#but with more of a God Complex blake also has the. god complex <3 about his friends

[cosmik-homo]

blake is not REMOTELY a nothingburger protagonist he has a lot of interesting shit going on its just very tied- by the protagonism but not remotely just that, its an active part of who he is- to plot and setting and stuff. Its not really convenient for shortform ramble-posting. except maybe "I think he'd do honestly p good if

[blazethecheeto]

ATLAS PARADOX RAMBLING

dude this book. i need to talk. about it. im going insane.

everyone who hasn't read it, PLEASE DO!!! it's a dark academia book about a bunch of gay silly magic people that join a society and try to kill each other. there's time travel, a big ass polycule, aesthetic scenes, the prettiest writing style in the world, science, philosophy, and fucked family. (opposite of found family).

(extremely chaotic unorganized long rant below, with spoilers. click at your own risk)

FIRST OF ALL WHY WAS THIS SO MUCH BETTER THAN THE FIRST ONE?!!?!?

i had to power through the first one, it felt long, and unnecessary and like trekking through a JUNGLE with the thickest and most intricate ecosystem that i had to peel back and unravel for hours and hours. only to like move the plot by an inch.

BUT THIS. olivie blake found her footing because this was so good. i am aware the reviews hate on this book and some people don't like it, but personally i adore it and it's really well written.

CHARACTERS

bro they all had such wonderful voices, like they were distinct and unique from each other but not drastically, noticeably different I NEED TO LEARN FROM THIS. six of crows and the atlas six do multi povs so well <3 its like this book was made for me, each character was perfect and incredible and gay and silly and-

reina. love of my life. i look forward to all her povs because the plants are so silly and she's the best character. i said it. she's canon asexual now too YEES. i needed more of her because she was barely in the first one, and they DELIVERED. the juicy plot with her 'god complex' (ily callum) and her feelings getting hurt and learning she actually is lonely and wants friends? she's so wanda maximoff. next book better have her opening up and learning to love people or i riot (and also her killing people and being the badass she is)

parisa always my fave too, i do wish her character wasn't always talking about sex or romance, there were some great moments in this book where she showed off her telepathy powers (the prince in the tower!!) it was awesome. i'm glad they acknowledged that side of her with reina, (oh my god i ship them so much wait till i rant about them-) but dude i still HATE DALTON. SO MUCH. OH MY GOD. every time it's her pov i dread seeing dalton, i wish she could give that up. generic white men should die.

CALLUM. whatever turned him from complex, daunting, and a psychopath last book to janus from sanders sides this book- beautiful choice. he's literally the one sassy wine-sipping gay aunt that feels nothing and everything at once, also extremely mentally ill and depressed. he's SO FUNNY. his povs are fucking hilarious to read, and he quickly became one of my faves bc of how complex he is. i'm not smart enough to decipher and psychoanalyze him but god i LOVE CHARACTERS LIKE THIS.

i don't know what happened but nico is literally one of my faves now too, he's so silly and sweet and kind and i loved his relationships with everyone this book. like him trying to murder tristan in multiple different ways oml. he's my bbg. tristan was hit or miss for me, i did find him interesting but he's not my favourite. doesn't mean i hate him, he's so very british, i feel it radiating off the page. libby my queen my icon, her dream povs were so trippy i loved it- so so realistic to a real dream, that was the most surprising and unique part. also my bisexual queen seducing belen??

i did not like ezra and atlas was a little iffy here and there but tbh the cast was so well rounded and interesting and unique but paralleled each other so well?? THE RELATIONSHIPS. I DONT THINK ANY BOOK HAS THIS INTRICATE WEB-LIKE RELATIONSHIPS WITH EACH OTHER. they're one big polycule.

RELATIONSHIPS

nico and libby <3 i love them so much as siblings/queerplatonic partners. i don't ship them romantically, because i LOVE how they subverted the eye-rolling predictable ' YA academic rivals enemies to lovers' trope. when i started TAS, i immediately thought they were gonna get together and assumed the worst. but no, they still had the banter and importance in their relationship but without the romance? instead both of them were gay af. it's beautiful. i love subverting tropes so much. they're each other's 'other half' and they're hilarious together.

NICO AND TRISTAN. they were such a highlight this book, it was unexpected but so funny. nico trying to murder tristan and their little talks because 'they're not friends...just coworkers' yeah right, the best friendships start with creatively murdering each other. tristan being droll and chill af, and then nico bouncing off the walls my adhd king.

reina and nico broke me?? like that one chapter where they sparred and caught up with each other and reina was guarding her hurt feelings. DUDE THAT KILLED ME. made me stare at the ceiling for a good minute. their friendship is everything to me, they contrast each other so well. she deserves to be treated better- when they had that projection chapter and she saw that nico downplayed her skills...like she was good, but not good enough for him to care about her. AGGHGH.

REINA AND PARISA. NOW THIS. THIS HOOKED ME INTO THE BOOK. i ship them so bad guys. they parallel each other and are both hot and enemies to lovers and wlw slow burn and- look. reina is asexual, therefore the only person to truly see and understand parisa for who she is, and not be influenced by her body. like that one projection. she can help parisa understand HERSELF and who she is past her sexual desirability. how to love someone again. romantically. then, on the flip side, parisa can help reina see and understand OTHERS. reina only sees people as one trait, cut and dry- without any of the complex feelings. parisa is a telepath, she knows how to read others. THEY CAN BOTH HELP EACH OTHER AND LOVE EACH OTHER IN WAYS THEY NEVER COULD HAVE OMFDADJFLSKJADFL- also reina pinned her against a wall and they want to kill each other and every time they interact i scream into my pillow-

-

'You can't love anyone right?"

"I've met very few people worth loving."

-

*throws myself off a building*

now we just gotta play the familiar game "IS IT DELUSION OR IS IT JUST SLOW BURN" and find out whether their insane chemistry pays off in book 3.

the nico parisa scene was actually sweet ngl, even though i don't ship them. the whole callum and tristan thing was so bitter exes situationship coded and i ate every second up. especially that last conversation. AND OFC. GIDEON AND NICO?!!! AAAAA THEY WERE SO CUTE THEY'RE ENDGAME I SCREAMED WHEN THEY KISSED DUDE THEYRE SO-

PLOT

now for the actual plot. this book has so many interesting subjects and philosophies and debates i'm not smart enough for this. but past all the aesthetic glamour, it's science, time travel, dreams, multiverses, fate, reality, and the complexities of the human mind. and my god it's fascinating as fuck.

do i have any idea what they do in this society?? NO. am i entertained? YES. especially that whole explosion paradox to bring libby back to the future. the whole powering the connections via aurora borealis? the whole debate about being gods? i love it. i love it.

alright im so sorry for that rant, i gotta go now but DUDE I LOVE THIS BOOK NO MATTER HOW WEIRD IT WAS

[lesewut]

“And because I am happy, and dance and sing, they think they have done me no injury.” [Chimney Sweeper]

William Blake, a wonderfully exciting poet from the Romantic era, was born in London in 1757 into a working-class family with strong nonconformist religious beliefs. Blakes believe and symbols are continously intervowen in his art. His poetic genius is trying to liberate the instinctual self and to defeat reason. Blake's ethics formulates the originator of morality and religion through the process of liberation. Overcoming phenomenal objectness or fragmentation for the sake of a symbiotic unity of humanity within themselves and peaceful harmony of man with the world.

For every soul-wanderer, reading Blake is a spiritual gift and looking at his visualised art, a dive into cosmic seas of collective psychology. Blake is breaking the lopsided emphasis of idealistic works. In all his gatherings of beauty, there is always a shadow of existential crisis. Even in the following work "Songs of Innocence", the Fall off Paradise is already happening. The violation of nature has begotten: The water is no longer clean and clear. The eternal division of humanity from the divine cosmos as a complex interplay of an individual search for the Holy Grail, is the human idiosyncrasy. The scepticism against rationalism and science is also playing a key role in Blake's work, as he underlines that only “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” [The Marriage of Heaven and Hell] and that "Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death."

Blake condemned the scientific trio of Isaac Newton, John Locke and Francis Bacon as sterile and materialistic. In this painting, (the idea of) Newton- sits on an algae covered rock, making calculations with a compass, like Urizen in Ancient of Days. He might be at the bottom of the sea, or perhaps in a black hole. He might be as Faust, signed a contract with the devil a few moments ago and then lose oneself in a cave, studying minerals and stones.

“The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.”

The work "Songs of Innocence (and Experience)" is a double set of illustrated poems showing “the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul”, the child-like and pure versus the angry and disillusioned (cf. Jung's psychology and the meanings of symbols and archetypes- The shadow of the child is the senex, vice versa). Here we also have dualistic concepts of questioning the being and the problem of theodicy: How could God tolerate the "evil" and why are bad things happening at all? If God is "the loving father" why are the humans deprived of their original goodness? Why is our world still torn between ferociousness of the few and the humble benign of the resisting ones? Through the Fall of Man the unity between man and animal was broken (Gen. 3, 17 - 19), so the seperation is a result of the "evil", which was subsequently brought into the world. An anthropological interpretation could be, that the "Fall of Man" or the "Original Sin" are narratives that memorize our cognitive faculty. First we had to be aware of ourselves and our environment, than we were able to distinguish between different kind of (living) beings. The consciousness aroused questions about ethics, examining motives, motivations and shaping a guideline of virtues (Golden Rule). But throughout the history of generating more insight- of metaphysical speculation and cosmogonic questioning of the creation of the world, it seems difficult to tell what we can really know and what are just guesses. In modern times (but beginning with Xenophanes) the imago of God is excoriated as anthropomorphic. But this statement shall not purport, that our human imagination is nothing less than an illusion and so less than nothing. As Blake wisely interlinks our assumptions with the search for the first principle:

“He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only. Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.”

Poets are the mediator dei, healing the earthly-borns from the abscence of spiritual healing. The humanity got more distrustful torwords ideals and the invisible world, but on the contrary, an individual, who always lacked deep philosophical wondering, is affected and enraptured easily through manipulative groups, who are just imitating religious sentiments, but without soul's salvation. The search of the humankind is an eternal journey to it's cosmic roots, a balancing act between boon and bane, an entanglement of wisdom and folly: Theia Mania.

“In the universe there are things that are known and things that are unknown, and in between there are doors.”

There are some theories and perspectives dealing with the similarity between holiness and madness, found in all world religions. Mania can be the consequence of confrontation with the absolute and infinite, which is overwhelming the human reason and through overstraining, turning them mad. Mystic mania is one of my favourite motifs, it is the breath of prophecy and the ecstasy of poetizing the world of illusions, as a bridge to eternal ideas. It is the idea of intensive love (to God and being), a radical self-denial for unification, a call for liberation. Paradox pairs in Blakes works are continuously expanded,

"Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence."

Blake sets contrasts or he is breaking boundaries, either way he is creating and this energy of creating out of imagination, is considered by Blake as the "only life". ______________________________________________________________ Inspired by Blakes bucolic poetry and hints of a collapsing worlds, I was incited to write a small tribute with the most common motifs of the poetry in "Songs of Innocence".

The Active Evil and Passive Good by Elvin Karda

Dwelling in the arcadia Pure daisies and cle the joyful life Piping songs of pleasant glee A child watches the piper on a cload "Pipe a song about a lamb- Let those tones into the air A reminiscence of a golden land Hidden treasures in ancient sand!" The piper plucks a hollow reed fire tunes his inner song and he stains the water clear walking the rippling stream along In the evening dew The joy is giving way to tears When green shoots turn violet- blue Error is created and eternal what is true

The child's weeping as meek as lamb But vanishes and crumbles into dust As melody clothes the tone in written words Mind and body out of touch Energy is life and like a fountain overflows Active evil is better than told with bad intent passive good

[rhodesportfolio]

SABRINA for Interview Magazine.

Sabrina Carpenter opens up to actress Maya Hawk on a personal chat for Interview Magazine. Photographed by Blake Rhode. Shot in New York City, NY.

As she finally espaces the prefab pressures of Disney-kid stardom by snatching back her artistic identity, Sabrina Carpenter followed up her first four albums with 2022’s Emails I Can’t Send, a more dangerous departure that saw the 24-year-old performer finding vulnerability in pop star problems like public breakups and internet hate. Taylor Swift took notice (she asked her fellow Pennsylvania native to help kick off the international leg of her Eras tour), as did the Catholic Church, which beefed with Sabrina over the video for her single “Feathers” (YouTube it). Someone else who’s been paying attention is the actor and singer Maya Hawke, who called Sabrina up to unpack the complexities of pop stardom.

Sabrina Carpenter wears Dress Givenchy. Bra and Underwear Fleur Du Mal. Bracelets Tiffany & Co. Stockings Wolford. Shoes Giuseppe Zanotti.

WEDNESDAY 6 PM JAN. 3, 2024 NYC

SABRINA CARPENTER: Hi, how are you?

MAYA HAWKE: I’m good. I’m so happy to be talking to you.

CARPENTER: Thank you so much for doing this. How are you feeling?

HAWKE: I’m feeling really good. I just made a sweet potato stew.

CARPENTER: Oh my gosh, you cook? My dream friends are friends who cook.

HAWKE: I cook. [Laughs] Wait, where are you?

CARPENTER: I’m in New York. I’ve told you this, but I live here half the time so I go back and forth. But this is the first year I’ve spent in New York City watching the ball drop, so I feel like I actually live here now.

HAWKE: You didn’t just watch the ball drop, you performed, right?

CARPENTER: Yeah.

HAWKE: What was that like?

Dress and Bag Dsquared2. “SC” Ring (worn on left hand throughout) Sabrina’s Own. Necklace and Rings Cartier. Garter Stylist’s Own.

CARPENTER: Surreal. It’s something I’ve wanted to do ever since I was a little girl, but for some reason it doesn’t click until you’re actually up there and Ryan Seacrest says your name.

HAWKE: I watched it and you’re such a showman, part of why I look up to you is that the visual aspect is really hard for me. Connecting the dots between the three is a really big challenge. I’m curious, did it come all at once or have you been piecing it together slowly?

Dress and Bag Dsquared2. “SC” Ring (worn on left hand throughout) Sabrina’s Own. Necklace and Rings Cartier. Garter Stylist’s Own.

CARPENTER: I like to keep my eyes and ears open for things that resonate with me because that’s what brings my world to life. But most of the time I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. It just has to be true to you, as clichéd as that sounds, because there’s no formula, as much as people like to think that you sit in an office and people tell you what you should wear and how you should act onstage.

HAWKE: Yeah. It’s more like you sit alone in your room and people call you and go, “What are you wearing? What’s the plan?” And you’re like, “I don’t know. Maybe this?”

CARPENTER: And then you end up finding what makes you feel comfortable. For me, clothing has had a huge part in that. It’s been a process of finding out what actually makes me feel comfortable. And oh my god, I’m not going to be comfortable in what I’m wearing right now in three to four years. But I have to follow what I feel at that moment.

Dress and Bag Dsquared2. “SC” Ring (worn on left hand throughout) Sabrina’s Own. Necklace and Rings Cartier. Garter Stylist’s Own.

HAWKE: That’s such a zen way to think about it. But if I hadn’t experimented in all the ways that I did, I don’t think I would be myself now.

CARPENTER: The mistakes lead you to knowing yourself the most. If I didn’t wear the hideous things I wore when I was 13, whatever fedora I had, I don’t think I would’ve been the same person I am today. Also, what a humbling experience to look back and be like, “I’ve changed.” That’s a really good sign that you’ve lived life the way you should.

HAWKE: I think so, too. I wanted to ask you about the organic growth of “Nonsense.” That song wasn’t a single, right? A fan found it and then it exploded, as far as I could tell.

CARPENTER: Yeah. Sometimes I get insecure about pop music and the fact that it can’t always resonate with people. So it was really special for me to experience that song having its own life, maybe because it felt like the closest to my true personality, as silly as that sounds.

HAWKE: That makes total sense.

CARPENTER: I get chills when my music received in a good way because I think one of the trickiest things for an artist is accepting being misunderstood. It comes with making art in any capacity.

HAWKE: Totally.

Top and Earrings Gucci. Necklace Cartier.

CARPENTER: I wrote most of the songs on Emails I Can’t Send not intending to ever put them out in the world, because I don’t think I would’ve written those songs if I thought about other people hearing them.

HAWKE: I actually feel that in the record. I started listening with “Skin” and then did a deep dive of your other stuff, but this record feels like you plunge 1,000 feet deeper into your own gut, and I’m so grateful you did.

CARPENTER: Unfortunately, you have to allow yourself to get to that point where you’re even able to do that, and until I made this album, I wasn’t at that place where I felt I could. The other day, this guy was like, “Life is so long. You just have to follow the things that make you feel something, whether that’s good or bad.” And I was like, “Wow, I always hear life is short.” But it made me really excited about the fact that I’m going to find my way through.

HAWKE: That’s a very, very important thing to remember. It’s both things. An hour can feel like an eternity and a day can go by in the blink of an eye. Time seems to be what you make of it and if you treat your life like it’s long, it will be.

CARPENTER: [Laughs] We sound like fortune cookies.

HAWKE: We do.

Dress and Belt Blumarine. Hat and Underwear Stylist’s Own. Earrings, Necklaces, and Bracelets Tiffany & Co.

CARPENTER: [Laughs] Exactly.

HAWKE: Wait, before you go, I have a couple ridiculous questions for you.

CARPENTER: Oh, please.

HAWKE: Okay. How do you choose the names of your songs?

CARPENTER: Ooh, good question. I choose the names of my songs by things I feel would jump out at me on a piece of paper, and usually my songs start with titles.

HAWKE: That’s extremely cool. Do you choose the names of your albums in similar ways?

CARPENTER: The name of my album comes through a miracle somewhere in the universe, and it usually comes the day before I have to turn in the whole thing, but I like to think I’ll get better at that as time goes on.

HAWKE: How do you decide what songs belong on the record and what songs don’t?

Dress and Belt Blumarine. Hat and Underwear Stylist’s Own. Earrings, Necklaces, and Bracelets Tiffany & Co.

CARPENTER: I spend a lot of time with them, and the ones I still want to listen to after six months to a year, that feel like they’re still brand new, resonate with me the most. But sometimes that question is a bit unanswerable because it’s a feeling.

HAWKE: And lastly, are you working on another album?

CARPENTER: I am.

HAWKE: That’s very exciting. My sisters absolutely love you.

CARPENTER: Will you tell them I say hi?

HAWKE: Duh. They will scream. Thank you so much for asking me to do this.

CARPENTER: I’m genuinely so grateful. You’re so awesome. Also, I secretly just asked you to do this because I wanted to have a conversation with you.

HAWKE: That makes me even happier.

[dwellordream]

“To understand what friendship between women was, we must first understand what it was not. Before turning to the ways in which female friendship illustrated the play of the Victorian gender system, we must develop grounds for distinguishing it from other relationships between women. This is a detour, for the subject of this chapter is female friendship; erotic desire and marriage between women are the focus of subsequent sections. But friendship, erotic infatuation, and female marriage have so often been conflated, and women’s relationships so commonly understood as essentially ambiguous, that the detour is a necessary one. 

The language of Victorian friendship was so ardent, the public face of female marriage so amicable, the comparisons between female friendship and marriage between men and women so constant, that it is no simple task to distinguish female friends from female lovers or female couples. The question “did they have sex?” is the first one on people’s lips today when confronted with a claim that women in the past were lovers—and it is almost always unanswerable. If firsthand testimony about sex is the standard for defining a relationship as sexual, then most Victorians never had sex. Scholars have yet to determine whether Thomas Carlyle was impotent; when, if ever, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor consummated their relationship; or if Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick, whose diaries recorded their experiments with fetishes, cross-dressing, and bootlicking, also had genital intercourse.

Just as one can read hundreds of Victorian letters, diaries, and memoirs without finding a single mention of menstruation or excretion, one rarely finds even oblique references to sex between husband and wife. Men and women were equally reticent about sexual activity inside and outside of marriage. In a journal that described her courtship and wedding in detail, Lady Knightley dispatched the first weeks of wedded life in two lines: “Rainald and I entered on our new life in our own home. May God bless it to us” (173). Elizabeth Butler, whose autobiography included “a little sketch of [her] rather romantic meeting” with the man who became her husband, was similarly and typically laconic about a transition defined by sexual intercourse: “June 11 of that year, 1877, was my wedding day.” 

The lack of reliable evidence of sexual activity becomes less problematic, however, if we realize that sex matters because of the social relationships it creates and concentrate on those relationships. In Victorian England, sex was assumed to be part of marriage, but could also drop out of marriage without destroying a bond never defined by sex alone. The diaries and correspondence of Anne Lister and Charlotte Cushman provide solid evidence that nineteenth-century women had genital contact and orgasms with other women, but even more importantly, they demonstrate that sex created different kinds of connections. The fleeting encounters Lister had with women she met abroad were very different from the illicit but sustained affair Cushman had with a much younger woman who became her daughter-in-law. 

Those types of affairs were in turn worlds apart from the relationships with women that Lister and Cushman called marriages, a term that did not simply mean the relationships were sexual but also connoted shared households, mingled property, and assumptions about exclusivity and durability. We can best understand what kinds of relationships women had with each other not by hunting for evidence of sex, which even if we find it will not explain much, but rather by anchoring women’s own statements about their relationships in a larger context. 

The context I provide here is the complex linguistic field of lifewriting, which brings into focus two types of relationships often confused with friendship, indeed often called friendship, but significantly different from it: 1) unrequited passion and obsessive infatuation; and 2) life partnerships, which some Victorians described as marriages between women. The most famous and best-documented example of a Victorian woman’s avowed but unreciprocated passion for another woman is Edith Simcox’s lifelong love for George Eliot, which has made her a staple figure in histories of lesbianism.

Simcox (1844–1901) was a trade-union organizer and professional writer who regularly contributed book reviews to the periodical press and published fiction and nonfiction, including a study of women’s property ownership in ancient societies, discussed in chapter 5. From 1876 to 1900, Simcox kept a journal in a locked book that surfaced in 1930. Simcox gave her life story a title, The Autobiography of a Shirtmaker, that foregrounded her successful work as a labor activist, but its actual content focused on what Simcox called “the lovepassion of her life,” her longing for George Eliot as an unattainable, idealized beloved whom she called “my goddess” or, even more reverently, “Her.”

Simcox knowingly embraced a love that could not be returned, though she was aware of reciprocated, consummated sexual love between women. Her diary alludes to a “lovers’ quarrel” among three women she knew (61) and mentions her own rejection of a woman who “professed a feeling for me different from what she had ever had for any one, it might make her happiness if I could return it” (159). Tellingly, though twentieth-century scholars often refer to Simcox euphemistically as Eliot’s devoted “friend,” Simcox rarely used the term, and modeled herself instead on a courtly lover made all the more devoted by the one-sidedness of her passion. Simcox defined her diary as an “acta diurna amoris,” a daily act of love, and aspired to keep it with a constancy that would mirror her total absorption in Eliot (3). 

After bringing Eliot two valentines in February 1878, Simcox wrote: “Yesterday I went to see her, and have been in a calm glow of happiness since:—for no special reason, only that to have been near her happens to have that effect on me. . . . I did nothing but make reckless love to her . . . I had told her of my ambition to be allowed to lie silently at her feet as she pursued her occupations” (25). George Lewes, the companion whom Eliot’s friends referred to as her husband, was present at most of these scenes, and he and Eliot tolerated and even enjoyed Simcox’s attentions, which they consciously construed as loverlike. 

During a conversation about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s love poems, Sonnets from the Portugese, Eliot told Simcox “she wished my letters could be printed in the same veiled way— ‘the Newest Heloise,’” thus situating Simcox’s missives to her in the tradition of amatory literature (39). In private, Simcox indulged fantasies of a more sensual connection, reflecting on a persistent “love that made the longing and molded the caress,” and recalling how “[i]n thinking of her, kisses used to form themselves instinctively on my lips—I seldom failed to kiss her a good night in thought” (136). 

In trying to define her love for Eliot, Simcox significantly refused to be content with one paradigm; instead, she accumulated analogies, comparing her love for Eliot to both “[m]arried love and passionate friendship” (60). Like a medieval ascetic, Simcox eroticized her lack of sexual fulfillment, arguing that her love was even more powerful than friendship or marriage because, in resigning herself to living “widowed of perfect joy,” she had felt “sharp flames consuming what was left . . . of selfish lust” (60).

In an unsent 1880 letter to Eliot, Simcox again found herself unable to select only one category to explain her love: “Do you see darling that I can only love you three lawful ways, idolatrously as Frater the Virgin Mary, in romance wise as Petrarch, Laura, or with a child’s fondness for the mother” (120). By implication, Simcox also suggested that there would be an unlawful way to love Eliot—as an adulterer who would usurp the uxurious role already occupied by Lewes. She concluded by explaining that her relationship with Eliot was too unequal to be a friendship (120). 

In the absence of the sociological and scientific shorthand provided by sexology or a codified subculture, and in the absence of a genuinely shared life that could be represented by a common history or joint possessions, women like Simcox represented their unrequited sexual desire for other women by extravagantly combining incompatible terms such as mother, lover, sister, friend, wife, and idol. Other women deployed similar rhetorical techniques of intensification and accumulation to express sexual loves that were not equally felt and did not lead to long-term partnerships. 

At age twenty, Sophia Jex-Blake (1840–1912), one of England’s first female doctors and an activist who helped open medical education to women, met philanthropist Octavia Hill (1838–1912). In a biography of Jex-Blake written in 1918 that still adhered to Victorian rhetorical conventions, Margaret Todd called her subject’s relationship with Hill a “friendship” but qualified it as one that made “the deepest impression . . . of any in the whole of her life.” Jex-Blake considered the degree of love she felt for women to be unusual, writing around 1858, “I believe I love women too much ever to love a man” (78). 

During a brief relationship that Hill soon broke off, the two women may have been sexually involved, but even so their feelings were never evenly matched. During the period when the women were closest, Hill reduced their bond to mere chumminess by calling herself and Jex-Blake “great companions” (85). By contrast, Jex-Blake was in awe of Hill and described her as both child and mother, roles often eroticized for Victorians, writing in her diary of “My dear loving strong child . . . I do love and reverence her” (85). Even after the relationship ended, Jex-Blake thought of Hill as her lifelong spouse, referring twenty years later to the “fanciful faithfulness” she maintained for her first love, to whom she left “the whole of her little property” in repeated wills (94). 

Like Simcox, Jex-Blake used intensified language to underscore the uniqueness of her emotions. When she described inviting Hill on a vacation that included a visit to Llangollen, a site made famous by the female couple who had lived there together, Jex-Blake wrote of her “heart beating like a hammer” (85) and then described Hill’s response: “She sunk her head on my lap silently, raised it in tears, then such a kiss!” (86). Female friends often exchanged kisses, but Jex-Blake’s account took the kiss out of the realm of friendship into one of heightened sensation. Although it was common for female friends to love each other and write gushingly about it, Simcox and Jex-Blake also wrote of feeling uncommon, different from the general run of women. 

Simcox identified closely with men and Jex-Blake felt unable to love men as most women did; both were extraordinarily autonomous, professionally successful, and self-conscious about the significance of their love for women. Other women also had intense erotic relationships that went beyond friendship, but were less self-conscious about those relationships, which they rarely saw as needing special explanation, and which usually lasted years or months rather than a lifetime. An example of outright insouciance about a deeply felt erotic fascination between women is found in the journals of Margaret Leicester Warren, written in the 1870s and published for private circulation in 1924. 

Little is known about Warren, who was born in 1847 and led the life of a typical upper-middle-class lady, attending church, studying drawing and music, and marrying a man in 1875. Her diary attests to a fondness for triangulated relationships that included an adolescent crush on her newlywed sister and her sister’s husband, and a brief, tumultuous engagement to a male cousin whose mother was the dramatic center of Warren’s intense emotions. In 1872, when Warren was twenty-five, she began to write incessantly about a distant cousin named Edith Leycester in entries that reveled in the experience of succumbing to another woman’s glamour: “Edith looked very beautiful and as usual I fell in love with her....Tonight Edith took me into her room. . . . She is like an enchanted princess. There is some charm or spell that has been thrown over her.”

 Numerous similar entries recorded an infatuation that combined daily familiarity with reverent mystification of a sophisticated and self-dramatizing woman. Warren’s fascination with Edith lasted several years. Unlike Simcox and Jex-Blake, Warren never self-consciously reflected that her feelings for Edith differed from conventional friendship, but like them, Warren ascribed an intensity, exclusivity, and volatility to her feelings for Edith absent from most accounts of female friendship. Indeed, Warren rarely referred to Edith as a friend when she wrote of her desire to see Edith every day and recorded their many exchanges of confidences, poetry, and gifts. 

Warren fetishized and idealized Edith, was fixated on her presence and absence, and used superlatives to describe the feelings she inspired. Within months of meeting Edith, most of Warren’s entries consisted of detailed reenactments of their daily visits and the emotions generated by each parting and reunion: “Edith was charming tonight and I was happier with her than I have ever been. She looked beautiful” (287). Warren created an erotic aura around Edith through the very act of writing about her, through a liberal use of adverbs and adjectives, and by infusing her friend’s most ordinary actions with dramatic implications. 

Describing how Edith invited her to visit her country home, for example, Warren wrote, “Edith came in and threw herself down on the chair and said quietly and gently ‘come to Toft!’” (291). Although Warren got along well with Edith’s rarely present husband, Rafe, she relished being alone with her and described the awkward, jealous scenes that took place whenever she had to share Edith with other women (362, 369). Warren found ways to dwell on the details of Edith’s beauty through references to fashion and contemporary art. Like many diarists, Warren had an almost novelistic capacity to observe and characterize people in terms of prevailing aesthetic forms. 

She described Edith with flowers in her hair, looking like a pre-Raphaelite painting, and recorded her desire to make images of Edith: “I sd. like to paint her. . . . It wd. make a good ‘golden witch’ a beautiful Enchantress” (290–91). A ride with Edith inspired Warren to pen another impassioned tableau: “All the way there in the brougham I looked at Edith’s beautiful profile, the lamp light shining on it, and the wind blowing her hair about—her face also, all lit up with enthusiasm and tenderness as she leant forward to Rafe and told him a long story . . . I . . . only thought how grand she was” (369–70). 

Shared confidences about Warren’s broken engagement to their male cousin became another medium for cultivating the women’s special intimacy. By assuring Warren that she did not side with the jilted fiance´, Edith declared an autonomous interest in her: “‘I wanted you to come here because— because I like you.’ She was sitting at her easel and never looking at me as she spoke for I was standing behind her, but when she said ‘because I like you,’ she looked backwards up at me with such an honest, soft, beautiful expression that any distrust I had still left of her trueness melted up into a cinder” (290). 

Just as Warren heightened her relationship with Edith by writing about it so effusively and at such length, the two women elevated it by coyly discussing what their interactions and feelings meant. Before one of her many departures from London, Edith asked Warren: “‘[A]re you sorry I am going? . . . How curious—why are you sorry?’ Then I told her a little of all she had done for me . . . how much life and pleasure and interest she had put into my life, and she said nothing but she just put out her hand and laid it on my hand and that from her means a great deal more than 100 things from anyone else” (293). Edith’s gesture drew on the repertory of friendship, but in the private theater of her journal, Warren transformed the touch of a hand into a uniquely meaningful clasp. 

This is not to say the relationship was one-sided. If Warren’s diary reports the two women’s interactions with any degree of accuracy, it is clear that both enjoyed creating an atmosphere of pent-up longing. Edith fed Warren’s infatuation with provocative questions and a skill for setting scenes: “She asked what things I cared for now? And I said with truth, for nothing— except seeing her” (303). Three days later, just before another of Edith’s departures, Warren paid a call: When tea was over, the dusk had begun and I . . . sat . . . at the open window. . . . By and bye Edith came and sat near me. . . . The room inside was nearly dark, but outside it was brilliant May moonlight. . . . Edith sat there ready to go, looking very pale and very sad with the light on her face. . . . We did not talk much. She asked me to go to the party tonight and to think of her at 11. . . . She said goodbye and she kissed me, for the first time. (303–4) 

Warren is exquisitely sensitive to every element that connotes eroticism: a darkened room, physical proximity, complicit silence, a romantic demand that the beloved remain present in her lover’s mind even when absent, a kiss whose uniqueness—“for the first time”—suggests a beginning. Any one of these actions would have been unremarkable between female friends, but comparison with other women’s diaries shows how distinctive it was for Warren to list so many gestures within one entry, without defining and therefore restricting their meaning. Warren’s attitude also distinguishes her emotions from those articulated by women who took their love for women in a more conjugal or sexual direction. Her journals combine exhaustive attention to the beloved with a pervasive indifference to interrogating what that fascination might mean. 

Never classified as friendship or love, Warren’s feelings for Edith had the advantages and limits of remaining in the realm of suggestion, where they could expand infinitely without ever being realized or checked. Women who consummated a mutual love and consolidated it by forming a conjugal household were less likely to leave records of their most impassioned moods and deeds than those whose love went unrequited or undefined. Indeed, women in what were sometimes called “female marriages” (a term I discuss further in chapter 5) used lifewriting to claim the privilege of privacy accorded to opposite-sex spouses. 

Like the lifewritings of women married to men, those of women in female marriages assumed intimacy and interdependence rather than displaying it, and folded their sexual bond into a social one. They described shared households and networks of acquaintances who recognized and thus legitimated the women’s coupledom, liberally using words such as “always,” “never,” and “every” to convey an iterated, daily familiarity more typical of spouses than friends. 

Martha Vicinus’s Intimate Friends cites many nineteenth-century women who described their relationships with other women as marriages, and Magnus Hirschfeld’s magisterial, international study of The Homosexuality of Men and Women (1914) noted that same sex couples often created “marriage-like associations characterized by the exclusivity and long duration of the relationships, the living together and the common household, the sharing of every interest, and often the existence of legitimate community property.” 

Sexual relationships of all stripes were most acceptable when their sexual nature was least visible as such but was instead manifested in terms of marital acts such as cohabitation, fidelity, financial solidarity, and adherence to middle-class norms of respectability. Because friendship between women was so clearly defined and prized, one way to acknowledge a female couple’s existence while respecting their privacy was to call women who were in effect married to each other “friends.” Given that “friends” was used to describe women who were lovers and women who were not, how can we tell when “friends” means more than just friends? 

…There are many instances of published writing acknowledging marital relationships between women by calling them friendships. Victorian women in female couples were not automatically subject to the exposure and scandal visited on opposite-sex couples who stepped outside the bounds of respectable sexual behavior. Instead, many female couples enjoyed both the right to privacy associated with marriage and the public privileges accorded to female friendship. The Halifax Guardian obituary of Anne Lister in 1840 recognized her longstanding spousal relationship with Anne Walker by calling her Lister’s “friend and companion,” a gratuitously compound phrase.

Emily Faithfull, whom we will encounter again in chapter 6, was a feminist with a long history of female lovers. An 1894 article entitled “An Afternoon Tea with Miss Emily Faithfull” described her home in Manchester, decorated by “Miss Charlotte Robinson,” whom Faithfull readily disclosed “shares house with me.”80 Faithfull left all her property to Robinson in a will that called her “my beloved friend” whose “countless services” and “affectionate tenderness and care . . . made the last few years of my life the happiest I ever spent.” To call one woman another’s superlative friend was not to disavow their marital relationship but to proclaim it in the language of the day.”

- Sharon Marcus, “Friendship and the Play of the System.” in Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England

[cauldronofmorning]

Okay so.... I've encountered your tags about "the talking scene between trapper and hawk in dr pierce and dr hyde the stuttering the grabbing the not blinking how another of hawk's coping methods has bitten the dust#trapper being soft parental but annoyed and how he needs to check out while hawkeye needs to save the entire world"... if you have time, Go off! I would love that 2000 word essay and your opinions.

It’s a bit of a mess and would probably get a C- if I handed it in, but! Dr Pierce and Dr Hyde and how it shows the difference between Hawkeye’s and Trapper’s coping methods.

Context! Alan Alda wrote the episode, mental health is important to him (not to psychoanalyze an actor, but he had depression before the show and his mom was schizophrenic) and there’s a quote on how Hawkeye didn’t actually change much in the eleven years, just had his coping methods beaten down.

So throughout season one, Hawkeye and Trapper have mostly been ignoring the trauma of a war. Hawkeye naturally ended a movie with a speech about propaganda (Yankee Doodle Doctor) and Tommy tells them (Sometimes You Hear The Bullet) about a kid who should have been the blonde hero in a war movie actually dying and not hearing a bullet, forcing them to actually quietly think about it. But for the most part, they can distract themselves with booze, pranks and women, and Hawkeye can still draw a straight line between his tenuous sanity pre-war and the place he’s in.

There’s also two important episodes in season two before Dr Pierce and Dr Hyde, that make the war more personal for both of them. The first is Radar’s Report, where a scared prisoner contaminates Trapper’s patient by knocking the blood over. Trapper’s sulkier throughout the episode, obsessed with how it could have been okay if it weren’t for that incident, and less indulging of Hawkeye’s girl of the week problem. His patient doesn’t make it, and he makes a beeline to the POW’s tent, maybe would have killed him if Hawkeye hadn’t bought him back to reality. “That’s not what we’re about.”

The second is For The Good Of The Outfit. This one has a village bombed by American military and Hawkeye/Trapper run afoul of previously decent sounding generals trying to shut them up from talking about it, including passive aggressive threats to send them to the front, and specifically to Hawkeye, intercepting letters to his dad. It’s okay by the end of the episode, but he’s still livid when he finds this out.

In comes Dr Pierce and Dr Hyde. The episode starts with Hawkeye already slightly dissociated from a long shift, thinking it hasn’t ended, and Trapper having to gently take him by the arm and guiding him out of the OR, telling him he was taking the chest cases “like he was their only hope”. Hawkeye wanting to save everyone keeps popping up throughout the episode; here, when he’s stumbling into Henry and his ego filtered through deprivation making him think he’s the only one who can do chest cases, the scene I’m getting to, and the end where Trapper and Henry sum him up.

As much as Trapper is “let’s get drunk to deal, okay?” kind of comfort in comparison to BJ who can actually talk about emotions, if not necessarily knowing the best way to deal with them (Hawkeye has a type and it’s repressed blondes), he’s soft with Hawkeye – gentle touches, firmly telling him to go to sleep, indulging that chopper noise is just thunder – until he figures the best way to get his friend to rest is to sedate him behind his back.

The thing with Trapper is that while he might be a bad husband, cheating on his wife with no shame (but he keeps bringing up that Hawkeye is more perverted so that might make it easier for him to deal with, see the couple of times he glares at Hawk for flirting with Henry/a male patient, Divided We Stand, The Trial Of Henry Blake, Check Up, Life With Father, Adam’s Ribs), he’s a good father who ran into a minefield for Kim and tried to go AWOL for Cathy and Becky. That’s not to say he always treats Hawkeye like a child, that would be weird considering how much flirting they do, but when the other man is manic or badly affected, Trapper’s first instinct is to be parental.

After Hawkeye in his doubletalky way admits to Radar he’s compulsive and psychotic (sidenote:  his symptoms of strong emotions, not being able to think clearly and too many spirals to name actually bear that diagnosis out, instead of just using the word when one thinks another is behaving badly), he wanders around the camp like a ghost, making notes about corpsmen with guns and nurses checking patients in post-op.

As Hawkeye often does, whenever he finds something out, or thinks he has in this instance, he has to tell his live-in boyfriend of the season immediately, and if he can’t sleep then neither can anyone else. He sits on Trapper’s bed, extremely close and not blinking, and jostles him awake. Already Trapper’s slightly panicky, as no matter what he says about being the mellow one, any time there’s shouting or loud noise in the swamp, he always wakes up with a start. Even when he sees it’s Hawkeye it takes him a few seconds to process and get back into his role.

Hawkeye’s very sad and very quiet. For the past seven minutes, even though he’s dissociated, exhausted and not doing well, he’s still trying to do his normal thing of turning his anger sideways and being snarky or being a clown bottom for the gaggle of nurses. Going back to one of Trapper’s good qualities is that he’s a decent parent, Hawkeye can regress emotionally into being like a ten year old (incidentally, the age when he had the most trauma pre-Korea, with Billy, his mom dying, guilt over not wanting dad to remarry and at some point losing his virginity), both for funny like in Picture This and for sadness.

So he’s finally noticed that he’s in a war zone and he’s too tired to make jokes about it or distract himself from it. Trapper already sounds frustrated but still listens, telling him to go bed before he drives himself crazy. There’s been a few takes that Trapper would get sick of later Hawkeye, and given how much they really can’t talk to each other that often, even just a mention of Hawkeye’s will when he has to go to the front makes Trapper shut down and Hawkeye cover with a joke, that’s probably true. They’re both messes, but for now Trapper can give Hawkeye someone to lean on.

“If I thought I could stop it just by going to sleep, don’t you think I would try?” Hawkeye does a twitch of the head, still unblinking, and that’s just really asking Trapper to understand and take him seriously. Also the wording, he’s not saying he can stop thinking about it just by going to sleep, or stop feeling anything just by closing his eyes, although both of those are implied. He makes it very clear later on (Letters, Preventive Medicine, Blood Brothers) that he feels like he’s as bad as the war – god and martyr complex combined – and if he can’t fight against/blame everything on that then it’s time for some self loathing.

Trapper does actually pay attention and gives him some advice. Definitely not great advice, but advice nonetheless, to close his eyes when things get unbearable, and to keep checking out when it keeps happening. This can’t work for Hawkeye, who’s had a guilt complex ever since he was a child, but it’s how Trapper copes. The next episode when Kim’s mother turns up for the boy, after a time of being actually open, he goes right to dismissive snark. Plus in season three’s Mad Dogs and Servicemen, another one on how differently Trapper and Hawkeye deal with things, he shrugs that he pretends he’s not there all day along.

Hawkeye’s stuttering a bit at this point. Words are important to him, it’s why you should probably leave him a note even if you’re a man who 1) wants to forget about Korea as soon as he arrives in Boston but won’t 2) wants desperately to believe he’s straight but isn’t 3) cares through physical touch and can’t think of what to say for seventy two hours. Wordplay is important to him too, and he admits to Sidney in the finale that his brain thinks too fast. Obviously exhaustion is going to put his brain and mouth out of sync, and considering how he sounds like he’s going to cry in the mess tent when he can’t even get words out to Frank Burns, it makes him all that more helpless.

“Somebody, and it wasn’t you or me, started this war.” It’s the “whoever the them, we were always us” of it all. It’ll be more important in the third season, and what happens in Welcome To Korea, but Hawkeye has taken it for granted that he and Trapper will stay co-dependent no matter what happens or who they come up against or how their time is running out. Much how he probably didn’t tell Trapper about the abandonment trauma he’s suffered before, Trapper always reassures him to come back soon, or no charge for leaning on him, or it isn’t a Christmas goodbye, and doesn’t want to share real feelings.

Beyond that scene, with Hawkeye dragging himself off to be a hero, assume that everyone who tries to take care of him really just wants to sleep with him, and cry while singing, Trapper tries to sedate him while he’s not looking. He’s tried being parental, he’s tried the repression advice, it’s time to be passive aggressive for Hawkeye’s own good. Or what he thinks is Hawkeye’s own good. It’s not especially great on Trapper’s part, but a similar thing happens reversed in Mail Call, where a drunk Trapper tries to go AWOL and as soon as he’s distracted laughing at Frank, Hawkeye locks his bag away so Trapper won’t be tempted again. Both of them are repressed messes who can’t really talk to each other.

When that sedation attempt ends up in Frank falling over, Trapper goes to Henry to be the worried macho boyfriend. Like with the only comedic dancing allowed and not the time in Officers Only when a genuine offer gets turned down, being protective over Hawkeye where he can hear can only happen when it’s for fun/likely no real danger.

At the end, Trapper and Henry sit by Hawkeye’s bed when he’s finally asleep and talk about him. Kindly, but they know he’s unstable with a hero complex. Like Mulcahy said in season eleven, the camp has a lot of experience with not dealing with reality, and even Trapper says in Iron Guts Kelly that one man’s reality is another man’s fantasy. Nobody has the capability to talk about this yet, and Sidney and Hawkeye only really become friends in O.R. Hawkeye will wake up and he and Trapper will pretend this never happened.

When Adam’s Ribs comes around, and Hawkeye has a manic episode over needing to eat something that isn’t liver or fish, Trapper and Henry are again the ones looking after him, comparing him to their kids and Trapper in the background both snarking over Hawkeye’s slippage in sanity and looking out for him. It’s not as quite high stakes as Dr Pierce and Dr Hyde, but they’re still worried about him.

To end this out, Trapper and Hawkeye and mental health is a fun thing to look at. Neither of them are particularly emotionally intelligent yet, Hawkeye just kind of a self absorbed mess and Trapper finding it easier to be a reassuring rock and keep his own struggling to himself, and they keep things from each other while also taking past each other, but they comfort each other with jokes and distractions that only they can understand. The repressed clowns are trying, even if it does all end with a borrowed kiss and only just barely missing each other.

[thebrisingamen]

Love Interests of the MCU

Bout to write some criticism of the MCU, if you don’t like, don’t read? Or do, I’m a poster not a cop. Click to read more, if you’re interested. Also, spoilers.

A problem in the MCU, to be honest. We’ll get into this here and you’ll see what I mean.

Jane Foster, MCU: An airhead, breathy absent-minded professor astrophysicist. Ok, cool, a STEAM lady.... who is constantly a damsel in distress in both movies and really adds nothing to Thor’s mythos or character. In fact, Erik Selvig is a more important character being set up in Thor to be a pawn of Loki’s for Avengers. Darcy Lewis is a more interesting character AND SHE’S SIDE CHARACTER AS WELL. (For those following MCU: SHE IS IN WANDAVISION for crying out loud)

And both Selvig and Darcy have less screen time than Jane. I don’t blame the actress, because I think Natalie Portman is very talented. But that role can only give you so much to work with when your entire personality is ‘I’m an astrophysicist and absent-minded professor trope.’ That’s it? That’s all Jane Foster is? ‘Cause that’s all I ever got from her.

Seriously you’re going to waste Natalie Portman on such a shallow role?

VS

Comics Jane Foster: A well-trained EMT (Or Nurse, but still) who immediately runs toward danger to help people, is a damsel out of distress trope, doesn’t take crap from men, is a fan of cricket, regularly also fought with Thor’s enemies (as in comics Thor was not originally god-Thor but Donald Blake, who was worthy enough to use Thor’s hammer). Was not afraid to sass or stand up to heroes (or villains!) who harassed her after she found out Thor’s identity. Hmmm...

Christine Palmer, MCU: A surgeon at the same place Strange works at! Who likes him, because they work together! Totally not afraid to stand up to him even though lots of people already call him out on his arrogance and egomania. Dated in the past but somehow together again, and has no personality beyond ‘surgeon’ and ‘ex-girlfriend who gives speech to remind ex that life is about [insert moral here]’

WOW. SO INTERESTING. I TOTALLY REMEMBERED THAT SHE EXISTED

Also what a waste of Rachel McAdams talents. I mean she got THIRD BILLING AND SHE’S BARELY IN THE FUCKING MOVIE.

VS

Clea, Comics: Princess of the Dark Dimension and Niece of Dormammu and ALSO DR. STRANGE’S IN-COMICS WIFE. She’s so well known as his love interest that at first I thought that’s what they were going to go for in his movie, esp with Rachel McAdams as the Third Billed ACTOR. But yeah, Clea, traditional love interest, super magically potent, likes earth, hates her evil uncle, just wants to learn more magic and live with Strange.

BUT NO HOW COULD WE POSSIBLY HAVE A FEMALE CHARACTER WITH ACTUAL POWERS. IT TAKES US UNTIL FUCKING AGE OF ULTRON TO GET WANDA, THOR 3 TO GET VALKYRIE AND YEARS (FUCKING YEARS) TO GET CAPTAIN MARVEL

Not that the others did not take years, but Carol only showed up RIGHT around the time Christianized Wonder Woman showed up in Snyderverse...

Clea’s comics personality isn’t that different from any of these other characters, but honestly, the MCU could’ve done a lot with her and used a character far more well connected to Strange in his own fucking movie.

Nakia: Again, an ex-girlfriend who used to work for T’Challa but couldn’t due to [insert morality speech here] and now, suddenly, they are back together! Because T’Challa is doing things! Wonder what comics Nakia is like...

OH YIKES OK MOVIE IMPROVED HER, THEY IMPROVED HER SO MUCH. (Comics Nakia: 16 year old obsessive/possessive supervillain and yeeeeaaah that’s just....No. Big ol’ NOPE). Still I forget she exists. Tbh I’d forget Okoye exists either if she wasn’t HAVING MORE SCREEN TIME THAN THE LOVE INTEREST.

I’m starting to notice a trend here...

VS

Monica Lynne, Comics: A more major love interest for Black Panther and more tied to his mythos. Arguably his most used Love Interest that isn’t Storm who is legally not allowed to be in the MCU anyway so she is unavailable for BP, which is a fucking shame. Personality wise, not much different, but Lynne isn’t as tied to Wakanda as any of the others.

Honestly I don’t know all that much about Black Panther so if anyone else does and wants to weigh in on a better love interest choice (THAT IS NOT STORM), please tag me.

Further, though, Monica could have given a deeper view into the complex experience of being a successful black woman in America to contrast with Erik’s storyline and have T’Challa hear more than just one singular experience.

But that’s just a hot take on my part.

Pepper Potts:

There’s no VS here because Virginia “Pepper” Potts is arguably the absolute closest MCU came to matching up with her comics counterpart. Fiery, intelligent, doesn’t take Tony’s shit and calls him on it, doesn’t take anyone’s shit toward her. She’s a bit more tame in the MCU and wildly OOC in Iron Man 3 so I don’t count that movie as canon, but honest to god, there’s nothing bad to say here about her character adaptation. A good job was done.

Hope Van Dyne: Again, a very good adaptation; most likely taking different characters together so because her comics counterparts are two separate entities, Hope has to be judged solely on her movie version. Her and Scott have good chemistry, she’s a good character in her own right. Only suffers from the trope of ‘Defrosting Ice Queen’ which you can tell because her hair and makeup get less severe as she ‘defrosts’

Better in the first movie than the second, where even though HER NAME WAS IN THE TITLE AS ‘THE WASP’ she was barely in it and sidelined by all the villains and side characters. For those interested, theories believe she is pulled from Nadia Pym (616 verse) and Hope Pym (982 verse)

Sif: Thor’s other in-comics and in-myth love interest/sometimes wife, absolutely side-lined, never given more than a few lines in any movie and despite having a supposedly epic backstory, we never see it. No one questions what the FUCK happened to Sif in Thor 3 because she has mysteriously vanished with Thor giving 0 fucks about where his remaining childhood friend went since she is the only one NOT KILLED OFF UNCEREMONIOUSLY (A different rant for a different problem)

So what’s there to say but why even include her as part of a love triangle if her absence is so unnotable that no one cares what happens to her

Gamora: Again, I’m not as familiar with her character, but like Pepper she seems to be a good adaptation, if made less of an anti-hero/villain in the MCU and given a bit of a softer side. Her romance with Star-Lord/Peter Quill is weak, however. Might be because of the actors but I don’t really see it? She has more emotional moments with her sister than ANYONE ELSE (Up until Infinity War with Quill and Thanos meeting)

The main problem we are running into, however, is look at this list. Look at how many female characters who are the love interest are demoted to be SOLELY THAT ROLE.

Please discern the difference for me, IN PERSONALITY between Christine Palmer and Jane Foster. Because aside from their professions, I don’t see any, do you? The fact that a good chunk of female characters in the MCU are the Love Interest and solely the love interest is....bad

It’s bad. It’s poor writing and it has consistently been done to more female characters than male. I just don’t see why the writers can’t do this basic thing.

1. Create/Adapt Character A as a full, three dimensional character

2. Create/Adapt Character B as a full, three dimensional character

3. Put A and B together romantically if they click

DONE. SIMPLE. EASY.

Also

4. Do not erase character personalities but remember what made them a good romantic pairing in the first place.

[donaldpepys]

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Brown bought the restaurant, located at 17779 Highway X, in July 2013, and he noted the original project plan was to keep one lane open on the bridge during reconstruction. Sometimes was a bit slow, I thought, but we worked pretty hard with (strength and conditioning coach) Rich (Hesketh) in the gym. The negro was also tied to a log and to the bed-post with ropes, which choked him, and he was kicked and stamped by Souther. At last, when I said that I had to go at once to Natasha’s, and that I was late, she started, and informed me that she had forgotten the chief thing. “This wounds me deeply, I will have you know,” he told them between signatures. If people choose to ruin their possessions, I don’t know what’s to be done. As defending champion, Palmer had to help Player into the green jacket.. I saw white men at work, and no slave smarting beneath the lash. But they can be a little unsightly in the middle of a nice green lawn. 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He literally “obeyed in all things” his “masters according to the flesh; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers, but in singleness of heart, fearing God.” If his conduct exhibits the slightest departure from a literal fulfilment of this injunction of Scripture, it is in a case which must command the approbation of the most rigid casuist; for the injunction of obedience extends, of course, only to lawful commands. “My face is still the same.”. I’m an old man, ail insulted father. We are particularly saddened that Mrs. They may ask for … ah … recompense for those who lost their lives to the dragon’s wroth. Again, the Focus will turn more heads inside with its cool blue lighting, while the switchgear has a slightly higher quality feel. “I was praying,” she told the Naathi girl. According to the port, the oneil mellény Hillsboro Airport is the second busiest airport in the state. Help me, explain our present position. She was in a fever and slightly delirious. Mount St. Blake was 16 and Paige 13 when the cheques started arriving in the post. "My family was wondering when I was going to get a real job," she recalls.. Are trying to work on the relationships and trying to work together, Lehmann said. He was not a tall man, Tormund Giantsbane, but the gods had given him a broad chest and massive belly. The key clicked three times, very softly, as the kindly man turned it in a lock. Extreme weather wasn't a huge factor. In the years to come, he decided to go to medical school at the nike jean jacket University of Tennessee, where he graduated in 1955. I won't lie, I get a small pleasure from exiting the plane and walking right out the door, while everyone else has to wait and shoulder there way to their bags on the conveyor belt.

[chiseler]

The Old Masters: Kurt Kren

31/75: Asyl / 31/75: Asylum (1975)

Kurt Kren (1929-1998) was best known for his work with the unpleasant bodily-fluid ridden productions of the Vienna Aktionists, a group of Hitler’s children whose post-war adolescence did in art what Ulrike Meinhof did in direct action. The suffocating atmosphere of retooled Nazi industrialists and amnesia with a born-again uptightness produced predictable results: the state must not be allowed to retain a monopoly on violence. How many Blood Order members can you watch, parading sanctimoniously on television, grinning in deathsheads from podiums, telling everyone that they have always been good citizen democrats, without wanting to burn it all down?

The body is alienated by the rigid control systems of Nazi and post-Nazi Germany (a continuum by other means); the invisible bodies of the pulverized dead shadow the plants and office blocks; Tiergartenstraße No. 4, where Aktion T-4 (Aktionist?) was hatched—the extermination of the unfit and insane—is now a bus terminal; tourists marvel at the great modernist IG Farben complex, alone in an otherwise-erased Frankfurt (IG Farben’s American legal representative: John Foster Dulles, who also worked for Krupp). No wonder Kren and his friends Otto Muehl and Herman Nitsch wanted to cut off their fingers and smear themselves with vomit, filming it all straight on, just like the Nazis shot the Warsaw Ghetto.

Kurt Kren

Sitting through works like Kardinal, Self-Multilation, and Sodoma remains a chore, but for different reasons than in 1969, I hazard. The glaring bright colors now reflect Japanese game shows or late style millionaire pop art; the beatings, couplings, spurtings and evacuations have long been appropriated by gross-out horror shtick in mainstream Hollywood, likewise the flashing old film stock and jump cuts. What is left is a past-tense sense of the epic, a lofty Wagnerian pronouncement that the cinema is best equipped to investigate violence and that entertainment is really all just fascism. Shaking off the idea of gesamkunstwerk or the marble atrocities of Arno Breker proved harder than it looked, no matter how true every sickened pronouncement of Aktionist agit-prop was—and it was, it certainly is true.

If the ‘Baroque’ aspect of these films was once part of the attack, it has now become a sign of the long dreary reach of fetishism and managed hypocrisy. The problem with animal intestines, bodies wrapped in metal wire, and piles of soaking flesh is that the arrangement does not mirror the repressed psyche of a generation of sons of Gauleiters, born-again liberal bureaucrats and captains of industry, but a great cathedral of interlinked reactionary problems to be solved hermetically. From this point on, such problems were doomed to become wholly personal—as if the artists were unconsciously terrified of collective nihilism after Goebbels cornered the market. Austria is mainly Catholic, and the confessional is never far away from Aktionist agony. Redemption rears its bestial head—which also implies a second innocence, which is postmodern salvation.

To expose the unreality of what remained of the saccharine and morose Nazi regime via vitriol and bleeding flesh was clearly not enough. After the Aktionists called it quits and retired to their various castles and cultic fiefdoms, the Red Army Faction kidnapped former SS officer, then-CDU member, and Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie head Hanns Martin Schleyer in 1977. When the German government refused to trade this grotesque relic for four captured RAF fighters (who were mysteriously found hanging in their cells afterward, á la the ANC in South Africa, and also like Ulrike Meinhof, a year earlier, another ‘suicide’—all of which shows the repulsive cynicism lurking under a supposedly ‘democratic’ state), Herr Schleyer was topped and left in the trunk of an Audi. No loss, but tears and outrage flowed from a middle class that forgot that it was a far, far greater executioner in ‘39. The late 1970s were dark, dark, dark. The very outrageousness of their ‘happenings’ show that the Aktionists were suckered in by hope ten years prior. The world remakes itself, oblivious.

The case of Aktionist Kren is more curious and longer lasting than the King Ludwig-like careers of Nitsch and Muehl. His early films were stark or wiggly or frozen: trees, landscapes, little images, people in rooms doing hypnotized screen tests. Unlike his later direction in Sodoma et al, he seemed concerned with the medium’s archaic properties and the possibility of making still-life and landscape political. He returned to this program out of the Aktionist dead end.

31/75: Asyl, from 1975, a sequel to his 1960 3/60: Bäume im Herbst, is one of his best films. More Holbein than Kaspar David Friedrich, it shrinks the epic panorama down to an insect view. Using a simple form of time-lapse photography, a static shot shows farmland and a winding road in late autumn to early winter. By placing various filters over the lens, days pass in globules, wax drippings, thick polluted rain, condensation and gum. A man with a dog goes in and out of frame; the snow melts, it rains; light shifts. Not blood and soil but damp, oily mud like a Turner marsh. And no heroics with geysers of blood, iron crosses and milk, the exegesis of guilt. However, there is certainly something displacing the day here. The status quo of round-ups and tests? Isolation, inner migration? The ‘asylum’ of the title suggests a place of refuge but like in English, the German asyl can also mean a madhouse or political asylum. The film was shot in Saarland, West Germany, under French control after WW1 but returned to Germany in 1935. Saarland is border country, a place of several masters and populations on the move. Kren himself was sent off on one of the Kindertransport to Rotterdam, where he lived until the end of the war.

Wilhelm Reich, in his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism, showed that the mysticism of Nazi ideology was depicted foremost in pretzeled human bodies, a combination of Protestant asceticism and cheap porn cartooned in the figure of the swastika. Before landscape, Fascism uses bulky propaganda to conjure up the Fatherland and recites bad poetry about the holy relation between man, pig, earth and muck. Sacrifice is the Father’s cloying prayer, his own death extended by his sons’ dying—for most fathers in the Fatherland rented their land from wealthy landlords, rented rooms from good Aryans, worked for Herr NSDAP Millionaire Flick. Places of death are used over and over again; their industrial emptiness ensures that no birds sing. No birds sing, but not out of reverence for the dead so much as disgust for the living—the quiet living that made those dead, that signed contracts for transport expediency for a Jew, Gypsy or a Red.

Kren’s view from a windowsill does have some of this void mood, yet he rejects the trap of timelessness in favor of everyday decay. The immortal Frost Gods can only bury dogshit in deep snows, give you pneumonia, cake your axel with mud. The landscape lives on geologically and not mystically. It has beautiful things, extraordinary things, because its own microscopic changes are more fabulous than eternity. Kren’s little film avoids both faces of the same reactionary crisis: that of the epic-making National Socialists, and his own earlier anti-epics that attacked the drapery of the historical fasces. Fall and winter last a little over 8 minutes in the duration of this film, which took 21 days to shoot. The Third Reich was supposed to last for 525,600,000 minutes, which is a thousand years of unreal time. William Blake wrote: He who binds to himself a joy/ Does the winged life destroy.

All of Kren’s films are curious, even his old naughty routines. He moved to America in 1978 and travelled the country, stopping to show his films at universities before finally settling in Texas, where he split his time between Austin and Houston. There, he became a fixture in the punk scene, appearing with some of the best bands of the time, projecting his films behind the noisy vigorous music of Left agitators like Really Red and Culturcide. Always a workman, he made new films while employed as a security guard at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. He died back in Vienna in 1998.

by Martin Billheimer

Links:

Technical details of the film here:  http://www.resettheapparatus.net/corpus-work/id-31-75-asylum.html

The film @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cblbgbnE1wo

‘Ode to Kurt Kren’, fan video with photos, using the tribute song by his friends, Really Red, recorded 1982: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3_RfD0Qv_k

[majingojira]

Crossovers, Magic, and the Two Wizard Harrys

Recently, a post has been going around on my dash about Harry Potter and the Dresden Files. I commented on it, but it got me thinking about the crossovers done with the two Harrys outside themselves, and how mixing these worlds would go about. 

First, we need to understand a few basics about crossovers and shared universes.  

First off, there are several major and influential crossover ‘hubs’ that link many things together, and also affect how we would view a shared world. 

Those are:  Historia Regum Britannia (1136)/Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart (1177-1181)/The Vulgate Cycle (13th Century) - Being public domain, these literary characters get a LOT of traction, and add a lot to Fae lore. 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595/96) - This really solidifies a lot of Fae lore in the west. 

Dracula (1897) - THE Vampire story, though not the first to see print (Varney from 1845-1847), it is the most influential of them.  Ask yourself how many people have had a “Vs. Dracula” story and you see how wide-reaching the Crossover Universe can get. 

Carnacki, Ghost Finder (1913-1947) - One of the earliest, and strangest Ghost stories to have a wider reach in the 20th century.  It draws heavily, like Ghostbusters later on, from the Spiritualist and Theosophist movements, which were a syncretic hodgepodge of western and eastern mysticism.  Another important text which is connected and re-affirms this style/rules-set is A Christmas Carol.  

The Cthulhu Mythos (1919-1943) - That is Not Dead Which Can Eternal Lie and In Strange Eons Even Death May Die.  Ol’ Squidface and friends show up a LOT, thanks to the public domain.  

The Dresden Files has complex lore, but one that is built upon both real-world mythology and a lot of stories that came before it.  

The latter include Dracula, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo & Juliet (Mab), The Cthulhu Mythos, and The Vulgate Cycle. 

Dresden also has the benefit of being referenced in other people’s works, expanding his reach. These range from Supernatural, Morris and Chastain Supernatural Investigations, and Rivers of London.   Alongside Harry in the Morris and Chastain Supernatural Investigations crossovers are references to: Warren Ellis’ Gravel, Dexter, Mike Carey’s Felix Castor, Clive Barker’s Harry D'Amour and The Hellbound Heart (a.k.a. HELLRAISER), American Gods, Simon R. Green’s Nightside series, The Wolf Man (1941), Fright Night,  Lord Darcy tales, Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter, Silence of the Lambs and related stories, The X-Files, Ghost Whisperer, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Millennium, The Usual Suspects, The Shadow, and The Hades Project

Now, before you ask about how magic revealed vs hidden magic can work within those crossovers, they obviously can’t.  The stance taken by Crossover Scholars like myself is that “Elements of the series have counterparts in the crossover universe” so things are altered so they are done in secret rather than in the open.  To some degree.  You work it out for yourself to your satisfaction.  That’s half the fun of this mental exercise.  

Potter has his fair share of crossovers too, but less than Dresden.  

Potter has connections to: The Odessey and The Vulgate Cycle in the first book; Gremlins in the film version of The Half-Blood Prince, and both Dracula and Carmilla in the video game version of Prisoner of Azkaban.  

Also, one time, in New Excalibur #3 (art by Michael Ryan, written by Chris Claremont), The Juggernaut almost crushed Harry Potter as he came out of Diagon Alley while the Juggernaut took a shortcut.  

I will never tire of posting that. 

Anyway. 

As you can see, within the context of the Crossover Universe at least, Dresden has a firmer established place within it than Potter.  I mean, can you really see Harry doing his Auror Duty and coming across THIS?! (WARNING! LINK TO R-RATED FILM).

Dresden?  Dresden would have luck that bad.  Potter, not so much.  There’s a lot of things in Dresden’s world that simply has no known working response in the Potterverse, and any crossover may have to thread one or more of those needles to really work.  This leads me to think of something that probably sparks the vs. threads that people have complained about: Which Series Takes Precedence over the Other. 

99% of the time, it’s Potter.  And I think, because of the crossover weight, and one other reason, that changing it to Dresden would be for the best going forward.   That other reason?   Can you really, in the Year of Our Lord 2020, look at everything J. K. Rowling has done with her IP and tell me that her use of Mythology and Folklore should take precedent over anything else?! 

REALLY?!

Isn’t it much more interesting to think of Voldemort as one of Kemler’s strongest Disciples rather than considering Kemler (a reminder, he’s the puppetmaster behind both World Wars who devised a way to become a god and almost did it) a footnote compared to Wizard Hitler?    I mean, I think so.  But I also just want to write a scene of Harry and Harry at Macks having a drink together, shooting the breeze.  

Now I sort of want to go through who was active on the supernatural scene between 1991 and 2012 (approximate date for Skin Game) to see who is around to give Potter and his friends' lessons in supernatural stuff and how well they’d fit in, at least who’s around within the web of Crossovers that have been sussed out so far.   But that’s for another post.  Gosh, I hope this didn’t come off as too putting down of Potter while bolstering Dresden.  I mean, it is, but I hope it’s not overtly or maliciously so. 

[jenishreads]

6 Binge-worthy Books to Shake Up Your Idle Mind 📚

Books have been an very effective agent, bringing major changes into the life of people. Whether the book is "The Communist Manifesto' by Karl Marx  or 'Harry Potter Novels' by J. K. Rowling. Each had their own impact on readers in terms of revolution, spirituality, relaxation, inspiration, reality escape or downright skill upgrading. Most of the readers down the lane start preferring only certain type of books. Eventually they miss other amazing books that can open their mind to different perspective. This led me to read books based on various subjects, and yes; sometimes it is fun to be jack of all and master of none.

Thus, If there's some curiosity burning inside you and want to read something different other then the usual genres. I have some recommendation for you.

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

Inquilab Bhagat Singh on Religion & Revolution by Irfan Habib

Islam for the Politically Incorrect: With a foreword for Donald Trump by Khaled Diab

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies for Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

The Man Who Played with Fire: Stieg Larsson's Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin by Jan Stocklassa, Tara F. Chace (Translator)

The listed book are from my read list that I have found most Interesting and I hope you will find it too. I have quoted one highlight from every book. You can access my Goodread book list and its highlights at goodreads.com

1. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

Despite of this book releasing in the year 1943 and the setting of the plot according to it, I am still amazed that those societal prejudice and ways has not been changed as of yet. Author has very well created the characters keeping in in mind the competition that existed in the architectural world. But while reading it can be accepted that, the mentioned norms exist in all kind of profession in the modern world too.

To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?

I have listened to this book on Audible (Narrated by Christopher Hurt) and it was notably long (32 hrs 2 mins) but its all worth it. Some people can find it boring due to its in-detail description of characters and the air surrounding it but it is the aspect that I found most important and literally joyful.

2. Inquilab Bhagat Singh on Religion & Revolution written by Irfan Habib and narrated by: LS Ravi

This book is the compilation of Bhagat Singh's Articles, notes and Letters. I chose this book, to get to know more about the freedom fighter after reading his essay 'Why I Am an Atheist". I used to consider him the person who wanted the freedom based solely on violence but this book really changed my mind and explained many things about Bhagat Singh the person.

A God-believing Hindu might be expecting to be reborn as a king, a Muslim or a Christian might dream of the luxuries to be- enjoyed in paradise and the reward he is to get for his sufferings and sacrifices. But what am I to expect? I know the moment the rope is fitted round my neck and rafters removed, from under my feet. That will be the final moment that will be the last moment. I, or to be more precise, my soul, as interpreted in the metaphysical terminology, shall all be finished there. Nothing further.

I listened it on Audible (Narrated by LS Ravi). It is an awesome book, because you journey through his notes and articles, from those literature; it is visible that how his ideas regarding the revolution evolved. His writing includes the topics related to communism, politics, religion and personal development. Any reader can enjoy this books because of the proper representation by the author and his insightful detailed comments.

3. Islam for the Politically Incorrect: With a foreword for Donald Trump by Khaled Diab

Islam, the, most talked about religion. Some people say that it's a religion of peace whereas If you see around you can only relate it to violence and terrorism in social, political and spiritual circle. Khaled Diab here explains that Islam is more than that and most of it is hidden behind the curtain that many people chose to ignore.

Devout Muslims who feel they are duty-bound to defend the honour of Muhammad through violence or intimidation should take a deep breath and recall the Quranic injunction: “For you is your religion, and for me is mine religion.”

The author is a prominent journalist and his wide knowledge reflects here. He has has beautifully explained Islam in context with all the expects like religion, political, sexual and geographical. He has shows each and every aspect of Islam very carefully without any bias. If you want to be an unbiased entity on the subject of Islam read this and recommend it to everyone. It's a completely insightful and enjoyable read.

4. Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

I had the honor of listening to this book on Audible (Narrated by Jon Lindstrom) and it is an absolute gem. This book by Blake Crouch is a must read because by default this book is classified in the genre of SF and Horror. But for me its an absolute love story, because the story has an antagonist that goes through some of the mind bending things just to get to his love.

It's terrifying when you consider that every thought we have, every choice we could possibly make, branches off into a new world.

Blake Crouch has done an amazing job on this because from story telling to characters to twist and turns, everything is just terrific. I don't want to write more about it and spoil it for you because I want you to have an experience of this must read.

5. Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies for Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

When it comes to motivational or self development books, I usually don't prefer them. But this book by Ozan Varol has some type of an very different energy. Here the author explains various strategies that scientist uses when they face various difficult situations. The book should have been an straight manual for humans but the author has explained everything very beautifully so that the reader gets inspired by it and not just get motivated temporarily.

We’re hesitant to think big, reluctant to dance with uncertainty, and afraid of failure. These were necessary during the Paleolithic Period, keeping us safe from poisonous foods and predators. But here in the information age, they’re bugs.

The author also describes his experience as a former rocket scientist and the time when he was in an operation team for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers project. You don't need to have experience in science field to read this, you just need to have the curiosity. This book will be an amazing help for the readers seeking knowledge in improving themselves daily.

6. The Man Who Played with Fire: Stieg Larsson's Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin by Jan Stocklassa, Tara F. Chace (Translator)

Well, we all love movies where the journalist investigates a true complex crime with the involvement of various shifting nodes. But this non-fiction book is on another level where the journalist Jan Stocklassa carried out an mind-blowing investigation based on the initial research done by the famous writer Stieg Larsson (author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) on the assassination of Olof Palme, the Swedish prime minister.

Some of the world’s biggest export contracts applied to weapons, and if anyone stood in the way of these deals or threatened to reveal secrets that could harm the bottom line, then a human life was a low price for being able to complete the highly lucrative and often shadowy deals.

Here the description of the investigation done by the author takes him to places and put him into an dangerous situation. And that  is really a thrill to watch because there are some techniques in there that can teach you to be a better communicator and most importantly when to step out. Its been an amazing read for me and if you are curios enough you will be enjoying it very much.

[sometimesrosy]

I keep seeing comments that the later seasons of the 100 aren’t as good as the earlier and I super confused? Season 6 has probably been one of the best if not the best and S5 was really complex and well done too. This is why I love your blog bc you’re so positive and are here not just for the ships (even though they’re great) but for the overall story.

I mean, people have their own favorites. I think a lot of people who prefer nostalgia or YA like the first season. I love the first season, but it was kinda crappy to start. It got there soon, but, it didn’t have the craft of the later seasons that were a more sculpted tale.

Season 2 was amazing. Great heroes, great quests, great villains, amazing horror, the understanding that this show really WOULD go there. But to be honest, I enjoyed it without all the layers that I found in the story later.

Season 3 was, for me both the hardest season and the most ambitious, which makes sense. But it’s the most literary of all, even though there was, I thought a problem with pacing and the whole story seemed to get far too dark... even though I think it got dark on purpose, to deal with the darkness of PTSD and the psychology of the characters.

Season 4 is probably the season I find the weakest, although I don’t dislike anything about the season. It almost feels as if it is in a holding pattern, not really ABOUT anything, but rather the purgatory between the first part of the story and the second. 1-3 v 5-7. And maybe it was.

I personally thought season 5 was fantastic, and I thought the complaints against it were for shippers concerns, which bothered me so much because I thought Bellarke was moved forward with SUCH intensity in season 5 which set us up for season 6 and the blatant love story. It also seemed to be where we started to get closure on some heavy damage in the earlier seasons, with major pain like the CL betrayal and the Blake dysfunction. 

And season 6, well I am just loving season 6. It’s like the villains of s2 but with the rich character development of the whole story, and that the characters seem to have worked through a lot of their trauma and so are REACHING the level of heroism we always knew was in them. Plus the horror of Clarke’s being stolen and the AMAZING quest Bellamy went on to save her. My GOD the epic love of it all. 

But that’s MY review. Everyone is going to have their own favorites. I personally think that once they see Bellarke actually HAPPENING, the fandom will be able to go back and rewatch the show and SEE how much it was happening all along, especially in season 5. I mean, I don’t understand how people don’t get it NOW in season 6, it’s like OBVIOUS. But people get what they get out of a story. 

I think this show will be even better once we get to the end of it and we can see how it all fits together. It may not be the same wonder and horror we experience the first time we watch it, but I think people will GET it a lot more. No one will ever say “oh lxa is the hero and bellamy is the villain.” not after watching the rest of the story. They won’t be able to have fights over who is endgame and who isn’t because we’ll know. They’ll see how bellarke was developed as a love story through the whole thing but most especially in season 5 and 6. (I really don’t understand how they can miss it and say JR isn’t doing it on purpose. It is LITERALLY the main plot.) But mainly, I think if they KNOW that bellarke is happening, then they won’t act like jerks because it doesn’t happen when they want it to. They dont’ trust the show, so they accuse it of the worst sins. And a lot of people believe that they show has betrayed Bellarke, even though its RIGHT THERE IN YOUR FACE. idk. fandom is weird. 

[pocparks]

now this is just a rant full of bad grammar and spelling errors but i kind of really hate the way the new designs look in 3d hhhhollly shit

weiss, hair looks like a separate creature just plot pasted on her head pin the tail on the donkey style im screaming it also looks like they attached some extra budles to her head holy shit why is that braid so thick especially at the top,,, also she’s so blue :( wheres the white?(i was under the impression that she’d have more white on her from the concept than there actually is on the model) the lack of complex shading/textures on her model specifically really makes you see how freaking ridiculous her whole look is (without the ruffles from the concept its just some fabric hanging on her) oh god and thats not even counting the belts(which im fine with),,,, i just had a second look at her weiss baby what did they do to you, why arent you wearing tights?? why keep the boob window??? why is the skirt such a weird shape?? does it even have physics or is the dress just gonna mold to her legs and move when they do oh no your concept art did not translate well my baby my angel my eveything im so upset

and blake’s zipper legs lord have mercy, please please please say sike, say sike right now why are they SO THICK AND CLUNKY?? JUST MAKE THEM THINNER LIKE THE CONCEPT ART?? MAKE THEM A TEXTURE ON HER LEGS OR EVEN BETTER GET RID OF THEM im screaming i hate looking at them and im gonna hate seeing them in the show on god i hate those zippers, and i hate how flat and not wavy/curly in the slightest her hair is, like yeah modeling curls is hard but still,,, her hair was always curly, you cant cut the curls out of your hair even if they just gave it a little more volume it would look better but damn. also thats a jacket huh,,, i thought it was a part of the suit somehow (which is stupid in hindsight) but a skin tight jacket,,,, okay,,,,,

idk why ruby needed a structured looking corset like that i think that just makes it harder to move and the weird belt loop? what is that garters??? on the bottom of them?? idk but i still think she looks cute i like how it looks like she’s wearing a skort which is nice seing as they just always wanna make her skirts shorter and shorter for some reason. i dont think the fun spiky hair from the concept translated well into 3d tho or maybe that was just a bad angle of it because they really really really really want to push ruby doing her trailer pose even tho everytime she does it it looks awkward and not like how someone with that weapon would hold it casually, the choker is cute

yang looks *chefs kiss* but thats mostly just because i hated her V4-6 design so much, i feel like hers is the one that went from concept to model the best because, ignoring the thigh and titty frostbite shes risking, you can see her personality in it so clearly and it just looks like a fun outfit to wear

nora looks like a goddamn kingdom hearts character ON GOD thats someones fancharacter outfit im telling you ON GOD with this kairi built ass outfit LORD and im so upset because its really really cute?!!?? like i love that on her but i just hate how just unashamedly kingdom heartsy it is, like nora looks like shes gonna pull a keyblade out any second now, she also looks COLD in this very not winter friendly outfit

ren looks fine but i dont think they’ve ever fucked up with ren, i like how it kinda looks like hes wearing a corset but idk because his arms are in the way. the only thing i think looks goofy is the placement of the knife on his arm,,, why is it there? its so big and clunky just put it on his leg?? then all 3 of them can have cool leg accessories

jaune,,,, jaune ole,,,,, DMC5 nero lookin ass haircut hoooo boy, is he gonna lose an arm this volume? because if he does im gonna scream, he looks fine if you ignore the hair, i hate the way it looks like bananas,,, like hes gonna get tossed to the side and called dead weight,,,, bang bang bang pull my devil trigger teas. gonna miss the hoodie, it was a nice reminder that this is an Urban Fantasy series with cars and cellphones and shit and also why take your hoodie off when ur about to go to snow land??? idk he looks cute or whatever hope he has a good time being a son of a son of sparda

ironwood looks like he needs a hot bath and a nap :(

[kittymaverick]

MCF Moths to a Flame commentary part 2...

I really heavily underestimated how much jumping I was gonna do watching the gameplay alone... So, Eipex, good job on making me scared for the MD’s life... MD: LEMME OUT. If this weren’t so entertaining, I would honestly be screaming the same still...

1. Pazu: I remember these people Who doesn’t? MD: I wish I don’t! 2. Oh, THEY MOVED THE ENTIRE DOOR HERE??? MD: ...Okay, next time, I’m not just bringing a lighter. I’m bringing lighter, and gasoline, and kerosene, and napalm, AND A TONNE OF TNT JUST TO BE SURE NOTHING OF THAT MANOR EVER SURVIVES AGAIN. 3. MD: this room, it’s like all the Ravenhearst cases in one-- I’m gonna go pass out in the corner. Eipex, when I asked for Ravenhearst, I don’t think I meant like... give the MD a full room of it... Or maybe I did... MD: I knew this case was bad before we started whyyyyyyyyy did I come whyyyyyyyyyyy *sobbing* 4. There’s even a shrine-- wait, why does Gwen’s nest have... eggs... MD, which one of the twins was it that survived? MD: Um, let me check your posts... Okay, apparently, it was Charlotte. ...Are we absolutely, 100%ly, without any doubt whatsoever, certainty beyond all reasonable speculations that Gwen LEGIT DIED WHEN ALISTAIR STABBED HER? MD: ...Look, I checked her body, OKAY? RANSACKED IT EVEN. THE DALIMARS DON’T EXACTLY STAY DEAD THOUGH IF YOU HAVEN’T EXACTLY NOTICED. (Meanwhile, probably elsewhere in this museum, maybe... Dalimars: The Master Detective sure likes arguing with themselves nowadays... they’re never going to get to the end of this game at this rate...) 5. MD: I probably shouldn’t go into a fireplace that just showed up, but... I’m too curious-- Oh, good to know you’re just like a cat like me! Which life are you on now? MD: ...Considering Ankou gave me the feather, negative 2? 6. Complex puzzles actually seem doable and logical this time! Though it is hella creepy. 7. “All the cases are too easy! I’m gonna look into some of the Master Detective cases next. Maybe there’ll be a challenge in there.“ MD: I’m second hand embarrassed about this man’s ego. And other than the security breach your agency has, can I say... Your cases don’t so much have challenges in them as so much as loose ends that never tie up... MD: Look, I REALLY try with the fire, okay??? 8. Shoot all the evil ducks. If you shoot a wrong one, you’ll have to start again! MD: THIS IS THE NEW WHACK-A-TROLL I SWEAR. Pazu: I got this. *100% it* MD: See, in the hands of a good player, I still got it. ...First, how dare you diss me. Second, You do realize your adversary now know your shooting skills, right? MD: Shut up and let me have my small victories will you? 9. Hm, Raven badge, crystal badge... wonder if the last one is going to be death badge.... MD: If the Dalimars and that Scottish guy teamed up, I’m as good as dead... 10. ...is that... is that? MD: ...ISIS??? PLEASE LET US KEEP HER AS A PET. MD: Wait, HOW DID YOU GET CAUGHT? YOU’RE BASICALLY A GHOST CAT. Isis: *innocent kitty eyes* 11. Gargoyle chest with... Madame Fate’s Crystal Ball. MD: Please tell me that’s not the real thing because if it is, I’m breaking it right here and now. I think the pieces are under lock and key because they have Charles’ soul fragments in them right now, right? MD: EXACTLY MY POINT. 12. Video guy assumes you’re a guy. MD: I’m glad as least one part of my identity has been kept secret more than anything else... (Note: MD’s voice acting in this game suggests they are feminine) 13. And the final badge is revealed to be... the cog badge? Wha? (Even Pazu is confused lol.) ((I also just realized, we’re still in the Beta segment of the videos...I’m gonna cry in act 2 and 3, aren’t I?)) 14. MD: Should I be scared or honored that someone made rooms out of my old cases? Do you really want me to answer the obvious? MD: ...Okay, VERY SCARED. FREAKED OUT SCARED. ...BUT THEN YOU KEEP ON DOING THOSE PUZZLES. MD: I CAN’T HELP IT OKAY IT’S MY OCCUPATIONAL HABIT AT THIS POINT. 15. Cheating with weights on the hammer, MD? MD: Look, I walk around a lot solving cases, but that doesn’t exactly leave me time to work out, okay? 16. Oh, so MAC... was constructed by this guy-- MD: ARE YOU SAYING MY BADGE LITERALLY BETRAYED ME??? Well... MD: I CAN’T BELIEVE IT I CAN’T EVEN TRUST MY BADGE IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE. WHERE IS THE NEAREST CLIFF I’M GONNA YEET MYSELF OFF OF IT. (...I did say they were gonna give us a companion cube just to take it away, didn’t I?...) 17. MD, considering how well you know the queen... um, why didn’t you check before coming here whether it was fake or not? MD: ... Well? MD: Look, UK’s going through Brexit right now okay, I don’t think she wants to be disturbed when her country is in a crisis. 18. Okay, past the spire staircases! And behind door number three is-- OH NO. MD: OH THANK GOD THEY ARE ALIVE. NO THAT’S NOT GOOD WE HAVE HOSTAGES. REPEAT WE HAVE HOSTAGES! 19. Chloe: Thanks for freeing me-- MD: Okay, can I first say, how could you fall for this? Um, pot calling the kettle black here? MD: ...OKAY OKAY I’LL RESCUE YOU THREE THEN WE’LL REEVALUATE OUR METHODS, TOGETHER. Aiden: Make that Archivist pay for what he did to us! Blake: ...No pressure? MD: *sobbing* 20. MD: OKAY I GOT EVERYTHING, AND THIS IS... an apprentice badge? Archivist: Yo. Wassup? *Springs trap* MD: I KNEW IT I KNEW IT I KNEW IT WE KNEW IT WE KNEW IT WE KNEW IT Other detectives: Um, oops, sorry? Archivist: Really, though, how could you fall for that? And you call yourself a Master-- MD: I AM GOING TO GET OUT OF HERE AND HURT YOU SO BAD YOU WILL WISH YOU WERE DUMBER. Archivist: Um... that wasn’t... on the script-- Me and MD: SHUT UP WE HAVE A LOT OF FRUSTRATIONS AND PARANOIA BUILT UP OVER THE YEARS TO VENT OKAY. MD: And YOU just happen to be on the receiving end of it. Archivist: *drops trap several stories down* MD: DAMN YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-- [Here endith the Beta section!] 21. Hey, we awake? MD: Yeah... awake, ish. OW. Need, to, break, out, somehow. How convenient this guy left sharp objects in the cabinet here for us to use... MD: ...How did the glass not break from the fall? ...Hey, I’m supposed to be playing captain obvious here, not you! MD: Oh right, sorry. Anyway, to vandalism! 22. Archivist: You’re sloppy, aren’t you? MD: Says the guy who left sharp objects for me to break out of here with. Probably because he WANTS you to break out. Archivist: Remember Broken Hours, detective? Tick tock-- MD: I can’t believe I preferred the Dalimars as the villains. Me neither. At least they had some competence in their madness, minus Victor. 23. Blake: Take this Detective! Quick, I’m almost out of time-- OKAY WE ACTUALLY HAVE A HOSTAGE SITUATION HURRY UP! MD: If we take back the incompetence comment, will you give us more time? Archivist: No, of course not. MD: I thought so, you incompetent bastard. Archivist: You little...! Um, PUZZLES AND LIVES TO SAVE PLEASE??? 24. MD: Solving books puzzles gives me more books? Really now, that’s real creative-- Um... is that what I think it is? MD: It’s... It’s nitroglycerin. I’m... I’m so moved. Finally someone understands me. *sobs* Might I remind you this guy has your colleagues HOSTAGE??? 25. There are literally so many references to past games that I’m like overwhelmed with joy. MD: And I’m overwhelmed with HORROR. 26. Pazu: He’s going to get squashed. THAT’S WHAT I’M SAYING. MD: Nah, he’s gonna be fine. I hope. I wish. I mean, I usually turn out fine, right? Right??? ...I’m starting to think your agency is so broke because of all the health bills you guys need to get reimbursed afterwards. 27. Archivist: You fall into my traps again and again-- Let’s be honest, that’s just an MD thing, okay? The rest of the MCF crew-- well, actually... Okay, you know what MD, the Archivist is kind of right here. It’s like you guys are literally DRAWN to traps. MD: I’m sorry for being a bad role model and starting the trend? 28. Huh, this room, looks REALLY familiar. MD: I GET IT. THIS GUY, HE’S A COPYCAT. LITERALLY NONE OF HIS THINGS ORIGINATE FROM HIM. HE’S BEEN STEALING THEM FROM EVERYWHERE AND FRANKENSTEINING THEM TOGETHER. It’s almost kind of impressive in a very disturbing way... 29. MD: Oh hey, Parker, coming with? ...I think the reason why you didn’t get a partner for this mission now is because... they all got kidnapped. MD: Yeah, I’m starting to see that now. We REALLY need better security... 30. MD: Found the center of the mechanism! Now to stop it-- WAIT, THINK, THIS IS A TRAP? MD: Gosh I hate that I have to do that for everything now... 31. Pazu: what is this obsession with badges? Someone clearly didn’t get one and is salty. MD: Gods, all four of us agents are going to need new badges after this, aren’t we. Oh gods that’s gonna come out of our pay too, I’m sure... Speaking of badges, look! You get an agent badge! MD: Can’t believe I’m saying this but I really, really, really, much prefer solving the case involving STAIN as well as about the Hope Diamond to get my qualifications than this... massive puzzle tower... Wasn’t Huntsville how you got start on the whole MD path to begin with? And solving the Hope Diamond got the queen asking you to go to Ravenhearst? MD: ...*sighs* yes, this is a trip down memory lane in the worst way possible, I swear... 32. Um, someone’s calling. You gonna pick up? MD: You know, the least you could do is fix broken things after bringing them over, Archivist? Archivist: But if I did that, where’s the SURPRISE? MD: The last group of people that tried to surprise me got their asses kicked, you know. 33. MD: Draining people of their mind force, huh? I believe the Dalimars have officially been outranked on delusions of grandeur. If this note doesn’t scream trap, I don’t know WHAT does. MD: Honestly, considering how dumbly I fall into traps... I’ll like to see the guy try to drain my brain and see what he gets out of it. 34. Is that... THE PATH TO RAVENHEARST MANOR REPLICATED INDOORS? MD: I’m both impressed, and also feeling Charles’ jealousy emitting from whereever he is sealed. Let’s just hope this guy doesn’t propose at the end too. You have all of our blessings to defenestrate him if he does. 35. Awwww he didn’t have time to finish the rest of the manor. Only got up to the gate. MD: It’s like watching someone give up half way on their ambitious project. HEY GUY, AT LEAST ALISTER AND CHARLES FINISHED THEIR PROJECTS. DID YOU? Archivist: Did they build traps like these? *Trap Chloe* MD: ....You are rising up my shit list with record speed and that doesn’t happen often. ALSO CHLOE SERIOUSLY! 36. Archivist: Too bad for your companion, she paid the price. MD: ...I KNEW I should have kept some of that nitroglycerin! Oh hey look he even has a cable car ride for you! Don’t think we’ve seen that since Return or Escape from Ravenhearst? Archivist: If you want to get to the end of the ride, take a seat, NOW. MD: Oh I’ll seat, but only because I WANT TO. Also, your chair aren’t even replicas. 37. MD: Okay the box now... let’s open it-- Oh come ON! IT’S WHACK-A-TROLL!!!!!!! 8D MD: *Smash emergency exit button* Now ladies and gentlemen, please exit the ride into the next insane area. We hope you’ve enjoy the trip BECAUSE I SURE HAVE NOT-- Really? AN AMUSEMENT PARK NEXT? You did say you weren’t having fun... 38. Aiden: HEEEEEELP! MD: ...as much as I feel sorry for the old guy, I’m also glad I’m not the one stuck in that rocket ride... 40. Oh hey, it’s whack-a... detective. AND IT’S MORE FRUSTRATING THAN WHACK-A-TROLL. REALLY EIPEX? REALLY??? MD: ...Can’t believe this, but now, I miss Whack-a-troll. 41. Archivist: Can’t believe you made it this far without realizing I was one of the missing people? MD: ... Actually... Me: That makes sense, like, I was expecting it, honestly. There WERE four missing posters and we only found three. I was wondering WHEN that was going to come up. MD: See, some of the players don’t go through 19 cases and NOT develop SOME sense of paranoia that you’re going to be betrayed. 42. Archivist: Why don’t you step through the door to claim your prize? Me: How about, no? MD: No here as well. Aiden: Also no here. LET ME GO THROUGH INSTEAD! Archivist: WAIT NO THAT’S NOT HOW IT’S SUPPOSED TO GO-- Me: ...Aaaand we’re out of the illusion. I KNEW IT! WHEN EVERYTHING WENT MISTY I KNEW SOMETHING WENT WRONG! MD: Okay, instead of celebrating you seeing this coming HOW ABOUT YOU GET ME OUT OF THIS CONTRAPTION THANK YOU. 43. Hey, you got your badge back. MD: I know. And it’s stabby. MD: I KNOW. YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS? MD: IT’S VANDALISM TIME! 44. Chloe: Hello? Anyone there? Blake: Um, same here? Aiden: AHA! Knew there was something fishy. MD: Okay, since we’re all awake, let’s do what we Master Detectives are great at doing. MDs: solving freakishly complicated puzzle panels. *sighs collectively* 45. Archivist: TOO MUCH BRAIN POWER! NOOOOO *Poofs* MD: THAT’S WHAT YOU GET FOR PLAYING GAMES WITH US-- Um, who, is, that? Basically everyone who remembers the sole survivor of the Dalimars: CHARLOTTE! [To be continue!]

[calliecat93]

Top 5 Things I Disliked About RWBY Volume 6

(Top 5 Likes)

Well everyone… we made it. I started doing this Likes/Dislikes series on Monday, hoping to get it done before Saturday. The lesson here is to do better about pre-planning. Nevertheless… I did it. Volume 6. The most recent volume. My favorite volume of the entire series. I am so ready to gush about everything that I love about this! But we gotta do Dislikes first, and there are a few. Unlike the others though where nearly all of them are outdated or irrelevant, whether these will be improved on or not remains to be seen. So let’s not waste any time and get to the Top 5 Dislikes of RWBY Volume 6.

#5. Neo Fanservice

This is Number 5 because it more annoys me than anything else, but it doesn’t ruin anything. I’m not a fan of Neo. I find her to be a pointless addition who only exists because of her design. Which she does have a fantastic design, and her being mute is interesting. But otherwise? She was just… there. I didn’t care about the character then, and I don’t care now. I knew that she was gonna come back for CInder’s head, and this feels like the right time. But by the writers own admission, shes there just to flare up CIndr’s plotline. Which… why not use this to flesh out Cinder? Tell us her backstory or at least hint at it. Explain her motivations. Have us understand why she’s as horrible and power-hungry as she is. Explain what the heck happened when Ruby Silver Eyes blasted her in Volume 3 already!

 I know that they’re likely waiting for the right moment, but like with V4 it just feels like they’re dodging it and people are running out of patience. So I feel like there were other ways to make CInder’s plot more interesting. Throwing in Neo feels… well… I hate to say it, but lazy. Which I know isn’t true. Miles and Kerry are insanely hard-working and devoted to this show and away as far from lazy as it gets. I guess they just hit writers’ block? Knew that people wanted to see Neo again and felt like this was the right time? I don’t know. It wasn’t badly written or executed and sets the stage for the future. But still, I do wish that they took a more creative route and let us actually get to know Cinder when they had the chance. It’s disappointing.

Again, this is on here because I know I’m in the minority. A lot of people really like Neo and want to see more of her character. And I can’t lie, with Roman gone, there is some motivation for her and now there’s room to flesh her out. So while I don’t care about her, I am interested in seeing what they do with her. To see what she’s planning because there is now ay that she’s not going t give up on making CInder suffer. But I can absolutely see her still wanting payback on Ruby who was both involved with Roman’s death and knocked Neo off the plane and prevented her from helping him. We’ve got a classic revenge story in the making people. Let’s hope that it’s a good one.

#4. The Reaction to Jinn’s Story

This one is… complicated. Why? Because I don’t hate this. At all. You might think that I’m about to get mad that RWBYQ were all angry at Oz. But… no, I’m not. I fully sympathize with Oz. I don’t think that he’s this horrible monster who did all that he did because he’s horrible. Oz is just a man. A man who has been through so much pain for so long, all because he tried to do the right thing and be with his wife again. He has so much guilt and self-loathing and I just feel terrible for him and all that he’s been through. But it doesn’t change the fact that he’s lied and used people, even if it was because he had to. People got hurt. People have died. All because of him and his cause. He isn’t as horrible as Salem or the Gods, but RWBYQ has every right to be angry at him for what, in their eyes, is leading them on a suicide mission. So no, I don’t have a problem with their reactions.

My problem is that they all have the same reaction.

There is no diversity in how they all take this, nor with JNR. I guess that Jaune, Yang, and Qrow took it worst than everyone else, but all of their reactions are pretty much being angry at Oz and feeling hopeless. The only person who keeps nay sense is Maria because this doesn’t personally affect her, but still. It’s boring to watch and offers no true exploration into the characters’ feelings outside hopelessness. We don’t see them talk about the story or try to debate about it. Whether Oz can ever be trusted again or not. Whether they feel like there are some legit points both for and against Oz. They don’t talk about finding out the origin of the world or about Salem. There was so much room for so much perspective and maybe V7 will go into that. But here? It just feels like a wasted opportunity.

IDK. I still enjoy the plot and it adds a lot of moral conflicts. Oz was wrong, but he also had his reasons. There is no right or wrong answer I don’t think to any of Ozpin’s choices. He’s trying to do the right thing, and that’s not always the best thing or even the moral thing. It’s complex stuff that can cause a lot of complex emotions. But it feels like it’s all meant to say that Oz was bad and there is no resolution or discussion about it by the end outside Oz helping Oscar land the jet. Can V7 fix that? Maybe, especially since the trailer hinted at the right thing vs best thing dilemma. But as far as this volume goes, it was good, but could have been better.

#3. Caroline Cordovin

Cordovin sucks. Big time. I admit she was amusing in her debut episode, but that was it. Cordo os, overall, just a stingy and arrogant old woman. She isn’t funny. She isn’t interesting. She pretty much exists to be another ‘Atlas people suck’ character, especially with her remark at Blake. Now I know that she was meant to be a minor antagonist, and that’s fine. But she went overboard and got the mech out when there were probably better ways of dealing with the heist peacefully. In fairness to her, the good guys can’t explain why they need to go to Atlas so I don’t blame her for trying to stop them. But with a huge-sized mech meant to deal with large Grimm? Really?

But really, none of this would have mattered to me… if it weren’t for the ending. Cordovin’s shift is out of nowhere. She has no epiphany. She never really accepts that this is her fault. We never see her viewpoint shift. And as such, her turn was utterly unprovoked. But most of all… she gets away with it. She gets away with endangering Argu. She gets away with her reckless endangerment. She gets away with escalating the situation unecesarially. She’s going to fudge her report, so Atlas won’t ever know about it.  That is what I hate the most, she didn’t get punished for her actions whatsoever.

Still, unlike Cardin, she had a purpose and unlike him and the Fennec Twins, she wasn’t around for very long. As such, she isn’t the worst villain. But unless it’s to show that she’s been stripped of her rank, I don’t really ever want to see or hear from her again… her and Maria’s bickering was funny though. I’ll give them that.

#2. Lack of Oscar Development

I talked about this in V4, but this was the boiling point for people I think. Oscar is, sadly, underdeveloped. V4 had to rush through his intro and getting him to Mistral, which is a consequence of the separate plotline. V5 was better as he gelled well with the cast, got some training and learned to sue his AUra, and we learned a bit more about how his and Oz’s bonding worked. It’s still rushed, but hey unlike Ruby he got an actual payoff. Plus there’s an emphasis that he made a choice to be there both in his talk with Ruby and when he was faced with Hazel. It’s not a lot, but better than V4 and again, we had a payoff that felt earned,

V6 though… not so much. We see Oscar struggling with keeping control and his growing fear of not being the same after the merger is complete. It’ super understandable and when he nears having a panic attack in Chapter 4, you really feel for him. They do a very good job of getting you to feel bad for this kid, especially in CHapter 8 when Jaune loses it and slams him into the wall out of anger at Ozpin. He snaps out of it and is immediately remorseful, but it was still utterly wrong to do that to Oscar. Qrow was also pretty horrible, but I’ll get to that later. Point is, this kid is scared, being unfairly punished for things that he didn’t do, and is probably about to have an identity crisis. So him going missing? It makes perfect sense.

But there lies the issue. He goes missing… and when we see him again, that’s the end of his arc. We don’t see him sort through his emotions. We don’t see him talk with anyone or with Oz. I’m glad that Oscar made his choice to stay committed and I love his new look. But we don’t get to experience it with him. He feels alienated from the main cast and I think that’s because we have so many characters. Some are gonna have to be shafted, but Oscar had an on-going arc and shouldn’t have been. It’s the same thing with Grif in RvB17, where his character arc was ongoing but got shafted due to both episode count and character amount. But with Oscar, it’s even worse as he’s still fairly new and is Oz’s host. He should be more important than he is. Not more than RWBY, ut he’s pretty much just a tagalong out of there because he has Oz in his brain. Not because of his own character.

This has been a pretty vocal complaint. I’m hoping that CRWBY is going to try more in V7. Maybe have Oscar enroll at Atlas or something and get some Huntsman training. I’m not sure what they can do, but I think it’s time that they do at least something. Because next to Nora, Oscar is the most under-developed character, and he really should not be. 

But hey, at least I still liked Oscar during the volume. Unlike a certain little birdie... on that note!

#1. Qrow’s Development

I did not like Qrow in this volume. At all. Now his attitude after the Oz reveal? Understandable. I think that Qrow is gonna be what Blake was to me in V4. Me hating how the character acted, but when I go back I’ll feel better about it since they’ll bounce back now that they’re past the lowest point. And to be fair in the final few episodes, Qrow got better and I felt more sympathetic when he was clearly having a Summer flashback. Plus, again, I get it. He trusted Oz for so long and found out that he was lied to all along. Everything that he worked for? Amounted to nothing. Any worth that it gave him after being marked as unlucky? That amounted to nothing. Him turning to drink himself stupid? Makes sense and it was good to finally delve into the negative parts of his drinking. Everything with Qrow makes sense.

The problem is very simple. It’ all due to one scene. Had they cut this out, I would be able to look past it. What scene is that?

“Don’t lie to him Ruby, We’re better than that.”

That killed any chance of me sympathizing with Qrow that the volume had. Ruby is trying to comfort Oscar, telling him that he isn’t just some vessel for Ozpin. I know that Qrow was upset. I mean he outright punched Oscar, which yeah it was aimed at Oz, but that also didn’t help. But that just felt unnecessarily cruel. Worst? He never apologizes for it like Jaune did with how he acted. Qrow is just overall useless, drinking himself stupid in Brunswick and just angrily giving up after Cordo refused them entry. Again, I get why. But I just cannot feel bad for him when he’s being such a downer and an asshole. Not even Ruby calling him out did anything until he began to flip out when the plan started to not go according to plan. Which by then… it felt too little, too late.

I don’t know. It’s like I said, I get it. But anytime that Qrow was on screen, it brought things down for me. I think that maybe they went a little too far with it, especially with the jab at Oscar. I’m glad that he’s on the right path now, and I assume that V7 will help make me like him again. But for now? I really did not like it, and it is my least favorite thing about V6.

And with that, the Dislikes posts are all done! Yay! One more post to go: the Likes post!  I hope that you all enjoyed this post, and thank you for reading~!

[doomonfilm]

Thoughts : Watchmen [HBO, Episodes 7-9] (2019)

It’s been nine weeks of intense ups and downs, slow reveals to astonishing questions, and red herrings that turn into lore-shifting revelations, but it seems that HBO’s collaboration with Damon Lindelof has resulted in a true television gem in the form of Watchmen.  Though initially plagued by waves of confusion, negative feedback due to it’s unflinching look at race, and the ever-present specter of Alan Moore��fans that echo his displeasure in any Watchmen property that is not the original run, the series eventually found strength via word of mouth, and the eventual fan service that arrived coincided with this new wave of interest.  The series is certainly a fascinating one, and it will go down as one of my favorites from the powerhouse that is HBO.

THE STORY CONCLUDES

Episode 07 : An Almost Religious Awe Angela finds herself in the custody of Lady Trieu as she recovers from an overdose of Will’s Nostalgia pills.  Already in a fragile state due to the harsh and traumatic nature of Will’s memories, Angela finds herself wading through the recesses of her own troubled past, specifically the loss of her parents, her time in a Saigon orphanage, and her near escape by way of her Grandmother’s custody attempted turned to untimely death.  Agent Petey discovers the remnants of a shootout at Looking Glass’s home, but there is no trace of Looking Glass to be found.  Special Agent Blake pays Jane Crawford a visit to confront her about the Cyclops organization, only to find herself a captive of Cyclops and the Seventh Kalvary.  Adrian Veidt faces a trial from the Game Warden.  Lady Trieu reveals that Dr. Manhattan is not on Mars, and that he is actually on Earth, forcing Angela to confront Cal (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II)about his mysterious past and the impending doom in his near future.

Episode 08 : A God Walks into Abar Cal, now revealed to be Dr. Manhattan, struggles to piece together the missing ten years from his life while attempting to orient himself after his sudden reappearance.  In 2009, he meets Angela for the first time and attempts to woo her.  In 1985, he creates life on the Jupiter-based moon of Europa, only to become disenchanted with the creatures made out of the image of his once childhood saviors and educators.  In 2009, he visits Adrian Veidt, who himself is disenchanted, in order to receive a device that will humanize the God-like Dr. Manhattan, and in exchange, Veidt is sent to Europa.  In 2009, Cal visits Will, and while informing Will about his missing granddaughter Angela and the feelings that have arisen for her, he inadvertently informs Will of Judd’s involvement with Cyclops.  In 2019, Dr. Manhattan realizes why he fell in love with Angela in the first place, and the two head into battle against an inescapable fate.

Episode 09 : See How They Fly The story of Lady Trieu’s origin is revealed when we learn that her mother broke into Adrian Veidt’s office during the recording of his presentation to President Robert Redford, found the storage of semen behind his painting of Alexander the Great, and inseminated herself.  Many years later, Lady Trieu receives Adrian’s S.O.S. from Europa and sends him a rescue pod, but Veidt soon learns of Trieu’s true intentions... a plan to undercut Sen. Keane’s attempt at stealing Dr. Manhattan’s powers, all in hopes of transferring them to herself.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

The Peteypedia : A weekly collection of documents relevant to the world of Watchmen, similar to the opening and closing inclusions in the original comic issues and graphic novel.

The Official Watchmen Podcast : Host Craig Mazin and showrunner Damon Lindelof discuss the HBO Watchmen series.  More episodes have been possibly teased, but as for now, Episode 3 marks the end of the podcast.

THOUGHTS ON THE SHOW

If making Will Reeves turn out to be Hooded Justice was world-changing, then I find myself at a loss for words to describe what the reveal of Cal as Dr. Manhattan was in terms of scope and scale.  The clues were there the entire time, as I often brought up to people in conversations about the show how locked in Special Agent Blake seemed to be to Cal, which in hindsight makes complete sense.  Cal’s incredibly reserved nature and no-nonsense approach to life echoed that of Dr. Manhattan’s indifference to the way that we perceive reality as well.  His continual search for love, despite his omniscience, is given another complex layer in the form of his romance with Angela Abar, and the unanswered questions we are left with in terms of his lasting impact on her continued life are simultaneously satisfying and frustrating, as any good story ending should be.  The seamless inclusion of what seemed to be a separate Adrian Veidt story helped bring it all home.

Those who were lucky enough to be following the Peteypedia during the run of the series were also given additional insight into the world of the show.  The texts provided gave us a look into the world that Lindelof built, including insight into Lady Trieu and her many business interests, continued connections to the Fogdancer lore from the original Watchmen, a look at how Nostalgia went from being a fad to a blacklisted item, and even an easter egg that answered a question that many viewers of the show were left believing was a hanging thread.  Totally random, but in a world with limited technology, I thought Lady Trieu’s use of an elephant as a makeshift hard drive was great writing.

Cal always seemed a bit too reserved not to be noticed, and yet to many (including myself), his reveal as Dr. Manhattan came as a complete shock.  Only a small number of people in the community were predicting this, and the payoff was one of the most rewarding in my recollection of TV reveals.  His calm and kind nature fits the predetermined mold, the revelation answered the question of how Angela survived the White Night, and his final moments being quotes from the Watchmen comic brought definitive connection between the HBO series and the original comic run.

Bian was another character that hid in plain sight, with the revelation of her turning out to be Lady Trieu’s mother helping tie the twisted knot (no pun intended) that was the relationship of Bian, Lady Trieu and Adrian Veidt.  Her creation also serves as a hint towards her intentions to supplant Dr. Manhattan, as her creation of Bian in her mother’s image mirrors Manhattan’s creation of Phillips and Crookshanks on Europa in homage of their impact on his life.

The understanding of who Mr. Phillips and Ms. Crookshanks were also sheds new light on the depths of Adrian’s cruelty, which we later learn was simply done as a tactic to keep himself from going mad during his ‘captivity’ on Europa.  Learning about their love and how it inspired Dr. Manhattan to create life in their image made the repeat burning of Mr. Phillips in front of Crookshanks during their performances of The Watchmaker’s Son cruel in retrospect, and while the numerous copies he killed to create his message for help were ultimately a sick, sad means to an end, it does seem that Adrian reveled in the dispatching of his ‘foes’.

If you watched this series without keeping tabs on the Peteypedia, you were watching Watchmen all wrong.

EXPECTATIONS AND REALITY

The ending made sense, I will give it that.  The way that the Millennium Clock was being built up, however, as well as the vagueness of Will’s connection to Lady Trieu, led me to believe that a mesmerizing operation would take place.  This, in my opinion, would have been a proper bookend to the inclusion of the Tulsa Riots, the White Night and the theater riot that happened while Will Reeves was a cop in New York, courtesy of Cyclops and the mesmerizing ray.  Police Chief Judd Crawford’s death at the hands of Will would have played as a test run for large scale chaos.  As Lindelof stated in one of the previous episodes of the Watchmen Podcast, however, once Dr. Manhattan lays his cards on the table, the nature of the game changes.  It was inevitable that any and all focus would shift to him once his presence on Earth was felt, but the way that Lady Trieu ultimately tried to Scooby Doo villain her way into Dr. Manhattan’s powers made logical sense, but lacked the imagination I would have come to expect from the self-proclaimed ‘smartest woman in the world’.  Playing the ending that did take place as Dr. Manhattan’s chance to make a selfless gesture, however, did make up for the imagination with emotional ingredients.

THE QUESTIONS

The only true questions here are whether or not Lindelof (or another creator) will choose to continue Watchmen as a series.  In light of this, my questions would center around the following thoughts : 

- What would the impact on the world be if Angela Abar was able to inherit any form of Dr. Manhattan’s powers?

- With no internet in the current world of Watchmen, how would a rogue Dale Petey share his information?

- With the power structure of Cyclops and the Seventh Kalvary obliterated, will the remaining members of the Seventh Kalvary continue to be a force of opposition?

- Unless I missed something, it seems that Bian survived what Lady Trieu did not... could this open the door to Trieu Industries continuing under her hand?

- With Special Agent Blake having seemingly arrested Adrian Veidt, does this open the door for a Night Owl appearance, seeing as both men would theoretically be Federal prisoners?

Nobody at this point knows what is in store for the future of Watchmen, but with this series having a successful ending, and the conclusion of Doomsday Clock on the horizon, I can imagine folks like myself will be hungry for more.