#nothing against the three but they do carry a lot of the narrative because of how intertwined their emotional states are with the plot

[danwhobrowses]

So after four months, Bell's Hells are off the moon

0.5/5 Stars - Some of the locals were nice but activities were shit and needs new management.

But what's this? Aabria with a steel chair!? She's probably cackling looking at the socials right now

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

SFX Magazine Issue 368, August 2023

THEY’RE BACK – AND THIS TIME THEY’RE IN ALL-NEW TERRITORY. NEIL GAIMAN TALKS RETURNING FOR SEASON TWO OF GOOD OMENS

THE RASCALLY DEMON Crowley (David Tennant) and the neurotic angel Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) put aside their differences to pull off one doozy of a Hail Mary and prevent an impending Apocalypse in Good Omens’ first season. The task cemented the pair’s unconventional friendship. So what are divine beings, who have fallen out of grace with both Heaven and Hell, to do for an encore?

The answer lies with archangel Gabriel (Jon Hamm), who shows up unannounced on the doorstep of Aziraphale’s London bookshop. Suddenly, Aziraphale and Crowley are caught up in a caper of biblical proportions – but also a more intimate tale.

“It’s a mystery,” showrunner Neil Gaiman tells SFX. “It kicks off a story that doesn’t have giant consequences for the universe, even if it does have consequences for Aziraphale and Crowley. We have a lot of the marvellous Jon Hamm, who is the angel Gabriel and turns up at the beginning stark naked, carrying a cardboard box with no memory of who he is. In the same way, it is about Aziraphale and Crowley having to get involved with humanity in a way that they haven’t before.

“They get dragged in slightly against their will to try to sort out the love life of Aziraphale’s tenant,” he continues. “Her name is Maggie [Maggie Service] and she runs the record shop next to the bookshop. You’ll see the coffee shop over the road, which is Nina’s [Nina Sosanya]. The relationship between Maggie and Nina is one that Crowley and Aziraphale try to fix, and mess up, because they are not good at human relationships, even if they can do miracles.”

Truth be told, Gaiman never originally intended this arc to serve as Good Omens’ second instalment. The TV series was based on Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s 1990 novel. The two collaborators had partially hashed out the details for a sequel to the fantasy comedy, late one night in a hotel room. This, however, is not it. Gaiman instead plotted a new narrative that could provide the connective tissue between the first season and a theoretical season three, if it happens.

“Because the hypothetical season three exists, there is a story that is there, and I didn’t feel that we could drive straight from season one into that,” Gaiman explains. “I knew what the stakes were. I knew what the parameters were. I also knew that I had David and Michael. I had the angels from plot number one.

I had demons from plot number one. And with anybody that I wanted to bring back, but didn’t have room for right now, I did not have to bring them back as themselves. “I had absolutely nothing for Madame Tracy to do in this plot, but I would be damned if Miranda Richardson wasn’t going to be in this. She is one of my favourite people in the world. She is hilarious and is so good. And I knew I was going to have a new demon replacing Crowley as Hell’s representative in London/ the UK. Miranda’s demon Shax is the best demon you could want.”

It’s late February 2022 and SFX is in Edinburgh for a set visit. A soundstage in Pyramids Studios has been transformed into a street in Soho. The visible local stores include the aforementioned book, coffee and record shops, as well as a magic establishment. In the middle of them all stand Aziraphale and Crowley, the latter in close proximity to his classic Bentley. It’s close to the end of the six-episode season, so exactly what the duo is discussing constitutes a spoiler. We can say, however, that Aziraphale has picked up the pace. Time is of the essence as Shax marshals her forces to descend on Aziraphale’s store and retrieve Gabriel.

“This is really Shax’s first time out on Earth,” Gaiman explains. “She is working very diligently and very hard in Hell for a long time. Now she is on Earth, trying to figure it all out. She’s just discovering what Crowley has known for 6,000 years, which is that if you’re a demon and come up with a brilliant plan to screw up the lives of humanity, people will get there first and do worse than anything you could have imagined! She’s coming to terms with that.

“She is having to deal with the first crisis on her watch, as well, which is the disappearance of the archangel Gabriel from Heaven. It would be fair to say that by the end of the story, she is leading as much as she can get from Hell’s requisition department – a legion of Hell – in an attack on a Soho bookshop.”

When audiences catch up with Aziraphale again, he’s enjoying his time among humans. He owns most of the block in a Soho neighbourhood, and he’s meddling in Nina’s love life. Meanwhile, Crowley has been living in his car, with his plants sitting on the back seat. He’s grumpy about his current status quo, but frequently hangs out at Aziraphale’s. The duo began as antagonists, but their history and blossoming relationship will be fleshed out in flashbacks.

“One of the enormously fun things I came up with is the idea of minisodes,” Gaiman explains. “They are 25-minute-long episodes within the episode. We have three of them over our six episodes. Each of them is like one of those chunks of episode three [in season one]. Whereas the longest one of those was four or five minutes, if that, these are full stories.

“You get to have the story of [put-upon Biblical figure] Job, and you learn Aziraphale and Crowley’s part in the story. Then writer Cat Clarke takes us to Edinburgh in the 1820s for a tale of body-snatching and attempted murder that the boys get involved in,” he adds.

“Finally, Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman reunite the League Of Gentlemen in a Nazi-period story that takes place very shortly after the episode in the church. That one was the only one I said had to be there, because I fell in love with our Nazi spies in the church. I kept thinking, ‘What would happen if they essentially came back as zombies, with a mission from Hell to try and investigate whether or not Crowley and Aziraphale were actually fraternising?’”

Gaiman admits that one of the greatest challenges has been filming Good Omens simultaneously with his upcoming show Anansi Boys. The two shoot within throwing distance of each other, but are both timeconsuming endeavours.

“If I could go back in time, I would go back to 16 September 2020, when Douglas Mackinnon [co-producer] and I got the phone call from the Amazon bigwigs to say, ‘We have good news for you and interesting news for you,’” Gaiman recalls. “‘The good news is we are greenlighting both Good Omens and Anansi Boys. The interesting news is you are going to have to do them both at the same time.’

“I would go back to then and I would throw myself on the call and say, ‘Neil, don’t! This is unwise.’ That we are doing them both together is great. The amount of sleep I am not getting is monumental and monstrous.

“It’s a little bit like childbirth, in that I managed to forget all the things that drove me nuts about the first one. Having said that, I managed to fix all the things that really drove me nuts making season one, which is great. We just have a whole new set of problems making season two…”

The Odd Couple - David Tennant and Michael Sheen talk character and sets for season two

Crowley and Aziraphale come off as the best of frenemies at times. Where do they stand with one other now?

DT: They are indeed. What’s different in season two is because of what happened at the end of season one, they no longer have head offices that they have to report to. They are in a very different position. Whereas before they were trying to get away with things, now they are kind of free agents.

MS: Although sort of fugitives as well. They are sort of in-between. But this amazing life they have created over a millennia, they are now able to enjoy in a slightly different way. They are not having to put on a front for their respective teams. There is a different kind of freedom.

DT: While at the same time being cut off, so they are also strangers in a strange land.

MS: That kind of connects them in a slightly different way. They have always been the only two beings who could understand each other’s position. Now they are pushed even closer together.

Now that they have the run of the place with no obligations, does that bring its own set of problems, being cut off?

DT: They have this sort of uneasy relationship. They are not entirely cut off from their head offices. Indeed, their head offices are quite keen to exploit that sort of adjacent connection, as we will see as the story unfolds. They exist in this grey area, neither the supernatural nor of the Earth.

MS: By the time we pick up their story in this series, they have appeared in time where they were kind of let alone a bit more. When we pick the story up, they are being bothered again.

The depth and the richness and the detail of what we are seeing on set here in Edinburgh is mind-blowing. How is it for you having it all in one place now, rather than having filming scattered around the UK?

MS: It’s completely changed the experience of doing it. Just being indoors… The Soho set on the first season was freezing cold.

DT: I was in a car park. Even inside the bookshop I was exposed to the elements! There’s a greater percentage of the show set here. There was a practical imperative to making it a manageable environment. If we had been in a car park, the elements might have impinged our ability to film.

Hellraiser - David Tennant is Crowley

You and Michael know these characters inside out. Do you have a shorthand?

It’s a hard thing to be objective about. Although I didn’t know Michael that well before we shot season one, it was always easy and exciting working together. It’s well-oiled now, for sure. It’s certainly fun to come to work. We enjoy bouncing off each other.

How comfortable are they about becoming involved with Gabriel?

I suppose Aziraphale is a much more enthusiastic detective. We are very much voting for the spin-off called The Azirafiles, which will follow this! As with most things, Crowley is reluctant to get involved or to exhibit any kind of energy or enthusiasm about very much. He is dragged kicking and screaming into this. Necessity forces him to get involved, whereas Aziraphale rather likes it.

Where does Crowley hang out these days?

He spends a lot of time in the book shop. He only has one friend. He can only have one friend. That is the great liberation, and also the great prison, that they find themselves in. They have no one else. They have come to rely on each other more than they ever did. And more than they care to admit.

Crowley is a rock star, in a way. Were there any particular musicians that inspired you?

Not consciously, no. The look was assembled accidentally during the first costume sessions. The Crowley of the book is of the mode when the book was written. He is more kind of Wall Street, the way he is described. We just decided that Crowley should always be of the moment he’s in. We were just trying to find a look that we felt fitted.

Divine Being - Michael Sheen is Aziraphale

How has knowing your characters better informed this series?

The first series was the first time we really properly worked together. It feels like we haven’t stopped working together since. Everything that has happened in-between plays into coming back to these characters. I am sure it is all feeding into it. It’s very difficult for us to know how that is informing the characters and their relationships.

With the flashbacks to various points in Earth’s history, is there a period of time Aziraphale enjoys the most?

One of the most enjoyable things for the audience and us is moving through different historical periods. It’s a great source of joy, and people thoroughly enjoyed that episode in the first series, so that has been expanded on in season two. But in terms of which Aziraphale enjoys the most, I think it’s not actually a period of time that we’ve seen him in on this series.

He would have been happiest at the end of the 19th century, in the Victorian era, which is considered the golden age of magic. He would have loved being with the greats like Harry Houdini. He loved the Victorian period. It was a great period of time for philanthropy and doing good works in a municipal way.

How has it been going from something dark like The Prodigal Son to a more whimsical show?

That’s the nature of an actor’s job. You go from one thing to another. In some ways, it’s even more useful to have big differences between the characters. What tends to happen, and I think most actors feel this way, is if you are playing one character for a long time, part of you yearns to play the bits the character doesn’t have. There’s a naivety and an innocence about Aziraphale. But at the same time, underneath that, there is eons of knowledge and experience.

[cosmerelists]

Ranking the First Five Stormlight Novels

For the record, this is not meant to be an objectively correct ranking or anything--but it is my personal ranking. I wanted to wait to do this until Stormlight 5 came out!

And I gotta say--I like all of the books. But I can rank them by "least favorite" to "favorite," even if they're all among my favorite books in general, you know?

[Spoilers for Wind & Truth! ...And all the other Stormlight books too!]

#5: Wind and Truth

I feel bad ranking the newest book at the lowest spot...but so it goes. The thing is: I'm a simple woman. I come to Stormlight Archive looking for people with huge fantasy swords fighting each other in the sky. And while I do respect and understand Kaladin finding his place outside of battles and becoming a Therapist to the Stars, I did honestly miss him getting to duke it out against overwhelming odds.

I will say that this was probably my favorite Adolin book--his WAT arc was my favorite. I also loved the new ways that Shallan is using her powers, to say nothing of finally getting the Rlain/Renarin love story. It was also extremely gratifying to finally get a lot of the backstory about the Stormfather and Honor and the Recreance. I'm also fascinated that so many arcs involved oaths being broken framed as a good thing.

Lots of great stuff in Stormlight 5. But my monkey brain really wanted more sky fights.

#4: Oathbringer

I have to imagine that if you are a Dalinar stan, Oathbringer is probably your absolute favorite book. I'm a Dalinar fan but not a Dalinar stan, so that definitely flavors my reaction to this book.

This one does have one of my favorite Sanderlanches--the battle of Thaylen city is amazing (and Shallan single-handedly fighting an entire army does legitimately make me tear up every time). The invasion of Kholinar storyline is also great, and I loved meeting Azure.

Again, lots of good stuff, but not as much good stuff as some of the other books, at least for me.

#3: Rhythm of War

Rhythm of War was challenging for me because Kaladin is having the ABSOLUTE WORST time in his whole life and it's sometimes legitimately hard to read about it. At the same time, we get such great Kaladin fights thanks to the Pursuer, and one of the all-time great Kaladin Dramatic Entrances at the end.

Plus, I mean....Navani and Raboniel? So good! So toxic! Such an accidental toxic yuri horrifying love story. I'm such a sucker for self-sacrifice too, so Raboniel sacrificing herself to save Navani AFTER Navani killed her? That could have been created in a lab just for me.

PLUS this book had Maya and Adolin, both their kata fight and the whole "WE CHOSE" scene.

Incredible book, IMO.

#2: Way of Kings

I go back and forth about whether Way of Kings or Words of Radiance is my favorite, if I'm being honest. At the moment of writing this list, it's turned out this way.

I really love Way of Kings. The whole bridgeman plotline is horrifying but so compelling, and I love watching Kaladin build himself and his man back up. I love seeing all of the ways they manage to survive, from the side-carry to, well, war-crime armor I guess. The scene of Kaladin surviving the highstorm--with Syl in front trying to block it--is one of my all-time favorite scenes ever. The Tower Fight is fantastic all the way through. And the end with Dalinar giving up his shardblade to save the bridgemen is so earned.

On a first read I was less compelled by Shallan's narrative but it honestly gets more compelling the more often I reread which I've done...let's say a few times. She's such a great character from the first line.

#1: Words of Radiance

As I mentioned at the beginning, I am a simple woman sometimes when it comes to my fantasy series. Words of Radiance wins for me because it contains my three favorite plotlines / scenes:

The 4 v. 1 duel. So amazingly fun to read. Such a good scene for Adolin, for Kaladin, for Renarin. "Honor is dead but I'll see what I can do." Come ON.

Kaladin & Shallin fieldtrip in the chasms. I loved the way their relationship developed over the course of this scene. The end when they're huddled in the cave in the middle of the highstorm while listening to the Fused above them, telling each other their true stories--top-notch. Plus I'm a sucker for storylines where people have to both use and hide their powers, and so the fact that they're both Radiant and trying to hide that from each other makes me giggle maniacally.

The Kaladin vs. Szeth duel. This fight has EVERYTHING. They're in the sky. It's a highstorm. They literally run across enormous boulders that were RIPPED from the GROUND by the storm while said boulders are SPINNING THROUGH THE STORM. It's so over-the-top and it's my favorite fight in the whole series.

So that's me! I know there are tons of "What's your favorite Stormlight book" polls out there, but if you want to put your ranking in the tags I'd be interested to see it!

[noramashhadani]

Bound by fate - Chapter 1 ~~ Our first meet ~~

June POV

Hi, I'm June. June Martinez.

I'm a writer and a university student at the same time.

I'm a person with many dreams, and I always love to achieve them.

I have so much to talk about regarding my story, so where do I even begin?

Should I start by narrating my story with my first love?

Perhaps that's the best starting point for my life's narrative, because all the truths began to emerge from there.

At Cambridge Public Library

June was wandering through the library, searching among the books for something new to catch her eye.

June was a book enthusiast and loved reading all genres: literary, poetry, detective, mystery, and every other kind of book.

June's dream was to read every book and visit every library in the world.

While searching among the books for something to read, she found a book that drew her attention. As she reached for it, another person also seemed drawn to the same book.

June's hand brushed against the man's hand, who also wanted to take the book. She looked at him in embarrassment, but the man was incredibly handsome. He was tall, with exceptionally beautiful eyes, as if their beauty was borrowed from the seas and the sky. He had sharp, well-defined eyebrows. His features were very distinctive, and June was intensely captivated by him.

Their eye contact lingered for three seconds before the man finally broke the connection, saying in his deep voice, "You take it, miss. I apologize." His accent was heavy, like a Russian one.

June continued to stare at him silently, then realized her silence and replied, embarrassed, "No, it's alright. I'm sorry, you can take it."

The man smiled at her, and his smile was incredibly beautiful. One could even exaggerate and say it was June's first time encountering a man with such handsomeness and perfectly symmetrical features. June felt her heart pound fiercely, and her composure seemed to melt as she looked at him.

As for the other... despite his stern and cold features, he completely melted because of the look in her eyes. She was indescribably beautiful. She wasn't the most beautiful, but she was unique. Unique to the extent that you wouldn't want to tear your eyes away from her delicate, beautiful features. Her eyes were the color of a forest, full of green and brown. Her lips were like an edible strawberry, not large, but pleasantly small and plump. Distinctively shaped. Her skin was fair and rosy, without imperfections... Her hair was blonde and medium-length. She was uniquely beautiful.

After a moment of continued eye contact, August finally decided to break the silence. He cleared his throat, then added in his rough, deep voice, "You already took it first, so you should take it... I can read it later somehow."

He said this while looking intently into her eyes. June then noticed that they had been staring at each other for too long for strangers and subtly moved back a bit, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. He also noticed this and turned to face the other way, still relatively close but without invading her personal space.

June looked at him with a smile and added, "Thank you for your generosity; it means a lot to me."

His eyes widened, and her words had pierced his heart. Wasn't it strange for someone to feel such warmth from just a word from a stranger?

He nodded his head with a gentle smile, finding the situation between them endearing. "You're welcome. It's nothing worth being selfish over," he added, his rough voice carrying a hint of tenderness and kindness.

She smiled upon hearing his words, and her heart filled with gratitude for his endearing kindness.

After that brief conversation... August gathered his large frame and turned to leave... He walked away, subtly glancing back several times... but he tried to control himself and left without turning again. As for June... she remained in the same spot, clutching her book tightly, watching his retreating back. It was the first time she had felt such a strange sensation. She stood there for a stranger, lost in thoughts about someone whose name she didn't even know, or anything about him. But he... had caught her attention in a different way... different from anyone else.

She continued going to that library many times, always hoping to see him again. She had become addicted to seeing him from just one glance and a short conversation that lasted a few minutes or less. But it could be said that those minutes were something profound for both of them. Something deeper than their small conversation.

Every time she went there, she indeed found him, and it sent butterflies to her stomach, making them flutter and overwhelming her with happiness that she had found him in the same place again...

He, too, noticed when she arrived. He tried as much as possible to keep his gaze on the book but failed, finding himself stealing a fleeting glance with his sharp eyes to look at her face and slender body with its subtle curves.

It was a pleasant and endearing coincidence that made both parties grateful for its existence.

June consistently went there to see him and enjoy a glance... even if it was just a glance.

Days passed... The university period indeed began.

June started attending Harvard Medical School. She met her friends there and enjoyed her time more than ever before... but this time, thoughts weighed heavily on her. Thinking about this man she had met previously in the library... and it would be difficult for her to go to the library with the start of her studies... The library was indeed far for her to be able to go there. But she was determined. She wanted to go there no matter the cost.

June was on campus, sitting with her friends... lost in her thoughts, pondering how she could go to the library without being late for university.

She looked at the girls after she had a chance to speak...

"I have something... an idea to share with you girls."

She said, looking at them with sparkling eyes. The girls felt curious about what she wanted to share and indeed allowed her to speak.

She looked at them with a smile, ready to speak soon... then added in a quiet, excited tone: "I found a library whose atmosphere I really liked... I've been going there recently, and I've gotten used to it... So I'm thinking of going there every day with you during the break between classes. What do you think?"

The girls looked at her and liked the idea, but one of her friends quickly, though not completely, objected to the idea... then she said in a questioning tone, "Shouldn't we know the location of the library before we decide whether to agree or not?" Georgina asked, her tone sharp.

June chuckled softly because she knew Georgina was right. It was her mistake from the beginning not to tell them about the place she was talking about.

June looked at the side where Georgina was sitting with a gentle, apologetic smile and tone. "Indeed, it's my fault, girls... I should have told you about the place first. Do you know Harvard University in Cambridge? It's 5 kilometers from here, so we can be there in 15 or 20 minutes, and the library is very close to it."

The girls liked the idea and agreed without hesitation, but Georgina always liked to have neutral opinions for them.

Georgina added in a tone of shock and annoyance, "Girls, are you really serious about something like this?! We already have libraries here. Why do we have to go there when we only have 50 minutes for a break? It's not even a full hour! What will we gain from that? We won't even be able to settle down there anyway because we'll have to return to the university after just 10 minutes of entering the library. Do we always have to act crazy and reckless, even after we've finally started studying at medical school? Do we have to lose our place and get expelled just for this? Just to enjoy for ten minutes? We can go during the holidays; why do we have to go during a break that isn't even a full hour?"

The girls looked at her, but the excitement of going there still simmered within them.

June placed her hand on Georgina's with a reassuring smile, "Girl, this will never be a reason for us to get expelled from university, please... We'll just enjoy ourselves a little, then come back. We have to break the rules a little sometimes to enjoy our short lives, which we only live once... Besides, I'll have Christoph drive us... You know Christoph always knows shortcuts to get in, and that will help us get there and enjoy our time before we're even late."

The girls confidently agreed with June's words, but Georgina remained unconvinced by their idea. However, she was forced to agree because she was sure they would do it whether she liked it or not.

"Fast forward"

"The Next Day"

The girls were indeed planning their trip to the designated place, and Georgina was still hesitant about the matter. Georgina was always cautious about such things that might cause problems for them when they were unaware, but the girls were always stubborn, loving to enjoy themselves and break rules, completely unlike her.

After the first classes ended, just before the break... the girls set off and found Christoph waiting to take them. They eagerly got in, and Christoph indeed drove off.

While driving, Christoph noticed the worried expressions on Georgina's face and stared at her for a moment before smiling and adding in a reassuring tone, "Georgina, don't worry about being late when I'm driving you... I'll make sure you get back to the university before the break ends after you've had your fun. Trust me before you trust your gut, okay?"

Georgina looked at him and smiled, nodding her head. His words calmed her heart somewhat... at least a small part trusted his words.

"Minutes later"

They indeed arrived at the familiar place and got out of the car excitedly. Christoph looked at them with a smile filled with warmth and told them he would wait for them in the same spot.

The girls went inside eagerly, exploring the new place.

As for June, she had a specific destination in mind that she intended to visit.

Her feet led her to a particular set of shelves she had in mind to check. She searched for something specific that was on her mind, and indeed, she found a book as if she had been waiting to see it... Her eyes widened in happiness upon seeing it, as if she had found something more than just a book...

[goblins-riddles-or-frocks]

Would you mind sharing what you found unsatisfying about iwtv's take on memory?

I mean I’m a huge AMC Interview With The Vampire hater, I think it’s poorly paced, poorly written (the misogyny…), has zero real thematic coherence, and actively works to dupe its audience into respecting it with like a string of soapy surface level entertaining stuff happening and dressing it all up to sound much smarter than it is. I will be seated for season three

But my plethora of issues with the show notwithstanding, focusing on the memory thing, I feel it is employed most often to strip Louis of agency and sideline him in his own narrative. On top of that, I feel like it just doesn’t really go anywhere.

IWTV is about collecting the closest to objective record of events as possible. As the series progresses, it becomes clear that this is the way Louis is trying to take some agency back for himself against Armand. This could be really poignant and interesting, but in practice it turns more into a narrative game of team Lestat vs team Armand with Louis himself as collateral— which is strongly exacerbated by how Daniel (and other characters) mock him for being in abusive relationships.

A standout example of this is from season one, when it comes to Louis’ involvement in Lestat’s death, and how his misremembering is treated like a gotcha.

In the book, Louis chooses not to involve himself, which is why Claudia is forced to carry it out herself. Once Louis does learn, he has the choice to save Lestat or side with Claudia. So when he grudgingly sides with Claudia, the entire plot is shaped by it. At a surface level, Louis reads like a rather passive character, but he has a lot of narrative agency. Nothing would turn out the way it does without his choices, even if that choice is frequently one of inaction, or simply an internal, emotional one.

In the show he’s nominally very involved in Lestat’s death, but we keep being told he doesn’t have the stomach for it. That he’s too weak to go through with it and not idk drown in Lestat or whatever— which again, is something the narrative framing belittles. Then it’s revealed that Claudia hid the real plan from him and poisoned Lestat separately. She was the only architect of his death all along because she knew Louis could not be trusted.

Then the misremembering comes in: Louis supposedly delivers the final killing blow— but suddenly it is uncovered that he was actually letting the poison drain out of Lestat’s body. And that he actually refused to burn the corpse to give him a chance to recover. This information isn’t actually centered on Louis and his feelings though, Daniel has to be there to call bullshit on Louis’ (implicitly Armand’s) version of events. And then season two even goes so far to confirm that Lestat couldn’t have died by fire anyway, because he has the blood of Akasha. Saving him from the incinerator didn’t even change anything!

So Louis was only superficially more enmeshed in the events shaping the plot, to then be separated from it entirely. Meanwhile there’s very little narrative interest in what it actually means to him, to have believed and felt a certain way about a very pivotal moment in his history, and to have had that entirely upended. Louis’ experiences and interiority, what he is going through beyond searching for a narratively defined as impossible objective truth, don’t actually matter to the narrative.

Another example is how the show frames Louis’ recollection of the physical violence in his relationship with Lestat. In season one we get to see this really OTT physical abuse (side note: I do get the sense that the show can’t really grasp abuse that isn’t so in-your-face. There’s a supposed dichotomy next to Armand’s memory wiping and manipulation but even that is taken to such an unnuanced extreme.)

It’s really gruesome, and the show seems to really enjoy showing Louis as physically fucked up as possible every chance it gets. Then season two has Louis unearth forgotten memories about how the fight actually began because Louis attacked first. How he was the aggressor all along and Lestat never even wanted to fight.

First of all, I just loathe that framing, that actually Louis just imagined being abused— even if it’s because Armand put those memories in his mind. But also the take away is that… Lestat’s not that bad actually? I guess? Especially paired with the reveal that he actually saved Louis (but … chose to let Claudia die… but we don’t care about this I guess…)

Louis remembering things incorrectly is mostly just a vehicle for a plot twist, and also often a means to just undermine him. That’s not a cogent theme! That’s not memory being a monster.

Like where is the exploration of there being nothing left of Claudia but what Louis, and her killers, remembers of her? Nowhere because the show hates her and all women. Where is any sort of conclusion about what Daniel may or may not remember after S2 Ep5? There was room for really interesting shifts in dynamic and perspective after that… where is it? They basically return to the status quo the very next episode.

What does “memory is a monster” even fucking mean in this show? Is it that it is consuming? That these characters cannot escape their pasts that have defined them? Is it that they can never be certain of their memories, even though that is really the only lens through which they can contextualize the world/their relationships/their lives beyond it?

They don’t go anywhere with any of their choices! It drives me insane! Instead they just keep repeating a single goddamn line because it sounds smart and people go nuts for it because idk vampire yaoi. It pisses me off!

[starbuckaroo]

Sorry I know this is going around a lot rn but anyone who wants to say ANYTHING about bad parenting on this show and wants to talk about Eddie mf Diaz can eat a fucking dick UNLESS they can show me they’re not being hypocritical and can show me their posts that rip Athena apart. Fucking hell.

I will preface this by acknowledging that ofc there’s absolutely no way I can know what it’s like to be a black woman raising a black child. I never can. I do have some personal experience with raising a black boy in the US, though, so the episodes with Harry have always hit me really really hard, and usually because I always want to mcfucking scream at Athena for the way she allows her career indoctrination to harm her children.

Yeah my main gripe with this show always always boils down to “Athena quit your job” bc I can’t stand her anymore tbh. She would have stayed an interesting character IF at some point in s4-5 thereabouts she started to have doubts about the system and they did something interesting with that

OR

If they would allow the literal actual conflicts of interest to crop up and let her be a fucking antagonist. Let Bobby struggle with his ethical evaluation of a scene and his marital obligations. Let May struggle with learning and growing away from her childhood home and wrestle with what her mom continues to do. And let that storyline with Harry this season actually carry the fucking heavy and heinous weight that it truly has. It turns my stomach honestly like I had to stand up and walk away, and let me sister tell me when it was over so I could go sit back down.

But the apologism is what is so unforgivable. Like don’t get me wrong, I love the hell out of this show and it’s my full on hyperfixation and has been for years, but its top billed character has been nigh unwatchable for most of the last few seasons. The narrative trying to sell me that she’s one of the protagonists, that she doesn’t have to struggle meaningfully at all about what she does for a living or to her family, and I’m supposed to swallow that without protest? Nah. Can’t happen.

I liked her character a lot in the first three seasons tbh against my better judgment! I was expecting to hate her from day one but I was sold, actually. Michael leaving the show kind of tanked her character, I think, maybe. I think it was their dynamic that made her interesting at first, and then sympathetic later on when she really was trying to make their blended unconventional family work despite her upbringing. But honestly once Harry aged into teenagerdom and Michael left and May graduated it meant there was like…nothing left about Athena that was interesting except her job except that’s actually the worst part about her lmao woopsies.

Anyways. Let Athena be a villain or at least an antagonist. That would fix everything tbh. It would make her interesting again, it would be in character given how many ethical messes she’s caused or been party to, and would allow the show to keep doing their dumb copaganda shit that they’re almost certainly contractually obligated to shove in at least once per season. But it would finally be interesting because it wouldn’t feel like I was being asked to swallow bullshit covered in glitter spray. Maybe they could explore her toxic relationship with her mother and how engaging so heavily and perpetually with respectability politics has done damage to herself (and her parents and her ex husband and her children) over the years. Maybe her magical fairytale white lady boss at the precinct can actually act in character for once and pls god I would just like. I would sell a kidney for a real and honest Athena Quit Your Job plotline. Fuck. They could even take the coward’s way out like they did with Eddie’s military service and just have her quit for some random reason so ethics never actually has to be part of the conversation but neither would we have to deal with the copaganda all the time. You know Angela Bassett would act the fuck out of that kind of complicated character. It would be a real conflict instead of whatever contrived nonsense they’ve been putting on her this season.

Anyways this really fucking got away from me but I’m just not willing to hear a fucking WORD against single dad Eddie fucking Diaz unless the speaker has already done their bit about Athena and they’re just making their way through the line.

Except

I don’t actually want that bc We Know Why they’re saying that shit about Eddie and if they ever opened their mouth about Athena I don’t even really have to wonder about what sort of racist bullshit might fall out. Those aren’t the people I want attempting to critique Athena Grant. So actually yeah can everyone just shut the fuck up.

Myself included.

[lyledebeast]

Since I watched The Crow (1994), I've been wondering if I should make an addition to my Vengeance Criteria. In addition to the vengeance being for a damage that is not the avenger's fault, solving an ongoing problem, and fitting the damage done, it should also be carried out against people who actually did the damage.

But shouldn't that go without saying? If the avenger is killing people who had nothing to do with the harm done to them, that's something other than vengeance. The only reason I would even consider adding it is that The Patriot's good guys kill people who have nothing in common with those who harm them apart from being in the same Army. Even their uniforms are different!

The militia: "We've got no smoke with the Green Dragoons who are actually killing civilians. Those Regular bastards guarding supply trains the British need to leave South Carolina and its civilian population, though . . . Fuck those guys! They all deserve to die!"

Obviously, this creates a lot of problems because the Green Dragoons definitely have smoke with them. A lot of it. Look at all the smoke they have!

January Jones's character in Sweetwater (2013), the other avenger of whom I approve, does kill a lot of people who were not directly involved in her husband's murder. However, she does not even know he's dead for quite a while, and it's impossible for her to tell who was or was not involved. She just wipes out Prophet Josiah's whole congregation to have her bases covered. Eric Draven is much more focused in his vengeance. The first three men he kills were all physically in his apartment the night he and Shelly died. He only shows up at the criminal symposium Top Dollar hosts because the fourth man who was in his apartment flees there, and he kills the other criminals in attendance to get to him. When Top Dollar reveals that he was behind the attack on Eric and Shelly's complex, Eric is happy to add him to the list, but killing people without direct culpability is certainly not a priority for him.

Honestly, watching The Crow made me wonder if I even have a problem with revenge narratives at all. I think I've just seen a lot of movies where violence itself is the end goal and vengeance is just a convenient excuse for it.

[screechthemighty]

VERY cross and bitter rant about the first two episodes of DD s4 below the cut

Let's just. Break this down, okay, a lot happened over those two hours, so let's just break this down:

Things That Are Making Me Consider Quitting Marvel Forever (Except for Moon Knight s2):

The fact that they called it Born Again was already a hit against this season, like I'm tagging things as "born again spoilers" for everyone else's sake but I will only be referring to it as season four otherwise because CATHOLICS DO NOT BELIEVE IN BORN AGAIN AS A CONCEPT THAT IS A PURELY PROTESTANT THEOLOGICAL TEACHING FRANK MILLER WHEN I FREAKING GET YOU

Killing off Foggy was bullshit. Okay, this is stupid. Like. Foggy has been a Daredevil CONSTANT for the ENTIRE HISTORY OF HIS EXISTENCE okay Foggy might go away for a bit but he ALWAYS comes back and I get that Bullseye didn't get to kill Elektra or Karen so they felt the need to cement his position as Killer of Matt's Loved Ones somehow, but this is stupid. It's a shock death. It's dumb. The rest of the season isn't going to feel quite right without Foggy there and so will any later seasons if they make them. I hate it here.

Hey remember when Wolfwood died in Trigun Maximum and even though he was dead, he was still so deeply present throughout the narrative? Even though his name is never spoken again? Remember when Faye in God of War was dead from the start but touched the narrative and the people who loved her so thoroughly throughout two games? Well apparently the writers for Daredevil season four never read Trigun or played God of War but they REALLY SHOULD HAVE because so far Foggy's death has meant JACK SHIT except as a catalyst for Karen being gone from the plot and Matt not being Daredevil anymore. I do not feel him anywhere in the narrative and it's BAD WRITING. I know we're only two episodes in and this might change but I'm not holding my breath.

The CGI is ass, I'm sorry, I hate it.

It really legitimately feels like they might be trying a bit too hard with the edginess of it all like. They have to prove we're still mature so every episode opens with a gruesome shock death and we've heard the fuck-word (which keep in mind, not even the Netflix series ever used) three times. This is a bit more of a minor quibble because it hasn't been too tryhard YET but I'm sensing that they were at least a little tryhard.

Matt's Catholicism continues to purely be used for window dressing to spite me, specificially

Things That Are Going to Make Me Finish the Season Against My Will:

Charlie Cox and Vincent D'onofrio are carrying this show on their backs so far, someone get them a spine doctor before they hurt themselves

"I'm visually impaired. I'd love to help" comedy king

This is the part that pisses me off the most but. I think the plot is coming after Punisher fanboys. The fact that the cop had a Punisher tattoo with the American flag and everything just SCREAMS "we're coming after Punisher fanboys, specifically in the police force" and that is something I am HERE for, that NEEDS TO BE DONE, and I'm SO ANGRY that they caught my attention with that. Get their asses.

There's nothing so far to suggest that there WON'T be a Moon Knight cameo.

Good (?) News:

Speaking of Moon Knight. I had a great idea for a fanfic, hold, please.

[farfromdaylight]

OH I AM SORRY somehow i completely did not see that you had already answered some of these lmao. anyway have some more: 9, 16, 20, 21

NO NO i got a bunch at the same time and answered them together, you just happened to double up! not ur fault at all. THANK U FOR SENDING MORE, i shall tl;dr below!

9: worst part of canon

god i could answer this for so many series, i am always full of salt about Bad Canon.

can i say "most of zero time dilemma?" i know this isn't final fantasy but oh my god, what the fuck was uchikoshi smoking on this one. i thought it was okay but not great when i played through it the first time. when @shepherdtostars played through the series she streamed VLR and ZTD for me and man, ZTD does not fucking hold up lol. like all three games have their low points (especially in gameplay/mechanics/traversal but i'm solely speaking about story here). ZTD's conclusion to the series is fucking stupid at best.

to be slightly more on topic, i have not thought dirge of cerberus was good since i was a teenager with no taste and no understanding of Decent Storytelling and Characterization. (and even then i could recognize some shit was garbage, lmao.)

16: you can't understand why so many people like this thing (characterization, trope, headcanon, etc)

my gut answer for this is zenos, lmao. i think @anneapocalypse summed up a lot of it in her similar response (i'm on mobile rn or i'd link). i think zenos is fine in stormblood itself and his ultimate ending at the close of 4.0 is fantastically done, ties together the narrative themes, etc.

i don't feel that way about endwalker. i don't think it's earned. i struggle with it to the point that i am going to replay stormblood (i haven't replayed it since 2020) and really dig into how i feel about it for my wol's story, then extrapolate from there for an ending that makes sense for endwalker. like i'm genuinely stuck on my 80% complete endwalker fic due to The Zenos Problem.

here's the thing, i don't hate his character trope? ennui is fine for a villain motivation and it ties into the themes of uncaring imperalism that stormblood puts forward. by contrast, i really disliked how zenos carried forward after that in the story. fandaniel didn't work for me. EW zenos didn't work for me. i have no desire to replay endwalker but i've reread and rewatched the scenes enough that i don't think it'll ever really work for me.

which is fine. i know i'm supposed to be choosing violence in this meme but it's fine that This Specific Storyline didn't click. there's a lot else i like instead.

20: part of canon you found tedious or boring

FF14 is too easy an answer for this. I love the game but it has some dead boring story and gameplay structure for MSQ. i have nothing against the character (i thought she was fine) but "speak with wuk lamat" illustrates the problem perfectly no matter how you feel about her. you need variance in the actual gameplay of telling your story, or it becomes too obvious to the player.

it works fine in visual novels and in many ways FF14 is very similar to that medium, but... it's not. it's a RPG. FF14 can't really do much of interest with this kind of thing due to the nature of its setup. i don't expect the kind of genuine exploration and discovery you get in other RPGs from it because it's linear by design. but please hide the bones of the structure so i can focus on enjoying the game.

21: part of canon you think is overhyped

final fantasy vii rebirth dev. square enix

lmao.

i really wish i'd liked it. in so many ways i should have liked it. it clearly, CLEARLY worked for many people. but it didn't work for me. remake was solidly middle of the road, but rebirth? good god, what is nojima smoking these days. why is aerith singing. why is zack here. what the fuck is that ending.

sigh.

[oldtvandcomics]

Queer Media Monday New Year Extra - 2023 Hall Of Infame

I was kind of supposed to do this at the end of the year, but missed the day because of Christmas, so it got postponed to New Year’s Eve. Which is a Sunday, but whatever. While I enjoy almost all the media I consume (I pick it carefully beforehand), there were three queer stories in 2023 that I just cannot recommend, but also are for one reason or the other too important to simply ignore. So, here is my 2023 Hall Of Infame. I’ll be more opinionated than usual, but let me have this, as a treat.

Loki (2021-2023)

As part of the MCU, alternate-timeline Loki escapes at the end of the 2012 movie The Avengers and gets caught up with a time-travel agency trying to keep the Multiverse in order. Notable for being the one that actually states Loki’s queerness on-screen. Well. At least his bisexuality. His genderfluidity, not as much.

This show had so. much. potential. Good actors, Disney budget, and a premise that can be taken in a million interesting directions. Unfortunately, they didn’t.

It seems like every time this show has to make a narrative choice, it takes the least interesting way. The new characters are shallow and Loki doesn’t feel like himself, probably because key parts of his backstory and personality have been simply ignored for no clear reason. Motivations aren’t established where they should be, and nothing is explored in depth. Interesting ideas, themes and concepts are brought up, just to be dropped immediately and never mentioned again. Oh, and that famous queer coming out scene? Was an offhand mention of Loki having dated men at some point. It never came up again.

This is not a good show. And not even in an interesting way, where we at least have a delightful trainwreck to analyze, but in a very boring, aggressively mediocre way. It’s nice if you want to watch something without having to care about characterization, themes or a bigger overarching story, or if you are doing what the entire fandom was doing and collectively hallucinate an entire different show. Otherwise, don’t bother. Go watch Doctor Who, Legends of Tomorrow or even Ministerio del Tiempo instead. The first two are very queer. The last one isn’t, but has great time travel bureaucracy and a cool morally gray lesbian as part of its main cast.

Le Premier Jour de Paix by Elisa Beiram

Read as part of my project to read more French books by French authors, this was sold to me with the promise of it being about living in peace and how to achieve it. Also, queer. It… Wasn’t entirely wrong?

So the blurb on the back is misleading. Aureliano is where the story starts out, but the book actually follows three stories, each on a somewhat bigger scale than the previous. Aureliano is the first, and the least important one. The second is a woman whose job is to travel around and solve smaller local conflicts, the third the lead negotiator for world peace. She is in contact with an alien, who uses neopronouns, hence the book’s classification as queer.

If you want an idea of a better future, this book is not it. It is very, very bleak, set in a world ravaged by climate change, where everyone still alive is just kind of carrying on with not much hope at all and a lot of resentment for the people in the past. There is also a discussion that can be had about aliens as queer representation and the implications of humanity needing alien intervention for the conflicts to stop. 

I must admit that the aliens were quite good, world building-wise, and that the author has clearly done research into climate change, conflicts and how to solve them, and was kind enough to include a list of sources in the back. She clearly cared a lot and did the best work she could. However, it feels like she’d been trying to write a hopeful book without being able to envision a hopeful future. 

Interesting book, and I wouldn’t recommend against it. But probably also not for it.

Fanfic (2023)

Fanfic is a Polish movie about a transgender boy coming to terms with his gender. It is a movie I very much wanted to like, because we definitely could use more Eastern European queer movies. Also, I love fanfictions as much as the next Tumblr user, and this is a subculture that definitely has not been explored enough on screen. Especially in relation to queerness, the potential is enormous.

Frankly, I don’t think the filmmakers knew here what they were talking about. They missed both the fanfiction and the trans aspects.

What the main character is writing here is not fanfiction. It is called fanfiction, but lacks the connection to fandom culture or even any recognizable source material. It appears to be about a band, or it is a band AU, and all characters are very obvious self-inserts. But like, what band?! It’s never elaborated upon. The story works well this way, but if you are going to call a movie “Fanfic”, then it does need to have some insight into actual fan culture, or it is just false advertising. As to the trans aspect, it feels strongly simplified, to the point that it seems unauthentic. I am not a trans man myself, but I have been in a difficult place at the age of the characters, and as such can say with certainty that this movie does not understand the amount of pain its protagonist is in. 

First, the transition happens very quickly. He pretty much goes from “hey, boy’s clothes, I like” to cutting off his hair binding his breasts and wanting to be called a boy within a day, with no signs of him actively questioning his gender before. As I said, I’m not trans, but based on what I’ve seen on the Internet, it definitely takes longer than this. Also, what bothers me more: This seems to magically fix all of his problems immediately. He becomes visibly confident and relaxed, has no trouble insisting on people gendering him right, and stands up for a classmate when she’s being picked on by the teacher. Coming from a character who days before was seriously depressed and drowning reality in self-insert fiction and stolen pills, no, I don’t buy it. What makes me the most upset is that one scene where a classmate calls the protagonist out for being so caught up with his own issues that he’s blind to those of other people, and it is framed as a good thing. As I said, I’ve been there. To this day, I have absolutely no idea what my classmates were doing around that time, because I was caught up in my own pain and my own need to survive and simply didn’t have any mental energy left for anything else. It sucks that Tosiek couldn’t be there for his friends, but given the pain he was in? Not his fault.

I repeat. This movie is doing its best, but clearly does not fully understand the subjects it chose.

So yeah. All three of these stories had a huge potential, and absolutely failed to live up to it. They are still worth knowing about. Loki, because it was a huge fandom phenomena, the other two, because they are stories by smaller, non-anglophone creators who clearly did their best. Eventually, they failed, but the stories could still be interesting conversation starters.

Happy New Year, everyone! Here’s to more good queer media!

Queer Media Monday is an action I started to talk about some important and/or interesting parts of our queer heritage, that people, especially young people who are only just beginning to discover the wealth of stories out there, should be aware of. Please feel free to join in on the fun and make your own posts about things you personally find important!

[tonydaddingham]

Source

Transcript of main article under the cut:

THE RASCALLY DEMON Crowley (David Tennant) and the neurotic angel Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) put aside their differences to pull off one doozy of a Hail Mary and prevent an impending Apocalypse in Good Omens' first season. The task cemented the pair's unconventional friendship. So what are divine beings who have fallen out of grace with both Heaven and Hell to do for an encore?

The answer lies with archangel Gabriel (Jon Hamm), who shows up unannounced on the doorstep of Aziraphale's London bookshop. Suddenly, Aziraphale and Crowley are caught up in a caper of biblical proportions- but also a more intimate tale.

"It's a mystery" showrunner Neil Gaiman tells SFX. "It kicks off a story that doesn't have giant consequences for the universe, even if it does have consequences for Aziraphale and Crowley. We have a lot of the marvellous Jon Hamm, who is the angel Gabriel and turns up at the beginning stark naked, carrying a cardboard box with no memory of who he is. In the same way, it is about Aziraphale and Crowley having to get involved with humanity in a way that they haven't before.

"They get dragged in slightly against their will to try to sort out the love life of Aziraphale's tenant," he continues. "Her name is Maggie (Maggie Service) and she runs the

record shop next to the bookshop. You'll see the coffee shop over the road, which is Nina's (Nina Sosanya). The relationship between Maggie and Nina is one that Crowley and Aziraphale try to fix, and mess up, because they are not good at human relationships, even if they can do miracles."

Truth be told, Gaiman never originally intended this arc to serve as Good Omens' second instalment. The TV series was based on Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's 1990 novel. The two collaborators had partially hashed out the details for a sequel to the fantasy comedy, late one night in a hotel room. This, however, is not it. Gaiman instead plotted a new narrative that could provide the connective tissue between the first season and a theoretical season three, if it happens.

"Because the hypothetical season three exists, there is a story that is there, and I didn't feel that we could drive straight from season one into that," Gaiman explains. "I knew what the stakes were. I knew what the parameters were. I also know that I had David and Michael. I had the angels from plot number one. I had demons from plot number one. And with anybody that I wanted to bring back, but didn't have room for right now, I did not have to bring them back as themselves.

"I had absolutely nothing for Madame Tracy to do in this plot, but I would be damned if Miranda Richardson wasn't going to be in this. She is one of my favourite people in the world. She is hilarious and is so good. And I knew I was going to have a new demon replacing Crowley as Hell's representative in London/the UK. Miranda's demon Shax is the best demon you could want."

It's late February 2012 and SFX is in Edinburgh for a set visit. A soundstage in Pyramids Studies has been transformed into a street in Soho. The visible local stores include the aforementioned book, coffee and record shops, as well as a magic establishment. In the middle of them all stand Aziraphale and Crowley, the latter in close proximity to his classic Bentley. It's close to the end of the six-episode season, so exactly what the duo is discussing constitutes a spoiler. We can say, however, that Aziraphale has picked up the pace. Time is of the essence as Shax marshals her forces to descend on Aziraphale's store and retrieve Gabriel.

"This is really Shax's first time out on Earth," Gaiman explains. "She is working very diligently and very hard in Hell for a long time. Now she is on Earth, trying to figure it all out. She's just discovering what Crowley has known for 6,000 years, which is that if you're a demon and come up with a brilliant plan to screw up the lives of humanity, people will get there first and do worse than anything you could have imagined! She's coming to terms with that.

"She is having to deal with the first crisis on her watch, as well, which is the disappearance of the archangel Gabriel from Heaven. It would be fair to say that by the end of the story, she is leading as much as she can get from Hell's requisition department - a legion of Hell - in an attack on a Soho bookshop."

When audiences catch up with Aziraphale again, he's enjoying his time among humans. He owns most of the block in a Soho neighbourhood, and he's meddling in Nina's love life. Meanwhile, Crowley has been living in his car, with his plants sitting on the back seat. He's grumpy about his current status quo, but frequently hangs out at Aziraphale's. The duo began as antagonists, but their history and blooming relationship will be fleshed out in flashbacks.

"One of the enormously fun things I came up with in the idea of minisodes," Gaiman explains. They are 25-minute-long episodes within the episode. We have three of them over our six episodes. Each of them is like one of those chunks of episode three (in season one). Whereas the longest one of those was four or five minutes, if that, these are full stories.

"You get to have the story of (put-upon Biblical figure) Job and you learn Aziraphale and Crowley's part in the story. Then writer Cat Clarke takes us to Edinburgh in the 1820s for a tale of body-snatching and attempted murder that the boys get involved in," he adds.

"Finally, Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman reunite the League of Gentlemen in a Nazi-period story that takes place very shortly after the episode in the church. That one was the only one I said had to be there, because I fell in love with our Nazi spies in the church I kept thinking, "What would happen if they essentially came back as zombies with a mission from Hell to try and investigate whether or not Crowley and Aziraphale were actually fraternising?"

Gaiman admits that one of the greatest challenges has been filming Good Omens simultaneously with his upcoming show Anansi Bays. The two shoot within throwing distance of each other, but are both time-consuming endeavours.

"If I could go back in time, I would go back to 16 September 2020, when Douglas Mackinnon (co-producer) and I got the phone call from the Amazon bigwigs to say, "We have

good news for you and interesting news for you," Gaiman recalls. "'The good news is we are greenlighting both Good Omens and Anansi Boys. The interesting news is you are going to have to do them both at the same time.'

"I would go back to then and I would throw myself on the call and say, 'Neil, don't! This is unwise.' That we are doing them both together is great. The amount of sleep I am not getting is monumental and monstrous.

"It's a little bit like childbirth, in that I managed to forget all the things that drove me nuts about the first one. Having said that, I managed to fix all the things that really drove me nuts making season one which is great. We just have a whole new set of problems making season two."

[after-perfect]

A few recent posts have made me think a bit about the ending of Elisabeth, specifically whether or not der Tod should carry Elisabeth offstage. I sort of wandered away from where those posts began, so to avoid hijacking them (and because I'm long-winded), I'm putting my thoughts here.

As with a lot of my Elisabeth opinions, it depends on the production/actors, so I'm going to stick with my favourite German-language Tods here, because this is going to be long enough as it is.

I do think there's a case to be made for some Tods carrying Sisi away, but the one for whom I'm most strongly pro-carry is Uwe Kröger. I've said before that Uwe plays der Tod as an actual being, morally grey by human standards, who becomes obsessed with Elisabeth. Whether he loves her in the way most humans would understand the word is debatable (I tend to lean towards no), but in his mind it's love, and he definitely feels something for her that he doesn't feel for the billions of other people who've died throughout human history. And I don't think that abruptly ends when she dies - at least not for Uwe's Tod.

Does this romanticize death and the whole "Elisabeth was in love with death" narrative that the musical's got going on? Sort of, maybe? On the surface, it looks like it follows the "primary couple are happily together at the end" trope. Problem is, one half of the couple is dead; she's not happily anything. But der Tod is still - alive? in existence? whatever he is? - and his feelings for Elisabeth are still there. And it's those feelings, whatever name humans would give them, that make me feel he should carry her off. It's not what I'd call romantic or a happy ending (I mean, it's a German musical; of course it's not a happy ending), but it is in character with what the audience has been seeing from Uwe's Tod for the last couple of hours.

The Tod I think has the strongest argument against carrying Elisabeth off is Máté Kamarás. I really like this interpretation of Máté's Tod - a real being, but one whose feelings are more human-like (in an immature and volatile way) than Uwe's. The linked post pretty much sums up why this Tod should leave Sisi onstage/with the Todesengel: it suddenly hits him exactly what death means, and he recoils from it.

There's also the possibility that Máté's Tod is a narrative tool Lucheni uses to lighten his own guilt, the imaginary puppeteer who directed Lucheni's act of murder. I feel less strongly about der Tod carrying or leaving Sisi in this interpretation. If Lucheni is caught up in telling this twisted romance, then it could make sense for the Tod he imagines to carry Elisabeth away. On balance, though, I think that this Tod should leave her; once she's dead, he's done what Lucheni needed him to do, and there's no reason for him to take any further action. (Side note: I'd like to see a production that leans into the "der Tod is Lucheni's invention" thing, has der Tod leave Sisi onstage, and then has either the Todesengel or a moving bit of the stage carry her body over to Lucheni. Then, faced with the reality of what he's done in the absence of his scapegoat, Lucheni hangs himself, and the curtain falls.)

The Tod who can either carry or leave Elisabeth in my mind is Mark Seibert. This Tod is the darkest of the three, and I like him in part because he's sinister in a way that strongly resonates with my experience of depression. There's nothing romantic about Mark's Tod. Both Elisabeth and Rudolf find him seductive at times (and also terrifying at times, and sometimes both), but he has no feelings for either of them; all he wants to do is destroy them ("mein Auftrag heißt zerstören" rings very true with him). It's obvious in the way he drops Rudolf once he's dead, and the same can be true of Sisi. If anything, he doesn't need to be as gentle as he is in laying her down; he could let her fall just as he did Rudolf.

Having Mark's Tod carry Elisabeth off would work for me if it were made clear that it's in no way tender or caring - if it were very obviously a victory move. He's finally won, and is taking her with him as a trophy. It should be rough, and probably shouldn't be a bridal-style carry like Uwe's Tod does. However, if Mark's Tod carries Sisi off, he absolutely has to take Rudolf too. As the personification of depression, self-loathing, and suicidal ideation, he wins a much more resounding victory with Rudolf, and if he's going to show his triumph over Elisabeth, he'd better do the same for Rudolf.

[squarebracket-trickster]

Happy STS! Since you're on the second draft of ur WIP, how was the progress of the first draft? What are some things you learned during it? What is something you would do differently for your next first draft?

It's so rare to see a writeblr going through revisions and i find your commentary very inspiring. One day i too will be telling myself to leave the sentence be for another draft LOLLL

Oooh I love this question so goddamn much!!! (well, ig it's sort of two? three? questions.) I had so much fun answering this<3333 It was an excellent chance at reflection.

How was the progress of the first draft?

(lol I did not intend for my answer to be this long but it just kept going. But I like the idea of being very transparent about the journey because I hear a lot of nice, summed up "one day I sat down and wrote a novel, the next month I had a manuscript and started querying" stories and I think that can be really invalidating for people for whom the journey isn't that smooth if that is the only narrative you hear.)

I think I came up with the story idea some time in 2019. It was one of those, "princess runs away from an arranged marriage but [redacted due to spoilers]" concepts but at the time I was worldbuilding for other things so I put it aside for later.

About a year later, when I had not made much progress on my other WIPs (due to not having enough worldbuilding ideas to carry a fantasy or sci-fi story and banging my head against a wall trying to think up something I was happy with), I decided, ah what the hell, I'll try this instead.

I picked it because it was a simple concept--an idea fit for a standalone novel on the shorter end, with a fairly small setting and requiring little worldbuilding. It seemed like it would be good practice before I seriously tackled my more ambitious WIPs.

It still took a while to actually get writing. I tried three or four times to make an outline--one was more than 8000 words--and ended up scrapping each of them because when I got to actually writing the scenes I had outlined I found them dry and soulless. I was just going through events that needed to happen but there was no emotion, no humour, no themes, nothing. I tried to write the first chapter once or twice but I started the story too early in the timeline and lost the momentum to keep going. Finally, I wrote a scene somewhere in the middle (the one where Sorin figures out Adris is a girl) and it was the first I was actually happy with. I had fun writing it and then reading it again, and it finally felt like there was some "life" behind the plot I had been failing to outline. I rewrote that scene in both first and third person, decided I liked 1st better, and tried to keep adding to it. Then I had about 3600 words. I wrote another scene near the end (when Isadred and Firnen meet; though I changed this later) and it gave me some direction to work towards.

Then I did not touch the project again for several months.

One day in November of 2021 (NaNoWriMo month but I hadn't heard of it yet) I decided to just go for it and put a bunch of time aside to write like crazy. I started from chapter one and had two rules, 1. Start chapter one as late into the story as possible, and 2. keep it going--don't edit (not even spelling unless it is absolutely critical for me to make sense of later), if I get stuck just jump ahead to the next scene I can write, and if I don't know what happens next just ramble about everything that can't happen until I figure out a situation where that does not apply.

It worked. Really well. The next things I knew (about three weeks in) I had roughly 48 000 words. Some days I was hitting 13-14 000 words per day. Then I took a break because uni and came back to it in April 2022. Same rules, same deal. Suddenly I had 112 572 words.

I got stuck on the ending. I wrote a few scenes but didn't like them. So I figured I would just call it a finished manuscript, put it aside for a while, and come back to it when the time was right.

About two months ago I thought up part of a better ending while in the shower and a few weeks ago, just before I started the second draft I figured out the rest. So I knew it was time and I went back to it.

What are some things you learned during it?

I had a lot of fun. I laughed a lot at the banter and dramatic irony, I highlighted my favourite lines to look back on later, and I left funny comments for myself in the margins. The weird part was that I was not expecting it to be fun at all. I see so much writing content about how hard writing is and how much writers hate it, especially first drafts, and I have done my share of banging my head against a wall (especially in my other WIPs) but, for me at least, it is one thing to get stuck on a plot point, but if I am finding every single new sentence to be a struggle to get down it is probably because my story has not come to life yet. I am writing too much from a place of "hit each plot point in my outline" and not enough from a place of "you know what would be fun/gut-wrenching/shocking/funny/clever/insightful?".

Believe it or not, the middle section was the most fun to write.

I have also come to believe ardently in these commonly touted morsels of advice:

if your story is losing momentum after only a few chapters you either don't know where you are going with it or you have started too far before the inciting incident.

Name your first draft draft zero, garbage draft, word vomit (or in my case, "idk what the FUCK this it looks pretty cool tho"), and just expect utter garbage.

Don't look back, just keep going. You know that thing in improv where they do the "yes, and..." exercise? Do that.

If you are stuck on what happens next, skip that scene and go to the next. There is a chance you may not even need the scene you were stuck on. Long time skips in the same chapter are allowed.

If you don't know what to write just sit down and start rambling. As long as you know what you are trying to write towards, eventually you'll end up there and you can cut the bloat later.

Know your climatic moment before you start--not your ending, but the big final showdown the story is building to. You don't have to know how it resolves (I didn't figure that out until like six weeks ago) but know who is in your final battle and where it takes place.

Don't research. Don't worldbuild. If you need a piece of information you don't have, write [insert type of medieval ship here] and move on.

What is something you would do differently for your next first draft?

I am honestly not sure on this one... I do wish I was a more skilled writer prose-wise because my first drafts would need a lot less editing later on if descriptive, poetic prose came as naturally to me as dialogue and emotional one-liners. But all I can really do for that is keep practicing.

The only other thing I wished I had done from the start was keep a journal, log, or blog of my progress, and save some of the funny comments and [somehow our two romantic leads have to sword fight their way out of a masquerade ball in this scene while dressed to the nines] notes-in-brackets I left in the draft but went back and deleted later once I actually filled out the scene. Hence the existence of this blog now.

One of these days I would also like to develop a proper writing schedule to make more consistent progress throughout the year (instead of the random sprints of activity followed by months of not touching it that I do now). But between the ADHD and the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome I don't know when that will happen.

[atreefullofstars]

So like, in my case, it's because I haven't been on board with the narrative's framing of the moral landscape since like episode... three?

This narrative is just PLAGUED with rules for thee but not for me. Is it wrong to assassinate the enemy kingdom's ruler who has blood on his hands? Depends on who does it. To send an assassin after the innocent young prince? Depends on who's doing it. To BE a magical assassin? Dunno, are you aesthetically pleasing while doing it? Is it wrong to kill bugs? Depends on who's doing it. Is it wrong to want power? Ditto. Is it wrong to use slurs and do unflattering impersonations of another species? Shocking and unforgivable if you're human, hilarious if you're an elf. Almost point for point, everything the "evil" characters have done that was bad, the "good" characters have also done and never been held to account for it by the other characters or by the narrative. And the "bad guys" have done a lot of GOOD stuff that the narrative refuses to acknowledge.

One of THE villains of the series is a man who worked tirelessly and sacrificed his physical health to not only defend his people from natural disasters and from incursions from invading forces, but ALSO defends the actual lives of said people from a king who would blithely throw thousands of them away for a feel-good moment with the queens of a foreign kingdom. Harrow FAILED as a king right there, it would have been DISASTROUS to his rule if they'd actually carried our that edict, Viren snatched that situation right out of the fire, and he's VILIFIED for it! And the reasoning is that they had to kill a big, possibly sentient, possibly unique creature to save thousands of (ordinary, common, boring) lives... ... but THEN when it's RAYLA AND CALLUM setting out with the intent to kill a big, possibly sentient, possibly unique creature -- not even to save lives, but to restore a cultural practice and claim the reward for it -- THAT'S FINE. Yes, they found a way not to kill it, warm fuzzies all around, but the narrative completely fails to grapple with the fact that they were GOING to and it NEVER treats that as wrong the way it does with the magma titan. (Caveat: I'm not saying Viren did nothing else wrong, but I take issue with the way sins were heaped upon him by the writers in later seasons because frankly they're just trying to retroactively justify the vilification that was already present in season 1.)

And the BIGGEST injustice at the heart of all these injustices is this idea that humans have no right to want magic, even when they're dying for lack of it, even when the people who have it are abusing them instead of helping them, humans have no right to call anybody out or take anything they aren't given or even wish for it to be different. Every human who ever did dark magic for any reason was wrong, every human who ever fought back against an elf or dragon was wrong, humans are supposed to accept their place at the bottom of the pecking order and in the reservations they've been force-marched to and they're supposed to be the ones to absorb any lingering anger from the conflict and set down their weapons first even when being actively invaded --

-- and then we get told the story of the FIRST time this happened, when a sweet innocent child motivated by love was the only one who wanted to help humans, and she was KILLED for it in the name of the natural order --

-- I'm on Team Aaravos here, not because I think he's righteous (he's not) or because this is nobler than vengeance (it's not) but because I'm disgusted with the so-called morality of everyone the show is telling me to root for. EVERYONE in this show has sought revenge for something at some point, which makes Aaravos no worse than any of them in terms of motives. Everybody's got blood on their hands, and the numbers just depend on who you think 'counts' as a person. He's manipulative in a way that obviously creeps some people out, but this show has failed to give me any character whose behavior I'm happy with, so pick your poison.

Aaravos is railing against the entire moral order of this little fictional universe and so am I. He wants to take that world apart with his teeth and I'm going to be over here with my popcorn. Fucking get 'em, babygirl.

Obviously he's going to lose, and we'll get some speech about how it was because of the desire for peace and unity or something, and it'll be super super gross, and the show will never actually address the fate it consigns the human race to, and everything will all work out because the writers said so, forever and ever, amen. Whatever. I'm here for the food at this point.

Someone explain to me why there are so many posts along the lines of: "Aaravos can do whatever he wants now that we know he lost his beloved daughter and has trauma"

My brother in Satan that's someone else's daughter he's going after and exploiting now.

I know the answer is He's Hot So He Can Do Whatever He Wants which- yeah like I'm here for the fandom's poor-little-meow-meowfication of him, too. Fandom gotta fandom, I guess. but still- I don't fully get that on a logical or emotional level.

The whole Leola thing did humanise him, yes, but that added complexity didn't change my mind about him being kind of a dick.

There is this song in Sweeney Todd, Johanna (Quartet). Sweeney grieves the loss of his daughter but that's still secondary to how focused he is on using that grief to fuel his desire for a revenge- Revenge that's destroying countless lives of innocent bystanders who mean nothing to him. The story he tells himself about his innocent daughter's faith is the justification for his actions. That's my perception of Aaravos. And that's ultimately more interesting to me than him being a perfect lil' victim of this all.

[lorenfangor]

I heard that #40 was super homophobic :/ so I skipped it. But now your fic is making me want to give it a try. How problematic is it? Are the characters worth it?

Okay.

Okay.

Let’s talk about #40.

The plot of The Other (a Marco POV) is that Marco sees an Andalite on a video tape sent in to some Unsolved Mysteries-esque TV show, and he assumes it’s Ax and hauls ass to save him from being captured. Ax, being Ax, has videotaped the show, and they pull it up and Tobias uses his hawk eyes to figure out that it’s not Ax, it’s another Andalite - one without a tailblade. Ax is appalled at the presence of this vecol (an Andalite word for a disabled person) and we find out that he and others of his species have deep ingrained prejudices against at least some kinds of disabled people.

Despite this, Marco and Ax go looking for the Andalite in question because he’s been spotted by national TV, and they meet a second one, named Gafinilan-Estrif-Valad. The vecol is Mertil-Iscar-Elmand, a former fighter pilot with a reputation and Gafinilan’s coded-gay life partner. The two of them have been on Earth since book 1; they crashed their fighters on the planet and have been trapped there thanks to the GalaxyTree going down. Gafinilan has adopted a human cover, a physics professor, and they’ve been living in secret ever since.

Thanks to that tape, Mertil has been captured by Visser Three, and he’s not morph-capable so he can’t escape. Gafinilan wants to trade the leader of the “Andalite Bandits” to the Yeerks to get his boyfriend back; he can’t fight to free Mertil because he’s terminally ill with a genetic disorder that will eventually kill him, and (it’s implied that) the Yeerks aren’t interested in disabled hosts, even disabled Andalite ones. Despite Ax’s ableism, the Animorphs agree to work with Gafinilan and free Mertil, and they’re successful. Marco ends the book talking about how there are all kinds of prejudices you’ll have to face and boxes that people will put you in, and you can’t necessarily escape them even if they’re reductive and inaccurate, but you can still live your life with pride.

So now that I’ve explained the plot, I’m gonna come out the gate saying that I love this book. I love it wholeheartedly, I love Marco’s narration, I love Ax having to deal with Andalite society’s ableism, I love these characters, and as a disabled lesbian I don’t find these disabled gays to be inherently Bad Rep.

that’s of course just my opinion and it doesn’t overshadow other issues that people might have? but at the same time, I don’t like the seemingly-common narrative that this book is all bad all the time, and I want to offer up a different read.To that end, I’m going to go point by point through some of the criticisms and common complaints that I’ve seen across the fandom over the years.

“Mertil and Gafinilan were put on a bus after one appearance because they were gay!”

this is one I’m going to have to disagree with hardcore. I talked about this yesterday, but in Animorphs there are a lot of characters or ideas that only get introduced once or twice and then get written off or dropped - in order off the top of my head, #11 (the Amazon trip), #16 (Fenestre and his cannibalism), #17 (the oatmeal), #18 (the hint of Yeerks doing genetic experiments in the hospital basement), #24/#39/#42 (the Helmacrons’ ability to detect morphing tech), #25 (the Venber), #28 (experiments with limiting brain function through drugs), #34 (the Hork-Bajir homeworld being retaken, the Ixcila procedure), #36 (the Nartec), #41 (Jake’s Bad Future Dream), and #44 (the Aboriginal people Cassie meets in Australia) all feature things that either seem to exist just for the sake of having a particular trope explored Animorphs-style or to feature an idea for One Single Book.

This is a series that’s episodic and has a very limited overall story arc because of how children’s literature in the 90s was structured - these books are closer to The Saddle Club, Sweet Valley High, Animal Ark, or The Baby-Sitters’ Club than they are to Harry Potter or A Series of Unfortunate Events. Mertil and Gafinilan don’t get to be in more than one book because they’re not established in the main cast or the supporting cast, I don’t think that it’s solely got anything to do with their being gay.

“Gafinilan has AIDS, this is a book about AIDS, and that’s homophobic!”

Okay, this is… hard. First, yes, Gafinilan does have a terminal illness. Yes, Gafinilan is gay. No, Soola’s Disease is not AIDS.

I have two responses to this, and I’ll attack them in order of their occurrence in my thought. First, there’s coded AIDS diseases all over genre fiction, especially genre fiction from that era, because the AIDS epidemic made a massive impact on public life and fundamentally changed both how the public perceived illness and queerness and how queer people themselves experienced it. I was too young to live through it, but my dad’s college roommate was out, and my dad himself has a lot of friends who he just ceases to talk about if the conversation gets past 1986 or so - this was devastating and it got examined in art for more reasons than “gay people all have AIDS”, and I dislike the implication that the only reason it could ever appear was as a tired stereotype or a message that Being Queer Means Death. Gafinilan is kind, fond of flowers, and fond of children - he’s multifaceted, and he’s got a terminal illness. Those kinds of people really exist, and they aren’t Bad Rep.

Second off, Soola’s Disease? Really isn’t AIDS. It’s a congenital genetic illness that develops over time, cannot be transmitted, and does not carry a serious stigma the way AIDS did. Gafinilan also has access to a cure - he could become a nothlit and no longer be afflicted by it, even if it’s considered somewhat dishonorable to go nothlit to escape that way. That’s not AIDS, and in fact at no point in my read and rereads did I assume that his having a terminal illness was supposed to be a commentary on homosexuality until I found out that other people were assuming it.

“Mertil losing his tail means he’s lost his masculinity, and that’s bad because he’s gay! That’s homophobic!”

so this is another one I’ve gotta hardcore disagree with, because while Mertil is one of two Very Obviously Queer Characters, he’s not the only character who loses something fundamental about himself, or even loses access to sexual and/or romantic capability in ways he was familiar with.

Tobias and Arbron both get ripped out of their ordinary normal lives by going nothlit in bad situations, and while they both wind up finding fulfillment and freedom despite that, it’s still traumatic, even more for Arbron I’d say than for Tobias. And on a psychological level, none of the main cast is left unmarked or free of trauma or free of deep change thanks to the bad things that have happened to them - they’re no less fundamentally altered than Mertil, even if it’s mental rather than physical. And yes, tail loss is equated with castration or emasculation, but that doesn’t automatically mean Mertil suffering it is tied to his homosexuality and therefore the takeaway we’re intended to have is “Being gay is tragic and makes you less of a man”. This is a series where bad shit happens to everyone, and enduring losses that take away things central to one’s self-conception or identity or body is just part of the story.

Also, frankly? Plenty of IRL disabled people have to grapple with a loss of sexual function, and again, they’re not Bad Rep just because they’re messy.

“Andalite society is confusingly written in this book, and the disability aspects are clearly just a coverup for the gay stuff!”

Andalite society is canonically sexist, a bit exceptionalist and prejudiced in their own favor, and pretty contradictory and often challenged internally on its own norms. In essence, it’s a pretty ordinary society, and they’re really realistic as sci-fi races go. It makes sense from that perspective that Andalites would tolerate scarring or a lost stalk eye or a lost skull eye, but not tolerate serious injuries that significantly impact your perceived quality of life. Ableism is like that - it’s not one-size-fits-all. I look at Ax’s reactions and I see a lot of my own family and friends’ behaviors - this vibes with my understanding of prejudice, you know?

“Mertil and Gafinilan have a tragic ending, which means the story is saying that being gay dooms you to tragedy!”

Mertil and Gafinilan have the best possible ending that they could ask for? They are victims of the war, they are suffering because of the war, they get the same cocktail of trauma and damage that every other soldier gets. But unlike Jake and Tobias and Marco, unlike Elfangor, unlike Aximili? Their ending comes in peace, in their own home. Gafinilan isn’t dying alone, he’s got the love of his life with him. Mertil isn’t going to be as isolated anymore, he’s got Marco for a friend. Animorphs is a tragedy, it’s not a happy story, it’s not something that guarantees a beautiful sunshine-and-roses ending for everyone, and I love tragedy, and so I will fight for this story. Yes, it hurts. Yes, it deserved better. But it’s not less meaningful just because it’s sad. Nobody is entitled to anything in this book, and it’s just as true for these two as it is for anyone else.

“It’s not cool that the only canonically gay characters in this series don’t get to be happy and trauma-free and unblemished Good Rep!”

This is one I can kind of understand, and I’ll give some ground to it, because it is sucky. The only thing I’ll say is that I stand by my argument that nothing that happens to Mertil and Gafinilan is unusual compared to what happens to the rest of the cast, and that their ending is way happier than Rachel and Tobias’s, or Jake and Cassie’s. But it’s a legitimate point of frustration, and the one argument I’ll say I agree has validity.

(Though, I also want to point out that I think there are plenty of equally queercoded characters in the story who aren’t Mertil and Gafinilan - Tobias, Rachel, Cassie, and Marco all get at least one or two moments that signal to me that they’re potentially LGBT+, not to mention Mr. Tidwell and Illim in #29 and their long-term domestic partnership. There’s no reason to assume that the only queer people here are those two aliens when Marco’s descriptions of Jake exist.)

“Marco uses slurs and reduces Gafinilan’s whole identity to his illness!”

Technically, yes, this is true, except putting it that way strips the whole passage of its context. Marco is discussing the boxes society puts you into, the ones you don’t have a choice about facing or escaping. He’s talking about negative stereotypes and reductive generalizations, he’s referring to them as bad things that you get inflicted upon you by an outside world or by friends who don’t know the whole story or the real you. The slurs he uses are real slurs that get thrown at people still, and they’re not okay, and the point is that they’re not okay but assholes are going to call you by them anyway. He ends by saying “you just have to learn to live with it”, and since this is coming from a fifteen-year-old Latino kid who we know is picked on by bullies for all sorts of reasons and who faces racism and homophobia? He knows what he’s talking about. He’s bitter about what’s been said and done, he’s not stating it like it’s a good thing.

Yes, absolutely, this speech is a product of its time, but it’s a product of its time that speaks of defiance and says “We aren’t what we’re said to be,” and in the year this was published? That’s a good message.

tl;dr The Other is good, actually, and Mertil and Gafinilan are incredible characters who deserve all the love they could possibly get.

[maxwell-grant]

Having asked your thoughts on designing Frankenstein's daemon, might I now ask your thoughts on bringing Count Dracula from the written word into illustration? (I'm definitely in favour of the 'Hairy Old Mountain Man of Horror pretending he's people' look from the original novel; one of the small tests too many Draculas fail to pass is an absolutely tragic lack of the Evil Beard and/or Wicked Moustache explicitly described by Mr Stoker).

Unlike with Frankenstein, where I think the design needs to be painstakingly thought out in order to achieve the best balance of the creature's traits for horror and tragedy alike, I think with Dracula you can actually just take an approach of "whatever works". Because as I mentioned before, I think much of the appeal and longevity of Dracula is how the character's both a layered villain as well as a shapeshifting narrative force that can be tailored to whatever you want to do with. Granted, there are bad or dissappointing Dracula designs, of course there are, but in regards to the leeway you get for reinterpretation, you get a lot more of it with Dracula than with other literary icons.

Like with Frankenstein, I'm gonna bring up how I'd tackle a less grim, more comedy-centric Dracula first, one that's less a force of horror and more of a charismatic villain, and I think to that end I definitely agree that people are sleeping a lot on the hairy old man barely-passing-off-as-humanoid of the original story. Despite very much loving these performers, I'm actually not a fan of takes that mold Dracula too closely to people who've portrayed him, like Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, partially because I think it's a waste of an opportunity to create your own Dracula design. Since I can't draw (yet), I'll do what I usually do and make a board of images to try and convey some of my thoughts on one way I'd design Dracula.

(Pictured: Kiwi's design for Dracula, Hotel Transylvania concept art, Nandor, Castlevania Dracula, Charles Dance in Dracula Untold, Vladislav, a Transylvanian rug)

I used the images in my other Dracula post and I’ll post it here again because I absolutely adore @kiwibyrd's designs for Dracula and it's main heroes, in particular I love the way it strikes a good balance at making sure Dracula looks distinctly separate from the humans, but not too much that he couldn't conceivably operate in society as just a harmless old man. I also adore the mustache and bushy eyebrows and pointy ears and I think these three are wonderful features to keep on any Dracula design. I'm also very partial to the Hotel Transylvania concept art, even if it makes me incredibly depressed to look at all the great designs they had for Dracula that they threw in the trash because they somehow decided making him look like Adam Sandler was the idea to go with.

I deeply adore What We Do In The Shadows, both the movie and the show, and Jemaine Clement's Vladislav is one of my favorite (maybe even my actual favorite) on-screen Draculas. But I also enjoy Nandor just as much, and I think it's really great that as a character he's completely different from Vlad while also being ostensibly a take on Dracula, and in particular I bring up his Jersey look because "Dracula in common clothing" is a criminally underrated concept for a joke.

As a character, I'm very partial to comedy takes on Dracula that play him up as a decadent aristocratic supervillain, the kind that can get away with talking in third person. I also have this idea for a version of Dracula who dresses ostentatiously in finely-broidered Romanian or Transylvanian patterns, maybe even wearing a rug as a cape, claiming that he's carrying the legacy of his people on his back. And of course he's lying, he's not Vlad Tepes and he's not even Romanian, he is just a parasite pretending to have a history to be proud of, but good luck getting him to admit that. And finally, I'd like this version to be played by Charles Dance, and I consider it a tremendous crime against humanity that he has yet to play Dracula proper even despite being in a film with the character's name on the title.

So that's kinda how I would design a take on Dracula for something more comedic or more based around him as this guest character and personality on-set. Now, if we're talking a more serious version, I think the possibilities increase, and I won't be getting into all of them because I may prefer to keep them to myself, but I'll elaborate a few ideas.

For example, the edition of Dracula I personally own comes with these really scratchy, really creepy B&W illustrations related to the story, that I can't find scanned online so I'm uploading them here so you can look at. They don't necessarily depict the scenes but rather some of the story's moments, like Van Helsing staking Lucy, Renfield in a straightjacket, Dracula as a coachman, and they are more focused on conveying the horror of the concepts at play.

Dracula never looks the same way in any of the illustrations, in fact you kinda have to piece him out of them by trying to find teeth or capes or eyes or bat-features to see where he's hiding this time. In the first, it's the half-man half-bat, in the 2nd, he's the shrieking bat silhouette next to Renfield, and in the latter, he's the gaping jaws and eerily humanoid eyes in the wolf. The effect to me almost feels like if you were to look at a bunch of tv static and then see a humanoid shape form for a split second before everything went back to normal, something like you'd get from Slender Man or other modern creepypastas, and I’ve argued before that Dracula’s form of horror is a very modern one. 

In terms of illustrations of Dracula that keep up the original traits while still pulling off horror, I definitely have to hand it to the one at the left of the image above, drawn by regourso on Deviantart (account deleted at present). Going back to Castlevania’s many takes on Dracula, two in particular that stick out to me would be Castlevania: Judgment’s armored dress Dracula, who’s got this great twisted heart/rose motif going on in his outfit, and Dracula’s final form in SOTN where he just sits in his throne and his cape twists into all these monsters, particularly how it’s depicted by witnesstheabsurd’s depiction. 

I’m not particularly a fan of how Dracula’s “final form” in these games is usually just some big demon, and part of what I like about his final form in SOTN instead is that, while it’s not a particularly challenging final boss, I do find it interesting the idea of us never actually getting to see what Dracula’s true final form looks like, only an ever-shifting pitch-black torrent of teeth and claws and bloody veins pouring out because that’s ultimately what Dracula is and brings to the world.

On the flip-side of the rotten old monster, we have the charming seductor Dracula, and while I’m really not a fan of how various adaptations have convinced people that “the point” of Dracula is that he’s a seductive force and an allegory for Victorian xenophobia and I’m reeeally even less of a fan of adaptations that make Dracula some misunderstood tragic hero (and I think I’ve made rather violently clear my feelings on interpretations that play up a romance between him and Mina), that the seductive force part exists is impossible to deny, so conversely, while on one hand we can have Dracula as the gargantuan whirlwind of predatory violence, we can also go for Dracula as the tantalizing lover.

I’ve seen a lot of opinions proclaiming Frank Langella as the best Dracula because he was the best at actually being seductive while still playing Dracula, although I haven’t yet seen his performances. If I had to point at one picture I look at and do buy for a second the idea of Dracula as a romantic character, it would be that particular still of Raul Julia in the left of the above image. And it’s strange for me to think of Raul Julia as attractive because I mainly associate him with his brilliant comedy performance of M.Bison (I know it’s far from the highlight of his career but, look, I grew up with Street Fighter, I can’t help it) but those eyes are definitely looking pretty convincing to me, if nothing else. 

And I’ve included this still of Sebastian Stan in the right because, during a conversation between me, @krinsbez and @jcogginsa about who could be a good fit for Dracula, jcog suggested Sebastian Stan, partially because he’s Romanian, and I’ve learned recently that Stan was actually interested in playing the character in Blumhouse’s upcoming remake. And you’d think I’d hate this idea  considering how much I don’t care for tragic anti-hero Draculas, but who says that’s what he’d have to play? 

Do you have any idea how much actors, who are traditionally known for heroic or supporting roles, usually LOVE it when you give them a chance to cut loose as the main villain?

I’d want Sebastian Stan to put all of his charm, all of his talent, all of his good looks and etc, into playing the absolute most vicious, bloodthirsty and irredeemable Dracula put on screen. Someone who is exceedingly, eerily good at being a lovable protagonist, who’s all smiles and charming eyes and politeness mannerisms and maybe even a funny accent, and then it isn't as funny when he's flying through your window intent on kidnapping babies to feed to his brides, except he may take a moment or two to do so because he's feeling pretty hungry himself right now.

Now, admittedly this is kind of a lot to juggle in regards to a single character, which is why my answer for questions like these inevitably has to be “depends on what I’m going for”. That being said, if I was going to try and cast someone who I think could both look the part of Dracula, as well as respectively, play “cartoon aristocrat” Dracula, “mercurial embodiment of evil” Dracula, as well as realistically be an attractive, even seductive performer who can charm viewers even as the character descends into horrible villainy, and juggle these performances even?

I think I’d have to go with Mads Mikkelsen. Not specifically because of Hannibal (I actually haven’t watched it yet), although it’s definitely a factor, the thing that actually made me pick him specifically is, other than his looks, his voice, his reputation for playing sinister characters, the fact that he loves the role and wants to play it, or how many people are deeply in love with this man, or that people already joke that he looks like a vampire, was watching him in Another Round, and specifically that glorious final scene where he’s just dancing to his heart’s content and just, moving with such spring in his step and such joyful vitality even though he’s past his mid-fifties, and that was the moment where, in regards to how much you all love this man, I went

And now I am going to add “casting Mads Mikkelsen as a dancing Dracula” to The List of Reasons Why I Became a Filmmaker.