#a character from the lighthouse right next to a character from victorious is CRAZY but. it's true. i mean.

[tricoufamily]

character/story influences tag

Rules: Write up a blurb or make a visual collage of the people or characters (from books, TV shows, movies, etc.) that inspired your OC, either visually, personality wise, or just a general vibe.

i misremembered this tag completely it was all about characters the whole time and i hallucinated the story part? so i guess everyone who did the character version like 2 years ago has to do the story version now sry

tagging @literalite idk who else hasn't done it do it!!!!!! it's fun!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(media/characters in order) this is the fall: succession, maurice, romeo and juliet, saturn devouring his son, that random dark academia bridge i saw that one time on tv that birthed the entire idea amen blood sports: the batman, the sopranos, macbeth, joker, jesus of suburbia music video, preacher's daughter hugo: fiona from shameless, yuuri from yuri on ice, belle, michael corleone, haruhi from ouran, sophie from howl's moving castle, wirt, elizabeth from pride and prejudice, mycroft holmes, saturn's son beckett: macbeth, arkham riddler, jack dawson, john marston rdr2, gotham riddler, billy loomis, jack skellington, stu scream, dano riddler, timothee chalamet's guy in lady bird, pretty odd era ryan ross, lead singer of midland specifically in the burn out video (it's where the mustache was birthed), kurt cobain, river phoenix connor: dutch rdr2, tony soprano, lady macbeth, arkham penguin, jd heathers, arkham origins joker, lestat, gotham penguin, robbie gravity falls, robert pattinson in the lighthouse, jade from victorious, amy lee, revenge era gerard way

[mst3kproject]

414: Tormented

When Bert I. Gordon took breaks from attempting to adapt H. G. Wells’ Food of the Gods, he made some half-decent movies.  There, I said it.  Thing is, half-decent is still not whole-decent.

A pair of lovers, Tom and Vi, meet at a lighthouse on an isolated island – but Tom’s only there to break her heart, telling her that he’s in love with another woman, Meg, and Vi can never see him again.  The meeting ends in tragedy, with Vi falling to her death while Tom, who could have saved her, lets it happen.  Man, she is gonna haunt the living snot out of you, Tom, and I won’t feel sorry for you at all.

Sure enough, as his wedding day approaches Tom grows more and more paranoid.  Everything he sees looks like Vi’s drowned body.  Every sound makes him think he hears her calling his name.  At first it seems like it’s all in his head, but soon other people begin to notice odd manifestations, too.  Either Vi really is back to take some spectral revenge, or Tom’s own guilt over not helping her is quickly driving him mad.  In the end, does it really matter which is the truth?  There’s only one way this movie can end, with Tom following his lost mistress to a death on the surf-scoured rocks.

This movie had an awful lot of potential.  The opening, in which Tom doesn’t actually murder Vi but doesn’t stop her falling, doesn’t try to benefit from her death but certainly doesn’t avoid doing so, is really very effective.  The events that follow start off as ambiguous and then it grows more and more certain that Vi’s spirit really is hanging around, perhaps trying to lure others to their doom.  At first Tom tries to draw others’ attention to what he is seeing, to confirm he’s not going crazy… later, he starts trying to hide the manifestations from them, because he doesn’t want to know after all.  The interplay of fantasy and reality, with the corpse that transforms into seaweed and the footprints that are washed away before Tom can point them out to Meg, feels like a precursor to the layers of unreality Gordon would later explore more fully in Necromancy.

The setting, a beach with vacation houses and a lighthouse, is well-used.  There are only a limited number of sets and locations, but that just underscores the smallness of the island and the idea that everybody on it is trapped there with this vengeful ghost.  I suspect that the beach itself is the same one that appeared in The Space Children, where it was bleak, featureless, and often deserted.  It looks very much the same in Tormented, even when there are multiple people enjoying the waves.  Tom feels increasingly isolated as the film progresses, with this terrible secret eating him alive, and the setting underscores that: the beach house and lighthouse both stand alone in establishing shots with nothing but rocks and sand all around them.  The island itself is isolated, and the buildings there are further isolated within that isolation.

There are even a few places where the tension builds very nicely. The bit where Vi’s ghost almost lures the landlady to her death is nail-biting, and there’s a moment when the movie teases doing the same thing to Meg’s little sister Sandy, which actually made me whisper, “oh, no!”  Vi egging Tom on to commit murder, as a sort of devil on his shoulder transforming him into what he most wishes not to be, suggests that she can be a ghost and a symptom of his mental disintegration at the same time, and the fact that he gives in to her is as terrible as it is inevitable. The sound of him dragging the dead sailor down the steps while the camera remains in the room is one of the creepiest moments in the film.

Even the effects are sometimes quite good.  Vi’s body melting away into a mass of seaweed is much better than it has any right to be.  Her ghost floating there with a white gown billowing around her like the foam on the rocks is cliché, but that’s intentional – is she really a ghost, or just what Tom thinks one ought to look like?  Her spectral interruption of the wedding is cheesy, but in a fun kind of way, and the ending maintains just that slight bit of ambiguity as we are left to wonder if Vi deliberately saved Sandy, or if Tom chose to commit suicide rather than do any more harm to this innocent child.

Yet for all that, this is still not a good movie.  It comes closer than a lot of MST3K material, but doesn’t quite arrive.  There are several reasons.  The first, noticeable right from the opening titles, is the jazz soundtrack.  It does have its moments, but it never really feels like it belongs in this ghost story, at least not as background music.  A more traditional spooky score would have helped emphasize the front Tom was putting up through his own jazz music by providing a foil to it, and it’s a shame they missed this opportunity.

The second is the acting.  Most of the players, such as Lugene Sanders as Meg or Richard Carlson as Tom himself, are pretty bland.  Juli Reding as Vi is oddly more believable as a ghost than she is as a living person.  Two notable players, however, are very bad indeed. One is Joe Turkel as the sailor Vi goads Tom into killing.  I’m not sure how old this character is supposed to be but I’m guessing considerably younger than Turkel, who was thirty-three at the time (and who died, creepily enough, on the day I watched this film for review, December 30, 2018). He speaks Beatnik slang, referring to marriage as ‘getting spliced’ and calling everybody ‘Dad’, and it’s so at odds with his sailor’s clothing and his early-middle-aged features that it’s rather unsettling.

The other is Susan Gordon (Bert I.’s daughter) as Sandy.  She’s actually a well-written character, who does very realistically child-like things such as playing Chopsticks on the piano over and over, or asking for a burger with nothing but pickles on it.  Her obsession with the idea of marriage is a little creepy, but that was what little girls were taught to aspire to in the 50’s.  Unfortunately, Gordon is not a very good child actress.  Most of her lines sound grating and false, and this undermines the movie quite badly, because Sandy is a pivotal character.  She is the person through whom we see the effect Tom’s behaviour is having on the people around him, and there are multiple points in the story when we’re supposed to be very worried for her, which is lessened when we find her so damn cloying.

The spot where the movie really fails, though, is the sequence in which Vi’s disembodied head appears and has a conversation with Tom.  It sounds silly when I type it out and the execution is so awful it’s hilarious.  It completely ruins everything the film has built up until that point, and it just gets worse and worse.  First we’ve got her head sitting on a shelf like she’s part of Donald Pleasance’s collection, then we’ve got Tom wrapping a mannequin head up in a towel to go do god-knows-what with it.  I laughed so hard I inhaled part of a Dorito.  It literally nearly killed me.  If the whole movie were that bad it would be enjoyable on a whole different level, but having that in the middle of an otherwise fairly effective film is like shooting a hamster with a harpoon.  There’s no recovery possible.

On a thematic level, this is obviously a movie both about guilt and about the slippery slope: Tom goes from merely neglecting to save Vi to actively killing the beatnik sailor to thinking about murdering a child.  In each case, having done the previous deed makes the next one both necessary and easier to do, and then it piles on the terrible burden of guilt he carries.  Tom wants to take responsibility for what he’s done. He straight-up tells Sandy, nobody could help any of it but me, and there are points when he desperately wants to give in to the urge to tell somebody the truth.  He doesn’t want that enough, however, to face the consequences.  He is as much a victim of his crimes as anyone.

It’s tempting to see Tom as filling the ‘victim/observer point of view’ role we see in so many of Bert I. Gordon’s movies, but he’s not quite there. For most of Tormented there is almost nothing Tom can do about his predicament – there’s not much you can do to argue with a ghost, and so he is stuck passively watching Vi’s reign of terror.  But to say he’s the equivalent of Sally from Attack of the Puppet People or Audrey Aimes from The Beginning of the End, we have to ignore the fact that unlike them, Tom got himself into this mess.  He could have saved Vi, but he didn’t.  He didn’t have to kill the sailor, but he did.  He could have come clean at any time, and he did not. Tom himself admits that this is his own fault, even as he continues to compound his bad decisions.

The moment when we know Tom is doomed comes early in the movie, when he goes out to the lighthouse to address Vi’s spirit directly for the first time.  The appropriate thing to do at this point would be to apologize to her for failing to save her – but instead he taunts her, telling her he’s going to marry Meg and there’s nothing she can do about it.  At a moment when he could have tried to placate Vi, Tom challenges her instead, and at the end of the film he is forced to return to the lighthouse and admit that she has won.  The final shot of the film only reinforces this, as Vi (is it short for Vivian?  For Violet? Or for Victory?) claims her prize.

I could go for a remake of Tormented.  It wouldn’t even be an expensive movie – I’ve seen effects and acting that would do the trick in Nostalgia Critic videos.  This one came so close to being effective that it was both very enjoyable and deeply disappointing.

[actuallyredorchid]

Annual Writing Self-Evaluation

*All answers should be about works published in 2017.

1. List of works published this year: 

NON-SHADOWHUNTERS

Adventures in Autumn (jukebox fic)

SHADOWHUNTERS (TV)

Sliding Doors Series

Closed Doors Don’t Lie (started in 2016, completed in 2017)

An Alliance For the Ages

The Spaces in Between

Quid Pro Quo series

A Little Spark of Heart

Canon-remixes, missing scenes and fix-its

Turning the Tide (S02E01)

No Sweeter Victory (S02E06)

Warm in Your Light (S02E07)

Aftermath (S01E12)

Four Mornings Without You (S02E15)

Communication is Key (S02E17)

One-shots

Battle of Runes (co-write with @janoda)

Lighthouse in the Woods (Lydia/Izzy soulmate AU)

Spectre (Halloween angst)

WIPs

Speak No Evil (Speakeasy AU)

2. Work you are most proud of (and why): Adventures in Autumn. I just really, really love that one. I think it’s easily the most creative story I’ve written this year, and it was a really cool writing experience (I was so in the zone, I almost missed a flight). So if you are going to read one fic by me this year, please make it that one. It doesn’t get any hits because it’s not really “in” a fandom, but I’m still going to signal boost it like crazy, because I honestly think it’s better than most other things I’ve written to date.

3. Work you are least proud of (and why): Hmmm... I don’t really have any fics that I’m unhappy with (because those never make it to posting). Possibly Lighthouse or Spectre, because I ran out of time on both of those and had to cut the story short (both of them had much longer stories planned in the outline). 

4. A favorite excerpt of your writing: 

“Oh yes, the ducks are the lost princes of this kingdom,” the Wolf said, reaching for the latch of the cage and opening it. “A wizard enchanted them and stole them away. I’ve been helping the queen to find them. They call me the King of Aquitaine here—mostly as a joke, I must admit—but the name I usually carry is Printemps. Now, forest child, shall we go?” (Adventures in Autumn)

5. Share or describe a favorite comment you received: I love when people make guesses about what’s going to happen further on in the story when reading a WIP. My other favourite thing is “live tweet comments”, i.e. when someone writes down their reactions as they read. That is the best thing ever.

6. A time when writing was really, really hard: Writing Clary’s POV in Speak No Evil. It just doesn’t come natural to me, at all.

7. A scene or character you wrote that surprised you: My characters always surprise me. That’s what I love the most about writing. Simon is being particularly good at it right now. :)

8. How did you grow as a writer this year: I did GYWO this year, which really helped me get into more of a regular rhythm with my writing.

9. How do you hope to grow next year: Improve that even more.

10. Who was your greatest positive influence this year as a writer (could be another writer or beta or cheerleader or muse etc etc): I love my betas and cheerleaders. @letswastetimehere, @fanny-toric, @janoda and @only-1-a, you have all been amazing. <3 Also, every single person who has reblogged one of my fics (I read all the tags, and I really appreciate them) or commented on them on AO3. So much love!

11. Anything from your real life show up in your writing this year: Always. :)

12. Any new wisdom you can share with other writers: Write drunk, edit sober (that one isn’t new, though XD).

13. Any projects you’re looking forward to starting (or finishing) in the new year: Lots! I’m looking forward to finishing Speak No Evil (which is seriously so much fun to write). And then I’m doing the SH hiatus bang, with a story I’m really excited about. And then there are a few WIPs I’d like to finish. And then, when S03 starts, I’m sure there’ll be more canon-related fics as well.

Tag writers whose answers you’d like to read. @greenfeelings @maleccrazedauthor @janoda @fanny-toric