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1800redpop · 4 years

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ao3 homestuck literature roundup

ok so honestly some of the most impactful pieces of literature I’ve ever consumed... have been fanworks for the web comic Homestuck. while fanfiction in general has the potential for greatness, and there are definitely some non-homestuck works out there i that i’ve enjoyed, Homestuck has a unique potential for spawning creative, original and daring stuff! and there are so many new fans who didn’t even experience the first wave of ao3 webcontent. sadly the site has not proved archival quality when it comes to preserving content, and many fics I’m linking feature broken links/images or have been orphaned by their authors. I’m posting only what I consider to be Good Literature. these are pieces of writing that have struck me, haunted me, and made me cry. Thank you to the writers, and please enjoy! the full rec list is under the cut >:)

old but gold

The Serendipity Gospels by urbanAnchorite (tzm) M

What is there to be said about The Serendipity Gospels? this illustrated fanfiction epic is a true classic. The use of Homestuck language and troll terminology on this fic is exploited to its utmost poetic potential, and every sentence is lyrical. While the story itself is original (and extremely well plotted!), events from the plot of Homestuck are echoed throughout, and it makes for a really satisfying read. This fic was published before Gamrezi was something that happened in the webcomic and gamzee had his downfall, if you’re hesitant to read it on account of the Gamzee<3<Terezi tag. Both of them are extremely well characterized. man... serendipity gospels gamzee is the best gamzee you can find on the market. definitely better than canon gamzee. And the pairing really works. The sad part is that this thing was supposed to be in three acts, and only two have been published. Since 2013... this shit sucks. i want act 3 so bad i’d commit heinous acts to receive it >:0

Cities in Dust (shit let's be hardboiled) by Cephied_Variable T

I’m not finished reading this yet but by now the ao3 handle Cephied_Variable has become a household name. This fic is... heterosexual. and where there were once illustrations, now there are empty white boxes. But the noir setting is played juuuust right, the soundtrack goes hard and it’s really fun to play the music in the next tab while you read, the writing is amazing (obviously) and... not to spoil anything, but it isn’t as much of an AU as it seems. really wish i could see the illustrations, bc the story is told through chatlogs like the source material.

Rule #2 by universe_c E (you can skip the sex scenes tho)

A super imaginative take on what Earth C might have been like. this fic was published while the comic was still updating, so earth c was a very distant possibility in the minds of fans, and in this work, all the players (every single troll, dancestor, human and cherub) are dropped on an uninhabited planet as an entirely new species with varying levels of godpowers, and they have to build civilization from scratch. It’s such an ambitious idea, and it was pulled of brilliantly! the author has more fanfiction online in that takes place in this universe, as well as selections featuring pairings such as Caliborn/Kurloz, an unexpected delight, and GamTav, a charming holdover from simpler times. This story in particular however focuses on Caliborn right after he passes through the gate. He doesn’t have a very easy time adjusting, poor guy. The narrative follows him as he rage-flees from his emotions to nonlinear points on the timeline of Universe C. Along the way he meets the family who he will someday love, learns about the civilization that will develop on their planet, gets laid, and matures a whole lot as a person. This fic is just.. really amazing. Read it!!!

Lost Teeth Like White Jewels by roachpatrol, urbanAnchorite (tzm)

Ok, so roachpatrol used to be a really big name in Homestuck fanfiction, but her stuff has... not aged well, and generally she is regarded (or at least she is regarded by me) as a pedophilic porn peddler, and she’s written a lot of nasty, scandalous smut. but you don’t have to read that stuff! This fic and this fic ONLY (don’t even read the other ones in the series, bro) is just a really nice soap opera. Bodices are ripped, eyes are gazed into in close proximity to an ocean. And the hemospectrum has been inverted. All in all, if you want something dramatic and romantic to read on a rainy day, this fic is where it’s at.

signalbeam is an author that wrote a lot of lesbian fanfiction in 2012. I haven’t personally read all their stuff but it’s all f/f and it’s fun to browse :~)

****DIRKJAKE CORNER******

a thousand years by venusianEye (orphan_account) T

Everything’s set for the surviving players to pass through the gate and claim their Reward... the only problem is, dirk has lost the will to live and is in some kind of mystical coma. Jake is the only person who can save him, by venturing into his mind-palace and solving puzzles that serve as metaphors for everything Dirk can’t express. It’s kind of like inception wrt to the dream mechanics, but the author uses folk tales as settings, and it’s all very poetic, and very well done. this author deleted her account. i watched all the drama. however all her work is still online on the orphan_account. she wrote this series (people who like dirkjake and artistic pornography, give it a read!) and also a medievalstuck au i remember reading and loving, but cannot for the life of me seem to find :( it was about eridan and kanaya and it was good. rest in peace, venusianEye!

A Spark, A Flame, A Fire by callmearcturus E (one skippable sex scene)

The best kingdomstuck ever!!! \(^o^)/ ugh this fic is everything... the author has another kingdomstuck dirkjake multichapter novella online that is also very good, but this one’s my absolute fave :,] the strilonde fam is so cute, and dirk&jake’s blossoming romance (oh, yeah, you BET it’s an arranged marriage AU!) is so romantic it literally makes me clutch my chest and sigh. also the writing and worldbuilding are just IMPECCABLE. another lovely romance for a cozy night.

***JOHNKAT CORNER****

remember johnkat? well,. it’s good.

General Vantas Gets Hitched, or, The Limits Of Bilateral Diplomacy: A Black Powder Romance by JumpingJackFlash M

another arranged marriage fic! seriously, when it’s done right, there can be nothing better. John is the king of Skaia and Karkat is a political insult disguised as a peace offering. No better way to ruin your chances at diplomacy than offer an arranged political marriage between the literal king and a mutant military grunt who isn’t even the right gender. But... what if the king accepts??? omg guys they fall in love... and everyone’s a badass. another notable johnkat offering from his author would b Hurricane , wherein everyone’s punks and dave and tavros are gay rappers. there’s also Space Bro and California Dreaming , which feature karkat/sollux and eridan/equius respectively, and are humanstuck au with vague game memories and are both very sweet and romantic <3

The Only Recipe For Lasagna You'll Ever Need by urbanAnchorite (t_ZM) G

Oh man.. this one’s just really cute.

No Quiet Sleeper by cest_what T

The premise of this fic is a stable little timeloop, so homestuck i could cry, and what occurs therein is extremely adorable :3c

modern fanfiction (post epilogues)

Pilot Light, Pale Rapture by purplebard G

Excellent post-epilogues Jade fic! The writing is beautiful, it’s a really genuine and melancholy work. A masterpiece in JadeDavepeta. I also give a blanket recommendation for all of this author’s fanfic -- it’s deeply original and flawlessly written, every piece!

House of Dirk by IMAC T

If you haven’t read House of Dirk... seriously, read House of Dirk. It’s a modern classic. A dadaist, genre-reconstructive, trope-subverting and absolutely hilarious MASTERPIECE!!! and the characterizations are pitch-perfect. this fanfiction can be cited as the spark which ignited the roaring inferno of Dirk/Caliborn shippers who can now be found online ^__^

mare in ossibus nostris dormit (in our bones sleeps the sea) by liobi

Just some really awesome scourge sisters :,) i love a nice romp through troll mother planet, and this is a flawlessly executed no-game AU.

JADE ROUTE by spicyyeti/muthahomestuckah T

Not technically a fanfiction, because this is 100% a comic, but if you want to read about Homestuck characters in a way that is engaging, innovative, touching and hilarious, you gotta read Jade Route! It’s the best thing that happened to jade since squiddles! the art is REALLY GOOD the characterization is REALLY GOOD god.. i love jade route.

BONES OF BLACK MARROW by oxfordRoulette E

an innovation in dirkjake pornography. this fic will make your head split open, and most of it is pornography of an exceptionally raunchy color. Basically, Dirk summons a demon (Jake) for stupid reasons and it fucks both of their lives up. Incredible work with formatting by the author, seriously who can even code like that, and i love the magical mechanics :) it’s very well researched and it really tears both Dirk and Jake to pieces psychologically. through porn.

Timaeus, Testified by sendificating NR

another fic that uses experimental formatting. It’s all about Dirk and it’s REALLY SO AMAZING.... a detailed and inventive psychological opus.

Also.... i write fanfiction. sometimes. can’t vouch for the quality but i would be remiss as an author if i didn’t plug . well, that’s all for tonight, folks! hope u find something to read!

#homestuck #fanfiction

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jisssooyah · 4 years

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Hi you... if you were going to curate a little season of films for me, which ones would you choose and why? They don't need to be horror, I'm just curious what you would choose 🌸

I don’t know if you’ll like these movies, or if you’ve already watched them, but after i watched these films, i felt like they might need to belong to you now. i hope they make you smile, roll your eyes, and cry just as much as i did.

1. city of god (2002): this is one of the most immersive and gorgeously shot films i’ve ever seen. it’s set in rio de janeiro during the 60s and spans decades exploring the drug culture in the slums and how this can affect kids just as they are trying to figure their own selves out. the way this film is shot, feels like you were at the sea with them as the sand crunched underneath your feet. but the way that the director captures these individuals, makes you so fucking relieved that you don’t live through any of the circumstances that they go through.

2. the dreamers (2004): set in 1968, this film follows three students in Paris who come of age and explore one another and their limits during the revolution. while these students prop themselves up as individuals obsessed with sex, running underneath themselves is a current of jealousy, obsession, and blurred familial relationships that made me increasingly uncomfortable. you find yourself feeling bad for the children, and ultimately upset at their upbringing because of their parents.

3. if beale street could talk (2018): this movie is based off of james baldwin’s titular 1974 novel. in it, the director expertly and vigorously explores love: a love that feels so real that it hurts. the cast is what sold this film to me. the way they talk, laugh, cry, and smile at one another is achingly beautiful and terrifyingly sad. i wanted to transport myself back to their time period and watch the main characters fall in love because the film didn’t seem like enough.

4. the neon demon (2016): this film follows an emerging model who sacrifices herself to the demands of the industry in order to be attractive and beautiful. there are so many stunning colors in this film that it makes you dizzy, like you’re in a trance and that’s what this world is for the main character: a trance. as she oscillates between reality and fantasy, her world and the characters in it, increasingly seek out to alter her personality.

5. death becomes her (1992): a deliberately ultra-campy parody of trashy, pandering "women's pictures," soap operas and paperbacks from the '80s and '90s. The three leads all do some of their best work - it's hilarious watching Meryl Streep play a terrible actress, Goldie Hawn is particularly hilarious during her character's cat lady phase, and all around just a really fun and eccentric film.

6. princess cyd (2017): i can’t think of anything to write for this but i just wanna say that this is literally one of the most pleasant movie experiences i’ve ever had. so much light and genuine interaction in warm sun rays radiating positive energy and an openness that is far too uncommon in movies nowadays. people talk, people connect, people grow bonds and are allowed to be sexual or intimate or personal without an air of shame or judgement. just pure kind and curious human association.

7. spiderman: into the spiderverse (2018): the message of Spider-Verse is not "gentrify yourself! stop expressing your personality and just conform to what society wants you to be!" After all, what makes you different makes you Spider-Man, and Miles' final expression of himself as a superhero still retains much of his personality and individuality...they're just being used in more productive and fulfilling ways. It's the little things that drive the point home, like noticing that the title page for Miles' finished Great Expectations essay has been stylistically doodled and colored like street art. Rather than seeing his artistic gifts as an opposition to his schoolwork, Miles infuses them together to make the best of the hand he's been dealt.

8. my life as a zucchini (2016): initially heartbreaking and sad, but slowly becoming more joyful and heartwarming as the plot moves along. The film really feels like it captures the essence and child like wonder of these kids, all of them going through hardships but managing to find something to help each other out. It’s so refreshing to see the actual orphanage portrayed in a more positive light, not the usual horrid dump that a lot of lesser movies play them out as. The animation is stunning. One of the best uses of stop motion I’ve seen, everything is so colourful and detailed. There’s some moments set in snowy mountains and these look incredible. There’s clearly been so much love and care put into each and every scene here. The music too, sounds spectacular, it really works well with each scene.

9. lovesong (2016): Mindy and Sarah have that type of relationship where they don't need words because they speak in a language made out of glances and touches. This movie is about the fear of ruining a meaningful friendship and losing an important person, about love that is so complicated that one might not even try because the outcome seems to be so obvious.

10. her (2013): Heartbreak is formative: it changes you heart side out, and leaves your muscles a little stronger, your skin a little thicker, your bones easier to repair. Before this film, I’d never seen anything constructive in having your insides pulled apart by the seams by another person, but this film taught me how. Being in love and then being forced out of it is an experience that changes you fundamentally, but Her taught me its purpose – you don’t need them to leave you so that you can find someone who’s a better fit, because perhaps you never will. You need it to participate in humanity. The common denominator is being hurt, and without it, you’re barely alive.

11. shoplifters (2018): bittersweet and richly transportive, Shoplifters is a film that nonchalantly eases you into its tragic beauty in a way that doesn't punch you hard until the end. It simultaneously made me want to be part of the film's world and also very glad that I'm not. The setting the characters live in is messy and cluttered and full of dysfunction and lies, but it's also got family, and laughter, and fist-bumps, and slurping warm noodles while rain pings on the tin rooftop. So nuanced, so many tiny moments of delicate beauty and unassuming heartbreak, so many people making terrible decisions with good intentions.

12. god’s own country (2017): though it is a love story between two men, this aspect is only addressed briefly in a single scene. Rather, the film is about finding someone who makes you want to be a better person, someone who comes into your life just when you needed it most. Gheorghe helps Johnny open up and realize the beauty of the simple life. From this relationship, Johnny begins to feel comfortable with expressing himself, and his love and gratitude towards others. He also begins to appreciate life in the country, surrounded by stunning landscapes and the beauty of simplicity. Addressing the Yorkshire countryside, Gheorghe says "It is beautiful, but lonely." Johnny is presented with the notion that he doesn't have to be cold and miserable, slaving and drinking his days away. He is presented with the possibility of no longer being alone and finally finding happiness and contentment - and it is more than gratifying to see him accept it.

13. disobedience (2017): a tender star-crossed daydream. the three main character dynamics are special enough on their own, but the romance that blooms at the center is cathartically intimate and even magical: a reunion that feels so inevitable. catching glimpses of a past life, details we aren’t privy to. all the stolen kisses and whispers and promises. a bond so strong that they fall back in sync with each other like second nature, even if they try to fight against it. even if it won’t work. and yet they choose each other, even if for a few minutes.

14. raw (2016): this film is so gross and I like that. There is tons of blood and unique body horror and it all works perfectly for the tone the film is attempting to set. The use of color, specifically neons, creates a constant feeling that you are traveling through some sort of weird ghost world, which I really like. Overall, it's a very well put together film with flashes of brilliance.

15. the night is short, walk on girl (2017): what an absolutely magical adventure of a film. Essentially this is a heavily episodic look at a night in the lives of several people, centered on a woman and a man as she gleefully floats from event to event while he neurotically obsesses over how to "coincidentally" talk to her. The storytelling is incredible; while the overarching narrative is simple there are countless threads woven together to connect everyone in the story to each other. That in itself is a big theme: connections between people, how everything is interrelated, and what a large impact seemingly insignificant things people do can have an impact on everyone around them.

16. coraline (2009): Coraline is the best stop motion movie ever made in my opinion. Before the film released in 2009, I read the book and was completely blown away by its creativity and story. It’s a pretty dark tale featuring many scenes of fright that work well in both a horror setting and an animated kids setting. On surface value, this film is quite horrifying, which is something I’ve always loved about it. While it does make a few minor changes to the book, it improves upon a piece of art that was already jaw-droppingly good. Coraline feels like a real little girl with some real problems. She’s selfish but likable which is something most films cannot translate well. Of course, she has a pretty awesome arc as well which brings this movie to a perfect close for her character. The other-mother is also perfectly done. She is almost exactly how I imagined her in the book and the animation on her is spookily gorgeous. There is not one dull moment in this film. It is literally a perfect piece of cinema.

17. the third wife (2019): haven’t seen a film this visually delicate in a while. Ash Mayfair works with the looming mountain surroundings to make her characters —these women, these girls— as small as possible, as isolated as possible. Uneasiest of all is the protagonist May, so young and so weighed by responsibility, her position blurs between being one of the wives and being one of the daughters. It’s an extremely bleak tale of circumstance. An old tale, certainly, but so beautifully crafted it doesn’t matter. Mayfair holds a fearful tension throughout, and it only ever shatters in the cruelest of ways.The abundance of women and display of sisterhood begin as a comfort, but horror takes over as we realize how conditional and fragile that comfort is. Even the daughters are subconsciously aware, one of them praying to the gods to grow up and become a man, shearing her hair off in naive triumph. It’s a doomed cycle of girls performing roles which are unfortunately their best option, right up until the final scene of May with her daughter, still in their mourning clothes. She, like the older wives, finally realizes they’re the same as the cattle laying on their side for too many days.

#asks #shortcake-kaspbrak

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sanrionharbor-blog · 5 years

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For Everybody Still Worried About the Leaks

Clues from the Cast Interviews, GRRM Hints, and My Own Gut Feelings

Disclaimer: Hey, nobody knows nothing, but life’s too short to stress about things we can’t control, and stories are supposed to be maps to help us learn more about ourselves and about life in general–not hair-pulling inducements. So I’m going to enjoy all the speculating that I can regarding the GOT season finale, and want to share some thoughts on why I think certain “leaks” are most likely bunk.

I’m mostly focusing on the pervasive “Does Tyrion die by trial?” leak, and everything that links to that, including any betrayals or major deaths.

Tyrion’s Ending and The Ending, In General

First, let’s quote Peter Dinklage himself:

I had all these ideas in my head and a version of one of them is how it ends up [for Tyrion]. David and Dan have a brilliant version of what I had. If I use any adjectives it will give it away. But I love how it ended up. And how it ends up for everybody. They had a beautiful gentle touch with some, and a hard touch with others.

But that’s just on Tyrion’s ending. Before I get into what that quote tells us, let me quote what other people have said about the Overall Ending of Game of Thrones:

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau:

I’ve never read anyone who got the whole thing. And when I read it the first time, I was blown away.

George R.R. Martin:

So many readers were reading the books with so much attention that they were throwing up some theories, and while some of those theories were amusing bulls*** and creative, some of the theories are right…At least one or two readers had put together the extremely subtle and obscure clues that I’d planted in the books and came to the right solution.

What the above quotes tell me is:

No one has guessed the ending completely–but parts of the ending? Yeah, they’ve been guessed. Which just goes to show how much this show and its themes have resonated not only with GRRM, but with his audience. Because,as a writer, I can tell you that no storyteller tells a story alone. There’s something guiding us and we can’t put a finger on it but it’s often the source of our best ideas. And it’s the same ineffable something that stirs all of us when we’re creating, sharing, and participating in stories. It’s the reason you see the same patterns in stories over and over. In short, the fact that part of the ending CAN be guessed is NOT a bad thing. It’s natural. Some postmodern storytelling theories have taught us that tricks and surprises are where it’s at–but a story isn’t true unless it can surprise us and, in retrospect, give us the only answer that makes any sense. You can see a pithier version of this kind of storytelling in Ye Olde Riddle–for example, the Sphinx in Oedipus Rex could tell us the answer to her riddle is orange, and that would throw us for a loop, but it would tell us nothing and mean nothing and add nothing to the story and thus would be forgotten. Surprise doesn’t count unless it has a ripple effect. So, about-face turns and OOC arcs may shock and subvert, but they’ll ultimately end up as dross and not as gold. (But hey, more on my thoughts on what can and can be accepted as canon in the last blurb below!).

Now, has anybody assumed that Tyrion would betray Daenerys and end up dead simply for 1) loyalty to the Lannisters, 2) suddenly losing faith in humanity?, or 3) suddenly wanting to usurp power himself? No. This is not a popular theory by a longshot. Tyrion dying? Sure. Somebody betraying Daenerys? Sure. Tyrion as a ruler? Sure. But this very specific, shoehorned version of the story is simply too contrived to have been picked up by fans organically.

The leaks so far have painted nothing but harsh endings for ALL the characters. Don’t tell me those leaks are pro-Stark. Those leaks point out backstabbing, loneliness, and emotional stagnation–forget what characters live, think about what these leaks have said about these characters. Not only does this not jive with the “bittersweet” aspect of the ending, it doesn’t jive with Dinklage’s assertion that, while some characters will go down harshly (R.I.P. Missandei especially–at least Edd and Jorah and Beric got heroic deaths and funerals), others will be treated gently. A heartbroken Brienne? A cold, lonely, manipulative Sansa? A suddenly hopeless, headless Tyrion? I don’t think so. (I also don’t think that means that Brienne and Jaime will necessarily ride into the sunset–but I do think we’ll have Jaime’s feelings for her confirmed, along with the completion of his redemption arc. I also don’t think that means Tyrion definitely won’t die–but I don’t think he’ll be character assassination, either. And I also don’t think that Sansa WILL end up in a canon relationship–but, logically, they can’t leave all the Stark’s COMPLETELY UNABLE TO LOVE, and um, somebody has to be willing to have legitimate heirs to the Stark House. Ok, just to continue this aside, but it seems theoretically impossible to me that the Stark House, which is all about the continuation of the Starks and the independence of the North, would not be given any canon marriages/alliances at the end of their arc. Arya’s already rejected marriage, Bran drove Meera away, and Sansa’s always wanted a happy marriage, even if she’s got very understandable trust issues right now. Anyhow–).

Peter Dinklage was able to guess how his character arc ended. What are the odds that Betraying Somebody He Cares About Without Good Reason (Daenerys–I could see him betraying her reluctantly, but not easily)/Being Betrayed By Somebody He Cares About (Sansa)/Dying Guilty After All The False Trials His Character Has Been THrough were in the mix? I don’t think so. Dinklage has gone on record multiple times to say how much he admires Tyrion and thinks he’s a good person. He’s also gone on record stating that Sansa and Tyrion’s relationship is full of true affection. Even if Tyrion dies and/or he and Sansa don’t end up as a couple, betrayal just seems so far out of the scope of what these characters’ storylines have been building to. And again, I can’t see that being even one version of one of Dinklage’s headcanons. What I think is most likely? A) Hand to the Ruler, B) Part of a new council that replaces or supplements the King/Queen, C) the King himself, or D) a heroic death.

How Long They’ve Planned the Ending:

They had talks with GRRM in 2014

They’ve been planning the ending for five years

They’ve known it was Arya who would take out the NK for three years

So some decisions weren’t set in stone, even by GRRM (such as who would take out the NK…an interesting thing not to know, actually, but that just points out how inflated the importance of the Others/White Walkers was–do I still think it will be handled better by GRRM, yes, but that’s another story), and even if D&D’s execution feels more like “here’s an outline of what’s happening” rather than “here’s the organic progression of that storyline,” I can only imagine that if core pieces were given by GRRM AND they’re not completely winging it, then there will be a certain amount of narrative cohesion once this comes full-circle.

Let’s not forget, we still have a third WTFudge moment that was came straight from GRRM himself, with the other two shockers being Hodor’s origin and Shireen Baratheon’s death. Could this third twist be Dany going completely mad? Maybe, though it doesn’t fall into the same category of completely-unexpected-but-honestly-possible, like Shireen and Hodor. Only because the foreshadowing for Dany’s madness was heavy-handed in the last few seasons (taking away the ‘unexpected’ bit), and is now quite uneven here in Season 8.

I think the third twist will likely be a specific action (a la Shireen’s death) or another origin story-type twist (a la Hodor). Some people have speculated that “Tyrion’s Trial” would make for that final twist, but here’s why I don’t think so:

The Nature of the Leaks

It’s very interesting to me that this leak, supposedly this Huge Most Important Leak, was one of the very first ones released. Like, months ago. While the rest of the leaks, the ones that have actually been accurate, are usually only released at the max a few days before each episode airs.

It’s also interesting to me that HBO has not done more to shut down this particular leak.

And, I would not put it past HBO to have actually filmed one entire fake-out scene. Most of the Dragon Pit/South scenes were filmed after the first three episodes, so they probably knew that they had the time and money to just throw fans for another loop. Sound tinfoily? Perhaps, but the idea that this big twist–and a twist that so far doesn’t make much sense given what we’ve seen in what is now ⅔’s of the season–was such an easy leak just makes me suspect.

Another possibility? Tyrion IS on trial, but is pardoned. Or Tyrion thinks he’s on trial, but it turns out to be somebody else’s funeral (a la that Littlefinger Fake Out 2.0.). I’m not saying any of this makes for the best handling of his character or for a particularly compelling scenario, but considering we haven’t seen it, I can’t say for certain.

GOT’s Recent “Plot Twist” Pattern

D&D have switched to information-withholding tactics in the last few seasons. Just look at Sansa and Arya’s arc and the Littlefinger Fake Out. Were these well-written? Not entirely–but they don’t make for the worst entertainment either. Yeah, we had better quality storytelling in the first four seasons, but soap opera can still be fun.

And how long have they been teasing Dark!Sansa without actually delivering? And let’s not forget–show-Sansa’s arc is still, broadly, based on book-Sansa’s arc. Book-Sansa remains far more in tune to the archetype of the Lady/Maiden, while show-Sansa is slightly blended with Jeyne Poole’s arc (and, unfortunately, a dash of Pop Feminism). But the fact remains that whatever meeting D&D had with GRRM back in 2014 contained information based on the broad trajectory of Sansa’s arc as GRRM has been writing it. (I’m writing a character arc meta on Sansa that’ll be out…soonish).

And let’s just say I don’t see Dark!Sansa hinted very well in the books at all. Sansa learning to pull strings like Littlefinger and Cersei and Margaery? Heck yes. But Sansa will do it Sansa’s way.

So, given that D&D usually try to shock us by hinting at a character’s worst possible tendency AND by withholding information AND by trying to get us to see one scenario while giving us another (another example being Jon Snow vs. Night King actually being Arya vs Night King), I can very well see them turning Sansa into a reluctant last-minute ally of Daenerys, Tyrion being pulled out of hot water at the last minute, Jaime’s running to Cersei being about taking out Cersei not making out with Cersei (yeah sorry/not sorry about that one), and heck, maybe Dany won’t go mad–she’ll just realize she doesn’t want the Iron Throne anymore, or the Iron Throne shouldn’t exist, or she dies tragically but not as a monster. Time will tell.

Who We Haven’t Seen So Far That Can Introduce New Complications

1. Edmure Tully

Tobis Mennzies (Edmure Tully) has been confirmed to return this season. Could it just be a cameo? Maybe. But I wouldn’t put it past Sansa, Arya, and Bran to be planning a back-up plan to help out Jon (and thus Dany). Arya is probably planning on killing Cersei, Sansa can rally what’s left of the Tully’s, and Bran will hopefully do something Three-Eyed Ravenish (or regain some of Bran’s humanity–which would be a twist worth waiting for).

2. Khal Drogo

Motherhood is an important theme in Dany’s life. I think ultimately, book and show wise, it’s what’s truly important to her. She just doesn’t realize it. In this way, Dany is a very interesting parallel with Cersei. Both of these women are tempted to replace their intimate losses with power. They believe power will protect them and their own. And that mentality can slowly shift into the classic Mother Bear conundrum: Us vs. Them.

Now, Khal Drogo not only represents a happy time in Dany’s life where she was both powerful and protected, but where she was a mother. After her losses, she gained her dragons. She truly loves her dragons as children, but they are also a liability to everyone but Dany. Interestingly, Dany’s human child with Khal Drogo was a liability to everyone but the Khalasar. The priestess from season 1 knew this, and so she prevented it. It doesn’t make the loss any less of a tragedy, however.

Will we see the same thing play out here in the final act of Game of Thrones? I’m not sure, but Khal Drogo’s presence will be heavily symbolic. Either Dany will meet him in the afterlife or reject death another time–but perhaps she’ll realize that her true desires were always for belonging and motherhood (just not at the expense of her own free will).

And, as an aside–I’ve really come to see Dany in a different light this season. I’ve always been anti-Daenerys as Ruler, but Daenerys as a character is truly fascinating. So what I see implied in her final arc is truly heartbreaking (and I hope it’s handled better overall than it was, in snapshot, here in 8x04). [Dany’s also my dad’s favorite character, haha, and I respect my dad’s opinion almost more than anyone else’s, so she gets props for that too lol].

3. Robin Arryn

I have a feeling this will be a cameo, but honestly the worst-case scenario for me would be Sansa being engaged to him lol. It would certainly be a Margaery Tyrell move on her part (knowing she won’t have to marry him for some time and he’ll be easy to influence), but the Knights of the Vale are already dedicated to her and I’m a Sanrion shipper so you know where I stand on any other Sansa ship. ;-)

Regardless, the Vale could become an important wrinkle in the plot, and I’m all for us not having a complete Doomsday scenario.

And In The Worst Case Scenario

The worst case scenario is that the leaks are legit. Bran as an emotionless king? The Starks are forever alone? Tyrion’s character assassination? Bleh.

But I’ve already hinted at my philosophy on canon storytelling.

Look, most fanon is crap–but so is most fiction. There are millions of stories out there, but it’s hard to find (and tell) one that resonates across all borders of sex, ethnicity, age, and epoch. You know what CAN exist in both fanon and canon–and what actually matters as canon in the end? The stories that are true.

If characters don’t act true to themselves, if deep-in-the-bones themes suddenly drop off, if crucial scenes that are present in every single successful outline are missing (don’t go postmodern on me–just read The Story Grid), then that story is incomplete. And it’s a lie.

Madeleine L’Engle once said “All truth is God’s truth.” She was trying to make the point that fantasy, and fiction in general, is important because it tells the truth. It’s not about the facts (dragons aren’t real! This is just a TV show! Etc.). It’s about the truth (dragons can be beaten! There is wonder in the world! We are united by our mythologies!).

So no, fanon can be a lot more than making heterosexual characters gay or inserting fluff without dealing with the consequences of character actions or erasing parts of canon. Fanon can be more true than canon when the author is on the tail of the actual Story.

Steven Pressfield does a much better job of explaining this in The War of Art. Madeleine L’Engle does a much better of explaining this in Walking on Water. Shawn Coyne does a much better job of explaining this in The Story Grid.

So don’t just take my word for it.

For me, then, I’m excited to see how the show plays out. And I’m fine if certain things that I only WANT don’t happen–but if the story doesn’t have what NEEDS to happen, then I’ll sadly and reluctantly reject it, and wait for GRRM’s books to come out, or simply contribute to the ASOIAF lore as best as I can. Hopefully not as wish fulfillment, but simply to respect the core of the story itself.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

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steve0discusses · 6 years

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Yugioh S2 Ep 6: Blind Sister Saga Continues

It’s tourney season, and wisely, Kaiba decided that just one human catastrophe from the Yugi crew would be plenty enough for gambling the lives of everyone on Earth with. Long story short, Joey awoke that morning and saw no invite on his doorstep.

Really wish we got to see what those invites looked like. Did Kaiba write them on creative stationary that folds into a weird shape? Did he have little stickers? Did he employ Jelly pens? Were they the type of jelly pen where you have to erase it to make a two-toned silver/purple ink pattern? Confetti? He’s definitely the type of Chaotic Neutral that would mail confetti.

There’s some timeline issues here--Mai and everyone else was there for the announcement in Domino’s Time Square because they got an invite to this tourney, but Yugi didn’t have one yet? Yugi, the only person Kaiba truly wants to compete with? Yugi learned about this tourney from a psychic who just spends her day spooking people who visit her museum?

Maybe Grandpa just forgot to check the mail that day? Or maybe...just maybe Grandpa is a little freaked out by mail these days and just never checks it at all?

Seeing that Yugi’s going to throw himself at the wolves again, Joey decides to enlist anyway, since Yugi will actually very seriously surely die without his friend’s constant attention.

So, they march down to the nearest “I Swear This is Not a Weapon” card-rig dispensary to get their paperwork filled out. Considering how quickly and how forcefully these things just shoot out holographic cameras at head-height, you’d think you’d need to register for it and get a special license like you would a sidearm.

(read more under the cut)

They talk so casually about this and it’s like...ok are we going somewhere?

Nope. Whenever the slightest guise of romance enters the scene, cards are here to slap that right off that plate that we never actually ordered. Even cards are there to cock block this 3 way the writers just have no idea what to do with.

Anyway, this outfit lives here.

Turns out that in the week or so that Kaiba spent putting this all together, he did some digging and made profiles for everyone already. Kinda what happened to me with Myspace, just being honest. I was just trying to get Boba one day when this one girl I distantly knew from High School was like “Why aren’t we friends on Myspace.” and I told her “because I have Facebook” and then before, my drink even got into my hands I had a profile. I only became friends with Tom, her, and this one guy from college I was in love with who’s Myspace played the anchorman version of “Afternoon delight” really loudly and you could not turn it off because it was hidden somewhere on the page. I look back on it now and realized just him having a Myspace years after Facebook existed was a red flag in itself, but hindsight’s 20/20. Anyway, back to Yugioh:

And so, bam, They toss a box at Yugi that is about 3/4 the size of Yugi himself. Kaiba didn’t make an XS version for the only person in this tourney he actually wants to fight?

Kaiba decides, when making Joey’s profile, to give him a 1-star rating, which kicked him out of the competition. But, this guy in the butcher outfit, the glasses, and the...bandana...sees Joey’s red-black dragon or whatever it’s called and decides it’s rare enough to Rare Hunt.

They legit say “My hard drive malfunctioned” PS. Lol what???

Why does he need to duel Joey? I mean I guess Joey is kinda strong and hard to take 1-on-1? Anyways, so despite Kaiba’s good intentions to get Joey out of this competition so Joey can spend some much needed time with his sister he hasn’t seen in 7 years, Joey gets in anyway.

I forget sometimes that Joey has this long sprawling teen soap opera story that just clashes so much with the magical altered history apocalypse story, it’s hard to believe it’s in the same show--and not just that--but that it’s a side-story in the same show that we hear about but don’t actually get to see.

This was just so funny to me, that he’s like “I will be there for my sister’s surgery!” and then--immediately--out of no where these three guys in robes pop out and it’s like lol, why would you need 3 grown men on one kid!? This ridiculous show.

And not just that, but they beat him with the card that Yugi used in Episode 1 that was so OP that Weevil tossed it into the ocean. And not just that but this guy has like 3 versions of it. Freakin Exodia is more than half of his deck.

I mean Episode 1 was a long time ago but Kaiba sure made a big fuss about how no one has ever played an Exodia ever in the history of mankind but here we are.

Anyway, the soap continues and we actually get to see Serenity. Y’all I was serious when I said I didn’t think this girl was real but, man--she exists and also is...kind of weird. Because her brother doesn’t show, she’s locked herself in a hospital room--a hospital that has locks on the rooms? I mean, girl your brother paid for this 3 million dollar surgery, what are you on about him not being there for you?

First off--Nice job forgetting she’s not a Wheeler anymore, Yugi, it’s not like she’s had a very rocky divorce of the past 7 years or anything.

Second off--Does anyone in this universe call the police!?

TRISTAN CAN DRIVE!?

So I guess these kids are 16 now?

I’m not even joking--it was at the abandoned warehouses, that Tristan drives by going “I FOUND HIM” and then drags Joey to the hospital looking like this.

This story line is so Daytime Kid’s TV One Tree Hill I’m expecting a golden retriever to run up and just devour one of Serenity’s eye transplants.

Anyway, so Serenity is so mad at her brother she won’t come out until he makes this big old speech for her--and it’s a fine speech and all--but like...girl he was left out to die last night??? Can a doctor please get his hands on Joey.

Ah, it’s been a full season, but it looks like Serenity is finally going to get those eyes.

I think. Maybe the rest of this season will be side-plots of Serenity just postponing her surgery over and over again.

Anyway, Next week, on Yugioh:

So does Tristan just bring that motorcycle with him everywhere now? Will we ever see Joey’s Mom ever again? (I’m guessing no because that hair is too normal) And does this dueling disk even fit Yugi or does he have to put it on his leg?

#yugioh #yugioh recaps #photo recaps #s2 ep6 #yugi muto #joey wheeler #serenity #joey's mom #tristan taylor #tea gardner #this neighborhood has got to do something about all these adults mugging children on the street #like you gotta remove some warehouses man #maybe replace it with a park or something ? Geez

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brendonwithyourshit-blog · 6 years

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Ryden Fics

Here’s some I recommend, and I appreciate the authors for making these because AhajjHha

(I’m sure most of these will be on google if you look up the title)

(and I’m also sure all of these are r rated)

The Heart Rate of A Mouse

It’s the seventies. Basically, sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Ryan’s band, “The Followers”, go on tour. One of their roadies gets injured and needs a last minute replacement, which happens to be Brendon-Gay-Urie. And it goes on from there. There may be a lot of bumps in the road, but Ryan finally figures out who he is.

My rating: 12/10

So long and ow my heart. Beautifully written and so poetic. This is probably the most popular ryden fic, but if you haven’t read it yet, jump on the bandwagon. It’s so totally worth it. You won’t forget about it.

The Black Rose Season

Ryan’s college scholarship gets cut short, and he has to reach drastic measures to get it covered: spy on a secret society that is lead by Brendon Urie. He wanted to get the job done so he could graduate, no strings tied. But that never happens.

My rating: 10/10

I love the story line for this, I was really digging the college AU. It was so mysterious and dark, but also bright and funny at the same time. Also the plot twists just, well, twist you up. Definitely worth a read.

Filthy Lucre

Brendon makes a living from prostitution, and sends most of his earnings to help his parents, leaving him with almost nothing. Ryan on the other hand, is extremely fortunate and famous. He is liability of his family, causing trouble and making headlines, never sober. When their paths cross, Ryan realizes maybe he doesn’t need drugs to make him forget his past.

My rating: 10/10

It’s such an amazing story despite being unfinished, and it really (even though it’s super, uh) has a good moral behind it. There’s some stories you forget, but this one will always be remembered for me.

Coffee

Brendon gets kicked out of his parents house, and Jon and Ryan take him in. That doesn’t last long though, but they will fight to get him back.

My rating: 8/10

This story moved a little too fast for me and it was also a tad too dramatic for my taste, but if you like that this is perfect for you. Minus that, I recommend it a lot. Super fluff-y.

The Key of Victory

Brendon gets a chance to be on a TV show called “The Key of Victory,” that chooses the best musical talent and gives them a kick start into their career. He is determined to win. Along the way he befriends Ryan Ross, one of the judges.

My rating: 9/10

This story is really creative and it’s also adorable as fuck. If you want a medium length story, choose this.

And That Smile That You Gave to Me

Jon develops a master plan to help Ryan win Brendon over. He has to follow EVERY step the correct way or it won’t work

My rating: 7/10

This one is pretty short but it gets the point across pretty well. If you want a super cute one-shot, this is probably your best bet.

Oh Doctor Doctor

Ever since Brendon started working in the oncology department, he has had a crush on the head surgeon, Ryan. Unfortunately for him, he has been declined for years. Until one night.

My rating: 10/10

This is one of my favorites because I love the hospital AU. It’s also the most adorable thing ever, like, it’ll have you screeching. Definitely the fluffiest on here. It’s not long, either. Literally go read it now. :)

In Case the Scene Gets Nasty

Brendon Urie has a smart mouth that gets him into bad situations. Especially fights with Ryan Ross. But Ryan’s no angel either, he’s pissy and temperamental. They develop a burning hate for each other. The extravagant amounts of fighting earn them both detentions for the rest of the semester, alone together, organizing files. During detention they both realize there’s something better they can do besides fight.

My rating: 12/10

This one. I love it so much. They literally hate each others guts, but they both have pretty rough lives and realize that’s something to bond over. If you haven’t read this yet seriously go do it you won’t regret it.

Iron, Neon Lights, and Weed

Brendon wants to pursue his dream by becoming a musician, but to do that he has to get a record deal. There was talk about this secret club in the city, called “The Bridge,” that gives them out to people that have the most potential. A new friend brings him in, and he meets a (dashing) guy called Ryan. Aside from that, Brendon has to convince someone called “Ross” that he’s record-deal-material.

My rating: 10/10

Do I even need to say an opinion about this one? It’s Anna Green so it’s obviously going to be great. Probably in my top five. It’s one you won’t forget either.

Two Weeks in Hawaii

Ryan was left at the altar by Pete, and Spencer and Jon force him to go on his honeymoon trip, in Hawaii, to get over it. He meets a resident, Brendon, and they both fall pretty hard for each other. It’s a shame Ryan has to leave in two weeks.

My rating: 7/10

SO CUTE. SO FLUFF. I LOVE. It also moves kinda fast for me, which is not really my thing. Also there’s like a ton of other couples in there besides Ryan and Brendon, but the main focus is always them. If you like that it’s worth a read :)

Burning Down Cathedrals

Ryan is a huge fan of “Established Heroes”, and it’s kind of a shocker when the famous Brendon Urie shows up to his family picnic. It’s even better when they become friends (or more?). Then it starts to feel like a dream when he asks if Ryan’s band could be their opener during the next tour. Sadly, good things don’t last long.

My rating: 10/10

This one feels oddly real even though it’s a fanfic. It’s also like super depressing and it makes you feel. And that obviously means it’s written amazingly. Highly recommend:)))

Posing in a Ballroom

The Smith-Urie brothers have everything, or it may so seem. In reality they’re covering up their own family secrets. But they’re not the only ones. Their friends, Ryan and Jon, have some skeletons of their own. It’s one man for himself. They can’t hide their feelings forever.

My rating: 6/10

The story is written so good, but it’s literally like a soap opera. It’s also not strictly ryden, and the other relationships get lots of the spotlight too. It’s kinda one of those “woah-i-didn’t-see-that-coming” stories. Conveys tons of feelings. Just gonna leave it at that.

Miguel Sanchez’s Grand Slam of Love

Ryan is a famous tennis player, and also a self-conceited asshole. He throws a bit of a fit when a newcomer wins to him in Australia. Ryan has hated this “Brendon Urie” ever since, but Brendon couldn’t settle with that, apparently. Now the man has Ryan wrapped around his little finger.

My rating: 10/10

Honestly it’s so fun to imagine Ryan as a world-famous tennis player because that’s probably the last thing he would do. And I love it. It’s sorta short, but again highly highly recommend.

ok so that’s all I have for now but if i find more that are super good I will add them on!!

#ryden #ryden fics #ahh sorry this took so long #tis later than later

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lynchgirl90 · 7 years

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Ep. 8 Of #TwinPeaks Is David Lynch's Purest Marriage Of Television And Video Art

Adam Lehrer , CONTRIBUTOR

It’s hard to describe how inestimable an impact David Lynch had over me when I first saw Mulholland Drive as a 14-year-old. Something I’ve been discussing with fellow artist friends of mine is the fact that the art that changed our lives the most and still carries the most weight over our own sensibilities is the art that we were exposed to very young, maybe even too young to fully understand what it is exactly that you’re viewing. I developed a taste for disturbing aesthetics at a very young age; when I was about five or six-years-old, my cinephile father would have “movie nights with dad” when my mom would go out with her girlfriends, and he would let my brother and I watch watch Ridley Scott’s Alien, James Cameron’s Terminator, and/or Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop when I still should have been reading children’s books (and boy am I thankful for that).

That early exposure to art, whether it be John Carpenter films, or Brian DePalma films, or Bret Easton Ellis novels, or my favorite music (Wu Tang, Lou Reed, or Marilyn Manson), is still the art that I think about and gravitate back towards even after decades of being exposed to just about everything contemporary art, cinema, literature, poetry, and popular music has to offer. But watching Lynch’s Mulholland Drive for the first time feels like a monumental point of epiphany in my life. A point where I thought to myself, “Maybe I want to create stuff when I grow up.” I had no idea what Mulholland Drive’s fractured plot meant, but its images left me confounded, and fascinated. I loved the dreamy, hallucinatory Los Angeles Neo-noir stylizations of its setting. I had never felt more terrified than when I first glimpsed that monster lurking behind the Winkie’s diner.

That film made me blissfully aware that cinema and art could be a simultaneously erotic, horrific, and thrilling experience. I knew how powerful art could be, but Mulholland Drive gave me my first taste of the sublime. Since then, I’ve been a David Lynch fanatic. I’ve watched all of his earlier films, binge watched Twin Peaks over and over (finding myself asking new questions each time), wrote college essays on Eraserhead and David Foster Wallace’s article that documented Lynch’s process on the set of Lost Highway, have searched out all his early forays into video art, have found merits in his more oft-overlooked output in advertising (his 2009 commercial for Dior is Lynch at his funniest), and have read countless analyses on the man himself and his cinematic language.

So, when you read what I’m about to say, know that I do so with much hesitance, consideration, and ponderousness: the eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return is the piece of filmmaking that Lynch has been building towards for his entire career. It is a singular cinematic and artistic achievement, and the purest distillation of the multitude of ideas and concepts that live and breathe in the Lynchian universe. I believe that years from now we will be looking upon this single episode as one of, if not the single most, defining artistic achievements of Lynch’s unimpeachable career. Bare with me.

Aesthetically, episode 8 would leave a powerful impression on even the most half-hazard of David Lynch converts. A hallucinatory, nightmarishly kaleidoscopic consortium of images of blood, flames, fluids, and demonic figures spews towards the viewer while Krystof Pendrecki’s tortuously atmospheric soundscapes underline the episode’s inescapable atmosphere of existential dread. Episode 8 is an hour long work of experimental video art, no doubt. But if you have been paying attention to this season of Twin Peaks and you know enough about the mythology of the show and know even more about Lynch’s artistic interests and visual touchstones, then you know that this episode was no mere act of meaningless artistic overindulgence. In fact, this was Lynch telling the origin story that set the entire series of Twin Peaks into place.

This was the origin story of BOB, the demonic force that forced Leland Palmer to rape his daughter for years and eventually murder her in Twin Peaks’ initial 1990s run. BOB, we learn in episode 8, was forged from the the United States' earliest forays into nuclear bomb testing. BOB was already the perfect metaphor for mankind’s capacity for cruelty, depravity and evil, and becomes an even more powerful metaphor now that we know his nuclear genesis. Any Lynchian fanatic will rave to you how delicious this notion is. What David Lynch has done, and in many ways has always been trying to do, is to create a piece of pure atmospheric video art that also works as a classic piece of narrative storytelling. In this episode, Lynch has perfectly located a zone in which vague and aesthetically menacing imagery also serve as clear and precise storytelling and, like the best cinema and storytelling, illustrates a metaphor for modern human existence. While Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, Lost Highway and Blue Velvet utilize video art aesthetics, they are also pieces of storytelling with easily identifiable stories if you look for them (well, maybe not Inland Empire). Episode 8 of the return of Twin Peaks is a mostly dialog-less piece of distorted, haunting images. It is art. But it also still tells a story. The story of a television series no less! This is all the more impressive in that television as a storytelling medium is the most reliant on expository dialog and over-crammed storyboarding.

David Lynch pays heed to the form while mainly utilizing the language of pure image. Who needs a script, and who needs dialog, when you can see that delectably menacing, fascinating and torturous world of Twin Peaks from inside the actual head of David Lynch? Episode 8 was the truest portal to the imagination of Lynch that has yet been put to screen.

I’m sure there are more casual David Lynch fans that are growing impatient with the restrained, at times glacial pace of this new season of Twin Peaks. I however have understood what he’s been doing this whole time. He hasn’t just been making a television season, he has been commenting on the current importance of television in our culture. Television has replaced cinema at the heart of cultural conversation for many reasons. Partly, this has been a result of the groundbreaking work that has been done in television over the last two decades: Twin Peaks, The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire, and more recently, The Leftovers have all expanded the possibilities of what people believe can be done with the form. There are also financial concerns: as major film studios continue to spend their whole wads on sure thing blockbuster action and superhero films, auteur filmmakers have had harder times getting their films properly funded. Cable and streaming television services like HBO or Amazon however have the means to give filmmakers the funds they need to realize a vision, and indie filmmakers have resultantly flocked towards the small screen.

Television’s prevalence has had connotations both positive and negative on culture. The negative, in my opinion, stems from its causing people to no longer be able to get lost in a pure, imagistic cinematic experience. Even the best shows are still mainly concerned with story and dialog, whereas cinema is about mood, atmosphere, and aesthetics. When Twin Peaks premiered in 1990, Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost (a television veteran) were very much interested in marrying the Lynchian world with the conventional tropes of television: serial drama, mystery, and even soap opera. Throughout its first season, it worked beautifully. Both Lynch aficionado cinephiles and mainstream television viewers alike were captivated, and the series was one of the year’s top-rated. But after the second season revealed Laura Palmer’s killer to be her demonic entity-inhabited father Leland far too early during its run, Lynch’s boredom with the constraints of television grew apparent. The show starts to feel like a standard nineties television show, albeit one with a quirky plot and wildly eccentric characters. Lynch mostly dropped primary showrunner duties to focus on his film Wild at Heart only to come back for Twin Peaks’ stunner of a series finale, when the show’s protagonist FBI Agent Dale Cooper travels to the mystical red velvet draped alternate universe of the Black Lodge, and eventually becomes trapped inside that Lynchian hellscape while his body is replaced with a doppelgänger inhabited by the demonic entity Killer BOB and set out into the world.

In the Black Lodge, Laura Palmer tells Cooper that she’ll see him in 25 years, and that's exactly where Twin Peaks: the Return starts off. It was apparent from the premiere episode of this new season of Twin Peaks that Lynch is benefitting from a new TV landscape in which Showtimes has awarded him full creative control over his product, and he’s directing all 16 episodes of this new season. Also, it’s quite obvious that the technological advancements over the last two decades have enabled Lynch to fulfill the fullest extent of his vision. Twin Peaks: The Return is a much purer marriage between narrative driven television melodrama and Lynch’s hallucinatory experimental video cinematic language. That first episode barely spends any time in Twin Peaks, but spends plenty of time with Cooper in The Lodge. There are some truly unforgettable images in that first episode: a demonic entity appears out of thin air in a cylindrical orb and viciously attacks a young couple having sex, a woman’s corpse is found on a hotel bed with most of her head missing, and who can forget Matthew Lilard, perhaps the newest victim to be inhabited by Killer BOB, in a jail cell accused of murder while Lynch moves the camera from cell to cell until we see the horrifying silhouette of BOB himself in high contrast red and black ghoulishly smiling? But at the same time, Lynch is able to move the plot forward in ways that should be familiar to all television viewers; through procedure, dialog, and plot device. Lynch is still working within the confines of television, but has peppered the narrative scenes with unforgettable imagery. It’s been almost as if he’s been subtly preparing us, the viewers, to not just respond to what we normally respond to in television: story, story, and story and dialog, dialog, and dialog. And to slowly reacquaint us with the thrilling experience that can be derived from watching a set of shocking, beautiful, erotic and terrifying images move along in a sequence on a screen.

And episode 8 of this new series is the pinnacle of this new body of work, and very possibly of Lynch’s career at large. The episode begins similarly enough, with evil Cooper escaping from jail only for his escape driver to attempt to murder him out in the woods. And that is when Lynch kicks it into overdrive. As evil Cooper’s body is bleeding out, a group of dirtied and horrific men called 'The Woodsmen' start picking over his body and smearing themselves in his blood, with Killer BOB himself appearing and apparently resuscitating Cooper’s lifeless body. And then, Lynch proceeds to tell BOB’s, and quite possibly Laura’s, origin stories through a 45-minute nightmarish experimental video art piece. The NY Times has called this episode “David Lynch emptying out his subconscious unabated.” That is totally accurate, and there has never been and most likely never will be an episode of television like this ever again. This episode was video art, but it was also still television, and it also served as a piece of and critique of cinematic and television languages. Allow me to explain.

Episode 8 functions in a way similar to that of the video art of Janie Geiser. Without any knowledge of the world of Twin Peaks or the themes of the Lynchian universe, one could admire this piece similarly to how they would admire the experimental video art of Janie Geiser, and in particular Episode 8 recalls Geiser’s film The Fourth Watch in which the artist superimposed horror film stills within the setting of an antique doll house. Episode 8 uses that same nightmare logic, but empowers it with the budget of a major Cable series. There are also similarities to scenes in Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant Under the Skin when the alien portrayed by Scarlet Johannson devours her male prey in a grotesque nether realm. And perhaps its greatest antecedent is Kubrick’s Big Bang sequence in 2001: A Spade Oydyssey, and in many ways Episode 8 is the hellish inverse of that epic sequence. Like the Big Bang, episode 8 tells an origin story of a world created by an explosion, but instead of a galactic explosion, Killer BOB and his world of evil were born of a nuclear explosion. Brilliantly, Lynch believes that Killer BOB was birthed by man made horrors, going back to something FBA Agent Albert Rosenfield said in the original series about BOB being a “manifestation of the evil men do.” Indeed, in Episode 8 Lynch brings us inside an atomic mushroom cloud set off during the first nuclear bomb test explosion in White Sands, New Mexico in 1945. As the camera enters the chaos and giving view to one horrid abstraction of flames and matter after another, we eventually see a humanoid creature floating in the distance. The humanoid eventually shoots tiny particles of matter out of a phallic attachment. One of those particles carries the face of none other than Killer BOB. The imagery is clear in its meaning: once humans created technology that could kill of its own planet, a new kind of evil had emerged into the world. Killer BOB is that evil imagined as a singular demonic entity.

But enough about the content, or the plot of the episode. There have already been plenty of recaps documenting its various thrilling enigmas: The Giant seemingly manifesting Laura’s spirit as a mutant bug that crawled into a young girl’s mouth via her bedroom window, or the horrific drifter walking around asking people for a light before he crushed their skulls with his bare hands and delivered a terrifying and poetic sermon over a radio airwave, or the impromptu Nine Inch Nails performance that preceded the madness. What is more important to note is the fact that there is a strong case to be made arguing that this episode was the pinnacle of all that David Lynch has ever tried to achieve. Lynch has always been a kind of pop artist. He comes from a background in abstract painting and sculpture, but he also has a deep and profound love for cinema that eventually influenced him to sit in a director’s chair. All kinds of cinema, from the kind of abstract cinematic geniuses you’d expect like Werner Herzog and Federico Fellini, to rigorously formalist filmmakers like Billy Wilder. From Eraserhead on, Lynch has tried to marry the formal conventions of cinema (plot, narrative, tension, juxtaposition, conclusion, etc..) with abstract and surrealist contemporary art. Twin Peaks was initially birthed of his interest in marrying conventional TV tropes, like soap opera and mystery, with that sense of terror art that he got famous for. But nevertheless, the constrictions of TV in the early nineties exhausted, and eventually bored, Lynch and he moved on. But now, he has been able to bend the conventions of television at will in this new season of Twin Peaks, and episode 8 was when he blew them up entirely. This hour of TV finds him drawing on all of his cinematic language and themes, from the surrealist ethos of his subconscious dream logic to origins of evil to the concept of dual identity (as this episode alludes too, Bob and Laura might be each other’s opposites, two side of one coin, if you will), while still working as a plot building episode within a contained, albeit sprawling, television narrative. There is no doubt that this episode will make the broad and at times confusing plot of the new season of Twin Peaks come into focus as it continues.

It was also the most mind-blowing cinematic experience I’ve had in years. And I watch everything. By successfully pulling off this episode, Lynch has also reminded viewers of the overwhelming potency that cinema and moving images can have that other mediums just don’t come close to. There is a lot of great stuff on TV right now, and one could even argue that something like Damon Lindelof’s The Leftovers had some jaw-dropping moments of pure cinema. But after watching Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, even the best shows feel like hour long scenes of conversation between people without much cinematic impact (on his podcast, American Psycho author and famed cinephile Bret Easton Ellis argues that television can’t do what cinema does visually because the writer is the one in charge, not the director, but that’s for another think-piece). Episode 8 is a reminder of the power of cinema, art and images. But it also still works as plot device for the over-arching narrative of the show. More than ever before, Lynch has pulled off a piece of work that indulges his wildest artistic dreams while still paying heed to the kind of formalism that television production necessitates. I don’t know about you, but when Twin Peaks: The Return returns for its second round of its 18 episode run this Saturday, I can’t wait to see what Lynch does next. We are witnessing something that will be written about by art historians as much as it will be by academics of pop culture. This is thrilling.

Link (TP)

#Twin Peaks #David Lynch #Mark Frost #Forbes

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josebarrmageddon · 7 years

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Dark Shadows (2012) 5th Anniversary

Dark Shadows was originally a 60′s Soap Opera that dealt with Gothic horror elements and dark story tones. In all intents and purposes, it is the perfect set for Tim Burton to tackle. Now, if you read any review on the movie, they’ll tell you the same thing.That it’s a half baked mess, a wobbly plot with no effort. Yes, that is all true, but as a Tim Burton fan and a creative mind myself, I can still see something of merit in this film. First off, the setting. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I absolutely love period pieces, particularly those set in the 70′s. It’s hard to not be wowed by Burton’s visuals, this is no exception. The 70′s decor and color is memorizing and done just. It’s really saying “look at how weird the 70′s were”, it’s simply addressing the time for what it was. The music, the clothes, even the film grain oozes with age.

The cast of Dark Shadows is made up of such strong talent. the likes of Michelle Pfeiffer, Jonny Lee Miller, Helena Bonham Carter, and Jackie Earl Haley. But the two that stand out are Johnny Depp and Eva Green. The plot revolves around Barnabas Collins(Depp) who leaves Angelique Bouchard(Green) for the true love of his life, Josette. Hurt by his betrayal, Angelique casts a spell on Barnabas that turns him into a vampire and traps for two centuries, until finally escaping. Their relationship is that of high school caliber, they insult each other but still have sexual desires. Depp is always a marvel to watch and here, his presence makes the entire scene a riot. His comedy comes from how sophisticated he is in such a loose and casual environment. Eva Green is phenomenal in her role, being conniving and slithery, but also passionate and fair. She is a witch who got her heart broken and want justice for it. Even though she is in such a position of power and can come out winning, she is denied what she strives for.

The film’s plot starts with Victoria Winters comeing to Collinswood to help David Collins cope with the loss of his mother, but once Barnabas is introduced, it takes a comical shift and focuses on him. Nothing wrong with that, but his interactions with the family are so loose and lead to nothing, it makes it feel pointless and that is the problem, it doesn’t match with anything. Now, if it were up to me, the plot would be this.

We are introduced to Bella Heathcote as Victoria Winters and observe the Collins through her eyes. Everything stays the same, until she encounters the Ghost of Josette. But instead of a ghost, she hears footsteps downstairs and heads out to investigate, only to find Willie(Jackie Earle Haley) sneaking outside and driving away with the family car( which was already said to have been in a disrepair). As the film progresses, Victoria gets closer with David, even though all he wants to talk about is ghosts. He has a curious taste for the afterlife, as we see him dressing up as a ghost around the house, standing in corners and watching the rest of the family. One night, Victoria will see David in costume in her room, only to find that it is actually the Ghost of Josette warning her that “He’s Coming”. Victoria would ask the family if they had heard or seen anything unusual in the house recently, to which they will all deny, except Willie, who she can never seem to find.

After the first 45 minutes, we follow Willie as he spends his nights running errands around town, not for the family though, for his own needs. At the house, David’s father, Roger is always hostile towards him, but shows a fancy towards Victoria. During an argument between Willie and Roger, he is about to strike him, when Victoria comes in and defends Willie, causing Roger to shuffle away embarrassed. Willie thanks her, but quickly dismisses her once she asks him what he does all night. As Victoria and David’s sessions go on, he shows her some drawings of ghosts he made, which shock Victoria as they have a strong resemblance to “someone of her past”. Victoria attempts to talk to Roger that his son may be able to see ghosts, but he pays little attention to it. Elizabeth(Pfeiffer) overhears this and advises Victoria to lure David away from these kinds of things. Victoria begins to explain herself, but stops as she seems to troubled by something.

While walking around the grounds, Victoria hears voices. Feeling paranoid, she walks cautiously in fear, but finds that the voices are coming from Willie who is carrying a heavy box down to the basement through the garage. Upon close inspection, Victoria notices it is a coffin. Willie warns her about telling anyone and threatens to tell Elizabeth about her own “demons”. This horrifies Victoria, but agrees and goes to find David. She tells him and Elizabeth that she may not be able to help him and will leave Collinswood the next day. On her last night, the Ghost of Josette appears one last time and leads Victoria away. She continues to call out for help as she walks out of the house and through the woods. Victoria hurries after her and catches up only to see Josette reach the end of a cliff, turn around, and plead for help once more. In a hypnotic stare, she falls off. Victoria is left alone, cold and confused as she begins to cry out. She is then approached by David who comforts her and admits that he “sometimes sees her too”. They both meet Elizabeth back at the house and this is where Victoria reveals her story, same as in the movie. Her name is Maggie Evans and she has been able to see ghosts since she was young. Upon spending several years in a mental institute, she escaped and found the job in Collinswood. Elizabeth allows Victoria to stay as long as she continues to help David. Meanwhile, in the basement, Willie is hunched over the coffin he was dragging earlier, when it suddenly opens, revealing a long arm that nearly strangles him. In the morning, Victoria and David prepare to go down stairs for breakfast and both promise to help each other. Victoria enters the dinning room to where Elizabeth introduces a new guest to the rest of the family, Barnabas Collins.

So that would be my movie, then this would act as a sequel with Barnabas and Victoria’s relationship blossoming as well as his revenge on Angelique. Every fan goes through a period where they think that their favorite actor or show or writer can do no wrong, that everything they produce is solid gold and stands on an impossibly high pedestal. But as one grows up, they start to see that sometimes, their artist doesn’t make the best thing that they could’ve. For me that was Alice in Wonderland(2010), not Dark Shadows. It’s a movie I always find myself watching at least twice a year and loving everything about it, even if my version is a little bit more coherent.

-Jose Barr(5-11-2017)

FUN Fact:

Last appearance by Johnathan Fried, the original Barnabas Collins

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taralouisereed · 7 years

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The Australian news article doesn’t seem to work as a link.... It should be found here: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/dance-academy-the-movie-earns-its-place-at-the-barre/news-story/cfa647e840ce679e8cee5a8ded83fdfd

Warning: it has minor possible plot spoilers... minor! And it claims it is ‘’better than La La Land’’!!!! Yeah!

STEPHEN ROMEI

OK, I’m just going to say this right at the start: Dance Academy, a feature film sequel to the successful Australian television series, is better than La La Land. Now that may seem like an extravagant plie (I looked up the words for ballet movements after seeing this movie) and people will disagree with me. Even Faye Dunaway thought La La Land should have won a best picture Oscar.

I liked the Emma Stone-Ryan Gosling song and dance romance-drama, but for me Dance Academy feels more real. It has something about it that is more dramatic, more emotional, more complex, which is surprising for a movie aimed at the teens and young adults who loved the Logie-winning, Emmy-nominated TV show, which ran for three seasons from 2010 to 2013.

Set 18 months after the final TV episode, the film explores the early adult lives of the would-be ballet dancers, who are now not teens but in their early 20s. Some, such as Abigail (dancer, singer and actress Dena Kaplan), realised their teen dream and are members of the Sydney-based National Academy of Dance. Others are more footloose.

The action opens with a ballet at the Sydney Opera House. We see the super-talented dancer Tara (a brilliant Xenia Goodwin). But as the scene widens we realise she is watching the performance on a TV screen. She is at the Opera House, yes, but working as a waitress. “Remember we are feeding old rich people, not ballet dancers,’’ her admonishing boss reminds her.

Tara, who could have been “the best dancer of her generation”, broke her back after slipping on a bead during a performance of Stravinsky’s Persephone. Not for nothing does that ballet include Hades. She has recovered but her dancing days seem to be over. She is suing the academy for damages. Her lawyer thinks she will win and receive at least a million.

But we know how Tara feels. The first scene shows her in a creative-writing class, reading a story she’s been working on. “All I see is a blank page and a giant question mark,’’ her fictional self says. “Who am I? Who is anyone without a dream?” And so the prima ballerina of a question is established. Can Tara make a comeback or is her dream dead? This is the regular storyline of lots of dance movies, but that doesn’t necessarily make it weak or cliched, and certainly it unfolds here with passion, nuance, intelligence and even surprise.

The crew from the TV series returns. It’s the second feature (after the romantic comedy Ali’s Wedding) for director Jeffrey Walker, who has an impressive television CV that includes Neighbours, Blue Heelers, Home and Away, the Jack Irish series and in the US, four episodes of the hit comedy Modern Family. Samantha Strauss continued as scriptwriter. The result is a tight, honest, moving drama that vibrates with the optimism and uncertainty of being young. There is no soap opera here.

The camerawork (Martin McGrath) reveals the real and imagined lives of the dancers. The pure physicality of dancing is apparent in unexpected moments, such as a behind-the-scenes shot of the dancers who have just come off stage. They are gasping for breath. They need to go back on stage soon. I don’t think I’ve seen a dance film that made me realise how hard it is. And that’s just the physical side. The emotional stress is also there, especially in innovative scenes where Tara remembers her accident.

There’s a sensuality too, though well within the PG rating. And perhaps this is one area where the rating renders the characters a bit unreal. No one swears, no one has sex (that we see). There is a brief, humorous moment involving a celebrity, a topless selfie and Twitter. I don’t mind such absences, but I suppose most 20-somethings do drop both the F-word and their pants now and then.

Most of the original cast is back. Tara’s boyfriend Christian (Jordan Rodrigues) is teaching modern dance to kids.

The gorgeous Kat (a bold yet subtle Alicia Banit) is in New York, starring in a children’s TV show that has seen her climb the ladder to “C-list celebrity”. Her penthouse apartment is nice. She’s hanging out with an American muso, Xavier (Nic Westaway, who does the accent well), who says he doesn’t want to be a minor talent but, in a clever line, “a Hemsworth”. He doesn’t say which of the three Australian actor brothers he wants to be.

Ben (Thomas Lacey) is still dealing with an illness that makes dancing life-threatening. Ollie (Keiynan Lonsdale) is also overseas, putting himself through cattle calls. Persephone becomes important to both of them, and to Tara, who finds an outlet for her literary skills. The new head of the academy is Madeline Moncur (a chilly but not ice-cold Miranda Otto) and Tara Morice is back as Tara’s former ballet teacher Lucinda Raine. The action spreads from Sydney to New York, both full of life, and later to Texas. There are also jokes about the cities that are funny because they are true, such as when Tara runs through Manhattan in an elaborate costume and no one blinks. Indeed, a Spider-Man salutes her.

I don’t want to reveal too much, as part of the thrill is watching, waiting, wondering as the dancers experience the pain and passion of their dream. “Everything hurts, every day,’’ Abigail says at one point. The classes, the auditions, the performances all ripple with the fear of failure.

This brings us to the deftest aspect of Dance Academy. The real question is this: is the dream worth it? When a struggling Tara says she is “nothing” without dance, a friend says, “Choose something else.’’ Christian asks her, “You are hurting yourself every day and I am just meant to let you?” When Tara complains that “I could do this variation when I was 15” she soon meets a teen dancer who can do it. Is it possible that Tara would be better off if she forgot her dreams? She has revealing conversations on this with Kat, Abigail, Christian and Miss Raine.

This theme evokes one of the great ballet films, The Turning Point (1977), with Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft. Ballet has interested a lot of filmmakers. It pirouettes with politics in Bruce Beresford’s Mao’s Last Dancer and in White Nights, starring Mikhail Baryshnikov, probes the psyche in Black Swan (2010), with Natalie Portman, and tackles class and gender biases in Billy Elliot. And of course being torn by the urge to dance is central to the tragic 1948 British classic The Red Shoes, choreographed by Robert Helpmann. Australia’s Dance Academy deserves its place at the barre.

Dance Academy (PG)

4 stars

National release

Oh my goodness, when, oh when will I get to see it!!!!!!!??????

#Dance Academy #dance academy the movie #danceacademymovie #better than la la land #when will i get to see it????

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danvssomethingorother · 7 years

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The Third Wheel

Index: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

A03

The final part of my series for @fiddlestanfiction summer event. I’m just posting the final four chapters here but if you want them broke up, check out my A03 link.

Thanks @acidicgumdrops for editing! And a huge thank you to everyone who reads this!

—

Part 5

(Campfire, fireflies, suspicious)

The next morning, they once more found themselves in Stan’s car heading out to the Rodriquez farm, Ford having assured them both countless times as they lay awake late into the night that it would work out this time with a little planning beforehand. Fidds curled into himself as much as he could so as not to touch either twin, not wanting to be accused of anything again. Fidds hadn’t been very surprised to find Stan fast asleep in the chair across from the bed the next morning.

Just as Stan shouldn’t be surprised that Fidds had chosen to sit in the back seat. He’d lain awake most of the night thinking about how he just wanted to leave the hotel room, his head ducked under the covers and his fingers tugging gently at his hair, the anger and frustration that just radiated off Stan physically and mentally distressing him. As he lay there, listening to Stan snipe and snarl at Ford’s plans and Ford take the bait each time arguing loudly and calling Stan names that Stan returned, Fidds realized he just wanted to go away. Far away from both twins and maybe not come back.

The rustling of sheets and the bathroom door being slammed shut startled him enough to rip out a large chunk of the hair he had previously been gripping to try and drown out the brothers. He buried his head into the bedding, trying to make his frustrated sob inaudible as the tears began quickly trickling down his face.

He might have broken down completely after the awful day and nerve wracking night if it wasn’t for a familiar six fingers resting gently on top of his head. It brought him back to a time this action would have been the only thing that grounded him after a particularly hard day back in college. When he used to rest his head on Ford’s knee, and Ford would place his hand on the top of his head, softly messaging his scalp like he was doing now to help him unwind.

He felt a deep self-hatred bubbling in the pit of his stomach the next morning when he realized that that action had been the only thing to calm him enough to sleep through the night. His knee bounced restlessly in the back seat and his finger twitched on his lap as he felt Stan’s accusing stare hitting him from the rear view mirror as they began their long drive.

Fidds glanced over at the page Ford was writing in and noticed an odd equation he was scratching quickly into the top, their eyes met as he glanced up from his book. Ford seemed taken aback a second noticing his friend watching him, but smiled towards him reassuringly and Fidds did his best to return the gesture.

“Is something troubling you today? Your KBPS is off the charts this morning.”

It took Fidds a moment to realize what he meant by that and then he slowly pressed down on his bouncing knees in embarrassment. He didn’t know how to respond to that so he didn’t, instead averting his eyes far away from Ford. He pressed his hands harder against his knees, feeling like he was being so rude to Ford who was only expressing concern for his well-being, but he felt uncomfortable discussing anything with him right now.

“If you’re worried about things going badly this time, you shouldn’t. I have a gut feeling that things will turn out better this time, Fidds, trust me. Once we get to the farm, we can make a trap for the creature and lie low until tonight when we strike.”

He gave Ford a halfhearted smile, hoping he was right about that.

—

The rest of the ride was silent and uneventful, the only sound being the static Stan’s radio picked up and the scratching of Ford’s pen, his mind miles away from the car as he plotted their next moves. Fidds kept his eyes glued out the window, thoughts zooming in his head a mile a minute, each worry toppling over the last becoming an incoherent white noise.

They arrived at the farm a little past noon, Fidds’s first genuine smile of the day coming from Maria offering them quite the feast in gratitude for them returning after the dismal first trip to the ranch. It was a very strange to have Ford being more polite and talkative than Stan during their lunch. Ford was in such a good mood about his plan being a success, he was more than willing to shoot the breeze with their host.

After their meal, Maria showed Fidds and Ford to a private area (the guest bedroom) to finish preparations on their plan before they got to work on initiating it. Fidds felt sickened by his relief that his boyfriend chose to sit in the living room with their host and watch a Spanish soap opera.

Ford sat at the desk and Fidds leaned over the back of the chair, watching him scribble the last few details before handing it off to Fidds to make any last minute corrections. Being in familiar territory once more helped calm Fidds’s nerves significantly. His mind going back to the world of science and numbers felt like a breath of fresh air compared to the emotional turmoil with no solution in sight that was his current relationship.

Ford turned his seat over to Fidds and Fidds shed away any thoughts about his problems with Stan entirely, talking a mile a minute about how to fix Ford’s calculations on the trap he wished to set up, trying to find creative but logical solutions to their limited supplies.

Ford almost took the book away from Fidds after he made a few corrections but Fidds swatted his hand away, reminding him they had time before his monster would arrive and he wasn’t starting building until these designs were up to his approval, not Ford’s. Ford shook his head and rolled his eyes before pulling out another book from his jacket and collapsing on the bed to pass the time while Fidds worked, needlessly making remarks under his breath.

During his third and final revision, Ford broke his concentration from the task at hand and back into the reality he didn’t quite want to be a part of at the moment.

“What is going on between you and my brother?”

Fidds didn’t answer at first, making his final corrections before setting his pencil down, unable to bring himself to look at Ford.

“It’s…. complicated.”

It must have been bad if Ford, who was usually oblivious to the world around him, noticed their crumbling relationship.

“You seem really upset today,” Ford began, but whatever he was going to say trailed off with a sigh. He awkwardly ran his fingers through his hair, not quite knowing what else to say. Emotions were not his forte, nor were they something he was used to dealing with so openly.

Fidds said nothing and let the silence consume their dying conversation. His finger began twisting and tugging at a strand of hair that slipped into his line of sight, knee bumping against the desk.

Fidds didn’t have the heart to say this was all Ford’s fault. If he hadn’t come with them, Fidds and Stan would likely be relaxing on a beach somewhere together without a care in the world. Maybe, even, Stan wouldn’t be so angry at him right now.

A tear slid down his face as the unvoiced frustrations began to come out. His shaking hand slipped, yanking out a tuft of hair just as the first sob escaped his throat. Ford gently rested his hand on his shoulder and began running his fingers through his hair, a frown settling firmly on his face.

“I think it would be best if, after the capture of the chupacabra, we head home. I don’t know what’s going on, but it might be best to settle it in a more familiar place.”

Fidds buried his head in his hands and silently agreed with Ford; this entire get away was a mess and he just wanted to go home.

—

The rest of the afternoon was spent plotting and constructing the trap. Despite the different environment, it felt more casual than anything else that had happened on this trip. It fell into a soothing normality that helped Fidds ward off his anxiety.

The normal routine of working on a project together even helped Stan get out of the miserable funk he had been.

By lunch, he was able to smile at Fidds’s terrible pun that had Ford cracking up, and by the time dinner rolled around it was as if the fight never happened. Maybe they were all too wrapped up in the familiar environment of work to remember the fight they were having, or maybe (Fidds hoped) it was forgotten for good.

Fidds shoved the bad events deep within his mind, hoping to never have to deal with them again as he settled next to Stan on the patio in front of the warm hand-crafted stone fire pit. Stan offered him a beer that he gratefully accepted. A smile crept across his face as Stan rested his arm around his shoulder and they drank their beers together in the comfortable silence, watching the fire burn.

Just the two of them at long last, their problems buried down deep behind both of their insecurities. Unlikely to be brought up again, just the way Fidds wanted it to be. ‘Let it be a forgotten memory, never to be spoken of,’ he decided, resting his head on Stan’s shoulder.

Neither mentioned Ford’s absence as they watched the sun sink down on the horizon, which again was fine with Fidds. If it meant no confrontation, all the better. A part of him hoped Ford didn’t return and they didn’t go through with their plan, maybe they could spend their last week on this beautiful little ranch. Make real farm hands out of the Pines men, teach them the ropes like his father had taught him many years ago on a pig farm similar to this little home. Maybe letting their little week on a ranch convince Ford that having farm animals around their home would be useful and not a waste of time.

It was only hopeful thinking.

The sun sank at last and it was time for them to go through with their plan, but Fidds didn’t rise up from Stan and Stan made no attempt to move. Both just stared at the fire roaring in front of them, not raising their heads when Ford slammed the back door shut behind them.

When Fidds rose his head after a few seconds, he immediately noticed something off about Ford. Something not quite right about the way his fingers kept twitching and the smug smile he didn’t see often, especially not before dangerous encounters like this, that was resting on his face.

“Hey, Fiddlesticks! Ya got everything ready?”

There was something odd about Ford’s speech, Fiddleford noticed. The way he said each word, and that tone was foreign to his usual proper, light tone.

“Yes, it’s all ready Stanford. We’ll start whenever you’re ready.”

There was an arrogance about his next words Fidds didn’t really like and he knew made Stan’s blood boil once more, scratching the scab off an old wound and making it bleed.

“That’s good, Fiddlesticks, let’s hope there are no mistakes this time around. We only have so much time, so get off your lazy butts and let’s get to work!”

Stan’s mouth was beginning to shape into a snarl, but Fidds cut off whatever he was going to say by taking charge of the situation and drawing his boyfriend’s attention away from his brother’s strange behavior.

“Stanley, why don’t you go wait by the barn like we planned and get ready to draw that critter out with Marco; he should be here shortly to assist you. Me and Stanford are gonna be by the machine. Make sure ya—“

“I know what I’m doin’ Fidds,” he cut him off already, sinking back into his foul mood and disheartening Fidds once more as they set off in their opposite directions.

Marco arrived back from the store right as the sun finally set, wishing a brief good luck to Fidds and Ford as he ran towards the barn, leaving the two by the crane-like machine that they had built mainly from garbage. Fidds feared it may be unstable, but that had never stopped him or Stanford from working on things in the past. Their college years were chalk full of questionable things one could make out of garbage, them constantly testing the boundaries of how far they could risk their lives just to outdo everyone else in the classroom.

Fidds bent over by the control center of the make-shift crane, no taller than the hen house, poised to drop the net down on the creature the second it ran under it. The net was made of thick chains with metal stakes attached to the end of them that would sink into the ground, pinning the little monster there so they could tranquilize it without a hitch.

That was the plan, anyway, but the machine had been made in a limited amount of time without any tests and mainly out of garbage, so it was really only with luck that this would work at all.

Not far from them, Stan and Marco stood in front of the pen that housed the bait.

Their plan was already ruined when they heard a commotion from the barn.

“I thought ya closed off all the holes in the barn, Marco?” Stan groaned, looking behind him at barn.

“I swear to you, Stan, I spent the last couple of days fixing the holes around the barn so it couldn’t go back in there.”

They would later find evidence that their little nuisance was living up on the rafters, hidden from sight in a nest it slept in during the day that Marco had assumed to be a bird’s nest. The lack of planning and foresight just made their job that much harder than it really needed to be.

Stan and Marco ran off towards the barn, filling Fidds with an unease he couldn’t explain as he realized he was alone with Ford. His knees quaked so hard it was hard for him to keep standing by the controls, which he tried to focus on to keep his mind off his growing anxiety.

A sense of déjà vu hit him as the goats flew out of the barn, running in terror. He clung to the rickety control panel to keep from being knocked over by the panicked animals.

Unbeknownst to him, Stan had pushed Marco out of the way of the large cow in the barn who was frantic and attacking anything in its way to get out of there while the creature latched onto a goat beside it. Marco and Stan were hauled up inside the barn, Marco returning his favor to Stan by looking after him till help arrived.

Ford was growing annoyed beside him and shoved him harder against the control panel, pushing a syringe against his chest and demanding he not mess up their plan while he went to find Stan.

In an astounding stroke of luck, Fidds caught the silhouette of the creature amidst the dirt clouds and hit the switch while it stood up on its hind legs, sniffing the air trying to get a bearing on its next move.

Without hesitation, Fidds powered the machine and watched, awe struck, as the machine constructed of only garbage actually worked. The net slammed down hard against the critter, knocking it to the ground as it began thrashing against its prison.

Fidds let out a few more shaky laughs, surprised it worked at all, before tightly holding the syringe and running over to the trapped creature.

Fidds fingers were shaking as he tried to hold the creature down on his own, even through the metal netting the creature managed to sink its teeth down into his arm, making Fidds yell out in pain and drop his needle. He struggled, crying out for help that didn’t come in the chaos surrounding him. Stanley still unconscious and Ford nowhere to be seen amidst the clouds of dirt and darkness.

Small though the claws were, they were like finely sharpened barb wire, leaving long crimson lines across his arms the more he struggled. The syringe was now a good foot out of reach from where he sat struggling to get his arm free from the beast’s grip.

Black dots were beginning to form around his vision, everything spinning around him as he slumped into himself, his knees quaking as he feared the worst.

Giving into those sinking feelings, he nearly missed the lack of pressure on his arm and the creature’s cry of pain.

Most would assume when he looked up to see Stanford standing above him, stomping his foot into the creature making it let go of him, he would be relieved and filled with nothing short of joy. That, however, was far from what he was feeling at that moment.

Warning bells were blaring inside him looking up at Stanford’s grin, it was inhuman and predatory and his eyes seemed to glow. A sea of fireflies lit up around him, illuminating that smile in the dark, shivers cascading down Fidds’s spine.

He shut his eyes trying to control his now erratic breathing, telling himself over and over again he was safe now that Stanford was back, he had nothing to fear being around Ford. He kept squeezing them tighter shut, even going as far as childishly covering his eyes with his numb shaking hands hearing the thuds of Ford’s feet smashing down on to the creature screeching out in pain.

Fidds eyes finally snapped open when the loud yelps stopped and he still heard the familiar thud of his boot meeting the ugly little creature’s flesh.

Ford’s boot was positioned to strike the creature once more with his boot when Fidds finally spoke up, his squeaked out ‘stop’ was nearly inaudable to his own ears, so he repeated himself louder, crying out enough for his plea to echo over the frenzied farm animals.

Their eyes met, Ford’s tense and threatening, Fidds’s teary and terrified. Ford lowered his foot and smiled at him as he gave the creature one last kick.

“Its had enough, Stanford, let’s just lock it up and be done with it,” he managed out becoming bold and moving between Ford and the creature, blocking any new blows in case whatever had gotten into Ford wasn’t over.

It was hard standing up right with his legs quivering the way they were, his breath shook with every word, but he stood his ground on this one. He may not like that creature and wanted it far away from him when this was said and done, but he didn’t want to be a part of needless cruelty either.

Ford stared him down and a smile began to stretch across his face, daring Fidds to go and he foolishly accepted the invitation

“Yer not yerself, Stanford…please…let’s just go, ya got what ya wanted.”

Fidds tensed as Ford stepped closer towards him, a smug grin taking over his face. Ford’s hand raised and Fidds braced himself for some kind of strike, squeezing his eyes closed and turning his head away.

It never happened, though. He slowly opened his eyes and saw Ford snickering at his reaction.

“Whatever ya say, Fiddlesticks. Let’s grab the little monster and get out of here.”

Ford put his hands on Fidds shoulders and went to move him out of the way to get to the creature, but Fidds wouldn’t move and shook his head firmly.

“I-I can get him, Stanford,” he gasped out and Ford raised his eyebrow at his defiance, “He’s scared of you…”

“That arm of yours is pretty messed up, bean pole.” Ford shook his head at him and shrugged, grin still ever present on his face. “But hey! If ya wanna get yourself hurt some more, be my guest.”

Fidds almost let his guard down, even despite Ford’s insincere concern, and may have just gone back to pretending that the cruelty was in some way necessary. That Ford was only thinking of his safety.

If not for what happened next.

“What’s the matter, Fiddlesticks? You sure are acting funny…”

Fidds began shaking as his hand pressed against his forehead and his hands travelled down his face, thumbs brushing against his jaw line.

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were afraid of me.” Fidds tried to lie to them both and shake his head, but Ford held it still, gripping both sides of his face firmly and making Fidds look him in the eyes.

“That’s good, ya should be.”

A chill traveled down Fidds’s spine and he began to tremble as Ford’s hands moved further down, stopping at his neck and wrapping themselves around it. Ford pressed his thumbs hard into his windpipe, cutting off his air supply and making everything blur around him. Fiddleford’s hands instantly went to the ones gripping his throat, desperately tugging to loosen the hold.

Ford let go a second later, a smile still wide across his lips at Fiddleford’s terror as he fell to the ground, breathing hard and clinging to his throat, tears prickling against his eyes once more.

“Yer useful to me now, Fiddlesticks. If yer smart, you’d do whatever you could to stay useful.”

With that, he turned around and left Fidds there, calling for him to meet him back at the house with the creature.

—

The creature didn’t move to harm Fidds when his shaking hands had moved to pick it up. It seemed to be done fighting at this point, or maybe it just preferred the notion of being with Fidds than Ford. He carried it back to the house without any fuss or complaints.

Ford was seemingly back to normal when he met him at the door, explaining to him how he had just helped Marco put Stan to bed and that he was doing fine for now, oblivious to what had just happened. Fidds wanted to keep it that way so he kept his mouth shut.

When Ford went to take the creature from Fidds, its aggressiveness was revived and it started snapping at Ford’s fingers, forcing them to drug it while they fixed it up. Fidds practically begged Ford, to his confusion, to let him do most of the work, almost fearing Ford would change on him again and cause more harm to the already injured creature.

At each touch from Ford, Fiddleford began to shake and twitch, which Ford interpreted as his bad nerves being in these kinds of situations.

Fiddleford was a shaking mess while Ford patched him up, talking calmly to him and asking him to try to breathe to control his anxiety so he could tend to his wounds properly. When he proudly announced he was finished, Fidds practically jumped up, taking the creature with him to the spare bedroom. He stammered out a good night to Ford, which he returned with confusion.

—

The family had allowed them to spend the night in their home while they recuperated, and the trio decided to head back to the hotel in the morning.

Stan was still out of commission from his blow to the head so he was in the only spare bed, Fiddleford not daring stray far from his side at the desk, and the injured little critter was in his kennel next to the desk. Ford had been in there to check on both the creature and his brother moments ago before calling it a night to go sleep on the couch. Ford noticed how distant Fidds was acting towards him, even commenting on it, and it was eating Fidds up that he could be this rude to his friend, but he was still reeling from the shock of Ford’s sudden change earlier that evening.

Finally alone in his room, he pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes and took large heavy gulps of air, sputtering and choking as he tried to calm his nerves.

The moans of pain from the creature next to him had become nothing short of back ground noise as he tried put himself back together before Stan came to, wanting nothing more than to bury this entire event deep down enough to never think about it again and just go back to life as normal.

His compassionate nature finally kicked in after a while, and he set his attention fully drugging the critter to hopefully take its pain away.

In its vulnerable state, it no longer looked like something to be feared. It was nothing more than a hairless raccoon, Fiddleford thought, and he’d always been fond of raccoons. He’d even made homes for the homeless creatures throughout their research facility, much to the annoyance of Ford and Stan.

Staring at the creature currently curled in the far corner moaning in pain and fear, a sense of pity flooded through Fiddleford and he, for the first time this entire evening, opened the kennel door. The creature’s tiny little claws were doing himself more damage, running against the muzzle they had placed on it. Fiddleford had earlier felt the muzzle was a safety precaution, but seeing the creature now in its injured state fully covered in bandages and already in a cage, he thought it was overkill.

His fingers flexed, shook, and faltered several times as he reached his hand into the back of the kennel and unlatched the muzzle. He began shaking again, fearing he made a mistake when the creature stretched its neck forward, but he couldn’t help the smile when he felt it lick his arm. He patted its head gently and smiled a little brighter, seeing that it didn’t try to attack him like it had Stanford earlier.

Fiddleford pulled his arm out of the cage and locked it up like nothing had happened, pleased that the animal had stopped its pained moans.

He crept over to the bed and tucked himself in next to Stan. As he reached over to shut off the lights and go to sleep after this long hellish day, he noticed that the scars on his left arm where the critter had clawed him earlier were completely healed, vanished like they had never happened.

He sat up, staring in astonishment at his newly healed wounds. Lost in his own world, he nearly missed Stan returning to a state of consciousness.

Fiddleford jumped when a hand touched his back and a raspy voice called out, “Hey, how’d it all go?”

“Stanley!” he gasped, the well wishes, threats of him ever scaring him like that again, and the thorough report on his health he planned out got lost in a hiccupped sob.

Stan just pulled him him down to the bed, where they both fell asleep, tangled tightly against each other.

Part 6

(Lake, Trouble, laughter)

This marked the last peaceful night Fiddleford would have next to Stan.

Fidds didn’t sleep with the twins the following nights; three in a row he spent down on the floor next the creature he pitied.

He couldn’t explain to himself why the first night, he just couldn’t sleep next to Ford with the fear that he would lash out at him again. He didn’t even want to confront these fears. Didn’t want to admit them to Stan and create more conflict.

He used the critter as an excuse when Stan wanted to go out and stretch his legs the next day, after they got back to the hotel room and Stan was cleared healthy and Ford had agreed to go along. It had been an excuse, again, to avoid the conflict. Pretend for another moment longer that it didn’t exist.

The first day he didn’t even pay much attention to the critter, laying on the bed watching a show he couldn’t understand, staring at a menu for room service and flipping through his Spanish-to-English guide trying to decide on what to eat for lunch that day.

The scratching from the cage was starting to test his patience as it hit his nerves just right, making it hard for him to concentrate on his task. He kept taking glances over at the cage, giving up almost entirely on his futile task as he snapped his dictionary shut.

He looked over the bed to see the creature scratching against the floor of its cage, and Fiddleford looked on with pity, feeling just as trapped as it at this moment. Maybe letting it out would do it some good. Taking the muzzle off gained enough trust from it to let it touch him this morning and allow him to treat his injuries, so maybe letting him sit on the chair to be more comfortable while it healed would convince it not to hurt him in the future.

Fiddleford scooted the chair away from the table, dragging it next to the bed and putting a pillow on it. He just stared at his work for a few minutes, regaining his lost nerves before turning towards the cage.

He opened the cage and let the creature have a chance to prepare himself for visitors like he had learned to do the previous evening and morning. If you gave him time to react, he wouldn’t lunge at the hand to grab him in fear (it had left some deep cuts in Stanford’s hands).

His fingers inched slowly into the cage and gently touched the creature. He ran his fingers across its coarse skin and crooned sweet nothings towards it, waiting a second for the critter to react. He took a deep breath and put his hand carefully on the creature, avoiding any of its injuries.

It thrashed once when he accidentally hit a sore spot. He instantly put it back down and waited a few minutes before attempting to pick him up again, calmly explaining to him what he was doing the entire time and apologizing profusely in soft, whispered coos.

He actually found himself smiling as the critter licked his fingers, giving permission for him to pick it up once more.

He had meant to put him down on his spot in the chair but instead found himself setting him on the bed next to him. The creature was now propped up on pillows right next to Fidds before he placed a blanket on him.

Surprising himself, he found himself scratching the creature’s ear, pretending the injured little thing was one of his beloved raccoons, letting it nibble at some of his snacks he had beside the bed. He laughed softly as it voraciously ate the treats he had collected from souvenir stores all over town. It growled slightly when Fidds tried to take back the treat.

“Ya remind me of my son Tate in some ways, little fella. He loved his sweets, too, my little tater tot,” Fiddleford become sullen after admitting that, and smiled at the creature licking his hand clean of the honey, “I haven’t seen him in over a year. I’m sure ya would have gotten along, though, maybe I can finally convince his ma that I won’t let nothing bad happen to him…”

“She don’t trust the Stan twins, though, and didn’t like me sticking up for them and allowing them to be around our boy. I know she only wants what’s best for our son…”

He let himself trail off after that, just resting his hand on the injured animal’s head and letting those thoughts fall on the way side once more, not planning to touch them again. All they did was cause him pain, and it was a fruitless endeavor trying to see his son again. The last he saw him was when Stan convinced him to visit the child without his wife’s permission after school. Stan encouraged him to be strong and stupid. It was a nice memory of the three of them seeing Star Wars together and taking Tate for burgers and ice cream, but once his ex found out he had allowed their boy to be around someone she considered dangerous (Stan’s arrest warrant was plastered all over the mail room she worked in, something to do with fraud and illegal llama herding) she’d threatened to have them both arrested. They ended up making a deal with her: so as long as she kept her mouth shut about Stan’s warrant, he wasn’t allowed near their child.

Fiddleford just buried it all deep down again, scratching his new found friend’s ear and making him croon in joy.

“Someday I want to try my hand at making something that’ll take away all the bad thoughts in my head and make everything easier, but I made a promise to the Stans a while back to not accidentally damage my own brain…”

Fidds let his thoughts and words cut off, staring blankly at the TV smiling as the creature licked his finger once more, bringing his attention back to it.

“I figure you and I will be together for a while, so hows about I give you a proper name? I know Ford’s dead set on just givin’ ya a number so we don’t get too attached to ya, but I can’t be hanging around somethin’ I can’t address properly.”

He ran his fingers across its skin, making it purr in pleasure, absentmindedly staring at the TV while he thought, and a grin stretched across his face as he saw the critter watching the show just as attentively.

“Ya like Carlos? I think he’s quite attractive myself, but don’t tell Stanley I said that…”

The creature licked his fingers again and he chuckled.

“I’d say Carlos is a fine name for ya as well.”

—

It was getting late and there was no sign of the twins, and Fiddleford was becoming anxious. He feared that Ford might have changed again and done something to Stanley, leaving him all alone.

He let Carlos stay on the bed with him throughout the night, watching him sleep and concentrating only on his wheezy snores. He found himself dozing off sometime into the night, only to be woken by shouting. He picked up Carlos who yapped in pain, snapping at Fidds for grabbing him so abruptly.

He placed a gentle kiss down on the creature as if it were his child throwing a tantrum, and put him back in his cage, shutting it tight and putting a blanket over it to keep it slightly hidden. He hurried to the door and looked out the large window beside it, unable to see anything, but opening the window helped him make out the voices better.

“—You’re drunk!”

“Stop dodging the damn question! What did ya do?!”

Fiddleford had heard enough. Instantly, he was out the door and running down the stairs towards the parking lot.

He arrived just in time to see the first punch being thrown by Stan, hitting Ford square in the face. Fidds opened his mouth to yell at his boyfriend, but no noise came as he watched Ford strike back.

Something stopped him from getting in the middle of their fight, some fear growing and clawing inside him.

Just as soon as their fight began it was over, Stan throwing in one last punch before getting up and grabbing Fidds’s arm.

“We’re leaving, find your own damn ride home if you want to hide shit.”

He practically dragged Fidds, a large lump settling firmly in the smaller man’s throat, preventing him from giving any sort of protest towards Stan’s rough treatment as they both staggered up the stairs. Stan smelt like he had been baptized in liquor and gotten his new attitude from that spiritual awakening.

“Fidds, get yer stuff. We’re leaving NOW,” he grunted out as he entered the room. Fiddleford continued to stand there, watching his boyfriend throw their clothes in their suitcases, even taking most of Ford’s cloths due to his lack of attention. He continued watching as Stan left most of their belongings scattered around the room, merely kicking at the mess instead of making any attempt to pack it up.

“Stanley…” he began, watching him throw their suitcases out the door, hearing them thud hard against the concrete.

“Why are you and Ford fighting?”

Fidds didn’t know why he was asking, he already knew the answer, but if he kept burying it further maybe it would eventually go away and leave the three be.

Stan stopped his rampage around the room to look Fidds in the eye firmly before sighing and sitting down on the bed.

“He hurt ya the other night and that’s why you’ve been acting weird, ain’t it? That’s where that bruise on yer neck came from?”

Fidds said nothing, sitting down next to Stan and sighing softly.

“That ain’t what happened,” he lied, looking over at the kennel, “Stanford got a little too protective of me and hurt that creature really badly, and it scared me. I haven’t seen him so violent before. I guess I felt so bad that it was my fault poor Carlos got so badly hurt, I took it upon myself to take care of the little guy.”

A chuckle escaped Stan’s lips, “You named it?”

“I couldn’t keep calling him ‘that critter’, Stanley.”

Stan began laughing, throwing his arm around Fiddleford’s shoulder and kissing him on the cheek, “Yer not covering anything up are ya? Nothin’ bad happened?”

Fidds could have told Stan everything then and there, maybe the three of them could have found out what was wrong with Ford that made him change the way he did, but Fidds never wanted to think about those things again.

He wanted to move on without confronting the bad feelings and just forget, so he lied.

“Nothing happened, Stanley, please stop jumping to conclusions…”

Stan said nothing, gently rubbing his smaller boyfriend’s shoulder. He decided to hold back his own feelings, letting his own insecurities and fears slip behind a mask and simply acting like nothing was wrong, as Fidds was doing right now. He felt like an ass for jumping to conclusions, but it had felt good to punch his brother, so he likely wouldn’t apologize and Ford would hold a grudge to be brought up later.

Fiddleford smiled, though, for the first time feeling a false resolve. One day this would all be confronted, but for now he just wanted to be happy along with his boyfriend and best friend, dealing with his problems later.

Ford soon after came into the room. Fiddleford nudged Stan’s shoulder and made him apologize for starting the fight.

Someone, Fidds couldn’t recall later who suggested it, said they should spend the rest of the evening at the beach not too far from there to make up for lost time fighting and chasing monsters, so they cleaned up the mess Stan had made and packed a few towels before leaving. Fidds even talked the others into bringing Carlos along with them to get out of the cramped hotel for a little while.

The first genuinely happy memory of the trip was forged on the beachfront that night for Fidds to carry with him over the years.

The waves washed the conflicting feelings and fears clean from all of their consciousness as they sat together all through the night. Ford pointed out star constellations, marking them in his journal and almost forgetting they existed, making him feel so small in this world he confessed. The comment made Stan smile, pulling Fidds closer towards him and scratching behind Carlos’s ear, letting the creature lick his bruised knuckles.

The waves pulled in and scraped against the trio’s now bare feet, everything between them as clean and repaired as Stan’s knuckles.

Part 7

(Honey, seashells, chocolate)

Stan sat at the table watching in amusement as his boyfriend set all the day’s souvenirs out in front of creature’s kennel, reminding him more of an over excited five-year-old setting up for show-and-tell than the grown man he was.

It was nice seeing him smile again. Things began slipping back into a normal routine for the three, all the drama stored away for now to be brought up when they returned home, if it was brought up at all.

For now, they were going to spend their last evening in their hotel room. Ford was already packed and ready to leave in the morning, buzzing with excitement over the research he wished to conduct on Fiddleford’s new pet (and would likely be just as much Ford’s pet, seeing the excitement on his face when Carlos had licked his finger).

Ford was on the floor besides Fidds, sketching him and his pet enthusiastically. The animal didn’t like being confined in its cage but it had been agreed he shouldn’t be moved often with his injuries.

Stan watched them interact, the pang of jealousy still somewhere in him but it was overshadowed with a pride that the people he loved most were content in front of him, slowly pulling the animal from its cage, checking its injury and giving him his bottle fed pureed raw meat. Ford and Fidds had spent days creating just the right blend of meats to give the creature they were both growing fond of the proper nutrition it needed.

It was an interesting few days going to the local butcher shop and ordering raw meat from the man at the counter, who always gave them odd looks about their choice in food and how Ford was always writing in his journal when he came in to see him. Stan had overheard him calling his brother some choice words to another customer, who wanted to know what his deal was watching him reach over the counter himself and weigh the food he wanted on his own to get better results on his choice.

For once Ford was the one who declared they should turn in early, ready to go home after their stressful trip and Fiddleford couldn’t agree more.

Fidds turned to Stan and kissed him on the cheek, asking if he would join them. Stan instantly shut the TV off, grateful to turn in and be one step closer to returning home and having their own bed that they didn’t need to share with Ford.

—

Stan rose late in the middle of the night after the groggy revelation that the blob he was snuggling into was far too big to be his lover. His face contorted in disgust when he realized the ear he had just kissed had been his brother’s. He flung the cover off and let his brother have the bed to himself, watching his silhouette roll into the middle of bed, seemingly proud of the victory he wasn’t aware enough to celebrate.

He had his mind on going out to his car and smoking, maybe getting some well needed rest there if he wasn’t going to get it here, when his eye caught the shadowy lump of his boyfriend curled next to Carlos’s kennel fast asleep. He sat on the floor next to him, resting his hand on his quaking shoulders before moving his hand up more running his fingers through his hair.

As his eyes adjusted more to the darkness, he noticed Fiddleford’s fingers lying at the foot of the kennel and the injured creature had moved himself as close to his only source of comfort as close as he could, claws resting on the tip Fidds’s fingers as he slept.

Stan took pity on this sorry sight and, not caring about ‘Dr. Ford’s’ orders, cracked the cage open to lift the already thrashing creature out. He took the nips at his fingers with stride, understanding the creature’s panic, which slowly disappeared as he was laid next to the man who took care of him. He gently helped the little monster curl comfortably against his boyfriend before getting up and stealing the comforter from Ford, letting him lay in the chill if he was going to hog the bed.

He wrapped the blanket snuggly around them before tucking it around himself, wrapping his arms snuggly around his boyfriend and securely shielding him from any of the chill that snuck under the comforter.

He kissed his neck and whispered he loved him before rejoining him in a peaceful slumber.

Part 8

(Popsicles, sea, refreshing)

Red sticky goop slid down Stan’s arm the longer he neglected his popsicle in favor of watching the sun sink into the ocean, vibrant colors bleeding into the water, making it shimmer and shine. Reminding Stan how beautiful the world could be when not grimmed down by all the ugliness.

He grimaced in disgust as ‘Carlos’ began licking at his arm. The second its snake like tongue touched his popsicle, he dropped it on its head and watched with a sneer as the creature sucked on the stick, red ooze slobbering down its mouth, its razor teeth turning the stick into mulch as it ground it all in its wide open mouth.

Fiddleford merely giggled at Stan’s disgust, cooing at the creature on his lap to slow down, no need to choke.

Stan wrapped his arm tightly around his boyfriend, snuggling him closer to him on the hood of the car, Ford’s loud snores echoing from the back seat after a long final day at the beach. Plenty of souvenirs, sea shells and photos (which both Stan twins would likely want to burn later on down the line) were stacked on the back seat floor. Some had toppled over on the sleeping Ford, who was too tired to notice.

Carlos’s scaly head nuzzled against Stan’s hand and he began absent mindedly stroking down the side of his ears, being mindful enough to not touch any of its nasty fresh scars, making it coo in satisfaction curling tighter on Fiddleford’s lap.

In an hour they would be heading home, Stan would have to tuck the little evil beast away just right so border patrol didn’t find the little demon Fidds had taken upon himself to see healed back to health.

For now, though, he just wanted to enjoy the sunset and the company sitting next to him. Basking in the breezy weather cooling their bright red skin.

He reached over the side of the car and pulled out a beer, taking a long refreshing drink. This was a close to paradise as this trip was going to get, so he might as well enjoy it.

#Fiddlestan #fiddleford mcgucket #stanly pines #stanford pines #mystery trio #old man Mcgucket #grunkle ford #grunkle stan #Gravity Falls #dan's fics

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aion-rsa · 7 years

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Tell Me A Story: 15 Weird Superhero Comic Book Formats

Over their several decades of existence, American superhero comics have had to adapt to changing market conditions and changes in reader habits. Anthologies were more popular in the Golden Age but dwindled away as the Silver Age ended. Early Marvel superhero books incorporated continuing subplots to create super-soap operas, and DC naturally followed suit. Today, even as the individual issue with 20 story pages still dominates as the standard comic book format, many readers wait for collected editions.

RELATED: The 15 Weirdest Comic Book Swimsuit Specials

And yet, every now and then there are isolated instances of experimentation in which a publisher bends those dominant formats to either stretch storytelling possibilities or just to attract attention. Never mind the menagerie of 1990s-era cover gimmicks or the modern effects that digital and motion comics can achieve; good old-fashioned print had some surprising tricks. Today, as the “Kamandi Challenge” revives an old DC experiment, we look back (in no particular order) on some odd and unusual ways to present superhero stories.

ROCKIN’ ROUND-ROBIN

If you think creative teams don’t stick around as long as they used to, then you need to consider the round-robin format used in 1985-86’s “DC Challenge” miniseries and currently in use by the “Kamandi Challenge.” Each issue has a different creative team and the only real rule is to end on a cliffhanger for the next team to resolve. Notice that the rules don’t include “tell a coherent story,” because as much fun as the “DC Challenge” teams apparently had on each of their issues, boy-howdy was it hard to follow!

It started with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Adam Strange and some demons in Mark Evanier and Gene Colan’s “DC Challenge” #1, but before it was over, Nazis had won World War II, Superman had a red sun for a head and the JLA Satellite was full of confused super-people. Nevertheless, the round-robin can stretch the capabilities of both readers and creators, and it truly shows off comics’ limitless potential.

A BIG DELIGHT

Likewise, we include the ubiquitous one-page Hostess Cupcake ads of the 1970s for the only rule they appeared to have: Make sure the product is the star. That was the point, of course; but for readers used to Batman and Daredevil fighting ninjas and serial murderers in their regular books, the ads were a bit jarring to read.

Although they featured even wilder plots than the regular comics (birds stealing the Statue of Liberty, for example) and used ultra-powerful characters like Green Lantern and Captain Mar-Vell, the day was always saved by the timely appearance of Twinkies, Hostess Cupcakes or Fruit Pies. Granted, who among us can resist rich chocolate taste and/or creamy filling. But the ads were so prevalent that, after a while, one got the impression that the Justice League and Avengers could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by stuffing the Anti-Monitor or Thanos full of sweet treats.

COMICS WITHIN COMICS

In the early 1980s, DC previewed new series with 16-page stories bound into the middle of selected single issues. The “Amethyst” preview was in “Legion of Super-Heroes” #294, “All-Star Squadron’s” was in “JLA” #192, and a little series called “New Teen Titans” was first seen in the middle of “DC Comics Presents” #26.

These previews didn’t have anything to do with the titles they appeared in, but later in the decade, “Bonus Book” inserts tied in more closely and featured up-and-coming talent. Today, the format is back, sort of, through “Dark Knight III’s” bound-in mini-comics. Basically they’re backup stories, but since they’re physically in the middle of the issue, you have to get around them in order to finish reading the main story, and then circle back and hope you read everything in the right order. Whatever you do, though, don’t risk your comics’ value (or its staples) by removing the inserts.

HEARD ANY GOOD PICTURES LATELY?

Another staple of the 1970s, Power Records specialized in book-and-record sets where kids could read along with an audio dramatization. Along with superheroes, the label featured sci-fi franchises like “Star Trek” and “Planet of the Apes.” While Power adapted existing issues, like September 1972’s “Fantastic Four” #126, December 1973’s “Captain America” #168 or January 1974’s “Incredible Hulk” #171, Neal Adams’ Continuity Studios also produced original stories for the label.

These included the Batman tales “Stacked Cards” and “Robin Meets Man-Bat” (reprinted in “Batman Illustrated By Neal Adams” volume 3); Superman stories by Cary Bates, Elliott S. Maggin and Ross Andru; and a 1976 Conan adventure by Len Wein, J.M. DeMatteis and John Buscema that was reprinted as November 1980’s “Conan” #116. Although the novelty comes from hearing an actor screech like Man-Bat or roar like the Hulk, we imagine “writing for the record” is a skill set all its own.

NEXUS IN STEREO

Sometimes the soundtrack is part of the main series. “Nexus” was a superhero series set 500 years in the future, initially published under Capital Comics and now owned by Dark Horse. Writer Mike Baron and artist Steve Rude’s independent sci-fi superhero classic started out as a magazine-sized black-and-white comic.

Bound into its third issue was a “flexi-disc” with the “Nexus” theme song (co-written by Baron) and an audio dramatization. An editorial explained the benefits: “The intonation of a character’s voice, background music to set the mood and electrifying sound effects all add new depth and dimension to the printed words and art.” While flexi-discs wouldn’t be in every issue, the editorial promised “next time we do this it’ll be even better.” However, there was never to be a “next time,” unfortunately, as the flexi-disc doesn’t show up in reprints and there weren’t any future issues that came accompanied with flex-discs to enjoy. However, “Nexus” turned out to be memorable enough without the audio accompaniment.

INDEPENDENT VOICES

Although it’s not really a distinct format to pair mainstream, corporate-controlled characters with comics creators from more of an independent background, anthologies like the “Bizarro Comics” and “Strange Tales” series are often both entertaining and illuminating.

“Bizarro” allowed DC to reprint Kyle Baker’s instant-classic “Letitia Lerner, Superman’s Babysitter” and “Strange Tales” gave us Kate Beaton’s take on Rogue and Kraven. Tom Scioli and John Barber’s “Transformers vs. G.I. Joe” series, which merged the superfans’ knowledge with their unique styles and filtered it through a ’70s Jack Kirby lens, is also a good example of combining the best of both worlds. Of course, with the Internet, it’s become easier than ever to find cartoonists’ “unsanctioned” takes on superheroes, but the official sanctioning of a DC or Marvel anthology may sand down some rough edges. Still, the freedom these creators normally enjoy usually transfers pretty well, and we’re all better for it.

NEXTWAVE EXTRAS

Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen’s 12-issue cult-classic “Nextwave” (2006-07) took shots at a lot of superhero-comics targets, but it also used some memorable gimmicks to grow an audience. Mixed into Fin Fang Foom’s pants-related anger, the filthy half of the Captain’s codename and Machine Man’s contempt for fleshy ones was the “Nextwave” theme. So too were things like issue #5’s “Crayon Butchery Variant.”

Yes, quite a while before adult coloring books became a thing, “Nextwave” encouraged its readers to cast off the shackles of hues imposed from on high and color the issue themselves. Granted, this was a variant, so readers had to make an extra effort to get it. So unsurprisingly, the non-colored version of the issue hasn’t been reprinted in any “Nextwave” collection. As a further incentive, though, Marvel conducted a coloring contest, and the winner’s name (Matthew Keegan, whose entry can be seen here) was forever immortalized in said collections.

EASY LIKE SUNDAY MORNING

The 12-issue weekly “Wednesday Comics” was designed to emulate the classic comics pages of Sunday newspapers, when adventure strips like “Prince Valiant” and “The Phantom” got ample room for their Sunday-continuity installments (Feel free to ask your grandparents for more details.). Each issue of “Wednesday Comics” folded up into a standard 7″ x 10″ comic-book size, but opened into 15 gigantic 14″ x 20″ broadsheet pages.

The features included DC’s A-listers as well as Kyle Baker’s “Hawkman,” Dave Gibbons and Ryan Sook’s “Kamandi” and Paul Pope’s “Adam Strange.” Neil Gaiman and Mike Allred’s “Metamorpho” even did two pages which combined to form the Periodic Table of the Elements. “USA Today” also published John Arcudi and Lee Bermejo’s “Superman” strip. The collected edition is similarly impressive, and includes a “Plastic Man” short feature; but nothing beat the love-of-reading experience from picking up each issue as it came out.

EVENTS PUBLISHED IN REAL TIME

One series which demanded to be read as it came out was 2006-07’s sequel to “Infinite Crisis,” the year-long weekly “52.” Since all of DC’s ongoing superhero comics had gone through a one-year time-jump, only “52” chronicled the missing year. Its brain trust, which included writers Geoff Johns, Mark Waid, Grant Morrison and Greg Rucka, and layout artist Keith Giffen, further imposed a strict real-time rule that each issue would cover one week. The only cliffhanger involved one issue ending at 11:59 p.m. and the next starting at midnight.

The method was popular enough, with some fans reportedly waiting to read each day’s events as they “happened,” meaning a fan on a Tuesday would stop reading on when he or she reached the part of the issue dealing with a Wednesday. There had been real-time comics before (the “Batman: No Man’s Land” epic played out over the course of a year, for example, from January to December 1999), but with elastic timelines a staple of superhero storytelling, “52’s” adherence to its internal rules was both a clever gimmick and a steadying influence on its pacing.

TRIANGLE TIME

Some superheroes are simply too big for one book, but when a hero has multiple comics titles being published, those books don’t necessarily have to flow together. When they do, however, the results can be quite engaging. In the early 1980s, Bat-writer Gerry Conway structured issues of “Batman” and “Detective Comics” so that “Detective” continued “Batman’s” stories, and vice versa. The format ended with 1986’s “Batman” #400, but not long afterwards the three Superman books (“Action Comics,” “Adventures of Superman” and “Superman”) picked it up.

To keep everything straight, the Super-titles put the reading order in a little triangle on each issue’s cover. It lasted about 10 years, before including the addition of a new monthly series (“Man of Steel”), as well as incorporating a new quarterly book (“Man of Tomorrow”) for the months that had five Wednesdays in them. It could be overwhelming at times, but the four series combined to tell some true epics, including the “Death of Superman,” “Funeral For A Friend” and “Return of Superman” story arcs.

PAGE-HOPPING

We’ve already talked about comics within comics, but Walt Simonson’s “Fantastic Four” #352 (May 1991) presented a story within a story, and the “inner” story was out of sync with the “outer” one! The main (“outer”) story involved Doctor Doom, Ben Grimm reverting back to the Thing, and Ben’s girlfriend Sharon Ventura giving up her own career as the Thing in her absence.

Doom had captured the FF and challenged Reed Richards to a duel using time-jumping devices. Their fight, which was waged across increments of minutes and seconds, was the “inner” story, and it unfolded in out-of-sequence vertical panels that ran alongside the in-sequence main story. Readers had to follow the timecodes in both stories in order to keep everything in order, and could check their work with the occasional panel where the two timelines intersected. It was a great use of single-issue real estate and the kind of innovative technique “FF” helped pioneer.

DIAL “R” FOR READER

Created by Dave Wood and Jim Mooney for January 1966’s “House of Mystery” #156, “Dial H For HERO” was one of Silver Age DC’s crazier concepts. It involved a magic “H-Dial” which would turn its owner into a randomly-generated superhero and, more often than not, a one-off character created specifically for the story.

The feature ran until issue #173 (March-April 1968) but was revived in February 1981 via a special insert (remember those?) in “Legion of Super-Heroes” #272. (It then moved to “Adventure Comics” and was a backup in “Superboy.”) This time, writer Marv Wolfman and artist Carmine Infantino’s gimmick was using characters submitted by readers, who both received credit for the idea and had a T-shirt sent to them in exchange for their intellectual property. While it was probably a time-saver for the creative team, no doubt they also wracked their brains trying to figure out how to work Lawnmower Lass, or whomever, into the stories.

THIS COMIC CAN KILL YOU

In “Animal Man,” Grant Morrison famously broke the fourth wall to introduce himself to the main character, Buddy Baker. Over 20 years later, Morrison would revisit the idea of characters addressing the reader directly in his “Multiversity” miniseries, especially in the “Ultra Comics” one-shot, which was an installment about a character named Ultra from the “real world” of Earth-33, who was a comic book come to life.

In other words, “Ultra Comics” was about itself, and by reading the issue, readers participated in the character’s life, including his birth and (very short) career. At the end of the issue, Ultra sacrificed himself by trapping his foe within the pages of the comic, begging readers not to let it out. To that point, “Multiversity” was already pretty meta-textual, so “Ultra Comics” was over the top on a number of levels. Nevertheless, the reader-participation angle gave the miniseries an entirely new dimension.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE COMICS

One of the many tools in Ryan North’s utility belt is a knack for choose-your-own-adventure storytelling. Besides his great mostly-prose Shakespeare adaptations (“To Be Or Not To Be” and “Romeo And/Or Juliet”), he’s also written a couple of chooseable-path comics. In November 2012’s “Adventure Time” #10, he and artist Shelli Paroline crafted a labyrinthine tale about the Ice King putting our heroes under the control of a mysterious force (guess who) which got more and more twisted as the issue played out. The ending even depended on the sheer number of options the story eventually encompassed.

More recently, in June 2016’s “Unbeatable Squirrel Girl” #7, North and artist Erica Henderson allowed the reader to guide Squirrel Girl to victory against Quoggoth, Swarm, and/or Doctor Yes, with Galactus himself as your host. Chooseable-path comics aren’t new (see “The Unwritten” #17, for example) but North has brought them back into the limelight and made them a one-man trend.

TITANS SEPARATELY

Superhero comics of the early ’90s get well-deserved attention for the cover-enhancement craze. Therefore, to stand out from all the chromium and foil, DC promoted September 1992’s first issue of “Team Titans” with — wait for it — alternate interiors. That’s right, not only did “Team Titans” #1 feature variant covers for each of the five Titans, each variant also included the 18-page origin of its cover-featured hero.

Accordingly, if you wanted to get the whole story, you had to buy five different issues (all of which were written by Marv Wolfman). That was overkill, since the variants all shared the same 22-page main story; and on top of that, the main story was Part 3 of a Titans-franchise crossover! Those of you doing the math will realize that if you bought all five variants, you got 4 extra copies of Part 3 of the crossover. Needless to say, DC decided to keep the variants on the covers only from then on.

Got a favorite storytelling strategy or comic book gimmick? Tell us in the comments!

The post Tell Me A Story: 15 Weird Superhero Comic Book Formats appeared first on CBR.com.

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lairofsentinel · 7 years

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Looming truths 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 10 11 12 13 14 15

Loomingtruths - answers as long as the fic XD

1:What inspired you to write the fic this way?

The game,the chars, and my depression back then.

2:What scene did you first put down?

It's hardto remember. The first ones were with Lang. Another of the firstones was the scene in which Phoenix tells Miles to stop behaving likea child, that they looked like actors in a opera soap. It was meantto be a parody/criticism of my own ridiculous scene lol.

Anotherone was the first scene in which Phoenix is depressed, laying on bed,unable to get up, sitting a bit but then falling again on the bed, wanting toforget his life, struggling with his bisexuality.

Also the 2possible Endings: the one in which Miles died (that turned out to be a scenein middle of the fic), and the solution of the whole plot about thecase of faceless bodies. You can't write police-like texts without doing them backwards: solve the crime and then, start splitting theparts that form the crime and making them fade out into thecharacter's doubts, assumptions, and lack of info.

3:What's your favorite line of narration?

Milesmonologues in front of graves. He got all my existential shit there.XD

AlsoLang's.

“Kay.Once again, her image appearedon his mind, and like his father's, it gave him some kind of vaguesafety, that only those pastprotective figures could provide in the world of the living ones. Maybeafter all this time he had found a sense to that strange habit ofvisiting old stones. The uselessneed to talk with those who were gone. Those who would never, everreturn.

“Everycase I read, now more than ever,scares me by foreseeing the image of the most terrifying hellawaiting us. The madness that humanscan reach frightens me. There are no rules for what is waiting foryou when human creativity,the disrupted one, is challenged. There is not even a kind of naturalrewarding system afterlong periods of suffering. It's more of the same. Uncertainty, chaosand nonsense. It's all you have.So unpredictable. That's why my father lies here. And also, that'swhy I'm here, alive. This universeworks in such fearful, chaotic ways. If humans can't put order toit... an order that could givesome kind of consolation to those who are lost in this storm...what's the point of being humansand be proud of it? What's the point of Justice and Law?”

“What?!”Klavier opened his eyes wide for a second. That was the mostrevolting suspicion he hadreceived in years. He was angry, but also tired. Putting his hands onhis head, he shook it slightlyover the desk and his voice started to get louder. “I can't believethe kind of image you haveabout me... all of you. I've done everything by the book. Myprosecution skills were perfect afterthat unfortunate first case. I've tried my best to do everythingright since then. But people are moreconcerned about my leather pants than the amount of cases I'vesolved. Yes, I don't wear a damnsuit, or glasses, and I work on my tan. But I'm a fair man. I'm notmy brother! I don't care aboutthe Gavins' legal fame!. Stop thinking of me as if I were him! He isdead! I pushed forthat tohappen!” Klavier sighed, calming himself down while straighteningon his seat. “Don't you dareto treat me as the twisted man he was.

4:What's your favorite line of dialogue?

Thereare many. One that comes to my mind is the one with Lang and Kayabout idealism:

“Iknow, but at least this will stop it. So many deaths weren’t invain” [said Kay]

“Iwouldn’t be so sure... but I let it go”, defeated emotionsplastered in his voice, in his eyes, in his soul.

Curious,Kay raised an eyebrow and smiled as if what Lang had just said was amere joke. “are youserious?”

“Let'sbe honest. You can't be serious believing this willfix the world, don't you think?”

Kay'ssmile was wiped out of her face. “So, you are doing things withoutbelieving they would changeanything?.”

Heshrugged, “Hmph, who knows.”

“Well,you should. It’s you I’m asking. You. You should know, it's yourown fucking mind.”

Bothof them looked at each other, defying, aggressively provocative. Anold tired wolf fighting againstthe Master. A little crow too smart for a savage predating world. “Ihave no time for over-thinking those things so much, like certainpeople could. I need to watch thosecriminals and sink my fangs in their throats. That's all my father,my whole family, my ancestorshave been doing through the years. But when your so long-lastingheritage has been doingthe same you do, century after century, and things never change onebit, you start to doubt if whatyou are doing right now will be the same useless thing they have donebefore.”

“Youare a bit pessimistic, Wolfie...” her face darkened. “I want tobelieve my father's ideals will beaccomplished, some day. A world that doesn't need the Yatagarasu. Hedied for this... you can't beaccomplished, some day. A world that doesn't need the Yatagarasu. Hedied for this... you can't sayit was useless....”

“Ofcourse it was not completely useless.Some people could have been saved with all this. I'll giveyou that, but... let's be serious. “

“Ican't believe that”. Kay looked at a screen, but her eyes were notwatching any of the lines displayedon it. A cold silence tensed the atmosphere.

“Forwhat it's worth, believe what you want, crow girl.” Lang threw histired body on the bed and sighedagain. A glimpse of Tyrell's image crossed his mind, remembering howmuch the old man usedto complain about the youngsters' enthusiasm. Probably time hadgotten to Lang as well, too oldfor interacting with young people in the same way he used to

5:What part was hardest to write?

Apollo'ssubplot. All about Apollo was always hard to write for me.

6:What makes this fic special or different from all your other fics?

Thefandom. I usually write one fic in each fandom, and that's all what Ido. I put all my passion, all what I want and I like in that singlefic. That's why my fics are... ridiculously long. The topics maychange according to the fandom. In Ace Attorney I try to focus a loton topics such as Justice, Power, corruption of the powerful ones,the loneliness, depression, several existential shit, love hard todeal (I mean, romance in Looming Truths is more about romance thatsometimes cross toxic limits and the couple tries to come back to ahealthy way). It's far from pinky romance, I guess. And of course,sexuality in a non-smut way. I read all my life fics with such smutin them, that I'm unable to write better things than that, so I tryto show the others things that may happen in sexual situations that Ididn't read in fics often.

7:Where did the title come from?

It'sthe common thing of all chars: truths that are there, hard to find or to see, that lurk aroundthem, like looming threats. It also applies to the case of facelessbodies, the main plot of the fic.

8:Did any real people or events inspire any part of it?

Hohoho.Like... Sure. There is a mix between the characterization of the gamechars and how I relate them to some people I've met in my life. Tosay the least, Phoenix is unbelievably similar to one of my ex, theone I had a long relationship as wonderful as you can read in the ficwith a person so hard to deal with due to their lack of emotionalintelligence like me.

Allthe stress and the conflict that Phoenix lives related to hisbisexuality, realising that he is bisexual when he was almost thirty,the shock it gave him is basically all the struggle one of my exlived, and I was close her to see all the process and how her mindwas deeply conflicted to this.

Klavier'sweird emotions and doubts for his brother are basically thestrangeness I feel when I think of my relationship with my father.

Theconcept of “let it flow” with Miles' stress and lack ofunderstanding?, Franziska dealing with all the shit around men, abouthaving to be much better than all of them because otherwise she willbe not recognized at all? And all her walls of rudeness around hereven though she was destroyed about Andrew's death? Because beingseen as a woman in a masculine environment makes surviving hard toaccomplish?. That's all different sides of myself in my real life translated into AA situations.

MyAura? it’s basically the friend I dedicated this fic: noir. I wroteAura always thinking in her.

10:Why did you choose this pairing for this particular story?

Narumitsu:because I love the pair. It will sound lame but I had a relationship like this once, and I know this is the kind of relationship I want to have. Writing about this gave me a lot of nostalgia. They look such a healthy couple, despitetheir weakness and flaws and fears. Their brutal honesty is what makes themkeep going on.

Klapollo:Well, I was not planning to do this pair, but considering how Klavierwas portrayed, I wanted a bit of good things in his life, same forApollo, so I tried to do what I did: a toxic relationship trying totake away the toxic part.

Franziska/Andrew:I wanted to write a lesbian, and Francy has that type ofpersonality that usually is only portrayed on male chars, so that'swhy I tried to write as much as possible about her, andI wanted her lesbian as fuck. But, to be honest, Andrew and Franziskaare not a pair I like. I simply see them too toxic in the game,that's why I changed a bit Andrew's personality. I did not want toshow co-dependant relationships as “good” relationships, but Idid not want to show the only lesbian couple in the fic as anunhealthy one, so I played a bit far away from the “in-char”field there. Sadly, I dont have lesbian pairs in AA. :( it hurts me. I can’t ship Francy with anyone, because she needs someone like Phoenix: tender, but that also has enough personality to calm her down. Ema is too aggressive and bitter for that. Maya is too naive and too “out of Francy’s field” (I mean, Laws. They dont have common ground from where to build the cound), Andrew doesn’t have a personality that could make Francy behave. I see that a “no” from Andrew is always too weak for the storm that Francy is. Lang’s personality is really good for her, but again, I want her lesbian as fuck, sorry.

Lang-Miles:Not my pair, but my friend's (Noir). I wrote half of this fic due to her,because she wanted to read a fic about lang-miles relationship in-char without rape, and well...Looming truths turned out like this.

11:What do you like best about this fic?

Thecharacters interactions and their existential shits.

12:What do you like least about this fic?

It'sgrammar, the words I used, the way I wrote it. English not being mynative language makes some sentences hard to write. In Spanish I cancraft a really good fitting sentence, but then it goes clumsy inEnglish, with less intense emotion or simply weird. But well, thisfic was, in part, written as a way to force me learn English. And Itdid it in a marvellous way.

Stillyet, I resent a lot its grammar issues, and some weird descriptions.Sigh.

13:What music did you listen to, if any, to get in the mood for writingthis story? Or if you didn't listen to anything, what do you thinkreaders should listen to to accompany us while reading?

Myplaylist. It's immense. It's full of OST from videogames, classicalmusic such as Vivaldi or Mozart, Jrock, Jpop, electronic music, tango,electro-tango, enka, celtic music, Irish music. Uff. It's a looong list.

Theonly song I think readers should listen while reading is the one Ilinked in the Epilogue.

14:Is there anything you wanted readers to learn from reading this fic?

Alot of things. But I leave that up to the readers. Every readerlearns or takes from the text what they want/need in that moment.That's all what I expect from the writer-reader relationship.Also, I’m always too obsessed with people developing their own critical thinking. I always try to stimulate that on my fics, to make situations that force readers keep thinking, and taking positions. If that happens, that’s all I want from my readers. That, and comments helping me to improve my grammar XD but those never came.

15:What did you learn from writing this fic?

English,lol. A loooot.

AndIt helped me to overcome my deep depression in that moment. It helpedme to survive really bad times. Like I said to one of my ex once: ifI write, it means I'm really bad. If I'm feeling happy and ok, Idon't have wishes for writing. But when I feel myself eaten bydepression, I learnt that writing helped me to kill me, to hurt me, toforgive me, to guide myself. Writing is for me a healing process thatno therapy can match.

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creativeconmans · 5 years

Text

The Batman Rant

It’s always a bit embarrassing to have your first blog post. Especially if it’s a rant. Moreso if you catch yourself trying to be profound in doing so. With this bit of self-observation out of the way, I’d like to talk about something that has happened some time ago: Batman #50.

Now, I shall do something horrible and assume that everyone reading this knows the arc and issue in question – and all the rest of you people don’t care enough to be hurt by any and all spoilers this post may contain.

I have, living in Russia, discovered the whole arc of the Batcat wedding only recently. The stories precluding the wedding were… different, though not too meaningful, soap opera in DC Universe, which is more or less standard, wrapped up in some of the best art I have seen in popular media. Thanks for that trend. And then came the issue of a wedding that has been built up for a year not happening, that began with a series of very, very questionable choices by both characters, which turned out to be a catastrophe instead. That is, by the way, how I found out about the existence of Tom King and that spoke volumes to me about his writing.

But if that was all, I don’t think it would really merit blogging about it. I have studied some threads – what few I could find – where the fans stated their own reactions not to the spoiler (I actually think this could have been damage control from DC – spoil the issue so that people don’t crash too hard), but to the story. Only three points emerged throughout, and that was that

a. People loved Tom King and his writing (apparently)

b. People thought that DC considered marriage toxic

c. People think that breaking the Bat has been done so many times it’s not even remotely funny. Not even in the Joker’s terms. Although, perhaps…

There were a couple of less frequently encountered points – and one of them was that a fulfilled – if not happy – Bruce Wayne would be, in fact, far more effective at stopping shit from happening that a permanently hurt fellow who needed his crusade to keep functioning. I sort of second that - a fulfilled Bat would have systematically empowered Gotham police and call upon his resources – League resources – to ensure specifically that threats were deconstructed on a more or less permanent basis.

But also throughout – and I may severely aggro the larger crowd now – there is, I think, a vast misunderstanding of two things. First is the fact that writers who keep dishing out the ‘No Bat without pain’ mantra severely misunderstand the character of Batman. In fact, in the King’s run, even his closest friends and family misunderstand Batman.

The second – is the fact that the writers aren��t in it to tell good stories. The game of writing has long since been forcibly changed.

At first, stories were made to convey meaning, from deep moral truths to memes to hitting your neighbor on the head with a sword and laminating his women being a good idea.

Then the stories were made to entertain at least, and at most - to force people to actually think before they act – and this is how the stories since circa 200 B.C. were written. Whether it is the classic Chinese epics or the cornerstones of French literature, or the Greeks or the Romans – this is how you normally find your story.

And then come the more recent times, and the invention of the printing press, and the proliferation of both basic literacy and paper. Suddenly there is more and more opportunity for more and more people to write – to tell stories for a living. They write, they draw, they paint, they make moving pictures. And a few of them find themselves in large collectives that are so stable that they can finally create a lasting mythos.

What would you do, if you suddenly found out you could create something that would – quite probably – outlive you and your children? What if it turned out to be so influential, even while being regarded as insignificant, that people would want more and more of it, would pay dearly for it? And what would you do, if suddenly control of such legacy, built well before you were born, fell into your lap?

Regardless of the answer, in our case the ever-winning pragmatism and child-like directness of people in power would dictate they would make money off those who believe in the legacy and want it continued.

That practical, inevitable decision suddenly makes everything else fall into place. One sees the audience not as your followers to be respected, nor a herd to be guided, nor even a crowd to be pleased, but as an opponent to be taken advantage of. And against an opponent you must arm yourself.

And with this opponent that is a renewing, rotating group of people, you have two specific goals in mind. One, to make your opponent pay for your product more than once, and preferably – for all your products. Two, to make sure your opponent is never destroyed, never pays too much, never stops – in short, never, ever hurt your opponent so much he won’t come back for more.

The shortest route to achieving Objective One is – forgive me for belaboring the obvious – to force your opponent to buy your product. Now we all know that under current labor market conditions men with tommy guns are a bit expensive to hire, too troublesome and can be creatively undirected – in the sense that they are as likely to sell your product to yourself as well as the target audience and then pocket the money. So if actual violence is impossible, our weapon of next resort is trickery and lies.

Now, it can – and, I’m sure, has been – successfully argued that people would enjoy being lied to, provided the lies were good and entertaining enough and told with a straight face and never weighed any on their pocket. The whole history of storytellers seems indeed to prove the point. Hence, the people of creative foundry in general seem to have adopted the tactics of lies.

So okay, people are lying to you. Some of them are even telling lies so that you, while listening or reading those, can arrive to a certain truth, perhaps even something deep. Or even profound. Where is the harm in that? Even if, in time, they start lying for the sake of you paying, and nothing else.

But there is a downside to a lie, and that is, once it has served its purpose it can only be discarded. No one will ever believe a lie told twice – or three times. No matter how you dress it up, people who have encountered it twice or more will recognize it, and react accordingly.

And so we come to a dilemma – we either tell different lies and change the legacy until we run out of believable lies, or maybe we stop telling lies, which would put us out of work and out of money.

This is where the nature of the target audience throws storytellers a rope. Storytellers, have easy times dealing with the young and the naïve, people who have not yet been duped many times, who keep having hopes and dreams of getting something out of every deal, every truth, every lie – everything. And their supply is replenishing, what with new people being born daily and all.

But telling old lies to new people only gets you so far – they can be easily inoculated by the older crowd who we have already lied to, successfully or not. Furthermore, the Internet and its propagation makes it harder and harder to peddle the same thing. You suddenly find that your consumer has collectively evolved and simple trick work no longer – they have already been seen and done and examined and analyzed to death.

You therefore must expand your repertoire of tricks and lies, and this is where the con comes into it. The long con.

Modern writing involves playing with your audience – in fact, running a long con on your audience. There is, in writing and drawing and filmmaking – in storytelling in general – an implicit promise. The promise is that a story will take you places, and that the world you heard about would change, and probably you yourself might change with that. It is that promise and hope of its fulfillment that makes one read a new story (barring professional readers, but those aren’t really a large crowd), invest time and emotion into it and its characters, willingly suspend disbelief as it comes. And it is that promise that is, in modern days, routinely and completely broken.

Which is where the long con comes into play.

A modern writer’s job is to make a script that fulfils the following objectives by any and all means:

1. Make people want to read what’s in their hands

2. Make people want to read the next one

The first objective is normally achieved with good graphics and composition and a story that is not entirely moronic, but mostly it is helped by the fact that once you buy a book – or a comic book, or whatever – it’s normally a waste not to finish it through (That has happened to me once or twice, though).

But the second one – that one’s a doozy. The term ‘plot hook’ now defines something that has evolved past simple hooking and into something that more resembles ‘plot anchoring drill’. Or whatever it is they anchor floating oil rigs with.

The original plot hooking mechanism worked on two simple mechanics – one, creating a gestalt that, by design, cannot be completed, until and unless the next piece of the story is experienced, two, promising that it will be completed in the next piece of the story in a satisfactory manner.

The actual execution of the scheme have long been any and all variants of a cliffhanger to a varied degree, but unresolved plot points also work towards the same goal, provided the main story is not concluded (i.e. the narrator isn’t planning to stop talking).

So where is the con?

If you analyze so many stories in the comic books of the Big Two – which is what actually prompted this post – you realize there have been supposedly radical changes throughout the comicbook universe, except they have amounted to nothing much. It is like a soap opera (Santa Barbara, perhaps), where everything keeps happening and nothing ever gets really resolved, because nothing ever really changes. Least of all, the direction.

In that regard, the canonic Batman suffers perhaps the most, both as a comic line and as the character. Every single positive influence that anything can possibly have has been for the recent years disintegrated either by some random villainous plot or by some immature and questionable choice of his own – except it really was the writer’s choice in every occasion.

But you know – you know – it will turn out okay in the end, right? Except it won’t. There is, for comicbook characters, an extremely specific baseline which determines what they are, and they aren’t allowed to be pretty much anything else. One thing that Batman is not allowed to be, for example, is efficient.

Another thing is apparently happy, but I have always – or at least since I started thinking about it – that it betrays either conscious manipulation on the writers’ part, or their complete lack of understanding of Batman as a character and as a man. We have been sold the ‘Happy man cannot be batman’ idea several times by now, but the rationale behind it is very, very questionable.

Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that Batman as a character is a paradox – anyone who has the sheer amount of will and determination to become as prepared for most conceivable situations could not have neglected his own emotional maturity, or lack thereof.

It is unrealistic that the man behind the cowl still has the same things and thoughts driving him fifteen years – and four Robins, and a tragedy, and a son, and several lovers, and countless instances of severe psychological ordeal and heartbreak after he had first started his crusade.

His personal trauma was the driving factor at the start of his career – and it was believable there and then. But after all these events – if the man is a living, sane creature not bent on self-loathing or self-torture (and such a person would have broken right about two world crises earlier) – he would want to be changed.

Which was in part why the idea of the Batman finally marrying Cat of all people (and which guy, exactly, hasn’t had a girlfriend not unlike the Cat in his life?) was sold very well. Depicting the romantic intimacy masterfully helped quite a bit. But the final ingredient, as it were, the core of all cons, was the hope. The hope that this time, this fellow who has survived chaos, murder, trauma to his loved ones, countless assaults on his sanity, couple of deaths in the family, psychological torture and continuous work well past the point of human endurance (mental and physical) deserves some happiness, especially where he had only to make a step to do it. The readers’ hope that finally everything would turn out right in the damn imaginary world that has seen too many wrongs. And it took a very long time and many plot arcs – not all of them particularly good – to settle the plot points and prepare the world for a transition…except the said transition never happened.

The number of gestalts formed throughout the arc numbers in dozens, all of them hitting a very specific group of emotions within the readers. Each and every marriage prelude pointed towards some serious character growth and a fulfilling resolution, despite the fact that Bruce Wayne is no Oliver Queen (but we know from the Arrow series that Ollie wants to face just as many sadistic choices as Bruce). And then it all gets spectacularly destroyed, all the gestalts incomplete.

With each incomplete gestalt the reader has formed comes a need – of varying power and degree – to see that gestalt completed, to see the resolution, and more specifically – the one resolution that has been pointed at and that the reader is hoping for. Some writers go so far as to push the hopes of readers into a specific direction, only to tear the gestalts in two later on.

And they do it consciously. The unfulfilled needs create a certain drive in the reader – or viewer. And the very first place where a frustrated reader will look in hopes of fulfillment and proper gestalt completion is the same place where the gestalt was created. Translated into consumer behavior, it means that #50 has virtually guaranteed a psychological need in its target audience to buy issues #51-#100. You can even see Tom teasing the audience with flashback pictures of Bat/Cat romantic scenes taken out of context, fueling the fire and bolstering future sales of hopeful, young, naïve and emotional consumers.

But the real bitch of it is, the con works if you emotionally invest in the story. In fact, it will work even if you take specific steps to prevent your own emotional investment. An unfinished story means an incomplete gestalt, and it is a micro-trauma for one’s psyche far more often than not (I believe there are times when implied completion of the story – and gestalt – is far more scary and traumatic than incompletion, but you’d have to talk to a practicing psychologist to be certain of that).

And so to the point. After #50 it has become clear that all Batman readers have been conned by Tom King et al into believing there was a chance of change. Especially those who missed his earlier statements about breaking the Bat – because, you know, the Kult didn’t do that (despite the series specifically stating it to be so), and Bane didn’t do that, and the Joker didn’t do that already.

And even as that is apparent, people – me, admittedly and regrettably, included – continue to hope for a better resolution, for Bat/Cat pair to drift back together and at least be no worse off than where they started… forgetting for the moment that the only real thing that could repair feelings on both sides is an actual consummation of marriage, impossible as it sounds. And since it is the only way to really repair the Bat/Cat pair, it probably won’t happen.

Nevertheless, people won’t stop forcing themselves to hope, because to lose the hope in good resolution would, for the hapless reader (also ‘punter’ or ‘sucker’ in this instance), be to lose hope of satisfying his own emotional needs – even if they originated – or became actualized – in an utterly fictional story.

There are worse conmen on the market of creative writing than Tom et al – one could probably write a short book on those – but this is probably the first time since the con has been ran on people with this much deliberation, for this long, using this particular base spectrum of emotions, and with such a long-term sales plan in mind.

So I postulate here and now, that the creative writing industry has finally become its own dark apex – it has necessitated manipulation and traumatization of readers through proxy of characters and it will, if left unchecked, have very serious and detrimental influence on both the readers and on writers. It will, if left unchecked, become a one-sided war of educated psychologists versus uneducated mass consumers. And, if left unchecked, it will by necessity upgrade the writers from creators of monsters into monsters themselves.

Not all writers are creators of monsters. But it has been something of a trend that so many of them are, and are lauded for it.

All we can do, perhaps, is educate ourselves and our young to fight, to perceive stories as means of manipulation and traps, to search for truths in a more profound way than what the mass industry offers.

Or maybe we can do nothing - but hope.

#Bat/Cat Batman Comics Psychology Con Rant

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cameiotmagazine-blog · 6 years

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The Peter Parker the Spectacular Spider Man Review

About three years ago, when I decided to get really back into comics, when Marvel Mania was pretty much where it was right now, which is extremely high, my first real port of call, the one I really wanted to read was Matt fraction’s Hawkeye series, which was fantastic. I know it got some criticism. I imagined it would. I read it in trade, which probably helped a lot. In that year or so, I really intensely read Marvel comics, like almost non-stop. To me, and I suspect to a lot of people, and this has been They were fantastic. I feel it's a real undersold golden age of Marvel stuff is that time period where Marvel was just doing fantastic and it seemed like no series they could do would screw up. The new characters were fun and interesting and diverse.

I remember explicitly one scene where I was like, "There is no better than this. There is no point that could be better than this," and that was the one scene where It was technically, I guess, an issue where there was a Christmas party . There was no action or anything. It was just undersold and everybody was having a good time. I was like ... As I've mentioned before, what I consider to be good writing, or particularly good character writing, is the characters seem to have lives outside of the story. Every Marvel character seemed to have a life outside of their story. They all seemed to exist.

It was after that it all went so, so, so wrong. I don't know exactly what happened. I mean, of course I do. I know exactly what the reason was. The reason was my most hated enemy and foe, the thing I dislike the most in comic book story telling, is the massive multiplayer crossover thing that seems to happen every year and always is late on schedule, goes on too long, and interrupts everybody's storylines and screws everything up. There was Secret Wars, which was popular but took too long, and then there was Civil War II, which was horrible and took forever.

But the movies were going strong. Some Marvel was still chugging along its film division, for a while definitively being better than its comics division. Brutal ironies. There was that. What did Spider-Man, Peter Parker, the former erstwhile star of the Marvel universe do now? Well, and despite what you might see previously written on this site, I do not, in fact, hate Dan Slott. In the unsung golden age of Marvel that I mentioned, I should bring up one of the ones that I particularly liked was his She-Hulk one. I do feel Slott had run out of ideas of what to do with Spider-Man because when you spend a good deal of time writing a different person than the supposed star of the series, that is not like great ... That usually indicates a man that is not interested particularly in doing the thing he's been doing for years anymore.

Of course, there was other ideas that didn't work out so well and then worked out particularly well with a different person taking over.

There was some good new additions to the cast.

What about Peter himself? Well, I've always had a love/hate relationship with Spider-Man. I realized why I do because I like the character and I like the conception of the character, but I always feel he's the easiest kind of dude to screw up on in a lot of ways because most, I feel, writers project so hard into him. He has a weird almost Superman-ish problem in that sometimes Superman writers don't let Superman be a character and he has to be this ideal for all humanity. It's almost a vague Jesus-y person in a lot of ways. That's the issue for Spider-Man, but with urban and their own personality interests.

The problem hits when Peter is not allowed to be a character of his own, and that, unfortunately, was what was dominating him for the past so many years. In fact, a different Spider-Man totally outshone him for a while. After Homecoming came out and I watched it and I examined it, I realized something about Peter and especially now with this new series. Oh boy, we're getting to the actual review of the thing I promised to review? Peter is a star. Peter Parker deserves his own comic book series because Peter Parker has and always will be a great character. An everyman, although side note, we desperately do need more diverse everyman characters. I'm just saying Peter is a great one of those, who is given great power and wants to do what he can to help the world but is stuck, but is human in a realistic and personable way.

That's why he always remains popular. No matter what, Spider-Man will, I feel, remain popular because kids ... Like Batman in a lot of ways, Spider-Man can always be there for you, but he needs a good writer. I didn't think ... I remember when I first heard about this thing, and I'm always late to everything because I don't really keep up with the news on these regards, and oh my god. Is there not a more perfect match between subject and creative force than Chip Zdarsky writing Spider-Man?

Chip Zdarsky is essentially what Spider-Man (if he also was comic writer/artist) would be if he was a real-world person. Oh my god. The second I heard about this, I knew they had found an absolutely perfect writer and the series did not disappoint. Brief overview for new readers coming into this world of Spider-Man. By casually mentioning a few things that went on in Peter's life, then pretty much ignoring, except for a few things. It kind of hints at the fact that the biggest significant new contribution to Spider-Man's mythology is one of’s Mark Wade was the one who I always thought should have been given Spider-Man. Until, they mentioned Chip Zdarsky.

Until Chip Zdarsky name was brought up, and just like his collaborators on sex criminals, Matt Fraction, Matt Fraction, Chip Zdarsky is blessed with an amazing lightness tone , is goofy and brilliant, and builds likable character, unlikeable character almost immediately.

The plot is, I'm up for it, I'm following it but so the plot, the additions I love, so the plot is essentially started by, and spoiler alert for the second issue of this, pretty much the end of the first issue. It started by when Spider man's sister comes to visit him.

That's right, from that graphic novel that I didn't read, but I want to now. It's Theresa Parker, is back in the picture. And for people who've only, who may or may not be related, Peter and Theresa certainly do have the chemistry, the fun chemistry of a brother and sister, which is good.

I don't know, I mean new family members are like soap opera one o one but super heroes are, share a lot of elements with soap operas in a lot of ways. I think most people liked Theresa and the graphic novel where she originated from was popular.

I don't think anybody, I certainly don't have an objection to it. You know you gotta kind of spice up the cast every once in a while, also there is Peter’s new romantic interest who I like, who's a stand up comedian. I misspoke there, it's not Peter Parker's new romantic interest, it's Spider man's new romantic interest.

Which leads to one of the funniest skits ever where Spider man literally dose stand up and the people are not into it (been there). So the plot is, I'm not 100% fan, although I don't mind it here because they seem to be handling it intelligently.

I'm not 100% fan when superheroes try hookup, like the concept of superheroes to real world politics, because it's such an inherently fanciful idea, the second you try and make it realistic, you always run into a little bit of an issue.

Whatever. No work can be perfect. 100% perfect. Forget that, cause that's not fun. But ultimately this is, and it tracks Peter's position to stop what turns out to be a plot by the tinkerer.

I don't want to get like more into it than that, I want to talk about the relationships because, In the end it's the relationships that make any story worth its while.

They've got some great ones cooking here. Besides, Peter and Theresa who have a great back and forth relationship, even though I dread, I'm not the hugest fan of the shop reveal, "Oh my gosh, I have a long lost sister" I like it.

If she does turn out to be his actually be his sister, or half sister, or cousin, or family member, or clone, oh please don't let her be a clone.

It would be okay if she was a clone but, they do clone stuff way too much and I'm a little sick of that plot point actually in Spider man, but anyways, that would be fantastic. They have the great natural back and forth like siblings do have.

The thing about only children is, I feel there's always a weird thing with only children and children who have siblings, it's like kids who have siblings always think like, gosh wouldn't it be great to be an only child, you wouldn't have to do all this crap and kids like me who was an only child goes, says, boy I'd love, I always kind of thought it'd be really great to have a brother or sister.

I always wanted that kind of relationship where it's like that close familiar relationship where you're close to somebody and they get you as a person and they care about you. I've always wondered about that in a person, like a peer you know? Anyways, a little too real on my part I guess. But let's talk about a few other people! Johnny Storm is in this and I always personally like it in Spider man stories when he has a close friend in the superhero community.

Either daredevil, and or, Johnny Storm are the two most obvious in my re-read and I've been reading the original spider man stuff lately, I dropped off for a while long time for reasons, and that's a nice call, the fact that Johnny Storm was the first superhero that Peter met, and they have a good back and forth.

I feel like I'm repeating that a lot but one of Zdarsky's strengths as a writer is he's very good at this back and forth stuff, and surprisingly he can get serious and almost always that works off.

I know that Zdarsky is not his real name, but, I think of that as him, writes very believable back and forth, and he has a strength in characters who can just be in rooms together talking a lot like his sex criminals collaborator Matt Fraction.

But the stories he writes usually are much lighter in tone and goofier. Have I mentioned I'm a big fan of Chip Zdarsky and Matt Fraction.

I think I brought that up right? Anyway, I guess the big secondary spoiler, maybe reading this to learn about this kind of thing or not, spoiler spoiler even, more spoilers than spoilage's and you know what spoiled cabbages and stuff like that are coming up is J Jonah Jameson and they fact that Peter tells Jonah that he's Spider man.

Which is a big emotional moment, and one of my favorite secondary characters, in a way matures and also runs a blog, way matures.

So after losing his, not being mayor anymore and not being publisher of the Daily, almost wrote the Daily Planet, I meant the Daily Bugle, Jonah has joined the illustrious and very very successful and hip, and hip, don't forget hip, world of online blogging.

Like most bloggers, he's obsessed just with his traffic numbers and nothing else, I certainly don't know that feeling. Staying up late at night, worrying over. Up late at night, wondering what the figures present me tomorrow. Oh, no. Anyway, so particularly long moment, Peter, who acts in a way that shows that Peter is one of the most truly human in the Marvel Universe. in the south too. Let's admit it, and let's say for real something about Jonah. Jonah is weirdly the real paternal father figure in Peter's life. I know that sounds odd that they always kind of but if you think about it, Jonah has always been the older male figure that has tried in some way to help Peter. He's been there with him in more ways than Jonah would admit. Jonah was always, in a lot of ways, protective of Peter. It's not a good relationship. It's always been this kind of paternal relationship. Some events happen. I don't want to share the specifics of it because I want you to read the thing, but let's be honest.

If you know me by accident if you're the one person from India and the one person from Finland that seemed to read this site a lot, first Hi. How's it going? I am really appreciative of you two. I don't know who you are, but I really am appreciative. Then you've read this already and you loved it as much as I do. I loved the series so much, I've re-read all of the available issues like a couple of times.

Anyways, I feel in a lot of ways that Jonah of this is one of the hearts of the series, and one of the great arks that Karpinski has really plotted and made use of the character in a way that he hasn't been used in a long way, because he's still both hilariously a cranky old sleaze who several times goes like, "Ah, that's a great story." Cranky old sleazy journalist and JJJ a deeply tragic figure. That's fantastic, man.

So what of crisis crossovers? Why don't they work and how can they work? Why am I bringing that up in the middle of this review? Well, what do you know, there's an alien invasion that happens. I'm not going to tell you how. It's a superhero series and you know. You need a big event, and invasions are good enough. Several superheros come through together to help fight it off. While I was reading this, I had a revaluation. This is a crisis crossover. There is a crisis going on, and there's a crossover, and there's several superheros. But, I don't hate it like I usually do.

I guess the point I wanted to bring up in this series, and I kind of included it in an artless way, but I'm just going to power through that. The real problem, and why I keep going back to this seen, and why this series proves to me that I was right ... That's in a Christmas party where all the superheros get together, is that this point crisis crossovers are essentially pointless. It was interesting a few years ago the original Secret Warriors with the crisis crossovers in it, it was interesting. But the thing is the Marvel Universe and DC Universe are essentially established worlds now and superheros pop in and out of each other all the time. It's not exciting anymore to see that. It's in a way good that it's not exciting anymore, because I don't have problems with shared universes in comics. I think they're fun. I like the idea. There's always another hero to tell another story. Although, you know, Robert Altman, whatever, make another comic book adaptation. I think he'd appreciate that idea, you know.

What this proves to me, and the fact that Storm, whose a very good supporting character in this comic, proves to me is that this feels like a world now. It feels like a real fantastical insane crazy wonderful world. The only thing that crisis crossovers can achieve now is to disestablish other people's stories, ruin character development. The reason why series seem to go downwind after every crisis crossover is because they have to spend the next ten issues justifying the character, getting them back to where they were in their story, and then continuing the story. And with continuous crisis crossovers, the never get back to telling their own stories because that's the truth of it, man.

With this I realized what the issue was. This tells the whole of the Marvel Universe coming together, and doing good themselves, and everybody keeping in character. It's great that we have Chip Zdarsky or Steve because this proves a perfectly match writer and character can work wonders with each other. And that's good. So, for the first time in a while, I feel confident about the Marvel Universe, and the way it's headed. Of course, they could always screw this up, and they probably will at some point. For a while, the water is calm. The ship has not sprung a leak, and everything is still.

#marvel #spiderman #Chip Zdarsky

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themastercylinder · 6 years

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Development

The man producer Richard Kobritz called upon to get him his vampire in SALEM’S LOT is Tobe Hooper, the director of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and the last person one might expect to find directing a glossy production for a major studio much less one intended as a television miniseries. Yet the hiring of Tobe Hooper is only one incident in a production chronicle almost as complex as the story of SALEM’S LOT itself, which comes to TV November 17th and 24th on CBS. Stephen King’s 400-page novel of vampirism in contemporary New England was acquired four years ago by Warner Brothers, who intended to produce it as a theatrical feature. At the outset, King and the studio agreed that he would not write the screenplay. He was busy with his own projects as a novelist (in less than a year, King’s career would begin to soar). So Warners was left with the task of finding someone to adapt King’s brilliant but complicated plot into something manageable as a normal movie and without sacrificing the elements that made the book so powerful. But over the course of the next two years, the studio was unable to come up with a satisfactory screenplay. Stirling Silliphant (who had adapted IN THE HEAT 0F THE NIGHT and more recently THE SWARM, and was also producing for Warners), Robert Getchell (ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE) and writer/director Larry Cohen (whose independent feature IT’S ALIVE was a surprise sleeper for Warners in 1974) all contributed screenplays all of them rejected by studio brass. SALEM’S LOT was becoming not only an impossible project, but a source of frustration: CARRIE, a King novel filmed by Brian DePalma, was released in late 1976 and began racking up enormous profits. Warners was sitting on a potential goldmine, but could do nothing with it.

“It was a mess,” King recalls. “Every director in Hollywood who’s ever been involved with horror wanted to do it, but nobody could come up with a script. I finally gave up trying to keep a scorecard.” At one point, if only because Warners was running out of writers and directors to consider, Tobe Hooper’s name was mentioned in connection with the SALEM’S LOT movie. But by then, interest in the project at the theatrical division was beginning to flag. Finally, it was turned over to Warner Brothers Television, in the hope that a fresh approach and the possibility of financial interest by a network would revitalize it.

Enter Richard Kobritz. Kobritz was the 38-year-old vice-president and executive production manager at Warner Brothers Television who had hired John Carpenter to direct a striking 1978 suspense telefilm, SOMEONE IS WATCHING ME, starring Lauren Hutton. As a genre buff with an eye for new talent (Carpenter went on to direct HALLOWEEN three weeks after finishing SOMEONE. . .), Kobritz at least stood a fighting chance of making some sense out of SALEM’S LOT. Kobritz began by reading the already completed screenplays. “They were terrible,” he says. “I mean, it isn’t fair to put down anyone’s hard work, but the screenplays just did not have it and I think some of the writers would probably admit that. Besides, the book is admittedly difficult to translate, so much is going on. And because of that, I think it stands a better chance as a television miniseries than a normal feature film.” So the decision was made to turn SALEM’S LOT into a miniseries and thereby lick the problem of its unwieldy length. Actually, though the production is technically labeled a miniseries, it is basically a four hour movie (31/2 hours, figuring commercial time) scheduled for successive nights. Emmy winning television writer Paul Monash was contracted to write a new, first-draft teleplay. Monash had created the landmark dramatic series, JUDD FOR THE DEFENSE (about a flamboyant lawyer in the F. Lee Bailey mold) during the late ’60’s, and as a producer was responsible for the features BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE, SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE and Brian De Palma’s CARRIE. Monash had also been producer of the mid-60’s TV series PEYTON PLACE, a credit that Kobritz, who has referred to SALEM’S LOT as “Peyton Place turning into vampires” was aware of. Clearly, one key factor in a viable teleplay would be an intelligent combination of the huge number of characters in SALEM’S LOT. Monash pulled it off.

“His screenplay I like quite a lot,” King offers enthusiastically. “Monash has succeeded in combining the characters a lot, and it works. He did try a few things that weren’t successful the first time. In one draft he combined the priest, Father Callahan, and the teacher, Jason Burke, as a priest who teaches classes and it just didn’t work, so he split them up.

“Some things were left out because of time, some because it’s television,” says King. “My favorite scene in the book is with Sandy McDougall, the young mother, where she tries to feed her dead baby, and keeps spooning the food into its mouth. That won’t be on TV, obviously.”

Other changes were made by Kobritz, who takes a strong creative interest in the films he produces. His three major alterations to Monash’s first script were: To characterize the vampire, Barlow, as a hideous, speechless fiend, not the cultured villain carried over from the novel, to have the interior of Marsten House, which looms over the town of ‘Salem’s Lot, visually resemble the vampire’s festering soul and to keep Barlow in the cellar of his lair, Marsten House, for the final confrontation with the hero (in the book he is billeted in the cellar of a boarding house once his mansion is invaded) a concept Kobritz would later say, “works in the book but wouldn’t in the film.” Kobritz also pushed the killing of an important female vampire to the climax, to give her death more impact and provide the film with a snap ending.

With the example of such turgid, dramatically impotent “evil in a small town” miniseries as HARVEST HOME before them, Kobritz and Monash were determined to make SALEM’S LOT work despite the television restrictions against frightening violence. The project would be designed as a relentless mood piece where the threat of violence, rather than a killing every few minutes sustained terror. And it would be cast with an eye toward good actors first, and TV names second.

But still, there was the matter of all those stakings, and a relentless murderer with no redeeming virtues. “CBS worried about a few things in the screenplay,” King explains. “They worried about using a kid as young as Mark Petrie is in the book, because you’re not supposed to put a kid that young in mortal jeopardy, although they do it every day in the soap operas. “Paul Monash finally sent them a memo that I think covered it. He pointed out, for one thing, that CARRIE which was a CBS network movie was the only movie that ever cracked the top five in the weekly ratings.”

Casting

Next came casting. From the instant Barlow was designed to symbolize “the essence of evil,” Kobritz had in mind Reggie Nalder whom he remembered from Hitchcock’s THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, and genre buffs recall from that film, Michael Armstrong’s MARK OF THE DEVIL and Curtis Harrington’s THE DEAD DON’T DIE. Kobritz’s idea was to recreate the Max Schreck vampire from Murnau’s 1922 NOSFERATU.

In a quirky touch, Kobritz also hired genre veteran Elisha Cook, Jr. (HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL THE HAUNTED PALACE) and former B movie queen Marie Windsor to play Weasel, the town drunk, and Eva Miller, the landlady with whom he’d had an affair years before.

“That was an inside joke we threw in right from the start,” Kobritz concedes. “I’m a Stanley Kubrick buff, and on purpose we’ve reunited them 23 years later after THE KILLING. In the script, it says Eva and Weasel were at one time married and then got divorced, so it was funny to think of that same couple from THE KILLING, 23 years later, now divorced, but still living together. It was also the first time since then, I think, that they’d worked in a movie and had scenes together.”

The rest of the casting was less frivolous, and reflected the seriousness with which Kobritz wanted the whole enterprise to be regarded. Kobritz sent James Mason a copy of the Monash teleplay, offering him the role of Straker, the European antique dealer who has Barlow smuggled into Marsten House and whose character had been expanded in the absence of a speaking Barlow. Mason loved the part and agreed to make his first appearance in a television drama since the medium’s early days (several years earlier, he had not been told that 1974’s FRANKENSTEIN: THE TRUE STORY was not intended for theatrical release).

Key supporting roles went to Emmy nominee Ed Flanders (Bill Norton, a composite character who became both the heroine’s father and the town doctor), Lew Ares (Jason Burke, the local teacher) and Geoffrey Lewis (Mike Ryerson, the gravedigger). Bonnie Bedelia, an Oscar nominee 10 years ago for THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY?, was cast as Susan Norton, who is on the verge of leaving ‘Salem’s Lot before she meets Ben Mears, played by David Soul.

David Soul? Though the hiring of Soul may shock or disappoint readers of the book who know him only through STARSKY AND HUTCH, it marks a shrewd move by Kobritz (which is discussed at length in his interview). Soul’s acting ability may sometimes have been concealed in STARSKY AND HUTCH, but it wasn’t in the telefilm LITTLE LADIES OF THE NIGHT, which happens to be the highest rated TV movie ever made. His presence therefore guarantees an audience. “I think the casting of David Soul is fine,” says King. “I have no problem with that at all.”

Soul also offers a strong counterpoint to Lance Kerwin (who starred in the well reviewed, but poorly rated-1978 NBC series, JAMES AT 16), selected to play Mark Petrie. Kerwin has a brooding presence that undercuts his superficial physical resemblance to Soul, and the two actors, who join forces to destroy the vampires at the end of the film, project a strange chemistry when seen together.

Production & Direction

SALEM’S LOT was budgeted at $4 million, about norm for a prestige miniseries, with financing split between CBS and Warner Brothers and a European theatrical release was planned from the start. It would, naturally, be shorter than miniseries length, but it would also contain violence not included in the TV version for example, the staking of vampires would not occur below the camera frame, and one death in particular Bill Norton’s impalement on a wall of antlers would be seen in graphic detail, while shot in a markedly restrained fashion for television. Because of his oft stated goal of having SALEM’S LOT like a feature, not a TV special (whether it was to be released theatrically or not), Kobritz and his staff handpicked production personnel capable of providing the right texture and depth under deadline pressure. Jules Brenner, who had shot the impressive NBC miniseries HELTER SKELTER, signed on as cinematographer; Mort Rabinowitz, a 23-year veteran of the film industry who was art director for Sydney Pollack’s CASTLE KEEP for which he and his staff built a castle in Yugoslavia) and THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY?, was hired as production designer; and Harry Sukrnan, an Oscar winning composer (SONG WITHOUT END), who wrote the excellent music for SOMEONE IS WATCHING ME and whom Kobritz describes as “a former cohort and protégé of Victor Young,” was contracted to score SALEM’S LOT. And Tobe Hooper was enlisted as director. Following a chain of events Kobritz describes at length in his interview, Hooper was deemed the only appropriate person to direct SALEM’S LOT. Kobritz had screened for himself one recent horror film after another usually films by highly praised neophyte directors. Some of the features Kobritz found intriguing. Others, like PHANTASM, he remembers with a shudder of disbelief. None impressed him like THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Hooper was called in for a meeting with Kobritz, and was signed.

It is important to note that the selection of Hooper did not signify an attempt to mimic the intensity of TEXAS CHAINSAW in a television show, which would be frankly impossible. Kobritz was searching for a filmmaker with a confident visual style, a mastery of camera movement, and an ability to follow a script and adhere to a tight schedule. There was, apparently, never any concern that Hooper would not be able to direct a film that did not contain a large quota of violence. “I think it goes without saying that if a man has a strong visual style and is also able to meet those other qualifications, his skills encompass more than the making of violent movies,” says Kobritz. “I knew Tobe was our man from the day I met him. And he’s come through like a champ.”

Hooper was signed in late spring of this year, and one of his first tasks was a field trip to the location that would be used for most of the exteriors of ‘Salem’s Lot. In 1977, Tony Richardson had directed a Warner telefilm, A DEATH IN CANAAN, which was supposed to be set in a small, contemporary Connecticut town. Ferndale, a northern California town 16 miles south of Eureka, and 75 miles south of the Oregon border, doubled perfectly as a bogus Connecticut location. Anna Cottle, associate producer for SALEM’S LOT, had been Richardson’s assistant. She remembered Ferndale and particularly the cooperation of the local inhabitants. After a brief scouting trip, Ferndale was chosen for SALEM’S LOT.

But in all of Ferndale, there was no house which could be used as a double for Marsten House, so Rabinowitz and his staff were dispatched to Ferndale to build one. They found a cottage on a hillside overlooking Ferndale and the Salt River Valley; it was decided to build a full-scale mock up of Marsten House around the existing cottage complex, complete with a stone retaining wall and several misted, dead trees. The family residing in the cottage was paid $20,000 and guaranteed all of the lumber from Marsten House once shooting was completed. The filming of SALEM’S LOT began on July 10 in Ferndale. “It took 20 working days to build Marsten House from scratch,” Rabinowitz recalls. “We put the last touches on it very late at night before shooting was to begin. I remember, my assistants and I were up there painting, and someone drove on by the road just below us. All of a sudden, he slammed on his brakes and backed up, got out of his car and just stood there staring at the house. ‘My God, I’ve lived here 25 years,’ he said, `and I never noticed that house before!’ I played along and just said, ‘Gee, I don’t know we’re just tourists.'”

Rabinowitz estimates the cost of the exterior Marsten House mock up as $100,000. Another $70,000 was spent constructing the interior of the house Kobritz’s rotting embodiment of the vampire’s soul back at the Burbank Studios. The interior rooms and passages of Marsten House posed the more difficult challenge for Rabinowitz and his staff. For one thing, there was the problem of creating atmosphere without going overboard.

“It’s a very difficult line,” admits Rabinowitz. “By the nature of the writing, you’re going into a theatrical abstraction, and you must take it further than normal, but not too much further. It’s trial and error. When I designed the interior, the first shots were way over, which I knew they would be, and I had to be careful in bringing them down not to lose all the gory description and so forth. When it’s that fine a line, I’ll intentionally go overboard and then gradually shave it back and back. I’d say it was two weeks from the first still photos and testing of the color lighting to the final result.

“I used a lot of plaster, no I could make huge craters all over the entire set and furniture so that it looked as though it was pock-marked, and from some of these larger openings in the walls I put a kind of epoxy or resin, and let it drip as if it were oozing from the interior, as if it were an open wound. We wanted a rotting, sick appearance, almost as if in discussions with the director and producer, we were looking into the body, the heart of the vampire. It reflects his whole being more so than just a decayed house. So we decided to go for an abstract image.

“Then,” Rabinowitz continues, “in front of the camera, we took the same material in medium shots and close ups and just loaded it up so it would ooze and pour right in front of you. Sometimes it’s very clear and at other times it’s not too obvious, just a little glistening in the background. “There’s a dark, greenish tint to the interior. We put down glaze after glaze after glaze, for the proper amount of sheen, and then various shades of green, mixing it up with other colors to that it wasn’t solid green.”

Two other important duties for Rabinowitz were the building of the antique shop (Strakers business front) and the small South American village where the beginning and end of the film are set.

“The Latin town was shot on the Burbank back lot and the San Fernando Valley Mission,” says Rabinowitz. “We used the interior of the mission church, and I built an adobe style native but on stage.

“My decorator, Jerry Adams, who is fantastic was responsible for most of what you see inside the antique shop. Ninety percent of what you see is his taste initially directed by me. But the individual pieces all Jerry Adams. I also have an assistant, Peter Samish, who is only 28 but is brilliant. He’s the son of Adrian Samish, the producer and former head of CBS who was not popular among many people. So Peter has not gotten where he is because of papa, he had a very rough time. But he was just to creative and inventive on this picture.”

Rabinowitz, a stickler for accuracy, found that one of his most perplexing assignments was to come up with a coffin for Barlow. “It was designed special,” he notes, “because there was no way to find anything like that. The research was difficult to come by, it’s a 400 year-old coffin but once I did find it, our cabinet shop and our antique shop here is so superb that they gave me exactly what I drew up, right on the nose. If I’d had to work at another studio, I don’t think it would have come out as well, because they are superb—just the finest in our business.”

Rabinowitz tries to be a perfectionist. A professional painter and sculptor, he has taught at UCLA and USC, and spends six months of each year at his Santa Fe, New Mexico studio, painting and sculpting for galleries. At 53, he is still excited by what he terms “that marvelous madness that is Hollywood,” and he still finds his work there a challenge. For SALEM’S LOT, in the rush of production for television, there are things he would do over if time allowed.

“There is one interior of the Glick boy’s bedroom,” Rabinowitz confesses “where I overdid the color and blew the gag. I absolutely telegraphed it by making the room a somber brown, so when the scene opens you’re in that mood already. Then, when the vampire arrives, it’s not as big a surprise. It’s still a very effective scene, but I’d have toned down my part of it more.”

In his interview, Hooper speaks of Rabinowitz with genuine awe. Rabinowitz worked closely with Hooper, and feels he developed an understanding of his personality. “He’s very good natured, extremely so,” says Rabinowitz, “very warm, but very laid back. He’s quite shy. But once he gains your confidence and you gain his, that stops. Was he articulate? With me, yes. He was very articulate. With others, not so much. It took time. It’s a personality kind of thing. But he knows exactly what he wants.”

But getting what he wants was another matter entirely for Hooper, particularly in the case of David Soul, who was also under pressure to perform. According to Soul, Hooper was articulate in relating to him what he wanted.

“I believe he is a good actor’s director and I believe he will be even more so,” observes Soul. “I think the problems of this film, which were primarily the special effects, the vampire obviously, and the fact that we were shooting out of continuity, made it difficult for him to spend the kind of time with the actors he’d have liked to.

“Many, many times we’d pull each other aside to talk and he’d say, `Goddammit, David, I’m sorry we can’t spend more time working out these relationships, but this just isn’t the time to do it so just hang in there.’ He was concerned that everybody on the set was happy. He’s a very gentle, very, very bright man. This picture, if nothing else, will seal his future, as an important director along with the Steven Spielberg’s, the John Carpenters, the John Badhams people like that.” Soul, who was cast two months before the start of production, was able to make suggestions that helped define his character a little better, but he feels some inconsistencies remain.

“Yes, there are a lot of inconsistencies, built into the script because the producers felt that since it’s television, there needs to be this reiteration of the fears on Ben Mears’ part so the audience is constantly aware. That for me is not giving the picture everything it could have. There are only so many times Ben Mears can say, ‘Did you ever have the feeling something is inherently evil?’, you know? There are a million other ways to say that same thing. I much prefer the scenes such as the entrance of Straker with his cane, which comes far closer to creating true terror than dialogue can.”

The scene with the cane the first meeting of Mears and Straker, helps illuminate Soul’s working relationship with Mason.

“There was a certain kind of awe to my working with Mason,” Soul explains, “and I used that for the relationship between the two characters: Mears is intimidated by Straker. It sounds simplistic, but it works. I did not try to get to know Mason better, so it was as if, in my early scenes with him, this imposing stranger could be the evil coming from the house. And only as we got further into the picture did my curiosity as David Soul—and certainly as Ben Mears—manifest itself in a kind of relationship with the character. So I kept away from him in the beginning. Also, the may Tobe staged our scenes heightened the element of surprise. The scene where I meet him as he’s walking with the cane is very well staged by Tobe, because I’m staring at the house and feeling all those disturbing sensations and memories and I back out almost out of the shot and then” Soul gasps “there he is behind me. These kinds of cinematic devices helped a lot, and that’s Tobe.

“I was impressed by both Tobe and Mason. There were a lot of impressive people on this film, actors especially. Lew Ayres was the same as Mason in a way, though he was a little difficult to crack. He’s a very orthodox and tough actor. He was a matinee idol, and he considers himself still to be a star. But once that was broken down, it became a very warm relationship.

“Mason is fascinating. He’s better than most TV actors and he’s also a personality. He’s got a mystique that he’s built up forty years and that’s what you’re watching also, and what you’re playing opposite. I was surprised to find out how organically he works, he had a whole history for Straker. His conversations about the character were very intelligent.

“How did I change my own TV personality and still play a hero? It’s a good question. I don’t have a pat answer. Obviously, they’re different characters. I think the accouterments changed me somewhat the glasses, the clothes. Also, I cleaned up my speech pattern a little bit. I sound like a writer, a man who’s at home with words. In STARSKY AND HUTCH, it was always dip-dip-dip, sort of half-finished sentences, a street jargon and repartee. This time, I stuck with the lines and the discipline of a well written script. There’s also a mysterious quality to Ben Mears and I tried to work with that. I didn’t socialize a lot. It was a rough part, and in a sense, I let the neuroses that were building up in David Soul because of the pressure work for the character.

“That’s one area in which Tobe was very helpful and understanding. He listened. “Have I seen THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE? No, but I do want to, very much, after working with Tobe.”

Hooper, who’s career literally reached a standstill a year after his arrival in Hollywood, is a living testament to the difficulty of maintaining a career in the horror genre. Shortly before he was approached by Kobritz for SALEM’S LOT, Hooper had even met with Italian producers over the possibility of directing THE GUYANA MASSACRE, before his agent blew the whistle on the project (“God bless him,” Hooper now says). Hooper openly admits that SALEM’S LOT pulled him from obscurity.

“Look,” says Hooper, “this is a quantum leap for me. SALEM’S LOT is my best picture, and there’s no question about it. It’s a major studio production, I’m working with a fantastic cast and crew. And Kobritz is wonderful. This is a first for me.” But is it the same Tobe Hooper in SALEM’S LOT that we saw in THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE or even EATEN ALIVE? Can the same audacious spirit run through something created for television? “Oh, I think so,” Hooper replies. “For one thing, my style is ingrained in me. It does not change. It improves, perhaps, but it does not change. Also, SALEM’S LOT does not rely on the same kind of dynamics as CHAINSAW. It is scary, it is atmospheric, but in a different way. I do not have to cheat the audience to bring it to television.

“The style of my films is not their violence. Violence has sometimes been an ingredient in them, but because I shoot it a certain way, people may have thought that is the style all by itself. You know, I made a number of short and feature films before I entered the genre with TEXAS CHAINSAW, and they didn’t contain violence, but my style was developing nonetheless in each of those films. “Part of the idea of SALEM’S LOT is to bring the audience into the movement, in a way the camera moves almost constantly. I am leading the audience on, but I’m satisfying them too, I’m not cheating them. They’re not going to expect a dollar’s worth of scare and get 75 cents worth of talk. And you can do that without slicing someone up with a chainsaw.”

In fact, there is relatively little dialogue in SALEM’S LOT. The narrative is advanced primarily in cinematic terms through camera movement and editing, and through scenes that establish perspective in a strictly visual way. Kobritz’s desire for this effect, and his need for a director who could add to his and Monash’s ideas, not just catty them out was the main impetus behind the hiring of Tobe Hooper.

One of Hooper’s most striking scenes of barely glimpsed violence is the murder of Dr. Bill Norton by Straker, who picks him up and heaves him across a room into a wall embedded with antlers. Hooper’s camera carries the audience right along with Norton, holding on a dose shot of Norton’s horror struck face up to and including the moment of impact. Because the actual impalement is not seen in a wide shot, the scene is technically acceptable for network TV, and Hooper’s surprise trick of dragging the audience along on the victim’s death ride assures both shock and terror.

In another sequence, Hooper and his special effects team employ a coffin’s eye view of the inside of a grave, to involve the audience in the resurrection of one of the Glick brothers. In his interview, Kobritz explains the mechanics of two of SALEM’S LOTS most elaborate effects: the vampires’ contact lenses and the shot in reverse levitation scenes. Hooper discusses their emotional quality. “I invented those,” Hooper says, “working with the makeup and special effects people. The one with the eyes has to do with hypnotism. I was going for an effect that would implicate the audience again, I guess it’s my interest in psychology rather than have them walk out of the room for a drink when the vampire turns to hypnotize someone. Those are generally very boring, predicable scenes.

“I studied what I had been exposed to as a film student and moviegoer, from the old Universals all the way up to the Hammer Films. No matter how you try to explain those away or make allowances, it’s always just Chris Lee with those damned bloodshot eyes. I knew our hypnotism would have to be something that is not easy for an audience to comprehend. Well, we’ve all had bloodshot eyes. So what we came up with was a kind of contact lens that just glows and glows and follows you, and is obviously not an optical done in the lab, and is therefore strange and fascinating to look at. The result is that it makes you look in his eyes, too, and you just wonder and look and look and look.”

And the levitation scene, in which the vampires float through the window to prospective victims?

“Well, I’m sorry they told you so much about that. Damn! That’s the kind of thing that should also make you guess, no you’re riveted to your seat. It’s one of those devices that ought to be revealed after you’ve seen the picture. But since they’ve told you. “The business of bringing the kid into the room on a boom crane eliminates the use of wires, and if you keep the camera in a certain position, keep the kid moving so you’re distracted from guessing or trying to guess how the effect was done, which is unlikely anyway and you cut properly, it’s very disturbing. It’s just obvious there are no wires. I also had an ectoplasmic mist surrounding him, and issuing in a kind of vacuum from him to his victim and back again.” The levitation effect was also enriched by shooting in reverse, which made the ectoplasmic fog swirl in an eerie way.

Jack Young – The Vampire Look

“We wanted something like the Nosferatu Of Murnau’s 1922 film where the vampire was walking death, ugliness incarnate, a skull that moved and was alive. “

– producer Richard Kubritz

‘Creating the image Of the vampire was a little like a fishing expedition, ” admits makeup man Jack Young, who in his 30 years as a makeup artist has worked on films from The Wizard of Oz to Apocalypse NOW changed the at least six time,” he says displaying a small card with Polaroid shots of each of the six renditions in his lab on the Warner lot. “We tried him with light pink on his face but he looked phony, burlesque. We finally came up with the light gray which is dead and bloodless. “Reggie Nalder (who plays Barlow) has such a wonderful face; he always plays some pretty grim so We just put ears on him, made him bald, put gray horrible makeup on him and used his own lips. For the teeth I made impressions of his, created a false set and then aged them by airbrushing shadows on them. They yellow and like they have cavities.” The eerie look of the vampire Barlow’s eyes are created by contact lenses almost like half a ping-pong ball—light green in color with red veins—that fit over the eye and can only be worn for 15 minutes at a time. The pupils reflect as do the eyes of the other vampire characters in the film, an effect created by yellow screen-like contact lenses. “They spark when the light hits them,” says Young with a devious look in his eye. “It looks awful, like they have searchlights coming out Of their eyes.”

In the scene near the end of the movie when Mears is driving the stake through Barlow’s heart, Barlow’s claw-like hand flies up and grabs Ben’s wrist. “For the claws, ” says Young, “I made a composite you can form with your hands. Ifs like a clay you can hake but it has flex. It wasn’t originally made for nails but that’s what I used it for. It’s all part of the attempt to get away from the stereotype Dracula. ”

As Ben continues to drive the stake in, Barlow’s head starts to rise from the coffin to meet Ben’s. Then suddenly the flesh seems to fall from the head, revealing a ghost-like skull. “I had to make the head about four or five times to get it to come out right, ” admits Young. The final one is hand-carved out of plaster then covered with a composition of wax that would sag , not drip. “I got the skin to appear to fall away by turning a heat gun on the completed portrait head,” adds Young.

But how will all of this look on a big screen? With everyone involved with the production stressing that SALEM’S LOT is a feature, not just a television special, it seems a logical question.

“This piece was not made with a lot of concessions to TV, beyond the obvious limiting of the use of violence,” Hooper replies. “There has been some second unit shooting, about five days I think, for some of the special effects. These are physical effects, as you called them before, not opticals there are no cheap opticals designed for the TV screen. The photography is very good, Mort Rabinowitz’s art direction is just remarkable, SALEM’S LOT will look like a feature.”

SALEM’S LOT wrapped shooting on August 29. Hooper assembled his rough cut within a couple of weeks after. CBS has already begun to promote the miniseries, and will air it on too successive nights during either the November ratings “sweep” (when network ratings are closely monitored to determine future advertising rates and the best specials are consequently televised) or a date soon after.

And way up in Center Lovell, Maine, the author of SALEM’S LOT is awaiting the production’s telecast like the rest of us.

“I thought THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE was a great movie, and I like the screenplay they’ve come up with for this, so I’m looking forward to it,” says Stephen King.

“What I’d really like them to do is send me a videotape of the European version. I’d be very into that.”

– Bill Kelley Cinefantastique – Volume 9, Number 2 (Winter 1979)

From “On the Set of ‘SALEM’S LOT By SUSAN CASEY” (FANGORIA Issue 4)

(Available at Amazon) Salem’s Lot 1979 Blu-ray

SALEM’S LOT (1979) RETROSPECTIVE – Filming Horror for Television (Part 1) Development The man producer Richard Kobritz called upon to get him his vampire in SALEM'S LOT is Tobe Hooper, the director of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and the last person one might expect to find directing a glossy production for a major studio much less one intended as a television miniseries.

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