#I'll probably post stills of my favourite sequence later!!

[klmwrites]

Finally had the time to watch the FNAF movie in cinemas. Here are my thoughts (Spoilers ahead!)

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Overall, the story was pretty decent. It certainly had its moments where it went off tangent from the canon, but it wasn't so fantastic to the point that it was completely off brand. It even paid good attention to detail! In one of the dream sequences where mike was cut by  Foxy's hook, the next shot when he woke up to the flickering lights if u looked at his left arm there is a visible tear on the fabric of his hoodie in the same fashion he was cut in the forest sequence earlier.

Another good example of  the movie paying attention to detail would be the scene where Mike sees Abby with the animatronics. He grabs the chair in an attempt to attack Freddy but once he gets up and close to him he hesitates. It gives us - the audience - a glimpse into just how large and intimidating these robots are actually IRL. An educated guess on my part says they are probably on average 2 meters(?) in height.

Also, Lillard is THE William Afton. You will not convince me otherwise. He literally ate and left no crumbs in this role. The "I'll always come back" as he places the mask back on?! PLEASE 😩 👌

The scene where Mike first meets "The Yellow Rabbit" i.e. Afton in his suit is so well done. The atmosphere as Afton walks in with his knife was tense and intimidating in its own right. Mike attempts to tase him at first assuming he is just another animatronic but the fluidity in Aftons movements later says afterwards. This is especially in contrast to the movements of Bonnie, Freddy, Chica and Foxy. Once again, great attention to detail!

But if I had to pick favourites in terms of scenes, the springlock suit failure has my whole heart. Hands down. Lillards performance here as the springlocks "eats" into his body was phenomenal. The facial expressions of the animatronics in this scene was absolutely the cherry on top. What a way to end the movie with a banger! Honorable mention goes to the post credit scene where Afton was on the ground trembling in the pizzerias backroom. His hand reached out to the door in the last part, indicating that like Abby he can see the ghost children.

TLDR: to me, although the Movie is not the best horror movie out there, it is still worth the watch! Although it is produced primarily for the hardcore fans of this franchise (hence perhaps the reason why some casual audience members expressed their confusion with the plot), it certainly won't be a waste of money to the casual fan of indie video game horror.

[iviarellereads]

The Plan, Such As It Is

tl;dr: System Collapse finishes the Murderbot series on Christmas. Last week of the year is a break, and then it's the Wheel of Time with likely between-book breaks for one-offs or shorter series, and someday maybe Alecto the Ninth.

I had a great time watching Desert Bus, and helping with the VST documenting and editing and uploading clips of the process of raising over a million dollars (over ten million in the lifetime of the event!) for a good cause. A most excellent week of "restoring my faith in humanity". But that's a little beside the point of this post.

I also got my hands on System Collapse, but because of how my brain works, I won't be reading it ahead, so we're going to have lots of fun as I read it for the first time in the format of the blog. Let's see if my style changes, if my predictions are well on or off the mark. (I have seen a few posts that spoiled a few moments and character bits, but I'm not concerned about those. I rarely feel like learning things that happen "ruins" anything about an experience anyway. If the story's well told, it's still fun to experience for myself.)

After System Collapse, well, that's the end of Murderbot to-date. And, I haven't run any polls for covering other things. That's because I'm pretty well set on rereading the Wheel of Time series, and revising my previous notes to this format.

It's something I could keep putting off, but the show has gotten so good, and it reminds me of all the things about the books that I loved so much (and how the show is fixing some things I didn't love). I'll also be very excited to do full-series spoiler posts again, Murderbot didn't have a lot that I felt needed commenting on, but the Wheel? Oh, buddy.

But, the caveat here is that the Wheel of Time has, well, fifteen very large books. Eleven thousand pages, over four million words. Coverage would take about three years if I didn't take breaks for other books in between, and I definitely will, so we're gonna be here for a while. I've said before that I was hesitant to cover Discworld for this, and I still am. Discworld has over forty books just in the main series besides the spinoffs, with a comparable total wordcount to WoT. Several of those, I have negative interest in ever rereading. Even if they're largely shorter than WoT bricks, they're also trickier to split, and I won't have as much context to share about them that isn't available elsewhere already. Whereas, the Wheel of Time lacks a lot of spoiler-free resources in print, despite the series being almost 35 years old. There was a huge influx of podcast coverage once the show publicity ramped up, but not so much blog style content. The few prologues and chapters that do need splitting, I've already calculated out from the first time I took the notes.

Mind you, I will be finding time for Alecto the Ninth coverage when Tamsyn Muir finally graces us with her presence, I'll just take a break between whichever WoT books I'm up to by then. And if something else strikes my fancy, I might alternate books. Like, making it through the Eye of the World might scratch the itch well enough, and make me want to dig into the Princess Bride as I threatened to once before, or perhaps when I reach my least favourite sequence of books in the middle, I'll alternate them with the His Dark Materials trilogy, though probably not its supplementary later materials because I'm still refusing to read the Book of Dust.

I totally understand if folks who followed me for other stuff want to jump ship when my WoT coverage starts. I love and can recommend it with some massive content notes and caveats which will be in my intro post for it, but it's not for everyone and treating it like a universal joy is nonsense. But, especially if you can get a library borrow of the first book, whether you get it in print or ebook or either of the incredible audiobook narrations (the full series by Michael Kramer and Kate Reading, or the first three are now available narrated by Rosamund Pike, who plays the character of Moiraine Sedai on the show), I hope you'll give it a try with me, and my analysis and commentary might help pull you into a series that's otherwise quite intimidating.

So, System Collapse will finish posting on Christmas, I think I'll take the last week of the year as a breather, and the Wheel of Time will kick off my 2024. I hope you'll consider sticking around and reading with me, especially my Locked Tomb girlies because I've said it before and I'll say it again, these two stories have SO much in common, hashtag Women's Wrongs and unreliable narrators. And, I am gonna try to break it up every so often since these are LONG books, most of them have 40+ chapters so will be two months apiece. But either way, if I'm gonna follow my heart, it's gotta be next.

[cobaltfluff]

Thank you SK8 for the best time I’ve had over the past few months!

I’m still a beginner at all sorts of stuff, but my love for SK8 beats any embarrassment I might have haha