#I review the source material

[getvalentined]

Thinking about finally throwing all my FF7 meta analysis and lore deep dive stuff onto a sideblog. It'd be reblogged from here, but I'd be able to organize it a little better, have a directory so people could find things more easily, and maybe it'd stop people from regurgitating things I say word-for-word for brownie points when they can just find and reblog the fucking original post(s).

[deimosatellite]

[uhbasicallyjustmilex]

ways journalists have really described alex turner and miles kane:

"Wearing matching outfits, gazing into each other's eyes, talking about their instant connection… Alex and Miles' claims that they wrote the Shadow Puppets' album about 'a girl' weren't fooling anyone. Quite simply Alex and Miles are hopelessly, madly, enviably in love with each other. Please lads, just be true to yourselves, embrace your feelings, and have a massive snog - we can't bear the tension any more."    - NME

“If there’s one sexual dynamic at work tonight at the Usher Hall, it’s homoeroticism. The Last Brokeback Mountaineers are a camp pair of strutting cocks, to be sure.”  - The Wee Review

"Speaking to them together feels like interrupting a conversation that's been going on since 2005." - NME

“Looking over at his manspreading counterpart, Kane gleefully points at Turner’s exposed bulge. Not wanting to be rude, I look away.” - SPIN

“Watching them finish each others’ sentences, agonise over their answers to how well they know each other and embrace when it’s time to leave... well, you’d need a heart made of Hoosiers CDs not to find it incredibly sickly sweet.” - NME

“Alex Turner and Miles Kane turn towards each other with fond looks when we suggest they’re best friends. Like doodle in each other’s notebooks BFF status. After spending 15 minutes with them though, we’re pretty convinced they’re going to grow old together in matching tracksuits.” - Sidewalk Hustle

“Miles Kane looks like he’s gagging for a great big man-hug (and maybe more...) off his buddy. These two have spent overly long admiring themselves and each other.” -  The Wee Review

“As soon as I decide to just get started without Kane, Turner accidentally Facetimes him from his pocket, and the two erupt into a fit of giggles, our conversation veering off course for the third time in as many minutes.” - Consequence

“While Turner stares on the ground during his answers, Kane watches him like a lovestruck teenager from the side.” - Musikexpress

“Say this for Lennon and McCartney, or Plant and Page: they never had their own romantic rock ‘n’ roll portmanteau. But “Milex”—Miles Kane and Alex Turner, for the uninitiated—have just that enviable kind of bromance. The two even moved to Los Angeles in tandem a few years ago. No wonder multiple “Milex” pages have cropped up on Tumblr, breathlessly re-posting the duo’s every embrace and droll quip; there is fan fiction, too, the kind that would make a coal miner blush.” - Interview Magazine

'"Alex Turner is like a princess in need of his prince Miles's assistance to get down from a tower." - Dutch Review

"You'd be forgiven for barely noticing anything beyond the front of the stage, though. Like a pair of teenagers egging each other on, Turner and Kane are the most infatuated frontmen since the Pete Doherty and Carl Barat." - Hot Press

"If Miles Kane had a 'hard on' for being a front-man before The Last Shadow Puppets, he's grabbed the opportunity Turner's patronage presented him with both hands. So to speak." - Q Magazine

"The feeling is contagious too, as though we're looking in on star-crossed lovers finally reunited." - Hot Press

[bambi-lesbian-posts]

Just so everyone gets the lay-down of some of the bigger points of the Supreme Court decisions and rights at risk after Roe v Wade was overturned:

Justice Clarence Thomas expressed his desire to go after Obergefell v Hodges (the case that federally legalized gay marriage)

Griswold v Connecticut is also being considered (the federal right to obtain contraception)

Lawrence v Texas (allows consenting adults the right to engage in whatever sexual acts they wish within private courters, i.e. their own bedroom)

Slightly biased source from CNBC:

A significantly unbiased source from what I can find, by Politico:

Miranda Rights or Vega v Tekoh is overturned, meaning it is no longer federally required for Miranda rights to be read to detained individuals. Therefore, any detained person cannot sue for damages against law enforcement/the court for being unaware of their rights and protections.

Slightly biased source from CNN:

The 100 Mile Border is also changed, meaning those who live 100 miles away from the country's border as well as international airports no longer have 4th amendment rights (i.e. it affects your abilities to sue for damages if you are a victim of a warrantless search.)

An unbiased (from what I can tell) and objective breakdown source by ACLU:

Senator John Cornyn of Texas tweeted about how Brown v Board (the case that established segregated schools are unconstitutional regardless if the school and education qualities were the same) should be overturned, and Plessy v Ferguson (case that brought forth the saying "separate but equal" in regards to segregation, meaning segregation was constitutional if poc were given the same quality facilities and education) should be reviewed.

Biased source from SALON which i am using simply because it has links and screenshots of his tweet:

[supercantaloupe]

The Rent Post™

aka, a lengthy screed on how rent the musical goes about adapting la boheme, where it fails, and what can be done about it

so i’m admittedly a reformed Theater Kid™. and tbh i still very much am a Theater Person, even a Musical Theater Person, i’m just in my 20s now and my taste has shifted away from what’s mainstream on broadway right now and closer to the world of opera. but there absolutely was a time in my early teens when i was Really Into Rent, as many Theater Kids™ were…and there was also a time in my later teens when i thought about it and realized that rent was not only just not my thing, but that there were some significant Problems with it, as its own work and as an adaptation. now, having finally seen boheme for myself, i feel like i’m really in a place to piece together how the two works compare to one another, and why/how i think rent falls short of success (as a piece of theater anyway. obviously rent is not lacking in commercial and popular audience success, for better or worse).

i knew years ago that rent is a direct adaptation of la boheme, but wow, only after seeing the opera did i come to realize just how closely rent follows boheme: in plot beats, in character names, even borrowing a couple of lyrics and musical motifs here and there. 

but it also changes things from the original opera -- namely, it adds things -- and i think this is the first place where rent runs into trouble. now i am by no means such a purist that i think no work should ever be adapted unchanged (more on this later...what’s the point of adaptation if not to change things to make the work resonate with a new audience anyway?). however, any and every change made to an existing work in adaptation should be thoughtfully made and motivated, because every single change has an effect on the whole product in some way, and many small changes can add up to create a rather different final product than a creator might realize. 

(and this goes both ways, i think -- both in a work where a more flawed source material is adapted into something new and better, and when a superior original work is adapted into a worse new creation.)

definitely some of the changes made in rent while adapting la boheme are due to the change in medium. opera and musicals are both theater, sure, and more similar in many ways to each other than either is to straight play or film perhaps, but it’s still like a spanish speaker and an italian speaker trying to have a conversation with one another. the languages are similar and there might even be a bit of crossover in mutual intelligibility but they are still ultimately two different languages with different grammars and vocabulary. opera in general tends to have slower pacing than book musicals, fewer plot threads of equal importance. that rent is specifically a musical adaptation of la boheme, rather than a true rock opera, demonstrates this well. the mimi/rodolfo relationship is still front and center (americanized of course as mimi and roger), with marcello and musetta close behind (though expanded in rent as more of a love triangle among mark, maureen, and joanne, the latter being an invented character for the musical who i think embodies the original marcello as much as mark does). but rent adds a lot of stage time and focus to a new couple, collins and angel, who are directly lifted from colline and schaunard, who are essentially secondary comic relief characters, whereas collins/angel are arguably as important plot wise to mimi/roger and mark/maureen/joanne. 

(and i’m not gonna get into the level of #problematic there is to the depiction of maureen as an overly promiscuous bisexual or discuss why colline and schaunard can’t have been a gay couple the whole time or whatever because. wow i do not care. there are more important things to complain about here c’mon)

first big addition to rent that wasn’t original to boheme is that increased stage presence/focus for collins and angel. it's not inherently a bad addition, and for its time the open depiction of multiple queer romances onstage was still kind of groundbreaking. and yes, rent having a longer runtime than boheme should give it the opportunity to flesh this relationship out more as well as the other two to make sure they all have an equal chance to develop and end in a satisfying way. hell, they don’t even all have to be equal in stage presence/focus/importance to be a positive addition to the show (and how can it be when angel dies halfway through act ii? then again, the character dying doesn’t exactly mean the relationship loses its importance in the plot…) but despite the extra runtime and faster storytelling pace, rent doesn’t actually develop angel and collins all that much, especially not before angel dies. this isn’t an issue with colline and schaunard, of course, cause it’s obvious they’re not important characters in boheme. but collins and angel are arguably more important in rent than even mark/maureen/joanne. and angel dies halfway through act ii…meanwhile, mimi survives the end of rent, when she very pointedly does not in boheme.

and…oh, mimi. she is probably the biggest and most problematic adaptational change in rent as compared to la boheme. on the surface she (and roger/rodolfo) seems the least changed of all the opera’s characters, her name not even undergoing the same americanization treatment as the others. but there are just so many small details that add up and up until she’s a fundamentally different character in rent. i don’t even begrudge the change in occupation: her becoming a stripper/exotic dancer/possible sex worker(?) rather than a seamstress does bring with it some cultural baggage, but i am not personally interested in reading any morality into her choice of occupation, and i choose not to read her line of work as having any implications for her “innocence” or moral value as a character. nor will i read her addiction or disease as being moral qualities either. however: there is a big difference between tuberculosis in the 1840s and both AIDS and drug addiction in the 1980s. neither boheme’s mimi nor rent’s are morally responsible for their illnesses. but there is absolutely nothing mimi could do about her tuberculosis in boheme except die, because it was france in the 1840s and nobody knew what an antibiotic was. in new york in 1989, there were rehab clinics and there were medications for HIV. these things were expensive and hard to access, yes, but rent really goes out of its way to show us that mimi had the resources to access these things -- she is able to afford AZT in act i on her own (and the fact that she’s on AZT is used as shorthand for her HIV+ status, as opposed to other characters about whom we are told outright)...

… and her relationship with benny (the much-expanded counterpart to boheme’s benoit the landlord character) in act ii, who verbally offers to pay for her admittance to a rehab program.

yet the next time we see or hear anything of her, her loving mother is calling to ask where she is as she’s presumably gone missing…

…and then discover she has been living on the street, dying from exposure/disease/addiction. 

did she do this willingly? did benny refuse to continue supporting her? we don’t really get an answer to any of this; rent isn’t really concerned with why mimi is in the position she’s in, but is rather entirely preoccupied with staying true to boheme -- up until mimi’s death, anyway. because mimi doesn’t die in rent, she is saved, and says that angel told her to keep on living (as though it were a choice). why? we can only speculate. really, if any character embodies the same “dying tragically in a world too cruel for them to survive” theme as mimi in boheme does, it’s angel. and her death is honestly used as a tool throughout the rest of the show: a purpose for kindness, community, life.

is this a bad “bury your gays” kind of thing? i don’t really know, i’m inclined to believe not. but i do think angel’s death is more thematically akin to mimi’s death in boheme than the actual (near-)death of mimi in rent. 

and this is the biggest difference between rent and boheme: boheme is not about hope. boheme is a tragic romance about how important relationships are among people in disadvantaged communities/situations, but it does not say that love will transcend or materially improve those conditions. rent, by contrast, does. rent suggests that the love of partners and community (even if filled with complications and tensions) is lifesaving. 

(and i know rent’s stated thesis is “no day but today,” i.e. live and enjoy every day as though it could be your last, but i think thematically all the characters and their interactions overall suggest a theme of community just as if not more strongly, whereas “no day but today” is more limited to the HIV+ characters and has little to do with the mark/maureen/joanne subplot. mimi's outlook on "no day but today" changes when she chooses to stay alive on the urging of angel from the other side.) 

now i don’t think this is altogether a bad moral to have in your theater piece. especially in one of the first major pieces of theater centered on marginalized queer characters. i will not deny how important and cathartic it can be, both now and especially thirty years ago when rent premiered, to end on a hopeful note rather than a tragic one. but i have a couple of issues with how rent goes about making this its central theme. for one thing, mimi has frankly too many Things affecting her health in the end for her survival to be realistic, and absolutely nothing up to this point in the show has suggested a setting of magical realism or pseudofantasy; everything has been as grounded in real life as possible, until finale b, when mimi suddenly and near-inexplicably survives. it feels like it comes out of nowhere tonally and thus isn’t very satisfying an ending when put to scrutiny. for another, angel has already died, and angel is, compared to mimi, a much more beloved and uncomplicatedly positive force in their community and relationships. angel’s entire stage presence (while she’s alive and when her character is invoked or referenced after her death) is a positive one: caring for collins when he’s injured, providing food and funds to the group, placating arguments, etc.

and the fact that angel has no concerned parents leaving her voicemails, unlike mark, roger, and mimi, underscores that she has no one else to lean on for support except her community of bohemians. and we’re not given a reason to believe one way or the other about her home life or financial stability outside of today 4 u when she got a sudden windfall for killing a dog (whatever; schaunard did the same thing to the parrot in boheme). in contrast to mimi, roger, and especially mark, who are clearly shown to have family who care about them and want to support them, yet they choose to live in romanticized poverty anyway. mark even gets a good job in filming and still finds a way to complain about it.

really, except for angel (and arguably collins, too), it’s difficult to totally sympathize with the characters in rent and care fully about their plight because they’re just…not depicted as particularly likable people. maureen is an unfaithful and kind of manipulative partner, and her approach to “protest” is really just bad self-absorbed performance art. roger just kind of sucks at songwriting (how is your eyes the song that he’s spent the whole show writing? it’s the worst number in the musical lol), and he’s quick to anger…his decision to leave mimi makes even less sense here than rodolfo’s decision to leave her in boheme, where at least he did so out of genuine concern for her health (also why does he leave mark? rodolfo embraces marcello as a friend still after mimi leaves in boheme...act iii of boheme is the least closely adapted in rent by far.). wheras in rent roger seems to be both genuinely jealous of mimi interacting with other men and upset by her continued drug use. although this last one i don’t begrudge him for, since it’s made clear he’s a recovering addict himself…although it does make mimi’s relationship with him all the worse, considering that mimi’s take on the whole “no day but today” theme is to throw caution to the wind with her actions and not worry about the future at all, and her interacting with roger is directly tempting him back into addiction which he clearly does not want. (and roger’s rejection of her in another day is framed as him being in the wrong with mimi being backed up by the life support chorus…)

while mimi as we’ve seen is reckless and throws her life away even when people try to help her (very very different from boheme’s mimi, who makes no particularly reckless choices, and accepts help when it's offered). and mark is entitled and uses his film as an excuse to disengage with the real world, even exploit it (see: the way he films the life support meeting without permission, or the homeless woman, which is never really confronted elsewhere in the show…)

the inclusion of a homelessness subplot in rent is particularly strange to me. it shows up a lot, especially in act i: the threat of homelessness for the main characters should they not pay their rent or come to some kind of agreement with their landlord; the vague future threat of benny’s “cyberarts studio” getting built which is implied would evict those living in tents on the lot; mimi being found living on the street in the finale; and the chorus/ensemble who show up periodically, as above. homelessness is an ever present element of set dressing/conflict in rent but it’s never really addressed, no points are ever made about it, which is in my opinion kind of wild and very unsatisfying. the above scene especially, considering how direct of a callout it is towards the show’s own characters and writing, yet it is never addressed afterwards, and this conflict is never really resolved. 

one could take similar issue with the choice to swap tuberculosis in boheme with AIDS in rent. though in my opinion i think addiction is as much as if not more rent’s analogue to boheme’s TB, since that is a much more acutely seen disease for mimi and only mimi while there are multiple characters (main and chorus) living with HIV…then again, angel is the character who gets the real tragic death analogous to mimi’s in boheme, and angel dies of complications from AIDS, so i suppose it’s open to debate. regardless, there’s a significant contextual difference between TB in the 1840s and HIV and addiction in the 1980s: there was no system, political, social, or medical, that could truly heal someone of tuberculosis in boheme’s setting. but there very much was a medical and social system in place to help people with HIV and addiction in the 1980s; systems which were aggressively denied to those who were suffering by the political system. and for as much as the characters in rent like to sing about revolution, protest, and activism, not a single one actually challenges the powers that be or call out by name those responsible for the systematic denial of healthcare to the marginalized. activism and artistic revolution is hollow and meaningless in rent, they never name a real enemy, just a vague sense of “the man.” but it’s a story set in a real and still recent historical time period, the effects of which we still deal with today (and i’m sure even more acutely so back in 1996); it just feels disrespectful to me to use those crises as such important set dressing for your musical which positions itself as a “fuck the man” revolutionary kind of piece of theater and yet do or say absolutely nothing about the real world issues it is appropriating. for more information i highly recommend checking out lindsay ellis’ video on the topic. 

so is all this to say i think rent is an irredeemable, fundamentally broken work? actually, no; i think it has a decent foundation and some solid music. i understand the reasoning behind and appeal of updating an old work to a new time period/setting for a new audience, and i think trading 1840s paris for 1980s nyc is an interesting and workable substitution. but when i look at rent as it is now, i just do not see a finished product. 

and i think this is the most frustrating and disappointing thing about rent to me: rent is, quite literally, an unfinished show. its composer and librettist, jonathan larson, died suddenly the day of its first preview performance. and for so many developing (off-)broadway shows, previews are when the actual finished product is crafted, as the show is revised based on audience reactions. of course audience and critical reception to rent from the very beginning was positive, but i can’t help but speculate how much of that is influenced by the mere fact of its creator’s untimely death. and i wonder what changes larson would have made to his show if he had lived, and been able to hear the audience’s reactions, and revise the show accordingly. i wonder if he would have thought it worked. i wonder if he would have seen the same cracks that i see in it. i don’t think rent is inherently unsalvageable, but it is so far unsalvaged. 

and frankly i don’t know that it ever will be salvaged; not for many years, at least. not until copyright and licensing in musical theater changes, and not until broadway audiences get more comfortable with the idea of altering beloved and familiar classics (the 2019 revival of oklahoma! was, in my opinion, a work of genius, but i’m well aware my opinion is not universal, and especially during its national tour the show’s entire concept has been extremely controversial). do to rent what bartlett sher and aaron sorkin are doing to camelot right now: keep the heart and soul of the piece intact, but rewrite what doesn’t work. or do something even more drastic, cut subplots and change character traits, i don’t know. maybe mimi should die; maybe it really is important that she survive! maybe rent shouldn’t have been based on boheme at all; hell, what would rent look like if it was based on la traviata instead? (well the answer to this one is “a different show entirely,” most likely, but if you want to write a poignant and tragic love story based on a romantic opera and set in 1980s nyc featuring queer and/or HIV+ characters, well…it could work and i’ll leave it there.) maybe that’s going too far, i don’t know, but the point is, i want to see directors and writers have the freedom to try that stuff out. because i don’t think rent is unsalvageable; i think it’s unfinished. 

but rent is far too popular and beloved for anyone to dare touch its libretto with new ink. the memory of jonathan larson is held far too preciously for anyone to allow such debasement of his work. when searching online for libretti to reference when writing this essay, i found one transcribed script with this at its heading:

and i think that about sums it up for me. “may he be friggen worshiped!” him and all his creations, holy and untouchable.  it’d be tantamount to theater sacrilege at this point to try and change it. how dare you sully larson’s good name by thinking you could “fix” his masterpiece…the masterpiece no one wants to admit he never got to actually finish. well, i don’t know, maybe it’s me being jewish and sentimental here, but if i have enough respect for a piece of work i want to be able to engage with it and question it and interpret it as i think it best ought to be. (jonathan larson was also jewish. would he agree with me? i don’t know. but i think he’d want to see the best of his work, just like i do.) live theater is inherently participatory and dialectical. and it ought to be alive, not carved into stone. neither immovable nor under threat of utter annihilation should someone come too close with a chisel. rent has potential. la boheme is still as affecting today as it was a hundred thirty years ago (did you know rent premiered almost exactly a hundred years after la boheme?). rent could be the same. and it does have emotionality behind it as it is now, credit where credit’s due. but it could be more than just that. if we could just let someone finish the thing already, even if larson himself couldn’t.

[kithj]

i just finished providence girls (which is a reimagining with two characters from lovecraft) and one thing i really liked about that specific reimagining is that it actually had something to say.

it explores the autonomy of both characters, who in their original stories, are used and abused by their fathers, and both die or disappear at the end with little reflection on what was done to them. this is something that will make a compelling reimagining. especially with asenath, Dante explores the theory that asenath was never really herself, but rather possessed by her father, touching on the gendered comments made by Lovecraft, rather than ignoring them.

the author doesn't shy away from the source material or completely rewrite the characters, but instead develops them with the source in mind, and explores how the events of their original story would affect them and impact their lives.

asenath feels disconnected from her body, and finds herself enraged by its betrayal as she starts to transform; lavinia reflects on her traumatic pregnancy and her short experience with motherhood as well as her albinism and how people treat her because of it. these things are interesting! they already existed in the source material and Dante is exploring them further. the differences between the two women cause problems as well as self-reflection, and they both come together and find healing in their short, bittersweet romance.

anyways, all that to say that i do think reimaginings can be done well. and also i recommend providence girls

[scattered-winter]

[bobtheacorn]

Anime only fans are the ones saying the Live Action is a better story than the original. Gee, I wonder why.

AAFKKGDSHK NO ARE THEY??????

**SPOILERS**

They got mad in punk hazard bc Luffy and the others were shocked to see a dragon for the first time bc Filler threw one in randomly at the end of the East blue arc and they think Zeff’s leg got caught on an anchor while he was saving Sanji as a kid - opla is a better story than the ANIME (EVEN THOUGH IT KIND OF MISSES ALL OF THE REALLY EMOTIONAL BEATS) because it’s more true to the manga and bc the pacing isn’t dog shit and bc the writing, for all that it’s different, is GOOD and well-rounded. It does its own thing in a good way!

I have beef with opla’s shifting of scenes and rushing the backstory in Arlong Park because it sorta sucked the OOMPH right out but I’m empathetic to the fact that it was probably a time issue because they got so few episodes to work with. The anime has no excuse whatsoever other than Toei sucks

[evilphrog]

Um...amazon? Where did Wheel of Time go?

[v41entine]

20$ on steam for anyone interested ✨️

[quietwingsinthesky]

okay sorry didnt mean to go on like that i just have many feelings about this. As A Gamer.

[krentle]

It's probably a cold take, but 'Shadow Over Innsmouth' isn't a very good book. It's filled with textual and subtexual racism, and at least half the book is different guys expositing at the main character at length. Don't get me wrong, some of the lore it adds to the mythos is neat. The setting and the premise of the book are fine to an extent. "Strange fishing town where there's a cult, the people look frog-like as they get older, and theres plenty of mysterious goings on" is perfectly fine and dare i say a good hook. On god tho, the handling of it is so sloppy and at the top of the list of most blatantly "just H.P. Lovecraft being racist" stories.

Mental this is like a famous one of his. It's not good 👎

[camelspit]

hey. maybe you shouldn't write a book review if you haven't even finished the fucking book. btw.

[jacquelinemerritt]

Diamond is Unbreakable: Episode 1 Review

Originally posted April 3rd, 2016

A solid beginning to the fourth part.

One of the most interesting things about Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure is its commitment to genuine fresh starts at the beginning of every new part. Phantom Blood was a gothic horror story about vampires and family betrayal, Battle Tendency was a classic Hero’s Journey to defeat an ancient evil, Stardust Crusaders was a “bro-trip” around the world in fifty days, and Diamond is Unbreakable is a “hangout film” set in the town of Morioh with a bunch of dorky highschoolers.

These stories couldn’t be more different, and yet they’re bound together by a commitment to the absurd, the ridiculous, and the bizarre that pervades every scene. There’s not a single fight in this series that doesn’t have the tension cranked up to eleven the whole way through, and every weird, potentially off-putting moment is balanced out by the series’ constant assertion that everything happening is par for the course within the world.

Case in point, the first episode of Diamond is Unbreakable introduces us to Josuke Higashikata, a superpowered high school freshmen who gets violent if you insult his hair. Not only is this character normal for the series, he’s actually the protagonist of this part, and in the first scene we see him in he goes from a demure turtle-wrangler to a badass cloaked in shadow, all at this tiny provocation.

That’s not all there is to Josuke of course; as Jotaro Kujo, the protagonist from Stardust Crusaders, talks to him he shows an incredible amount of humility regarding his position as a lovechild bringing grief to the Joestars, and he also displays some cleverness in his fight with robber at the convenience store, using his Stand’s restorative abilities to punch through a woman safely and embed the robber’s knife into his stomach.1

The rest of the episode is focused on introducing us to Josuke’s family and the town of Morioh. His grandfather is a kind elderly cop who loves his daughter, a fiery-tempered badass whose rage clearly impacted her son. They unfortunately are also given the duty of providing exposition for Josuke, explaining who he is in ways we’ve already seen, which doesn’t make for a particularly engaging conversation.

Morioh is also introduced in fairly broad strokes as a peaceful town with a sinister secret, with one aspect of its underbelly being made clear with the introduction of a deranged criminal. This introduction pales in comparison to the opening scene of the episode, which sets a far more insidious tone by making us watch as a severed woman’s hand makes breakfast to a cheery song on the local radio. It’s a hell of an opener, and it’s guaranteed to set the tone for the rest of Part 4.

Rating: 4/5

If you enjoyed this review, consider supporting me on Patreon.

Stray Observations

1It’s also worth noting that Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure takes a lot of cues from the horror genre, especially body horror, and I’ll be damned if it isn’t effective.

So, I’m not actually the biggest fan of subs because of how literal the translations tend to be, and that was pretty readily apparent in this episode (I watched it on CrunchyRoll; it’s totally possible that there’s a fansub out there that’s stronger). Honestly, the only reason I tend to watch subs more often is because of how weak dubs’ voice acting tends to be, even though they tend to have more figurative and colorful (and thus better) translations (which I imagine arises from a need for actors to actually read the English version of their lines).

Josuke is probably my second favorite Jojo, though I’ve yet to finish Stone Ocean, which might change my mind.

My favorite Jojos in order: Joseph, Josuke, Jolyne, Giorno, Jonathan, Jotaro.

My favorite parts in order: Battle Tendency, Diamond is Unbreakable, Phantom Blood, Vento Aureo, Stardust Crusaders. I’m not ranking Stone Ocean until I’m finished with it.

[thetorturedarchives]

just found out there are people who hate channel awesome and think that the nostalgia critic videos are 'substitutes' for watching movies and don't fall under fair use. don't let them see subway surfers tiktok they'll have an anuerysm

[unproduciblesmackdown]

"Ed Iskandar talked with God. Then it was Lucifer’s turn. Now he was addressing Adam and Eve.

[...]

Right now, Iskandar was rehearsing the plays from Act I, including Madeleine George’s 10-minute piece about the Fall of Man, which she gives the elaborate title,  “A Worm Walks Into A Garden or The Fall of Man, an experiment in motive and comedy.”  In it, Lucifer tells dumb jokes to Adam and Eve, as a way of seducing them. Adam finds them funny. Eve doesn’t.

“You’re missing a crucial part of your anatomy,” Lucifer says to Eve. “The funnybone.”

Lucifer is being played by Asia Kate Dillon.

[...]

Dillon was writhing and entwining themself around Eve.  Suddenly Chase Brock, the show’s choreographer, got down on the floor and started to writhe on the floor along with Lucifer. Brock had researched the earthworm, and showed some pictures of earthworms to Dillon on his laptop to suggest other moves they could make."

"50 different plays by almost as many different playwrights is a massive undertaking in which each vignette varies in tone from the one before it.  The actors playing the characters do not change from play to play; this forces the performers to be as comfortable and convincing with farce as they are playing tragedy.  It is also fascinating to contemplate the mental and emotional gymnastics that each performer of The Bats (the resident acting company of The Flea) must have undergone to ensure that each character maintains the same internal psychological throughline when they appear in different plays by very different authors.

The first act deals with the Old Testament books and the Nativity.  In playwright Dale Orlandersmith’s Song of the Trimorph, the angels in Heaven mindlessly worship God (a deliciously petty, yet shrewdly authoritative Matthew Jeffers), who takes it as His due until Lucifer (Asia Kate Dillon) starts to question whether love without choice means anything.

Dillon’s beautifully delicate, white-haired devil is one of the show’s most complex figures. Watching them evolve from nuanced philosopher to diabolical heavy to world-weary cynic, depending on the vignette, is fascinating.  The narrative speeds its way through the Bible. Highlights include Madeleine George’s surprisingly feminist take on the Adam and Eve story; Hwang’s marvelously urgent Cain and Abel tale, which posits the first murder as a story of vengeance against a capricious God; and Mallery Avidon’s whimsically horrifying tale of Noah’s Flood, which also entails the deaths of everyone who didn’t make it aboard the Ark.

[...]

The show’s second section deals with the Life of Jesus, with Colin Waitt’s astonishingly variegated boy-next-door Jesus shifting from an idealistic dreamer as he travels with Mary and Joseph to a forceful, almost angry philosopher when he argues with Lucifer about the nature of love to a bratty dolt when he confronts Gabriel about his inevitable fate.  The fact that the playwrights clearly have a different idea of Jesus’s personality sets Wiatt a complex task:  He has to make his Christ the same in all situations; whether he’s being comic or tragic, Wiatt is convincing and moving in a performance of stunning versatility.

Indeed, his likable turns in Gabriel Jason Dean’s beautiful Christ Enters Jerusalem makes his ferocious agonies in Qui Nguyen’s Christ Before Herod and his subsequent crucifixion all the more heartrending. The third act deals with Christ’s resurrection and humanity’s fate at the Day of Judgment, and includes a series of plays set in modern times, as well as God’s final words to Lucifer, Jesus, and to us.  The show’s final Day of Judgment coda by Jose Rivera is an essay of forgiveness and unexpected love."

"Overall, the point of view of The Mysteries leans toward deism, the Enlightenment philosophy that presents God as a kind of clockmaker who created the universe, then left it alone to run according to its own laws. We see God squabbling with, then abandoning, Lucifer, setting in motion the events of the Bible, but even in Eden he is surprisingly enigmatic.

[...]

And, as one of the thieves killed with Jesus prophesies, it may all be for naught; he conjures up a future in which "the religion founded -- haha --upon your existence will be held up to justify the slaughter of millions over hundreds and thousands of years, for the brutal sins of domination and exploitation, the lynchings, the massacres and genocide, the relentless militarism. Everything you stood for will be erased."

[...]

In any case, the company is an almost constant joy. Among the more striking performances, [...] Asia Kate Dillon is a compelling presence as Lucifer."

"Four dozen playwrights take four dozen spiritual positions, which allows bubbles of radical reimagining to emerge only to sink again beneath the waves. For instance, our very first playwright, Dael Orlandersmith, paints Lucifer (Asia Kate Dillon) as a sweetheart Cordelia type refusing to curry favor with an insecure God (Matthew Jeffers). The fallen Light bringer keeps popping up throughout, and yet while Lucifer makes a number of solid points—many vigorously antichurch—they're still costumed as a blood-smeared reptile. Does evil exist? Or does it only exist when it can dress super cool?"

"It begins with a scene in heaven where we meet the lavish Angel Chorus that will be with us for the duration of the play, and witness Lucifer’s expulsion from heaven, something like in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

[...]

We also meet the rebellious Lucifer in that first scene in heaven, played with dazzling cynicism by Asia Kate Dillon, and at the same time the angel Gabriel, played by Alice Allemano, who, obedient to God, in contrast to Lucifer, struggles valiantly trying to make sense out of God’s commands and following through on them.  These two, Lucifer and Gabriel, played by tall, striking people, fine actors who resemble one another, hold the vast array together like bookends.

The scenes in the Garden of Eden are delightful, played, appropriately in the nude, by Jaspal Binning as Adam and Alesandra Nahodil as Eve.  Throughout the play, Biblical episodes are interpreted by the many playwrights in non-canonical ways and the first of these is brilliant:  the knowledge the first couple gain through their disobedient eating of the apple is — how to tell a good joke and how to enjoy one!"

"Act I – The Fall begins with Creation and Lucifer’s fall from grace with God. Lucifer is played by a steady, radiant Asia Kate Dillon who reappears frequently to mix things up with earthlings and the rival angel, Gabriel, played by Alice Allemano makes goodness alluring. God is played by an extremely patient and multi-dimensional Matthew Jeffers whose sense of humor humanizes the Lord."

"As starting points, Dael Orlandersmith’s “Song of the Trimorph (Lucifer’s Lament)” and Liz Duffy Adams’s “Falling for You” are somewhat too abstract, particularly “Falling for You,” which has Lucifer wonder, “How can there be love in the absence of being?”"

"Starting with the Fall, we are introduced to the Angel Gabriel and the fallen angel Lucifer, played by two equally lissome and brilliant young actors, Alice Allemano and Asia Kate Dillon. They compete for God’s affections by using a chorus of singing punk angels."

"Asia Dillon as Lucifer brought the precise mixture of demonic delight and fragility necessary for such an adaptation: watching their performance was like looking at a raw cut in the bowels of the earth, brimming with fire and unimaginable sadness."

(no relevant quotes, but throwing in a brief pdf of a grantee project report that focuses on Engagement)