#...the reason is that this is a show based on high school pop culture tropes

[jq37]

So, that lady FH episode was amazing and all, but...

Hoo boy, I already see the discourse around the Ratgrinders' fates forming and it is going to be painful. Be careful around the fandom space.

(I mean, resurrection is still on the table for them, but that's based on if the players feel like it and right now, we're looking at 50/50 odds at bests)

Yeah, don't worry about me. This isn't my first rodeo and also I post a lot about D20 and respond to asks I get but I don't actually personally engage with any of The Discourse (tm).

And I'm not really surprised at the reaction. I know people have been opinionated all season in two main camps (that have a lot of overlap): people dissatisfied with the narrative direction and people deeply sympathetic to the Rat Grinders to the point of being mad at the Bad Kids.

The first camp I mostly understand. I get wishing the cast would explore a certain storyline more. For example, I've been on the Aelwyn redemption arc train since literally the first episode of Fantasy High so I was a little disappointed that when that finally came to a head in Freshman Year, it was a big fight and then very little aftermath/unpacking because Aelwyn was sent to jail right after. And Sophomore Year hadn't been announced so I had no idea that she was gonna get another shot. But I wasn't upset or anything. Adaine at that point still hated her sister. She had no reason to want to reach out. And at the end of the day this is other people playing a game. Brennan presented them all the possible plot threads and they were most interested in self discovery, hanging out with each other, doing Shenanigans, and playing Tomb Raider re: Ankarna. Those are all options they were presented and it's not like they were doing crazy off-roading. It's well within the parameters of what D&D is. If you're gonna watch a show like this (or honestly any show), you have to accept that what's most interesting to you isn't always going to be the most interesting thing to the people in the driver's seat.

So yeah, I feel like this side of things I get (even though I'm fine with how things turned out).

The other camp--people being legit mad at the Bad Kids (and in some cases the actual cast) for treating the Rat Grinders like antagonists instead of victims that they were responsible for empathizing with and redeeming--I find kind of wild.

Like…you're mad at the kids who go to Child Murder School for killing kids who want to end the world and kill them specifically? Literally the first day of school the principal of the school says that adventurers are violent wanderers who engage in shenanigans and enact violence. This is the exact assignment they were given and that's what they're doing.

I think it's wild to at the same time believe that the Rat Grinders (who have killed people) are not responsible for their actions and deserve to be talked down while in the process of causing an apocalypse because they're just kids who were manipulated while at the same time calling the Bad Kids evil lunatics for trying to stop them by killing them (in a world where Revivify and Resurrection exist) even though they are ALSO kids who are doing what they've learned at Child Murder School. The Bad Kids have to be mature enough to thoroughly investigate the situation and have nuance about it but the Rat Grinders don't have any responsibility to not join a shady evil murder plan*? And do the Bad Kids really hate the Rat Grinders to the point where they're doing some overkill in this fight? Absolutely. But it's not like they're killing them because they hate them. They're killing them because they're trying to end the world--and they also happen to hate them. Are we forgetting that Kipperlilly killed Buddy--her own teammate--with a gleeful smile on her face? That was so out of pocket.

They're adventurers! Not guidance counselors! If Jawbone was like, "We need to kill these kids," yeah that would be weird but why would the Bad Kids extend an olive branch to the kids who (1) famously hate them, (2) killed at least one maybe 2 of their own party members, (3) endangered the entire student body population an hour ago, (4) are currently trying to end the world. Hell, Adaine was ready to be mean to her own sister in elf jail literally up until the point Brennan described how rough she looked from the torture and that's when she changed her mind. The Power of Love and Empathy is on the menu but it's a special item you only can get if you know the chef. Everyone else is getting a serving of These Hands. Just because you can find a vegan solution to a problem it doesn't mean you're obligated to.

This all comes down to, "Maybe teenagers shouldn't have godlike powers and the ability to play judge, jury, and executioner" but that's literally the premise of the entire show so you can't get around it without rejecting the show's entire premise. If they were like, "Hmm the systems that underpin our world are questionable and we should change the power structures" instead of, "Let's kill some bad guys!" then that's a totally different thing we're doing here!

And, idk man, this show has always had a Who Framed Roger Rabbit style morality where the normal rules of ethics stop applying when it's funny. They beat the crud out of Ragh and then lied to him that he shit his pants just for the bit. A pirate was rude/kinda racist to Riz so they scared him into killing himself. Riz ate the remains of the sentient (albiet evil) dragon he killed. That's all unhinged behavior but none of that is meant to be serious. Getting upset about Fig sending Ruben to hell to me feels like getting mad that Jerry hit Tom with a cartoonishly large mallet.

None of this is new so I have to assume that people are having a big reaction because they relate to the Rat Grinders or just really like them so it feels bad that the Bad Kids are treating them like fodder rather than beloved NPCs.

But again, this is a world where you can bring people back from the dead and the Rat Grinders have showed intent that is grievously neglectful at best and insanely murderous at worst so I can't muster a lot of sympathy for the fact that the Bad Kids are just taking them down without remorse. I don't think you have to try to empathize with the people who are trying to harm you if you don't want to especially while they are in the process of harming you.

(*And we still don't know how voluntarily they joined this plan. We don't know if they were killed and basically forced into resurrecting with rage or if they just leapt at the chance to join a plan that would let them get one over on their rivals. It literally could be either. We've had kid villains on this show strong armed into being party to evil plans by threat of harm (Aelwyn) as well was kid villains who just had their own selfish motivations and weren't tricked at all (Penelope and Biz). We actually don't have any clear answer on how culpable they are. We don't know if they all have rage crystals (except for Buddy). And we don't know how much having a Rage Crystal effects your actions. The best indicator we got is in this latest ep when Brennan said that there was a mechanic where Porter was going to call anyone with a rage crystal to fight for him but that says to me that he's only directly puppeting them when he uses that action and otherwise they have free will and are just angrier. The Bad Kids don't have a reason to believe definitively that the Rat Grinders are just unwilling puppets even if that is the case so of course they're treating them like enemies. Anyway, this is a whole lot of "I don't knows" but that's only because I've seen a lot of people talking like the Rat Grinders literally aren't in control of their actions but that's not info that we have. It could be true but we don't actually know that so it's not a good argument.)

[olderthannetfic]

Re: High School AUs

I think if I saw a fic tagged as "High School AU", clicked on it, and it wasn't the stereotypical US movie high school I would actually be disappointed, lol. It really is more of a genre term to me, rather than just describing a setting. The name is just unfortunately broad and I agree that there is a huge problem with US (pop-)culture being seen as the "default", even internationally.

I wonder if the reason I enjoy the artificiality of it is due to a combination of my country's school system being very different from that of the USA and the last half of my base education being a thoroughly unpleasant experience I have 0 interest in revisiting outside of therapy sessions, and so the North American Movie High School setting is an escapist way of experiencing my favorite characters leave their magical dark fantasy canon to go through stupid low-stakes teenage drama without hitting too close to home.

And sometimes it's just funny to me to see characters who are basically war criminals in canon be reduced to regular mean kids or hardass teachers, lol.

And because it's so unrealistic it can easily be "scaled-up" to include Anime High School tropes, like insanely powerful clubs, everyone acting like they might as well be in college and weird hierarchy systems. I really enjoy reading darkfic and these insane settings lend themselves a bit better to it than realistic ones where you'd expect weird shit like human pets or a student being a serial killer being an open secret to get more of a reaction from people.

I think if I wanted a more realistic (western) school AU I'd look for SKAM!AUs or something like that. Seeing ads for my country's SKAM adaptation does always trigger a viscerally negative reaction in me, so I can second all the positive reviews in the show getting the atmosphere of school right, haha.

--

Yes, but consider:

High school AUs suck because I would prefer #dark academia boarding school bullshit with more attractive architecture.

Don't people understand that I have needs?????

[ghosthan]

what would you say are the differences between 616 Tony and MCU Tony? 🤔

Hi anon! Many people have talked about this and I'm certainly not the authority on the topic, but I’ll try my best to explain some of the major differences that I have noticed! Thank you for asking and I’m sorry it took me so long to answer you.

Important to note: neither version of Tony has had a totally consistent characterization. Depending on who you ask and which comics/movies they've consumed, they might give you a different answer here and not be wrong.

616 Tony is even harder to put into one box because his character has been around since Tales of Suspense in the 1950s. That’s a long time. Things have changed over time, under different writers, changing political atmospheres, and outside pop culture influence (including influence from the MCU, unfortunately, in recent years.) You get the picture. So I’ll be making some generalizations and try to be clear about which eras I’m speaking when I make these comparisons, but ultimately, if someone wanted to be contrarian, you could probably refute a lot of what I say here if you cherry pick canon. Which is fair enough! That’s sort of the fun of comics, there’s so much to choose from and something for everyone.

So here are some observations from me, under the ‘read more’.

1. Physical Appearance

This is sort of an easy one, but worth mentioning!

MCU Tony does not look like 616 Tony. RDJ is great, but he would not be most 616 fans’ casting choice on looks alone. MCU Tony is tan, a Malibu man, with brown hair and brown eyes, and RDJ has sort of round facial features (a funny sloped nose, big, round eyes, round forehead, not a particularly sharp or classically “superhero masculine” face.) As you may know, this lends well to certain fanworks and tropes, such as Tony having Bambi eyes.

Or Tiny Tony. He is not actually canonically small, but he's smaller in the MCU than in 616 and from what I can tell, a portion of fandom has latched onto that. He’s a grown man, but RDJ is pretty short, and of slighter build than 616 Tony. RDJ is 5′9, but they make him act in heels, and I believe his canon MCU height is 5′11. Another popular trope I’ve seen is shrinking Tony in fanfic/fanart for a dramatized height difference with Steve, making him weak or fragile; this is fine because everyone has their own taste, but for the official record, he’s a capable, strong guy! Especially in earlier stages of the MCU, in which he’s a bit younger. Tony isn’t just a brain; he carries out his plans with his own two hands! He builds his armor, he remodels his lab, he survives hand to hand combat when he doesn’t have the armor. Muscles!

616 Tony is 6′1 without armor and 6′6 in armor (making him taller than his 616 Steve counterpart in armor and very close to the same height out of armor!) 616 Tony is generally paler with black hair (sometimes the classic blue-black I love so much) and blue eyes, and it obviously depends on the artist, but he has a pretty typically ‘masculine’ face and build. Generally he is drawn with a squared jaw and a high bridged nose (such as in the Extremis storyline, or drawn by Marquez), but again, this varies from artist to artist! Here's some examples of 616 Tonys.

Wait, you might be saying, but I have seen comic panels where Tony has brown hair/brown eyes!

Yep. Due to a combination of forgetfulness, inconsistency, and the MCU bleeding into the general consciousness of the comics, sometimes Tony is randomly depicted in the image of RDJ, or if not in his image, at least visually inspired by the MCU-- hair color and style, eye color, dialogue, etc.

616 fans don’t typically love this; he’s very handsome when drawn this way, of course, (look at him!) But it isn’t really the same character.

Also, MCU Tony has (at least for some of his movies) a reactor built into his chest. While 616 Tony has, at times, been more or less physically connected/dependent to his tech, he doesn’t have the built in reactor (most generally speaking, there are times in comics when he temporarily has the tech built in, but this isn’t really the status quo.)

2. Relationship with parents/ family history

While it is definitely implied in the MCU that Howard was not a good father to Tony, (such as in Iron Man 2 when Tony says “You're talking about a man whose happiest day of his life was shipping me off to boarding school” and “He was cold, calculating, never told me he loved me, never even told me he liked me”), Tony has a different sort of attitude toward Howard in MCU than in 616. It’s kind of weird, and hard to discuss. To me, it seems implied that MCU Howard was emotionally abusive to Tony based on what Tony does say about his childhood, and yet, the films kind of randomly give Howard weird moments of “Well, he tried his best and deep down he loved me the whole time!” forgiveness. MCU has a Howard kink and I'm very cringe-face emoji about it.

For example, Iron Man 2 shows that old film reel of Howard talking about how Tony is the greatest thing he ever created, and in Endgame, when Tony goes back in time, he meets Howard and has a very weird interaction with him in which Howard declares he would do anything for his son, (to his deeply damaged son who is a new father himself.) Yet, for all his talk, it's his actions that speak, and his actions left Tony damaged, traumatized, and emotionally inept at forming healthy relationships. So.

Sorry. I’m a little bitter. I'm just uncomfortable with how they sort of set up an abuse history but then treated it kind of lightly and Howard gets off the hook as "well, he tried his best" without really acknowledging the hurt he caused.

Avengers: Endgame 2019

I won't go super in depth into the abuse stuff because it's a little touchy and could take up a lot of this post. But.

I’m not against any reconciliation and I do appreciate the fact that a lot of times, victims of abuse feel a desire to forgive and reconnect with their abuser-- my issue with the MCU depiction of Tony and Howard is that Tony never really gets the vindication of his abuse being recognized for what it was before he forgives Howard. To me, that’s not forgiveness as kind of... gaslighting himself that it wasn't as bad as he remembered his own experience being, because of a sense of nostalgia and grief. It’s not the same, and I have issues with it.

However, a lot of my opinion is based on subtext and it is just my opinion; with depictions of abuse, different people are going to react differently, and other people may have found these scenes touching and gotten something positive out of them, and that's totally fine too!

It’s also a bit difficult to talk about Tony’s relationship with Howard in 616, for a few reasons: shifting timelines, lots of canon that I have not read all of, and the fact that it really is difficult to sum up such a complicated relationship.

Right off the bat, I’ll address the basics. I used the same scene in another ask, and I think it's frequently cited in any meta regarding Howard, but in Iron Man Vol. 1, we see more into Tony’s childhood and see Howard verbally abusing his family, drunk, at the dinner table.

Iron Man Vol. 1 #285

We get this scene with adult Tony’s retrospective commentary on how his own issues that he blamed himself for were actually a cycle starting with his father, the insecurity and abuse and alcohol, and that he realizes how much this has influenced him. Both MCU Tony and 616 Tony have some form of “stop the cycle of shame” arcs, but I don’t really see how this works narratively in the MCU because Tony makes excuses for Howard and continues to blame himself for a lot of his own personal struggles, whereas I think there’s just a bit more nuance in 616.

But uh. This isn’t totally true, and in recent years, things got real weird. I choose to ignore this chapter of canon, but in the Dan Slott run, Tony Stark: Iron Man, Tony’s whole backstory gets imploded. For one thing, the little of Tony’s childhood it shows in a flashback is uh. Uh. Well, it’s certainly out of character compared with previous 616 material, depicting Tony as an overly confident poor sport.

Basically, Tony is adopted. Tony has an evil brother. Tony’s biological parents make an appearance, as do his ‘classic’ parents, Howard and Maria. It’s just weird. It’s kind of out there. I’m honestly not a huge fan of this and ignore a lot of it, but it is certainly a difference between MCU and 616.

3. Personality

I’m going to be very general. Both Tony’s have an outer self which they present to the public and an inner self, but they’re a bit different. Both Tony’s have struggled with self loathing, but I think MCU Tony’s actual self worth is a bit higher, even just at some points in time. Even if his ego is part of his facade, I think he does believe some amount of the “I’m awesome”, even if just when it applies to his own work/inventions/saving people. Not to say that these moments of fluctuating self esteem make him egotistical, but this combined with his egotistical act and snarky, non-stop sassy dialogue, he’s quite different in general personality from 616 Tony, who is much more reserved.

Some more recent iterations of 616 Tony have been adapted to reflect the snark of the MCU, but he’s not so snarky and he tends to approach things more seriously. This is not a dis on MCU Tony; I think MCU Tony uses false ego and excessive sassy jokes as a means to deflect and control, which I think is very interesting and it’s nice to see this explored more in depth in fic where you get to see the thought process behind the bravado. MCU Tony is a partier, a good times guy, especially during Iron Man 2, in which he really does disregard consequences to have fun (driving his race car, partying drunk in his suit, letting pretty  girls play with the armor, shooting off repulsor blasts for fun in a crowded room); I’m not bashing MCU Tony-- I think he had psychologically understandable reasons for behaving this way, the man was dying-- but 616 Tony really doesn’t act this way generally, and I think it’s a personality difference more than a difference of one being “better.”

616 Tony handles his stress differently, and they just have different psychological patterns, I think. I’m coming up kind of blank trying to think of a good comparable 616 arc, (sorry, I’m brain dead) but a less-than-perfect  example might be Tony’s brain delete arc; he’s “dying”, like in Iron Man 2 he  knows his expiration date, (circumstances are quite  a bit different), but he throws himself more into work, into a cause, and as he really fall apart, we  see him spiral into self doubt, remorse, fear, and insecurity, sort of falling into  himself with lots of manly tears and calling himself pathetic.

(Some things happen in this arc that a lot of people find Gross. I also find these events gross. But. I don’t count the sex in “World’s Most Wanted” as partying to cope with personal mortality, because I think both character involved are in “end of the world” mode, and it’s more seeking intimacy for comfort than partying to numb the hurt. Does this distinction make sense? No? Perfect, moving on.) 616 Tony is generally much more humble.

Whereas MCU Tony, I think, tries to outrun those feelings via parties or making dozens of new suits, or seeking comfort by comforting others! Gifting things to people, building things for people, highly personalized individual living quarters, teaching Nebula games and trying to show her a fun time when they were in peril together.

They have some traits in common, for sure! But canon being inconsistent both in the MCU and in 616, my observations aren’t the rule, because I’m kind of cherry picking and going based on limited memory. But off the top of my head, they’re both extravagant gift givers! Recall Tony gifting Pepper the giant bunny in Iron Man 3, and compare this with Tony carrying a mile high pile of Christmas gifts after shopping with Rumiko in Iron Man Vol. #3.

I would say that while both Tony Starks are considered humanitarians, this is much more fleshed out and supported by canon in 616. Some examples of his philanthropy in the MCU: Tony makes charitable donations of art and money, Tony has an organization which provides disaster relief/cleanup which is referenced in Spider-Man Homecoming, Tony has an MIT grant for students and staff members. But to be honest, a lot of his MCU philanthropy is only mentioned in passing, or is largely handled by other people on his behalf and on his dollar.

In 616, we see Tony using charity almost as a means of therapy: it’s something he does very privately, not in the public eye (at least, not always), and it’s something deeply personal to him. One example that immediately comes to mind is Tony’s home for disadvantaged girls in Iron Man Vol. 3, and we see scenes of Tony basically driving the streets at night, picking up underage prostitutes, feeding them and listening to their stories before bringing them to a home he’s established where he knows all the residents, and provides educational opportunities and protection.

Another more recent example in canon that the Tony fandom loves is that Tony canonically holds babies at an orphanage. Sorry I don’t have panels for all of this, this section got long and I have been working on answering this ask in a very scattered way for a very long time.

Both Tony’s are romantics, I literally could write a whole other post about their canon love life similarities and differences, but I will briefly say that while MCU Tony does the long on and off, and eventual ultimate commitment, to Pepper Potts, 616 Tony is a serial monogamist; he is always falling in love, and he’s definitely not a playboy, but the hero-ing, self loathing, and lifestyle make it very hard for him to keep anyone in his life, and most of his partners fuck his life up and betray him. Needless to say, 616 Tony is not married, and certainly not to Pepper Potts.

Oh, and I guess this is so obvious I almost forgot to include it, but a huge similarity between both iterations of Tony is that they both constantly use their own life as a bargaining chip, and will pretty much die for anything. Or be the bad guy for a good reason (at least, in his own mind... see Civil War, or Hickmanvengers; 616 Tony, especially, does not shy away from making the hard decisions, and this leads to a lot of guilt and tension in his  relationships-- often with Steve because 616 Steve/Tony angst fans are well fed, I guess)

Remember that time Tony had Steve’s mind wiped because Tony felt that Steve’s inflexible morality might hinder the Illuminati’s ability to save the world? And it eats Tony up inside and erupts into a homicidal fight when Steve finally gets his memory back? Me too.

Tony Stark as a character is defined by sacrifice, both of his own life but also of his own happiness and reputation and conscience, I think, in a lot of ways, and we see this in many universes. I could go on about Tony’s propensity for sacrifice in the less obvious ways, because I think in terms of heroic sacrifice, Tony has done a lot that other heroes wouldn’t be able to do because of moral inflexibility and conflicting philosophical schools of thought; Tony really is the “whatever it takes” type, and often believes the ends justify the means if he deems a threat worse than the potential wrong that could be done in preventing the threat. We see this a little bit in the MCU in the creation of Ultron, and in Civil War with the Accords. But there’s a whole lot more going on there I don’t want to get into.

4. Alcohol

MCU Tony’s alcoholism is never really explicitly explored. He is shown drinking in Iron Man 1, and in Iron Man 2 he drinks a lot and makes a fool of himself publicly, but MCU Tony doesn’t get any specific narrative arc focused on his drinking, and if I recall correctly, I don’t think he ever refers to his drinking as alcoholism in the movies? Also, while his binge drinking and embarrassing behaviors ostensibly stop after the events of Iron Man 2, he is shown drinking on screen at least one other time after that which I can remember, and it wasn’t a “falling off the wagon” moment, and an alcoholic in recovery such as 616 Tony would not take a drink casually. This article sheds a little light on some decisions made about Tony and alcohol in the MCU.

Alcoholism is a huge part of 616 Tony’s personality, which I went a bit more into depth about in this post, so I won’t repeat myself too much.

5. Their relationships with the Iron Man armor

A few points here: MCU Tony is famous for the “I am Iron Man” line being repeated throughout the franchise after he blows his own secret in the end of the first movie. MCU Tony sees himself as one with Iron Man, and the suit is the tech that enables him to be this version of himself. He sees Tony Stark and Iron Man as inextricable: you cannot separate them, and his identity is public. He, as Tony Stark, is an Avenger.

You may remember MCU Tony’s induction into the Avengers; in Iron Man 2, Nick Fury is forming the Avengers and tasks the Black Widow with going undercover to assess Tony to be a part of a hypothetical initiative. “Iron Man yes, Tony Stark no” and the comments about Tony as a narcissist may be funny, but the fact is, the snark and erratic personality of MCU Tony at the time of the formation of the Avengers in the movies is not at all like the Tony of the comics, at the time of the Avengers being formed. 

In 616, things are quite a bit different! Tony invents the Iron man armor to save himself (like in the MCU) and uses it for hero-ing, but in secret. He works very hard to protect his identity as Iron Man, and for a long time, as far as the world is concerned, Iron man is a mystery man piloting armor built by Tony, hired as Tony’s personal body guard, (hence the 616 Steve/Tony fandom’s proclivity for identity porn as a trope!) When the Avengers form, Iron Man is the Avenger, close friends with the Avengers, (particularly Steve!) and Tony Stark is just the benefactor of the Avengers, providing them with a place to live and finances with which to operate.

In the very early days, Tony did not have the “reactor” like in the MCU, but his chest plate did keep him alive, leading to some very dramatic shots of Tony charging up using a wall socket, lamenting the plight of a secret hero.

616 Tony, generally, and especially in some of these earlier comics, was quite reserved, rather serious, and very angsty, (in private of course.) He may be wealthy, but speaking generally, he’s much less ostentatious than MCU Tony, less of a show off, less into flashy things and grand gestures. Of course, this isn’t always true in the comics, and some iterations of Tony are more like this than others, but MCU Tony is showier, sillier, and more of a fun-times guy. Any MCU fan would find those panels quite contrary to the Tony Stark you know:

Iron Man 1

Iron Man 2

I think I would say that while MCU Tony sees himself and the Iron Man identity and the  armor as all being inextricably connected, we see a bit more compartmentalization with 616 Tony, who pretends that the armor is a whole separate person for years when his identity was private, and we see instances in older and newer comics, in which Tony  is uncomfortable with some aspect of himself as Iron Man (for instance, during the second drinking arc, Tony temporarily swears off being Iron Man entirely, or for another example, when Tony is in a comma and Tony AI exists during Secret Empire, Tony “lives” in the Iron Man suit, and I think this could be interpreted as a meta parallel to Steve during this arc; Steve has had some core aspect of his character inverted, Captain America becoming Captain Hydra, so Tony experiences a similar inversion-- Tony Stark and Iron Man are forcibly merged, in a way that Tony seems deeply uncomfortable with, if his digital drinking relapse is any indication. But I digress; sorry for the tangent.)

Okay this post is inexcusable long, and very, very tangential, and I don’t feel like I’ve really covered everything I wanted to. But it has been sitting in my inbox for too long and if I don’t post it now I never will, so I hope this long, rambling thing has been a little bit helpful to you! Thank you so much for asking, I had a lot of fun rambling about this.

If you want to read a similar post, but well written and organized, with other insights, this post by Sineala answers a similar question!

[tyrantisterror]

I did a four part series of trivia posts when ATOM Volume 1: Tyrantis Walks Among Us! came out, and that was pretty fun!  You can see that set of trivia posts here if you’d like.  I thought it’d be fun to do another now that ATOM Volume 2: Tyrantis Roams the Earth! is out - just one this time, because a lot of the trivia I talked about with Volume 1 still applies.

I’m gonna divide this into two sections: non-spoiler trivia, for things that really don’t give a lot of plot points away, and spoiler trivia, for things that DO give away major plot points.  I recommend not reading the spoiler trivia until after you’ve read Tyrantis Roams the Earth!, for obvious reasons, and will put the spoiler trivia under a cut.

Ok, let’s go!

- So if you read ATOM Volume 1, you probably noticed that the book is split not only into chapters, but “episodes,” which consist of four chapters a piece.  It’s kind of a nod to how the series owes a great deal of its DNA to various monster of the week shows, with Godzilla: the Series and The Godzilla Power Hour being obvious influences.  It also allowed me to pepper in some illustrations and cheesy b-movie style titles into each volume.

- The first “episode” of Volume 2, Tyrantis in Tokyo, pays explicit homage to the giant monster movies of Japan, perhaps even moreso than the chapters that came before it.  Given how much Japanese media influenced ATOM - from tokusatsu like the Godzilla, Gamera, and Ultraman franchises to anime like Digimon and Evangelion (hell, the title of this episode itself is a tip of the hat to Tenchi Muyo by way of one of its spinoffs) - it kind of felt obligatory that Tyrantis visit Japan and pay his respects.

- Tyrantis in Tokyo also fits in a tribute to another staple of Atomic Age pop culture: Rock and Roll.

- Kutulusca, the giant cephalopod that appears in Tyrantis in Tokyo, is one of the oldest kaiju in this series, dating back to the first iteration of Tyrantis’s story that I put to paper back in 2001 or so.  It’s changed a lot since then, but its fight with Tyrantis goes more or less the way it originally did.

- Old Meg, the giant placoderm/shark, and Nastadyne, the bipedal beetle, both owe their existence directly to Deviantart’s Godzilla fandom.  Old Meg originated as a dunkleosteus monster I submitted to a “create a Godzilla kaiju” contest held by Matt Frank, while Nastadyne is based on a Megalon redesign I made during the “redesign all the Godzilla kaiju” phase of DA’s kaiju fandom.

- The second episode, Tyrantis vs. the Red Menace, gets dark as we visit the USSR, which had enough REAL horror with atomic power in its history to make creature features seem a bit defanged by comparison.  It’s probably the episode with the strongest horror elements - ATOM’s always been influenced by Resident Evil, and this is probably where that influence shows the most strongly.

- It also features the first fully robotic mecha in the series, the mighty Herakoschei!  Its name is a combination of “Heracles” and “Koschei the Deathless,” with the former part being added by its Russian creators to make it seem a bit more international as they offer it to the U.N. in hopes of gaining aid for a very extreme kaiju problem they’ve developed.

- Most of Tyrantis vs. the Red Menace takes place in the Siberian Monster Zone.  Its name is a reference to the Lawless Monster Zone in Ultraman, which is such a cool fucking name I wish that I wish I could go back in time and steal it.

- The next episode, Tyrantis’s Revenge, is... full of spoilers, so we’ll move on for now.

- The penultimate episode, Tyrantis vs. the Martian Monsters, is a love letter to MANY different sci-fi stories that involve life on Mars, though the most prominent of them is of course The War of The Worlds (one of my top 3 favorite books) and its various adaptations.  From its tentacles sapient martians, the tripodal leader of the titular monsters whose name includes the word “ulla” which is uttered by said sapient martians, the plant monster made of red vines, the cylinder-shaped spacecraft the Martian monsters are sent to earth on, the copper-skinned stingray-esque flying martian who shoots lasers from its tail, and the fact that every chapter title in this episode is a quote from the book, the H.G. Wells influence is STRONG.

- The final episode, Invasion from Beyond!, is shamelessly inspired by Destroy All Monsters, although there’s a dash of “To Serve Men,” Godzilla vs. Monster Zero, and The Day the Earth Stood Still mixed in as well.  It’s also sort of a tribute to my first “published” bit of a kaiju fiction - a rewrite of Destroy All Monsters that included EVERY Godzilla monster that had appeared at the time, which my middle school self wrote back in 2002 or so for Kaiju Headquarters, a kaiju fansite I’m not sure exists anymore.  Invasion from Beyond! is just as ambitious (but hopefully better executed) as my DAM Remake, with dozens upon dozens of different kaiju duking it out, earthlings vs. aliens.

- There were three different documents I made to outline the final battle of Invasion from Beyond!  It’s the largest episode of the series so far and more than half of it is that fucking fight.  My inner child is pleased, though, so hopefully you will be too.

Ok, that’s all I can share without spoilers.  READER BEWARE WHAT FOLLOWS BELOW THE CUT!

JUST MAKING SURE you know that SPOILERS will follow from here on out.  Read at your own peril!  YOU WERE WARNED!

(I’m gonna start with lighter ones just in case you scrolled too far and want to turn back)

- There’s a number of explicit Spielberg homages in ATOM Volume 2, from a “we need a bigger boat” joke during a chase with a giant shark to the fact that Invasion from Beyond! opens with a group of people flying to an island of monsters to review whether or not it should get more funding.

- When Tyrantis appears in the first chapter, I snuck in modified lyrics of The Godzilla Power Hour’s theme song.  “Up from the depths”... “several stories high”... “breathing fire”... “its head in the sky”... Tyrantis!  Tyrantis!  Tyrantis!

- The two rock bands in Tyrantis in Tokyo have real life inspirations ala Gwen Valentine, albeit a bit more muddled than hers.  The Cashews are inspired by The Peanuts (see what I did there), while The Thunder Lizards are a mix of The Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper.  I wanted The Thunder Lizards to be more akin to the myth of a famous rock and roll band than the reality - less the real Beatles and more the Yellow Submarine cartoon version of them.

- The song The Thunder Lizards write for Tyrantis was written to fit the tune of “The Godzilla March” from Godzilla vs. Gigan, though ideally if someone made an actual song of it it would be its own song.  I got the idea from Over the Garden Wall, which used the Christmas song “O Holy Night” as a a starting point for “Come Wayward Souls.”

- Perry Martin, UNNO reporter and peer of Henry Robertson, is a nod to Raymond Burr, with his name being a combination of two of Burr’s most famous roles: Perry Mason, and Steve Martin from Godzilla King of the Monsters (1956).

- Dr. Rinko Tsuburaya is a few homages in one.  Her name comes from Rinko Kikuchi (who played Mako Mori in Pacific Rim), while her last name is obviously in homage of Eiji Tsuburaya.  Her being the daughter of an esteemed scientist is inspired by Emiko Yamane from the original Gojira.

- Nastadyne’s Burning Justice mode is named after a similar super mode from various Transformers cartoons, though it’s more directly inspired by the Shining/Burning Finger super move from G Gundam.

- Martians sending kaiju to different planets via shooting them out of cannons (with or without cylinder spaceships around them) is another War of the Worlds shoutout.  So is martians living on Venus after their homeworld was made uninhabitable, actually.

- Kurokame’s vocalizations are described as wails in explicit homage to Gamera.  His name can be translated as either “black tortoise” (a reference to the mythical guardian beast Genbu, which can also be construed as a Gamera reference thanks to Gamera: Advent of Irys implying Gamera and Genbu are one and the same) or a portmanteau of the Japanese words for crocodile and turtle - “crocturtle.”

- Burodon’s name is just a mangling of “burrow down.”  It also sounds vaguely like Baragon, who Burodon is loosely inspired by.  AND, since Burodon is sort of a knockoff/modified Baragon, that kinda makes him a reference to various monsters in Ultraman!

- The final battle of Tyrantis in Tokyo is sort of a hybrid of the finales of Ghidorah the 3 Headed Monster and Destroy All Monsters.  

- The Japanese kaiju teaching Tyrantis the art of throwing rocks at your enemies is both a joke on the prominence of rock throwing in Japanese kaiju fights AND the tired trope of an American hero learning secret martial arts from a Japanese mentor ala Batman, Iron Fist, etc.  In this case, the secret martial art is throwing rocks at people.

- When introduced to Herakoschei and its pilot, we are told that the strain of piloting this early mecha is so intense that many pilots have died in the process, with the current one passing out on more than few occasions.  This is of course a Pacific Rim homage - sadly, no one invents drifting.

- Herakoschei’s design is a loose homage to Robby the Robot and Cherno Alpha, because big boxy robots are cool.

- The Writhing Flesh and ESPECIALLY Pathogen are both hugely influenced by Resident Evil and The Thing.  Giant body horror piles of raw flesh, tendrils, mismatched mouths and limbs may be a bit outside the main era of monster design ATOM homages, but they fit the themes and bring a nice contrast.

- I came up with Pathogen long before Corona but MAN it definitely feels different in 2021 to have a giant monster whose name is a synonym for disease driving other creatures crazy in a quarantine zone than it did when I plotted out the story in 2016.

- The chapter title “Hello, Old Foes” is a riff on “Goodbye, Old Friend”

- Minerva, the kaiju-fied clone of Dr. Lerna, is meant to be an homage to Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, which is a genuinely good giant monster flick.  I am sure many of you will also believe I included her because I’m a pervert whose into tall women, but you’d be wrong!  I included the seven foot tall Russian mecha pilot Ludmilla Portnova because I’m a pervert whose into tall women.  Minerva’s inclusion was just coincidental, I swear!

- Since Promythigor is a play on the archetypal ape kaiju to contrast Tyrantis as a play on the archetypal fire-breathing reptile kaiju, their fight has a lot of nods to King Kong movies.  Promythigor attempts the famous jaw-snap maneuver of Kong (with less success), J.C. Clark paraphrases the “brute force vs. a thinking animal” line from the King Kong vs. Godzilla American cut, and Tyrantis slides down a mountain to knock Promythigor off his feet in a reversal of Kong doing the same in King Kong vs. Godzilla.

- Tyrantis sliding down a mountain on his tail doubles as a Godzilla vs. Megalon homage.

- Though Promythigor is the archetypal Ape and Tyrantis the archetypal Fire-Breathing Reptile, I think it’s fun to note that in some ways, Promythigor is the Godzilla equivalent in their matchup, and Tyrantis the Kong.  Promythigor has a slight size advantage, was scarred by humans performing unethical weapons technology, and is associated with violent explosions.  Tyrantis is a good-at-heart prehistoric beast who humanized in part by his unlikely friendship with a human woman.

- Of course, in the context of the famous quote from the American cut of King Kong vs. Godzilla, they remain in their archetypal lanes.  Promythigor is the more intelligent of the two (though not necessarily wiser), and Tyrantis is in many ways a brute reptile.  Their battle is a rebuttal of sorts to the assertion that Kong is the “better” animal because he is closer to human.  Promythigor’s near human creativity and emotions don’t make him the kinder/more benevolent monster, but instead fuel a very self-centered and destructive attitude that makes him the far more dangerous threat.  On the other hand, Tyrantis, who is less intelligent, limited in communication with others by his reptilian mindset and instincts, and simple in his thoughts and desires, is nonetheless a sweet creature that is easily dealt with when others consider his animal needs and mindset.  There’s a quote from Hellboy I love that probably sums up all of my writing thus far: “To be other than human does not mean the same as being less,” and that’s what the matchup between these two in particular tries to illustrate: the “less” human Tyrantis is nonetheless more benign than the “more” human Promythigor.

- Kraydi the psychic lizard began life as a soft sculpture I made of the Canyon Krayt Dragon from The Wildlife of Star Wars.  The sculpture didn’t look much like the illustration, but I liked how it came out, and so I made it an original monster named Kraydi (see what I did there).  Figuring out an explanation for that name in ATOM’s world was possibly the most difficult kaiju naming task in the series, but it worked out in the end.

- Kraydi and Promythigor having psychic powers is a result of my time on Godzilla fan forums in my middle school years.  Most of the forums had OC kaiju battle tournaments, and SO many of those kaiju had a wide array of beam weapons and psychic powers just to win the tournaments by beam-spamming and mind controlling their foes into oblivion.  There’s a special kind of rage you get when your original creation is beaten by “Fire Godzilla” because he has a genius level intellect and the power of unstoppable telekinesis.  Kraydi began as (and still is I suppose) my attempt to do a psychic kaiju well, while Promythigor’s villainy being tied to psychic powers being forced on him is sort of my passive aggressive commentary on people foisting powers on a monster without any real thematic reason for them.

- Henry Robertson and Dr. Praetorius chewing out the laziness of people giving kaiju completely unaltered names of mythic beasts will probably be seen as a jab at the Monsterverse and/or the numerous writers in the kaiju OC scene who do the same, but it’s ACTUALLY a jab at my past self, who had DOZENS of kaiju whose names were just Greek mythological figures verbatim.  There are dozens of kaiju named Hydra, Scylla, Charybdis, Chimera, etc., past me, try to make the names stand out!  Oh wait you did.  I mean, don’t pat yourself on the back too much, you still went with “Mothmanud” as a canon name and never came up with something better, but, like, good on ya for trying I guess.

- Dr. Praetorius takes his name from the evil mad scientis in Bride of Frankenstein, who basically has all the wicked traits that Universal’s Frankenstein downplayed in their take on Dr. Frankenstein.  Ironically, ATOM’s Dr. Praetorius is a bit less evil than his fellow mad scientists in ATOM.  I really like how his character turned out, he surprised me.

- Isaac Rossum, the pilot of the USA mecha Atomoton, is named for Isaac Aasimov, whose robot stories are to robot fiction what Lord of the Rings is to high fantasy.  His last name is a reference to Rossum’s Universal Robots, which is where the word “robot” came from.

- The unfortunate pilots of MechaTyrantis in ATOM Volumes 1 and 2 are all nods to Jurassic Park.  John Ludlow = John Hammond and Peter Ludlow, Ian Grant = Ian Malcolm and Alan Grant, Dennis Dodgson = Dennis Nedry and Lewis Dodgson.

- A good way to pitch Invasion from Beyond! would be “what if the staff and monsters were able to fight back when the Kilaaks tried to take over Monsterland?”

- Ok, here’s a fun joke that no one will get but me because it requires a very specific chain of logic based on some obscure and loosely connected nerd bullshit.  There’s a rocker in ATOM’s universe named Sebastian Haff, right?  One of his songs, “Darling Let’s Shimmy,” is referenced right before a mothmanud larva emerges from the ground in both ATOM Vol. 1 and 2.  Ok, so, in the Bubba Hotep, an aging Elvis impersonator named Sebastian Haff claims he is actually the real Elvis Presley, having changed places with the real Sebastian Haff as a sort of Prince and the Pauper deal that went wrong.  Got that?  Ok, so, in UFO folklore, a common joke is the theory that Elvis didn’t die, but was rather abducted by aliens (or he actually WAS an alien the whole time - the whole “Elvis didn’t die, he just went home” joke in Men in Black is a good example of this).  Ok?  Ok.  So, in ATOM’s universe, we can surmise that their equivalent of Elvis, whose name is Sebastian Haff, WAS abducted by aliens, and that his song “Darling Let’s Shimmy” is subconsciously influenced by his repressed memories from his time aboard the Beyonder spaceships, which is why it accidentally awoke a Mothmanud larva in Volume 1.  There’s a lot of bullshit jokes I put into ATOM, but this is perhaps the bullshittiest of them all.

- One of the most common bits of feedback on ATOM Volume 1 I got was “I kept waiting for something to eat Brick Rockwell, he’s such an asshole.”  And I had to smile and go, “Oh, yeah, guess he never got his, huh?” the whole time without letting on that he was going to die here all along!

- Dr. Lerna and Brick Rockwell’s nature as foils to each other is probably most apparent in Invasion from Beyond!, where both are given fairly similar situations - a nonhuman approaches them with a solution to a global crisis - and react to it very differently.  I worry that some people may think they both made the same choice and got different results, and that that’s hypocrisy on my part, but I hope I wrote it so you can see how their choices and situations actually differ in key ways, and why their decisions, while similar on the surface, are ultimately very different, and thus result in almost opposite outcomes.

- So, when I planned out this book in 2016, I swear I didn’t know about the Orca from 2019′s Godzilla King of the Monsters.  Having the plot hang around Dr. Lerna deciding whether or not to use a sonic device to rouse all the kaiju to save the earth was not INTENDED to be a Monsterverse reference - it came about from me looking at Pathfinder’s take on kaiju, who are all explicitly influenceable by music, and thinking, “Oh, wow, music and songs DO have a major connection with kaiju in a lot of media, I should do something with that.”  Whem KOTM came out a few days after Volume 1 came out I realized I was kinda fucked here, because the comparison was definitely going to be made, but I’d also set this all up already and you can’t just change suddenly to avoid looking like a copy cat and make a good story, so... I dunno, I leaned into it a bit, but it is what it is.

- While most people will probably think they’re a reference to the Reptoids of UFO folklore, the Reptodites are more inspired by the Dinosapien of speculative evolution fame and, even morso, by the Reptites from Chrono Trigger.  Me wanting to avoid the “lizard people control the government” conspiracy theory trope is one of the main reasons why Reptodites have this non-interference clause with humanity.

- Lieutenant Gray is a bunch of different humanoid aliens rolled into one - a little Hopskinville goblin, a little classic gray, a little this one weird alien with five-fingered zygodactyl hands, etc.

- There’s some Beyonder Mecha in this volume that are basically kaiju-fied versions of the Flatwoods Monster.  The species that built them ALSO engineered the Mothmanuds, because connecting Mothman and the Flatwoods Monster is fun!

- Pleprah is, obviously, a one-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater.

- Tyrantis’s brush with death, in addition to being so very anime, was inspired by my dad outlining how mythic heroes often have to travel to the underworld/land of the dead before they can finish their journey.  It’s one of the plot points that I’ve had planned for this series since middle school.

- I’m sure some will view it as hackneyed and corny, but as a person who’s battled with depression for decades, having Tyrantis’s choice to live be the big heroic turn of the finale was very important to me.  Tyrantis incorporates elements of a lot of imaginary friends I made as a kid, and in many ways he’s kind of the face of my more positive side in my head.  He’s been telling me to choose to live for a while, and while maybe to an outsider it may seem hackneyed, it’s just... very Tyrantis.  He chooses life and kindness in the face of pain and struggle.  That’s Tyrantis.

- Tyrantis’s powered up form is called “Hyper Mode,” which is another Gundam reference.  Originally it was a lot gaudier and involved him turning gold like a fuckin’ Super Saiyan.  I opted for something a little more toned down here.  

- Also, speaking of KOTM references, I decided to make Hyper Mode Tyrantis’s final duel with Pathogen be a sort of foil to Burning Godzilla’s final bout with Ghidorah in KOTM.  Instead of ravaging the city, Hyper Tyrantis’s pulse of energy rejuvenates his fallen allies, and as a result he is “crowned” not out of fear for his supremacy in the wake of killing a powerful enemy, but in gratitude for his kindness.  See?  Leaning into it!

- And now I can finally reveal that Yamaneon is ATOM’s equivalent of The Monolith Monsters - that is, a kaiju that is also a mineral.  I took the “strange continuously growing rock” thing in a very different direction, though, as unlike The Monolith Monsters, Yamaneon is actually alive.

- At various points in the pre-writing process, either Promythigor, MechaTyrantis, or both were going to die fighting Pathogen.  I ultimately decided to let them both live, with MechaTyrantis even getting his flesh and blood body back, because I think it’s more interesting and thematically consistent that way.  They get a chance to heal their wounds by changing their ways.

- The Great Beyonder and Dorazor both almost didn’t make the cut, as I felt they didn’t have the same pull as villains that Pathogen, Promythigor, and MechaTyrantis did.  But then I thought that could actually be the gag - build them up as the final boss, only to have Pathogen take their crown.  I want to explore post-face turn Dorazor a bit more, though.  We’ll have to see about that in a later volume.

- Volumes 1 and 2 make up what I call “The Ballad of Tyrantis Arc” for ATOM.  I call it that because Tyrantis’s storyline in these two volumes was patterend after Chivalric ballads like Yvain the Knight of the Lion.  Tyrantis, a heroic warrior who is kind but dumb of ass, learns of strange goings on outside his home and investigates.  During his journey into the unknown he falls in love with a powerful woman, whose favor he tries to win.  Through happenstance he is separated from his love and, distraught, wanders around fighting various foes to prove his worth, before finally returning to his love a better hero.  Invasion from Beyond! could even be seen as a sort of Morte d’Artur, with Tyrantis and a bunch of other kaiju heroes (including Nastadyne and Kemlasulla, who are built up as Hero Kaiju of Another Story) take part in a huge battle that threatens their idealic kingdom (of monsters).

- Volume 2 isn’t the end of ATOM, but it’s designed to work as an ending if you want to tap out here.  As a reader I feel a definitive ending is important, but as a writer I’m always tempted to revisit my beloved characters, so I feel giving closure while leaving a few doors open for possible future adventures is a good compromise between these positions.  There will be more ATOM stories, some (but not all!) following Tyrantis and Dr. Lerna, but if you want to know that Tyrantis and Dr. Lerna get an ending and the resolution to their arcs such a thing promises, here you go.  An ending, if not THE END.

[thecrownnet]

‘The Crown’ Season 4 Review: It’s to Di For

Ann Donahue, IndieWire Nov 9, 2020

*Spoilers*

In a case of art imitating life, the addition of Princess Diana to the Netflix series revitalizes the Royal Family.

[Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoilers for Season 4 of “The Crown” and British history between 1979-1990.]

Like the good public school types that they are, the British Royal Family isn’t above a bit of hazing to those who seek to enter its inner circle.

It’s known as “The Balmoral Test” and involves diligent bouts of outdoorsy activity at the Queen’s castle in Scotland. (Traipsing over steep hills in the mud! Stalking stags to kill! Wearing tartans unironically!)

Season 4 of “The Crown” debuts November 15 on Netflix, and early on you learn Margaret Thatcher wore high heels, brought a briefcase and a sneer to Balmoral, and unequivocally, catastrophically failed the test. Diana Spencer wore boots, bangs, and a sweet smile, and passed with flying colors.

In the end, though, they both lose the bigger game of conquering The Firm.

After a subpar Season 3, it turns out that what this ongoing narrative of Queen Elizabeth really needed was an enemy — or two. In a season with the most pop culture audience pressure riding on it — because of the Princess Diana factor, there is no doubt that people who have never watched a single second of  “The Crown” before now will tune in — Peter Morgan’s show delivers its best yet.

With the addition of Thatcher, played to gritty, galling Iron Lady perfection by Gillian Anderson, and Diana, a near-impossible role that Emma Corrin makes look effortless without descending into hagiography, “The Crown” gives a riveting look at a decade that codified callous excess in the characters’ public and private lives.

Instead of the world being seen through others’ eyes and leaving Olivia Colman on the margins to react — as she was left to do in Season 3 — Colman is now allowed to own the monarch’s authority in her performance. And with foils like Anderson and Corrin, all three turn in very brittle and beautiful performances.

The great fear was that the Prime Minister vs. Sovereign face-offs between Anderson and Colman could be reduced to tropes: either “It’s Girl Power time, Tory style!” or “Oooh catfight!” Thankfully, this is avoided entirely by letting both actors show their chops in the most understated and devastating ways at their command.

Morgan was the playwright for 2013’s “The Audience,” which envisioned the weekly meetings between the Queen and her long history of Prime Ministers, and it won Tonys for Helen Mirren (playing guess who) and Richard McCabe as Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Colman has extensive stage experience, most recently in “Mosquitoes” at the Royal National Theatre in London in 2017. Anderson has three Laurence Olivier Award nominations, including one for 2019’s production of “All About Eve.”

As a result, the scenes between these two are a study in the subtleties of power dynamics and differences in upbringing that are framed to read as beautifully on a TV screen as it would on the West End. What you see is Anderson as Thatcher curtsying particularly deeply at a certain moment, or Colman as the Queen making a calculated move to end the audience. What you understand is that Thatcher doesn’t get why someone with an inherited title should hold more power than her, and the Queen’s firm resolve to keep Thatcher in her place.

Yes, yes, yes, contemplating the wounds caused by the vicissitudes of the British class system is all well and good, let’s please get to the part about Prince Charles and Lady Di, rich people in doomed love. Or “Whatever love means?” as Charles agonizingly asked at his engagement press event as Diana wilted beside him. This famously public cringe-moment is recreated in “The Crown,” and it’s one of the reasons why this long has been the timeframe where the show stood the most risk of devolving into shadow puppetry.

The Charles and Di moments have been covered a million times in various news clips and documentaries; you can see the entirety of the terrible engagement interview at a moment’s notice via YouTube. Great credit is due to Josh O’Connor as Charles, Corrin as Diana, and Emerald Fennell as Camilla Parker Bowles, as they all find layered emotional textures to enrich the footage that’s been part of the pop culture vernacular for decades.

Corrin, in particular, does a hell of a job. This is not a Diana with a sad-princess-imprisoned-in-a-tower sheen — several episodes open with content warnings due to the graphic depiction of her disordered eating. The show doesn’t play coy: Diana was a particularly child-like very young woman who checked all the boxes for “virginal beautiful young princess” — and beyond that perfect-on-paper resume there wasn’t a second thought given to her mental health. She is shown without the emotional capacity or maturity to understand that this isn’t a love story; it’s a job to fill the global complexities of a role in a chilly, treacherous family.

Corrin pulls no punches; her Diana is winsome and frustrating, sweet and calculating. She is savvy and silly and petulant. She is world famous but starved for attention. Corrin spins around to the point of collapse as she dances, all desperate, keening, frenetic energy and no joy. It’s a complex portrayal of a complex person, one that is fully aware of the mythology that surrounds the character but isn’t weighed down by it.

Diana was an Instagram royal decades before there was such a thing, and it’s through gestures like famously hugging a child with HIV in the hospital that the princess tried to kill the Crown with her kindness. It’s something a perpetually battle-ready Thatcher would never conceive of doing — but it’s also something The Queen would never consider. But why shouldn’t they? What do we expect of our hallowed institutions, and why? If we can envision better, more humane treatment, why don’t we require it?

These are weighty questions, and they are asked in a show relentless in its ability to propagate its characters’ power through setting and spectacle. It goes without saying that the production design, hair and makeup, and costumes remain outstanding on “The Crown”  — there is a reason the show is undefeated during its three-season run at the Emmys in the category of Outstanding Period Costumes.

The streak should continue this year if for nothing else than the combination of creating a wedding dress inspired by Princess Diana’s voluminous meringue and the true-to-life pink plaid ensemble the lonely princess wears to roller skate around Buckingham Palace. (Corrin also at one point wears a sweater with llamas embroidered on it — also based on an outfit Diana wore. The ‘80s were a lot.)

Beyond reveling in the tawdry candy-colored tale of Charles and Di, Morgan’s writing on the show routinely explores notions of classicism, privilege, sexism, and racism. But this time around, the undercurrents surface in a way that is timely, incisive, and, ultimately, more pointed and hopeful: If England can survive 11 years of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister, the United States will survive four of President Donald J. Trump and the craven GOP leadership.

This isn’t a particularly sunny take. The cruel deprivation, degradation, and devastation wrought by the Thatcher years is the basis of several episodes over the course of the season. A war was started out of preposterous personal motivation (Shout-out to former President George W. Bush! Some of us haven’t forgotten that you’re a war criminal!); institutional racism was bolstered and emboldened for oligarchical profit; public resources were diverted from the marginalized in the righteously cold-blooded notion that there is no implicit bias in society, it’s just that some are lazy and choose to suffer.

All of this is familiar. Very painfully, infuriatingly familiar. But as “The Crown” in this season shows, with a steel spine and ice in its veins, the Monarchy was built to withstand whatever onslaught comes its way.

So are we.

Grade: A

“The Crown” Season 4 will be available Friday, November 15 on Netflix.

[rumandtimes]

“Bossypants” by Tina Fey: A pre-view

Luigina Cecchina-Tarquina

Assoc. Lifestyle Contributor

When I picked up Tina Fey’s book, I knew little more of her reputation than as a female comedian. I expected a chuckle and some depiction of a woman’s take on the world of hollywood success — I would not have expected to come across a racist book that struggles to relay a single joke while recounting the life of a southern woman’s bygone teenage years, but then, what would one expect from a cast member of “saturday night live”.

For those who are even aware of Saturday Night: Live (SNL), it is common knowledge that Tina Fey, and saturday night live for that matter, are controversial figures in american media. It seems to be a split right down american society: people who find Tina Fey “L-O-L” funny, and people who find her humour unsufferable; people who tolerate the blatant racism of snl and 30rock as “satire,” and those who have had enough of the denigration, minstrels, slurs, and tropes for cheap comedic effect.

I know Tina Fey is a comedian — a clown — and sets out to prick peoples ears and widen people’s eyes. To quote another comedy critic, I do not seek to come off as someone wilfully misunderstanding humour and repeatedly not getting the joke.

Yet the illusion of that decision is for those who do not remember that Bill Murray had a sketch on snl, where he dreamed about “turning from ‘brown’ to ‘white’”, and the more recent habit of snl writers hiring minorities as comedians to attack themselves on the show with slurs, because it would look less objectionable than if the writers denigrated those actors or people themselves. In Tina Fey’s book, she states that “As a Greek,” she would “only date a ‘white’ man, such as a redneck” inexplicably fond of camouflage.

But to quote that same critic again, humour has a goal; It has an audience. When engineered to subvert expectations and play to the common denominator, jokes have a base which they are founded upon. If that baseline for the comedian or writer, like Fey, is a bedrock of deep-seated racism, which the comedian exploits rather than lampoons, it is no longer a humorous observation, but a cheap, racist ploy servicing an already receptive racist base.

Tina Fey saying she would only date in a certain imaginarily-defined group is racist. Full stop.

Fey going on to say she would date even the lowest, “redneck,” in that category, before anyone else in the world is not less racist — as Fey probably expected her statement to be received (by deprecating people of European-descent with ethnic slurs like “redneck” or “hillbilly” or “honche”, rather than solely praising their racist memes) — but it is more racist, as Fey is simultaneously using racism to make fun of her suitors, and again using racism to elevate even them above anyone and everyone else.

Not to “belabour the point,” as Fey would appreciate, or focus on one bad joke: but Fey’s joke is playing to long-festered notions of racism, colonialism, and rogue supremacism, which Fey buys into rather than challenges, where Fey herself puts (1) any “Aryans” above (2) rich Europeans, (3) Greeks above poor Europeans, and (4) poor Europeans above (5) the rest of the living world. It is inane — and stupid — but a strongly held delusion among groups (1) through (5), and probably strongest among groups (2) to (4).

Fey happily plays with this unholy flame of racism, undergirded by genocide in her native South, fuelled by the segregation in Fey’s own high school, and leaving embers of anti-marriage laws across the American East.

That is not to say racism, colonialism, genocide, holocaust, mob rule, political repression, et alia, are not to be joked about — they are the most popular comedic material in the United States (even if only in the United States). But these topics are deadly serious, and not as distant and abstract as we would like them to be.

There is a real possibility, given their frequency and recency, that anyone who read the first edition of Fey’s book, or attended same secondary school, committed a hate crime, using the exact same rhetoric Fey employs as a “joke.” Not only that, Fey never says it is a joke — there is no punchline.

The only reason I give Tina Fey the benefit-of-the-doubt and assume she was not serious about what she said is because the statements where so outrageous and absurd that someone would have to be insane to print them in sincerity, and equally as ungracious to print them even in jest.

Nonetheless, it was never expected to have to wrestle with these issues, which Fey has ill-managed, in a comedy memoir. Maybe if it had to do with Fey’s experiences or personal identity (as “German–Greek”?) it would have a more natural place. That is, if Fey had been the victim of racism, and condemned it, even through humour, that would be expected, cool, and fine. Fey calls herself “Greek,” but only tongue-in-cheek, and it’s apparent she doesn’t speak Greek. Fey calls herself “German,” but only in relation to being American, and it’s apparent she doesn’t speak German.

What we learn is not how Tina Fey suffered racism, but her experience in adopting racism itself. It offends the senses, and anchors the book.

While hardly intended to win over the intellectual crowd, some of Fey’s items over the years cannot be ignored. Conventional culture, and Fey herself, would seem to agree, after the firing of certain snl comedians and the pulling of certain 30rock episodes, that just went too damn far.

This puts Fey in the precarious position of defending her legacy of racist and baiting comedy, and that of her colleagues, as now she has been outed as admitting herself that she has crossed the line on several, several occasions. But does that mean that Fey is accommodated now that she has made a partial apology? Or is that the mere beginning of scrutiny now that critics have gotten their first concrete admission of her failure?

Fey, and many of her cultivation, say such racist things in order to just have meaningless fun, or in order to make fun of the racist. While Fey and the others may consider this to be in good fun, and an inclusive way to overcome racism, at the end of the day you have subtly racist comedians repeating the words of violently racist hate-mongers for the entertainment of an audience often apathetic to the realities of racism. That is to say, with such willingness to commonly, repeatedly, and recklessly embrace such a serious topic, they can miss the mark.

The impulse may be that racism is so at the heart of American culture and popular life that it is expected that a pop culture figure embrace it (similar to why comedians talk so much of ornery subjects such as politics), and that they should not be taken seriously as comedic plays on the feelings of the populace.

However, comedy is nothing if it does not play to the sentiments of the crowd, and the cover of the clown mask is a poor excuse for crude thinking. In Fey’s apology for racist comedy sketches on her show 30rock, she echoed a previous comedians apology, David Letterman, when she said that intent is less important than perception when that perception causes innocent people pain. In Letterman’s statement (on a different subject), Letterman also says it is not about intent but perception that forced his apology and goes so far to say that if you must explain a joke, it wasn’t that funny anyway, so there is no sense in defending it.

Elizabeth Xenakes Fey, or Tina, has been a supporter of progressive movements in the country, but it should not be overstated to what extent, nor should the virtue of this support be overstated. Fey’s famous endorsements of Barack Obama versus John McCain, and of Hilary Clinton versus Donald Trump, and moreover her critical statements of Sarah Palin’s alliance to both McCain and Trump, have been definitive to her identity as a good liberal and progressive person who supports women’s advancements.

Yet, so too did the majority or Americans. It is not a controversial stance to support the candidate that won the popular vote of a national election — and, sadly, many racist people, both aware and unwitting, also vote for so-called “progressive” candidates for different reasons, despite their problematic stances. That is to say, being a Democrat is not exculpatory of anything. It should also be noted that Fey endorsed Clinton over Obama in the primary, and refused to endorse Bernie Sanders (or Clinton) in the next primary, and Fey describes herself and her works as “neutral,” rather than progressive.

Fey’s most famous work in comedy, the impersonation of Sarah Palin wasn’t as scathing as one might expect of a true critic, but was in many cases humanising, and even flattering. Fey was not kind in undermining the Tea Party spokesperson, but Palin was made out to be an odd yet loveable figure, rather than a contemptible one: she was written off. As Fey’s alter ego said herself, ‘it would be egotistical for saturday night live (or anyone else) to believe that a couple of jokes swung the 2008 election.’

Tina Fey has many hard questions to answer for racist depictions in her sketches, television series, and book — and it is not so easy a dodge to say that she once ‘made fun of Sarah Palin.’ Another reviewer stated, “I don’t think Fey comes off as a bad person, I just don’t think she’s funny.” Tina Fey doesn’t come off as a good person, or a bad person, but just presents as an ordinary person, and whether you find Tina Fey (or mor importantly, any of her jokes) funny is a personal and indeterminable matter.

I watched a few of Fey’s “world-famous” skits for this review, and I admit I did mistake Sarah Palin for Fey in their cross-over cameo skit; And the moment I laughed the hardest (in fact the only moment I laughed through the skits) was during the VP Debate Sketch with her fellow southerner, Jason Sudeikis, where “Biden” repeatedly attacked Scranton, Pennsylvania as “the worst place on Earth” — so again, people react to comedy in an unpredictable way, as a basis of personal experience. I don’t think all of Fey’s jokes make it, yet no one can singularly define anything as “funny,” or not, but I do see her as a professional on screen. I don’t give a pass however on bad interest jokes, especially on the mere basis of not liking Donald Trump (who, remember, is also a television celebrity who has worked in comedy, and made jokes that were blatantly racist — and sexist).

Entering Fey’s book, “Bossypants”, with this pre-review (re-preview?) in mind, it introduces to me that this memoir may turn to places unexpected, and that just because it is a celebrity-text does not mean it will be a simple, casual, or homey, ride.

[bow-woahh]

Chapter 1. Just... chapter 1

Send me your favorite scene/chapter from one of my works and I’ll post a DVD commentary on it.

okay I'm gonna assume you mean chapter 1 of bloom since it's my latest fic haha.

Originally, bloom was literally meant to be a little one shot based on this post someone sent me, which very quickly spiralled out of control. So even though I left seeds of things in that first chapter, I never thought they'd actually be explored. But I loved it so much that I wanted to expand on the world and began properly outlining after either this chapter or like chapter 2.

First of, the title of the whole fic and every chapter is a different song lyric. Some of the songs (all in the playlist) really accurately describe mainly Catra's feelings or what she's going through, while other ones are just more of bops that although had one or two relatable lines, they're not as meaningful and are there to more or less fulfill the vibe/feeling I'm going for. you showed me your smile and my cares were gone fits into the latter category.

Now onto the chapter itself!

She'd been dancing when she’d run into her ex’s friends. Then her ex.

So I know it was a big question in this chapter who Catra's ex was, because it was never revealed since it really wasn't that significant and isn't in the rest of the fic either. Initially I thought of having her ex be DT but decided against it just because it didn't feel right. Because she probably won't make any appearances in the fic (besides mentions), I think it's only fair that I tell you guys a little bit about her.

So, her name's Roxanne and she just graduated high school (she went to Bright Moon High) when Catra finished her sophomore year so she's 18/19 now. They met at a party when Catra was still back at Horde High (when she was 15) and after a couple of months of knowing each other they got together. She was Catra's first girlfriend which...other than serving to reaffirm her sexuality to herself it was not a great relationship and definitely did more harm than good, especially towards the end. 

So she put in her earphones, chose her late night vibes playlist and scrolled through Twitter.

Someone once asked me to also make a playlist of what Catra listens to and I would if finding all the songs for every chapter didn't traumatise me but after thinking about it, in this playlist she'd have some Frank Ocean songs, Bruno Major, Harry Styles, some X songs on this playlist. Oh songs by this one artist called keshi - very chill and I can imagine she'd jam to that.

Adora Grayskull: the captain of the lacrosse team, adored by many, quite possibly the whole school, teachers and students alike.

I don't know why out of all the sports I chose lacrosse. But I did. So. More work for me.

Maybe she added all her classmates. Yeah—that was probably it.

Okay so this is in reference to Adora adding Catra to her private story and while, yes, she'd be fairly liberal with who she added to her private story, she also specifically added Catra hoping that she'd get added to hers (to no surprise, Catra doesn't have one) or that it'd somehow start a conversation. It did. Eventually.

There was, just not what she’d expected—a picture of her ceiling and the caption: skipped out on party, bored at home - smbdy hmu?

Adora is the type of teen who cares more about the food at a party and the company rather than the drinking culture and dancing. Combine that with the fact she's also just a workaholic and I can imagine that if Glimmer and Bow didn't drag her out to most parties she'd go to slim to none of them.

Catra was sitting on the bench still, bopping her head side to side, only slightly tipsy and now listening to her guilty pleasures playlist—mostly consisting of pop music—when she felt a hand on her shoulder.

Taylor Swift is 1000% on this playlist.

Taking a step closer, Adora opened her mouth, then closed it, opened it again and settled on saying, “I...was I not meant to? Because you did kind of ask, and then I responded, so I—”

Adora is such a dork here, I love it. Like she's just so awkward but she's also simultaneously radiating himbo energy and I love it lmao. As the chapters progress, she does have less moments like these because she's obviously gotten more comfortable around Catra but there are times when this energy comes back and it so much fun to write.

Catra was widely known in school, which she supposed was similar to Adora, but for all the wrong reasons.

Although Catra is super smart, she was obviously held back by being in an environment like Horde High and it got to a point (near the end of her time their especially) where she didn’t really care and was really acting out. And even though she wanted a fresh start at BMH, her reputation massively carried and it only got worse when she broke up with her girlfriend and she outed her and started spreading even more rumours, some of them completely untrue just to stir the pot. Basically, fuck Roxanne, all my homies hate Roxanne. 

Adora held out one of the sweatshirts she had under her arm. Briefly hesitating, Catra took it, muttering a ‘thanks’ before putting it on. She wasn't sure if Adora watched her as she did. Unsurprisingly, it was a size or two big, as Adora was a little taller, and definitely had more muscle. But it was warm, and it smelt like it was fresh out of the laundry, and it’d been worn by Adora Grayskull—Bright Moon’s star athlete. 

At this point, Catra very much only sees Adora as this popular girl who everyone loves, because that’s how everyone else sees her. And even though she prides herself in not caring about that kind of thing, she still can’t help but be a little star struck that she’s wearing Adora Grayskull’s clothes. Because how many people can say that they have? Also, pretty girl, she gay.

They got to her truck, with Adora getting in after shutting Catra’s door for her (apparently it shut better from the outside) and went to put her keys in the ignition.

This is kinda true, but also kinda bullshit. Adora is just chivalrous. Also, I’m surprised I haven’t written this in yet, but her truck’s called Swift Wind.

“Really, Grayskull?” Catra asked again. Adora gave her a blank look in return, so she continued with a sigh. “Okay well, not only was she just a shitty person, but she pretty much outed me, to the whole school. Ring any bells?”

Bright Moon High is definitely not the Horde, so most people aren’t dicks, or raging homophobes, but after a slew of bad experiences Catra had witnessed and some she’d been apart of at the Horde, she obviously wasn’t ready to come out of the closet there and being at BMH didn’t change that. But because she was outed, she didn’t really have a say in it and being from a Horde High, some people who aren’t even necessarily homophobic would use that against her. 

That was when Catra looked down and realised she’d forgotten to take off her sweatshirt.

The sweatshirt is definitely going to make a reappearance. Maybe in a different form. Like I just love this trope, it’s so cute and you can’t convince me otherwise so.

Anyway, that’s the end of this commentary thing, I had a lot of fun, and if you guys liked it, feel free to leave another in my ask box! Chapter 8 is coming I promise, I’m just finding it hard to find time to write now that I’ve started A-Levels but hopefully it can be out this week! (:

[the-nysh]

The anons on this blog are so fucking clairvoyant I am frightened ScarJo in OPM might be real. She is the perfect pick for a bland Hollywood reimagining of Fubuki as a "strong independent white woman with one or two "girl powah" one-liners who still gets shoved into a bland boring romance with the main guy for no reason whatsoever and does nothing of value all-movie".

And those posts back then were only jokes! :’D What is happening!! But I suppose it also depends on which part of the story is chosen to be...adapted for the big screen. I’m guessing just the introduction at this rate (before Fubuki likely even shows up.) But hhhh;; Honestly no clue otherwise.

Christ, the more I think about this the worse it gets. There are so many characters here Hollywood just Cannot Handle. Darkshine, Puri Puri, Okamaitachi, Watchdog Man, Tatsumaki... none of then can be easily casted or written or costumed (I have Never seen even a decent Tatsumaki wig!!). In fact, the live action might even cut down the number of S-classes and leave only the most popular ones (imagine high school fuckboy Metal Bat) because not featuring any of them would be insane. 

Eeep! Translated thru a Hollywood/western lens could end up pretty yikes;; Leaving out all the nuance and irony from ONE’s approach and having the tropes played dryly straight...uhoh. Unless they just don’t bother and cut out/modify everything that doesn’t ‘work,’ but not having ONE’s balance on what’s jokey or what’s serious could spell disaster on how many of these characters are even read. Saitama and Genos will likely remain at the forefront, but even getting their dynamic down accurately will be...uhhh;; So yeah, no clue how they intend to approach this, unless ONE himself is an active advisor. 

Oh, but you know that the worst thing would be? Worse that racewashing? Culturewashing. Imagine the writers try to be smartasses and shoving the movie full of western movie/pop culture references. Just ripping away Saitama from his world to make a dumb fan movie where One Punch Man wrecks bootleg Thanos while winking at the audience. I hate it here. 

Nuuuu! It’d become just another generic superhero movie only claiming to be ‘opm’ in name alone. Again, their approach will definitely matter here, and I won’t trust anything until we get...news of more value to base anything on.

(I will only allow Jim Carrey Garou because by the time we reach a moment where he can be introduced - in this movie or the next - Holliest Wood will have shot themselves in the feet enough times that the pet detective in a Russian assassin turtleneck and ballerina flats ripping off a man's arm will fit the tone)

akjghgh when the cursed prospects become a potential frightening reality...but in that case, the tone will have become so whack that I dunno, that might even be unironically entertaining, hah. :P But welp, here we are (it’s actually become a thing D:), and we can only sit back and observe how this will all unfold...

[theparanormalperiodical]

7 Reasons The Nun (2018) Is The Best Feminist Horror Film Ever.

As we steadily approach Halloween, we often tend to stumble across a mess of films that make up the horror genre.

Amongst most of the trash churned up by production companies is a tangle of tropes designed to make you turn your back on films with sense, and instead eat your own body weight in popcorn.

And it was the changing of the leaves that reminded me of a film that unfortunately got caught up in these horrors of the horror film industry:

Last year, The Nun was released as a sequel to the iconic Conjuring series, tracing a demonic tale that runs through the films. And lord, she was panned.

Horror film junkies didn’t show up to screenings, and if they did, they didn’t rate it highly.

Sure, it got mixed reviews.

Sure, it was haunted by its endless use of jumpscares.

And sure, it wasn’t the best clergyman in the congregation.

(Even though it somehow ended up as the film which made the most money out of the series…)

But something about it just clicked with me.

I liked how it was a small offshoot of my favourite set of flicks. And I loved how it weaved together the intricate stories that created the hula-hoop of horror plots.

But there was still something I just couldn’t quite work out!

It felt fresh, it felt different…

And it was only the other day that I worked it out, that the pieces clicked together, that I finally could finally yell ‘Eureka!’ at my dad over dinner.

I came to the realisation that The Nun is the feminist film we all need this October.

In fact, it jumpscared its way into the #MeToo movement, and fundamentally represented a takedown of the traditional portrayals of women in the genre of horror.

No, I take that back – every goddamn genre.

That’s why I’m here to stand in defense of The Nun.

That’s why I’m here to contribute to the #MeToo movement, and take down the patriarchy one trope at a time.

Today’s post is going to take you through a rundown of women in the horror genre, how women have figured in the paranormal theories inspiring these films, and how The Nun is the feminist icon we should all stan this Halloween.

So, grab a crucifix, burn some popcorn in the microwave, and chuck on a white-purple-n-green sash.

Let’s get spooky.

How did horror films portray women before The Nun?

As made evident by recent allegations, convictions, and cases – or just, like, watching a film – you can see that most of the film industry has been stuck in the wrong century.

And it’s not difficult to decipher that horror films have featured prominent tropes that support this.

Their distressed and weak women are the fundamental building blocks to misogyny.

It’s even been traced to specific horror film genres, styles, and characters! 

Take slasher films:

From The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to fellow horror icon Carrie, these films have been traced back to the good ol’ American Dream. The middle-class aspirations reflected across society and into the films that furthered the negative – but mainly weak – images of women.

And these images became some of the most striking tropes in horror films.

The first of these tropes is the Final Girl.

She’s pure, and she’s untouched.

She doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, and most definitely doesn’t die.

The female virgin is the first character to see that things aren’t quite right, and she’s the only one to see us through the plot and finally kill that monster.

(And yes, that vague plot works for basically every horror film ever…)

The Final Girl gets her name by taking on male characteristics, ditching her femininity and finally taking on the monster!

With her new-found masculinity, she can survive, and live up to her name.

But it’s only when she conquers the monster by turning her back on femininity that she embodies the next trope on our list:

The Female Monster.

One of the main factors reinforcing misogyny is the sexualisation of the female body.

And in case you hadn’t noticed, the oversexualisation of women is central to most horror films.

From awkward sex scenes, to the troubling portrayals of high school girls, women’s bodies have undergone their maximum objectification in the horror industry.

But what I want to talk about here is the female monster.

Her body is not used for a picture-perfect DVD-cover shot, and it’s not put in slow-mo for a cringey running shot. Instead, horror films consider the female monster’s body as abject.

By bringing together the physical processes associated with women – which include menstruation and giving birth – the monster is constructed.

Just think of the obsession with the ‘hysterical woman’! The horror film industry has spent most of its years evoking the image of the ‘triggered woman.’

Thus, the female monster is based on physical disgust as well as the masochism she seeks – this is what drives a wedge between male and female villains:

Male monsters commit sadistic acts in the aim of self-mutilation. Female monsters on the other hand commit such acts to avenge the abuse carried by those around them.

Take I Spit On Your Grave or Carrie.

Both iconic horror flicks, both iconic examples of the female monster:

Carrie avenges her high school class and spends most of the plot covered in pigs’ blood, echoing her original menstrual difficulties; and Jennifer is sported on the film posters as wearing little clothing and smeared in a sexy array of mud from which she seeks revenge on her rapists.

Evidently this fulfils the role of the ‘male gaze’ which never falls short of most genres, unfortunately.

But within this, we have to consider the key role of menstruation.

Think back to the opening scene of Carrie.

No, not the weird soapy boob bit, the bit where she starts bleeding from the vagina.

(Which BTW isnt how periods work in the shower.)

It is actually believed that the female monster can be traced to the bleeding vagina thing.

Basically, when a girl hits puberty, she immediately becomes a monstrous being, and follows another step to becoming the ‘female monster’.

Following on from this obsession with disgusting things and women, we come to the perverted mix of sex and violence that has contaminated the genre.

Take The Chase scene:

Think of the ripped clothes, the dim-yet-sultry lighting, and the dewy skin; it’s a live pop performance away from a Victoria’s Secret Runway!

Female victims are believed to be captured in this confused state of a sexualised body image and violence-infused distressed 5 times longer than their male-colleagues.

And once again we return to the Final Girl, and her survival of The Chase.

The final major trope we need to consider is that of the possessed young girl.

Affirming its role as a major horror theme, the innocent young girl is often laden with creepy vibes as the dangerous and demonic spirits take control of the events of the film through her.

And it’s possibly because an all-powerful demon strikes such a contrast with the innocent young girl.

Consider one of the most famous horror films to grace the industry - The Exorcist.

The all-swearing, sexually-harassing, self-mutilating, all-knowing possessed Reagan challenges every component of being a ‘young girl’.

And this is the mirror image of the role of women within paranormal theories.

What’s the role of women in paranormal theories?

Theories regarding the paranormal obviously are entrenched in past beliefs regarding the societal roles of the sexes.

The supernatural was their science, and their religion their law!

But I’m not here to list all the supernatural theories that specify the differences between the genders.

I’m going to focus on one key piece of theory that echoes out into the horror movie industry:

And it’s how women and young girls in particular were deemed more likely to be possessed by spirits.

To skip out the confusing bits, this is what you have to know: as women and young girls are considered weaker, they are more ‘open’ to allowing in spirits and demons, and thus being possessed.

Obviously, this has made its way into pop culture.

But beyond the creepy possessed girl is the gender roles entrenched within the theory of possession.

If we compare European and African sentiments regarding possessed women, we can see that each specific country upholds a specific focus on women.

For example, several African countries focused upon how possessed women were more likely to leverage their condition in order to gain luxury items.

Some belief systems even classified that certain spirits could possess only women!

Clearly, women’s relationship with the paranormal has been painful to say the least.

And this is what makes The Nun the feminist icon that it is; it breaks down both the horror film-specific misogyny, and the misogyny inherent in paranormal theories.

Here’s how.

Why we should stan The Nun. Like, right now.

Upon The Nun’s release, it was branded a basic-bitch horror film.

It had endless jump-scares, a silly monster, and a forced plot used to duct-tape the films together. But underneath that surface we see a feminist icon disguised as a basic-bitch horror film. 

*I am about to discuss key plot points from The Nun - this is your spoiler alert!* 

The film starts with the Vatican responding to claims of strange activity in an abbey (that just so happens to house the demonic Nun, Valak). A group of priests and other clergymen dictate the situation, and seemingly control the narrative.

And it’s this masculine and priest-based control that sticks to traditional films.

So, when the dream-team sent to investigate Valak is finalised, the move against the traditional tide surges.

We see the emergence of a new dynamic between the main characters – Frenchie, Sister Irene, and the Priest.

And it’s all down to the young soon-to-be-nun, Irene, who join forces with the priest to seek out the activity, and complete god’s mission on earth. Clearly – as she is a virgin and embodies the purity we expect from the trope – she is the Final Girl.

But she doesn’t swan around being cute and dorky. She doesn’t even end the film with a succinct rescue!

She expresses her own agency by placing power in her faith, and in her desire to be a Nun, which is the thing that fulfils her identity as the Final Girl.

Indeed, it is her visions that lead them to victory over the demon, Valak.

Her own faith which celebrates her virginity is what saves them!

She also demonstrates her own agency by going against the church’s teaching on dinosaurs, and when they embark on the journey to the abbey and deal with the problems there, she isn’t just a sidekick.

Irene stands together with the priest, and brings her own set of knowledge to the table. Sure, the priest embodies his own set of wisdom from his previous experience of exorcisms and his position in the church.

But it’s the collaboration between the two - rather than a well-timed rescue - that really emphasises her power.

To complete this, upon meeting Frenchie – who immediately smells of a love interest the second we see the curly mop of hair and hear that accent – he makes a pass at Irene. He is quickly shot down, and from there we see no forced love story set to entice the female audience.

Sister Irene is a new wave of ideas and spirituality that manifest even more promisingly in her visions. She represents feminism - this is key to my next point.

Now, I’m gonna be honest – I get confused here.

A key premise of the film is that Irene has visions. And one of these is when her and a group of nuns are praying to seal Valak in the abbey, and keep the demon at bay.

I’m not sure if all of the nuns we see throughout the film that were at the Abbey were real or just a part of these visions.

But we do know that at least one of these nuns existed - Victoria.

She was the nun that committed suicide at the beginning of the film.

It is later confirmed in the film that Victoria committed suicide to prevent Valak from possessing her body and escaping out of the Abbey. And alongside this, we see the constant battle and bravery of the nuns in keeping Valak at bay!

Just before Victoria commits suicide, another nun takes on the challenge of facing Valak, and attempts to seal the demon using the relic that we later find out is the blood of Christ.

Consistently we see nuns be badass. 

We see meek and mild women, drenched in Final Girl tropes throwing off the shackles of patriarchy and reclaiming not just their right to their sexuality and womanhood, but also to defending their faith and what they believe in!

What defines them is no longer their bodies, it’s their beliefs.

This is made dually effective by the comparison between their consistent efforts to keep Valak at bay and the initial efforts of the crusaders. The nuns mirror the efforts of actual knights, and use their agency and power of being nuns to do so.

We then come to the Nun - Valak - herself.

The monster titling the film ties together the tropes of the female monster and the possessed girl, evoking the role of women in horror films for the last 100 years.

Nuns often fulfill a mothering image.

So – just like the innocent young girls that figures so prominently in films such as The Exorcist or The Exorcism of Emily Rose - the mocking of such an image by a demon incites the traditional approach we see in traditional horror films.

This is accentuated by her appearance.

Not far off the female monster, Valak is hag-like, stretching the perverted image of a woman by mocking a nun.

And Valak’s demise – which is brought about by the most badass scene ever – involves Irene spitting the blood of Christ in it’s face.

It is a true act of guts, grossness, and power.

It once again evokes the obsession with blood and the female monster splattered across previous horror films.

It truly brings together the main image I have concluded is core to this film:

The new, badass anti-patriarchy nuns who defy all Final Girl tropes and represent feminism defeat Valak who symbolises the past, misogynistic horror film tropes.

(Okay, fine, I doubt James Wan and the rest of the people working on this film had this message in mind.)

This is solidified by the final 2 scenes that end the flick:

We think that Valak is defeated and sealed away in the hellish crevice from whence it came.

But it is not.

Instead, it has possessed Frenchie, and this is who the Warrens find and exorcise. Footage of this then draws us back to the first film.

See, what matters here is that a man is possessed.

From the dozens of films I have sat through, I can think of few that actually involve men being possessed.

And that’s why I fucking love this movie:

The film ends by overturning misogyny, and it’s this ground-breaking male possession that kickstarts the whole Conjuring series!

They may not have defeated Valak, but they defeated the misogyny inherent in horror films.

***

This film will go down in the reviews section as a trope-filled-jumpscare-ridden-basic-bible-bitch- film.

But it’ll go down in history as a feminist icon.

(Well, to me, anyway.)

Now it’s time to hear what you think:

Do you think The Nun is the feminist icon we all need?

And are there any other feminist horror films that we gotta know about?

[onedirectionfanfics]

Love Always, Harry by @gucciwoodnymph​

Holmes Chapel, 1985 - Best friends since childhood, you and Harry have grown up to lead lives on opposite ends of the spectrum. He travels the world as a journalist for Rolling Stone. You’re stuck in your hometown, waitressing at a diner. You and Harry keep in touch through letters and postcards until the day he returns home and flips your world upside-down. 

This month’s featured story, Love Always, Harry, takes us back to the 80s when we raid record stores with our best friends and send letters to each other as we travel! This fic tells a beautiful love story that blossoms between two best friends who are so different, yet similar in many aspects. Read below to learn more about it from our interview with the lovely author!

***

How long have you been writing for?

I had always been coming up with little stories in my head, but the first time I actually wrote a story down was when I was ten years old. My class had just finished reading Old Yeller and I was really upset about the ending, so I wrote my own version of the story where the wolf bite ends up giving Yeller superpowers instead of rabies, and Yeller uses those powers to fight crime in the town (very highbrow stuff). I haven’t stopped writing since then!

Do you have certain habits or rituals you have to do while writing?

So before I start writing, I have to clean my room or whatever area I’m in. I tend to talk aloud to myself and pace around a lot if I’m trying to work through any snarls in the fic so I need plenty of clean space for that. The first things I pull up on my laptop when I’m starting out are my fic outline and thesaurus.com. I read through the outline a few times to smooth over the scene and get a clear picture of it in my head. Also, I turn into a bit of a hermit when I’m really ready to write. I have to be alone and I need complete silence because I have a goldfish’s attention span and get sidetracked very easily.

The ever famous question: how did you come up with this idea?

I really like the whole “opposites attract” trope and I think showing that dynamic within a close friendship is really interesting because (most) friendships have a stronger, more enduring bond than (most) romantic relationships. So I knew I wanted the story to revolve around two best friends – one who is really confident and more of a free-spirit, and the other who is very reserved and a bit cautious – who fall in love. I also wanted the characters to write letters to each other because I just love the idea of them. I think it’s so sweet when someone takes time to sit down and write out a letter; it adds a nice personal touch.

When does a story go from an idea in your mind to paper? Is there a process you go through before writing it out, or do you just get straight in it?

Some of my writer friends can just dive in and write absolutely beautiful pieces without planning and it makes me so jealous because for me, it takes a loooong time for an idea to go from my mind to paper. I usually have a few different AUs brewing at a time, and I cycle through them until one idea starts to branch off on its own and grow into a Thing that takes up 95% of my daydream capacity. Once I’ve decided on the basic story, I write everything out in an extremely detailed outline that describes the characters and their personalities, and breaks the story down into parts, what events happen in each part, etc.

Your fic is set in the late 1980’s, was there a specific reason for it?

When I decided I wanted to write a fic based around the idea of sending letters, I knew I would have to set it in an earlier decade. It wouldn’t have been realistic to set it in 2019 and have Harry and MC send letters back and forth when they could easily text, call, FaceTime, or stay in touch through social media.

I chose the 80s on a whim. I really love the aesthetic of that era, and after I had an 80s movie marathon I could see Harry fitting perfectly in that time with his cuffed jeans, and Vans, and high-waisted pants.

As a young adult in 2019, how did you find writing a story set in a different time period?

I had a TON of fun writing it, but it involved significantly more research than a fic set in present day. I had to do a lot of research for the little things that make an appearance in the story and make sure that they were actually around in 1985/1986 (i.e., the books on Harry’s nightstand in his room, the candy Harry and MC share when they’re smoking, the VHS tapes, the magazine that the MC interviews for).

I also had to be cognizant of not overdoing the pop culture references in that time. Sometimes after reading over first drafts of the installments, I would find sentences that essentially sounded like, “MC threw on her neon leg warmers before she grabbed her Walkman and listened to a mixtape.” So I edited a lot more to have a balance where I could create an 80s atmosphere, but avoid making it sound contrived.

What made you want to write about a girl who sacrificed the things she loved for a secure future? Is this something you’ve ever had to do?

I wanted to write about it because it’s a trend I see so frequently among my friends and my age group. One of my friends is such a talented artist, but she gave that up to study engineering (which she hates); another one of my friends decided not to pursue his passion for music and instead go to pharmacy school (which he hates), solely because it provides a secure future. I think I had to do it to a lesser degree – I wanted a job that involved lots of reading and writing, and I’m pursuing law which has a ton of that but it’s not the publishing or journalism career I had in mind when I was in high school.

Harry and Y/N have a very special bond. Without Harry, would Y/N have married a controlling man like William?

No, she wouldn’t have. I think eventually she would have realized how stifled she was and how she wouldn’t be happy with someone like her fiance. Harry just expedited that realization for her. Without him, she might have called off the wedding five minutes before she was going to walk down the aisle as opposed to months before, but she would never have actually married William.

Y/N’s self-discovery and growth can all be credited to her (for pursuing her dreams and aspirations) but her decision was heavily influenced by Harry. Would a woman like Y/N have gotten to this position without someone like Harry in her life?

Everyone has someone in their life who pushes them to be the best version of themselves, who calls them out whenever they’re falling short of their potential, and essentially tries to get them into gear whether that’s a friend, family member, mentor, or whoever. In the MC’s case, that someone for her is Harry. Without Harry in her life, I think the MC would still have gotten to her position because she has that drive and desire to do so, but it certainly would have taken her a longer time.

There are a lot of artists and bands from the 80s being referenced in this fic, did you have to do research for it or is old music something you have an interest in?

I really love 70s and 80s music because it reminds me of the stuff my parents used to play while I was growing up, but I did still have to do a lot of research for this fic to make sure it was historically accurate. For example, in Part I the MC gets a letter from Harry dated December 7, 1984. I originally wanted Harry to tell her about how he was reviewing a Fleetwood Mac show, but it turns out FM didn’t tour at all in 1984. So a lot of the time I had to research to make sure the dates, the locations, the artists, and the events all matched up with what actually happened.

I also looked up the actual Rolling Stone UK covers from the 80s to see which artists were featured and what year they were featured in to see if it could fit into the storyline. The actual RS archives are available online for a fee and only for the US editions, so I ended up combing through really obscure websites to find the UK versions, and spent hours on that just for the information to feature in like, one or two lines of the fic.

You wrote a very inspirational and powerful piece about self-growth and knowing your worth, did you hope to influence anyone with it?

Honestly, I treat writing as a form of therapy so when I started writing this fic, my intent was just to vent out my own feelings of inadequacy or frustration, and my fear of failure. When I started this, I wrote the characters to mirror the two “voices” I always have in my mind. The MC is the irrational half of me who’s afraid to even attempt new things out of fear of failing and Harry is the more rational half saying I’ll never get anywhere if I don’t at least try. So not to sound like a narcissist, but I think I mainly hoped to influence myself to grow as a person.

That being said, I have received a few messages from readers about how this fic has influenced them to grow, or recognize their self-worth, or make a change in their lives and it absolutely blows me away that anything I’ve written can do that. I cannot explain how honored I am to have played an iota of a role in helping someone decide to improve their lives. It’s been absolutely the most rewarding facet of sharing my writing.

Anything you’d like to say to anyone who read your fic?

Thank you very much for reading my writing! And thank you for taking the time to send in your comments, questions, rants, and key smashes. It really means more than I can ever articulate, that I’m able to share my writing and have such an amazing response from readers. Thank you a million times.

***

Thank you Tans for the wonderful interview! Check out more of her writing here! 

***If you would like to send in recommendations for next months featured story, please do so here.

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

On JK Rowling, Dumbledore, lycanthropy, and cultural context

I want to address an idea I’ve been seeing pop up a lot recently, which is that JK Rowling added Dumbledore being gay and lycanthropy being a metaphor for AIDS years later in order to seem progressive, and I’ve put a lot of time into thinking about why these claims bother me (since I’m definitely not mad on Jo’s behalf because she’s been dead to me since 2016), and I think it really comes down to this. These claims are based entirely off of how things are today and show a fundamental disregard for the cultural context at the time that’s concerning and feels dismissive to the people who lived through it. Basically, it goes hand in hand with the lack of knowledge and sometimes intentional rewriting of our community’s history that’s so prominent on this site.

Note that I am not arguing that Dumbledore is good rep or that the lycanthropy-HIV metaphor was well executed (or even a good idea in the first place). I just wish people would stop treating these things like JK Rowling said them yesterday as opposed to 12 years ago.

1. Dumbledore being gay 

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out in July 2007 and Jo first publicly said Dumbledore was gay and in love with Grindelwald in October 2007, so the idea that she added it years later is just factually untrue. It came out three months after the release of the final book. 

Let’s take a look at public attitude towards queer people in 2007. I’ll preface this by saying that I’m American, so I’ve done my best to find data on the UK, but most of my info is from the US.

In 2007, in the US, Gallup reported that only 59% of adults surveyed believed consensual sex between two people of the same gender should be legal, that 46% of adults believed that same-sex marriage should be legal and come with all the same rights are marriage between a man and a woman, and that 50% of adults favored a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Despite all that, only 22% of surveyed adults answered that they thought gays and lesbians (the language in the poll) should be more accepted in the US and 27% of adults thought gays and lesbians should be less accepted. Jumping back to 2005, 43% of respondents didn’t think gay people should be hired as elementary school teachers and 36% didn’t think we should be hired as high school teachers. I mention these numbers specifically because they’re relevant to Dumbledore. 

On the legal side of things, there were enforceable sodomy laws on the books in 13 states until 2003, four years before Deathly Hallows came out and Jo announced that Dumbledore was gay. In 2004, the fact that Kerry was in favor of same-sex marriage was considered a significant liability in his presidential campaign because even a lot of democrats still didn’t support it. In October, 2007 when Jo did that interview, same-sex marriage was legal only in Massachusetts, civil unions were legal in four states, and domestic partnerships were legal in three states. Meanwhile, twenty-five states had constitutional bans on same-sex marriage and twelve of those states also had constitutional bans on other rights, such as civil unions and domestic partnerships or extensions of employment benefits to same-sex partners.  

In the UK in 2007, just under 40% of adults believed that same-sex relationships were morally okay, 17% strongly agreed that same-sex marriage should be legal, and just under 45% believed that a same-sex couple could raise a child as well as a man and a woman. A 2005 Gallup poll found that, 38% of Brits believed homosexuality should be more widely accepted, 15% thought it should be less widely accepted, and 44% thought the currently level of acceptance was about right. 

On a more personal note, my high school hired its first openly gay teacher in 2008, and the fact that he was gay was considered pretty scandalous among the student body. We had a gay band instructor, but he only ever referred to his partner as his roommate. When we did debates in social studies classes, same-sex marriage was always one of the issues we had to debate over. Of the eleven people I went to high school with whom I now know are queer, only three of them were out in high school. That’s how uncommon it was at the time to come out before you were relatively independent. 

So this idea that announcing that a prominent character who was a headmaster at a school and had a close relationship to the teenage boy main character in a wildly popular children’s book series was gay would have been a popular move in 2007 is pretty laughable to anyone old enough to remember what 2007 was actually like. No one was using support for queer people just to bolster their public image unless their product was specifically marketed towards queer people, because the general wisdom at the time was that it would hurt them too badly with straight audiences. In fact, if memory serves, the queer fandom’s reaction to Dumbledore was initially pretty positive because it was more than we ever thought we were going to get. I didn’t start seeing people talk about how it wasn’t enough or about how the entire plot line was homophobic until maybe 2012.

You can’t use today’s context to interpret why someone made a decision in 2007 because it’s difficult to overstate how different things are now. The only reason to want to look pro-gay in 2007 was if you genuinely thought it was the right thing to do.

2. Lycanthropy and HIV

I was genuinely surprised when this caused a stir when JK Rowling tweeted (?) about it in 2016 because I was pretty sure she’d talked about lycanthropy being a metaphor for HIV years ago. It turns out I was right. She discussed it during the copyright trial she was involved in in 2008 (you can find it here, on pages 72-73). So it didn’t come out until nine years after Prisoner of Azkaban and three years after Half-Blood Prince (when Fenrir Greyback was introduced), but it’s not something she first mentioned on twitter in between tweets about how she meant for Nagini to be a Korean woman in 1989. It was before she was shooting off her mouth about ridiculous stuff every other day.

Regardless, I can understand why that would feel like her pulling something out of left field today because HIV doesn’t get talked about as much, but you have to remember that these books were written in the 90s at the height of the AIDS crisis. It’s difficult to imagine how much that permeated our culture if you didn’t experience it, even for someone like me who was in elementary school in a white suburban area and, as far as I’m aware, didn’t know anyone who was HIV+. My school had a how-not-to-get-AIDS assembly every year.  They probably showed us every movie in existence about kids with HIV. After-school TV shows did special episodes about how you shouldn’t be “blood brothers” with your friends because of AIDS. 

So when my friends and I were reading Prisoner of Azkaban as middle schoolers in the early 2000s, those memories were still fresh in our heads. We didn’t need to be told lycanthropy was supposed to be a metaphor for HIV because it had just been a huge issue five years ago and we knew enough about HIV and how the people who had it were treated to see the parallels. I imagine it was even clearer to the people who read PoA right when it first came out in 1999. It didn’t even occur to me that the metaphor is less obvious to people who are younger until I started seeing claims about this was just something she made up years after the fact and was like, "What do you mean this wasn’t clear to you when you read the book?” It fits perfectly with the general public’s preoccupation with and faulty understanding of AIDS in the late 90s. You just have to acknowledge that things have changed in the past twenty years.

I know that this comparison calls on a lot of stereotypes that are homophobic and otherwise bigoted against people who are HIV+, but those aren’t arguments against the metaphor existing and being intentional, they’re arguments about why that’s not a good thing. Fenrir Greyback is straight out of a 90s detective show. The “person with AIDS who wants to infect other people because they’re bitter about it” was such a common trope that almost every crime drama in the 90s and early 2000s did an episode about it. The “adult man gives a young boy HIV” thing grew out of the “gay men are pedophiles” and “queer people want to recruit your kids” stereotypes. These were prejudices Jo had that misinformed her writing.

I don’t have a whole lot to say on this one other than that given when it was written and how close it fits, including how much it draws on negative 90s-era stereotypes about people who are HIV+, I would honestly have a harder time believing it wasn’t intentional than believing it was.

Anyway, really my point is that it wasn’t always 2019 and if you’re using only today’s culture to inform your opinions about why someone made a certain decision a decade or two ago, not only is your understanding of the situation going to be incomplete, but the fact that it’s incomplete is going to be obvious to anyone who remembers what things were like during the time period you’re trying to talk about.

[fba-art]

Just out of curiosity, why don’t you like young justice??

aight, so i knew i was gonna wait to respond to this ‘til i had some time to explain.

and i want to start out by saying that i don’t think Young Justice, as a property, is a bad show. in fact, i think it’s a show that had GREAT potential. i watched every new episode via livestream every saturday lol. and now, i’ll be honest when i say it’s been some time since i’ve rewatched it, and i’m always open to changing opinions. a few years back, i wanted to give it another, fresher perspective and dove in for a rewatch, but ultimately didn’t finish. i don’t remember my reasoning exactly, but i recall being disappointed.and it’s funny i received this ask this week, b/c my friend and i were planning on giving it another rewatch for shits and giggle after finals ( sober or not is tbd ).

but so, here’s where i stand on the show.

i started watching YJ when it was abt 5 episodes into s1. and i binged those first five and stick to my guns that holy SHIT 1-3 are bomb as FUCK. super strong start! Independence Day will never not get me SO HYPE and remind me why i fell in love with DC’s teenage heroes in the first place. it’s so… youthful. a fun conversation for another time.

and now, when i started watching YJ, it was like four months into my making my TT!Kid Flash rp blog, and two months after i’d gotten into reading comics; when i found out Wally was like a biG DC CHARACTER, NOT JUST AN OLD CARTOON ONE-SHOT, i went EVERYWHERE to get my hands on more about Wally West. ironically, the first purchase i ever made from a comic store was a silver age Teen Titans tale, issue #2 of TTY1, and two issues of the old Young Justice comics ( still some of my favorite comics to this day; more on that later ).TL;DRi saw a commercial for YJ, ft. my fave DC char and my fave comic title and went “HOSHIT”.

as the episodes pushed the show’s plot along, it was fun and explorative of a more intense side to the idea of a group of superteens in the DCU. and again, very TEENAGER-Y, which i say in the BEST of ways, considering that was the target audience as well. but, as part of that audience at the time, one of the things that had started to bother me was the character relationships. yeah, i was loving on most of the main cast at the time, but for the first half of the season, the team’s supposedly-close friendships were pushed to the backburner ( EXCEPT for KF and Rob’s, which was one of the only things that got me through the season ). the first season WAS about straining relationships. the social drama was palpable. you NEED conflict in your plots, and char-v-char is especially fun. but i remember feeling like there was little bonding. they were a group of acquaintances, learning to co-habitate the same space- not to say that they didn’t seem like friends, but there was a lack of balance between “teens being professionals in their field” and “teens being immature teens”. both were squeezed in, but both consistently felt forced.

which brings me to the next point: forcing relationships without developing them!i wasn’t sure why i was supposed to care about Roy, like. At all. the team always bringing up that they trained alongside him, grew with the guy, and then??? nada, except when the plot needed edgy tantrumy angst.then there was spitfire. i ship spitfire now, but the ENTIRETY of s1 i was SO FRUSTRATED, because all those two did was bicker. wally was pretty foul to artemis, who was also just plain mean to wally. and i say this with the two of them as my TOP FAVE CHARS.and don’t get me STARTED on the best char on the entire team, KALDUR’AHM!!!! who was shit on by EVERYONE– fandom and plot, alike. actually, i do recall in my last rewatch starting two tallies of everytime kaldur was DISRESPECTED and TREATED LIKE GARBAGE BY TEEN AND ADULT CHARS, versus everytime he was treated respectfully. this boy was BRUTALIZED through s1.m’gann and conner, too– a cute concept, but borderline cringey, even creepy, at times. i was rooting for supermartian. i was. but it was like the writers didn’t know how to write a slowburn. the idea was honestly better on paper than in execution.

the YJ spinoff comics filled in a lot of these gaps, i’ll admit. it explored the chars, their relationships, and their behavior in ways the show seemingly didn’t have time to do, and i LOVE the spinoff series. but i also firmly believe that you shouldn’t need a second media to fix the first. it’s capitalistic and no fun.

through the duration of the show, there were also issues such as the hiatuses. i don’t recall them coming with much warning at a time, nor sticking to much of a schedule. i don’t actually remember what they were for, either. but, before and after each of (three?? was it three?) hiatuses, the showrunners would introduce a new character during a new arc, give said character some liners or plot fodder, and do away with them for the rest of the season ( i.e Rocket, Zatanna, Garth and Tula, etc. ).

i have some other, nitpickier issues– why was wally That Way, why was clark Like That, how come bruce was the ENABLER the entire time, etc– but many can be argued as whether they affected the show as a whole or not.my actual biggest problem was the direction.the director.Greg Weisman.bc idk what the hell he was doing half the time, and i don’t think he knew, either. the writing wasn’t GREAT, but at least it was consistent. Weisman truly had a marketable property, a fan favorite, and one of CN’s best running shows at the time. but between the hiatuses, the writing’s faults, the insufficient character development, and a HUGE ego thanks to his fanbase, Weisman was unable to uphold the integrity of his show. there was both fan-pandering, AS WELL AS consciously going AGAINST fans’ wishes. there was that whole “Ask Greg”-thing, too, where he would get back to a fan once every blue moon and answer background questions about the show’s universe, which became a scene of hot debate. Greg Weisman became the JK Rowling of DC, and lost a lot of my respect with his lack of damage control, and impulse control.

then, with the very inception of the show– and i don’t actually know if i can blame weisman for this or not, but i wanna know who pitched it, otherwise– the show’s CONCEPT. why was Young Justice made with this particular cast of characters, cherrypicked through DC history, aged down or revamped or just cut-and-pasted where they didn’t fit? why was its concept, “COVERT TEAM OF ADOLESCENTS WITH SUPERPOWERS WORKING TOGETHER WITH LACK OF SUPERVISION”? why was the show called “Young Justice” when what they wanted was the TT v3 comics? WHY DID WE NEED TO TURN SUPERMAN INTO THE UNAVAILABLE-FATHER TROPE????? questions that will forever remain unanswered. that’s a lie, i can answer most of them, myself.but all in all, a show with great potential that failed in execution.

season 2, i actually enjoyed more than season 1– it felt like there was more of a handle on the story and cast, alike. did i approve of season 2 and what went down? debatable. but that’s a very subjective view. objectively, season 2 flowed better than season 1, but still didn’t follow through on subplots, nor resolved relationships or even characterization ( m’gann, girl what the fuck?? ). very little team bonding, save for, once again, two chars out of the whole team. again, another season of SO much potential, but one that fell short.

its pros, however– i really enjoyed the darker themes, getting darker as time went on. there was a lot of tragedy in s2, and different perspectives and walks of life to watch through different lenses. a much more diverse cast, and very different conflicts to tackle. i was impressed. i don’t think all the controversies were resolved, but i also wasn’t quite as upset that they weren’t; open-ended conflict is frustrating, but is a great lead-in to another season.

————which, for better or for worse, we weren’t supposed to have.i personally would’ve rather the show ended there, not quite on a high note ( are u fucking kidding me fjaoisdfjoaifio waLLY, this was during the n52, too ), but with a concrete END. of course there was more to explore, the world they’d built was a big one, but we didn’t need to.

i was literally just yesterday chatting w my sis, bc after school lets out, we wanna watch season 3. i really do. i’m upset that there is one, but i do wanna know what happens to my faves. and, on top of that, i’ve been meaning to do one BIG rewatch, anyways, to get me set up for s3. as a student of film, it’s a huge philosophy of mine to rewatch EVERYTHING and go in with the intent of giving it a fresh start and a clean slate– both medias i love, and medias i hate. it’s important to analyze pop culture critically, and even things that aren’t good can still be enjoyable.

for me, Young Justice wasn’t a phenomenal show to begin with, from its technological side to its creative team to its politics, and i stopped enjoying it pretty early on. but, that isn’t to say it didn’t accomplish GREAT things, and isn’t UN-enjoyable; it has its moments. also i would DIE for most of the cast, i fucking love the characters.

i don’t think anyone is wrong for liking Young Justice. i try to stay in the loop about it, and form new opinions based on whatever information is out there until i can get ahold of the source material. and, i do like aspects of the show. but ultimately, it just isn’t my cup of tea. 

[paulisweeabootrash]

Book Review: Princess Holy Aura

An earlier version of this post was published on Facebook on April 30, 2018.

PAUL IS WEEABOO TRASH; or, Paul Reviews... A Book?!

Q: A book?  So, like, you're reviewing based on the first volume of a manga series or something?

A: No, a novel.

Q: A novel.

A: Yeah.

Q: Why not manga?  You have a problem with it?  Are you being snobby about what kinds of books are better than others?

A: No, not at all.  Manga is just another kind of literature.  I just felt like doing this novel because it's relevant to--

Q: How?  Oh!  Is it a novel that an anime is based on?  One of those outrageously-long light novel serieses?

A: No.

Q: A visual novel?  That seems like something you'd review.

A: No, it's a Western print novel, and there's no anime based on it.  But I swear it's relevant.

Q: Relevant...?  Hm.

A: Because it's--

Q: Is it something mentioned in an anime or something else you'd review?  Oh!  Is it "Hyperion"?

A: No.

Q: ..."Portrait of Markov"?

A: That's not a real book.

Q: Well what then?

A: It's a novel about a magical girl.

Q: Oh.  Huh.  Weird.  Proceed. -----

EPISODE 8: Princess Holy Aura (2017)

Princess Holy Aura by Ryk E. Spoor is a magical girl story for people who are familiar with the genre and find its absurdities at least as endearing as they are frustrating.  It's a sort of affectionate parody.  We follow the normal progression of certain famous magical girl anime — the mascot (a magic rat named Silvertail) giving our heroine her powers, the escalating danger of fights with an otherworldly enemy (an assortment of creatures derived from Japanese and American pop culture and folklore), meeting and bonding with a whole team of magical girls (the Apocalypse Maidens) — with some added twists and an awareness of the rules of the genre that allows the main character to succeed because of his ability to deconstruct what's going on.

The deconstruction is justified--

Q: Wait, did you say "his"?

A: Yes.  I'm getting to that.  And the pronouns are going to get confusing.

See, the reason Holy Aura is genre-savvy is that her secret identity is Stephen Russ, an impoverished thirtysomething otaku and Air Force veteran.  Chosen for his intense willingness to help others and his experience with the stresses of adult life, his knowledge of magical girl shows also turns out to gives him the preparation he needs to understand and anticipate his enemies.  Why?  Because, as I was going to say before, the deconstruction is justified by magic-users' beliefs about magic affecting how magic works — so it's susceptible to the magic-related memes of whatever culture(s) the current crop of Apocalypse Maidens are from.  This means Holy Aura and the other Apocalypse Maidens apply knowledge of various media conventions to figure out, and sometimes anticipate, their enemies.

The other four magical girls, for magical plot contrivance reasons, are actual teenage girls, so Stephen must go undercover as "Holly Owen", Holy Aura's eyeroll-inducing normal human girl form, to find and recruit them.  Stephen/Holly deals with the strangeness of abandoning his old life and adjusting to his role — not just physically, but because of how his status as small, young and female now drastically change how others interact with him.  This leads to one of my favorite things about the story: how it describes Stephen/Holly's adjustment.  Each Apocalypse Maiden is partially herself, but also a cumulative reincarnation of every previous version of the Maiden they are.  So Holly not only has Stephen's memories, but those of every previous person to become Princess Holy Aura, all of whom up to this point have apparently been actual teenage girls.  As Stephen adjusts to the radically different physical form of Holly, and the differences in treatment that come with it, he also finds himself feeling more and more "right", as if Holly is the "original" and Stephen the assumed persona.  This is true not only of acting like a high school girl but also true of her physical body.  Stephen's crisis of identity as he realizes he is becoming Holly to the point that his own male body becomes just plain disorienting to walk around in feels genuine and understandable.

The gradual shift from Stephen to Holly eventually leads to (sigh) an inevitable romantic subplot between Holly and another student, because the genre demands it.  But I actually like how uncomfortable this is for both Stephen and the reader.  At this point in the story, Stephen is in a truly alien and frightening situation.  Since Holly is not just a persona adopted by Stephen but has traces of the personalities and feelings of all people who have ever been Princess Holy Aura in the past, Stephen is more and more a passenger in Holly's body rather than the "driver".  Stephen is becoming subsumed into Holly, a brand new person born out of the combined experiences of many.  So of course Holly has feelings Stephen feels alarmed by and does things Stephen doesn't fully control, and the reader should be creeped out by contemplating what that would be like.

As the book goes on, however, its flaws also become more apparent.  Expository conversations (both between heroes and between villains) are an expected part of this genre, and given that there have been many iterations of the Apocalypse Maidens vs. Lovecraftian Aliens battle in the past to learn from there is at least an in-universe justification for them, but there are so. many. of. them.  Silvertail's advice in particular gets increasingly tiresome, sometimes feeling as if we're reading "Silvertail's Walkthrough Guide to Magical Girl-ing" instead of a novel, and he has far too many conveniently-helpful magical abilities despite his alleged weakness.  The premise also leaves itself vulnerable to an obvious in-universe problem, which it tries to address, but not convincingly.  For reasons to do with how magic works, the Apocalypse Maidens reveal themselves to their parents, and this includes them learning that Holly was previously Stephen.  As you might expect, this does not go over well.  Stephen is genuinely a nice guy, not a "Nice Guy", and attempts to get that message across, but the most convincing argument he can muster is basically "your daughters are safe around me because they could kill me easily if I tried to molest them even if I was in full Holy Aura mode", and worse, parents accepting the situation is explained mainly as a mixture of that reassurance and magic itself keeping the Maidens together.  There is, apparently, nothing Stephen can possibly say or do to reassure them he's not a sexual predator.  Maybe that's the point of those scenes?  It's unclear.

That takes us most of the way (and slightly out of order) through a broad overview of the plot, and I don't want to give any spoilers for the resolution (go read it yourself!).  Suffice it to say that it continues along a pretty much "first season of Sailor Moon" trajectory.  And of course, the whole book ends in a way that leaves it open to a second season-- er, I mean, sequel, but still definitely ends this particular story arc.  Exactly as you'd expect.  Exactly as it must, according to the memes controlling magic.

-----

[Classic] W/A/S Scores: 4(+extra) / 1 / 4

Weeb: This is very much a book by a geek for fellow geeks.  Although I previously said the Magical Girl genre does not have a high a barrier to entry in terms of general cultural knowledge, and although Princess Holy Aura also incorporates tropes and characters from, and makes references to, a great deal of American media, knowledge of both Japanese and American horror and fantasy tropes is really helpful to "get" what anyone is talking about.  Not only is it taken for granted that characters recognize the source material for what's going on, they also sometimes make leaps of logic that I have trouble following, and I don't know if that's a problem with the story or with my own background knowledge so that if I'd seen the right show(s) I would've caught on immediately.  Plenty of things are explicitly spelled out, especially in early conversations between Stephen and Silvertail, but familiarity with several magical girl shows or manga would probably be helpful if only to know more specifically what Stephen is talking about.  I'd rate this a 4 on the Weeb scale, but also at least a 4 on a scale of American Geek Media — knowledge of H.P. Lovecraft and recent internet lore, and to a lesser extent general knowledge of RPGs and major works of sci-fi and fantasy, are probably essential to not staring blankly going "what is this?"  Like certain interminable live-action shows I could name, it mashes together monsters from a variety of source materials with mixed results.

Ass: As if directly responding to common complaints about men writing women in inappropriately-sexualized and deeply-implausible ways, descriptions are actually descriptive rather than gratuitous, and Stephen-as-Holly really only talks about his/her own body in the context of getting used to it, and does so in less-sexualized terms than I've heard women I'm friends with use in moderately-polite company.  In fact, although Holly is understandably portrayed as having sexual feelings, Spoor rather aggressively avoids sexualizing her to the audience, which is an important distinction.

Shit: The whole "trust me, I'm not a pervert" interactions with the parents, some way-too-convenient things about the way magic works, and OH DEAR GOD THE EXPOSITION just end up making me go "is that really the best way you could think of to resolve that?".  Also, the Cthulhu mythos seems shoehorned and incongruous.  It's not great, but it is entertaining and coherent, unlike some things I've reviewed so far, so I'll give it a middling score.  I still recommend it if you're in the target audience of "gigantic fucking geek", which, face it, you probably are if you read my reviews.

-----

Stray observations:

- The action scenes are described well enough that I can pretty much imagine how they'd go shot-by-shot in an anime.  Or maybe I've just seen enough anime to know what common shots Spoor is talking about.

- SLENDER MAN IS NYARLATHOTEP.  (This is barely a spoiler.  It takes about one page for the characters to make the connection.)

- If "Silvertail's Walkthrough Guide to Magical Girl-ing" were a real book, I would totally read it.  It would go on my shelf right next to Hate You Forever: How to Channel Your Rage Into Effective Supervillainy, which is also not that good but quite entertaining if you're the right flavor of geek (which, again, you probably are if you read my reviews).

[blackjacketmuses]

hc; team dr and the show

DRV3 headcanons for the actual Danganronpa TV show and other pertinent things!

Under a cut for length, whew!

DR Seasons

Previous: two main games + anime + UDG + light novels etc; the Hope’s Peak Arc

Year 1 - s1-6

Year 2 - s7-12

Year 3 - s13-18

Year 4 - s19-24

Year 5 - s25-30

Year 6 - s31-36

Year 7 - s37-42

Year 8 - s43-48

Year 9 (final) s49-53

Recent History / The Fall of DR

In between years 6 and 7, the team switched the full writing team out from professionals to megafans -- there was a pretty big recruitment drive on the forums. The new team started writing on season 37.

From that point on, some fans noticed a slow downturn in the writing of the series. The fanwriters would pull from previous seasons -- especially the Hope’s Peak Saga -- for much of their plot elements and backstory, and even in victim/culprit/motives. A lot of things became derivative as the fanwriters only focused on feeding their nostalgia and repeating what they loved about the show, and some complaints were made on forums of how tropey, cliche, and sterotypical the plot and characters got at points, especially with the slow increase in pop culture references. Not only that, but things kept getting more brutal.

But despite a chunk of the fandom disliking the way the show was going, most fans didn’t care -- the dissatisfied fans were outnumbered by those who loved the show still. To them, it was the repeated elements that kept them coming back. The murders, the death, the familiar and beloved plot elements and the characters that fought despair to make sure hope always won, that was what they wanted. Maybe for some of them it was cathartic, but it blinded them to how the series was going downhill. All they wanted was their fix.

In season 49, the newest in-game Mastermind was introduced: a cosplayer and megafan named Tsumugi Shirogane, who had been on the writing staff since season 42. It was then that a larger portion of the fans became disillusioned, as Tsumugi slowly began the worst run of the show’s history: as the seasons ticked by, it was clear that the woman was obsessed with the Hope’s Peak Arc and the series was her life -- to unhealthy levels. And in the five seasons she ran, she visibly treated the whole thing like her personal dollhouse, living out her fantasy of being the next Junko gleefully with no consideration for anything but her own personal enjoyment.

Four seasons went by relatively calmly -- even if they were increasingly erratic and increasingly full of pop culture references and tropes and stereotypes -- and then...no one is sure what the catalyst was for Tsumugi Shirogane’s complete psychotic break, but it happened on live TV at the climax of season 53 after one of the most plot-hole-filled and ridiculous season’s in the show’s history. It and the protagonist’s -- Shuichi Saihara -- speech to the fandom at large finally struck a chord with even the diehards in the RoboChat, and the season was shut down with a non-ending.

In the wake of this, a lawsuit has been filed -- Rantaro Amami, Kaede Akamatsu, Shuichi Saihara, et al. vs. Team Danganronpa -- in which the participants of Season 53, as well as others from previous seasons, are seeking reparations. The charges filed are, among other things, Endangerment of Minors, Criminal Negligence, Copyright Infringement, Defamation, Improper Medical Care, and a whole hell of a lot of damages thanks to psychological trauma.

The show has been suspended pending a thorough investigation into the studio -- there have been hints that the show has been operating without proper paperwork or inspections.

How The Show Works

Danganronpa is a virtual reality game show. The contestants -- 14 of them, plus the mastermind (a staff member who works with the crew from inside the game) and the AI audience camera “Robot” -- are all given the most basic of debriefs (their memories will temporarily be suppressed in favor of their in-game character’s persona, and they will believe the game is real), and are then all hooked up to the computer simulation via Virtual Reality Pods.

Once inside the ‘game’, as mentioned, their real selves are temporarily suppressed and replaced by their character’s persona -- they keep their name and appearance, but are otherwise turned into Ultimate students. The contestants all choose only the basics of their personas, the application form having a request section, but the final say on talent, backstory, and personality is the studio and writers’. They do not tell the contestants what their personas will contain beforehand. However, their personas cannot be far from their true selves: the simulation cannot rewrite personalities entirely, simply enhance certain traits or diminish other ones, or add a few odd quirks. Most contestants are similar to -- but not exact and certainly not as intense as, their in-game personas.

The contestants, once they are in the game, do no longer know that they are in a game, and believe the events of said game are completely real -- as such, the trauma and death feels completely and utterly real to them. Once a contestant dies in game, they are released from the simulation, and are taken to the medical room for a cursory physical examination in order to make sure their avatar’s ‘death’ did not leave any physical damage. This done, they are sent to the Contestant Lounge (a comfortable room with chairs, cots, a bathroom, a snackbar, and a huge TV showing the live stream) where they are to await the season’s end. They are allowed their phones back, but they are only allowed to call immediate family, and they are not allowed to leave until the season is over.

Fandom

While the fandom was almost entirely unified before the Writer Swap, afterwards it became more split. While roughly a quarter of the fandom became increasingly dissatisfied with the direction the show was taking under the new staff of fanwriters, most of them did not mind, and some didn’t even notice a change. Arguments broke out between Diehards and the rest, who collectively coined the term Reserves for themselves after the Reserve Course in SDR2, and though nothing came to real-world blows, there was definitely a schism.

The Reserves grew in number after season 49 onwards, and eventually even the Diehards had to admit the show wasn’t what it used to be, thus its shutdown after season 53.

Popular Knowledge

Unlike Tsumugi’s claims in the climax of season 53, the series is far from universally watched. It is a rather popular show, but it isn’t near top ten, or even top fifty. It isn’t even broadcast on TV itself: the episodes are released through the Team DR studio onto their streaming site, which also contains the link to the RoboStream and RoboChat, which is the live feed from their proxy’s cameras and the survey chat. It is reasonably popular, but far from universal pop culture. The games are far more known than the reality show itself.

Applications

Applications can be found through the Team DR website, and mostly only people who know about the show apply to be on it. It is not common knowledge -- at least a third of the fans believe the show to be entirely faked, with the characters completely fictional -- but the rest do know and do apply.

The application process is simply a form and a video, and requires only that the applicant submit proof of their attendance at a high school and that they be ages 15 to 17. It does not require any sort of parental permission (something they are getting hit for in the lawsuit), and does not do background checks (which is how underage kids have gotten into the show), but it does require at least a dozen or more pages of NDAs.

Survivor Perk

The Survivor Perk concept was introduced after the Writer Swap as incentives. A particularly selfless or MVP player in the game would be targeted in the final trial to “sacrifice themselves in the name of hope” -- and then would be given the option to play again in the next season. It was not used in every season, but came up sporadically as a concept.

RoboStream / RoboChat

The RoboStream was another concept introduced around the time of the Writer Swap as a way to bring the viewer base closer to the game itself: a live first-person stream from the POV of one of the contestants themselves, so the viewers could feel part of it. This concept was introduced in season 38 as M1-R41, an Ultimate Robot character whose appearance was slightly based on Chiaki Nanami from SDR2. She was immediately a favorite, and the RoboStream -- in its own section on the website -- was loved by the fandom as well. She would appear in every season afterwards as a staple alongside the mastermind until season 52.

As her repeated use in the show went on, however, M1-R41 -- pronounced and romanized by fans as Mirai -- who was in reality an AI, became increasingly self-aware, retaining memories of past seasons and realized what was going on and her real purpose, keeping it within the show itself. This manifested in season 52, where she and one of the contestants turned on the show in chapter 5 and were killed by the Exisals (who were as of then unmanned). She was decommissioned after that, and a new AI/Robot, as well as the new audience survey RoboChat system was introduced for what would end up being his one and only season -- K1-B0.

[some-triangles]

mmarycontrary replied to your post “I kind of forgot to mention this but Some Triangles, the collection of...”

review new shows you like? Coin useful new terms like "toyetic"?

I watched an anime called No Matter How I Look At It It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m Not Popular, or Watamote for short, and then got current with the manga.  This was a wholesome experience for me and I’m going to try to explain why.

Watamote is about Tomoko, who is a high school freshman and also a disaster.  She’s a malignant nerd with no social skills and no talent to speak of whose understanding of how the world is supposed to work is derived entirely from internet trash culture and dating sims.  She makes plans to become popular based on tropes from anime and light novels, plans which either a) don’t work or b) might work if she could speak to other human beings, which she can’t.   She’s also enormously, omnivorously perverse, in the uncritical way that 15-year-olds can be, and she has the entire Japanese internet at her disposal in this, which - 15-year-old me might have died, is what I’ll say.

There are many ways this could have gone wrong.  In different hands this character could have been a moe sex object (”I hear otaku like plain, awkward girls,” she thinks to herself while walking through Akihabara) but the show is absolutely unsparing in making her as unpleasant as possible.   She is vain and contemptuous and self-centered and foul-mouthed and not very bright.  In an odd way the focus on her (unacceptable) desire is helpful in insulating her from being objectified - she is sexualized, but it is a) essential to her character and b) exclusively on her own terms.  The gaze in the show is hers.  

One might also expect that the joke of the show would be that she’s a nerd but she’s a girl - that the humor would come from genderswapping standard otaku bro situations, tediously - but none of that happens, because the show is aware that she’s a type.  (Pop culture has finally learned that there are girls on the internet, at least in Japan.)  It instead focuses on how her warped expectations are fostered both by media that is created for women and by women’s roles in media created for men.   Being a nerd girl is its own thing with its own parameters and challenges and expectations, albeit not without some crucial elements of universal relatability.  

So, having established the terrible things the story isn’t, what exactly is it that it is?  For me, there are three distinct pleasures to be had here. 

The first is the obvious, surface level farce, where you go “how’s she going to fuck up this time” and it’s reliably even worse than you expected.  (It’s a kind of comedy I probably wouldn’t have been able to enjoy years ago when my own experiences of this kind were closer, but fuck it, I’m old now and everything’s funny.)    Her sheer disastrousness has a kind of poetry in it, and her seething contempt for the community that she’s trying so hard to get into is the kind of thing that’s funny because it’s true.

The second begins to creep in later, at that point that you get in good comedy anime where the jokes are allowed to stop for a while for the sake of character development.   There’s a sequence in episode 10 wherein Tomoko’s assigned seat has been moved from the back corner of the class to front and center.  One of the consequences of this is that she no longer has a place to eat lunch - even if she felt comfortable eating surrounded by people, when she gets up to get food her chair is inevitably borrowed, and she is incapable of asking for it back - so she goes looking for a spot.  She thinks the roof might work, but of course the roof access is locked, because this isn’t that kind of anime.  There is, however a pile of spare desks on the roof stairwell landing, which becomes her spot, until one day she arrives to find that they’ve been taken downstairs.  This is a quietly devastating moment for her, and the thing is, that’s real - the struggle of finding a safe place to eat when every potential human interaction is dangerous to you is real, I remember that.  She ends up finding an empty classroom and pulling all the other desks around her to make a barrier, even though nobody is there.  Moments like this remind you that for all that she’s lazy and vicious and deluded and predatory she also goes through every school day in a state of barely contained terror, surrounded by people who are capable of panicking her just by saying hello, and again, I remember this.  And it’s a useful thing to remember, that hypervigilance and mistrust which was daily life for me, when I’m considering the person I’ve become.  So: funny, and relatable.

The third thing is switching to the manga and finding that manga Tomoko is not quite as complete a disaster as anime Tomoko, and watching her slowly, painfully learn how to have friends.  This process goes from ‘I have one (1) friend’ to ‘I am hanging out with these people I don’t like very much because I have to but for some reason we keep doing it’ to ‘somehow without noticing it happening I am now on speaking terms with people from multiple social groups’ in a way which is, again, extremely familiar.  Having learned to care for Tomoko despite the fact that she is an unacceptable gremlin, this feels enormously cathartic - even though she hasn’t succeeded in her own eyes because she hasn’t learned to talk to dudes (there will be time for that in college), she is capable of learning, and it isn’t diluting the things about her which are good and interesting.   You feel proud of her.  If you’re me, you feel proud of yourself - you remember how much you hated yourself while you were going through this process, and you remember what a feeling of accomplishment you got when you realized you could talk to people.   You access sympathy for the person you were, patience with the person you were, through the sympathy you feel for this character who is just as terrible as you always thought you were.

So if I’m coining a phrase: if you’re a nerd, this story is cringe therapy.  It shows you a worse version of yourself and invites you to accept and forgive them, but it doesn’t let you do so by ignoring their faults.  It keeps your nose right in the worst of it and tells you that this person is human, and so are you.  This strikes me as a valuable service and I am happy to have seen it through.

There are other good things the show does - it functions as a satire of media images of women in Japan by emphasizing how fucked up Tomoko’s received goals are, and also is easily readable as the story of a baby gay in denial, at least up to this point.  But it made me feel a positive nostalgia for objectively terrible times, and that, as far as I am concerned, is tremendous.

[smashmusicideas]

Actually I'd really interested in learning how each of these sources are used.

Cool! Just to note, this one’s gonna be kinda long. So Star Wars is made of a huge smorgasbord of sources, and I’ll have missed a few, but here are at least the ones I can immediately remember.

Akira Kurosawa: probably more than any other single source, Kurosawa’s classic samurai movies loom large over Star Wars. Lucas is an unabashed Japanophile, and you can see dozens of details in the movies, the first one especially. Darth Vader’s beetle suit is a stripped down samurai armor, the lightsaber battles were modeled on samurai duels more than fantasy sword fights, and several of the characters were given “pseudo”-Japanese names like “Kenobi” to create a sense of exoticism. The plot of the first movie is basically The Hidden Fortress, a film about a general and princess’ escape from a villainous army both with the help and from the perspective of two lowly peasants - peasants who became the series’ Greek chorus C3PO and RD-D2. Lucas even wanted Kurosawa’s most famous collaborator, Toshiro Mifune, to play Han Solo.

1950s car culture: So even though the plot steals from Kurosawa, the premise came from Lucas’ teenage years. He was a fairly typical California kid obsessed with cars, and Luke Skywalker’s desire to get out from under his aunt and uncle’s care was modeled after his own desire to drive away from home in the seat of a classic American car. Most of the spaceships are part-WWII biplane, but also part muscle car, with fins and a smooth design. Instead of planes being generic units, everyone just gets their own; it’s actually kind of like Cowboy Bebop, which also drew from a broad swath of mid-century American culture.

WWII era adventure movies: This one’s fairly well known, I think. The space battles are basically dogfights, the high adventure takes a lot from Errol Flynn movies, and like those, the plots are heavily based around a very clear “good versus evil” plot. Some of these movies have a fatalism that’s really deliberately avoided in Lucas’ stuff, with characters knowing they’re going off to die, but his an have that there - it’s just in the background. And falling in with the prism of “everyone teaming up to fight the villains" through which we typically view World War II, there’s a sense of camaraderie and almost “building up the team” that happens, usually during a grand heroic climax.

Nazi imagery: This is sort of a weird one, because while the shadow of Nazism does loom over Star Wars - the term “Stormtrooper” literally comes from a contingent of the Nazi party that went around assaulting Jews and communists, some shots of villains mimic Triumph of the Will - it’s not really used in a political context. There are political elements found throughout the series (most infamously Lucas’ somewhat tin-eared criticism of Bush-era government overreach), but the Empire isn’t really representative of the Nazis or any other villainous fource, just as I don’t really think the Death Star is emblematic of, say, nuclear weapons. The Empire just represents evil at its most generic, a Rorschach test that can be whatever vaguely oppressive force the viewer wants. Star Wars is an interesting bridge that led the films of the late Sixties and Seventies into the Eighties, and a big part of that is a deliberate avoidance of overtly political storytelling in the name of more broadly popular, non-confrontational “popcorn flicks.” But there’s still an interest in these more difficult political elements at the fringes.

Planet of the Apes: we forget, but Star Wars wasn’t the only big science fiction franchise. There were five Apes movies, and there are a few parallels between the series (notably an emphasis on softer structures, a distrust of technological encroachment of nature, and a sort of Sixties New Age fetishization of the natural world), but what where the influence can really be seen is in the toys. Somewhat weirdly for a series so cynical and fatalistic that thee of the films had to be prequels because humans annihilated the world with a nuke in the second, Apes was one of the first big licensed toy lines, with a whole variety of dolls and playsets. The relationship between the Star Wars films and the Star Wars toys was in place from the first movie, and a lot of how it sold its dolls and playsets was definitely influenced by how Apes did it.

Film serials: we don’t really have these anymore, but classic film serial series of the Thirties through early Fifties were a big influence. For those less familiar, often in that period of time, film showings could be a longer affair; you might see a full-length film, but also documentary newsreels, a cartoon, and short films. Some of those would be serialized, but would include dialogue and writing to help people if they’d not seen the previous episodes. Star Wars shows that from the word go; the entire concept of it being an “Episode 4″ is itself a joke, a recap for a preceding story that doesn’t exist. And tonally, the movies take a lot from these series, with a generally upbeat tone, runtimes and plotting that take a lot from the attitude of those multiple-hour shows, problems that take no more than another episode to solve, and cliffhangers that promise an all new adventure coming up. Revenge of the Sith even puts a point on this by naming a minor character after one of the most famous serials: Commando Cody and the Radar Men from the Moon.

Sixties and Seventies Sci-Fi: This is a case where Lucas was looking at, among other things, his own source: the techno-dystopia TXH-1138, whose title gets a little reference in Star Wars as the cell Princess Leia is held in. Science fiction of those two decades often struck a line between smoother and blockier design, each associated with more optimistic or serene or more cynical and paranoid attitude that kind of defined American cultural attitudes in the mid to late-Seventies. Star Wars kinda bridged the gap; it was optimistic but decidedly apolitical, a world where both sides of the technological divide could exist. The machinery in particular takes a ton from those moves, all monochrome rooms and constant lights and switches. Unsurprisingly, these streams are all mostly tied to Seventies softcore hippiedom, an interest in light transcendental thought. But it’s not really about those; the science itself isn’t the focus. It’s why people - myself included - sometimes discuss Star Wars as not “really” science fiction. I’m not really as interested anymore in having that argument, but it’s certainly indebted to science fiction.

New Hollywood: More than anything, though, Lucas was part of the New Hollywood crew, a new breed of filmmaker that dominated the late Sixties to late Seventies in America. These were (almost all white and male) graduates of newly founded film schools. Influenced by Japanese and French cinema and inspired by communist revolutions (though very much not communist dogma; they viewed themselves as rebels from both marxist and capitalistic conformity), people like Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Tobe Hooper, Woody Allen, Roman Polanksi, and Ridley Scott tried to create a “revolution” in western and particularly American film. Lucas’ big pre-Star Wars films were THX and American Graffiti (as well as working on Apocalypse Now for a few years), and each represented two parts of Star Wars: oppressive technological social machinery and nostalgic small town chill. Eventually this culture died, partially from Lucas and Spielberg themselves; Jaws and Star Wars became cultural monoliths, altered film distribution, and indirectly began the slow death of both New Hollywood and drive-in theater culture.

There are other touchstones of less importance. Pretty much everything in Jabba’s Return of the Jedi palace comes from fantasy comics, and especially the art of Conan and death metal album artist Frank Frazetta. The pod-racing sequence in The Phantom Menace is a high-tech chariot race from religious epics like Ben-Hur. And certainly the tropes of fantasy storytelling are huge. Luke and Anakin aren’t just skilled young men; they’re heirs to a great legacy (and in one case, a comically absurd genetic superiority) that only justifies their importance and worth. The unfortunate racial caricature aliens in his films also come from those, along with many of the war movies and serials, ranging from the more benign (Chewbacca is essentially based on a classic cliché of a parter or servant from a “noble race” who follows his friend, but he’s likable and not indicative to any one culture) to, well, Watto.

And I think this is one of the bigger reasons why I find most of Lucas’ sequels less good, even in many ways preferring Star Wars to The Empire Strikes Back. As the films went on, this wealth of sources contracted, a sign of his becoming less voracious or engaged a consumer of not just pop culture but art as a whole. It’d pop up in a few ways, like the Ewoks’ defeat of the Empire alluding to the Vietnam War (whose end was still being processed in the culture), but generally those sources stayed unchallenged: Monochrome halls, dogfights, samurai duels, and fancy ships. As much as I’ve little interest in relitigating the prequels, I still maintain that their fundamental problem comes from Lucas not updating those sources, not using mysteries or film noir to craft a story set in the past.

And, of course, then came J.J. Abrams, and while I certainly enjoyed The Force Awakens far more than the prequels, it gets even worse under him, because that’s a Star Wars film where the only reference is just Star Wars itself. If the best parts of the film are about Rey, Finn, and Kylo Ren struggling to live up to the legacy of Star Wars and its iconography - the shot of Rey eating under the giant mass of overbearing Star Wars trash is a favorite - than the worst is when it’s just redoing that iconography, most intensely in yet another X-Wing battle against yet another, dumber Death Star. And that one didn’t even kill off Greg Grunberg. I try to avoid “X fan-fiction” when describing something like this, but it’s reminiscent of modern superhero comics that are only about modern superhero comics, only really interested in the same tropes and icons.

And that’s also one of the greatest reasons I loved The Last Jedi so much, because it went back to those sources and reimagined them. So we get World War II culture, but instead of dogfighting it’s Casablanca, with two characters descending into a sleazy, corrupt world that’s ostensibly free from these endless space battles. We get this interest in politics, but it goes from focusing solely on the evil First Order to this idea that all these battles are more at the whims of an unseen military-industrial complex than anything else. And it even introduces new ideas of its own, from humor more akin to Mel Brooks than anything Lucas could ever do to a cheeky enjoyment of hinting at high octane violence in an otherwise family movie. Playing at the latter in particular leads to some brilliant visual splendor, with exploring red salt and crimson wall carpeting substituting for geysers of blood, and one major character’s visceral demise feels like something from an Evil Dead movie, equal parts horrific and hilarious.

But more than anything else, it’s the Japanese influence. Rian Johnson is another Japanophile and otaku, but he brings in his own wealth of influence, from other Japanese directors - mostly those who worked in the debatably trashier sections of the “chanbara” samurai genre - to even fatalistic manga and anime. Laura Dern’s awesome purple hair makes it implicit, but that sequence of her ship’s destruction comes so clearly from something like Gundam or Evangelion, a single gorgeous image conveying incredibly destruction. Even his Kurosawa lifts are different; he draws from the man’s color movies (which emphasized an intense, painterly use of color), and a major plot thread is based on Rashomon (that sequence in particular is interesting for also being on the few times we see a scene in Star Wars that’s dependent on character perspective). The film’s best sequence even ends with Rey and Kylo Ren fighting literal space samurai over walls of metaphorical blood.

There are also a few times where the film seems to bring in some of the prequel influence, with that casino planet or the more heavily choreographed fight scenes, and others when it outwardly deconstructs some of the series’ tropes. It all leads to this film that felt, at least to me, to be the first really “necessary” (such as it is) Star Wars film since the first, something as idiosyncratic as Lucas’ original.

I’m not sure exactly how to conclude this, other than to say when creating art, it’s easy to fall into a trap of just reusing your sources. I do that more often than I’d like, certainly. But bringing in new things can help. I recently started watching Cowboy Bebop again for the first time since college, and thinking about how that show used spaceships as car and plane analogues made me think about another way artists were able to come at the same ideas. And I don’t think knowing that Lucas was cribbing from these (and that his various producers and editors were keeping him under control to make a comprehensible final product) lessens any of the “magic” of them; at least to me it enhances it.

Though I should also note again that this is nowhere near a comprehensive list, and there is definitely a huge wealth of material he and everyone involved in the making of the movie exploited or used that I forgot about or haven’t noticed. But that often is how the process works; you bring in all sorts of ideas.