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itsthenovelteafactor · 5 years ago

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Vanya and the Phantom

I asked and y’all answered (special thanks to @schizoidwire and @the-aro-ace-arrow-ace and all the people who responded to my earlier post for encouraging me!), so it is time for how The Phantom of the Opera song introduction can be read as a look into Vanya’s self-narrative and also foreshadows future events in a really subtle and interesting way.

I’m channeling my inner Elliot and going into full conspiracy mode. This is gonna be a long one, y’all.

Part One: In Which I Expose Myself as a Former Theater Kid

So, for those who aren’t familiar with The Phantom of the Opera, it was originally a novel by French writer Gaston Leroux back in 1909. In 1986, Andrew Lloyd Webber rewrote it as a musical. For purposes of my analysis here, I am just going to be discussing the musical because 1) the score used in the opening scene is from it and 2) I’ve never read the book. (If anyone out there has read the book and wants to weigh in, please do!)

It’s a very aesthetic show, and draws on a lot of gothic themes and imagery. The plot follows an opera house, and specifically a young chorus girl named Christine Daaé. I’m not going to explain the whole show plot in detail because wikipedia exists, but I will do a quick overview here and point out some things as they relate to things I’ll be discussing later. Also there will be a test after and it will NOT be multiple choice.

The show begins when the opera house is sold to new owners who 1) just want to make money and 2) do not respect the opera house’s resident ghost (who isn’t really a ghost, but we’ll get to that later.) When the Phantom makes his presence known, and freaks out the resident prima donna singer (who will be relevant later) Carlotta, who says she won’t sing under these conditions. It is then that Christine appears. She’s quiet and humble and has always lived in the background, but is incredibly talented. The woman who runs the chorus (also owner of the opera house’s resident braincell) suggests Christine sing the part. She does, and is amazing. Everyone is blown away, and she’s catapulted into instant fame and success.

We later learn that Christine has been studying under the Phantom, who appears to her in mirrors. She calls him the Angel of Music, and thinks that he was sent to teach her by her recently deceased father. He isn’t. He’s actually pretty malicious, and is obsessed with Christine, wants to control her voice, and doesn’t like her dating anyone. Which is a bit awkward when her childhood friend shows up and promptly falls in love with her.

Anyways, Carlotta is jealous of the attention Christine has been getting and threatens to leave prompting the new owners to cut Christine from the program. The Phantom doesn’t like it at all, sends a bunch of letters, things escalate, people are murdered, and the whole first act ends with the chandelier falling from the ceiling and crashing onto the stage (which is done with really cool effects, oftentimes beginning the show hanging over the audience. It’s a BIG MOMENT and one of the most iconic ones from the show. This will also be relevant later.)

Act two takes place a few months later, wherein no one has seen the Phantom. Shock of all shocks, though, he’s not dead. He’s been writing an opera and he wants Christine to star in it. More stuff happens, you learn the backstory of the Phantom (which is pretty sad, ngl, but in no way makes him less of a creep) and the story ends with the Phantom kidnapping Christine and giving her an ultimatum: stay with him forever, or he kills Raoul (aka childhood friend/romantic interest guy). She agrees to stay with him and he’s so moved by her compassion that he lets them both go and disappears forever.

Part Two: Casting the Characters

That’s interesting, Rosie (note sarcasm) but you said this was about The Umbrella Academy? I did, in fact. So, we meet Vanya when she’s playing a medley of songs from The Phantom of the Opera. Since it’s primarily the melodies and not one of the orchestral pieces from her performance later (I don’t think), we can assume she’s just playing it for herself (which is nice! good on you, Vanya).

Maybe she’s never seen the play and just likes the score, but for purposes here, let’s assume she’s familiar with it.

You can tell a lot about a person by the stories they connect with (for example, I like TUA because I like fun sibling dynamics, found family, music, and being sad). And I think that it makes sense that The Phantom of the Opera would be a story that resonates with Vanya. The overlooked chorus girl finds power in music, and, after years in the background, is finally given a chance to show how special she is.

So, yeah. I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility that Vanya sees herself as Christine. There are some discrepancies, sure, but this is Vanya’s self-narrative, which we learn pretty much immediately is unreliable. (Love her, but it’s true.) And if Vanya is Christine, then we can try and tap into her perspective to look at some other characters.

Anyways remember Carlotta (the prima donna opera singer who always got the spotlight and tried to destroy everything good that happened to Christine because she felt threatened that someone might be as good/better than her whose entire personality and role in the story I just summarized, rendering my plot recap useless)? Carlotta is how Vanya views Allison. (Kind of all her siblings, but her relationship with Allison is the most important here.)

Think about the scene in the cabin?

“You couldn’t risk me threatening your place in the house! You couldn’t handle the fact that Dad might find me special!” - Vanya, having a mental breakdown.

This always struck me as an interesting accusation to throw, since prior to this moment, I don’t think there was any indication that Allison had ever felt threatened by Vanya. She excluded her, sure, and wasn’t super friendly at times, but the idea that Allison has been pulling strings to keep Vanya out of her spotlight is new. But that is exactly the role Carlotta plays in Phantom.

Fun fact! At one point in the musical, the Phantom enchants Carlotta so that she loses her voice right before coming on stage.

Part Three: The Phantom of the Opera is there

So based on everything I’ve said so far, the most straightforward reading is then, that Leonard Peabody/Harold Jenkins (who for purposes here I’ll call Leonard) is the stand in for the Phantom, which works... really well. Both in helping to understand Vanya and also because it foreshadows the twist of season one in a really cool way.

So, the Phantom appears to Christine first not as an enemy, but as a friend and teacher, who encourages her to be more confident in her abilities. He trains her to develop her singing ability. While the teacher-student dynamic is actually inverted initially with Vanya and Leonard, from the get go, he is showering her with compliments, encouraging her to be confident in her abilities, and, at least on the surface, supporting her in a way she hasn’t been supported before (he’s a trash human but an expert manipulator).

But, in the play, the Phantom is also very possessive over Christine and her power (er, I mean voice). He also is perfectly willing to kill and/or hurt people who he views as standing in the way of Christine and her success (see the aforementioned Carlotta incident). Which is exactly what Leonard does to Vanya. He kills the first chair violinist to help her get it, and orchestrates a whole master plan to get her to reveal her powers on his terms.

Even the part where he starts “training” her to use her powers kind of resembles the second act of the play. The Phantom wrote a play for Christine and she’s going to star in it, whether she wants to or not.

(One could even make the argument of the parallels between Christine believing the Phantom was sent by her father to teach her and Leonard showing up because of his revenge scheme against Vanya’s father, but I honestly don’t have much support for that.)

Part Three: Two Conflicting Narratives

So, as you might’ve noticed, I sort of have two different threads of analysis going on right now. 1) The Phantom of the Opera parallel is part of Vanya’s self-narrative and in it she mischaracterizes Allison, making her more suspicious of her motivations and 2) Leonard Peabody is clearly the Phantom and doesn’t bother being subtle about it. I hope that I’ve been convincing (or at least intriguing) for you to get to this point, because here is where they come together.

Vanya has this parallel going, but she doesn’t see Leonard as the Phantom. In the beginning at least, he’s her Raoul. If I had to guess, I’d say Reginald Hargreeves is the Phantom in Vanya’s self-narrative (says he’ll train her but wants to manipulate her and keep her locked away for himself, strict teacher who doesn’t really care about her well being, wearing a mask to appear more normal/human... she wouldn’t exactly be wrong). Leonard, on the other hand, is Vanya’s supporter. He validates her, and believes in her, and taker her side when Carlotta and the opera house owners (er, the rest of the Hargreeves children) gang up on her and conspire to keep her out.

This is all building to, of course, the final confrontation. The Phantom says Christine has to pick one or the other. When Allison comes to talk to Vanya, Vanya feels as if she’s been given an ultimatum and lashes out.

And that’s where everything (including this parallel) starts to crumble.

(I honestly don’t know a lot about the other characters and how they fit in. I suppose we could have Five = Raoul if we ignore romance plot and focus on the childhood friend that hasn’t been seen in a while angle? And maybe also Pogo = Madame Giry. Vanya doesn’t really have any friends to be Meg.)

Part Four: It’s All About the Moon

So that is kind of the gist of The Phantom of the Opera as a window into Vanya’s self-narrative theory, but there are a couple of other loosely related ideas I thought I might as well bring up since this thing is already ridiculously long.

Remember how I mentioned the chandelier is like, THE scene from The Phantom of the Opera back in part one, and said it’d be relevant later? Bringing that back now, because I’m going to pull a Luther and connect everything to the moon.

So, to get the obvious out of the way, the moon exploding and the chandelier coming crashing to the stage are similar because something falls, breaks into a bunch of pieces, destroys a bunch of stuff, and creates a powerful and memorable image to close off before an act/season break (the next installment of which begins with a time jump).

Additionally, it’s worth mentioning that The Phantom of the Opera is told out of order. The opening scene shows a grown up Raoul at an auction for the items left behind after the opera house closes, and it switches to the past as the remains of the chandelier rise upwards to the ceiling, Phantom’s theme swelling (it’s a really cool moment, tbh). Following the prologue of The Umbrella Academy, we switch to the present with two images: Vanya alone on the stage, and then Luther alone on the moon. Which has a kind of symmetry that might mean nothing, but is still kind of cool.

(Also the item that Raoul buys from the auction is a music box with a monkey crashing symbols on top of it. Which might mean nothing.)

Part Five: How is she STILL talking about this? (AKA Conclusion)

To be honest, this is more a very tangled “things I noticed and thought were interesting” discussion than a formal essay with any clear thesis. While there is a chance that this was all coincidental and I’ve gone full Pepe Sylvia, the music selection in The Umbrella Academy is one of the things that they seem to be really deliberate about.

I would love to chat with anyone about this theory, so feel free to reach out in the notes or message me! My inbox is always open. Much love, and thank you for reading, if you got this far! ❤️

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lastsonlost · 5 years ago

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All this over the Japanese liking a game they don't like...

Ghost of Tsushima opens with a grand wide shot of samurai, adorned with impressively detailed suits of armor, sitting atop their horses. There we find Jin, the protagonist, ruminating on how he will die for his country. As he traverses Tsushima, our hero fights back the invading Mongolian army to protect his people, and wrestles with the tenets of the Bushido code. Standoffs take advantage of perspective and a wide field of view to frame both the samurai and his opponent in something that, more often than not, feels truly cinematic. The artists behind the game have an equally impeccable reference point for the visuals: the works of legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa

“We really wanted to pay respect to the fact that this game is so totally inspired by the work of this master,” director Nate Fox said in a recent interview with IndieWire. At Entertainment Weekly, Fox explained how his team at Sucker Punch Productions suggested that the influence ran broadly, including the playable black-and-white “Kurosawa Mode” and even in picking a title. More specifically, he noted that Seven Samurai, one of Kurosawa’s most well-known works, defined Fox’s “concept of what a samurai is.” All of this work went toward the hope that players would “experience the game in a way as close to the source material as possible.”

But in embracing “Kurosawa” as an eponymous style for samurai adventures, the creatives behind Ghost of Tsushima enter into an arena of identity and cultural understanding that they never grapple with. The conversation surrounding samurai did not begin or end with Kurosawa’s films, as Japan’s current political forces continue to reinterpret history for their own benefit.

Kurosawa earned a reputation for samurai films as he worked steadily from 1943 to 1993. Opinions of the director in Japan are largely mixed; criticism ranges from the discussion of his family background coming from generations of samurai to accusations of pandering to Western audiences. Whether intentional or not, Kurosawa became the face of Japanese film in the critical circles of the 1950s. But he wasn’t just a samurai stylist: Many of the director’s films frame themselves around a central conflict of personal ideology in the face of violence that often goes without answer — and not always through the lives of samurai. In works like Drunken Angel, The Quiet Duel, or his 1944 propaganda film The Most Beautiful, Kurosawa tackles the interpersonal struggles of characters dealing with sickness, alcoholism, and other challenges.

His films endure today, and not just through critical preservation; since breaking through to the West, his visual ideas and themes have become fodder for reinterpretation. You can see this keenly in Western cinema through films like The Magnificent Seven, whose narrative was largely inspired by Seven Samurai. Or even A Fistful of Dollars, a Western epic that cleaved so closely to Kurosawa’s Yojimbo that director Sergio Leone ended up in a lawsuit with Toho Productions over rights issues. George Lucas turned to Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress in preparation for Star Wars; he’d eventually repay Kurosawa by helping to produce his surreal drama Dreams.

Ghost of Tsushima is part of that lineage, packing in action and drama to echo Kurosawa’s legacy. “We will face death and defend our home,” Shimura, the Lord of Tsushima, says within the first few minutes of the game. “Tradition. Courage. Honor. These are what make us.” He rallies his men with this reminder of what comprises the belief of the samurai: They will die for their country, they will die for their people, but doing so will bring them honor. And honor, tradition, and courage, above all else, are what make the samurai.

Except that wasn’t always the belief, it wasn’t what Kurosawa bought whole cloth, and none of the message can be untangled from how center- and alt-right politicians in modern Japan talk about “the code” today.

The “modern” Bushido code — or rather, the interpretation of the Bushido code coined in the 1900s by Inazō Nitobe — was utilized in, and thus deeply ingrained into, Japanese military culture. An easy example of how the code influenced Imperial Japan’s military would be the kamikaze pilots, officially known as the Tokubetsu Kōgekitai. While these extremes (loyalty and honor until death, or capture) aren’t as present in the myth of the samurai that has ingrained itself into modern ultranationalist circles, they manifest in different yet still insidious ways.

In 2019, to celebrate the ushering in of the Reiwa Era, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party commissioned Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano to depict Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as a samurai. Though described as being center-right, various members of the LDP have engaged in or have been in full support of historical revisionism, including the editing of textbooks to either soften or completely omit the language surrounding war crimes committed by Imperial Japan. Abe himself has been linked to supporting xenophobic curriculums, with his wife donating $9,000 to set up an ultranationalist school that pushed anti-Korean and anti-Chinese rhetoric. The prime minister is also a member of Japan’s ultraconservative Nippon Kaigi, which a U.S. congressional report on Japan-U.S. relations cited as one of several organizations that believe that “Japan should be applauded for liberating much of East Asia from Western colonial powers, that the 1946-1948 Tokyo War Crimes tribunals were illegitimate, and that the killings by Imperial Japanese troops during the 1937 ‘Nanjing massacre’ were exaggerated or fabricated.” The Nippon Kaigi, like Abe, have also pushed for the revision of Japan’s constitution — specifically, Article 9 — to allow Japan to reinstate its standing military.

This has been a major goal for Abe as his time as prime minister comes to a definite close in 2021. And from 2013 onward, the politician has made yearly trips to the Yasukuni shrine to honor the memory of war criminals, a status of which his own grandfather was accused, that died with the ethos of the modern Bushido code. Abe’s exoneration of these ideals has continued to spark reactionary nationalist sentiment, as illustrated with the Nippon Kaigi and their ultranationalist ideology. These traditionalist values have encouraged xenophobic sentiment in Japan, which was seen in the 2020 Tokyo elections with 178,784 votes going to Makoto Sakurai, leader of the Japan First Party, another ultranationalist group. Sakurai has participated in numerous hate speech demonstrations in Tokyo, often targeting Korean diaspora groups.

The preservation of the Bushido code that was highly popularized and utilized by Imperial Japan lives on through promotion by history revisionists, who elevate samurai to a status similar to that of the chivalric knight seen in Western media. They are portrayed as an honor-bound and noble group of people that cared deeply for the peasantry, when that was often not the case.

The samurai as a concept, versus who the samurai actually were, has become so deeply intertwined with Japanese imperialist beliefs that it has become difficult to separate the two. This is where cultural and historical understanding are important when approaching the mythology of the samurai as replicated in the West. Kurosawa’s later body of work — like the color-saturated Ran, which was a Japanese adaptation of King Lear, and Kagemusha, the story of a lower-class criminal impersonating a feudal lord — deeply criticized the samurai and the class system they enforced. While some films were inspired by Western plays, specifically Shakespeare, these works were critical of the samurai and their role in the Sengoku Period. They dismantled the notion of samurai by showing that they were a group of people capable of the same failings as the lower class, and were not bound to arbitrary notions of honor and chivalry.

Unlike Kurosawa’s blockbusters, his late-career critical message didn’t cross over with as much ease. In Western films like 2003’s The Last Samurai, the audience is presented with the picture of a venerable and noble samurai lord who cares only for his people and wants to preserve traditionalist values and ways of living. The portrait was, again, a highly romanticized and incorrect image of who these people were in feudal Japanese society. Other such works inspired by Kurosawa’s samurai in modern pop culture include Adult Swim’s animated production Samurai Jack and reinterpretations of his work like Seven Samurai 20XX developed by Dimps and Polygon Magic, which had also received the Kurosawa Estate’s blessing but resulted in a massive failure. The narratives of the lone ronin and the sharpshooter in American Westerns, for example, almost run in parallel.

Then there’s Ghost of Tsushima. Kurosawa’s work is littered with close-ups focused on capturing the emotionality of every individual actor’s performance, and panoramic shots showcasing sprawling environments or small feudal villages. Fox and his team recreate that. But after playing through the story of Jin, Ghost of Tsushima is as much of an homage to an Akira Kurosawa film as any general black-and-white film could be. The Kurosawa Mode in the game doesn’t necessarily reflect the director’s signatures, as the narrative hook and tropes found in Kurosawa’s work — and through much of the samurai film genre — are equally as important as the framing of specific shots.

“I don’t think a lot of white Western academics have the context to talk about Japanese national identity,” Tori Huynh, a Vietnamese woman and art director in Los Angeles, said about the Western discussion of Kurosawa’s aesthetic. “Their context for Japanese nationalism will be very different from Japanese and other Asian people. My experience with Orientalism in film itself is, that there is a really weird fascination with Japanese suffering and guilt, which is focused on in academic circles … I don’t think there is anything wrong with referencing his aesthetic. But that’s a very different conversation when referencing his ideology.”

Ghost of Tsushima features beautifully framed shots before duels that illustrate the tension between Jin and whomever he’s about to face off against, usually in areas populated by floating lanterns or vibrant and colorful flowers. The shots clearly draw inspiration from Kurosawa films, but these moments are usually preceded by a misunderstanding on Jin’s part — stumbling into a situation he’d otherwise have no business participating in if it weren’t for laid-out side quests to get mythical sword techniques or armor. Issues like this undermine the visual flair; the duels are repeated over and over in tedium as more of a set-piece than something that should have a component of storytelling and add tension to the narrative.

Fox and Sucker Punch’s game lacks a script that can see the samurai as Japanese society’s violent landlords. Instead of examining the samurai’s role, Ghost of Tsushima lionizes their existence as the true protectors of feudal Japan. Jin must protect and reclaim Tsushima from the foreign invaders. He must defend the peasantry from errant bandits taking advantage of the turmoil currently engulfing the island. Even if that means that the samurai in question must discard his sense of honor, or moral righteousness, to stoop to the level of the invading forces he must defeat.

Jin’s honor and the cost of the lives he must protect are in constant battle, until this struggle no longer becomes important to the story, and his tale whittles down to an inevitable and morally murky end. To what lengths will he go to preserve his own honor, as well as that of those around him? Ghost of Tsushima asks these questions without a truly introspective look at what that entails in relation to the very concept of the samurai and their Bushido code. This manifests in flashbacks to Jin’s uncle, Shimura, reprimanding him for taking the coward’s path when doing his first assassination outside of forced stealth segments. Or in story beats where the Khan of the opposing Mongol force informs Shimura that Jin has been stabbing enemies in the back. Even if you could avoid participating in these systems, the narrative is fixated on Jin’s struggle with maintaining his honor while ultimately trying to serve his people.

I do not believe Ghost of Tsushima was designed to empower a nationalist fantasy. At a glance, and through my time playing the game, however, it feels like it was made by outsiders looking into an otherwise complex culture through the flattening lens of an old black-and-white film. The gameplay is slick and the hero moments are grand, but the game lacks the nuance and understanding of what it ultimately tries to reference. As it stands, being a cool pseudo-historical drama is, indeed, what Ghost of Tsushima’s creators seemingly aimed to accomplish. In an interview with Famitsu, Chris Zimmerman of Sucker Punch said that “if Japanese players think the game is cool, or like a historical drama, then that’s a compliment.” And if there is one thing Ghost of Tsushima did succeed in, it was creating a “cool” aesthetic — encompassed by one-on-one showdowns with a lot of cinematic framing.

In an interview with The Verge, Fox said that “our game is inspired by history, but we’re not strictly historically accurate.” That’s keenly felt throughout the story and in its portrayal of the samurai. The imagery and iconography of the samurai carry a burden that Sucker Punch perhaps did not reckon with during the creation of Ghost of Tsushima. While the game doesn’t have to remain true to the events that transpired in Tsushima, the symbol of the samurai propagates a nationalist message by presenting a glossed-over retelling of that same history. Were, at any point, Ghost of Tsushima to wrestle with the internal conflict between the various class systems that existed in Japan at the time, it might have been truer to the films that it draws deep inspiration from. However, Ghost of Tsushima is what it set out to be: a “cool” period piece that doesn’t dwell on the reasonings or intricacies of the existing period pieces it references.

A game that so heavily carries itself on the laurels of one of the most prolific Japanese filmmakers should investigate and reflect on his work in the same way that the audience engages with other pieces of media like film and literature. What is the intent of the creator versus the work’s broader meaning in relation to current events, or the history of the culture that is ultimately serving as a backdrop to yet another open-world romp? And how do these things intertwine and create something that can flirt on an edge of misunderstanding? Ghost of Tsushima is a surface-level reflection of these questions and quandaries, sporting a lens through which to experience Kurosawa, but not to understand his work. It ultimately doesn’t deal with the politics of the country it uses as a backdrop. For the makers of the game, recreating Kurosawa is just black and white.

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lunawings · 4 years ago

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Minato’s Birthday PriZoom (8/21/21) commentary/report

Oh geez where to begin.

I originally intended to do two showings this time (which is one more then usual) but due to a last minute decision based on other poor decisions I ended up doing three which was the most I’ve ever done in a row! My translation of the bonus content is in a separate post.

Not only that but like... it kept putting me in the main screen up at the top too!! Like more than I’ve ever been up there! And I’m sure none of this was intentional, but I also happened to be positioned right next to a couple other people who also knew the traditional cyalume cheering stuff so that was really cool!

Heck I even made it onto the Mantan Web article apparently!!? (This is an official event photo.) Am I that recognizable even in blurry pixels? (Haha well I guess there’s the background too...)

I put a lot more concentration into my own cheering this time so I wasn’t clicking around to look at the other people in the room as much and thus I have fewer shoutouts to make.

I happened to catch a guy trying to balance TWO of the giant Shin mochikoros on his shoulders though?

And there was that guy hula-hooping to Kakeru’s entire performance!!??

And the person whose screen was just a cheering piece of celery.

The highlight was probably “Kouji’s Kitchen” though. A Kouji cosplayer who spent the entire show actively cooking.

I really admire the folks who make the actual food for these showings. I’ve been thinking I want to make pudding a la mode (probably the only KinPri food I could actually manage to make) if they do a Taiga showing next year but how would I keep it from melting during the show ahah ha... (Mashed potatoes I suppose?)

In the weeks leading up to the show I’d been wondering if we’d see any Minato cosplayers. I realized I’m not sure if I’ve actually EVER seen one at a showing (PriZoom or otherwise) as he’s not an easy character to do (what with body type and a lot of Kinpri cosplayers being female) but I think I saw at least two!

This was the first showing where I made an honest attempt to keep the soundboard on, largely because of @takadanobaba’s posts on it, but also just because it’s our STYLISH NEW ABNORMAL (...watch Idol Land PriPara). Ever since they introduced it, traditional cheering has gotten quieter and quieter with long periods of silence except for big moments like Over the Rainbow’s prism jumps. (And what is King of Prism when you’re actually able to hear it.)

So I tried it, really I did. And as I was saying, I can somewhat see the appeal. People are finding ways to use it creatively to bring out that same brand of humor that makes traditional cheering so fun. I turned it on and off during Pride the Hero and the first half of SSS Part 2. The best and worst moment I had with it came during episode 5 however, when Ace kabedon’d Miyo and Joji pulls up in the car.

D-DDDDD-D-DDDD-D-DDDDDDD-DD-DDD-DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDEEEETAAAAAAAAAA

“But Joji is my star!”

KKKKKK-KK-KKKKKKKK-KKKK-KKKKKKKKKK-KKKAAAAKKKKKKKKKKOIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

Imagine that but like too fast and too loud for your brain to actually interpret what’s going on.

So that was... that was... that. (Thinking of how it will be at Joji’s actual birthday next month is giving me chills.)

I did turn it back on briefly during Best Ten while Platonic Sword was on. And for some reason I can’t quiiiite comprehend it was a grand chorus of ORE MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Okay, okay on to the meat. This showing had the BIGGEST bonus of all. Masashi Igarashi appeared for a “talk show” at two of the showings.

One of the first things he pointed out was how, unlike traditional theater greetings, he could see all of our faces individually. And then he actually clicked through all of our video feeds and made comments!!!! (Tatsuyuki Kobayashi didn’t do that.)

Throughout the first session he actually directly acknowledged me THREE SEPARATE TIMES. The first time was when he recognized that I had S-Pulse Dream Plaza as my background. (The real life location in Shizuoka where Minato saw Kouji for the first time.) The second time was when I pasted a message into the chat about being his American fan and HE ACTUALLY READ IT! The third time was during the All Stars Playback when they put me on the screen and he thanked me in the chat again for putting up Dream Plaza.

I’m really happy I put in the effort to do a meaningful background!

All of a sudden I’m inspired to do more for each character. It was years before King of Prism existed, but I did go to Okayama once. I’m thinking I might need to sort through some old photos before Joji’s showing.

Anyway.

Masashi-san didn’t really seem to have anything planned out to say. He just kinda played off us when he could and rambled for a while about how great Minato and King of Prism is and all that. I think he’s a bit better when he has someone else to play off of. (Junta usually ends up being his straight man.) I don’t even know if he knew what he was saying half the time hahah.

The part that really stuck with me though was when he was talking about how there was such a large concentration of Minato fans here, but then he corrected himself as that’s not necessarily true since King of Prism fans cheer for everyone. So instead of camps for certain characters, he suggested we should do “club activities” as a fandom and since so many people brought vegetables to the showing we were the vegetable club.

This was followed by a rush of puns in the chat like VegetaBU (”bu” is Japanese for club).

Another official photo from Mantan web. I love it when they show the “behind the scenes”.

I didn’t realize the second session of the greeting would be starting at the beginning of the next showing, even though that is how they usually do it for theater greetings (so the voice actor doesn’t have to wait around through another movie). It’s kind of odd that they had two different sessions actually, since pretty much everyone had the opportunity to do both as the tickets didn’t come close to selling out. But more money for them either way I guess. He actually changed shirts in between hahah. (From one Minato shirt to another.)

But anyway, when he suddenly came up on the screen again I was actually in the middle of trying to change the batteries in my cyalumes ahahah. And it put me up top of the main screen AGAIN! I kinda wanted to switch my camera off so someone else could get a chance but I didn’t want to seem rude for disappearing either!!!

Eventually I did turn my camera off, giving up my space, because my cyalume blades were all DYING from having been on CONSTANTLY since the beginning of Pride the Hero and I didn’t want it to seem like I was checking my phone or something while I was changing the batteries. (One of them ended up cutting out during Best Ten anyway because in my mad scramble to change the batteries I guess I put the old ones back in haha.) That felt like the right decision since I crashed and burned pretty hard during the middle of Best Ten. (Cheering fatigue is rare for me but I was pushing 24 hours being awake at this point...) I also sure heck didn’t want to be up there during Love Graffiti BUT I didn’t do as bad as I thought. The drills I did without the video before the showing paid off! I’m so happy I’m finally learning it after all this time. Take THAT two year depression spiral.

Although this showing was lively, I have to admit it didn’t quite meet my overinflated expectations, though. I don’t think either room broke 200 people at any point during the showing. I could have sworn at least ONE showing I went to in the past did... I think the Shin/Louis one maybe... but looking through my past posts I can’t find a mention of it. ...Wait, even if that’s true I guess it doesn’t count since we only had one room back them. Mmmrhghg.

I do have pretty high hopes for the next few months though because Joji and Hiro are EXTREMELY popular characters.

So you. YES YOU! The person who somehow read this entire post and is now somewhat regretting skipping out on this one. YOU CAN DO IT! I’ll see you are the next one right? RIGHT?? OKAY!!

#king of prism #kinpri #minato takahashi

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quartings · 5 years ago

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College Adventures Special Episode IV: Interview with Brad Bird!

The director behind Iron Giant, Ratatouille, both Incredibles movies and Mission Impossible 4, plus the amazing voice actor of Edna Mode!

I was lucky enough to get to hear him talk about some of the secrets behind a lot of his films!

The Iron Giant (The coffee scene, animated by Chris Sauve):

Brad grew up with very mild-mannered parents and didn’t get to experience coffee until adulthood.

That coffee scene was written to show that Hogarth is desperate to fit in and wants to be an adult- Also to provide exposition quickly and humorously.

The voice actor didn’t actually go that fast- they edited the voicelines closer together.

Brad really wanted the fight scene of the Iron Giant vs the army to be bigger, but it would require a lot of changes- there was a submarine and bombs and everything! (Mark Andrews from Special Episode 2 was put in charge of that)

The Incredibles (Bob and Helen argument scene, animated by John Kahrs of Paperman.) and The Incredibles 2:

The first scene sent to Pixar for approval. Unfortunately, it made the executives nervous because they felt Bob was being abusive to Helen. Brad loved the writing and wanted to keep it, and realised that he only needed to make Helen stretch over Bob at the end to show an equal power dynamic. After making that one change, Pixar approved the scene.

Brad often disagreed with Pixar’s then-sentiment at the time of just making storyboards minimalist and simple. He wanted to play around with as many camera angles, minor movements, and expressions as he could. It really impressed Steve Jobs!

IMPORTANT: Storyboards are more important to refine, because it’s cheaper to fix a mistake in storyboarding than it is to fix a mistake in animation!!

Origins of Edna Mode! Brad noticed on tour that every country has their own “Edna”- aka, a snooty and perfectionist fashion designer. The core idea was a small person with a massive influence and designer genius, big enough to stand out against the huge supers she worked with. As such, countries with a BIG designer voice (and historically- erm- “imposing” personalities) Germany and Japan were chosen, and Edna was made German+Japanese as a result.

Brad did script readings for Bob, Syndrome, and Edna. His performance and availability were what compelled Pixar to keep him for Edna.

In both films, Brad wanted to make sure the heroes’ weren’t perfect. They can miss and trip, and if they do it too much, they can get pretty hurt. Making characters fallible and mortal makes the audience more excited and invested. (Eg Bob getting cut in his first fight with the Omnidroid)

“How the characters look in Incredibles 2 is how we wanted them to look back in Incredibles 1, we’re very thankful to technology for that”

Ratatouille (Anton Ego’s flashback):

Next time you watch it, pay attention to how many shots focus on the Ratatouille itself to showcase its importance.

The dish is a big thing in France, but not in the USA- How do we make Americans understand how good it can be? They designed it in a shape that looks more universally delicious, more than your average stew.

In the original Gusteau-lives draft, the life-changing flashback was for Gusteau himself, to snap him out of his depression. It was about to be scrapped when it was changed to the dead-Gusteau version, but animator Correia Yoccu (? Sorry, I don’t know if that’s spelled right) reminded Brad to give that scene to Anton instead.

Brad is the one who suggested Ghost Gusteau. Pixar execs thought he went nuts when he presented that idea.

They wanted to make Anton Ego’s disbelief at Remy’s identity feel legit and real to reconcile how crazy the movie premise was.

Brad is one of the few directors whose micromanaging actually works (moving things around by 1 frame) Most of them time he wants his actors and animators to give their own takes- he already writes and directs, he doesn’t want any more bias because he already has a full view of the characters in his mind.

The philosophy behind the world of Ratatouille: Cooks are givers, rats are takers. That’s why Remy feels so isolated at the start.

Mission Impossible:

Removing the frame before impact in action scenes helps because stuntmen brace themselves and pull punches in that moment.

Overall:

“No two stories come into being the same way” Sometimes endings are written first, sometimes beginnings, and sometimes the title is the spark of inspiration! You discover the theme of the story on your own the more you write subconsciously.

Once you realise the theme, go back into your first draft and make it a bit clearer!

“Unlike in 3D, you can’t pretend to be better than you are in 2D animation” Work on being able to DRAW, even if you’re going into 3D. Especially perspective drawing and anatomy.

#brad bird #the incredibles #the incredibles 2 #the iron giant #ratatouille #pixar #mission impossible ghost protocol #college adventures #q speaks #my writings #advice

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divineknowing2021 · 4 years ago

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viewing guide

At its core, divine knowing is an exhibition about knowledge, power, and agency. It’s become a more common understanding that governments, institutions, and algorithms will manipulate the public with what information they frame as fact, fiction, or worthy of attention. Though I am early in researching this topic, I've only come across a minimal amount of mainstream discourse on how the initial threat limiting our scope of knowledge is a refusal to listen to ourselves.

In a world faced with so many threats - humans being violent toward each other, toward animals, toward the earth - it can be a bit unsettling to release the reins and allow ourselves to bear witness for a moment, as we slowly develop a deeper awareness of surrounding phenomena and happenings.

divine knowing includes works by formally trained and self-taught artists. A majority of the artists are bisexual, non-binary, or transgender. Regardless of degree-status, gender, or sexuality, these artists have tapped into the autonomous well of self-knowing. Their artworks speak to tactics for opening up to a more perceptive mode of being. They unravel dependencies on external sources for knowledge and what we might recognize, connect with, or achieve once we do.

The installation Femme Digitale by Sierra Bagish originates from a series she began in 2017 by converting photographs of women that were taken and distributed online without the subject’s consent into paintings. Her practice at the time was concerned with female abjection. Sourcing images found via simple keywords and phrases (e.g., passed out, passed out drunk) she swathes a mass-circulated canon of internet detritus that articulates and produces aggression towards women. With her paintings, she circumvents the images’ original framing mechanisms and subverts these proliferated images through a sincere and personal lens.

These paintings divulge the blurred space between idolatry and denigration these online photos occupy, asking whose desires these images fulfill and what their propagation reveals about the culture producing them. While Bagish's work contends with political motivations, she also remains keenly observant of form and the varying utilities of different media.

“I use the expressive potential of paint as a vehicle to intervene and challenge ideas about photography as a harbinger of the real and everyday.”

Chariot Birthday Wish is an artist and angel living in Brooklyn. They have seen The Matrix 28 times in 2 years and love horses. The tarot series included in divine knowing is their most intuitive project, something they revisit when unsure of what to work on next. The Major Arcana are composed of digital collages made from sourced images, the Minor Arcana are represented by short, poetic, interpretative texts about the cards. The series is played on shuffle, creating a unique reading for each viewer. This is a work in progress that will eventually finalize as a completed deck of digital collages available for purchase.

Chariot's work emerges from a constant consideration of apocalypse and connection. They reference technology in tandem with nature and a desire for unity. Underneath their work's surface conversation on beauty, care, and relationship exists an agenda to subtly evoke a conspiratorial anti-state mindset. Through a collective imagining of how good things could be and how good we want them to be, we might be able to reckon with how bad things are in contrast.

“I think about texting my friends from the middle of the woods...

Humans are a part of nature and we created these things. There's this Bjork quote where she says that "You can use pro tools and still be pagan." I'm really into the idea of using technology as a tool for divination and holy connection with nature. I imagine a scene; being in moss, it's absolute bliss, and then the connection of texting, sharing an image of moss with a friend, sharing that moment through cellular towers.”

The album "adding up" by thanks for coming is composed of songs Rachel Brown wrote during what they believe to be the most challenging year of their life. Rachel now looks back on this time in appreciation, recognizing they grew in ways they had never imagined. The entire year, they were committed to following their feelings to wherever it may lead.

“If I hadn't been open to following the almost indiscernible signs I was being sent, then I would have missed out on some of the most important moments in my life.”

Kimberly Consroe holds a Masters in Anthropology along with degrees in Archaeology, Literature, and History. She is currently a Research Analyst at the US Department of Commerce. Her artwork is a passionate escape from a hectic professional life and touches on themes of feminism and nature.

Her works begin as general ideas; their narrative complexity growing with the amount of time she invests in making each one. Her decoupage process starts with cutting hundreds, if not thousands, pieces of paper. The accumulation of clippings sourced from vintage and current-day magazines overlap to tell a story. In Domestication, Kimberly borrows submissive female figures from found images of Ryan Mcguinness's work and places them in a position of power.

“I believe intuition is associated with emotion and experience. It is wisdom and fear, empathy and outrage, distrust and familiarity. It is what we know before we know it. This relates to my artwork in that, from beginning to end, there is never one complete idea concerning the outcome: it is a personal journey. It emerges from an ephemeral narrative that coalesces into a definitive story.”

Anabelle DeClement is a photographer who primarily works with film and is interested in relationships as they exist within a frame. She is drawn to the mystery of the mundane. Intuition exists in her practice as a feeling of urgency and the decision to act on it --- a drive often used to describe street photography where the camera catches unexpected moments in an urban environment. Anabelle tends to photograph individuals with whom she has established personal relationships in a slow domestic setting. Her sense of urgency lies in capturing moments of peak intimacy, preserving a memory's informal beauty that otherwise may have been forgotten or overlooked.

Gla5 is a visual artist, poet, bookmaker, production designer, and educator. Play is at the center of their practice. Their process is an experimental one embracing impulse and adventure. Their compositions are informed by relationships among bodies of varying shapes, materials, and densities. Interests that come up in their work include a discernment between symbols and non-symbols, dream states, the portrayal of energy in action, and a fixation on forms such as cups, tables, and spoons.

“I generally think of my work as depicting a layer of life that exists underneath what we see in our everyday lives.”

Gladys Harlow is a sound-based performance artist, comedian, and activist who experiments with found objects, contact mics, textures, range, analog formats, present moments, and emotions. Through raw, avant-garbage performance art, they aim to breakdown societal barriers, abolish oppressive systems, and empower communities. Gladys was born in Queens, NY, raised in Miami, FL and has deep roots in Venezuela. Currently haunting in Philadelphia, PA, Gladys is a founding member of Sound Museum Collective. SMC holds space for reconstructing our relationships to sounds by creating a platform for women, nonbinary, and trans sound artists and engineers.

Street Rat is a visceral exploration of the mysteries of life. Attempting to bring heavy concepts to your reality, it is the eye on the ground that sees and translates all intersecting issues as they merge, explode, dissolve, and implode. Street Rat is Gladys Harlow's way of comprehending, coping, feeling, taking action, disrupting the status quo, and rebuilding our path.

All Power To The People originated as a recorded performance intended to demystify sound by revealing the tools, wires, and movements used to create it. All Power To The People evolved into an installation conceived specifically for this exhibition. The installation includes a theremin and oscillator built by Gladys, a tarot deck they made by hand, and books from the artist's personal collection, amongst other elements. Gladys has created a structure of comfort and exploration. They welcome all visitors of divine knowing to play with the instrument, flip freely through the books, and pull a tarot card to take home.

Phoebe Hart is an experimental animator and filmmaker. A majority of her work is centered around mental illness and the line between dreams and reality. Merry Go Round is a sculptural zoetrope that changes in shape and color as it spins. Its form is inspired by nature and its color by the circus. The video’s sound was produced by Hayden Waggener. It consists of reverbing chimes which are in rhythm with the stop animation’s movement; both oscillate seamlessly between serene and anxious states.

“I often don't plan the sculptures or objects I am fabricating, there is a vague image in my mind, and my hands take care of the rest. I find that sometimes overthinking is what can get me and other artists stuck. If I just abandon my judgments and ego, I can really let go and create work that feels like it came inherently from me.”

Powerviolets is the solo project of multi-instrumentalist Violet Hetson who is currently based in New York. After experiencing several false starts while bouncing coast to coast, recording and performing with several lineups, Hetson has finally released her debut album. ~No Boys~ namesake is a sarcastic sign she hung on her suburban CT teenage bedroom door. Violet Hetson grew up primarily listening to punk and hardcore. She parses elements of these genres with influences from bands such as X and Suburban Lawns. ~No Boys~ takes a softer, melodic approach to Hetson's punk roots. Powerviolets' music is linear, unconventional, dark, and airy with a sense of humor.

Mary Hunt is a fiber artist specializing in chain stitch embroidery. This traditional form of embroidery uses vintage machinery and thick thread to create fibrous art and embellishments. They use an approach called "thread painting," which requires each stitch to be hand guided by the turn of a knob underneath the table while the speed of movement is controlled by a foot pedal. Chainstitch works can take anywhere from 20 minutes to 200 hours, encouraging a slow and thoughtful process. Mary uses a Cornely A machine, made in Paris more than 100 years ago.

“I think we are sent messages and guidance constantly. Our intuition is simply our ability to clear the path for those messages. The largest obstacles on my artistic path are usually self-imposed negative thoughts. I simply do things to take care of my spiritual well-being, first and foremost, and the rest follows. If I can trust the universe, trust the process, then I am much more likely to listen to the messages sent my way.”

Jes the Jem is a multi-media artist working with acrylic, watercolor, mold clay, and whatever else she can get her hands on. She uses vivid color to bring joy into the lives of those who view her art. Jes the Jem has experienced a great deal of pain in her life. Through that unique displeasure, she has been gifted a nuanced perspective. She aims to energize the present while paying homage to the past events that shape us. In her art, her life, and her interpersonal relationships, Jes the Jem appreciates the gift of all of life's experiences.

“The pursuit of happiness and understanding is instinct.”

Pamela Kivi pieces together visual scraps she has saved over the years, choosing to fuse them at whatever present moment she sees fit. Her work reflects on creative mania, fleeting emotions, and memories. Pamela's collages are a compilation of unexpected elements that include: old notebooks, cut-outs, text messages or Facebook message conversations, nostalgic cellphone photos, and visual materials she has chosen to hold onto. She prints out, cuts up, scans, edits, repeats. Pamela's artistic practice is deeply personal. It is a submittal to the process of dusting things off until a reflection can be seen, all enacted without an attachment to the end result.

“I rely on intuition and whatever state of mind I am in to whisk me away. In life, I often confuse intuition with anxiety- when it comes to creative work, I can decipher the two.”

Through sobriety, Kendall Kolenik's focus has shifted toward self-discovery and shedding old adaptive patterns, a process that led her to a passion for helping others heal themselves too. In autumn, she will begin her Masters in Social Work at Columbia University.

“I love how when I'm painting my self-doubt becomes so apparent. Painting shows me exactly where my doubt lies, which guides me towards overriding it. When I paint something and lean into doubt, I don't like what comes out. When I take note of the resistance and go with my gut more freely, I love it. This reminds me of my yoga practice. What you practice on the mat is a metaphor for how you show up in life. By breathing through the uncomfortable poses on the mat, you learn to breathe through challenging life moments.

I think we all grow up learning to numb and edit ourselves. We are taught not to trust our feelings; we are told to look outside ourselves for answers when we already have a perfectly good compass within. Painting is an archway back to that for me - rediscovering self-reliance and faith in my first instinct. When I'm creating these rainbow squares, sometimes I move so fast it's like something else is carrying me. I sort of leave myself and enter a trance. Like how you don't have to tell the heart to beat or the lungs to breathe - thinking goes away and I can get so close to my knowing that I become it. I love how art allows me to access my love for ambiguity, interpretation, and an interpretation that feels closer to Truth. I find no greater purpose than guiding people back to safety and reconnecting them with themselves. The most important thing to ever happen in my life was when I stopped trying to deny my reality - listening to your intuition can be like a freefall - no one but you can ever know or tell you - it is a deep trust without any outside proof.”

Lucille Loffredo is a music school dropout, Jewish trans lesbian, and veterinary assistant doing her best to make sure each day is better than the last. Lucille tries to find the music rather than make it. She lets it tell her what it wants to do and what it wants to be. The Wandering EP was in part written as a way to come out to herself. She asks all listeners to please be gentle.

“Change will come, and it will be good. You are who you think you are, no matter how far it seems.”

Whitney Lorenze generally works without reference, making thick, graphic pictures with precise forms conceived almost entirely from her imagination. Images like a slowly rolling car crackling out of a driveway, afternoon sun rays shining through a cloud of humidity, or headlights throwing a lined shadow across a black bedroom inspire her.

“As it concerns my own practice and the creation of artworks generally, I would define intuition as the ability to succumb to some primal creative impulse. Of course, this implies also the ability to resist the temptations of producing a calculated or contrived output.”

Ellie Mesa began teaching herself to paint at the age of 15, exploring landscapes and portraiture. Her work has evolved into a style of painting influenced by surrealism where teddy bears will morph into demons and vice versa. Her work speaks to cuteness, the grotesque, and mystical beings. The painting "Kali" is an homage to the Hindu goddess of creation, destruction, life and death. This was Ellie's first painting after becoming sober and is an expression of the aforementioned forces in her own life. Through meditations on Kali, Elli has been able to find beauty in the cycle of love and loss.

“To me, intuition means doing the thing that feels right whether or not it's what you want it to be. When I'm painting or making a sculpture, I give myself the freedom to follow what feels right, even if that means starting over or changing it completely. I allow the piece to present itself to me instead of forcing something that doesn't want to be.”

Mari Ogihara is a sculptor exploring duality, resilience, beauty, and serenity as experienced through the female gaze. Her work is informed by the duality of womanhood and the contradictions of femininity. In particular, the multitude of roles we inhabit as friend, lover, sister, and mother and their complex associations to the feminine perspective.

“Intuition is an innate, immediate reaction to an experience. While making art, I try to balance intuition, logic, and craftsmanship.”

All Of Me Is War by Ames Valaitis addresses the subconscious rifts society initiates between women, estranging them from each other and themselves.

“It is an unspoken, quick, and quiet battle within me as the feeling of intuition purely, and when I am making a drawing. I am immediately drawn to poses and subject matter that reflect the emotion inside myself, whether it is loud or under the surface. If a line or figure doesn't move me, after working on it for a few minutes, I get rid of it. If something looks right to me immediately, I keep it; nurture it. I try to let go of my vision, let my instinct take hold. I mirror this in my life as I get older, choosing who and what to put my energy into. The feeling is rarely wrong; I'd say we all know inherently when it is time to continue or tap out.”

Chardel Williams is a self-taught artist currently living in Bridgeport. Her biggest inspiration is her birthplace of Jamaica. Chardel views painting as a method for blocking out chaos. Her attraction to the medium springs from its coalescence of freedom, meditative qualities, and the connection it engenders. rears.

“Intuition for me is going where my art flows. I implement it in my practice by simply creating space and time to listen. There are times when what I'm painting is done in everyone else's eyes, but I just keep picking at it. Sometimes I would stop painting a piece and go months without touching it. Then, out of nowhere, be obsessed with finishing. I used to get frustrated with that process, but now I go with it. I stopped calling it a block and just flow with it. I listen because my work talks.”

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linhnguyen125 · 4 years ago

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Week 1 Reading & Video Review

Reading #1

- Text 1 - Video Art / Characteristics, Origins, History, Famous Postmodernist Video Artists

- Video art is a new type of contemporary art, commonly seen as installation.

- Video technology and digital computer can manipulate film sequence.

-2 basic varieties: Single-Channel & Installations.

- Single Channel: Video is either screened, projected, shown in single series of image.

- Installations: Environment & Assemblage or Performance art of several distinct pieces.

- 1965 Sony released the Portapak, a portable recoding device.

- Using synthesizers to produce abstract work.

- Famous Video Artist: Andy Warhol, Peter Campus, Nam June Paik, Joan Jonas, Bill Viola.

- Text 2 - Busting the Tube

- Kate Horsfield described the history of video practices, from society oppression from gender biased exploitation to political oppression.

- In the 1950, Television was starting to get notice and becoming more popular, government would take control of the media and to only cast news that praised the good deed and hide the ugly truth.

- In 1965, Sony released the Portapak, a portable recording device.

- Artist saw the Portapak as a new undiscovered medium that allows the user to capture in the moment event, that has not been tampered with by the government.

- Artists use the Portapak as a way to communicate with the society outside the restriction of the mainstream news

- In the 70′s technology became more advance with better feature to show their work and thoughts. However it come with a high price to possess it.

- Artist help with AIDS activist to prevent hysteria

- Low funds supported to artist, lead to the release of Sony Cam Recorder 8, a cheap device with powerful feature.

Reading #2

- Text - Cinephile: The Voice Over

Voice Over in Romantic Comedy Today

- Dual Focus: Seeing both of the male and female train of thoughts, opinions, and feelings towards each other. Ultimately ending up together with all knowing viewpoints

- Single Focus: Seeing only from one side, male or female. Viewer shows more emotion and feel sympathy and other emotion towards the actor. Viewer are more likely to be anxious to know the ending. Male can be seen as more romantic.

What Does God Hear?

- Malick used voice-over in a variety of unconventional ways for a number of different effects.

- “Linda’s voiceover expresses a number of different views and serves multiple functions, leading us “to re-evaluate what we see and hear…to become conscious of the narrating agency’s presentation of the diegetic world, and perhaps to become suspicious of it””.

- Voice Over can set up a different multitude of sound perceptions.

- The voice over let the viewer to be in the position of god.

- The voice over allows the viewer to empathize with the character through hearing and grasp the bigger picture through seeing.

Native American Filmmakers Reclaiming Voices

- “Myriad of invisible storyteller”

- Use multiple off screen voice over actor as “invisible storyteller”

- Rule of synchronous sound: the match between the human body and the human voice appear seamless and result in the representation of a homogeneous thinking subject whose exteriority is congruent with its interiority.

- Voice over (almost always) allows the male subject to be superior with power and knowledge

The Voice Over as an Integrating Tool of Word and Image

- Voice over as a tool or device attempt to integrate words with images in manner of poetic techniques.

- Role of voice-over in alloying words and images in Asian films are more prominent, the variety of languages in which the written word takes on both aural and visual form.

- Japanese Benshi: A Japanese performer performs live narration for a silent film.

- Chinese calligraphy is a form of art.

- The mode of poetic expression in traditional Chinese poetry.

- “If we consider cinema as a poetic form, we might then say that words and images are juxtapositions in a metonymic flow”.

- The voice-over acts as a generic tool, carrying nuances of Chinese form and methodology of expression (the poetic modes of fu-bi-xing)

- Visual technique of dissolve acts as another generic tool, helping the natural flow of images be coordinated by words

Voice Over Narrative Agency and Oral Culture

- The god-like third-person cinematic narrator that recalls the autonomous narrator in some African oral performances, the griot.

- Oral performance informs a diverse range of African films, straddling the canon of Sembène.

- Borom Sarret achieves this transgression via its voice-over’s unstable situation within the heterogeneous soundtrack.

Reading #3

- Text - Mary Ann Doane

- Photogénie: supplement an object to enhance a photographic medium.

- Walter Benjamin: “the close-up was one of the significant entrance points to the optical unconscious, making visible what in daily life went unseen."

Reading #4

- Text - Exercise in Style

- 99 ways of retelling the same story

- With each way he adds in a little more of details

- Different style of writing with each way being told according to the expression.

WEEK 1 VIDEO REVIEW

- Richard Mosse: The Impossible Image -

- Showing the beauty of what under the war image.

- Unique concept to contextualise beauty.

- Soldier looking macho and expressive with their poses and actions, when being film, some stare down at the camera or having the eyes of not being wanted to film. Being really self-conscious.

- South Africa - Mohau Modisakeng - Passage - Venice Biennale 2017 -

- A 3-pannel projection showing the history of slavery towards the people that were in South Africa

- The water represent both the flow of life and death of many who have arrived or departed in the slave trade.

- All human beings are referred as “voyager” and all voyager has a beginning and an end.

- Exploring the dark past of South Africa history. that the present time usually doesn't pay attention to or simply went unnoticed.

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robhorninginternalexile · 5 years ago

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what was google reader

July 1 was the anniversary of Google’s shutting down Google Reader, its tool for organizing RSS feeds. On Google’s scale of operations, Reader was a fringe product, but among a certain generation of 2000s era bloggers and writers, it was the public sphere, whose loss is now much nostalgized.

Reader was a means to share links to posts and articles that were worth discussing, and a means to disseminate one’s own bloggy writing without having to optimize it for social media’s algorithms or hype it incessantly for a merely theoretical audience who might have missed it.

The thriving RSS-driven social network assured people that their work would find its way to the people who had shown an interest in it. This generally encouraged (for better or worse) longer pieces of writing, often in response to other people’s posts, and a greater flexibility in subjects and arguments. There were no blue checks or euphemistic metrics (likes and favorites) foregrounded, and bad-faith engagement was typically remanded to comment sections that many bloggers took care to try to moderate.

Some people managed to make money from this mode of discourse, but it was only haphazardly organized as an economic venture. Mainly it was characterized by its opposition to mainstream media; it consisted of writers who had not yet broken into conventional journalism or established themselves in academia, or were not interested in professionalized opinion-making but wanted to participate in a conversation that hashed together mainstream media’s failures, under-discussed social concerns and political perspectives, random pieces of popular culture, and personal narratives of everyday discovery or ennui.

Even before Reader was discontinued, you could see this culture was falling apart. The pressure to professionalize became stronger, more evident in the writing, in the hedging of analysis, in the pretenses to specific forms of authority and the flows of subservience to certain locations of power. After vilifying and ridiculing bloggers, mainstream media outlets began to appropriate their style and co-opt some of the writers. The “blogosphere” started to take on the quality of a protracted audition. It was seemingly paralleling how “indie” culture became “alternative” in the 1990s.

But the main thing that destroyed blog culture was of course social media. It wasn’t a matter of an independent subculture selling out; it was more a vast expansion of the space of countenanced cultural production. Social media generalized the idea of ordinary non-media people broadcasting their thoughts and feelings and details from their lives on an all-day everyday sort of rhythm. Social media brought more people “online” — that is, into the everyday exchange of “content” as a mode of socializing. It brought scale to bear on a kind of communication that had been ad hoc, somewhat serendipitous. Everyone suddenly needed a profile and a rhythm of posting and consuming; everyone would eventually have a personalized feed.

Blogging presumed the idea of people being online, on a computer all day long, probably in an office. Social media seized on the commercial possibilities of generalizing that posture as a lifestyle, anticipating the integration of mobile technologies into people’s lives. From that position, one doesn’t “consume information” but is instead immersed in its continual flow. The product tech and media companies can then sell is not the content itself but the modulation of that flow — the route it takes and the advertising that can be festooned along its way.

This raised the stakes for bloggers who were already doing this form of writing and posting — gave them a potentially larger audience and a possible means of making a living by monetizing that audience. (They would be supplemented and then supplanted by influencers.) It also shifted the tenor of concerns in the “discourse” toward putting out attention-gathering opinions (”takes”), whose impact could be measured not through coherent comments but reflexive gestures (follows, likes, retweeets, and eventually the “ratio”).

People began to track the much expanded everyday conversation through social media, which was popular enough to begin to collapse contexts — it was not a community of people who shared interests, politics, or writing styles; it was just a mishmash of everybody you ever knew. This changed what people said and how they said it and why.

The platforms themselves were invested in organizing people’s attention to “the discourse” around compulsion rather than curiosity. This meant creating a sense of FOMO around the friends and family and glamorous-seeming strangers who personal lives were now more visible and accessible for consumption, and a sense of urgency around information and conversation in general, investing it with a sense of competition, a scoreboard (foregrounded metrics), the possibility of “winning.” Being informed didn’t matter so much as being appropriately positioned in the flow. The substance of any conversation or debate was insignificant relative to how that debate was organizing people, lining them up into factions, gathering metrics, goading their quantifiable participation.

The main tool for this reorganization was the algorithmic feed. Google Reader operated on an algorithm so simple it didn’t require the word. It was just a chronological feed of everything you chose to see. It could sometimes become hard to keep up with, but you never wondered if you were missing anything, and you also knew exactly what sort of time commitment it would require to “get to the end.” Social media reorganized media consumption so that there could be no end, only continual information triage, which it would insist on helping you perform.

Algorithmic feeds are usually described as being what people “really” want because they drive up time on platforms. This mistakenly conflates consumption and control with desire. It may be better understood as a bait and switch. Algorithmic feeds changed what people were actually consuming on platforms, but not by shifting the mix of content. People started to consume the experience of being catered to, of being nurtured (or force-fed). This is the opposite of being in a public sphere; it’s enjoying the process of seeing the public sphere transcended, subordinated to the individual self.

What people get from social media is no longer about the information itself or the quality of what the algorithms choose but the process of having recommendations made to you; you consumed your own passivity in the face of torrents of information as a form of convenience. You got to enjoy the extinguishing of your own self-directed curiosity as a kind of luxury, as though it were a psychic massage working out the kinks and knots in your executive function until it was smoothed into nothing.

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ryanmeft · 5 years ago

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My Top Performances of 2019, Part 2

Here is the second half of the list of my favorite film performances of 2019. I tried to be as objective as possible, but it’s also a result of personal preferences. As before, the order is unimportant. Part 1 is here: https://ryanmeft.tumblr.com/post/190668845597/my-top-performances-of-2019-part-1?fbclid=IwAR3_d80vj0FbIVXqWaTV1heUlIDJJmL-JB_ZksaadO_oNRztnhBMICxzTd8

Zhao Tao in Ash is Purest White

She’s got everything you could want in a rusting former industrial town: a good boyfriend who has influence in the area’s small underworld, which gives her power, love and money all at once. In a blink it is all gone, and she finds herself adrift in the world, dealing with the resentments of people with no patience for what she has gone through. Tao is the key component of this crime drama, which is more drama than crime. She does not take the world in blazing force as a crime figure in a Scorsese film might do, but quietly and slowly accepts that the days of her power are past---and unlike the men around her, tries to adapt to, rather than battle, the inevitable.

Ana De Armas in Knives Out

Knives Out is in the grand, disappearing tradition of the character actor, albeit with the parts mostly played by superstars. Yet among a roster that includes Captain America as an irresponsible playboy and Michael Shannon as a professorial-looking semi-Nazi, De Armas’s humble heroine Marta stands out. Maybe it’s because Marta is humble but not naive or entirely innocent, and De Armas manages to capture both her cunning and her honesty without turning her into a doe-eyed victim. She’s the kind of character you want to become a Nancy Drew-esque mystery hero for adults, so you can revisit her later adventures.

Joaquin Phoenix in Joker

Some hated the movie, some loved it, but one thing it seems everyone could agree on is Phoenix’s performance. He’s credited as Arthur Fleck, not as Joker, and his handling of the character couldn’t be more different than any previous portrayal. Arthur is sad and lonely, not at all an enigma---his private life is laid out for us in great detail---and Phoenix portrays him as just sort of being blown through the world, bereft of any real agency. You can debate all day whether the character deserves to be portrayed in a sympathetic way, but you can’t say Phoenix doesn’t pull it off, making us root for this maladjusted, societally-forgotten misfit almost up ‘till the end.

Sienna Miller in American Woman

In a just world, Miller, hardly a household name, would have her face up on the stage Sunday night for playing this role, a drunken, hard-partying too-young mother and grandmother whose life begins to change when her daughter disappears. I say begins to, because this is not one of those magical stories of miraculous redemption. Debra does not become a good parent to her grandchild right away, and never becomes a great one. Instead, the film follows her throughout years of her life, during which, naturally, she must go on living as she mourns. Miller embodies each stage of this perfectly, never once allowing drama tropes to disturb her unflinching portrayal of an ordinary life.

Jeff Goldblum in The Mountain

What does the word “monster” conjure for you? Whatever traits it brings to mind, they are all present in Dr. Wallace Fiennes. He’s an egotistical, self-interested, callous man who performs lobotomies on mental patients in the 1950’s American heartland, the kind of person for whom his gruesome practice is not an outmoded method to be improved on by advancement, but an art form in itself, and his patients merely the canvas. This isn’t handled like a horror movie: Goldblum is not a mad scientist cackling away in a lab, but an urbane, cultured, engaging professional---which makes him all the more frightening.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw in Fast Color

Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel were, to a large extent, a marketing department’s ideal female superheroes: always flawless, gorgeous even when kicking ass, unable to make any very serious mistakes. Ruth is very much not that. She’s living wherever she can, dealing with the effects of past addictions, running from the government, scared of her own powers. She’s not just unlike any other woman in tights (without the tights), she’s unlike any mainstream superhero ever has, can or will be. Mbatha-Raw is one of our most underrated actresses, and she portrays Ruth in a way that allows us to both sympathize with her plight and support her as she grows stronger. The movie’s not getting a sequel, because the Hollywood franchise machine isn’t ready for imperfect superheroes yet, but it is getting a series, so at least we’re getting more of Ruth in some medium.

Renee Zellweger in Judy

I won’t pretend I knew much about Judy Garland going in, and frankly I’m not sure I understand her after seeing the movie---it was, in most respects, a fairly typical music biopic. Where it broke the mode is in Zellweger’s performance. I think it’s fair to say the once-household name has been largely forgotten by Hollywood in recent years; she never had the perfect starlet looks or the ideal girl-next-door adorableness that is the main standard on which women are judged. But she had the acting chops, and here she finally gets to prove it. Her Garland is twisted and gnarled inside and out by years of sexist treatment and the resulting substance abuse, but still a loving mother to her children and a great singer---and justifiably angry at the industry that used her up and spit her out.

Paul Walter Hauser in Richard Jewell There was never a single chance of seeing the camera pan to Hauser during Sunday’s roll call of acting nominees---both he and the person he plays are about the polar opposite of Hollywood’s image of itself. And it must be said that while Jewell should not be forgotten, Eastwood’s movie, with its ginned-up anti-press narrative, maybe should be. But none of that is on Hauser, whose performance firmly proves that fat guys can be more than bumbling comedic relief or ineffective sidekicks in the movies. It matters that someone who looks like Jewell is portraying him, and that he does it so well that we can almost overlook the film’s other faults.

Honor Swinton Byrne in The Souvenir

This one was little-seen, and though it generated awards buzz initially, it’s already been largely forgotten. That’s too bad. Byrne’s Julie is a woman torn between her own ambitions and her love for a man who is---abusive? How to judge him? It’s a toxic relationship fueled by addiction on his part, but the movie is more about how you cope with a partner who is committed but not capable of commitment. Perhaps the most resonant aspect of Julie’s character is the way she holds out hope even when everyone tells her not to, even when she herself knows deep down that it is hopeless. You may find this weak, but I’ve never known a human being who wasn’t in some measure susceptible to it.

Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins in The Two Popes Everyone has strong feelings about the Catholic Church---it’s not a thing you go half-measures on. And every Catholic has strong feelings about the last two Popes---again, they aren’t the kind of personalities that inspire milquetoast reactions. What Pryce and Hopkins do in portraying Francis and Benedict, respectfully, is remind us that no matter how much they claim to be the chosen of God, these are after all two men---two men with flaws and opinions, whose own lives have shaped them every bit as much as the Bible or the church. When they are on screen together, you can imagine them in an odd couple buddy comedy, two aging road trippers tending to the flock. Lots of performances didn’t make my arbitrary 20-point cutoff. To be dead honest with you, it’s entirely possible that if you ask me in a year, I’ll have re-considered who is on the main list and who is in the honorable mentions; the idea that what I say now, when all these movies are fresh in my mind and affected by immediate emotional reaction, has to be my inviolate opinion for all time is silly. That said, here are some excellent and noteworthy performances that didn’t quite make the cut.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Kelvin Harrison, Jr. in Waves

Zack Gottsagen in The Peanut Butter Falcon

Isabela Moner in Dora and the Lost City of Gold

Alessandro Nivola in The Art of Self-Defense

Cate Blanchett in Where’d You Go, Bernadette?

More or less everyone in Little Women (I couldn’t decide, and thought more of the acting than the overall film)

Jodie Turner-Smith in Queen and Slim

Cynthia Erivo in Harriet

Kaitlyn Dever in Booksmart

Edward Norton in Motherless Brooklyn

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curious-minx · 5 years ago

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Hollywood Hillbillies, The Ballad of the Boomers.

This image turned Norman Rockwell into a socialist.

Hollywood fed and bred celebrities are finally starting to wane much like franchise family restaurants, simple no-frills shotgun weddings, Budweiser, and egg-based mayonnaise, and for the most part, most American lives are probably not feeling impacted by this loss. In a world of Amy Adams and Glenn Closes two women in make believe professions whose biggest hurdle remains whether or not they will reap the Industry awards they so richly deserve, and seeing as real life underdogs give you fleas you might as well root for these Queens. For starters, one of these talented performers has BIG EYES, while the other is elegant and old, but not too old, and they are both perfectly fine at what they do. One thing millennials and mineral-based Americans are not kidding around about are award shows, because we’re all stabbing and shaving ourselves with all of the trophies that line the walls of each and every day spent doing our best. Egad, Josh Gad will one day get an Egot and a new species of animal is eradicated each and every day.

Wait I thought that the new Dark Crystal series was cancelled?

The trailer for the Ron Howard picture Hillbilly Elegy is coming in hot off the tepid and apathetic trails of a Star Wars film more forgotten than the Life Day special, Ron Howard also feels like a man awarded more and more opportunities for simply doing his best. Come gather around the Battle of the Boomers! In Netflix’s corner is a conservative personal parable of someone born and raised in Ohio warding off the festering influences of his parents Appalachian Kentuckian upbringing. According to the great powerful Wiki the book is concerned something of a conservative doggrel beating the same wife beater wearing fiction about the horrors of the Welfare Queen. As someone who recently became a welfare queen himself, as well as someone overcoming substance abuse issues I feel like a venture capitalist from Ohio and Okie’s golden son Ron fucking Howard are really going to get down to the real truth about poverty and substance abuse.

There are three types of Terminators in the World: Neutral Terminators, Good Terminators, and Bad Terminators. I’m Glenn Close.

Netflix and friends are the only buffet any of us without a death wish can frequent in the 21st century. As of the date of this writing Netflix has already released 85 a total Netflix Productions (not counting documentaries). This noticeable leap in quantity benefits from the amount of international non-English language movies spanning languages from Akan to, Netflix has gone from releasing only 2 movies to its name in 2015 up to 105 movies by the end of 2020. How many of these exercises in funny accents, prosthetic transformations, Horse Girls, Lost Girls, Tall Girls, Sweet Girls and The Girls I’ve Been can we claim to be really moved by? Will you remember me come next Girlfriend’s Day? You could keep stringing Netflix titles along and find some meaning or come up with nothing but a Bird Box. Nobody but Netflix has been releasing a movie or two or three a week, and that’s because Netflix dueling CEOs Ted Sarandos and Reed Hastings are cut throat dynamos of Men of industry who dared to ask, “What if movies, but on TV?”

Oh the Caucasity!

////////

Whereas, HBO asks no questions, stands completely nude (as ordained by HBO’s Ministry of Nudity) , and proud. HBO does not need to ask any questions, because they are the answer. HBO is the movies (as of 1982). HBO has been quietly churning out direct to TV movies in the years where the cineplex was becoming strictly for the Haus of Mouse and the Captain Reboot was dealing with his worst bout of necrophilia yet! This other movie I am discussing isn’t an HBO movie though, but an HBO Max feature. The first of a strange new breed. The other trailer in question to drop this week is by yet another historically Hollywood director is Bobby Zemeckis, who let’s be very clear is not directing the upcoming Roald Dahl Witches adaption he is only humbly re-imagining the material. So if this movie tanks like Marwen don’t blame Zemeckis, because he only re-imagined this one. As someone who has no soft spot in my skull for Dahl I am not coming to this project with anything but cautious fascination.

The look people give me when I tell that my favorite movie of all time is Alice Through The Looking Glass

Anne Hathaway and Amy Adams both talented actors that get under a lot of people’s skins in the way peculiar to successful women. I will say that Hathaway looks like she is having a lot more fun these days. At the very beginning of the year I had watched one of her more recent leading lady vehicles Colossal an indie movie dealing with alcoholism through emotional kaijus, a big foolish swing. Hathaway really succeeds for me whenever she is in Rachel Getting Married fuck up mode , and it looks like here on the Witches she’s back at being an actor having fun getting themselves dirty for the sake of expression. This looks like a performance built around a silly accent and prosthetics, but Hathaway is too startling a screen presence to be drownedout. Maybe I am actually really hyped for this frivolous dark family fantasy comedy? Or maybe I’m just really into horrifying animal transformations which the trailer doubles down on, which makes me believe that this is just the tip of the green screen abominations!

So if you’re am embittered actor out there that feels spent and drained of all naturalistic energy as the horizon of live performance fades further and further out of view. I implore these thespians to reach down into their silliest accent cabinet, for God’s sake make sure you’ve gotten rid of your racist silly accent drawer, and most importantly be very pretty so that the process of uglifying you is more of a process. Accomplish both of these grand feats, and maybe you too could be working alongside the classic American directors and studio wizards keeping the Dream alive by slathering their dolls and action figures in enough digital magic to close the circle. Movies are Dead! And the coroner is sorting through her wigs.

#netflix #hbo #Hillbilly effigy #the witches #Roald dahl #hollywood #americana #anne hathaway #Amy adams #glenn close #halloween #movies #trailers #upcoming

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vdragon-creations · 5 years ago

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Meet Nina, The Water Demon! Yu Yu Hakusho OC!

Here’s the first OC I would like to introduce!

(Mild Warning for mentions of Sexual Abuse.)

Name: Nina (It was given to her by Violet when she found her. Umi was gunna be her original name, but her mother and father never got to give it to her.)

Age: Mid to Late 20's

Sex: Female

Species: Demon (Specifically a Water Demon Hybrid)

Height: 5 Feet 3 Inches

Weight: 130 Pounds (Or 1993.9118 Fluid Ounces)

Orientation: Pansexual (Isn't apposed to a Polyamorous Relationship, but she prefers to stay with a single person.)

Relationship Status: Taken (Is with Jin The Windmaster)

Demon Class:

Beginning: D Class

Current: Middle A Class

Home: Demon World

Beginning: A small pond owned by Violet's family!

Current: In a lake on an Okunenju Stock where Jin lives.

Personality:

Nina is a very shy girl, so shy that she tends to run or hide from most new people she meets. This comes from her kind being extremely rare and hunted to near extinction. However, despite her shyness, she's also very kind. She gives her all if she think she can actually help someone. She also has a bit of fire in her. Despite her docile and fragile look, Nina also don't go down without a fight. While she's no martial artists, she can still use her Teeth, Claws, Tail, and Poisonous "blood" to keep herself from being easy pickings. She's a pretty determined gal, wanting so badly to live a life where she's not afraid for her life, to finally be free.

This being said, after meeting and hanging around Jin, Chu, Rinku, Suzuki, Shishiwakamaru, and Touya for a while, she began to come out of her shell. Joking with them, watching them train together, and eventually getting trained herself

Diet:

Water Demons used to feed off Human Blood back when the Living World and Demon World where joined. However, after the Makai Barrier was made, Water Demons had to find a substitute! Demon Blood. Nina is no different, and while she could eat other foods, none of them would offer any nutritional value. For the whole time she's been alive, she's either feed off the random hunters that ended up dyeing while looking for her, or off of Violet, whose been willingly giving her a steady meal.

On the bright side, Nina doesn't need daily meals, in fact she can go a whole month without any food. But if she isn't feed on schedule, she'll start turning green and get very sick. Luckily, Jin has been offering his own blood in times when Violet is absent. Not that Nina's too thrilled about it. After all, she doesn't like hurting anyone.

Weaknesses:

Having been someone who has little to no training or fighting experience. And as such has a hard time controlling the amount of energy she uses for any of her attacks or special skills! Meaning that most of her powers are usually pretty limited to a single use.

Powers, Skills, and Attributes:

●Water Manipulation~

Like all Water Demons, Nina has the ability to manipulate any amount of water around her! This can include the moisture in the air, and while this can also be extended to the liquids inside a person, Nina refuses to do this.

●Flying~

Nina was born with wings that wound up being quite useless to her till she met Jin, who taught her how to fly! She's pretty graceful in the air, and can even hover and fly backwards. And coupled with her dormant Wind abilities, she's a bit of a force to be reckoned with.

●Swimming~

Nina can swim at unnaturally fast speeds and thanks to her body, can withstand intense water pressure and freezing cold temperatures. However, the colder it gets, the slower her movements are, and eventually she'll turn white and fall into a Hibernation state.

●Body Of Water~

Her body has many interesting qualities. While normally, Nina's body has skin and bones that you can touch and feel, she can turn her body to liquid. She lacks a lot of organs, say for the Liver, Heart, Lungs, Stomach, Reproductive Organs, and Tongue. This makes it easier for her to escape if she happens to get caught by someone who isn't equipped with the right tools to catch her.

●Night Vision~

Water Demons are nocturnal, and Nina is no exception to this. Her eyes very good at seeing in the dark.

●Memory Sharing~

This is something all Water Demon females can do. Nina can place her hand on another person's head and share her memories with them. This is primarily done with demons, however it is just as possible to do this with humans too! The only downside to this, at least to Nina, is that this can result in unintentionally "peeping" at the other person's memories as well. And the person on the receiving end also ends up feeling the same emotions that the original memory holder felt while the event had taken place.

●Bioluminescence~

The freckles on her cheeks, shoulders, knees, elbows, back, and butt can glow when Nina needs a little extra light.

●Echolocation~

If her eyes and Bioluminescent freckles fail her, Nina can use Echolocation to see around her. This is easier underwater for her though, as she can also feel the vibrations in the water. On land she can't quite do that.

●Invisibility~

Nina was not born with this power, but earned it after completing an Ordeal given to her by Koenma. She promised to only use it when absolutely necessary, and only for defense. This power, as its pretty clear, allows her the ability to become invisible for a short about of time. (About 15 minutes, but it can be turned off before the limit.) The only downside to this ability tho is that it only hides her appearance, so things like her energy could still be detected. In addition, she could also still be affected by objects giving away her possession like smoke screen or stepping on twigs.

●Spring Rain~

After training with Jin and Touya for a while, Nina picked up a move similar to Touya's Shards of Winter attack. This attack let's Nina materialize water drops from the air and send them raining down on her foes with such force that the water can actually cut through skin!

●Aqua Whips~

Similar to Jin's Tornado Fist, Nina can create a mass of water around her entire arm and use them like giant tentacles!

●Smell~

Nina has a ridiculously good sense of smell! She's been known to predict storms and how far they are by just smelling the amount of moisture in the air! And under the water, Nina can smell other living things around her up to 5 miles away!

●Instinct/Survival Mode~

In times of extreme stress, anger, or danger, Nina's body changes a bit. The once smooth skin on her body becomes rigid and sharp like scales. And the scales on her face and tail turn into dangerous spikes. Her tiny fangs become large and deadly, and her welcoming golden eyes turn to slits. In this "transformation" Nina temporarily pushes her sweet disposition aside and replaces it with a being who will fight to the death to stay alive.

●Poison~

Nina can secrete poison liquids from her skin like sweat, especially from her tail and claws!

●Healing~

Much like her Poison abilities, Nina can also heal small wounds and cuts with her spit. However, things like larger wounds, Nina can use some of her own demon energy to heal someone. Much like Rinku did for himself during the Dark Tournament. But the backfire to this power is that no matter the situation, using this power takes a massive amount of energy to perform this. Thus Nina uselly ends up feeling pretty weak afterwards.

●Wind Sensory~

Nina's powers over wind are very limited, in fact the only times it's useful is when she's flying and just needs some extra power, or when she and Jin are commuting in secret.

●Optional Birth & DNA Selection~

Water Demon Female have the ability to have birth at whatever time they choose. They are automatically pregnant after being with someone for the first time. But they are able to halt the development of the child for months even years. They also don't show signs of being pregnant either, and can be with multiple different partners throughout their lives. When the time is right, the mother can then have her baby, and take traits from the partners that she's been with, and give them to the child. Nina is one such child, and can do the same with her future offspring.

●Color Changing~

This has no real purpose other then non verbal communication. Nina's whole body can change colors depending on her health, environment, and emotions! When she turns red or pink, her body heats up to extremely high temperatures, and is usually an indication that she's embarrassed. She turns white when she's in an environment that's super cold, and this usually causes her to fall asleep. When she turns green, it's because she's either hungry or very sick.

Relationships:

🦊Violet~

Nina's first and best friend, saved her as a child after finding her washed up in her families pond! The Fox Demon's competitive and fierce spirit made her the perfect bodyguard for Nina. And due to her willingness to take care of Nina and keep her safe, Violet has gone to some great lengths to help her along her journey to become free! For instance, Violet, to avoid having Nina revealed, has been giving her some of her blood to feed off of. She even went so far as to find a way to contact Urameshi so that he can ask Koenma to grant Nina the ability to be hidden from those who would do her harm. She was also the reason she ever met Jin, Chu, Rinku, ShiShi, Suzuki, or Touya.

🌪Jin The Windmaster~

Nina had never heard of him, until Violet insisted that she watch the Dark Tournament with her. When it came time for Team Urameshi to fight Team Masho, that's when Nina saw him. He was so....handsome! Fluffy red hair, Big beautiful blue eyes, and a smile and laugh so contagious that for the first time in a while, Nina was....actually having a good time. Needless to say she fell hard for the Windmaster. And after hearing about his Team's want for freedom....she couldn't help but relate. After seeing him fight in the Demon World Tournament, Nina's drive to become free only grew. So that one day she could actually meet him in person!

Well, that day would come sooner then expected, since after about a week since Violet entered the Dark Tournament herself (and lost), she woke up to Violet saying that she had a special surprise for her. Only to find that the surprise was Jin, Touya, Chu, Rinku, Shishi, Suzuki, and Urameshi had come to visit! Nina was so spooked by not only seeing her favorite fighter, but her crush, and the Ex Spirit Detective in front of her, she panicked and quickly hid from them. After getting to know her more, Jin slowly saw himself becoming drawn to her.

Sure, she was cute and pretty, but the power she had whipping around her was so interesting. Different, but so familiar. And after finding out her past and her need for freedom, he made it his mission to help her reach for the skies! He began giving her flying lessons, as he found it a shame to see her pretty wings go to waste without touching the big wide wind at least once. But after those lessons, Jin continued to get closer and closer, until it was clear to him. He had fallen for her.

Eventually, he does confess his love for her after being told by Seaman that he should probably do so, as it appeared Nina couldn't tell if Jin was interested in her in that way. And after training together, entering the Demon World Tournament and facing off one another, Jin knew this was the lady he wanted to be his bride! So, during another festival with other wind demons, Jin asks Nina to be his wife. Which she gratefully accepts.

🧊Touya, Master of Ice~

The two have a rather understanding relationship, as they both tend to stay quiet and are both sides of the same Elemental Coin. Nina also has an eminence amount of respect for both him and Jin, seeing how they where both Shinobi. And years ago, while her mother was still in slavery, she was saved by a Shinobi Sect. She also admired his love for his teammates, especially with Gama. In fact she refuses to wear makeup knowing how Gama felt about it being used of vain reasons, and Touya appreciates her respect for Gama's feelings, even if she didn't know him.

Chu~

Despite the two having massive differences in their personalities, Chu and Nina get along rather well! Especially after Nina came out of her shell! He loves making jokes about how they should take Nina drinking with them, so they can get free booze. And Nina likes poking fun at his smell and failed attempts at wooing the ladies.

🪀Rinku~

Nina likes to think of him like an adorable little brother. And Rinku treats her like an older sister. He loves showing her cool tricks with his Yo-Yo's, and teaching her how to play kids games, as Nina never played them growing up.

Suzuki~

He's blunt and honest with her about basically everything, including her sense of fashion. Nina finds him annoying, but gets along with him well enough.

🗡Shishiwakamaru~

This guy didn't exactly start off on the right foot with Nina when they first met. He was immediately trying to come onto her, and laying it on rather thick. Though, his worst mistake was thinking it was ok to put his arm around her, laying his hand just above her collarbone. She bit him, making him pretty mad. Ever since then, he's kinda had a grudge against Nina, and Jin! Cause not only was he not her favorite (which was unthinkable to him) but in his mind, he lost to a scatterbrained Wind Demon who's head spent more time in the clouds then doing important things.

Seaman~

Nina met this young man during her Ordeal in Living World. However, during her time there, this sweet boy ended up falling for the sweethearted Water Demon. But Nina turned him down after he tried confessing, saying that her heart was already set on someone else. Seaman was upset, but understood. He asked if he felt the same about her, and according to Nina, she didn't see how he could. When Seaman found out who she was talking about, and saw the two of them in action, he pulled Jin aside and informed him that if he really loved Nina, then he should probably tell her.

Koto, Juri, & Ruka~

Nina isn't normally the type to be jealous or hateful to anyone. But these three ladies are the exception to that. When it comes to Koto, Nina doesn't really care one way or another about her. But she's a cat and thus, can't fucking stand her. Juri, being a subspecies of the Water Demons, looks an awful lot like Nina in a way. On the nights she's out with Chu and the others at the bar, Nina is often stopped and asked either for dates or what it was like being a ref for the Dark Tournament. Nina eventually figured out they where mistaking her for Juri, and thus Nina's irritation with her began.

As for Ruka, Nina can say wholeheartedly that she's the one person that she DESPISES! She's more the aware of her crush on Jin, and is a bit pissed about what her attitude towards him is like. Ruka has gone on the record saying that he's bubbly and cheerful, but is probably naive when it comes to the ladies. And while to some extent that's true, Nina doesn't like the implications, and knows from personal experience that Jin is MORE then capable of pleasing a lady. Jin finds her jealousy and hatred for her adorable, assuring Nina that Ruka's got nothing on her. But this still didn't stop Nina from secretly flipping Ruka the bird during the next Demon World Tournament when she spotted her with Koto and Juri.

🌬Kitaro (Nina's Father)~

This Wind Demon met Nina's mother her lowest point. She had been running for years, and still hadn't had her baby, and she was almost ready to just give up. But then, he met her. She fell for this kind man, and finally after conceiving with him, she finally had her baby. But a freak storm washed Nina and Her mother away. Kitaro was devastated by the lost of his wife and baby. But there was still hope. After finding out that only his wife passed, and that the baby wasn't to be found, he had a feeling the baby was still alive. But without knowing what the child looked like, knowing that his wife could change her child's look to be much different from her or his appearance, he couldn't quite go out and find them.

That was until years later, during a festival for Wind Demons, he heard commotion going on that the festival had a couple of special guests. He then soon found out that these special guests where brought by Jin. They where friends of his from the Dark Tournament, and when he saw the young Water Demon with him bearing his eyes and wind energy.....he knew. That was his child. Nina knew exactly who he was from the moment she laied eyes on him, and was overjoyed to know that at least one of her parents where still around. They caught up, and her father was very proud of her, having been trapped for so long and then gaining the freedom her mom never got to have.

Finding out that his Daughter was with Jin was amusing for him. Suspecting that Nina was more like her mom when it came to their taste in men. Jin pulled her dad aside, mentioning that normally wouldn't think to ask this of anyone, but asked if it was ok to have his daughter's hand in marriage. Her dad just laughs him off, saying that, "I never got to raise her, therefore I don't exactly have the right to say what she can and can't do. She's the one you should ask."

Bio:

Nina's story starts with her mother's story! Nina's mom was born as a full blooded Water demon! They (especially the females) are extremely rare, and for good reason as they've mostly been hunted or driven into hiding. See water demons have very valuable scales on their tails! So valuable that selling only one will set a two demons up for life! Another reason their so sought after is because they're know for their promiscuous nature! Especially after having sex for the first time. And due to their odd reproductive abilities, they're unfortunately the perfect targets for Sex Trafficking.

And this is unfortunately where Nina's mother ended up. For several years she remained a slave until one day, she and the other slaves were rescued. Apparently, her master had made a few enemies, and one of those enemies just so happened to know a small Sect of Demon Shinobi! Nina's mom couldn't help but admire them, even if they where just following orders and weren't really there to save the slaves in particular. But regardless, Nina's mother escaped. But not completely however, as it wasn't long before more demon bandits and hunters started targeting her for her scales. She had been running for so long, she ended up deep in Lord Mukuro's territory. Which wasn't good, as "his" territory is know to have some of the most dangerous demons living there.

Nina's mom continues to run, until she stumbles upon a small colony of Dragonfly Demons. They are equally as rare as Water Demon females, as their wings are harvested to make Ship Sails and can be used in Spells and Enchantments. The leader of the colony was so taken by Nina's mother's beauty, he made her a deal. If she agreed to marry him and bare him a child, he'd let her stay with the colony. Nina's mother, knowing full well that she could get away with not having a kid with this guy, but needing his protection, she agreed. The plan being that she wouldn't give birth at all, and just wait it out until she could leave safely.

Turns out, she didn't need to worry about this though, as it wasn't long before demon hunters caught up to them, and once again, her mother was on the run. After a while of being on the run, Nina's mother was cornered, and as she was almost ready to give up on her dreams of freedom and having a child safely, that's when she met him. He was a Wind demon, with long white hair and golden eyes, and a smile so infectious, it made her smile genuinely for the first time in centuries! They where in love, the Wind Demon keeping her safe! And together they stayed for about a year, when Nina's mother finally decided it was time to have her baby!

So, one day, she goes to a shallow river, now with the DNA she longed for, she gave birth to Nina! She was the splitting image of her mother, but with the wings of a Dragonfly Demon, and beautiful golden eyes, freckles, and a gift of the wind in her to symbolize her mother's true devotion. And hope that Nina was now armed with the abilities that would help keep her from suffering the way she had for years.

However, she would've been able to see her grow, as fate had something else in mind.

As Nina's mom headed up stream to find a place to rest and call her lover so that he can meet his daughter, a raging storm blew in and it began raining hard. The river soon began to flood and Nina's mom was quickly getting swept away by the current. Even her powers where useless, as she couldn't risk letting go of her baby!

Finally, Nina's mother made the ultimate decision! She wasn't about to let this world take her daughter! So, she quickly grabbed onto a low branch just above the river and quickly tucked Nina's tiny body under the water in a small crevice on the edge of the river. And as the branch was about to snap, Nina's mom granted her with one final tearful gift. She transferred her own memories to her daughter, hoping that they would help her avoid making the same mistakes, as she unfortunately, wouldn't be able to teach her face to face.

#yu yu hakusho #oc #art #jin the windmaster #nina the water demon #oc x canon

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cryoculus · 6 years ago

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i'm back fool may i request headcanon or scenarios for the hq captains (or honestly whoever u wanna add) finding out their fem crush does hardcore parkour as a hobby. At school she wears the cute uniform but after ???? It's bad bitch time. Adidas sweats, the tank top for guys (under armour idk what's it called).

HHHHHere it is

Ushijima

He doesn’t believe it at first when Tendou tells him about it. You were practically Shiratorizawa’s resident goody-two-shoes and because you were his classmate, he knew you to a certain extent. There was simply no way you’d be a closet parkour artist.

Tendou always insisted that Ushijima would come along with him sometime after school so he could show him, but he was simply in denial™ and thought Tendou was being obtuse.

He eventually caved though.

Ushijima didn’t really know where to look when Tendou said, “Here we are,” after bringing him smack in the middle of a busy Sendai intersection. But then he saw it.

A couple of teenagers were jumping buildings like it was nobody’s business – and to his utter disbelief, you were there. There was no trace of the adorable classmate whose charm was unparalleled.

Tendou had to drag him by the arm so they wouldn’t lose track of your group, which was difficult because this six foot bag of meat was probably twice his weight.

Your session ended at a nearby park, doing backflips from memorial statues. Ushijima thought that was a little disrespectful, but he couldn’t put a thought into it because he was gaping at you.

“Tendou-kun, you said you wouldn’t tell!” you whined, hitting the middle blocker in the chest.

“What can I say, Wakatoshi-kun has to know about his crush’s secret identity right?”

“Tendou,” Ushijima cautioned. How could he just rat him out right there?

But you were blushing at Tendou’s proclamation. Your outfit may suggest otherwise, but you were definitely the girl who had put him under your charms.

“Ushijima-kun, you won’t tell, right?”

He nodded. He wouldn’t want anyone else getting to know you this way, anyway.

Oikawa

Outside volleyball, Oikawa was known to be Seijoh’s local playboy. Though he only had one girlfriend, he did have many notable conquests because of his flirtatious nature.

But he seemed to be having trouble trying to woo a certain first year student.

“I heard she was an exhibitionist,” supplied Hanamaki when he asked his friends what they knew about you.

“What kind of exhibitionist though?” Iwaizumi asked.

Matsukawa snickered. “Maybe she’s a gravure model.”

Oikawa punched Mattsun on the shoulder. “Don’t besmirch (Name)-chan in that kind of light! She’s practically a saint.”

You were at the top of your class, the year-level representative, and volunteered for charity. And you were only a first year.

“I dunno, Oikawa,” Makki sighed. “She seems a little too good, don’tcha think? I bet she’s got some weird secret she doesn’t want everyone to know.”

That actually made sense. So, he tried offering to walk you home that day to try and smooth talk some answers out of you, but you politely declined, to his chagrin.

“Sorry, Oikawa-senpai, I’m meeting some friends at the park today,” you explained.

Any normal person would just suck it up and accept it right?

Oikawa was not a normal person.

So, he went to the park that afternoon after school to see what was so important that you denied a walk home from the Oikawa Tooru. But the sight that beheld him nearly made his jaw drop.

You and a couple of older looking boys were climbing up the walls of an abandoned building with the swiftness of felines. Once you reached the top, you all hopped off the roof and landed gracefully on the cobblestone path.

You saw Oikawa hiding behind a lamp post though. He gaped when you approached him with a cheery smile.

“Still like me, senpai?”

He threw his arms around you.

“Duh.”

Sawamura

I personally headcanon Daichi as someone who has some experience with parkour ‘cause of those t h i g h s.

Anyway, he has a huge crush on Kiyoko’s cousin, who’s also a third year in Karasuno. Where Kiyoko was the graceful character, you were a bit more of a girl who was the actual definition of “kawaii-desu~ xD”

And not in a cringey way.

You were so ridiculously adorable, a lot of boys from Karasuno swooned over the sight of you.

But one day, Asahi managed to get him into parkour again.

“Asahi, you know how my stunts were a bunch of failures back then, right?”

Asahi laughed. “We were first years. Surely with all this training, our bodies have better coordination.”

So they contacted the guys they used to do parkour with back then and to their surprise, they began recruiting girls as well.

When the two of them arrived at the meeting place on top of a corporate building in the main district, Daichi nearly choked when he saw you in the small crowd, talking to one of the members.

But before he could tell Asahi about it, the guy overseeing the whole thing pulled them to the side and gave a quick briefing.

“Oh, and for saftey purposes, you’ll be getting a guide,” he smiled before calling out to someone, “(Name), come here would you?”

Asahi shot Daichi a knowing look and, the next thing they knew, you were their temporary coach. But you didn’t really provide them with any useful information besides:

“Don’t weigh me down.”

When the practice exhibition went underway, Asahi was performing fine but Daichi had to put his back into catching up with the rest of the group. His eyes were glued on you, who jumped each and every obstacle with unparalleled grace. Was that really Karasuno’s sweetheart?

Right before the beam exercises, he decided to chat you up and asked how long you’ve been doing parkour.

“None of your business,” you deadpanned.

As you walked away, Asahi nudged him.

“You’ve got it bad, don’t you?”

Kuroo

Kuroo had pretty high standards, if he did say so himself.

He wasn’t easily enamored by a pretty face unlike a certain brunet setter from Miyagi. But of course, he was still human and could still fall prey to that inevitable force called feelings.

It started when this shy girl transferred into Nekoma at the beginning of his third year. You were his seatmate and he’s convinced that, if you were assigned a different place to sit, he would’ve never interacted with you unless needed.

But since you were given the pleasure to be seated close to his glory, Kuroo decided to befriend you.

You were ridiculously timid and Kuroo was perfectly fine with that, since his own best friend shared the same personality trait. He knew how to handle you without making you feel like he’s overstepping his boundaries.

Whenever he didn’t have practice, he offered to walk you home ‘platonically’ since you lived in the same neighborhood as him and Kenma. But strangely, whenever they dropped you off at home, he’d see you sneaking out of your house to go out.

He thought that maybe you just had somewhere else to be and was too shy to decline his offer to walk you home.

“She’s hiding something,” Kenma flatly concluded.

Amused, Kuroo questioned, “What makes you say so?”

He rolled his eyes. “You’re the one who kept telling me she’s basically me. I’m sure I’ll notice when I’m hiding something.”

“Touché.”

So, when Kuroo walked you home the next time without Kenma, since he didn’t want to involve himself in Operation: Find Out What (Name) Does in Her Free Time, he tailed you at an inconspicuous distance.

But then, you had travelled all the way to an abandoned warehouse in the outskirts of the city. Were you involved in some criminal activity? Concerned, he decided to step inside.

Someone nearly kicked him in the head from propelling yourself on top of an unused cargo carrier.

“Sorry!” you apologized profusely, helping him back onto his feet. Your entire face was flushed crimson at Kuroo’s presence.

“What are you doing here?” he inquired.

“I-I-I uh do p-parkour as a hobby,” you stammered, fidgeting with the hem of your tank top. “Keeps m-my blood circulating.”

“Keeps your blood circulating?” he echoed with a smile. It reminded him of the words he’d tell the team before a volleyball match.

He grinned. “Can you teach me some of your moves?”

Bokuto

He always prattled endlessly about his newfound crush to Akaashi when he met you in the cafeteria one day.

“She accidentally poured piping hot coffee on my uniform, but she was so cute, Akaashi!”

“Bokuto-san, could you please focus on the game? The opponent is at a match point.”

Since he had the attention span of a goldfish, Bokuto would always find his thoughts drifting back to you, someone he barely even saw in the halls of Fukurodani.

Eventually, he got “deprived” of your beauty and decided to hunt you down, asking various friends of his if they knew who you were.

“Ah, (Surname) from Class 1? She rarely comes to school.”

“I heard she was a delinquent.”

“No, her dad’s part of the yakuza!”

“Someone told me she was a spy deployed at our school.”

“I think I saw her on a porn movie once.”

In short, no one really knew your true identity and you didn’t make a lot of friends. The information more or less put Bokuto in a dejected mode like no other, which irked Akaashi very much when his performance dwindled during their practice matches.

So, for the sake of the revival of his captain’s volleyball prowess, Akaashi took it upon himself to do his own investigation regarding a certain (Surname) (Name). When he finally got intel on where you were usually seen, he gave Bokuto the address.

“Really Akaashi? You’re really going to let me see her?” Crocodile tears ran down his cheeks.

“Please, before I change my mind.”

Bokuto did as instructed and headed out to Akihabara Park. He looked around, eyes carefully scanning the area for a familiar face, but then his attention got snagged by a couple of people doing parkour stunts near the multi-level parking lot.

You were scaling the building without any protective gear whatsoever. Your feet disengaged fluidly with each jump you made to reach the bottom. The finishing move was a flawless backflip that Bokuto thought would go awry, but you landed on your feet without fail. One of your companions pat your shoulder for a job well done and you grinned.

But then you locked eyes with Bokuto.

“What’re you doing here?” you asked when you jogged up to him.

“I think I’m in love with you,” he admitted in a trance.

You blinked, attempting to let his spur-of-the-moment confession sink in. “What?”

“I’m. In. Love. With. You.”

An unattractive snort escaped you. “I’m sorry. Bokuto, was it? I only date guys who can keep up with me.”

With that, you went back to your little parkrour group for your next set of stunts, but that’s until Bokuto ran to catch up to you.

“I won’t disappoint you!”

#haikyuu!!#haikyuu!! headcanons #haikyuu hc #ushijima wakatoshi #oikawa tooru #sawamura daichi #kuroo tetsurou #bokuto koutarou #hqhc #request #redhotchampion

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pictureamoebae · 6 years ago

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3, 10 and 15! :)

3. Do you have any favorite simblrs?

So many. I know I’ll miss almost all of them out and forever want to come back and edit this, so let’s say to start with that if I follow you you are one of my favourite simblrs. I always feel awkward about this sort of question because I’m definitely of the ‘here’s a participation award’ mindset rather than a ‘winner takes all’ person, and don’t like playing favourites.

I will mention a couple of people though, not because I think they’re better than anyone else, but just because I tend to perk up more when their names cross my dash (for some of them I don’t know why, maybe it’s just that their gameplay has something about it that floats my boat, idk). If I don’t mention you please don’t think it’s because I think you’re the absolute worst, because I don’t.

Like a lot of people, I have to mention @jenba, because her builds are of a consistent high quality and give me so much inspiration, and she’s a really nice person who’s always got time and patience to answer people. She doesn’t go anywhere near drama, which is always a huge tick in the ‘yay’ column for me (some of you are so messy).

@paper-lioness is a sweetheart, she made me a birthday gift once and that made me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

@fake-sims posts always bring a smile to my face. I don’t play TS2, but if I did this is what I would aspire to. In fact, I wish I could be like fake-sims in TS4, but I simply don’t think anyone could be.

If anything could come close to how fake-sims makes me feel in TS4 it would have been @napoleonfrost, whose sims are absolute goals. I’m also really fond of @midpoosimmer-deactivated2019030‘s sims (deactivated, boo) because they walked that line between realism and being stylised really well. @alcearosea-sims‘ game always looks absolutely stunning and I could look at it all day. Who’s the person who does a bunch of retro stuff? Begins with an F? Gah. That person. In love.

There are a ton of cc makers whose stuff I admire and will follow until the ends of time, and you’ll know who they are if you ever have downloaded any of my lots and looked at the cc lists. I hope @brazenlotus continues to separate and liberate items from packs, because honestly it does the community a service. @peacemaker-ic gives us consistently excellent sets, and his build mode stuff in particular has been a lifesaver. @budgie2budgie has been giving us excellent maxis match stuff since the beginning of time, and I will never be without all that art.

There are many more, many many more, and I know I’ll think “OH I FORGOT X, Y AND Z” as soon as I hit post.

Edit: I forgot an important person: @suspiciouslypinklady because we bonded over some personal stuff and I owe her a message atm, and she’s been very sweet to me <3

10. What expansion pack are you hoping for next?

I don’t think I have a specific preference for an entire pack, only particular elements I’d like to see at some point. I was really excited by the Off The Grid stuff when they were polling for Laundry Day, because I think it would enable such rich storytelling opportunities, so I’d love to see that explored, and it would be timely considering the state of the world – lead the way, Sims team! Show us how to save the world!

Other than that it’s more little things that I’d like to see that would make life more interesting, particularly as a some-time builder (*glares in spiral staircase*). And of course, I’d like to see a return to larger worlds with more neighbourhoods.

15. What is your favorite Sim World?

It used to be Oasis Springs. I really love The Spice District. I also love the harbour in Brindleton Bay. I’m very fond of StrangerVille (it scratches an itch Oasis Springs didn’t quite manage), but it’s simply too small to have a permanent number 1 spot. I haven’t spent enough time in Del Sol Valley but I love the overall aesthetic of it, but again there’s not enough to it.

One reason I like The Spice District so much is the way it’s set out: it has that large public space in the centre, and it makes it feel like a more lived-in neighbourhood than the other more linear ones where people just walk from one end to the other. In The Spice District people stop and play basketball, they eat at the food stands, they listen to performers, they take part in protests… it just feels so much more real and vibrant. The rest of the game is sorely lacking in that regard.

#anonymous

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moistwithgender · 6 years ago

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Monthly Media Roundup (May 2019)

The march of time inexorably proceeds beyond my grasp and so I must write another post. I’ve been a bit burned out, just focusing on one diversion (it was Zelda, you know it was Zelda), but after finishing it I recovered enough energy to get a few more things done in the last half of the month. I didn’t watch any anime or read any manga in May, though I did read some 70s Marvel, which I liveblog in my “curry reads comics” tag. Last time I did an actual capital-P Post about my Marvel reading was a year ago after marathoning a full(ish) decade. If people are interested in more of that I could work at making posts for each year of issues I read, recapping the developments and my thoughts on them (which will become more relevant as Events become more common, I imagine). I’ve just got a few games to talk about this month, but I imagine I have a lot to say about at least one of them.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch): 2 years ago I did something I extremely rarely do: stood in line at a Best Buy at midnight for the release of the Switch so that I could buy it with BotW. BotW was also out on Wii U, which I had, but the promotional material for BotW had struck such a chord in me that it justified making the jump for the new console (this would eventually become troublesome when the first model of joycons failed, but, well). I got home, put some ten odd hours into it, and then put it down for two years. I’ve always had a problem where, struck with the intuition that I will end up forming a deep relationship with a work, I will put it off for years. I put off Persona 3 for five years after buying it at launch, and it eventually became the most personal game experience I would have, even seven years onward. I think the two factors that pushed me to finally play through BotW was wanting to watch a friend stream it (but also not wanting it spoiled for me), and needing a distraction for when I was taking care of my cat.

It’s been about two months now since he passed away, and I finally finished the game at 215+ hours about half a month ago. So, I was playing this game as a coping method while preparing for loss, and in dealing with loss. It’s appropriate that the game is effectively both a fantasy about reclaiming at least part of what you have lost, and a colossal exercise in coping. The game is as much about getting distracted from your responsibilities and fucking off to snowboard in the mountains as it is about being aware of the world around you. The Zelda games have frequently used themes of Shintoism to portray harmony in nature and in civilization. I’m currently replaying Ocarina of Time and the cosmogony myth (is it a myth if a talking tree explains it to you?) specifically words the goddesses as “[giving] the spirit of law to the world” and “[producing] all life forms who would uphold the law.” When I was younger (see: early 20s) I didn’t scrutinize the text much but now I figure it’s reasonable to read “law” as “natural order”. It should be noted that for an N64 game, OoT has remarkably good prose. BotW, in transitioning the series in what may be its third main genre (as opposed to the genres of Zelda 1 and OoT), has taken that Shintoist aesthetic and incorporated it into the entire philosophy of the game’s design. More than just being a game whose narrative concerns an imbalanced world, BotW embraces the trends of open worlds and immersive sims to create an immense, varied space where the coded laws of physics are always impacting the experience. Thunderstorms make metal equipment a liability, while rain covers the sounds of footsteps. Wind can sweep away items, fire and high temperatures affect flammable objects (including yourself), and aforementioned metallic items can conduct electricity, which can be used to solve puzzles in unintended ways. Weather changes regularly based on the region and changes the world in tandem. Rain doesn’t just fall, it actively collects, and ponds become bigger, and surfaces become slicker. Each systemic element (pun not intended) that was incorporated affected everything else in the world, and in interviews there were mentions that changing the volume of wind in one area had a butterfly effect on another, causing pots to fly off of patios in a village. It’s no wonder the game took five years to make, considering how rarely glitches occur in the game (and most that I know of have to be deliberately recreated for exploitation). You’re engaging with enemies as much as you are with the environment, and at times even with your own body, creating and consuming food and drink for the purpose of staving off sunstroke or frostbite. As a result, BotW’s Hyrule is immensely palpable, and easy to lose oneself in from how livable it feels.

When I first started playing at release, I was a bit disappointed to discover that villages existed in-game, as early promotional material and the state of the Great Plateau you start on painted a picture of a lonely world. In the end, the soundtrack and vast amount of uncolonized land does give an understated sense of melancholy that defines the game, though the fact that every five steps you’ll find a Korok micropuzzle waiting to YA HA HA and fanfare at you betrays that a bit (I still love those Koroks and their puzzles, don’t @ me). The NPCs in this are numerous, though, from the occupants of the villages to wandering traders, and their personalities are all distinct and charming, and probably the best I’ve ever seen in a game, or at least in a long time. If this game wasn’t railroading the Link/Zelda relationship so hard, I would have liked a Dragon’s Dogma-style “date any NPC (within reason)” mechanic. I’m just going to have to start a “NPCs you should marry” side-tumblr.

Another defining aspect of the gameplay, and easily what makes the game surpass arguably every other Zelda, is how Nintendo heard the decade or so of complaints about the linear Zelda lock-and-key formula being reiterated to the point of stagnation, and, after great success with A Link Between Worlds’ item rental subversion, just decided to make everything optional. You do the tutorial on the Great Plateau, and, if you feel especially gutsy, you can beeline it straight to Ganon. He’s in horse-riding distance, or running distance, if you’re tenacious. Will you make it to him, survive the hordes of enemies, and take him down? If it’s your first time playing the game and you haven’t learned the systems, probably not. Is it possible? Absolutely. Much like how the monthly cycle of a Persona game is a proverbial Rocky training montage of preparing for The Big Fight, everything you do in BotW is in preparation. A lot of open world games can feel dissonant in that you’re incentivized to be distracted as a player and make your own fun, meanwhile the protagonist keeps saying “I’m gonna get bloody revenge on the mafia boss!” during bowling matches. There is still, unavoidably, a sense of urgency played up for narrative sake in BotW, since Impa insists Zelda is waiting and can’t hold Ganon back forever, but it’s all much more narratively justifiable, if you want that. You know, because Zelda is for hardcore roleplaying.

I couldn’t resist a second playthrough, even after logging 215+ hours, so I went ahead and started a separate file on Master Mode, Nintendo’s weird in-house, in-franchise rebranding of, uh, a hard mode. Previously it was called Hero Mode. Why do you--well, okay, I know why they do it. They’re likely trying to distinguish it from a “we just tweaked the numbers” hard mode, and also want to make it feel less threatening than something labeled hard mode. If they’re going to go to the trouble to make it a distinct form of play, they want to try and appeal to everyone. And it is fairly distinct. All enemies are bumped up one rank, so a red bokoblin is blue, and a blue bokoblin is black, and so on. There is a new strongest rank of enemy, though in my run I did not seek them out. There are enemies (and treasure chests!) perched on flying rafts, which can be one-shot with proper bow aiming, but also carry dangerous elemental arrows, and can alert all other enemies in the area. Stealth is much more difficult, and pointless early in. All enemies regenerate up to a third of their health, including bosses! Though, that can be temporarily interrupted by inflicting any amount of damage on them, so it behooves you to be on the offense. Less autosave slots! This wasn’t a problem for me. Guardians randomly delay the firing of their beams! This was absolutely a problem for me and I avoided them entirely in my run. In the beginning when tools and resources are scare, particularly on the Great Plateau, Master Mode is at its hardest, and its most thrilling. Rather than aimlessly exploring, I was pressured to decide where I knew things were, and beeline it to them. Sometime in-between two of the four main optional dungeons, I had amassed enough valuable resources that the game had settled back into the same kind of difficulty as normal mode. Bosses were a little harder due to regen and my resources being somewhat scarcer, but they were manageable. Competently performing flurry attacks (upon successfully dodging attacks at the last second) was extremely valuable to me, but I imagine with enough food in my inventory, I could have brute forced my way through a lot of the fights (though, uh, obviously thou wouldst like to live deliciously (please hate me for this phrasing)). I chose to forego the Master Sword for the sake of challenge, and beat Master Mode with only seven hearts, in around 25 hours. You should play Master Mode, it’s fun.

Here’s a little gameplay SPOILER:

Something I haven’t done, but would like to eventually do, is avoid the main dungeons and just head straight to Ganon. When I played Master Mode, I wasn’t totally confident, and did the dungeons for the resources. After watching some speedruns I learned that if you skip the dungeons, and therefore the main bosses, you have to fight them all at once immediately before the fight with Ganon, without breaks.

That. Sounds. Great.

Wandersong (PC/Steam): Have you heard about Homestuck?

Okay, wait. Wait. Come back, wait. Stop leaving. PLEASE.

Okay, I got the most inflammatory sentence out of the way. Now that we’re eased into that: Wandersong is unignorably influenced by Homestuck. Homestuck conjured a lot of baggage, from having a really difficult, pretentious, arrogant author (I should know, I gave him the benefit of the doubt for way too long), to having some unfortunate narrative turns, to being a billion words long. Wandersong invokes the vaster-than-God scope, the minute and personal perspective of the heroes, and its inclinations toward emotional intelligence (it still surprises me Homestuck had these moments given the author’s deeply unsympathetic sense of humor), and… condenses it! It also makes it a light puzzle-platformer and is about performing music (note: not rhythm, you don’t have to have ANY rhythm), and looks like a Paper Mario game. It is very charming, very funny, very optimistic, and most surprisingly, uncompromising at times. Wandersong says that you, despite your role, are capable of great things, especially self growth and change, as long as you commit to it. If, faced with the consequences of your bad decisions, you choose to double down and keep at it, you will reap what you sow. This is distinctly different from Undertale’s brand of pacifism route optimism, where “no one has to die!” This brand of optimism is a measured but enthusiastic “you can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved, but you can save the rest” and I think that’s a uniquely valuable message.

I was a little confused about the resolution of the communist uprising chapter, but I recall the game bringing my cynicism into question, and the most important thing a work can do is make you question yourself.

(Also, if any of my mutuals are low on funds but interested, I do have a drm-free version I can share.)

Minit (PC/Steam): I don’t think I actually have a lot to say about Minit! It’s very fun and curious and short. You play a little… duck… thing, and you pick up a cursed sword which kills you in one minute. Then you wake up the next day, and die in a minute. Then you wake up the next day. Having only sixty seconds of vitality, you have to optimize your exploration. There’s a slow-speaking old man who you will die listening to, but the hint he gives at the end of his sentence will lead you to something valuable. There’s a guy in a bar angry about the lack of music. If you change the music, he will probably dislike it. If you keep changing the music, you might live to see him like it. There’s a boat ride to a tropical island you have to grit your teeth and wait through. Not all of the events are slow, some are quick bouts of hurried exploration. Most of it is, given the time limit. I’d say more, but given the overall length (it took me about an hour to finish), I’d risk spoiling a sizable fraction of the experience. It’s about $10, though I got mine in a Humble Bundle Monthly subscription. The spec requirements are very low, so your laptop can likely run it.

A Hat in Time (PC/Steam): Heads up, I’m gonna get into a lot of spoilers for this game, including endgame spoilers, but also heads up, the story isn’t really the point in this game. This is a game about tone and platforming. That said, I’m gonna be talking exclusively about the weird ideas in this game, and if you want those weird ideas to be a surprise, then just skip ahead until I put up big letters.

I’m somewhat hesitant to be critical of A Hat in Time because despite a number of weird Things about it, I recognize that it’s quite popular with a lot of people, and that always makes me pause and want to figure out what it is that makes it pass the bar for others. My guess at this point is that it invokes nostalgia through its unmitigated imitation of games that came before. The games it chooses to ape are all your childhood’s Greatest Hits, Wind Waker (which it most resembled in its earliest development), Super Mario Sunshine/Galaxy (which it most resembles now), Banjo-Kazooie, Psychonauts, etc. It never really surpasses those games, for me, and at times cribs from them to the degree that it obscures the game’s own identity. After all, what you enjoy may help define you, but you wouldn’t say it’s your personality. Well. Unless you kin the Gamecube. I guess. There are bonus levels to the game’s different “worlds” (I thought they were different planets, since your hub area is a spaceship, and you access them via different telescopes, but it turns out it’s just one planet?), and you can collect photographs, which sequentially tell a story about the residents of that “world”. Psychonauts did this because each level took place in the mind of a character, and the photos together told a story about the character that fundamentally changed the way you thought about them, and made the whole game feel richer as a result. I collected the photos for all but the DLC levels in AHiT (those are Really Hard), and of those five or so worlds, none of those bonus photos told me anything that changed how I thought about the characters. There’s a dock town run by a mafia (s-sorta) led by a chef, but did you know they all used to work at a processing factory before going there? There are two manipulative bird directors who are fighting over the same studio to produce their own film and win an award, but did you know they… wanted to be directors since they were kids? There’s a devil analogue who steals people’s souls if they wander into his forest, but did you know he was a prince, and the princess was mad he talked to another girl (it was a flower girl, he was getting flowers for the princess), and imprisoned him until they both the prince and princess turned into evil ghosts? That’s the only one that comes close to being an “oh” moment, but I don’t think it does for the reasons the writer was hoping for. In general, these are prologues without substance.

Speaking of substance, the game has a bit of an issue with theming. At least, it does at first. The first town is the previously mentioned dock town, run by a mafia. By “mafia”, I mean a bunch of meatheads who talk about how they like punching people, and refer to themselves individually, in the third person, as Mafia. Mafia loves to punch the poor and the birds. Mafia is a one-dimensional character copy-pasted across 20% of the game. Mafia laughs. They’re run by a chef, but also they can’t cook, so there’s a cat chef in hiding who routinely swaps out their food with his so no one has to eat bad food. I don’t know why, when the town has maybe three non-Mafia character. He does eventually leave and board your ship, so maybe he’s just looking for something to do. The leader of the mafia also boards your ship, for a joke and to sell you an upgrade. The mafia are also afraid of mud monsters, or aliens, or something. There’s a girl with a moustache named Moustache Girl who wants to use your Time Macguffins to overthrow organized crime, and Hat Girl decides that’s a no-go. There are giant faucets around the town that replace all the water with lava. You might be noticing these things have little to no connection. You might be suspecting this level was made first when the dev was inexperienced. I might be suspecting this. It’s fine.

Later worlds do a much better job of theming. There’s the movie studio split between two birds. One of them a penguin, who prefers science fiction, the other a…

...hmmm. I suspect this guy, The Conductor, is an OC the director has had for a while, maybe since childhood, that they just decided Is A Bird, and carried it into the game, since the game occasionally is like... bird?? Alternatively, it’s some sort of corruption of Woodstock from Peanuts. Possibly both. Anyway, this guy just wants to make movies that take place on wild western trains. He has a strong fake Scottish accent, and the penguin, named DJ Grooves, is some sort of disco Elvis. They’ve both hired owls as actors, and some crows have snuck onto the train set (the crows are so obviously the G-Men from Psychonauts’ Milkman level it bothers me a bit). This is already a little busy, but it’s okay! Birds, movies, two distinct genres, and you trapped in-between them, just trying to collect your macguffins. It works. You take part in both of their movies, and your performance in both determines the winner, when suddenly… CORRUPTION WAS AFOOT, and you have to explore the depths of the studio and engage in a showdown.

Another world is a spooky forest where your access is restricted by completing certain contracts for the devilish character. Sometimes it’s murder (reasonable), exploring a haunted mansion in survival horror format (ooh!), fixing the plumbing in a well (wait, what), and doing mail delivery (back up back up). Half of that works. The finale of the forest makes up for it, though. This game insists on most of its bosses having like 4-5 phases and breaks for dialogue and the gall required to get away with that honestly earned my respect. They’re pretty fun times.

The best level to play is, unsurprisingly, the first DLC. I say unsurprising because it’s clear the dev is learning as they go, and the level design improves as they go along. Aside from bonus levels, the first DLC takes place on a massive cruise liner titled the SS Literally Can’t Sink. Ha ha. It’s split into three parts. The first part has you exploring the many interconnected rooms of the ship to find broken shards of a macguffin, the second part has you taking that mental map and using it to frantically complete multiple timed fetch quests at once, and the third part, now that you understand the ship pretty intimately, capsizes the ship, requiring you to traverse frigid waters and overturned scenery to retrieve babies and the ship’s incompetent but adorable baby seal crew (the seals speak in hewwo talk, the game is unforgivably loaded with memes but let me have this). This progression is my favorite in the game, and while I haven’t bought the Nyakuza Metro DLC, I’m looking forward to it.

The ending level had me a bit bewildered at first because in the beginning when Hat Kid refuses to use time powers to stop organized crime, I saw it as a hamfisted way to create tension between Hat Kid and Moustache Girl. Apparently it was working up towards the moral of the story. In the final level, Moustache Girl has stolen all the macguffins, and possessing ultimate power, becomes corrupted ultimately, and summons everyone in the world to her Bowser castle to be judged and die. On first glance, I thought “well, sure, that’s sensible,” but when Hat Kid finds the support of all the villains in the game, I was a little confused. The villains sacrifice themselves to give you infinite health, explicitly stating that they’ll just come back through time magic if you win so who cares (cool stakes), and you overcome authoritarianism with the support of corrupt hollywood, organized crime, and the literal devil. This would be fine if at some point Hat Kid, you know, took them on a Zuko Quest to face turn all of them, but that doesn’t happen. They just all decide “hey yeah, fuck this girl! Also we don’t have time for the nuance this might require!” After all is said and done and you collect all your macguffins, you’re given the choice of leaving the defeated Moustache Girl a single macguffin so she can defeat the mafia (whose side are we on) or just saying nahhh. Neither appears to make a difference, but maybe in a year or two we’ll get a DLC that makes you regret your words and deeds. You try to fly your ship to your home planet, and the villains all grab on to your ship, which is in space, begging you not to leave. I seriously suspect they intended to incorporate face-turn scenes and just couldn’t find the time, because nothing but physical proximity implies these guys would have any emotional attachment to Hat Kid, and that’s a bit of a stretch. Anyway, Hat Kid brooms them off the ship to plummet down to earth and flies away. Sheds a tear about the whole thing. In the end, the moral was that Order good, but too much Order bad, except if you are Hat Kid, in which case Chaos good. Or maybe…

After finishing the game I decided to look into any left over secrets, since my completion score was in the 80s of percents. Turns out that if you use the camera badge to finagle the free look feature into a marginally open armoire somewhere on your spaceship, you can find a shrine to Hat Kid with a couple skulls, a bunch of blurry photos, and some strange symbols. If you doing this while wearing the mask that lets you see the secrets of the dead (for platforming and puzzle purposes, of course), there’s a bunch of alien text you can decode. And then there’s some youtube channels. And a twitter account. All sharing more of those decodable ciphers, all talking about vague dreamy apocalyptic histories and dark betrayals. Or something. That’s right, this game’s got a fucking ARG. I cut things off there. If the developer Gears for Breakfast is gonna make an occultist grimdark sequel to A Hat in Time, they can put up a trailer for it.

OKAY I’M DONE TALKING ABOUT A HAT IN TIME, the short of it is that I had a lot of mixed feelings but had fun.

How did I end up talking more about A Hat in Time than Breath of the Wild? What are my priorities?

Well, that’s everything I finished in May! Will I get back to anime and manga in June? Guess we’ll see! Again, let me know if you want me to do year-recap Marvel posts, since my liveblogging is mostly just shitposts, and the occasional attempt at thoughtfulness among those posts feels kind of out of place. Honestly, I’m probably gonna do that anyway, but it’s nice to see interest. If you read all this, thanks a lot! Go play Breath of the Wild and Wandersong.

#curry plays games

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the-desolated-quill · 6 years ago

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The Quill Seal Of Approval Awards - The Best of 2018

Hello and welcome, dear reader, to the greatest, most important awards ceremony in the history of entertainment. The Quill Seal Of Approval Awards. The award of recognition that everyone on Earth covets even though they don’t know it. For the Quill Seal Of Approval is a most esteemed prize for hard work and artistry. Better than the Golden Globes, more prestigious than the BAFTAs and guaranteed to be more diverse than the Academy Awards. You know your film, novel, TV show or video game has achieved legendary status when some random nobody on the internet says it’s the best in some obscure top 10 list that’s read by only a couple of people. That’s the true sign of success.

First, a few parish notices. Obviously this is my subjective opinion, so if you disagree with my choices, that’s fine. Go make your own list. (also remember that my opinion is 100% objective, scientific, factual and literal truth and anyone who disagrees is clearly a philistine and a dummy and a poopy-head whose mum smells of elderberries). Also please bear in mind that I haven’t been able to experience everything 2018 has to offer for one reason or another. In other words, please don’t be upset that A Star Is Born isn’t on this list. I’m sure it’s as amazing as everyone says it is. I just never got around to watching it.

Okay. Let us begin.

Inside No. 9 - Series 4

BBC2′s Inside No. 9, written by the League of Gentlemen’s Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, is an anthology series that’s often sadly overlooked, but it’s really worth a watch if you’re into shows like Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone, and this series in particular has been fantastic. We’ve had an episode written entirely in iambic pentameter, an episode whose chronology runs backwards, a live episode that really plays around with the format, episodes containing tragic and biting satire, and one especially twisted episode that brings out a side of Steve Pemberton we’ve never seen before. Series 4 has been a real treat from start to finish, with each episode beautifully written and expertly performed. Inside No. 9 deserves to share the same pedestal as Black Mirror, no question.

Black Panther

I’m sure everyone knows about my less than flattering views on the Marvel Cinematic Universe by now, which is what made Black Panther such a breath of fresh air for me. Stripping away all the convoluted crap, Black Panther has often been compared to The Dark Knight, and for good reason. Like The Dark Knight, this movie uses the superhero genre to tackle real social and political issues. In Black Panther’s case, exploring just what it means to be black in the modern world. Boasting an impressive cast of black actors, strong female characters, an engaging and complex antagonist, fantastic special effects and truly excellent direction from Ryan Coogler, Black Panther represents a new benchmark for Marvel, the superhero genre and the film industry in general. It proves how important and how lucrative diversity and representation in media can be, and it unintentionally shows how flawed the Marvel business model has become. The reason behind Black Panther’s success is simple. It’s because it’s bloody brilliant. And the reason it’s bloody brilliant is because Coogler was allowed to realise his own creative vision without Kevin Feige and Mickey Mouse breathing down his neck. Perhaps they should take note of that in future.

Deadpool 2

Of course Deadpool 2 is going to be on this list. Are you really surprised?

The Merc with the Mouth goes from strength to strength in the rare instance where the sequel is actually as good as, if not better than, the original. The first Deadpool was a great origin story for the character, but Deadpool 2 felt like an adventure ripped straight from the comics themselves. Crass, ultra violent and hysterically funny, Deadpool 2 is the crowning jewel of the X-Men franchise. Fan favourites such as Negasonic Teenage Warhead and Colossus return as well as new characters such as Domino, played by the exceptional Zazie Beetz, Cable, played by the astounding Josh Brolin, and Firefist, played by Julian Dennison who deserves all the success in the world because good God this kid can act!

But of course the star of the film is Deadpool himself with Ryan Reynolds once again proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that he understands this character back to front. Not only is he hysterically funny, capturing the character’s irreverent tone perfectly, he also absolutely nails the tragic underpinnings of Deadpool that make him such a wonderful character. In between the f-bombs and gore are moments of real drama and emotional pathos as the film tackles themes such as loss, discrimination, abuse and suicidal depression. All this whilst taking the piss out of 2017′s Logan.

Oh yeah, and it also features the first openly LGBT superheroes in cinematic history. Fuck you Disney! NegaYukio and Poololosus for the win! LOL! No, but seriously, now that you have the rights to X-Men back, if you try and censor Deadpool in any way, shape or form, I will kick your arse.

God Of War (2018)

“BOY!”

Yes Kratos is back, having successfully destroyed the world of Greek mythology and now has his eyes on the Norse Gods. And he has a son now. What could possibly go wrong?

Seriously though, this new God Of War is simply exquisite. While I have long admired the God Of War franchise for its interpretation and adaptation of Greek mythology, the previous games in the series have never exactly been the most sophisticated when it comes to storytelling (and the less said about the casual sexism, the better. Yes Sony, I promise I understand the thematic reasons behind playing a minigame that allows you to have sex with Aphrodite in God Of War 3, but it still doesn’t change the fact that it’s sexist as shit). God Of War 2018 changes all that with an intelligent and engaging story that allows us understand and connect with Kratos at a more personal level than we’ve ever done before. Taking place years after God Of War 3, Kratos is older, wiser and trying to raise his son Atreus in the hopes that he won’t make the same mistakes Kratos did in his past. Not only is the story amazing, continuing the franchise’s themes of vengeance and the strained relationships between parents and their children, the gameplay is also a ton of fun with many memorable moments and boss fights.

And as an added bonus, we get two strong female characters that aren’t treated like discardable sex objects. That was nice of them.

Incredibles 2

The long awaited sequel to The Incredibles finally arrived in 2018 and it did not disappoint. Incredibles 2 was everything I could have wanted and more. Continuing on from the events of the first movie, we see Elastigirl take the spotlight as she fights the Screenslaver whilst trying to persuade the worlds’ governments to lift the ban on superheroes. Meanwhile Mr. Incredible takes a back seat as he tries to reconnect with his kids Violet, Dash and Jack-Jack and prove he can be a good, supportive dad.

Continuing to draw inspiration from Fantastic Four, X-Men and Watchmen, Incredibles 2 is... well... incredible. Expanding the world he created, Brad Bird tells a smart, funny and compelling story that stands head and shoulders above the majority of superhero movie fodder we get nowadays. Elastigirl flourishes in the lead role this time around and the kids get a lot more development, the Screenslaver is a great villain that compliments the themes of the franchise wonderfully, and we get to see a whole bunch of new characters such as Voyd and the Deavor siblings as well as the return of old favourites like Frozone and Edna Mode.

Honestly, the baby alone is worth the price of admission. Hopefully we won’t have to wait another fourteen years for Incredibles 3.

Marvel’s Spider-Man

Marvel’s Spider-Man is an amazing game. But of course you knew that already. It’s made by Insomniac Games, the same guys behind Ratchet & Clank. Of course it was going to be brilliant.

Simply put, this game does for Spider-Man what the Arkham games did for Batman. Not only is it a great game with brilliant combat and fun web swinging mechanics, it also has a great story worthy of the wall crawler. Unlike the movies, which seem to continuously yank Peter Parker back into high school with each new reboot as those the poor bastard were attached to the fucker on a bungee rope, this Spidey has been fighting crime for eight years. With great power comes many responsibilities as we see him struggle to juggle crime fighting, his new job as a scientist, his commitments to helping Aunt May at the F.E.A.S.T shelter and trying to win his ex Mary Jane Watson back after a six month split. It’s a brilliant story featuring many classic villains such as Shocker and Electro as well as lesser known villains like Screwball and the criminally underrated Mister Negative who finally gets to be the central antagonist in a Spider-Man adaptation. It’s fun to play, engaging, dramatic and really emotional at points. I cried real tears at the end. What a punch to the gut that was.

OOOOOH! And we might be getting to play as Miles Morales in the sequel! I sure hope so! :D

The Grinch

At this point I imagine many of you are scratching your heads.

“Really Quill? The Grinch? Illumination’s The Grinch? This deserves the Quill Seal Of Approval? Are you sure?” Yes dear reader, I’m absolutely sure. Just hear me out.

It’s true that the majority of Dr Seuss adaptations are shit. While the live action version of the Grinch starring Jim Carrey has a cult following and is fondly remembered by some, it’s still pretty crap, and even Illumination themselves screwed up royally with their adaptation of The Lorax. But this new Grinch is truly excellent. For starters, the animation is gorgeous. This is clearly the format that works best for Seuss movies. Benedict Cumberbatch does a really good job voicing the character, giving him depth and complexity beyond just being a big old meanie. The film also has something no other Seuss film has ever had before. Subtlety. Illumination have clearly learned their lesson after The Lorax. They’re no longer bashing you over the head with a moral message. They’re not trying to over-complicate a simple story by adding pointless sub-plot after pointless sub-plot. In fact the bits they do add actually feed into the main core of the narrative, as opposed to The Lorax, which just confused things. And while there are cute Minion-esque sidekicks like there are in a lot of Illumination films, The Grinch limits it to two (Max the dog and a reindeer named Fred), they’re both legitimately funny, serve an important narrative purpose and don’t distract from the more serious and emotional moments.

In all honesty, I was debating between giving the Quill Seal of Approval to The Grinch or to Bumblebee (the first legitimately good Transformers movie), but I decided to go with The Grinch because of how it handles the character and the story’s message. A lot of people scoffed at the idea of giving the Grinch a back story (and to the film’s credit they don’t force the issue or over-explain where the Grinch came from) but it’s honestly what makes this new adaptation of The Grinch so special to me. He’s gone from being a Scrooge-like monster to an anxiety filled misanthrope who associates Christmas with being alone. It may sound like a jarring change on paper, but in practice it honestly works so well and adds a whole new dimension to the Grinch. It’s treated with absolute care and sincerity and the film really earns its emotional moments, particularly at the end when we see the Grinch sit down to have Christmas dinner with the Whos.

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend you give this new Grinch a chance. You might be pleasantly surprised :)

Doctor Who - Series 11

A woman?! In the TARDIS?! How absurd!

Jodie Whittaker made history as the first woman to play the Doctor and the new series doesn’t disappoint. Whittaker is predictably brilliant in the role, giving the character compassion, charm and wit. We also get a new bunch of companions (including the always brilliant Bradley Walsh as Graham) who all have some great moments in Series 11 and the relationships they form with each other is incredibly touching and fun to watch. But the writing, my God, the writing. Admittedly not every episode has been perfect, but it’s leagues above anything Moffat has given us during his disastrous reign. The majority of Series 11 has been well written and intelligent, tackling important and relevant social issues (something Doctor Who has always been doing and anyone who says otherwise is an idiot) and focusing on likeable and relatable characters rather than convoluted series arcs. We got to meet Rosa Parks, witness the partition of India, and ponder on the dangers of automation whilst the Doctor tries to save the world from bubble wrap. Oh, and the Daleks are scary again! I know! I couldn’t believe it either!

What makes this all the more remarkable is who the showrunner is. Chris Chibnall. A writer I’ve often criticised in the past for being derivative and shit, and yet somehow he’s managed to create some of the best Doctor Who I’ve seen in a long time. Not only has his writing improved dramatically since his Torchwood days, he’s also demonstrated a commitment to having diverse representation both in front of and behind the camera as well as in the scripts themselves. For the first time in what feels like an age, Doctor Who feels like Doctor Who again, and I’m ecstatically happy.

Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse

How come we don’t see many animated superhero movies in the cinema? Considering the medium from which superheroes came from, you’d think it would be a no-brainer. Presumably it’s because Disney have got such a strangle hold on the animation market, but that’s hopefully going to change thanks to Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse (or, Sony’s Repentance for The Emoji Movie).

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. The animation is gorgeous. It’s pretty much an animated comic book and it stands out as one of the most unique looking animated films in recent memory. Spider-Verse is essentially a love letter to the legacy of Spider-Man as we see multiple different versions of Spidey, including Spider-Gwen, Spider-Ham and Nicholas Cage as Ghost Rider cosplaying as Spider-Man Noir, demonstrating not only the sheer variety of Spider-Men we’ve had over the years, but also exploring what connects them together. With all these different interpretations across many different universes, the idea of Spider-Man comes to the same thing. An ordinary person who experiences tragedy and becomes something greater. It’s hopeful and inspirational in a way Spider-Man films hasn’t been for a while now (Spider-Man: Homecoming sucked donkey balls. Period).

But let’s not forget that while the film explores the Spider-Verse, the main focus is Miles Morales who finally makes his cinematic debut. Not only is it a very faithful adaptation of Ultimate Spider-Man’s origin story, Miles himself is such a great central character for the modern age and arguably has more relevance to today than Peter Parker does. The characters are funny and relatable and the story is expertly crafted and impactful. But then what do you expect from the writers and directors of The Lego Movie? (if only Disney hadn’t interfered with Solo: A Star Wars Story. We could have had it all).

Mowgli: Legend Of The Jungle

This one kind of snuck up on me toward the end of December, but I knew the moment I saw it I had to include it on this list.

Mowgli: Legend Of The Jungle is an adaptation of The Jungle Book with Andy Serkis making his directorial debut. Yes the same guy who did the motion capture for Gollum in Lord Of The Rings and Caesar in the rebooted Planet Of The Apes movies and who totes deserves an Oscar for Best Actor (fuck you Academy Awards!), and he brings this same motion capture technology to this film. Unlike Disney’s Jungle Book, which merely rehashes the original animated film whilst somehow stripping all the charm from it, Mowgli sticks closer to the original Rudyard Kipling book. This isn’t a cheery musical. This film is often dark and intense as we see Mowgli (played wonderfully by Rohan Chand) struggle to find his place in the world. He knows he doesn’t belong with the animals in the jungle, but he doesn’t really fit in with the world of man neither. It’s an emotional and dramatic character piece brought to life by great writing, great acting and stunning special effects.

Andy Serkis has expressed a desire to do an adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and after watching this movie, I would love to see that. If you haven’t already, go watch Mowgli: Legend Of The Jungle. It’s available to stream on Netflix and it’s truly amazing.

And that’s it for 2018. Congratulations to the winners of this year’s Quill Seal Of Approval Awards. Unfortunately we’re on a limited budget here on The Desolated Quill, so I can’t offer any sort of trophy or medal or anything. What I can do though is write the words ‘I’m an awesome cookie’ on a post-it note and stick it on your forehead. Will that do?

#quill seal of approval awards 2018 #quill seal of approval awards #best of the year #review #opinion

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