#SCREAMING IN MOTHER ISSUES

[hxzxrdous]

Hi sweetheart, Cissy said you needed a little loving? It that true baby girl, do you need some Mama love. Mama has big arms for all her good girls. Would you like to be one of those good girls too, sweetheart? Hmm? * gently wraps you in a soft hug, pulling your head down on my chest* If you need to cry or to vent, or just need held Mama's here.

-xxx🧶

Yes, please, I want to be one of those good girls too, please and need some Mama love. :))) <3

I just want to be held right now, if that's okay; I'm too tired to cry or vent atm ;///.

A lot going in my head... Anxiety and stuff. :')

SO EXTREMELY HAPPY YOU'RE HERE

xx,

Hazardous

[asexualenjolras]

No thoughts, just Ray Stantz watching Phoebe Spengler stand up to Walter Peck with the biggest smile on his face because she reminded him so much of Egon.

He was so proud. And there was so much emotion in his expression. He missed his partner, but he was so proud that his legacy was living on through his granddaughter.

[scintillyyy]

anyways, some food for thought. tim was introduced in 1989 and was 13 years old--meaning that at his introduction his birth year would have been 1976. median age of first marriage for women in the early 1970s was ~21. so assuming janet was early to mid-twenties when tim was born (jack was 43 when he died, meaning he would have been ~27 when tim was born, and janet was likely a little bit younger than him--maybe 23-25ish?), she would have been born in the early 1950s. so whenever i think about her as a 1980s businesswoman and even mentioning women's liberation in her first appearance i think of the following things:

title ix wasn't passed until 1972, which means she would have gone through her entire high school career without equal access to sports. likely her choices would have been a dance team or cheerleading.

the women's educational equity act was 1974, which means janet would not have had the right to a non-sexist curricula or career counseling in elementary or secondary school. my mom always described it as "girls took home ec, boys didn't" and "no matter how smart you were, girls were counseled to look into careers like teaching or nursing with the expectation they would only work until they got pregnant and then they'd quit, boys doctors"

the equal credit opportunity act was passed in 1974. janet would not have had the legal right to get her own line of credit until (most likely) after she was married to jack

the pregnancy discrimination act wasn't until 1978, which wouldn't have been enacted until after tim was born (up through the early 1970s is was normal for women to sign a contract saying they would tell their employer they were pregnant and basically say they would quit as soon as they were showing because a pregnant woman in public was considered obscene)

i am always rotating this in my mind. because i am simultaneously in my head critical of the absent parenting that made tim feel neglected and interested in the social and marital dymanics of the time that make janet infinitely more sympathetic to me as a working mother of that era and the impossible expectations that were likely placed on her at the time to "have/do it all". and those are the considerations i have in my head when i modernize what struggles she likely ran into when tim was a baby.

[spavlson]

thinking about post season 4 shiv and how the post partum depression is going to hit her so hard that she’s going to unconsciously cut off all links with her child before it’s even old enough to recognize its own name

[minaoakdown]

Somedays I'm just living my life and enjoying my twenties when I see a child with their parents on the streets eating ice cream and then, all of the sudden, I'm fourteen again crying in my neighbour's house as I hear my parents scream.

Then, and just then, I'm sixteen crying alone at home knowing I won't be seeing my mother again. Then... oh, back when I was younger, I was so scared.

Then, just then, I allow myself to rewatch the movies I used to watch with my mother and order the ice cream from the parlour my father and I used to go.

Then, I allow myself to heal.

[proud-bl0ndee]

[felidacy]

Of ancient magic and blood oaths

Gotham is a city build on cursed, ancient land. Even long before it became a place of civilization the people used the flourishing forest and the torrent waters, that even back then were unpredictable, for their own sinful deeds. The innocent were dragged, dead or alive, with their blood tainting the earth and seeping into the crust, the skin of mother earth. She was repulsed at their actions and began to act out, sending out earthquakes and floods to deter them from seeking this remote place out any longer and dirty the land. But the people were persistent and found enjoyment in the elemental disasters.

Soon enough a group of people, steadily growing at that, found their calling and began to purposefully turn into a game. It was as if the retaliation of HER only spurned them further on, accelerating the descent into chaos. Their body count rose as they let free their victims in the land only to hunt them down. When that grew too boring, because the hunters were simply too human they broke another rule. They went against the rightful law of humanity and played with experimentations that were inexcusable. It was slow, yet a gradual growth, as they perfected their hunters. Hundreds of years later their name was still known in whispering myths that only a few knew of their origin by then as their purpose changed for more power, the Court of Owls and their Talons.

All that to say that the unnecessary bloodshed on the land caused the very earth to turn sick. An infection that grew deep and rotted it from within. It stank of death and attracted the attention of the supernatural beings. Humans were manipulated into staying and the supernatural mingled under them with none of them any wiser. Gotham was born from the vulgar and as such the rot was ever-growing. The sickness would have spread considerably more if it hadn't been for the shamans and warlocks that put borders on Gotham. The curse at that point too old and too powerful already to be broken, but it could be contained. At a price to never being able to banish it, that those once born in Gotham could never escape HER grasp completely and forever confined to HER will and lastly that those with magic caliber were to always suffer in the presence.

{SHE would weep forever weep at HER daughters poor fate when humans blemished HER, ripped HER open mercilessly and made HER unrecognisable to HER own mother. In order to stay safe SHE was forced to abandon HER child, banishing HER as if it had been HER at fault. Regardless of the grief SHE did it for the greater good and shut HER away forever, did never hear out HER cries for help and the apologies that GOTHAM failed HER mother were a fatal mistake. But the humans gave HER a name, ripped her from Divinity and Purity and made her humane. As such MOTHER EARTH would never be able to wield power over GOTHAM ever again and SHE was at the mercy of the people now, woolly human and yet a being they could never be able to comprehend. Trapped between dimensions with an inability to ever return. As GOTHAM raged over the injustice, MOTHER EARTH came to forget about her beloved daughter as a being of beyond time and space could never revel in such human emotions. Stripped from Divinity GOTHAM had become unworthy of HER devotion that was blinding like the stars and the protection this brought forth either.}

Blood Oaths & Other Rules

Born from the laws of Gotham and the supernatural that ended up captured by the land. Gotham is a vicious beast that pretends to be the slaver when SHE is the once divine collared and isolated from the Mother. Gotham and HER people were taught laws old old, or used to, until they became too prideful and thought to trick Gotham by neglecting teaching their young ones any longer. As such they broke the deal and Gotham struck back.

Their deal was a simple one of Give and Take. Gotham had thought HER to be merciful after the boundaries were set, but humans were cruel and only ever know how to take. More and more they their greed drove them to make mistakes. Enraged SHE decided to unleash the curses of the humans back on them. A cursed land could never live in peace after all. If they did not fear the Beast, the Divine, they would simply fear themselves. Many people grew sick, more blood began to flow and new terrors in the form of entirely human entities took form and haunted the streets. Her greatest terror would forever be the Joker. And while SHE resented the humans and the endless cycle of curses, SHE could never hate what SHE created. But SHE was not entirely cruel with a small spark of HER Divinity withstanding and as such SHE created two, an antithesis so to speak. Two princes of Gotham.

{It was hope in a dark place they did not deserve. Maybe because of that Gotham took HER princeling's parents on HER own land and let him watch. Maybe SHE wanted to tempt him to the same darkness when his brother by everything but blood was the one at fault. Time and time again SHE gave him a wy out, yet HER Prince never accepted it.}

Because of the nature and creation of Gotham, blood oaths belong to the ancient magic. There are two types of blood oaths.

Vengeance blood Oath

A victim curses their perpetrator when their blood gets spilled. This causes them to lay a claim over the other to fulfill their vengeance one day, which is easier when the victim remains alive. Those who attempt to kill him with no blood oath on him will be unable to, a natural response of survival instinct seen as striking a target regardless sends the cursed victims on you instead. A curse like that can only be broken should the target beg for it, which also brings the vengeance of the victims as they get to be in tune with the person striking down the target before leaving forever after the death. Should the victim however die they too get affected by the curse and are forced to haunt Gotham, only able to be seen by their target and bring them to madness.

{The infamous mad Joker coincidentally has the most curses claiming him. Despite the apparent madness that steadily affects him, the man does not falter and instead seems to relish in it. The curses of vengeance are unable to be broken.}

Dealer blood Oath

The far simpler and more frequent of the two oaths, the Dealer. It still follows the old rules more resolutely and before humans betrayed Gotham. Between multiple people they need to share blood and make a deal of Give & Take. Those deals are in itself easier and by nature also easier to break, although with dire consequences, however because those oaths are based on the earliest times they are inheritedly unfair in nature. The one striking the deal can force another one into the oath, should they be excessively hurt by them, and they are the only one in the participants able to break off the deal. Seen as breaking a deal causes great harm to the other parties such a thing is a great opportunity. However one cannot force the same person into a oath more than once.

[littlecutiexox]

Mentally preparing myself for next week fully knowing I’m gonna be the most triggered I’ve been probably since New Years

[milksnake-tea]

so uh... that dan heng trailer huh

[mayoiayasep]

thinking about the horimiya character arc potential friday....

[herawell]

.

[radishhqueen]

insane to me when ppl don't have complicated relationships with their parents. how did u do that. what kind of dark sorcery

[frankendykes-monster]

The trailer for Scream VI arrived last week. At one point in the promo, franchise veteran Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) acknowledges how familiar all this has become. “You know you’re like the tenth guy to try this, right?” she complains to the latest killer hiding behind the Ghostface mask (Roger L. Jackson). It’s a sentiment with which the audience might agree, and there’s a strong sense that Scream VI is built around that. “I’m something… different,” the killer intones in reply.

The trailer makes an argument for Scream VI as a departure from what came before. Reports suggest this will be the first film in the franchise not to star Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott. The opening of the trailer finds Ghostface discharging a shotgun. Allowing for the Los Angeles setting in Scream 3, Scream VI takes the franchise and its cast away from the familiar surroundings of Woodsboro, with Ghostface stalking his targets in the Big Apple. The movie’s initial teaser trailer was set on a subway.

While these are major departures for the Scream series, they also feel like somewhat generic conventions for any major horror franchise. Classic horror franchises like the Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th series regularly swap protagonists between installments. Despite being perhaps the most iconic “final girl” in horror history, Jamie Lee Curtis has taken extended breaks from the Halloween franchise. As Scream gets older, it feels more like every other slasher series.

There are other touches in the trailer that recall the standard conventions of a long-running series of slasher movies. When it was first announced that Scream VI would be set in New York, there were obvious comparisons to the eight Friday the 13th movie, Jason Takes Manhattan. To be fair, given that famously only the final act of Jason Takes Manhattan actually takes place in the eponymous borough, Scream VI at least looks to take proper advantage of its new urban setting.

The trailer also teases the prospect of a cult built around Ghostface, the unifying persona donned by the individual killers in the previous five features. There appears to be a museum or an auction house populated with memorabilia from the franchise. Oddly enough, this evokes a recurring trend in classic slasher sequels, such as the “Cult of Thorn” in the later run of original Halloween sequels. Cult of Chucky riffs on a similar idea with the eponymous killer doll (Brad Dourif) creating copies of himself.

That said, there are other elements of Scream VI that suggest a more modern style of franchise-building. The film goes heavy on the fan service, even resurrecting characters who should probably be dead. Like so many modern franchises, Scream seems increasingly reluctant to kill its darlings. The trailer brings back fan-favorite character Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere), who was brutally stabbed at the climax of Scream 4, but was confirmed alive in an Easter egg buried in the fifth movie.

A lot of this is carried over from the previous installment, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Scream (2022). That fifth movie found a way to bring back the franchise’s original killer, Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich), as a vision haunting his daughter, Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera). This reflected the increasing reverence for continuity and fan service in modern franchising. It is perhaps revealing that one of the posters for Scream VI is a literal web of continuity arranged to evoke a subway map.

The fifth film also demonstrated a reluctance to kill off potentially popular characters, making the film’s killers seem especially inept. Sam’s half-sister, Tara (Jenna Ortega), became the franchise’s first character to survive a movie’s opening set piece. Both Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad Meeks-Martin (Mason Gooding) also survived brutal attacks at the movie’s climax. In some ways, that film was more engaged with fan-service properties like Star Wars than with horror franchise tropes.

Scream 4 was the final film in the franchise from the series’s original creative team, director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson. There were reports that Craven imagined Scream 4 as the first film in a new trilogy, but those plans were scuppered when Craven passed away in August 2015. As such, it seems reasonable to draw a clean line between the original four films defined by the involvement of Williamson and/or Craven and the sequels that followed.

There would be 11 years between the release of the fourth and fifth films, with directors Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett taking over the series with writers Guy Busick and James Vanderbilt, who had collaborated with the pair on Ready or Not. Understandably, these creators seem to have a very different understanding of what Scream is and how it functions. In some ways, looking at their work on the 2022 movie and the premise / trailer for Scream VI, it is a much more generic franchise.

The original Scream was in many ways a perfect movie for the late 1990s. It was postmodern, ironic, and self-aware. It breathed new life into mainstream horror filmmaking, a genre that was somewhat moribund as the millennium approached. George A. Romero argued that “the genre was dying and Scream saved it.” It did this by drawing attention to the tropes and conventions of the classic slasher movie, presenting a cast of characters shrewd enough to engage with the trappings of the genre.

Scream fundamentally altered what the slasher movie could be and profoundly affected other major horror franchises. Just a year before the release of Scream, the Halloween franchise seemed to be on its last legs with the cheap and dire Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. Two years after Scream, the Halloween franchise took its cues (and some uncredited story work and script polish) from Williamson to deliver the franchise revival Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later.

Scream seemed to inspire the best in these old horror franchises. After the disappointment (and controversy) of Child’s Play 3, the Chucky franchise roared back to life with Bride of Chucky, a movie so heavily indebted to the self-awareness of Scream that even the posters evoked Scream 2. Much like Halloween H20, Bride of Chucky was a film that used the youthful energy and self-awareness that made Scream a breakout hit to reinvigorate a franchise that had seemed past its prime.

As such, there is a sense of frustration in watching a franchise that had so effectively reinvented slasher movies become much more generic. These recent sequels enthusiastically embrace the tired tropes that the original Scream mercilessly parodied and criticized: ghosts, the resurrection of fan-favorite characters, unnecessary tangled webs of interpersonal relationships and continuity, cults worshiping that continuity, and the desire to keep things fresh by just swapping setting.

The Halloween and Chucky franchises used to take their cues from Scream, but the trailer for Scream VI suggests that the trend has been reversed. Scream saved the slasher genre from underwhelming and lifeless sequels like Jason Takes Manhattan and The Curse of Michael Myers, so it is surreal to see Scream itself caught in that same web of long-running slasher franchise conventions. What would seasoned video store clerk Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy) think of the trailer for Scream VI?

Then again, perhaps it makes sense. There is a solid argument that the self-aware irony of the 1990s has served its purpose, and pop culture is too saturated with knowing and winking media. Watching many modern blockbusters, it can seem that Hollywood learned all of the wrong lessons from the cleverness of Scream. In so many modern feature films, everything is a joke and nothing has any real stakes. That level of detachment can become numbing, especially when applied thoughtlessly.

Looking at recent box office figures, there is a vague sense that audiences might yearn for a little earnestness and sincerity. For well over a decade, the box office has been dominated by the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has an aesthetic defined by quippy and self-aware dialogue in the style of Joss Whedon, a key figure in the same wave of 1990s youth culture that produced Scream. However, there is a small sense that audiences are drifting (just a little bit) away from that template.

In contrast, the biggest movies of the past year were undeniably straight-faced, never breaking character to wink at the audience. Avatar: The Way of Water was James Cameron leaning into his cheesy and sentimental side, creating a movie that cannot survive any contact with irony. Top Gun: Maverick is an unapologetic embrace of the conventions and beats of old-fashioned blockbusters, an ode to the old-fashioned movie star charisma of its lead Tom Cruise.

Despite playing its slasher tropes much straighter than the four earlier films in the franchise, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s Scream was a massive critical and commercial success. Along with films like Maverick, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s Scream was part of a banner year for Paramount. In a strange way, it feels like the recent Scream films have read the room and pivoted accordingly, embracing a more earnest and sincere approach to slasher and franchise storytelling.

So this swerve back to an unironic embrace of these slasher movie conventions makes a certain amount of sense in the context of larger cultural trends. Still, it is a little disheartening. Scream used to set horror trends. Now, it looks like it’s chasing them.

[localdiscountgoth]

“hello. this is all so confusing

but who knew i had such a strong girl living under my roof this whole time?”

when i tell you i started sobbing

[jvzebel-x]

🦋

[enteragoodnamehere]

(voice of guy who likes to project onto its favorite fictional characters) idk man i wish tma had gone into more detail with nikola orsinov and her relationship with gregor it would’ve been interesting