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lenawin4 · 4 years ago

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vincenzo & the godfather

okay okay so from someone who has watched/rewatched The Godfather multiple times for the past seven years, it is very easy to see why I loved Vincenzo so much. The Godfather has been my favorite movie ever since I watched it, so now Vincenzo is my favorite kdrama. because I literally cannot shut up about how much Park Jae-Bum drew from it, I will proceed to just write meta about this gd show. warning for an incredibly long post, where I’ve bolded the most direct parallels. listen to this while you read it.

What is The Godfather?

Well, the IMDB summary says this:

An organized crime dynasty's aging patriarch transfers control of his clandestine empire to his reluctant son.

Which is pretty accurate. It’s a modern Greek tragedy about the son, Michael Corleone: we see his descent from a kind-hearted veteran who wants nothing to do with the family business to becoming a corrupt, cold-hearted businessman for the sake of his family and his family’s legacy. After his father, Vito, is nearly killed, a series of events leads Michael to become the new Don.

Now the main characters are:

Michael Corleone - the youngest son

Vito Corleone - the Don, or in Vincenzo terms, the Capo (both refer to the Godfather/the boss)

Sonny Corleone - the oldest son (very brash + impulsive, which is why Vito doesn’t want to hand power to him)

Fredo Corleone - the middle son (seemingly sweet + clueless, the least business-like, which is why he never gets involved in any family business)

Tom Hagen - the consigliere

The Consigliere

The first incredibly impressive characterization Vincenzo gets right is the consigliere’s ruthlessness. In the first two Godfather movies, Tom Hagen:

Cuts off the prized horse’s head to convince a man to sign a document (yes, that famous horse head scene)

Orchestrates the assassination of the head of another family and a police officer under his payroll

Convinces someone to commit suicide by indirectly threatening his family

Not only that, but Tom Hagen himself is an orphaned Irish boy, adopted into an Italian Mafia family. He’s an adopted foreigner groomed to become the capo’s/don’s right-hand-man as the consigliere.

In the first movie, Sonny (the oldest son) is angry after his father’s attack and wants to strike back at the other family who ordered the hit immediately. Because Tom is a lawyer and has advised Vito for years now, he advises Sonny not to act so impulsively. In response, Sonny yells, “Will you just do what I tell you to do? Goddamn it, if I had a wartime consigliere, a Sicilian, I wouldn’t be in this shape!” There’s a moment when Sonny cools down, tries to backtrack what he says, before apologizing. Tom isn’t having it.

Now watch Vincenzo battle racism and an impulsive, brash, violent brother. He is a lawyer, yes, but that’s most likely what they groomed him to be after he turned to the Mafia to torture and kill his foster parents’ murderer. It probably wasn’t his choice, much like it probably wasn’t Tom’s choice, to become consigliere: it was just the only option they knew, to give back to the Family that took them in. It was for their survival in a world where they’re outnumbered and ostracized for their race, and their advice (Vincenzo criticizing Paolo for killing women and children vs. Tom criticizing Sonny’s impulsiveness) is ignored by those who still see them as outsiders, even after the Don/Capo accepted them into their families.

The New Don

OKAY SO. I didn’t think Park Jae-Bum would go ALL out on the Godfather references - I thought it would end with the first episode/how they built Vincenzo’s character to become a direct mirror to how Tom Hagen was a foreigner adopted into the family. But the conversation with Park Seok-Do to get Vincenzo to call him hyung, Seok-Do calling him Michael Corleone, and the Godfather theme playing in the background - made me go absolutely insane.

So here’s the deal about Michael. First, Michael before his father’s attempted assassination:

Is a sweet, patriotic boy who just came back from the war (WWII)

Has a girlfriend named Kay who he promises he won’t get involved with the family business

The Lighter

Then his father almost dies, and Michael is pulled into the business. He protects his father when he’s healing in the hospital against hired guns from a rival family. There’s an excellent scene analysis on Youtube (1:15) about how just one simple two second frame shows that while one of his father’s friends nervous, and yet Michael — who has, arguably, fought in a war — isn’t nervous at all, which foreshadows his level-headedness and cold cruelty when he becomes the new Don. How, you ask, do we know? WELL.

The hired bodyguard can’t seem to ignite his lighter because of his nervousness. Michael, calm and collected, takes the lighter and ignites it from him.

*distant screaming*

Vincenzo’s lighter has always been his go-to tool to calm him down, to collect himself, to prepare for war. It’s the sound that makes him think. It’s poetic that it’s also Michael’s way of telling the audience that he is ready for a war between Mafia families.

The Lovelife

So after protecting his father, Tom Hagen and Sonny are discussing how to deal with the rival family. Michael himself volunteers to murder them by shooting them at point-blank range at a restaurant. He then flees the country, after taking care of his father’s business, much like how Vincenzo leaves Italy after Fabio’s death. Michael goes to Sicily, where his father was born, while Vincenzo returns to Korea.

In Sicily, Michael falls in love and gets married to a Sicilian woman named Apollonia. Like Michael, Vincenzo returns to his roots and falls in love with a woman who supports his position as a part of a Mafia Family and accepts him. (Side note, Michael’s marriage is problematic in and of itself, he literally didn’t say a word to Kay about anything, but anyway)

However, back home, there are problems in the family: Sonny is brash and arrogant, and gets killed by the rival family. Just when Michael is informed and asked to come home, Apollonia is also killed in a car bomb. You can imagine why I was concerned for Chayoung’s life at one point of the series before I realized Park Jae-Bum was too good for that.

But here’s where Vincenzo diverges from Michael, and what makes Chayoung superior to Apollonia and Kay’s characters.

Michael goes home a changed person. Apollonia’s and his brother’s deaths are the final nails in the coffin for him: there’s no going back and not taking part in the family business. He is the only option to become the new Don. When he gets back, he gives Kay empty promises about becoming the new Don to make his father’s empire clean and stop the corruption. She believes him and agrees to marry him.

Famously, the last scene of the first movie is Michael being crowned the new Don (people kissing his hand and asking for his favor) as Kay watches from the other room before the door closes in her face. His favorite line to Kay is, “Don’t ask me about my business.” (This scene always gives me chills!!!)

While Michael starts off kind-hearted and open, someone who sees his family’s business as corrupt and unapproachable, Vincenzo is already a hybrid of Michael and Tom when we meet him. It is, as SJK said in his recent interview, an opening and softening of his character: the complete opposite of Michael’s character development.

Apollonia barely has three lines in the movie and barely has any role but to be the woman Michael falls in love with and to represent the idea of him staying in Sicily and not moving back to take over the family. She is an ideal Sicilian wife who understands how the family business works. His American girlfriend Kay, on the other hand, can never accept this Sicilian part of Michael. He shuts the door on her and never lets her in on anything that he’s doing, and eventually, Kay wants no part in the marriage, either.

Chayoung is stronger than Apollonia in that she takes the center stage of Vincenzo’s masterplan. She is allowed more agency and access into Vincenzo’s world than Kay is into Michael’s world, because Vincenzo considers her his partner, while Michael considered Kay to be his subordinate.

The fact that Vincenzo begins as post-Sicily Michael makes the show so satisfying to watch if you’ve seen The Godfather. Vincenzo is a story where a woman gains power and respect from her Mafia partner, and a man forced into violence and ruthlessness finds someone who accepts that part of him wholeheartedly. The Godfather ultimately ends in heartbreak and tragedy, but Vincenzo’s ending is hopeful and fulfilling for both of our main leads. They have an accepting, powerful love that Michael does not have with anyone.

Betrayals by Brothers

Last one (for now)! In the second movie, Fredo betrays Michael to a rival business partner, which almost leads to his assassination. When he finds out it was him, Michael keeps him alive until their mother passes away before ordering his men to kill him. (Also by now Michael and Kay have two children who are close with Fredo so like rip childhood trauma when your father murders your uncle ahahahahah)

SO ANYWAY this part has haunted me for days. When Paolo betrays Vincenzo the second time, why doesn’t he kill him? Is he waiting for Fabio’s wife to pass away? Does Fabio even have a wife? Did Vincenzo respect her as he respected Fabio? I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS.

Or maybe it’s because he’s different from Michael: the second movie confirmed that Michael has become so cold-hearted that he doesn’t think of his family when he makes decisions, whether that’s killing his own brother or divorcing Kay. For Vincenzo, family is the most important thing in the world. For Michael, the Corleone family becomes just a business to run.

In other words, it goes to show that Vincenzo’s worst self-deprecating thought — that villains don’t deserve to love, because love is just an asset to them — is proven wrong for him through his love for Chayoung, the Geumga Plaza Family, and even the Cassano Family, while it is proven right for Michael.

OKAY that’s it for now. Thanks for listening. Literally if you have any questions about the Godfather let me know because I could talk about it for hours.

#vincenzo #i did it #vincenzo vs. the godfather #my goodness #i think this is my longest piece of meta ever #lena writes #chayenzo

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pitviperofdoom · 5 years ago

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Gotta love Penumbra’s scalding hot takes on redemption

AKA, Jet Sikuliaq “even if we can’t be forgiven for the terrible things we’ve done, it shouldn’t stop us from trying to put good things in the world” vs. Ramsack O’Flakano “I ruined three lives in a failed attempt to do Good and I just keep ruining more lives trying to make up for it with More Good”: FIGHT

Because good parallels are my catnip, I couldn’t help but notice that their situations have more than a few similarities, even though obviously they're very different people in VERY different circumstances. But there's that connecting thread of redemption for past evils, and I was pondering why Jet’s quest is a shown to be a good thing while Ramses’ is... decidedly not.

But I guess it’s pretty simple if you think about it. Ramses may have had the same idea about doing good things in the present in spite of past wrongs, but at no point did he ever try to change himself. Except superficially, of course: new face, new name, new life, a fresh start as Ramses O’Flaherty with Jack Takano scrubbed clean. But while he understood that his actions hurt people, he never seemed to grasp that he was the problem. I got the sense that, for all that Ramses felt guilty about the people he hurt, he always pushed the blame on something or someone else: on circumstances, on society, on the system, on other people.

Polaris Park and his work with Northstar failed because other people either couldn’t understand his vision or twisted it into a cash grab, not because he was working with stolen ideas and zero real understanding of running a business. Sarah, Juno, and Benten suffered because Sarah wouldn’t take his money, not because he gaslit Juno into helping him steal from her and got her fired when she was a single mother with two young children to feed.

It’s like, there’s a difference between admitting you failed and admitting you did something wrong, you know? “I tried this and it didn’t work” versus “This was wrong, and I shouldn’t have done it.” And his solution in the end was to vanish, scrub his past clean, and... try basically the same thing over again, on a larger scale. Taking things that aren’t his. Imposing what he believes is right over what would actually help. Controlling everything and everyone.

And then you have Jet “We may look backward only to ensure we have not walked this path before” Sikuliaq, whose redemptive journey is a lot less fraught with destruction because he understands what redemption actually is. Ramses treats it like a balancing act, maybe if I put enough good in the world then it will make up for the harm that I have caused, but Jet knows that it doesn’t work like that. He remembers what he did, not to keep score, but to make sure he doesn’t make those mistakes ever again. It’s not about making up for what you did, it’s about addressing the parts of you that drove you to do it.

M’Tendere may have built the weapon, but Jet was the one that set it off. And Jet understands that there was something in himself that he needed to take care of before he could start turning that energy outward to try to put good into the world. He tries to distance himself from that part of himself, yes, and we see his journey through Tools of Rust to the realization that he can't lock away the person that killed those people, because it's not a separate person, it’s still him. And the only way to make sure it never happens again is by accepting that and holding himself accountable.

He keeps his name to himself but he doesn't change it, he doesn't try to play at being a different person, he just puts in the effort to fix the person he already is.

I dunno, I just love narrative parallels. Foils are sexy.

#the penumbra podcast #tpp juno steel #jet sikuliaq #ramses o'flaherty #jack takano #meta

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nikibogwater · 5 years ago

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A Shot in the Dark: Chapter One (Author’s Commentary)

(read the fic here)

General Notes:

(So I kind of stole this idea from my friend @unexpected-possibilities after she made an author’s commentary post on one of her fics, and I was like “Oh. Wait, I actually find this kind of stuff SUPER interesting to read." So...yeah, here’s mine for anybody who feels similarly lol)

I have been dying to write this kind of story pretty much since the completion of my second Wizards/ToA fic back in August, but it took me a while to suss out the plot. I generally try to keep my fics as canon-friendly as possible (not that I have anything against AUs, that’s just not a direction that I usually go in) so it was tricky to create a high-stakes adventure story that didn’t mess with canon too much.

That being said, Chapter 1 is pretty chill, apart from the scene at the end. But it is incredibly important to the plot, because it sets up elements that will be very relevant later in the story. It also serves to re-establish the three-way relationship between Douxie, Archie, and Nari, which will give their interactions in the future chapters more weight.

One last general note before we get to the passage-specific stuff: The song “Protector” by City Wolf has always been my go-to theme for the Douxie-Archie-Nari relationship, but I think it really captures the feel of this story in particular (or at least, it will once the whole thing is posted lol). I’ve never associated a particular song with any of my other fics before, but this one really was a huge part of what inspired this story, so I highly recommend that you give it a listen, if you are so inclined.

Passage-Specific Notes:

Two pairs of luminous golden eyes were hovering uncomfortably close to his head and staring at him fixedly. Douxie yelped and threw off his covers, scrambling upright and fumbling for his magic vambrace nearby. A small green hand held it out to him politely, and after a bit of confused blinking, Douxie finally registered the faces of his companions. Nari and Archie were sitting on the floor next to his mattress, looking at him eagerly.

Two short things: One: I had no idea how I was going to start this scene, and then I remembered that one Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin wakes up to find Hobbes hovering over him menacingly, and I was like “Yes, that will do nicely.” Two: I still have no idea what Douxie’s magic bracelet-thingy should technically be called, so I settled on vambrace. I know Merlin refers to it as a bracelet in the show, but Merl, I’m sorry, but you clearly know nothing about jewelry. That thing is NOT a simple bracelet. (Also I had to research the difference between bracers and vambraces in order to determine which word to use. Bracers are apparently protective gear that is exclusive to archery, while vambrace is a more general word for any kind of armor worn on the forearm).

“It’s also the day you promised to bring Nari to Central Park,” Archie informed him.

This is a callback to a previous entry in the series, Home Away From Home. Although each entry in the Immortal Bonds series is written in such a way that it can be enjoyed as a standalone, I do weave tiny threads of continuity throughout all of them.

Mornings for Nari looked very different than they used to, she realized as she set the kettle on the stove, stepping back so Archie could light it (due to her somewhat complicated relationship with Bellroc, she was still wary about anything that involved fire). As a demigoddess who had existed for hundreds of millenia, she had never had much experience with something as human as family domesticity.

The scene where Nari and Archie make Douxie’s tea was originally going to be much longer and feature a lot more introspection on Nari’s part (I even researched the British tea-making process for it, since I’m fairly certain Douxie is the one who taught her how to make tea). I was going to start exploring the idea that Nari is still insecure about her place in this little found family, but I realized after about three paragraphs that there’s no way Nari doesn’t know how much Douxie genuinely loves her--she is already proficient in reading his emotions at this point. So that’s an internal conflict for another day.

“Keep very still for me, Nari.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, his aura flowing out and wrapping around her like a warm, familiar cloak. “Celare,” he murmured, and Nari felt a sharp tug on her spirit as the spell washed over it, cool and comforting like the shade of an old tree.

If you’ve read previous entries in this series, you know that I can wax poetic about the physical sensations of magic for DAYS. It is one of my favorite aspects of writing Tales of Arcadia fanfiction. Also Celare (kel-ahr-ay) is Latin for “Hide” or “Conceal.” I had to get outside help for this because I don’t speak Latin, and Google Translate is (as I found out) completely unreliable for even the simplest, single-word translations (it gave me the word for “clothe” when I used it 😑)

The first time she had walked the streets of New York City, Nari had been on the verge of tears. There were so many sensations assaulting her mind at once, the feeling of countless souls buzzing around, a crowd of spirits so thick that sometimes it felt like a wall. Even without tapping into her roots, she was drowning in a sea of tangling energies, as hundreds, even thousands of voices echoed in her soul all at once.

Oooooops, is that a parallel for Sensory Processing Disorder? Well, how did that get in there??? *shoves my own mental health issues under a rug with my foot* I have no clue.

This is probably as good a time as any to discuss auras vs. life energy. Basically, aura is the energy radiated by the presence of magic. Magical creatures who share close bonds can become very sensitive to one another’s aura, and because magic is so inextricably linked to emotion, Nari is able to read Douxie’s aura to pick up on whatever he’s feeling (though this is because she is extra sensitive to magical presence--Douxie is attuned to her aura, but he can’t read hers the way she can his). Life energy, meanwhile, is the energy given off by every living soul, magic or otherwise, and that’s what Nari is able to sense via her powers as a demigoddess. I sometimes interchange the word aura with spirit or soul or something similar, but if Douxie or Nari are sensing one another in any capacity apart from their actual physical senses, it’s their auras. Archie also has an aura, but it’s not as intense as that of a true magic-wielder.

He was fashionably dressed, (“business casual,” the humans called it), with an elegant black trench coat hanging nonchalantly off of his arm. He had dark brown hair, handsomely trimmed and styled, just a bit shorter than Douxie’s, and was wearing a large pair of expensive-looking sunglasses. He looked thoroughly uninterested in the world around him, and had the appearance of someone who was waiting to meet up with a particularly tardy acquaintance. But Nari couldn’t sense that he was waiting. She couldn’t sense anything from this man. He emitted no life force, no aura or energy of any kind. He was like a standing, breathing corpse.

I have had this character floating around in the back of my mind since August, and I was just waiting for the opportunity to use him. Also fun fact, he was originally conceived as a sort of prototype for who I thought Mordred Le Fey would be in the ToA universe. But since canon is technically still ongoing and the ToA writers could still bring Mordred into the picture, I decided to adapt him into the original character Rivan (whose name will be properly revealed in the next chapter).

Beside her, Douxie’s aura was rippling with unease. But a moment later, his spirit stilled, and he put an arm around her to turn her away from the alley...

...A minute later, the crosswalk signal changed once more, and they continued on their way. Though Douxie’s spirit was radiating a placid energy, Nari couldn’t help noticing that he kept his arm around her for the rest of the journey.

It was important to me that Douxie not look like a complete idiot in this scene, which was a little difficult since this part isn’t told from his perspective. Homeboy absolutely knows better than to ignore something suspicious like this. But he is also acting as Nari’s brother/guardian in this scene, so he tries to play it off to keep her from worrying too much. He promised her a fun day in Central Park, and he’s not willing to bail on that just yet. But I’m hoping that the fact that he has to force his aura into a state of calm and physically holds Nari close to him as they walk are good indicators that he has gone on high alert.

And that’s a wrap for this week! Next Friday, all hell is gonna break loose, so definitely come back for that. If you have any questions/comments, definitely hit me up either in my Ask Box or over on Ao3. As always, thanks for reading! ✨💕

#fanfiction #writing #author's commentary #tales of arcadia #douxie #nari #a shot in the dark #the magical siblings #and their therapy cat

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upontheshelfreviews · 5 years ago

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Whenever I discuss Sleeping Beauty with someone who doesn’t share my enthusiasm for Disney, they have an irksome tendency to get it muddled with Snow White; their excuse being “it has the same plot”. I’ll admit, there are some surface similarities that even the most casual viewer can pick up on: a fairytale where a princess is forced into unconsciousness and wakes up with some necking, the comic relief and villain being the most beloved characters, a little frolic in the forest with animals, the antagonist plunging off a cliff, you get the idea. In fact, Sleeping Beauty even reuses some discarded story beats from Snow White, mainly our couple dancing on a cloud and the villain capturing the prince to prevent him from waking his princess. Yet despite that, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are two wholly different movies shaped by the era and talents of the time.

I’ve discussed how Walt Disney was never one to stick to a repeated formula, no matter how successful it was. He must have noticed the parallels between his first movie and this one, but decided to make one crucial change for Sleeping Beauty that would forever differentiate the two: the look. We all know the traditional Disney house style: round, soft shapes, big eyes; charming as it was and still is, Walt was sick of it after several decades. Meanwhile, artists like Mary Blair and Eyvind Earle were producing gorgeous concept art that rarely made a perfect translation into the Disney house style.

Walt wanted to make a feature that took the pop artistry of their designs and made the animation work for it instead of the other way around – which brings us to another animation studio that was doing well at the time, United Pictures Animation, or UPA.

UPA didn’t have the kind of budget Disney normally had for their animated projects, but what they lacked in fluidity they made up for in style. Watch The Tell-Tale Heart, Gerald McBoing-Boing and Rooty-Toot-Toot to see what I mean. UPA were pioneers of limited animation, taking their scant resources and creating some striking visuals with bold geometric designs. Through this, they defined the look of 50’s animation. Though perhaps unintentional, Sleeping Beauty comes across as Disney’s response to UPA, or what would happen if UPA had the funds they deserved. The characters’ contours are angular but effortlessly graceful, defining their inherent dignity and royalty. And the colors, ohhh the colors…

Because of the immense amount of work required to animate in this difficult new style (and in the Cinemascope ratio, no less) as well as story troubles and Walt barely supervising the animation studio now that he had his hands full with live-action films, television, and a theme park, Sleeping Beauty had a turbulent production that lasted the entirety of the 1950s. For a time, Chuck Jones of Looney Tunes fame was set to direct. Director Wilfred Jackson suffered a heart attack partway through production and Eric Larson, one of the Nine Old Men, took the mantle from there before Walt Disney replaced him Clyde Geronimi. And even after that, Wolfgang Reitherman teamed up with Geronimi as co-director to get the film finished after no less than three delays. Also, Don Bluth got his foot in the door as an assistant animator for this feature, beginning his short-lived but impactful tenure at Disney. Did all this hamper the movie, or did they succeed in what they set out to accomplish?

Well, one of the reasons why this review took so long was because I had a hard time not repeating “MOVIE PRETTY” and “MALEFICENT AWESOME” over and over. Make what you will of that.

The story begins as most fairy tales do with your typical king, Stefan, and his queen suddenly blessed with a baby girl after years of wishing for a child. They christen their daughter Aurora (middle name Borealis, localized entirely within their castle) and throw a huge celebration in her honor. People come from all over the kingdom to pay homage to the princess and OSMKFKSBFHFGILWBHBFC…

Movie pretty…

MOVIE PRETTIEEEEEE…

John Hench, Academy Award-winning special effects man and art director, turned Walt on to the idea of basing the look of Sleeping Beauty on classic medieval artwork. Thanks to him and Eyvind Earle’s insanely detailed designs and backgrounds, this is one of Disney’s most visually distinct and beautiful films. A single still from this feature wouldn’t feel out of place up in The Cloisters.

Among the party guests is King Stefan’s old friend King Hubert (Bill Thompson) bringing his young son Prince Philip. Stefan and Hubert wish to unite their two kingdoms and formally announce Philip’s betrothal to the infant Aurora.

“We were going to do it during the second trimester, but we decided to wait until she was more mature.”

By the way, your eyes are not deceiving you. That is Aurora’s mother, Queen Leah, alive and well and named. And frabjous day calloo callay, she even gets some lines! The most common joke about Disney princesses is that they don’t have moms (even Ralph Breaks The Internet went out of its way to highlight that), so as a hardcore Disney fan who often has to put up with this generalization, Leah’s existence leaves me feeling vindicated.

Once that happy revelation is out of the way, we’re introduced to our main protagonists.

Oh, you thought I was referring to Philip and Aurora? Nonononono, my friends. THESE are the true heroes of Sleeping Beauty, the Three Good Fairies.

The fairies started off as one-note side characters sharing the same personality. Think pre-Ducktales-reboot Huey, Dewey, and Louie in dresses. But the studio had a difficult time giving Aurora more depth and was having a lot more fun developing the fairies. Naturally, they became so fascinating and appealing that more screentime was given over to them. Now the story’s carried by three wonderfully fleshed out ladies who are distinct in both looks and personality: Flora’s the pragmatic tradition-adhering leader, Fauna’s the sweet scatterbrain who mediates, and Merryweather’s the feisty young upstart.

With the plot now focused on characters who held a traditionally minor role, it’s easy to read this as a perspective-flipped version of the fairytale, but there’s more to it than that. Remember in my Clash of the Titans review how I mentioned the gods literally play chess using the heroes as pieces? I tend to view the main conflict of Sleeping Beauty in the same way. The Three Fairies and Maleficent are in a constant game of good vs. evil, moving Aurora, Philip, and the rest of the royals as pawns in their plans. There’s plenty of plotting and intrigue, with both sides constantly guessing and second-guessing the other’s next maneuver, and even if you’re already familiar with the story’s trajectory you’re still left on the edge of your seat as it inches towards the fiery climax.

And dare I say it but…the fairies and their power dynamic make this Disney’s most feminist film. Yes, really. You could argue that some of the other animated movies from the Renaissance and Revival period have more notable, stronger female protagonists, and many of the live-action remakes try to be woke without really grasping the concept, but consider this: The cast of Sleeping Beauty is mostly female, the leads aren’t objectified in any manner (that is if you count Aurora as a supporting character), nor does their gender factor into their competency, each one differs in age and body type, and most of them are working together towards a common goal as opposed to against each other. Name a movie in the past decade that does the same and still manages to be entertaining (no, really, I’d love to see it). There’s even one scene that unintentionally provides great commentary on the divides in the feminist movement, but more on that later.

Flora and Fauna bless the baby with beauty and song respectively which are accompanied by a short chorus and some sumptuous graphics. I don’t think I need to reiterate that when this movie goes extra with the visuals, it GOES EXTRA with the visuals. Next comes Merryweather with her gift. To this day, no one knows what Merryweather intended to give Aurora. Flora’s the most traditionally feminine of the three so her giving Aurora beauty comes as no surprise. By comparison, Merryweather is the most forward (or unconventional, depending on your point of view). I wouldn’t put it past her to favor Aurora with intelligence, or humor, or passion, or creativity or humility or confidence or decisiveness or physical fitness or great swordsmanship or telekinesis or ice powers or one million YouTube subscribers or comfort in her female sexuality.

Me personally, I think I’ve got the best gift of all:

“O Princess, my gift shall be…getting all reviews posted on time for once!”

Alas, before Merryweather can bestow such a wondrous quality upon the child, she’s interrupted by a horny party crasher.

Maleficent. The Mistress of All Evil. Chernabog’s right-hand witch. The Disney villain all Disney villains strive to be. She has it all – the looks, the poise, the power, the laugh, the cunning, the ruthlessness! She doesn’t even need to sing a song because she’s already awesome enough without one. Marc Davis’ gothic design cuts a fine figure and Eleanor Audley’s subtle icy voicework is trés magnifique. As much as I enjoy Audley as Cinderella’s evil stepmother, Lady Tremaine was but an appetizer in comparison to the four-course banquet of pure villainy that is Maleficent.

This leads to a small point of contention some viewers have with Maleficent in spite of hitting top marks elsewhere: her motivation. Putting a hit out on a child for not getting invited to a measly party? Not exactly compelling, is it? And yes, it isn’t a deep motive…is what I would say if I wasn’t well-versed in folkloric tradition. In the original fairy tale and the movie (though it isn’t outright stated in the latter), the party for Aurora isn’t just your average royal kegger, it’s a christening. Back in ye olden days, christenings were very big deals. To not receive an invitation to one was a grave insult, so not extending an invite to your semi-omnipotent magical neighbor is just asking for trouble. In the fairy tale’s defense, no one had seen the evil fairy for years and assumed she was dead, though I can’t imagine how nobody thought Maleficent wouldn’t find about it eventually.

“You dare to deny me, foolish mortals? Very well, then! I shall have my own christening! With blackjack! And strumpets!”

Maleficent is proof that sometimes you don’t have to have an elaborate backstory, a god complex, a tragic past or the unfortunate luck to be on the wrong side of a conflict. Sometimes all you need is some magic, brains, class, and a whole lot of flair to be a perfect, intimidating, and unquestionably iconic villain.

Basically what I’m saying is these movies never happened. Got it?

Maleficent is disarmingly polite over being snubbed, even after Merryweather bluntly tells her nobody wanted her to come. She even brought her own gift for the baby – sixteen years of life cut short by the prick of a spinning wheel spindle, because why change into a dragon and destroy everyone all at once when you can draw the torture out over an agonizingly long time and deliver the coup de grace in the prime of a young woman’s life? That’s how Maleficent rolls, baby. She could dole out capital punishment when she has to without batting an eyelid, but causing human suffering is her bread and butter.

Stefan begs the fairies to undo Maleficent’s curse, but it’s too strong for them. Flora and Fauna insist, however, that Merryweather can use her gift to lessen the spell’s potency. Now instead of dying from that fatal prick, Aurora will sleep until she receives True Love’s Kiss™. Stefan’s not one to throw caution to the wind though, so he orders all of the kingdom’s spinning wheels to be burned in the meantime.

I just pray his kingdom’s economy wasn’t based on textiles otherwise they’re screwed.

As the peasantry celebrates Guy Fawkes Day several centuries early, the fairies ponder their next move. They’ve been around long enough to know that removing spinning wheels from the equation won’t put a damper on Maleficent’s scheme. This scene is incredibly effective in establishing two things:

Maleficent’s near-omniscient presence in the film

How well the fairies’ differing personalities play off each other

Maleficent rarely miscalculates her opponents, and that guile puts her one step ahead of the heroes, making her one of the few Disney villains to nearly reach their goal. The only mistake she makes in the entire movie is trusting her henchmen to do their jobs when she isn’t directly supervising them, though that’s more on them than her. The different methods the fairies propose to deal with Maleficent fantastically illustrate what kind of people they are. Fauna believes she’s just a miserable soul who could be reasoned with if they talk things over. Merryweather would rather take the fight to Maleficent and turn her into a toad. Flora, however, is wise enough to know Maleficent’s too wicked to plead to, too clever to bargain with and too strong to face head-on, so their best course of action is to focus on protecting Aurora through any means necessary. Her initial idea is to enchant the princess into a flower (her namesake is her specialty, after all), but Merryweather reminds her that Maleficent enjoys creating bitter frosts just to kill her flowers.

“Well we could try that but stick her in a castle with a beast for a while…nah, that’ll never work.”

Yet never one to give up, Flora alters the plan so they’ll raise Aurora as a peasant girl out in the woods. This means disguising themselves as humans and giving up magic for sixteen years so as to not attract Maleficent, but that amount of time is like twenty minutes to the fair folk. Stefan and Leah reluctantly agree to the plan, and the fairies spirit little Aurora away from the castle that very night.

Sixteen years later, Maleficent is infuriated that her minions have failed to locate Aurora, even more so when one reveals that they’ve spent the whole time looking for a baby instead of a maturing woman. In an interview with the Rotoscopers podcast, Don Bluth called Maleficent a very flat antagonist because she surrounds lackeys dumber than her so she could be the smart one among them and, again, her supposed lack of motivation. But come on, let’s not entirely condemn the bad guys for having too much faith in their underlings. It’s difficult to find minions smart enough to carry out orders but dumb enough to stay unquestioningly loyal. Usually you have to register as Republican in order to get some.

Maleficent gets her anger out in the most therapeutic way – throwing lightning bolts at her orcs, awesome – then leaves the job of finding Aurora up to her trusty raven Diablo. We then finally see the grown-up Aurora herself, whom the fairies renamed Briar Rose as a nod to the Brothers Grimm version of this tale.

I know I’ve made the occasional case for the princesses from Walt’s era compared to the present day, and yet I have a hard time defending how…I don’t want to say bland. Bland would mean there’s nothing interesting about Aurora, and that’s a lie. She’s gorgeously designed and drawn, and even in her peasant dress she has an air of elegance and sophistication. She carries herself like a queen; her innate royalty reveals itself in her graceful movements. Mary Costa also gifts her with an excellent set of pipes. Hearing her song echoing through the forest is nothing short of magical. She’s a flower child who can talk to animals. She has dreams of escaping her adopted aunts’ loving but stifling care and being allowed to grow up, see the world, actually talk to people, and even find a life partner. She has some strong potential. It’s not that Aurora’s boring, she’s just not quite as developed as we’ve come to expect our animated female protagonists to be. I’m grateful for what we’ve got, but I only wish we could have more. What was her childhood like? How did she learn to communicate with animals? When did the fairies trust her enough to let her spend time out on her own? Did the fairies ever subtly teach her lessons in royalty through lessons and games? Heck, nobody bothers to keep her informed about Maleficent or her curse, and they act surprised when she’s shocked to learn she was a princess the whole time. I want to see what Aurora could have been like if she had known the truth already and what kind of steps she would take to defend herself. Blame the source material for this; it’s difficult to write a compelling main character when she’s supposed to sleep through most of her story.

The fairies send Aurora on a fetch quest so they can plan a surprise birthday party for her. Merryweather wants to bring their magic wands back out for the job, but Flora insists on taking no chances now that they’re in the home stretch. Fauna gets to live her dream of baking an elaborate cake (it’s thanks to her referring to a teaspoon as a “tsp” that I do it too), and Flora insists on making Aurora a gown fit for a princess using Merryweather as a dummy. And we also get one of the best burns in the Disney canon:

Merryweather: It looks awful! Flora: That’s because it’s on you, dear.

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The fairies fall into reminiscing over raising Aurora and get teary over having to let her go soon. I see where they’re coming from, they’re the ones who raised her for sixteen years. They must have so many fond memories, not to mention they put all that work into learning to properly raise a child let alone live like normal human beings seeing how two of them still can’t sew or cook without magic. I wonder what that was like –

No, NO, you CGI abominations DO NOT exist! Go back to the fires from whence you came!!

“Ugh, I’m gonna need something strong to expunge that from my eyes.”

There we go.

Aurora wanders through the forest, drawing out the usual bevy of cute woodland critters with her singing. She also catches the attention of a grown-up Prince Philip (Billy Shirley) who’s more dashing and considerably less blonde than he was sixteen years ago.

By this point, the Disney animators were far more confident in their ability to draw realistic but expressive leading men, hence Philip’s expanded role from the story. He’s also the first Disney prince to have a personality; not a terribly deep or defined one, but it’s a step up from his nameless plot-device predecessors. There are some signs of him being a hopeless romantic, he gets a few funny lines here and there, has a sturdy friendship with his horse Samson, and is fiercely determined when it’s time to kick some ass. He does have the same problem as Aurora in he randomly decides to stop talking for the rest of the movie once he reaches the midway mark (at least Aurora has the excuse that she’s sleeping for that remainder), but I suppose you could chalk this up as to him wanting to spite Maleficent with his silence.

The animals steal some of Philip’s clothes so they can pretend to be Aurora’s dream prince. Aurora plays along as she sings the movie’s standout song, “Once Upon a Dream”. Philip and Samson watch until he smooths his way into the dance. Once Aurora discovers the switch, Philip gets a little too up in her personal space for my liking, constantly grabbing her hand so she doesn’t run off and pulling her closer to him. Not as horrible as what the prince does to the sleeping princess in the original story (a questionably consensual kiss is a trifle compared to how the scumbag of a prince treats her there), but still a bit iffy.

“It’s a good thing my aunts taught me to never go anywhere without a loaded pistol taped to my back.”

But once Philip backs off a little and joins in her song, they both dance together and OEHSGBJSGBLL…

I think I’m going to need surgery to get my jaw off the floor back into its proper place thanks to this movie.

As per Disney tradition, Aurora and Philip’s waltz means the two are head over heels in love with each other. But when it comes time to finally exchange names, Aurora panics and runs away, though she sticks around long enough to tell Philip to meet her family at the cottage that evening.

Back at home, the party preparations aren’t proceeding as planned. Flora’s dress looks as good as my attempts at dressmaking, and Fauna’s dessert wouldn’t feel out of place on Cake Wrecks.

A fed-up Merryweather reads Flora and Fauna the riot act and convinces them to finally take up their wands again. This produces more desirable results, though Merryweather still gets stuck with cleanup duty.

Enchanting a broom to come to life and do your dirty work? I don’t see this going wrong in any possible way.

Things start to go south when Flora and Merryweather argue over the dress color and it escalates into a full-blown wizard’s duel. This gag was supposedly based on the animators’ arguments over what was Aurora’s proper dress color. I think they should have compromised and combined both colors to make purple, which would go lovely with Aurora’s violet eyes, but what do I know. I’m just the illustration major writing a blog. Unfortunately, while the fairies remembered to cover every door, window, and crack that could expose their magic, they overlooked the fireplace. The sparkly residue of Flora and Merryweather’s fight fly up the chimney, alerting Diablo to their hideaway.

Going back to what I said earlier about this movie providing some commentary on feminism, consider this: Flora is obsessed with pink, a traditionally female color, and she gives Aurora an attribute that is oft preferred in a woman but not the most important quality, beauty. Merryweather, on the other hand, is all about blue, a color usually geared towards boys, and she has much more common sense and practicality about her. Though Merryweather and Flora are able to put aside their differences in personalities and approaches for a common goal, it’s when they refuse to compromise and begin prioritizing which color – ie. which ideology and extension of themselves – that they want Aurora to step into that they lose sight of what’s important, and allow everything they worked for to collapse on itself. It’s played for laughs very well, sure, but if not’s symbolic of the dichotomy between traditional femininity and modern sensibility that tears apart the feminist movement then I don’t know what is.

The fairies manage to fix their messes in time for Aurora’s return. She’s thrilled with their gifts but shocks them all when she announces her new boyfriend is coming over for dinner. They come clean about her heritage and betrothal to Prince Philip, and Aurora runs up to her room in tears over the fact that she’ll never see her one true love again. That and her entire life has been a lie and she’s being carted off to meet parents she knows nothing about to marry a man she’s never met and rule an entire kingdom with no prior experience or knowledge. But mostly the true love thing.

Meanwhile, Stefan and Hubert are making wedding plans over wine with “Skumps”, the preferred toast between me and my friends. Also adding to the humor is a minstrel who keeps stealing sips until he literally drinks himself under the table.

This was also his way of getting through the Black Plague, co-opted by the rest of the world six hundred years later.

Philip returns and Hubert goes to greet him. He thinks his son is thrilled at the prospect of marrying Aurora but is disappointed to learn that he’s fallen for an anonymous peasant.

“At least tell me if she’s royalty in disguise so you don’t elope to Sicily!”

Philip rides back into the woods for his big date, leaving Hubert with the unenviable task of breaking the bad news to Stefan. As for Aurora, the fairies smuggle her into the castle and prep her for her homecoming. She’s still blue over having to ghost her forest hubby though, so the fairies give her some time to herself.

Biiiiiiiiig mistake.

So imagine you’re me, growing up watching this movie on tape on a television set with a very standard but not spectacular sound system. Then years later you download the remastered soundtrack and give it a listen while you’re falling asleep. You’ve got the whole score memorized, the volume is nice and low, it’s all good.

And then, just as you’re drifting off, you hear a ghostly voice singing in your ear “Auroraaa…Auroraaaaa…”

That reminds me, I haven’t had a chance to talk about the music yet, haven’t I? Forgive me for waiting so long to do so but my reaction to it is equivalent to the visuals. The score is taken straight from the Sleeping Beauty ballet by Tchaikovsky, the same composer as The Nutcracker, and it is lush, sweeping, sumptuous, just…

While George Bruns was mostly faithful with how the score was represented within the context of the ballet, at certain points he took the same approach as The Nutcracker Prince and rearranged the music order to underscore totally different scenes to staggering effect. The beautifully ominous music where Maleficent appears as a ball of green flame and leads the hypnotized Aurora to her doom? It’s from one of the ballet’s divertissements where Puss in Boots dances with his girlfriend. But tell me which is more fitting for a musical composition such as this – two cats pirouetting around each other in a crowded ballroom, or eerie pitch-black spiral staircases illuminated by green fire as a cursed princess inches closer to her dark destiny against her will?

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The fairies realize their error and frantically search the maze of secret passages for Aurora. Though the princess resists Maleficent’s commands for only a moment, they are still too late to save her from fulfilling the curse. Maleficent gloats and leaves the fairies to wallow in their failure. It’s made even worse as the merrymaking from the oblivious revelers below ring out while they put Aurora to bed in a tower and mourn over her. It’s heartbreaking: they raised and loved her as if she were their own daughter, and they still couldn’t protect her. Everyone talks about “Baby Mine” and Bambi’s mom as huge tearjerkers, but why is this scene constantly forgotten?

Stupid onions, stupid stupid onions…

Fauna and Merryweather can’t even begin to imagine how heartbroken Stefan and Leah will be, but Flora has a solution: put the kingdom to sleep along with Aurora until she is woken up. I understand her wanting to spare Aurora’s family some pain, but conking out an entire principality for god knows how long to cover up their failure? AND at a time when Europe was all about invading and conquering itself? Are we sure this isn’t just part of Maleficent’s overarching plan for revenge? This sounds more like something she would come up with instead of the leader of the good guys.

“So what happens if one of the neighboring kingdoms decides to attack while everyone’s sleeping?”

“Then we’ll put them and their armies to sleep, too.”

“And once Aurora is saved, both kingdoms will immediately wake up to find themselves thrust into a war they’re barely prepared for, is that correct?”

“Oh, you’re right, that’s a terrible idea.”

“Finally, thank you.”

“I’ll just turn them all into flowers.”

“THAT’S NOT AN OPTION!!!”

The fairies flitter about the castle grounds spreading their spell over the unwitting royal court, even putting the candles and sconces out. We have another reprise of the “Gifts of Beauty and Song” chorus now altered to sound like a lullaby, providing an interesting bit of symmetry between it and its earlier use in the film. Whereas it first underscored their blessings upon Aurora, now it plays as the fairies are giving the “gift” of sleep to the entire castle.

While Flora knocks out the throne room, she overhears Hubert muttering about Philip eloping with a peasant girl and she makes the connection. The fairies speed to the cottage just as Philip arrives there. But once again Maleficent beats them to the punch. Her goons ambush Philip and she watches them wrestle and bond him with fiendish glee.

You magnificent, kinky bitch.

Maleficent was only out to capture the one man who could break Aurora’s curse; the fact that he’s really the son of her nemesis’ allies is just icing on the cake. Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather resolve to rescue him from Maleficent’s fortress in the Forbidden Mountain.

Some movies reach the brink of greatness only to falter when it comes to the final act. Sleeping Beauty is not one of them. Everything that happens from the moment we slowly zoom in through the purple mist on to the Forbidden Mountain itself up until the storybook closes is perfection. The perfectly paced action, the animation, the music, Maleficent’s hideaway in all its decaying glory (I swear it’s like Jean Cocteau meets Frank Frazetta meets Giotto) all make for the climax of climaxes.

The fairies shrink to insect size and silently sneak through Maleficent’s creepy domain, narrowly running into guards and gargoyles at every turn. They traverse the stronghold until they find her overseeing a hellish bacchanalia in honor of her supposed victory.

“My old gaffer would have a thing or two to say if he could see us now.”

Soon Maleficent gets bored and goes to “cheer up” her captive. Then we have it: The Moment.

I’ve talked about this before, that one small, devious step further the villain takes to make themselves more heinous in our eyes. It’s the Wicked Witch taunting Dorothy with visions of Aunt Em. It’s the Beldam hanging Other Wybie’s remains. It’s virtually everything Heath Ledger’s Joker does. And it is this simple scene where Maleficent details what she plans to do with Philip. She spins “a charming fairy tale come true” of Aurora sleeping without aging, waiting for her prince to come to wake her. And Philip will escape the dungeon, ride to her rescue and prove true love conquers all – in one hundred years, when he’s a broken old husk of a man on the brink of death. DAMN. If you want to know why Maleficent is considered the best of all the Disney villains, it’s not just all her previously praised qualities, it’s her sheer sadism and the pleasure she takes in it.

The fairies enter and free Philip once Maleficent departs. The course of true love never runs smoothly though, so they arm him with the Shield of Virtue (licensed by Carefree Maxi-Pads), and the Sword of Truth to aid in his escape.

“So, why’s it called the Sword of Truth?”

“Anyone who’s subjected to it speaks only the truth…as they bleed out and die, of course.”

“Cool, cool. On an unrelated note, I think I’m gonna go to DC for my honeymoon.”

Diablo sounds the alarm and the Battle With the Forces of Evil kicks off with Philip slashing his Sword of Truth through Maleficent’s goons.

“I steal lunches from the break room fridge!” “I broke wind last Tuesday and blamed it on the dog!” “I cried like a little girl during The Good Place finale!” “I only wash my hands for NINETEEN seconds at a time!”

Philip makes his getaway on Samson and the music reaches truly operatic levels as Maleficent does everything in her power to end him. Yet Philip soldiers through it like a boss. Crumbling mountainsides, Maleficent hurling lightning from the sky and summoning a forest of thorns to block the way? Fuck that shit, he’s gotta go save his girl.

Then, as Philip cuts his way through the briars, Maleficent looks at her watch, realizes it’s No More Fucking Around O’Clock, zooms over to the castle, throws down the most intimidating challenge ever –

“Now you shall deal with me, O Prince, and all the powers of HELL!!”

– and with that, she takes her final form: a massive fire-breathing dragon.

Every Disney villain who’s gone kaiju in the final act owes everything to this gorgeous terrifying beast. The dragon is an awe-inspiring unholy fusion of style, power and darkness. There’s a reason why she’s the final boss in Fantasmic; the chance to watch a live dragon battle is too cool to pass up.

Speaking of battles, Maleficent’s dragon form was animated by Woolie Reitherman, who previously brought us such gargantuan monster clashes as the T-rex brawl in Fantasia and the escape from Monstro The Whale in Pinocchio. And when you have a dragon confronting a fairytale prince, well, you know what’s coming.

Maleficent backs Philip on to a cliff surrounded by flames, leaving him only one desperate shot. With a little extra magic from the fairies, he throws his Sword of Truth at Maleficent and it plunges right into her heart.

“I liked…Frozen 2…more than the first one…”

Maleficent’s spells die with her, clearing the way for Philip. He gives Aurora that wake-up smooch and everyone in the castle slowly rouses, owing their inexplicable simultaneous twenty-minute blackout to the unusually strong wine.

He can attest to that fact.

The royal families are happily reunited, and the film ends on Flora and Merryweather fighting over Aurora’s dress color yet again as she and Philip waltz together on the clouds using animation Beauty and the Beast would borrow thirty-two years later.

Sleeping Beauty is a movie I can never have on in the background because the moment I look up from my work I am spellbound by it. Do I need to elaborate on how this is one of the most beautiful looking and sounding movies Disney’s ever produced? Sleeping Beauty is the swan song of Disney’s first golden age of animation. For better or for worse, their animation process would switch to the rough, cost-cutting Xerox process starting with their next feature, 101 Dalmatians, and few films would reach Sleeping Beauty’s level of gorgeousness ever since.

Though a massive financial and critical hit on release, it wasn’t enough to make up for the monstrous production costs, not unlike Fantasia. Thankfully, home video sales revived interest and made it Sleeping Beauty of the top-selling VHS tapes of the decade, cementing it as a bonafide classic. It’s one of my favorites from Disney for its stunning visuals, gorgeous music, phenomenal villain and overlooked but great cast characters. Revisit it if you haven’t already.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this review, please consider supporting this misfit on Patreon. Patreon supporters receive great perks such as extra votes for movie reviews, movie requests, early sneak-peeks and more! Special thanks to Amelia Jones, Gordhan Rajani and Sam Minden for their contributions!

Artwork by Charles Moss.

Screencaps from animationscreencaps.com

March Review: Sleeping Beauty (1959) Whenever I discuss Sleeping Beauty with someone who doesn't share my enthusiasm for Disney, they have an irksome tendency to get it muddled with Snow White; their excuse being "it has the same plot".

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eastonia-blog · 6 years ago

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Let's Chat about these Reversed Aged!Robins AUs

So recently I replied to @gentlemenpaws generalask!post which said…

And I thought I would go a little into my reply to him. Because and hear me out.

I can never take reversed ages Robin headcanons and stories seriously. Without turning off my brain a little. And please, please, please just hear me out.

There is a reason why.

(TLDR at the bottom of this long post)

1) This is the most important reason. Say it with me. THERE IS NO ROBIN WITHOUT DICK GRAYSON.

Think about all other ‘sidekick’ or 'junior partner’ characters. With the exception of maybe Speedy, what are their names and costumes? Aqualad, Kid Flash, Wonder Girl, Super Girl, Super Boy, Bat Girl, Miss Martian... You know, the famous ones? The ones that all based their costumes in echo of their mentors (and yes, I’m including Roy Harper here, Speedy’s costume is a mirror of Green Arrow’s - in red).

So why doesn’t Batman’s apprentice call himself Batboy? Why is his design so divergent from Batman’s? (Okay I understand there’s other reasons but I’m trying to stay in universe/lore here). Depending on the continuity, when Barbara Gordon/Betty Kane became Batgirl she followed the trend. Robin’s identity although associated with the Bat, can stand alone without context.

Why Robin? Why the traffic lights? Something that has been shown time and time again (despite continuity differences and all) is that Robin was Dick’s pet name, from Mary Grayson, his mum. Again depending on the continuity, Mary Grayson called Dick Robin because:-

1) He was “...always bobbin’ along.” (Pre-Flashpoint Robin: Year One)

Interesting because it could either refer to his skill in acrobatics or a tendency to get underfoot because of his curiousity.

2) Born on the first day of Spring.

Or...

3) Just as a tease because he just really, really loved the stories of Robin Hood.

The traffic light colouration he chose for his costume, even the design of his costume? Well if you take a look at most of the Dick Grayson origin stories (Pre-Flashpoint: Robin Year One, Batman Year Three. Post-Rebirth: Batman #54 just to name a couple examples) the Grayson aerialist costume is... Red, Green and Yellow. The proportions of the colours and presence of a cape vary but traffic lights are Grayson colours.

Robin was Dick Grayson’s tribute to his dead family.*

*Part of the reason why Dick got so hurt that Bruce gave Robin away to Jason was because Bruce forgot that Robin was not his to give. This is why the other Pre-Flashpoint comics had Dick give Tim his blessing to become Robin. And then outright have Dick give the R to Damian. Jason eventually got Dick’s blessings but by that point, the relationship was never going to start from the best place.

2) Damian as the first 'apprentice’ would not work. Why? BRUCE WOULD NOT HAVE SURVIVED LONG ENOUGH. (I can hear all the cries of ’But he’s Batman!’ ring out).

Dick and Bruce met super early into Bruce’s career as Batman.

Remember how pre-Batman Bruce went about as a generic vigilante without a moniker or anything? And got his butt kicked so hard by the Gotham streets that it took a bat crashing through a window to convince him to try again?

Pre-Robin Batman was characterised by one thing:- Recklessness. He knew sooner or later Gotham was going to claim his life and that he would probably be going sooner rather than later.

He spent a lot of time recovering in those days. Maybe more than he did catching lowlifes or solving crimes.

And then everything changed when the Flying Graysons fell.

The crime that touched Dick mirrored the crime that affected Bruce. (It’s actually pretty interesting from a meta standpoint. The Waynes died in a circle of light - under a Park Row streetlight and the Graysons paralleled that with the spotlight remaining on them long after they hit the ground.)

And Bruce looked into the eyes of little 8-10 year-old Dick Grayson, and saw himself. But more than that, he (Bruce) saw an opportunity to change things for him (Dick). So that Dick would not end up like him.

(Want to know a cool thing? The reason why Dick’s relationship with Bruce is different to the approach Bruce took to Jason, Tim and Damian? Age difference. Bruce is about 14-18 years older than Dick. Putting him in that weird spot where you could simultaneously be a teen parent or an older sibling. Bruce has a more Older-Brother-Promoted-to-Parent relationship with Dick than father-son. It’s why in the Rebirth Nightwing vs Hush Prelude to the Wedding issue, Dick thought he could be a candidate for Best Man).

This is also the reason why I love Dick’s and Damian’s relationship so much is because it directly parallels Bruce’s and his. I don’t quite know what the age difference is post-Rebirth (and I tend to outright ignore the New 52 at times) but since Rebirth tends to mirror Pre-Flashpoint more than not, I think the age difference between Dick and Damian is about... 14-16 years? Again, simultaneously a teen parent and older sibling.

This is also why I don’t think a Damian as the first Dark Squire would work, because Bruce would not be in a good place to help out a child. Nor will there be the same connection that there was between him and Dick. Damian being first would probably ruin Batman for ever taking on someone in the ‘apprentice’ role.

So after Bruce (eventually, inevitably) takes Dick in, Bruce is forced to realise that he has to be more careful because he has to be there for Dick.

This is when Bruce fully embraces the amount of Crazy Prepared he’d need to be to be.

And then Dick (at 8-10 years-old! Seriously we talk about the amount of detective skill Tim has to figure out Batman’s and Robin’s identities... But we don’t talk about the amount of charisma, courage and will it takes to out-stubborn the Batman???) makes his way onto the streets (and Bruce can’t stop him so he has to help him). So now what does Bruce have to do?

There is a rule medics and first responders have to follow: Protect yourself in order to save others.

Bruce is no longer allowed to accept dying as an option (until Dick is old enough to take care of himself). This forces Batman to work situations to his advantage so Batman and Robin can both come home.

Basically, Dick made Batman evolve into the Batman we know and expect today.

Batman’s relationship with the police significantly improved after Dick Grayson debuted as Robin. Batman’s relationship with other Justice Leaguers improved after Dick Grayson debuted as Robin. Batman’s relationship with Wonder Woman and especially Superman/Clark Kent improved after Robin.

So let’s remove Dick from the lineup and stick him at the end as the youngest then. And... put Damian as the eldest son... that’s... not going to work.

Hey Damian. Where did you go?

Remember the timeline. Without Dick as the eldest Bruce can continue to be reckless. Batman was a suicide mission until Robin stepped in.

No Dick? Batman continues to be reckless. Reckless Batman? Dead Batman. The Al Ghuls and the League of Shadows/Assassins? Probably would have nuked Gotham and Bludhaven. Also Damian Wayne will not have his male genetic donor because... Without Dick Grayson as the eldest son/brother? Batman would not have survived to catch the eye of the League of Shadows/Assassins.

It is necessary for Dick to be the ‘eldest son’ otherwise the rest of Bat!Lore will not fall into place. Dick was Bruce’s more traditionally heroic foil from the start without which we would have a dead Bruce Wayne before Batman could take off.

TLDR:

Robin was created as Dick’s Tribute to his dead family. If Dick wasn’t the oldest - Batman’s partner (if he would even have one!) would NOT be called Robin.

Bruce and Dick met very early into his career as Batman. If they didn’t meet Bruce would have carried on his reckless path and possibly DIED before Damian could even be ‘conceived’.

And that, my friends, is the tea.

Tagging @theflyingwonder as inspiration of this particular meta

#batfam #dick grayson #bruce wayne #batman #nightwing #dc comics #robin #meta #analysis #the rally cry #the multiverse constant #why I find reverse robin ages problematic #eastoniarants

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blurhawaii · 6 years ago

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Yuletide 2019

dear yuletide writer,

hello and happy yuletide! this is my fifth year taking part and my longest letter yet so i’m just going to jump right in. the suggestions are guidelines. if you’ve got a great idea, go for it. i only ask that you steer clear of my dislikes.

feel free to go through my tumblr for each of these fandoms. i should have tags for them, tho your mileage may vary. i might even have more stuff on my side blog: here. likes:

dysfunctional relationships eg. codependency, messed up father/son dynamics, enemies to lovers, power imbalances.

found family

big loyalty kink. love it when trust is earned and kept.

praise kink

vulnerability in men

open and honest communication between partners

i love ot3s. it’s the journey of them getting together and making it work that interests me the most. or how an established pair goes about bringing in a third person.

stories set in canon. or a divergence of canon.

dark/bleak fics. don’t be afraid to drag characters through the mud. happy endings are welcome but i like the struggle.

i’m fine with anything from gen to porn but would be happiest with something in the middle. i love first times.

canon typical violence is fine and to be expected from some of my choices of fandoms.

detective stories/film noir

magical realism/cosmic horror. weird hints of it in an otherwise normal universe

redemption arcs

characters and relationships are more important than plot for me

dislikes:

AUs that are completely disconnected from canon e.g. coffee shop AUs.

established relationships

crossovers

genderbending

feminisation of male characters

fics that are entirely fluff

A/B/O fics

PWP

mpreg

scat/watersports

first person fics (i have no problem with second person fics tho if you think that could work. they really wow me when done well.)

The Departed (2006) *Billy Costigan *Sean Dignam

one of my favourite films ever. i request it every year so you can't really go wrong with this as i am thirsty for anything. most of my love is for dignam and his tough love attitude towards his job and the undercovers he's responsible for. it's obvious he cares, i don't think you could do a job like that and not care, but those rare and few moments when he softens around billy --we need you, pal-- that's what i would like to see more of. i have written a couple of departed fics myself, centred around costigan/dignam, but in all honesty, i would be happy with anything involving them both. shipping is preferred but whatever you are comfortable with is fine. due to the nature of the film, i am perfectly comfortable with violence and the screwed up relationship they are bound to have. the friction born of the situation vs the fact that they need each other to get through this is what i am all about.

codependency, power imbalances and enemies to lovers tropes are abound here.

fics where billy lives are my usual go-to. the survivability of being shot in the head, that kind of stuff can be hand waved away in fic, and i'd love something that explores the angst of billy's ‘where the hell were you when i needed you’ reaction towards dignam following that ending.

or a canon divergence fic with their totally antagonistic relationship being front and centre. i just ask that there be an underlying level of affection, no matter how buried. when billy is undercover, there’s a special kind of relationship that comes with dignam and queenan being the only people he can talk to.

something i’ve never seen for this but would actually love: a time loop/groundhog day fic

Jurassic Park Original Trilogy (Movies)

*Sarah Harding *Ian Malcolm *Nick Van Owen

i originally wasn’t going to ask for this again this year (i was lucky enough to get treated with a fic a couple of years ago) but then someone other than myself nominated nick van owen which surprised and delighted me and i figured why the hell not.

my passion here is the ot3 potential. i view these three in the same way i view the trio in the first film, meaning i see them as three people who have bonded over a traumatic experience and come out of it forever linked in some way. they spend the entire film looking out for each other and keeping each other safe, and they all separately take care of ian’s daughter at one point and i am fascinated by this and how that could continue in the future. (in fact, i love stories where adults treat kids like adults, not talking down to them–see any shane black film.) i’m looking for an actual relationship between them but would be happy with anything that showcased a connection with every side of this triangle.

anything post-film with them dealing or not dealing with what happened would be amazing. there are quite a few fics based around this idea for the first film’s trio, i’d love to see something like that for these three. (i’ve always been kind of bitter about the way nick just disappears for the last act but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ that’s what fics are for, i guess.)

i don’t like the jurassic world films but i’m fine with fics that take that future into account. a lot of the trauma for these characters comes from the idea that the parks still exist and continue to fuck people up.

Godless (TV 2017)

*Roy Goode *Bill McNue *Alice Fletcher

i’m a massive fan of westerns. the harsh way of life, the violence, the isolation, drawn out revenge plots, the murkiness of good vs evil or sheriff vs anti-hero, the importance of honour and heroism and how that differs for men and women, especially in this universe with its town full of widows. having said all that, i’m still very much a sucker for cool cowboys in a shallow female way.

as you’ve probably already gathered my favourite thing is turning every love triangle into an ot3. so i’d love a fic post canon where roy comes back after realising found family is just as important as real family despite frank’s influence. i imagine bill would try to do the gentlemanly/self depreciating thing of bowing out and letting roy and alice be together but i’d love for alice to actually get a say in this where she wasn’t allowed in the show. however you jigsaw them together my main thing is that bill doesn’t get left out.

i feel the roy/bill aspect in particular could be explored a lot more. i love that they don’t hate each on sight. they learn mutual respect and then smoothly move around each other during the gunfight at the end. (bill’s deteriorating eyesight side plot also fascinates me, how it goes with his loss of purpose -”losing his shadow”- and comes back when teaming up with roy to defend the town. maybe there’s a fic possibility where it flares up again due to his insecurity of roy coming between him and alice. either way, the hints of magical realism here and with frank’s repeated insistence that he’s seen his death and this ain’t it are great and i wouldn’t mind seeing more of that.)

the usual ideas of western masculinity get all twisted around when roy and bill are in the presence of alice and they both seem kind of subby towards her, which yes please. the way alice kisses the scar she gave roy and the fact that he simply lets her is *chef kiss* because i also love the parallel that bill got shot in the hip trying to get revenge for alice. they all have scars that tie them together.

i’m actually very okay with letting them be soft with each other after all of their tragedy.

honest communication between partners could work wonders here.

Barry (TV 2018)

*Barry Berkman *Monroe Fuches

i expected to like this show. dark comedy, depressed hitman, henry winkler, it’s a perfect combination of things. i didn’t expect to get obsessed with barry’s obvious fucked up father-figure hangups. but hey ho, i was pleasantly surprised.

pretty much every one of barry’s relationships in this show has an element of fucked-upness but the barry/fuches one is by far the worst. it’s codependent, it’s manipulative, it’s a little abusive, the power is constantly flip-flopping and most importantly there’s the father/son dynamic that could so easily tip over into something sexual. it’s everything i love. any time fuches calls barry “his boy” it kills me. and i am fascinated by the way barry can go from needy and touch starved to a rampaging killer hunting fuches down by the end and still have that dynamic going strong.

the parallels between them and the barry/gene cousineau relationship, which is fucked up too just in a very different way, are great. love the jealousy it brings and i would even be into a fic set post the season 2 ending, if you could find a way to swing that. though, while i like a little darkness, i would still rather see them fall back into old unhealthy habits than kill each other.

any kind of prequel fic would be amazing too.

and just to be clear i’m more than okay with a sexual relationship between these two but if you don’t want to write it that’s fine. I’d just like all the other aspects of their shitty relationship delved into.

L.A. Confidential (1997)

*Bud White *Ed Exley

pretty much all of my bullet pointed likes come into play here. i’ve nominated two characters but i’d be happy with almost any combination of the characters available in the tagset as long as exley is involved in some way.

ships i like: bud/exley, exley/vincennes, bud/exley/lynn

but if we matched purely on both bud and exley then:

i love the opposites attract partnership bud and exley have and i like that they both seem angry at their attraction to each other. hate-sex with reluctant feelings? always good. i'd love anything that deals with their perceived difference in intellect and/or education. bud being turned-on by exley's smarts, exley realizing how much he's underestimated bud, them being mutually impressed by each other.

if you choose to go down the ot3 route then:

i love fics where exley shows up in arizona and they fall into weird domesticity. i love seeing how three people--especially three people who aren't used to the idea of poly relationships--work their way towards realizing and accepting what they want.

and while i’m not sure what you could do with this knowledge, i’d just like to add that i’ve read the book and i’m somewhat obsessed with the existence of dream-a-dreamland in general. if you could incorporate that in any way i’d be hugely impressed.

POKEMON Detective Pikachu (2019)

*Harry Goodman *Hide Yoshida

this is totally a last minute request that i’ve edited in but is by no means less wanted than the others. i watched this film back when it came out and was honestly surprised by how much i enjoyed it. i’m a massive pokemon fan and have been since i got my pokemon red when i was seven years old and, let me tell you, getting to see all those growlithes waddling about the real world was like a childhood dream come true.

i had a good time and i moved on.

a few days ago i stumbled on a piece of art : here : and it was like the little goblin that is my brain just sat up straight. the very concept of these characters together had never crossed my mind before that but then suddenly the desire for this just casually strolled through my entire headspace, turning on every light as it went.

i love detective stories, i love cop partnerships, i love hot single dads who happen to be cops with cute little pokemon cop partners. i love that harry is kind of a shitty father but he’s now trying his best. i love that hide had nothing but praise and respect for harry when he meets with tim and that he knew things like tim wanting to be a pokemon trainer when he was younger (meaning he and harry had talked about stuff like this.) i love that hide inexplicably has a spare key to harry’s apartment in his desk drawer. i love how absolutely certain hide was in saying harry loved his son more than anything in the world.

there’s history there is what i’m saying, and i’d love to know more about it.

anything set pre-film would be cool. loose cannon harry throwing his whole being into his job to deal with the loss of his wife and his fractured relationship with his son. hide the tired lieutenant trying to rein him in, quietly talking about tim together, keeping him grounded and safe. all up until he can’t, that is. (great angst potential with hide genuinely believing harry is dead.)

anything set post-film would be even better. harry struggling to find balance between being a father and a cop. probably doing a shitty job at it in the beginning. hide trying to help. would love for tim to be an actual presence (outsider POV could be amazing here.)

may sound strange but my favourite thing that used to happen in digimon a lot is when characters would interact with each other digimon partner. i would be massively into a fic about the two of them growing closer through each other’s pokemon partner.

thank you writer and best of luck.

#yuletide #yuletide 2019

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chronicbatfictioner · 6 years ago

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A Real Boy - Chapter 22

"So... King Kong is real, and even Solovar don't know what to do with it."

"Technically--" Barbara started, and then changed her mind. "Forget it. I can't even-- I don't even know what's real or not real but is... real, anymore."

Dick placed his elbow on the table and chin on his hand. "I'm with you in this. But if you're gonna say that 'technically Solovar of Gorilla City is King Kong', you're not wrong. Just... this King Kong is about three, four storeys' tall. And Solovar himself isn't even eight feet tall. He's like, seven-foot-two? Something?"

"I'm lost." Tim admitted, as he walked in to the room in the middle of the conversation.

"Hi, Lost--"

"Grayson, no dad jokes. You're not a dad, yet." Jason interrupted.

"Did my bike get home in one piece?" Dick turned to Jason.

"Definitely not, it's in approximately 142 pieces between here and Sprang Bridge." Jason replied insolently.

"Oh, cool. Considering there are about 800 pieces on that thing, means the puzzle pieces that was my bike are still big enough to reassemble..." Dick responded idly.

Tim met Barbara's glare before simultaneously rolling their respective eyes.

"Uh, guys? King Kong?" Tim finally decided to press. "I know I'm not gonna like the answer. But I gotta ask, don't I?"

"Yeah, well, I didn't like it either, but I ended up facing it..." Dick replied, shifting. Tim finally noticed and realized that under the fitted V-necked shirt, there were parallel bulges. Slight enough to not be noticed, if Tim hasn't seen the sliver of white under Dick's collar.

"You're injured." Jason, who apparently noticed the same thing, commented first.

"Pretty much. Bruised ribs, several stitches--"

"Dozen. Several dozen stitches," Barbara corrected.

"--several dozen stitches. And they all came from a freakin' King Kong."

"Dick was the damsel in distress, shrieks and all. Only Kong wasn't looking to like, rescue him from the nasties that is Men's World, but rather to devour him or something." Barbara elaborated. "And I have the only unedited footage, complete with sound."

"Dibs on watching it!" Jason exclaimed.

"It squished me." Dick said, looking almost proud. "And I gotta say that was the first I've seen Kong vs Elephant."

"Zitka was... clearly unhappy and expanded herself to be bigger than the Kong. Rammed herself onto Kong and freed Dick. The others... Arsenal was then able to shoot it with enough tranquilizer to sedate... --uh..."

"Ten gorillas?" Jason's unsuccessful attempt to not smirk was all too visible.

"Yeeeah, thereabout. Probably closer to like, twenty gorillas from Gorilla City that are larger than common gorillas by default..." Dick concluded. "And then Donna Troy moved it from Downtown Manhattan to... I dunno where she brought Kong to." he admitted.

"Best to not know, really. It was re-shrunk into its ordinary size - which is, as anyone would suspect, that of a common silverback gorilla..." Barbara finished. "Sooo... you guys got Cthulhu, I've heard."

"What the hell's going on, anyway? We've got literal made-up creatures coming out the wazoo..." Jason groused.

"I thought Cthulhu was real...?" Barbara queried.

"It is - the species. But not as massive as the one we saw on campus. Just like your Kong." Jason explained. "So yeah, what the hell...?"

"Those creatures were made up. Man-made with... Well, I'd say Lovecraft probably had the better prosaic description of the one we saw. But a massive Kong was absolutely... unimaginative." Tim remarked. "I'm just hoping that whoever did this won't do Jurassic Park next..."

"I would probably roll my eyes so hard at the first live T-rex or velociraptors I see, shoot them damn things and make steaks." Dick growled. His eyes suddenly widen. "I am, however, hoping this person isn't a sci-fi fan..." he said dramatically, glaring alternatively at Jason, Barbara, and then Tim.

Tim groaned exasperatedly. "If I see a Jabba or an ewok, organic or not, I'm gonna change them back to plastic."

Jason gasped mockingly. "But Tim! There could be creatures like them anywhere else in the universe! It's like we're alone in the whole universe!"

"Oh shut up." Tim snarled at him. "Eh... wait..." a thought suddenly hit him. "They were all man-made, organic, and sentient."

"I seriously could see a lightbulb switched on in his head..." Dick remarked as Tim mulled his thoughts, which promptly changed into the thought of 'what if all humans or magi would have an image of a lightbulb getting switched on whenever they got a brilliant idea?'

Fortunately the split second question did not interrupt Tim's main line of thoughts at all.

"They weren't supposed to be alive, or sentient, or exist. Or organic. Sizes notwithstanding..." Tim muttered under his breath after the pictures of his thought lined up a little neater in his mind.

"The person has the same powers as yours?" Barbara hazarded a guess.

"I can't make living things out of inanimate ob--" Tim said, and stopped abruptly. "Where is Lex Luthor now?"

"Belle Reve, last I checked," came Bruce's voice. "he's constantly undergoing psychiatric evaluation on daily basis. He's still there and has no contact with either his former associates or employees."

"How well do you trust the staff at Belle Reve?" Tim insisted. "I mean, he managed to make Conner. He's the only one who had managed to turn an effigy - a statue - into a human being!"

Bruce glared at Tim contemplatively - at least that was what Tim hoped for, and not anger out of Tim's insolence in doubting him.

"The staff at Belle Reve is... commanded by Amanda Waller, a staunch proponent of controlling magickal abilities and artifacts for the good of humankind, regardless of their magickal abilities or lack thereof. She will not let Luthor meddle with anyone under her watch." Bruce explained. "Some things Waller has done that I... generally do not approve of. She is a warlock, you see. But like me, she had opted for protection rather than destruction. Her methods still made me cringe, sometimes. But it is... out of my jurisdiction."

Tim could see that Bruce was gritting his teeth for the last few sentences, and Barbara confirmed his suspicion by saying, "she's like, a government-sanctioned agent. She could and has actually applied the death sentence and perform... experimental methods upon her inmates."

"Oh," now Tim cringed, too. It was public secret that the government - their government - has agencies that were authorized to do things that would be frowned upon by general morality, and that was just Tim's brain being nice. Human experimentation - through magickal or other means - was at the forefront of the reasons. Not surprisingly, death sentence was far further in the list.

Still, there was a more important question in Tim's mind that was not answered by either Bruce or Barbara.

"But do you trust her enough not to use Luthor's abilities for her own advantage?" Tim insisted.

The quiet that followed was punctuated by a distant screech of a bat, as if mocking their sudden silence filled with blatant uncertainty.

"I do not." Bruce finally said after some good long seconds. "I should have given you excuses and reasons on why, but I cannot provide you with answers that will not sound like a cliché."

"Good to know that you're not a typical adult who'd say we youngins should trust our government implicitly and explicitly." Tim deadpanned.

"I wouldn't still be here if he's like that. I'll check if Waller is in any way complicit or in any way behaving differently in the past... well, through the times of the strange goings-on, really. You'll need a broad data points to see patterns, right?" Barbara asked, and Tim froze a little at just how easy it seemed for Barbara to offer an activity that would generally constituted to a 'Big Brother' type of thing. Barbara, probably sensing his uneasiness, smiled and added, "no, Tim, I don't watch her 24/7 deliberately. But we do live in a kind of Big Brother country, after all. She was the one suggesting that the government keep watch over all of its citizens."

"Barbara just figured out ways to keep certain people out of the loop, like - you know - what the government itself would do for their secret agents and CIA and stuff." Dick elaborated.

"But if she's like, out of the loop...?" Tim hesitated.

"That's what I did, she can keep the government watching common people and hide her own people - or people like her; but she can't hide from me." Barbara smirked. "The Oracle's Tiara made it possible for me to manipulate cameras and programs to literally show what is hidden. So no, there's no need for me to keep watch on people 24/7. I'm not that dedicated. Or have nothing better to do with my time..."

"Oh, cool," Tim was interested this time. "If, say, I want to know where Dick is at certain time and date, you can find that out." he ascertained.

"Yes, if I allowed you to. But no, Tim, I don't stalk Dick, either." Barbara chuckled.

"Yeah, no... that was just an example 'cause I think Dick and Bruce - at least - would've been hidden from the government cams, anyway. But... not your cams, right?" Tim spluttered. "I mean, I've made sure that all recordings of me would at least be distorted - if not destroyed - every time I did something magickal in public..."

"...and you've done a very good job that none of us even know of your existence. I figured that if you can hide that well, it shouldn't be a big trouble for you to figure out how to reverse engineer your trick to find what you want to find, yes?" Bruce hinted, not-so-subtly.

Tim glared at him, blinking owlishly, more lost in his own thoughts than anything else as methods after methods of reverse 'engineering' camera filters started spinning in his mind.

"Right," Bruce nodded. "Just let Barbara know what you need and how we can help." he decided.

"I haven't even say I'll do it!" Tim protested out of habit.

"Your mouth denies it, but your entire body language is already trying to figure out how to solve this, little Timmy!" Dick chuckled. "So let's! I want to know how King Kong came to happen and if I can use it to make a bat that I can ride on!"

#Tim Drake #Jason Todd #JayTim #Dick Grayson #Barbara Gordon #Alfred Pennyworth #Zitka #because Zitka deserves to be mentioned in a tag #Lex Luthor #Amanda Waller #Oracle #Magi!AU #no-capeAU

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thehikingviking · 4 years ago

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Ducket Peak, South Fork Mountain & Little Bally from Coggins Park, Whiskeytown National Recreation Area

I wanted to climb a cluster of peaks with little fame west of Redding. Standing at 6,975 ft, Bully Choop is the tallest and most prominent peak in the general area. The interesting name comes from the Wintun people of Northern California. Bully translates to spirit, while the translation for Choop is unclear. When I first saw the mountain, the conical peak was impressively covered with snow. I felt a distant energy emanating from the peak, so perhaps there is a certain spirit within this mountain. While this peak was definitely on my to-do list, it wasn’t what incentivized me to finally visit the area. A patch of peaks on the California Coastal list which includes Buckhorn Bally, Little Bally, South Fork Mountain, Ducket Peak and Shoemaker Bally were begging to be climbed. I saw it as an opportunity to “bag” several peaks in one outing, so I devised a thorough plan over two days that would hopefully allow me to climb all of these and more. I reached out to Daryn, who I knew was also interested in these peaks, and I set off north on a Friday. On my drive-in day, I hoped to bag three peaks towards the later half of the afternoon; Buckhorn Bally, Bully Choop and Paradise Peak. All are essentially drive ups, and I hoped to exert little energy in climbing the trio. From Redding, I followed Highway 299 West, then turned left on East County Line Road. I parked near the highest point of the road no more than a tenth of a mile on the northeastern side of Buckhorn Bally.

I walked through the forest for about 5 minutes until I reached the top.

There were a few rocks laying about, so I climbed several of them just to make sure I stood on the highest one.

I found a register containing familiar names. I was surprised that such a nondescript peak contained a register at all.

I spotted Shasta Bally through a gap in the trees.

I retraced my steps through the forest, hopped back in my Jeep, then continued downhill towards my next saddle. I stopped for a picture once I got my first view of Bully Choop.

The road took longer to drive than I budgeted for. At least I was able to drive all the way to the top. A recently reported snow patch had receded, and while it was rocky for the last mile, my Jeep handled it like a champ.

I climbed the lookout. A chilly breeze blew through me. The forecast was slightly unstable, but I viewed this as a positive thing since I expected the following day’s hike to be warm. Off to the northeast were Shasta Bally, Shoemaker Bally, Little Bally, South Fork Mountain, Ducket Peak and Paradise Peak.

To the south was North Yolla Bolly Mountain.

Shasta Trinity National Forest was shrouded with clouds.

To the northwest were the Trinity Alps, obscured by the late afternoon glare.

I still wanted to climb Paradise Peak and even Shoemaker Bally while I had daylight. I hurriedly drove back down the road.

I could have driven almost all the way to the top of Paradise Peak by approaching from the north, but I didn’t research this peak at all. Instead I approached from the west. I realized my error during my walk, but whatever, I was there to hike anyways. I noted a building on my way, which spooked me out a little. I was concerned that I was unknowingly trespassing, but after some post hike research, I think this is nothing more than a storage building for the lookout. I hiked up a short but steep and sandy trail to the summit where I found a structure and several rocky pinnacles.

I climbed one that was class 3, but was discouraged to find an even higher rock that looked rather technical. I walked to the base and knew immediately that I wouldn’t be able to climb it.

It reminded me of the summit block on Thunderbolt Peak, except with less holds. I think at minimum it is 5.10a. I was a little pissed off because several people have logged successful summits of the peak, but I know for a fact that they didn’t climb it. Now I have to come back with a lasso.

Strike 1. Defeated, I sulked back towards the car. I turned on the radio and listened to the Warriors vs Grizzlies basketball game. They were playing for the 8th seed and the final spot in the NBA playoffs. This was a nice distraction as I drove down the lonely forest roads alone. I felt I could still partially salvage the day with a summit of Shoemaker Bally. I reached the turnoff which climbs up to the saddle just north of the peak, but found the gate closed. This was also the road which led to our planned starting point for the next day’s hike. I considered running up the dirt road, but doing so would add an extra three miles and a thousand feet of gain. I simply didn’t have enough time that evening for a lengthened approach of Shoemaker Bally. In addition, the following day’s effort would now be significantly harder. Strike 2. I decided to sleep in my car at a big flat area next to the gate. Daryn showed up while I was cooking dinner. and listening to the end of the game. It was back and forth, but the Warriors collapsed in the last minute, losing both the game and their chance at the playoffs. Strike 3.

I woke up the next morning ready to bounce back. The day’s itinerary was to climb Little Bally, Ducket Peak and South Fork Mountain. If I had enough “juice”, I hoped to tack on Shoemaker Bally at the end of the day to recoup from my previous day’s loss. I had originally planned on starting from the saddle north of Shoemaker Bally, but the road closure would add mileage and elevation gain to an already difficult day. My brain raced around and after studying the map for a bit, I noticed a road leading towards the general direction of Little Bally from Coggins Park. This route option was out of the question before due to extremely thick brush, but with the Carr Fire of 2018 burning most of the area, I hoped to find a way through. We found another closed gate at Coggins Park, but figured starting here would be good enough.

Even if the gate was open, we would not have been able to drive much further since a small creek washed out the road. The road was very gradual and we followed it for 1.5 miles. Staying on the road would eventually take us up Shasta Bally, so we took an unmarked spur road underneath the northern face of Peak 5493. I had expected to run into the impenetrable brush by this point, but much to my delight, the Carr Fire had cleared out most of it. The road petered out, but it was no longer needed, and we strode east towards the ridgeline above.

Daryn passed the time working on his limerick that incorporated the word Ducket. I swear he could pass for a poet. Shasta Bally was an impressive sight to our north.

Once atop the ridge, South Fork Mountain, Little Bally and Ducket Peak came into view. Climbing all three would be a challenge.

Off to the northwest stood the Trinity Alps.

We continued along the top of the ridge. There were several reference markers along the ridge marking the boundary of Whiskeytown National Recreation Area.

- Shasta Bally

The Carr fire burned a shocking 97% of the entire Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, and all the nasty bushwhacking that previous parties had reported was eliminated. Our three peaks of interest stood ahead of us; first we would climb Ducket Peak on the right, then we would climb South Fork Mountain on the left, and lastly we would climb Little Bally in the middle. With any bit of luck, we could avoid climbing over Little Bally multiple times by sidehilling along its barren flanks.

As we continued along the ridge towards Little Bally, it began to snow. I actually welcomed this, recognizing that I probably wouldn’t find any water throughout the day. The colder the better.

I looked back at Shoemaker Bally and Bully Choop.

- Colorado Four O'clock

- Rainbow Iris

What ensued was an unavoidable one thousand foot drop to the saddle just west of Little Bally. The temperature at the saddle was noticeably warmer. Here stood a small patch of pines that survived the fire. Pine needles covered the already soft sandy ground. This was likely to be the most pleasant area of the hike, but we were looking to climb peaks, not find shelter. We continued along the ridge up the western slope of Little Bally through gaps in the brush which were plentiful and easy to find.

- Shoemaker Bally

The climb went quicker than I expected. There was a false summit in front of us which I was able to sidehill beneath. I’m not sure if this saved any physical effort, but mentally it might have helped me. I looked at Ducket Peak as I approached the saddle between the false summit and the true summit. It looked incredibly clear and pretty straightforward to angle directly towards this peak, so we decided to climb Ducket Peak first.

We took a rest under some shade at the mini saddle. I stashed some water here, knowing I would need some reserves for my return.

We then began our traverse towards Ducket Peak.

Travel was again easier than I expected. I led the way here, finding a route that ran parallel to the contour lines on my topo map. I maintained my elevation across the open swaths along the mountainside, and when my progress became interrupted by new growth, I allowed myself to drop down slightly in elevation to avoid the obstacles. This effective strategy was made easier by the soft sand underneath our feet, and we progressed around the mountain quickly. Once on the southeast side of the peak, we dropped down quickly to the ridgeline leading towards Ducket Peak below.

- One-seeded Pussypaws

I believe we crossed into private property at some point, however I did not see any signage indicating as such. I assume that the area was part of a logging interest, but after the big fire, not many trees remain. We connected with an old road once on the ridge. It hadn’t been driven in years, which eased my concerns. I didn’t want to get turned back by a landowner after all the hiking we had just done. We crossed an intersection with a very nicely graded road that appeared heavily used. The peak was close, but if we were to see anyone, this would be the place.

We crossed the road unperturbed, then continued along the ridgeline. The last section was very steep and sandy. We found a forested summit area. There were two summit contenders. We had to break some branches to sit atop the first rock, but this was the least interesting of the two.

We turned our focus to the boulder problem a few meters away. I studied it quickly, but the best I could think of was to stand on a friction slab then heave my body awkwardly up on top. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. I found Bob’s register underneath a cairn on top then I simply jumped off. It was a bit high, but there was a soft cushion of pine needles underneath my feet. Then I watched Daryn solve the boulder problem.

I would rate it at V0.

Daryn was able to get up alright, but he had troubled getting off. While I had the advantage of young knees, Daryn needed to be more cautious. I stood with my back facing the rock while Daryn placed his feet on my shoulders. I then lowered down into a squat until we both collapsed onto the ground. Success! We ate lunch and found a benchmark located on a lower rock nearby.

After all that work, we had summited only our first peak, but it was probably the hardest of them all. We backtracked along the ridge towards Little Bally, but our next objective was South Fork Mountain.

Rather than climb up and over Little Bally, we sidehilled underneath Little Bally diagonally towards the saddle between Little Bally and South Fork Mountain. This was unpleasant, but short lived.

We crossed too high in the drainage to get any water from Eagle Creek. Once atop the ridge we had easier terrain as we made our way east towards South Fork Mountain. We found a random bear box on the way. We guessed that this was placed for the fire crews since it looked somewhat new.

My other theory was that there once was a trail along this ridge, and the bear box was placed for recreational purposes. There were a few sections along the ridge that looked like an old trail. While no trail is marked here on the topo map, there is an old road on the east side of South Fork Mountain, so to me it seems plausible that one existed at some point. Below us to our north was Whiskeytown Lake.

The ridge dragged on and on and on. There were more ups and downs than I had expected, as these minor bumps were not significant enough to be represented on the topo map. I started to tire, but all things come to an end.

We were thankful to finally reach the summit. To the southwest was Ducket Peak.

To the west were Bully Choop and Little Bally.

To the northwest was Shasta Bally.

To the north was Whiskeytown Lake.

To the east was Sacramento Valley. On a clearer day Mt Lassen would be visible.

We couldn’t find the register at first. I looked around the bushes underneath the summit rock and found it wide open. The pencil was missing but the book was still in tact. Perhaps some rodents had gotten to it. The register container had rusted so we decided to replace it. We added a new pencil and signed ourselves in.

We were as far out as we would be that day, so all we needed to do was head back. I am thankful for the burn because without it, I don’t know if our trip would have been possible. The area kind of reminded me of Ventana Wilderness.

We continued west along the ridge, passing a little garter snake on the way. This time we actually climbed Little Bally, which was the highest of the three named peaks. To the east was South Fork Mountain.

To the northwest was Shasta Bally.

We didn’t spend much time on the summit of Little Bally since we still had a lot of hiking ahead of us. I picked up my water stash and replenished myself. We then dropped back into the deep saddle to our west. I found a bird nest on the ground.

The climb back out of the saddle was a slog, but we were prepared for it. Daryn and I both wanted to climb Peak 5493 as a bonus peak. We skipped this on the way in, and it would only be a short detour to reach it. We continued along the ridge to the high point of our hike, struggling through a short section of manzanita on the way. Looking back to the east were South Fork Mountain, Little Bally and Ducket Peak.

To the north was Shasta Bally.

To the southwest were Shoemaker Bally and Bully Choop. Daryn had already climbed Shoemaker Bally, but I still needed it and I really wanted to get it today, however I was pretty tired. Continuing along the ridgeline looked tough, so I decided to bail with Daryn and head back to the car.

We continued along the ridgeline towards Shoemaker Bally for another half mile, and then we dropped down back to the old road which we used on our approach. Once back on the road, it was an easy walk to the car. I figured that I need to come back for Paradise Peak anyways, so I would be able to combine that with Shoemaker Bally. In the end, it was an 18.5 mile day, and getting Ducket Peak was my main goal, so I was satisfied. I drove back home that night excited to spend the following day with my family.

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aion-rsa · 5 years ago

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Ready Player Two: The Sequel’s Best Easter Eggs & References

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This piece contains spoilers for Ready Player Two.

When Ernest Cline published Ready Player One in 2011, its exhaustive array of Easter eggs were literally built into the worldbuilding—seemingly one pop culture name-drop per pixel that made up the digital OASIS, per the fierce 1980s nostalgia that creator James Donovan Halliday possessed for the most formative decade of his adolescence. And once the billionaire inventor revealed the Easter egg hunt for his fortune, it made perfect sense that the 2040s generation of gunters would immerse themselves in the same references, placing themselves into Halliday’s mindset to inherit his treasure.

Almost a decade later, those ’80s references are more exhausting in Ready Player Two—like when Wade rattles off his vintage morning routine basically cosplaying as Marty McFly, down to getting woken up by Huey Lewis and the News’ “Back in Time” via a Panasonic RC-6015 flip-clock radio. Whereas the Wade of Ready Player One enthusiastically logged onto the OASIS by quoting The Last Starfighter, the sequel’s gunter-turned-billionaire seems burnt out. He takes no joy in playing at a fictional character’s life instead of trying to improve his own.

Similarly, if Twitter reactions are any indication, readers of Ready Player Two are already finding the dense ’80s shout-outs to be more white noise than fun tidbits to be caught and noticed. It’s the same trick, but it loses its efficacy once you’ve seen behind the curtain.

That said, there are a handful of Easter eggs that break through the static. Because what’s the best way to make two familiar things new again? You mash them up.

Seven Shards for the Siren’s Soul

In some ways, it feels as if the sequel is retreading familiar ground, not quite copying Ready Player One’s Easter egg hunt but certainly building a seven-part quest around solving pop culture riddles. What somewhat redeems the narrative choice is a slightly different take on Easter eggs: not an exhaustive ’80s Wikipedia entry, but the personal Easter eggs of one woman’s life.

That woman is Kira Underwood, wife of OASIS co-founder Ogden Morrow, but also the unrequited love of James Donovan Halliday. As young adults, their Dungeons & Dragons campaigns eventually transformed into the creation of Gregarious Games and, ultimately, Gregarious Simulation Systems and the OASIS. But when Kira died young, both men mourned her… but only one tried to bring her back.

This time around, the prize is not Halliday’s fortune, but Kira’s “soul”—or, at least, a digital copy of her consciousness that Halliday copied without her knowledge or permission. Each Shard references a key point in Kira’s life, plenty of which overlap with Halliday’s ’80s obsession, as Kira met the two boys in 1988—in the middle of playing Sega Ninja, in fact. That’s the trial for the Second Shard, but later Shards relate to properties dear to Kira, which makes gunters like Parzival initially disregard treasured texts like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion or the rich discography of a certain iconic purple-themed musician.

And as the Shard search goes on, the clues become more and more specific to Kira’s life, including the learning-is-fun planet that she and Og created together (Halcydonia) to bring free educational games to underserved children when they were unable to have biological children of their own; and Leucosia, her D&D character-turned-AI-persona. Each Shard also includes a “toll,” or a memory that Z must experience as Kira, to better understand how she was a vital person on her own, beyond these two men’s love for her.

While the Seven Shards won’t be immortalized in the best-of lists of fantasy quests, it’s a clear effort to reinterpret the notion of Easter eggs to be more than just however many pop culture references one person can hold over another. They can also be the personal artifacts that others are encouraged to excavate, and experience the world through another set of eyes.

Planet Shermer

Recast the foul, restore his ending. Andie’s first fate still needs mending.

The Third Shard’s riddle sends Z and Art3mis to Shermer, a planet named after the fictional Illinois town in which John Hughes set the majority of his movies. Inspired by his hometown of Northbrook (which was previously called Shermerville), Shermer was a composite of different aspects of suburbia from both sides of the tracks and everything in-between. A 2010 Vanity Fair article related how in Hughes’ mind, Sixteen Candles’ Samantha (Molly Ringwald) was a “passing acquaintance” of Ferris Bueller’s eponymous hero (Matthew Broderick), and The Breakfast Club’s Bender (Judd Nelson) grew up near Planes, Trains, & Automobiles’ Del Griffith (John Candy).

The OASIS’ Shermer follows Hughes’ thinking, by throwing his iconic teenage characters into a planet-sized Breakfast Club of sorts, with them all attending the same Shermer High School; Z notes that depending on which direction you approach the school, its facade resembles all three aforementioned teen films. That’s amusing enough, but then you remember that actors like Ringwald and Michael Anthony Hall collaborated with Hughes in a number of films—which means all of their alter egos are going to homeroom or the cafeteria together.

This portion of the book is rather delightful in how nonchalantly it plays out every fan’s crossover dreams and how it engages with parallel-universe casting decisions. For instance, Parzival notices Keith Nelson and Amanda Jones (Eric Stoltz and Lea Thompson) from Some Kind of Wonderful, only to realize that that couple is technically the original Marty McFly and his mother. And when it comes to deducing the Shard’s clue, superfan Samantha deduces that they must recast Duckie (the “fowl”) from Pretty in Pink, replacing Jon Cryer with a Weird Science-era Robert Downey, Jr., who had originally been up for the part. (You can already imagine the digital de-aging fun in the inevitable Ready Player Two movie.)

But while their goal is to get RDJ-Duckie and Andie dancing at prom, what’s most important is visiting Hughes himself in his home office to obtain his original Pretty in Pink ending. Perhaps the best Easter egg embedded in this mashup world is that when Art3mis and Z go to the Hughes’ home, they encounter his wife, Nancy Hughes. “I’ve never seen her here before!” Art3mis, who has played through this world’s rhythms countless times before, excitedly tells Parzival. “I didn’t know you even could!” It’s a nice parallel to Wade’s realization that Kira is more than just the wife or love interest, that she and Nancy Hughes are worth squeeing over all on their own.

L0hengrin’s Genderbending Avatar

As Wade relates, Parzival looks almost like him, just a bit thinner, taller, more muscular, and less afflicted by acne. His avatar is an idealized version of himself, as is the case for Samantha with Art3mis—though in Ready Player Two, she has incorporated her IRL facial birthmark into her digital persona, while Wade still sticks with his dream-self. They might also dress as pop culture characters, like Art3mis in her Molly Millions (from William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic) phase, yet it only goes so far as typical cosplay.

But in the sequel, Parzival meets YouTuber and gunter L0hengrin, who he identifies as a fan by name alone; in Arthurian legend, Lohengrin was Parzival’s son. When they meet in the OASIS, however, Parzival is struck by Lo’s avatar: She primarily takes the form of pixie-haired teen Helen Slater in The Legend of Billie Jean, but she’s also known for shifting into floppy-haired James Spader in Tuff Turf. While Lo, a trans woman, is not the first OASIS user to find herself in a nostalgic movie avatar, the fluidity of her gender presentation speaks to a deeper identification with various iconic figures depending on her gender in that moment. It also opens up the possibility of other genderqueer or nonbinary users finding their own unique representation via ’80s figures—after all, there are infinite personas to choose from.

The Afterworld

Another mashup world that Parzival, Aech, and Shoto visit on their quest for the Shards is a planet-sized shrine to Prince. And while its name is technically the unpronounceable Love Symbol, those in the know call it the Afterworld. Under ominous skies of “Purple Rain” they drive a “Little Red Corvette” to raid Paisley Park not for weapons, but for musical artifacts with which to challenge the Purple One(s).

Basically, the three gunters have to reenact Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, doing musical battle with seven iterations of Prince as the Evil Exes: Purple Rain Prince, Cloud Suit Prince, Gett Off Prince, Batdance Prince, Microphone Prince, Third Eye Prince, and Mesh-Mask Prince. Not to mention their henchmen, in the form of several past bands and collaborators.

All things considered, the battle goes pretty quickly, especially since Aech is a super-fan coaching Parzival through how to wield the Cloud Guitar, and they have their own backup in the form of Prince’s old band Morris Day and the Time (a.k.a. The Original 7ven). There is a reason that Scott fights seven separate battles, each with its own arc and stakes. It ratchets up the tension in each fight and hints at Scott possibly failing, instead of seeming more like a means to an end, as is the case with Ready Player Two’s big jam session.

This one might be a tad more controversial for readers, depending on how sacred one holds Prince, but I would argue that inspiring a reaction—positive or negative—still counts as an Easter egg that works.

Needle Drops

Both Shermer and the Afterworld include dozens of music cues that can be triggered by passing over a certain spot or into a key moment out of pop culture history, though the needle drops are a consistent Easter egg throughout Ready Player Two. These “soundtrack landmines,” as Z calls them, set the scene, striding into Shermer High School to Killing Joke’s “Eighties”; or add gravitas to a moment, like when Parzival stares at Art3mis, realizing he’s still in love with her, and Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” begins playing.

For the most part, these cues belong to everyone: They’re planted in the same spaces for any user to trigger, regardless of whether or not they’ve ever actually sung or danced to these moments in John Hughes movies. Yet little Easter eggs like the Boston needle drop—which can only be triggered by one avatar staring at another for five seconds, while the ONI records an increase in heart rate—feel like personalized love letters to two lovebirds, caught in a special moment unique to just them. That’s exactly what you want an Easter egg to do.

Ready Player Two is available now from Ballantine Books. Let us know the Easter eggs that worked for you in the comments below…

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gffa · 8 years ago

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This week I decided to do something a little different–video recs instead of fic recs! Which will return next week, but today I wanted to cry over STAR WARS videos for awhile and, sure, there’s some absolutely hilarious vids or really exciting, awesome vids, too! But there’s also a bunch of them that totally put tears in my eyes because why are you like this, Star Wars? Long post under the cut! (Categories: Humor, The Sads, Shipper, Meta, Awesome, Serious Fanvids) (Last updated: 2017.06.28) STAR WARS - HUMOR VIDS:

✦ Fuck This Shit, sequel trilogy I thought, okay, I’m going to rewatch this one to write a quick rec, I’m not going to laugh this time. I STILL BURST OUT LAUGHING, even knowing it was coming. ✦ Firework, sequel trilogy/cast I laugh every single time I watch this video, this is it, this is me as a Star Wars fan. It’s one of those that takes a serious moment and puts a fun song over it and the result is magic. ✦ Turn Down For What, prequel trilogy I will rewatch Satine’s epic speech with dramatic background music every time. ✦ Palpatine Shooting Stars + Shooting Star, prequel trilogy, original trilogy, sequel trilogy I love this song more and more every time I see these videos, they’re hilarious. It’s kind of the epitome of meme culture but goddamn if it doesn’t make me genuinely laugh. ✦ BLOCKED, prequel trilogy Never has this been so accurate.

✦ Fireball, prequel trilgy The only video to successfully make me not have the sads while watching the ROTS duel. It’s also amazingly well edited and just incredibly fun. ✦ Real Housewives of Vine, prequel trilogy All three versions are beautiful. ✦ Imperial March Replacement: One and Two, original trilogy The Imperial March replaced with various songs and it gets funnier with every one of these I see. “Hello Bitches” is a personal favorite, it works so much better than it possibly should. ✦ Rogue One Hallway Scene Replacement: One, Two, Three, Four, and Five, Not mentioning which songs are on which vid because sometimes the surprise is half the fun. But they are ALL HILARIOUS. ✦ If Chewbacca Had a Human Voice, original trilogy IT FITS SO WELL BUT ALSO I LAUGHED REALLY HARD. ✦ We’re Number One, prequel trilogy Vader’s path to the side of evil! It’s hilarious every time I watch it, but also, MAN, THAT SONG IS CATCHY. ✦ I Gotta Go My Own Way, prequel trilogy ….but that pretty much is exactly what happened. ✦ I have no idea what I’m doing- , prequel trilogy A collection of short videos (5 to 20 seconds at most), some music vids, some lip synching, all hilarious. The Parks and Rec one at the beginning gets me every time, it’s too accurate. ✦ Star Wars/Parks and Rec, original trilogy Luke and Leia replaced by Jean-Ralphio and Mona Lisa from Parks and Rec and it’s AMAZING. ✦ My Heart Will Go On, prequel trilogy The music in the Mustafar duel ending replaced with My Heart Will Go On. I still want to cry, but at least I’m laughing while I’m crying. ✦ How It Should Have Ended: The Phantom Menace / Attack of the Clones / Revenge of the Sith, prequel trilogy Sometimes HISHE videos have to ignore the plot reasons certain things happen, so you do have to roll with that instead of wanting to point out the logic of what happened in canon, but I shut that part of my brain off and found that I really enjoyed each of these, that by the halfway point they’d picked up steam and I laughed out loud at least once per video. They do have a great sense of humor and it’s not mean-spirited at all, I had a great time with these. (Qui-Gon’s funeral had me in stitches.) STAR WARS - THE SADS VIDS: ✦ Obi-Wan Remembers The Truth, prequel trilogy/original trilogy [Also on YouTube] This is, bar none, my favorite video in this genre. Obi-Wan’s conversation with Luke in ANH, with that sad music, interspersed with clips from the prequels. It’s gorgeous and utterly wrecks me every time. ✦ Ain’t No Grave, prequel trilogy Beautifully edited and sad and haunting. The use of clips interspersed with the heavy song really has a good impact. ✦ Control, prequel trilogy Another beautifully edited fanvid that has heavy, sad themes about Anakin Skywalker. Like, it’s just pure pain in a really lovely way. ✦ Krwlng, prequel trilogy And like I wasn’t sad enough about Anakin Skywalker, NOW HAVE SOME MORE SAD FEELINGS, with more really beautiful editing. ✦ Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith - Modern Trailer, prequel trilogy This is a really excellent remixed trailer that looks fantastic and would hold up today even! It got across so much of the emotion of what happened, there was a real weight and impact to it, and it was beautifully edited. There’s also modern trailers for The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, but my favorite is the ROTS one. ✦ Bad Blood, prequel trilogy I really love the editing of this one, the colors and effects look really gorgeous and the clips are chosen well, but also OH SHIT SO MANY FEELINGS, it’s really, really well done. ✦ See You Again, obi-wan & anakin I got a little teary-eyed by the end of this one, it did a wonderful job at showing the sheer scope of their relationship, it really made me feel the weight of just how long they waited to see each other again. By the time the OT stuff started showing up in the vid, I was just laying on my bed in a pool of feelings. ✦ The Chosen One, prequel trilogy, anakin Combined with the sads from the previous video, this one had me actually wiping tears from the corner of my eyes because I love Anakin Skywalker as a character so much, he inspires so many feelings in me, and this beautifully edited video that shows the tragedy of his entire life, from young child to his death, really, really well. One of my favorites of my vid trawling. ✦ When the violence causes silence , prequel trilogy, anakin Another sad Anakin vid with some very nicely chosen clips and editing, that combine to really make me feel the tragedy of his character, how unstable and angry he was, how sad I am for his character. /has feelings again ✦ 7 years, prequel trilogy, anakin I’m on a roll with Sadakin vids apparently and this one made me feel so many feelings all over again, for the sheer scope of sadness that is Anakin’s life. There’s especially some great use of TPM Anakin, too. ;__; ✦ Fight Inside, prequel trilogy, anakin I’m not usually a fan of songs in this vein, but I thought this video did really well with it, how much of a storm Anakin’s entire character was and the clips/song reflected that. ✦ You’re the Chosen One ; I’m a Jedi like my father before me, Prequels footage plus original trilogy footage, to show the connections and parallels and story of Anakin and Luke, very nicely done and gave me a whole lot of feelings while it was at it. ✦ Before The Dark Times, prequel trilogy, original trilogy Another video where prequels footage is interspersed with Obi-Wan’s conversations with Luke about the past and it gave me so many sad feelings exactly as it was supposed to. ✦ The animal he has become, prequel trilogy, original trilogy This video is all about how out of control of himself Anakin is (and Vader as well, to a degree), that he’s helpless against the tide of his own fall, and he’s a raging storm of feelings as it all comes crashing down. ✦ Hurt, prequel trilogy, original trilogy A Vader vid set to Johnny Cash’s Hurt is entirely appropriate, there are some really great clip choices that gave me feelings, and made me sad for Anakin Skywalker all over again. Everything I could have asked for from this vid! ✦ Shout, prequel trilogy, original trilogy, rogue one Another Vader video that’s half montage and half music vid, yet all feelings, as it shows the journey of his life, the things that have come back around again, and how much tragedy there is for everyone here. The ending of the vid is especially well done as it reaches the climax and there’s just so much here to these characters. ✦ Brothers, prequel trilogy, original trilogy A beautifully edited video summary of Obi-Wan and Anakin, starting with Old Ben’s conversation with Luke to flashing back to the past, to their fight on Mustafar and the sheer amount of tragedy between two people who loved each other. Ugh, feelings. STAR WARS - SHIPPER VIDS: ✦ I FOUND LOVE, obi-wan/anakin fantasy au Plus bonus graphic! I would watch this movie and it would be beautiful. ✦ take your time, obi-wan/anakin, modern au Modern AU vids for something like Star Wars can be tricky, but I really liked this one, it’s another movie I would totally watch. ✦ They’re a team. They’re the team. , obi-wan & anakin Okay, maybe not precisely shippy, but definitely about the sheer weight of shit they’ve gone through together and it’s gorgeous, I had so many feelings over this. Perfect choice of song, it even works great as an action vid, and I’d have watched an hour of this, for real. ✦ t o x i c, obi-wan/anakin The song is a slower version of the one you’re thinking of and this was a nice shipper vid set to it! ✦ beautiful crime, obi-wan/anakin I’m a sucker for sad vids about these two and the way this one looks is really beautiful. ✦ Tessellate, obi-wan & anakin Another really beautifully edited video with a collection of clips that will break your heart all over again. ✦ a thing that swallows you, sith!obi-wan/anakin Holy hell, this video had some great moments and really captured the feeling of Sith!Obi-Wan seducing Anakin, like I could watch this and believe he was absolutely going to take that young man to bed and fuck him senseless. It was a really solidly good vid and appealed to my id like whoa. ✦ the devil within, dark!obi-wan&anakin This one strides the line between Obi-Wan&Anakin vs Obikin, but it works either way, and it’s a nicely edited video about the sheer depth of how deeply they get under each others’ skin, how intertwined they are, and the heavy weight of that. ✦ bang bang, obi-wan/anakin Okay, this one was just fun! “You need a good boy to blow your mind.” indeed. ✦ Brothers (Carry Me), obi-wan & anakin Not precisely a shipper vid, but it’s all about their friendship and the tragic weight of it and it had some really solid editing and pacing to go along with it. STAR WARS - META VIDS: ✦ How the prequel trilogy mirrored and rhymed the original, original trilogy/prequel trilogy This is an absolutely beautiful video that shows the mirroring themes and the sheer amount of thought and care that went into them. ✦ Star Wars Limbs Removed, original trilogy/prequel trilogy Who’s removed the most limbs via lightsaber in the course of Star Wars? It’s exactly who you think it is. I laugh like a maniac every time the buzzer sounds, too. ✦ Everything Great About Star Wars, prequel trilogy/rogue one/sequel trilogy [The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, Rogue One, The Force Awakens] I don’t 100% agree with everything here, but the sheer amount of enthusiasm for the movies is incredibly infectious, it’s so great to see something that’s just absolutely having fun and pointing out awesomethings. STAR WARS - AWESOME VIDS: ✦ Guardians of the Galaxy Style: Prequel Trilogy / Rogue One / Original Trilogy / The Clone Wars, prequel trilogy/rogue one The Rogue One version is super fun and very well edited, and the Clone Wars one is amazing fun and reminds me of why I love it so much, it’s the perfect kind of trailer that showcases how great the show really can be. But, holy shit, the prequel one is the best, the comedic timing is fantastic, it has a great sense of humor, it picked great choices, the character intros are amazing, and I cackled right out loud at least twice! Super, super fun remixed trailers! ✦ star wars - timelines, prequel trilogy/original trilogy/sequel trilogy A really beautiful editing job to show visual echoes and reflections in all three trilogies! ✦ “The Big Bang” animated scene, prequel trilogy This is a brief fan animated clip (only seven seconds) but it’s pure joy as Obi-Wan is so annoyed and the conversation looks super neat animated! ✦ Rogue One spliced with A New Hope, rogue one & original trilogy This is a really awesome look at smoothing the transition between the two movies, I loved it! ✦ Eye of the Tiger, prequels trilogy & original trilogy This is an older video, so it’s not quite as polished or bright as some newer ones, but it was sheer fun and had a great selection of clips and a good pace to it, so I had a good time watching the entire thing! ✦ OBI-WAN, prequel trilogy, original trilogy A very nicely edited Obi-Wan Kenobi fan trailer that, as always, gave me a lot of feelings about just how much Obi-Wan has been through, the sheer scope of his life. STAR WARS - SERIOUS VIDS: ✦ Straight to Hell, I’m not usually into b&w vids, but this one has some really pretty splashes of color and the editing was really good, so I wound up enjoying it a lot! ✦ heaven, prequels trilogy, sequel trilogy A short (less than a minute, sadly) but beautifully edited video paralleling Anakin and Kylo, with some really vibrant colors and excellently chosen clips. It’s a gorgeous watch. ✦ Star Wars: The Last Sith - Darth Vader Trailer (Fan Trailer), prequels trilogy, original trilogy A fan-made trailer for a theoretical Darth Vader movie, using footage from various sources to show the scope and story of Vader, it’s a really cool video!

#obi wan kenobi #anakin skywalker #padme amidala #obikin #luke skywalker #fic recs #star wars fic recs #(well i want to be able to find them on those tags shhh)#vid recs #star wars vid recs

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ourmrsreynolds · 6 years ago

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stuff i read November 2019

Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance (2014) (Stormlight Archive #2) “I don’t want my life to change because I’ve become a lighteyes … I want the lives of people like me—like I am now—to change.” Kaladin Stormblessed, ACTUAL LOVE OF MY LIFE. Contrast: Dalinar whose “well you just have to be twice as good by distinguishing yourself in the position I gave you, that’s how you change the world” rhetoric makes my skin crawl. Nah it ain’t fam. Dalinar may be be a good person who has never personally mistreated a darkeyes, but that’s beside the point. He still benefits from a highly unequal, unjust arrangement that places him at the tippy top of the social, economic & political pyramid. And the parshmen at the bottom. If the next book isn’t 100% about Parshmen Rights I'm outta here. this book—well there were moments i was on my feet cheering, like that four-on-one-duel where Kaladin is the only one with the cojones to jump into the ring, and Adolin’s “bridgeboy” goes from a term of disparagement to a term of endearment. When we found out the Shardbearer whom Kaladin killed in Amaram’s service was Shallan’s brother that was WELL-PLAYED SIR that punch really landed. Renarin turning out to be a Radiant is a pretty harsh indictment of the overvaluation of martial prowess, and I liked that too, but on the whole I didn’t like this book as much as Book 1 because I wanted MOAR KALADIN.

Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire (2019) “Nothing empire touches remains itself.” They say that science fiction is psychology and fantasy is sociology. If that’s true (and I don’t remember where I heard it) this book bucks that trend because it’s all in for both sci-fi (it’s a space opera!) and sociology. It’s been getting a lot of well-deserved buzz and I really enjoyed it. I do think it’s fair to point out it’s a story centered on whip-smart highly-educated bureaucrats and the imperial court they orbit; that the perspective of “ordinary” people is missing, and you feel the lack because in the course of the book there’s a revolution/coup?? But I mean, if you think about the Roman Empire (the author is a Byzantine scholar) the kinds of “barbarians” it attracted were always from the better-off stratum of “barbarian” society. I guess the chimney sweeps wouldn’t have been reading Catullus. Nothing empire touches remains itself.

Robert Galbraith, Lethal White (2018) (Cormoran Strike Mysteries #4) The unresolved tension between the leads is A+ 10/10 but I feel like the actual mystery plot is not resolved as elegantly as I expected from JK Rowling? She’s like, the queen of tight plotting and I didn’t think she’d just round up 7 suspects only to let 6 of them off the hook with an apologetic shrug of “whoops that was a red herring.” There’s a metric shitton of gratuitous bashing of socialists & other lefties, which didn’t even faze me. What bothered me was the novel’s unevenness. The portion of it that was dedicated to character work was phenomenal. Rowling’s always had a gift for invoking petty and/or aggrieved secondary characters and she absolutely nailed it here, plus the main characters experience extraordinary personal growth while still bearing the scars of their traumas. Yet tbh Chamber of Secrets is a better mystery novel and I say this as someone who ranks Chamber of Secrets dead last on my personal “HP books, ranked” listicle.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the body, and primitive accumulation (2004) Pluses of academic writing: you get to raid the ENDNOTES and BIBLIOGRAPHY for more texts devoted to your topic of interest. Minuses of academic writing: dense as hell, puts you to sleep. Praise be to Silvia Federici whose arguments are uncommonly lucid and contain almost no bloat, though the sections covering the New World are definitely weaker than the European sections, which is where Federici’s speciality lies. She argues that the witch hunts of the late Middle Ages were a political project, a campaign of terror designed to decimate the power of peasant women, sever them from their communities, and subjugate their reproductive capacities to doing USEFUL stuff like accumulating surplus for capitalists. The parallel between the enclosure of public commons and the enclosure of women’s bodies & labor power—all done with an eye towards private profit—is one that will haunt me for the rest of my life. What an absolutely staggering work of scholarship. So glad I sprung for the physical copy so I could annotate copiously.

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1848) It’s been 20 years and I’m still salty about Jo/Laurie. This is the first time I’ve actually reread it cover-to-cover instead of just reimbibing the shippiest bits and I gotta say, props to Louisa May Alcott who is a much better writer than I recalled. Her treatment of the process and the craft of writing is also right on; the 1994 movie by contrast just has Jo climb up into the garret and don her writing hat and hey presto, a manuscript. What I’d forgotten was Alcott’s mastery of tone to skewer a character—I don’t wanna say she rivals Jane Austen in this department but she comes close. I had also forgotten how much of Part I in particular is just Jo repressing her desire to marry Beth and cart her off to a lesbian utopia bursting with grand pianos. My girl is dead set against any of her sisters marrying, insists she’ll man up herself in order to keep the family intact, and if you only read Part I you may well conclude she’s not wrong. Part II is painful because it’s where Alcott sinks my ship. Hate to say I can see why she does it?? It’s because Amy and Laurie have the most to learn from each other, and Alcott is all about GROWING and LEARNING as a person. You know what, the text doesn’t belong to Alcott. The text belongs to all of us, and I will proclaim Death of the Author from the rooftops. Jo and Laurie love each other without labels, they’re not “romantic” or “platonic,” they set no limits on that love.

Cat Sebastian, The Lawrence Browne Affair (2017) (Turner Series #2) You know why this mlm Regency was absolutely DELIGHTFUL? Because it’s literally kidfic. They bond over the kid, that’s the story. It’s not the whole story, I just mean the arrival of the kid kicks the plot into high gear, even if there isn’t undue focus on the kid as a character in his own right. God this book is so relatable: They both have the worst case of imposter syndrome. “Neither of us is normal but have we ever thought to question whether fitting in is good, or normality is desirable?” It’s that trope where “I’ve insinuated myself into your life under false pretenses and now I’ve gone and fallen in love with you, how do I make a clean breast of it,” meanwhile your romantic interest knows FULL WELL you’re a con artist and it doesn’t lessen their attachment in the slightest. Also relatable: Lawrence likes being alone, clings to routine because unscripted social interactions give him anxiety.

Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom (2004) (Saxon Stories #1) I marathoned all three seasons of the BBC/Netflix adaptation earlier this year and I gotta say, lead actor Alexander Dreymon and his combination of martial arts background and tenderness 100% makes the character. Whoever does the score for the show also knocked it out of the park. In comparison, the book falls flat. Uhtred comes off as merely bratty rather than deeply conflicted in his loyalties, which could be a function of his extreme youth—he’s 18 I think at the end of this installment. The Danish vs Saxon identity contest is less prominent here; he pretty much accepts he’s a Saxon. @Bernard Cornwell your English ass is showing. There isn’t a real tight three-act structure, the plot just sort of meanders along from one battle to another (which is a hallmark of Cornwell’s writing, and never bothered me in his Grail Quest trilogy which are some of my favorite books of all time, so idk why it seems like weak sauce here) . One thing that remains constant is that Uhtred becomes irrational when threatened with the loss of things or people he considers MINE. Uhtred: sees a random dog paddling along in the middle of a storm. Uhtred: IS THAT RAGNAR’S DOG. Lmao.

Brandon Sanderson Oathbringer (2017) (Stormlight Archive #3) I opened this book with some trepidation because it is Dalinar’s book, the way Book 1 was Kaladin’s book and Book 2 was Shallan’s. I mean, all the flashbacks belong to Dalinar. You can tell Brandon Sanderson built this world around Dalinar, that Dalinar is more foundational to this ‘verse than any other character. And I gotta hand it to him, when I put the book down there were actual tears in my eyes: “The ancient code of the Knights Radiant says ‘journey before destination.’ But if we stop, if we accept the person we are when we fall, he journey ends. That failure becomes our destination. To love to journey is to accept no such end. I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next one.” I think about when Kaladin took the first oath way back in Book 1, when we first heard “journey before destination,” and I say BRAVO SIR BRAVO. I think about how Gavilar’s assassination is this primordial scene we keep circling back to; with each new book we return to the scene of the crime with a different POV and we keep peeling back the layers and upending everything we thought we knew. Other things I am here for: Shallan referring to Kaladin internally as Brightlord Brooding Eyes (I’m still recovering from how Sanderson sank my Kaladin/Shallan ship). Kaladin running into his archnemesis & ex-bully and all he can think is “Adolin would never be caught dead in a coat three seasons out of date” lmao Kaladin x Adolin brOTP of the century. Ok but remember how I said while I was reading Book 2 “I hope Book 3 is 100% Rights for Parshmen”??? Well I called it didn’t I. Turns out humankind are the invaders—they literally rolled up from another planet which they had accidentally destroyed, they came as refugees and they proceeded to…enslave the indigenous parshmen. What. The fuck. Brandon Sanderson was born and raised in the USA, where the ideology of settler colonialism is fucking hegemonic. We are REALLY GOOD at conflating preemptive warfare with self-defense, dispossession with property rights enforcement. We tend to think of democratic self-rule as coextensive with coercive rule over alien subjects. Sanderson’s choice to dismiss out of hand the “would you give the land back to the parshmen” argument is troubling because it absolutely bolsters the settler colonial narrative that indigenous elimination is a necessary condition of settlers’ “freedom”. I realize that the parshmen are currently being led by Hitler but that’s a choice on Sanderson’s part. Giving us 95% human POVs is a choice. This is the story of humans reckoning with their blood-soaked history, not the story of parshmen throwing off their chains.

#stuff i read

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aboriginalnewswire · 8 years ago

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Ex St. Louis Cop Who Said He'd 'Kill This Motherf****r' Before Shooting Black Man Found Not Guilty // #AnthonyLamarSmith was fatally shot by #JasonStockley following a car chase in 2011.

STATE or MISSOURI . 88 SEP 1 5- 201? or ST. tours gngUWGMLomcun OFFICE MISSOURI CIRCUIT COURT BY DERHY SECOND JUDICIAL CIRCUIT (City of St. Louis) STATE OF MISSOURI, Plaintiff, No. 1622wCR02213w01 Division No. 23 vs. JASON STOCKLEY, 3 Defendant. FINDINGS AND VERDICT Defendant, a St. Louis police officer at the time of the events at issue here, has been charged with first degree murder and armed criminal action for the shooting death of Anthony Smith following a high speed pursuit on city streets. The Court has closely examined the evidence, has viewed the State's video exhibits multiple times, has reviewed the testimony of the witnesses, and has considered the arguments of the parties. In reaching a decision in this case the Court is bound by the Code of Judicial Conduct, and specifically, Rule 2? 2.4, which provides that ?a judge shall not be swayed by partisan interests, public clamor or fear of criticism." The Comment to this Rule provides, fair, impartial, and independent judiciary requires that judges decide cases according to the law and facts, without regard to whether particular laws or litigants are popular or unpopular with the public, the media, government officials, or the judge's friends or family." Chronologically, the factual events at issue in this case occurred in 2011. Defendant was interviewed by the F.B.I. on May 30, 2012 about the events of December 20, 2011, and the criminal charges in this case were brought in the Spring of 2016.1 No federal criminal charges have been pursued by the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice. The relevant events began on December 20, 2011 when a silver Buick being driven by Anthony Smith pulled into a parking space at a Church's Fried Chicken restaurant.2 Mr. Smith and his companion, Kirkwin Taylor, exited the vehicle, leaving the engine running and the windshield wipers operating, and walked into the restaurant. Mr. Taylor subsequently walked to the rear of the building where, he testified, he urinated. Mr. Smith returned to the vehicle a couple of times, opened the door on the driver's side and reached in, and then returned to the front of the restaurant. Mr. Taylor was walking back to the front of 1 The complaint was filed on May 16, 2016 and the indictment was filed on August 8, 2016. "3 State?s Exhibit 2, a surveillance video from the restaurant, was admitted into evidence and was played at the trial. 2 the restaurant when a marked police vehicle drove by. The police vehicle is then seen driving rapidly up to and stopping behind the silver Buick as Smith ran up to and got into the Buick.3 Mr. Smith did not have a bag containing food on any of the occasions when he returned to the car. Two police officers exited the police vehicle, Stockley from the passenger's side and Brian Bianchi from the driver?s side, and approached Mr. Smith's car.4 Mr. Smith rapidly pulled forward up to the building, then frantically drove his Buick backward crashing into the marked police vehicle twice, before speeding away at a high rate of speed. Mr. Smith?s Buick did not "gently strike" the police vehicle. Smith's Buick forcefully struck the police vehicle twice, striking the police vehicle hard enough to cause the driver's side door to slam shut, and also struck a red sedan parked on the lot adjacent to, and perpendicular to, the police vehicle. Smith struck the red car hard enough that it could be seen to rock back and forth on the surveillance video. After completing a "five point turn" Smith drove off the parking lot, striking the hand of Stockley, who had a gun drawn, 3 Defendant Stockley testified he observed a hand to hand transaction between Smith and another person, and Stockley believed it to be a drug transaction. Stockley testified the officers decided they needed to investigate the suspicious activity. 4 Brian Bianchi was a relatively new police officer on December 20, 2011. 3 and Smith sped away. Bianchi swung at the driver?s door of the Buick with his gun, breaking the window, and then as Smith sped off the parking lot Bianchi returned to the police vehicle while holstering his gun. Stockley testified that Bianchi yelled "gun? at the time Bianchi broke the driver's window on the Buick, indicating Smith had a gun in the car, and Stockley testified that he saw a gun in Smith's hand on the passenger seat of the Buick as the Buick was pulling away. Stockley fired shots from his police department issued Beretta at the Buick as it sped off. Stockley then got into the police vehicle and told Bianchi to "get him." Anthony Smith drove at speeds up to 87 miles per hour, on wet roads, endangering other drivers and pedestrians, and the police pursuit was in response to Smith?s perilous conduct. The pursuit lasted for approximately three (3) minutes. The pursuit ended when Smith drove into oncoming traffic and was bumped from behind by the police vehicle being driven by Brian Bianchi. It is apparent from the dash cam video recording, which includes audio from inside the police vehicle, that this pursuit was a stressful event for the occupants. Due to multiple radios being turned on (Stockley?s, Bianchi?s, and the car communication radio) there were confusing sounds including feedback on the radios and communications with a police dispatcher. One of the occupants of the police vehicle said on the radio multiple times, "shots fired, shots fired."5 During the pursuit Bianchi at one point started to turn right where the Buick had turned left, and Bianchi also hit a sign and a tree and had to back up to continue the pursuit. Approximately 45 seconds before the pursuit came to an end, the audio contains a garbled and unintelligible statement, in the middle of which Stockley said, ?we're killing this motherfucker, don?t you know."6 The dash cam video from the police vehicle continued to run for a time after the vehicles came to a stop. Smith's car came to a stop perpendicular to and adjacent to the curb, when it was struck by the police vehicle, and the police vehicle came to a stop parallel to the curb with its front end adjacent to the right rear of Smith?s car. Stockley testified it was decided to attempt to end the pursuit by striking Smith's car when Smith started to drive headwon into oncoming traffic. 5 Police officer John Baumgartner testified that "shots fired" means somebody has fired shots, either a suspect or a police officer. 5 The statement was not intelligible when the recording was played during the trial. However, Stockley did not deny making the statement. He testified he could not recall making the statement and he could not recall the context. The context is not clear from the recording; it cannot be determined what was said immediately before and immediately after the statement. 5 After both vehicles came to a stop, Bianchi is seen on the dash cam video running up to the driver's window of the Buick. Bianchi has his hand on his gun, which is in the holster, as he runs up to the Buick. He then leans down at the driver's side window briefly before Stockley approaches and leans down at the driver's window. One can see Bianchi's exhaled breath in the cold air, as he approaches the driver's window, and another large exhale of his breath as Bianchi leans down at the window. The View from the dash cam is over the top of the Buick; it cannot be seen what is occurring inside the car. While Stockley is bent over at the driver's window, out of sight of the dash cam, it appears that Stockley is wrestling with something or someone at the window and Bianchi approaches again. At one point it appears Stockley?s breath blows off to his right when he stands up; his breath again appears to blow off to his right as he is bent down at the driver's window. Stockley's right elbow can be seen rising up as if he is unholstering his gun, Bianchi suddenly backs up, and it appears that at this point Stockley fires into the car. It cannot be determined from the dash cam video how far Stockley's hand, holding the gun, is from Smith at the time the shots are fired, or precisely when each shot was fired. At the time the shots are fired, Stockley is wearing what, on the video, appear to be winter gloves. Antonio French, a witness for the State, said he was on the second floor of his club where Mr. French and a few others were cleaning the club up for the next event. Mr. French testified he heard a loud crash, he went to the window and he saw two officers, one with a firearm, approach the crashed car. Mr. French saw an officer at the driver?s door and heard the officer say, "open the fucking door, open the fucking door.? The officer then fired shots into the car. Mr. French recorded from the second floor window the events that followed the shooting for several minutes, and his cell phone video was introduced as Exhibit 5 and was played at the trial. Mr. French said the officer fired four or five shots all together in sequence. He could not see anything inside the car. Mr. French said the officer came up to the door and pulled on the door three times without the door opening prior to the shots being fired. Monte Jodeh, a witness for the defense, testified that he was at a store across the street from the scene of the shooting (the evidence shows he was across the street diagonally from the scene). Mr. Jodeh heard a crash and ran to the door. He testified he saw two officers at the driver's side window of Smith?s car. Jodeh said he saw and heard Struggling and murmuring. He could not see into the car because the airbags had been deployed. Something happened that startled the officers, and then he heard four or five shots in succession with the officer firing the shots stepping back. He said there was no break between the shots. Police Officer Elijah Simpson testified that he was the first officer, other than Stockley and Bianchi, to respond to the scene on December ll, 2011. Before he arrived at the scene he had observed a police vehicle pursuing a silver car. Simpson did a U~turn and followed the pursuit. When the other two cars came to a rest, he parked his police vehicle and approached the scene. Stockley and Bianchi were at the silver vehicle and airbags in the silver car had been deployed. Both Bianchi and Stockley had 9 mm. Barettas drawn when Simpson arrived, but Simpson did not see or hear gunshots. Simpson said Stockley told him to "watch his hands" and Simpson?s belief was that the person in the car had a gun, but he could not recall whether anybody specifically warned him that the person inside the car had a gun. Simpson also heard Stockley tell the driver of the car to "show me your hands." John Baumgartner, who is currently a Richmond Heights police officer, testified he was a patrolman for the St. Louis Police Department in December 2011. Baumgartner said he arrived at the scene several minutes after the shooting. He said he recognized several officers from the Sixth District who were present but he did not speak with any officers other than maybe to ask if they were okay. Stockley did not provide him with any information after Baumgartner arrived at the scene. At some point he was told there was a gun in the car and Sergeant Rumpsa told him to recover the gun from the car. The gun (a .38 Special) had been "made safe" by removing the cartridges from the gun. The car had already been searched by another officer and the items had been left on the passenger seat. Baumgartner said a bag containing narcotics was also recovered from inside the car.7 Baumgartner said there are two different jobs involved at that point, one by a searching officer who would search the car, and one by a seizing officer who would be told what's there and who would recover it. Lieutenant Kirk Deeken testified that in December 2011 he was notified of an officer involved shooting. He viewed the dash cam video and briefly spoke with the Deputy Commander, and 7 Mr. Smith?s DNA was on this bag, and the contents were later determined to be heroin. then said the FBI should be contacted because there was the potential for a criminal investigation. Lieutenant Deeken also testified that an officer is trained to order a suspect out of a car and to have one?s firearm out in case the suspect is armed. One re?holsters one?s gun when the threat is over. Sergeant Brian King testified he was called to the scene where he photographed the entire area. Sergeant King said five shell casings were recovered from the scene, four on the ground and one on the floorboard of the Buick. Doctor Gershom Norfleet, a medical examiner, performed the autopsy on Anthony Smith. Dr. Norfleet testified at the trial that he found five entrance bullet wounds and one exit wound: 1) the left lower neck; 2) left chest; 3) mid left flank; 4) left lower flank; 5) dorsal left forearm (entry); and 6) inside left forearm (exit). The cause of death was a combination of the shots to the lower flank and chest, one of which went through Smith's heart, and internal bleeding. Smith did not die from bleeding out. A toxicology report indicated that at the time of death Smith had metabolites of marijuana in his blood. Dr. Norfleet did not testify as to the order of the wounds and he could not say whether Smith was reaching for anything at the time he was shot. Dr. Norfleet said the shots to Smith's left 10 shoulder/lower neck, left chest, left mid flank and lower flank (which was ?pretty low") all had the same trajectory. He said the wound on the shoulder would not have caused Smith?s death and to call that shot a "kill shot? would be wrong. Dr. Norfleet was asked how Smith got a gunshot wound to the lower flank if he was sitting inside the car and was shot from the outside. Dr. Norfleet said this was not inconsistent with Smith?s reaching for a gun at the time he was shot. David Menendez, a supervisor at the firearm lab, testified that he examined and swabbed the .38 special and saw nothing that was consistent with blood stains. Eric Hall, a biological screener at the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, testified that a DNA test and analysis will determine what DNA, if any, is present but it will not determine whether the DNA is from blood, semen or something else. Mary Ann Kwiatkowski, a supervisor at the biology section for the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, was called as a witness by the State. Ms. Kwiatkowski testified that she examined screws on the firearm recovered from the Buick for blood. A test she performed, a presumptive test, indicated possible blood, however, the lab does not perform confirmatory ll tests, a presumptive test can produce false positives, and DNA testing determines whether DNA is present, but DNA testing does not say what substance the DNA is from. Ms. Kwiatkowski testified she could not say there was blood on the gun, that in 2011 it was rare to find DNA on a gun, and that the absence of a person's DNA on a gun does not mean that person did not touch the gun. She reiterated that if DNA is not found on a gun, all she can say is that there is no DNA there, not that someone did or did not touch the gun. Dr. Karen Preiter, a DNA analyst at the St. Louis Metropolitan crime lab, testified that DNA results from the gun are consistent with Jason Stockley. Dr. Preiter further said that the absence of a person's DNA does not mean that person did not touch the gun, but it only means there was no DNA present. When DNA is found, all that can be said is there is DNA present, not who else may have touched the gun or how many times anyone touched the gun. Doug Halepaska, a firearms examiner at the FBI laboratory division in Quantico, Virginia, testified at the trial that he received materials to be examined via a Fed Ex package that was delivered in 2012. Included in the package was clothing that Anthony Smith had been wearing at the time of his death as well 12 as a hand gun. He test fired the handgun and examined the clothing. He concluded, based on his testing of the jacket, that the bullet hole related to the shot to the top left shoulder of the jacket was from six inches or less but was not a contact shot. Defendant Stockley testified at the trial. Defendant is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and he suffered injury to his back while serving in the United States Army during the January 2004 bombing of the Shaheen Hotel in Baghdad, Iraq. He has lingering problems with his sciatic nerve. Stockley testified that in December 2011 he was a certified field training officer for the police department. Stockely testified the weather on December 20, 2011 was wet and "somewhat cold." He was wearing a bullet proof vest under his shirt, the pants he was wearing did not have cargo pockets, and he was wearing a three inch wide duty belt. Stockley said he was also wearing his personal gloves for the cold, gloves which were needle resistant to avoid getting stuck by a sharp object. Stockley testified that on December 20, 2011, his partner was Brian Bianchi who was six months off probation. Their l3 assignment was to take 911 calls, and to proactively look for drug or burglary activity. As they were driving by the Church?s restaurant they observed suspicious activity and decided to investigate. Stockley said he had never seen the silver Buick before, they were not looking for it at the time, they did not know either person involved in the perceived drug transaction, and they initially did not know either participant in the perceived transaction was connected to the silver Buick at the time they observed the transaction. Stockley testified that he heard Bianchi yell ?gun" at the time Bianchi broke the driver's window on the Buick, and Stockley then saw the driver?s hand on a gun on the passenger seat as the Buick drove by him and was pulling away. Stockley said that the pursuit was a high risk situation during which he was feeling fear. When asked about the statement, "kill that motherfucker" he could not remember making the statement. He said he had not made a decision to kill Smith and he could not recall the context in which the statement was made. Stockley testified that after the pursuit ended he exited the police vehicle and went around to the driver's side door. When he got to the door, the airbag which had deployed was 14 lifted up by Bianchi and Stockley said he could see Smith reaching around, patting around with his right hand. Stockley told Smith to ?show me your hands" repeatedly, but Smith continued reaching around. Suddenly Smith's demeanor changed, around fifteen seconds after Stockley reached the driver's window, when Smith reached between the seats, and Stockley said he thought Smith had retrieved the gun. Stockley reached for his Baretta (his service revolver) and stepped back because he was scared Smith would pull up his hand and shoot him. Stockley then fired several shots at Smith, which ultimately resulted in Smith's death. Stockley said he did not initially have his Baretta drawn when he got to the driver's window. Evidence of what occurred following the shooting was provided through, among other things, the cell phone video taken by Mr. French from the second story window overlooking the scene. When the cell phone video first starts, Stockley is seen walking from the driver's side of the Buick back to the left rear door of the police vehicle, where he opens the door, places his on the rear seat, then closes the door and walks back to the driver's side of the Buick. Another officer is standing at the door with his gun drawn and aimed into the Buick. Stockley then returns to the police vehicle, removing gloves from both hands while approaching the vehicle, and he then climbs in and reaches across the rear seat.8 Stockley testified he took his gloves off as he returned to the police vehicle because he was going to retrieve Quick Clot, which is used to stop bleeding, from his personal bag which was on the back seat of the police vehicle, and he said it?s hard to feel what you're touching with the gloves on. Stockley then exits the police vehicle and returns to the driver's side of the Buick and proceeds to walk all the way around the Buick and the adjacent police vehicle where he meets with Bianchi and Sergeant Rumpsa. Stockley can be seen on all sides while walking around the two vehicles. Stockley does not have a jacket on over his blue police uniform shirt. There is no gun, other than his holstered service revolver, visible in his hands, in his pockets or tucked into his belt, and there is no bulge from a gun in any pocket. As other officers gather at the scene, they do not appear to be wearing gloves as they approach the Buick or other officers. After conferring with Bianchi and Rumpsa, Stockley again returns to the driver's side of the Buick and again there is no gun in 3 A video recording from inside the police vehicle shows Stockley was reaching across the rear seat to a personal bag, which he reaches around in, and then exits the vehicle. Stockley does not have anything in either hand during the brief periods his hands are in view on this video, immediately before he exits. The video does not show defendant trying to stealthily recover a revolver and conceal it on his person. l6 his possession other than his holstered service revolver. After Smith is removed from the Buick, Stockley gets in on the driver's side; there are six other officers visible immediately adjacent to the Buick, and initially four of them are by the driver's door looking in. The evidence at trial was that Stockley got into the car to search for a weapon, and Stockley testified that he found a handgun tucked down between the seat and the center console. He rendered the gun safe by unloading cartridges from the cylinder, and then left the gun and cartridges on the passenger seat. A demonstration at the trial of how the gun was unloaded showed that a person would hold the gun by its grip in one hand, and with the other hand unlock the cylinder and remove any cartridges. No charges were filed by the State in this case until the Spring of 2016, and no federal charges have been filed. The key issues in this case are whether the shooting of Anthony Smith was an intentional killing following deliberation by Stockley, or whether the shooting of Smith was a lawful use of deadly force by a police officer who was reasonably acting in selfwdefense. All of the witnesses who testified at the trial, other than defendant Stockley and Monte Jodeh, were called as witnesses for the State. 17 A criminal defendant is presumed innocent and the State has the burden to prove a defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. State v. Henton, 753 19, 20 1988). Due process requires the State to prove every element of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. gtatewv. Neal, 328 W.3d 374, 378 2010). Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is proof that leaves the finder of fact "firmly convinced of the defendant's guilt See, 4% 402.04. The burden on the State to prove a criminal defendant?s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt applies to every criminal defendant in every case. The version of the statute on first degree murder that was in effect in December 2011 provided that "a person commits the crime of murder in the first degree if he knowingly causes the death of another person after deliberation upon the matter.? 565.020.l RSMO. 2000. Therefore, the three elements of first degree murder are: knowingly; (2) causing the death of another person; and (3) after deliberation upon the matter. "Deliberation" is defined as "cool reflection for any length of time no matter how brief." "Like any state of mind, deliberation generally must be proved through the surrounding circumstances of the crime." State v. Ferguson, 20 485, 497 (Mo.banc 2000). 18 The defendant has the burden of injecting the issue of seifwdefense. 563.031.S 2016. However, the defendant does not have the burden of proof on the issue of selfwdefense. State v. Morley, 748 66, 68 1988). It does not matter which side presents the evidence that supports the issue of selfwdefense. State v. Fincher, 655 54, 58 1983). If there is evidence to support se1f~ defense, the State has the burden of disproving the defense beyond a reasonable doubt. State v. Watson, 839 611, 615 1992). A law enforcement officer need not retreat or desist from efforts to arrest or prevent the escape of a person the officer believes to have committed an offense. A law enforcement officer is entitled to use deadly force where the officer reasonably believes the use of deadly force is necessary to effect the arrest and reasonably believes the person is attempting to escape by the use of a deadly weapon or may otherwise endanger life or inflict serious physical injury. 563.046 2000. The State contends it has met its burden of proof as to murder in the first degree because the statement made by officer Stockley during the pursuit that "we're killing this 19 motherfucker" was followed by Stockley shooting Smith while Smith was seated in his car. The State contends Stockley's statement during the pursuit proves Stockley intended to kill Smith and that he deliberated about doing so, prior to shooting Smith when the pursuit ended. The State argued that Stockley initially fired four shots at Smith, who the State contends was not in possession of a firearm in the car, and then after a gap in time fired a fifth shot at close range into Smith?s lower neck/shoulder. The prosecutor referred to this fifth shot as a "kill shot" that was fired because the first four shots did not kill Smith. The State argued that a ?puff of smoke" seen on the dash cam video came from the "kill shot" and supports the State's theory of a fifth shot separated in time from the firstl four shots. The State claims Stockley did not act in self" defense because Smith was not in possession of a firearm, and the firearm found in the car was planted by Stockley. The Court belieVes it is significant that defendant Stookley and Smith did not know each other prior to December 20, 2011, they had no prior history, there was no history between Stockley and members of Smith?s family, and there was no basis in the evidence to suggest any prewexisting animosity by 20 Stockley towards Smith.9 There was also no evidence that Stockley even knew who was being pursued. Commencing in the parking lot of the Church's restaurant, when Anthony Smith rammed into the police vehicle twice, and then struck Stockley?s arm with the car while fleeing, officers Bianchi and Stockley were involved in a dangerous high speed pursuit. It is apparent from the dash cam audio and video that the pursuit was stressful both from the high speed nature of the pursuit and from confusion caused by the multiple radios and communications with a dispatcher. People say all kinds of things in the heat of the moment or while in stressful situations, and whether Stockley's statement that "we're killing this motherfucker,? which can be ambiguous depending on the context, constituted a real threat of action or was a means of releasing tension has to be judged by his subsequent conduct. The Court does not believe Stockley's conduct immediately following the end of the pursuit is consistent with the conduct of a person intentionally killing another person unlawfully?-0 9 The defense wanted to introduce evidence that Anthony Smith had an outstanding parole violation warrant and a felony record. However, the Court ruled that such evidence is not relevant and can be given no weight as the defendant did not know Mr. Smith and he had no knowledge of any criminal history at the time of the relevant events here. The Court also believes the dangerous, highly stressful and frenetic events during and immediately following the pursuit and shooting on December 20, 2011, are the antithesis of "cool" anything, much less reflection. 21 Stockley did not approach the Buick and immediately shoot Smith multiple times. Stockley had been warned by Bianchi that Smith had a gun. Stockley approached the driver?s side, appeared to attempt to open the door and, as testified to by the State?s own witnesses, ordered Smith to open the door and to show his hands. Stockley also warned another officer to ?watch his hands It was not until fifteen seconds after Stockley arrived at the driver's side door, that he unholstered his service revolver and fired several shots in succession. The Court finds the State?s contention there was a fifth ?kill shot" fired by Stockley after a gap in time, is not supported by the evidence. No witness testified to hearing a shot separated in time from the first group of successive shots. Antonio French, a fact witness for the State, testified that the separated in time from the other shots. There was also no evidence regarding the order in which Smith's wounds were inflicted. The Court finds the State?s reliance on a "puff of smoke" as evidence of a fifth shot separated in time from the others is not supported by the evidence. There was no puff of smoke from any of the other shots, and there was no testimony that firing a service revolver would or could cause such a puff 22 of smoke. There was also no explanation offered for why such a "puff of smoke? would be seen outside the car if such a fifth shot was fired with the gun inside the car as the State contends. It seems more reasonable to conclude that what the State characterizes as a "puff of smoke? was in reality exhaled breath in cold air. Puffs of smoke are seen multiple times on the dash cam video unrelated to the firing of any gun, but coming from the mouths of officers in the cold air. The State made much of the fact that Stockley was in possession of an pistol on December 20, 2011. Stockley admitted he was in possession of such a weapon, he testified he knew his possession of such a weapon was in violation of department policy, but he said he had it with him to use as a deterrent in situations in which he (and other officers) might be facing persons armed with more dangerous weapons than a Beretta service revolver. There is no evidence he ever fired this weapon, and while Stockley's possession of the gun might be a matter for departmental discipline, it is not relevant to the criminal charges here. The defense does not deny that Stockley shot and killed Smith. Rather, the defense contends Stockley acted in self" defense and that Stockley's use of deadly force, as a police 23 officer, was justified because Smith was armed with a handgun, had demonstrated that he was a danger to other persons by the manner in which he fled from the police at high speed, and Stockley did not shoot Smith until Smith reached for his gun. Section 563.061 Supp. 2010, the statute in effect in December 201l which governed the defense of self?defense, provided that a person could use physical force upon another person ?when and to the extent he or she reasonably believes such force to be necessary to defend himself or herself or a third person from what he or she reasonably believes to be the use or imminent use of unlawful force by such other person." Subsection 2 of the statute provided that a person could not use deadly force upon another person unless he or she reasonably believed that such deadly force was necessary to protect himself or herself "against death, serious physical injury, or any forcible felony.? A fact issue that is central here is whether Smith was in possession of a firearm inside the car at the time he was shot. The State contends Anthony Smith was not in possession of a firearm inside the silver Buick and that Stockley planted the firearm that was recovered from the Buick. 24 Stockley testified that Bianchi warned him of a gun in the Buick at the Church?s restaurant, and that he observed a gun in Smith's hand as the Buick drove past him. Stockley testified he did not draw his service revolver and fire until after he saw Smith reaching around inside the car and then change his demeanor suggesting to Stockley that Smith found the gun. A handgun was found inside the Buick after the shooting. The Court finds the State's contention that Stockley planted the handgun found in the Buick is not supported by the evidence.11 The gun was a full size revolver and not a small gun, such as a derringer, that can fit in the palm of one's hand or into the side pocket on a pair of pants without being obvious. Stockley was not wearing a jacket; if he had such a gun in his possession it would have been visible on the cell phone video. The gun was too large to fit entirely within any of the pockets on the pants he was wearing, there was no bulge in any pocket indicating a gun within the pocket, and the gun would have been visible if it was tucked into his belt. There Mr. Taylor, Mr. Smith?s companion when he arrived at the Church?s restaurant and who has a felony drug conviction, from Pike County, Missouri, and a fifteen year (15) sentence, with execution of the sentence suspended, testified that he did not see Smith with a handgun and he did not know there was heroin in the ear. The Court finds Taylor?s testimony has no probative value and was not credible. Taylor was impeached with his own deposition testimony that he did not recall anything about that day, and he was impeached with several inconsistencies between his trial and deposition testimonies. 25 were several officers standing around adjacent to the driver's side of the Buick and not one of them was called to testify that they saw Stockley plant a gun in the Buick. The State's argument that the presence of Stockley's DNA and the absence of Smith's DNA on the gun proves the gun was not in Smith?s possession but must have belonged to and been planted by Stockley is refuted by the State?s own witnesses. Mary Ann Kwiatkowski and Dr. Karen Preiter both testified that the absence of a person's DNA on a gun does not mean that person did not touch the gun. Finally, the Court observes, based on its nearly thirty years on the bench, that an urban heroin dealer not in possession of a firearm would be an anomaly. The State further contends Stockley did not act in self? defense because Officer Bianchi did not perceive Smith to be a threat. Brian Bianchi, defendant's partner on December 20, 2011, did not testify at the trial. At the time of the shooting, Bianchi was an inexperienced police officer. To draw compelling inferences from Bianchi?s actions or inactions is not a reliable endeavor, and would amount to mere speculation. Officer Bianchi only holstered his revolver on the Church's restaurant parking lot when Smith drove away at high speed. 26 Stockley testified Bianchi warned him on the Church's parking lot about a gun. The Court does not believe one can draw any inferences regarding Bianchi's state of mind from Bianchi?s actions at the side of the Buick prior to the shooting. It is worth noting that Stockley did not perceive Smith to be an imminent threat while he was initially interacting with Smith through the driver?s window after the pursuit, but only after fifteen seconds had passed during which Smith was ordered to show his hands and open the door, and only when Stockley believed Smith had located the gun. The State further argues that Stockley removed his gloves when he returned to the police vehicle with the purpose of providing an explanation for his DNA being on the handgun recovered from Smith's vehicle. The gloves he removed were winter gloves, Stockley's explanation for removing the gloves is plausible, other officers at the scene either did not have winter gloves or had removed them prior to exiting their vehicles, and it makes sense that a person would remove winter gloves when searching for something inside a personal bag. Here Stockley was searching inside his personal bag, and he testified he was searching for Quick Clot. In the absence of any evidence showing Stockley in possession of the gun prior to his entering 27 the Buick to search, this contention regarding the gloves makes no sense. One obvious question the State made no attempt to answer was how Anthony Smith could have been shot in the left lower abdomen by a person standing outside the car if Smith was simply sitting in the driver?s seat. Dr. Norfleet, who conducted the autopsy, testified that the wounds in Smith's left flank could indicate that Smith was reaching for something to his right at the time the wounds occurred. This would be consistent with 'Stockley?s testimony regarding Smith's actions immediately prior to the shooting. No one promised a rose garden, and this surely is not one. Missouri law requires that the trier of fact be "firmly convinced" of the defendant's guilt in order to convict. As stated above, the burden on the State to prove a criminal defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt applies to every criminal defendant. The requirement that the State meet its burden of proof is not a mere "technicality" and the instant case is not decided on a technicality. This Court, as the trier of fact, is simply not firmly convinced of defendant's guilt. Agonizingly, this Court has poured over the evidence again and again. This Court has viewed 28 the video evidence from the restaurant?s surveillance camera, the cameras in the police vehicle, and the cell phone video by the lay witness, over and over again innumerable times. This Court, in conscience, cannot say that the State has proven every element of murder beyond a reasonable doubt or that the State has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that defendant did not act in self~defense. The State asked the Court to consider, should it find defendant not guilty of first degree murder, whether defendant is guilty of a lesser degree of homicide. The defense did not ask the Court to consider lesser offenses. The lesser degree offenses of first degree murder are listed in 565 025 This Court has found that the State did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Stockley did not act in selfwdefense. The issue is whether a finding that the defendant was not guilty of an intentional killing based on the defense of selfwdefense forecloses the possibility of a conviction of a lesser degree of homicide. The Missouri Supreme Court has held that selfwdefense in a homicide does not foreclose a conviction for involuntary manslaughter if the defendant was entitled to use force while acting in selfwdefense, but exceeded the scope of the self" 29 defense privilege by using an unreasonable amount of force. This is because an intentional act of selfwdefense may constitute reckless conduct if the force used was unreasonable. ?tate v. Beeler, l2 294 (Mo.banc 2000); ?tate v. Pulley, 356 187 2012). Given that the State here has failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that defendant?s use of deadly force was not justified in selfedefense, the Court need not address lesser degrees of homicide including involuntary manslaughter. WHEREFORE, it is ordered, adjudged and decreed that the State has failed in its burden of proof and the Court finds that defendant is not guilty of both charges in this case, murder first degree and armed criminal action. SO ORDERED: Timothy J. Wilso;/ judge madam c5} 9m 23m i ii 30

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grizzlefur · 8 years ago

Text

WWEm - Too Much Shit For One Man to Kick

In which Emma’s heart grows three sizes.

Broadcast date: Monday 4/Tuesday 5 September 2017

Now that I've torn myself away from the combination of Destiny 2 and trying to fix my phone, it's time for MONDAY AFTERNOON RAW!: The Nacreous Gem Around The Intrusive Sand Of Roman Reigns Trying To Cut A Promo

trialling a new slogan

daniel's uncle's idea

apparently owning the building means you can give production advice

price of free offices, i guess

anyway, i'm like 70% sure he doesn't read these, so i can say whatever

but yes, the actual show

the bright orange blur in this tumbnail suggests we may be hearing from one mr cena

straight in on a recap video of the contract signing from last week

only presumably without cena kicking a hole in the fourth wall like the fucking shockmaster

also they've edited it to remove roman forgetting how to english

some damn good promos, though

i'm just loving all the shots of kurt in the background gawking like oh god what have i wrought

oh, apparently this is labour day

you'll pardon me for not exactly giving a shit

and we're in omaha

and here's the cena himself

here to cene all over us

oh, apparently we're just kicking straight into a match

and booker's back

i never thought i'd be glad to hear that slurred bullshit

and here comes jason jordan and his dodgy synth music

here to fight cena for unspecified reasons

oh, so we can play the clip of cena debuting against kurt 15 years ago

back when he was ruthlessly aggressive

who doesn't love cross-generational parallels

omaha is super behind cena, possibly for his music containing actual instruments and vocal tracks recorded at the same time

jason goes straight into the amateur mat game, which is not exactly cena's forte

lots of lingering hugs

i think booker just managed to get jason and cena mixed up, but let's be real, i wasn't listening

my mind just levels out everything booker says into a kind of mealy blur

but hey, that's better than the unignorable shittiness of the jerry

(my favourite kundera book)

cena gets a comeback phase, including whipping jason so hard he also faceplanted himself into the mat

that seems poorly thought out

tries to deploy his five moves, jason manages to counter out my backflipping out of a suplex and dropkicking him

fuck you, cruiserweight division

jason takes a five knuckle shuffle, then counters an aa into an indescribably weird rollup

takes an stf for ages, then reverses into a crossface/chinlock thing

cena says fuck you, i'm john cena, stands up out of it and goes for another aa

jj counters out into a beautiful rolling double nothern lights suplex

straps come down, jj unleashes his true power level

and immediately eats an aa for the pin

way to disprove roman's argument that cena buries young talent

oh hye, speaking of

-slips into pre-emptive coma-

and he's got a mic

fantastic

roman's like why the fuck did that take you 20 minutes that guy's been on the show for like a month

roman really needs to work out what point he's making

so yeah, argument today is that cena's not as great as he thinks he is

and is a lion

fake-ass little bitch

"Roman, I'd say I'm happy to see you, but...I'm disgusted by your whole face."

cena is all out of shits to give

like stop trying to use your brain, it's not your thing

cena immediately addresses roman's inconsistent point

and that his fly is open

which roman turns into lol cos i'm the big dog

men

and cena counters with a balls joke, and roman with a gay joke

fuck's sake, guys

there's a bar, at least make a cursory effort to get over it

cena takes it to roman for having everything handed to him, like damn dude i fucking hate the miz but at least he works for his shots

this is all true

cena's mostly just exasperated

like damn dude, get a clue

so roman's like hey if you want to beat me up let's do that

roman, stop being smug

or just, yknow, go away

cena does not beat him up, so roman's like hey fuck you dude and walks off

that worked, i guess

but later, we apparently have braun/show in a cage

so we can play the gif of those two crushing the ring

also later jeff hardy has an ic title match

but now, enjoy this advert for total bellas

or don't, very much up to you

but now, here come the not-shield

entering to dean's intro

they're gonna be on announce for slater and rhyno vs the kkb

seth and dean should totally rebrand as the sword

god, i love that they've managed to get a dragon ball reference into their entrance

dean's like welp, that's a great entrance,can't take that away from them

confirmation that we've got their title rematch at no mercy

dean goes off on a tangent about jurassic park and getting your face eaten by velociraptors

seth starts giggling

send for the man

corey asks if seth and dean are getting on as a team, dean's like eh, i've had five years to punch this guy in the face, i'm kind of over it by now

back in the ring, heath slater is getting the fuck kicked out of him

but then, that's what he does

inevitable hot tag so rhyno can get some offence in

and then eat a brogue for the pin

dean starts talking smack on the bar, then he's like well we're the bar now hey we should steal their name

dean talks like he fights

cesaro and sheamus do their fusion dance in the ring, and i'm like 90% sure their fusion would be goro from mortal kombat

although more the plasticine fantasticine version from the film, tbh

that's science right there

toasty

cut back to the announce team, where seth and dean have evaporated

and they talk to book about the hurricane

briefly

but now, renee interviews the hardyz

matt breaks in with a semi-broken accent

crowd goes mental

and jeff's like yuuuup gonna win this or get myself killed with the FIRE THAT BURNS WITHIN ME

man can preach

so that's next, i think?

after this ad for randy/shinsuke on smackdown

insert comment about what competition means

and here comes the match

starting with the hardyz

jeff's wearing a connor's cure tabard over all his other clothes, and seriously, i think the man has a problem

it also makes it very hard for him to rock out to their music

cole makes a reference to them wanting to delete paediatric cancer

well played

and enter the miztourage

maryse has a new vest/pvc leggings/sparkly knee boots combo, and as ever, i want it

also perilously close to real human clothes

apparently it's just over 10 years since jeff had the ic belt

bell rings, jeff goes straight for a rollup because fuck wrestling

miz cowers against the ropes like please mr hardy don't beat me

and uses it to throw jeff out to his cronies

a scheme

who would have thought

back in the ring, jeff just punches the hell out of miz's oh-so-punchable face

whisper in the wind for a nearfall

it's taken this long for jeff to jump off something, he must be taking it seriously

sets up for a swanton, bo distracts the ref so curtis can pull jeff off the turnbuckle

sparks a brawl outside the ring, ref is just like fuck this noise all three of you can fuck off

matt is deeply offended like how could you do this to me i was defending my brother's honour

miz counters out of jeff's crotch leg drop, which is good to see, because it is such a trivially easy move to counter

this match is actually p good

it's been like 60% reversals

maryse is still at ringside, which can't possibly be foreshadowing anything

ooh, she's gone with acid-green nails as well

maryse is just my style icon

(as if you didn't know)

miz pulls jeff off the apron, then collapses against the barricade in fornt of a small child in a cena shirt who's like um what

miz gets a figure four one, jeff just goes to counter by punching miz in the face

makes sense when you think about it

eventually gets to the ropes

then hits miz with a stunner, nearfall when miz gets the rope

live by the rope break...

miz crawls out of the ring while the ref shouts at jeff, then immediately eats a baseball slide

and then poetry in motion off the steps

kind of feeling sorry for miz atm

he's bumping like a demon

maryse pulls her husband out fo the way of a swanton, leaving jeff to fuck himself upon the mat

goes for a twist of fate, miz counters into a finale for the pin

damn good match, solid finish

but now, women do things

or so i am assuming by this recap package of banks/bliss

oh yeahb, and nia's inevitable betrayal

announcement: sasha has her rematch at no mercy

and now nia accosts kurt backstage

she's not impressed that she doesn't get a title shot

and emma interrupts to talk about her twitter analytics

she also wants a title shot

nia's just like fuck off or i will actually break you

kurt holds them apart, and hatches a plan

nia/emma v sasha/alexa tonight

if the undercarders win, he'll make the title match a four-way

foreboding shot of the cage, insistent mentions of the ring being reinforced

and have some more recap videos of brig showman fucking the ring

never noticed how hard the ref bumps to the outside when it happens

caught it now, of course, because they've replayed the clip from SEVEN HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN FUCKING ANGLES

but now it's time for cruiserweights to not get an intro

dar, nese and gulak already in the ring

and cedric and gran metalik get to enter with enzo, because seriously, nobody's getting a fucking intro

except enzo, who's brought a mic as usual

enzo tries to spin cheating to win matches as some kind of god-given right because it gets you wins

babyface?

despreately hypes 205 like please watch my show

he introduces cedric and metalik in the shittiest way possible

i spoke too soon, his smacktalk introductions for the other three are even worse

match kicks off with cedric/tony doing the cruiserweightiest wrestling ever

and enzo tags himself in to ruin everything

drew tags in to kick a non-trivial amount of shit out of enzo

not all of it, of course

the man contains too much shit for one man to kick

the heel team start doing rolling tags to take turns fucking up enzo's shit

and then they all just cruiserweight over everything and i can no longer narrate

stereo topes from cedric and metalik, during which enzo tags himself in because he's a twat

and then sticks a thumb in drew's eye to get his stupidly-named finish for the pin

the alleged faces celebrate as drew's outside with his friends like aaaaaaaaaaa i am blind

end segment

and now alexa collars sasha in the locker room to bitch about their opponents tonight

alexa has a cancer shirt too because she's a face by default tonight

this conversation quickly turns into a huge row

that match'll go well

up next, finn bálor wears a shirt

boo

and an advert for the myc, which continues to be great

and here comes everyone's favourite irish possible serial killer

-does the arms-

goes 'this is bálor club' like he's introducing his new talk show

waxes lyrical on his previous titles and how bray wyatt's a dick

finn has chosen his fate

or possibly faith?

this just in, he has an irish accent

calls bray out, immediate wyatt cut

and now we're in the void with bray

talking about learning to hunt as a kid

and the day he decided to stop using a bow and just kill things with his bare hands

i think we could have all filled in that backstory, tbh

taunts finn for only being able to beat him using the demon as his weapon, rather than doing it with his own power and will

and obliquely challenges him for no mercy

finn starts shouting back at him, which is a rarity for these segments

bray calls finn a rabbit, wyatt cut, end thing

so yeah, bray v human!finn for no mercy, presumably

oh hey, more ads for smackdown and total bellas

and now it's women's tag time

cole claims total bellas stars alexa bliss, corey's like um dude that's just a lie

she is here though

this much is true

oh my god i had forgotten how fucking angry i was about emma's new music

although that said, i think it's changed again

it's still not as good as her proper music, but better than last week

cfo$ are clearly going through a weird phase atm

corey is critiquing emma's hashtag efficiency

someone had to

the basic theme if this match thus far is 'tagging yourself in for giggles'

my inner bitch is loving the reluctant passive-aggressive teamwork in this match

(also my outer bitch)

(aka me)

as the smaller woman in the team, emma is performing her proper function of getting fucked on relentlessly

this rule does not apply to alexa, because her rage gives her virtual height

she's like one of those tiny dogs that will FUCKING HAVE YOU

emma finally gets a tag to nia, alexa gets a chance to vent at her

and get creamed

eats a big-ass samoan drop, sasha breaks up the pin after a moment of internal conflict

gets the tag, shining wizard for a nearfall

emma blind tags, nia leg drops sasha, emma gets the pin

i'll be honest, i was not expecting that

four-way should be good, though

emma celebrates extravagantly in the middle of the ring, nia's like um

and samoan drops her

nia will also fucking have you

back to the ambiguous backstage room, where renee has acquired a braun

asks what he's thinking before his first cage match

he's like really what the fuck was kurt thinking, this match might hurt me before my title match at no mercy but will definitely hurt company property

the man does a surprisingly good promo

but up next, seth and dean are back

their walk backstage is briefly interrupted by elias thrashing out a new song

long beat as they just kind of stand there like what's up with this guy, then shrug and carry on, dean playing along on the air

but next, they fight the good brothers

after these ads for every show we make

back from ads, sheamus and cesaro are in the ring arguing with gallows and anderson for some reason

who am i kidding, you don't need a reason to bitch on those guys

seth and dean still using dean's intro

like, if you're going to just use one, seth's is way better

BURRRRRN IT DOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWN

ref eventually manages to usher the kkb out of the ring, match can commence

sheamus and cesaro seem to have settled on just sarcastically applauding from ringside

someone needs to get them popcorn

this match is a little formulaic, but damn do i love how in sync seth and dean still are as a team

seth/dean v jordan/gable v gargano/ciampa v dawson/wilder

give them a whole show, best tag match possible

as opposed to this particular long-ass superplex setup that didn't even work

dean counters a chokeslam into a dropkick, which is p cool

seth gets the hot tag, commences to jump off every goddamn rope before braun and show fuck them up

dean tries to join in, does a shitty suicide dive

seth hits a lovely top-rope frankensteiner on anderson, the kkb try to interfere, seth gets the pin anyway because they're just that good

and then the good brothers take sheamus and cesaro out while they're distracted

they take a long moment to consider their options, then go back to the ring to fuck up anderson and gallows

and now here's the connor's cure video basically the same as last year, because history and cancer haven't changed much

and they've got the wwe makeup department in to give kids superstar redesigns

that's kind of sweet

and steph giving them all hype ring announcements is cute

dammit, i've fallen for a cute ill kids advert

and they brought alexa, miz, and finn

which seems like a super weird collection

to inspire these kids with cancer, we've brought our resident bitch, a self-important asshole, and a guy who draws power from being possessed by a demon

perfect sense

but up next, main event time

but first, cruiserweight recap vt?

because now we see enzo and his mates in the locker room being annoying

cue sarcastic clapping from neville

and news that those three have all qualified for a five-way elimination match for a title shot at no mercy

neville sows dissesnsion with a few ominous geordie words

closeups of techs reinforcing the ring

and now charly interviews the ref from the ring explosion match, of all people

oh, apparently the ring's double reinforced

not just reinforced

fancy

he's like welp this match is gonna be carnage i'm just going to focus on dodging

and now renee gives big show a hype chat

gah, i'd forgotten his new hairlessness

come on show, give us a YOUUUUU DID THISSSSS TOOO MEEEEEEEEEE

Shockingly, Giant Baby Show says Braun ain’t shit

the dramatic climax of the promo is just show telling us his own nickname

you know how i said braun could promo surprisingly well?

well...not that

seriously guys, how many ads do we need for total bellas?

it's back

we know

ad for 205, in which we learn that the other two slots in the 5-way are kendrick and nese, for no adequately established reason

wait, has anyone seen kurt and show at the same time?

feels like we might have a dr angle and mr show thing going on

corey just referred to braun as "the steam-breathing monster"

i have no clue what to say to that

is he coal-powered?

bell rings, braun kicks show in the face

and starts bodychecking him into the cage

weirdly, it goes wrong on the fourth one

show counters with a magic fist, doesn't climb the cage for some reason, cut to ads

cut back and nothing at all has happened

ecept show is now taking his turn to throw his opponent into the cage walls

show starts climbing, braun follows

weird scale going on, since they can both stand on the top rope and touch the top of the cage

show gets crotched really hard

guys, stop doing that spot

it is not good for you

show sets up on the top rope, everyone goes wtf

and does an elbow drop for the first time in like two decades

doesn't connect properly, but still a good moment

goes for the pin, braun kicks out at two because fuck you i'm braun strowman

show crawls for the door, braun walks over, grabs it, and hits show in the face with it

then braun tries to walk over show to get the door himself, and show does eexactly the same thing back to him

see, that was just dumb

braun kind of wanders into a chokeslam, then counters into a ddt for a nearfall

few spots later, show manages to land the chokeslam, braun kicks out because see the above re: fuck you

show goes for a magic fist, braun counters into a powerslam, show counters out and throws braun into the wall

show goes for the climb, followed by braun

gets his chest over the top before braun drags him back down because NOT FINISHED WITH YOU

i have never seen big show on the top rope this much before

braun gets a superplex in, the double reinforcement does its job

still a hell of a crash

and running powerslam for the pin

okay, i'm not usually one for large man punch fights, but that was actually really good

braun looms ominously over his fallen foe, then somehow acquires a mic

calls out brock to see big show's corpse as an object lesson

long ominous beat, then tells big show it's time to go to pasture, picks him up, and powerslams him through one wall of the cage

crowd goes wild

next time they should maybe think about also double reinforcing the cage

show lies on the broken cage wall going aaaa i'm dying, braun stalks off and roars, end show

in all senses

right, well, i've got some bad news

the horizontal line's off in Marbella this week, so we're gonna have to roll straight on

-checks the list of test slogans again-

MONDAY AFTERNOON SMACKDOWN!: Takes Hotter Than Your Dad.

i swear, the things i do so we can have somewhere to record this show that's only occasionally filled with vengeful woodland animals

so yes, the raccoon incident aside, let's watch mackdown

or indeed smackdown

mackdown is the wrestling dating sim i am now going to have to make

opening on a weirdly-saturated recap package of the orton/nakamura situation

the worst holmes story

and yes, the best thing about smackdown today

i'd had it spoiled, but still

JBL IS FUCKING GONE

he's off to do charity work, so we get the double whammy of disadvantaged kids getting support and me not having to listen to his voice

and they've replaced him with corey, making pretty much the ideal announce panel

Tom: "Did you miss me, Graves?" Corey: "Yes!" Tom: "I...am surprised!"

i live for these two talking shit

so yes, orton/nakamura tonight for a title shot at hiac

and here's randy, standing in three-quarter profile in a dimly lit corridor

yknow, like people do

and giving a speech about how he' gonna fuck shinsuke up

cut to shinsuke shadow boxing in the locker room

tells us about how he's gonna fuck randy up, i mostly get distracted by his left shoulder, which i hadn't noticed before

it's kind of fucked

i'm guessing that's a dislocation that healed weird

cut to the ring, and ellsworth announces his bae

only to be interrupted by...kevin?

he's decided he's going to be guest referee for carmella's match with nattie

begins trying to intimidate the ref into taking his shirt off

here's shane

who may have opinions on this fuckery

takes a moment for a cheap pop before getting into professional mode

he's just like kevin

dude

sort your shit out

long tense faceoff

shane's like maybe take responsibility for all these failures which are in all ways your fault

kevin's like fuck you i don't even want to be on this show

shane's like well yeah, cos this isn't the bullshit show where we just give people belts

kevin calls shane out on him needlessly inserting himself into eveything on the show

mentions his dad, gets an ooooooh, mentions his kids, shane immediately gets in his face like fuck you

kevin spins the helicopter crash into this, says his family would all be better off if he'd died there

mentions his kids again, shane explodes on him

well, he did warn him

trips getting out of the ring, killing the moment a bit

throws kevin over the announce table and just absolutely goes to town on him

security pull them apart, bryan turns up to be like the fuck are you doing dude that's an employee

and give the most disapproving dad look you've ever seen

and...cut to an ad for total bellas

way to maintain the mood, guys

and recaps of what happened thirty seconds ago

in which they've edited out shane tripping

backstage, kevin staggers through the room supported by three officials

bryan comes out to apologise

kevin promises to sue shane, wwe, and the entire mcmahon family

bryan's like wow, that seems wildly disproportionate

kevin's like fine, i'll go press assault charges insteads

cut back to announce, corey and byron are both like well he totally deserved that

but yes, now we actually have that carmella/nattie match

recap from last week reminds me precisely how fucking awful carmella's singlet was

thankfully, she's back to normal gear today

provided you count bright orange leggings with leopard-print piping as normal

announce team start spinning next week's 'Sin City Smackdown'

carmella gets her face punched off, retreats to her ellsworth

pan out to naomi watching the match with a look of deep concentration as carmella does a long-ass guillotine choke

nattie powerslams her out, gets a comeback

carmella superkicks nattie, gets a nearfall, ellsworth gives the ref the briefcase

carmella's like wtf no i'm not cashing in give my that back, throws it at ellsworth, and gets rolled up for the pin

ellsworth comes back into the ring to apologise profusely

carmella starts being all magnanimous, then opens up on him

including using the same line twice

calls him a 'genetic defect'

and asks how he's still employed at wwe

really, the question we were all asking

"You are a charity case, and your mother should have given you away at birth!"

wow

harsh

and officially dumps him

takes her case, struts off

leaving james in the ring and the depths of despair

backstage, here's shane looking conflicted

up next, dolph ziggler re-debuts

i have no clue how this is going to go

expect everything

after these ads for the myc and no mercy

and tom giving us a talk about paediatric cancer

roll the video again

refer to my comments above

well, that gave me plenty of time to curate my itunes library

fringe benefits

and here's the dolph

looking...exactly the same

he's got a mic

presumably to tell the fans to go fuck themselves

yup

railing at the fans for not appreciating the greatest performer in the company

and they'd prefer some dumb gimmick

lights go back down, and here he is again

doing cena's entrance

all credit to the crowd for the DOLPH ZIGGLER SUUUUUUUCKS singalong

dolph's like hey, did that not work? i'll try another

lights go down again, and now he's...who had land of hope and glory?

-research break-

yeah, thought it was him

dude, if you're gonna do a macho man entrance, you could at least have the shades

gives up on it, shouts at the crows for not doing the usual nostalgia pop

sends his valet away

and now he promises to have exactly what the crowd want and deserve

and...now he's naomi

the fuck is this

does the knee slide, then gives up

all gimmicks are defeated by ennui

and now he's back to railing against the idea of gimmicks, because anyone can do them

says he, after clearly showing that not everyone can dance like naomi

tells the fans they make him sick, stomps off backstage

so that happened?

up next, sami zayn v aiden english

because this is 2014 nxt, apparently

aiden gets about one line into his aria before sami's music interrupts him

oh yeah, this is the rematch from last week when kevin fucked on everything

and aiden gets a rollup out of nowhere

that lasted about 90 seconds

the bookers have some sort of problem with sami

and aiden's got his mic back

so he can give us some more singing

swiftly tailing off as sami chases him out of the room

let's have yet another recap of shane brutalising an employee

pan out to bryan rewatching it

only to get interrupted by the new day

here to lift his spirits

oh, and here are the usos

to do the opposite

announcing the stipulation for next week

street fight

which seems ill-advised when you're fighting a team of three

bryan gets a call, ushers the new day out

someone bryan calls 'sir' (so vince) wants him to do something in the ring

i know what, because i have a dreadful habit of going on twitter and getting spoilers, but i'll maintain the mystery for now

bryan disagrees, is shut down

and he's going to do............IT right now

(couldn't resist)

and here he is in the arena

gets in the ring, calls shane to come too

he doesn't

finally, here he comes

with nary a HERE COME THE MONEYYYYYYY

not sure i've ever seen either of these this sombre

bryan's like remember last year when the miz was pushing me every week and i made the bold choice to NOT FUCKING ATTACK HIM?

bottom line, you can't assault our employees

fair policy

shane's like yeah sorry but when people talk about my family i go crazy

bryan's just i don't give a single shit you've endangered this entire show because we both know kevin's a vindictive bastard who'll take us for everything

shane offers to go and reconcile with kevin

bryan's like no, i talked to your dad, you're suspended indefinitely

and leaves

shane's left in the ring like welp

why would you leave him there if he was suspended?

eh, wrestling logic

many crowd chants later, shane slumps off

gets a lot of thank you chants for a man who's just been suspended for attacking an employee

and now renee is in the blue curtain room to interview jinder

in an ugly-ass houndstooth suit

asks which guy he'd rather fight, he doesn't give a shit

claims he represents asia better than shinsuke ever could, despite shinsuke actually being from fucking asia

does the promo again in punjabi to speak to 3% of the great nation of india

back in the arena, aj's on announce

to talk about paediatric cancer

(i feel like i'll be writing that phrase a lot in the next few weeks)

and here's baron

sidebar fact: "Won the Money In The Bank ladder match earlier this year"

guys, maybe stop reminding people of that

recap vt of styles/dillinger last week

and of baron being a tool

i feel like i might need to specify that more

and here's tye

and they haven't synced his music with his new tron, so the sexy number voice says 10 when the video's on about 6

kind of love the KO'S A BITCH sign in the crowd

works on many levels

baron slides out of the ring to face off with aj, so tye just jumps out and fucks him up against the barricade

solid advice: maybe keep an eye on the other guy in the match

cut to ads, come back to a really slick spot of baron lariating tye's head off

tye tries to set up for the tye breaker, is thwarted by his opponent being large and heavy

and baron continues to stop having the match he's actually having so he can shout at aj

and i love the complete lack of shit aj gives

baron scores a cheap shot to tye's throat, angering aj, and end of days for the pin

actually a pretty good match

you forget that tye's got a lot of skill in the ring

aj is shocked at baron's lack of honour

because he doesn't watch the show, i guess

up next, "a special look at bobby roode"

ok, whoever edited it to go directly from saying that to a total bellas advert needs firing

backstage, aj congratulates tye on his fight and says next week, the us open challenge will only be open to him

dude

that's not an open challenge

that's just a challenge

and now for a bobby roode video package

enhanced by corey being on this show now so he can run hype for him

and now we're backstage with ellsworth pleading for carmella to forgive him

and being like yes i'm subhuman and i don't deserve anything please take me back

this is not healthy

carmella says from now on, they're doing things her way

gives him a huge kiss, then slaps his face off

flounces off, leaving ellsworth to be like the actual fuck is my life

but now we have a main event

here comes the very finest in flailing japanese men

and adverts for all our other shows

and also a fucking snaaaaaaake

loving the contrast of entrances

incredibly theatrical alien dance vs walking slowly down the ramp

cut over to jinder and the singhs in his skybox

tom mispronounces kinshasa even before the bell rings

this is why we got corey on here

whoever you are trying to get your MAGA sign to constantly show up on hardcam, kindly fuck off

randy does a massive hotshot, aided by shinsuke being an extremely floppy man when he wants to be

randy goes for his draping ddt out to the floor, shinsuke reverse out because that would be dangerous as fuck if he hit it

throws shinsuke into the announce desk, corey's like this is the worst first day ever

shinsuke just decides to get a comeback spot like oh hey maybe i should just kick him in the face a bunch

superplex to shinsuke, and the setup only took a small percentage of my life this time

lovely spot as shinsuke's reeling on his knees then just leans back into doing his cmoooooooon

goes for a kinshasa, randy counters into a snap powerslam

into a draping ddt, because you know randy's spots

strikes up the snake, which is still weird when your whole thing is hitting it out of nowhere

goes for an rko, shinsuke counters into an armbar then transitions to a triangle

that was fucking lovely

randy powers out, shinsuke counters an rko into a backstabber

see, this is how you preserve finishers

and kinshasa for the pin

oh, sorry corey

KINSHAAAAAASSSSSSSAAAAAAAAAAA

(totally why corey's here)

well thank fuck for that, i'm not sure i could have taken another orton/mahal rematch without taking up amateur tattooing or something

backstage, bryan tells kevin they're done

kevin's like fuck that, imma run the show next week

and bryan drops the bomb that vince'll be there next week to sort shit out

great

ah well

and brief cut back to shinsuke partying so we have something to end on

and thus we finish the week's shows

by which i do of course mean last week's shows

one day i'll actually get my shit together and be punctuahahahahaaaa sorry i couldn't get through that

[Don’t forget to follow Emma on Twitter, where she’s @Waruce]

#WWE #WWE Raw #wwe smackdown #Wrestling

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