#Personally in terms of storytelling I prefer one big mystery | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lesyasun · 3 years

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A while ago I received an interesting question about game aesthetics. The person in that ask really struggles with downloading stuff and finding their own style. They asked me how I came up with what you see on my screenshots. Have you ever thought that you can recognize whose screenshot this is by just a quick glance? Is editing important in photoshop? How to take beautiful screenshots? Today let’s talk about how different one single game could be for each of us and what really makes this mysterious “sims aesthetics”.

EDIT: Sorry, it turned out to be huge with lots of random thoughts :D I hope at least one percent of these is useful!

NOTE: English is not my native language, I apologize for possible grammar or spelling mistakes. I tried my best in writing this!

Ok, let’s imagine that you’re a person who just obtained the sims game or just want a nice fresh start and demolished your download folder. (We all need fresh starts sometimes, right?) The struggle is that you have no idea which style you like the best. There are so many sims blogs. Everyone seems to enjoy what they post but you’re a little bit lost in that jungle. Don’t worry! I’ll try to guide you and share my thoughts.

STEP 1 Choose your general style

I roughly divide all sims blogs that I see on my dashboard into a couple of so-called styles. I’ve been doing it in my mind for ages. I like following different people and seeing diferent editing. None of them are better than others. I hope you understand that it’s just a matter of liking. Ok, here we go. Let me put this sorting hat on you :D

1. Realistic

Screenshot by @luchiatores

Perhaps, it’s the most important thing that you should decide for yourself. Wether you should use realistic textures in your game or you’d prefer to stick to more cartoonish maxis match ones. Why is it so important, to my mind? I like things that match. Just imagine game Witcher 3 where characters and surroundings are realistic. And now imagine Minecraft where things are pixelated. Both games are great, both games have certain beautiful styles. And now imagine Geralt hunting for monsters in a pixelated Minecraft swamp. A bit strange, isn’t it? :D The same applies to Sims. If you put a super realistic skintone on your sim and put a Maxis ponytail, that would probably look strange too. If you choose this style, just try to dig for a good quality content, start following simblrs in this style. Unfortunately, I’m not an expert when it comes to realistic content. So, try to drop an ask to someone whose realistic game you like. There are so many helpful people around in the sims community no matter what style they have :)

2. Trully Maxis Match

screenshot by @whattheskell

This is a complete opposite of a realistic style. I’ve always called people who use a lot of original maxis textures “trully maxis” :D If you can decorate a house without any custom content, if you like the way original hairstyles look, if you like Maxis clothes, you should go this way. From what I’ve spot after being so many years in the sims community, “trully” maxis simblr are so creative when it comes to storytelling. The stories that they write about either their sims/or maxis premades are so breathtaking. So much drama, so much fun. The only thing that I write about my screenshots is “Ok, this is my cat! Look, it can eat flowers and puke afterwardst! Yay! Cute”. If you choose this way, I can recommend you to check out @holleyberry, @didilysims or @moocha-muses. Obviously there are a lot more blogs that I follow. These people are just so sweet and helpful and they’re first who came to my mind.

3. Bright Maxis Matchery

screenshot by @muupi

This is where I refer myself to. This style is still Maxis but what stands out is the use of bright colours and saturated photoshopped pictures. Ah, my love for overedited pictures is endless <3 This is what I’m going to talk a lot below since it’s my cup of tea. It’s all about colours and pallete addiction. If you love looking at super bright/silly/cheery screenshots and they boost up your mood, than join the squad!

Basically, Maxis match (I’ll just shorten for MM from now on) players avoid super shiny skins or hair textures and prefer to have content with Simlish letters instead of English ones. This is a very important factor for me when I choose paintings or prints for T-shirts. I don’t know, I feel like it’s so cute that sims can’t understand our languages, talk this funny gibberish simlish language. It’s cute! There are so so many people that I can recommend. @lina-cherie @keoni-chan @kahlenas They are first who came to my mind <3

4. Grungy/cosmic

screenshot by @lilithpleasant

I don’t know if these are suitable words :D But this is how I describe people’s game who like aliens/supernatural sims/grungy textures with or without bright colours as well. Just think would you prefer a bit of a grungy stuff or less-textured but cleaner MM? You always need to think about textures while you download stuff. I can recommend to check out @pooklet or @furbyq-sims

5. Semi

screenshot by @whysim

You might ask me “Why am I not allowed to put a realistic skintone on a maxis sim? What the hell?” Of course, you are! Do it please, if you want. There are no rules, no restrictions. You CAN go semi-realistic, you CAN mix patterns, you CAN mix colours. There’s only one rule: please, enjoy what you do. Don’t be afraid to share your pictures on the Internet. There will always be people who can judje your style and say: “meh, it’s too dull, meh, it’s too bright, meh, too shiny, meh, too plain meh, meh, meh”. Just don’t pay attention and enjoy your game. As for semi-realistic I can recommend such wonderful people as @marvelann @lilith-sims @falkii @knowledgeaspiration

A bit about my style: I’ve always loved cartoonish/bright style. I’ve never ever played with shiny textures. Before Tumblr era I just played either without CC or with a bunch of maxis recolours. How I came up with the idea of cartoonishness? Pretty simple. It’s a part of my personality, I think :) I’ve always loved Disney/Pixar movies. Cartoons just make life a lot funnier! They make me happy. I’m a pre-school teacher after all :D. You can’t imagine how many cartoons I’ve watched throughout my life. I can quote Peppa Pig and will never be tired of that :D Before Tumblr I just played some funny legacies (I’ve never finished any though :D) When I found out about Tumblr, and such great content that can make my game even more Disney looking, it just blew my mind! Every time when I download stuff, I imagine that I’m watching a Disney/Pixar or whatever studio cartoon. When I create sims, I feel like I’m a cartoon designer. Pretty silly, right? :D

Let’s take a look at my screenshots from the past. I tried to find similar ones with a lot of greenery.

2014

2021

I stil like a lot of greenery. Editing has changed, photo angles have changed. But bright colours and Maxis stuff are forever in my heart <3

Risa (2014)

Gage (2021)

As I’m a big cartoon addict, I love recreating game/anime/cartoon characters. No matter, if they’re my favourite or requested ones. I love when my sims have different traits. I love when they’re funny looking/clumsy/absent-minded or when they’re evil/supernatural. When they are pirates/detectives/vampires or witches. This is my way of playing Sims. I love this game as it gives us possibilities to show your creativity, a chance to recreate our favourite characters. A chance to be a writer of storylines or if you’re bad at telling stories, just being “a cartoon designer” like me :)

STEP 2 Colour palettes

If you’ve chosen the path of “bright maxis matchery” than colour palettes are super important! Oh, you can’t imagine how addicted I am to certain colours. I can download GBs because of it.

Here are some of my favourite colour palettes:

1. Anna’s colours

My absolutely favourite palette. I would download absolutely anything in these pretty colours. Just looking at them makes me so cozy *0* There’s a photoshop action for those who want to recolour CC in this palette.

2. Poppet’s colours

I especially like the latest one. So pretty! @poppet-sims is the queen of lovely recolours. She has some more palettes. But “Back to Basics is my favourite”

3. Eversims colours

@eversims has got a lot of pretty colour palettes. But the most iconic one is Ever So Lovely

So, these are the basic colours that I like downloading furniture/clothes with.

There are a couple more pretty palettes that I like:

Huning’s Pony Colours

Back in the days it was my ultimate favourite one. But these days I edit my pictures in Photoshop excessively and prefer calmer colours and add bright layers in photoshop instead.

Nyren’s Kosmic Colours

If you’re more into pastels, than try to download some stuff in this pretty palette.

You might wonder if I use all of these colours. Of course not! I have a selection of colours that I use: apple green, sky blue, yellow, red, pink, orange, purple, teal, mint. I absolutely love combining 2 or 3 of these in my interior shots. I also love choosing my sims’ favourite colours and dressing them/decorating their bedroom in this certain colour(s).

For example, my sim Mia likes apple green/purple and mint.

I think @deedee-sims can relate. While I prefer choosing a favourite colour per sim, she chooses favourite colour for the whole family!

This is a great idea, I think! :)

STEP 4 Bodyshop stuff

Ok, I hope it’s clear that I’m colour palettes addicted, now let’s move onto actual custom content and what I prefer adding to my game. I decided to divide CC by sections. Let’s start with Bodyshop.

4.1 Skintones

Another important thing that you need to choose for yourself. There are tones ofoptions. I’m going to recommend only MM skins as obviously I have no idea which realistic or semi-realistic ones are high quality.

screenshot by @deedee-sims

If you prefer trully maxis skintones, I recommend you to try Leh’s skintones. It’s super close to original ones in terms of shades. Also look at those button noses! These cute noses is the reason why I started using this skin back in 2014. But later I switched to Lilith’s feather as I wanted more variety and those noses there got a lovely shine.

It was my default skin for a lot of years. These days I own every possible skintone by Lilith and various blends by other people.

Lilith’s Alien Flavor

Lilith’s Android Skin Edit

Lilith’s Apple Pie Skinblend v.2

Lilith’s Apple Pie Skinblend

Lilith’s Apple Pie by Kahlena

Lilith’s Feather Skinblend

Lilith’s Feather Skins

Lilith’s Feather by Sim-Strangers

Lilith’s Feathers Colourful by Berrynooboos

Lilith’s Honey Supernatural Custom

Lilith’s Honey with freckles

Lilith’s Honey with no freckles

Lilith’s Honey Unnatural by Berrynooboos

Pixel-danger-sims pastel skins

Here’s a very handy set-up by Vimpse with Lilith’s skins being townified.

Try to choose one set of skins or download all of them by one certain creator. I need a lot of skins because I love creating tones of sims and I want to make them various looking.

4.2 Eyes

♦ Polaroid ♦ - my favourite

♦ Transcendental ♦

♦ Sleeping Lion ♦

♦ Sharp Eyes ♦

♦ Shallowed in the Sea ♦

♦ Hand Outs and Punch Ups ♦

These are just some of my eyes. There are some more by Poppet, by Kahlena. And I have various addons to these sets that I grabbed over and here. I remember having struggles of choosing only one set. But than I thought: why do I have to choose if I like all of them and want my sims to look as different as possible? I just love when they are cartoonish but high-quality with nice white clean sclera. Just look at Disney Rapunzel. You’ll see what I mean ^_^

There’s one little trick that most mm players do for making sims’ eyes bigger and rounder - adding a whiteline eyeliner by jesstheex. I personaly do it for every single sim of mine.

4.3 Makeup

I use tooooons of blushes, lipsticks and eyeshadows. I have everything by Lilith and Jesstheex. And lots of bits and bobs by various creators. I love using both matte or shiny textures. I sometimes add nose shine or use special nosemasks. There are various lovely things in my collection. What I can recommend you is to download a sim that you like by another creator with the help of Sims Clean Installer and just steal makeup from the sim to add to your collection *evil laughter* I recommend to do it because sometimes there are some mouth corners or various eyebags and etc which are difficult to find. It’s easier to grab them together with sims.

For example, I grabbed the shiny nosemasks from one of Lilith’s sims.

Sometimes I like adding a bit of shine on Sims’ noses. Some sims of mine don’t have shine. It really depends on a sim. But what I definitely like is cute button noses! I like using nosemasks to achieve that. I have all the masks by Lilith and these ones by kahlena.

4.4 Hair textures

Another important decision for you is the hair textures. I recommend you to choose one certain retexture. Back in the days, I used to have Remi’s textures

screenshot by @selenaq13

I liked Remi’s ones because they were non-shiny. They had maxis colours and a really cool yellowish blonde!

Receintly I switched to Simgarooped as I’ve always loved that there are 6 naturals. The yellowish blonde is still there! Plus my favourite Deedee-sims keeps updating every week with the retextures of new meshes <3

There are lots of various textures blends. Just search, download, play test. Think, if you’re ready to look at such type of hair hours of simming.

Also try to decide if you’d like to have more natural looking sims or go crazy and have supernatural/aliens. I used to have really bright sims with colourful skins and hairs.

Even my toddlers had unnatural hairs. It’s a lot of fun! But right now I prefer to create more natural looking sims though I like vampires/witches/aliens anyways!

screenshot by @honeylungsims

If you would like to have colourful supernatural sims, check out Honeylung! She has the brightest and most unusual supernatural sims <3

You’ll need a lot of face masks/bright lips/shadows. Check out @berrynooboos for the cutest alien CC.

4.5 Facial hair and Brows

I don’t think they should really match as long as they look great.

For example, I use eyebrows by @suratan-zir which are super cute and high quality but use Poppet’s textures instead of Simgarooped.

As for facial hair, I use some Poppet’s as well.

by Skoogy

by Poppet #1

by Poppet #2

by Simgaroop

4.6 Clothes

As I already mentioned, I love clothes in my favourite palettes. I love Simlish prints. There are so so many creators who share wonderful clothes.

I love @deedee-sims for age conversions, shoeswaps, morphs. I love @mdpthatsme for really cool 4t2 conversions. I love @moocha-muses for colourful T-shirts <3 Don’t be shy to send me a WCIF about a certain item of clothing.

STEP 5 Buy and Build

Tooons of bright recolours, IKEA items, Maxis add-ons, 3t2 and 4t2 conversions - all these things make my heart beat :D

These days I play in a rural-type world. I download a lot of craftsman-style build things, a lot of plants and garden deco.

I love bright wallpapers and greenhouses, I love clutter and kids CC for nurseries. Patterns with polka dots and plumbobs. Sunflowers and tulips. This is what I usually drop into my download folder :)

STEP 6 Taking screenshots

No matter which recolours and textures you prefer, I think high-quality pictures are important. The first thing that you need to playtest for yourself is a camera mod. It’s upo for you, but I can’t live without Gunmod’s Camera Mod. There are some more available, just check out.

Also lighting is important since Maxis original is terrible. I use Dreadpirate’s mod.

I recommend to take screenshots in a camera man mode. Click Tab to enter it. Use W, A,S,D,E buttons to move right/left/up/down etc. And what’s important, use X and Z for zooming in and out. I always use Z for example, when I take close ups of my cats.

Don’t be afraid to experiment with angles. Try some artistic ones.

You can move your camera down and take a screen from below.

Or vice versa from above.

Sometimes I’ll just take a screen of my sims’ hands or feet. It really depends. I love spending hours on just “walking” in a camera mod around my sims houses.

Another useful feature of this mod is to use Ctrl +4,5,6,7,8,9 buttons.

These can fix the angles for you. And after fixing them, when you click on 4,5,6,7,8,9 you camera will go back to those positions. It’s very handy when you want to screen 2 sims who are talking and there’s no need to constatntly move camera from sidde to side. Just fix it and wait for them to perform cute emotions!

As a bonus, you can fic positions in the life mode too. For example, I always choose a proper angle from above where the wgole house can be seen. And wait for something cute/funny/to happen.

Also there’s such a thing as The Rule of Thirds. It’s the rule of photography composition. I always try to follow it :)

STEP 7 Photoshop Editing

I love oversaturated colours. It can be too much for someone’s eyes, but I like the brightness :) I’ll share some good Photoshop resources. Probably, one thing that I can recommend to absolutely everyone no matter how bright you want your screens to be is sharpening! Seems that Tumblr eats our picture quality for breakfast. Sims screenshots seem so blurry to me. I love sharpening them first.

I use sharpening from Kalekaloo’s action.

After sharpening I run the base from Eversims Action and then add some colour layers from Simburgerr’s one (I like gradients and fluffy lights layers especially). It makes the reds colours a little bit too saturated but I think it’s cute!

There are a some more cute actions and PSD files out there:

OhMySims - Action 1

OhMySims - Action 2

Sterina’s Action

Photoshop PSDs by Pleyita

Snapdragoned PSD

Mandragore PSD by Kiinuu

JellyBeanery’s Action

Roguebotanist

Nnilou - 12:51

A generic PSD by Knowledgeaspiration

Colorize IT by Bonnypixels

Colour Crush by Bonnypixels

Just Like Heaven by Pixeldemographics

For more tips/palettes/cute fonts I recommend you to check out @bepixeled

That’s all that came to my mind. I hope at least something was useful!

#ts2 #sims 2 #the sims 2 #sims 2 tutorial #sims tutorial #sims guide #sims 2 guide

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0aurelion-sol0 · 3 years

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Yo~

What's your opinion on the Will Byers DID theory? If you like it, which version do you like better? Both interpretations seem cool to me, though I personally like strangertheory's version better ^.^

Hi!

That's a very interesting question. I want to start by saying that I am a singlet, so I don't have DiD or OSDD. My knowledge of this condition is primarly known through medias I consume or some more "advanced" psychiatric documents or researches.

DiD is a condition that hasn't been always best represented or accurately represented since this condition varies from people who have it and so while there are similarities, the experience of it is very much unique and personal. It is also something that in a fictional setting with different genres, themes and tones is very hard to pull off or represent unless you go for the very realistic take on it.

It is bound to be, like many other things in fiction, dramatized. And speaking from a singlet perspective, who also had particular problems represented in fiction, I think it's okay as long as it's done right, in the setting, tone and genre it is in.

For example, we have today a lot more LGBTQ+ representation and like everything, unless you go for the fully realistic route, it's going to be simplified and dramatized. There's so many gender identities and sexual orientations today, you have to simplify it. And that goes for many other things that people care about in media, it has to be done right, but the writers still have a story to tell and unless that subject is the focus of the story, they're not gonna always spend their time talking about that. There is a story to tell.

Secondly, if it is the main focus of the story, that is where people have to do their research and really represent what they are talking about. Not some half-baked representation with dull arguments and points that come from a capitalist and conservative worldview. (Looking at you Disney.)

Now what you are referencing are @strangertheory 's and @kaypeace21 's theories which are about the show being about a DiD system where we see different alters evolving in said story with the host being Will Byers.

There is a lot of evidence pointing towards it, I'm gonna let you go see their posts and read it.

But their theories are very different in the way that they see the show portraying DiD, I have actually find quite a great way to describe the two takes.

@kaypeace21 's take is that elements of the DiD system have been externalised through science-"fictional" or supernatural means. Similar to Legion from the Marvel universe.

(David is a powerful mutant with DiD where each alters, if I remember correctly, has a different power or powers. (Which to this day is still one of the most BADASS thing I have ever come across though it must be quite terrifying for David.))

@strangertheory is an internalised POV on the DiD system existing in the show. She believes that what we are seeing right now is what is exclusively happening INSIDE the DiD system and that what we are experiencing is not our standard definition of the "real world". As in the physical world we all know. This would be in very vulgar terms happening inside Will's self, head, mind or brain. In a sense, it would be a more accurate representation of what DiD is about. A Shyamalan twist if you prefer.

(Though right now I don't have any word for word examples of such take, there is a show called MR.ROBOT that fits a bit of this description since there are moments in the show that we are seeing are only happening in the DiD system itself.

I recommend this show A LOT. It still is a bit dramatized but from what I know the DiD representation is quite accurate and pleased a lot of people with DiD. Also some people on the Stranger Things crew worked on that show.)

Now do I love the DiD theory ?

Heck yeah, I fucking love it! And with a big L! (Am I right "The First I love you?").

And I Love both of the takes and I think each one works at explaining the mysteries of this story. I even think that in some ways both could work well together.

I believe that DiD can be, without the meaning of being used, like many things a powerful storytelling "device" since it is connected to so many themes and other writing tools and is linked literally to the psyche, emotions and personalities of the characters.

I can understand why some people like both or one or respectfully and logically dislike both or one of the takes. But it is close to my belief about what the show is about or were even before I came into this fandom or on the internet, not as complex and thought out as the theory itself but pretty close in the overall themes and aspects of it.

(Though it bewilders me how much people lack imagination or are scared of such twist when I have seen so many of those types before whether it's done well or not, accurate or not.)

Now both @strangertheory and @kaypeace21 are intelligent people with very nuanced takes. And they had their fair share of completely unjust controversies coming from either rabbid ignorant shippers, far too sensible people or downright ignorant stupid people, most of the time 16 year olds. I am not saying that they are perfect, no one is, but the hate they have received is completely unjust.

And I am gonna lay it down right here, they are begging for an accurate representation here, they are not doing this because it just sounds cool and is edgy, they are actually wanting that The Duffers pull this off well. They would be very mad if they use all the imagery just to make it look cooler or scarier.

They are not bringer of truths, they are just like us. They are theorists, they believe in something that they think can explain the story they love and are experiencing. And so far, they have a pretty damn good track record.

They are analysing, dissecting the show because it's what they want to do and they believe in it and they believe the Duffers wants them to do that (I mean how come no one believes it when watching a show like that set in the 80's with so many references ?).

It is also supposed to be fun. Have fun for God's Sake! You can disagree with it but calling names and being disrespectful because somehow they don't agree with very basic, lazy and cliché theories (and no it's not being hypocrite, a lot of people barely do the work.) or are not on board with your creepy projection over the characters IS not okay.

And no, they aren't supporting p*d*philia as some people have claimed. How can you read these theories and come up to that conclusion ?

Most people haven't even read the DiD theory or have gone all the way through with it because they are lazy, easily bored people who don't have the time to just relax, process and think.

Stranger Things is not a kids show, some dumb teenage romance drama show with cool monsters! It's a very mature show, with real problems that are treated, out of which is trauma and mental health. Kids are killing people and even dying on this show. There is sexism, racism, abuse both physical and psychological.

It is a very mature and dark show. And you are being disrespectful to the Duffers when you say they are not that smart or that isn't that important. They are putting a lot of thoughts into this and the fact that no one really recognises this annoys me.

Or people only think it's important when it is only about the things they enjoy in the show. (Which is more hypocrite to me.) OR people are very stupid if they truly think that or are just jealous, bitter that two women have more imagination together and individualy than all of them or that person alone.

Color and costume choices, subtext, context, camera angles, directing, VFX, music, editing, sets, props, script, acting and editing are very important. All must be carefully done or you get very bad or generic stuff if you don't. If you love and you are passionate about the work, you put all the details you can into it.

And the Duffers and all the people working with them have already referenced those sort of things AND the practice of what we do on the internet. They are aware, they know because they have been in the same place too. They grew up with stories too, they made theories too whether it's on the internet or not.

At the end of the day, it is just a theory. An explanation of what is unfolding, may unfold or may have unfolded. I believe in it, I think it is reasonable, it has logic and it makes sense. It also has a lots of elements backing it up.

And the Duffers don't even have to go with DiD or mention it. Will creating some of the characters and supernatural events from his trauma is also similar and more accessible to the masses. But a Shyamalan twist can also work if it is done well.

And I am also open to other possibilities and theories, if they make sense and have enough elements IN THE SHOW and everything connected to it backing it up.

If the Duffers write something completely different but it is as good and also explains even better than this theory than I'll be okay. I love being wrong, it makes me learn new things and enhances the way I approach stories in the future.

If the Duffers only used this as some very inaccurate and disrespectful scary/abstract subtext without commiting to it. That is where I will have a problem.

Or write something completely incoherent with the rest of the show with a bad plot twist catering to the main public masses to sell the story even more and just make money so that they are safe with a fallacy of a work of fiction. Because they are cowards who didn't know how to manage themselves and baited entire audiences or listened to some crappy executive who didn't understand shit about the story. (wink wink, looking at a certain something...)

So yeah, I do love the DiD theory and both of it's takes and if it happens and is done right, with of course my perspective on the thing and PRIMARLY the perspective of people who have DiD or know a lot about it, I'll be pleased with it and I think it could be something very important for stories, people, the world and "art" in general.

Thank you for the question it was really fun! I hope I described the theory and the condition in the right way @kaypeace21 and @strangertheory and also the people who are concerned or know about it if I didn't let me know. Also, if you disagree with what I said, the way I said it or the subject itself let me also know IF it's respectful of course.

#stranger asks things #stranger asks #did theory #the did theory #will byers #will the wise #willel #stranger things

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maxwell-grant · 3 years

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So that ask about a Doc Savage/The Shadow crossover (which as an aside, I agree that Doc is probably the worst of the archetype he is functionally the Ur-Example of that isn’t an intentional deconstruction focusing on his worst eugenicist/borderline-fascist aspects to create a villain) has me thinking: what exactly would be the boundaries for a good, well-written crossover between the Shadow and different genres or eras of what we all collectively call pulp? Could someone do a crossover between the Shadow and Indiana Jones that didn’t rely on one or the other being little more than a glorified cameo in a small portion of what was essentially the other’s story, or reducing the former to his lamest two-dimensional “gun-toting homicidal maniac” interpretations? Could the Shadow ever functionally exist in a universe shared with a space opera setting like the Lensman series? It seems like one could theoretically do a crossover between the Shadow and a character of the same era like Nero Wolfe or Sam Spade, but would it strain credulity to attempt it with characters from an updated form of the private detective archetype like Thomas Magnum’s Hawaiian noir or Rick Deckard’s cyberpunk dystopia? Obviously not expecting answers to each of these hypotheticals specifically, just as examples of the kind of thing I’m wondering now.

I will be going through some of your hypotheticals though, you clearly gave a lot of thought to this and it's only fair I respond in turn. I am always eager to respond anyone who wants to ask specifics about writing The Shadow, because much of what I strive to do through this blog is to just inform people about the many, many things that made The Shadow great, the things that have been neglected, and to provide paths anyone who wishes to write the character may take. I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to write The Shadow someday, but the least I can do is spread knowledge as I work my way there. I'd like to think I've done allright so far.

It's a fairly big question though so we're gonna through it by pieces...

...not THAT way

what exactly would be the boundaries for a good, well-written crossover between the Shadow and different genres or eras of what we all collectively call pulp?

Part of the reason why I did a post yesterday on The Shadow's influences is because looking at them, looking at a character's influences and history, I think are always essential to the prospect of tackling them. And in that regard, The Shadow doesn't actually have much, if any, boundaries stopping him from crossing over with just about anything. The most that's stopping the pulp heroes currently is, besides legal issues, their time periods and obscurity, but The Shadow is the most famous of them all, and a lot of stories have already worked with the idea that he's immortal (which I have my misgivings with, but for better or worse is clearly not going anywhere, and it's not a unworkable concept).

Right from the start, The Shadow was designed to be a long-running, versatile character that could partake in whatever adventures they felt like telling, and part of this is due not just to an incredibly strong personality not afforded to most pulp heroes or characters in general, even those who tried imitating him, but also the fact that he often takes a narrative backseat to the agents and proxy heroes, which means he doesn't have to carry a narrative by his own (and is in fact best suited not to), can blend in to just about anyone's story, and still stand out and be the center of sprawling mysteries. Actually, I'm gonna let Walter Gibson answer this one for you:

While his major missions were to stamp out mobs or smash spy rings, he often tabled such routines in order to find a missing heir, uncover buried treasure, banish a ghost from a haunted house or oust a dictator from a mythical republic.

There was no limitation to the story themes as long as they came within the standards of credibility--which proved easy, since The Shadow was such an incredible character in his own right that almost anything he encountered was accepted by his ardent followers.

Widespread surveys taken while the magazine was appearing monthly showed that a large majority of newsstands sold nearly all their copies within the first two weeks of issue. While other character magazines might show an early flurry, their sales were either spread evenly over the entire period or gained their impetus about the middle of the mouth and sometimes not until the third or even the fourth week.

From the writing standpoint, this made it advisable to adhere more closely to the Cranston guise and to emphasize the parts played by The Shadow's well-established agents, since regular readers evidently liked them. Also, it meant "keeping ahead" of those regulars, with new surprises, double twists in "whodunit" plots, and most exacting of all a succession of villains who necessarily grew mightier and more monstrous as The Shadow disposed of their predecessors.

Always, his traits and purposes were defined through the observations and reactions of persons with whom he came in contact, which meant that the reader formed his opinion from theirs.

This gave The Shadow a marked advantage over mystery characters forced to maintain fixed patterns and made it easy to write about him. There was never need for lengthy debate regarding what The Shadow should do next, or what course he should follow to keep in character. He could meet any exigency on the spur of the moment, and if he suddenly acted in a manner opposed to his usual custom, it could always be explained later.

The Shadow’s very versatility opened a vast vista of story prospects from the start of the series onward. In the earlier stories, he was described as a “phantom,” an “avenger,”, and a “superman,” so he could play any such parts and still be quite in character. In fact, all three of those terms were borrowed by other writers to serve as titles for other characters.

Almost any situation involving crime could be adapted to The Shadow’s purposes

The final rule was this: put The Shadow anywhere, in any locale, among friends or associates, even in a place of absolute security, and almost immediately crime, menace or mystery would begin to swirl about him, either threatening him personally or gathering him in its vortex to carry him off to fields where antagonists awaited.

That was his forte throughout all his adventures. Always, his escapes were worked out beforehand, so that they would never exceed the bounds of plausibility when detailed in narrative form. And that was the great secret of The Shadow.”

In some regards, The Shadow is a mirror. He presents himself to people the way that's best suited to them, the way they'd like him to be, the way he needs to be to affect them. They want money, he has it. They want honor, glory and purpose, he gives them that. They want to fight and turn around social systems for the better, he funds their dreams. Gangsters want the underworld's greatest hitman on their side, he becomes that and lets it be their doom. The story calls for a rich aristocrat who can rub elbows with politicians and kings and presidents, he can do that as long as it suits him. Kent Allard can be a world famous celebrity in one story and a disfigured, broke and faceless nobody in the next. You want a kind janitor with unexpected fighting skill to spy on police and assist the homeless, he has a little someone named Fritz for the occasion. You want an evil monster to be defeated, bring out Ying Ko. Hell, James Patterson's upcoming Shadow novel, which by all reviews seems to be pretty lousy, apparently features The Shadow transforming into a cat. Why? Screw you, that's why! But you'd never see James Bond or Batman spontaneously transforming into a cat without outside interference. He's The Shadow, he's got a face for everything.

(Okay to be clear I don't actually want the Shadow to literally transform into animals, at least not without a good explanation which the book clearly doesn't provide, but I do think it illustrates my point about how generally weird he is)

He is a shapeshifter who can be just about any character in any given narrative who only reveals himself when it's time to materialize into a cloaked terror or a familiar face (whether it's Cranston or Allard or Arnaud and so on). War stories, romance stories, sci-fi stories, globetrotting stories, parody stories, he's done all of them and then some. He doesn't need to be the protagonist of a story, he doesn't need to be invincible, and he doesn't really have any set rules regarding powerset. Gibson stressed credibility a lot, but for over 70 years now, that's clearly gone by the window of the character's writing. By design, he was always meant to be able to smoothly integrate into any existing narrative. Frankly, the only thing that's really holding him back (or saving him, depending on how you look at it) is the fact that he's not public domain (yet).

I think for a start, it's not so much boundaries, because in make believe land boundaries are just things to be overcome on the way to telling a story, so much as it's a good working knowledge of the character and of how far you are willing to stretch your storytelling limitations to include him, because he can account for just about all of them. Now, obviously there's stuff that works for the character better than others, a lot of Shadow fans don't like it when they take the character too much into fantasy, there's debates on how superpowered should he be if at all, and so forth. I have my own preferences, but one of the bigger tests of long-running characters is how can they succeed and thrive when placed outside of their element, and The Shadow can do that.

Could someone do a crossover between the Shadow and Indiana Jones that didn’t rely on one or the other being little more than a glorified cameo in a small portion of what was essentially the other’s story, or reducing the former to his lamest two-dimensional “gun-toting homicidal maniac” interpretations?

would it strain credulity to attempt it with characters from an updated form of the private detective archetype like Thomas Magnum’s Hawaiian noir

Well regarding the first question, the latter portion I think is very easy to do. Just, don't write him like that. Just be aware of why that's a mischaracterization, why the character doesn't need that to work, why he works better without it, and so on. It shouldn't be that hard.

Regarding Indiana Jones and Thomas Magnum, I think these two actually lend themselves very easily to crossovers with The Shadow. On Indy's case, he already is a Pulp Hero operating in the same time period, who's got a heavily contrasting niche and personality to build a fun dynamic around. Indy is more story-driven, in the sense that the Indiana Jones moves are all centered around his experiences and point of view and growth as a person, compared to The Shadow's stories, which are not really about "his" story as much as they are about the stories of the people he comes in contact with. Indy is a blockbuster superstar while The Shadow lurks and slithers through the edges and cracks of a story until it's time to strike. But if anything that just makes even more of a case as to why they could team up without issue, since there's a further built-in complimentary contrast to work with.

I have never watched Magnum P.I so there's definitely stuff I might be missing, but looking him up, past the necessary explanation as to why The Shadow's hanging around the 80s, it wouldn't strain credulity at all for the two to team up. The Shadow has had Caribbean/beach-themed adventures and one unrecorded adventure in Honolulu, he has a beach bum secret identity called Portuguese Joe that he could use for this occasion, and Magnum seems like exactly the kind of character who could star as the proxy hero of a Shadow novel. He's lively and friendly and can look after himself, he has a job that leads him to trouble and puts him on contact with criminals as well as victims, he's got secrets and a dark past and a laundry list of character flaws, he's perfectly capable of carrying a story by himself but can be out of his depth in the schemes that he gets caught up in.

Could the Shadow ever functionally exist in a universe shared with a space opera setting like the Lensman series? Or Rick Deckard’s cyberpunk dystopia?

I'm going to tackle parts of this question more throughly when I answer one in my query that's asking me "How would you do The Shadow in modern day?", which I still haven't gotten around to answering because it's a tricky one. I won't go into the specifics for the two examples you listed because I've never read the Lensman books and googling about them hasn't helped much very much, and Deckard's a fairly standard P.I character mostly elevated by the movie he's in, there's not really much to discuss regarding him specifically interacting with The Shadow. The question you're asking me here seems to generally be: Could The Shadow functionally exist in settings so radically apart from the 30s Depression era he was made for?

My answer for this is a maybe leaning towards yes. Starting with the fact that the concept of The Shadow is more suited for allegorical fantasy along the lines of space operas and cyberpunk, than the gritty realism he's been saddled with for decades, which I'll get into another time. For some reason, a lot of people seem to harp on about how the Shadow's costume is impractical and unworkable for modern times, and said James Patterson novel mentioned above ditched it all together, which as you can guess was a massively unpopular decision. Matt Wagner talked once about how cities don't have shadows and men wearing hats anymore and that's part of why you can't have The Shadow in modern times (as if The Shadow was always supposed to be dressing like an average guy, and not cowboy Dracula). But nobody seems to have a problem with characters dressing up exactly like The Shadow showing up all the time in dystopian future cities with fashion senses where they stick out like a sore thumb (and really, they should stick out, otherwise what's the point of being all weird and dark and mysterious?)

Although The Shadow is specifically suited for urban settings, is conceptually rooted in 1930s America, and there are important facets of his characterization related to history like the Great War, there are not the be-all end-all of The Shadow. It's part of the character. Other parts integral to the character are, as mentioned above, the versatility and metamorphous nature he was always intended to have. His nature as a character who exists to thrive in narratives not about him and not centered around him. His roots on Dracula and King Arthur and Oz and Lupin which are concepts that have had so, so many drastical revisions and turnabouts that still stuck to the basic principles of the icon.

Besides, The Shadow's already been there. He's already been to space, he's already been in alternate dimensions, he's already reawakened in modern/future times several times now (when he doesn't just live to them unchanged). He's been a cyborg twice, and between those, El Sombra, Vendata, X-9, the Shadow-referencing robot henchmen from Bob Morane and Yu-Gi-Oh's Jinzo referencing the movie's bridge scene, it's enough to constitute a weird pattern of The Shadow and Shadow-adjacent characters turning into robots. Perhaps one positive side effect of The Shadow's decades-long submersion in fantasy is that it's opened the character for just about anything, and I think this could be a good thing if it was married to an adherence to the things that made him such a juggernaut of an icon in the 30s and 40s.

Really, The Shadow partially works on Predator rules. And by that I mean, the big secret of the Predator that filmmakers don't seem to get is that the best way to make a Predator film is to just put the Predator somewhere he's not supposed to be, and let that play out. Because the Predator is, by design, a trespasser who invades narratives and turns the power dynamics around, and that works for any narrative you put it into.

The first movie is all about setting you up for a jungle action movie with Schwarzenegger's Sexual Tyrannosaurus Crew as the biggest baddest death squad around, only for the Predator to appear, turn the tables on these shitheads and pick them off one by one until Arnie scrapes a victory by beating it at it's own game. The 2nd movie is about a drug war between cops and gangs in L.A, until the Predator shows up and suddenly he's the big problem again that's gotta be put down. All the other movies fail because they try to be "about" the Predator, but the Predator doesn't work that way. He's a ugly motherfucker who's here to fight and kill things in cool ways for the sake of it's warrior game, who already has a specific structure to how his story's meant to play out, and that's all he needs to be. What you do is just take that character, take the structure he carries around, and throw it somewhere that works by different rules, and let the contrast play out the story.

Obviously there's a lot more to The Shadow than this, I write a billion essays on the guy after all, but much of what makes The Shadow work, much of what made The Shadow such an icon at the decade of his debut and such an interesting character to revolve any kinds of stories around, was because of the great contrast he posed to everything surrounding him, and the ways he can both be at the forefront as well as the backseat of any story.

Going back to what Gibson said:

Almost any situation involving crime could be adapted to The Shadow’s purposes. He could meet any exigency on the spur of the moment, and if he suddenly acted in a manner opposed to his usual custom, it could always be explained later.

The Shadow was such an incredible character in his own right that almost anything he encountered was accepted by his ardent followers.

advisable to emphasize the parts played by The Shadow's well-established agents, since regular readers evidently liked them.

The keyword here isn't that the Shadow should be realistic, frankly that's always been a lost cause. He was never really that realistic, and it's unfair to expect writers to keep pace with Gibson who had lifelong experience with the in and outs of magic and daring escapes and whatnot. The keywords I want to stress here is "accepted by his ardent followers".

Make a good explanation, an explanation that fits the character, an explanation that works, and the rest will follow. And if you can't, make us like the character. Make us accept that he can do and be all these things. Give us something to be invested in. And if that can't be The Shadow himself because he has to stay at arms length constantly to be mysterious, Gibson cracked the code almost a century ago through the agents. Make us invested in them, and through them, we will become invested in The Shadow.

The pulp Shadow would get tired, get injured, need rescuing, need to stop and rest and catch his breath, would need to think and plan and make split decisions on the spot and sometimes would make the wrong ones only to reverse them in the nick of time, and it made the fact that he was achieving all these things all the more impressive. The pulp Shadow was a creature of fantasy grounded in the history of the world he was a part of.

If you can make people care about The Shadow, be truly, genuinely invested in him and his world and the people he comes in contact with, be as invested in those as audiences were back then, you can and maybe should put him anywhere, doing anything, as long as you know what you're doing. As long as you understand what makes The Shadow tick, what makes him work and what doesn't, and whatnot.

Which is a lot of words for "do whatever you want, just don't fuck it up"

#replies tag #pulp heroes #pulp fiction #the shadow #lamont cranston #kent allard #the predator #indiana jones #thomas magnum

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titusmoody · 3 years

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2021 Q2 stuff

Games

Return of the Obra Dinn -- Very different. A great experience to play, it doesn’t use any typical “gamer” skills or knowledge. It also hit on a lot of my personally prefered sensibilities (stories self-contained to ships, non-linear storytelling, mysteries, and meticulous attention to detail)

Kentucky Route Zero -- Even more different. I’m glad I played it for the atmosphere, though it didn’t click with me the way Obra Dinn did. Extremely atmospheric and cool, but also has a strong academic curiosity to it.

DOOM (2016)-- Okay, we’re back to regular video games. Everything about this one seems very carefully crafted. I had a good, mindless time with this one.

Spider-Man -- Not as well-crafted as DOOM, but also less juvenile. I also had a good, mindless time with this one.

Metroid: Samus Returns -- Feels like Metroid. The moment-to-moment combat is different than Super Metriod and Fusion, which is a nice way to keep things from getting stale.

Shadow and Bone -- Sometimes tropes exist because they make for good stories. This show was a good example of that.

Pani Poni Dash -- WTF Japan, in a good way

Princess Tutu -- Much like I felt about Cowboy Bebop, this show was very well-made and I had an easy time appreciating what it was doing, though in the end it’s not the kind of thing that’s really for me

Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid -- Pleasant to watch, mostly lighthearted but could definitely have emotional moments here and there to keep you interested.

Kakegurui -- Shows like this are the reason anime fans are so self-depricating. It was thoroughly trashy, but I’d be lying if I said that the trashiness didn’t lead to a lot of fun.

Love, Chunibyo, and other Delusions -- An excellent comfort-watch. About a high-schooler trying to run away from his cringe-y middle school phase. I definitely have criticisms of it, but I’m also definitely going to watch it again.

Devilman Crybaby -- I swear, Masaaki Uasa takes the most overdone premises and portrays them in such bonkers ways that they become pretty cool. This isn’t one of the best examples of that, but it still works.

Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket -- Part of Gundam’s brand is that it shows the effect of wars on individuals. This is a great small-scale example of that.

She-Ra -- It’s good. The plot kinda meanders and the backstory lore is presented confusingly/unclearly at times. But the central characters are good enough to carry at least a few seasons, and the secondary characters really elevate the whole thing. I was personally very fond of Scorpia as well as the way the writers used Entrapta both in the plot and as a character foil.

Chernobyl -- Second time watching this, it’s definitely a favorite.

Movies

Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again -- You already know what this is like and whether or not you enjoy the sort of thing it is.

Moulin Rouge -- It’s hard to watch Mamma Mia without thinking of this one, so I watched it soon after.

Minari -- My personal reward for being fully vaccinated was to go to the movies by myself. This was a good movie, though overshadowed by the circumstances in which I saw it. I would’ve been very happy to be seeing anything.

My Fair Lady -- An iconic pop-culture touchstone. Not my favorite musical, for sure.

Interstellar -- This movie is in the odd position of currently being my favorite Christopher Nolan movie despite the fact that I don’t like it nearly as much as I liked either The Dark Knight or Memento when I saw those for the first time.

The Perfect Storm -- George Clooney, big wave.

Legally Blonde -- I didn’t hear the term “sitcom” until oddly late in life, and when I heard it, I assumed it meant movies like this where there aren’t a ton of jokes, but the characters are constantly in inherently funny situations. I don’t like this type of humor that much.

Jurassic Park -- A big “moral” of the movie was “don’t trust computers to do anything important” but today it’s hard not to get the message as “never underpay your system administrator” instead.

Apollo 13 -- Pretty good

ET -- I really didn’t like this movie and I don’t quite know what it doesn’t do that Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones do. Imminent danger seem to be part of it, but I don’t think that’s the whole picture.

The Day After Tomorrow -- *shrug* I had fun watching it

Pearl Harbor -- expected it to be bad, it was bad. It was definitely bad in interesting ways, and was almost good a lot of the time.

Die Hard -- I was looking for suspenseful movies with clear character motivation and this fit the description. It was good, though I didn’t like it quite as much as I hoped to.

Star Trek V -- Star Trek is often silly and I just can’t get on board with some of the silliness, like the last part of this movie.

Terminator 2 -- Yeah, I do like suspense. I don’t think I’ll look back on this as a favorite, but I was pretty into it. Moreso than Die Hard.

Cast Away -- Pretty good

Predator -- Somewhere between Die Hard and Terminator 2. I was a bit bored by the end, which ironically was the part that most closely resembled what I was looking for.

Braveheart -- I think romanticising medieval Europe is fun and cool. Unfortunately this movie has some creepy sexual hang-ups as well as rampant “no step on snek” energy that ruin the whole thing.

Redline -- Just a cool looking movie

State of Play -- I forgot the whole plot of this already, but I enjoyed it

Troy -- It’s not as bad as its reputation suggests, though the end does get really over-the-top cheesy

Demon Slayer -- I liked going to the movies by myself so much the first time that I did it again. This time it was in a much more full theater and I was one of very few people over 17. Fun action anime movie, though.

Gladiator -- I’m so disappointed that I didn’t connect to this movie, since over and over I felt like I was very close to loving it. I think the revenge motivation was what ultimately prevented me from really getting into it.

K-19: The Widowmaker -- Hell yeah, extremely tense submarine scenes, that’s exactly what I wanted.

The Manchurian Candidate (2004) -- The movie felt like it wanted its premise to feel plausible, but it really didn’t. Still pretty good, though

The Big Lebowski -- Still not a big fan of this one.

The Naked Gun -- This confirms that my sense of humor has not gotten more refined since age 17 or so. I still thought this was pretty funny.

Dances With Wolves -- Mostly just boring.

Angels and Demons -- Even at age 15 the book’s riddles and clues premise felt a bit too contrived. The movie has the additional disadvantage that verbal explanations are the most boring way to resolve questions, unlike books where words are all you have.

Chinatown -- Meh, a fine detective story but nothing really clicked with me. The director’s life is wild, though. He escaped the holocaust, had his pregnant wife murdered by the Manson family, and is currently a fugitive from justice for raping a 13 year old.

The Core -- Like The Perfect Storm, appealing in the “so bad it’s good” way.

Porco Rosso -- Think the type of character study of Kiki’s Delivery Service, but about a middle-aged man, so it doesn’t resonate with Miyazaki’s audience enough for many people to talk about it.

Uncut Gems -- My second time watching it, it’s definitely a favorite. Between this and A Serious Man, I seem to love extremely stressful movies about mediocre jewish men.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) -- Interesting to compare/contrast with the other version. I like both

Galaxy Quest -- another movie that fits my personal definition of what “sitcom” should mean. Again, not my favorite type of humor

Fantastic Planet -- Looks like something between the animated sketches in Monty Python and Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Very weird, it personally really worked for me.

Scarface -- I think romanticising organized crime is fun and cool.

In the Heights -- colorful, catchy, happy and fun.

Books

The House in the Cerulean Sea -- a good comfort-read. very simplistic and a little clunky and amateur-ish, but ultimately pretty cute.

There There -- not a comfort-read at all. A super raw look at the modern life of a variety of Native American situations. Very harsh but also interesting.

Six of Crows -- Fine YA fantasy fluff.

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ecoamerica · 2 months

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youtube

Watch the American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 now: https://youtu.be/bWiW4Rp8vF0?feature=shared

The American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 broadcast recording is now available on ecoAmerica's YouTube channel for viewers to be inspired by active climate leaders. Watch to find out which finalist received the $50,000 grand prize! Hosted by Vanessa Hauc and featuring Bill McKibben and Katharine Hayhoe!

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weaselbeaselpants · 4 years

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That Krispy Cat: A Warning, part 3

The last of the images cause I don’t want this bitch on my computer anymore.

Knowing tumblr I kept the images hidden JUUUUST in case no one reads the fine print and can’t tell I’m being critical of this and gets me in trouble.

VVV ((Just in case you thought the JewishGriffon piece assured everyone that Crispy couldn’t POSSIBLY hate people of color, some of her earliest Nazi art had her character Klaus beating up Amigo Bear. She also made Amigo into a liberal strawman. )) VVV

((Dialogue to one of her TROLLARIOUS pictures that featured Amigo:

Amigo Bear: *muttering* "Your leader was a !@#$% little #@%^!@$^*!, you fascist feather duster..." General Klaus: "Fräulein, Ich vant you to cover your ears und shut your eyes as tight as you can." Crispy: "How come, General?" General Klaus: "Klaus ist about to say und do very bad sings zhat he does not vant his little Edelweiß to see or hear." Crispy: "Alrighty!" General Klaus: "WHO SAID ZHAT ABOUT DER FÜHRER? WER DIE FICK GESAGT? WHO'S ZUH SCHLEIMIG LITTLE COMMUNIST-SCHEISS SCHWANZLUTSCHER DOWN ZHERE, WHO JUST SIGNED HIS OWN DEATH VARRANT? NIEMAND?! GOTTVERDAMMT STALIN SAID IT! HERVORRAGEND! VHICH VUN OF YOU VANTS TO BE ZUH FIRST TO FIND OUT ZUH HARD VAY VHY MEIN FEINDE CALLED MIR DER BUTCHER BIRD?" ))

^^^ ((BUTOPHERARTISGOODSOYOUCAN’TCOMPLAIN

also the disc. for this pic before it was deleted had a ‘joke’ about cooking Jews in ovens. Oh and yes, that IS Hitler she’s giving that ugly ass cupcake too.))

^^^ (( - Thanks dA I never would have known I had a notifications unless eclipse blah -

This is one of her rants about how #Triggered she is that Starlight be compared to the Nazis when she runs a communist cult. Because A) that’s the real problem here and B) I too get upset when people say my OC is based on Jeffrey Dahmer when he’s so CLEARLY based on Ed Gein, Bwwwaaaah D> D> D> !)) ^^^

VVV ((Ugly art of her friend’s awful OCs.)) ^^^

VVV ((Crispy showing off why no one wants to be a patriot in our country.)) VVV

((FYI, Crisp, that attitude will make the Hamilton fans stronger so just keep that SJW-flinging coming you little SJW.

WHAT?! Social Justice is a broad term and as Crispy’s plainly demonstrated, you can circle it around and make a majority-class sound like the real underprivledged if you have enough fancy frou frou know-how and furries. Also, if a Social Justice Warrior constitutes someone who takes their cause soooo seriously that they’re annoying/petting/cruel/stupid about it....idk I think Crispy qualified.))

^^^ ((Crispy and her friend muse about what other races occupy the world of MLP in her headcanon. This, more than any other dA disc. and picture shows you her brand of “Segregationist-Nationalism is OKAY” thinking, cuz the art of these different races isn’t super offensive or cruel and neither are the characters. BUT if you scratch under the surface you’ll find that Crispy really likes these different people staying in their place and not in “someone else’s” country.

THEN, this same kind of thinking is used to convince you any mix of cultures is just cultural appropriation, again acting like she and her Nazi-stans are the only ones standing up to actual bigotry.)) VVV

^^^ ((Crispy makes the world a worse place by bringing up actual decent points; like how Americans dress Thanksgiving up as progressive and for the natives when we all know that’s not true...all to better her worldview.

fyi, GET OUT whenever you see a selfproclaimed Nazi fawn over Native Americans, because: Nazi Germany had a deep fascination with American Indians and used their struggles about their land being taken away from them to justify their eugenic genocide.)) ^^^

^^^ (( Crispy laughing it up on Furaffinity how she couldn’t be banned from her Furaffinity and then mysteriously never using her site there wowie.)) ^^^

^^^ (( Crispy complaining about SOPA cause her freedom of speech and blahblahblah.

Freedom of Speech is important. Unfortunately what people like Crispy don’t understand or care for is there’s no freedom of consequence. )) vvv

VVV ((LOL Joseph Mengele was such a stinkah let’s tell blithe jokes about him. At least WE AREN’T LIKE HIM!!!)) VVVV

VVV ((Early onset eugenic BS from her Spyro stuff that would be easy to miss if you didn’t know what this woman was talking about)) VVV

((Crispy admitting she thinks gays are pointless cuz they don’t reproduce but apparently loves them anyway. Also big shock Crispy’s seen Hetalia.)) VVV

VVV ((Crispy probably wanting Weeaboos to attack her cuz aren’t Japan’s animations so laaaaaaazy?!!?!? GUUdd think’ I’m a naziaboo! Germany’s never made any shitty animation evah. You know what, I lied. She doesn’t deserve Hetalia. She just doesn’t.)) VVVV

VVV ((Crispy dragging Brazil down with her as the apparent “Best South American Country”. Yikes.)) VVV

VVV ((More “it’s trolling ergo it’s not harmful” shit. Bulgarians probably do deserve their own Care Bears, but they certainly don’t want yours Crispy.)) VVV

VVV ((Disc. for her Richard Spencer bear art)) VVV

------

I know, I know...this isn’t what you wanted to read today, guys. I know it’s offensive and I’m sorry if it made you ill. I also know I’m putting my own blog under fire by showing these images here but I think that should say something about dA’s bad policies that this art gets a filter slapped on it and nothing more when the artist is blatantly pro-fascist.

Crispy resonates with me so much - and no it’s not cause I DARED to be “triggered”.

It’s because, for one, she was talented. I MEAN I HAVE EYES! That’s some nicely drawn digital stuff I’m not gonna deny. She had some cool rewrites and sequel ideas that, had it come from someone else I would have eaten up and faved to hell and back onceupona2012. But I didn’t, where a ton of MLP and furry fans did because they undervalued their own talents and would say “well it’s pretty who cares about the message?”

Unlike so many commercial+published artists, it’s REALLY hard to separate the art from the artist here because the artist is so connected and a part of her art and storytelling. If you fav her art, even if you didn’t like her, that was telling Crispy she’d won. It’s so defeating to have other artists say their gonna ignore their gut for the sake of prettypretty-Don-Bluth style art. And yes, that stigma DOES affect my view on 2D purists btw.

Crispy was so holier than thou’, and that attitude also was appealing to dA folks, not to mention her knowledge of art history by the time she dropped off the radar. Crispy was the kind of person who’d make long, detailed, justified rants against the design and color choices in Hazbin Hotel and then a bunch of antis would eat her redesigns up only to learn the awful truth later and embarrass themselves cuz they were so taken up by the craft they didn’t know they were reblogging a fucking Nazi.

Not to underplay Viv’s wrongdoings of course, but I’m sorry; the two aren’t comparable on the problematic artist meter. THAT’S HOW BAD CRISPY WAS.

If this somehow was just a faze and she’s come to her senses or doesn’t really think this shite she preaches...I don’t care. She said some vile shit and fuck no I’m not forgiving her. It’s like KenDraw or Shadman. You’ve changed your life around and realized you’ve done/drawn nasty shit that’s done real harm? Cool....I’m still not talking or ever promoting you, ya dingbat. You ain’t no Roman Polanski or Doug Tennaple. You’re a singular internet artist and any support of the project has to go to you - and you suck!

ThisCrispyKat was a wakeup call that showed me these people not only still exist but will be allowed to get away with it. I was very touchy bout this kind of thing back in the day. Fuck, I STILL AM TOUCHY. The rabbit holes I found thanks to Crispy opened up to reveal communities where people think my hair color’s going extinct. People would detail how much they wanted to rape me - a natural blonde - and kill my friends and family for not looking like me. That they want to jerk off in my naturally curly hair and see me in glowy German princess gowns preparing them dinner.

Crispy and other Nazistans would look at me; a blond-haired blue eyed Polish/German American woman and think I need to be “fixed” because I DARE to repeat propaganda that the Nazis were bad. They’d call me a traitor for thinking that celebrating the Nazi party ISN’T German pride.

HOW DARE YOU TELL ME THAT’S GERMAN PRIDE! I’LL SHOW YOU GERMAN PRIDE YOU EGOSTROKING-LIMPDICKED ATTENTION WHORES.

People like Crispy make it 1000x harder to actually show interest in German things. Because I AM interested in German shit btw.

Like for real: it’s a country I’d love to visit one day (at least the black forest, which is where my mom’s fam comes from). I love German art and German fairytales slap. I really do want to explore my heritage through art and stuff.

But guess what? Much as Crispy would argue to the contrary I DO know my WWII history and beyond and FUCK YOU if you honestly think jerking it to cuddly Nazi-furs is empowering or just “showing your interest in history”. Take your own advice and read a god-damn book.

TL;DR: I DO NOT have to be proud of Nazis to enjoy German culture and if you think otherwise, FUCK YOU. It’s a slap in the face to everyone even if you are ‘just trolling’ and it in no way values actual German’s feeling on the matter. It’s annoying how people undervalue real people just for the sake of fan art.

The Nazis were evil. They were racist, eugenic-genocidal idiots who killed over six million Jewish people, Romani, Slavs, Jehovahs Witnesses, disabled people, Poles, homosexuals and prisoners of war. They would have killed my dad’s side of the family if they were in Poland at the time. They made bullshit tanks that killed the people making them and didn’t work on the battlefield. Their leader was a fat, farting one-testicaled bastard who preferred animals to people.

They ruined everything for everyone and then took the easy way out, leaving the Germans that were left in the hands of the also-genocidal Soviets and Americans. Germany is still paying their war debts and now, 70-80 years later everyone else wants to laugh off this dark period of history with memes and forget what they did, and as such, are forgetting the victims of the genocide.

I have 0 tolerance for Nazi things for the sake of HUMANITY, let alone the individual groups they target. I don’t have to have German ancestry or know a single Jewish person to tell you any of this. It’s fucking history.

Eat shit.

#tw: nazi #tw: neonazi #tw: swastika #tw: antisemitism #cultural appropriation #kimba the white lion #thiscrispykat #altright #classic spyro #My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic #balto #animals of farthing wood

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nachohypno · 4 years

Text

Pine’s College Jocks 2 Ch. 2 - Two Player Game

A naked Mike was kneeling in front of me, enthralled by my cock as it swung side to side. His glazed eyes were fixated on it like it was the only thing that mattered to him.

“What are you?” I asked him.

“Your jockboy slave…” he said, dazedly. “I’m under your complete control…”

“And what am I?”

He smiled at that question. “My owner and master… And the love of my life…”

Mind controlled Mike was almost as great as nervous cutepie Mike. I had him perfectly programmed for these little sessions of ours. He craved them, and I was happy to give what the public wanted!

“Your owner, you say?” I said, without stopping my cock’s movement.

“Yes master… You own my mind… my body…” He took a big sniff of my cock, getting my scent. A dopey smile appeared on his face. “…I belong to you… And I love you, master”

“Good jockboy. And when I wake you up, you will be eager to obey everything I tell you, won’t you?”

He nodded “Yes master…”

I stopped moving my cock and snapped my fingers in front of him. These little trances I put my slaves in resulted very useful for adding suggestions or programming. And they looked hot while under.

He blinked a bit, gave my cock a small kiss and got up again. “Learned my lesson, bro. I’ll leave your Switch where you left it after I use it”

I had another thing in mind “So… ‘the love of my life’, huh?”

He blushed, his whole face went red. “T-That’s… W-Well, that’s how I feel like, bro!”

I chuckled and gave him a good kiss in the lips. “Don’t be embarrassed. I love you too, my sweet and cheesy boyfriend”

“Damn bro” He smiled “I can’t get enough of you, apparently”

“That won’t save you, though. Why don’t you go ahead and start preparing our breakfast?”

His eyes glazed again as he said “Yes master!”, before running off to the kitchen. I wasn’t mad because he used my switch, I just wanted an excuse to play with him for a while. He was probably going to make the breakfast anyway

I pulled my underwear back up, I didn’t need to dicknotize my boyfriend any further. Then, I walked back to the living room of the apartment. I sat down on the couch, waiting for breakfast to be ready, and checked my phone.

I noticed I had messages from coach Peter, saying he’d been researching as I asked him to, for possible coaches I could recruit for the club. It was a good way of retesting my powers, after that big break I took. Only using my current mind links and the mind control through speech was the safe bet, but a year has passed and I had to check things out.

Since the sport club’s owner 'had' to fire all his employees, I couldn’t open up yet. I had to get new employees, and I saw that as a chance to reuse my powers once again, and also win a good handful of slaves in the process.

Peter sent me a few of his fellow coaches’ pics. He apparently knew them from previous sports championships. I told him we would speak more about the matter later. He answered with a happy face emoji.

And then, Mike arrived with breakfast.

-----

My classes flew by today. I couldn’t stop thinking about the research I’ve managed to do with my little personality project. Keeping my place as one of the best in the class was kind of hard, now that I have more hobbies than studying and gaming.

Coaching a team, fraternity stuff (Which included the occasional party that Mike forced me to go to), and now managing a sports club. The list just kept growing and growing. And yet, I still managed to get good grades.

Practice would start in a few hours, so I thought about calling Peter and asking him to pick me up with his car. That way, we would start with the recruiting coaches right away.

However, I got an unexpected change of plans. Gary, my first slave, sent me a few worried messages. We still talked about normal stuff from now and then, and he liked to spend any free minute he’s not partying at his college, visiting me in here.

[Bro, something super strange happened last night at a party] Gary texted.

[What is it?]

The next thing he sent was an audio, explaining the whole situation. [“Last night, I was with some bros at the local bar. Y’know, celebrating our good grades and looking for something to bang while getting drunk”] I rolled my eyes ["when suddenly, this strange guy came closer to me. For some reason, I felt like I was talking to you while he spoke… he was so convincing, telling me to go with him to be a good slave"]

At this point, I thought ‘What the heck?’

[“But! As the good slave I am, I whispered to him that I wasn’t interested. He seemed weirded out for my answer, then kept insisting on the matter. Until he asked if I had a master already. I wasn’t sure if I should answer him, so I told him to give me his number and I would text him later with the answer”]

Good thinking Gary, not sending weird strangers to my door.

[“But I tell you bro, his words felt so powerful for some reason, and I felt compelled to obey him. Maybe he has powers like you have? You should talk to him; to see what he wants or if he’s not a faker. Wait, let me write you his number”]

Well, I think I don’t have anything to lose.

I sent the mysterious guy a simple [Hi] And waited for him to answer. In the meanwhile, I postponed the enslavement of those coaches.

This was something bigger than just making some random guys drink my cum to become linked to me. This was possibly another guy who also has mind control powers!

After a few minutes, the other guy answered with a [How r u?! So good to hear from u, been waiting all day!]

Huh, he seemed nice.

[I’m good, how about you?] I wanted to ask directly about the powers part, but I was afraid if that would seem rude.

The other guy seemed as anxious as I was, because he said [I’m awesome! But I think we have a matter to chat about, would you like to meet in a coffee shop?]

[What about my place? Would be more fitting to chat about these… things] I appreciated the secretism. I didn’t want to chat out loud in a public place about mind control. [It’s a few hours away from my friend's college]

[Fair enough, send me the address and I’ll travel there ASAP, if it’s that close. We could meet today, man!] That was fast. And now I was scared, what was I going to do? It was just a chat with a possible new friend, right?

I sent him my location through Maps and asked him to tell Gary to come too. He knew the place already.

This was going to be something fun, right?

-----

A few hours passed, and I decided to cancel today’s recruitment and just do a normal football practice. The sports club wasn’t going to open until I got enough coaches working in that place, so I was kinda free of guilt.

I went with Mike back to our place, and checked that everything was clean enough to receive our visitor.

It was just a matter of time, just a while more and… *knock knock*

I went to open the door, and there he was.

“Yo!” The man said. He seemed older than me, maybe in his late 20’s/early 30’s? “So glad to finally meet ya!” He had a British accent, and that made Mikey chuckle. Luckily, this guy didn’t notice him yet. He was wearing a sweater with a shirt underneath, and black pants. His torso was big, like the body from a rugby player.

“Hey, I’m Pine” I mumbled, obviously nervous.

“Great! I’m Leo!” He gave me a big, tight hug. Gary entered behind him and closed the door. I looked at him over Leo’s shoulder and he mumbled a “Hi!” with a nice, but nervous smile. Glad to see I’m not the only one nervous in here.

“So, is it true?” Leo let me go of his bear hug and looked around “You have a nice place, dude. Did you get it with your powers or…?”

“Wait wait wait. First things first, do you have mind control powers too?”

“Hell yeah, and I love ‘em! I assume this fella here already told you what happened when I tried to control him” He said, pointing to Gary. He just stood there, looking around. Gary had been at my new place already, he visited a few times. “But, it didn’t go as planned. Man, I was so scared. I was like ‘Oh god, am I losing my powers?’ But, I tried with a waitress and it worked perfectly!”

He was talkative, good to know.

“Would you like to take a seat on the couch? Do you want something to drink?” I asked. I had to be a good host!

“Do you have juice?” Leo asked as he sat on the couch. I went to the kitchen and served him some orange juice, before returning and sitting beside him “Thanks man”

He finished drinking and resumed his storytelling. “As I said, my powers didn’t work for like the first time ever. That scared the hell out of me. Your guy told me he wasn’t interested, which was really disappointing. No one ever managed to resist me!” Another sip of his juice “But yeah. Bing bang bong, we arrived here and there’s another mind controller!”

I never thought about a term for my powers. I didn’t even know where they came from. ‘Mind controller’ sounded right, but weird at the same time.

Gary called Mike over, which followed him with a frown, towards the kitchen. Leo still hasn’t noticed my boyfriend. I preferred to leave it that way, what if the guy tried to control him?

“So what about you? How long since you’ve had your powers? Tell me everything, I’m so excited!” His excitement was pretty obvious at this point. I was sort of excited too, but also scared.

This guy seemed, and probably was, older than me. That could also mean that he was more experienced and powerful.

I explained him my side of the story. The whole senior year ordeal, how I enslaved Gary, coach Mark, and the two football teams. He seemed interested, and never stopped listening. He asked if I did something else besides from that, and I mentioned the college football team and the frat president.

“Nothing else? But you had these powers since… when?” Leo sounded disappointed.

“A year and a half… maybe two years, I don’t know exactly when I started having them, but I know they appeared halfway through senior year”

He nodded and looked around “Well, you do have a nice place on here. Got it with your powers, right?”

This was getting unnerving. He talked about his powers like a mean to get stuff instead of… I don’t know, the right way?. “Not exactly…” Being the assistant of the mind controlled coach counts as a job?

He nodded slowly. “I’ve got mine when I became 17” He started “I remember being in complete bliss about it. I come from a very good family, don’t get me wrong.”

We got our powers around the same age, maybe it was a coincidence?

His story didn’t end there “But, that wasn’t enough for me. I’ve always been a guy that wanted more, and out of nowhere, the world seemed to give a way to get that for me! I was at senior year in my high school during that time. But I didn’t have the idea to enslave a whole sports team at the time, may do that now” He chuckled. “I did enslave a few guys, and girls, to serve me. Just people I found hot at first. Then people that would be useful in the future, like guys from wealthy families”

That didn’t sound so good.

“I would tell you my whole life, but that kind of summarizes it. Just me, using my powers to get what I want. Can’t say we’re exactly on the same page here, but it’s alright. I respect you, dude. It’s great having another one like me around!”

He finished his glass of juice. I thought that would be a good escape route. “Would you like more juice? I can get you more”

“Yeah, but do you mind if that hottie from before is the one who serves it? I love seeing hunks obeying orders. Uh, Garrett was his name?”

“Someone called?” Gary appeared from the kitchen. I assume he and Mike had been listening the whole conversation. It’s alright, probably curious to see if this guy was good or bad.

“Yeah! Would you mind bringing some more juice?” My friend frowned at the order, but I nodded behind Leo, to avoid causing a scene. Gary went back to the kitchen and came with another glass of juice. “Thanks, man!” He said at Gary.

“No problem, do you need something bro?” He asked me.

I looked at my glass and shook my head in denial.

“Wait!” Leo spoke up. “I have an idea, but first” He looked at me “Can I try something with your slave?”

Both guys were looking over at me. Mike was peeping through the kitchen’s door, with curiosity.

I didn’t know what to say, so I looked at Gary and mumbled “Are you up to it?”

My first slave shrugged “Yeah. Maybe you can see why it didn’t work last time” He sat beside Leo on the sofa, as he left his glass of juice and got in place

“Awesome!” He waited for Gary to get ready and stared into his eyes. I thought it was some weird focus thing, to make it work better. He was older than me, he probably knew ways to have his powers take more control of the victim. “You want to obey, don’t you?”

Gary gave the guy a sly smile and answered “Yeah…”

Leo smiled too, it seemed to be working. “Yeah, you want to obey me, isn’t that right?”

That’s when it went wrong. Gary seemed about to nod, but he snapped out of it and said “Not really, bro” His smile faded, and he was looking at Leo with a frown. He got up from the sofa and walked to the kitchen again.

I was relieved. He didn’t seem able to control my slaves, no matter that he’s older than me. Leo pointed that out too, with a little joke “Seems like we can’t share slaves, huh?”

I noticed Mike was still peeping through the open door, and Leo noticed him. “Who’s that one?”

“My boyfriend” I said quickly, giving him a big, but not so nice smile. I didn’t feel threatened, but better to assert dominance.

“You have a boyfriend? Is he under too?” Leo asked with curiosity. What’s with him asking that? Like my powers are my only way to get stuff. He was nice, but his obsession with the mind control seemed unhealthy.

“…Not really. Well, kind of. We have a mind link, but we just play with my powers, he consented it and is aware of everything that happens while under”

“Oh. Well, I wouldn’t mind a one night stand with one of these guys if you’d allow it” He winked.

“Uh... Again, ask them about it. I prefer to leave it to them” But Gary and Mike didn’t seem eager about that. They shook their heads in denial.

“Uhm. Now this got weird. Better get going, but first” He finished his juice and took his phone. “You have my number, right?” He asked. I nodded and he continued “Great, let’s keep talking man. It was great getting to know you!”

“Same!” I offered my hand for a shake. He shook it and headed to the door.

“Have a good day!” He said, before leaving the apartment.

Mike and Gary left the kitchen, finally

“What a weird guy” The later said.

“He was… alright. And he seemed happy to get to know me. It’s good to know his powers don’t work on me, or you” I finished my juice and took the glass to the kitchen. “But, everything went amazing, and luckily we don’t have an enemy”

“His accent was funny, though” Mike said. “I mean it. Fuh fock saek!” He tried to imitate the exaggerated British accent from Leo. It was really funny. The three of us laughed, before I let out a yawn.

“I don’t know about you guys, but this whole visit thing got me tired” I looked at my watch and it was pretty late already. “We have an extra bedroom; would you like to stay there?” I asked Gary. It was late, and I don’t know if he would like to return to his place now.

The jock nodded. “Sure, no problem” He waited to see if I had anything else to say, maybe a ‘oh Gary, come sleep with us! We have a lot of space in our bed!’

But it wasn’t the case.

Mike seemed nervous, I could tell. And I decided to take care of that instead of making what would probably be a very hot threesome with me controlling this pair of hunks.

I said ‘good night’ to Gary, faked a yawn and went to my room. Mike followed me, after giving a bro nod to his ex-teammate and turning off the lights.

I changed into my pajamas while Mike just stripped down to his underwear. We both laid down on the bed and he just stared to the ceiling.

Alright, time for a boyfriend chat. “Is everything alright? You seem nervous” He liked being straight forward, so let’s take that approach

“Uh, yeah. Everything is alright, bro” Again, he didn’t sound as usual. “But…” He got sideways, facing me. “D-Do you… Ehem. Do you love me, bro?”

Where was this coming from? “Of course I do! You’ve been my best friend since forever, and well, we’ve been dating for a whole year now, and it’s been amazing. We already had this chat, you know I love you”

He gulped “You won’t… You wouldn’t let another guy take me as his slave, would you?” That was it. He was scared. Poor Mikey, he probably feels worried about my constant use of my powers over him, now that another player joined the game.

I passed my hand over his hair, trying to comfort him. “I would never do that. Not to you, not to anyone. You are like a brother to me, I could never do that to you, Mike”

He nodded and said “I trust you. I like being yours and doing what you want… Being tranced is fun too, that swinging cock idea is awesome. But that guy from before and the idea of possibly being controlled by him… I’ve been scared since he arrived, babe”

“Don’t worry, nothing is going to happen to you” I kissed his forehead “I love you Mikey”

He seemed more at ease. I could easily use my powers to erase any worry or fear on him. But that would be stripping him of his humanity. It was good to feel, from a psychologist’s point of view.

He returned the kiss and pulled me in to cuddle “I love you too, Piney. Thanks so much for being with me”

“Anytime, Mikey. Anytime” Tomorrow I would get back to my plan: Enslaving a few coaches to help save that sports club. If Leo wanted to join me, he was welcome. But I would be careful around him, until I confirm he doesn’t have bad intentions.

The room’s door opened, all of a sudden.

Gary entered with a pillow under his arm. He was in his underwear, just like Mike. “Sorry. Mind if I sleep with you, bros? I feel a bit uneasy after what happened” He said, walking over to the bed.

I looked at Mike, he was frowning. The romantic moment wasn’t really ruined, but he didn’t like Gary that much.

“Uh… Sure, come here” I said. I hoped that Mike wouldn’t mind.

“Thanks, man. I really appreciate it” He put his pillow at one of the sides and got under the covers.

Now, I was surrounded by hunks, and I tried to not think with my cock and just randomly throw the bedsheets aside to start a threesome.

Gary faced my back and tried to cuddle with me. I was hugging Mike and he was hugging me. This felt great, but I could feel the animosity between the pair.

Yep. This is going to be weird.

-----

Chapter 3 is already available in my Patreon! And by pledging you also get access to other stories before they go public!

#PinesCollegeJocks #hypnosis #hypnotized #straight to gay #gay hypnosis #brainwash #brainwashing #brainwashed #mind control

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mediaeval-muse · 4 years

Text

Book Review

Warbreaker. By Brandon Sanderson. New York: Tor, 2009.

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

Genre: fantasy

Part of a Series? Yes, Warbreaker #1

Summary: Warbreaker is the story of two sisters, who happen to be princesses, the God King one of them has to marry, the lesser god who doesn't like his job, and the immortal who's still trying to undo the mistakes he made hundreds of years ago. Their world is one in which those who die in glory return as gods to live confined to a pantheon in Hallandren's capital city and where a power known as BioChromatic magic is based on an essence known as breath that can only be collected one unit at a time from individual people. By using breath and drawing upon the color in everyday objects, all manner of miracles and mischief can be accomplished. It will take considerable quantities of each to resolve all the challenges facing Vivenna and Siri, princesses of Idris; Susebron the God King; Lightsong, reluctant god of bravery, and mysterious Vasher, the Warbreaker.

***Full review under the cut.***

Overview: I’ll come clean here... despite Sanderson being a pillar in the fantasy genre, I haven’t read one of his books until now. A friend, who is a big Sanderson fan, suggested I start with Warbreaker, so my review is going to be based on no other knowledge of Sanderson’s work. Overall, I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would; Sanderson has a talent for creating complex worlds and an imagination which makes his setting memorable. I also think there were a lot of good ideas built into the structure of the narrative, as well as infused in the character archetypes. The main reason why I didn’t give this book a higher rating, however, is personal preference: I don’t think the main action of the novel kicked off soon enough, and I personally didn’t feel invested in the war plot or the personal arcs of some of the characters. That being said, I do look forward to checking out more of Sanderson’s work. There was enough in this book to intrigue me, and though I didn’t love everything about Warbreaker, I can definitely see why Sanderson’s books are so beloved by fans.

Writing: Sanderson’s prose is fairly straightforward. It doesn’t contain a lot of rhetorical flourishes or figural language, but it doesn’t leave the reader in the lurch, either. I never had a difficult time picturing the world Sanderson creates or wondering what characters were thinking or feeling - everything was described well, and I never had to go back and read something multiple times in order to understand it. In that sense, Sanderson’s prose is simple, yet effective. It’s easy to get through, which helps the story move quicker.

There were a couple of info dumps (the two I can think of off the top of my head include the scene when Siri learns of Hallandran history from a storyteller and the scene where Vivenna learns about the theories of Awakening), but other than that, I think most of the worldbuilding was shown well through descriptions of the scenery, the actions of the characters, etc. I really did have the experience of being immersed in the world, and I think Sanderson knows how to craft a complex setting without overwhelming his readers with pages and pages of exposition.

Plot: The plot of this novel follows four main “threads,” centered on four prominent characters: 1. Siri, the youngest daughter of the king of Idris, who is sent to the kingdom (?) of Hallandren to marry their God King as part of a peace treaty; 2. Vivenna, Siri’s older sister, who was supposed to be sent to the God King, but was held back because of favoritism. She follows her sister in part to rescue her and also to prevent war between her kingdom and Hallandren; 3. Lightsong, one of the gods in Hallandren’s pantheon, who finds himself reluctantly drawn into the politics between the gods; 4. Vasher, a mysterious figure who wields a sentient sword named Nightblood.

Each of these “threads” were bound by the looming threat of war, but I personally didn’t find the war aspect suspenseful, in part because 3 of the 4 characters were “upper class” (and thus, war would impact them differently), and partly because we don’t spend much time with Idrians, who have the most to lose. I also think that the main action of each of these threads didn’t really take off until halfway through the book, and while I appreciate a slow pace to become familiar with the worldbuilding, I think the plot could have moved a bit quicker.

In terms of the individual threads, each had their ups and downs. I first found Siri’s storyline to be a little icky - she’s only 17, yet much of her plot involves discussions of sex and fertility. On the one hand, I get it - she’s sent to the God King as a bride, and her job is to produce an heir. On the other hand, I felt uncomfortable when reading about how often she was naked and how everyone calls her “vessel” rather than something proper, like “my queen.” I didn’t find her story particularly interesting until she finally begins to interact with the God King; for the first couple hundred pages, most of her time is spent getting used to Hallandren and palace life while her husband ignores her. Only when the God King begins to form a relationship with her did I feel invested, in part because Siri finally had a meaningful connection with another person, and thus personal stakes in the war.

Vivenna’s plot seemed interesting on the surface, but I ultimately found her to be too passive for my liking. Vivenna spends most of her time inciting then stifling a rebellion amongst her people, many of whom live as second-class citizens in Hallandren’s capital. It seems like that would be an active role for her, but most of the time, she’s acting under orders/guidance from other characters around her. I personally didn’t care for scene after scene of her meeting with people to convince them to do something, or scenes of her failing and being helpless. She often had to rely on male characters to get around, and while I don’t think she had to be perfect at everything, I do think she could have made use of her extensive training to be a bit more active. I did like, however, that her plot challenged a lot of her biases and supposed values of her religious teachings, shedding light on how we can’t judge people who are living in desperate conditions.

Lightsong’s plot started slow but picked up steam. As a god who is not convinced that his divinity is earned, he copes by indulging in a decadent lifestyle and putting up a jovial façade. At first, he tries to stay out of the debates about war, but once he’s dragged into the politics of the pantheon’s court, things get a little more interesting. I liked the moments when his story was less about war and more about discovering who he was before he became a god. They felt a little more personal, whereas the war didn’t seem to threaten his well being one way or the other.

Vasher’s POV chapters are less frequent, and when they appear, he’s doing something sneaky for reasons we don’t understand until some 2/3 through the novel. While I found his interactions with Nighblood amusing, I was frustrated by the lack of a clear motivation until the point where we learn what he’s up to. After that, I found him more fun to watch.

Characters: There are a lot of characters in this book, so I’m going to cover the main ones and a couple prominent supporting roles. Overall, I can say that each character archetype was interesting, and I often liked the idea of a character on its own as opposed to how the archetype was used in the narrative.

Siri is an impulsive, rebellious princess who has trouble respecting authority. While I’ve seen this archetype before, I think Sanderson avoided the “not like other girls” trope and instead wrote Siri as one who uses her impulses against the authorities that are restricting her. I was actually pleasantly surprised that Siri went from a fish out of water (because she doesn’t have the training her sister has about Hallandren society) to someone who is better equipped to spearhead a resistance within the God King’s own palace, all because resistance requires the guts to take risks and stand up to authority. In that sense, I liked her story a lot.

The God King, her husband, was also likeable, in part because he seemed to genuinely want to be a good ruler. I admired his affection for Siri, as well as his desire to use his power for good.

Vivenna, on the other hand, seemed like a good character at first, but I quickly started to dislike her. All her life, she was raised to be the God King’s bride, so she has extensive training and education. She’s also poised and confident, up until she is out of her element and has to find a way to operate on the streets of T’Telir. I thought Vivenna would use her training in a more meaningful way; knowing about Hallandren so thoroughly, I thought she would do more to apply that knowledge when concocting a plot to save her sister. Instead, Vivenna always seemed to be passive, letting the people around her make decisions and tell her what to do. She also doesn’t seem that interested in saving her sister after some time, despite being protective of Siri when they were younger. As an older sister myself, I found the easy abandonment of her sibling a little hard to believe, and I wish the desire to save her family was more of a driving force than Vivenna’s sense of duty to her people. While she does manage to do things on her own towards the end, I also found that to be undercut by her deference to Vasher. While it might be realistic to let characters with more skill/experience take care of stuff, it made me wonder why we were following Vivenna at all (in other words, why is Vivenna a main character and not Vasher, if all Vivenna is going to do is get in the way?). I also found Vivenna to be a little stuck-up and judgmental, which, granted, she learns to overcome, but for the majority of the book, she just seemed holier-than-thou, and I didn’t find her fun to watch.

Within Vivenna’s chapters (or sections), we see a number of side characters, the most prominent being the band of mercenaries that help her meet with influential people. At first, I liked these mercenaries; Denth seemed to be a good friend, while Jewels challenged Vivenna’s assumptions about Hallandrens in a way I found productive and enlightening. In all, it seemed like these characters were written in a way that broke stereotypes, and I was wishing they could have formed a little found family. However, after the twist, I didn’t quite like how the mercenaries were handled. They seemed to disappear from view, and we only heard of their actions by word of mouth (so everything they did seemed to happen “off screen,” then relayed by another character later). Because of that, I didn’t ultimately feel like they were much of a threat. I did like that their beef with Vasher was seeded early, so that when they finally come into contact, it felt like we were getting a payoff.

Lightsong is full of charisma, so even though his plot was slow, I enjoyed following him. He has some nice banter with Blushweaver (another goddess in the pantheon) and his high priest, Llarimar. I particularly found his relationship with Llarimar rather sweet, and I liked that Lightsong was curious about his past life without letting it distract from the threat at hand. The end of his arc felt a little unfair, as did Blushweaver’s - I was hoping he would get to do a little more.

But speaking of Blushweaver, I found her to be complicated. I liked that she seemed to genuinely care about whether or not Hallandren went to war, and wasn’t just playing a power game for power’s sake. However, I hated how she was written as a sexpot, using her body to distract (or try to distract) the other gods and to get what she wanted. I have no problem with a female character being sexual, but I do hate female characters who use sexuality as a manipulative tool. It’s just a tired trope, and I don’t enjoy it. Also, can we talk about how she calls Siri a slut at one point?

Vasher at first didn’t seem that interesting to me until we learn of his true motivations. After that, I enjoyed his character archetype immensely. He seems like a gruff badass at first, which I am also tired of reading about, but after a while, he’s shown to be something of a softy with terrible interpersonal skills. I probably enjoyed his conversations with Nighblood the most. Nightblood jokes and pouts and talks about killing in an almost childlike way, which was quite amusing. I wish we had gotten more of those interactions.

Other: The thing I appreciated most about this book was the worldbuilding. Sanderson creates a world that feels unique - instead being set in the gritty faux-Middle Ages where everything is violent and dirty, the narrative takes place in Hallandren, a kingdom full of joy and color. I particularly liked how color was important not just to Hallandren culture, but to the magic system. In Sanderson’s world, everyone has a life force or aura called “Breath” or “BioChroma,” which can be used in a variety of ways. BioChroma allow users to enchant objects (so to speak) or sustain life, and I liked that possessing and using BioChroma affected things like sound and color. It was a refreshing change from the dull worlds of grimdark fantasy.

I also liked the tension between the polytheistic religion of T’Telir and the monotheistic religion of Idris. Hallandrens worship “gods” that they can see and speak to, whereas Idrians worship a single god who is unseen. It posed some interesting theological debates, as well as a subtle, yet critical, examination of things like the hypocrisy of priests, the superiority complex of conservatives, etc.

Overall, I did enjoy this book, even if there were things that I wish were different. I hear there is supposed to be a sequel coming out at some point, and when it is out, I will pick it up.

#book reviews

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jesterlady · 4 years

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Rise of Skywalker review

After Watching Episode IX for the second time, I feel like it’s finally time to make my feelings known regarding the sequel trilogy and to vent some of the negativity by getting it down in somewhat rational fashion.

If any one recalls the 6k I wrote on Avengers Endgame, you’ll know what to expect.

Now it’s been a while since I saw either Ep VII or VIII, so my memory is likely rusty on details.

My feelings on this trilogy in general have been extremely negative. It’s interesting, but after I saw Force Awakens, I actually had a very positive reaction at first. It felt like a Star Wars movie (following the New Hope formula). But after a while, even before Last Jedi came, I realized that I actually was disappointed, not necessarily in the movie as a movie or the new characters, but the direction the whole trilogy was likely to go.

I must confess a great deal of this feeling probably arose from watching Clone Wars and Rebels in the meantime and becoming very caught up in those time periods and what they represent for Star Wars. And that’s just it…the sequel trilogy takes what came before, what those people bled and died for, and basically said it didn’t matter. They didn’t actually save the galaxy. The victory at Endor has become incredibly cheapened by the First Order’s existence…and it doesn’t even matter that apparently it was Palpatine all along so it’s suddenly very connected in a haphazard fashion.

They could have told a much more interesting story about the struggles of rebuilding a galaxy. They could have had the same characters, they could have had the same arcs (terrible ones mostly), and the galaxy could still be in danger. But starting off with a brand new evil empire like destroying the old one didn’t even matter, not even letting Han and Leia stay together…like, that’s just creating drama for the sake of drama. We have to destroy everything that was built before, because we’re really unoriginal and don’t know how to create new stories or build on top of a good foundation.

Say what you like about the prequels (I am a fan in general) they had a very cohesive story, building toward a single point. The sequels…did not.

Now, we must all acknowledge the elephant in the room. That of the atrocious planning and divided directional control that went into making these movies. I don’t know what Disney was thinking! The MCU for all its faults is a cohesive whole. With a franchise infinitely more popular and lucrative and with a fraction less of the movies, you couldn’t pull off having a story that makes sense?

And I’ll just say that even if JJ didn’t like what Rian did with TLJ, basically completely doing a 180 and trying to go the other direction, was selfish. It destroyed further rather than fixed the problem. I don’t have anything else to say, other than the lack of unity is probably the ultimate problem after the initial direction in the first place. I didn’t really approve of TLJ. The Rey/Ben parts…sure, but the slowest chase scene known to man and completely superfluous side ventures to a gambling planet were utter drivel. So it’s not that I’m a Rian vs JJ person. I think the lack of unity and that they both screwed with each other’s narratives is the problem.

Anyway, we’re here to talk about TROS. (And how about that, coming up with a title that is super confusing since we already have Revenge of the Sith. I guess that’s ROTS…but come on!

So…this will be fairly chronological but as I get deeper into character arcs and plot points, it will delve all over the place.

The intro of a Star Wars movie is usually fairly jarring. We’re dropped into the middle of a situation and all we know is three paragraphs long, to tell us what’s going on and what happened. But this felt even more jarring than usual.

Suddenly knowing Palps is alive in the credit titles is so off course. Knowing he was alive at the end of TLJ would have been preferable, leaving us time to stew over how he was still alive and giving them time to come up with something more coherent than the absolute zero explanation we were given. The return of an essential character/villain like that deserves way more gravitas and planning than the shock value we were presented with. The idea of him being alive is not so shocking to those familiar with the EU, but that was explained and explained well, whereas how long he’s been planning this, Snoke, the ships, how…it’s all completely ignored and I guess we can come up with explanations on our own. So…is Snoke his clone? Or a part of him? How many Snokes were there? There are so many questions regarding their relationship…how it relates to Kylo/Ben, how it relates to Rey, how it relates to their bond, but I’ll get more into that later. And more on those ships.

Pretty sure a blow no one can be faulted with is Carrie’s death. If she had been alive, I have to believe so many things would have been better. She uttered the only sensible line in the movie…never underestimate a droid. Something everyone else went on to ignore even though droids made the whole movie possible. Ugh. I do think it’s funny that since TFA we’ve all been told to call her the General now…no more princess cause princesses are apparently weak, but she was suddenly a princess again this movie.

The Jedi texts, I’d like to know more about that. Very plot device-y really, if you think about it. All this info about new and improved powers and places and things and considering how much lore we know as an audience who actually have been exposed to when the Jedi were still around, opposed to Luke onward…it’s just an excuse for story. Same thing with the Sith wayfinders and that dagger. I guess you could make the argument for Palps having them made after ROTJ, but…that makes no sense. But it’s the only thing that makes sense since how could anyone make a dagger the exact shape of a crashed Death Star before it crashed? But the Jedi texts…super old texts…reference the wayfinders. And it was already in the vault of the crashed DS. All I’m saying is that doesn’t make a lot of logical sense and someone needs to explain it to me. And to stop making mysterious keys and clues to things. It makes sense the Sith loyalist would have it since he needed to go back to Exegol to deliver Rey, (though he had clearly already left Jakku and killed her parents, so was he just going back to say, oops, I messed up? Palps clearly got the message somehow) but maybe it would have been better for them to keep all the Oracle stuff in and explained all this stuff properly. Like I’m confused about Palpatine’s plan and he’s usually the master of strategy.

Okay…Poe is so unlikable in this movie. And he really doesn’t have an arc. Maybe a little one, struggling with the burden of leadership. But he mostly seems to be there to argue with people and be rude to Threepio. This is a waste of a good character. He was barely in TFA, he was a total mess in TLJ, and here he’s just a jerk. I got nothing good to say for him. Which is a shame because he could have been awesome.

We will talk about Rose and her complete lack of presence. Up front, I never cared for Rose in TLJ…didn’t see the point of her. She brought nothing to the story in my opinion and whether she was supposed to be a love interest for Finn or to symbolize hope or just be representative of WOC, I don’t know. But her being shifted to the sidelines of this story is a blatant statement of disrespect. The actress has been very publicly discriminated against online and instead of taking care of her, the director and studio pretty much stated they agreed with that by what they did with her character. Aside from that…makes zero sense for someone who was so built up and had such a big part in TLJ to be so downplayed and have her story just stop in the middle. It’s bad storytelling. Especially while you’re bringing in a troop of new female characters to do…what? Basically things Rose could have accomplished and would have made more sense doing.

Along the lines of pointless things…what is the point of the Knights of Ren? They were so built up…such an ooh, scary prospect and they play zero role in this. They have no point. They have no purpose. We know nothing about them unless we hunt for backstory in comics and things like that. But you shouldn’t have to do that to understand the point of someone in a movie. I’d also just like to point out, if they’re really Force sensitives who were Jedis in training…maybe? Then they should be a lot harder to defeat and why don’t they have light sabers? And…why are they the Knights of Ren if there isn’t at least a discussion about what their leader is doing when he comes to Exegol. Like they’re just trying to kill him from the second he enters. I’d be like…hi, boss, so why aren’t we killing the girl…or something like that. And if they’re the Knights of Ren, his…family for lack of a better term, people who trained with him since boys, I’d like to think he at least would have some compunction of striking them down…would try to reason with them first. They might still be brainwashed like he was, but he would know that better than anyone. I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s my knee jerk reaction. A waste of possibilities.

Want to talk about another waste? Hux! Never liked him and his Hitler youth attitude, but really he was not important in this trilogy, like at all. DG is too good an actor to not have his talents used better. He, Phasma, and Kylo were built up as this villain trilogy to stand against the Rey, Poe, Finn good guy trilogy, and basically none of them got any kind of development other than Kylo. I knew Hux was the spy and I believe it is funny that he is the spy solely because he hates Kylo so much, but other than that…he was a waste of space. Better to have him finally rise and become the commander he’d always wanted to be instead of Pryde suddenly being there and being all evil and competent for some reason. Having him be significant for having followed Palpatine before would only actually be significant if we had seen him serve Palpatine before. It’s just another instance of this brand new character suddenly taking the place of an established one for no reason.

We can talk about Finn now. Finn, who also suffered from lack of actual character arc and purpose in the movie other than running after everyone and being worried about them. The whole Force sensitive thing is old news…we all knew about it a long time ago. And this way of revealing it…such poor methods! As far as I know the only reason you’d start thrashing around and declaring you never told someone something is because it is going to be a declaration of love or like a super big confession of guilt. I mean, that’s what they wanted us to think by keeping it in suspense for so much of the movie and it’s just…not that big of a deal. Like it’s not a surprise, it’s not a death confession topic. It was just stupid.

As for the idea that he only left the First Order because of the Force, well, that just implies that only Force sensitive people know right from wrong and can make moral decisions…it’s just not a good message. Now whether Jannah’s whole platoon is Force sensitive is not clear, but it’s strongly implied. And the fact that it’s what he wants to have told Rey is also not clear. Like you have to figure that out (possibly with online help), it’s not inherent in the narrative. Also…could have been told to Rose, Jannah not needed. In fact, this whole storyline would have actually made much more sense and been better if it’s something Finn had been dealing with in TLJ and perhaps came with an army of defectors or been out convincing people this whole time. Potential storyline wasted. Plus…for someone who’s an ex Stormtrooper, watching Finn run down hallways and strike down troopers is pretty insensitive and OOC if you ask me. Just a super bad way to take the character. And he really didn’t do that much else other than be the main person who does the thing that destroys the thing so everyone else can do the main thing they’re there to do.

Wow, and can we talk about Threepio’s treatment in general and in this trilogy in particular? I will be the first to admit that Han and Leia especially weren’t all that great to him all the time. But it was how they would have treated anyone, I think. Poe particularly just laid into him all the time for no reason, even after he sacrificed himself for them. Like…just really made me mad at Poe and really mad at everyone the whole movie. It appears that Threepio, one of the two original droids of the whole franchise, gets the least respect out of any of them. With all the fanservice going on, you’d think he’d be treated better. I love the HISHE part where he talks about taking a last look at his friends and it certainly ain’t none of this trio! You want to talk about underestimating a droid! I know he’s not everybody’s favorite and I’m probably biased, but if we’re ranking droids in the SW universe, which we all do, Threepio’s not at the top for me either. That spot belongs to Chopper. But I’m still going to accord Threepio the respect and dignity he deserves for seniority if nothing else. Because he tries so hard and no one ever thanks him for it. I like BB8 and all, but he goes under Threepio and R2 both in ranking! And let’s not forget if not for a droid’s knowledge of Exegeol (so convenient) and the way to get there, you resistance jerks are all toast, so respect!

Zorii, Zorii, Zorii, frankly another superfluous new character. But I liked her best out of all of them. I can see that little something something with her and Poe and I think it would be cool for it to flourish now that the war’s over and they can put the really convenient past and betrayal behind them. Poe being a spice runner isn’t bad but isn’t good either. It’s just convenient, because they suddenly needed black market stuff. Also…like how’d she survive? Really. Because it’s such a big deal for her to have gotten that thingamajig and it’s not like people have warning when the bad guys blow up your planet. There is no evacuation time.

I’ve mentioned her a bit so Jannah, again, other than it’s cool there are more women in the galaxy, just took up screen time for other characters to develop. Were they trying to insinuate she could be Lando’s daughter, because that makes zero sense! And why all of a sudden he’s champion of finding the lost families of the galaxy is super weird. Also, it was cool to see him flying the Falcon and all, but did he really add anything other than gravitas from the original trilogy? I’m usually a huge fan of fanservice, but I didn’t really feel like a fan being serviced. I felt like someone constantly having nice things thrown at me so I won’t notice the murder being done in the other room. A nice shot of Wedge, too.

So many extra resistance people always there. Like I love Dom, but why was he there?

But talking of other people really who the heck is Maz? I mean she just shows up out of nowhere and knows everything about the Force and the Jedi and people’s pasts and what their decisions are and we don’t have a clue why. Like who is she? How does she know these things? Where does she even come from? Like why does she talk about Leia trying to reach Ben and why does she smile when Leia dies, what does she know that we don’t and why?

I guess now for the really hard stuff. Rey and Ben.

They were the only ones who really got developed and even then, I think Ben got robbed out of his ending.

So Rey’s heritage. Being a Palpatine, very disappointing. If there’s one good thing I liked about TLJ it was the idea that you didn’t have to be part of some great bloodline to be special in the Force. The Force doesn’t care who your parents are. Most of the great Force users we know have literally nothing to do with who their parents are. If anything, it has more to do with their lineage of training. So JJ basically saying screw that idea and forcing Rey into that was very disappointing. And apparently electricity is very genetic…Dooku aside, of course! It also implies the Dark side in her is because of the Palpatine heritage. But the Dark Side of the Force exists for a reason, for balance, and provides something important to the galaxy. It’s already proven even the Lightest of users and bloodlines have that pull.

Rey has been alone and searching for family this whole time. Having someone to belong to was important to her. But…the message of her finding a family and joining one, I think is a lot more important than her finding out her past and heritage. Just being Rey at the end instead of having to say she was Rey Skywalker or Rey Solo would have made more sense! Of course…I also think Solo makes more sense for her anyway given her connection with Han, her training with Leia, and her bond with Ben. She did train under Luke as well, granted, but she had more Solo connection than Skywalker. They just wanted the cool name. But also doesn’t make sense since Palps calls Ben the last Skywalker in the movie as well. But whatever, I don’t really care.

Let’s talk about this whole dyad in the Force thing and the grand plan. Because I can’t logically reason it out myself.

So Palps apparently has a plan to bring Rey to him as a girl so he can have her kill him and his spirit can go into her body and he can reign through her because his old body is like super fried and the clone thing ain’t working so hot. Doesn’t happen, but he’s also working on his other plans to corrupt Ben and bring him to the Dark side, under the influence of Snoke, to do what? Like what is his plan there apart from just general evil and revenge and nasty stuff? But all along there’s apparently been this Dark prophecy against Ben (and we all know Palps is the manipulator of the Dark). Luke said Leia gave up her Jedi training because she sensed that at the end of that journey was her son’s death. You’d think then they’d honor that sacrifice by not killing him, but whatever.

Palps created or controlled or was at the back of Snoke (however he was at the back of Snoke) and so he’s pulling the strings during TLJ. He knows everything Snoke knows. So if Snoke created the bond between Rey and Ben, then he’d be very aware of that. So how does the whole dyad thing work? Because it’s made very clear Palps doesn’t know about the dyad, otherwise he likely wouldn’t have tried to do the dark ritual/strike me down plan first when it would have been so much easier to get them both together to drain them.

So…have they always been a dyad from birth? Was the dyad created separate from the bond when Snoke created the bond? A Light balance to the Dark bond? Regardless of how, clearly they are one soul and connected more powerfully than anyone else in generations.

But Palps and his plan…he tells Ben to kill Rey. What was he actually trying to do since it’s clear he didn’t want Rey dead?

My only thought is that he thought Rey would actually kill Ben and thus give in to her Dark side and be more ready to be Empress…

But Leia’s sacrifice and all of that still confuses me. Palps said that Leia interfered with his plans.

Now in that fight Rey was the instigator, was the one trying to wreak damage (freaked out by her vision and revelations, I’m sure) and Ben was the one winning that fight. Like he was going to win until Leia stopped him. But was he going to kill her? Because I think it’s pretty clear that Ben has never wanted to kill Rey even if he was trying at first before the bond really started. Either way, Leia stops him from doing something and Rey stabs him instead. Then Leia dies and snaps Rey out of it. Was it the reaching out to Ben or the death that Palps was talking about interfering with his plans? Because again…he didn’t want Rey dead at that point.

I don’t know. Having a fleet full of ships hidden for how long, when did those weapons go into place, who’s manning the ships? Because apparently there’s the regular First Order fleet still out there conveniently being taken down by the rest of the galaxy after this fleet burns, so have these recruits just been sitting out there, chilling at Exegol for years, waiting for this order and attack? Total side tangent and question really, but it all makes no sense.

Leia’s death…so much speculation on why her body didn’t vanish until Ben died. There has to be something significant there and I’d really love to know if it’s a future plan or if it was part of the original end of the movie since clearly it was changed. Maz smiles, remember. Also…is she somehow giving her life for Ben’s to bring him back? She’s clearly a Force Ghost at the end of the movie.

Okay…so Han memory. I did like that and I did like that Ben could get absolution from his dad and have that be the final thing that turns him from Kylo to Ben. I wasn’t sure I could forgive Ben ever after TFA. I cried so much and I was so mad. That’s Han Solo, y’all. HAN FRIKKING SOLO. I mean how do you even kill Han Solo?

Granted, I think we were all robbed of a story where Han and Leia are a united front raising their kid and trying to protect him from danger, but that’s just me. I mean we could have had The Mummy 2 in space, guys. ROBBED! Someone write that AU, please.

And can we just talk about Adam Driver’s acting for a moment? I mean, the boy is phenomenal. He goes from being one person to being a completely different one effortlessly. From the moment he throws the light saber in the sea, his mannerisms and physicality is so different. It’s amazing. Kudos to him. Absolutely. Oscar worthy! He does it without having any lines whatsoever apart from ‘ow.’ And I like Ben Solo and I’m sad we didn’t get to see more of him. He’s so Han’s boy, so Han’s boy. Love that! He’s an awesome character in his good boy sweater. (Love the sweater and while we’re on the subject, could him and Chris Evans have a sweater off with the good boy sweater and the white knit sweater please?)

Hey, Luke got to raise a X Wing finally. That’s the kind of fan service I’m talking about.

One of my favorite parts of the movie actually was the whole Jedi from the past bit. Mostly because I saw my boy Kanan getting his recognition and rightful spot as one of the great Jedi, up there with Obi Wan and Anakin and Ahsoka! I also loved Ahsoka being there and the other Clone Wars greats. Really cool. I do kind of wish they had included Ezra, too, but that’s just me loving on my Space Blueberry! And wishing James Arnold Taylor who put so much into Obi Wan could have at least done Plo Koon since Ewan took his place as Obi Wan. Either way, that was the only homage and respect paid to the other two trilogies and the Star Wars legend in general. The only acknowledgement of how much sacrifice and history went into this franchise before now.

Now…can Rey kill Palps now and not have his spirit go into her because he’d already made himself revitalized with their dyad energy or was it because no ritual had been done? Just wondering. Or was it a loophole since all she did was defend herself and his own lightning killed him?

There’s a lot about energy and healing and the Force in this and so you can speculate all over the place about what the rules are. (You’d think in the Clone Wars healing each other would have been a thing!) And since we’ve never deal with a dyad before, we don’t know how it works. But it really kind of feels like even with how drained both of them were after Palps took their bond…it either should have been returned to them when he died or their combined energy should have been able to keep both of them alive. Or something. Two in one means connection and honestly, I feel like both of them should have died or both of them should have lived.

I know a lot of people think it was the perfect end for Ben because he redeemed himself (like Anakin) and there would have been no place for him in the galaxy after all the evil Kylo had done. (Much less if you read the comics!) But I’m a sucker for a redemption story and I think the hardest punishment always is to face your past and work through what you’ve done instead of taking the easy way out of death (not having to actually atone). I think it’s a beautiful potential for forgiveness and grace and realizing none of us can really save ourselves.

And whatever you think of Kylo/Ben or his ending, it’s clear something was changed at the last minute. There’s a whole lot of editing done on that last scene when he revives her and they kiss and on Tattoine. There are apparently screen tests people swear they saw where he didn’t die. I won’t go into the scene analysis some Reylos have, but jaw moving and talking on Rey shots that were cut, it looking more natural for her to have been pulling him back up rather than him falling down, it looks like his hand is the one in the burying lightsaber scene… He was obviously supposed to live at some point and why they changed their minds, I don’t know. He is one of the most popular characters and they lost a cash cow when they killed him off. Silly idiots.

As far as Rey goes, I also think that’s terribly unfair, to give her the connection she’s been yearning for her whole life and instead of giving her a future, you stick her back on a sand infested planet, sliding down in a parallel to TFA, and burying the past sabers, and being alone. I know she’s still got friends and stuff but I think she won’t know her new place in all of this and she’s going to feel very lonely.

Also, where did the yellow saber come from? Did she cleanse Ben’s saber? Did she find a new kyber crystal of her own? Come on now…don’t be mysterious and weird. Normally I can take mysteries being unsolved if great care is taken to resolve relationships and characters and this trilogy and story did neither, so no love from me.

As for shipping them. I didn’t really through the first two movies. I was curious to see what would happen, but I could have gone either way. I did ship them after this one. I do love two broken people finding solace in each other. And I think there is such potential there for these characters and as a relationship that could have been done so much better and wasn’t and that’s what is the saddest thing of all.

I really have an urge to write an AU…Luke Skywalkers’ Academy for Sensitive Younglings (title patent pending) and rewrite the whole stupid thing. I fear I have neither the time nor inspiration for that. But I would dearly love to see awkward teenage versions of these characters growing up and learning and being stupid and given a chance to become the best versions of themselves. My vision of the future.

Probably in another 30 years there will be a fully formed, all ready to go evil Empire that no one has done anything to stop anyway…

So there we go. I probably have more to say but that’s all I got and that’s with taking notes!

#star wars #spoilers #text post

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maverick-werewolf · 5 years

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Hello! I'm trying to write a werewolf story, but I'm too worried about things we see in every single one (painful transformations, silver weakness, it's a curse, etc), so I'm trying to twist them kind of (painless transformations but you feel the beast fighting for your mind, silver weakness is a myth, it's a rare virus spreading by blood, etc), 'cause "all cliches and predictability are bad" but I never saw anything about cliches that are necessary to the story. Is there any such thing?

Ooh, a fun question! Thank you for asking. Get ready for a long answer! I have a lot of thoughts on this.

I already wrote one very big post on werewolf tropes we commonly see in fiction, and which ones I do and do not like. That’ll help a lot on this topic! But I have more to say, in regard to the points you brought up.

To me, a werewolf is - by definition - a variety of types of people that can, in different ways, turn into a wolf or wolf-man hybrid…

But also, to me, a lot of the fun can get removed with people trying to subvert too many of the fun werewolf tropes we’re familiar with today. The good ones, I mean. Especially the ones that came from folklore, or at least have an amount of basis in some legends.

For instance, painful transformations do have basis, though of course that wasn’t always the case, and I am very biased in that I love them - but non-painful ones and/or mental ones also sound very fun! Personally, I do both.

More than that, though, today we have so many people throwing around the word and idea of subversion that, frankly, almost none of the “classic” werewolf stuff remains. Just to use the examples you gave-

In quite a lot of things today (Teen Wolf, Harry Potter, Warcraft, Twilight [with both the retconned “we’re not actually werewolves” Quileutes and the “children of the moon”], and a lot more), werewolves are not sensitive to silver and that’s 100% a myth. Now, I don’t mind that at all, frankly, because a lot of very stupid and silly and preposterous things result from the Hollywood contrived silver weakness concept, which was never remotely in folklore, but I also think it can be done well and can be fun if properly worked into a setting (I myself use this trope in my main werewolf setting and series, heavily worked into lore so it isn’t just a random weakness).

Here’s the big one for me, though. A curse or a disease - which way should it be handled, and which one might be considered cliche? This is a can of worms for me.

First off, the concept of being a werewolf very much started off as a wide variety of things - a curse, a blessing, something one was born with, some other type of magical ability…

And being a werewolf was never, in folklore, considered a disease. This is completely a modern concept, and one that basically everyone everywhere uses today thanks to the Early Modern period and later concepts. This is a huge topic I could go into even more detail about.

Be it a disease spread by bite and/or through saliva, a disease spread by bite or scratch (ugh, the scratch thing…), a disease spread through blood, an experimental “disease” caused by “science gone wrong,” a disease spread through sex (don’t get me started, though, really)…

Today, it is pretty much always called a “disease.” This is especially when it is associated with madness and/or bloodlust. This is where the word lycanthropy first comes from - in the Early Modern period, people called those suffering with the “insanity” of being a werewolf were said to have lycanthropy. Later, this term was picked up by popular culture, so the term we still have today for people with certain types of mental illnesses is “clinical lycanthropy.”

Most pop culture today tends to turn lycanthropy into a disease instead of a curse. Even in terms of fantasy settings where one might think of it as a curse, it’s still largely considered a disease. D&D, for instance; it’s called an affliction, a disease, etc. Look on the wiki of any number of modern things with werewolves in them and it’ll refer to it as a disease first, if it refers to it as a curse at all, and many paranormal TV shows and the like will have some kind of reference to various bodily fluids in terms of how it’s spread/how it works/what it’s infecting.

Can it be both a curse and a disease, in a way? Yes, definitely! I actually kind of prefer it that way, myself. Though if I had to pick just one, I would pick curse, personally. I also prefer a less scientific explanation than “just” a disease, more often than not, though that’s just me - especially if it starts turning into some kind of STD or something… Bluh.

Details, though. In my setting, just to clear things up, I refer to it as both a curse and a disease. It is, of course, in this case, a setting in ancient transitioning into medieval times, so they wouldn’t really have a more scientific explanation, but some people are looking for a more logical one sometimes. Anyway, I do have other werewolves in other settings that are done differently, so don’t take all those ramblings as meaning that I only like werewolves done one way.

There are lots of ways someone can become a werewolf in folklore. And there are lots of reasons that werewolf might transform.

So, ultimately, you might be more unique in terms of werewolves if you dialed it back toward some of the “classic” “tropes,” like making it more of a mysterious curse.

But that, of course, is 100% up to you! There is no right or wrong way to tell a story that you want to tell. There are just people who’ll tell you which way they would prefer it told. Like me! I can definitely tell you how I prefer a werewolf story handled, and I’m very flattered you’d ask me for my thoughts on it.

And I will say this emphatically, while we’re at it - I love what most people call “cliches.” They are cliches because they are fun and they work. I am a classicist. A traditionalist. I love traditional stories, storytelling, and classical myths, folklore, and - generally - tropes, at least and especially when it comes to things like monsters.

Werewolves, vampires, dragons, elves, dwarves - I like the classics. I think people trying to subvert them too much is creating a world in which we are losing perception of what those things were in folklore and what they were meant to be and represent, and that’s pretty tragic to me, because now everyone is subverting. That’s a big part of my research and academic work.

People cry “cliche, cliche!” but there is no cliche. Because you can hardly find the stuff that is based on what used to be considered cliche anymore, since everyone is scared of being considered “cliche,” and thus are all mutually adopting new cliches in attempts to avoid the older ones.

That being said, sometimes it’s cool when people swap things up, of course, and I definitely don’t want to shoot anyone down!

I also would argue that cliches don’t necessarily mean predictability. A “cliche” done well is a beautiful thing. It’s all about the storytelling. It’s much more about that than the idea of “cliches” themselves.

So let’s reframe the word “predictability” - think of it as “familiarity.” Familiarity can be a good or bad thing depending on who you ask. I think some familiarity, at least, is a good thing. Because if you can recognize a werewolf as a werewolf, then that’s good. If it’s so different people don’t even recognize it as a werewolf, I kind of start losing interest, personally.

I don’t like “our [creatures] are different,” but that is just me.

Getting back on track - are there any werewolf tropes necessary to a story? Completely an opinion piece.

In my opinion? I don’t think so. I think you can make some radically different werewolves that are still werewolves and they’d be neat. BUT I have basically never seen this done, and my favorite werewolves remain ones that others might consider “cliche.”

Is it necessary to have a werewolf that howls at the moon? Absolutely not. Is it more fun than one that doesn’t? It very well might be. Is it necessary to have the werewolf be based in magic instead of science? Nope! Is it necessary to have being a werewolf be based in some kind of disease? Absolutely not. Is it better to have werewolves as rare monsters or as a plague sweeping across the earth? I can certainly tell you I deeply detest werewolves being turned into the zombie plague and/or plague rats, but hey, some people juggle geese.

A whole ‘nother can of worms is if there are cliches necessary to the storytelling itself and progression of the werewolf character(s), or werewolves as monsters within the setting itself if you are not telling a story from a werewolf POV. I’d pretty much reiterate what I said above in that case, too.

If we get technical, no, recognizable tropes are by no means necessary. If we get personal, I wouldn’t call them necessary, but they are familiarity and they are a personal preference - so I rather like at least a few of them.

Oh my goodness, this is a long post. Quite a bit of rambling! Sorry about that. Hopefully some of this was/is helpful, though! Please feel free to shoot me any followup questions this might’ve spawned, I could talk about this all day. :D Plus I totally feel like I left tons of things out, somehow.

Bottom line, though?

Tell your story the way you want to tell it. That is the most important part. Don’t feel like you have to alter something just because someone somewhere might call it “cliche.” Even if they think that, they are likely to enjoy it, anyway!

And ultimately, your story is yours; do what you want with it and have fun. Don’t let anyone anywhere tell you something you do is going to be bad just because of a silly term like “cliche.”

A “cliche” story can be just as amazing or just as terrible as a wildly original one. It all depends on how you tell it. And if you enjoy telling it, and tell it the way you want to instead of letting anyone strongarm you into altering things from your vision, it will be a story well told.

#asks #anonymous #werewolf #werewolves #folklore #lycanthropy #lycanthro #lycanthrope #wolf man #wolfmen #creative writing #fiction writing #writing topics #tropes #cliches

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stevenuniversallyreviews · 5 years

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Episode 127: Are You My Dad?

“This might be serious.”

Those of y’all that check out my episode rankings at the end of every post know that my favorite “normal” episode of Steven Universe (so not Steven and the Stevens or Hit the Diamond, which are in their own category of perfect character studies) isn’t Lion 3 or Alone Together or Jailbreak or The Answer or Mr. Greg or Mindful Education. And, spoiler alert, it won’t be Jungle Moon or A Single Pale Rose or Reunited or Change Your Mind. It’s Mirror Gem.

So it’s not a shocker that I’m drawn to another episode that’s the beginning of a two-parter closing out the first half of a fifty-odd episode chunk, which starts out goofy but grows increasingly ominous and ends in a confrontation with a new blue Gem. In terms of tone, Are You My Dad? is an incredible exercise in tension, albeit one that benefits from two prior episodes’ cliffhangers in a way Mirror Gem manages without (but to be fair, Mirror Gem arrives when we still don’t know there are other Gems, which gives its mystery a major advantage).

The silly beginning here is strengthened by the return of all three original Crystal Gems, who haven’t been in a room together since Rocknaldo. They’re increasingly out of focus as we get into more Steven-centric storytelling, and I’ve heard this lobbed as a criticism of latter-day Steven Universe; while I agree that these characters are terrific and am always down to see more of them, I can appreciate that their big moment is Act II (Seasons 2/3), and Steven’s is Act III (Seasons 4/5). If Act I is about creating Steven’s universe, and Act II is about developing Steven’s family, it’s because Act III, which the other two have been building towards this whole time, is about Steven.

Episodes like Storm in the Room and Lion 4 fundamentally don’t work with the Crystal Gems around, and our last two episodes place Steven among Beach City citizens to prime us for a finale about Beach City paying for Steven’s past. So I get why we haven’t seen the trio as a whole for a while. But I sure am glad to see them again.

Amethyst’s offer of beans and suggestion to barter them for donuts is great, but come on, nothing beats Garnet and Pearl’s sand castle. I love glimpses into the Crystal Gems’ leisure time independent of Steven (he’s around, but clearly wasn’t involved with the construction): because the Gems are so often characterized in relation to Steven and/or in big personal ways, it’s a pleasant change of pace to just see them reading the paper in Watermelon Steven or assembling furniture in Shirt Club. Doug Out and The Good Lars are celebrations of the mundane tainted by the supernatural in their last moments, so it’s perfect to ease us into this new story with more slice-of-life lazing.

Still, this beach day is a backdrop for Steven wondering where his mail is (in the first of many callbacks, we get his Mr. Postman song from all the way back in Cheeseburger Backpack). On its own this might not be a big deal, but we know that Onion and Sadie were being stalked by new Gems and that Lars didn’t show up at the potluck (which, for now, we can lump in with other disappearances), so even though Steven doesn’t know anything sinister is afoot, Jamie’s absence sets off warning bells for us.

The scenes that follow build dread with masterful efficiency. First we get an uncharacteristically worried Sour Cream, which stands out even more than normal because we just saw him behaving as usual in The Good Lars. His concern is tempered by fun visuals: our MISSING poster is a repurposed WANTED poster, and we get a neat flashback aesthetic as Onion’s haunts are seen as if through an old-school View-Master (calling back to Onion Gang, Arcade Mania, and Onion Friend). While the audience knows new Gems are to blame, Steven is able to write this off as another weird Onion thing, and is more disappointed than concerned when he hears the Big Donut is closed.

Even now, Steven thinks things are probably fine, assuming Lars and Sadie are blowing off work to watch scary movies (calling back to Horror Club and The New Lars). It’s here where we’re introduced to the most clever element of this first act: Barb Miller. She’s connected to Sadie, so she can reveal that her daughter never came home after the potluck, but is also connected to Jamie, who she sent out that morning with Steven’s package. And she’s overprotective enough that she doesn’t make rationalizations like Sour Cream and Steven did for Onion (although she does reference Island Adventure, finally acknowledging how weird it is that three kids went missing for days and nobody seemed to care). In one fell stroke, Steven realizes that this is an alarming pattern, and starts looking for answers at last.

But he still hasn’t caught up to us. Sure, he knows his friends are missing, but he hasn’t seen the looming shadows from the end of Doug Out and The Good Lars, so when he comes across Aquamarine he has no reason to suspect her of kidnapping. A lesser show might build suspense making its characters too thick to put obvious hints together, but Steven Universe makes it clear that none of these threads are obvious to Steven. A more cynical version of the character might deduce earlier that this new Gem is bad news, but despite everything he’s been through in Season 4 he’s still empathetic to his core. After all, the pivotal event of this season was his own dad’s disappearance, so he’s primed to help a kid in a similar situation.

But finally, after knowing more than Steven from the beginning of the episode, Aquamarine asks the titular question and brings us back into the unknown with him. “Are you my dad?” is a brilliantly weird question: of course it’s odd for anyone to ask this of Steven when the answer is so self-evident, but it’s even odder for a Gem to do so. As Steven later tells Connie when she suggests the stranger might be a hybrid, this is a full Gem, and Gems don’t have dads.

Steven’s council of Garnet, Amethyst, Pearl, and Connie shows that his instinct isn’t to go it alone, lending weight to his solo sacrifice at the end of this two-parter. But for now, it offers a moment of respite by reveling in the artistic differences of these characters; on the one hand, it makes little sense for Steven to not just draw Aquamarine himself, considering he’s the one who saw her and we know he likes drawing from Shirt Club and Open Book and Barn Mates, but on the other hand, this scene is a delight. Connie draws a manga-influenced figure using an amateur ball and plane method, Amethyst goes abstract, Pearl undersells her dramatic flourish, and Garnet just draws herself; I actually think Pearl’s is closest, but we go with Connie’s and set off.

This is the second time since Lion 4 where we’ve explored the potential for other half-humans like Steven, and in my first viewing of Are You My Dad I saw it as foreshadowing for fellow hybrid. The trend never really continued, and while it seems like a red herring in retrospect, the close proximity of two stories about Steven maybe not being alone shows just how alone he really is. There’s nobody else like Steven, and while this makes him special, it adds to his burden as a bridge between worlds, a burden that’s partially thrust upon him and partially created by his own sense of outsized responsibility.

Connie lightens the mood as they search by inventing exciting new scenarios to explain this new Gem, contrasting her further with Pearl. Connie’s art is cutesy while Pearl’s is dramatic, and where Connie sees hope for a new friend, Pearl is the only member of the team who advocates preparing for a fight. We don’t go very far down the “optimism is wrong and cynicism is right” road, because that isn’t at all what this show is about, but I love that youthful innocence from both Steven and Connie isn’t championed as an absolute positive in this story.

The light mood of two friends hoping for the best leads to Steven making a game of looking through Onion’s woods, and his facetious search of an empty log ends up getting him trapped. Again, this show isn’t here to build suspense by dumbing down the characters: Steven needs to be out of commission for Connie’s kidnapping to work the way it does, but getting stuck comes from realistic playing around rather than stupidity or ineptitude. And it continues the thread of others getting punished for Steven’s perceived mistakes, which of course adds to his guilt complex (and is furthered by Connie getting kidnapped because Steven shouted her name). These are small moments of getting us from Point A to Point B, but it’s so important that this crew pays attention to such details for the story and themes to flow smoothly.

Aquamarine’s questioning becomes even more confusing when she corrects Connie, saying she’s not looking for “your dad” but “my dad.” Connie’s condescending Tarzan speak is a bit out of character, but it at least makes sense that she wants to simplify her language for someone who doesn’t seem to understand the meanings of words. Aquamarine’s hidden nastiness emerges, with a wicked snicker at Connie’s “Me Connie” routine before she calls for Topaz.

While I prefer Mirror Gem to Are You My Dad? in most regards, the reveal of Topaz takes the cake in the horror department. She’s announced by thundering footsteps that clear birds from the surrounding trees, and emerges first as a shadow before we see our missing friends trapped inside her body. None of the captives’ mouths are free except Onion’s, and he's nonverbal, so their struggles are joined by muffled and incoherent screams while their captor lurks in silence. The soundtrack lurches into unnerving strings as Connie panics at the sight, substitutes more typical digital music as a moment as Topaz splits up, and returns to even tenser strings as Connie is viscerally absorbed into the giant Gem. As with the Ruby Squad’s giant fusion, it’s a brutally practical application of something the Crystal Gems have made beautiful, and Steven is as helpless as Connie to stop it.

A key element of Steven’s martyr complex is that his sense of ownership over everything bad that happens around him is unwarranted, and this sequence is a perfect example. Yes, he’s stuck in a log when Connie is taken, allowing him to blame himself for the kidnapping, but once he’s free he doesn’t stand a chance against Aquamarine’s magic wand. In the best-case scenario, where he and Connie manage to fuse and fight off Topaz, Stevonnie would still lose: as we see in I Am My Mom, even four Crystal Gems working together are beaten with ease by the wand’s ridiculous power. If anything, getting stuck in a log was the only reason Steven was able to regroup and fight back later in the first place. But in the moment, it seems like he made an avoidable mistake that cost Connie her freedom, which is certainly on his mind when he makes his sacrifice.

Aquamarine follows the Holly Blue Agate mold of brief but memorable villains, and while both are petty monsters, Holly Blue Agate’s Professor Umbridge has nothing on Aquamarine’s Eric Cartman. It’s one thing to let middle management power go to your head, but Aquamarine is cruel for the simple joy of being cruel, an attitude captured magnificently by Della Saba’s refined British accent. She taunts Topaz as readily as her enemies, and unlike the fiercely loyal Homeworld villains we’ve seen before, she sees her duty as a waste of time that she begrudgingly fulfills because she’s the best. Like Kevin, this is a troll who’s just mean to her core, but she unfortunately has a lot more power than your everyday toxic douche.

As is standard for two-parters by now, we end with a cliffhanger, this time evoking Steven’s Dream (another first-parter that ends with a new blue Gem). A loved one has been taken, Steven blames himself because he put this person in harm’s way and couldn’t stop it, so now it’s time for a rescue mission. An unprecedented streak of consecutive serialized episodes already began with Doug Out, but now we get a proper two-parter, then a four-parter, then a six-parter, then another two-parter all in a row. It’s a special time in the series, highlighted by Earth plots and Homeworld plots colliding in ways that backdrop Steven’s role as a child of two worlds, and Are You My Dad excellently escalates the plot.

In closing, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that this is the final episode from the amazing Raven Molisee. Other veterans like Joe Johnston and Kat Morris ended their roles as lead-credit writer/storyboarders to fulfill other roles for the show, but this is it for Molisee’s tenure as an active member of the Crewniverse. Her work speaks for itself: she helped introduce Lapis in Mirror Gem, Peridot in Warp Tour, Jasper in The Return, Yellow Diamond in Message Received, and now Aquamarine and Topaz in Are You My Dad?. She helped bring to life the comedy of Kindergarten Kid and The New Crystal Gems, the tragedy of Rose’s Scabbard and Monster Reunion, the horror of Frybo and Keeping It Together, the wonder of An Indirect Kiss, the catharsis of Earthlings, and so much more. We were lucky to have her, and I really hope she didn’t leave because she was abducted by aliens.

Future Vision!

Steven is down to watch a movie about an orphaned Gem whose parent figure left for Beach City and never came home. So were the fans, apparently.

If every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn’t have inconsistencies…

The ages of Lars and Sadie were nebulous at first, but it’s more or less been established that they’re teens of sorts by now, which makes Barb’s declaration that Sadie’s an adult confusing in a way that I find surprisingly annoying. It’s really not a big deal, but it bothers me way more than your average nitpick.

We’re the one, we’re the ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!

It’s not unheard of for first-parters to make my greatest hits list: Mirror Gem is certainly one of them, and we’ve also got The Return and Steven’s Dream. But it’s hard to put an episode without a proper ending up with the best, and despite its wonderful tone, meeting Aquamarine lacks the conclusive impact of meeting Lapis, we don’t get a huge moment of Steven summoning his shield and protecting his team, and Aquamarine isn’t a Big Deal like Blue Diamond. I still love Are You My Dad a lot, but this is a hard list to crack and it does feel like half an episode when viewed alone.

Top Twenty-Five

Steven and the Stevens

Hit the Diamond

Mirror Gem

Lion 3: Straight to Video

Alone Together

Last One Out of Beach City

The Return

Jailbreak

The Answer

Mindful Education

Sworn to the Sword

Rose’s Scabbard

Earthlings

Mr. Greg

Coach Steven

Giant Woman

Beach City Drift

Winter Forecast

Bismuth

Steven’s Dream

When It Rains

The Good Lars

Catch and Release

Chille Tid

Lion 4: Alternate Ending

Love ‘em

Laser Light Cannon

Bubble Buddies

Tiger Millionaire

Lion 2: The Movie

Rose’s Room

An Indirect Kiss

Ocean Gem

Space Race

Garnet’s Universe

Warp Tour

The Test

Future Vision

On the Run

Maximum Capacity

Marble Madness

Political Power

Full Disclosure

Joy Ride

Keeping It Together

We Need to Talk

Cry for Help

Keystone Motel

Back to the Barn

Steven’s Birthday

It Could’ve Been Great

Message Received

Log Date 7 15 2

Same Old World

The New Lars

Monster Reunion

Alone at Sea

Crack the Whip

Beta

Back to the Moon

Kindergarten Kid

Buddy’s Book

Gem Harvest

Three Gems and a Baby

That Will Be All

The New Crystal Gems

Storm in the Room

Room for Ruby

Doug Out

Are You My Dad?

Like ‘em

Gem Glow

Frybo

Arcade Mania

So Many Birthdays

Lars and the Cool Kids

Onion Trade

Steven the Sword Fighter

Beach Party

Monster Buddies

Keep Beach City Weird

Watermelon Steven

The Message

Open Book

Story for Steven

Shirt Club

Love Letters

Reformed

Rising Tides, Crashing Tides

Onion Friend

Historical Friction

Friend Ship

Nightmare Hospital

Too Far

Barn Mates

Steven Floats

Drop Beat Dad

Too Short to Ride

Restaurant Wars

Kiki’s Pizza Delivery Service

Greg the Babysitter

Gem Hunt

Steven vs. Amethyst

Bubbled

Adventures in Light Distortion

Gem Heist

The Zoo

Rocknaldo

Enh

Cheeseburger Backpack

Together Breakfast

Cat Fingers

Serious Steven

Steven’s Lion

Joking Victim

Secret Team

Say Uncle

Super Watermelon Island

Gem Drill

Know Your Fusion

Future Boy Zoltron

Tiger Philanthropist

No Thanks!

6. Horror Club 5. Fusion Cuisine 4. House Guest 3. Onion Gang 2. Sadie’s Song 1. Island Adventure

(It took some serious sleuthing, because the amazing Are You My Mother parody image is unsourced on Google Images and comes from a TeeSpring shirt that is no longer available, but I tracked down the artist as Zaccrim.)

#are you my dad #steven universe #su #steven universally #review

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thebastardofgloucester · 4 years

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So...The Rise of Skywalker (Spoilers, obviously)

No Star Wars movie is anywhere close to perfect. Frankly, they all have serious flaws of logistics or plot logic or characterisation changes or deus ex machinas or lack of originality (which includes A New Hope when you look at its inspirations). It's pointless and silly to pretend otherwise. At its best, Star Wars overcomes that with captivating characters, glorious spectacle, and John Williams.

I think you'll all be familiar with how much I disliked The Last Jedi (and chafed at being lumped in for disliking the movie in with bigots, unimaginative fanboys, and the like).

I liked The Rise of Skywalker. A lot. It had more than enough to offset its major shortcomings, in my opinion. It was not 'soulless,' it was not a complete recreation of Return of the Jedi anymore than The Last Jedi was a rough retelling of The Empire Strikes Back, and it was not as bad or incoherent as Attack of the Clones, jfc are you high

There are certain areas where I am more sympathetic to that not being the case for some people than others. I don't think it completely junked The Last Jedi, but it did demonstrate a huge gap in creative visions, preferred plot structures, and other priorities. Blame for that should not lie with JJ Abrams (or Chris Terrio) or Rian Johnson, who did what they thought was best, and what they were hired to do, and what they thought audiences would enjoy. It should lie with the Lucasfilm story group and Kathleen Kennedy, who had every opportunity to make a trilogy with a united vision and simply declined to do so. (There are a set of different issues with Disney that I'll get to)

Anyway, here's my take on individual components.

Rey ‘Palpatine’

We might as well start with the single most contentious part of the film, and where it is perceived (wrongly, in my opinion) to clash the most with The Last Jedi: Rey being of the Palpatine bloodline.

Rey's arc was about pushing past her own past traumas and doubts and the repeated attempts of other people to define who she was to make her own identity. It is about the refutation of destiny, of genetic determinism. I'm not really sure how anyone really came away with a different impression. I understand being annoyed that Rey couldn't just come from nothing, but call me an annoying fanboy - I wanted some explanation for how Rey was a match for the grandson of literal Space Jesus. Anakin being the most powerful Jedi ever born (and how he was failed by those who were supposed to guide him to that destiny) is kind of central to the entire mythology of Star Wars. Is it reductive and elitist? I guess. I certainly enjoy having Jedi not born of the Skywalker bloodline in the old EU and the Clone Wars/Rebels story. I was frustrated by killing off all of Luke's students as part of resetting the universe in The Force Awakens, and never learning anything about them.

Honestly, as somebody who was in the Rey Skywalker camp (and wrote fanfiction to that effect!), I was glad to be wrong. This was better. It gave Rey more agency, and emphasized found family.

The exposition is weird and clunky. JJ clearly meant for Rey to have some kind of blood link to the previous mythology of the series - you cannot watch the sequence in Maz's castle and tell me otherwise. Rian didn't want to tell that story. JJ did. Kathleen Kennedy and Lucasfilm threw their hands up in the air and Disney raked in the cash. Looking at that Maz castle beat, there's a very good case to be made that Rey was supposed to be either a Skywalker or a Solo, and Palpatine was JJ's attempt to not completely throw out Rian's idea (that her parents went into hiding, becoming 'no one,' abandoning her and being killed somewhere else - their motivations in TLJ (drunks ditching her) are imputed by Kylo and Rey's own fears of abandonment, remember).

Weirdly, I think that of the outcomes, Palpatine was the best one. Explaining how Rey ends up alone on Jakku when she's related to either Luke or Leia is pretty hard without further damaging their characters. Palpatine having lovers, mistresses, whatever before Mace melted his face is gross but entirely plausible. The timeline is...confusing - I guess there's enough basis for Palpatine still having agents running around, chasing down Rey, that even years after his death Rey's parents would leave her behind in an attempt to protect her. It's a bit muddy, but so was Anakin being Luke and Leia's father before we had the prequels. A novel here would probably help if it is written competently)

The point is that Rey's arc refutes genetic destiny. Instead of being afraid of her, as the Jedi were of Anakin (and to an extent, the Skywalkers were of Ben) Luke and Leia (specifically Leia) allow her to grow into her own person, and ultimately she chooses to take the name Skywalker to honor them (and Ben's sacrifice). The problem in my mind is less that Rey is a Palpatine by blood or a Skywalker by choice, and more that she's the only Jedi standing at the end of the trilogy. Making Finn's absolutely obvious force sensitivity a bigger deal narratively in TROS would have helped a lot (more on that later). And we still have the important implications of Broom Boy! He's not erased from existence, there simply wasn't room for his story in these 2.5 hours.

The First Act (and a bit)

The first 30 minutes or so of The Rise of Skywalker are...nuts. They feel less like a movie and more like a series of trailers or a 'previously on' for a movie we never saw. It's about as well done as it could be at establishing plot threads, the situation of the Resistance v the First Order, and where characters are starting from, as you could reasonably expect, but it's like cramming the entirety of the Jabba's Palace segment of Return of the Jedi into about half its runtime, at most.

What it comes down to, and I said this at the time, is that The Last Jedi is a very bad sequel to The Force Awakens. That doesn't (REPEAT: DOES NOT) make it bad film, or even a bad Star Wars film. But in terms of what the middle movie of a planned trilogy should be. It is. Not Good. JJ had seeded hints of Rey's origins and opened a bunch of mysteries. You can contend that he never intended or was never capable of answering them, and I think that's entirely unfair and reducing JJ's opus to the unsatisfying ending of 'Lost' is stupid and lazy, but they were there. The Last Jedi threw all of that out with extreme prejudice. I deeply disliked that; other people didn't. Either way, you had a problem (and you would have had even more of a problem if Colin Trevorrow had directed Episode IX as planned - this could have been SO. MUCH. WORSE.). The Rise of Skywalker is a natural sequel to The Force Awakens, though Palpatine's return could have been foreshadowed much better (or at all, if we're honest?) and it really makes me wonder how much changed from the first drafts of The Force Awakens to the version of The Rise of Skywalker we saw on screen.

I saw some criticisms that we had to read the tie-in material (including a bit from Fortnite??) to understand all the specifics of what planets these were, who Kylo Ren was murdering, etc...I don’t really think any of that was particularly important. It actually opens up a ton of new storytelling opportunities and made the universe feel big again, which The Last Jedi didn’t, at least for me. Apparently the planet Kylo is fighting on is Mustafar. That...doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense (maybe we finally have a Star Wars world that isn’t a single biome?) but it wasn’t actually that important. We saw Kylo searching for the Sith Wayfinder and murdering anybody in his way, we saw Poe and Finn being pursued from one end of the universe to another, and we got the 16 hour deadline before the fleet was ready (which was...weird, admittedly, but not in the slightest less weird that the fleet running out of fuel on a slow-motion chase or needing to fly off to an entirely different system to find a ‘code breaker’ to counter a techo gadget thing that let you trace people through hyperspace.

And yeah, if you are going to forgive The Last Jedi the dumb codebreaker/fuel shit which led to the detached Canto Bight B plot, you have to just acknowledge the Wayfinder thing as a macguffin that gets the plot moving in a certain direction and gives a clear path from narrative point a to narrative point b. Rian is not ahead of JJ on this aspect.

The subsequent fetch quest is less about the macguffin and more about the character beats on the way. Kylo and his boy band pursue Rey, Rey realizes her powers are kinda scary and hella impressive (including the healing mechanic, which is entirely precedented in past canon), you get to see some brilliant, funny, and touching moments between the trio we were not allowed in The Last Jedi, Rey discovers hints about her past, and Lando shows up.

We also get to my least favorite part of the film.

Poe Dameron is Better Than This

I do not understand why they ret-conned Poe into having a past as a smuggler, or why Keri Russell’s character was even necessary. You could explain it as youthful rebellion, maybe after Poe’s mom Shara Bey died (both his parents were Rebel veterans - that’s a lot of pressure), but it fits awkwardly into the established timeline.

The one good thing that came out of it was a moment where Poe is tempted to leave the Resistance, but that only makes sense because of Poe’s terrible hotheaded, reckless characterization in The Last Jedi, neither of which at all fit with his portrayal in the Poe Dameron comics (which are excellent). Poe eventually gets where he needs to be, and the conversation with Lando after Leia passes is one of the best moments of the film, and justified bringing Lando all by itself. Oscar Isaac is apparently really frustrated with Poe’s character and I cannot blame him. Rian Johnson started this weirdness, and it is one of the greatest flaws of The Last Jedi and more people need to acknowledge how racist it was to reduce a 30-something brown-skinned veteran to an impulsive, out of control idiot who gets physically and verbally smacked around by two white women, and JJ didn’t really try to fix it. I guess his arc kinda works in a vacuum. I still deeply dislike it. Cutting that entire section down to the bare bones would have made more room for...

Finn and the Triad

The dynamic between Finn, Poe, and Rey was fantastic. There is abundant basis for Finn and Poe to be canon romantic interests, and I cannot conclude it was anything but Disney’s cowardice that prevented that from happening (and honestly, same for Finn and Rey). JJ is no more to blame than Rian - I genuinely believe this came from higher up. It sucks. A lot. What we do get is precious, and frankly makes Rian’s argument for separating them (that they would get along and it would be boring) kinda silly. They are also incredibly funny together - John, Isaac, and Daisy play off each other so damn well, and I was cackling when the Falcon was on fire and Poe was mad about BB-8.

Finn is absolutely force sensitive. It is apparently what he was trying to say to Rey, he has feelings that turn out to be correct like three times, he wielded a lightsaber with some proficiency in The Force Awakens. It’s canon. Why it isn’t explicit is a function of the Force User plot becoming divorced from Finn and Poe in The Last Jedi. JJ and Terrio also could have fixed that, and chose not to.

We got a tantalizing glimpse of what could have been with Janna and the other defectors. It was really good, but it wasn’t nearly enough, and I am Mad about it. To borrow from some great ideas on twitter, Janna could have revealed that her unit heard about Finn on Jakku and it inspired them to defect. They could have together swayed a bunch of reluctant stormtroopers to rebel (they were otherwise just treated as facist canon-fodder, which, not great when a lot of them are child soldiers!). It was perfectly set up from TFA and they just...dropped the ball.

Like I said, I’m Mad. TLJ did nothing with Finn as a defector or the child soldier thing in general, and TROS did the bare minimum. Huge, huge wasted opportunity. We got promises that we’d get to find out more about who Finn is and...we didn’t, or at least, not in the theatrical cut. TLJ had a scene of Finn and Phasma talking about his being a traitor/defector. Rian cut it down to a fight scene and the ‘Rebel Scum’ line. Writers jail for both of them, tbh, though JJ clearly cared about Finn (he’s why the character exists as he does, as why Boyega was cast, and maybe if TLJ doesn’t make Kylo into Rey’s co-protagonist we get something different. I'm not going to blame Rian for something JJ could have fixed if he cared to.

And least we got something, I guess.

Kylo Ben

I think the first time I actually cared about Ben Solo as a character was when Kylo symbolically ‘died,’ and Ben was saved by Rey’s healing abilities. That was excellent writing, even if it was not subtle. I liked Leia and Han (as part of Ben’s memories) have a role in helping him find some sort of redemption. I was frustrated and mad that Anakin Skywalker’s grandkid could be a straight up space fascist with even fewer redeeming qualities. He still deserved to die. He had no family to go back to and he was directly responsible for thousands of innocent deaths and closely linked to the death of trillions. Like Vader, you don’t just come back from that.

Like Anakin, Ben made his own choices. Was he manipulated by Snoke/Palpatine? Sure. He still had multiple occasions to chose differently and did not. It’s part of his flaws as a character. Han and Leia did their best as parents - we find out Leia even abandoned her Jedi training because she was afraid for her son. Ben’s inevitable fall (which mirrors that of Jacen Solo, a truly fascinating character who I will always be Mad about) soured the sequel trilogy from the start in some ways, but it is hard to envision it without Ben turning. I don’t know. I think without Ben being who he was we simply have a different set of movies.

The kiss is...I don’t even know. Rey clearly cared about Ben, and believed he could change, but also refused to compromise who she was in order to pull him back to the light. I would have vastly preferred a forehead kiss or something along those lines.

On balance I’m glad he got a Vader redemption. I think Palpatine came back in part because Ben simply was not a particularly captivating villain, and without him to provide contrast and make the stakes clear, Ben’s redemption is not possible, and that’s arguably an even worse outcome, especially given how he was manipulated so much at an impressionable age. I’m really glad Leia had a chance to influence his turn as her final act in this life (Carrie deserved a better ending but it was the best they could do after Carrie’s death imo).

Grandpa Palps

First, Palpatine finding a way to survive and setting up multiple contingency plans to return to power is completely in keeping with his portrayal in both the old and Nu EUs (a big part of the post-Endor stuff is Operation Cinder, where Palpatine posthumously ordered the scouring of dozens of Imperial loyalist worlds to spread fear and prevent the Empire from continuing without him). Palpatine also LOVES his superweapons - he built two Death Stars, ffs. A fleet of them is not exactly a stretch in terms of strategy. The Rise of Skywalker definitely felt like it owed a debt to one of the more divisive bits of the old Star Wars EU - the Dark Empire series of comics by Tom Veitch and Kevin J Anderson, which have cloned Palpatines, Luke turning to the Dark Side, an ungodly number of superweapons, and a planet where Palpatine hides and builds them after his defeat.

I don’t think his survival ruins Anakin’s arc - Anakin’s actions still destroyed Palpatine’s Empire (that he helped to build) and its 26 year reign of terror. The galaxy got 30 years of relative peace and then a war that was not nearly as destructive or large scale as the Galactic Civil War. People saying it makes Anakin’s arc irrelevant are just being silly.

Retconning Snoke to a cloned puppet (probably an unwitting one) is actually not a bad writing choice. It explains why he was such a cardboard cut-out villain, and why he was so easily defeated. Honestly, I’m far more okay with how he died in The Last Jedi now that I know this (even if the pacing and the placement of that scene is still utterly bizarre).

The new EU set up cults and fanatics around the Dark Side and its avatars in the emperor and Vader. None of that felt particularly implausible to me as a result.

Legacies in the Sequel Trilogy

I really loved the ‘thousand generations live in you’ conceit. I loved the power of the old Jedi, snuffed out by Palpatine, helping Rey defeat him one last time (including my girl Ahsoka, RIP, I'm sure you went out like a badass). These are legacies and powers that don’t require blood ties or dynasties, they just rely on the force spanning the whole of the GFFA.

Ben is offered the chance to either turn away from his grandfather’s dark path early enough to warrant redemption, or to follow it through until the end. He actually chooses to do neither. With Leia’s dying intercession, he ends up following Anakin’s path to an extent, but his story is ultimately about the tragedy of expectations, fears, and the immense weight of the Skywalker name and legacy. All of his family are caught up in it. Rey is mostly apart from it, and then explicitly subverts her destiny to be Palpatine’s heir, and faces her fear of ending up there, by intent or just fate. As Luke says, some things are stronger than blood. Rey’s story is the ultimate testament to that, and it’s a pretty powerful message.

Leia. Oh god. I was absolutely thrilled when we found out she trained as a Jedi, and then served as Rey’s Jedi Master after Luke failed Rey so badly (after failing Ben). I think Luke’s story from TLJ to TROS is easily the most consistent, honestly. He made mistakes, both with Ben, and then with Rey, and he recognized it. The Rise of Skywalker acknowledges that Luke wasn’t right in how he handled training Rey either, and that went a long way to making me better accept how Rian portrayed him as flippant and dismissive and cynical.

Carrie’s absence was so badly felt. As I’ve said previously, I think they did the best job they could with the footage they held back and Carrie’s recorded audio. They managed to give her a relatively coherent story and an effect on the plot which she didn’t really have in The Last Jedi. I’ve seen speculation that it was supposed to be Leia, not Luke, who gave Rey that pep talk on Ahch-To, and in some ways it might have made more sense. Selfishly, I’m still glad it was Luke, because it helped reconcile my feelings about him in The Last Jedi. But they really did a great job in a really, really tough situation.

Rose Tico

Let’s just get it out there: the film’s treatment of Rose Tico and Kelly Marie Tran was inexcusably bad. Whether her character was a great addition to the cast in the Last Jedi or not, KMT faced horrendous abuse from various bigots and assholes, and after making a lot of public promises they reduced her to barely a minute of screen-time and no real impact on the plot. It’s shitty, it’s bad, and JJ and Disney should feel bad.

Introducing a character like Rose mid-way through a trilogy is risky, and while it worked with Lando, JJ clearly had no idea what to do with her. It’s just a mess, it’s the biggest black mark on the film, and on the sequel trilogy more broadly. Nobody comes out looking good here, and Rose Tico needs a Disney + series of her own or something. Protect Kelly Marie Tran at all costs.

The Rest

- Lando was great. So great. I wish we’d gotten the line that his daughter had been stolen by the First Order (and thus was potentially Janna) - we’d better get a book or a film or something. Lando’s conversation with Poe salvaged his character arc. Billy Dee Williams did a damn good job getting in shape for the role. He came out as genderfluid recently. He’s an absolute treasure and thank god they didn’t waste him.

- I just wanted to reiterate how HAPPY I AM THAT JJ ABRAMS MADE LEIA A JEDI HOLY SHIT

- It was a blink and you’ll miss it moment for people who didn’t read Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath series, but the death of Temmin ‘Snap’ Wexley in a battle where his step-dad (Wedge Antilles) made a brief appearance was devastating and I still don’t know how to feel about it.

- The space battles were awesome. Lando and Chewie bringing in the cavalry was what we were so cruelly teased for in The Last Jedi, which I am still mad about. Forget the logistics, forget the story logic, it was awesome. Maybe in the future I’ll be more annoyed. I honestly doubt it.

- Hux lives (and dies) for drama. He’s the pettiest son of a bitch in the GFFA, he would absolutely turn informant to win his fight with Kylo Ren, especially if he suspected that Kylo had killed Snoke and then was an incompetent child. His dying shortly thereafter is honestly exactly what the character deserved.

- On the cavalry moment, and the galaxy rising to destroy the First Order - I loved it in Return of the Jedi’s special edition, I love it here. There’s a thematic resonance with our heroes overcoming their fear and the galaxy at large being stirred to action. I just wish we’d gotten a few ragtag forces to show up at Crait, but that was a choice Rian made. I’m glad JJ chose differently. It was incredibly Star Wars.

- The 3PO stuff was weird, especially given how emotionally centred it was in the final trailers. It was also tied up in the Poe stuff I disliked. I don’t really know what else to say. At least R2D2, BB-8, and him felt like characters, not purely plot devices.

- Chewie - his reaction to losing Leia was absolutely devastating, his relationship with the next gen trio was great, and his death fake-out was...weird. I could go either way with that - killing him would have been a huge risk I could have respected, on the other hand if he was going to go out he deserved better than that (like, say, a moon getting dropped on him saving the life of Han Solo's kid). His ‘death’ did set up a crucial character beat for Rey. And there were, in fact, two transports, I remember that.

TLDR;

It was a fun movie! It tried to do way too much because The Last Jedi was not an effective sequel to The Force Awakens, and that’s on Kennedy and the LFL story group more than anyone else. It nailed the broad strokes of the Jedi/Force plot in my opinion, including subverting genetic destiny and the power of blood ties over everything else. In the process, it let a number of characters down, who were unfortunately also the characters of color, which is: not great.

I found it rewarding as a fan. It rewarded my faith in the goodness of the denizens of the GFFA and the power of found family. I’ve loved Rey from the start and I’m thrilled with how her arc ended with her burying the Skywalker legacy and making a new start with her new family in Poe and Finn (and Rose, damn it). I’m glad it made me feel better about Luke Skywalker and finally made Leia a bona-fide lightsaber wielding Jedi. I was exhilarated coming out of it, instead of exhausted and frustrated like I was in The Last Jedi. It didn’t make me hate Star Wars. It had extreme Return of the Jedi energy, and that is literally all I needed out of this film.

Here’s to a load of more complex, nuanced, and adventurous storytelling that the Skywalker saga never really allowed. I’m still excited for the prospect of Rian working with his own characters in the universe. I think JJ should probably be done.

Chuck Wendig said that the Star Wars universe was junk. Fun, whimsical, exciting, but ultimately not really a well-crafted piece of art. I’m inclined to agree.

#martinus watches the star war #tros spoilers

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oscopelabs · 5 years

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Mirror, Mirror: When Movie Characters Look Back at Themselves by Sheila O’Malley

“I always feel it behind me. It’s myself. And I follow me. In silence. But I can hear it. Yes, sometimes it’s like I’m chasing myself. I want to escape from myself. But I can’t!” —Peter Lorre as child-murderer, M (1931)

There was a period in the ‘60s and ‘70s when you could barely call yourself a male movie star if you didn’t do a scene where you stared at yourself in the mirror, doing various “private” things. The device shows up before then, too, but the floodgates opened in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Meryl Streep has observed, “Often the scenes that are the most exciting, and most illuminating in film, are the ones with no dialogue…where a character is doing something alone, where the deepest most private self is revealed or explored. Exposed.”

Mirrors have multiple thematic uses (as well as the obvious directorial choice to add visual interest to the frame). But if a character is inarticulate, then seeing him “deal with” his reflection can fill in some gaps. It’s a great storytelling shortcut. If the character has a firm public “mask,” a “mirror scene” can let us see who he is when no one is watching. We all lie, to some degree, out there in the world (or on social media). We construct a “self” and a mirror scene allows the character to strip that away.

Speaking stereotypically (or, in archetypes), what is expected of male characters in terms of public persona is different from the pressures on female characters. Not better or worse, just different. Crying, showing uncertainty, weakness, vulnerability … can be a minefield. This is why the glut of male mirror scenes in the 70s makes a kind of sense: as the women’s movement rose, men began to wonder about their place, as well as buck against some of the gender norms imposed on them (or, in some cases, re-entrench said gender norms, Travis Bickle’s “You talkin’ to me” the most classic example).

Shakespeare’s use of the soliloquy—in particular for Kings and prospective Kings—could be seen as mirror scenes, with the audience as the mirror. A man goes into a private space, showing the audience things he cannot show on the battlefield or in the court. Hamlet, one of the most introverted of Shakespeare’s characters, showing non-gender-norm qualities of uncertainty and sensitivity, has a massive six soliloquies. (“O that this too too solid flesh would melt”, “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I”, “To be or not to be”, “Tis now the very witching time of night”, “Now might I do it pat” and “How all occasions do inform against me.”) It is impossible to imagine the play—or Hamlet—without them. In Richard II, after Richard is forced to surrender his crown, what is the first thing he does? Like a true narcissist, he calls for a mirror. As he stares at himself, he wonders,

“Was this face the face That every day under his household roof Did keep ten thousand men?”

and throws the mirror on the ground.

Mirrors are powerful and mysterious symbols. The doubling-up can mean all kinds of things. Alice steps through the looking glass into another world. Goethe’s Faust looks into the witch’s mirror and sees a beautiful woman staring back. Dorian Gray takes a mirror to compare his face with the one in the attic portrait. (Like Richard III, Dorian smashes the mirror.) A mirror is crucial in Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” where “The Lady” is cursed to view the world only through a mirror. But then Lancelot rides by and she can’t help it, she has to sneak a peek. Maybe the most famous fictional mirror is the Evil Queen’s in “Snow White,” the one she asks every day, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” Richard III doesn’t look for a reflection of his beauty. He wonders where his “self” even is, without the crown.

An early male mirror scene—and one of the best—is Peter Lorre’s in Fritz Lang’s M (1931). Our first glimpse of Lorre’s face comes without warning. As a handwriting-analyst theorizes in voiceover about the child-killer’s psychology, we see him, staring at himself in the mirror. He pulls at his face, slowly, manipulating his mouth into a smile, trying it on for size, maybe seeing what it looks like to the children he seduces. He bugs his eyes out, turning this way, that, a maniacal presence, almost like a shark rolling its eyes backwards as it attacks. He has no sense of what human beings feel like, of what he looks like, of how to even make a facial expression. It’s one of the most chilling private moments in cinema.

Speaking of “private moments”: Constantin Stanislavski wrote a lot about how actors needed to feel “solitude in public.” He wrote: ”During a performance, before an audience of thousands, you can always enclose yourself in this circle…You can carry it with you wherever you go.” Lee Strasberg developed his “private moment exercise” to help actors achieve “solitude in public.” There are things you do when you are alone which you would stop doing if someone walked in. Maybe you sing along to the radio. Maybe you talk to yourself. Maybe you pick your nose. Maybe you do all of these things simultaneously. Our “public” selves are drilled into us from a very young age. There are “good manners,” there are “contexts” to be memorized—what flies at home will not fly outside the home. Breaking down the public face, letting an audience see who you are when you are by yourself, is part of the actor’s job. (It’s not a surprise that the '70s came to be dominated by private-moment mirror scenes, considering the influence of the Strasberg method on acting styles.)

One of the most important mirror scenes, and a huge influence on Martin Scorsese, is Marlon Brando’s in Reflections in a Golden Eye, directed by John Huston. Brando plays Major Weldon Penderton, a closeted gay man married to a frustrated, luscious Elizabeth Taylor. Late at night, Penderton sits alone, staring at pictures of naked male statues from Greek antiquity. The character lives in an almost totally male world (the military), turned on by young soldiers, and terrified of revealing himself. In one scene, alone downstairs in the house, he walks into the hall and stares at himself in the mirror. After a moment of vacuity, he begins to talk to himself, or, more vulnerably, to an imaginary other person. He pretends to respond to what the other person says, he practices laughing, and he smiles, but the smile is superimposed. He can’t get it to look real. What he says is a kind of murmur, a “pretense” of conversation. This is the kind of vulnerability Brando could achieve like no other. Without this scene, the Major could have been a caricature. All we see is his fuddy-duddy sexless stiff public mask. The mirror scene shows his confusion at how to be a man, how to navigate even a casual conversation.

Alain Delon has a stunning mirror moment in Purple Noon (1960), Rene Clement’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. Delon plays the sociopath Tom Ripley, in thrall to his casually masculine friend Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet). Delon’s chilly presence onscreen works to beautiful effect: He doesn’t show us much. But then, he tries on Philippe’s clothes, a sleek pinstripe jacket, fancy shoes. He checks himself out in the mirror. Most actors would leave it at that. But Delon understood the homoerotic implications of the script, not to mention the character’s dangerous narcissism. Delon leans into the mirror and gives himself a rapturous long kiss, slitting his eyes open at one point, to check out what he looks like.

It’s interesting to contrast this with the same scene in the 1999 adaptation, The Talented Mr. Ripley, starring Matt Damon. Director Anthony Minghella makes the subtext practically text, by placing mirrors in almost every scene (the final shot of Ripley is through a mirror). When Ripley tries on his friend’s clothes, he dances around to Bing Crosby’s “May I,” doing a vaudeville burlesque. It’s a different kind of rapture than Delon’s swooning kiss. Damon’s drag-style dance is more for the audience, an explicit display of inner gay-ness, what Ripley is hiding beneath his good-natured submissive public persona. It’s a good scene, although I prefer Delon’s. Delon’s kiss is Stanislavsky’s “public solitude”—and it shows the terrifying void within the character. There is no self. The entire world is a mirror.

In Karel Reisz’s gritty Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Albert Finney’s Arthur, in a whirl of work, sex, and alcohol, is suddenly caught by his reflection one hungover morning. He was beat up the night before. He plays at being a sniper through his window, targeting local women with pellets. It’s a thin line between playfulness and murderous acting-out. Finney digs into this aspect of the character when he suddenly speaks to his reflection. It is a statement of bravado before descending into confusion: ”I’m me and nobody else. Whatever people say I am that’s what I am not, because they don’t know a bloody thing about me. God knows what I am.”

For the opening sequences of Rocky, we see Rocky Balboa’s normal “day in the life.” We are introduced to him through various public selves. But when he goes home to his dank apartment, feeding his turtles, gentle and quiet, his loneliness is so acute it reverbs off the screen. Childhood photographs of him line the mirror frame, and Rocky stares at them, his big-lug face almost crushed in disappointment. Holding a container of turtle food, he starts to talk to himself. What he’s saying doesn’t sound like anything, just private-moment murmurings, but in the next scene, when he goes to visit the girl in the pet store, it becomes clear. He was practicing a joke to tell her, a joke designed to make her laugh, show her he’s a safe person, he’s nice. Rocky practicing a joke in the mirror is one of Stallone’s most vulnerable moments as an actor (and evidence of his gift as a screenwriter).

John Travolta’s mirror moment in 1977’s Saturday Night Fever is star-making, not just because of Travolta’s almost otherworldly gorgeousness (as well as how he revels in said gorgeousness, behavior considered coded-female). Surrounded by 1970s icons—posters of Rocky, Serpico, and Farrah Fawcett—he blow-dries his hair, places gold chains around his neck, and stands like a superhero in his black speedo briefs, shot from below. Perhaps the most revealing thing about the scene is that when his father barges into the room, Travolta’s Tony Manero does not stop what he is doing. His lack of embarrassment tells us everything we need to know about the character.

Francis Ford Coppola’s epic, Apocalypse Now begins with a hallucinatory sequence showing a PTSD-rattled Martin Sheen, holed up in a hotel room in Saigon, tormented by memories. In one shocking moment, Sheen stands unsteadily, and lurches around in front of the mirror, flailing his arms out in imitation martial-arts moves, an attempt to combat his helplessness and anguish, his impotence. But the gap between reality and fantasy is too great, and he, like Richard III, smashes the mirror.

Richard Gere’s mirror moment in American Gigolo is a distant cousin of John Travolta’s. His Julian has carefully crafted an immaculate persona for his female clients, and part of the movie’s pull is watching it get stripped away. At home, Julian wanders around, practicing Swedish, working out, picking out clothes for his next appointment. He’s vain, but vanity is part of his job. Smokey Robinson’s “The Love I Saw In You Was Just a Mirage,” and it’s perfect because Julian literally is a mirage. To his clients, to himself, even. When he stands in front of the mirror, flexing his muscles, he is more Evil Queen than Richard III, a destabilizing of gender norms around male sexuality (and self-presentation) which is so much a part of the film. (When Julian meets a private detective, it’s at a joint called the Me & Me Coffee Shop. Julian’s hall of mirrors shatters by the end of American Gigolo: in the final scene, he talks to Lauren Hutton through a glass partition in prison. The mirror is no more. He can see through it now to the other person, and, crucially, he can be seen, too, as he really is.)

The most famous mirror moment is, of course, Robert De Niro’s in Taxi Driver. In the insomniac voiceover, his Travis Bickle says, “I think that someone should become a person like other people,” showing the character’s alienation from other humans. You aren’t already a person, to Travis: you have to become one. As Travis descends into psychosis, dreaming of 1. impressing the cool blonde (Cybill Shepherd) who rejected him after he took her to a porn movie on their first date and 2. rescuing the child prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster), he begins to amass a small arsenal, putting together boot holsters and straps to go around his wiry body. In the unforgettable moment when he checks himself out in the mirror, he goes into a zone of macho fantasy. (Schrader’s script said only “Travis speaks to himself in the mirror.” De Niro’s “You talkin’ to me” was his improvisation.) De Niro goes so far into his sense of privacy, it’s almost embarrassing to watch. And yet it’s so human, too. (If you say you’ve never talked to yourself in the mirror, or sung in the shower, you’re lying.)

De Niro’s second mirror moment is Raging Bull’s final scene, when the bloated Jake La Motta recites Marlon Brando’s “I coulda been a contender” monologue from On the Waterfront, before standing up and doing a series of “pumping up” exercises, to get ready to go onstage. (Side note: Mary Elizabeth Winstead closes out Eva Vives’ wonderful 2018 film All About Nina, about a troubled stand-up comic, with a re-creation of the scene from Raging Bull.) What’s fascinating about the Raging Bull scene is that Jake La Motta has no “self” to reveal. It’s almost like there’s no inner life at all. He doesn’t “get it.” He never did, he never will. De Niro blanks himself out in a very unnerving way, opposite to the dangerous vengeful-spirit fantasy he inhabits in Taxi Driver.

Although Walter Hill’s Johnny Handsome descends into a cliched crime movie with paper-thin characters, the opening sequences are dark, cynical, and atmospheric. Mickey Rourke plays Johnny, a man with a deformed head, an “ugly” appearance which has separated him from other humans. Reminiscent of the Joan Crawford film A Woman’s Face, a caring plastic surgeon (Forest Whittaker) offers to operate on Johnny, to give him a chance at a new life. When Rourke unwraps the bandages and sees his new face (i.e. Rourke’s real face), Rourke has a mirror moment like almost no other, a moment worthy to be placed alongside Brando’s and De Niro’s. He touches his face with wonder, bursting into tears. That’s touching enough, but then, as he glances back at Whitaker, Rourke goes deeper. A look of fear, and lifelong anguish floods his eyes, as he says, “I feel like I still have a mask on” and then, after that, Rourke goes even deeper into a maelstrom of emotion: gratitude, bafflement, awe, despair. The scene is Rourke’s finest hour.

Up until recently (with a couple of exceptions), when women stared at themselves in the mirror in the movies, it was obvious what they are doing: touching up their makeup, checking out their mask. Once again, in the 1960s and 70s, women started doing “mirror scenes” equivalent to men’s mirror scenes, where the purpose was not perfecting the public mask, but to - as Sylvia Plath wrote in her poem “Mirror” - search “my reaches for what she really is.” Faye Dunaway has a great one in Jerry Schatzberg’s Puzzle of a Downfall Child. Gena Rowlands has quite a few “mirror scenes” in the movies she did with Cassavetes (there’s a couple of stunners in Opening Night). In my favorite moment in Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, after breaking into Paris Hilton’s house, Katie Chang goes into a daze of mad-woman fantasy, staring at herself in Paris’ mirror. It’s not hard to imagine the character slipping into the Manson family, if a Manson came along. She’s as blank as Jake La Motta. In La Verite’s opening scene, Brigitte Bardot stares at her face in a broken shard of a mirror, right before marching off for her court date. Her “self” is fragmented, broken. Jennifer Jason Leigh has an extraordinary extended “mirror scene” in Georgia. The moment is everything: self-hatred, rage, searching and longing, and bone-deep narcissism.

Men staring at themselves in the mirror let us into their secret worlds, their fantasies and anxieties, uncertainties and vulnerabilities. It’s not about being self-obsessed. It’s trying to find the self, the self that is not allowed free rein, be it a benign self or a malevolent one.

In Caravaggio’s “Narcissus,” Narcissus leans towards his reflection in the water, his posture pulled downwards with a seductive tug. He braces himself by his hands on the ground, and his knee, bulging out beneath his torso, is the only barrier between Narcissus and his reflection (and, perhaps, drowning). In the painting the reflection below is cut off; all we see are the forearms and that gleaming sturdy knee. Even though Narcissus’ body is barely visible, even though he’s hunched over himself, his energy is childlike, soft and open. He gives his reflection a caressing stare, a swooning look. He yields. This is not just vanity. This is something else.

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rpgmgames · 6 years

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November’s Featured Game: Shooty and the Catfish

DEVELOPER(S): Daniel ENGINE: RPGMaker MV GENRE: Adventure, RPG WARNINGS: Course Language, Gore SUMMARY: Shooty and the Zaat are a dynamic duo solving monstrous mysteries!

Play the demo here!

Our Interview With The Dev Team Below The Cut!

Introduce yourself! Sure! So my name is Daniel, I guess technically I am an animator. I started out making flash cartoons around 2000 just for fun and became a professional animator in the advertising space around 2007. I have been working in media ever since, both in studios and as a contractor working under the Visitors From Dreams label which is also the label I use for my game development. I started dabbling with RPG Maker in around 2002 but I never got very far. Once I got into the media industry I wanted to pick it up again but with Mac being what almost all my work was done on, at home and in studio I didnt get the chance to actually get into it properly again until MV released, infact I was so excited that I purchased MV the day it dropped and immediately begun development on my first title Flatwoods. Ironically Shooty and the Catfish was developed on a PC, but I digress.

What is your project about? What inspired you to create your game initially? *Daniel: Shooty and the Catfish is set up pretty simply. The 2 lead characters, Shooty and Zaat run a sort of monster investigation unit out of their home. They get calls to different desitinations to deal with different monster problems. I really wanted it to feel like it was set up in a similar way to a lot of cartoons from the 80s, where every episode had a pretty similar but still managed to feel like a little self contained adventure. I have thrown in some little elements of an larger narrative but they are light until the final episode. Originally the series was pitched to Frederator for Cartoon Hangover, it got a little ways into early development but then Youtube changed its algorythm and animation on the platform became a struggle and the project was dropped. I didnt want to waste all the work I had done on the concepts and so I eventually tried to find a way to work them into a game, its taken me quite a few years to get as far as I have with development, but I would be even further back if I had tried to animate it all alone. I created Flatwoods to try and get a small project out, you know, to get some experience with the engine, little did I know how much more I had to learn!

How long have you been working on your project? *Daniel: I pitched Shooty and the Catfish back in 2013 from memory, but it didn't start to take shape as the project you currently see until the last 12 months. In that sense I am incredibly happy with how quickly the game has come together.

Did any other games or media influence aspects of your project? *Daniel: So many things have influenced my work its not funny... Where do I even start? Shooty and Zaat have a bit of a Finn and Jake thing going since when the project was originally pitched to Frederator and thats what they were looking for at the time. Resident Evil 4 (the closest any game has ever come to perfection imo) was the inspiration for the games ammo based combat system. Demons Souls originally derailed the project when I tried to emulate its non linear hub based design (you will notice the demo takes place on a single island instead), that created all kinds of balancing issues though so thats all been stripped back and is what lead to the decision to make the game episodic instead. One element from Demons Souls that remains in the game is a diverse mix of linear and looping level designs when it comes to mapping. The game also features towns that have layouts based on unused maps from the Pokemon GS 97 Spaceworld demo since they never made it into any of the actual games in the series. Pokemon GS also influenced the games visuals. I'm not a big RPG guy, but I played a hell of a lot of Pokemon growing up and Gen 2 is still my favorite. Trying to get MV to emulate the limitations of the Game Boy Color was quite the hurdle, I still cant believe I got it working as well as it is. I also have a lot of cameos from other peoples RPGM games, so there's that. Its a big ol' mixing pot of ideas and inspirations.

Have you come across any challenges during development? How have you overcome or worked around them? *Daniel: Countless, the biggest challenge is always scope though. I originally wanted the game to be like 3 hours long tops, now its well in excess of that and that's before I have even put in meaningful NPC interactions. That's why I have decided to break the game up into episodes, each one should be around an hour which is much more my jam. I don't have a lot of free time so I tend to gravitate towards games that are tight and short, I think that's why I am so determined to keep this game in nice manageable chunks. Now that the game is shorter I don't need levelling so I am starting to tone down the RPG elements. One change always leads to another, but episode one is getting damn close to completion. I say this before I have even had the chance to announce the game's going to be episode on my own blog, ha ha. Episode 1 January, The Great Spore Chore! Keep your eyes out for it!

Have any aspects of your project changed over time? How does your current project differ from your initial concept? *Daniel: As mentioned above a lot has changed, I feel the biggest change was when I tried to move the game from being episodic into one adventure after playing through a bunch of other RPGM games for ideas, it all started to feel a bit aimless and the storytelling techniques I had planned when it was episodic weren't translating well as the game progressed. So I guess now the game is episodic again we have come full circle! So many ideas seemed good on paper but ended up not really being fun or adding anything in practice. Oh yeah, and the transition from Game Boy green to color was a big one based on feedback from the demo. Some people were finding it hard to tell what elements were interactable, doors in particular, I hope that color has helped minimize that issue. Key items will also have an animation on them so they are hard to miss. I'm not a fan of hunting for items in big maps, it's certainly not something I want to subject people too in my own projects.

What was your team like at the beginning? How did people join the team? If you don’t have a team, do you wish you had one or do you prefer working alone? *Daniel: This project has had a few key people involved. Outside of myself I have worked with 2 musicians. One is an old school friend who did music for my animations back in the early 2000's. He has contributed a bunch of really cool EDM which makes up most of the games OST. On top of that there is also a number of optional bosses (one per episode) that have music composed by Secret Agent Ape who worked on Soma Spirits and a bunch of other upcoming games. I have been really lucky to get to work with such rad dudes.

What is the best part of developing the game? *Daniel: I love designing enemy battlers, my process usually involves me drawing a weird shape, sticking some eyes and a big goofy nose on it and trying to come up with a stupid pun to use for a name while listening to bands like Yes or Klaatu. It's bliss. I have a lot of people ask me why I have limited myself in terms of resolution and color palette, and it comes down to one of the important things I told myself when I got into game making as a hobby was that I would stop if it ever started to feel like work. I spend my days doing heavy visual effects and compositing, sometimes doing complex character animation. I want to keep that stuff as far away from my game development as possible. Ironically working within the incredibly restrictive limitations of the Game Boy has ended up being incredibly liberating and keeps things feeling fun as opposed to feeling like more of what I do all day to pay the bills.

Do you find yourself playing other RPG Maker games to see what you can do with the engine, or do you prefer to do your own thing? *Daniel: I always enjoy checking out demo's of upcoming games. Both Heartbeat and Virgo and the Zodiac's demos blew me away from a technical standpoint on the MV front. I still find it hard to believe those demos were made with the same engine I'm using. I guess it really shows what can be done when the engine is in capable hands. I wish I had more time to play actual full releases, I mean Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass just came out and I have no idea when, if ever I will have the free time to play it because its such a commitment. I feel like I am missing out on some great stuff.

Which character in your game do you relate to the most and why? (Alternatively: Who is your favorite character and why?) *Daniel: I guess I relate to different characters in different ways. Slim Grim is the one who hands out assignments to Shooty and Zaat, he is pretty much done with life, over people and the world itself, I think thats something we all have a bit of inside of us. Shooty is a very positive individual, his solutions to most problems is a bullet with a smile, and I think theres a bit of that in all of us as well. Zaats a bit of a cheeky smart arse, so I guess in a lot of ways I am most like her as a person. One of the episodes also features Gerkinman who is and has been a sort of self insert in my work since 2001 so I guess technically I relate to him most... ha ha, but thats cheating!

Looking back now, is there anything that regret/wish you had done differently? *Daniel: I wish I had done a better job keeping the project focused. I feel like a good few months were spent making the game bigger in ways it didnt need to be.

Once you finish your project, do you plan to explore the game’s universe and characters further in subsequent projects, or leave it as-is? *Daniel: All of my games are loosely connected, taking place in the same world. None of them tie directly into each other, im not big on the cinematic universe concept that seems so popular right now, but events in my previous 2 releases and the 5 planned episodes of Shooty and the Catfish are loosely connected in ways people who take the time to look can find. They are also tied into around 17 years worth of animated shorts I have released. I have no plans on stopping now!

What do you look most forward to upon/after release? *Daniel: Well, theres quite a few things... Mapping for all 5 episodes (outside of towns) is complete, so when Episode 1 is done I will be immediately rolling into Episode 2. I am aiming to have an episode out every 2 months which should be doable with so much of the game already finished. I also have a couple of short films I am looking forward to being able to invest some time into, things have slowed down in recent months due to freelance but I am eager to get to animate some of my own work again. I am also eager to see the comments sections on Lets Plays. Both Flatwoods and Hazmat got a bit of Lets Play action and a couple of those have some pretty substantial comment sections. The amount of theories people try to put together for these projects is staggering. I could never write something as entertaining as what the speculations in these comment sections contain in terms of what my games mean, it cracks me up and I find it quite flattering that random people have put more thought into elements of my stories then I have. Makes me want to keep things deliberately vague just to encourage more of it. Lastly I will be releasing all the build files for the project so if anyone wants to make fangames or whatever they have direct access to all of the core files used to build the games. Im a big fan of the concept of a mod community, and while RPGM doesnt exactly allow for that, id love to see people do similar things to my work as whats been done with a lot of LISA fan games.

Is there something you’re afraid of concerning the development or the release of your game? *Daniel: I don't know about being afraid exactly. I am curious about how my business model for the episodic releases will go over. I was planning on releasing them at $1 an episode and $4 for the bundle when it's all complete. I know some people think thats still charging too much, but some people have also told me im not charging enough and that it lowers price standards accross the board for RPGM content. The way I see it if I can cover the costs of Steam and the music I commissioned then I've done alright since this project was for fun, but that's just me.

Do you have any advice for upcoming devs? *Daniel: Just keep at it and set yourself small goals. If your working on a big project break it up into manageable sections. Take things one map at a time, ya know what I mean?

Question from last month's featured dev @overcast-rpg: If you could choose an RPG Maker gamedev to release another game; which one would you choose and why? *Daniel: Oh that's an easy one, The Catamites. I love Space Funeral, it's easily my favorite game made in the engine, and while The Catamites has developed countless games since its release, they have all been in other engines. It would be fun to see them return to the engine after all they have learned about game design since Space Funeral's release and to see what they would do.

We mods would like to thank Daniel for agreeing to our interview! We believe that featuring the developer and their creative process is just as important as featuring the final product. Hopefully this Q&A segment has been an entertaining and insightful experience for everyone involved!

Remember to check out Shooty and the Catfish if you haven’t already! See you next month!

- Mods Gold & Platinum

#rpg maker #rpg maker games #indie games #free games #pixel games #shooty and the catfish #games #gotm #game of the month #november #november 2018 #inktober 2018 #gotm 2018 #game making #game development

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arcanalogue · 5 years

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Obligatory ‘Meet Your Diviner’ Q&A

Okay, stepping out from behind my little screen for a moment! A lot of people following here nowadays may not know anything about me, or the background of this blog. You may not even remember following me in the first place! I can relate.

It occurred to me that some people MIGHT LIKE TO KNOW CERTAIN THINGS. And since I’m looking to build up my roster of Patreon clients (who likes monthly readings, or tarot lessons, or random tarot insights? You do!) it seems a bit of disclosure may be in order. If I do it honestly and entertainingly enough, some of you old friends might actually enjoy re-learning these things too!

So, below is a brief introduction — dagger points instead of bullets, because I’m old-school like that. Inbox me if there’s more you’d like to know!

🗡 Who are you, anyway? Hi, my name is Tom, I currently live in Los Angeles with my my extremely tolerant boyfriend. I grew up in rural Arizona and then ran off to New York at a formative age. Queer non-binary human, accepting all pronouns! I’m a dingbat Aries who frequently craves validation, but can’t accept a compliment.

Pastimes include retreating from the world so I can grumble about everything, and wearing too much perfume. I go to thrift stores almost every day, and have amassed too many vintage hat-pins. I keep a giant doll house in the kitchen.

Who wouldn’t want advice from a creature such as this?

🗡 Can I get a reading in person? Yes, but know that I’m shy about it. When I first started out in New York City, it was all about reading at parties and posting Craigslist ads to meet new clients. However, when you shine a light out in the world like that, you can never be sure who it will attract. In my case, it brought lots of interesting people into my life; some were a little too interesting.

For the most part, I prefer working from behind the veil of this little site, or via email. I’m at my best when I have an extra moment to divine deeply and then gather my thoughts; also, there are benefits to receiving readings that you can revisit as words on a page.

Ask me truly anything, I will do my best to respond!

🗡 Are you psychic? Sorry, but I’m not that person, nor am I an astrologer. I have a rigorous spiritual practice that I keep relatively private. However, I’m happy to share whatever inspiration I glean from it.

Originally it was important for me to understand tarot cards through a truly secular lens: archetypes, synchronicity, the whole Jung starter pack. I wanted to combat popular misconceptions about what the tarot is, how it functions, what it can do, and what it can’t.

That’s all very useful stuff, mainly so a reader can interact meaningfully with people from all walks of life, and all kinds of faith (or none at all). But tarot is NOT a secular or purely intellectual practice, and here’s why: no one knows where the “responses” are coming from.

Despite starting out as a skeptic, after many years of practice, I can no longer personally accept nowhere as an answer to that question, or consider the results of a reading to be purely random or meaningless. If you don’t believe the answers really mean anything, then why are you asking?

(If you’re asking purely to amuse yourself, I have great news: you can do that at home, yourself, for free.)

🗡 Why ‘Arcanalogue’? For about a decade, I have branded my site and services with this name, a mangling of Latin/Greek words that essentially refers to a “conversation with the unknown.”

Embracing the arcanalogue nature of divination (instead of demanding to know who/what is speaking) has challenged my beliefs in ways I couldn’t have expected, gradually rekindling my faith.

🗡 Wait, faith? So are you like... a Christian? Ha ha no. HA HA HA. No! But so much of the iconography in the tarot deck stems from early Christianity, I have learned more about this history and symbolism from studying divination than I ever learned in church.

Sorry baby goths — ya think it’s gonna be all demonic Crowleyisms and spooky #witchvibes and jacking off over sigils, but the history of everything is completely intermingled. You might still end up having to say the Lord’s Prayer. You might find that you actually really enjoy saying the Lord’s Prayer. Life is strange! And witch-life is the strangest of all.

You CAN just buy the Crowley and/or various #witchvibes tarot decks, but if that’s all you ever learn, you’ll only scratch the surface of the deck’s mysteries, which are a major source of its power. And if you hate Christian symbolism with a burning passion (who could blame you?) and you’re looking for a purely non-denominational form of divination, you could always just flip a coin! Or grab one of those oracle decks.

And even then, the goddess Fortuna may want a word with you...

🗡 What book do you recommend for beginners? This one: The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, by Robert M. Place (who has also created many brilliant decks, such as The Alchemical Tarot).

There are so many books geared toward beginners, very few of which really dig into the concept of divination itself, or how the cards really work. As a historian, Place can show you why certain cards have ended up meaning certain things, instead of just providing a list of meanings for you to memorize. He also teaches divination as a storytelling technique, so you don’t end up just regurgitating those meanings straight from the page.

🗡 Why isn’t this blog more active? Ouch, you really came for me with that one. I’d really like it to be! I work full time, and I love my work. The more people support me on Patreon, the more space I’ll be able to carve out for this project in my schedule. *hides*

🗡 Do you have any special rituals that you do when you’re giving a reading? I spent so many years actively combating the kind of superstitions that cling to the tarot like barnacles. If you don’t feel like your practice is “right” or “authentic” without including these, then by all means, do what you’ve gotta!

Just remember, you’re bringing all that with you into an experience where you’re supposed to be alone and vulnerable with your thoughts, opening yourself up to the unknown. Whatever gets you there!

Nowadays, I consider everything I do when I read to be a gift given to myself, in hopes of enhancing that effect. I’ve found over the years that when I cut the deck, I like to cut almost all the way down, not just halfway. To me, this is symbolic of casting a bucket deep down into the well of my unconscious. There’s something satisfying to me about a very deep cut!

The most personal rituals are the ones that mean the most. There’s value in sharing these with others, but dictating them as protocol is shabby teaching.

🗡 How do you know if reading tarot cards is right for you? If you feel any calling whatsoever, then I think you should answer that calling. That’s why I first started my blog, it helped me organize my thoughts and keep track of what I learned, what I’d read. Before then it had all been very scattered and vague, and my progress was much more difficult to track. And believe it or not, I’d already begun teaching lessons by that point! It’s humbling to look back on now.

There’s a lot of self-consciousness and social anxiety wrapped up in the idea of trying to read someone else’s cards, or presenting yourself as a reader. Hello, I share these exact anxieties!

But this is a state you must overcome at the beginning of almost any journey. Go be a big ol’ nerd and show the world where it can stick its judgment. I’m happy to help in any way I can! My “Learn” page links to some stripped down tutorials on a few basic subjects.

Back to an earlier point, if you feel called to take on a more-than-casual study of tarot, I urge you to learn the old ways as you contribute to new ones. Feeling connected to a tradition can be a tremendous support in times when you’re really not sure WTF you are doing. There are SO many new decks being made which are aesthetically beautiful but are very thin in terms of supporting a deeper connection to the tarot mysteries. An experienced user will be able to fill in the gaps easily. A newcomer? Perhaps not so much.

For those reasons, I recommend learning with the classic Rider Waite-Smith deck, or else one that closely reproduces its meanings.

The unknown speaks to us in so many ways. It always has. The process of learning how to listen, and how to help others hear it too, is cumulative. Others stand to benefit from whatever you learn while seeking.

🗡 You seem great! How can I keep tabs on you or interact with you more? I don’t mind if people follow me on Instagram (personal follows are fine also). I’m really boring on Twitter but there it is. I don’t really understand how the Tumblr chat works, so I don’t always see these until hilariously long afterward.

🗡 You suck, this was a waste of time and I want my four minutes back.

#tarot #tarot cards #divination #tarot readings

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