#why do u think they always suffer the same if not similar fates or end up in the same place or die/almost die together | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sbk-zgvlt · 10 months

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For the Baskverse :3

How do each of the Sebek's react to each other.

And who is throwing hands first?

Im prepared

Modern/Human Sebek

Human Sebek's closest friend in the Baskverse is def STYX Sebek, or Sebek Shroud. Since he's more than aware of slang and how to use it, conversations with him are more fun and there's less miscommunication, especially among a bunch of Sebeks that are socially inept. It's why both of them aren't afraid to bully each other.

He's not that close with OG Sebek, who judges him for being fully human. They're able to work it out in the end though. For now, he gets a bit...embarrassed, seeing OG Sebek act the way he is. It reminds him of his old fanboy phase.

He doesn't know what to think of Housewarden Sebek, since most of the time he acts aloof and cold towards him. It doesn't help that they fight over Human Sebek's relationship with Diasomnia. But at the end of the day, he knows that he's reliable and that he has his back.

He thinks that Ghost Sebek is super nice...if it weren't for the fact that he keeps on insisting on "borrowing" his body, saying that he "looks warm." He's usually the victim of Ghost Sebek's jokes and pranks, but their relationship is more akin to brothers of the same age.

STYX Sebek

He's so glad that there's someone in the group who actually understands his jokes and references. He makes a lot of inside jokes with Human Sebek because of this. He can't handle being in a group that's so...cold. And unfunny. And aloof. And-

He took one look at OG Sebek and immediately thought that "oh boy he has some ISSUES lawl." He doesn't find much fun in teasing him because unlike Housewarden, OG is a bit more unstable. Trying to tease him, especially with Shroud's crass, blunt, and idgaf personality will most likely end with OG blowing up or ending up in tears after a joke too far.

LOVES to make fun of Housewarden Sebek. Imagine falling out with ur Diasomnia??? Scratch that, imagine HAVING a Diasomnia (he has no idea who they are). He constantly teases him because he gets the BEST reactions out of him. Housewarden hasn't blown up at him yet, so the teasing shall continue! Even so, he trusts him with his life.

Ghost Sebek INTRIGUES HIM. He genuinely thought that he wasn't dead for a good while before Ghost revealed it to them, which resulted in the "R U /SRS OR /J." He wants to observe him like a bunch of bacteria spinning around on a petri dish. It does unnerve him a bit, knowing that he's...dead, but he's gotten used to it faster than the other.

OG Sebek

A VERSION OF HIM THAT'S FULLY HUMAN!? PREPOSTEROUS! He's constantly judging whatever Human Sebek does, even after finding out that his Diasomnia is also fully human...as well as literally everyone else. He just can't wrap his head around it. They have a tense relationship due to this, but they end up having a lot in common in the end.

He can't STAND STYX Sebek. He somehow always finds a way to push all of his buttons, and he can't do anything about it! It doesn't help that his jokes and teases always have truth and meaning behind them, which makes for a lot of existential crisis' for OG Sebek. He can't help but be interested in how he dresses up though...

Housewarden Sebek leaves him AWESTRUCK. Their universes are the ones with the most similarity, and STYX actually has a theory that they come from the same universe- just from different timelines. So, knowing that there's a possibility Sebek could be a housewarden himself someday...HE MUST NOT LET WAKASAMA DOWN!

When he met Ghost Sebek he immediately knew the cause of his death. He almost suffered the same fate as him, after all. He gets a bit creeped out because of this, knowing that if he wasn't able to grab onto...he doesn't like thinking about it. It doesn't help that Ghost seems to have formed an interest in him.

Housewarden Sebek

Human Sebek is HOPELESS in his eyes. Why can't he see that his situation with Diasomnia will end up in flames? There's no use holding onto people who'll just leave you behind in the end. They butt heads over this, but he's fond of him. Think of it as an older-younger brother relationship.

He will admit that STYX Sebek is scarily on point with his jokes. He knows how to push people's buttons, and he knows how to use the right words to rile people up. Him included. He's a bit embarrassed that he keeps falling for them, but he's not that bothered about it as he shows to be. They're basically a duo atp.

Was this really how he acted back then? He's getting so much second-hand embarrassment just from being in the same room with OG Sebek. It's like his past came to bite him in the ass. He's still fond of him though, as OG reminds him of a younger him that hasn't gone through the horrors that he's faced...yet. For now, he tries his best to be a good role model.

Looking at Ghost feels like deja vu. Just like OG, he's fully aware of the cause of his death. He can't help but feel sorry for him. The worst part about Ghost is he acts like his childhood self. Carefree and just so happy to be living. Which is ironic, considering he's dead. He can't bear to look at him most of the time.

Ghost Sebek

He's actually not serious about those jokes lol. He likes pranking Human Sebek a lot simply because he's the only guy of the group that's unaware of how far magic and the supernatural can go. It's also easier to interact with him since they're the "younger" bunch of the group.

STYX Sebek keeps on BEGGING for him to help out for a little "experiment" of his and Ghost has sirens and red flags already popping up all over the place. He is NOT going to approach Shroud unless he's 5 feet away. If he's going to pass onto the afterlife he wants to take him with him/lhj

It's weird, seeing himself...alive. What if Epel was slightly to the right instead? What if he was closer? What if he held on just a bit longer? What if he was actually found? There's no use thinking of those "what ifs" anymore, he's dead anyway. He can't help but wonder if he would be just like OG if he was still alive though. (He hopes not.)

Just looking at Housewarden Sebek makes him feel stressed himself. He always looks so stressed, and it doesn't help that Housewarden is practically in love with work and DOING work. He tries to remind him to let loose and live once in a while...ironically. Because you know. He's DEAD.

OH MY GOD that was so many. Words. Anyways

The people throwing hands first is def STYX and Housewarden, even if they become a powerhouse duo. The first time they met Shroud told him that just looking at him gives him wrinkles with how stressed he looks (All of them don't have wrinkles. It is IMPOSSIBLE for any of them to get wrinkles). Housewarden stared at him and immediately swung his staff at him.

#twisted wonderland #sebek zigvolt #twst #twst sebek #sebek twisted wonderland #twst sebek zigvolt #my asks!#twst baskverse au

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sailoms · 2 years

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thing is!! A-xu isn't even mad about his "evil" plan bc it's "evil" (tho wkx interprets it that way! 😭) He's mad bc A. He's not about that life anymore (not in a moral judgement way but in a IM RETIRED!! I WANT TO SETTLE DOWN and SLEEP way) and B. He doesn't want wkx to be hurt by the consequences. This is a parallel to caoxiang, how cao weining tells a-xiang he isn't judging her for killing, he fears for how it might effect her if she took innocent lives. This is a similar moment where wenzhou are just not on the same page. But it's not that zzs disapproves of revenge, he actually fully supports wkx in this, he just wants to make sure he's not making a mistake that's only going to hurt him in the end. I love them 🥺

anonie, i dont even know where and how to start my answer cus THERE ARE TOO MUCH STUFFS RUNNING IN MY HEAD WHEN I READ UR ASK BUT OK if this turns into an essay, forgive me 😭

1) the first, like, three sentences u said. i tried to summarize it for that wkx gif when he looked shooketh at ah xu's reaction BUT I WAS STRESSED OUT BY TOPAZ LAB and i was upset cus this gifset took too long for me to do despite my love for this project. additionally, the explanations gon be too long to put into the gif. thus, i didnt deliver it well cus i just chose the easiest word to describe that look but I ACTUALLY MEANT WHAT U ELABORATED ABOVE THANK U FOR REACHING OUT TO ME ABOUT IT 💖

the point is ah xu had the same experience of taking the wrong decision and the consequence that came after it -> he saw the same pattern in lao wen -> he got reminded of his past and the effect that took toll on him physically and mentally -> he got angry out of anxiety and worry cus that lao wen's gonna taste his own meds too and he wouldnt be able to bear the sight of him suffering.

2) he emphasized it too in the later ep after wkx spat blood due to shen shens confrontation. he didnt want more sin on lao wen's hand, he would help him take revenge on zhao jing and would stay as his advocate/consultant, whatever; who to be taken care of and who shouldnt. as long as all those choices wouldnt hurt lao wen in the future.

most "break up" moments between wenzhou were actually just both of em being not in the same page but the root of all his behavior was mainly

3) ah xu's motherly sense. what wkx said about him being soft-hearted, to me, later got translated as, like, a motherly love??? wkx is a literal child, both in his human wen mode and chief of ghost mode. he is a child in a 30 yo body, ngl as i rewatched the drama three times, i couldnt stop thinking about what my psychologist friend told me.

wen kexing is an overpowered baby with an adult tantrum, thats why he went around the town killing whoevers standing in his way.

and that makes sense cus he spent his childhood without parents and grew up in an environment thats not so child-friendly obviously. hes not used to expressing his emotions too (cus even before his parents died, he had to help his mom take care of his injured dad like he dont have time for tANtRum), thats why he blew up here and there cus he didnt know exactly how to vent?? plus, hes fighting the effect of the lethe water to his mind so, he was mentally exhausted.

and then appeared ah xu, who took care of him so patiently and always came back to him to stay and fix his mistake, to remind him of the consequence every time he went ballistic, and to stand with him against whoever that's against him, even ye baiyi the immortal.

i thought, ah xu became like a mother figure too who didnt want to see his "child" went astray and suffered after that. it's just his protectiveness that took the control and rationality. he cared so much about lao wen to the point of jumping into death to try to save him and he didnt even hesitate to fight a powerful immortal. he's so ready to fight fate fr. didnt say fathers cant be like this but in my experience, its more eminent in mothers. ah xu was so calm that hearing his name already eased lao wen's frantic mind.

(BET IF WEN KEXING LOST HIS HAIRPIN OR SHIT HED JUST GO "ah xu do u see my hairpin?" "its on the table" "no, i already looked there. theres nothing" then ah xu sighed and walked toward the said table and held up the hairpin like "tHerES nOtHinG -_-")

#ask inc.#from: anonie #wenzhou #ANONIE IM SORRY THIS TURNS INTO AN ESSAY FR

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captainstarkky · 3 years

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Hello i had a question about DAYS

U know in the beginning scenes myul mang was crying at the funeral hall when dong kyungs parents died right

He was apparently crying for the goddess ig ?? But why ? Doesnt he hate her ??? And shes gonna be reborn again anywya ?? So im confused about that

Hello CHINGU!

I don't know if our opinions align on this one though. But I'll try to answer this for the sake of science (lol).

Anyways, kidding aside, let's proceed.

But to those who are confused, I think it was Sonyeonshin’s previous reincarnation that Myul Mang actually cried on because of this scene:

So, I really don't think Myul Mang hated Sonyeonshin. They probably have a parent-son relationship; as we can see in the whole series, even if he is angry or annoyed with Sonyeonshin and her antics, he keeps on coming back to her. It's just like a son, even how annoyed he is to his mother, will always come back to her arms at the end of the day.

So before we star, let us set the scene:

Regarding as to why he was crying in the exact scene during that funeral, there are a few speculations for that:

Some say that it was Sonyeonshin's way to connect Dongkyung and Myul Mang's fate together. Though I cannot give a thorough explanation on this one but this is something we really need to look into. Because if you look at it that way, anyone could’ve been anyone - but it was Dongkyung who saw him in his form. Why? Well we still boil down to what we call ‘fate’.

And I would also want to reiterate that Sonyeonshin is a deity who reincarnates. To give you a better explanation to how that works, I would like to give a very similar case scenario. If you watch the Noragami anime, it actually gives you a concrete explanation on how a God/deity reincarnates.

According to that anime, a God, like humans, can die. They can die a natural death - if people don't worship them anymore, and they can get killed by another God. But what's different is that, Gods can reincarnate. They reincarnate as a new being

if and only if people/humans ask for it.

For Sonyeonshin’s case, people created her. So as long as there are people who worship her name, she will eventually come back to the world of the living.

Why do I use this reference?

Because no matter how you see it, the logic is the same.

I don’t know if you’re curious about this, but he actually denies being a deity himself. Instead, he prefers to be called as Myul Mang.

This scene was actually from when Sun-kyung found out what was happening. He - Sun-kyung - actually said that he was a deity but he subtly denied it only to accept the adjective to avoid more explanations.

That is because unlike Sonyeonshin, he can't be reincarnated. He don’t have a name or people who worship him to get that privilege. That is also probably one of the reasons why he always believed that his job is a punishment.

Sonyeonshin is different. She was created by human wishes; she was loved and at the same time hated by humans.

OKAY it’s better to pause for a bit. I'm sure you're curious about why I said that humans 'hated' her, right?

Well, they do. Because love blossoms from hate. That is also Myul Mang's reasoning as to why Sonyeonshin loves humans. Because at a point, she probably hated them for creating her.

Also, let's not forget that she shoulders human sins and suffering on her shoulders - making her physically ill in her every resurrection.

That brings me to answering the question:

Why did Myul Mang cry in her funeral?

I think he always do cry on her funerals. In every of her funerals.

Everytime a deity reincarnates, I think she reincarnates in a completely different person. As you can see, her younger self was different from when she died in that funeral.

The old Sonyeonshin.

The new Sonyeonshin.

She probably regains her memory as time passes, but that does not change the fact that she is different person, physically. She now had a different face and probably a completely different vibe.

Now, when you’re used to someone, you can’t automatically get used to a completely different person who claims to be that ‘someone’.

** So let’s say for example, you’re Myul Mang. And you saw Sonyeonshin literally being laid to rest. Then after probably three years time, a kid would randomly pull your shirt and tell you she’s Sonyeonshin. Would you automatically warm up to the kid? I honestly don’t think so.

And imagine Myul Mang literally experiencing this every single time.

That means, Myul Mang has to adjust then again to a new persona of the goddess which he already have a hard time doing given that he doesn't know anything about feelings.

And when he finally do warm up to the new Sonyeonshin, she dies.

I mean, anyone would cry - even if you’re Myul Mang. Probably because of the thought of doing that process over and over again. And at the same time, hating people who makes him suffer by killing and then reincarnating the same person in a different persona.

It probably drove him crazy. And that also explains his hate on humans.

And regarding his loathe for humankind, I think it’s also because of how humans treat Sonyeonshin. He never was close enough with humans so he never forgave them for killing his mother over and over again.

Well, not until Dongkyung came and he ended up with this realization:

Which is for the record, beautiful.

Okay, I hope I was able to answer the question. I was keeping my mind into this since I received this question and had came up with these answers - just these two lol.

Anyway, today, a new episode is supposed to come out at 9PM and I just feel empty when I realized that there’s no DAYS anymore. But I’m really thankful to the guys who asks me random DAYS question because with it I can actually post some content. LOL.

And I can’t post GIFs

#I CAN FINALLY POST DAYS CONTENT #I HOPE MY ANSWER IS ALRIGHT THOUGH #doom at your service #tvn doom at your service #seo in guk #seo in-guk #park bo young #park bo-young #myul mang #tak dongkyung #tak dong kyung #sonyeonshin #kdrama #kdrama opinions #kdrama theories #kdrama rambles #anime reference

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chosenimagines · 3 years

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You and me?! (Gryffinclaw)

Universe: Harry Potter

Summary: Tobias and Anabella can’t stand each other! But a fight on the Quidditch field gets them into a difficult situation

Used Prompts: -

Warnings: Enemies to Lover, soft swearing, mentioning of fights and wounds

Language: English

Request: yes/no (by Anon) could i make a request for an enemies to lovers gryffindor x ravenclaw short story if u have time? thanks in advance! <3

Requests [Open]

A/N: This one shot/imagine can be found as well on my wattpad^^

My requests are open on wattpad and tumblr^^

🖊️ 🖊️ 🖊️ 🖊️

____________________________________________

The bass filled the Great Hall like it had never been before. The school year was finally over and to the students’ delight the end of the year was brought forward. But how it had come to this was a different story. Now Hogwarts celebrated! The party showed the relief of the student body. The classes were over and the O.W.Ls as well! The only thing which was left was the last Quidditch game of the year. But this was only the grand final for the school year! The year couldn’t end any better. Only Toby who wanted to go back to his room had no luck at the party!

Linda was close on his heels and didn’t let go of him. He could do what he wanted to it didn’t work! No matter if he was nice or he was mean to her Toby couldn’t make clear for her that he was not interested in her. Especially not in a romantic point of view! He would rather with Ana- Quick he discarded that thought. It was as silly as Linda’s flirt attempts! Worse was that she didn’t care about the rejection he gave her. She ignored it the facts which Toby told her over and over again. Linda made approaches to Toby even though it was the last thing Toby wanted in the entire world. Okay, it was time for plan B! That would make clear for Linda that he didn’t want her no matter how hard and insensitive that may seem. A glare into the crowd and the idea for a plan B was born! Admittedly Toby needed he worst (and only) enemy but for his peace he had to bite the bullet. “That means nothing, Whitlock!”, Toby warned her when turned the Ravenclawgirl he hated towards himself. Before Anabella could react, Toby had pressed his lips onto Anabella’s mouth. The despair which led to this action was testable on the tip of her tongue while she stood infront of him dead still. She was way too shocked to move. What was that stupid Gryffindor doing?! “You have a girlfriend? Toby, who could you not tell me that you have a girlfriend?”, Linda who was behind Toby squealed. But he stepped up his game! He put his hands on Anabella’s waist and pressed her against himself the moment he intensified the kiss. Toby noticed the annoyed sigh from Linda and how the Gryffindorgirl left. Relieved from the moment Toby broke away from Anabella. He finally got rid of Linda! In the next moment Toby’s face flicked to the side. A burning pain prickled on his left cheek. As if it was a reflex, he put his hand on his cheek. He had not expected a different reaction! How could it be different when they rivaled with each other to the death for six years now. Anabella raised a warning finger. “Do not ever touch me again without my consent, Samson or I will chase you with an unforgivable curse before you could say ‘Sorry’!” After the threat she left fast.

“The last game of the year! Gryffindor against Ravenclaw. Ravenclaw against Gryffindor. And we have a tie! Even though the stunning-” A cough led to a crackling sound. Professor McGonagall probably cocked her ear -as always as Lee Jordan commented the games. Poor commentator! “I’m sorry, Professor!”, Lee mumbled sheepishly. But everybody -including the experienced teacher- knew it was always half the truth. “But back to the game! Things are getting lively on the field. The suspense is excruciating! Even the fans can’t stay on their seats anymore. But the tension on our beloved Quidditch was worse than on the stands. Especially the tension between Gryffindor’s 6 and Ravenclaw’s 3 was tangible! But we don’t know it differently, guys. Whitlock and Samson fight day and night just as today! But Whitlock is out to get her opponent more than usual- Au! That hit home, Toby. But our chaser isn’t easy to bring down with a buldger. Wait a minute! WAIT- PROFESSOR! Professor, that isn’t about to end week!” Lee was about to be right! Toby and Anabella had completely lost the game out of sight! Instead of focusing on the game they fought up in the air on their brooms. Cuts, bruises, scratches… Their faces and torsos were cluttered with wounds and blood which didn’t keep the 6th graders from fighting each other. Before a teacher could interfere, Anabella lost her balance and fell into the deep. Only a few meters parted her from hitting the ground. But it didn’t happen! Without thinking Tobias followed the falling girl and saved her from death by catching her. He could feel her body which was shaking out of death fear against his chest. But now she was safe! Through the shock Anabella managed to say a word. “Why?” Of course Toby understood instantly what Anabella wanted to know. “I don’t like you but that doesn’t mean that I’ll watch you fall into death.”

“In 38 years at this school I have never seen something this irresponsible! You will have detention during the holidays and your parents will be informed about this outrageous incident. Beside that Professor Flitwick and I are thinking about taking you two out of your teams until you graduated. Do you understand me?” With tilted heads the still wounded students answered: “Yes, Professor…” The teacher nodded and left the hospital wing along with her colleague. As if Minerva McGonagall’s lecture hadn’t been enough more raged scolding flew through the window. Problems over problems! The flow of them didn’t want to stop… They suffer in silence with pulled up shoulders, teeth-gnashing and almost closed eyelids while listening to the howler. But Toby was faster through the torture than Anabella. Anabella suffered longer! The voice of her mother filled the hospital wing. “NOT ONLY, THAT YOU HAVE BRING SHAME ON OUR FAMILY’S NAME WITH THAT DISGUSTING ROWDY-BEHAVIOUR OF YOURS WHICH I CAN’T STRESS ENOUGH! YOU HAVE BEEN SIX YEARS ON THAT SCHOOL AND YOU ARE HARDLY ABLE TO FIND A WIZARD THAT CAN STAND YOUR COMPANY. YOU NEED A MAN BY YOUR SIDE, ANABELLA! YOU NEED A STRONG MAN WITH MANARES ON YOUR SIDE LIKE ALL WHITLOCK-WOMEN BEFORE YOU. IF YOU DON’T GET A MAN WITHIN THE NEXT YEAR YOUR FATHER AND I WILL TAKE OVER THIS TASK FOR YOU!” After these harsh words the message destroyed itself. Tears filled the eyes of the Ravenclaw. But not one rolled over her cheeks. She would not cry infront of Samson. She would never be weak infront of Tobias Samson! Never. In the same seconde the same thought crossed the mind of the students. He/She has the same fate as I do… Immediately they forget about that. To be similar to each other in any way would be horror for both of them! After all there was nobody to them that was more disgusting than the other one. But the hate got less (on both sides) since the situation on the Quidditch field. Then Toby had an idea! Anabella’s mother gave him the idea. They both were born in a good house… It was so silly that it was genius and for both of them it was practical. “Hey Whitlock-” “Bloody hell, Samson! What do you want?”, Anabella hissed. No weakness, no weakness, no weakness, no weakness… It went through her mind again and again as if her life would depend on her mantra. Her life not, but her dignity. To show any weakness to Tobias had never been an option! “You and me have the same problem, Whitlock! So calm down. I know a solution.” Silent Anabella waited for the explanation. She crossed her hurting arms. “Your parents want to force you into a marriage if you don’t find the right guy and mine want to do the same thing. And I have Linda’s on my heels-” “State your point, Samson!”, Anabella interrupted the Gryffindor impatiently. She had no nerves to listen to long talks! Why did he talk so much? “Calm down, Whitlock! There are advantages for you as well. I suggest that you and I have a relationship. Fake of course! And we get rid of all of our problems.” The Ravenclawgirl laughed out loud. The thought was just stupid! “You and I? You are crazy!” “Don’t let it get to your head! I am not into you but the status of your family is exactly what my parents want for me and I am convinced your parents think the same way. Besides I am the perfect son in law!” “Don’t over work it, Gryffindor.”, Anabella answered dryly. “So what do you say! You and I and a fake relationship? Just until the next year ends.” Toby stopped for a moment. “Or until I found a girl I want to have a real relationship with. Until then we both don’t have to get married!” An annoyed sigh and an eyeroll were the comment to the previous words. “So what do you say, Whitlock?” “Deal! I am in.” Anabella took his hand and the deal has been sealed.

#gryffindor x ravenclaw #gryffinclaw #gryffinclaw relationship #gryffinclaw imagines #hp #harry potter #imagine #hp imagine #harry potter imagine #harry potter oc #gryffindor #ravenclaw #gryffindor oc #ravenclaw oc

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buzzdixonwriter · 3 years

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Hoo U?

A spirited discussion is raging on Facebook now, the good kind of spirited discussion, an enthusiastic exchange of ideas and ideals, not a snark fest.

The top is a deceptively simple one: Who are the characters various actors played?

Let me clarify: It began as a trivia challenge to name actors who have won Oscars for playing the same character.

And there in lays the debate.

How exactly are we defining a character.

This all sounds trivial, and to be frank this part of the discussion is, but it’s gonna get deep by the end.

Trust me.

So here’s the kickoff:

Marlon Brando won a Best Male Performance Oscar for playing Vito Corleone in The Godfather; Robert DeNiro won a Best Male Supporting Performance Oscar for playing Vito Corleone in The Godfather II

Heath Ledger won a Best Male Supporting Performance Oscar for playing the Joker in The Dark Knight; Joaquin Phoenix won a Best Male Performance Oscar for playing the Joker in Joker.

(Trivia bonus: Kate Winslet and Gloria Stuart received Oscar nominations for playing the same character at different stages of her life in Titanic, and Winslet and Judi Dench were both nominated for playing the same character at different stages in Iris as well; plus Peter O’Toole was nominated twice for playing Henry II in Beckett and The Lion In Winter which technically counts as a sequel…)

The Facebook debate is over whether Ledger and Phoenix were actually playing the same character.

Now in the case of the former, The Godfather II is a continuation of the same story in The Godfather by the same creative team with much of the original cast reprising their roles, the Oscars going to two actors who played the same character at different stages of their life (BTW, where's the love for Oreste Baldini, who played Vito as a young boy?).

The two films were re-edited and combined with The Godfather III to make a nine-hour and 43-minute miniseries The Godfather Trilogy.

It is clear the creators’ intent from the beginning was for audiences to accept Baldini / DeNiro / Brando as the same person at various stages of his life.

The Ledger Joker and the Phoenix Joker cannot possibly be the same character for a wide variety of internal continuity issues separating the two films. The creators of Joker went out of their way to state their version of the character was not The Dark Knight version.

Unlike The Godfather movies, you can’t link up the various live action Batman / Suicide Squad / Joker stories into a single coherent narrative (especially since you have to drag in the live action Supeman and Wonder Woman movies and TV shows as well).

. . .

Can different actors play their version of the same character in otherwise unlinked productions?

Of course they can.

Stage plays do it all the time.

If you start with the same exact text, then clearly any number of actors can play Hamlet or MacBeth or Willy Loman.

The problems arise when one goes afield of the text.

. . .

In 1932 Constance Bennett made a movie called What Price Hollywood? that did okay but really didn’t set the world on fire.

In 1937 Janet Gaynor remade that film as A Star Is Born, the story changed to give it a tragic yet uplifting conclusion; her version was a big hit and Gaynor received an Oscar nomination.

In 1954 Judy Garland remade A Star is Born as a musical and that proved a big hit, and Garland received an Oscar nomination.

In 1976 Barbara Streisand took a swing at the material with a country-western version of A Star Is Born and while she got an Oscar nomination, audiences were unreceptive.

In 2018 Lady Gaga remade A Star Is Born and received both an Oscar nomination for her role and an Oscar win for her song.

Question: Are they all playing the same character? Each played a character that started their film with a different name than the other versions, but the Gaynor / Garland / Streisand / Gaga versions all end with the central character proudly proclaiming they are “Mrs. Norman Maine.”

Same character?

. . .

There’s no argument that William Gillette, Basil Rathbone, and Benedict Cumberbatch all played Sherlock Holmes, even when their productions took certain liberties with the stories.

But Sherlock Holmes is not an idiot, and Michael Caine played Holmes as an idiot in Without A Clue.

Was he playing the same character as Gillette / Rathbone / Cumberbatch?

(Ironically Peter Cook played a very recognizable and wholly credible Holmes in his farcical send up of The Hound Of The Baskervilles with Dudley Moore.)

Did George C. Scott play Holmes in They Might Be Giants? Almost everybody else in the story thinks he’s a New York banker who’s suffered a nervous breakdown and only thinks he’s Holmes, but Scott believes he is Holmes 100% and throughout the film other people he encounters accept him as Holmes at face values.

He functions as Holmes throughout.

And in the end, the audience is left in a weird place, not really knowing what his fate may be, not absolutely sure if he is a bonkers banker but maybe…somehow…he is Sherlock Holmes…

. . .

Did John Cassavettes in Tempest and Walter Pidgeon in Forbidden Planet play the same character? Were either of those roles Shakespeare’s Prospero?

Did Christopher Lee play the same character in Horror Of Dracula and its sequels, in Count Dracula, and in In Search Of Dracula? (The producers of Count Dracula sure went to great pains to explain their version was a different and more accurate version than the Hammer version of the character, and In Search Of Dracula cast Lee as Vlad Tepes who was the real life historical figure Bram Stoker based his novel on.)

For that matter, is Count Orlok in Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Terror actually Dracula? A European court awarding lawsuit damages to Bram Stoker's widow sure thought so.

Along similar lines, was Bela Lugosi playing Dracula in Columbia's Return Of The Vampire? Universal's lawyers sure thought so.

Did Jim Caviezel in Passion Of The Christ, Max von Sydow in The Greatest Story Ever Told, Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, and Michael Rennie in The Day The Earth Stood Still all play the same character?

Did Toshiro Mifune, Clint Eastwood, and Bruce Willis all play the Continental Op?

Did Clint Eastwood play the same character in all three Dollar films?

Did Vincent Price, Charlton Heston, and Will Smith all play the same character?

Did Leonardo DiCaprio play the same character Steve McQueen played in The Great Escape (even if just for one brief scene) or did he play a character who played a character Steve McQueen played in The Great Escape?

Ooh, here's a good one!

Lon Chaney Jr starts Ghost Of Frankenstein playing the same monster Boris Karloff played in the original Frankenstein / Bride Of Frankenstein / Son Of Frankenstein trilogy, but by the end gets Ygor's brain (Bela Lugosi) transplanted into his body and speaks / thinks / acts briefly as Ygor in Frankie’s body.

However, Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman while maintaining continuity with all four previous films cast Lugosi as the monster (because Chaney had to play the Wolfman, duh) without dialog. Glenn Strange then assumed the role again in continuity with all previous films for House Of Frankenstein, House Of Dracula, and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, occasionally speaking briefly in the role.

Who was Strange playing in his films? The original Karloff monster or Ygor in Frankie's bod? Are those two distinct characters?

. . .

All the above is fun trivia to debate, but it links to a much more serious question: Who are you?

That’s not a trivial matter. What constitutes out identity? What makes us who we are?

I lost my father years ago to Alzheimer’s. As my brother Robert observed, the only member of a family not affected by an Alzheimer’s diagnosis is the person suffering from it themselves.

I would talk to my father on the phone, and he was always pleasant and cheery, but about three years before he died I realized he had no idea who I was, I was just some voice on the other end of the line that mom wanted him to talk to.

My father was by nature and easy going kinda guy, and that certainly made his last few years easier for my mother and brother Rikk to cope with, but one night when I was visiting, trying to get their affairs straightened out so he could enter a nursing home, he got irritated with my mother as she was trying to help him and raised his hand as if to slap hers away.

My father never raised his hand against my mother.

Ever.

He taught me and my brothers that was something no real man ever did.

He might sound gruff on occasion but he never raised a finger, much less truck our mother.

The fact he did so in the throes of Alzheimer’s indicated that whoever he once was, he wasn’t that person anymore.

We got him into a nursing home and he lasted a little less than a year there, his mind and his memory and his personality deteriorating rapidly.

Who was he at the end?

I didn’t go to his funeral.

What was the point?

The father I knew and loved had departed long before they buried his shell.

My grandmother, on the other hand, remained her cranky, irascible self until a week and a half before she died, finding the wit to crack one last memorable joke before her body began shutting down.

. . .

The question of identity is related to consciousness, and these are referred to as “the hard question” by physicians and physicists and philosophers alike.

What makes us “us”?

How do we know who we are?

What constitutes identity?

There are no easy, pat answers.

We have textbook definitions that dance around the issue of identity and consciousness, providing enough of a foundation for us to recognize what it is we’re discussing, but no one has yet come up with a clear, concise explanation of what either phenomenon is.

It’s like saying “apples are a red fruit.”

Okay, we know what you’re talking about, but we also know that description falls far, far short of what an apple actually is.

That’s why trivial discussion like whether or not Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix are playing the same character is a lot more important than it seems.

(BTW, they aren’t. Phoenix won his Oscar for his version of the Rupert Pupkin character in a violent remake of The King Of Comedy.)

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seoafin · 3 years

Note

BYE I WAS IMMERSED WITH GENSHIN’s STORY PLOT (AND THE FANARTS ON MY TL) WHICH WAS ALSO DROPPED EARLIER THIS MORNING AND FORGOT ABT JJK FOR A SPLIT SEVONDSJJSJEJ

but anyways ,, jjk 145// the more i write abt it, the more i’ll sound incoherent, this is ur last warning to ignore this 🧍‍♂️(1)

the one who is based on avalokitesvara (i’ll start calling it them as kannon from now) that i mentioned was actually brain (out of ppl) 😭😭

kenjaku (羂索) is shorten from "不空羂索観音 (fukukenjakukannon)" ,, they existed b4 the heian period... older then sukuna ?? suggested that brain is at least 1k years old... hsjsjjsjs

fukukenjakukannon, a manifestation of the buddhist god of mercy and compassion,, perhaps of some interest is that the fukukenjaku shares some kanji with gojou's infinite void followed by kanjis for trap & rope, with kannon directly referring to an all-knowing/overseeing divine existence. it rly does seem that kenjaku, tengen, and gojou's fates have all been strongly interwined throughout history,, kannon has been perceived as both male and female depending on the portrayal and the region, not unlike jjk's kenjaku switching bodies and genders over the course of time (kamo vs kaori vs getou)

some associations with kannon may be relevant to jjk. namely, as yuki mentions, salvation ,, kannon is a deity to serve his subjects, and resolve their suffering by eliminating its source,,, in which case, i think kenjaku's goal may possibly not be too far off from geto’s ,,,,, he may think that he is saving a group that is enduring greater suffering than any other. whether that is shamans, cursed spirits, or sth else entirely is up for debate. given his persistence over the millenia, and the likelihood of spreading suffering worldwide through a universal tengen merger, it's more than likely that he has a very personal motive. note that under his plan it is specifically the evil of a human that would spread and destroy all of humankind connected through tengen

this is an interesting contrast to sukuna, who is much more whimsical and far less calculated. i think the clash between these 2 in the past will have strong relevance for the future,,, on the other hand, since kannon has historically manifested in response to the suffering of various beings, it may be that the feelings of cursed spirits as a whole have led to kenjaku's existence. he could very well be a curse born from curses, instead of from humans.

okay now what i'm really excited abt: the relationship between kenjaku and the 6 eyes. 1 of the functions of kannon is to protect the 6 realms of rebirth/the 6 paths. u may already be familiar with this buddhist concept as it has been referenced in a variety of animanga (notably it is a major plot point of naruto, it's mukuro's ability in KHR, etc.). there's strong reason to believe this concept also has connections to the gojou 6 eyes ability. i think if we get to learn more abt the 6 eyes, i may be able to speak more on this point.

(as a side note here, i’ll mention that there’s an association between kannon and the protection of aborted children, perhaps relating to og kamo and the death paintings)

at the very least, we know that kenjaku and the 6 eyes are in opposition, and i'm speculating that the gojou bloodline is the true manifestation of a protective deity, at least for the humans, and kenjaku's goals are antithetical to that,,, perhaps, as yuki kind of suggested, taking the name kenjaku is a joke of sorts. if sukuna is malevolence incarnate, kenjaku is mercilesness,,

i think some of the core concepts being explored by the tengen storyline are that of form and existence. gojou satoru, tengen, kenjaku, and eventually the star plasma vessels are existences that transcend the norm,,, toji on the other hand, is the only example of the opposite. an existence that shouldn't have ever existed, in a sense. kenjaku seemed to have used that to his advantage in his manipulation of the events in hidden inventory,,, but it also leads me to believe that only a similar anomaly could undo the new destiny he's setting up for himself.

geto was the perfect piece to set kenjaku up for success in conducting a merger and putting this culling game into motion. geto's path has led to this outcome,,, in which case, an apt parallel as we have known all along is that gojou's path should lead to the counter-outcome: megumi, yuuta, and especially yuuji— these 3 will be the key to unravelling kenjaku's plan.

also tengen said that kenjaku’s objective is to send all the ppl in jpn to higan or turning all non shamans into one but he doesnt have enough cursed energy to do that,,, i did say that yuuji’s birthday took place in the 4th solar term where a part of a week long celebration haru no higan (higan 彼岸→other shore, buddhist pārāmitā), when ppl would honour the dead and sweep ancestral tombs took place,,,

so theres this buddhist mantra, called the “heart sutra” and the last verse of the sutra is,,

there are many sutras in buddhism, but the most well-known among them is probably the Heart Sutra,, altho it depends on the sect (of buddhism), the heart sutra is often read at funerals and memorial services, so even if,, and for some reason the sutra is often associated to kannon even in the utube thumbnail 👁👁 if u search up prajnaparamita sutra,,

heart sutra has the meaning of "an important teaching to reach the state of enlightenment by the power to see through the truth and essence." which is based on the idea of "void" as this important teaching,, the sutra tells us what we shld do to be free from the suffering of this world and live in peace,, in the heart sutra, the idea of "void" is especially important.

buddhism can be broadly divided into theravada and mahayana buddhism,,,,

theravada is a teaching that only some ppl (those who practice buddhism with strict lifestyle like the monks) reach the state of enlightenment, while mahayana is a teaching that all ppl (some who practice Buddhism) can reach enlightment even if u dont practice anything related to the religion,,, the idea of the void has the idea of not being caught up in individual things and not being obsessed with it, and the idea of heart sutra belongs to the category of mahayana buddhism

"void" does not mean "empty" but "no substance (no fixed shape)". the sutra also states that "everything keeps changing" and "although it keeps changing, the essence (core) of things remains the same."

for eg, the idea is, "i am me, no matter how old i am,, my appearance and various abilities deteriorate, how I am evaluated by others, whether i feel good or bad."

in other words,,, it’s a teaching to be aware of the essence without being caught up in the phenomenon of change.

"void" means "no substance (no fixed shape)", which means that u don't have to be obsessed with things or get caught up in one value.

eg, the reason why diamonds are beautiful is that diamonds arent beautiful from the beginning, but that humans decide that they’re beautiful,,, and that each person has a fixed evaluation of the movement of their hearts that they feel is beautiful. but thats not always the case right?

the last verse goes like this :

“Therefore, Prajna Paramita is known as the most divine mantra,

the great enlightening mantra,

the utmost mantra,

the incomparable mantra,

destroyer of all suffering!

Since what is true is not in vain, listen to the mantra of the Prajna Paramita– it goes like this:

GATE GATE PARA GATE PARASAM GATE BODHI SVAHA!”

the translation of the last line is: “going, going, going on beyond, always going on beyond, always becoming buddha.”

quoted from a web here : “it suggests movement toward awakening. It expresses the enlightenment of a buddha as an unfolding process, rather than a steady state. It puts us in the hopeful position of one who may not have arrived, but who may be on the way. The destination may not be an end, but the journey itself.

As appealing as this translation is, it is by no means the only one. When you do an Internet search for the terms “Heart Sutra” or “Prajna Paramita” you get numerous references. At these various pages you will find several different translations of the mantra. These include:

* Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond. Oh what an awakening! All hail!

* Gone, gone, gone beyond altogether beyond, Awakening, fulfilled!

* Gone, gone, gone to the Other Shore, attained the Other Shore having never left.

* Gone, gone, totally gone, totally completely gone, enlightened, so be it.

* “Oh, you have done! You have done! You have completely crossed the margin. This is Enlightenment! Congratulations!” “

the irony though of toji dying thinking that he should've stuck his principles but actually having ridiculous impact on the world,, this also puts a new spin on the "look upon the flesh of one who is free" (afaik it was left untranslated on his cover page when he invade dagon’s domain) and the implication is imo,,, the more cursed energy, the more restrictions and so in a way humanity goes into a devolution the more cursed energy there is because they will be bound even more tightly to the cycle than before,, which is the irony of the kenjaku & bodhisattva linkage

toji had a heavenly restriction and has zero cursed energy, which is an anomaly that is his own, which makes me wonder what he would've been like if he had an expressed technique,,, but it's the zero cursed energy part, that uniqueness, that makes him powerful in canon

im rly curious how having cursed power automatically seems to lock u into a binding,,, which is seemingly fate. the shaman world rly operates entirely on rules,, where this is because of tengen's barriers or the origin of techniques being more commonplace im not sure

i used to think CTs came abt when individual sorcerers made pacts with supernatural beings etc but now im not sure,, despite leaning hard on shinto and buddhist frameworks there isnt much overt indication over what is and is not a real power in canon,,, like we have mahoraga but are bodhisattvas assumed to be real and exist? or as figures of belief, are they and other figures of shinto mythology, all just cursed spirits in the end?

but that tengen is linked with the proliferation of 6 eyes and star plasma vessel, makes me start wondering how and why tengen started this whole barrier thing,, like yes jpn has a ton of cursed spirits but was it before or after the barrier i can't remember now

maybe Kenjaku was messing around too much back then,, i like how sukuna also maybe had very lil to do with this and is possibly going to interfere as a wild card once more. is the idea to use him as a hail mary so u convey more ppl to the other side all at once? unless kenjaku thinks sukuna is the person who got closest to the next evolution of humankind and is actually a fan 🥴

but yeah if sukuna and megumi can remake the world together can they just hit the reset button so tengen isn't somehow this massive jungian collective unconscious? is sukuna going to accidentally save the world lol,,, i didn't care for fate themes before since it felt like akutami hadn't wholly committed to it as a theme,,, but fate and collective responsibility/influence on the individual just became a much bigger theme

also the mind/body/soul thing with tengen,,, when is that idea coming back

so tengen and sukuna are so far the only ppl who have said to have evolved into curses, whereas kenjaku still seems to be a shaman, as well as angel. what catalyzes that??

also how tf are the cursed weapons made i have questions,, just putting it out here but i actually thought that if toji, presumably, didnt rebel and defected from the clan,,, what are the chances of zenin thinking of turning him into a cursed weapon lol

,,, does being a cursed spirit mean u are bound even more tightly to fate? or do u escape because u are no longer a human bound by ur technique and u are instead just energy that keeps cycling over and over.....cursed energy rly just karma with strength mechanics???

why did gojou get rid of the black rope only for yuuta go to find more??? seems contradictory,, like...did he exorcise sth in that couple years gap?? or were there other reasons? or is HE the one scared since he also hid the inverted spear of heaven,,, makes me wonder how common knowledge all these mechanics actually are

trying to wrap my head around potential megumi learned helplessness or not being able to work through his own problems, or if it's this weird backward wishing that he didn't HAVE to deal with problems if he didn't HAVE to do these things and there were simple solutions,,, like i don't think he's exactly lazy bc he seems to do a lot of work behind the scenes, but there's a certain stasis to him, a wishing not to know. i wonder if he was ever given the "u are a child and I'm the adult" speech nanami gave yuuji

nanami, qifrey and maybe reigen are the adult/ mentor figures i wish was/ is in my life orz

i think it's kind of funny how 145 is like suddenly christianity! this manga is just abt the many ways people seek freedom and want to be delivered,,,

but im not going to talk abt it 😔 — i only have lil to no knowledge abt it other than the lil trivias my friends dropped time to time whenever we’re having a discourse abt religion suddenly lmao and im not a big fan of talking abt things idk abt bc i’ll just look stupid otherwise LMAO

its interesting to note that christian have this uh for a lack of better way to describe it, higher power which can grant u eternal salvation or damnation while buddhism is just fending for urself in pursuit of enlightment ,,, while buddhism also have beings like devas/ deities it just means that 1) if ur born as one, u must have done a good deed sometime in one of ur previous lives,, 2) u just have a ridiculous long life span but yes u’ll eventually die again and rebirth as sth depending on ur actions,,, that goes for living in gods, demi-gods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts or hells realms

this is completely unrelated but,, my mother used to blast the heart sutra frequently in my house back then and the only thing i catch is the “gate gate parasamgate bodhi svaha” which i used ,, whenever i see sth..that is supposed to be unseen

theres this time i stayed behind in cram school for an exam,, i purposely took a another path from my usual one to clear my head (but im still familiar) and i saw this guy standing on the side road and the only thing that went thru my mind back them was “why is he not moving? is he waiting for someone? is he lost or sth,, the main road is just 6 foot away tho lol”

it was until i keep looking at each house that i finally notice that the spot he stood on is not even a ground lvl asphalt,, it’s a fucking sewer which means that he’s actually floating 😭😭 i just jogged and say sth along the line “wow today, ma is cooking hotpot for dinner (i actually have no idea what she plans to cook everyday) i dont want to eat it cold,, so i better hurry up” out loud while chanting the verse in my head

theres also this time me and a friend were sitting on my motorcycle after getting our late night food run until a particular smell and when we stay silent, a woman is singing on the branch right above us that we dipped right away and i almost catch a ticket for speeding all the while thinking abt that verse💀

i dont mind seeing one of “them” but i do have a problem with them following me back home and end up haunting my house for some period of time,, that one or sth ghost who slam things around and giggle in the middle of the night is enough for me to deal with 😀

now im off crying abt genshin (again) now and i’ll go back to sleep afterwards,,, ALSO I LOVE WITCH HATE ATALIERJSJEJEJ- 🐱 (2)

you literally brought up THE SAME EXACT QUESTIONS I HAVE!!! like why would gojo send yuuta to find more of the rope if he destroyed it in the first place?? unless he destroyed it in the heat of the battle with miguel during the prequel but it didn’t look like that. also i saw on twitter kenjaku might not even be a male?? apparently when referring to kenjaku, tengen didn’t use gendered pronouns. im also super curious as to how the six eyes, star plasma vessel (riko...), tengen, and kenjaku are all entwined because kenjaku’s plan was a long time coming, even though he was foiled two times already.

this reminds me of the heavenly restrictions because im still so confused about what exactly it is!! is it something a person is born with or is it something that is placed on a baby by another person??

you brought up fate too and i think that’s such an interesting concept like with akutami making more and more references to the heian era and the “golden age of sorcery” in the end I feel like everything led up to this moment. the existence of cursed energy too just feels like this “endless cycle of fate” which makes sense considering this theme also kinda aligns with yuuji’s birth which was pre planned. idk...this whole thing is suddenly feeling so much more insidious than we may have originally thought.

the sudden christianity mention is a pretty odd choice on akutami’s part but a lot of ppl (including me) are speculating that hana is going to be a harbinger of doom or something. once again is she even japanese?? the western concept of angels have never been particularly altruistic either.

unfortunately gojo has always been treating megumi like an adult so i don’t think he was ever given the “you are a child” talk from gojo. we can see it in their first meeting too. when their conversation takes a turn to serious, it becomes a conversation is from one adult to another. gojo also seems like the type to pile even more responsibility onto megumi because gojo isn’t responsible, so megumi had to pick up that slack.

i agree with you. i think sukuna is literally a wild card LMAO he does what he wants when he wants and that’s in. i don’t even think you can have a contingency plan for sukuna because he’s just that unpredictable!!!

nanami, qifrey and MAYBE reigen LSDNFKJFKN....reigen beats gojo by far though so i’ll give reigen that (that's not saying much tho tbh 😭) reigen's still sexy as hell tho 😁

also you mentioned khr!! khr is one of my favorite mangas of all time....although amano akira cannot write women despite being one khr still holds a very special place in my heart. i had no idea mukuro was influenced by kannon (to be fair i was like 14) but then again...mukuro’s eyes....i can’t believe our tastes in animanga are the same....bestie our taste>>>

HELLO???? YOU’RE RUNNING INTO SUPERNATURAL CREATURES LIKE THAT??? also motorcycles!! now im like 80% sure you're in SEA somewhere, bc as someone who lived in a SEA country for 3 years and went to school in a haunted building I feel you LMAO

#as always....you truly never miss!!!!#and witch hat atelier is sooo good #i love qifrey....white haired anime man of my heart!!!#🐱 anon #all ur analyses are MWAH

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ziracona · 4 years

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I am both kind of glad she didn't like. Spiral into thoughts or more realization of what exactly she's done to these people. But also not, because I love angst. So. Questions. Will she ever meet the other survivors? What will their interactions be like? Who do you think she gets along with most? Will she meet any other killers? (probs introduced by other survivors??) And also. A painful one but. Does the entity realize she's lying? Do you think you'll continue this story in anyway?

Haha, I feel that. Adiris certainly will hit that horror realization more completely than she did during her breakdown in the archives room. I think because of her realizations of both what she’s done and just how much danger she and they and everybody upstairs depending on her is in suddenly because of the truth, happening at the same, she had a whole lot of fear and anger in play (I was used and hurt and manipulated and lied to and made to suffer, whatever you[Not Nergal/Entity] are, you have been doing horrible stuff to innocent people for no good reason, my people have also been manipulated and lied to and forced to suffer, oh Gods what happens to us if he knows I know? What can I do to save my people and myself and these foreigners? Can I do anything?) and I think the immediacy of the parts of that she had to act on hit so hard it was her core focus, but next time she either is in a trial and has to method act through hunting down people she now knows are not murderers and infidels, or the first time she’s in a safer and more calm setting with the survivors and one of them mentions something, that will all uhhh, it’ll hit home. I’m sure. God, this poor woman.

Okay! For the questions.

“Will she ever meet the other survivors?”

Yes. Definitely, and all of them.

“What will those interactions be like?”

It’s hard to say since I haven’t written that yet, but probably exceedingly awkward. I think there’s a lot of inherent fear from them towards her, and like, how would you feel talking with someone you used to murder a lot because you thought they were the enemy? Nnnmnnnnn probably not great! TuT which is how she gon be feeling. I think she is very aware she’s coming from a place of power, and is also still super used to thinking of herself as a priestess/holy/kind of removed, so she’ll try to approach it like that. Reassuring, and thoughtful/careful to not be scary or threatening, but also in control and a little aloof. And probably after a little time with the survivors, who will all go from “Scary. D:” to “A curiosity but in a good way. Weird. Neat. Still kinda spooky.” to “I like her : )” and thinking of her the way they would any normal human (the normal version of the fkn speedrun Quentin & Dwight went through), she’ll have to adjust to being treated like a normal person, and the way 21st century humans act when they’re being casual and friendly—which honestly, not too different from being friendly throughout history, but sadly either way not something this girl is used to. I think it’ll be weird and she’ll be nervous to try shifting identities from one of the only two things she’s ever known how to be, and into normal human and friend, but that it’ll also be really welcome. Because she has literally never gotten to have a family or a normal life or a friend or any single goddamn healthy or even decent relationship with another living human being. And like, god, humans need that. On a DNA level—We die in isolation. And she hasn’t been “isolated,” but she’s been mostly isolated her whole life, and she sure as hell has never ever gotten to belong or have any kind of certainty or permanence in her relationship, even her spiritual ones. She needs that. She just needs someone to look at her, go: “There’s a human being right there, and I see who she is, and I think she’s very worthwhile. I would like to keep her in my life.” God, she needs that so, so badly. I don’t think she knows it, but she really, really, desperately does.

And she deserves it, too. None of the abandonments or alienations or failures in her life are things she did wrong. But when that kind of thing keeps happening to a person, it sure as hell makes them feel like it. So, haha, sorry, got carried away (the name of my memoir probably >.>). But I think she’d be awkward, and confused, and then nervous, because she’d be invited into something she has literally never had, doesn’t know how to do right, but also desperately wants without fully understanding, which is a terrifying combination to work with socially. But then deeply impacted and happy and moved. Also afraid—I mean, girl smiled without doing it on purpose one time and flipped out emotionally with no idea why, because every time she has felt attachment or sought belonging or thought she had it her whole life, she’s been routinely betrayed and abandoned. She’s a lot more than once burned. But after the initial fear, she would be a mixture of happy and very awkward, and then eventually hopefully just exceedingly happy and also proud of herself and confident. I listened to I’m Still Here from Treasure Planet a lot while writing Adiris. Like, a lot.

“Who do you think she gets along with most?”

Hmmm, well, Dwight and Quentin I think will always be special to her after the day in the temple. Claudette is a sweetie who will definitely try to help alleviate sickness symptoms and be maybe the single least afraid to touch her of all the survivors, and that can’t help but be meaningful. Meg & she have a lot of complimentary similar personality traits, Jeff is super kind & also a great artist so he’ll probably be group interpreter & she’ll be around him a lot, and since Tapp is 2 and 0 so far on drawing bullet barrel in friend luck Russian roulette and keeps befriending women with absentee fathers, I can only assume that means she will end up close with Tapp as well. It’s too funny for him not to be 3 & 0. The world itself demands it. Beyond that, I’d have to write interactions and see how they fall. 👈👈😎 (Also a large part of how she feels about Meg & maybe also Ace, possibly Nea too, maybe even Feng, will come down to how she feels about being flirted with shamelessly. F in the chat for my poor confused ancient Mesopotamian. 😔)

“Will she meet any other killers?”

Yes, definitely. And it will be very interesting to me to see that.

“Does the Entity’s realize she’s lying?”

No. It absolutely does not. Queen method acted hard enough to give herself trauma—the first person experience thoughts and narrative are what she lived, and luckily the Entity is an emotion sponge, not a mind reader. It may or may not have been aware Quentin & Dwight were in the room (legit just depends on if it decided to/thought to look, which I don’t know, because I didn’t need to to write the scene & it be like that sometimes, but regardless of if it did, the outcome is basically unchanged. Either it didn’t look because Adiris clearly wasn’t lying, from its POV, as she felt nothing but what she exhibited outwardly as well. Or it did look for them, saw they were under there, and thought nothing of it because it lined up with her story. She said they ran off. Wouldn’t be weird for them to go to the Archives to try to steal information, or hide, or even just get lost. And it had no reason to expose them if it did see, because if it had dragged them out, it would have had to do something Adiris would understand to them, and it’s really just easier to give itself time to figure out in what way to do its “Nergal the God” aftermath, than to do it right in the room on the spot. TLDR: No, it has no clue. She method acted the fuck out of that situation, and there was nothing weird to sense, so it didn’t. Queen out-bullshitted the Entity.

“Will you continue the story in any way?”

Harder question. Probably? Likely? Maybe? Hard to say. I would love to, but I also have four, five other stories right now? Ever since I made a dumb Fate joke about having four multipath AUs, my brain has been trying to convince me to adapt New Dawn Fades, From the Earth of No Return, and some fourth, as yet unchosen story, into full length monsters. But I might die. Like, y’all, ILM is a hunk of book. If I recall correctly from back when I saw my word count, got nervous, and looked stuff up, if I published a physical single volume copy of ILM, it would become the longest single volume book ever published in a physical single book form. Which I both kinda want to do now just for the knowledge of it, but also!!! That’s SO much, like, I don’t even know how that happened. Like I am immensely proud, but also kinda like wtf? Did I drug me?? And also mostly just because rip @ me that the longest work I have written is a fic I /can’t/ ever publish or include in a resume or reel or anything. :’-](Also, @ the speed readers who did ILM in under two weeks, HOW? And please teach me your absolutely terrifying powers). I don’t plan, even if I do full length stuff again, to make another ILM length one or something. But even then, full length is big! (Also I live in fear of saying this to myself, trying to write, and becoming:

Like u have no idea rip lol.) It takes a whole bunch of time to do books, and like, I do fic books because I love it! Like SO much. It has and does bring me great joy. But, it can get a liiiittle daunting too. It eats up most of my free time to all my free time, if I get super into it.

So yes, I would really like to adapt it further. I have the barest of bones for an outline, I even have two possible endings already envisioned and several major events more fleshed out! : D But if I do write more long-form full novels for DbD, even in more manageable sizes than their forebearer, I’d try to do them in the order I began. Which means Signifying Nothing—the prequel to ILM about Philip’s time with Vigo, Alex, & Benedict (which is a will do, not if), then New Dawn Fades (the ongoing fic I have on AO3 centered around Joey & Quentin’s relationship), then From the Earth of No Return. Which for the record, my soul very much wants to adapt. Every time I hear Brave Shine now, I see cool TV show opens for it in my head. TuT But I guess the best I can say is, “We’ll see”? Since fics aren’t like my paying job or smth, it depends largely on my personal & work life & how much time I have to devote to for-passion writing. So, I guess the short answer is I’d love to, and I hope to, I’d even say I think I intend to sometime, but I’m not completely certain I’ll be able.

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ppeasants · 5 years

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Ok, so, imagine this.

A Zelda AU or game or fic or something, where the three Triforce people are friends (how original, I know). Hear me out tho. It's gonna get extremely emotional (hopefully).

It starts like a whole bunch of years in the future. Like, so long that nobody remembers the legend of the Triforce, or the goddesses, or anything, except for maybe like 1 or 2 historians or something who believe it as myth. Maybe kinda like a BOTW world but before the Calamity, and with no Guardians or stuff. All the kingdoms are generally at peace or whatever, and Hyrule is the main one.

So, the Gerudo's birth a man, their first in however many years (it's Ganondorf). They have no idea what's going on, or why is happening and shit, so they talk with their elder, and they're confused too, so they go to Hyrule Kingdom, and they don't know what's going on. Nobody knows what's happened, but the Hyrule Kingdom is also celebrating the recent birth of a princess (it's Zelda), so they set up meetings to talk about this, and the two kids get to know eachother after a while. Also, some random other kid is born around the same time (it's Link).

So, Zelda and Ganondorf hang out and become friends, and Link is born to a travelling family of merchants or something, just to get him moving around and training to survive, and he meets Ganondorf and Zelda among his travels as kids at different points. eventually Link and his family settle down in Hyrule, and he grows up there from like 6-7 onwards. He sees Ganondorf coming in every once in a while, so they hang out and become friends. Ganondorf is usually coming with his family now that they know the royal family, and the two hang out, meaning Zelda and Ganondorf hang out. So Ganondorf makes Zelda and Link meet, and the two know eachother a little bit, so the three become friends.

They become super close friends, like REALLY close, cause they're the only people who aren't family who don't treat eachother differently, as Zelda is royalty, Link is mute, and Ganondorf is a Gerudo man. They grow up together, with Zelda on track to becoming queen, Ganondorf on track to becoming king, and Link being a commander or head guard or some shit. They're all extremely close, and good people, and it seems like the legend won't happen, not that people know about it anyways.

But you can't go against fate.

One of the advisors the king is visited by one of the historians or some shit who know about the legend of the Triforce, Hylia, and Demise, and how the man born into the Gerudo's will cause chaos or something. So, the advisor, tells the king and queen, and they get scared. Slowly they start to dissuade Zelda from seeing Ganondorf, thinking he's bad. She doesn't listen, so they get more drastic, like not allowing him into the kingdom, them not allowing Gerudos in, then stopping trade with them, and other stuff like that. Both Zelda and Link get mad with this, so they find workarounds to keep hanging out with Ganondorf.

Ganondorf and his people are really mad about this, but they don't do anything, hoping it'll blow over, cause they don't wanna start a war. Zelda and Link let him know they're against this.

Eventually, the historian and advisor convince the King and Queen to take action, so they do. They send in someone secretly to set fire to Gerudo Town. The entire city gets lit aflame, and about half the people or something make it out. the other half die. Ganondorf and his family makes it out. The king and queen, trying to save face or something, offer refuge in Hyrule, and offer apologies for not letting them in. With nowhere else to go, they all go there.

Ganondorf is devastated, so the three end up living together, and things seem to be going better. Then, Gerudo people start dying left and right. No one knows what's going on, a d eventually, Ganondorf's family is killed. Just as Ganondorf is about to be killed himself, the last living Gerudo, he manages to capture the attacker, who says it was the king and queen who not only hired him to kill the people in the town, but set fire to Gerudo Town.

Of course, Ganondorf is mad. He activates Ganon mode or something and goes on a rampage. Link and Zelda manage to calm him down, but not before he destroys part of the city. The king and queen banish him, and put a bounty on his head. Link and Zelda, furious at Hyrule, chase after him.

Eventually, they all meet, and talk about everything. How Ganondorf's family and people were killed, how he has a bounty, and how they came looking for him. Ganondorf asks how Zelda could let this happen. She says she didn't know about it. Ganondorf doesn't believe her. They fight, and they ask Link to choose a side. He picks Zelda.

Ganondorf with tears in his eyes says he's done. He's not gonna be nice. If people see him as a villain, then he'll be a villain. They try to talk him out of it, but he doesn't listen. He hits Link on accident, and he runs away in horror at what he's done. The two go back.

They tell the king and queen what happened, and they say they knew he was always evil. Link and Zelda counter, saying he was never evil, still isn't, just angry at the world and misguided. The advisor and historian walk in, and talk about the legend, and how they need to stop the evil before he can destroy everything. They say he's not evil. The historian convinces them to go out and activate their Triforce pieces to fulfill the prophecy.

They go out, link goes dungeon crawling like in the games, and Zelda does some soul searching or something, and they do it. Ganondorf also activates his by sheer anger and training or something.

They come back, and the historian reveals herself to be a messenger of the goddesses. She was planted to make sure the prophecy was fulfilled. She gave the ideas to outcast Ganondorf and the Gerudo's, she brought the person to set fire to Gerudo Town, and she hired the person who went around killing the Gerudo's. She reveals the goddesses influenced the king and queen to do this, because they need their prophecy to be fulfilled, no matter how cruel they need to be. They release the king and queen, and they feel ashamed at what they've done.

Just as Link and Zelda are in the middle of exploding at everyone in the room, there's a loud crash outside. They go out and they see Ganon rampaging in Hyrule. They go out to try to talk to him, but they can't.

So they have to fight him. They don't want to, but they do. And they win. They subdue him, but they don't kill him. He reverts back to Ganondorf, injured, but awake.

He yells at them to finish him off, they refuse. They let out all of their frustrations, their anger at everything for eachother, and what has happened to them. How the world, the goddesses, everything, has ruined all of their lives. How they just wanted to live their lives, be friends, and how they can't. How the goddesses forced them to fulfill a destiny which only caused them pain.

How even though he wants to, Ganondorf can't give up on his revenge. He knows how much it'll hurt everyone, how much it'll hurt his friends, himself, but he can't stop now. He's gone too far. He only wants his people back.

How Zelda doesn't want to be a ruler. How much she doesn't want to lead a kingdom that committed genocide on an innocent people, but she knows she has to, if only to make up for their mistakes. She only wants her innocence back.

How Link doesn't want to kill his friend. His friend who only knew hardships, and came out a good person, but was forced to be evil by some people who play with lives. He doesn't want to, but he knows he has to, it's his destiny. He only wants his friends back.

So they fight. They fight with the pain and anguish that they were pawns on someone else's game, and they have to suffer for it. There's no reason for it, but they have to, and it hurts. And Link wins. Ganondorf smiles, and Link and Zelda cry. And Ganondorf dies.

The historian disappears. The king and queen relinquish the throne to Zelda. She rules over Hyrule, only trying to right the wrongs of her people.

Link left hyrule, and just wanders. Like his family used to do, he lives alone and in the wild, but never visits Hyrule or the remains of Gerudo Town. He just walks.

And somewhere, a lone escaped Gerudo Lady gives birth to a beautiful Gerudo daughter.

And the cycle continues.

This is probably really incoherent and also already done and also not very good, but I've just wanted to get this idea I've had out into the world.

I would def have a lot more fluff b/w the trio before shit goes down, and I would write a lot better (hopefully) when it's actually a story.

Let me know if it's any good, and what changes I should make, and what I could add. Also lemme know about other similar stories, cause I wanna read them.

If u read through all this word garbage, thanks :).

#the legend of zelda #tloz #zelda #link #ganondorf #ganon #botw #breath of the wild #au #story ideas #fanfic #fanfiction #video games #angst #fine ill do it myself

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moodboardinthecloud · 4 years

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Out There, Nobody Can Hear You Scream

Out There, Nobody Can Hear You Scream Sep 21, 2020

https://www.outsideonline.com/2416929/out-there-nobody-can-hear-you-scream

Two years ago, Latria Graham wrote an essay about the challenges of being Black in the outdoors. Countless readers reached out to her, asking for advice on how to stay safe in places where nonwhite people aren’t always welcome. She didn't write back, because she had no idea what to say. In the aftermath of a revolutionary spring and summer, she responds.

In the spring of 2019, right before I leave for my writing residency in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, my mama tries to give me a gun. A Ruger P89DC that used to belong to my daddy, it’s one of the few things she kept after his death. Even though she doesn't know how to use it, she knows that I do. She’s just had back surgery, and she’s in no shape to come and get me if something goes wrong up in those mountains, so she tries to give me this. I turn the gun over in my hand. It’s a little dusty and sorely out of use. The metal sends a chill up my arm.

Even though it is legal for me to have a gun, I cannot tell if, as a Black woman, I’d be safer with or without it. Back in 2016, I watched the aftermath of Philando Castile’s killing as it was streamed on Facebook Live by his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds. Castile was shot five times at close range by a police officer during a routine traffic stop, when he went to reach for his license, registration, and permit to carry a gun. His four-year-old daughter watched him die from the back seat. In his case, having the proper paperwork didn’t matter.

I’ll be in the Smokies for six weeks in early spring, the park’s quiet season, staying in a cabin on my own. My local contact list will be short: the other writer who had been awarded the residency, our mentor, maybe a couple of park employees. If something happens to me, there will likely be no witnesses, no one to stream my last moments. When my mother isn’t looking, I make sure the safety is on, and then I put the gun back where she got it. I leave my fate to the universe.

Before I back out of our driveway, my mama insists on saying a protective blessing over me. She has probably said some version of this prayer over my body as long as I’ve been able to explore on my own.

In 2018, I wrote an article for this magazine titled “We’re Here. You Just Don’t See Us,” about my family’s relationship to nature and the stereotypes and obstacles to access that Black people face in the outdoors. As a journalist, that piece opened doors for me, like the residency in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

It also inspired people to write me.

Two years later, the messages still find me on almost every social media platform: Twitter, Instagram, even LinkedIn. They come through my Gmail. Most of them sound the same—they thank me for writing the article and tell me how much it meant to them to see a facet of the Black experience represented in a major outdoor magazine. They express apprehension about venturing into new places and ask for my advice on recreating outside of their perceived safety zone. They ask what they can do to protect themselves in case they wind up in a hostile environment.

Folks have their desires and dreams tied up in the sentences they send me. They want to make room for the hope that I cautiously decided to write about in 2018.

Back then, as a realist, I didn’t want my essay’s ending to sound too optimistic. But I still strayed from talking about individual discrimination in the parks, often perpetrated by white visitors, like the woman who recently told an Asian American family that they “can’t be in this country” as they finished their hike near Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California, this past Fourth of July. Or the now famous “BBQ Becky” who called the police on two Black men at Lake Merritt in Oakland, California, in 2018, for using a charcoal grill in a non-charcoal-grill-designated area. Nor did I mention that when I venture into new spaces, I am always doing the math: noting the lengths of dirt roads so I know how far I have to run if I need help, taking stock of my gas gauge to ensure I have enough to get away.

I have been the target of death threats since 2015, when I started writing about race. I wasn’t sure if magazine readers were ready for that level of candid conversation, so in 2018 I left that tidbit out.

There are risks to being Black in the outdoors; I am simply willing to assume them. And that’s why I struggle to answer the senders of these messages, because I don’t have any tips to protect them. Instead I invoke magical thinking, pretending that if I don’t hit the reply button, the communication didn’t happen. Sometimes technology helps: when I let the message requests sit unaccepted in Instagram, the app deletes them after four weeks.

I deem myself a coward. I know I am a coward.

There are two messages that still haunt me.

The first is an e-mail from a woman who wanted to know what she and her brown-skinned husband should do if they encounter another campground with a Confederate flag hanging in the check-in office. She described to me a night of unease, of worrying if they and their daughter would be safe. I filed her e-mail so deep in my folders that I don’t even think I can find it anymore. I was dying to forget that I had no salve for her suffering.

The second was even more personal. It came via Facebook Messenger, from a woman named Tish. In it she says: “I came across a read of yours when I was searching African Americans and camping. I want to rent an RV and go with my family. I live in Anderson S.C. Had a daughter that also attended SCGSAH. Is there a campground you recommend that is not too far and yes where I would feel comfortable? Thank you.”

The signaling in it, of tying me to her daughter, examining my background enough to offhandedly reference the South Carolina arts high school I attended and saying, Please, my daughter is similar to you.

I leave her message in the unread folder.

These women have families, and they too are trying to pray a blessing over the ones they love while leaving room for them to play, grow, and learn—the same things their white peers want for their offspring. In their letters, they hang some of their hopes for a better America on me, on any advice I might be able to share.

I haven’t written back because I haven’t had any good advice to offer, and that is what troubles me. These letters have been a sore spot, festering, unwilling to heal.

Now, in the summer of 2020, there are bodies hanging from trees again, and that has motivated me to pick up my pen. Our country is trying to figure out what to do about racial injustice and systemic brutality against Black people. It’s time to tell those who wrote to me what I know.

Dear Tish, Alex, Susan, and everyone else:

I want to apologize for the delayed reply. It took a long time to gather my thoughts. When I wrote that article back in 2018, I was light on the risks and violence and heavy-handed on hope. I come to you now as a woman who insists we must be heavy-handed on both if we are to survive.

I write to you in the middle of the night, with the only light on the entire street emanating from my headlamp. Here in upstate South Carolina, we are in the midst of a regional blackout. My time outdoors has taught me how to sit with the darkness—how to be equipped for it. Over the years, I have found ways to work within it, or perhaps in spite of it. If there’s anything I can do, maybe it’s help you become more comfortable with the darkness, too.

But before I tell you any more, I want you to understand that you and I are more than our pain. We are more than the human-rights moment we are fighting for.

It isn’t an exaggeration to say that the Outside article changed my life. People paid me for speaking gigs and writing workshops. They put me on planes and flew me across the country to talk about equity, inclusion, and accountability. I know the statistics, the history, the arguments that organizations give about why they have no need to change. I call them on it.

I have to apologize for not being prepared for the heaviness of this mantle at the time. I have to admit my hesitation back then to call white supremacy and racism by their names. The unraveling of this country in the summer of 2020 has forced me to reckon with my actions, my place in the natural world, and the fact that as a Black woman writer in America, I am tasked with telling you a terrible truth: I am so sorry. I have nothing of merit to offer you as protection.

I am reluctant to inform you that while I can challenge white people to make the outdoors a nonhostile, equitable space where you can be your authentic selves, when the violence of white supremacy turns its eyes toward you, there’s nothing I can give you to protect yourself from its gaze and dehumanization.

I do not wish to ask you to have to be brave in the face of inequality. This nation’s diminished moral capacity for seeing Black people as human beings is not our fault. Their perception of you isn’t your problem—it’s theirs, the direct result of the manifest-destiny and “anybody can become anything in America” narratives they have bought into. We are made to suffer so they can slake their guilt. I want you to be unapologetically yourselves.

I check with my fellow Black outdoor friends, and they say they’ve gotten your e-mail and messages, too. They also waffle on what to say, telling y’all to carry pepper spray or dress in a nonthreatening way. I am troubled about instructing people who have already been socially policed to death—to literal, functional death—to change the way they walk, talk, dress, or take up space in order to seem less threatening to those who are uncomfortable with seeing our brown skin.

The Great Smoky Mountains (Photo: Kennedi Carter)

I have no talisman that can shield you from the white imagination. The incantation “I’m calling the police” will be less potent coming from your mouth, and will not work in the same way. In the end, your utterance could backfire, causing you more pain.

I want to tell you to make sure you know wilderness first aid, to carry the ten essentials, to practice leave no trace, so no one has any right to bother you as you enjoy your day. I want to tell you to make sure you know what it means not to need, to be so prepared that you never have to ask for a shred, scrap, or ribbon of compassion from anybody.

But that is misanthropic—maybe, at its core, inhumane.

I resist the urge to pass on to you the instinct my Black foremothers ingrained in me to make ourselves small before the denizens of this land. I have watched this scenario play out since I was a child: my father, a tall 50-year-old man with big hands, being called “boy” by some white person and playing along, willing to let them believe that they have more power than he does, even though I have watched him pin down a 400-pound hog on his own. I have seen my mother shrink behind her steering wheel, pulled over for going five miles above the speed limit on her way to her mom’s house. She taught me and my brother the rules early: only speak when spoken to, do not ask questions, do not make eye contact, do not get out of the car, keep your hands on the wheel, comply, comply, comply, even if it costs you your agency. Never, ever show your fear. Cry in the driveway when you get to your destination alive. Those traffic stops could’ve ended very differently. The corpses of Samuel DuBose, Maurice Gordon, Walter Scott, and Rayshard Brooks prove that.

I will not pass on these generational curses; they were ways of compensating for anti-Black thinking. They should never have been your burden.

It would be easy to tell you to always be aware of your surroundings, to never let your guard down, to be prepared to hit record in case you run into an Amy Cooper or if a white man points an AR-15 at you and your friends as you take a break from riding your motorcycles, hoping to make the most of a sunny almost-summer day in Virginia.

These moments—tied to a phone, always tensed in fear—are not what time in nature is supposed to be. Yet the videos seem to be the only way America at large believes us. It took an eight-minute-and-forty-six-second snuff film for the masses to wake up and challenge the unjust system our people have had to navigate for more than 400 years. They are killing us for mundane things—running, like Ahmaud Arbery; playing in the park, like Tamir Rice. They’ve always killed us for unexceptional reasons. But now the entire country gets to watch life leak away from Black bodies in high definition.

I started writing this on the eve of what should have been Breonna Taylor’s 27th birthday. The police broke into her home while she was sleeping and killed her. I write to you during a global pandemic, during a time when COVID-19 has had disproportionate impact on Black and brown communities. I conclude my thoughts during what should have been the summer before Tamir Rice’s senior year of high school. All the old protective mechanisms and safety nets Black people created for ourselves aren’t working anymore. Sometimes compliance is not enough. Sometimes they kill you anyway.

Having grown up in the Deep South, I have long been aware of the threat of racial violence, of its symbolism. In middle school, many of my peers wore the Dixie Outfitters T-shirts that were in vogue in that part of the country during the late nineties. The shirts often featured collages of the Confederate flag, puppies, and shotguns on the front, with slogans like “Stand and Fight for Southern Rights” and “Preserving Southern Heritage Since 1861” printed on the back.

I was 11 years old, and these kids—and their commitment to a symbol from a long-lost war—signaled that they believed I shouldn’t be in the same classroom with them, that I didn’t belong in their world.

But that was nothing compared with the routine brutality perpetrated upon Black people in my home state. In 2010, years before the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Sandra Bland, there was the killing of Anthony Hill. Gregory Collins, a white worker at a local poultry plant not far from my family farm, shot and killed Hill, his Black coworker. He dragged Hill’s body behind his pickup truck for ten miles along the highways near my grandmother’s house, leaving a trail of blood and tendons. Abandoned on the road, the corpse was found with a single gunshot wound to the head and a rope tied around what remained of the body. Collins was sentenced for manslaughter. Five years ago, a radicalized white supremacist murdered nine Black parishioners as they prayed in Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. South Carolina is one of three states that still does not have a hate-crime law.

All the old protective mechanisms and safety nets Black people created for ourselves aren’t working anymore. Sometimes compliance is not enough. Sometimes they will kill you anyway.

Before my writing residency, I did not own a range map. Traditionally, these are used to depict plant and animal habitats and indicate where certain species thrive. Ranges are often defined by climate, food sources, water availability, the presence of predators, and a species’s ability to adapt.

My friend J. Drew Lanham taught me I could apply this sort of logic to myself. A Black ornithologist and professor of wildlife ecology, he was unfazed by what happened to birdwatcher Christian Cooper in Central Park—he’s had his own encounters with white people who can’t understand why he might be standing in a field with binoculars in his hand. Several years ago he wrote a piece for Orion magazine called “9 Rules for the Black Birdwatcher.”

“Carry your binoculars—and three forms of identification—at all times,” he wrote. “You’ll need the binoculars to pick that tufted duck out of the flock of scaup and ring-necks. You’ll need the photo ID to convince the cops, FBI, Homeland Security, and the flashlight-toting security guard that you’re not a terrorist or escaped convict.” Drew frequently checks the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate-group map and the Equal Justice Initiative’s “Lynching in America” map and overlays them. The blank spaces are those he might travel to.

I never thought to lay out the data like that until the day I went to Abrams Creek.

Three weeks into my residency, I made an early-afternoon visit to the national-park archives. I needed to know what information they had on Black people. I left with one sheet of paper—a slave schedule that listed the age, sex, and race (“black” or “mulatto”) of bodies held in captivity. There were no names. There were no pictures. I remember chiding myself for believing there might be.

Emotionally wrought and with a couple of hours of sunlight ahead of me, I decided to go for a drive to clear my mind. I came to the Smokies with dreams of writing about the natural world. I wanted to talk about the enigmatic Walker sisters, the park’s brook trout restoration efforts, and the groundbreaking agreement that the National Park Service reached with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians about their right to sustainably harvest the edible sochan plant on their ancestral lands. My Blackness, and curiosity about the Black people living in this region, was not at the front of my mind. I naively figured I would learn about them in the historical panels of the visitor’s center, along with the former white inhabitants and the Cherokee. I thought there would be a book or a guide about them.

There was nothing.

Vacations are meant to be methods of escapism. Believing this idyllic wilderness to be free of struggle, of complicated emotions, allows visitors to enjoy their day hikes. Many tourists to Great Smoky Mountains National Park see what they believe it has always been: rainbow-emitting waterfalls, cathedrals of green, carpets of yellow trillium in the spring. The majority never venture more than a couple of miles off the main road. They haven’t trained their eyes to look for the overgrown homesites of the park’s former inhabitants through the thick underbrush. Using the park as a side trip from the popular tourist destinations like Dollywood and Ripley’s Believe it or Not, they aren’t hiking the trails that pass by cemeteries where entire communities of white, enslaved, and emancipated people lived, loved, worked, died, and were buried, some, without ever being paid a living wage. Slavery here was arguably more intimate. An owner had four slaves, not 400. But it happened.

There is a revisionist fantasy that Americans cling to about the people in this region of North Carolina and Tennessee: that they were dirt-poor, struggled to survive, and wrestled the mountains into submission with their own brute strength. In reality, many families hired their sharecropping neighbors, along with Black convicts on chain gangs, to do the hard labor for them.

These corrections of history aren’t conversations most people are interested in having.

After a fruitless stop at Fontana Dam, the site of a former African American settlement where I find precious little to see, I try to navigate back to where I’m staying. Cell service is spotty. My phone’s GPS takes me on a new route along the edge of the park, through Happy Valley, which you can assume from the moniker is less than happy.

Early spring in the mountains is not as beautiful as you might believe. The trees are bare, and you can see the Confederate and Gadsden flags, the latter with their coiled rattlesnakes, flapping in the wind, so they do not take you by surprise. At home after home, I see flag after flag. The banners tell me that down in this valley I am on my own, as do the corpses of Jonathan A. Ferrell and Renisha McBride, Black people who knocked on the doors of white homeowners asking for help and were shot in response.

In the middle of this drive back to the part of the park where I belong, I round a corner to see a man burning a big pile of lumber, the flames taller than my car.

I am convinced that pyrophobia is embedded in my genes. The Ku Klux Klan was notorious for cross burnings and a willingness to torch homes. The fire over my shoulder is large enough to burn up any evidence that I ever existed. There is a man standing in his yard wearing a baseball cap and holding a drink, watching me as my white rental car creeps by. I want to ask him how to get out of here. I think of my mama’s frantic phone calls going straight to voice mail. I stay in the car.

Farther down the road, another man is burning a big pile of lumber. I know it’s just coincidence, that these bundles of timber were stacked before I set off down this path, but the symbolism unnerves me.

I round a bend and a familiar sign appears—a national-park placard with the words “Abrams Creek Campground Ranger Station” in white letters. Believing some fresh air might settle my stomach and strengthen my nerves, I decide to enter that section of the park. The road I drive is the border between someone’s property and the park. Uneven, it forces me to go slowly.

The dog is at my car before I recognize what is happening. It materializes as a strawberry blond streak bumping up against my driver-side door. Tall enough to reach my face, it is gnashing at my side mirror, trying to bite my reflection.

I’m not scared of dogs, but this one, with its explicit hostility, gives me pause.

Before emancipation, dogs hunted runaway slaves by scent, often maiming the quarry to keep them in place until their owner could arrive. During the civil rights movement, dogs were weaponized by police. In the modern era, use of K-9 units to intimidate and attack is so common that police have referred to Black people as “dog biscuits.”

I force myself to keep driving.

When I reach the ranger station, the building is dark: closed for the season. I see a trail inviting me to walk between two shortleaf pines, but I decline. There is something in me that is more wound up than it has a right to be. No one knows my whereabouts. Despite making up 13 percent of the population, more than 30 percent of all missing persons in the U.S. in 2019 were Black. A significant portion of these cases are never covered by the news. The chances of me disappearing without a mention are higher than I’d like.

There are three cars in the little gravel parking lot. A pair of men, both bigger than me, are illegally flying drones around the clearing, and there is palpable apprehension around my presence. They don’t acknowledge me, and I can’t think of what I’m supposed to say to convince them I’m not a threat. I have no idea who the third car belongs to—they are somewhere in my periphery, real and not real, an ancillary portion of my calculation.

I take photos of the clearing, including the cars, just in case I don’t make it out. It is the only thing I know to do.

I run my odds. No one in an official capacity to enforce the rules, no cell service to call for help, little knowledge of the area. I leave. Later, my residency mentor gently suggests that maybe I don’t visit that section of the park alone anymore.

A favorite spot in the Smokies (Photo: Kennedi Carter)

Ipromise that there are parts of this park, and by extension the outdoors as a whole, that make visiting worth it. Time in nature is integral to my physical, spiritual, and mental health. I chase the radiant moments, because as a person who struggles with chronic depression, the times I am enthusiastically happy are few and far between. Most of them happen outside.

I relish the moments right before sunrise up at Purchase Knob in the North Carolina section of the Smokies. The world is quiet, my mind is still, and the birds, chattering to one another, do not mind my presence. I believe this is what Eden must have been like. I still live for the nights where I sink into my sleeping pad while I cowboy-camp, with nothing in or above my head except the stars. I believe in the healing power of hiking, the days when I am strong, capable, at home in my body.

The fear, on some level, will always exist. I say this to myself all the time: I know you’re scared. Do it anyway.

Toward the end of my writing residency, the road to Clingmans Dome opens. At 6,643 feet, Clingmans is the highest point in Tennessee and in the park. About two days before I’m scheduled to leave, I go to see what this peak holds for me.

There is a paved trail leading to the observatory at the summit. It isn’t long, just steep. Maybe it’s the elevation; I have to do the hike 20 steps at a time, putting one foot in front of the other until I get to 20, then starting over again. I catch my breath in ragged clips, and there are moments when I can feel my heartbeat throbbing in my fingertips. I’d planned to be at the top for sunset, but I realize the sun might be gone when I get there. I continue anyhow. I’m slow but stubborn.

If there’s anything I appreciate about the crucible we’re living in, it’s the role of social media in creating a place for us when others won’t. We’re no longer waiting for outdoors companies to find the budget for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. With the creation of a hashtag, a social media movement, suddenly we are hyper-visible, proud, and unyielding.

As I make my way up the ramp toward its intersection with the Appalachian Trail, I think about Will Robinson (@akunahikes on Instagram), the first documented African American man to complete the triple crown of hiking: the Appalachian, Pacific Crest, and Continental Divide Trails. I understand that I’m following in Robinson’s footsteps, and those of other Black explorers like writer Rahawa Haile (@rahawahaile) and long-haul hiker Daniel White (@theblackalachian)—people who passed this way while completing their AT through-hikes and whom I now call friends, thanks to the internet. I smile and think of them as the trail meets the pavement, and stop for a moment. We have all seen this junction.

Their stories, videos, and photographs tell me what they know of the world I’m still learning to navigate. They are the adventurers I’ve been rooting for since the very beginning, and now I know they’re also rooting for me.

It’s our turn to wish for good things for you.

We’re no longer waiting for outdoors companies to find the budget for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. With the creation of a hashtag, a social media movement, suddenly we are hypervisible, proud, and unyielding.

When I get to the summit the world is tinged in blue, and with minimal cloud cover I can see the borders of seven states. There is nothing around me now but heaven. I’m grateful I didn’t quit.

My daddy had a saying that I hated as a child: “The man on top of the mountain didn’t fall there.” It’s a quote by NFL coach Vince Lombardi, who during the fifties and sixties refused to give in to the racial pressures of the time and segregate his Green Bay Packers. It took me decades to understand what those two were trying to tell me, but standing at the top of Clingmans Dome, I get it. The trick is that there is no trick. You learn to eat fire by eating fire.

But none of us has to do it alone.

America is a vast place, and we often feel isolated because of its geography. But there are organizations around the country that have our backs: Black Outside, Inc., Color Outside, WeGotNext, Outdoor Afro, Black Folks Camp Too, Blackpackers, Melanin Base Camp, and others.

The honest discussions must happen now. I acknowledge that I am the descendant of enslaved people—folks who someone else kidnapped from their homeland and held captive in this one.

We were more than bodies then.

We are more than bodies now.

We have survived fierce things.

My ancestors survived genocide, the centuries-long hostage situation they were born into, and the tortures that followed when they called for freedom and equality. They witnessed murder. They endured as their wages and dreams were taken from them by systemic policies and physical force. And yet, because of their drive to survive, I am here.

I stand in the stream of a legacy started by my ancestors and populated by present-day Black trailblazers like outdoors journalist James Edward Mills, environmental-justice activist Teresa Baker, and conservationists Audrey and Frank Peterman. Remembering them—their struggles and triumphs—allows me to center myself in this scenery, as part of this landscape, and claim it as my history. This might be the closest thing to reparations that this country, founded on lofty ideals from morally bankrupt slaveholders, will ever give me.

I promised you at the beginning that I would be candid about the violence and even-keeled about the hope. I still have hope—I consider it essential for navigating these spaces, for being critical of America. I wouldn’t be this way if I didn’t know there was a better day coming for this country.

Even when hope doesn’t reside within me—those days happen, too—I know that it is safely in the hands of fellow Black adventurers to hold until I am ready to reclaim my share of it. I pray almost unceasingly for your ability to understand how powerful you are. If you weren’t, they wouldn’t be trying to keep you out, to make sure they keep the beauty and understanding of this vast world to themselves. If we weren’t rewriting the story about who belongs in these places, they wouldn’t be so focused on silencing us with their physical intimidation and calls for murder.

The more we see, the more we document, the more we share, the better we can empower those who come after us. I’ve learned during all my years of historical research that even when white guilt, complacency, and intentional neglect try to erase our presence, there is always a trace. Now there are hundreds of us, if not thousands, intent on blazing a trail.

It is true: I cannot protect you. But there is one thing I can continue to do: let you know that you are not alone in doing this big, monumental thing. You deserve a life of adventure, of joy, of enlightenment. The outdoors are part of our inheritance. So I will keep writing, posting photos, and doing my own signaling. For every new place I visit, and the old ones I return to, my message to you is that you belong here, too.

Latria Graham is a journalist and fifth-generation farmer living in South Carolina. Her writing has appeared in Oxford American, Bicycling, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Backpacker, The Guardian, Southern Living, and other local and national outlets. You can find more of her work at LatriaGraham.com.

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The Weekend Warrior Home Edition 8/14/20 – SPUTNIK, THE SILENCING, FREELAND, SPREE, THE BAY OF SILENCE

Another week, another batch of movies to get through in hopes there’s one or two worth writing about… and then writing about all of them anyway. (Sigh). I hope there are people reading this, at least. If so, go to the bottom of this column and drop me a line!

Before I get to this week’s movies, I want to give a special congratulatory shout-out to the wonderful Melanie Addington, because this is the final week of the 17th annual Oxford Film Festival. I have to say as someone who regularly covers a couple other bigger festivals, she’s done such an amazing job pivoting to the virtual world, to the point where what usually is a five-day very localized festival turned into a nationwide digital festival that’s been stretched out for 16 weeks! Those bigger festivals like SXSW and Tribeca could take a lesson from Oxford, because what usually are two highly-anticipated festivals every year became a whole lot of nothing thanks to COVID. It’s like they gave up, rolled over and just died. Oxford, meanwhile, has done Zoom QnAs with a lot of the filmmakers and casts from its films to help maintain the community feeling that makes the festival such a great destination for those in-the-know. (I haven’t even gotten into the amazing drive-in screenings or the year-round On Demand program they’ve been having over the past couple months.)

Anyway, OFF ends this week with the world-premiere of a movie that was supposed to open at SXSW, Mario Furlani and Kate McLean’s debut feature FREELAND, starring Krisha Fairchild from Trey Shults’ movie, Krisha. Freeland is a similarly strong indie r drama, this one starring Ms. Fairchild as Davi, a black market marijuana farmer in Humboldt County, Norther California, who sees her way of life changing when she’s forced to go legal after California legalizes marijuana. Instead, these changes might run her out of business. It’s a beautifully-shot (Furlani is also the cinematographer) character drama that spotlights Fairchild giving another memorable performance, surrounded by an equally excellent cast that includes Lily Gladstone from Certain Women. I hope a good distributor like IFC or Magnolia will scoop this up for release, as I think it’s an interesting look into the pot business from a unique perspective. I also think it could do VERY well at the Indie Spirits. You can watch Freeland for a couple more days (at least) with a QnA with cast and crew on Thursday night right here.

Also, check out the Eventive site for the final week line-up which includes a TON of shorts. (Be mindful, that some of the content, specifically The Offline Playlist, will only be watchable if you’re in Mississippi.)

Also starting this week on Thursday is the 5th Annual Dallas-based Women Texas Film Festival (aka WTxFF), also going virtual this year, which I don’t really know that much about, but it’s run by my friend, Justina Walford, and she generally knows her shit when it comes to movies. Its mission pledge is right there in the title, but all the movies in the festival have a woman in at least one creative role. You can check out the full list of movies playing here, although they are geoblocked to Texas unfortunately. The festival’s series of panels and QnAs, though, can be watched anywhere in the United States, and those should be good.

Let’s get to the regular releases….

This week’s “Featured Flick” is Russian filmmaker Egor Abramenko’s SPUTNIK (IFC Midnight), a sci-fi thriller taking place in 1983 after an incident the Russian spaceship Orbit-4 that leaves one of the cosmonauts in detention after the death of his commander. Oksana Akinshina (who was in The Bourne Supremacy) plays Tatyana Klimova, a psychologist sent to study the surviving cosmonaut, Konstantin Veshnyakov (Pyotr Fyodorov), and she learns that he brought back something with him from space.

I was a little worried about this movie, only because the opening reminded me so much of my experience watching the original Russian film Solaris so many years ago. Its quizzical opening in space leads to Akinshina’s character being introduced in a way that’s so slow and talkie that I worried about what I should expect from the movie as a whole. Thankfully, about 20 minutes in, we meet the creature that’s seemingly come down from space inside the cosmonaut, and it immediately changes the very nature of the film.

I don’t want to spoil too much about why the movie gets so interesting, because it’s not non-stop creature kills, although the movie does get quite exciting every time this creature emerges, particularly when it’s being fed various Russian convicts. Even so, the film always remains fairly cerebral about the creature’s origins and its relationship to the cosmonaut, who abandoned a child before his fateful space accident. Adding to the grey area about whether Tatyana should ally herself with Konstantin is her supervising officer, played by Fedor Bondarchuk, who clearly wants to use the creature as a weapon, knowing that both Konstantin and his “other” only trusts Tatyana, so they all need her.

Needless to say, the creature design is absolutely fantastic, and the comparisons this movie is going to get to Alien are quite apt, because the creature is on par with the xenomorph. I only wish I could see it better since it only comes out in the dark, and watching a movie that plays with light like this one does is just not conducive to watching on a laptop. (In fact, if you’re in a position to see Sputnik in a theater, even a drive-in, and you’re not averse to subtitles, I’d recommend going that route.)

Sputnik might fool you at first into expecting something in the vein of the original Solaris. In fact, it’s more in line with The Invisible Man, a creature feature that explores one man’s inner demons through the lens of science fiction. This probably would have been a better Venom movie than the one we actually got.

Jamie Lannister himself, Nicolaj Costar-Waldau stars in THE SILENCING (Saban Films) the English language debut of Belgian filmmaker Robin Pront (The Ardennes), a dark action-thriller set in the rural area of Echo Falls where a serial killer is hunting and killing young women and girls.

Robin Pront’s The Silencing is usually the type of movie I’d enjoy, if only I haven’t seen the exact same movie so many times before. I wasn’t sure whether it’s Costar-Waldau’s alcoholic hunter Rayburn Swanson, whose daughter disappeared years earlier, or it was cause of Annabelle Wallis, the town’s sheriff, Alice Gustafson, whose troubled brother Brooks (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) is caught up enough in the towns drug issues to act as the movie’s second-act red herring. Throw in the Native American aspect of the movie, and you’re right back at Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River, which was just a much better version of this movie all around.

Adding to the lack of originality is the fact that there are now so many television shows about serial killers, which is a shame since Pront’s previous film showed so much promise but also suffered from similar issues. Costar-Waldau gives a credible performance, maybe slightly better than Wallis, but we’ve seen this movie so many times before that even trying to throw in a twist or two goes awry since no one ever commits. The major plot twist about halfway in has an opportunity to change everything but instead, it’s negated mere minutes later.

Slow and grim, The Silencing suffers from being an overused genre that’s been done so much better before. It’s already been playing on DirecTV but will be in select theaters, On Demand and Digital this Friday.

Next up is the thriller THE BAY OF SILENCE (Vertical Entertainment), starring Claes Bang from The Square as Will, whose girlfriend and baby momma Rosalind (Olga Kurylenko) vanishes with their twin daughters and baby son, and her father Milton (Brian Cox) seems to know more than he’s telling. The film is written and produced by British actor Caroline Goodall (who has a small role in this one), adapted from Lisa St. Aubin de Teran's 1986 novel and directed by Dutch filmmaker Paula van der Oest, who has made some decent films like Black Butterflies and the Oscar-nominated Zus & Zo.

We meet Will and Ros as they’re having a romantic moment in the titular bay in Luguria, Italy, and after a few odd occurrences, Ros vanishes with her twin girls and the baby boy they had together. It doesn’t take long for Will to find her, but she seems to have gone insane, and Will needs to find out what happened.

Honestly, it’s not worth getting too deep into this movie’s plot, not so much due to spoilers, but more because there are just so many WTF moments that happen out of the blue, and then the next moment they’re forgotten. For whatever reason, the movie just doesn’t allow any of the tension or mystery to build, and even the most horrificly grim plot turn is handled so matter-of-factly.

There’s no question that van der Oest is a fine filmmaker, something you can tell from the general look of the movie, but the pacing and tons is generally all over the place as nothing happens and then a LOT happens. Bang’s decent performance is countered by a lot of overacting from Kulryenko, and while Cox plays a much bigger role in the story than you might expect, his scenes do very little to elevate the film’s plodding tone.

The Bay of Silence is a highly uneven and bland thriller that tries to offer a twist a minute with very of them ever really connecting, instead feeling grim and tedious and like a lot of wasted potential. Oddly, it feels more original than The Silencing above but just doesn’t come together even as well.

Where do I even begin with Eugene Kotlyarenko’s SPREE (RLJE Films) except that it stars Stranger Thing’s Joe Keery as Kurt Kunkle “of Kunkle’s World,” a social media vlog where he tries to get viewer’s attention and likes. He finally decides to go on a killing spree (get it?) while picking up passengers in his car ride service Spree (see?), until he encounters a stand-up comic (Sasheer Zamata) who fights back.

Listen, I understand fine why a movie like Spree might get made, since it’s meant to be relevant to the youngsters, who are much like Kurt, totally obsessed with their own social media and getting attention. The idea of some kid becoming a serial killer just to draw more attention to himself is not exactly incredible. I found Kurt so annoying that I didn’t think I would ever be able to have any empathy for him, and I was right.

We basically watch Kurt driving around and killing various people, most of them pretty horrible, granted, but Keery comes off more like a bargain-basement Christian Bale in American Psycho. Zamata is generally the best part of the movie, which is why the last third starts to get past some of the movie’s earlier problems to become more about an actual influencer showing Kurt how it’s done. (Zamata’s “SNL” castmate Kyle Mooney can’t really do much to make their scenes together funnier, since it’s just another sleazeball hitting on her.)

David Arquette also has a few funny scenes as Kurt’s father, but what’s probably gonna throw a lot of people off and make or break the movie is that so much of it is made to look like it was filmed on a smartphone, complete with running commentary from the viewers that you’re supposed to read, and presumably enjoy? Me, I just found it annoying.

Spree is gonna be one of those love-it-or-hate-it movies depending on which side of the age gap you’re on. To me, it just seemed way too obvious and not something I could possibly recommend to anyone over 19.

Okay… Documentary time!

I really wanted to like Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ BOYS STATE (A24/Apple TV+), which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and received Special Jury Prize at SXSW Film Festival, but it’s a pollical doc that deals with a subject that just didn’t interest me very much. It follows a thousand teen boys from Texas who come together to form a government from the ground up, and that’s the problem right there. The fact this is all about guys. I just couldn’t get interested enough to watch the whole thing since it seemed obvious how it would turn out. Boys State was supposed to open in select cities last month but instead, it will be on Apple TV+ Friday after getting a few drive-in preview screenings, cause that’s just the way things are going these days.

Willa Kammerer’s Starting at Zero: Reimagining Education in America (Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation/Abramorama), which will open in Virtual Cinema Friday after a Virtual Premiere tonight. It seems very timely, as it deals with investing in high-quality early child education. Just as timely is Muta’Ali Muhammad’s Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn (HBO Documentary Films), which premieres on HBO tonight, looking at the events around the 1989 murder of teenager Yusuf Hawkins by a group of white men in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Erik Nelson’s doc Apocalypse ’45 (Discovery/Abramorama), which will be in theaters this Friday and on Discovery over Labor Day weekend, is about the end of World War II, using never-before-seen footage with narration by 24 men who were there for it.

Quiver Distribution has two movies out this Friday, both which could probably be seen as young adult movies – not really a genre I like very much, so your mileage may vary?

ENDLESS from director Scott Speer (Midnight Sun) is a romantic drama starring Alexandra Shipp (X-Men: Apocalypse) as graphic novelist Riley, whose boyfriend, Nick Hamilton’s Chris gets stranded in limbo after he’s killed in a car crash. Taking the blame for his death on herself, Riley struggles to find ways to reconnect with Chris in the afterlife.

I wasn’t sure if this movie would be for me, since I’m not a very big fan of young adult movies generally. So many of them have hard-to-believe high-concept premises involving two lovelorn teens – Midnight Sun being a good example. Unlike so many of these movies, Endless isn’t based on a popular book, and I was a little worried about Speer’s skills as a director and whether he could avoid turning this into a very obvious teen version of Ghost. There’s a little bit of that but on a whole, the movie isn’t a complete waste of time. For instance, Shipp is decent in this sort of dramatic role, probably better than Hamilton, and it avoids getting too weepy thanks to DeRon Horton’s animated Jordan, who befriends Chris in limbo and quickly becomes the movie’s frequent saving grace.

Otherwise, the movie feels like any other soppy teen romantic drama, being very predicable with way too much overacting, particularly from Fammke Janssen as Chris’ Mom. Even though the relationship between Shipp and Hamilton works fine, unless you’re on board with the whole concept of the latter spending the entire film as a spirit, you’re going to have a hard time fully enjoying the movie.

In Bobby Roth’s PEARL, Larsen Thompson plays the title character, a 15-year-old piano prodigy whose mother Helen (Sarah Carter from The Flash) is murdered by her stepfather (Nestor Carbonell). She’s sent to live with Jack Wolf (Anthony LaPaglia), an unemployed film director, who used to be one of her mother’s ex-lovers, who also might be Pearl’s father. I know! Let’s spend an entire movie going back and forth trying to figure it out, okay?

I don’t have a ton to say about this movie, but if for some reason, you want to watch it just cause you’re a fan of Carter from The Flash, you should know that she appears in the movie via a series of black and white flashbacks to show her relationship with Jack, but those might be the best part of a very bad movie.

Thompson just isn’t a very solid actor to carry this, and Roth must have pulled a lot of favors to get this movie made ‘cause it wasn’t financed based on the script. Her relationship with LaPaglia just seems kinda creepy. Things just gets worse and worse, especially when Pearl goes to school and the other girls act like they’re in prison. There’s also Barbara Williams as Pearl’s alcoholic grandmother – the fun just never begins, does it?

At its worst, Pearl comes across like a Lifetime movie – not the first time I’ve used this statement this year and probably not the last. It’s just very dull and not a very good movie; LaPaglia is way too good an actor who deserves better than this.

Also on VOD this week is Kevin Tran’s Dark End of the Street (Gravitas Ventures), an indie horror movie involving a community in the suburbs plagued by someone who is killing the residents’ pets. This wasn’t a terrible movie but I had a hard time getting past the general premise about killing pets, so it was hard to get into what Tran tried to do in terms of putting a twist on a tried-and-true horror genre. Maybe I’ll give this another try after finishing this column.

Also, Ben Galland’s action-comedy Gripped: Climbing the Killer Pillar (1091) follows Rose (Megan Kesley), a L.A. gym climber who falls for rugged outdoorsman Bret (Kaiwi Lyman) as they embark on a trip to climb the “Killer Pillar” in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, only to get caught on a cliff edge.

The Metrograph’s Live Screening Series is continuing with a great line-up over the rest of August with the Satoshi Kon Retrospective continuing with Millennium Actress playing until midnight tonight, plus Masaaki Yuasa & Koji Morimoto’s popular 2004 film Mind Game starting Wednesday night at 8pm. Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001) will screen on Friday at 8pm, and then Monday, Jenna Bliss’ animated The People’s Detox (2018) will join the screening library. To become a digital member, it’s only $5 a month or $50 for a year, which is a great deal for the amount of movies you see.

Film at Lincoln Center’s Virtual Cinema will stream Paulo Rocha’s 1963 film Change of Life starting Friday while Film Forum will stream Weiner Holzemer’s doc Martin Margiella: In His Own Words about the fashion designer, as well as Bert Stern’s Jazz on a Summer’s Day which is a 1959 documentary about the fashion photographer filming the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival with the likes of Louis Armstrong, Hoagy Carmichael, Mahalia Jackson, Thelonious Monk and many more.

Apparently, Netflix has a new movie out on Friday called Project Power, starring Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but I received ABSOLUTELY NADA about it from Netflix, so this is all you get. Watch out, Netflix, there are a lot of streaming options out there now!

Speaking of drive-ins (which I was WAY up there), on Wednesday, you can catch the latest in Amazon Studios “A Night at the Drive In” series. “Movies to Make You Open Your Eyes,” which will screen Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Jordan Peele’s Get Out.

Next week, more movies not in theaters!

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!

#TheWeekendWarrior #Movies #Reviews #OxfordFilmFestival #Sputnik #Spree #vodun #TheSilencing #TheBayOfSilence #BoysState #Pearl #Endless

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