when Mercutio and Romeo have a game of wits before the Nurse enters gets cut or abridged a lot, for obvious reasons. The double entendres and witty Elizabethan wordplay are very difficult for even great actors to convey them to an audience, and they don’t seem to serve a narrative or thematic function apart from “two bros just being bros!!!” That bit of the scene just feels like filler safely cut or abridged in order to jump to the Nurse’s entrance and thus the plot. R&J the play, after all, is long; the whole play done completely is usually touching three hours. Cuts are always necessary, and for the most part it’s justifiable.

But I’m not going to lie, I like this bit a lot. Always have. Not only do we get Mercutio’s attitude toward Tybalt and his growing concern over Romeo’s love doldrums, but we get another side of Romeo hitherto unknown to us: Romeo being witty and fun and actually roasting Mercutio good, even besting him in a game of wits. And Mercutio actually being happy about it and just surrendering the battle to Romeo (!!!) What is this cinnamon roll of an exchange, too pure for this world, doing in an otherwise heavy tragedy? Are Romeo and Mercutio out of character just for some punny times? Not at all! The punny times are entirely necessary narrative and thematic-wise, sets up the tragedy, and shows needed nuance and dimension to both characters and the Montacrew in general.

Where the Fuck Is Romeo Seriously, I’m Getting Kinda Worried

So we begin the scene with Mercutio right away wanting to know where Romeo is:

Mercutio. Where the devil should this Romeo be? Came he not home tonight?

Benvolio. Not to his father’s, I spoke with his man.

Mercutio. Why, that same pale, hard-hearted wench, that Rosaline, torments him so that he will sure run mad.

It’s really hard not to read even a little bit of concern in that first question past the bluster, but in case you missed it, Shakespeare makes it explicit by having Mercutio blame Rosaline and worrying that Romeo’s love for her is driving him crazy. Once again, we get the sense that Romeo was not really himself pre-Juliet, and that, according to Mercutio, this is something to be concerned about.

We then segue into news that Tybalt has challenged Romeo via letter. Benvolio expresses confidence that Romeo would fight him, but Mercutio has doubts:

Mercutio. Alas, poor Romeo, he is already dead! Stabbed with a white wench’s black eye, shot through the ear with a love song, the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow boy’s butt shaft—and is he a man to encounter Tybalt?

Once again Mercutio switches to troll mode and characterizes Romeo’s love angst over Rosaline as him “being dead” (“the ape is dead!”)—which would be dramatic, to say the least, except that the tone is humorous/satiric. But it does betray an anxiety on Mercutio’s part and gives the understanding that whatever Romeo’s infatuation with Rosaline was, it was not “typically” Romeo, at least according to Mercutio and by implication Benvolio, since he doesn’t challenge it. When Romeo finally enters, Mercutio continues his satiric portrait:

Benvolio. Here comes Romeo, here comes Romeo!

Mercutio. Without his roe, like a dry herring. O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified!

We get it, we get it, Romeo has turned a lameass pussy by ~love. But unbeknownst to Mercutio but knownst to us, Romeo is not the same guy of previous acts. How will Julietsimplord!Romeo react to Mercutio? This is going to be good.

Mah Bruh is Back and He’s…Fucking Roasting Me?

So we get the first encounter.

Mercutio. Signior Romeo, bonjour! There’s some French salutation to your French slop. You gave us the counterfeit fairly last night.

Romeo. Good morrow to you both. What counterfeit did I give you?

Mercutio. The slip, sir, the slip. Can you not conceive?

Romeo’s greeting is polite, open, but unconcerned, perhaps a bit breezy, perhaps humoring. Notice how Romeo before has given Mercutio a ton of slack for his satiric mocking—his only critical comment so far in the play is “He jests at scars that never felt a wound,” which can read almost as dismissive (this in contrast to Benvolio’s worry that Mercutio would anger Romeo by talking about Rosaline lewdly). Either way, he responds to Mercutio’s acerbic queries about him ditching them straightforwardly and without heat.

Romeo. Pardon me, good Mercutio. My business was great, and in such a case as mine a man may strain courtesy.

Mercutio. That’s as much to say, such a case as yours constrains a man to bow in the hams.

Notice how Mercutio doesn’t ask Romeo directly about what his business was, but rather assumes that it was sexual (“bow in the hams,” to flex his butt cheeks). Again, typical of Mercutio, but it does justify a little why Romeo, at this point in the story, does not immediately tell Mercutio and Benvolio about Juliet. And also why he says this instead:

Romeo. Meaning, to curtsy.

Mercutio. Thou hast most kindly hit it.

Romeo is 100% trolling here, doing a Mercutio, in fact by pretending to take another meaning—oh, yeah, you obviously mean curtsying, right???? This marks the first reply in which he doesn’t answer openly, but instead answers slyly. Mercutio answers accordingly with an equally troll-y, “Oh yeah, that’s definitely what I meant, super PG” *snort*

Romeo. A most courteous exposition.

Mercutio. Nay, I’m the very pink of courtesy.

Romeo. Pink for flower.

Mercutio. Right.

Romeo. Why, then is my pump well flowered.

My Burton Raffel edition, infuriatingly enough, only gives one definition of “pump” as shoe, but make no mistake—Romeo also obviously means “dick” (the pump, I think, being the “head” part of the shoe, and thus….you get the idea). Mercutio is immediately excited—Romeo is speaking his language now.

Mercutio. Sure wit, follow me this jest now till thou had worn out thy pump, that, when the single sole of it is worn, the jest may remain, after the wearing, solely singular.

Romeo. O single-soled jest, solely singular for the singleness!

Mercutio. Come between us, good Benvolio, my wits faint.

Romeo. Swits and spurs, swits and spurs, or I cry a match.

Mercutio. Nay, if our wits run the wild goose chase, I am done, for thou hast more of the wild goose in one of thy wits than, I am sure, I have in my whole five.

Barely does the game of wits begin when Mercutio seems to give up, and now Romeo is the one urging him playfully to keep going or else *he* wins. Mercutio could just be joking about needing to be “rescued” by Benvolio, but he does say explicitly that nah, Romeo is just too witty today to continue to “chase” the joke, or the goose (“wild goose chase” eventually became a cliché all on its own, and it’s really just a throwaway line).

And now for my absolute favorite Romeo retort:

Mercutio. Was I ever with you there for the goose?

Romeo. Thou wast never with me for anything when thou wast not there for the goose.

“Was I ever with you for the game?” “Bitch, you weren’t with me for anything but the pussy!!!!!” “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!”

Mercutio. I will bite thee in the ear for that jest.

Romeo. Nay, good goose, bite not.

“I’ll fucking jump you for that” “A pussy jump on me??? Oh no, I’m ~scared” 🤣

Mercutio. Thy wit is a very bitter sweeting, it is a most sharp sauce.

Romeo. And is it not, then, well served in to a sweet goose?

“Your game has some spice, bro” “Like the spice they’ll put on you after cooking your ass????” 🤣

Mercutio. O here’s a wit of cheveril, that stretches from an inch narrow to an ell narrow to an ell broad.

Romeo. I stretch it out for that word “broad,” which, added to the goose, proves thee far and wide a broad goose.

“You’re stretching that joke so damn much it’s going to break” “As much as I’ll stretch your stupid ass out because you’re the joke, bro!!!!!!” 🤣

And then comes the end of the game of wits with the final twist:

Mercutio. Why, is not this better now than groaning for love? Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo, now art thou what thou art, by art as well as by nature.

“Jokes on you, bro, I’m into that shit!!! (Seriously, though, glad you’re back, bro, omfg, finally)”

Conclusions

So now for some wrap-up:

Mercutio in the beginning of the scene thinks the Romeo he knew is lost or “dead” by love. This has been established before in the after the ball scene, but here it is explicit—The Romeo he knows is gone and replaced by a pussy all over Rosaline’s pussy. Not good. There is also more than a trace of concern and worry—Mercutio is the one who asks for Romeo, and not Benvolio, the guy’s own cousin.

Mercutio is not upset by Romeo beating him at the game of wits and in fact gives in rather too easily. It’s not too clear why Mercutio does this. Mercutio has been established as a witty, satiric character. Romeo is as verbally dexterous as he is, if not more so, but his wit is warm and expressive, not satiric. His roasts and shade are playful and good-natured for the most part. By all accounts, Mercutio should have won the skirmish. It could be that he is too happy with Romeo actually making witty puns to care about winning, but personally I think Mercutio would be too proud of his verbal acrobatics, to concede that easily and make himself a willing target for Romeo’s roast (especially since he has roasted Romeo so damn hard these past scenes). It’s not like Mercutio to go easy on Romeo or even anyone, as he proves with his roasting Tybalt and even ragging on Benvolio. It could be Shakespeare is slyly characterizing Mercutio as a character who can give it out, but not take it, hence his backing down so easily, (“Okay, okay, you win!”) but usually that type of character responds with impatience and even anger. Mercutio’s replies are too amused for that. Perhaps he was too surprised by Romeo suddenly taking a page out of his book after scenes of him just angsting—to his perspective, but not ours, this does seem to come out of nowhere. But his replies don’t sound like someone who is surprised at all by this show of wit by a good-natured friend—on the contrary, it is taken as proof that the friend is back.

By the end of the exchange, Mercutio believes Romeo is more himself again. Not entirely, as he does cast further shade on his infatuation with Rosaline, but he is genuinely glad to see Romeo act more like himself again. We are once again reinforced with the notion that the mopey Romeo with Rosaline and even the radiantly lovestruck Romeo with Juliet is not the Romeo his friends have known. We receive proof of this: Romeo can and will throw shade over you for a song.

Not going to lie: I am here for all of this.

So I think it’s fair to conclude, based on the above information, that Mercutio has missed Romeo, perhaps something awful. His constant ragging on him for Rosaline and being mopey (lovers aren’t even supposed to be sad, wtf man) and his asking for him and just generally talking almost exclusively about him (that could just be his supporting character role, though) supports that. His joy at Romeo roasting him also characterizes a key component of their friendship and dynamic hitherto missing or not as present: Jokes, teasing, puns, wordplay, outright roasting when called for.

Not only is bro bonhomie clearly established (brohomie!), but also the macho culture—this exchange is far from locker room talk, more focused on wordplay than crude expression, but it does set up the dynamics of the duel scene and Mercutio’s motivations. Mercutio is most happy when Romeo performs masculinity through puns, wordplay, and roasting; when he doesn’t, or refuses to take stand in the defense of his honor, that’s when Mercutio gets frazzled. This is not because he believes Romeo is inherently a wimp—far from it, as he clearly expects Romeo, once he seems unstuck from the quagmire that is Rosaline, to duel Tybalt. He is unsurprised when Romeo throws shade on him right back, and is even pleased. So it’s shocking and disturbing for him when Romeo refuses to step up as he had done in previous scenes to fight the likes of Tybalt, for seemingly no good reason.

On a related note, expectation is noticeably absent in Mercutio’s own dynamic with Benvolio, whom he sees as helper and abettor of his wit and decisions, a soundboard, and a quasi-sidekick (“come, shall we go?” “Come between us, good Benvolio, my wits faint” “Help me into some house, Benvolio, / Or I shall faint”). When he does rag on Benvolio for his supposed sword-happy temper, Benvolio does not rise to his bait or roast him back, but gives only mildly amused replies, if gently pointed, to Mercutio’s surly displeasure.

Benvolio. An I were so apt to quarrel as thou art, any man should buy the fee simple of my life for an hour and a quarter.

Mercutio. The fee simple? O simple!

Mercutio may want to fight someone badly enough to go after Benvolio, but he also wants a challenge, the excitement of a back-and-forth of wits—hell, even for someone to tell him he is full of shit if so he could hit back. Perhaps that’s what Mercutio needs and perhaps secretly desires: Someone to roast him and tell him to shut the fuck up every once in a while. But would Romeo do this?

Nurse. I pray you, sir, what saucy merchant was this that was so full of his ropery?

Romeo. A gentleman, Nurse, that loves to hear himself talk and will speak more in a minute than he would stand to in a month.

The answer is yes. Yes, he would.

R&J Adaptations’ Weirdness with This Exchange

So why the difficulty retaining this fun exchange? Well, Romeo talking about well-flowered pumps and Mercutio just happily taking his roasts goes against the usual romantic!Romeo and charismatictroll!Mercutio characterization of earlier scenes. Even in adaptations that do keep this part of the scene, they tend either to brush it by (Baz Lurhmann) or even mischaracterize it a bit to keep it consistent with the interpretation of the characters as established (Zeffirelli). McEnery’s Mercutio in the Zeffirelli is in control and dominant all of the way through, and one of his lines (“Thy wit is a very bitter sweeting, it is a most sharp sauce”) is given to Romeo instead. The Baz Lurhmann plays it only broadly in terms of group male camaraderie and not so much Mercutio-Romeo dynamics; Benvolio does not participate in the game of wits and is by all accounts just vibing (my personal troll headcanon is he is keeping track of the game of wits on a slate. 2 Romeo, 1 Mercutio, that sort of thing).

Also, perhaps due to Mercutio being on Romeo’s case for most of the play and his being a lil’ shit at points, some adaptations take a weird Ho Yay approach to the dynamic, especially productions that make Mercutio gay or queer. If so, then productions have to do a lot of heavy lifting to interpret Mercutio’s gleeful/amused roasting of Romeo, his lewd blazon of Rosaline, and his anger at Romeo’s loss of honor in refusing to fight Tybalt as signs of romantic love towards Romeo. Romeo’s own emotional independence from his friends and his willingness to roast Mercutio also works against this interpretation. Thus another reason why this exchange is often cut or abridged (although the Globe Theater just decided to go ahead and have Mercutio roll all over Romeo while Romeo is roasting him as a shameless pussy chaser in this scene, because of course that makes perfect sense. Is it any wonder why I don’t like most R&J productions and adaptations?).

The only adaptation I know that gets the camaraderie and dynamics even close to right is the French musical (and to a certain extent, the Hungarian version) through that earworm and evergreen bop, Les Rois du Monde. It captures the spirit of their friendship and youthful zeal so delightfully. Mercutio, Benvolio, and Romeo were so well cast you can identify which is which at a glance—and they are literally as far as from my personal faceclaims for them as you can get, and it’s great. Presgurvic didn’t have to go that hard, but he did and it was glorious.

TL;DR

Mercutio roasts him, Romeo enters, they trade quips and wordplay, Romeo roasts him, Mercutio is too happy to gaf, and everything is character-building fun that will pay off very nicely later on, except that versions and productions can’t make the puns and wordplay comprehensible so they prefer to cut or abridge it (ten points from Gryffindor). And all because Mercutio actually misses Romeo and wants his bro back. Bruh.

#romeo and juliet #shakespeare #william shakespeare #rj meta #r&j meta #les rois du dorks #les dorks du monde #lehetsz dorkály!#i’ll stop now #but seriously am loving these two in the play #hope my troll paraphrases please #montacrew #cristina metas

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somanysigns-13 · 3 years

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Part 3: Snuggle in and buckle up for a long read. 😬

Reputation 2017 - her final required album with BMR (2014-2017 3 years after 1989)

…Ready For It? (also see cowboy like me on evermore)

* Knew he was a killer first time that I saw him wonder how many girls he had loved and left haunted...Knew the beard (maybe Joe?) was gay; wondered how many girls he had to pretend with?

* But if he’s a ghost then I can be a phantom holdin him for ransom...She can use him to cover her relationship with Karlie (also see New Romantics)

* Some boys are tryin too hard he don’t try at all though younger than my exes but he act like such a man so I see nothing better keep him forever like a vendetta...Some of her beards actually tried to make the relationship legit but he doesn’t try at all, maybe because he is also gay, so she can see staying with him until it’s over

* In the middle of the night, in my dreams you should see the things we do. In the middle of the night in my dreams I know I’m gonna be with you, so I’ll take my time...She knows in the end she will be with Karlie so she’s just going to ride this out

* Knew I was a robber first time that he saw me stealing hearts and runnin off and never saying sorry but if I’m a thief then he can join the heist and we’ll move to an island.... Possible reference to Karlie’s bearding with Josh and him knowing they are together and being part of the whole plan?

* He can be my jailer Burton to this Taylor...Nod to Elizabeth Taylor and her relationship with Richard Burton * Karlie’s middle name is Elizabeth * Burton to this Taylor - Josh will marry Karlie to quiet the rumors of her and Karlie’s relationship therefore he is Taylor’s “jailer” keeping the “cage” in place. Back to that recurring theme..cages..(see so it goes, this is me trying, and cowboy like me)

* Baby let the games begin...Here we go...start of the end game by playing more games

End Game

* I wanna be your endgame I wanna be your first string I wanna be your A-Team... She wants to be able to be public with Karlie and not the “secret”

Could the End Game be them getting through the final years of the BMR contract and possible other contracts (Karlie with Scooter and Josh). Did Taylor possibly sign a 3 album obligation to UMG which is why she busted out 3 albums in 1 year (Lover/folklore/evermore) to make “End Game” “New Year’s Day” 2021? There seems to be a countdown between the years of album releases...1989-reputation (3) rep-lover (2) and lover-folklore/evermore (1)

* Big reputation, big reputation ooh you and me would be a big conversation... If they came out now everyone would really be talking about it even though there are currently rumors

What kind of big conversation would really come of her and Joe Alwyn? Why would being in a heterosexual relationship need to be kept such a secret? What’s so taboo about it? And why would it need to be a secret when the public narrative is that you are in a relationship with him already?

* I hit you like bang we tried to forget it but we just couldn’t...Karlie and Taylor’s chemistry is too much to disregard or act like it was just a temporary thing, they are each other’s lobsters and they couldn’t quit each other.

* And I bury hatchets, but I keep maps of where I put them... She’s going to go along with the plan but she won’t forget who made her have to do it

* And I can’t let you go your handprints on my soul It’s like your eyes are liquor like your body is gold...again Karlie’s astrological sign is Leo and the Leo color is Gold…she’s love drunk on her eyes and she’s left a mark on her forever (see This Love and Dress)

* You’ve been calling my bluff on all my usual tricks so here’s the truth from my red lips...Taylor tries to push Karlie away or talk herself out of her feelings but Karlie calls her on her bullshit

I Did Something Bad

* I never trust a playboy but they love me so I fly ‘em all around the world and I let them think they saved me...Playboy as in boy she uses as her beard (play things for her to use- Don’t Blame Me) they think they can be the one to change/save Taylor (make her straight?) or possibly that by them going along with the plan she owes them something more since they “save” her reputation/career, she pays for all their expenses as her beard

* They never see it comin’ what I do next ...New Romantics; poker ref...she fills them in on the situation?

* This is how the world works you gotta leave before you get left...Foreshadowing her leaving BMR so she doesn’t lose Karlie?

* If he drops my name then I owe him nothin’ and if he spends my change then he had it comin... Did a beard say something he wasn’t supposed to in an interview that went against the NDA contract... Was he taking advantage of Taylor and her money?

* They’re burning all the witches even if you aren’t one they got their pitchforks and proof their receipts and reasons... “Witches” historically were thought to be lesbians (see Salem witch trials - see Willow) Even if you aren’t one - Some of the rumors of her being with her friends other than Karlie (Martha Hunt)...The proof is obviously in the rumors of her and Karlie and possibly Kissgate..and lots of witch references in evermore

* So light me up go ahead and light me up...Acknowledging she’s gay?

Don’t Blame Me

* Don’t blame me, love made me crazy if it doesn’t you ain’t doin’ it right lord save me my drug is my baby I’ll be using for the rest of my life... Don’t blame her for all the crazy things she’s had to do to keep her relationship with Karlie Lord save me - “pray the gay away” type ref

* I’ve been breaking hearts a long time and toying with them older guys just playthings for me to use (see “I Did Something Bad”)...Boys = beards

* For you, I would cross the line I would waste my time I would lose my mind they say she’s gone to far this time... She would give it all up to be with Karlie (see lyrics of evermore)

* My name is whatever you decide and I’m just gonna call you mine I’m insane, but I’m your baby...Reference to Karlie writing her name in the sand wrong or maybe using “James” or another pseudonym like maybe Kayda?

* Echoes of your name inside my mind halo, hiding my obsession I once was poison ivy but now I’m your daisy...

Alleration of Karlie’s name? (Echoes of your name) Halo = Victoria’s Secret Angel.. Poison ivy (see Ivy) Daisy - all the pictures of them with daisies during the Big Sur trip and other

* And baby for you I would fall from grace just to touch your face if you walk away I’d beg you on my knees to stay... She would give it all up and come out if she could ....If Karlie wanted to leave (Victoria secret fashion show “walk away” ref) she would do whatever she had to do to make her stay

Delicate - there’s more lyrics here but you’ll get the point with just a few

* Is it cool that Taylor told Karlie how she felt? She knows their relationship/situation they’re in is delicate

* Echoes of your footsteps on the stairs stay here honey I don’t want to share...She hates that Karlie has to leave and pretend to be with Josh, she gets jealous

* I pretend you’re mine all the damn time...She hates the bearding

So It Goes - all Victoria Secret fashion show refs

* See you in the dark all eyes on you my magician all eyes on us you make everyone disappear ...From Taylor’s perspective - Victoria secret fashion show interactions - usually all eyes are on Taylor but not now, it’s all eyes on her and Karlie and Taylor see’s only her and her “shiny abs” when they’re out there together on the stage

* Cut me into pieces gold cage hostage to my feelings back against the wall trippin when you’re gone...it kills Taylor to have to hold her love for Karlie inside and not share it with the world as much as she hates when Karlie has to leave after their time spent together

* Cause we break down a little but when you get me alone it’s so simple cause baby I know what you know we can feel it... When they have to be apart it’s hard but when they’re together it’s all worth it...They both know what they have and what they have to do to keep it

* And all the pieces fall right into place getting caught up in the moment lipstick on your face so it goes...Everything so far is going to plan but sometimes they forget and have to deal with a revelation (lipstick on Karlie’s face as they walk out of the apartment and get papped)

* I’m yours to keep and I’m yours to lose you know I’m not a bad girl but I do bad things with you so it goes...Seems like Taylor is saying the ball’s in Karlie’s court so to speak? The bad things = lesbian things 😂

* Met you in a bar all eyes on me your illusionist all eyes on us I make all your grey days clear and wear you like a necklace I’m so chill but you make me jealous but I got your heart skipping when I’m gone... From Karlie’s perspective - usually everyone is looking at Taylor but not at the VS Fashion show. She’s the sunshine in Taylor’s life but she does get jealous sometimes...But she knows she has Taylor’s heart and that Taylor misses her when she’s gone

* Come here dressed in black now scratches down your back now so it goes...Victoria’s Secret fashion show when they’re in black dresses holding hands walking down the runway and likely what happened after the show 😉

* You did a number on me but honestly baby who’s counting I did a number on you but honestly baby who’s counting 1, 2, 3...They really can’t help themselves with each other and their feelings * 3 years has gone by (2014-2017) (see invisible string - bold was the waitress on our 3 year trip. * 3 album contract with UMG?

Gorgeous - the rest of the lyrics speak for themselves I think, so here’s a couple.

* You make me so happy it turns back to sad ...When they’re together vs when they’re apart (Karlie w/Josh)

* There’s nothing I hate more than what I can’t have Due to the management teams keeping them apart?

Getaway Car

King of My Heart - Karlie is a Leo (Lion - king of the jungle)

* Salute to me, I’m your American Queen - Karlie referred to Taylor as the Princess because she has blue eyes, red lips, is beautiful and wears a crown in the Best Best Friend Vogue video

* Cause all the boys and their expensive cars, with their range rovers and their Jaguars never took me quite where you do...She feels nothing with any of her expensive beards like she does with Karlie

* Late in the night, the city's asleep Your love is a secret I'm hoping, dreaming, dying to keep... They have to sneak around to avoid being seen together in intimate situations

* Change my priorities The taste of your lips is my idea of luxury... She’s making all the effort to make the relationship work. I’m sure some guys have tasty lips but typically the ladies win that one

* Is the end of all the endings? End Game

* My broken bones are mending She uses breaking bones metaphors often (sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me refs?)

* Up on the roof with a school girl crush

* She’s got a girl crush

* Drinking beer out of plastic cups

* Karlie and Taylor at the Knicks game

* Say you fancy me, not fancy stuff

* Taylor wants to know that Karlie wants her for her, not what she has

Dancing With Our Hands Tied - a lot to unpack here so I’ll try to do it briefly

* I, I loved you in secret First sight, yeah, we love without reason...Depending on when they first met, Taylor saw Karlie either irl or modeling or through mutual friends and had a crush instantly

* Deep blue, but you painted me golden

* Karlie is Leo...astrologically represented by 1 color...Gold

* I, I loved you in spite of Deep fears that the world would divide us...If they came out what would it do to their relationship and their careers?

* So, baby, can we dance Oh, through an avalanche?... Is it possible to do it? Maybe not now, but can they weather the storm until they can make it public?

* I'd kiss you as the lights went out Swaying as the room burned down Possible Kissgate ref?

* I'd hold you as the water rushes in...They’re both fire signs...a water sign beard (Joe is a Pisces) could be the extinguisher to squash the rumors of Kaylor

* If I could dance with you again...She’ll do what she needs to do to keep this relationship

Dress - another big one

* Our secret moments in your crowded room They've got no idea about me and you...Victoria Secret fashion show moments

* There is an indentation in the shape of you Made your mark on me, a golden tattoo Again with gold and the tattoo...permanent mark (see End Game)

* Say my name and everything just stops I don't want you like a best friend...Not really sure if it could be any more obvious..Karlie and Taylor were each other’s “Best Friend” and Taylor is letting it be known that she wants her more than that

* Only bought this dress so you could take it off Take it off (ha, ha, ha) Carve your name into my bedpost 'Cause I don't want you like a best friend...She wants to “do bad things” with Karlie (see “so it goes”)

Call It What You Want

* Possible start of the bearding ref?

* Sounds an awful like “So Karlie would you want to?”

* Windows boarded up after the storm ...They have to be apart, possible arguments over what the plan should be? Also see Death by a thousand cuts on Lover

New Year’s Day=End Game?

* Last song with BMR..Taylor’s contract is over

* Candle wax and Polaroids on the hardwood floor...Candles are a recurring prop in her music videos, assumed to represent the passing of time of their respective contract periods * Polaroids - Karlie was asked in an interview what she collects, she said Polaroids...They took lots of Polaroid pictures on their trip to Big Sur * Taylor used the image of a Polaroid as her album cover in 1989

*You and me forevermore...direct link to the evermore album and song...she said in the MAATHP documentary that her life is planned out at least 2 years in advance...looks like maybe some of the folklore/evermore songs were already in the works or at the very least she went back and drew inspiration from other albums.

* You squeezed my hand three times in the back of the taxi

* could 3 years be the length of Karlie’s contract with Josh? (See So It Goes)

* 3 album contract with UMG?

* I can tell it’s gonna be a long road They’re going to have to suffer through at least 3 years of not being seen together in order to avoid speculation

* I’ll be there if you’re the toast of the town, babe Or if you strike out and you’re crawling home Whatever Karlie’s reason is for going along with the Josh stunts, Taylor will be there to support her no matter what...Strike out is a baseball metaphor and Karlie is a big St Louis Cardinals fan (baseball ref also used in peace on folklore...”swing with you for the fences, sit with you in the trenches”)

Crawling home…opposite of what Karlie used to do as a Victoria Secret model and “walking” the runway

* Don’t read the last page But I stay When it’s hard or it’s wrong or we’re making mistakes... Try not to look too far ahead, things can go wrong and it can make the time longer or seem longer

* I want your midnights But I’ll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year’s Day Taylor wants to be with her now, but she knows in the end she’ll be with her forever after the charade and games are over.

* Hold on to the memories they will hold on to you Just keep remembering the good times..they’ll get “us” through until the games are over

#taylor swift #kaylor #karlie kloss #gaylor swift #part 3 #reputation #lyric analysis

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infinite-xerath · 3 years

Text

Runeterra Retcons 1: Thresh

This is something that I did today. I plan to make this an on-going series (might even take it to YouTube someday if I get the nerve to share my voice), but for now have it as a tumblr post.))

The world of Runeterra is one of the most interesting and complex fantasy settings in modern gaming; a fictional realm bustling with fantastical beings, characters, and a wide variety of plot points offering near endless potential for story-telling. The story of League of Legends is not, in fact, a singular narrative, but rather a collection of different stories spread out across a variety of fictional countries, continents, and even dimensions.

Runeterra as we know it today wasn’t always like this, however; in 2015 Riot Games opted to effectively reboot the lore of their world to be rid of the more restrictive plot elements like Summoners and the Institute of War to allow themselves more wriggle room to tell the stories they wanted to tell. While the decision to effectively make League of Legends non-canon to its own story was initially controversial, the writers of Riot Games have effectively proven themselves extraordinarily capable of using this newfound freedom to its full potential… For the most part.

With a retconned world came the need to retcon characters; Riot has made a substantial effort in the last few years to reimagine and redefine the backstories of the iconic Champions to make them fit into the new narrative, albeit with mixed results. Let’s face it: no writer is perfect and hindsight is 20/20, so a number of characters throughout the years have been left with less-than-stellar backstories compared to most of the roster.

Welcome to Runeterra Retcons, a series in which I’ll be analyzing some of the more controversial champion bios in the game to pick apart the good, the bad, and the horribly missed opportunities. With all that out of the way, let’s begin, shall we?

Episode 1: Thresh

Thresh is at once both an interesting and a bland character. He’s arguably one of the more iconic characters in the game, to the point where he’s practically become the unofficial mascot for the Shadow Isles. In-spite of this, I’ve long felt that Thresh is one of the most awkward fits into the region; before we can discuss the problems with his current lore, however, we first need to address Thresh’s backstory pre-retcon and see if we can analyze the core of his character.

Insert original lore here

So, we can see the concept behind Thresh’s character pretty easily: he’s a jailor who loves tormenting his charges, so much so that he continues to do so even after death. If you were to describe Thresh in a single word, it would probably be “sadistic.” Unfortunately, the original lore doesn’t give a lot beyond that; not where he’s from, not when he died, not even where his prison was located. The bio itself literally says that no one knows the details, and while that does add a faint air of mystery to the character, it doesn’t do much to tie him into the faction he’s supposed to represent: The Shadow Isles.

With that out of the way, let’s now take a look at Thresh’s new bio and see how Riot decided to change him after the retcon.

Insert new lore here

Alright, so, there’s a lot to unpack here. Perhaps the most notable change is that Thresh went from tormenting people to… Tormenting “living relics.” The relics are offered no further explanation in the lore or given any prior context. There’s just… A mirror with a soul in it. There’s a sentient book hidden down in the vaults. For some reason, the monks of the Isles even decided to stash a living person down there because he infused his body with raw magic. Why? Who was this person? What did he do to end up in chains? If this was a dangerous mage, wouldn’t it be better to build a proper prison for him rather than stuff him in a vault full of powerful, dangerous artifacts?

There are so many mysteries here, but perhaps biggest one is this: why was Thresh changed from a warden of people to a warden of relics? Why did they feel the need to turn him from a jailor who enjoyed tormenting his inmates to a curator that was slowly corrupted by the very magics meant to help him do his job? Well, I believe that’s meant to tie into the change made to the Shadow Isles themselves, or rather, the Blessed Isles.

While we never had much info on what the Isles were like before becoming an undead haven, a lot of the lore suggests that they were effectively a paradise, hence the name “Blessed Isles.” This was a place without war, without starvation, without corruption. Naturally, there would be no criminals in paradise, and so this of course means that to make Thresh a warden of things that are inhuman… At least, this is the thought process one might have until they introduce the mysterious regenerating mage, but I guess he’s meant to be one bad egg amidst the crowd, assuming he even came from the Isles at all. Again, it’s never really elaborated on.

So, while the change does make a degree of sense, it kind of feels… Flat. I mean, a guy who enjoys tormenting prisoners in their cells to hear their screams sounds a lot more terrifying than a guy who just stops his sentences halfway through to spite a book. Also, the fact that his lantern just becomes a seemingly endless vessel for souls because of the Ruination is a little silly; like, I know the Black Mist does all sorts of nonsensical things to matter, but the fact that an ordinary lantern gets turned into a relic arguably far more dangerous than anything Thresh was ever guarding seems kind of backwards, at least in my opinion.

So, how can we change this? How would I, personally, retcon Thresh if given the chance? Well, there are a lot of base elements that I would keep, but also some key components I’d like to alter. I’ve written up a short bio of my own for you all to enjoy, so without further ado…

In an age all but forgotten to history, there existed a realm known as the Blessed Isles. Hidden away from the world by a veil of magical mist, the Isles were a place of peace and prosperity; a land free of war, corruption, plague and misery. This paradise was ruled by an order of sacred monks devoted to learning and enlightenment. It was within this paradise that Thresh was born and raised by a pair of humble farmers, growing up surrounded by nature’s bounty.

Though expected that he might follow in his fathers’ footsteps, Thresh showed an aptitude for learning from an early age. In-particular, Thresh seemed fascinated with matters of philosophy; the nature of the soul, morality, and other complex subjects were frequent on the boy’s mind. This attitude quickly earned Thresh the attention of the brotherhood, who invited him to join their order as soon as he was of age. Thresh agreed without hesitation, leaving the farm behind to study at the Isles’ monastery.

For many years, Thresh studied under the tutelage of the order, distinguishing himself from his peers for his ability to grasp complex philosophical issues. Though acknowledged by his teachers, Thresh was met with looks of envy and scorn from his fellow students; rather than let himself be disheartened, however, Thresh instead took an interest in the root of their envy in scorn. Upon approaching his elders with such questions, Thresh found himself being led to a secret chamber deep beneath the monastery, guarded by powerful wards and runes. It was here that Thresh learned the truth of the Blessed Isles.

Thresh watched as one of his fellow pupils stood surrounded by figured in ominous robes, chanting an ominous spell in unison. Thresh’s teacher explained to him that this was ritual had been used by the order for ages to ensure that the Isles flourished. Evil was present in all humans, and so the only way to ensure it did not corrupt their paradise was to extract it from the soul, and seal it away. As the ritual drew to a close, Thresh saw the essence of all the other student’s hatred, envy, malice and warped desire ripped from his body, and placed into a special lantern made to contain it.

Thresh was intrigued. He approached the lantern without hesitation as the other boy was escorted from the chamber, and to his surprise, he heard voice whispering to him from within. The monks explained that though the evils of humanity could be removed, they could not be truly discarded. They needed to be contained, and more than that, they needed a warden to watch over them. Thresh volunteered in a heartbeat, and the monks smiled, pleased by their pupils’ devotion.

What they did not know, however, was that the whispers in Thresh’s mind had already begun taken root. From that day forward, Thresh vigilantly stood guard over the lantern, watching each successive cleansing as it took place. Each time, the wicked essence in the lantern grew stronger, as did the whispers in Thresh’s mind. He began to dream of enacting twisted torments upon the monks, the other disciples, and even his own parents. Slowly but surely, the brotherhood noticed a change in Thresh’s behavior. Fearing that he himself would be subjected to their cleansing rite, Thresh stole the lantern and fled the monastery.

The monks chased Thresh for days, but their search was brought to an abrupt end when strange ships arrived on the Blessed Isles: something Thresh thought impossible. From the safety of the cliffs, Thresh watched in delight as a soldiers led by a foreign king massacred his fellow monks. Their screams were music to the warden’s ears, and as the chaos spread, Thresh found himself reveling in the suffering of all who fell to the foreigners’ blades. Even at the cost of his own life, Thresh dared to move about the battlefield, searching for survivors left in the king’s wake only that he may snuff out the remnants of their lives himself.

Finally, as the screams of his victims began to subside, Thresh turned his attention to the heart of the Isles. From there, he saw a cloud of pure darkness rushing to meet him, and opened his arms wide to embrace it. In that moment, all the wickedness trapped within Thresh’s lantern was freed, bound to his soul through the power of the Ruination. Thresh emerged a being of pure maliciousness, and his lantern, now empty, would serve as the perfect vessel to enact his twisted fantasies.

Thresh now roams Runeterra as an avatar of sadism, bringing pain and misery to all unfortunate enough to cross his path. He stalks his victims and torments them by slowly stripping them of their sanity, before finally prying their souls from their bodies with his wicked sickle. If you hear the sound of chains in the dead of night, run… Though it may already be far too late.

So, what did you think? Now, it’s at this point I feel I need to clarify something: I’m not trying to bash on Riot’s creative team, nor am I saying that I can definitely make a better version of someone else’s character. Hell, I’m not even really saying that my version of the story is flawless; it would probably need to go through several more rewrites before I’d ever consider publishing it as canon, not that I have the power to do so, of course.

Rather, I wanted to take a closer look at Thresh’s character and how well his current lore represents him. I said earlier that Thresh is at once and interesting and a bland character. I consider him a little bland because you can sum him up in a single word: “sadistic.” He has no goals and no motivation other than to cause pain and suffering. Even the other undead of the Shadow Isles typically have some kind of agenda, even if it’s only to spread the Black Mist’s influence. Thresh doesn’t care about that; he just wants to see you writhe in agony, both before and after death. I’d argue he has more in common in with League’s demons than the other specters of the Isles, but it’s BECAUSE Thresh is undead that he has so much potential for an interesting backstory.

The main points I wanted to emphasize in my rewrite are: expanding on the magics that corrupted Thresh into being so sadistic, giving his lantern some greater significance in the story, and replacing the vault full of otherwise pointless macguffins with something a little more sinister that gives the Blessed Isles a hint of dichotomy. Riot loves adding a little morally grey to all their characters and factions, after-all.

Anyways, what do you all think? Could Thresh’s lore be improved, or do you all like his story the way in currently is? Lemme know down below, and I’ll see you all next time!

#Outofpower #League of Legends #Runeterra Retcons

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oumakokichi · 3 years

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Hello!! Since I saw you were enjoying YTTD, what do you think about Sou and possible parallels to be drawn between him and Kokichi? Love your blog!

Oh boy, that’s a pretty great question. I had a feeling when I started YTTD that it was only a matter of time before Sou wound up being my favorite, and I wasn’t proven wrong over the course of the game. There are definitely some similarities between the two of them—and some differences too!

Spoilers for both games under the cut, so be careful when reading!

Well, to start with the similarities: they both lie. Uh, a lot. In fact, lying is sort of the most memorable thing about both of their characters.

Kodaka has stated that Ouma represents ndrv3’s entire theme of lying on multiple occasions, and I don’t think anyone needs any convincing that lying is Ouma’s entire schtick. With Sou, Nankidai has never (as far as I know) said anything about him representing the concept or idea of “lies,” but it’s still pretty evident nonetheless from the narrative.

Where Sara tries to keep the group united and cooperating with each other honestly, Sou undermines her attempts at nearly every opportunity and lies time and time again, both in and out of the main game. Even his theme song emphasizes how much he lies. Vgperson did a great job translating the title in my opinion by making it “Not So, Sou,” and in Japanese the title is “Sou no Uso”—a play on the fact that his name is a rearrangement of the Japanese word for “lie.”

They even have a few physical similarities as well: Sou is physically taller and older, but both of them are fairly scrawny, underweight (this is lampshaded with Sou in Your Turn to Shine by the fact that he can put off dying from starvation for at least one extra turn), and of course, they both wear scarves.

I have actually seen a few people in the DR fandom call Sou “green Komaeda” when playing YTTD for the first time, probably due to his role as the “trickster” character within the main game, but I honestly think it’s much fairer to say he’s similar to Ouma instead. If anything, it’s kind of hard to not see the similarities between the two when going from one game to the other.

Ouma does, after all, go out of his way to antagonize people within trials as well, and both he and Sou are considerably paranoid and mistrustful of others’ intentions. Both of them are all too happy to play the role of the villain even if it means being hated by everyone else, because they want to make it out of their respective killing games alive and they don’t trust anyone who talks openly about “cooperating” and “believing in each other.”

Of course, that’s not to say that the two of them are carbon copies of each other. Sou is similar to Ouma, but he’s definitely not identical. Their key differences are easier to see when you look past their surface-level personas, as well as their motivations for why they do the things they do.

To put it simply, both of them lie, but for almost completely different reasons. It’s true that Ouma in part does lie because of his own paranoia and lack of trust for the rest of the group—but also, Ouma just really, really loves lying. It’s a core part of his character; he states multiple times that he believes having the ability to lie is the same as having free will, and this shows how deeply he resents the idea of “having” to tell the truth, or well, being “forced” to do anything, really.

He also lies to entertain. He says so pretty explicitly in his salmon mode ending, and it’s absolutely not a lie: Ouma is someone who loves being dramatic, over-the-top, and entertaining. He hates being bored, and he hates the idea of boring other people even more.

After playing ndrv3 at least once, it’s really easy to see that deep down he’s just a clown with a love for funny wigs and really dumb pranks, so I wholeheartedly believe that even outside of a killing game, Ouma would still lie all the time (in fact he does, again, in his salmon mode route). It’s just that his lies would lack any malice or hostility to them.

The thing that sets Ouma apart from many other “bastard trickster” characters in fiction is that his love for lies isn’t some of act or façade that he’s putting on. He enjoys it in the same way that a kid enjoys making a prank phone call or putting a whoopee cushion on someone’s chair. Within the constraints of a killing game, it’s absolutely true that Ouma is cold, calculating, and manipulative—but he’s also genuinely childish, fun-loving, and silly. These traits are honestly the reason I love Ouma so much as a character and find him so interesting.

By contrast, Sou lies out of absolute necessity. Knowing that he has a 0% chance of survival only increases his desire to make it out of the game alive all the more, and solidifies his distrust in Sara with her high rate of survival. He lies out of sheer desperation, willing to talk and act like a completely different person from his true self if it means giving himself even the slightest sliver of an opportunity to stay alive.

Even his name (his real name, that is), reflects this. He took on both the name and, to some degree, the persona of the real Sou Hiyori: a first name that is, like I said, an anagram of the word “lie,” and a surname that means “sunny.” By contrast, his actual name, “Shin Tsukimi,” means “truth” and “moon-viewing.” Before the events of YTTD, Shin Tsukimi was an extremely gentle, timid person who was honest and trusting to a fault, further confirmed when we actually see an AI of him in chapter 3 who acts completely different from Sou as we know him.

Sou might put on an act and pretend that he enjoys lying and being a huge bastard in the middle of the main game, but he’s not nearly as good at keeping up the villain façade as Ouma, and his cracks show a lot easier. Multiple characters, particularly Sara, Kanna, and Keiji, call Sou out on his bad acting at various times, and insist that he isn’t nearly as evil or uncaring as he’d like to pretend. This is a sharp change from Ouma, who remained an enigma even after his death and played the part of the ringleader so well that nearly everyone still believed he was a Remnant of Despair until nearly halfway through the chapter 6 trial.

From what we can see of Sou’s personality, both in YTTD and YTTS, he’s not lying because he likes the fun of it all, or because he’s just a kid who loves pranking people deep down. He’s really, truly scared shitless and eaten alive by his own paranoia for pretty much the entirety of YTTD, and while he’s certainly not the trusting or naïve Shin Tsukimi anymore, he nonetheless tends to still show signs of being quiet, timid, and occasionally even grumpy and closed-off from other people.

For example, Sara has multiple opportunities to tease him or attempt to befriend him throughout the game. When you teasingly insist that you’ve “always been close friends” with him during the second half of chapter 2, he looks completely startled and taken aback, even a little horrified at her persistence in wanting to get to know him after all the stunts that he’s pulled. You can also have Sara bother him while he’s working on the laptop after they get rid of Mishima’s AI, to which he responds with more and more irritation. In my opinion, I get the sense that Sou is more used to being the butt of jokes rather than making them, and doesn’t enjoy feeling as though someone’s poking fun at him, even if people like Sara are doing it with good intentions.

While I called them both scrawny earlier, I do want to clarify that I absolutely, unironically think Sou is weaker than Ouma physically too. Ouma isn’t exactly super strong or anything; he complains when lifting the inugami statue with Saihara in chapter 3, and he doesn’t seem to like PE class from some of his dialogue in salmon mode. But it’s really clear that Ouma does hide some of his aces up his sleeve, and that he can punch a hell of a lot harder than he lets on, like in chapter 5 when he counters Momota’s second attempt to punch him.

Meanwhile Sou… Sou struggles to open cabinet doors and probably pickle jars too. He has weaker physical strength than both Kanna, a middle schooler, and Gin, an elementary schooler, in his YTTS stats. I love him to pieces, I think he’s a fantastic character, but it’s just too funny. Sou is not merely scrawny, he’s essentially the biggest, weakest pushover despite being around 20 years old or so and I think that’s great.

Anyway, these are just my thoughts on the similarities and differences between the two of them! Both of them are absolutely willing to go to extreme lengths in order to try and survive their respective killing games, and they’re both extremely paranoid and distrustful of others. But removed from the killing game, Ouma is pretty clearly someone who aspires to be a clown (both a class clown and a literal, pie-throwing, nose-honking party clown) and to entertain others, while Sou is honestly just an exhausted and extremely grumpy convenience store worker bordering on unemployment who has zero upper body strength and just wants to be left alone.

Thank you for the really fun question, anon! I really love both Sou and Ouma, so I had fun getting to write this meta for them!

#danganronpa #your turn to die #kokichi ouma #sou hiyori #shin tsukimi #ndrv3 #my meta #ask #anonymous #ndrv3 spoilers //#yttd spoilers //#okay to reblog

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mooglesorts · 3 years

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man. it's weird, because there's a lot of things about me that are Very Badger Primary, to the point where i would probably pick it with a strong bird model over anything else at this point... except that i hate dehumanization. i saw primaries described recently as 'things you wouldn't be you anymore if you went against,' and more than just about anything else that's it. even when i think people are monsters, i can't see them as not human; i'd be hard put to define exactly what i consider a 'monster,' but it's more about like. good faith than personhood, i suppose?

it's not necessarily a permanent status to be one--people can change--but my deeply held instinct is that once you have done something monstrous you will always be a person who has been a monster by your own choices, and that it's your duty to learn how to accept that while still living your life, and act accordingly from thereon out. you have to reconcile that you are a person with the fact that some doors are closed to you now, and it's up to you to decide what you do from there.

just. like. even when i hate someone and as far as i'm concerned they can go fuck themself, even in the multiple Heavily Badger social environments i've been in over the course of my life--church, progressive circles, the way the structure of the internet kind of just affects you in general--even on occasions where i've gotten swept away and given in to the pressure to dehumanize (or perform it) for a minute, there's always, always been a voice in the back of my head saying this is a person. this is a person. this is a person. this isn't right.

unintentional dehumanization sets off my '...should we really be doing this? we are getting into not good territory here, it's time to pull up and start questioning' alarms. explicit, intentional, purposeful dehumanization sets off the whole ass tornado sirens. if people on my side are doing it it's enough to throw me into a system-destabilizing crisis, because NO NO NO I WANT TO GET OFF THIS RIDE, I WANT NO PART OF THESE PEOPLE'S MORAL SYSTEM, I FEEL UNCLEAN. it's a good way to make sure i will never, ever, ever trust someone again.

things that are Really Really Badger, off the top of my head (after the cut because Long and trauma talk):

[[MORE]]

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-i've always loved playing adoptable games, pet simulators, etc? any game with randomly generated characters that are Yours Now and a Community, in a deeply badgery way. including games where they can die (the satisfying part is making sure they don't). except that, no matter how much fun the gameplay is, if it gets to the point where they start feeling disposable, and the only way to really keep playing is to stop humanizing them, i lose interest. it's super fucking depressing. it feels like part of me dying inside a little. i don't like it at all.

-i've always been drawn to fandoms and roleplaying communities. i was fiercely loyal to, and proud of, my first rp community on dragoncave as a 13-year-old. when my abusive mom found out about it and completely isolated me for half a year, the promise of being able to make it back to them--just sneakier this time--kept me going; when i finally got back and the group had drifted apart in my absence, it.... was absolutely devastating. i never really recovered from it. even then, i spent years trying to get the group back together every now and then, until i finally gave up.

-i am always keenly, painfully aware of the life cycle of a community. every time i hear the sentiment 'you guys are all great and i love this group' my stomach drops, because i know it's only a matter of time before things go sour or the group dissolves. rp groups, skype chats/discord servers, fandoms, you name it, i am always bracing myself or staying away entirely to avoid the inevitable and it hurts. and it hurts to see people taking part in a community i don't dare be part of, which makes lurking in fandoms... really rough. frankly, it takes me a lot of courage every time i express my appreciation for the shc community because i've been burned so many times.

-on that note: i went through some really traumatic stuff at the end of 2020 that completely turned my life upside down, and i was doing bad until i stumbled across the shc community. the moment i started engaging, it was a huge boost to my mental health, and my ability to cope with circumstances under which i was about to break down spectacularly. and it has been ever since! contributing to The Group Project and seeing other folks being friendly with each other gives me the happy feelings.

-i used to go out of my way to build and run spaces, mainly fandom and rp spaces, and took a lot of pride in engineering them so that they Functioned Well. unfortunately it wore me the hell down over the years for Burnt Badger Reasons, and now i'm too jaded, bitter, and exhausted to give a shit about being a mod/community leader anymore because of it lmao

-among those burnt badger things i relate HARD to the Red Ledger narrative. hoo boy.

-i wish i could find it again, but there was an mlp comic i saw once which went into luna's observations of what each element of harmony Means. with the element of friendship, she says that twilight has a massive amount of love to give; right now it's all focused on celestia, but when she learns to expand it outward she'll have grown into her full potential as a person, and she'll change the world. that struck a chord with how i used to feel, hard, and it's really stuck with me ever since. (hello, unhealthy snake model)

-emphasis on 'used to feel,' lmao

-got super invested in a really toxic '''mental health''' community at a low point in my life; exploded HARD trying to help everyone i could; got into vicious, protracted fights with the shitty mods for years about the harmful way they ran their community until i finally managed to go 'fuck this it's not getting better' and leave.

-had to numb myself emotionally to the people around me for a long time once i really started learning about mental health and trauma stuff, because now i was seeing signs of their pain and baggage everywhere i looked, and i couldn't handle not being able to help.

-the imagery with which i think about my bird primary is overwhelmingly negative. whether it's my actual primary or a model, i uh. i feel like a healthy relationship to one's primary doesn't involve associating it with gore.

-i saw a conversation recently about how birds think of morality in terms of 'if you can, you should,' and how that's scary for badgers because their definition of 'can' involves destroying yourself for the sake of that 'should,' and... yeah, that's a mood. that's a BIG mood. thinking about bird primary stuff is hard--and i had to pick up my lion model to deal with it--because it's so easy for me to spiral into a self-shredding spiral of other people are counting on you to do the right thing, how dare you pull back for your own health and sanity. how dare you turn your back for even a minute. how dare you rest. the work is never done.

which is... a very exploded badger approach to exploded bird morality. whoops.

-fix-it and time travel fiction in which Everything Went Right This Time and It's Going to Be Okay are one of my very favorite self-indulgent fantasies. i will enjoy putting characters through the wringer in all kinds of creatively horrific ways which may or may not end on a downer note, certainly, i love that shit, but i will also 90% of the time have a backup version of the arc or dynamic that's softer and lighter and Actually Healthy This Time. it's the dichotomy there that really gets me tbh, a story where Everything Ends Happily by default will mmmaybe pull me in? but stories where there's the constant shadow of this could end horribly, it's supposed to end horribly, and we got a happy fucking ending anyway are just... that shit will make me cry, man.

it's also why i kind of really hate stable time loop stories where it initially looks like this is going to be The Good Timeline this time around, but OOPSIE everything went to shit anyway! we're right back where we started, just like it was meant to be all along! it's a tired cliche by this point and an unsatisfying one for me, and it makes me roll my eyes every time.

-this is relevant to the bird vs. badger because like... my gut instinct is to prioritize people over systems. when shit hits the fan, when someone's fallen into the machinery and is about to get hurt, i don't feel right about it if i just let it happen. i'll break the machinery if i have to to keep it away from them; i won't feel great about that, and it might cause problems, but fuck it, we'll figure it out later. throwing people into the gears of a system when i'm convinced it's the only option makes me feel Awful.

-related to the above, another trope that really speaks to me in fiction is when a character defies the rules of reality through sheer force of will. no, this is not happening, i don't give a shit what the limits are supposed to be. i refuse to let this be the way things are. (there's that lion model.)

-i've just kind of... always wanted to be an Everyone Badger. it makes me sad how much of that i've lost over the years as i've gotten more cynical, but it's what i wish i could be.

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doubtless i'll think of more the moment i hit send, and there are just as many things about me that are Super Bird Primary, but like... mamma mia that's some spicy badger. the main thing stopping me is the Can't and Refuse to Dehumanize bit. i also... hm. i think i can function okay without a community? they just help a lot, and it sucks when i'm confronted with one i don't have a (stable) place in. any thoughts? is it possible for a bird system's foundation to run so deep that eventually it overrides the bird?

#shc #sortinghatchats #sorting hat chats #badger primary #bird primary #burned badger primary #exploded badger primary #exploded bird primary #burned houses #exploded houses #abuse cw #gore implied cw #moogle hat talks

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