#i see that your character is flawed and made a dumb or incorrect decision...

[joeloverture]

vetty’s comprehensive tlou2 review

aka if i suffered for 30 hours you must suffer with me. spoilers below, obviously.

for 8 months, i have been an avid tlou2 hater. based on what i knew, it sounded like a frail plot line with even frailer progression. so i wasnt necessarily looking forward to it, but i gave some benefit of the doubt! surely because everyone lauds and worships this game as being fundamentally life changing, surely there’s a kernel of plot here that makes it all worth it! right?

LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER

boy i wish i knew what i was getting myself into proper. almost 30 hours of continuous gameplay and i hated 25 of those hours.

breaking down this review into tiny digestible segments, we have, in order: a bite sized masterclass in writing, abby, game mechanics & combat & level design, and story arc. i will then finish off with a #woke tangent that doesn’t feel woke to me because i have common sense and basic empathy. and a little wrap up <3

this is all typed on my phone while i bathe trying to reduce the headache this experience gave me. so yay.

01: on writing

when i went into my undergraduate writing program, the person who would later become my mentor told me in our first office hour session that good writing is not determined by words, but by necessity. your characters need to be proactive, need to be forced into action. there has to be no other choice for them. that mentor also told me that we cannot make decisions for our characters — that we should never see the writer offscreen or under the page.

i simply didn’t get the impression that these characters were alive. deeply flawed people experiencing a wide spread of emotions, yes, but these emotions never felt like they came from a place of authenticity to me.

joel was the only one who made sense to me this entire game. his decision to stand by what he did to save ellie, standing up against seth, saving abby. all of it made perfect sense for his character. tommy too, who i could write essays about. dina is also relatively up there for characters who i understood during the game.

abby, ellie, lev&yara, abbys friends, and jesse continuously made 0 sense to me.

examples:

ellies choice to go after abby the 2nd time and consequently spare her felt very shallow to me. she did see joel, yes, but it felt as if there was 0 build up there. i didn’t really see ellie having any severe regrets either way, which i desperately wanted to! i wanted to see her emotions more transparently and also wanted to see more of her trauma. the lost level with the boar would’ve been great.

abby saving and siding with lev and yara made 0 sense. she bonded with kids she’d known for barely 24 hours and decided she was ride or die, only explaining that she “had” to save them. no tf she didn’t. she was close enough with isaac and the rest of the wolves that she had more there than with these two kids. and after almost half a decade of indoctrination, i don’t believe it fell apart so quickly. they saved her life! do you know who else saved her life? starts with a j. she oscillated entirely too much, and this could’ve been a beautiful allegory for the danger of indoctrination, recruitment of child soldiers, and the courage to realize what you were taught is wrong. we.. did not get that story.

jesse going after ellie. joel is hesitant to bring ellie out west because that’s a hefty task even for him. im supposed to believe that the very intelligent and emotionally adept JESSE. chose to make the trip from jackson to seattle in ~2 weeks and got there with ZERO injury???? not buying it.

the salt lake crew minus abby pissed me off the whole time. owens deal was nonsense. at least he was the only one among them with a moral compass, but his dumbass got mel killed. manny is a cheap caricature of a mexican written by someone so white they’ve never even listened to feliz navidadz. nora is dumb as rocks. agitating the girl with the gun is such a dumbass choice, and she was my favorite of ellies kills for sure. mel is mostly fine i guess? i just cannot believe they all went along with abbys ridiculously lengthy revenge plan and even allowed her to torture joel, taking on an active role in the plan. “you want what i want” can only go so far when you all have different lives now, seemingly are only finding dead ends, and don’t even like abby all that much!! she clearly was not well liked imo, apart from by manny and owen. the rest were there by proximity.

lev and yara. oh my god. lev shaving his head with 0 forethought. lev running BACK. TO. THE ISLAND. absolutely not. we don’t know enough about his relationship with his mom that isn’t learned through shitty dialogues between yara and abby. we needed to know what type of person he was before that happened. and yara thinking lev was ridiculous for questioning the scripture only to start correctly gendering him approximately one day later. again, indoctrination is not undone overnight. a mess.

all of this just keeps piling on. we keep getting monumental scenes without enough buildup, and them choosing to take on a game of such magnitude while trying to tell two intertwined stories is clearly not something they could handle.

02: abby

everyone knew this was coming.

so let’s get this straight. you meet her torturing joel after he explicitly saved her life. then you are forced into her shoes for several hours in which she doesn’t even show a modicum of regret about how she approached her revenge plan. you learn she’s basically isaacs pro seraphite slaughterer and basically sees them as subhuman/kills them for sport. she says seraphite children should die if they attack first. constantly spews pro colonial language about the territory war. one of her training manuals is about terrorism tactics, which she says she’s been wanting to read about! her flashbacks of her dad are lackluster just like her. she’s nothing remarkable. she’s not a beautifully complex character that many people almost tricked me into thinking. she’s just bland and flat. she has so many reasons to regret who she was and we see NONE of it. she is not absolved of her actions because she let ellie go once.

i love evil women when the writers know she is evil. when the writers aren’t trying to convince you she is good at every corner but instead let you see humanity in unsuspected places.

this is why joel works when abby doesn’t. we see joels worst moment 10 minutes into part one. we see his humanity deteriorate. we see him on autopilot. we see him resisting a blossoming bond with ellie. and we see him return to himself via ellie.

with abby we get her running into her sworn enemies and changing all her viewpoints because they’re just kids or whatever. and then they become her sole priority within 2 days.

03: combat

is where the game shines for me. hillcrest and santa barbara were INCREDIBLE experiences. i disliked a lot of abbys combat though. her weapon sway was GOD. AWFUL for me compared to ellies and idk if this is an isolated incident or not but it was noticeably different for me. which makes 0 sense because ABBY is the trained soldier. i hated fighting the seraphites. loved fighting the rattlers. loved fighting the wolves. will definitely be playing no return a bunch.

04: story arc

for all the above reasons, the story of tlou2 is a sloppy one. too many convenient situations, stories, and details all wrapped up into a torture p*rn fantasy.

i wanted ellie to kill abby so badly. and don’t overreact when i say this

i wanted her to kill her and go home and have a more visible realization of what we never really got from abby. i want her to see the empty walls and empty farmhouse and realize it accomplished nothing. but we didn’t get that. we got bullshit instead. they didn’t even know how to make their own point!!!

finally the wokeness.

im just gonna make a list because you should know why these are fucked up via a frontal lobe.

- manny is so stereotyped and forced

- all the people who die for shock value are minorities

- seraphites painted as religious extremists and “savage”, othered antagonists while mostly being made up of pocs.

- yara being disabled as punishment

- tommy being disabled as punishment.

- EVEN ELLIE. yes losing fingers can be a disability

- the turf war issues

- the zionism

- ‘there is no good side’!!! hoe r u stupid

anyway, that’s my tlou2 takes. i have more than this but these r the sparknotes of my notes i took when playing. reminder not to buy tlou2 unless you can nick it off of a family member or friend in family sharing or get a secondhand copy <3

[youngbugandtonystank]

Your analysis about tony in hoco is interesting!! I saw some people said he's not a good "mentor" for Peter but I think they failed to see Tony's character in depth, so your analysis really helped a lot! If you have time, could you please do for Peter in hoco as well? Thank you ❤

Hi!

I know other people asked different things but I’m going to respond to these ones first. Thank you for asking!

Ok, first I want to talk about three things people usually get wrong about MCU Peter:

1. He’s not poor.

2. He doesn’t blindly admire Tony. 

3. He’s not dumb.

1. He’s not poor. Now, this doesn’t mean he’s rich or a billionaire but Peter is not poor. He’s average or might be above average. I think the reason people choose to believe that he’s extremely poor is because of his relationship with Tony and his classmates. Tony is a billionaire and many of his classmates are rich kids. Peter goes to a very expensive school so you are obviously going to spot kids with cars and expensive clothes, that doesn’t mean Peter is dying of hunger.  

Of course, the kid can’t afford really expensive things like cars but if his aunt is capable of taking Peter out for food instead of cooking, capable of affording a Jansport Wasabi of 46$ multiple times, sneakers of 39 to 70$, capable of affording apartments like this then the kid is doing fine. 

He has an extensive wardrobe, hell, I even spotted Flash wearing the same shirt three times on different occasions and Flash is supposed to be rich. Peter is a dumpster diver because Peter always loses, breaks or ruins things when he’s Spiderman. He mentioned in hoco that he has the habit of losing his backpack and the movie demonstrates that Peter gradually breaks his phone till it’s in pieces. His aunt is not going to pay stuff multiple times for him and it’s not because she can’t afford it, is because Peter would never ask unless it’s a necessity like a backpack. Something he can’t build, so he fixes or makes the other stuff. 

2. He doesn’t blindly admire Tony and 3. He’s not dumb. The thing about their relationship is that people love to exaggerate the ‘’bad’’ parts to fit their ‘’Tony Stark is a villain’’ agenda. Peter knows Tony is not a perfect man, he’s a smart kid, he can tell. Tony’s life is constantly on the news, that includes his dumb decisions: like giving the villain his home address or his playboy party days. Peter knows about this too. 

When Toomes explains to Peter why he’s doing what he’s doing he tells him that Peter is the lesser guy to a man like Tony (something that is more of a reflection of toomes’ character and attitude more than an actual explanation as to why continuously being aware of hurting people and dealing with weapons illegally is a choice he /Toomes/ still makes) and that they’re usually the ones that eat their table scraps. What’s Peter’s answer? ‘’Why are you telling me this?’’ /= ‘’I’m aware of this, why are you telling me this?’’ 

Truth is, Peter doesn’t share his opinion. He sees Toomes for who he is. He sees someone who continuously makes bad decisions and chooses to act in a morally incorrect way to provide to his family and Peter understands that in the end, he’s going to end up hurting Liz (This is why he dropped out of a high school experience such as homecoming with the girl he likes, because Peter understands. ’’How could you do this to her?’’). He sees someone who got comfortable with wearing a profiteering two-faced skin, something Peter could never do. He knows Toomes is only using the ‘’tony stark is evil too’’ card to try and justify his actions. He’s basically saying: ‘’The hero did it, so why can’t I?’’ The hero changed, Toomes didn’t. That’s what makes him the villain.

People now more than ever have a hard time accepting the fact that Tony is, in fact, someone who grew out of a bad place/mentality/morality because they want him to stay as the ‘’bad guy’’ in their minds. It’s easier for them to hate him with this mentality. Truth is, he’s the definition of character development. Tony learns from his mistakes and makes an effort to correct those things. He rebuilds himself. He stops. He fixes things. Because when you do something wrong, you make things right. That’s how it is. And Peter also understands this. 

You see, Peter looks a little desperate in Homecoming to become an Avenger and it’s not because he wants to impress Tony Stark. Peter himself addressed the reason for this. 

He’s bored.

This is his face when entering the school.

And this is him getting out of it.

 ‘’So, how’s school? It’s boring. Got better things to do.’’ ‘’You want to be a high school dropout? I am so far beyond high school right now.’‘ ‘‘But we have a Spanish quiz. Ned, I’m probably never gonna come back here.’‘ He’s tired of school. This is proof of how smart this kid is, he doesn’t need to look at the board or pay attention in class because he already knows all the stuff the other kids are learning. He counts the hours to be able to leave the school. The principal knows Peter is a smart kid. His classmates begged him to stay on the decathlon team and doubted they could win a competition without Peter. School is not a challenge for him anymore.  After getting the experience he got in Civil War, he firmly believes he’s wasting his time in school and could be doing bigger things and his one-way ticket to do that is getting an official membership to the Avengers team. 

Look at him here, he’s having the time of his life.

For a hyperactive

genius kid

school must be hell. 

His motivation to be an Avenger is completely different than his relationship with Tony. He wants to change the pace of what he’s so tired of experiencing. High School. Now, he does want to impress Tony but not to prove his worth as an Avenger but because he looks up to the man. With all of his flaws and mistakes. He knows Tony is not perfect, he knows about Ultron, about his playboy days, about the Accords (you can see him receiving a full lecture in school about them: ‘’The Sokovia Accords were put into place…’’), about how he gave his address to the villain and how said villain destroyed Tony’s house, etc. All of this was on TV. All of it. 

When Peter said ’’I just wanted to be like you’’ he didn’t mean ‘’I wanted to be you’’. Peter wants to do great things, world-changing things, make a difference in someone’s life, help out on a bigger scale. Something Tony does. It’s easy for a kid like Peter to like those things about Tony because he wants the same. And he wants that because it’s who he wants to be. So why wouldn’t he want the approval of someone that does those things? 

‘’So you wanna look out for the little guy-

-you wanna do your part? 

Make the world a better place, all that, right?’’

‘’Yeah, just looking out for the little guy-

-That’s what it is.’’

Aaron Davis about Peter: ‘’The other night, you told that dude, “if you shoot somebody, shoot me.” That’s pretty ballsy.’’

Peter sees a great guy in Tony. Despite everything else. Someone who knew how to put himself together after surviving the grief and pain life presented for him. Peter can see through him and can tell this man has been through hell and back and Peter admires that. He can see strength in him and he wants that as well. If Peter thought Tony was a god almighty, he wouldn’t have stayed at the ship in IW claiming he ‘’thought about Tony’’ and decided to stick to the side of the ship to help his mentor. 

He got attached to Tony really fast. He thought of him as a guidance figure because that’s how Tony presented himself to Peter, since the beginning. He told Peter when he met him that he was there for a hundred-point restoration. He asked him why was he doing the superhero thing, what is his MO and what gets him of bed every morning. It’s natural that Peter got attached that fast, because Tony not only did his homework on him, he showed him that he was there to support him and that he understood him. When was the last time Peter got that from a male figure? That’s right, his previous father-figure, Ben Parker. So receiving that from Tony made him start looking at the man that way.

When we start seeing this? In here:

He challenges Tony when he believes the man is not listening to him, not caring enough about him. Thing is, Peter, had been way too involved in his own little world that never once stopped to pay attention to details like: ’’like that lady that bought you the churro.’‘ ‘‘Happy told me you quit band six weeks ago.’‘ ‘’My dad never really gave me a lot of support…and I’m trying to break the cycle of shame.’’

And like a typical teenager, he gets defensive when Tony proves him wrong.

Here, he starts to realize Tony means more than just the Avengers membership or the recognition. He gets way too upset and sad over something like what happened. He could easily offer an apology or use his old suit instead. He gets upset because he feels like his relationship with Tony is over.

‘’I just thought that I could work really hard and he could– He would– You know. But I screwed it up.’’  /=  ‘’I just thought that I could work really hard and he could see me as a hero, he would offer me a place on the team/his life- You know. But I screwed it up.’’

Peter was aware of all of this just after the ferry incident. Just like Tony, before that confrontation, he was doing this unaware of the personal feelings he was putting into the equation. He even complained to Ned about Tony like any kid would about their parents: 

‘’I’m sick of him treating me like a kid all the time.’’

‘’Why would I tell him about the churro?’‘ ‘’Can I please talk to Mr. Stark?’‘ ‘‘I don’t really want Mr. Stark to know about it.’‘ ‘‘Mr. Stark really overdid it.’‘ ‘‘Hey, Mr. Stark, could I do anything?’‘ ’‘I gotta tell Mr. Stark.’‘ 

He wants Tony in his life. He already thinks of him like he’s his father-figure.

He gets time to reflect on everything and does the right thing as he’s always done. He understands he needs to give Tony his space and that if he wants to be there for him, he needs to be patient. And he gets that at the end:

‘’Boss wants to see you.’’ ‘‘Give me a minute with the kid.’‘ ‘‘I gotta talk to the kid.‘’ ‘‘I was wrong about you.’‘ ‘‘I think, with a little more mentoring…’‘ ‘’Happy will show you to your room…’‘ ‘’You’ll fit right in.’‘ ‘‘See you around. Okay.’‘ ‘’He actually made a mature choice.’’

He wants to be more than what he is and he wants to stay around Tony because he wants the guidance and the feeling of comfort and security he gives him but he knows he needs to stay on the ground for the little people. That’s where he started, that’s where he stays. After getting crushed by a building, I think he is still a little unprepared for the big stuff. 

And at the end, he gets confirmation Tony is going to be there, no matter what choice he makes.  

Thank you!

[majimemegoro]

I see. Thanks for answering my question about Park. I apologise if I came off as judgemental. I saw your post about how Park haters are blind, deaf and dumb, so I assumed that you were overlooking her nastiness when you said you liked her character. I'm satisfied to hear that you do take her flaws into account, and that they're actually why you find her compelling in the first place. (Though I agree with HanzoPresentingTiddies in that her dream should never have been Haruka's responsibility.)

(There's also an issue with the way the other characters view Majima and Park's flaws and crimes. For Majima, the characters (like Kiryu) acknowledge that he's a wild card with moral ambiguity. But for Park, practically all the good guys (like Akiyama and Haruka) consider her a paragon who's admirable and worth emulating (and her dream of being an idol and performing at the Japan Dome worth risking people's lives for), and they don't ever bring up her immoral actions and business practices.

Nah, I hear you. Memes are all in good fun but they can lead to a very un-nuanced mode of communication. Despite what that meme explicitly says, I don't harbour any ill will towards people who don’t like Mirei, and I don’t think any less of them - as long as they aren't being sexist. I apologize if my dumb meme made you feel like you or your opinions were unwelcome. I do love talking about this stuff and I like to have my interpretations challenged and refined, so I appreciate hearing from people with differing views. 

Part of my instinct to defend Mirei so vehemently comes, I think, from the fact that there are lots of people who hate her only because of the suffering she caused to Majima. Which, cry me a river. It was a thorny situation and she made a decision, and Majima’s suffering as a result can be real and important without causing us to be misogynistic and treat Mirei as a mere prop to male characters. This is the kind of view I am reacting against when I make ‘Mirei is perfect and amazing’ posts. I do think critiquing her is warranted, but the discussion that surrounds her is overwhelmingly negative in a way that it isn’t for other characters, and it can get frustrating. 

As for the your latter point, I both concur and offer a complication/revision. *BIG Y5 SPOILERS FOLLOW* I agree that it is completely inappropriate and incorrect for the other characters to uncritically accept Mirei’s vision, especially given her unsavoury methods and the unpleasant way she often treats Haruka. However, I also feel that in subtext the narrative condemns Mirei’s prioritization of career over family, and presents Haruka’s choice to give up her idolhood as a ‘correction’ to this error. (To be clear, this is what I got out of it, and not something I agree with. For one thing, the situation with Mirei and Majima did not represent a safe and stable family situation worth sacrificing for, and IF the narrative really meant to suggest that she made the ‘wrong’ choice by having an abortion and separating from Majima, well. There’s not much of anything positive I can say about such a deeply horrible perspective.) I would propose that if we want a Watsonian/in-text account of Akiyama’s and Haruka’s approval for Mirei’s expectations, we should look to their psychology. I understand doodlysquat about Akiyama, but I might tentatively suggest that Haruka’s main role model (Kiryu) has a history of giving his main role model (Kazama) respect and obedience that, perhaps, was never earned. Haruka also has self-effacing tendencies (see the beginning of y6) that would make her vulnerable to getting sucked into someone else’s projects. And maybe she would be especially vulnerable to her first close female role model.

But it’s been several years since I watched y5. All of this merits further investigation, and further overthinking. Thanks for the asks, comrade, and for listening to my rambling! 

[herotheshiro]

i wanted to post this online somewhere but didn’t know where to put it (not really something to put on any of my IG accounts and if you stay w me for the rest of this post you’ll know why i didn’t put it on twitter) and i almost forgot tumblr existed and no one really uses it (i.e., my sibling doesn’t follow this account. was going to put this on my personal blog which my sibling also doesn’t follow but i feel like this blog is better in the end) so good place to put it and let me release my thoughts. [put it under cut bc it’s pretty long lol]

but basically one of the worst decisions i’ve made in the last half yr is become active on twitter. i made an account back in october to try to order some hipmaic merch from a proxy which ultimately failed and had unexpected personal blowbacks as well... that in itself should have already indicated the dumpster fire that twitter would become for me (from the bad vibes of that failure i mean) but unfortunately in the time before i knew the proxy was going to fail, i got absorbed into fandom twitter. for whatever reason i have this weird thing of wanting to become fandom famous or like fandom well-known, which i think is partially due to me wanting to be like my sibling who sort of became a recognizable name due to their fanworks in some of their fandoms in the past. i feel like i used to kind of have that kind of recognition back during the young deviantart days but since i don’t really produce/publish fanworks anymore, i’ve gotten to liveblogging/livetweeting as my attempts to fame. ik some ppl have succeeded off of that, based on some of the ppl i’ve followed for a number of fandoms in the past few years, so i thought i could do it too ... but alas as y’all know, the internet is a big place and it’s hard to get ppl to care abt your one voice. and ppl noticing you also sometimes happens in unwanted ways, like that whole thing i got stressed over re: a/3 which i think i blogged abt on this blog before ... i mean still not even 100% they were referring to me specifically w that vague tweetinig but i was stupidly anxious over dumb shit like that.

also, as everyone knows, once you really get into a fandom, there is always the absolute mess of “problematic” content/call-outs. sometimes it’s valid critiques of the series content, sometimes it’s over stupid ass petty inter-fan drama. and even if you’re not involved in the drama itself, it’s so tiring to have to witness all the passive aggressive (or sometimes outright aggressive) tweets ... esp in this current global pandemic situation where we’re already getting negative news re: our real lives. i’m writing up this post really in response to me reading through threads of ppl calling out the problematic ways hipmaic handles hip hop/black culture which is definitely valid and basically something i’ve always been aware of even when i first came into the fandom bc non-black iterations of hip hop culture (esp overseas) usually do not hit the mark .... even though i’ve been aware of all this shit, it’s so tiring to read through and then the guilt of still consuming the fandom even w its flaws (which is still something you can do as long as you acknowledge the flaws and problematic aspects. but it also depends on the series i suppose, like imo a/o/t is just shit that prob shouldn’t be consumed lol, which is also funny bc i used to consume it a long time ago but that was like way before the timeskip like when the anime first got released ... i mean this kind of opinion/perspective is fraught w so many asterisks so i’m not going to go into it further but hopefully you get what i mean even if you’re not hearing all of my personal footnotes)... like i don’t think i’m going to give up hipmaic yet, bc i still do enjoy some of its music and i do enjoy seeing character content, but adding twitter to my life was honestly a goddamn mistake. not only for that one case of anxiety re: a/3 but also just me purposely consuming fans’ content that i literally KNOW will piss me off but i still do anyways. it’s tiring to read some of the comments hipmaic fans say, and a few months ago i wanted to interact re: headcanons and stuff but now i’m like you know what. keep your frankly incorrect and inaccurate headcanons to yourself (partly sarcastic but you know when you read a thinkpiece and you respect them for voicing their opinion but it’s also “wrong” at the same time...).

like recently i’ve gotten to thinking to literally just blocking any twitter account that talks abt hyp mic and just restricting my twitter to non-fandom stuff or japanese twitter accounts where i don’t understand what stupid shit they’re saying (if any). and also let’s not get into what a time-suck scrolling through twitter has become for me ... i’m already depressed and completely unmotivated to do work, and twitter is just a major procrastination device to continue wrecking my academic and professional lives and productivity ... i don’t have the app, but i can still access it through safari so of course it’s still a stick in my wheel. i really need to follow what my sibling said and try to rarely go on it and if i do, just stick to my dash and don’t stray too far out (i.e., looking up shit in the search bar). tbh, IG and twitter are both huge time-wasters for me, and i seriously need to consider deleting social media in general or at least for a good chunk of time which is something i wanted to do literally 2 yrs ago but just never did ... ik some of my friends are relatively inactive on social media (they do have it but they just never post or anything) and i really really need to be like that. everything for me (like many ppl at this time i assume) is remote, and i know from past experience that i am VERY BAD at being productive when doing remote working. and having IG/twitter drains is definitely going to make that worse, especially since they’re already major distractors when i AM physically going to school/work. i feel like i’ve tried to cut cold-turkey before, but i usually never keep up the block for long ... it’s also due to a lack of motivation in general (this is a whole other monster of a topic that should be put on my personal blog LMAO) but i need to just try to cut things that i have some control over that could further contribute to my lack of productivity.

tl;dr

fandom twitter truly is a dumpster fire

twitter itself is helping ruin my life (not bc of anything happening on it but just its presence)

i am just purposely consuming bad news and shitty takes and making myself feel worse and i need to stop

[bartgoes2camp-blog]

Blood and Sand (1941)

So Madame Satan was a dishearteningly dull start to this project, and my planned follow-up, Beyond the Forest, left me with little to say other than “Bette Davis is the greatest anything ever.” She sharp shoots a porcupine out of a tree while saying “I hate porkies,” but that’s not really enough to constitute even a modest article. So let’s talk about Blood and Sand, a 1941 bullfighting extravaganza starring Tyrone Power as Gallardo, a young toreador destined for glory and doomed to his own success, and directed by Rouben Mamoulian, also responsible for the extraordinarily lurid pre-Code Friedric March version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from 1931 (seriously, it’s amazing how much they got away with).

Blood and Sand features gorgeous costumes, and the characters are preoccupied with clothing as markers of social status. Young Gallardo strips off his peasant smock to fight a bull owned by his future impresario, who sends him off in clothes so fine his mother assumes he stole them. Upon his return to Seville as a modestly wealthy bullfighter, Gallardo showers fine veils and dresses upon his friends and neighbors. The most dazzling photography in the film occurs when Gallardo is dressed, piece-by-piece, in his new matador outfit, royal blue silk embroidered in gold thread and fuchsia with busy floral patterns and a white cape that could have been worn by sad, 1970s Elvis. It’s absolutely gorgeous and I would wear it every day if I was less fat/not worried about cultural appropriation of blood sport. (via Berlinale)

The film’s portrayal of masculinity is wrapped up in Gallardo’s appearance--how he dresses, how he smells, how his body moves, how he eats. American audiences, accustomed to heterosexist/misogynist ideas of manhood, read the decadent florals of Gallardo’s costume and the attention drawn to the amount of expensive perfume he wears (though he points out that it merely masks the smell of horses and bulls) as effeminate. But the film establishes these markers of effeminacy as indicators of Gallardo’s heterosexual virility. There’s a hilarious scene where Rita Hayworth seduces him with his cape and he play-acts as a bull, lowing and grunting in idiotic, animalistic lust.

That visual extravagance is carried over to the set design, gloriously fussy mishmashes of silver arabesques, wrought iron swirls, rococo furniture and wicker. Two Velazquez paintings hang on Rita Hayworth’s wall like it’s no big thing. A crucifix in the matador’s chapel stands ominously before a backdrop of faux marble that make it look EXACTLY like El Greco’s Vision of Saint John. (via flickr)

But Blood and Sand isn’t strictly the funny, ironic camp to which modern students of queer theory have grown accustomed. It’s knock-out melodrama, very effective at that. You gasp when Rita Hayworth steals away Gallardo from sweet Linda Darnell and then hate her even more when she leaves him for his childhood rival, Anthony Quinn. Your eyes pop as Gallardo’s mother delivers a monologue in which she confesses to asking Jesus to let her son be gored in the arena. A rum-drunk Gallardo slaps his friend for suggesting he take a handgun into the arena to shoot the bull like a coward, and it stings. A picaresque, funny first hour resolves into intense psychological drama, a string of humiliations and bad decisions that leaves the ending far less certain than typical Old Hollywood fare (almost like Barry Lyndon, but less mean-spirited).

These are big emotions. But these are identifiable emotions. If camp asks us first to find fault in a text’s representation of affect and behavior and then relish the overblown and overacted, what happens when we approach a well-made, well-acted film AS camp? Camp doesn’t necessarily rely on something being poorly made, but it’s certainly a helpful touchstone, something that gets brought up A LOT. Sontag even acknowledges that camp is “not necessarily bad art, and some art which can be approached as camp.. .merits the most serious admiration and study.” But is it possible for a film to exhibit NO flaws in its screenplay, set design, effects, acting, editing, or score to qualify as a camp piece? Perhaps focusing on “camp” qualities as “flaws,” as something negative or incorrect or even bad, is less helpful than thinking of these qualities as eccentricities, choices in the film that fall outside of the Hollywood norm without necessarily becoming avant-garde. While Blood and Sand isn’t eccentric in the same way as, say, a Powell and Pressburger film or The Scarlet Empress, it’s certainly excessive. I’m not convinced that excess alone is enough to consider something a camp text, though. And although Blood and Sand’s visual excess certainly invites a camp reading, I’m not sure whether it’s silly or dumb enough to actively qualify.

I really, REALLY enjoyed this film. It’s big, bold, gorgeously shot and a wonderfully breezy 2 hours. If you’re not into bullfighting, which most people probably thankfully aren’t (no tea no shade on the proud country of Spain), at least see it for the most shockingly funny scene in sports drama history, where a dummy gets gored through the butt and flies through the air like an idiot.