#and the characters were so divorced from the original media that i thought they were ocs

[aurosoulart]

As an anon who followed you back in Ye Olden Days, your growth as an artist has been absolutely spectacular and phenomenal to behold.

Regardless of your roots.

thank you so much - this truly means a lot to me! it's been such a journey to have come this far, I'm excited for the future......

..... and the ominous spacing of that last sentence is DEFINITELY written by someone who knows I was in the onceler fandom

[shipposttt]

Ship of the Day: Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr

Character Names: Charles Xavier x Erik Lehnsherr 

Ship name: Cherik 

Original Content: X-Men (also present in the comics but for the purpose of this post, focused on the movies)

Ship Info:

Before getting too far into it, what you must know is that Cherik is not mainly shipped as a fully happy together ship, these two have gone through a divorce and are only just coming back together after a whole bunch of stuff. Either that or fans are being delusional and  ignoring the canon “Beach Divorce” (will be explained later, don’t worry).

The X-Men franchise is an institution in the comics world, a product of some of the best minds at Marvel in the 60s. Homo Sapien Superior are the next stage of human development, dubbed mutants, these people are born with superhuman powers, from telekinesis to intangibility, super speed to power absorption. Standing as metaphors and representations for oppression, the othering of the non-majority, racism, genocide, government control and the fight for equality, the X-Men have stood the test of time and come out of it as a present-forward moving media.

And at the centre of this media is two figures, Charles Xavier, powerful telepath and creator and head of the X-Men and Erik Lensherr, metallokinetic and leader of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (if going by comics). Two leaders on what would traditionally be thought of as opposing sides, but in the case of the X-Men sphere, they instead play as two sides of the same coin against the true enemy.

The Government.

(Yeah, the writers weren’t playing about with subtlety, were they?)

(And people complain that modern comics are too liberal. This shit has always been here, complainers have just been blind to it. Somehow. I really don’t know how. It is a very much integral part of understanding the world the X-Men live in.)

Charles and Erik meet when they are both in their 20s, Charles recently graduated from Oxford with his doctorate in Genetics and Erik continuing his path of Nazi hunting while searching for the man that killed his mother when they were taken to Auschwitz when Erik was a child. They meet, stuff happens and almost the entirety of X-Men: First Class is just a getting to know you, whirlwind romance summer with a couple of breaks between the flirting and longing stares to further the plot which includes working with the CIA, building a team and, at the culmination of the film, being at the centre of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ah yes, because we needed more of a reminder that we’re in the mid 60s, it’s not like the USSR being a big deal, or the middle-aged Nazi officers or the young looking Holocaust survivors didn’t do a good job of illustrating this point. 

Thus we reach the height of the movie, the missiles are on their way to Cuba and are currently being held in the air by Erik. Erik views the shooting of these missiles as a betrayal as they have been working with those who just sent the missiles for the duration of the movie and wants retaliation so spins the rockets around and sends them back in the direction of the US and Soviet fleets. Charles is also feeling pretty betrayed but does not believe that the men on the ships should die for it. And in a moment of what is probably one of the stupidest moments of Charles Francis Xavier’s life, he tells a child survivor of the Holocaust that the soldiers who have just fired upon them with the intention to kill them are “simply following orders”.

Yikes, Charles.

They have a grapple across the floor, Erik loses concentration, he wins the fight, regains control of the missiles, continues them on their course for the ships before getting interrupted by one of the X-Men team shooting his metal helmet to break his concentration. He deflects the bullets, cause, ya know, metallokinetic. It just so happens that he deflects one of these bullets into Charles’ back. More specifically his spine. Instantly paralysing him. 

There’s a whole moment of Erik cradling Charles' body and apologising. A bunch of other things happen that ends with Erik leaving Charles on that beach with no way to go home and only a couple allies. 

Thus, the beach divorce. 

It is here that Charles and Erik’s stories can go two ways, because the X-Men movies have fully canon time travel that they used to end the old early 2000’s timeline and restart, allowing them to make more money. In both of these, Erik is arrested for the murder of JFK, in the original timeline he stays there until the mid-2000s and is often visited by Charles. On these visits they play chess and have civil conversations. As elder men, they greatly respect one another and in fact, Erik even comes to Charles’ defence against one of his own brotherhood members when they disparage Charles. Both see that the other is working towards the same goal, they simply have differing opinions on how mutants should get to the equality they are fighting for. Charles believes it can be fostered through education, defanging misinformation and working alongside the human governments. Erik believes that it is too systemic and instead mutants must take their place in the world and not fear or be afraid of humans. By the end of their timeline, they are back to being by each other's sides, any differences are put to the side due to the nature of their existence dwindling. Instead they work together and stay by each other, giving each other comfort in the others continued existence. 

In the alternate timeline, Erik is broken out of prison in the mid 70s by the combined effort of a time travelling Wolverine, Charles, Charles and Erik’s past teammate and Charles’ caretaker Hank and a very young Quicksilver, who is not yet aware that Erik is his father. Though to be fair, no one on that mission knows that. In these films, Erik attempts to build a life, getting a quickly fridge-ed wife and daughter and goes on to build the mutant nation safe haven island Genosha. Charles goes on to found his school for mutants, as he did in the original timeline. This timeline ends with Erik and Charles meeting at a cafe in Paris (romantic, huh) and sitting down to play some chess (yes, chess is almost definitely a flirting metaphor, the amount they do it).  

Type of ship: Queer Read

Despite the fact that all 4 actors who have portrayed Erik and Charles in these movies have shipped them, at the end of the day there was never an intentional move done by any of the creatives to intentionally mislead fans to the idea that a romantic relationship may develop between the two. 

Both characters have had female partners throughout the duration of the movies and yet, neither of them last. Erik’s wife dies simply to further the plot within 10 minutes of introducing her on screen and Charles has a kind of girlfriend who he ends up wiping the memory of and leaving alone. By the end of the timeline, they don’t have any partners and are instead with each other. 

Erik and Charles are so compelling as characters, both separately and in combination and one of the reasons for that is how they act as foils for one another. Differing values, same mission, the utmost respect for each other. They are lovers ripped from each other by tragedy, both in terms of the divorce and in terms of being on opposite sides. But they are not just on opposite sides, instead they lead them and that is one of the most tragic parts of their existence. They love each other, but not more than the fight they lead, the ideas they believe. 

At the end, in 1983, when they both finish their missions, passing them on to the next generation, they come together in the romance capital of the world and play chess together. They come back together after so long apart and simply begin to exist in each other's presence in a way they haven’t done since the 60s.

Admin🦉

[confluencechimera]

Top 5 list of your own OCs. (｀∀ ´)Ψ

OUGH this is a GOOD QUESTION. I really had to narrow it down because I have so many babies but I think I got something solid

1 - Malech H'owl, an OC I made for St*r W*rs. she was based off an old chimera fursona of mine that I turned into a unique alien species and aaa I love drawing her SO MUCH. she's my go-to doodle char. she has a whole entire society and backstory where she was a ruler and a gladiator fighter and a tactician and a mercenary. because I got really into her. she is so self indulgent but that's probably why she's my favorite. I'm so attached to her I've thought abt making her a totally original universe recently divorced from the source media just for meeeee ✨

2 - Ace, who I've been trying to get a ref sheet done for for the past year and a half or so. He looks like a basic old furry on the surface but he's apart of a much larger sci-fi story where his species are trying to preserve history for future generations by inserting memory-recording ships into different members of their kind and then beaming all that into a supercomputer hidden somewhere in the galaxy. Ace comes from a middle generation (the first gen were adults who had the procedure done, the middle generation were fairly young, the newest generation are cubs), so his chip doesn't work entirely as well as the newest gen, and he gets weird deja vu moments of seeing other people's memories. He's also a mercenary. He has a cool spaceship and lives on his own on a barren icy planet. This is the best photo I have of him atm

3 - Howlite, another OC I made for a media (this one being TF!). I'm trying to redesign her atm so I don't have as many pics to show off. but he turns into a plane and later a big old SUV. she's got an insanely long backstory as well: loses everything in a big war, goes on a revenge quest, realizes she wants to live for something more, gets almost killed (twice) and then wakes up on Earth where she finds her old partner and learns to start a new life there. he's a Certified Strange Girlboy Bi Thing. here's a real edgy picture of her after killing a bunch of ppl.

4 - Glitch and Error, two REALLY old OCs of mine who I recently revived from my old dA days. They're personified computer viruses apart of a giant hivemind sort of setup, where the larger viruses "kill" and "consume" smaller ones to become bigger and stronger. The strongest virus rules over the entire hivemind and uses the smaller drones to go out and find electricity to feed on. Not a lot of super solid universe/hard-set rules for this story, it was just something I made for fun, but these guys have endured in my brain for over 10 years so they deserve a shout out.

5 - Comet, a very new character for me (and one I haven't entirely fleshed out yet), but a simple little black wolf furry. Her aes/story is a mixture of Stray Gods, a dash of Hi-Fi Rush, lots of Norse mythology and hard rock (Breaking Benjamin in particular) music. She's the lead singer of a band called Fenrir's Chains, and one day on her drive home from a local show she gets swept up in a Wild Hunt that actually gets her to meet Fenrir. The whole story is meant to be a sort of analogy for dealing with mortality but I'm still working the themes and kinks out. So, I only have a few sketches, plus the plushie she's based on in real life. (She's next to a plushie I plan to turn into Ace one day too!)

[bardicbeetle]

hey. Hey. You got any analysis of the Lost Boys or thoughts on the movie to share? who's your favorite character in it and why??

@abalonetea

Analysis on the movie I've been many levels of obsessed with since age 14 you ask?

...this is going to end up undercut for length I can already feel it.

The Lost Boys is my comfort movie, my I-feel-like-shit-nothing-is-fixing-it movie, my I-can't-write-please-help movie and my go-to for when I am inflicting media upon a new friend. I know it backwards forwards, upside down and inside out, I own the out of print novelization written by Craig Shaw Gardener, I posted the original prequel script to fanfiction.net in the early 2010s because I found it buried in a forum post and wanted it to be easier to find, I have listened to every version of cry little sister that G Tom Mac has ever put out in addition to the entire stage musical he produced. The fic I wrote for it in 2011 is still on Wattpad and to this day for some fuck ass reason gets 1000s of hits per year. I have another fic for it on ao3 that still takes up brainspace for me on a minimum weekly basis.

I.

Honestly do not know who I am as a writer if not for this film.

It is such a huge part of who I am as both a fan of media and a vampire writer and as a horror enjoyer in general.

And it is undeniably, baked into its bones, queer as fuck.

Not just from the overt point of here is a film in the 1980s about men sharing blood, directed by an openly gay man, hands us platonic and familial and romantic interactions between male characters, who are allowed to hold one another, allowed to express emotion, allowed to exist freely and without shame I am--so very abnormal about this movie.

I'll be the first to admit it's not perfect by any means, it very much exists a time capsule of its era, but also, to momentarily put the bar on the floor, it isn't slur laden and full of take-backs for any of the emotional vulnerability like other things around then were (see: Once Bitten, which while unarguably very much more on the comedy side of horror-comedy, i'm going to put into the same category by virtue of Camp Vampire Movies of the 80s).

It hands us one of my favorite mothers of all time. Lucy Emerson is a treasure, she spends the whole movie trying her goddamn best to remember that she is stronger than anyone gives her credit for. That she chose to divorce an abusive man, pick up her two sons, and leave without more than signing the papers and getting out. She doesn't care if they're poor, she doesn't care if she could have gotten something from her ex-husband, she wants her boys safe and there is a very large implication that sticking around to do the whole song and dance would have ended badly. Lucy lives for her sons, she wants so badly to make the world easier for them than it was for her, she wants to be part of their lives and part of their interests even if she does not understand them, and I maintain that Had Max Actually Succeeded, it would not have been long before the Lost Boys themselves were Lucy's as much as her own two sons, and that would not have ended well for Max. Protecting mother, lioness, made to be underestimated so you are always caught off guard.

Edgar and Alan Frog are near and dear to my heart, these idiot vampire hunter children were just so very much what my brother and I were in terms of Making Up Games To Play--ignoring the fact that for these two it's real, not that it ever had been before the Emerson family rolled into town and Sam's brother got mixed into the Lost Boys group. Edgar wanting to be in charge of things and wanting to protect the people he cares about and the town he is too stubborn to admit he loves despite being what, 12? 14? Alan being quieter but just as absolutely ready to go "yeah we are totally experts at this" as his twin, the fact that neither of them have any idea what they are getting into. Dipping barely into the sequels territory (which...they aren't good. by any definition. but Edgar and Alan are the best part of them both) we get Edgar dealing not only with his perceived loss of Alan to half-vampirism, but his whole loss of Sam after having to kill him and I just.

Ugh.

NOW, dipping into the main event there is Michael, who spends this whole movie just trying to figure out where the hell he's supposed to belong at this point. He doesn't see any point in starting a new high school in his senior year, he doesn't want to upset his mother by just absolutely dropping off the planet, he cares deeply about his family and wants to help however he can because they are struggling for money. So what does this seventeen year old kid do? He starts picking trash up off the beach for eight hours a day. He gives that money to his mother under the guise of it being "leftover from christmas" because he doesn't want her to worry about him working. He feels so fucking lonely without the friends he left behind in Phoenix and he feels like he's too old to supplant himself into a new friend group in Santa Carla before everyone goes their separate ways after high school anyways.

Enter Star and the Lost Boys.

Yes, Michael is taken in by Star because she's beautiful and mysterious and he's a teenage boy seeing nipples through a tank top, but beyond that he sees in her, in David and the others, how self sure they all are of the decisions they've made. This group is all within his age, they're all living in a goddamn sunken hotel half claimed by the ocean, they have motorcycles like him, they smoke weed and eat chinese food and Marko keeps pigeons and Dwayne can skateboard and Paul is a music nerd and what the fuck how do they manage to seem like they have their lives more together as a group of teenage runaways than he does?

He's enamored with it, obsessed with it, the movie speeds up a timeline of something that does in fact happen over the course of a couple weeks, of him hanging out with them, slowly experiencing more and more symptoms of vampirism from the blood he drank the first night, unable to stop coming back, unable to really figure out what it is they have figured out that he doesn't, and hoping that maybe if he stays with them he will eventually feel the same confidence in his own existence that they do.

But couple that with the horrifying reality that he is becoming a monster. His younger brother is terrified of him, the family dog bites him, the horses won't go near him, he pulls a mouse out of a trap freshly dead and squeezes it like a spent juice box into his mouth, he is falling apart at the seams by the time David decides it's time to finish things. And that's what David wants, he wants Michael in a position where he is no longer lucid enough to resist once there's blood in the air.

And it almost fucking works.

I stand by my belief that the entire movie hinges on the beach party where the Lost Boys kill a whole bunch of Surf Nazis. The whole thing, the outcome of the final fight, the failure of Max's plan, all of it hangs on that one night, and whether or not Michael can actually manage not to give into the bloodlust. He does manage, obviously, he leans into the shock and fear and near throws himself out of that tree because he knows that if he doesn't, he will join the blood bath happening not ten feet away. He is starving and exhausted and everything in him is screaming that if he just gave in, it would all feel so much better.

But he doesn't.

He lays in the sand until he cannot hear any heartbeats left.

Lays there clawing his hands into the ground like if he can hold himself still enough then maybe this will stop being real.

Three of the four boys don't pay much mind to this, Dwayne Paul and Marko have slipped back into regular antics despite being coated red. Their faces have returned to normal, their eyes no longer brilliant gold rimmed red, they are laughing and shoving and having a good time.

But David is furious. He's quiet about it, he isn't loudly angry, something I think he probably absorbed from Max over the years, he tells Michael what needs to be done if he wants to stay with them, and then he and the other Lost Boys leave him there in the sand, burnt flesh and ashes drifting down to him on the breeze.

The thing about David is that he realized the night on the train bridge that he didn't care about Max's bullshit plan. He didn't care that he was originally going to feed Michael to Star. He is fixated on getting Michael to join them, not just for himself, not just to keep Star around, but also because there's a refusal to give up in this kid that has him excited, a stubbornness that he wants to break. It's the thing that eventually leads to his death.

ANYWAYS.

I think, perhaps, I have yelled enough.

Oh, shit, favorite character.

I think without any doubt it has to be David. Especially after reading the novelization, the comics, the original prequel script, he's just, he is such an interesting character and his motivations are so obvious despite how much he would appear to hold them close to his chest. He's a root character I can trace a lot of the tropes that carry over in my own antagonists to, and some of my protagonists as well.

double anyways, camp vampires from 1987 my beloved.

Thank you Katie <3

[the-faultofdaedalus]

Chase from House is so interesting to me, because like, reddit people did the math and even before he gets set up as House’s heir apparent starting in like season 6-7ish he was the underling with the most amount of independent and diagnoses in his original season 1-3 run. Like all this talk of Foreman being “just like House” and Chase was just…there? his character really hits on a rewatch because of how originally he’s kind of an after thought compared to Foreman and Cameron and you don’t really like him right away but by season 3 he’s starting to stand out as the best of the 3 until mama bird House shoved him out the nest. And so he’s so out of focus from the start he was clearly not supposed to be the next in line but he was (maybe accidentally?) always the most talented??

And like, how hilarious (and sad????) it is that he’s been unaware of how hot and desirable he is until after his divorce from a woman he had to (hah) chase for years. And even once she leaves him he’s all, actually it better that you never loved me therefore I didn’t do anything wrong like???? and he discovers his pretty privilege and tests it out by asking for people’s cars and they just give the keys to him??

And the mortician doctor being like, I hate you and Chase is like??? Because it turns out he’s jealous of Chase, who seems to have seen himself as a Ken but turns out to have been a Barbie the whole time: he’s the 2nd best diagnostician in like the world at this point, beautiful, and became the hospital’s best surgeon in only a few years (as stated by both House AND the mortician who hates him), he’s a triple specialist who always seems to have a skill they need because he keeps collecting them like hobbies (remember how he was trained as a neurosurgeon but just didn’t take the test? Remember how they were like, yeah Chase know how to do hypnosis whatever). And it all came so seeming easily to Chase and it made the mortician like, SO mad because Chase has no ambition and squanders like ALL of this for years

He’s all these random assortments of traits they kept throwing at him that make no sense but also all the sense? fuck he’s a mess. He’s the child of privilege! And his father abandoned him and his mom drank herself to death! He was parentified as a teen and tried to escape to seminary school! He got kicked out for sleeping with the grounds keeper’s wife! He only became a doctor because his mom locked him in his dad’s study and he’d read the medical texts once he got tired of crying! He surfed for 7 months until his boss got out of jail because 🤷 He killed a genocidal dictator! He’s weirdly fatphobic! He was in a BDSM relationship and was NOT a dom. He’s a genius but also very gullible and easily manipulated (the cancer patient that got a kiss) , but also very cany and can read people really well (he figured out House canceled Foreman’s interview) except when they have to do with him I guess? He’s a cringefail manwhore with no swag and so many bitches! He’s just some guy! Sometimes the way he reacts to something makes it clear he’s kind of a broken mess! But mostly he’s just some beautiful, beautiful guy!

And he’s just like, hangs around people long enough where they start to care about him wayyy more then they mean to. Cameron is an obvious example but by the end House is like, idk I guess your my son? after years of Chase being like, you are my new dad now and getting bullied for it (and he gets a sibling in 13 because she is also House’s kid). And Foreman was all, I don’t like or respect you as a person, and then becomes the Cuddy to Chase’s House by the end. He just orbits them until they are like fuck I guess you’re here to stay?

chase is SO funny because he's such a boring person when by all rights he should be one of the most interesting character of the show. like truly chase is a litmus test for how insane every character in house is because chase is boring but if you transplanted him to any other media he'd be one of the most complex characters just by virtue of existing.

anyways im. not really reading all this because its late and im tired and have spent Too Long staring at some brutal markdown formatting but. he truly is just some guy. he's just Here. fuckin vibing i guess.

he's the best when he actually grows a pair and starts standing up to authority figures. he's very good because you get both "clown on chase" moments, which are great, and also cheering when he like. punches out house. or murders the afformentioned dictator. fuckin incredible

[blackbird-brewster]

Thoughts About Tara Lewis (CM Evolution Spoilers)

Tara Lewis is Queer.

I woke up this morning and the SECOND I was conscious, I turned to my partner and said 'Tara Lewis is Queer'. I woke them up two times last night to tell them the same thing. I have echoed this thought back and forth to friends for hours.

It almost feels like if I don't constantly remind myself that Tara is now canonically queer, then maybe it isn't real. Maybe it was a dream. OR maybe it will be taken from us.

The thing about being in this fandom since 2005 is that I've lived a WHOLE lot of life in that time. I have been through relationships and divorces and insurmountable loss. I can't even count how many times I've moved in that time. I have struggled, I have flourished. All the while, Criminal Minds was a constant for me.

If you're newer to this fandom (Welcome!) then you might not FULLY grasp how wildly improbable it is to be able to say: Tara Lewis, a main character on Criminal Minds, is canonically queer.

When the show first aired I was in college, I had graduated HS an entire year early because the homophobia I faced was suffocating and genuinely dangerous. I was threatened all the time in my school. I came out when I was 15, in a small rural religious town. It was horrific.

I graduated HS and started college by age 17. Criminal Minds started around then and I loved it, because I was already a huge fan of crime dramas (SVU, TXF, Bones). It became a comfort show to me.

It continued to be a comfort show to be for nearly the past two decades. I remember waiting week to week to find out what happened next. Or waiting all summer to find out what happened after a cliffhanger. Or waiting each year for news on whether it was getting renewed or not, especially through the 2007 writer's strike when the fate of many TV shows felt so volatile and unsure. I remember watching the Valhalla arc and Emily's 'death' live. As each season came out on DVD box set, I would buy them and re-watch them (This was when Netflix was only dvd rentals and not streaming. Streaming wasn't even a concept then. We all just bough 8-disc DVD box sets and had to change the DVD every 3 episodes to binge a show)

I remember when the interview came out about how Emily was originally supposed to wake up in bed with a woman. I remember how devastating that was to me. Emily was my fave character back then (now she ties with Tara) and she had always felt gay to me and to find out she COULD have been canonically confirmed as gay but they killed that idea, was really hard. We didn't have a lot of wlw rep in media back then. The L Word was a trailblazing show but it's representations of wlw ultimately did WAY more harm than good (imo. I could write an entire thesis about how tLw really fucked up my entire understanding of what it means to be gay, but I digress)

I remember watching the way CBS treated AJ, Paget and Kirsten. I remember following articles talking about why the women were forced to leave the show while the men were celebrated and doted upon. (Reasons why I hate certain characters that are popular here iykyk)

The very first scene with Tara Lewis in S11 made my heart skip a beat. My soul was screaming 'SHES QUEER!!!! SHE HAS GOT TO BE QUEER!' even though I never once held my breath that would ever become CANON.

Here I am, still in this fandom, seventeen years later, and I get to say 'Tara Lewis is canonically queer' on a show that has gotten me through some of the hardest times in my life. On a show I turned to for comfort when everything felt like Too Much.

Because there is something so incredibly magical about seeing my favourite character and saying: Tara Lewis is Queer...and So Am I.

I know people are already like 'Emily was right there!?' or  'Why not make Emily queer!?' to those people I have one thing to say:

Please stop. Please stop and understand HOW important it is for TARA to be queer.

We have A CANONICALLY QUEER BLACK WOMAN IN HER 50s played by a sapphic actor. DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW IMMINESLY RARE AND SPECIAL THAT IS?!?!? Do you have ANY idea of how IMPORTANT that is for representation?????

Emily Prentiss will never be confirmed queer in canon for many reasons. I have a LOT of thoughts about this, but that's not what this post is about.

This post is about celebrating one, extremely special fact.

And I couldn't be happier.

[shrinkthisviolet]

character ask game 2, 3, 4, 5, 15, 16, 23, 24, 25 (sorry there's so many lol) for Mr. Eddie Thawne <3333

2. Favorite canon thing about this character?

He and Iris are sweet together! And he is, in general, very sweet—befriending Barry even tho he suspects that Barry and Iris are in love (and keeps being proven right)?? How could I not admire him for that omg

3. Least favorite canon thing about this character?

I didn’t like him keeping Barry’s identity a secret from Iris, but…I mostly blame the writers for that one tbh. The sexism strikes again 😒

EDIT: I completely forgot s9 existed, apparently 🤦‍♀️ THAT is definitely the worst thing they did to him, hands down. They ruined his character…and for WHAT, the arc wasn’t even good!!

4. If you could put this character in any other media, be it a book, a movie, anything, what would you put them in?

Eddie gives me Disney Prince/knight in shining armor vibes. A fairytale epic would be perfect for him 🥰

(Or a pirate setting, like this wonderful Westhallen fic 👀)

5. What's the first song that comes to mind when you think about them?

As strange as it might sound, “Cave In” by Owl City. I think Eddie, for all his optimism, does struggle with self-worth—we know he had a hard time making friends as a kid, especially given his dad’s job, and given that he was originally from Keystone…this is more speculation, but I doubt he and his dad were particularly close either (especially if his dad is the sort of person Eowells would like).

And in “Cave In”, there are multiple instances of the narrator/singer struggling with inner turmoil, depressive thoughts (“please take a long hard look through your textbook, ‘cause I’m history”…which also ties in tragically to Eddie’s ultimate fate of dying heroically at the end of s1) and yet trying to be optimistic despite it (“if the bombs go off, the sun will still be shining, because I’ve heard it said that every mushroom cloud has a silver lining”). It’s very Eddie-like imo 💞

15. What's your favorite ship for this character? (Doesn't matter if it's canon or not.)

Westhallen wins for me, hands down. Eddie is great with both of them individually too, but like…all three of them = the superior ship

16. What's your least favorite ship for this character?

Admittedly I don’t really read a ton of Eddie fics, so idk many ships for him 😅 I guess Eddie x Caitlin? Not a bad pairing per se, and I’m the last person to complain about shipping characters who have never properly met onscreen (Reyrose (I haven’t read the comics where they interact) and Franmaya are two of my favorite ships, after all)…I just don’t get that vibe from Eddie and Caitlin. But also, I think that ship only has a few fics anyway, so 🤷‍♀️

23. Favorite picture of this character?

I don’t really have one tbh but he looks so lovely he smiles, so I present you with:

24. What other character from another fandom of yours that reminds you of them?

Jim Paxton from the MCU! Scott Lang’s wife, Maggie, remarried when she and Scott divorced, and Jim is just an absolute gem. A great husband to Maggie, a great friend to Scott, and a great stepdad to Cassie. They’re such a wonderful family, all four of them, and I love them so much 🥰

25. What was your first impression of this character? How about now?

I gotta be honest man, I was suspicious of him. Idk if I thought he was the RF, but I definitely thought he was gonna turn out to be a bad boyfriend because of how that trope usually goes, and that would be the impetus for Westallen getting together. Imagine my shock when that didn’t happen!! When, in fact, he befriended Barry, Westhawne was going strong for a while, and died a hero!!

(I would’ve preferred that he not die, ofc, but on the other hand…I don’t trust the Flash writers that much. They would’ve ruined him for drama, I can just feel it)

character ask game!

[roobylavender]

So I'm pretty new to comics and the DC comics fandom and I've been noticing this interesting parallel in the cultural ideas and fandom discussions with the star trek fandom, specifically the concept of Kirk Drift. In brief the term was coined by an article talking about how the cultural perception and modern conception of Jim Kirk is completely made up and utterly divorced from the Kirk we actually see in the original series. And your analyses of male characters as they were portrayed in the 70s and 80s (Hal Jordan and Bruce Wayne in particular) really reminded me of this article.

It's interesting how similar the warping of these massive cultural icons is given the similarities (being a part of a decades old property and having been written by multiple writers over a long stretch of time) and the differences (the sheer volume of material that dc characters get as opposed to 3 seasons of a tv show plus some movies, the mediums, different industries, and being a part of a genre that kind of espouses different ideals). Another interesting commonality is that they're both media that everyone knows about but very few people have actually engaged with.

I don't know how much of star trek you've watched but the idea of a hotheaded, rash, womanizing dick is wildly different from the canon Kirk who was a nerd, pretty by the book, utterly devoted to his ship and his duty to his crew as a starfleet officer, was on really good terms with his exes who were all accomplished and intelligent women with lives and aspirations of their own, sensitive, and extremely professional.

The reason why I'm explaining that is that it's really striking how the imagined version of Kirk and various superhero characters ends up diminishing the point of these stories and the progressive themes that they actually did have and ends up creating a version of the story that is significantly more regressive than the source material. This not only affects the character in question but often also ends up flattening and erasing female characters that actually existed. For instance the whole purpose of star trek is to imagine a better future, a world where we've moved beyond the issues of today. It wasn't always great at it but the intent was always clear. Similarly the superhero comics genre to my limited understanding is meant to inspire the idea of regular heroism in the readers, to make you feel like you could be a hero too. And I get that these male characters get treated significantly better than their female counterparts but the destruction of their characters doesn't just affect them it also affects the overall story and the world of the story and ends up destroying anything good these stories had to say in the first place.

I don't really have anything to conclude this with just noticed this similarity and thought you might find it interesting given your interest in looking at stories within their cultural context and would love to know your thoughts. Have a nice week!

i unfortunately never got into star trek! i do think i've watched the first chris pine movie but i imagine going off of what you're saying here that it wasn't entirely accurate to who kirk is as a persongjkdfjlhdf. still though, this totally resonates and i couldn't agree more! i really believe there is a huge issue with with the life span of various media allowing their core message to deteriorate over time, esp bc that life span means they evolve in response to political changes in the real world. we are progressively moving into a very conservative time period in our history right now and that could not be reflected more than in what is being propagated via popular, long-standing source material. it's a very worrisome and disheartening phenomenon and i imagine much won't change unless the public political spectrum changes first :/

[narcissa-black-supermacy]

My toxic trait is that if ur a Barty Crouch Jr stan, I don’t wanna hear from u about how the prank was unforgivable. (Real talk tho, I get divorcing characters from canon but this fandom is real, real selective about whose character flaws get left in *cough Snape* and whose get removed bc we don’t like what’s in the books)

Anon hayati you simultaneously triggered two whole topics that i am incapable being brief about. im sorry in advance this will be so rambly.

im a big fan of villain characters, i enjoy antagonists in media, always had. watching the hp movies as a kid my absolute favourites were always bellatrix and lucius malfoy, i thought theyre soo cool (still do).

but like, the whole point is that theyre evil, yknow? and if i was to write a story featuring young bella where shes originally kind and good, her whole character arc would be centered around the things that happened to her that slowly made her lose her mind and become evil. because thats fundamentally the essence of the character, this is what im here for.

like nobody talks about anakin skywalker without the context of him eventually becoming darth vader, right? even tho hes originally a genuinely good kid who went through so much abuse.

i just genuinely dont get why you would take a character like barty crouch jr and write them as if it does not lead us where we know it will. people dont just get up one day and go "ok chapter 2 of my life im evil now" - no, theres a buildup. there are signs.

at this point people are genuinely writing ocs that have no connection to the original role of the character. and what genuinely baffles me is that when you point out "uh you know they killed and tortured people right?" people get defensive? like if you dont like the fact that they killed people and want to cut it out of the story, why pick this character to begin with? theres avery and mulciber for example, who we know absolutely nothing about except that they were slytherins in the same year as snape. take them. theyre a blank slate. do whatever you want. but you picked this character! who killed people. and now youre getting defensive when people point that out?

and the prank, well. i hate how its portrayed in soo many fics. i believe ive already talked about this in one of my posts in detail, but basically i dont believe sirius was in full consciousness when he did that. my personal hc is that snape tried to use legilimency on him bc he was suspecting something close to the truth, and sirius' mind kind of occluded on instinct bc thats what he was used to doing at home. so in an occluded state he locked away most of his feelings/thoughts about his friends and remus specifically to protect them, and thats why he wasnt thinking about the consequences when he told snape.

but im going to stop now bc i can talk about this for hours if someone doesnt shut me up

[freedfromthegalactichivemind]

I just finished a slew of fanfictions to be released later.   Anyway, while I was working on them, I came across this Youtube analysis of J.K. Rowling that I was watching / listening to of all things.  I was never much into Harry Potter.  I saw the movies like most people in this wide world, but I never read the books.  It just wasn’t something I ever got into.  It was tailored to a younger crowd than I was at the time, it was a bit overhyped, etc. Or maybe I just have an aversion to most things that take place in a school-heavy environment because I am still traumatized from being the Weird Kid.  Whatever. I still find myself interested in media analysis of the work in regards to the fall of the author in the public eye, how she went from progressive icon to cancelled.   The guy doing the media analysis was a cis gay man who was a big fan and spoke of how it helped him form his identity as a kid, even helped him in his journey to come out, and while he is not trans, he knew trans people who had a similar journey, and therefore everything going on with Rowling feels like a betrayal.  I’ve personally wondered “was this always even there with her, beneath the surface?  Or are her Terfy-views entirely new?  After all, people do change, their worldviews included, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.  I mean, the me of 15-20 years ago was an obnoxious evangelical and a lot of my current views couldn’t be more different. I went from conservative --> progressive, utterly sincerely and I think that the opposite can happen, too, people being sincere progressive ---> conservative, because we’re all a bunch of humans and no one and nothing is completely “pure.” Maybe the person who wrote those books really was a completely different person than the one who exists now, holding the authorship rights.   Anyway, since this is a She-Ra fan blog... getting to the point.  Watching this media analysis made me think about how I feel like I have an advantage in certain fandoms I choose to be in, and what seems to choose me.   Harry Potter fans, by and large, seem to have the inability to divorce the story from the author.  This is a fundamental part of how the story is set up.  The books have a single origin-point, this specific author. Films and games and other media are a group-effort, but they all center back to the origin-point of a single author.  The story is inexorably tied to one person, so anyone who is in fandom for it - even if they’re making their own art and stories from it, have to process the fundamental truth of a single origin-point of the thing they’re doing their own derivatives of.   The analysis I watched made no judgement on how people process their grief, as it were.  The host said that he’ll spend no more money on the franchise, but that he’s not giving up his enjoyment of what he once loved and already has.  He knows others the same way - people who refuse to let even the author herself take the good thing they enjoyed away from them. Some, of course, choose not to engage.   I spared a brief thought to “What if someone on the She-Ra crew did something that I thought was really awful?”   And that’s when I realized some of them have.  Not J.K. Rowling levels - obviously, the entire show is incompatible with that.  There are actual trans characters, gay characters, racially diverse characters, disabled characters - they can’t do much that’s really anti-progressive.  But... a few of the creators have said things that I know some of the fans have found off-color... I remember a fiasco when one of the voice actors on Twitter made a joke about Entrapta working for Trump because she’d want to be in the Space Force and she just got reamed by the fans over that.  (She seemed to have forgotten that Entrapta is not white, for one thing).  Then there was the debacle where a joke was made about Bow’s family in the writer’s room that came out in an interview that seemed to me like it was “innocent, but tone-deaf” - like it wasn’t meant as awful, it just “You weren’t thinking, were you?”   In-series, on-screen, the “Let’s leash Entrapta, the confirmed character with autism” joke was...um...it was a thing.  And yet, I’m here, in a fandom, doing fanwork, unbothered by it for the most part because... I think it’s because Spop isn’t tied to a single vision.  It was a group-effort with many writers, a director that conferred with the writers, character designers and story-boarders who eventually got their storyboard running gags into the series (I heard that Rogelio x Kyle wasn’t originally going to be a thing until it became a story-board crew’s running thing).  The writers, artists, voice actors, etc. all had different takes on what they were doing, and to boot, the whole thing was a derivative-property to begin with, a reboot-adaptation of something that existed before some of them were even born.  (I think a lot of the Crew-Ra are younger than my nostalgic and modern-animation loving ass).   Enjoying this property isn’t as much intrinsically tied for me into any single-point origin.  Some people treat it as “N.D.’s vision,” but I divorce it a little from even him, because he didn’t handle all of the story aspects.  (In particular, I’ve heard that he wasn’t much interested in dealing with Hordak, so much of Hordak’s arc was handled by others).  My “side” of the fandom has taken this football and run because we know that the “main creator” wasn’t really the “parent” to our blorbos, that Entrapta and Hordak were largely handled by others on the crew.  So, you know, there’s just not this worshipful “my creator must do no wrong” thing for me at all.  It’s almost like Death of the Author is particularly strong with this property.  I am very much an advocate for Authorial Rights - like, if an author says “my work means this” that fans should listen.  I mostly am into this because I do original work, myself - not that I’m ever going to become well-known, and I just...really, really don’t want far-right bozos pretending my work means something it doesn’t and adopting it as their own, which happens to way too many authors.  (That poor guy who made the frog cartoon even tried to kill the frog off in story, but people still did their own thing with the image and I just feel sorry for the guy).  At the same time, I do believe in a degree of Death of the Author, because, obviously, I write fanfiction and create my own stories, and sometimes my own stories are really off-the-wall of the canon, and purposefully so.   A couple of my upcoming collection stories have... “Ugh, I know that this plotline is so out of character for Etheria, I honestly don’t think it would happen if canon continued beyond a certain point, but I need to include it to make MY plot work!”    I guess I just want to say that I have an easy time of this in fandom because I seem to become most enamored with fandoms that really are “group effort” and are generally cooperate / collective-owned from the get-go with no One Shining Idol-Person to put on a pedestal.  Zelda is a big fandom for me, too, and it’s like that.  In fact that property has some Ship of Theseus shit going on with changing crew working on it over the 30+ years the games have been a thing.   I just wonder if it’s easier to “divorce creator from fandom so you can ignore problematic creator-bullshit” is just easier to do if you know that the base canon has tons of fingerprints from lots of different creators on it.  

[duthea]

What are the other protags like?

Since I've already talked about the gen 1-5 protags here, I'll talk about X, Moon and Sword!

X is a girl who moved from Viridian City to Kalos, and decided her goal is to become the most stylish girl in all of Kalos. Inwardly, she's pretty insecure, but she's a believer in "fake it 'til you make it" and has gotten really good at pretending she's the most self-confident person you've ever met. She loves fashion and clothes, but had a long period in her childhood when she was unable to dress how she really wanted, because she just... couldn't rack up the courage. Also she's trans, which of course played a part too. (Fun fact! I didn't originally intend that, but after looking over her backstory and everything, I realized a lot of it seemed to fit, so I figured I might as well make it official. I sometimes realize a character I've created is trans years and years after originally making them, so any of my OCs could honestly be trans without me knowing yet. I guess they gotta come out to me too.)

Her main rival is Trevor, who she just can't get along with, but she becomes instant besties with Y (Calem) who she feels like she's on a similar wavelength with. She's also friends with Silver from before she left to Kalos, and they still talk to each other and visit each others' Animal Crossing towns. (Yeah AC exists in Pokemon world, don't think about it too hard)

Next is Moon! She's got a twin brother named Sun, and at first glance they seem like the same person in two bodies: Equally excitable, precocious, and use a lot of similar phrases. They're both gay and develop crushes fast, and tease each other about said crushes. But as their Pokemon journey begins, they start going their own ways and developing differently. One difference between the twins is while Sun is usually impulsive and quick to act but regrets his impulsiveness afterwards, Moon is slower to act, cautious at first, but once she decides to do something after thinking it over she does it full steam, not looking back.

Moon got a crush on Lillie from basically the moment she met her. She also met Red and Green early on in her journey and asked them to mentor her as a Pokemon trainer.

Here's their family tree, btw, since I happened to have it drawn. Their father works as a scientist in the Aether Corporation. By the way, their surname, Akasha, is the fifth classical element in old Indian cosmology, similar in concept to Aether. Lillie and Gladion are also twins in this AU (because I thought they were twins when playing the game ._.,), so the Aether twins and Akasha twins kind of mirror and contrast each other in some ways!

Finally, Sword. Sword is an unflappable-seeming girl who grew up in the Crown Tundra. She's got an obvious scottish accent and a tendency to make jokes with a deadpan tone and a straight face, as well as say anything else with a deadpan tone and a straight face. She's not really all that big on the Pokemon League Challenge, but since her best friend Hop is so excited about it, she decided to become a Pokemon Trainer and join in too.

Sword's parents are divorced, and her dad is Chairman Rose, who's far too busy to have time to spend with his daughter, so their meetings are often awkward. Also, Sword's mom has been spending more time with Peony, Rose's brother, and it seems like they might be getting together, so their family tree is going to be a bit complicated ^^; (yeah I decided to give Rose maximum divorce energy in this AU. it just fits) The fact that Sword is Rose's daughter is usually kept hidden from the media, so nobody around them really knows about it unless told. So when Bede tells Sword that he's practically already adopted by Chairman Rose, Sword just goes 'oh ok then' and starts calling him her brother without explaining why, which annoys the hell out of Bede.

And that's about it! I haven't talked about their Pokemon, but there's a rule of thumb: All of my protagonists (except Grey) have their region's grass starter. Not always as their first Pokemon, though!

[charcubed]

I posted 2,283 times in 2022

That's 194 more posts than 2021!

108 posts created (5%)

2,175 posts reblogged (95%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

valleydean

agentmika

twofrontteethstillcrooked

teledild0nix

burnhamandtilly

I tagged 2,264 of my posts in 2022

Only 1% of my posts had no tags

#supernatural - 429 posts

#destiel - 172 posts

#dean - 148 posts

#sherlock - 83 posts

#spn fanart - 70 posts

#queer - 65 posts

#marvel - 62 posts

#lmfao - 58 posts

#the winchesters - 57 posts

#video - 56 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#largely because… he’s sam’s brother but he’s also sam’s parent. dean’s not repressed. he’s just selective in terms of what he lets sam see.

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

was anyone gonna tell me Dianna Agron is dating Megalyn Echikunwoke the actress who played Cassie on SPN, or did I just have to find that out myself in tags on posts that are making comparisons to the current debacle because of how Dianna once wore a “likes girls” shirt then backtracked to say she wore it as a feminist

157 notes - Posted April 26, 2022

#4

I’m only interested in stories I go insane over

166 notes - Posted February 14, 2022

#3

“Everything good about [piece of media] happened by accident” is a phrase that is going to become my villain origin story

I don’t know how to explain to you that creators put effort and detail into their content and you did not manifest its enjoyable traits with your ~superior mind~

I think part of the reason this drives so insane is that as both (some semblance of) a current creator and an aspiring creator, in different fashions, if people looked at my solo or collaborative work and tried to be like “lmao it’s crazy how the best parts of this were ACCIDENTS or COINCIDENCES” I’d commit homicide

I feel like some fans like to try to say that the ~good things~ about a piece of media are accidental or that “the fans made it better” because it gives them a sense of power, and then they totally can’t be told they’re into something “cringe” or “subpar” or “reading too much into it” if they’re rationalizing their thoughts as being a Next Level Of Hypothetical Enlightenment

“Oh I know this isn’t ACTUALLY good and I’m making up everything I’m seeing in it haha! Most of it even happened with a strange twist of fate I think. So I can like bad media ironically by recognizing what I enjoy is only the version I’ve made up in my head <3 “

How about… if you like a thing… then it’s good, so jot that down. Because chances are high what you like about it didn’t come out of your own brain and is, in fact, in there in some capacity.

Because if you see ANY genuine depth in a piece of media, then maybe that’s because it took work by many people over the course of many years to create, consciously and with intention

Your favorite show/movie wasn’t made by monkeys with typewriters and dartboards guided by fate

266 notes - Posted January 4, 2022

#2

GOD................... you literally CANNOT divorce johnlock from The Show. you can’t. and that’s also why it’s so impossible to be normal about any facet of it!!! it’s the bones of it and the heart of it and the POINT of it. the show does not make sense if johnlock is not the reason for the entire way it’s structured, not really. from day one that’s been the reason for its existence. because it’s commentary on ACD but the reason the commentary has to exist at all is because of the queer truths it’s bringing into the light. like I know we all know this by now but FUCK ME this is why I can’t think about this show for more than 5 minutes unless I pencil in 5 hours because this shit is just soooooo insane it will always be insane like ekjrngmnsdkfjnmrgklsmdfkjgn ohhhhhh my God

318 notes - Posted January 29, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

are they....…. you know………. watched by a giant slug

2,422 notes - Posted March 3, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[thegeekyartist]

I finally saw the new genderbent version of Company and I have some thoughts... (the Let Bobbie Be a Lesbian essay)

I want to preface all of this by saying that I love this musical and there was so so much of it that I enjoyed (which I'll get to). I LOVE the move to make Bobby/ie a woman. I think that it opens the door to a lot of incredible interpretations of an already fairly open-ended text.

However, so much was lost because of the other changes made to the text to force it to work.

The new lyrics felt so clunky. ("Bobbie really ought to have a fella"???? Why not "husband"?? Just ugh.) There are also new nicknames for her in the Company motif that I still can't figure out. I also find it odd that they chose to have the husbands sing Poor Baby and the wives sing Have I Got a Guy for You. Not that I necessarily think it was bad, just that I didn't think it was necessary. The lyric changes in those were strange as well (for example, why can't the husbands be "the only tenderness she's ever known"? Why change that to "comfort"?). I can't remember all of them but there were plenty of moments like that that just felt disjointed with the change.

They also removed the implications that Peter was gay - which I totally forgot about until my partner reminded me. If memory serves there's a little bit of flirting with Bobby in the original (?), but they could have mostly kept those lines and implied that he and Susan had divorced to form a more queerplatonic union, a look into a different type of lifestyle for Bobbie to consider - which leads me to my main point.

So much of this clunkiness could have been avoided if they just let Bobbie be interested in women. Assuming that this version of the musical is set in the present, Bobbie is a late millenial who grew up in a time when casual homophobia was *everywhere* and being out and proud was still very taboo, with possibly the only exposure to queer living being some very imperfect queer representation in media. She watched gay marriage become legalized. It's still NEW. She has so much internalized homophobia to work through, and I think that could play a lot into her avoidance of committing to someone and settling down.

This also brings life back into the girl/boyfriends, and how each of them gives Bobbie a different look into what her life could be. Look at Martha/P.J! Martha would be an excellent bit of lesbian representation -- a way for Bobbie to experience a world in which she's allowed to be loudly queer and part of the pulse of the city. Kathy is an example of a queer woman happily falling into a traditional lifestyle, one who just wants to act like and be treated like people in heterosexual couples. April is a little tricky (I actually loved turning her into a self-aware himbo vs. ditzy and naive woman). But! Given April's wounded butterfly story, she could be interpreted as another baby gay trying to accept who she is and heal from previous relationships that didn't treat her the way she deserved. She's someone who already decided she wants something more, someone who IS ready to dive in, which is why she's so clingy at the end of their scene (Barcelona).

I also HATED that Joanne's come-on to Bobbie at the end of the play was changed to her offering up Larry instead. If Bobbie has spent the whole play struggling to come to terms with her sexuality as well as a desire for more than just physical intimacy ("Who will I take care of?") I think this makes Joanne's "I just did someone a huge favor" line even more poignant. Bobbie has fully accepted not only herself, but that she wants love and companionship for real.

So why not just make Bobbie bisexual? Keep some of the changes but allow for some of the original text to return? I appreciate the forethought to avoid Bobbie falling into the indecisive bisexual stereotype, however! I think a major part of Bobbie's character is that she is terrified of making the wrong decision, and what those decisions mean for the life she's currently living and (mostly) content with. There's such a huge level of biphobia in our society (yes, including lgbtqia spaces) that we insist that if a bisexual woman marries a woman, she's actually just a lesbian. And if a bisexual woman marries a man, well then obviously she's just straight and saying she's bi for the attention. This could be a huge barrier for Bobbie to settle down, that fear that an entire part of her identity will disappear with it. While I don't necessarily think this is a better reading than a fully lesbian Bobbie, I do think there could be interesting changes to explore there, as well.

What I will say!!!!!!! Is that there were plenty of things that I thoroughly enjoyed.

I think changing "Tick-Tock" from a ballet while Bobbie and April/Andy have sex into a fun nightmare of Bobbies speed-running a traditional marriage while our Bobbie was forced to watch was *awesome*. I almost wanted even more Bobbies running around to make her feel even more suffocated.

I also loved swapping Jenny and David's lines, making David the doting, nervous husband while Jenny is this woman who has lost her individuality to being nothing but wife/mother. Watching him get stoned and climb over the set and struggle to say "bitch" was hilarious.

AND ABOUT THAT SET!

One of my favorite things about Company is that it's a concept musical -- there's no set timeline, the plot is entirely comprised of unrelated vignettes. I think they could have played WAY more into this using the set, but let me start by saying I LOVED the grayscale. I loved that it gave everything this manufactured, fake feeling. And seeing Bobbie's bright red outfit in contrast was so nice and striking. Plus, seeing how small and crowded Bobbie's apartment was on such a large stage was an incredible visual (when the whole cast squeezed in for the first "Company"?? awesome)

I was GAGGED in the very beginning when Bobbie was pulling on all the doors of her apartment and couldn't escape, only for the set to shift and move so that when she could finally open a door, it led right into Harry and Sarah's apartment. Why didn't they do more of that??? I wanted so badly for them to always have Bobbie in this forced unreality of "how did I get here? Have I always been here?". Then each time she does finally escape a scene she'd find herself stuck in another one. I feel like that tension could have built beautifully throughout until the final "Company" motif when she finally breaks and interrupts them (Being Alive). It's not like they *didn't* do this (for example, the Peter and Susan's balcony lowers on her in a way that shows she wasn't expecting it), but it could have been a much, much bigger part of the overall theme had they really pushed it.

I did also really like the repeating 35's in the background of all the scenes, like it was a constant reminder for Bobbie that she couldn't escape. I wish there was even more of that, too (the balloons getting bigger was a vv nice touch, for example).

I also appreciated that in the scenes where the songs are sung as asides (Poor Baby, The Little Things You Do Together), Bobbie gets to interact with the singers while the rest of the cast is frozen. That's a great change, and once again plays into that idea that Bobbie feels stuck and is trying to escape/work through all these issues in her head throughout the play.

*************************

I know this got long, I guess my point is that with all the fun, incredible changes they made (The Amy/Jaime scene was hilarious. And I didn't even TALK ABOUT all the hidden passages in that set!!), they fell short of making the choices that would have really caused this interpretation to shine. An issue I always have with Company is that I never *really* root for Bobby. Every time he makes a poor decision it's like "well, there he goes again". I think keeping a lot of the changes, changing Bobby into Bobbie, and allowing her to be a lesbian trying to come to grips with her sexuality while also giving herself permission to open up her heart to what a serious relationship could be, would make this a perfect re-imagining of the original text.

[sencilla-mentelibros]

The seven husbands of Evelyn Hugo

I never know how to address my book opinions without spoilers, because to me, every single detail is a spoiler ― lol ― and, for me, the best experience is to go in with the main feeling of the book and without major detail. So, if you are like me and want to read this book, please do not read my words right now. Find another general review, read the book, and then come back to this opinion, so we can discuss, as I often do.

First, I must say, it was very entertaining, not in a humorous way, but in the sense that it keeps you glued to the pages without you knowing how much time has passed since you started reading. It keeps you wanting to know more about the characters at every single step. Honestly, I did not expect this book to be this captivating.

The author exposes the life of an accomplished-in-her-field actress, Evelyn Hugo, and how she got to have, in the words of Evelyn, what she wanted most of the time. Taylor depicts a main character that will do what she considers necessary to protect and keep her lifestyle, and if you need to throw in a few marriages in the process, so be it.

Every chapter is named after a husband along with a characteristic of said husband. It starts with «Poor Ernie Diaz», continues with «Goddamn Don Adler» and so on. My favorite: «Brillian, kindhearted, tortured Harry Cameron», and I felt that it was Evelyn Hugo herself who was using the tailored adjectives for each one of them. Basically, the 79-year-old Hugo tells her life to Monique, a struggling journalist who is in the middle of a divorce, and while Monique listens, she finds herself being like a sounding board for Evelyn who narrates herself, most of the time.

Less than 389 pages hold her passions, her fears, her ruthlessness, her opinions, her drives, and her love story. I liked it very much, but what did I like the most? I enjoyed the fact that it touches some very important topics like women’s sexuality, abortion, euthanasia, being biracial and of course, being queer in the second half of the 20th century. Topics that are complicated in any period of time and relate to the defense of human rights.

While everything happens to Evelyn or, better said, while she makes everything happen, we get to hear Taylor’s voice in the background and how things should be. She mirrors, I think, what we are taught to think about sexuality and the dangers of it, and maybe this is me, but I understood this book as a complaint of the state of our reality. How we should reflect and rethink our own views on these important topics. We also get to see how the tabloids tend to treat the life of a celebrity and we are invited to reflect on how we digest the news we get on the media from people in the spotlight.

I liked the fact that I had some disagreements with the characters, how they behaved, how they thought, how they were not perfect. But overall, I enjoyed the little conclusions I could agree with, the truthfulness of it all.

People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is ‘you’re safe with me’- that’s intimacy.

There were some parts of the plot that did not strike me as plausible, but the story outweighs these details. It was a good read. Four stars.

Fecha original de publicación: enero 25, 2024

[everygame]

A Christmas Adventure (Apple II) Developed/Published by: Chartscan Data, Inc. Released: 12/1983 Completed: 11/12/2023 Completion: Couldn’t get Rudolph to drink his bloody milk.

Well, it’s been two years since I thought I’d “have a look at the earliest Christmas games” and I managed to play… one of them. And then last year I was sick for most of December so I didn’t really play anything other than tapping miserably at Marvel Snap. But I’m back, baby!

First up, I owe almost all understanding of this game to Joe Pranevich over at The Adventurer’s Guild who has written an insanely detailed post on it which I highly recommend reading, but I’ll summarise some of the findings here.

A Christmas Adventure is generally considered online to be the second Christmas-themed video game ever released commercially, following the somewhat bizarre Santa’s Sleigh Ride, but I’ve since discovered that there’s several ZX Spectrum games with a 1983 date (including one, potentially lost media, called A Christmas Adventure as well???) so there’s probably more out there for like… the Dragon 32 and shit. But let’s talk about this one anyway. What makes it more interesting than just potentially being the second Christmas-themed video game ever is that it isn’t just, as you might expect, a Christmas cash-in, but an attempt by a French Canadian fellow named Frank Winstan to make video games that acted as greeting cards. Mind how for a while personalised children’s books were all the rage, and you got this crappy book where a jpeg of your child’s face was awkwardly stuck on the main character? Like that basically, with the idea that they’d start with this Christmas “card” and then do… well probably Easter, and then branch out to like… “Happy 43rd Birthday: the adventure” or “Sorry Your Grandma is Dead: the adventure” I guess!

Unfortunately (or not) due to time pressures they never quite managed to get the company off the ground, with this selling poorly its first Christmas, although Winstan would continue to work on it through 1986(!) updating and improving it. As far as I know, I’m playing a version from the same era ion Pranevich did, which seems to be a later version than the one you can watch on Youtube.

Anyway. A Christmas Adventure is an early graphical text adventure; originally released in 1983, it would be contemporary with the very end of Sierra’s Hi-Res Adventure line before they’d go on to make the more sophisticated King’s Quest, and surprisingly, very few other examples, making this… sorta cutting edge?

What does feel cutting edge actually is the opening cinematic, which you have to flip the disk to see, which includes an animation where you fly to Santa’s Ice Palace. Sierra’s Hi-Res Adventures have insanely terrible art (well, apart from Dark Crystal I’d say, which has a near stained-glass window approach) so getting something that generally looks like it’s had a bit of effort put in is rather nice.

Telling that classic story, “Santa’s been kidnapped and only YOU can save him” after the intro you’re dropped in his house and have to wander about picking things up and using them to save him. I very quickly hit the issue that has stopped me bothering to play any of Sierra’s early output: the parser is terrible. Doing literally anything is a nightmare, and I will fully admit I had to use Pranevich’s article to walk me through the game, and he had to hex edit it just to understand how to solve it!

It’s confusing, because this is a commercial concept based on greetings cards. Now, I imagine nowadays you can probably get “escape room” greeting cards where you have to like, solve a fucking cypher or whatever to see something that says “We’re getting divorced” (and if there isn’t, I should get on that) but in general, if you’re giving someone a gift like that you want them to… enjoy it? I really assumed that this would be very simple. You know, for kids. I mean you’re saving SANTA. Not Santana (ft. Rob Thomas) which would of course be for cool adults only.

I suppose I’ve said it before, but maybe people in 1983 were made of sterner stuff; less likely to give up. I guess some puzzles in this are easy, like dressing up like Santa to fool his safe, or the disk that tells you the password right on it (Santa’s Jewish???) But then like… there’s a time machine. And there’s just so much wrestling with the parser to get anything done. Typing “HELP” gives you a list of words that the parser understands which is, 100%, a lie, because almost all the words don’t work.

Ultimately, it’s the reason I couldn’t finish this. In his article, Pranevich was able to feed Rudolph, but despite having stuck the “was’bask+mlk” in the fireplace I could not feed him. I went through every possible thing I could imagine, really tried to get Martin Luther King out of that was’bask, but I’m starting to believe the archive.org version of this is just bugged. It is what it is, and I watched the ending on youtube (and for good measure used the HELP to see the message as well.)

Feels a bit harsh to say this isn’t good despite the fact it it is, er… not good, just because it’s an interesting attempt at something that just seems to have come at the wrong time and with some rather wrong-headed ideas about how challenging it has to be. Also: it didn’t make me feel christmassy at all!

Will I ever play it again? I have a save. If anyone can tell me what to type to get Rudolph to eat I’m making that bastard eat.

Final Thought: It’s worth noting that you can really feel the developers–at least Frank Winstan?--cared about this project because it’s full of little touches. I love that Santa has a poster of Bob and Doug McKenzie’s backdrop up (as Canadian a reference as you’re going to get) and there’s non-sequiturs like Pac-Man showing up for a hot minute.

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Day 42- Film: We’re Not Married 

Release date: July 11th 

Studio: 20th Century Fox 

Genre: Comedy 

Director: Edmund Goulding 

Producer: Nunnally Johnson 

Actors: Ginger Rogers, Fred Allen, Victor Moore, Marilyn Monroe, David Wayne, Eve Arden 

Plot Summary: When a bumbling old man is appointed justice of the peace by his nephew, he starts marrying couples on Christmas Eve, not knowing his license isn’t valid until January 1st. A few years later, one of the 6 couples he married before the 1st tries to divorce and discovers their marriage wasn’t legally valid. Now the other five couples must be notified. Which ones will decide to marry again, and which ones will seize the chance to break free? 

My Rating (out of five stars): *** 

This is basically light comedy fluff, but I found it fun. It’s essentially a little anthology, because we get self-contained vignettes of each of the five couples in question. Some stories were stronger than others, but if I ever got a little bored or impatient, it resolved quickly, because each section breezed by at only a handful of minutes. 

The Good: 

The cast was impressive. I knew every single actor well out of all ten who played the main couples, and even the befuddled justice of the peace and his wife.  I not only recognized them all, but was happy and excited to see them, because I liked them. Oh, it’s Eve Arden! It’s Paul Douglas! Fred Allen! Louis Calhern! Etc. 

The radio parody at the beginning with Fred Allen and Ginger Rogers was perfection. They played a couple with a morning radio show, and there was a long scene of them at the studio beginning their show. Fred Allen was mainly a radio star in real life, so having him do it was especially appropriate. The movie poked fun at how many sponsors shows had, and how the show was required to plug them. Fred and Ginger tried to “naturally” converse while moving from one sponsor to the next- a mattress company, a coffee, a cleaner, a hair salon, a bird food, and a newspaper! I laughed out loud. It also startlingly made me see how similar it is to social media stars today! It sounded just like a podcast or youtube channel. 

Fred Allen. The guy is seriously funny, and a lot of his droll cynical humor could translate pretty well today. He was on The Big Show often and always made me laugh. Finding his original radio shows can sadly be difficult, though. 

The old guy and his wife. They were both cute and funny. Victor Moore plays overwhelmed and confused people so well. His wife actually played Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, so I loved her too. 

The premise and the vignette structure. The idea for the film was cute and amusing. Anthology films are pretty rare, so it’s always interesting to see how they're done and how it comes off. 

It was nice to get to see Marilyn Monroe, however briefly, playing a character who wasn’t the ditzy type. She played a beauty queen, but she was no dummy. 

The whole movie was just light breezy fun. 

The Bad: 

Some vignettes were stronger than others, as you would expect in a film like this. Even though I adore Eve Arden and Paul Douglas, I thought their section was one of the weaker ones. (Through no fault of their own; it was the material.)  

The reminder of the intense social shaming that could come from being an unwed mother. In the final story, Eddie Bracken is leaving to join the army, and he finds out on the train that his marriage isn’t legal. His “wife” has just told him she is pregnant, and this puts him in such a terror about the kid being considered a “bastard” (a word they couldn’t even say in the movie), that he goes AWOL to find a justice of the peace to marry them, and have his wife travel a long way to meet him. When the justice of the peace says they need a “medical check”, his wife has a panic attack and refuses to go. The thought of going to the doctor as an unmarried pregnant woman is so horrific, she won’t do it. Thankfully she finds out that the medical check is only a finger prick blood test, so she calms down and goes. It was kind of sad to watch. I know it was supposed to be more comedic, but I mostly just felt bad that the situation caused such distress for them.