#because you just parodied art but you made it without any real knowledge of what abstract expressionism was

[dreamgirledward]

i think more people should be mean to the particular 'a kid/i could make that' crowd of people who dislike or even hate modern art

[vriskasapotheosis]

Red vs Blue and Homestuck, famous internet things from eras of the internet gone by and yet they still howl violently today. (warning post grande)

so generally when one thinks of the "old" internet, a lot of things can come to mind: less ads, a sense of wonder with a budding new technology, the lack of the cold grip of consumerism, a nostalgia for the old days that didn't really exist and you were just 10, you name it.

What always sticks to me was that the internet, in its early days, was another medium of art. People took to the internet and began to create art and music of course, but the internet as both a database archive of knowledge and a social tool gave rise to many different expressions: forums, websites, chat rooms, the way people used these were so uniquely creative because it was basically a whole new way of communication. It developed into its own language of how people talk online, which is still present today. Take even this dishonored little website Tumblr: peoples customization of their blogs to absurd degrees, the websites glitches and errors being used to make posts even funnier, the interplay between people being chronically online and the real world consequences, the entire internet was like this, this wild west mesh of ideas being shot at each other and ricocheting violently.

A specific aspect of this was the optimization of absurdism and parody: you had the memes, the flash animations, the abridged series, the youtube poops, the newgrounds, the impossible quizzes, anime episodes on youtube with subtitle translators having fun, all of these things were increasingly absurd with so many levels of variation, and it's this aspect I feel a lot of people have nostalgia for; The internet was a breeding ground for ideas that, because the soil was so fresh, nothing was really rejected, nor was there a push to "create content". People in the past made a whole ton of these things because it was fun, they wanted to express themselves, and they shared the space with tons of people who wanted to do the same. That isn't to say that people today don't also want to do these things, but the internet was so new at the time that it was unprecedented. The internet wasn't just a tool for knowledge archiving or communication, it was an art piece in and of itself, with every user having the ability to contribute to that. It became indistinguishable from being its own culture and ideology.

Which leads me to this: Red vs Blue, one of the most famous (if not The single most famous) webseries, and Homestuck, one of the most famous (or infamous) webcomics of all time are each reflective of these aspects in similar ways.

When talking about the directions, I mean the use of the internet as a medium to entertain vs a medium to communicate. Of course, these aren't mutually exclusive, but I bring them up because the internet nowadays is somewhat at war with itself in what it's becoming. You can point to any number of reasons for this (capitalism, reactionary mindsets, social media, etc etc), and you'd be correct, but the larger idea I'm referencing is that the internet, in a lot of ways, is alive. It grows and evolves with the culture around it, similar to how, say, societies or cities grow. It's no longer just a medium, but something we literally cannot live without. This is a blogging website that literally evolved into a social media website, and is now once again having its user base fall back into treating it like a blogging website. It's somewhat lost to us now, but the time of the internet where it's begun shifting towards being primarily a marketing tool is pretty recent. Things like youtube premium and their ad-free services (make a problem, sell the solution) are not even a decade old, but the sheer speed at which the internet evolves makes it seem like they've just been a fact of life forever. Ideas are always present, regurgitated, recycled, expanded on, reduced, and stretched and compressed in so many ways that it makes the internet feel simultaneously too fast and yet ageless.

But I'm getting ahead of myself: Red vs Blue and Homestuck are living relics in a lot of ways, reflective of a time long past where so many other original ideas and parodies have more or less faded from the collective internet audience. They also shockingly share many of the same methods of storytelling and hitting emotional beats, and in themselves are pioneers of how people on the internet create and share media.

Red vs Blue is the well-known parody of Halo where the guys at RoosterTeeth made self insert Halo OCs that do nothing but be deployed in Blood Gulch, stand around and talk. RvB is a veritable time capsule of charm, so much of the humor reflective of the early era of the internet. It's not out of place alongside the type of stuff you'd see emerge from places like Newgrounds, where many budding animators and game developers began to post their first ever works. Many people today may not look as fondly back on these times (and in fairness there Is dated humor), but there's a reason why even two decades later people still regard the series fondly: It was really funny. No joke, one of RvB's greatest strengths was the staying power it had in just being witty and creative with its humor. RvB was literally made out of a joke the crew had where they argued about whether the Halo Warthog should have been named a Puma because it looked more like a cat. And even when RvB put more stock into fleshing out its story and world building, even the most serious hard asses in the series would still be comedic in some way. What was most amazing about RvB though was that it was a fan work made out of love and yet was nothing more than a group of guys recording their voices over regular game play. Despite that, the genuine charm and effort of the series made it so beloved that even today people still hold RvB fondly in their hearts.

Homestuck follows a similar pattern: The first thousand or so pages are literally about the characters trying to turn on and play a game, and the shenanigans that come from giving a group of children the power to control reality through a game. Homestuck was an original comic idea that exploded in popularity, and similarly took more chances on its storytelling. The majority of MSPAdventures style comics aren't actually structured like a normal comic narrative would be, rather it's like watching a walk through of a point-and-click, Sierra style puzzle adventure game, only further compounded when Homestuck would also include actual flash mini-games into its story. Additionally, despite people knowing Homestuck nowadays for its infamy with its fan base or the absurd narrative, an underappreciated aspect of Homestuck is that it was also really comedic at times. They weren't afraid to poke fun at their own story and be meta, but not to such an overwhelming degree that it becomes a self-referential schlock of the characters pointing at the audience, winking and going "yeah we know we are in a fictional story".

The thing that makes these two series special is that, at their core, they're utterly genuine. They absolutely acknowledge the ridiculousness of the story they tell, but they also place an equal importance of those elements alongside their serious plot beats. Any seasoned RvB fan will encourage everyone that they must absolutely watch the first five seasons, because the more grounded and momentous story beats later don't work without them. In a similar vein, a good half of Homestuck is literally about the characters clicking through their rooms and saying random things. These stories are built around the ideas of characters just standing around and talking about nothing, and they don't work without that because it's a core element of the series to Be about nothing important. They weren't afraid to engage their audiences in more serious ways, where these comedic, ridiculous stories gained weight and stakes, and you found yourself caring for these characters in far deeper, meaningful ways compared to their humble beginnings. They were passion projects at the end of the day, which became successful as a byproduct because the original authors really didn't expect for these series' to become full on franchises.

Personally, I don't think that series' like these two could be made today. The internet is just too different now: These types of independent projects are far harder to make, and drowned among the extreme mass of other new media constantly released. More than anything, I feel like the online scene has become too... mean, for lack of a better word. Again, as previously mentioned there's tons of extraneous factors as per why someone might not want to commit to an incredibly long series where people might warn you that "it doesn't get good until xyz point", but people really do have increasingly higher expectations towards something being "the perfect piece of media". The reality is, it's no longer viable for a dude in his basement to hammer away at a profoundly strange piece of media that resonates deeply with other people. The relationships between creators and fans has also changed, so these independent projects can be far more affected by mass opinion. This is not a critique, an admonishment or anything, but just how I view the state of independent, ongoing storytelling creators. I can't remember the last time someone made their own website to host their independent passion project comic. Things just change, and it's not a good or bad thing, just a fact of life. In the same vein, there's many good stories and pieces of media today that couldn't have been made back then for any number of reasons.

I really hope this doesn't come across as a "nostalgia good/bad" or "watch new/old things" type post, mainly because I highly encourage people to continue dusting off their old blorbos and share what they loved so much about them. I just find this specific case interesting, because RvB and Homestuck are both timeless in so many of the same ways (RvB is technically still running, and Homestuck last I checked still had spinoffs being made), especially because they are something that really could have only been born in the time when the internet was beginning to fall into place as a place to be creative. If you look hard enough, I don't doubt you could find tons of references of these two series' in many other pieces of media, because their status as some of the oldest and wildest stories to come out of the early era of the internet where everyone was figuring out how to use it still holds true today.

It's also why I hope people who read this are encouraged to try writing out or drawing their own strange ideas for stories. It's true that many people want to see the same stories and ideas repeated over and over again, but many more, I believe, want to see wilder and more profound stories, ones that don't make sense, that aren't afraid to challenge their viewers, and even just make them laugh and think "man, that was fucking weird".

[piduai]

Interview with Noda Satoru from the Golden Kamuy fanbook

sharing anywhere is fine, but please credit me.

Q: Tell me how you feel about passing 6 years of serialization. Noda: I was already serializing at the time of my debut, so I guess I’d be able to give a summary when I’m finished. I don’t really think about how many years it’s been, it’s merely a checkpoint.

Q: What made you decide to become a mangaka? Noda: I feel like I wrote it down as my goal in my yearbook back in middle school. I also wanted to become a movie director, but as a mangaka you can create the entire thing by yourself. 

When Golden Kamuy just took off I was living in a tiny apartment and the postman, a young fellow and a reader of Young Jump, realized that I’m Noda Satoru. The magazine was sending me a lot of things, so it was rather obvious. “Are you the author of Golden Kamuy?”, he asked in a surprised tone while looking around the cramped entryway. I could feel feel his confusion regarding the fact that that vast Hokkaido world of the manga was being created in this modest apartment. Or maybe he just expected me to be making more money and afford a better place. Anyhow, I just thought again about how a manga can be created in even the smallest room in the universe.

Q: Who is your favorite character and why? Noda: As always, it’s Tanigaki. But well, I love all of them. I want to showcase only the best parts of them, and it hurts when I fail. For example I’m very happy that there’s a character who stirs the pot as well as Usami. He’d be Katsuo in the world of Sazae-san.  

Q: Which characters are the easiest to draw, and which ones are the most difficult? Noda: Characters like Shiraishi, Tsukishima and Nagakura, they don’t have a lot of hair and even if they turn out a little ugly their faces are well-defined so it’s easy to draw. In general faces that are strongly distorted and resemble caricatures are easy. Meanwhile Asirpa, Kiroranke and Inkarmat have neat facial structures on top of wearing Ainu clothing, so they are a very high-calorie effort for me. Ogata and Kikuta are difficult too. Their faces are distinctive and I have to make them look cool too, which is wearing me out the most.

Q: Have you decided on all 24 convicts at the very start of the story? Noda: Wouldn’t I sound like a badass if I said that that I have? Anyway. There were the ones that were based off real-life Meiji era criminals, such as Shiraishi, Kumagishi Chouan or the lightning couple, and of course there was Hijikata.

Q: Tell me of a funny thing from the manga that you are fond of. Noda: Gansoku’s “Hah! ☆”. And also when Koito Jr. Was flapping his arms and legs around trying to keep himself in mid-air.

Q: Why did you decide on Otaru as the starting point? Noda: I am from Hokkaido, so I’m familiar with Otaru and Sapporo. Otaru is close to both the mountains and the sea. Sapporo used to be a swampland, it’s wide and flat and there is no sea. Otaru is a place where foreigners come and go, there are many criminals roaming around creating danger, and money is found. There aren’t many big cities in Hokkaido. There were Ainu living in Otaru but sources are scarce, however Nakagawa-sensei, the supervisor over the Ainu language, told me not to worry too much about the difference of location, so I figured it would be best to make it Otaru.

Q: Was there any real life experience you had while growing up in Hokkaido that you turned into a scenario? Noda: When I was about 19 someone I knew told me that there is a locust graveyard on a nearby mountain, which sounded so ridiculous I had to laugh in their face. Turns out it indeed was a heap of locusts and their eggs left after a locust plague, that place was the Teineyamaguchi locust mound (a real historical site). I realized I ended up using this in my story. I owe that person an apology.

Q: Was there any scene that was particularly difficult to draw? Could you elaborate on it? Noda: The time Sugimoto went against Nihei and Tanigaki. It gave me a very hard time. Who goes where and does what, how does Nihei carry Asirpa, stuff like this. I had no time to waste either, I just remember that sequence overall driving me insane. 

There was also the sequence with Wilk, Sofia and Kiroranke being at Hasegawa’s photo studio. It’s really frustrating to draw something that you know will bore the readers, the story flow becomes less exciting too. I was praying for everyone to have a little more patience and keep reading, because the twist was so good.

Q: If you were to take part in the gold hunt, which group would you like to belong to? Noda: It seems that Hijikata’s group doesn’t have funding problems, and because Kadokura is there the atmosphere is relaxed too. I’d go there.

Q: If you were to find all that gold, how would you use it? Noda: No idea. Had a couple when I was younger, though.

Q: Were you planning to eventually transfer the action to Sakhalin from the very beginning of the series? Noda: Asirpa and Kiroranke have roots there, so I anticipated that the story will eventually move to Sakhalin. I also expected to have to travel to Amur river myself, but couldn’t go after all, only went as far as Khabarovsk. 

I was thinking of making Sugimoto eat permafrost mammoth. There was talk of a research team or an ivory excavation team’s dog eating mammoth. However there was no reason to make Sugimoto and Co go as up north as needed for permafrost, so I scrapped the idea.

Q: Tell me something about the hardships you experienced while doing research is Sakhalin. Noda: It was tough, but fun. I was only able to understand the clear differences between Nivkh and Orok people by going there; I couldn't by only looking at records and materials while in Japan. 

Complete unrelated, but I was surprised by how many stray dogs wander around there. One time my cameraman and I ended up being chased by one while looking for a factory and we had to run for it. The beast was big, about the size of a German Shepherd. The guide also warned us about junkies, it was really scary.

I also went to the Japanese military pillbox over 50th parallel north and prayed at a cenotaph deep in the mountains. I met a group of Japanese people in the hotel by the place where it's said you can still find remains of Japanese soldiers and their driver, a Russian, seemed to help with collection of the remains on the regular. He said that he's doing it out of reverence, even as a former enemy. As a Japanese, I felt gratitude. The 7th Division are villains in my story, but I don't have any personal bias against either side.

Q: What were the biggest differences between drawing Hokkaido and Sakhalin? Noda: Well... it's Russia. Even though Sakhalin is so close, it's already Europe. The structure of houses is strikingly different. There's also the differences between Hokkaido Ainu and Sakhalin Ainu, and differences between Orok and Nivkh people. There is no manga that will conveniently lay the differences of those down for you. 

It seems that the Orok and Nivkh's relation with Japan only got more difficult by the beginning of Showa era, there is only one person in the whole of Japan who can supervise on the Orok language. The professors in cultural studies I consult for Golden Kamuy are truly top-level; not only are they tremendously knowledgeable, they also understand how important to me is to stay impartial.

The wildlife, as well. There's a biogeographical boundary between Hokkaido and Sakhalin, observing animals I would never be able to see in Hokkaido was riveting. 

Q: Did Sugimoto really have a hidden plan during the whole stenka business? Noda: No idea. Even if he used it as a pretext to get everyone involved, though... cut him some slack. He's only a man. Sometimes he just wants to fight and win. Not for Ume-chan or Asirpa-san, just for the sake of proving to himself that he's strong.

Q: Your art is dynamic and detailed. I think your style changed quite a bit with time, though. How would you describe yourself as an artist? Noda: I want to preface this by saying that in no way do I think of myself as more skilled than other mangaka, but if you're drawing everyday for more than 10 hours you're going to improve a lot eventually, whether you want it or not. People who are able to keep the same style for years without change are the ones who are impressive, because it means that they achieved the peak of their potential. Ageing and health problems influence your art a lot, you know. I try to draw by observing. I use a lot of references. Drawing by memory alone is not a good thing.

Speaking of other artists, I once had one of the assistants I had working for me for years draw me a door knob from memory, and the result was a truncated cone resembling pre-packaged pudding. The actual shape of a door knob has an intricately angular circular shape. It's the result of being unobservant in everyday life. Good art requires constant observation.

Q: What was the foundation for your style? Is there an artist you were influenced or inspired by? Noda: Araki Hirohiko-sensei, for sure. During my time as an assistant, many authors told me to not even try to be original when it comes to battle abilities, it's already been done in JoJo, it has it all. He's kind of the Beatles of this industry, isn't he? 

By the way, I usually have no intention of parodying JoJo in Golden Kamuy, but my friends will tell me that they identified this or that reference from time to time. I read Part 1 about 30 years ago but I was obsessed, so maybe some things were just left in my subconscious. I only did one obvious parody, during the stenka fight. Funnily enough that trope started in Fist of the North Star, though, not JoJo.

Q: What's one thing that gives you the most motivation to write? Noda: Fan letters. I know how straining it is to write long and neat sentences by hand, and am thankful for them. I'm happy that people go that far to share their thoughts about my work with me. I'm really grateful to the people who keep reading and supporting Golden Kamuy.

Q: Did you have an interest in Ainu culture before starting the series? Noda: I did not. I'll be glad if my work makes people interested in the Ainu. Prejudice is born out of ignorance, so if you want to learn about the Ainu, don't limit yourself to Hokkaido only; there are museums all around Japan, and they have knowledgeable curators. It's important to remember to take into account the time period and the occupation of the person on which the research materials are based when you're trying to learn about the subject.

Q: You showed us a lot of aspects of life during Meiji and Taisho eras. Tell us about what surprised or impressed you in the process of research. Noda: It's not that I was particularly knowledgeable, so having to check every single thing was quite exhausting. The Ainu, the military, katanas - all of these needed research on my part. 

There are more regulations and rules set for things out there than one could assume, and mangaka who base their works on real life need to be especially careful about this. You have to take into account things like the size of the buttons on a military uniform, how a tea cup is held, and and how different people talk in different ways. For movies there's staff working on costumes and props, there's the cast, there are screenwriters, but in a manga you are the one responsible for every single detail. I wish I had a time machine and travel back to those eras. There are things I couldn't get right here and there that I keep having regrets about.

Q: Golden Kamuy was the main visual in the British Museum manga exhibition between May and August in 2019. I know you went there in person. How was it? Noda: The trip felt like a reward for all of my efforts. The exhibition is jam-packed by opening time, but I got special treatment and they let me inside early in the morning so I could walk around the vast British Museum in solitude. I also travelled between Jack the Ripper's crime scenes at night by taxi.

The driver in a taxi I caught by chance was wonderful, she looked up photos of the crime scenes and surroundings taken at the time of investigation on her smartphone and showed them to me one by one, saying things like "the third victim was found here!". 

I've always had a soft spot for Jack the Ripper, back in middle school I even wrote a screenplay for a school festival stage and played him in it myself. It was done in very poor taste, like that one scene in the Addams Family movie where there are arms blown away and fountains of blood gushing out. The audience loved it. 

Q: Please leave a message for the readers. Or maybe some advice for the troubled youth. Noda: I want people to say that everyone in Golden Kamuy had a satisfying ending, and I want that for everyone involved more than anything. As for advice for the troubled youth, there's none. Life is survival of the fittest. The weak ones get eaten.

[glittergummicandypeach]

Fake Hafez: How a supreme Persian poet of love was erased | Religion | Al Jazeera

This is the time of the year where every day I get a handful of requests to track down the original, authentic versions of some famed Muslim poet, usually Hafez or Rumi. The requests start off the same way: "I am getting married next month, and my fiance and I wanted to celebrate our Muslim background, and we have always loved this poem by Hafez. Could you send us the original?" Or, "My daughter is graduating this month, and I know she loves this quote from Hafez. Can you send me the original so I can recite it to her at the ceremony we are holding for her?"

It is heartbreaking to have to write back time after time and say the words that bring disappointment: The poems that they have come to love so much and that are ubiquitous on the internet are forgeries. Fake. Made up. No relationship to the original poetry of the beloved and popular Hafez of Shiraz.

How did this come to be? How can it be that about 99.9 percent of the quotes and poems attributed to one the most popular and influential of all the Persian poets and Muslim sages ever, one who is seen as a member of the pantheon of "universal" spirituality on the internet are ... fake? It turns out that it is a fascinating story of Western exotification and appropriation of Muslim spirituality.

Let us take a look at some of these quotes attributed to Hafez:

Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, 'you owe me.' Look what happens with a love like that! It lights up the whole sky.

You like that one from Hafez? Too bad. Fake Hafez.

Your heart and my heart Are very very old friends.

Like that one from Hafez too? Also Fake Hafez.

Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.

Beautiful. Again, not Hafez.

And the next one you were going to ask about? Also fake. So where do all these fake Hafez quotes come from?

An American poet, named Daniel Ladinsky, has been publishing books under the name of the famed Persian poet Hafez for more than 20 years. These books have become bestsellers. You are likely to find them on the shelves of your local bookstore under the "Sufism" section, alongside books of Rumi, Khalil Gibran, Idries Shah, etc.

It hurts me to say this, because I know so many people love these "Hafez" translations. They are beautiful poetry in English, and do contain some profound wisdom. Yet if you love a tradition, you have to speak the truth: Ladinsky's translations have no earthly connection to what the historical Hafez of Shiraz, the 14th-century Persian sage, ever said.

He is making it up. Ladinsky himself admitted that they are not "translations", or "accurate", and in fact denied having any knowledge of Persian in his 1996 best-selling book, I Heard God Laughing. Ladinsky has another bestseller, The Subject Tonight Is Love.

Persians take poetry seriously. For many, it is their singular contribution to world civilisation: What the Greeks are to philosophy, Persians are to poetry. And in the great pantheon of Persian poetry where Hafez, Rumi, Saadi, 'Attar, Nezami, and Ferdowsi might be the immortals, there is perhaps none whose mastery of the Persian language is as refined as that of Hafez.

In the introduction to a recent book on Hafez, I said that Rumi (whose poetic output is in the tens of thousands) comes at you like you an ocean, pulling you in until you surrender to his mystical wave and are washed back to the ocean. Hafez, on the other hand, is like a luminous diamond, with each facet being a perfect cut. You cannot add or take away a word from his sonnets. So, pray tell, how is someone who admits that they do not know the language going to be translating the language?

Ladinsky is not translating from the Persian original of Hafez. And unlike some "versioners" (Coleman Barks is by far the most gifted here) who translate Rumi by taking the Victorian literal translations and rendering them into American free verse, Ladinsky's relationship with the text of Hafez's poetry is nonexistent. Ladinsky claims that Hafez appeared to him in a dream and handed him the English "translations" he is publishing:

"About six months into this work I had an astounding dream in which I saw Hafiz as an Infinite Fountaining Sun (I saw him as God), who sang hundreds of lines of his poetry to me in English, asking me to give that message to 'my artists and seekers'."

It is not my place to argue with people and their dreams, but I am fairly certain that this is not how translation works. A great scholar of Persian and Urdu literature, Christopher Shackle, describes Ladinsky's output as "not so much a paraphrase as a parody of the wondrously wrought style of the greatest master of Persian art-poetry." Another critic, Murat Nemet-Nejat, described Ladinsky's poems as what they are: original poems of Ladinsky masquerading as a "translation."

I want to give credit where credit is due: I do like Ladinsky's poetry. And they do contain mystical insights. Some of the statements that Ladinsky attributes to Hafez are, in fact, mystical truths that we hear from many different mystics. And he is indeed a gifted poet. See this line, for example:

I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.

That is good stuff. Powerful. And many mystics, including the 20th-century Sufi master Pir Vilayat, would cast his powerful glance at his students, stating that he would long for them to be able to see themselves and their own worth as he sees them. So yes, Ladinsky's poetry is mystical. And it is great poetry. So good that it is listed on Good Reads as the wisdom of "Hafez of Shiraz." The problem is, Hafez of Shiraz said nothing like that. Daniel Ladinsky of St Louis did. 

The poems are indeed beautiful. They are just not ... Hafez. They are ... Hafez-ish? Hafez-esque? So many of us wish that Ladinsky had just published his work under his own name, rather than appropriating Hafez's. 

Ladinsky's "translations" have been passed on by Oprah, the BBC, and others. Government officials have used them on occasions where they have wanted to include Persian speakers and Iranians. It is now part of the spiritual wisdom of the East shared in Western circles. Which is great for Ladinsky, but we are missing the chance to hear from the actual, real Hafez. And that is a shame.

So, who was the real Hafez (1315-1390)?

He was a Muslim, Persian-speaking sage whose collection of love poetry rivals only Mawlana Rumi in terms of its popularity and influence. Hafez's given name was Muhammad, and he was called Shams al-Din (The Sun of Religion). Hafez was his honorific because he had memorised the whole of the Quran. His poetry collection, the Divan, was referred to as Lesan al-Ghayb (the Tongue of the Unseen Realms).

A great scholar of Islam, the late Shahab Ahmed, referred to Hafez's Divan as: "the most widely-copied, widely-circulated, widely-read, widely-memorized, widely-recited, widely-invoked, and widely-proverbialized book of poetry in Islamic history." Even accounting for a slight debate, that gives some indication of his immense following. Hafez's poetry is considered the very epitome of Persian in the Ghazal tradition.

Hafez's worldview is inseparable from the world of Medieval Islam, the genre of Persian love poetry, and more. And yet he is deliciously impossible to pin down. He is a mystic, though he pokes fun at ostentatious mystics. His own name is "he who has committed the Quran to heart", yet he loathes religious hypocrisy. He shows his own piety while his poetry is filled with references to intoxication and wine that may be literal or may be symbolic.

The most sublime part of Hafez's poetry is its ambiguity. It is like a Rorschach psychological test in poetry. The mystics see it as a sign of their own yearning, and so do the wine-drinkers, and the anti-religious types. It is perhaps a futile exercise to impose one definitive meaning on Hafez. It would rob him of what makes him ... Hafez.

The tomb of Hafez in Shiraz, a magnificent city in Iran, is a popular pilgrimage site and the honeymoon destination of choice for many Iranian newlyweds. His poetry, alongside that of Rumi and Saadi, are main staples of vocalists in Iran to this day, including beautiful covers by leading maestros like Shahram Nazeri and Mohammadreza Shajarian.

Like many other Persian poets and mystics, the influence of Hafez extended far beyond contemporary Iran and can be felt wherever Persianate culture was a presence, including India and Pakistan, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and the Ottoman realms. Persian was the literary language par excellence from Bengal to Bosnia for almost a millennium, a reality that sadly has been buried under more recent nationalistic and linguistic barrages.

Part of what is going on here is what we also see, to a lesser extent, with Rumi: the voice and genius of the Persian speaking, Muslim, mystical, sensual sage of Shiraz are usurped and erased, and taken over by a white American with no connection to Hafez's Islam or Persian tradition. This is erasure and spiritual colonialism. Which is a shame, because Hafez's poetry deserves to be read worldwide alongside Shakespeare and Toni Morrison, Tagore and Whitman, Pablo Neruda and the real Rumi, Tao Te Ching and the Gita, Mahmoud Darwish, and the like.

In a 2013 interview, Ladinsky said of his poems published under the name of Hafez: "Is it Hafez or Danny? I don't know. Does it really matter?" I think it matters a great deal. There are larger issues of language, community, and power involved here.

It is not simply a matter of a translation dispute, nor of alternate models of translations. This is a matter of power, privilege and erasure. There is limited shelf space in any bookstore. Will we see the real Rumi, the real Hafez, or something appropriating their name? How did publishers publish books under the name of Hafez without having someone, anyone, with a modicum of familiarity check these purported translations against the original to see if there is a relationship? Was there anyone in the room when these decisions were made who was connected in a meaningful way to the communities who have lived through Hafez for centuries?

Hafez's poetry has not been sitting idly on a shelf gathering dust. It has been, and continues to be, the lifeline of the poetic and religious imagination of tens of millions of human beings. Hafez has something to say, and to sing, to the whole world, but bypassing these tens of millions who have kept Hafez in their heart as Hafez kept the Quran in his heart is tantamount to erasure and appropriation.

We live in an age where the president of the United States ran on an Islamophobic campaign of "Islam hates us" and establishing a cruel Muslim ban immediately upon taking office. As Edward Said and other theorists have reminded us, the world of culture is inseparable from the world of politics. So there is something sinister about keeping Muslims out of our borders while stealing their crown jewels and appropriating them not by translating them but simply as decor for poetry that bears no relationship to the original. Without equating the two, the dynamic here is reminiscent of white America's endless fascination with Black culture and music while continuing to perpetuate systems and institutions that leave Black folk unable to breathe.

There is one last element: It is indeed an act of violence to take the Islam out of Rumi and Hafez, as Ladinsky has done. It is another thing to take Rumi and Hafez out of Islam. That is a separate matter, and a mandate for Muslims to reimagine a faith that is steeped in the world of poetry, nuance, mercy, love, spirit, and beauty. Far from merely being content to criticise those who appropriate Muslim sages and erase Muslims' own presence in their legacy, it is also up to us to reimagine Islam where figures like Rumi and Hafez are central voices. This has been part of what many of feel called to, and are pursuing through initiatives like Illuminated Courses.

Oh, and one last thing: It is Haaaaafez, not Hafeeeeez. Please.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

This content was originally published here.

[valofaxwords]

Blog Post Week #6 Due 9/30

Do you agree with Jeffery Ow in his essay The Revenge of the Yellowface Cyborg Terminator?

In Jeffery Ow’s essay, Ow goes on to critique the game Shadow Warrior (1997) as a giving gamers “ the role of the cold blooded colonizer who rapes, pillages and kills like a digitized reenactment of the My Lai massacre.” In defense, the creators of the game, 3-D realm, excuse all action, dialogue, and themes of their game by stating that the game is not racist but rather “ a parody of all the bad kung-fu movies on the 60's-80’s”. All though I do overall agree with Ow on that Shadow Warrior is a racist game due to their use of Asian themes, I believe that Ow in his essay focuses on the incorrect things due to their ignorance of video games or the video game industry in general. Reading this essay, the ignorance on basic details about the game, such as claiming it is a 2.5D when it is a 3D game, gives off the air of this essay being written by an outsider looking into a world they don’t fully understand, and in turn, making assumptions and invalid accusations. Now this is in no way an attempt at discrediting the author due to their lack of video game knowledge, nor is this a defense to 3D Realm’s game, but rather directing the narrative to a more constructive and applicable place. To put it simply, because Ow’s ignorance of the video game scene in general, they tend to make points about the game that are completely unnecessary when they are completely more valid points to be made. Yes, this game is racist, but not because of the some of the points Ow makes.  

Does parody excuse accusations of racism?

In most cases, no it does not, and in the case of Shadow Warrior (1997), as Jeffery Ow also criticizes it, I would agree with him that the jokes and themes presented in the game go beyond parody and enter the realm of harmful stereotypes. Though Jeffery Ow focuses on the player being forced to perform certain actions due to the game being first person, that is besides the point in terms of the argument against the game. Looking into 3D Realms most popular games during that era, and what was generally popular in the industry at the time, you would see that the first-person shooter was the norm that every game developer was attempting to follow. What should be focused on is not that the player is “forced” into committing such acts, but rather that the developers saw it acceptable to be able to give players this option. Looking at their previous games such as Duke Nukem 3D, we see similar acts of generic violence seen in most games, which is also narrated by an overly macho caricature of cheap action movies speaking ridiculous one liners. What makes Shadow Warrior different is that 3D Realms felt the need to add an ‘Asian’ touch to their already successful formula. To focus on the gratuitous violence, the gameplay mechanics, and perspective is more akin to conservative pearl clutching of M Rated video games that it is a point towards criticizing the racism of the game. The problem lies with 3D Realm, without a care for sensitivity or respect towards the Asian community, thought it would be easy to make a new IP by taking their existing Duke Nukem game and characters, and simply repainting it with an ‘Asian’ brush. So, the terrible action one liners and crude jokes become tinted with their idea of an ‘Asian” flare, and instead rely on harmful stereotypes and overused, unfunny racist humor. What could have been a parody of the ridiculous action martial art movies of the 70’s and 80’s turns into a cheap racist imitation of what they believe those films were. Had it actually attempted to reference these movies and not the stereotypes believed about them, you may have gotten a game with nuanced funny references to movies akin to Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon, but instead of you get racist prostitute scene from the movie Full Metal Jacket stretched into a 15-hour game.  

Is online racism feel the same way as in person racism?

If you’ve ever experienced any form of true racism or harassment due to your race in real life, you eventually develop a type of thick skin that can differentiate the differences between words of pure hate and words of micro aggressive ignorance. POC grow up needing to know that difference simply to get by in the world. Their lives need to know the difference because every act of micro aggressiveness towards them can’t feel the same way as a hurtful slur to get by. So when encountering racism in an online space, does that feel any differently? Some may say that because of the internet’s anonymous nature, it may feel like nothing but a small shout in the dark from an unknown assailant, nothing more than a pebble in the road due to it’s facelessness; but others may counter with the notion that the dread of not knowing who it is, that it could be anyone, makes it more mentally looming. Personally, I would counter that online spaces aren’t more inherently different than real life spaces. Though the technology is mechanically different from anything seen ever before, I would argue that all human communications have remained essentially the same, or at the very least, our reactions to them have remained the same. Which to apply directly to the question, online racism feels the same as in person racism. I would feel just as hurt being slung a slur at me with malice if it had been said directly to me, posted to me online, or even been told on the telephone. How racism manifests itself in an online space certainly can be unique and must be analyzed, but if you analyze the root of it all, it all ends up and leads to the same thing, an awful ignorant person spouting hate in whatever means they have.

Is there a way to fix online racism?

There is always a way to deter racism in online spaces but determining to fix racism in online spaces is as fruitless of an effort as insisting you could fix racism found in physical letters or through the phone. Online spaces aren’t a mystical different beast than real life spaces in which people congregate, but what you gain from the mechanical nature of an online space is the technology to head off racism at the pass. The idea that keeping a public space clean and spotless encourages the upkeep in that space because no one wants to be the one to make it dirty, certainly applies in the discussion of keeping online spaces clean. Therefore, most online spaces combatting things like racism will tend to outright ban or censor certain phrases or slurs in their space. But the same problem that happens in real life occurs in the online space. When certain spaces get too big with too many members, the area becomes unmanageable as the caretakers are overrun by the number of people. And with a greater number of people, the statistical likelihood of encountering an outlier person who is perfectly keen on disturbing a spotless place, comes forth to ruin everything. If not nipped in the bud immediately, this causes those around to believe this conduct is okay, and those on the fence of doing harm are now being shown that it is acceptable to act in such behavior and will in turn also act similarly. All in all, there are ways to manage racism in online spaces, and they are normally the same way we would handle these situations in real life, so that goes to say that you can only fix online racism as much as you could fix racism in the real world.

[thewrongexecution]

thinkin’ ‘bout final fantasy

I go by Not The Author for exactly the reason that I ain’t no expert on any given work of fiction, but I do like to make connections what make me seem smart: an illusion, haphazardly crafted by incident accident and supplemented by precocious pretentiousness. All the same, here are some fun thoughts I had that you might also enjoy!

I do have a point, that I do get to. I feel like I should say that ahead of time, all things considered. Like, I can appreciate if you can’t appreciate a shaggy dog story? But there is a point to all this.

...Eventually.

Spoiler Warning:

Final Fantasies 1, 6, 7, 7R, 13 and 15

Content Warning:

Discussion of death

Cussin’

Length warning:

5621 words

13 sections

16 digressions

Let’s dig in.

- - - - -

Final Fantasy 1 was not my first Final Fantasy experience, but I think it was the first I ever played by myself? The remaster for the GBA, came bundled with FF2 on the same cart, which I played briefly but did not complete and do not remember, except that it had Cid.

FF1 doesn’t have a Cid, but I really loved the narrative anyway, straightforward as it was, because it was very specifically about spitting in the face of an uncaring god who would doom the world for a laugh. Take these chains that bind us to darkness and, though we be forgot to history, strangle with them that selfsame darkness to bring an end to its tyranny.

((it is a terrible curse, to love time travel. so many grand expectations, so few ever met. play ghost trick, chrono trigger, radiant historia, majora’s mask, outer wilds. have you any recs yourself, lemme know! I digress.

((I digress a lot, as I may have mentioned. they’ll be noted in parenthetical, like this.))

This is the foundation upon which Final Fantasy is built, and while any student of architecture could tell you of many and varied perfectly valid construction techniques, it resonates. Grappling with an immutable past to course-correct an uncaring future is, too, an apt description of personal growth; a theme as universal as being alive. And I, as an impressionable youth, ate that shit up.

((I assume I was young, at any rate. my love for time travel, be it era-spanning or moment-stretching, is, I suspect, not entirely coincidental to my terrible temporal memory.))

And that was the tale of the studio, too. Final Fantasy was so titled because, the story goes, the developers knew they would shutter if it didn’t make bank. Staring your imminent demise in the face, knowing your fate is doom, and giving it your all, all the same.

And then they made another twelve, plus two-and-a-half MMOs, and god knows how many mobile games and spin-offs, and now the Fantasy is that there could ever be a Final one. so say I: life parodies art.

((the half-an-MMO is FF14 1.0, which no longer exists and is a fascinating tale, a rally against bleak futures all its own. I’ll [link] Noclip’s three-part documentary covering the developer’s side of things, because that’s the one I’ve seen. there’s plenty other material to hunt down, though, if you wanna.))

- - - - -

Final Fantasy VII is a game about fate, too. Particularly Death, that most ultimate of fates. Tragic, to be sure; preventable, or at least delayable, in many cases; necessary, at times, for the growth of something new.

Unrelenting. Unstoppable. Inescapable.

Death, and the fights against it, take many forms. There are the fascist death squads that hunt down your ragtag band and any dissent against their cruel masters, but these will only truly stop by cutting off the hydra’s head and building an entirely new society; eight dudes and their dog, faced with a corporate private military, can survive but never win. There are such disasters as do slay that hydra, be they natural or man-made. There’s the space alien and the apocalypse it ushers. There’s literal illness and injury, physical or otherwise. There are the deaths of loved ones, friends and family, that lead to some subtler deaths within those that survive them. The deaths of relationships, by neglect or abandonment. The ideological deaths we inflict on ourselves, accepting ever-growing lesser evils in the name of some impossible ideal.

Every day, the person we were becomes the person we are, and soon, the person we are will give way to someone new, and this, too, is a sort of death. In this sense, we tally Cloud’s deaths at least five: failure to become a Soldier and rebirth in shame, the massacre of Nibelheim and rebirth in grief, arrival at Midgar and rebirth in delusion, his cratering at the Crater and rebirth in nihilism, and his death and rebirth in the Lifestream of Mideel.

((you could prolly hunt down another two if you wanna be cheeky, but I lack the knowledge, motive and patience. frankly, this whole thing is to create a leading line of logic and probably isn’t, uh. academically ethical? or whatever the term is. I’m not necessarily wrong, but I’m definitely scuttling nuance. oh well!))

Now, I say “rebirth,” because that’s how deaths of identity more-or-less work. There’s usually some new identity waiting in the wings to take over. And rebirth is itself a notable theme, inasmuch as it is one outcome of death. But death is oft more final than that, and what people do in its imminence and wake is key here, too. Wutai’s collapse into an insular tourist trap. Avalanche’s vengeful fervor, in general and post-plate drop. Bugenhagen trying to pass his knowledge on to Red. The whole party’s ongoing post-traumatic depressive episodes.

Ultimately, death is the inescapable fate of all things. It’s what we do, in light of that, that makes us who we are.

- - - - -

Final Fantasies 13 and 15 are the only modern Final Fantasies I’ve beaten, and I bring them up because both deal very prominently with fate and death, and as Square’s most recent mainline FF titles, Remake can’t exist without comparison to them. Here’s what I remember:

Final Fantasy 13 was a game I enjoyed. The stagger system mixed up my casual FF tradition of Get The Big Numbers by putting a prominent UI element onscreen that says You Can’t Get The Big Numbers Unless The Bar Is Full. Suddenly there’s a natural-but-enforced ebb and flow to combat built in, where you gotta juggle chip damage, survival, and crowd control while keeping resources enough to burst down a staggered foe, but maintain situational awareness to swap back into survival mode if you’re not gonna down your enemy, all in something close to real-time. Very obviously a direct precursor to the combat of Remake. I didn’t realize the depth of it, but it was still super fun.

People at the time didn’t like the linearity of the game and, I can see that in retrospect? I think it’s closer to, there weren’t breakpoints, there wasn’t variety. It was cutscenes, combat, and the stretches of land between them; the only real thing for the brain to get a workout on was the combat, and eating only one kinda food is gonna make that food taste bland.

((I didn’t mind, but I like idle games, and, also probably had depression around then. Take that how you will.))

The story, though, I loved. You got your uncaring gods forcing mortals to do their increasingly-impossible bidding, cursing them to agonized unlife if they take too long, and with blissful, beautiful death if they succeed. It sucks! And here you have a ragtag band of incidental idiots trying to rebel against a system that, actually, wants them to? Like that’s the plan? Have mortals kill god and summon the devil to destroy all life, because god, doesn’t.... like life anymore?

((The lore gets more than a little impenetrable, and I remember bouncing off it a couple times. The throughline of God Sucks And Makes Zombies was good though.))

The biblical parallels are obvious, and if they weren’t, the final boss’ design will clue you in, god that’s a good design. hang on I can add pictures and already tossed a spoiler warning, here, look at this:

(per the Final Fantasy Fandom Wiki [X])

That’s literally The Holy Trinity But A Sword The Size Of A Building. It’s perfect.

Anyway, I love this game, because the heroes win, which is what God wants, so in winning, they lose, as was fated to be, right? Fuck All That, say the lesbians from space australia, as they turn into satan and, as satan, stop God’s shitty metal moon from crashing into space australia and destroying all life.

((this awakened something in me, though, as is becoming a theme, I wasn’t aware of it at the time. actually hold up I’m gonna rewatch that sequence.

((yeah okay wow on review that was aggressively cheesy and had a whole bunch of weird emotional whiplash that just leaves a super-bad aftertaste. I don’t really like it as an experience, but big bazonga lesbian satan with arms for hair is still a look-and-a-half.))

The whole thing is not entirely unlike if meteor was also Midgar, and there’s more than a few points where I went, hang on, are they trying to evoke 7 here? “Lightning” is ex-military and bad at emotions, Sazh is a black dad w/ guns and emotional trauma and I love him, quirky pink healer girl who might be an alien is here, the game starts on a train and leads into a robot bug fight; obviously it’s not one-to-one but the connections are there for a brain like mine to make, and only more prominent for the fact that FF7 was the more satisfying game.

((I cannot speak to 13-2 or -3; 13-2 was fun up until the enemies were abruptly 30 levels higher than me, more or less a mandate by the game for me to do all the side content, which I was not on-board with. I skipped 13-3 entirely, especially when I learned the whole game is on a timer. did not and do not need that stress in my life.))

- - - - -

But okay, FF13 was “too linear” and wasn’t doing super great. Enter Final Fantasy Versus 13, by which I mean enter Final Fantasy 15 actually, we don’t need any more of this 13 crap. And once again, I enjoyed it! ...Right up until it was bad.

Final Fantasy 15 was not a finished game, and we know this for certain now, because all its DLC was to make it a finished game. At the time, though, there was uncomfortable and inconsistent story pacing, only one playable character, relatively sparse combat mechanics... but it was open-world, and hey, that’s what you wanted, right? open, non-linear environments? I picked it up because, Teleporting Swordsman With a Motorcycle Sword. I am of simple pleasures, and those are they.

Of the little I remember, one point that’s stuck with me is the sequence following the Leviathan fight. See, we’ve been talking about fate and destiny and how Final Fantasy likes to spite them. Here in 15, our main man Noctis doesn’t want the destiny he’s been burdened with, to Become The King and Save The World from the Coming Darkness, or whatever. He’d really rather be doing, anything else? like hanging out with his buddies or actually getting married or, I dunno, grieving the death of his father. Nope! You don’t get to do that. Go find the ghost armaments of your dead ancestors so you can ~saaave the wooorld!~ I would have been in college around then, so, eminently relatable.

Now, on this journey, you meet a guy called Ardyn. He’s the sort of character that was built as an attack on me personally: sleazy, charming, possessing airs of casual familiarity with people he’s never met, kinda helps you out in tight spots, and also, by the way, vizier to the empire that killed your dad and wants you and your friends dead too. But not in the “secret good guy” way, he just likes fucking with you! he’s perfect.

Right up until the Leviathan fight.

See, Lunafreya, your betrothed--

((I’m so mad about this stupid, stupid garbage. I love Lunafreya on principle, but the game doesn’t bother to give her screentime. you only ever hear about her incidentally, which can be cool if you then meet the character and get to compare/contrast what you’ve heard, but the initial release only has her show up for this one chapter, and your party doesn’t really get to interact with her that much.))

Your betrothed is here and she’s some symbol of the peoples’ hope, right? she’s got light magic or something, and can actually commune with the gods. the gods are on your side, but you can’t actually understand a word they say, but she can, and that’s sick as hell. anyway.

You lose the fight against Leviathan, because you’re a shitty emo teen who doesn’t know how to use your ghost swords, and she got beat up earlier when Levi got all pissy at being summoned. And then Ardyn shows up in his magitek dropship.

Now earlier, Ardyn had Luna as his captive, completely at his mercy, and right now, he who would be king of kings, destined to save the world from darkness, is clutching at rock in a hurricane, beaten, wounded and dying.

Of the two, which do you think he stabs to death?

if you thought, “the protagonist, which will allow him to win, and subvert Final Fantasy’s themes of defying fate by having the villain be the one to do it, forcing everyone else to scramble for some alternate solution and deal with the fallout,” congratulations! You win disappointment, because that idea’s cool as hell and they didn’t. fucking. Do it.

((Ardyn, before this, had given me major Kefka vibes, and thinking on it now, the world descending into darkness in the 15 we never had could have played with even deeper parallels to FF6... but I never played 6, and that FF15 doesn’t exist, so... I’ll leave that analysis to better scholars.))

now, with the benefit of hindsight, that was never going to happen. too long in development hell, game had to ship, had no time or budget for mid-game upheaval. but at the time? made me lose any interest I had in Ardyn, made me mad at the developers for passing up on fulfilling the themes their series had explored in past, made me almost stop playing the game. I’m still mad about it for crying out loud!

((thinking about it gets me tensed up, coiled, with that sort of full-body thrum that’s best conveyed with letters that jitter around. best I can do here is bold italics, but it doesn’t have the right energy. it’s a fleeting feeling, but when it’s here? god. given the men that wrote this scene I would fight all of them and win.

((inhale...

((exhale...

((and move on.))

We, the player, never really meet Luna, so there’s no real... impact, no substance to it. It’s sad, but impersonal. villain kills damsel to inflict manpain on hero. that’s it. we’ve seen this song and dance before.

But kill Noctis? The character the player’s been controlling all this time, who they know intimately? Now it’s personal. Now your party members’ grief is a mirror to your own. And now you get to play as Luna, maybe? give the game time to flesh her out, have her bond with your old companions over their shared grief, and maybe use her connections and public speaking skills to rally the people of the world, in a perhaps-vain attempt to resist the oncoming darkness, while simultaneously using that public-facingness to drive her to hide her own fear and hopelessness...? That’s a complex character ripe for drama and tragedy right there! And then her, at the head of a story about people coming together to solve a global calamity themselves, rather than await their appointed savior?

Even then, but especially now... You can see the appeal, right?

- - - - -

Lemme step back and zoom out for a moment, because there’s one more kind of Fate to discuss before I finalize my thesis. Yes, I promise, there is a point besides being mad at FF15, this is still ultimately about Remake. Bear with me a little longer.

See, Remake’s premise is that it’s not quite FF7, but that itself is predicated on Remake being essentially FF7. Certain things must be in the Remake series, or it will cease to be the Final Fantasy 7 Remake series. The developers have gone on record saying as much, that they’ll still cover the thrust of the original, and that makes a lot of sense from a development standpoint. Building on an existing framework saves loads of time, and lets them focus on details as they have in Remake.

((I think they've already set up an in-universe justification for this, too. The party may have defeated the Whispers at Midgar, but the Whispers are the will of the planet. The only way to truly defeat them would be to defeat the planet itself, which: kind of the goal of the villains!

((a bit ironic, because the villains are the Whispers’ means to keep manipulating events. Remake backends a very large portion of the plot, and I don’t think Rufus seeing the Whispers is a throwaway detail. The party chases Sephiroth by chasing Shinra in the original, so even if the party has shaken free of the direct influence of the Whispers, manipulating Shinra should in turn manipulate the party.

((on top of which, Rufus prizes power, and the power to change or control fate-- something both the party and Sephiroth have seized-- would be as enticing as anything.))

But this begs the question: How much of Final Fantasy 7 is necessary before it stops being Final Fantasy 7? Do you need all nine characters? The Weapons? Rideable chocobo? Breedable chocobo? What about locations? Can you drop the Gold Saucer? or Mount Condor? or Mideel? How many minigames am I holding up? These are necessary questions, but so is this:

“Would a one-to-one recreation of the original game have the same emotional impact as when it released, twenty-three years ago?”

- - - - -

Now, the phrase “emotional impact” is necessarily kind of nebulous and subjective, so lemme dig into that a little bit.

The first significant chunk of the original FF7 takes place entirely in Midgar, which is one huge city. Every screen is densely packed; movement is typically constrained to narrow corridors and industrial crawlspaces. The whole world is deeply claustrophobic and visually hostile, by design.

This is FF7 for the first few hours, before a motorcycle chase deposits you outside city limits, and then... you hit the world map, and everything changes. The world is rendered in three whole dimensions, now! (Then, a technological marvel in its own right.) There’s a sky! There’s a horizon! Grass, mountains, the ocean!

Boundless, terrifying freedom.

From a mechanical standpoint, there’s only one real destination, an A-to-B with random encounters before a small enclosure with an inn and shops, no real change from what you’ve already been doing. But the mood? Everything’s fresh and new, now. Everything’s an unknown.

So, how do we do that again, two-and-a-half decades on?

Let’s say, something like this: Remake 2 starts with Cloud and Sephiroth en route to Nibelheim. For new players, this provides immediate intrigue: why are these mortal enemies hanging out in a truck? how did they get here, where are they going? For veterans, it’s familiar: oh, we’re in the flashback sequence.

For both, it provides mechanical familiarity. We just finished last game hanging out in Midgar, a bunch of town squares with shops and cutscenes connected to hazardous corridors. Well, Nibelheim’s a town with shops and cutscenes, connected to a monster-filled anthill and capped with a reactor. We know this. We’ve done this. We can do this again.

And when the flashback ends, we’re in Kalm. Another town, maybe with sidequests this time; Midgar looming in the distant skybox as a reminder of how far we’ve come.

And then you leave Kalm, and the camera zooms out, and out, and out...

Remake is essentially 7, and you can’t have the impact of 7′s world map reveal if Remake isn’t functionally open-world too. Square has plenty of experience with open environments, however successful their more recent attempts have been; I’m confident that the have the ability, at least, to craft an expansive world that feels appropriate to FF7.

((I’d like to take a moment here to talk about FF14, which mixes both compact twisty dungeons and wide-open overworld zones, and is necessarily wildly successful to still be operating as an MMO... but though I have played it briefly, I don’t claim knowledge sufficient to go in-depth. The point is, Square not only can make a game like that, they have, and are, and apparently possess non-zero competency. I have worries, but I’m not worried, if that makes sense.))

So, can you recreate a given kind of emotional impact? Yeah!

Can scenes from the original Final Fantasy 7 be rendered into a new context, more-or-less as they were? Absolutely!

Would a one-to-one recreation of the original game have the same emotional impact as when it released, twenty-three years ago?

- - - - -

Aerith dies.

If you opened this post and didn’t know that, well. There were spoiler warnings up at the top, the game’s more than two decades old, and the spoiler itself is basically a piece of pop-culture, up there with space dad and wizard killer. There’re probably plenty of people who know next-to-nothing about Final Fantasy 7 except that Aerith dies.

Everyone knows because, at the time, it was so big a thing. This was a title that Square hyped to heaven and back to push JRPGs into mainstream western markets, and it worked. And this was before major death was so common and arbitrary as it is today; even now, Game of Thrones and its ilk are a relative rarity. The death of a protagonist or love interest wasn’t a new thing for games, or any media really, but usually you knew it was coming, or it served some purpose. Aerith’s death was sudden, arbitrary, you’re almost immediately thrown into a boss fight so you don’t even have time to process it right away, and it’s the first stone in an avalanche of other pointless arbitrary tragedy. It’s an obvious narrative setup for the endgame confrontation with Sephiroth; instead, Cloud has a breakdown, Meteor happens, and now there’s an entire Disk 2.

Fandom has always been fandom, even before the continuous immediacy of the modern internet, but... people wrote letters to Square, and got sad on message boards. There’s an entire subset of forum signatures, back when those were a thing, that you could sort as “people fucked up over Aerith dying.” And again, this was the world. Not just Japan, or Asia, but everyone.

((Or, everyone with the finances to have a PS2 and/or an internet connection. Gaming as a pastime remains way expensive, whether played or watched. But you know how it is.))

And that’s the problem with answering that question.

See, FF7 is a lot of things, but for better or worse, it is defined by Aerith’s death. It’s one of many factors, but you can’t... leave it out, right? or it wouldn’t be FF7 anymore.

Aerith dies in FF7, and everyone knows it.

- - - - -

But Remake has promised, repeatedly, that things will be different this time. Everyone is coming together to defy fate, and Cloud in particular is here to keep Aerith from dying. Bodyguard jokes aside, Cloud repeatedly has flashbacks (flashforwards?) to Aerith’s death and the events leading to it. When he meets her in the church, when they cross into Sector 6, twice in the final battle. Hell, the very first time they meet, Sephiroth taunts him about not being able to save her. Even from a metatextual standpoint, since everyone knows Aerith dies, that’s like, The Most Obvious Fate To Change.

If, after all that, Aerith still dies? It’s not just tragedy, at that point. That’s the developers, actively lying to the player about their intent in making this game series. That’s frustrating, and immersion-breaking, and when said death is likely to still have one or more entire sequels to come after? maybe not great for sales! I know I didn’t bother buying the complete edition of FF15; I couldn’t bring myself to care enough about a game that set up this cool possibility, and then just, failed to deliver on every count.

And, Remake is being made for two audiences. I’ve said “everybody knows Aerith dies,” but that’s not really true, is it? It’s been 23 years, after all. Remake could well be someone’s very first Final Fantasy experience. That’s why they’ve been telegraphing Aerith’s death so hard. Not everyone knows, but at least everyone can guess. Is it fair, then, to this new audience, with potentially no knowledge or understanding of the legacy of this flashy new action game, to foreshadow tragedy in the future, have everyone come together to say, We’re Going To Stop This, and then... not? Is that good writing? Is that satisfying? When this is a multi-game and potentially multi-console investment of time and money, is this, as a newcomer, a story you’d want to keep playing?

And then on top of that, it’s 2020.

I don’t mean that in the current-year-fallacy, “we’re better than this now” kind of way. Rather, the way I felt about Final Fantasy 15 is even more relevant now. People, in real life, are realizing that the powers-that-be are failing them, have failed them, have been failing them for far longer than twenty-three years. The people that already knew that are actually showing up for each other, to spite what felt and feels like inescapable fate and finding that, together, they might just be able to ruin God’s day.

Game development is, of course, its own whole beast, and projects in motion tend to stay in motion; deviating from a plan takes time and money that Square may be unwilling to spend. But, under current world circumstances: is making a game where the hero sets out to save one specific person from their fated death, and following that with a game where that one specific person dies anyway, aside from everything else, a good business decision?

- - - - -

So... Aerith, shouldn’t die, right...? But, FF7 requires Meteor, and so requires the Temple of the Ancients and the Black Materia. And, Meteor can only be stopped by Holy, so FF7 requires the Forgotten City.

FF7 is a tragedy. FF7 demands blood.

...Hey, actually, hold that thought. How come Cloud can remember Aerith dying in the first place? He’s not from the future, right? He’s got a connection to Sephiroth, who is from the future... and Sephiroth can manipulate his memories...? but, why would Sephiroth let him, or make him, remember that?

Hey, how come Zack is alive, but like, in the “narrative scope” sense? Wouldn’t his presence circumvent Cloud’s delusions about the Nibelheim incident?

Hey, how come Cloud had multiple big climactic Sephiroth confrontations at what’s essentially the end of the prologue, including one that mirrors the very end of the original FF7? Shouldn’t that still come at, like, you know. the end?

Hey, how come--

- - - - -

Remake has these... Callbacks? Refrains? Like my favorite, when Sephiroth throws a train-- you know, The Fate Metaphor-- at Cloud, who absolutely shreds the thing. Or, for a more direct example:

And it frequently uses these to show that people are changing, that things can change. You know, the whole Running Theme the game has going on.

Sephiroth gets a refrain, too.

At the start of the game (give or take a reactor), in his first real appearance, Sephiroth philosophizes at Cloud, makes sure Cloud hates him, and tells Cloud what he wants.

At the end of the game, in his last appearance, Sephiroth philosophizes at Cloud, tells Cloud what he wants, and makes sure Cloud hates him.

Structurally, these encounters more-or-less bookend the game; thematically, it doesn’t exactly indicate change. Barret may or may not have come around on Cloud, and his admission that Cloud is important to him after all is, itself, important. Cloud, on the other hand, was always going to defy Sephiroth. He stands resolute, now, ready to fight rather than flee, but apathy was never on the table.

Now, Sephiroth’s whole Thing is psychologically manipulating Cloud to get what he wants, and as part of that, what Sephiroth wants is usually not what he says he wants.

All throughout the original FF7, Sephiroth riled up Cloud so that Cloud would pursue and defy him, culminating first in the Black Materia incident, and then again in the Forgotten City. None of the Sephiroth clones could survive the trip through the Northern Crater, so Sephiroth had to lure Cloud, with the Black Materia, to him, and then also convince Cloud to give up the Black Materia of his own accord. Mind control, memory manipulation and illusions were involved, but if Sephiroth could maintain those indefinitely, he probably just. Would have done that instead. Way easier,

The point is, in Remake, in addition to all the intermittent retraumitization sprinkled throughout the game, Sephiroth goes out of his way twice to directly ask Cloud, “hey, you hate me, right?” And, as part of that question, he tells Cloud, “this is what I want.” And Cloud? He hates Sephiroth, and will do his damnedest to keep Sephiroth from getting what he wants.

So. What does Sephiroth... say he wants?

- - - - -

One last aside before we cap off: This post would not exist without the valiant efforts of one Maximilian_dood. His devotion to the series kept myself and many others engaged and excited and, frankly, hopeful, in the leadup to the release of Remake, and his correlations between the rest of the FF7 series and Remake were enlightening and entertaining.

and had he not the gall to identify defying fate as a device to make aerith’s death more tragic, I would never have been angry enough to write this.

((I know, I know. Gaming and streaming and lit analysis are all hard individually, and I don’t begrudge losing one for the other two. And it was a first playthrough! I might have seen these lines sooner than some, but collating all this info was certainly not instantaneous. And Square can be hack writers at times-- see again my rant on FF15-- so even then, I can’t discount the possibility.

((but, still.

((Really?))

So, while I would like to believe that I have, by now, made my thesis on Remake’s narrative direction abundantly clear, here it is spelled out anyway:

- - - - -

At the bottom of the Forgotten City, at the shrine on the pillar in the lake, Cloud will find Aerith, who believes her fate immutable.

Sephiroth will descend, and Cloud will sacrifice himself, that Aerith should live.

This is Sephiroth’s plan.

- - - - -

Hey, thanks for reading this far! With my conversational tone and rambling tendencies, I’d have preferred to make this an audio post or, god forbid, a video essay, but I got a keyboard, and that’ll have to do. Diction is important to me, as the capitalization, italics and use of punctuation may have clued you in on, so... maybe you’ll get a dramatic reading sometime in the future? but, don’t bet on it.

Feel free to riddle me with questions, or point out inconsistencies with this big ol’ thing! I’m not exactly an expert, and I’m sure I glossed over, heavily paraphrased, completely forgot, intentionally ignored and/or aggressively misrepresented some stuff, but I love learning and teaching esoteric bullshit about The Vijigams. On that note, anything that sounds like it should be sourced is sourced from “I heard about it on social media or in a stream or youtube video one time, but if I actually had to hunt it down this whole thing would never see the light of day, and it has already been like three months,” which isn’t to excuse my lack of due diligence, but I do, lack diligence, so, tough.

Oh! but the Remake screens all come from [here]. Don’t care much for that splash screen, but, I Get It, so, whatever.

There were some other things I wanted to touch on but couldn’t really find a spot for. FF7 Remake as a metaphor for its own development, for example. Or, some of The Possibilities, like how Cloud’s death could very literally haunt Aerith, or how Remake sets up a more fleshed-out Midgar revisit that Cloud’s death specifically would make infinitely sadder.

On that note, if it was not yet obvious, I love speculation, and if they do go this direction, it’ll probably be their justification to go completely... off the rails? Remake only has to be FF7 until it doesn’t, after all. If there’s some wilder implications youall see for like... I dunno, a Jenova more fully-regenerated from also having Cloud’s cells back, getting into proper Kaiju-on-Kaiju battles with the Weapons, or anything like that? Feed me your brain juice, etc.

And, once more, for the road: this is interpretation; subjective, opinionated, and very much in denial of any kind of author-ity. Nor is this a claim on how things should be, or an assertion that this would be good or bad. Everything ultimately rests on Square's narrative design team and, we’ve touched on them already.

((but, for your consideration: I’m smart, and right))

Here’s hoping, whatever happens, we get the game we deserve.

thanks for coming to my ted talk, have a great day

[hoe-for-ares]

AU in which Red Rising is just a futuristic roleplay held in a chat full of teenage boys...

l posted once about it, but never went in detail. I was getting bored, so I wanted to make a list of the boyos from the AU - the homies behind the characters they are playing, duh! I imagine them having a roleplay chat and a homie-talking chat, that is mostly a voice-call never-ending conversation that is occurring while they are also roleplaying. Internet homies, also!

Feel free to add more.

Darrow - played by a 16 y/o Scottish boy, a know-it-all-mf, with an extensive knowledge. *Big nerd, fanatic of Ender’s Game and Star Wars. *Where does this dude even fit so much Ancient Greek history? *‘’Wait, why would someone even spend their time reading this crap???’’ - the homies in the chat. *All his friends created big, powerful Gold personas to shame him Red persona, but then Darrow went really deep with it and created a whole storyline about inequality and slavery, all in a long shower session. *No one took him seriously, but Darrow was dead serious - and also no one, maybe aside of Roque and Nero, didn’t really care what the hell he was talking about, but they followed him anyway because it was about badass warriors conquering and torn mfs apart! *He keeps deleting and rewriting his phrases, correlates everything with history and art, making the roleplay to seem wayyyy too serious. *He is anxious as shit if he doesn’t GET THIS LINE RIGHT! 

Sevro - played by a 14 y/o east-european boy, because no one can nail ‘em swearing better than an east european. *Moved to US recently and doesn’t seem to fit in, it makes him to not have many real life friends and not feel welcomed anywhere he goes. *He and Cassius are at the same high school, but since Sevro is a little freshman goblin, Cassius doesn’t fw him and ignores him. *Thus, Sevro acts like he hates him in the group chat and roleplay, but he only really is hella intimidated by him.  *His dad is a super cool dude and joins the gang’s games and conversations as often as he can. *Sevro doesn’t like that his father is much more liked than him within the group. *Listens to rock as a way of living and sunk in heavy metal as a coping mechanism.  *Big and proud furry. Has an IG dedicated to his fursona. *Relationships?? BLEAH. They are for suckers.  *But he has a ‘secret’ thing for muscular, tall and intimidating video game girls. Denies his affinity, though.  *Gang acts like they believe him when he insists he doesn’t care about those kind of girls and no girls in general, but Tactus is not fooled so easily and taunts him a lot by creating Victra.  *Also plays Uncle Narol because he wanted the chance to be the father figure since the gang always sees him as a little boy and treat him as such.  *He recalls every hoggish thing he heard from his father for Uncle Narol’s role, but creates his own expressions for Sevro’s.  Tactus - a 16 y/o french boy, neighbor with Roque.  *His only type of humor is yo mama jokes. *Gang is tired of Tactus’s obsession with their mothers, but Tactus doesn’t lose any chance and always recalls their mama in conversation... it is odd sometimes.  *He might have some mommy-issues.  *Also plays Deanna as a way to parody off Darrow’s real life mother, but he really started to get attached to the character. *He lives with his brother’s, that are always mocking him and embarrassing him every time he is in a voice-call conversation.  *But Tactus ain’t having any of this and screams at them - auch. *’’CLOSE YOUR MICROPHONE, COCK-FACE! YOU ARE FUCKING MY EARDRUMS!’’ - Sevro *He kinda wants to cry when his brothers do this, but he acts all tough. Homies can sense the shaking in his voice, but they act as they don’t hear it so Tactus can think he succeeded into fooling them.  *His brothers always force him to drink as a way of theirs of entertaining.  *Most of the time, he stumbles and vomits, no matter how hard he tried to act as one of them. This is the pure comedy his brothers are talking about! *Once he succeeded into drinking a whole bottle of beer without puking. He is really proud of his achievement.  *Groupchat knows all about it.  Roque - played by a 16 y/o french boy.  *Has a funny accent. *Homies are always laughing at him because of his fuddy-duddy accent.  *Tactus, too, which makes Roque hella sad.  *He doesn’t show his sadness and acts unbothered and way too stoic for being hurt because of their stupid charade.  *He really is deeply infuriated.  *Crushing on Tactus 24/7, but won’t show it - only his character is suspiciously close to his’. *Like...always privately sticking to him.  *No one knows what is going on in his private chat with Tactus. What are they roleplaying about? Hmm...  *He is really worried about Tactus’ mental health and brings him over his house as often as he can.  *Has some blessed asf parents, always lenient and nice. Accepted Tactus as part of their own family since his is way too fucked up.  *Rich as shit.  *Talks as pompous as possible. *Always reading and subtly bragging about what smart things he read, by quoting long and complicated verses out of his ancient poetry, early edition books, wrapped in animal skin.  *Kinda jealous of Darrow’s extensive knowledge.  *He was the one who brought Adrius in the group chat... no one knows how the hell he met such a shady dude.  Cassius - played by a 17 y/o american boy. *Knows Sevro personally, but won’t really give a fuck about him.  *Kinda ignores him irl and in game, too.  *His brothers all have curly hair, but he doesn’t - so of course his character has the perfect, craved-by-God, golden curls! ‘’Fuck you, Mother nature! If you didn’t want to give me the curls, I gave them to me myself!’’ *Doesn’t really know how curly hair works - did his character just went into a dirty ass fight and is full of grim? Bruh, whatever! His hair still shines and bounces like a little angel in Heaven! *He is bisexual irl, too, but tries to hide it. *His character is embracing his bisexuality, but he surely ain’t bisexual! No, nope!  *Hides his affinity for boys by making no-homo jokes and calling dudes gay for showing the slightest closeness to him - dayum, he carves for it, but no one needs to know!  *Thinks Darrow is cute, but as a homie, ya know? *I mean, he is totally going on a no-homo trip with Darrow. *He always listens to him and carves to talk to him the most, ignoring the rest of the squad most of the time.  *Also, always asks Darrow to teach him about ancient stuff he won’t care about irl, but once Darrow talks about them...ugh, they become so interesting! He is such a cool bro, dude, he like...knows how to explain thing to his bro!  *Praises the shit out of Darrow. Always mentions him when he is gone. You know, as a good homie does!  *Tactus ain’t fooled by any of it and makes subtle and snarky commentaries about his behavior.  Fitchner - played by Sevro’s dad. *A cool mf. *Proudly laughing his ass off when he hears how creative his son is with his language. *He knows damn well he is his son’s inspiration - beyond proud of knowing he created a genius.  *Single father.  *Joins the boys chat pretty often.  *Fakes reading something next to Sevro so he can listen what the squad is talking about via voice-chat or to keep up with the events in their roleplay because it makes him to feel good and young.  *He taunts his son irl and in game.  *Sometimes Sevro feels humiliated by his father, so he leaves the chat and/or the roleplay. Fitchner always brings him back and promises him not to mix in their game again.  *Squad doesn’t want him to leave, so they beg him to stay every single time when Fitchner says he about to let them play alone. *He can’t resist and promises them that he will come every time when he has a little spare time. *Sometimes acts like he is really busy and can’t join, when he really only wants Sevro to spend his time with his only friends being unbothered or mad by his father’s presence.  *Squad made him to be Ares because they worship him and call him the leader of the chat.  Adrius - played by a 16 y/o british boy.  *Has the stereotypical unintelligible british accent.  *Roque brought him in the group, out of nowhere, long after the roleplay started.  *No one really knows what’s up with this weird ass dude.  *Is online 24/7, but rarely speaks - he is the dude always peeking at the corners and watching everyone talking.  *When he shows up, his character has complex, long monologues when everyone else, aside of Darrow and Roque, can barely spell.  *He doesn’t fw with anyone’s plans and wreck them completely, by popping out of nowhere and destroying everything.  *But squad kinda enjoys it because he creates a good amount of drama within their rp.  *He types hella fast, like dude would spend his entire time sending messages. *Doesn’t he, like, has any friends?  *He never socialize within the group chat, he only breaths in the voice call.  *Squad created an anti-Adrius chat without him, but keeps him in the roleplay because his weird ass plan-wrecking character is interesting.  *He is so mysterious, with his character and all, that he resembles a chocolate egg with surprises. You never know what to expect.  Nero - played by a 16 y/o american boy. *Brought by Cassius long before Adrius came.  *Squad accepted him, but he doesn’t really fw them. *He is pretty shy and wanted to quit the group chat, since he wasn’t really talking much.  *Also, first time when Cassius suggested him to join roleplaying, he declined.  *A big history fanatic, always researching about war and dictators, corruption and tyrants.  *He will mainsplain every single detail in the lives of the big bad guy’s of the history.  *He will also get all ruffled if you don’t know the exact date in which WW1 started - like, are you even paying attention in the class, Karen??  *Gets excited every time Netflix drops a documentary about WW2.  *Cassius brought him the chat because he wanted to obligate him talk about anything else, but sad, miserable historic facts.  *Also, asked him to join roleplaying so, instead of focusing on the history of amok dictators, he can fight against them in a cool, space-knight way! *Became interested in roleplaying after he heard about Darrow’s plotline, all about inequality and war, thus considering it will give him the chance of shining and playing an old good tyrant. *Cassius hated the shit out of the idea, but Darrow was in ecstasy hearing they will have a big bad guy.  *Didn’t really join in the first part of the roleplay due still being really shy and clumsy at it, only joining when Darrow asked him for the execution part, but once he got used to it...oh, boy!  *He once joked about Adrius being Nero irl in the anti-Adrius group chat. Roque told Adrius about it and he liked the idea so much, he decided to make his character Nero’s son! Roque was kicked out from the anti-Adrius group chat just after that, Mustang - played by Cassius. *Why? Well, Darrow kinda cute... *He is just kidding, duuuh! It’s not about Darrow. It’s about playing a beautiful,tough girl so he can ‘’sharpen’’ his homies!  *He is a senior, so he has experience with girls, duh! He can play a girl just fine and give them tips on how to handle one. *OOPS! Sike! You can’t handle Mustang! Nice one, Cassius.  *Forced Darrow to chase Mustang as a way to entertain himself.  *He felt his soul going uwu when Meaper was going on.  *Expresses his feelings through a cocky girl as a way of coping with his feelings. *Made Mustang Adrius’ sister as a way of flipping off Adrius and his plans, thinking Adrius will lose his shit when someone will disturb his perfectionist plans and monologues just as much as he does to others, but it just fueled Adrius’ weird imagination and fitted into his agenda way too perfectly.  *Now he regrets his decision since he is obligated to spend a little extra time around Adrius.  Victra - played by Tactus *Created her for two sole reason. *Fucking around with Sevro’s not-so-secret passion for dangerously muscular fictional woman that can step on him any time. *Flexing fictional muscles in front of the squad by creating a super-giant-titan-ninja-classy-monster-woman to kick their space-knight asses. Even his own, too, because is funny to see women kicking metallic asses of knights, duuh! *And maybe for fw Darrow a bit, by making Victra all flirt with his shy ass. So, let’s say...three reasons.  *He gathered extensive knowledge from all the girls he knows about what the hell a girl likes - had no idea ‘till then, but now he knows what girls prefers the most: slaughter.  Feel free to add!!!

[christianslaterreview]

Mobsters (1991) dir. Michael Karbelnikoff

Synopsis:

Charlie 'Lucky' Luciano, portrayed by Christian Slater, is a young, working class Italian whose family is being terrorized by the Mafia as his father owes money to one of two main bosses, Don Faranzano (Michael Gambon). Luciano teams up with three of his boyhood friends to overthrow Don Faranzano and the other boss, Don Masseira. The film follows the boys as they quickly rise to top and become embroiled in Mafia politics, love stories, and personal conflicts that threaten to ruin lifelong friendships.

Review:

This is going to be a hard review for me to write because I really don't care about this movie. Like, at all (I mean look at my shitty synopsis lmao). Usually I'm so ardent about my reviews because I so desperately want the film in question to be good. Typically, Christian Slater's films have just enough about them that's good that elements of them are not only salvagable, but sincerely enjoyable. They're also usually just bad enough to remain interesting. Bad enough to make me care.

Mobsters, however, was so formulaic and devoid of any actual substance that the end product feels like a parody. It was so clearly hitching it's wagon to the popularity of other films in the same genre such as Bugsy and Good Fellas, but in their hurry to piece together some semblence of a film before the trend fizzled, they forgot that a movie needs elements beyond snappy one liners, empty banter, period costumes, and pretty faces with famous names. The audience is rushed through most of the narrative with focus only given to a handful of major plot points - but this is of course only when we're torn away from the laughably long and gregarious sex scenes which are peppered throughout the entire film to really help move things along - so all the opportunities to truly get to know the characters, their drives, their vulnerabilities, etc. in compelling B-plots or excellent pacing of the A-plot are nowhere to be found. The result is a film that feels like it was developed purely for flashy, promotional material with the story being tossed inside this hollow, pandering concept as an afterthought.

One of my main issues with most films is the pacing. I expect every film to have Tarentino level pacing where the story is slowly teased out in a seemingly chaotic but methodical progression. Tarentino is the fucking master of knowing just how long to let a certain plot point sit on the back burner before bringing it back full force right before you forget it ever happened. He knows just how long to keep the camera focused on one character's face, how long the back and forth dialogue needs to continue before bursting into action, how long to keep the audience waiting before a reveal (if the reveal ever happens). And before I get totally lost on this tangent and end up becoming a Tarentino stan blog, my point is that Mobsters fails in every single one of these devices.

Instead of feeling like 2hrs passed by so quickly because I was just that engaged, the run time of this film felt unbelievably long because literally nothing of real interest happened until about an hour into the movie. Right off the bat, we're thrown into the drama as Luciano's Mother and Father are assaulted and threatened by one of the main bosses, Faranzano. But rather than feeling like we're being poignantly acclimated to the brutal setting of this story, it just feels sudden and awkward, like a cheap, theatrical bid for emotion and drama. Granted, this might not be the screenplay's fault per se. None of the actors did a particularly solid job throughout this film, which did end up weakening whatever elements of Mobsters could have been salvagable.

After this point, the movie just rushes through introductions in a series of montages with a voiceover by Slater in his ... "accent". The movie barely has time to get on it's legs before we've already reached the next milestone in the boys' story as they're making a name for themselves as bootleggers. However, instead of actually demonstrating the struggle, the danger, the politcs of rising to the top, we just get another expositional montage with voiceovers. Have fun trying to remember what overlapping whispers are important plot points and which ones are just a little flavoring to show the glamorous gangster lifestyle the boys are entering into.

The stitled, awkward pacing of this film can actually be broken down to a pattern if you were paying close enough attention: major plot point, expositional montage mentioning specific Thing, the Thing happens in literally the next scene, 12 minute long sex scene, and repeat for 2 hours. It doesn't make for a very compelling narrative at all.

Additionally, the characters themselves were so one dimensional and poorly acted (sorry Christian :/ ) that not even they could save the movie. The accents were cheesy as hell, but even worse than those was the dialogue which consisted of banter and one liners that wanted so badly to be insidious and clever, but only ended up sounding like borderline nonsensical gangster jargon that was regurgitated by memory from someone who had seen Good Fellas once. And when the dialogue wasn't an unsuccesful mimicry of shrewd banter, it was equally meaningless, psuedo-artfilm dialogue. But instead of using dialogue as a device to allude to greater themes and deepen both the emotional and philosophical landscape of the film, everyone's dialogue was just a series of free floating, psuedo-intellectual lines that when strung together, didn't actually make a conversation or even develop the characters themselves.

Which is yet another problem with Mobsters. Although the characters are based upon real life historical figures, the characters themselves are barely developed on screen. Everyone's personalities are almost indistinguishable from one another because every character is so one dimensional. Despite the bounteous material the writers had to work with such as Lucky Luciano's righteous anger at the injustice his family and others have faced, Lansky's battle against the anti-semitism he faces, or the political landscape of the time controlled by the Mafia, all the characters are still underdeveloped caricatures.

The main focus of the film could have been the conflict that exists between Luciano's desire to see an end to the vicious reign of the Mafia while also seeking to be the Ringleader himself. It could have been a slow burn film focusing on the strategy and politics of attempting to dethrone the cities two biggest mob bosses. It could have been about how Luciano's and Lansky's friendship developed and devolved throughout their enterprise. It could have focused on literally any number of things to help anchor the story in a main conflict. But instead, the focus of the film flits from politics to personal drama to love scenes with only the cast of characters to connect the threads. None of those plot points were artful B-plots that helped flesh out the story and the characters; they were pitiful, unskilled attempts at creating a world to immerse the audience in without having any knowledge about how to effictively do that. As a writer, you can't give equal attention to all the different threads throughout a story otherwise the audience doesn't know what the main point is - that's why they're called B-plots.

Moreover, Mobsters used yelling really loudly and dramatically as a superficial plot device over and over again and each time it did nothing but made me want to hit mute for a moment or two. Syd Field's put it best when she said "All drama is conflict. Without conflict, there is no action. Without action, there is no character." However, what Karbelnikoff doesn't understand is that conflict is not just people displaying extreme emotion; there needs to be substance behind what is creating this conflict and that the audience needs a chance to become invested in the storylines and motivations the conflict is contigent upon. People aren't moved just by emotion itself; people are moved when they can empathize with a character's struggle. But we can't do that unless the director takes the time to walk us through the world they've created so the stakes actually seem real.

This film is chock full of scenes where characters that don't seem to have a reason to fight are fighting. I'm sure it's supposed to demonstrate what a rough business being a mobster is and how the pressure of ambition and the ever present threat it might overtake you, but instead it just makes the characters seem volatile and juvenile to the point that I don't even want to sympathize with any of them.

Lastly, this wasn't even a beautiful movie. Just like a Marvel movie, every shot was obvious, straightforward, and boring. In a movie that is all about the excess and glamour and violent opulence, you'd think the cinematography itself would reflect that. Instead, I wasn't surprised or moved by a single shot throughout the whole film. The overtop villains had such potential for unsettling, aggrandizing angles but every scene felt about as creative as watching talking heads.

And my very last bone to pick with this film is the ENDING. It felt like they decided to toss in a random moral to the story solely for the purpose of offering some kind of closure. I mean, to be fair, there's no other way they could have wrapped it up since the entire film is just a series of loose threads. But it was just the perfect way to punctuate the end of this wishy-washy movie (about MOBSTERS) with a vague cliche sentiment of "can't we all just get along?"

To me, Lucky Luciano is perhaps an anti-hero. I empathize with his desire to seek retribution and justice and instigate egalitarian politics, however, he doesn't seek to eradicate the institution of the Mafia, he just wants to run it *differently*. This could have made Luciano a supremely compelling character, but the movie never really frames him as a good guy or a bad guy. He is just kind of matter-of-factly presented to the audience with no real commentary. So by the end of the film, the fact that he's painted as this feel good hero within the last few minutes felt contrived and meaningless.

If Luciano's aim was to be the biggest mob boss around while also instituting a more egalitarian regime, why wasn't that the main focus of the film? It's definitely brought up, but it isn't given the focus it should have. We just knew that he wanted to overthrow the other bosses, but didn't delve into what his visions for the Mafia were or how much his desire for success was consuming him.

So the ending sentiment of the movie being "and then the bad guys were dead and a really Nice Guy became head of the Mafia and everyone was treated a lot nicer :)" felt juvenile and cheesy.

Mobsters gets a total of 1 Slaters out 10 Slaters. I'm not prepared to give it a zero, but I have no justification for that because, news flash, my rating system is wholly subjective and based on what I feel inside my heart. I will not be accepting criticism on this point. Thank you for understanding.

[mizulyn]

indygotcha said:Top 5 Animation Shows?

This took me all night to decide on, but if we’re not talking about anime, here are my top five!!

full resolution: x

I’ll go further with my thoughts if anyone is interested! Read at your leisure below:

1. Hey Arnold

This show had good life lessons. Not just the preachy kind like in most morality-centric cartoons of its time, but it felt like it was doing a lot to prep kids for Real World stuff. A lot of episodes stick out in my mind as if I saw them yesterday, not to mention it had a memorable ensemble cast. I still feel like Helga G. Pataki is one of the best-written female characters in cartoon history (even though she and Asuka from Neon Genesis Evangelion are basically the same person, but that’s just me being a weeb).

2. Ed, Edd, ‘n’ Eddy

This is what happens when you take unique sound design and slam it face-first into some of the best on-screen slap-stick I’ve ever seen in animation. If Loony Toons had it down to a science, then I’d say these guys made it an experimental art form. Truth be told, I almost put Codename: Kids Next Door or even The Powerpuff Girls in this spot, but some of KND’s fatphobic jokes irritated me. PPG, while still really really good, didn’t make me laugh nearly as much as these dorks did, so I had to give credit where credit was due!

3. The Venture Brothers

For me this is one of those shows that gets better as it goes on. It’s basically a parody of those “Adventure” cartoons (Johnny Quest, The Adventures of Tintin, etc.) and is full to the brim with nerdy, comic-book geeky type of nods and parodies. Even without an extensive knowledge of comic books, I feel like the wacky cast of characters manage to stand out in their own right. The dialogue is some of the best out there, and they put a lot of care into the plots as well! (Also the animation...ahh so good!! Even if it’s limited!)

4. Archer

I feel like I’m kind of cheating, since I like it basically for all the same reasons that I like Venture Bros. Only instead of super heroes, it’s spy movies! But since they’re animated with what looks like flash puppets (could be toon boom? something like that?) I feel like it deserves to be acknowledged as well. (Plus I really like the characters, like you could put these guys in any scenario and it would play out in an interesting way!)

5. Regular Show

This one actually came as a bit of a surprise to me! I thought for sure I would include Steven Universe, Adventure Time, or My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic on here. But nope! Why? Well...I think it’s because, of all of the shows I mentioned, Regular Show’s dialogue always sounded the most authentic. Sure you had characters doing goofy voices, (Pops, Muscle Man, etc) but Mordecai’s reactions to Rigby’s constant reaching, it felt like how friends might actually interact with each other in the real world. Also this reminds me of a simpler time, when I was out of high school but didn’t have a job so I’d just stay home, watch cartoons and play animal crossing between bouts of depression.

[kaleidographia]

[Analysis] The "Weird" One: Where The Last Jedi Fits

I have a confession to make.

This may be a weird way to start what is essentially the first post of a new media critique blog, but I consider it to be essential knowledge. Every reviewer and analyst brings their own unique perspective to their writing, and I am no different; sooner or later, this truth will make itself known. To know this fact about me is to gain a new understanding of what makes me tick as a consumer of art, and it is one that it best to get out of the way as soon as possible, for it is better for a reader to lose interest now than to string along until the awkwardness of hiding such a secret reveals itself.

Here it is:

I LOVE the Star Wars prequels.

Oh, not only do I love them, completely and unironically, I actually do not care much for the original trilogy. It’s all right. But it doesn’t make my heart sing.

Attack of the Clones does.

Okay, okay, I can already hear the groans of disgust and the clicks of mice leaving my blog to the wilds of the web, but I promise this is going somewhere. I am not unaware of the many flaws the Prequel trilogy has, and I can’t in good conscience call them cinematic masterpieces, but I think this opinion derives itself not from poor taste, but the relative lack of blockbuster quality movies that tap into very particular themes and structural quirks that I appreciate. I may dive into those specifics at a later time, but the reason why I am bringing this up now is because it inextricably ties into my feelings about the most recent film in the franchise’s main series, which would be impossible for me to discuss without addressing this aspect of my formative film influences.

The Last Jedi has already received tons of coverage, controversy, and counter-controversy, so if you’re interested in picking apart the finer aspects of the plot and characters, feel free to look those up — I am sure there is a brilliant video essay on Youtube tailor-made just for you. I am more interested in the meta-narrative surrounding its position in terms of fanservice to what is an enourmous empire of not only fans of the original trilogy, but fans of its many derivations, spin-offs, and cultural foundations.

Star Wars is no longer just a film about a space farmer who learns he’s a space wizard and goes on a perfect beat-by-beat hero’s journey. It encompasses more than that: two sequels, an expanded universe of books upon books, comics, videogames, pinball machines — a holiday special (and no, I have not watched it) — toys, cartoons, parodies, reiterations, iconic images, phrases, cinematic touchstones, and, of course, the Prequels.

When the new Sequel trilogy was announced, the filmmakers had a real challenge to contend with: How can one follow up on not only a legacy of films, but also a legacy of expectations of what such a sequel would be like? I am not just referring to the fact that Disney, post acquisition of Lucasfilm, decided to just toss out the previous expanded universe, label it “Legends”, and start afresh with a new canon. I am also referring to the literal millions of fans who were already thoroughly familiar with not only the films but also their cultural impact. How could one possibly please them, especially when the Prequel trilogy was so universally mocked?

It was clear that Disney needed to win the crowd over, and to do so they leaned heavily into a safe bet: the Original trilogy. The Force Awakens released with a sort of wink-and-nudge, reflected in its story beats, characterization, and practical effects, that said “hey, we hear you. We know you’re scared because you don’t trust us to do this material justice and we know you love the original films, so we’re gonna give you exactly what you’re looking for”. It’s hard not to see the fanservice and whether or not it was successful has already been discussed to death, so I won’t get into it here, but the point is — and I am sure this wasn’t really intentional — to someone like me, who actually liked the prequels and a lot of the expanded universe, this approach felt incredibly alienating. Everyone was having fun with the new film, but to me it felt like it was saying, “all those things you love about Star Wars are not the reasons why anyone else loves Star Wars,” and I’m not gonna lie, I was pretty hurt, but at the very least The Force Awakens gave me a cast to fall in love with.

This is why when The Last Jedi was in production, I was intrigued to hear that this film was going to be “weird” and “unlike any other Star Wars film”. My expectations were tempered by the fact that ultimately this was going to be a Disney movie anyway, so it was probably not going to reach my standard of Weird (my dad showed me Koyaanisqatsi when I was 7, to give you an idea). Nevertheless, after the very safe rehash of Episode 4 that was The Force Awakens, I was just hoping for anything that might show me the franchise still had room for creativity.

I was in fact happy with the result, although it doesn’t surprise me at all that it attracted controversy. Some of my close friends, whose opinions I highly respect, hated the film for various reasons and I can even agree with them on some points. Others, like me, loved it. Overall, however, what I like most isn’t necessarily anything about the film itself, but its position as a nod to fans who wanted their corners of the Star Wars universe acknowledged. To put it bluntly, as a Prequels fan, I felt represented.

Going even beyond the Prequels, The Last Jedi contains themes from my favourite piece of Star Wars media, the Bioware-produced videogame Knights of the Old Republic and its Obsidian-produced sequel, which layer critique of what it means to be a Force user and what the role of Jedi and Sith are in the grand scheme of things. “Jedi” does not necessarily mean “good”, a fact Luke highlights in his role as reluctant mentor to Rey, and while there are some things I would change about his portrayal here, this perspective is absolutely one I wanted to see more of in the main series. Even as a kid, good-vs-evil stories bored me; it’s one reason why the Original trilogy failed to speak to me, because even though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate why at the time, the setup was just too easy. It didn’t challenge me to think that there’s a side that’s inherently good and a side that’s inherently evil, but when Knights of the Old Republic put decisions about when and how to use the Force in front of me, that was a much more interesting proposition, and the idea that doctrine about the nature of the Force could be wrong or even damaging was outright enticing. I honestly can’t remember whether playing the games or watching the Prequels came first, but I get the feeling it was the games, because that malleable view of what the Force means and who the Jedi and Sith are has carried through for me ever since.

The Last Jedi does kind of play it safe in some ways, ultimately being a Disney property that has to sell lots of merchandise and bring people to theme parks, but it also boldly rejects just about every expectation one might have of a “Star Wars Film”, characters make mistakes, they fail, things go wrong at the worst possible times, some act selfishly or foolishly, and by the time the credits roll there’s actually very little to be excited about, as the heroes are in a much worse position than they were when the film started, which was already very bleak. But in a way, that was the most exciting part to me, as someone who grew tired of the popular culture perception of Star Wars and who felt shut out of the Sequel trilogy by its first film; The Last Jedi may have been agonizing, but it was agonizing in a way that promised more, giving hope to those of us who were looking for a less straightforward narrative at a time when powerful politicians can be comically villainous in public and yet people would bend over backwards to excuse their actions as if an “evil empire” didn’t already exist. Over the last couple of years I have seen people post a gif of Padmé Amidala’s iconic line, “So this is how liberty dies… with thunderous applause”, saying this was the only part of the Prequel trilogy that aged well, and yet to me the truth was already glaringly obvious back when the film was released, contributing strongly to my own critical interpretation of it. The Last Jedi is a film that picks up on the thought that people can make foolish and terrible decisions and runs with it, but it is by no means the first in the series to approach this theme.

(I should note that as a Brazilian, whose country was freshly out of a dictatorship when I was born and which is now hurtling towards another at full speed, my views on what counts as an Evil Empire and how and why a democracy dies may be somewhat sharper than the average American’s. This is by no means the only reason why I’m into this kind of storytelling, nor is it exclusive to me, but it is a big one, and it would be short-sighted to ignore it.)

Ultimately I understand why The Last Jedi is so polarizing; it doesn’t pull punches and some of the punches it throws are even a bit misaimed, thus the description of it as “weird” and “unprecedented” makes sense. It just isn’t quite as weird or unprecedented when compared to previous attempts at broadening the scope of the Star Wars narrative both within the main film series and the expanded universe (at least pre-Disney; I haven’t engaged with any post-Legends canon aside from the Rebels cartoon, so I can’t say for sure). It also serves as a complete 180° turn from the Sequel trilogy establishing itself as a safe haven for Original trilogy fans and a middle chapter leading into a final film we still know nothing about, so whether its narrative leaps will pay off are still a mystery. In any case, The Last Jedi rejects superficial concerns in favour of theme, leading to a certain degree of dissatisfaction from fans who really wanted to know Rey’s parentage and what exactly was up with Snoke, but I think this is a good thing, because they gave new meanings to previously established Star Wars tropes and drove the whole thing into uncharted territory. I for one am glad the franchise has freed itself of these particular burdens; it simply remains to be seen whether the conclusion will maintain this momentum.

All this to say, I like the Last Jedi because it likes the things I like about Star Wars, and now I know I’m not the only one.

[vintage1der]

What separates these works from the Harry Potter fanfiction you find online may come down to snobbery. There is an undercurrent of misogyny in mainstream criticism of fanfiction, which is widely accepted to be dominated by women; one census of 10,500 AO3 users found that 80% of the users identified as female, with more users identified as genderqueer (6%) than male (4%). Novik has spent a good deal of time fighting against fanfiction’s stigma because she feels it is “an attack on women’s writing, specifically an attack on young women’s writing and the kind of stories that young women like to tell”. Which is not to say that young women only want to write about romance: “I think,” Novik says, “that [the popularity of fanfiction amongst women is] not unconnected to the lack of young women protagonists who are not romantic interests.” Devotees of fanfiction will sometimes tell you that it’s one of the oldest writing forms in the world. Seen with this generous eye, the art of writing stories using other people’s creations hails from long before our awareness of Twilight-fanfic-turned-BDSM romance Fifty Shades of Grey: perhaps Virgil, when he picked up where Homer left off with the story of Aeneas, or Shakespeare’s retelling of Arthur Brookes’s 1562 The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet. What most of us would recognise as fanfiction began in the 1960s, when Star Trek fans started creating zines about Spock and Captain Kirk’s adventures. Thirty years later, the internet arrived, which made sharing stories set in other people’s worlds – be they Harry Potter, Spider-Man, or anything and everything in between – easier. Fanfiction has always been out there, if you knew where to look. Now, it’s almost impossible to miss.

In the last few years, fanfiction has enjoyed something of a rebrand. Big-name authors such as EL James, author of the Fifty Shades books, and Cassandra Clare, who has always been open about writing Harry Potter fanfiction before her bestselling Mortal Instruments series, have helped bring it into the mainstream. These days, it’s fairly common knowledge that some people just really like writing about Captain America and Bucky Barnes falling in love, or Doctor Who fighting demons with Buffy. The general image of fanfiction has brightened somewhat: less creepy, more sweetly nerdy.

But the divide between fanfiction and original writing holds strong. It’s assumed that if people write fanfiction, it’s because they can’t produce their own. At best, it functions as training wheels, preparing a writer to commit to a real book. When they don’t – as in the famous case of Fifty Shades, which one plagiarism checker found had an 89% similarity rate with James’s original Twilight fanfiction – they are ridiculed. A real author, the logic goes, having moved on to writing their own books, doesn’t look back.

“Here’s the thing,” Naomi Novik explains over the phone from New York. She is the bestselling author of the Temeraire books, a fantasy series that adds dragons to the Napoleonic Wars, and Spinning Silver, which riffs on Rumpelstiltskin. “I don’t actually draw any line between my fanfiction work and my professional work – except that I only write the fanfiction stuff for love.”

In between writing her novels – or indeed during, as she admits that fanfiction is one of her favourite procrastination techniques – Novik is an active member of the fanfiction community. She is a co-founder of the Archive of Our Own (AO3), one of the most popular hosting websites, and a prolific writer in the universes of Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Merlin and many more.

And she’s not the only professional at work. Rainbow Rowell, the bestselling author of Eleanor and Park and other novels, once told the Bookseller that between two novels, she wrote a 30,000-word Harry Potter fanfiction. “It’s Harry and Draco as a couple who have been married for many years, and they’re raising Harry’s kids,” she said. “It’s them dealing with attachment parenting and step-parents and all these middle-aged issues.”

The divide between a fanfiction writer and an original fiction writer can look very arbitrary when looking at authors such as Michael Chabon, who once described his own novel Moonglow as “a Gravity’s Rainbow fanfic”. Or Madeline Miller, whose Orange-prize winning The Song of Achilles detailed the romantic relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, and whose latest novel Circe picks up on the witch who seduces Odysseus in the Odyssey. Miller said she was initially worried when one ex-boyfriend described her work as “Homeric fanfiction” but has since embraced her love of adapting and playing with Greek mythology. The tag could also be applied to classics such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, reworkings of Shakespeare by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Edward St Aubyn in the Hogarth series, and a spate of parodies: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or Android Karenina.

What separates these works from the Harry Potter fanfiction you find online may come down to snobbery. There is an undercurrent of misogyny in mainstream criticism of fanfiction, which is widely accepted to be dominated by women; one census of 10,500 AO3 users found that 80% of the users identified as female, with more users identified as genderqueer (6%) than male (4%). Novik has spent a good deal of time fighting against fanfiction’s stigma because she feels it is “an attack on women’s writing, specifically an attack on young women’s writing and the kind of stories that young women like to tell”. Which is not to say that young women only want to write about romance: “I think,” Novik says, “that [the popularity of fanfiction amongst women is] not unconnected to the lack of young women protagonists who are not romantic interests.”

Others may find it odd that published authors would bother writing fanfiction alongside or between their professional work. But it’s all too simple to draw lines between two forms of writing that, in their separate ways, can be both productive and joyful. Neil Gaiman once wrote that the most important question an author can ask is: “What if?” Fanfiction takes this to the next level. What if King Arthur was gay? What if Voldemort won? What if Ned Stark escaped?

“I believe that all art, if it’s any good, is in dialogue with other art,” Novik says. “Fanfiction feels to me like a more intimate conversation. It’s a conversation where you need the reader to really have a lot of detail at their fingertips.”

For writers still wobbling on training wheels, fanfiction offers benefits: the immediate gratification of sharing writing without navigating publishers; passionate readers who are already interested in the characters, and a collegial stream of feedback from fellow writers.

“There was an audience of people who wanted to read my writing,” says young adult author Sarah Rees Brennan, who wrote Harry Potter fanfiction in her teens and twenties before she published her own novels, the latest of which, In Other Lands, was a Hugo award finalist. “Here were all these people online who wanted stories about familiar characters. Audiences were pre-invested and waiting.”

For writers, whether already published or on the path to being published, this instantaneous readership functions as a writer’s workshop: Novik calls it a “community of your peers”. Spending hours thrashing out the details of Draco Malfoy’s inner life can’t help but function as a crash course in character motivation. And the limits and constraints of working within a pre-existing world, with its own characters and settings, is a unique challenge.

“Fanfiction is a great incubator for writers,” Novik says. “The more constraints you have on you at the beginning, the better. It’s why people do writing exercises, or play scales. That kind of constraint forces you to practice certain skills, and then at a certain point you have the control to bring out the whole toolbox.”

Once some writers get those tools, they never look back. Rees Brennan no longer writes fanfiction. “I had a friend say it’s like the difference between babysitting kids and having children of your own,” she says. “With a world you built yourself, and characters you built, there’s this sense of deep, overwhelming love.”

But Rees Brennan is still a fan of collaborative writing and shared universes, as in the short stories she writes with Cassandra Clare about characters from Clare’s Mortal Instruments universe. “It’s amazing to gather around a kitchen table and yell at each other excitedly about what’s going to happen to mutually beloved characters,” she says. “I want that for every creative person – a chance to find their imaginative family, wherever it may be.”

Novik scorns the idea that published authors should turn their back on fanfiction. She recalls being on a panel where one member said he couldn’t understand why someone would waste their time writing it over an original work: “I said, ‘Have you ever played an instrument?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, I play piano’. I said, ‘So, do you compose all your own music?’”

“When I was first published, I deliberately went to my editors and said, ‘Yes, I’ve been writing fanfiction for 10 years. I love it.’ It was non-negotiable for me. As soon as you do that, by the way, it turns out that like half of the publishing industry has read or been involved in fanfiction,” she laughs. “Shockingly! It’s amazing how all these women who like storytelling have some connection to the community.”

For Novik and many other writers, fanfiction is a fundamental a way of expressing oneself, of teasing out new ideas and finding a joyous way to engage with writing again after the hard slog of editing a novel. The journey to become a published writer isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral, as we grow older and continue to explore the characters and tropes we love. There’s so many stories waiting to be told – perhaps one or two of them could involve getting Captain America laid. God knows he needs it.

[tyrranux64]

Terry’s Favorite Playstation Games

I hate Sony. I have not made this secret, from much of my art to a good helping of Youtube comments reacting to blind praise, most who know me more than the usual internet passerby are acquainted enough with my hatred of the company and brand. 

And it is not a biased band wagon kind of hate either, no this took time to fester into a most blackened bloom. Interactions with the biased rank and file, learning of the less than favorable business practices Sony has employed, the constant in your face propaganda from even third party publishers made against its two direct competitors, but most of all and most important my own experience with their premiere game system. No joke, the PS3 was effectively the worst console I have ever had the “pleasure” of owning, both with the initial 600 dollar 40 gig grill and the used slightly slimmer replacement I had to get just to keep my own sanity. I blacklisted the PS4 for a reason and even now I look at what the fourth generation of the console has to offer and feel assured my choice was correct.

Again my hatred of Sony is not pure bias fanboy raging, it is the culmination of less than favorable experiences and acquired knowledge that has forever soured my perceptions of the brand. And to further stress this point? I’ll go ahead and give you the Playstation Exclusives I absolutely loved in no particular order. Heavy emphasis on “exclusive”, all the titles listed will be ones you absolutely need a Sony console to play, no multi-platform titles, no games that were once exclusive then ported to other systems. Sony only.

And don’t expect Shadow of the Colossus on this list, of all the excellent titles one can point to that is the lowest of hanging fruit. Everyone loves that one, everyone, even its critics and detractors. My reasons for liking it are the same as everyone else’s...

____________________________________

INFAMOUS & INFAMOUS 2; Honestly I couldn’t decide which I liked more since both offer the same consistently excellent design and experience, I guess the second one for being more polished and having more interesting settings but trading one over the other is heresy. And honestly if I didn’t hate Sony so much I’d be all over the third one (though after seeing the story on Youtube I gotta say, Fetch is a complete unlikable asshole).

Ultimately this is a 3D platformer, one that more than belongs in the same breath as the likes of Super Mario Anything and Banjo Kazooie. Despite its otherwise “serious, realistic and edgy” tone and design this is the kind of delightful platforming romp that’ll satisfy even old school players pinning for the bygone era of platformers being the dominant genre in gaming. And it just makes the circumstances of its creation more fascinating. How Sucker Punch followed suit with Naughty Dog going from cartoony mascot games to so-called serious realistic games, yet unlike Naughty Dog puts out a product that still feels like a spiritual successor to their previous work.

Naturally the biggest negative is the morality system. Bad enough it is so arbitrary and safety helmet in its design that it tells you which choices are good and evil but said choices are so cartoonishly extreme on both spectrum that any sense of ambiguity and nuance are lost. But on the flip side, it does present one of the most fun bits of obsessive compulsive gameplay features I’ve ever experienced....

The Pulse Heal. Damn was this so much fun. The sheer rush of not only going to help someone but actually having the capacity to do so, the kind of humanity enriching wish fulfillment I didn’t get enough of. And I wasn’t just blowing smoke when I described it as a “obsessive compulsive” gameplay feature, I lost count of the number of times I slammed the breaks on what I was doing every time I saw some helpless citizen in desperate need of a jolt. It was nuts man, a game that lets you play as a superhero and actually let you feel like one....one helpless citizen at a time.... ______________________________________

GOD OF WAR III; But then there’s this fucking game that makes me feel like a complete villain, go figure. Then again that has been the real beauty of this franchise especially after the first game, there are no real heroes, no real champions of justice. There are only villains. What separates Kratos from all the other villains is that he was ultimately the culmination of their selfish and petty machinations to satisfy their own ends, he is the necessary evil meant to liberate the world from the cruelty of Olympus.....unfortunately, it entailed nearly destroying the world and sending it into a state of anarchy thereby making things worse. Oops.

Well either way the games are still just good ol’ hack n’ slash shenanigans. Technically I should give the nod to GoW 2 for having the more satisfying journey involving the Sisters of Fate....but it ends with a complete blue balling of an ending. Pretty arrogant to have such an ending when you’re not even sure you’re getting a sequel....well it did but still....

Plus the third one lets you actually fight more than one Olympian, hell it actually lets you fight Hercules, the proverbial OG Superman himself. AND HE’S VOICED BY KEVIN SORBO. But what really cements it is the overall combat which feels more satisfying. Not only are some of the core moves fantastic (especially the grab moves) but all the available weapons are chained weapons. It’s the kind of sameness and consistency that actually works to the game’s benefit, complimenting the gameplay and Kratos’ overall design as a range based fighter. Also nice how all the button prompts are regulated to the side of the screen to correspond to the button placement, a nice touch to mitigate any disorientation of the chaos on screen. __________________________________

CRASH BANDICOOT: WARPED; Yes yes I know the N’Sane Trilogy is now gonna be multi-platform (thank Primus) but as many who have played it will verify it’s such an extensive HD remake that it doesn’t quality as being the same game. And sadly I don’t see the original ported to any other system.

Not much that needs to be said here, when it comes to the original trilogy everyone has their first favorite. I might have played the first one once or twice but never haven owned the first PS (fun fact I actually wanted it over the N64 but my mom was convinced to get the later) it would be this one that I ended up playing the most and ultimately beat first during one particular visit to my out of state cousins. _______________________________________

RATCHET & CLANK FUTURE: A CRACK IN TIME; I never got into R&C during my initial PS2 era days, it wasn’t until a decade or so later that I played all three of the original trilogy and the future trilogy. And I played them all in chronological order, so to go from the utter lackluster flop of a plot that was Tools of Destruction to this one was an easy step up.

I’m not gonna argue this game’s quality against the original trilogy, after much retrospect and hearing other opinions there is just no contest as far as story, setting and personality. The original trilogy wins. But as far as the future trilogy? Yeah, this is easily the best one, the other two are just boring.

Crack in Time just had the best story overall and an overall journey that didn’t feel like my time was being wasted. Plus this was one of those games that gave me incentive to actually seek out the optional side objectives. Gameplay balance is an issue as things can skew a bit too easy but I was having too much fun overall to mind. Plus any game that gives me something like the Constructo Pistol and Shotgun easily gets the nod. ___________________________________

LITTLEBIGPLANET 2; There is some part of me that still loves this game....but these days it is more of a tragic love story of love lost. Ultimately my creativity and ambition overgrew my actual ability and the limitations forced on me with both the allotted level space and materials (I mean good lord have you tried to make levels with a lot of gold and complex shapes? The game just flat out tells you to fuck off). Perhaps what really soured the experience was trying to do exactly what the devs did with the story mode they made, but I realize now it was as impressive as it was because they had no arbitrary thermometer limiting what they could put in.....bastards....

These days I more respect this game for what it was made to do and what others were able to do with it. But as far as what I was able to do? Yeah, it’s too heartbreaking to think about..... __________________________________

JAK II; Remember not even a few paragraphs ago I said I never played Ratchet & Clank until recently? This is why. Because in an industry where brand new games cost up to a few tens short of a full Benjamin, well, choices have to be made.

And yeah I was easily drawn to the first game with it being a more direct 3D platformer, easily the kind of game I’d get into after my time with the N64. And then the second game came along and added guns and an edgy dark hero super mode.....without compromising the gameplay the series was established on. And for as edgy as it was now being with the story it never felt ridiculous or out of place, one of the few times I’ve even see it work out really.

Also it was a laugh riot to play what was extensively Crash Bandicoot meets Grand Theft Auto. __________________________________

KINGDOM HEARTS; I have already chronicled my thoughts on this franchise several times before so I won’t bore you with too many details. Bottom line I feel the first one is the only good one simply because it had a nice fun story that felt like both a parody and love letter to Japanese RPGs without a hint of Kojima grade arrogance or self indulgence, unlike later entries >:/

And not once did this ever feel like a mere commercial for the Disney films represented, each world was an adventure all its own and the interactions with your favorite Disney characters actually felt like characters interacting, instead of just actors in a studio voicing their lines. So ultimately I’m able to tolerate the rather archaic gameplay because the story is still a treat to enjoy.

But more relevant to this list, this was the game that got me to get a PS2 in the first place. I was rather content going only with Nintendo but then I played this game while at another cousin’s house and was immediately entranced. And really it was at this point I was kinda tired of missing out on third party games that were PS exclusive for reasons that sounded as arbitrary excuses back then as they do now. 

I still can’t fathom how many games of the PS2′s third party library wouldn’t have worked just as fine on the Gamecube, thereby increasing the available consumer base and resulting in more sales. And if KH3 really is slated for release on Xbox One, why the hell are none of the HD compilations of past games also released on the console as a courtesy to those who might be interested in the series but don’t have reason to get a PS4? Sadly it’s a question I shouldn’t be asking because I know exactly what kind of answer I’ll be getting, excuses. ________________________________

So yeah, even though I have indeed enjoyed some of the titles available, not even these select games are not enough to sway my disdain for Sony. In fact the games listed that were developed and publish by Sony themselves only serve as a reminder of what the company is now all too willing to throw away in light of the current direction it is going for with its exclusives library.

And really it kind of makes sense that Sony just doesn’t give much of a shit these days, they were never a video game company to begin with, they are an electronics conglomerate. Movies, music, computers, headphones, that sort of jazz. Video games is just another department to satisfy their fiscal year quota, nothing more. People keep praising them for revolutionizing gaming but forget that they never needed to get into video games to begin with.....

Their only incentive to doing so was as a petty, vindictive, butt hurt reaction to Nintendo’s refusal to bend over the same way Michael Jackson did. Sony hates taking no for an answer so they acted like a jealous ex lover and produced a product based on a foundation of hate...and hatred only begets more hatred.... _________________________________

Also figured I give a few honorable mentions that can’t be on this list proper for one or two obvious reasons, but all of them I have experienced on Sony consoles...

CASTLEVANIA SYMPHONY OF THE NIGHT; Truth be told I’m more partial to Harmony of Dissonance but I know someone will get on my ass for not bringing this up. But yeah this was also on the Saturn....in Japan. Who’s dumb idea was it to keep the majority of the Saturn’s library Japanese exclusive?

MEGA MAN X6 (But Only On Easy Mode); On anything higher this game is just as broken and near unplayable as people say it is, shit even on easy it’s still a mess. Anyway this was the only PS MMX game I actually played on the PSOne back when it was new, this time on a friend’s console. And I’m not gonna lie I still have kind of a soft spot for it even with the glaring flaws....

KINGDOM HEARTS II; Yes yes this is a far superior game to the first one, gameplay wise. But in a game genre that lives or dies on the story being told there is no question that this was a serious downgrade. Everything that endeared me to the first game’s story this sequel proceeds to fuck up royally, and thus seeing the skip cutscene option as an absolute godsend makes me die a little inside, first rule of good storytelling in games is to make sure no one will ever want to skip the cutscenes even if they have the option to.

DEVIL MAY CRY 3; It was of course the first DMC I ever played and beat, and when said first happens to be the best in gameplay, structure and story it’s pretty hard not to be biased. 

TRANSFORMERS WAR/FALL OF CYBERTRON; I think you guys know by now that I am a big fan of Transformers, so my reasons for liking these games are a no brainer.

BAYONETTA; Yeah it’s weird thinking this game ever saw the light of day on the PS3 and 360, mostly because Platinum had the decent courtesy to port the first game to the Wii U in direct response to concerns about the sequel now being Nintendo exclusive. And what did they do when it was announced a third game was on the way? They ported the previous two titles to the Switch so that no one would be left out of the loop, not even those that passed on the Wii U. That’s what I call customer service, wouldn’t you agree SQUARE ENIX?

DEAD SPACE; Pretty much the last good EA game. The final gasp of air made by EA’s capacity for common human decency before tossing it away and effectively going all in on putting out a constant flow of bullshit on a yearly basis.

ASURA’S WRATH; Pretty much the only interactive movie game in all creation that still feels like a video game, with actual video game segments. Still bullshit that you had to pay additional money just to see the ending but hey at least said ending was actually worth the money, heaven help Capcom if it ended up being a shit ending...     

BATMAN ARKHAM ASYLUM; Yeah yeah I should be giving the nod to Arkham City but that whole business involving Talia Al Ghul all but killed the second game’s story for me....seriously Bruce what the fuck do you even see in that cunt to make you so sycophantic for her? 

DRAGONBALL XENOVERSE; Well it was fun while it lasted and even now I feel it’s a better “Kingdom Hearts” than any of the latter actual KH titles. But aside from also being on the 360 and such, well, it’s not exactly something I’m willing to play again.

GOD OF WAR: GHOST OF SPARTA; One of two reasons I even bothered picking up the PSP, and while I have since fallen out of love with Birth by Sleep, this is one I’m still able to go back to. Not only is it a decent adventure in its own right but somehow it makes God of War II better from a story perspective as now it gave Kratos even more reason for going against Olympus...

[tren-fraszka]

Yuletide Letter 2020

Dear creator,

Thank you for taking your time to check my requests. I know my requests can sound a bit tricky, but please don’t be discouraged. I wish you will have good time writing first and foremost!

My AO3 is Tren, if you wish to check it out.

Likes: comedy, casefics, canon compliants, AUs, time loops, bodyswaps, roleswaps, fantasy AU, urban fantasy AU, “being hoisted by your own petard” plotlines, snark, pettiness, rivals, enemies to friends to lovers, complicated relationship, violence, friendships, character bonding. 

DNW: explicit sex (makeouts and fade to black is okay), A/B/O, mpreg, rape depicted as positive (so no “it’s okay, because the other person enjoyed it/it was what they truly wanted”), trans headcanons, soulmate AUs, stories ending with surrender to fate/destiny, fourth wall breaking in canons where that doesn’t occur, character has cancer or other real-life terminal disease AU, word “queerplatonic”.

Also, I included what ships I’m okay with in each fandom. Please do not include any ships that aren’t canon and I have not allowed in those sections (if you feel really strongly about a ship I haven’t mentioned, you can always ask through mods just in case).

Additionally, while I almost never request fanart as possible medium, because I prefer my main gift to be fic, I would be very okay with receiving fanart treats. On another note, feel free to use my old letters if you get your hands on them. I never stop being interested in fandoms, and if I requested something once I will still want it in the future.

                                            REQUESTS

GREAT PRETENDER (ANIME)

Edamura Makoto Laurent Thierry Abigail Jones (Great Pretender) Cynthia Moore (Great Pretender)

You don’t have to include all the requested characters. I love all of the main four characters and will gladly take story focusing on any of them.

I love the idea of swindlers who go after terrible people and would just like more of the same. Maybe it’s just a small con one of the characters does to kill the time. Or maybe it’s another large scale operation against a wealthy prick. Or maybe Edamura made bet with someone that he can take down an exploitative cult so he joins and tries to become one of its heads just so he can make it implode from inside. Or maybe Abby joins some martial arts tournament for real to prove her prowes. Or Cynthia is off to do some more mischief for the benefit of people important to her. Or Laurent is just Laurent, going through life by flirting and teasing.

For some more prompts. It would be fun to get some insight into Edamura’s days in prison. He probably had more free time than he knew what to do with back then and he’s not one to just sit without doing nothing. Was he trying to improve his english only to angrily chuck the book after he remembered he’s not going to work with Lauren’t crew anymore? Did he get along with other prisoners? I would also love to get insight into what made Cynthia give up on trying to become an actress and become a confidence woman instead. How did her ex-boyfriend factor into her change of heart? I would love to see that explored. For Abby I would love to see something connected more to her future. She’s a character that’s trapped by their past probably the most, so I would love to see her finding some happiness in the life she’s leading right now. Laurent always feels so elusive, I would love to see a fic that gives more insight into his actions.

AUs and ships

Setting changes are okay, but I want the characters to still be conmans at the end of the day and swindle those who abuse their power/money. Any other AUs are also fine. Maybe a roleswap where Edamura is the head of a conman group and Laurent is a newbie in over his head. Or ones where characters have different skillsets (they are still conmen, just with different specializations).

I’m fine with Laurent/Edamura, but I’m not big on romantic relationships in this anime. Mentions of any past relationships are fine.

Great Pretender is available on Netflix.

天晴爛漫! | APPARE-RANMAN! (ANIME)

Sorano Appare 

I find it amusing that Appare is set up as this genius who doesn’t human emotion and it feels like this series will teach him kindness and empathy, but then it turns out he already has all of that and the lesson he needs to learn is about admitting those feelings to himself. Appare despite his standoffishness deeply treasures people and I love that he always puts them first, even if he uses excuses for that reason.

I would love any introspective piece about the journey he takes during the race or something set in the future. Maybe he needs money for his flying machine project, so he ends up goining another race. Or maybe he pairs with Xialian as the driver and him as a mechanic so they can split the prize money. I know everyone went their separate ways, but I would love to see him reuniting with some of the cast in the future.

AUs and ships

I don’t want any setting AUs for this, because the anachronistic wild west setting of this series is just too cool. Any other AUs are fine, though. Maybe Kosame really died after being shot and Appare needs to find strength to go on without him? Or an AU where Appare for all his talent with machinery can’t drive to save his life, so Xialian joins their team as a driver.

I ship Appare and Xialian, but I will be very happy with them as friends too.

Appare-Ranman! is available on Funimation.

I’M THE GRIM REAPER (WEBCOMIC)

I’m caught up with the newest chapters. You are free to incorporate any new developments into the story.

Chase Carter Scarlet | Grim Reaper

I love the relationship between Chase and Scarlet. Chase is discount Light Yagami who instead of god complex got an ugly cat and a nerd status. Scarlet is a grim reaper with amnesia, who is trying to figure out what kind of sins she committed to land her in the lowest circle of hell. Together they kill sinners, while also being stupidly sweet to each other.

I would love to see more of their misadventures, whether serious or more on the lighter side. I would love some MMO shenanigans. Maybe someone in Red Spades introduces Brook to Fatecraft and Scarlet together with Chase coach him through the early stages of it without realizing who he is. Or Scarlet learns that Chase’s birthday is coming soon, so she tries to secretly organize something for him. Or Chase and Scarlet are investigating a sinner, but something goes wrong and Chase is in danger. 

AUs and ships

I’m okay with AUs and canon divergences. MMO-focused fic would be absolutely great for this fandom. Maybe the main characters are a part of the same guild that’s currently in feud with Red Spades guild. Satan is the chaotic guild leader who annoys everyone whenever he does log in. Or a role swap where Chase is the amnesiac grim reaper and Scarlet is the detective with far too strong sense of justice.

It’s probably obvious from the intro, but I ship Chase and Scarlet.

I’m a Grim Reaper is available on webtoon.

THE VILLAINESS REVERSES THE HOURGLASS (MANHWA)

I’m caught up with the newest english translated chapters of the manhwa, you are free to incorporate any new developments. However, DON’T include anything that hadn’t happened in webcomic yet. I’m not interested in the original light novel and I don’t want to get spoiled about future happenings.

Aria Roscent

I love fictional stories about terrible people getting a second chance at life and not afraid of dirtying their hands to achieve their goals and I love stories that incorporate economies. Needlessly to say I love this story. Aria is absolutely terrible person, but there’s a reason for her terribleness and at the same time she is enough of an underdog that you can root for her. She needs to fight for her future happiness and she will do it and make life of

I love the petty wars between Aria and Mielle and would love to see more of them using the ettiquete to make jabs at each other. Also Aria using her economical and business knowledge is always so great. I would love to see more of her learning and understanding economy than we were shown in the story (where she just read a few books). Outsider POV of prince’s allies watching Aria attend the secret meetings would also be interesting.

AUs and ships

I would prefer no setting changes for this story. Other AUs are fine, though. Maybe there are some other side-effects to using hourglass than simply growing up quicker. What if Aria’s stepfather didn’t try to steal the credit for the ideas and actually worked with her to strengthen their family’s business?

I ship Aria and prince like burning and would love any moment of them totally not flirting while discussing economical and political situation of the country.

ANIME CRIMES DIVISION (WEB SERIES)

Detective Diesel (Anime Crimes Division) Joe Furuya (Anime Crimes Division)

I loved this affectionate parody of anime culture. A hardboiled cop show about detectives solving anime crimes was just incredible and I would love to see more of that ridiculousness. I also loved how well Detective Diesel and Joe Furuya worked together as cops complimenting each other strengths.

I would love for them to explore some more unique places in Neo Otaku City. Maybe there is a kabedon valley where everyone feels compulsion to kabedon someone. Or fanfic district where everything is fanfic tropes and eyes become orbs in the descriptions once characters enter that part of the city. There are just so many interesting things you can do with that setting. 

For some suggestions of potential cases, maybe there is a new “isekai drug” in the city that makes you believe that you’ve been transported into a fantasy world with cool powers and it’s up to Diesel and Furuya to find out who is manufacturing it. Or the two of them get a tip that one of the gatcha games is hypnotizing its users which leads them down a path of gatcha hell to try to figure out which one is actually using hypnotism rather than good old gatcha games manipulation techniques. I would love any and all cases, those are just some suggestions.

AUs and ships

No setting chages for this canon, please. I’m fine with divergent AUs or just a general madness that comes from a city where anime tropes work. 

I would prefer no romance between Diesel and Furuya (unless it’s a situation similar to that time in S2 where they went to the city where everything played by the rules of western TV shows and they had to have romantic tension). I want them as buddies more than anything.

Anime Crimes Division is available on youtube: Season 1, Season 2

TALES OF CRESTORIA

Vicious (Tales of Crestoria)

This gatcha game had no right to have such a good main story, but here I am loving the hell out of it. I would love to see more misadventures of Vicious whether it be before he meet Kanata and the rest of the team or after.

I would love to see more of Vicious absolute lack of morality contrast with other characters. Vicious works best when he has someone to bounce off. I absolutely love the weird dynamic between Vicious, Kanata and Misella. For some prompts, maybe Vicious attempt to obtain booze results in some trouble for the team. Or he ends up separated from the team after they are attacked and now has to work with someone to rejoin them. 

Feel free to throw any characters from other Tales games. I played Symphonia, Graces f, Vesperia, both Xillias, Zestiria and Berseria (and Links and Rays before english versions got closed), but I’m fine with characters from games I haven’t  played as long as you give me an idea of their personality and who they are. Don’t be afraid to throw in your favourites!

AUs and ships

No setting chages for this canon, please. Feel free to use any other AUs. This story is pretty much an AU for all other Tales characters that get transplanted into this story, and I love how they get integrated into the setting of Crestoria.

I’m not really big on any ships for the main Crestoria team, please just preserve their usual dynamics.

Tales of Crestoria is a mobile game available for free on IOS and Android.

[fred-ott]

Screenwriting Part III

Second Thickener: by the time you get to the second thicker you should already have a whole mess of conflicts that you protagonist should have to deal with. So many that this situation is a “crisis”. This is also the right moment for you to introduce the weakness of your protagonist the one that you introduced in the beginning.

Preparing: during your story, your character must learn from his experience is part of his development, in fact all of your character should pick up knowledge has to be the information they need to solve their conflict and their desires. This wisdom comes from all those obstacles and antagonists so put on paper all of the obstacles put on the way of your character and what did they learned with each one of them.

Act2 PlotTwist: the third variation on your story: “the victory moment” (after your character struggled it comes that victory). If you think that for your story this is not ideal you can use instead of the victory you can use the: “Great Revelation”. Is when your protagonist finds a peace of information that makes everything click! An “Aha Moment”. This comes on the scene where your protagonist can solve his problems once and for all. The act two plot twist has to be as big and as bold as you can!

Act3 Opening: this is where the tie up all of the loose ends of Act2, is the resolutions. A solid third act has several resolutions not just one. Some of the resolutions can be happy, can be sweet, tragic or bitter-sweet, a good story has a little of everything. A common what of opening the Act3 is a “change of scenery and a jump forward in time”. The audience really appreciates being taken somewhere new! Change the scenery/place or introduce a meaningful change or twist. Before writing your Act3 opening scene thank about how your previous act ended? What would make the biggest contrast with that scene? Example: if Act2 ends in chaos Act3 could start in stillness. Give contrast without confusing your audience. The beginning of Act3 should be a plausible response to Act2.

Climax: per example in a war movie is the final chapter, on a sports movie is the final epic game. So we can define this as “The Decisive Confrontation”. This is where your protagonist has to start his ground and fight for what he really wants or believes, is the biggest scene of your story. The lack of conflict results on a simplistic confrontation. Avoid this at all cost. When you think about this final confrontation don’t make it only a big fight or a revelation give your audience more

Make your Act3, suspenseful, put a lot of status shifts and reversals of fortune, put his weakness at play, keep your stakes high and let your main character use his special ability/quality or superpower. Also don’t forget to think on how your final confrontation will change (and it should) the status quo. The Act3 climax is where all of the payoffs come in.

Event Summary:

Act1:

- Status Quo (the build up to your drama)

- Routine Killer (the opportunity of adventure).

- Obstacles (all the challenge appeal).

- Plot Twist (forcing the protagonist to adventure).

Act2:

- Story desire

- Plot thickener

- Conflict

- Great Revelation

- Plot Twist

Act3:

- Preparing for resolution

- Story climax

- Event

- New Status Quo (for all characters of our story)

The world is not the same anymore you just told a story about change. Drama=Change.

Aftermath: this is the scene where your characters adapt to the new status quo, if it is after the great event is called the “aftermath”, if it takes place a long time later then is the “epilogue” there is no structural different between the two so is just a creative decision, this is a very important scene because the final scene is the scene your audience is going to walk way with. It can be whatever you want, sad or happy it doesn’t matter it only has to be “emotionally satisfying”. By remembering an old memory of your main character of what he wanted/wished in the end is a tribute to your audience intelligence. You must have a “full-circle” mind-set when writing your story. Remember that, every:

- Every SET UP  has a PUNCHLINE  & every CONFLICT has a RESOLUTION.

Even if your ending is shocking/surprising with a big twist it should make sense and it should be emotionally satisfying.

One Page: there is an old formula for a standardize screenwriting one page script is equal to one minute of  screen time. Use plain white paper 8 ½ by 11 inch paper, three hole punched you can only use one “font” – Courier. Or Courier New, courier final draft or courier standard.

This are the industry standard for screenwriting, 12 `point single spaced. The technical reason for using courier is because all of its characters have the same with and to maintain the “one page – one minute” formula there is no better font. There is specific software where you can write at will and the program wi8ll format everything. Per example: Final draft or Movie Magic Screenwriting.

Layout: (screenplay page layout) you better search for the standard screenplay page layout.

Advanced: there are a lot of details and small tricks you should know in order to write a professional script, investigate carefully. Before writing the final draft.

Screen Direction: (www.simply scripts.com) or script fly and read as many scripts as you can in order to see various script types and styles. Because every screen writer approaches screen direction on a different way. However focus only on what you really need to write to tell your story. The “art” of screenwriting is on writing complex feelings and emotions on a few well chosen an well written words.

Made Already: in order to find out if your idea was already created or a really similar one, you should type your key words at the “IMDB” online. Even if you find something similar to your idea this shouldn’t stop you, because the difference between them will be the voice of the writer, there are tons of vampires movies (the same there but all different).

Adapting: before writing any adaptation you must acquire the rights, usually this is the producer job. Make sure is in writing and you must use a lawyer. The basic process is:

1. Get exclusive motion picture rights.

2. Negotiate a term (for this rights), that’s how long the copywriter will give you to make the movie. You can include an “option” which is a deadline for you to write and film the movie if the deadline expires and you didn’t make the movie.  You can choose to renew the agreement and extend the deadline or move on. However in this situation the copy-write owner gets paid more money than you. 

3- Always specify and agree the right money compensation.

4- Sort out the screenplay credits.

Public Domain: refers to anything that is not protected by trademark or copywriter, so you are free to base your screenplay on it. This refers to:

A) Certain creative works: even if the copy-write has expired be careful, because if you use a translation of an old translation of an old book, it might be that the copy-write of the story is free but the translation particularities and style didn’t.

B) Real life events: you can write whatever you want about a public figure as long as is truth and accurate. However the danger here is, if it ends up being too introspective on their privacy.

C) Public figures: means you have the right to depict the real world and share your opinions about it. However be careful on using copy write material (songs for example) or personal opinions on brands, people or products. You might get sued by defamation. However parody is slightly different because, parody is associated with humor, humor is associated with opinion and opinion is associated with fair use. You have of rights involved on the story script you to write, so you must make sure that all of the people involved and also their lives have rights as well.

Copywriter: if you decide to write with a partner, don’t forget to “define an agreement” it doesn´t matter if it is your mom or your best friend. And you need to put that agreement on writing. There are some things that should be cleared on that agreement. The payment, the copy-write ownership and screenscreen-credit.

Work for Hire: this means that you have a secure payment but you don’t own the copy-write, you have no say in the script sale and you cant take it to other producers.

Copyright:when you finish writing your master piece you have to register yourself in order to copy-write, so go to www.copyright.gov click on forms, download the form PA (performing artist) and print it out, first you have to create an account (is free). All of the necessary instructions are there, however here are some tips: don’t put only one title put more than one (if possible all of the titles you have thought about, so you can be more free to change your mind in the future. Another useful link is, wgawregistry.org/webrss)

[cto10121]

don’t know where else to put my sniping over this cringeworthy essay at harper’s, so it’s going here. be warned: there will be high-level snark

‘‘If nostalgic cartoonists had never borrowed from Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren & Stimpy Show; without the Rankin/Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, there would be no South Park; and without The Flintstones — more or less The Honeymooners in cartoon loincloths — The Simpsons would cease to exist. If those don’t strike you as essential losses, then consider the remarkable series of “plagiarisms” that links Ovid’s “Pyramus and Thisbe” with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, or Shakespeare’s description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch’s life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.”

ay ay ay ay ay what the fuck is this shit show 

so this idiot cultural conservative has obviously no idea what plagiarism means and if he thinks shakespeare ‘‘plagiarized’’ romeo and juliet from ovid’s pyramus and thisbe and even that leonard bernstein and stephen sondheim (?!!) did it for west side story. plagiarism is taking another’s words, phrases, and - with some obvious, very vast exceptions - ideas VERBATIM or with minimal deviation from the original and taking them as your own. reusing characters and tropes, especially common ones in the public domain, are NOT plagiarism.

shakespeare, like virtually every writer of his time, borrowed liberally from his sources, as it was almost required for every writer to write and adapt stories already well-known and in existence. granted, shakespeare did flirt with actual legit plagiarism on the (extremely lazy) occasion, and those lines from anthony and cleopatra are the closest and most damning. but even then the wording is not exact, the purpose different, and elsewhere shakespeare did not borrow without radically transforming the material to suit his purposes. prospero’s incantation starts off like medea’s spell from ovid’s metamorphoses before it veers off into something else altogether. shakespeare also made sure to quote and honor his contemporary christopher marlowe’s famous line in his play as you like it: “dear shepherd, now i find thy line of might / ‘whoever loved, that loved not at first sight?’’’ the difference is that marlowe was a contemporary and possible friend of shakespeare, and it was his line; ovid’s metamorphoses, the greek writers and the roman writers of histories were all felt to be in the public domain, and so shakespeare didn’t feel the need to give attribution.

even if such a case for plagiarizer!shakespeare can be proved, we would have to keep in mind that he lived in a time without copyright and with the very common practice of borrowing from existing stories, to the point where it was actually discouraged to write original characters. stories from greek and roman mythology and history were fair game, and even other playwrights’ plays could be revived and re-adapted again, as hollywood does now. apart from his sources, shakespeare actually quoted and appropriated little; his words are his own, and they’re damn fine ones indeed.

this author trivializes and misunderstands plagiarism to an impossibly ignorant extent, to the point of denying shakespeare and bernstein/sondheim their creative due as artists simply because the plot and story they used are not original to them. west side story is not the same as romeo and juliet, even if it did no more than change the settings and the character names (hell, it even did more than that), and never will be. hell, presgurvic’s roméo et juliette, another musical adaptation which keeps not only the story, but the same characters, and comes even closer to being a straight adaptation of the play than west side story, is still not the same as shakespeare’s play. moreover, shakespeare’s play is completely different from pyramus and thisbe; his source was actually arthur brooke’s poem ‘‘tragedie of romeus and juliet’’ with mostly the same characters and names. even then there are vast, deep differences; you would never, in a million years, confuse the two. 

‘‘The Walt Disney Company has drawn an astonishing catalogue from the work of others: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Song of the South, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, and, alas, Treasure Planet, a legacy of cultural sampling that Shakespeare, or De La Soul, could get behind. Yet Disney’s protectorate of lobbyists has policed the resulting cache of cultural materials as vigilantly as if it were Fort Knox — threatening legal action, for instance, against the artist Dennis Oppenheim for the use of Disney characters in a sculpture, and prohibiting the scholar Holly Crawford from using any Disney-related images — including artwork by Lichtenstein, Warhol, Oldenburg, and others — in her monograph Attached to the Mouse: Disney and Contemporary Art.’’

i’m not a big fan of disney’s lawsuit-happy antics either, buddy, nor of the disney company in general, but they are well within their rights to sue if they see probable cause of plagiarism. their snow white is a particular kind of snow white, their cinderella their own particular cinderella. if another work were to come along with a snow white with short dark hair, a yellow dress, thirteen or fourteen years old, who sings to the tunes of harold arlen or whatever, then disney does have the right to have a finger on their lawyer call lines. you may have a point about copyright being a little too strict, with only instances of satire, parody, or educational purposes protected. but then again, we do have fanfiction that is published with no problem and legal impediment, thousands of them. what more do you want? (an explicit clause protecting transformative works? maybe.)

‘‘Kenneth Koch once said, “I’m a writer who likes to be influenced.” It was a charming confession, and a rare one. For so many artists, the act of creativity is intended as a Napoleonic imposition of one’s uniqueness upon the universe — après moi le déluge of copycats! And for every James Joyce or Woody Guthrie or Martin Luther King Jr., or Walt Disney, who gathered a constellation of voices in his work, there may seem to be some corporation or literary estate eager to stopper the bottle: cultural debts flow in, but they don’t flow out. We might call this tendency “source hypocrisy.” Or we could name it after the most pernicious source hypocrites of all time: Disnial.’’

every writer, without exception, is influenced by the books and authors they read and love. what do you mean, a writer that likes to be influenced??? yeah, of course you have your heroes, your inspiration, your heartloves. of course, writers are proud and happy to talk about other writers and artists that they like and have inspired them. that doesn’t mean an artist should give up the right for their work to be dealt with in their own terms, to be judged on its own merits or demerits, as it were. what is with this conservative obsession with influence???? first harold bloom, and now this. it’s a religious thing, i know, but...just calm down! you may believe angels and demons exist and they are messing with your little head all you want, but don’t expect me to swallow that shit, buddy. 

‘‘The power of a gift economy remains difficult for the empiricists of our market culture to understand. In our times, the rhetoric of the market presumes that everything should be and can be appropriately bought, sold, and owned — a tide of alienation lapping daily at the dwindling redoubt of the unalienable. In free-market theory, an intervention to halt propertization is considered “paternalistic,” because it inhibits the free action of the citizen, now reposited as a “potential entrepreneur.” Of course, in the real world, we know that child-rearing, family life, education, socialization, sexuality, political life, and many other basic human activities require insulation from market forces. In fact, paying for many of these things can ruin them. We may be willing to peek at Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire or an eBay auction of the ova of fashion models, but only to reassure ourselves that some things are still beneath our standards of dignity.’’

nice try, buddy, but art =/ economics. it’s one thing to detest, as i do, the erosion of social safety nets, the toxicity of laissez-faire economics that demands corporations be not held accountable at all even if they kill people by polluting rivers or making inferior products, and an ideology that insists federal government should butt out of doing what it should very well be doing - protecting the majority of people from the interests of few. we are living in a capitalist hellscape, no doubt about that

but it’s another thing to deny that because all art is derivative (which is itself a fallacy) the artist therefore relinquishes his or her right to profit from that art and not have some unscrupulous individuals claim credit for that. that won’t fly, buddy. you are making what i would call the transference or epistemological fallacy - using the ideas of one episteme or area of knowledge and applying them to another. i’m as socialist as you can be, but cultural marxism is silly and bankrupt and has always been. this is sloppy thinking at best, ideological sabotage at worst. 

‘‘Nearly any commons, though, can be encroached upon, partitioned, enclosed. The American commons include tangible assets such as public forests and minerals, intangible wealth such as copyrights and patents, critical infrastructures such as the Internet and government research, and cultural resources such as the broadcast airwaves and public spaces. They include resources we’ve paid for as taxpayers and inherited from previous generations. They’re not just an inventory of marketable assets; they’re social institutions and cultural traditions that define us as Americans and enliven us as human beings. Some invasions of the commons are sanctioned because we can no longer muster a spirited commitment to the public sector. The abuse goes unnoticed because the theft of the commons is seen in glimpses, not in panorama. We may occasionally see a former wetland paved; we may hear about the breakthrough cancer drug that tax dollars helped develop, the rights to which pharmaceutical companies acquired for a song. The larger movement goes too much unremarked. The notion of a commons of cultural materials goes more or less unnamed.”

again, this is material that would be a++ on an economics essay, but it has zero relevancy when it comes to art, which this essay insists on considering as mere cultural product, like shakespeare and tea as examples of britishness™ (never mind that if you ask shakespeare for a cup of tea, he’d ask you what is that). an art work is not quite the same as a cancer drug or public parks and schools. i agree with federal government subsidies and grants towards the arts, because it is a public good, but the key point is that the federal government doesn’t turn art itself into a public, common good; it merely gives money to institutions that in turn helps artists and gives them a financial cushion and support for their art. that doesn’t deny art from the artist and assumes that it belongs to the public without some kind of recompense or credit. all that copyright means is ensuring the artist will be properly repaid for the work and effort he or she has done. 

‘‘A few years ago, the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced a retrospective of the works of Dariush Mehrjui, then a fresh enthusiasm of mine. Mehrjui is one of Iran’s finest filmmakers, and the only one whose subject was personal relationships among the upper-middle-class intelligentsia. Needless to say, opportunities to view his films were — and remain — rare indeed. I headed uptown for one, an adaptation of J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, titled Pari, only to discover at the door of the Walter Reade Theater that the screening had been canceled: its announcement had brought threat of a lawsuit down on the Film Society. True, these were Salinger’s rights under the law. Yet why would he care that some obscure Iranian filmmaker had paid him homage with a meditation on his heroine? Would it have damaged his book or robbed him of some crucial remuneration had the screening been permitted?” 

true, douchebaggy moves happen when it comes to copyright. however, i don’t really know the circumstances of salinger’s move. did mehrjui at all stole salinger’s words and phrases or stuck too closely to the original work? was this a straightforward adaptation or was something more original, transformative? i think if it was the former, permission would have to be sought and granted. still, salinger has always been weird when it came to adaptations of his works, and he is more an outlier in this than a true example. most artists are okay with adaptations so long as it honors, in some way, their original work. some give even more freedom to the filmmakers and such, knowing that adaptation into another medium is tricky enough as it is without imposing too-strict rules.

‘‘Contemporary copyright, trademark, and patent law is presently corrupted. The case for perpetual copyright is a denial of the essential gift-aspect of the creative act. Arguments in its favor are as un-American as those for the repeal of the estate tax.”

you know what i dislike most of all? when anyone claims such-and-such is un-american because x, y, and x. why isn’t this shit dead yet? we are country who literally has installed dictators and orchestrated coup d’états in other countries simply to protect corporate interests. we are a country who goes to war for every goddamn thing. we are a country literally founded on genocide. news flash, darling: evil is neither american nor un-american. it is something that exists.

‘‘Artists and writers — and our advocates, our guilds and agents — too often subscribe to implicit claims of originality that do injury to these truths. And we too often, as hucksters and bean counters in the tiny enterprises of our selves, act to spite the gift portion of our privileged roles. People live differently who treat a portion of their wealth as a gift. If we devalue and obscure the gift-economy function of our art practices, we turn our works into nothing more than advertisements for themselves. We may console ourselves that our lust for subsidiary rights in virtual perpetuity is some heroic counter to rapacious corporate interests. But the truth is that with artists pulling on one side and corporations pulling on the other, the loser is the collective public imagination from which we were nourished in the first place, and whose existence as the ultimate repository of our offerings makes the work worth doing in the first place.”

*inhales, puffs cheeks, exhales* 

again, for the dozenth time, originality, creativity =/ a work without the slightest shred of outer references, quotes, or is based on something else AND THEREFORE. it is entirely possible to be original even if your work is explicitly based on something else. a young or older person who has never read romeo and juliet can watch west side story or roméo et juliette with no loss in comprehension or enjoyment. they are different works and can be enjoyed separately. generations upon generations have enjoyed the wizard of oz without ever cracking open a page from l. frank baum’s book. yeah! try wrapping that around your pseudo-intellectual head, buddy.

i find it insulting and intellectually bankrupt to equate artists with corporations as if their ends and desires are one and the same. they are not. artists want to be compensated for their work and protect it from being stolen, the whole purpose of copyright; corporations want to make products and sell them by spending as little as possible in order to maximize profits. because corporations get huge enough to actually cause damage to the environment and to people, government is needed to curb these excesses and to regulate them. all j.k. rowling’s done is given the okay for the dubious spin-offs cursed child and fantastic beasts, and though some people (*glares*) would actually equates this to polluting a river, most sane people would understand the difference. rowling trolling with her millions isn’t the problem; businessmen with millions is. 

in sum: idiot conservative masquerading as intellectual thinks no art work is original and therefore creativity doesn’t exist and copyright shouldn’t exist and it all belongs to the all-powerful ~culture~ and the artist should just suck it up and deal with people stealing your words and if you think about it for ten seconds it makes ZERO sense and it’s unquestionably bs

[architeuthid-blog]

Books That Have Made an Impact On Me

The Pale King: It’s strange to read a book by a dead man, I mean a book that wasn’t finished because the author died but which was published anyway. In the literary world this is taken as a matter of course; one expects posthumous publications from renowned authors. It’s pathological, and it was hard to shake the feeling when reading one of these artifacts that you’re looking at something unintended for your eyes, like you’ve wandered into a dressing room and stumbled upon a clown who hasn’t finished putting on his makeup. Then again, the novel ends with the same abruptness and feeling of ruined orgasm as Infinite Jest, so maybe the difference is academic for Wallace.

That’s not what made this an impact though. It’s a certain scene, in the chapter from the point of view of the slacker-stoner character, who’s wandered into the wrong classroom and ends up listening to a lecture from an accounting professor. It’s the way he describes, in his airy confessional, the teacher’s attitude, a self-possessed man, without any of the corny jokes he’s used to from the humanities department, an assurance that everything he is saying is true and necessary, no filler, no need for emotional connection, just pure knowledge, a Kantian understanding of the world and its phenomena.

This semester I’m teaching a world literature course in the science & engineering building. Every day I arrive a few minutes early to set things up, and every day the previous professor is still occupying the classroom, either still lecturing about mathematics or staying after to answer students’ questions about the material. Every moment is filled. It’s pedagogy at its most efficient and essential. I bet she never feels the need to justify what she’s doing; the importance of differential equations is self-evident, even if one has (probably) never moved anyone to tears.

I’m sure it’s not always the case. Some of my students do seem to care about the Epic of Gilgamesh; I’m actually surprised how many, this semester around. And everything is more complicated than it first appears. I know nothing of this other professor’s life, her dreams, whether or not she’s happy, whether or not such a question actually matters. But every time I’m up at the lectern and have to fill an awkward silence, every time I’ve run out of things to say about some classical Indian epic and then realize there’s still 20 minutes of class time left, every time I ask a question about the text and am met with a sea of blank stares, I can’t help but think about The Pale King and the way that layabout was inspired by an accounting lecture.

Have I ever inspired anyone?

2666: Ah, and we’re hopping right back into morbidity. Another book that was never finished due to the author’s sudden non-existence. This might actually be, unintentionally, my favorite genre of literature. Few will argue against Bolaño’s genius, and 2666 holds up even incomplete, even incomplete and in translation (for Natasha Wimmer, though less celebrated, is also a genius). Beyond general prose mastery, this book is also remarkable for being telepathic: About halfway through The Part About the Crimes, I was sitting in a coffeeshop, thinking to myself, “Wow, all this violence is really starting to become a chore to get through, I wish something else would happen for a change,” and lo and behold, on the next page, the book suddenly lapsed into a bizarre, extended parody of One Hundred Years of Solitude. I have to respect that.

Bolaño has also been one of the largest influences on my writing style, mainly because I decided to write a story that imitated his prose, and, it turns out, imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery, but also the best way to learn from someone. I swear less in my writing though. I’ve been uncomfortable with swearing, I don’t know why.

The Story of My Teeth: The first book on the list that isn’t a doorstopper and whose writer didn’t die before finishing it. Wow! Also the first book on the list written by a woman. Double wow!! Actually, I’m not quite sure what impact this book made on me, but it was a good one. It certainly made me fall in love with Luiselli’s writing. Her prose is just the kind of weird and humorous that I adore. (I was originally going to write “She’s just the kind of weird and humorous that I adore,” but I’ve never met her in real life, and so cannot make that kind of qualitative judgement. I was going to meet her, back in 2015, at a conference in Tucson, but I miscalculated when booking my flight and hotel, and so had to leave a day early. On top of that my flight was on Halloween, so I also missed out on one of my favorite holidays. I wouldn’t say that I was inconsolable, but I was certainly in an ill mood for a while.)

I’d talk about how Luiselli is like a reincarnation of Scheherazade, a master of the art of the story-within-a-story, but this isn’t LitHub, and the onanism I’m engaging in here is a different animal altogether.

(Even though I’ve written for LitHub before, I kind of despise them, for reasons that don’t quite add up. I think mainly they seem like yet another vanguard of the fake-woke brigade, and I can’t stand people who seem like nothing more than the masks they wear. Ooh, what to do, you’re being problematic again. And you just used “seem like” twice in quick succession. That’s shoddy craftsmanship.)

Not One Day: I actually just finished this book a few days ago. Actually, it hasn’t even been officially released yet (tee hee, I have an advance copy, well that’s less titillating that you might think). The conceit of the book is that the author, Anne Garréta (a member of the Oulipo, nonetheless!), has decided to spend five hours every day writing about different women she has desired over the course of her life. So it’s a confessional novel, but Garréta is very self-conscious about the fact that she’s writing a confessional novel, she knows how the sordid game is played. I, too, often feel self-conscious about the things I do, like I’m always late to the party. Fortunately, Garréta knows how to innovate. And not all her tales are erotic adventures; actually, very few are. One is about a little girl who develops a fascination with her. Another chapter centers around her learning that someone has a crush on her, but she never figures out who.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say here. I like the style. I’m narcissistic enough that I may steal it for something (just like I’m stealing this from someone--but I’m getting ahead of myself).

The Elephant Vanishes: This was gateway drug into the world of Murakami. Short stories are easier to digest than full novels; there are natural starting and stopping points, along with the sly exhortation that you can walk away at any time if you’re feeling unsatisfied. Of course, I was reading the book for an undergrad course, so that wasn’t really an option for The Elephant Vanishes, but then again I never felt the need to take advantage of that particular safety cord.

(The course was called “The Poet In Asia” and was a general survey of Asian literature, more or less. We also read Rumi, Li Bo, Du Fu, Matsuo Bashō,   etc.)

Actually, there’s not much else to say about this one. I guess it also introduced me to post-modern literature, literature that maybe went beyond the mainstays of plot, characterization, and so on. Does that mean anything? Plenty of writers today would say no, that post-modernism is just privileged navel-gazing. But I do gaze at my navel a lot; it collects a worrying amount of lint over the course of the day.

Notes From Underground: Another required reading from my undergraduate years, twice: first in a mandatory “Narratives of the Self” class, then later in an elective course on Russian literature (Anna Karenina would have also made this list, but, I mean, c’mon). My major, incidentally, was philosophy. All of this is just tangentially related.

Notes From Underground taught me an important life lesson, one I didn’t even realize I needed until I had it. Oh wow, I hate myself a little bit more for writing that. I don’t even want to tell you what it is now.

Okay, I’ll give you a hint.

I saw some of myself in the Underground Man, and correctly understood that to be a bad thing.

Pale Fire: Did this book actually make an impact on me? Thinking about it, I’m not really sure. Formally it does something I think is cool. Moving on.

Minor Angels: The first Volodine novel I read. Of course that carries significance. It certainly delivered on its promise of its effect hiding not in the text itself but within the reader’s dreams. After finishing Minor Angels I woke up locked outside my apartment, around midnight, in January, barefoot in the snow, braving my way over slippery ice and pointy rock salt to reach the emergency phone. I need to stop talking about this event, or at least stop pretending that it somehow makes me interesting. This isn’t even the post-exotic novel that made the biggest impact on me. That honor would belong to. . .

We Monks & Soldiers: Everything comes around in great circles. Or small circles. Fuck, I don’t know. Everything is at least repeated here, and by here I mean in We Monks & Circles, er Soldiers. I like how we see the narrative twice, with slight variations the second time. It’s a genuine post-exotic form, the Shaggå, a series of seven sequences, repeated, and interspersed with commentary, impenetrable to the outside reader, any of which could be the enemy of post-exoticism.

Yes, this is hell of pretentious. No, I don’t care. Shut up. I hate you. I’m going to kill you. Oh noble son or daughter, you who are reading this, you shall die by my hands. Think on the Clear Light, though you will not reach it. You are doomed the wander the Bardo for forty-nine days until you are reborn into another miserable existence.

Also, the scene with the spider-girl in the burning hotel is pitch-perfect.

The Soul of an Octopus: This book made me jealous more than anything. Here Sy Montgomery is, going backstage to prestigious aquariums across America, getting to meet firsthand the octopuses in their care (not to mention a rather handsome-sounding marine biologist), and then she goes and writes a best-selling, award-winning book about the experience! Whenever I go to an aquarium, the octopus isn’t on display. Or they’re hiding. I can’t blame them for hiding, I’d be shy too if I were on display like that, but the former just seems like rotten luck. I was so looking forward to seeing the Enteroctopus dofleini at the New England Aquarium two Decembers ago, and her handlers had spirited her away that inauspicious winter day for some well-deserved r&r. At least I got a t-shirt.

I have gone to the following aquariums:

~Georgia Aquarium (Atlanta) ~Tennessee Aquarium (Chattanooga) ~New England Aquarium (Boston) ~Mystic Aquarium (Mystic) ~Tybee Island Marine Science Center (Tybee Island) ~South Carolina Aquarium (Charleston) ~Aquarium of the Bay (San Francisco) ~Shedd Aquarium (Chicago) ~National Museum of Play (Rochester) ~Aquarium (Endless Ocean: Blue World)

Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic: It’s not the book itself that made an impact on me here, but rather its translation, by Chris Tysh. She takes Genet’s Notre dame des fleurs, a prose text, and transforms it, in her interpretation, into a poem. The effect is striking and opened the door to a vast array of translatory possibilities. Things were no longer one-for-one (nor had they ever been, but before this, it was merely an academic matter, shadows on a distant wall).

Granted, I’ve never translated a prose text into a poem, but then again, I’m not a poet. Poets have an easier time going crazy with translations, I think. The older generations didn’t even bother learning the source language. That’s probably taking things too far. But if Quine is right, then it doesn’t matter either way, I guess. Is Quine right? Who the hell would have a special word for “rabbitness instantiated”?

Autobiography of Red: Another book of poetry, another liberal interpretation of an earlier work. Turning and turning in the widening gyre, etc.

I’ll come out and say it: This book made me cry. I straight up teared up. I bet it made other people cry too. If you say you read Autobiography of Red and didn’t cry, I’m going to assume that you’re lying. Or that your literary sensibilities are far more refined than mine. Probably that second one. (Putting aside the fact that it’s hard to get more refined than Anne Carson, but rationality rarely enters my autoevaluative equations.)

Why did I cry? For all the normal reasons. Even when we identify with them, tragic characters will always be way cooler than we could ever dream of ourselves.

In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods: I’m including this book here specifically because it did not impact me the way I thought it would. While reading it, I often felt tired, like I was running a surrealist marathon (especially once the narrator stopped transforming into a cephalopod). I can’t begrudge Matt Bell’s style; he does some interesting things with his prose. I get the feeling that he’s an ace when it comes to unreliable narrators. But things have to come to a close at some point, and so many times I thought I was finally reaching some sort of conclusion, only to discover that, nope!, we were just going a layer deeper, into the house, or the protagonist’s psyche, or the married couple’s past. So, even though this book was kind of a let-down, I still talk about it, because every condition contains the seeds of its opposite nature, and I’ve read Hegel too, Sam. Maybe Cataclysm Baby is better.

The Pillow Book: I would be remiss if I didn’t mention to book to which I am indebted for the form in which I wrote this whole shindig. I admire the way Sei Shōnagon writes about whatever seems to capture her fancy at any given moment. It’s incredibly intimate (and with reason: we’re essentially reading her diary. Why do people think it’s okay to publish others’ private writings? What would Anne Frank say if she knew her personal thoughts during a time of great trauma were now required reading for middle school students?). Her poetry is beautiful, yes, but it’s the lists that get me. They’re just lists of things, a show about nothing. But they convey so much about her, about her compatriots, about courtly life in Heian Japan. Last semester my students weren’t huge fans of this text; they preferred the Tale of Genji. They found the Pillow Book “too hard to follow.” I think maybe they just didn’t like how long the selection in the anthology was. But then again, judging by their research papers, many of them had no problem reading the New Testament Gospels (even if they had no idea how to write about said Gospels--it turns out, coming as a surprise to no one, that devout undergrounds have no fucking clue how to do Biblical exegesis). So here I am, taking up the one-woman literary tradition of a courtier who lived over a thousand years ago, for no reason in particular beyond a habitual shrug and a muttered “just because I felt like it.”

A Google search reveals that TV Tropes has an article on the Pillow Book. According to the anonymous author or authors of the page, Sei is an example of the “Alpha Bitch” trope. So, that’s enough of that web adventure.

Post-Scriptum: Reading over what I’ve written so far, it would be tempting to ask (like the rote commentator of any list on the internet), “Are these really the only books that have impacted you? What about The Dew Breaker? What about If on a winter’s night a traveler? What about Horror Recognition Guide?” That’s all well and good; plenty of other books have certainly stirred something inside me. The practical answer is one of laziness: I’ve written what I felt like writing about, and now I’m done. Or maybe, if I didn’t mention some book, then I didn’t inspire me as much as you might think it did. Or, I only wanted to include one book by any given author (with one obvious, but pre-eminent, exception).

Incidentally this entire exercise also borrows heavily from not just the Pillow Book but also Not One Day: Anne Garréta ends her confessional narrative with a P-S that’s essentially an apology and a shrug. Which is what I’m doing here, explicitly so.  

Okay, I think I’m done.