#but quite frankly- they’re fictional characters and if you feel like they should exist beyond the realm of sexism then that’s ok

[mariathechosen1]

“Babygirl can only be used about a grown man”

How does it feel to engage so little with female characters that you don’t even know of a female babygirl?

[howtodisassembleyourdeviant]

DBH RANT:

I’m talking about hate and racism, so, if you think this will upset you, I implore you not to read. This is also done by a person with ADHD, so it might be scattered, but I needed to say this.

I feel the desire to say this:

STOP CALLING OUT PEOPLE FOR LIKING “RACIST” CHARACTERS.

Detroit: Become Human is about the struggle androids have in fighting for their freedom. Yes, this is very much an allegory to current struggles minorities have, even though it is full of flaws (We all know it is, that doesn’t mean we don’t love it). 

However, we also know that the game is very limited in forms of interaction. You can’t go up to a character like you can in other games and have repeated conversations. You can’t talk to Chris after the incident where Markus spared him after shooting all those androids. You don’t get any real form of backstory on them. It’s not how the game is set up, even though we marvel at all the things we can do. 

Yes, in a lot of cases, this is true in real life. When people hate others, you don’t know their story. Sometimes, it’s a case of poor environment or some kind of catalysis that altered their perception. I’m not saying some people aren’t ‘born’ with anger and direct it at others or a group of people. It’s not something people like to believe though and, quite frankly, is not as common as everyone seems to think it is. In any case, we don’t know why people are hateful and their reasonings do not justify their actions. That does not mean they are beyond redemption. 

What am I getting at? 

Well, the fact of the matter is, we don’t know these characters past or future. 

Chris is a good example. In the beginning of the game, he does ignore Connor’s argument to let Ortiz’s android go. This would be an example of environment. All Chris has known of androids is that they are supposed to listen to humans and that they often give ‘helpful hints’ (much like those annoying pop-ups at the bottom of the computer that everyone ignores). So, hearing one talk isn’t going to make him listen. Then, you have Gavin breathing down his neck. Naturally, he’s not going to know what to do, so he does what he knows. 

Later, he informs Connor that he was right about the android. He has no obligations to even talk to him, much less point this out. Chris doesn’t treat Connor negatively and it’s a pretty basic conversation that one would have with a coworker. Not saying he views him as such, but I digress.

Now, we come to the most contradictory scene, where Chris actively takes part in shooting androids. Once again, this is environmental + ignorance. By now, news stories have been going apeshit over androids. We hear a couple talking propaganda (depending on what demands Markus makes) about the potential dangers or how ridiculous this all is. This is just a few snippets. Nothing like what a human would really be exposed to, especially considering where Chris works with all the news broadcasts playing. He’s a new father, quite frankly, he seems more like a rookie than anything, so even if he doesn’t think so, they’ve been planting thoughts in his head. It’s not like he knows anyone who is saying different, so, seeing androids roaming the streets after ‘escaping’ their department stores, all he knows is that they are stronger and could kill (as evidence of Ortiz android). There are not enough people on the side of androids that’s stating they’re alive, and all he’s known them to be are machines or murderers, so, as bad as it sounds, yes, he is going to view them as machines and shoot without reservations. 

This is why it would have been nice to talk to him after. Did his opinion change after Markus (assumingly, otherwise he’s not there to ask if you made the other choice) spared his life? Like the human Connor saved on the roof, would he be grateful? Would he realize the errors of his ways? I’m not condoning his actions, I’m saying that there is the chance for him to change for the better, for him to want to redeem himself. 

This can be applied to most of the people in the game. They are ignorant and do only what they know. Change is not easy, or rather, not easy to accept. When you are raised to believe a certain thing, or have relied on a certain thought pattern for a while, to accept that it’s wrong is difficult. That is where the difficulty in change is, especially when others believe the same thing. It reinforces that thought. I could rant about this for hours, but I’d rather not. In the end, we are aware that things need to change and are frustrated by how little it happens. 

On to the most polarizing character: Gavin fucking Reed.

He makes no secret that he hates androids, but something people seem to ignore is that he seems to fucking hate everyone. HE’S A BULLY. Androids are just an easy target because they can’t fight back. He berates Chris for being unable to move Ortiz’s android yet does not step in to help. Points a gun at Connor (which I find it interesting that he says to Hank, “You’re not gonna get away with it this time. We are well aware Hank gets away with a lot more than he should, but it doesn’t go into detail what Gavin could have been referring to), straight-up punches Connor after mocking him, talks in bad taste at a crime scene, insults Hank and elbows Connor. 

Point is, it’s not limited to androids. Bullies, as we all know, pick easy targets. The fact that they can’t fight back is incentive. We also know that bullies are not born. We’ve all seen the after-school specials where the bully is being bullied at home or something along those lines. It does not justify the actions, but it does give reasoning. Something we are denied by the storyline. 

Once again, what am I getting at?

Fandoms are synonymous with ‘fixing’ things that they feel are broken. They build on the world, give characters backstories where there aren’t any. None of it’s canon, but they try to make as much of it work with canon as possible (at least, when they’re being serious. Let’s keep the crack out of this). It’s an amazing thing that people pour their heart and soul in. 

So, having their love for a ‘racist’ character brought up, after they have written several stories where Gavin was abused as a child or Chris is an android advocate. It’s not fair to them. I’m not saying, if you’re talking canon, not to say your opinion and say they are racists or how terrible they are. I’m saying don’t go saying, “You know the character that everyone loves even though they are racist?”. What you are doing is shaming people who have spent hours, days, weeks, writing ‘fix-it’ fics. Giving these characters a chance at redemption that we weren’t given in game. 

These kinds of things can make a person question themselves, when all they are doing is believing in the possibility for a person to change, no matter how set in their ways they are. Is that not the kind of beliefs we should have, as human beings wanting to promote care and understanding for all? For a future where all humans are treated with equality? 

Even if that isn’t what you think, these people are the ones who inspire others. They express their love for the game and add to the fandom. Making them doubt themselves because they like these characters is a way to kill the fandom. Even if you don’t like their work, others do and build off of it. I, personally, have read some fics that I didn’t like, so I might write something in my tastes. This is what makes a fandom great. 

You can hate a character. You can hate their actions. You can hate their very existence. But don’t attack someone because of their love for the character. In the end, this is all fictional, but being hurtful because someone does not conform to your way of thinking is real. 

Alright, I’m done. I appreciate you reading this far. If you want to reblog you can. I just needed to get this out. I was getting tired of this bullshit. 

[popwasabi]

“Westworld III” takes several steps forward...and several steps back (REVIEW)

Created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy

Starring: Evan Rachel Wood, Jeffrey Wright, Aaron Paul, Ed Harris, Vincent Cassel, Tessa Thompson, Thandie Newton

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

Season three of HBO’s “Westworld” cleans up many of the issues season two had but ultimately falls short of season one’s loftier thematic ideas.

It’s cinematically sharper, it’s about as well paced and fun as the show has ever been and that on it’s own makes it worth watching and certainly worth continuing the series going forward but for fans hoping it might have something new to say in the vein of its hyper meta-textual and thematic commentary of the first season it may leave you disappointed.

Season three may have raised the stakes of the series with its pending (and frankly, all too timely) apocalyptic vibes going on in the story but it lowers the bar on its cerebral nature opting more for fast paced thrills over anything more profound or hadn’t said already.

That said, I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it anyways for better…and worse.

“Westworld” season three picks up not too long after the events of season two as Dolores has infiltrated human society and begun working on her master plan to bring it all down. She has spared Bernard, who now spends his life as butcher outside the major cities but he often wonders where she is and when this apocalypse will begin. Meanwhile a veteran named Caleb spends his life doing the same mundane tasks and mercenary work everyday to make ends meet pondering his existence as he deals with his PTSD. He decides to break the cycle however when one day he finds Dolores shot in an alleyway and joins her on her quest to start a revolution.

“Westworld” is one of the few series that hooked me immediately with its first episode.

Where some series take their time to gain momentum before going into overdrive in their season finale, season one’s “The Original” grabbed my attention from the start with a combination of mystery, action, stellar acting, and the kind of cerebral humanist story-telling I expect and want from the cyberpunk genre.

As someone with a father who talked extensively about myth, theme, and got me to listen to old Joseph Campbell essays on CD  growing up, a series that explored story-telling on a meta level with a high octane LARP concept setting was everything someone like me could ask for in a science fiction series.

(Seriously, there was some compelling analytical story-telling dialogue in this series.)

So invested I was in this tale of synthetics gaining agency and humans exploring their own personal myth-making and what it said about themselves made me a huge fan early on, proudly proclaiming it to be the best show on HBO several years ago.

I was so certain this series was creatively the best thing on television at the time that I strongly considered getting a maze tattoo like that in the show to proclaim my brand-new fandom.

But knowing there was still more seasons on the horizon, I held off thinking I should probably see this through before doing anything that brash.

Well, a few years later I feel pretty good about that decision…

(Imagine how fans who named their newborns Daenerys or Khalessi feel right now...)

I remember thinking at the end of season one “Where can they possibly go from here still? Other LARP destinations in this cyberpunk world? A robot vs human war? How can the world expand?”

The problem is these thoughts did not really ask the most important question following that first season; “What more does it actually have to say?”

The first season is, in my opinion, a perfect season of television. It’s a brilliant take on the stories we tell ourselves, the choices we make that define us in our personal myths, and the exploration of our nature and how that relates to choice all while playing out this synthetic mystery plot. The entire first season pulls all these arcs and ideas together through characters like Bernard/Arnold, William/The Man in Black, and of course Dolores. They all, more or less, complete their arcs in that first season and there’s not really much needed to be said beyond that when you really think about it. If the series ended on Dolores murdering Ford and the Delos guests in the season finale that honestly would have been a perfect ambiguous ending to send the story off on.

(Kind of itss own meta commentary on the journey of a fan and an ever-increasingly cynical series...)

But because this is HBO, and “Game of Thrones” is no longer the driving force of premium TV, Westworld MUST continue because it’s the new cash cow for the channel. Whether or not writer/producers Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan really knew what they wanted to do following that first season is anybody’s guess but it’s hard not to see that they have struggled a bit since that point.

Season two is a mixed bag, where the characters literally feel like they’re going in circles. Plotlines get muddled, characters become hyper versions of themselves, and while certain ideas and episodes reached similar levels of brilliance that the first season had it still lacked the narrative sharpness of the first season and that has a lot to do with the characters having mostly no other driving force besides survival and simply getting to the next physical plot point.

It just didn’t have much more to say and frankly in a story about stories that’s pretty damn important.

(This episode from season 2 is still one of its best.)

To their credit, Joy and Nolan appear to rectify quite a few issues season two had with season three. Again, it’s faster, better paced, there’s a clearer destination at the end for its characters and not to mention a pretty compelling villain for this season’s plot in Serac played by the brilliant Vincent Cassell.

But it suffers ultimately the same problem; it has nothing truly new to say.

This is not to say the season is without any meaningful messages or metaphors. It’s quite critical of our hyper surveillance and information gathering state, might even be the best depiction to date on the broader implications and consequences of a world where we all have our personal information readily online to mined and plundered by big businesses and government. Caleb, played by the always great Aaron Paul, is a good avatar for the everyman who has grown jaded and disenfranchised by this system. Though he spends most of the season looking overly shocked and gape-jawed at just about everything, it’s hard not to feel empathy and a connection to this character as we are quite literally living in a bit of a cyberpunk hell as it is these days and treated just as much as expendable commodities right now.

(You fucking jackasses are arguing for the wrong things! You’re all being swindled and cheated for nothing! *photo “unrelated”*)

The season is generally best when the focus is on him, as the first episode delivers a strong start in the same way season one did.

Where the season begins to fall apart though is when quite literally the world “Westworld” inhabits begins to do so itself. Serac’s Rehobaum, which reminded me just a little too much of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s” Deep Thought, releasing all its data to the world and everyone discovering they’re basically all dangerous assholes is almost hilarious to me. 

Though the idea of hyper data controlling our every move is a good cyberpunk metaphor to jump off of, the way this bit is executed is a little over exaggerated and clumsy.

(Though it does deliver a pretty powerful scene regardless.)

This isn’t actually a tremendous problem with season three, but it doesn’t do much to add to what we already understand about the story; which is how narrative controls us and how important choices and free will is to that. All this is already told and expanded on in the first season through Dolores, all season three does it bring it to a macro level and put that onus on the humans instead of the hosts. The hosts were already a metaphor for humanity anyways so again the story in some ways hasn’t changed much since season one.

It's interesting to have the narrative of the hosts turned on the humans but thematically it feels redundant.

I’ll add that this isn’t the worst idea they could’ve gone with, it works in moving the physical aspect of the story forward for sure, and I wouldn’t even classify it as a bad one, but again the problem is the story has largely run out of new things to tell us.

We like stories because we want to learn some truth about ourselves, whether we want it to or not, and Anthony Hopkins’ Ford makes a great point of this in season one. This has been the purpose of myths and legends since the dawn of time and it’ll be no different even when the 37th Fast & Furious comes out in 40 years. You could argue that the message of Westworld deserves repeating or that it’s not important to the entertainment value it still provides, and you might be right. But for a series like this, that is so invested in what stories mean I don’t think it’s wrong to think there should be more to it than this.

(Maybe, I should’ve...)

Of course, there’s still plenty more to see out of “Westworld” for the foreseeable future as HBO won’t be canceling it anytime soon and certainly it’ll have its chance to still tackle more ideas and themes in the future but, at this point at least, it’s been less meaningful that its first season.

There are other problems too, namely Dolores constantly changing and unclear revolution plans and arcs resolved offscreen, certain side plots with other characters ultimately going nowhere, and a fairly predictable twist with Caleb, but this is the crux of the problem with the series as it stands now and the one worth mentioning the most.

(And Maeve, *sigh* oh Maeve...)

That said, season three really is a lot of fun despite my issues with the narrative. The pacing, as mentioned, is great from start to finish. I was never bored or disinterested during this season, despite its flaws, and the action bits are frankly better than they’ve ever been as the series goes full cyberpunk in parts with great robot on human and robot on robot action.

The cinematography is sharp and striking too as Jonathan Nolan shows he’s definitely Christopher’s brother with some beautiful, haunting shots of the future Los Angeles city Gotham-esque skyline set to Ramin Djawadi’s excellent cyberpunk score that gives the new season a more noire-ish feel that would make Vangelis and Hans Zimmer proud.

(In the future Los Angeles will be Singapore!)

The acting is still stellar of course. Though Jeffrey Wright’s Bernard is largely wasted in this season and his plot goes nowhere, his scene with Gina Torres in the finale is touching. Luke Hemsworth is dry as hell in a good way as Chief of Security turned personal buddy bodyguard to Bernard as Ashley Stubbs. Ed Harris is wicked and dastardly as always as William and of course Evan Rachel Wood is solid as the driving force of the series as Dolores.

(Out of context season 3 spoiler.)

The finale doesn’t leave much to say beyond a pending machine vs human war though which has been building up since the first season anyways. While I can see some possibilities for an interesting direction here, I can’t say I’m as intrigued as even the finale to season two left me.

In some ways, season one left me not too much unlike William going into season’s two and three; looking for additional meaning in something that wasn’t looking to tell me anything deeper, at least right now. Perhaps the maze just isn’t for me anymore but moving forward I’ll be lowering my expectations.

(Oh my God! Meta commentary on meta commentary! It’s meta-ception! I’m beginning to question the nature of my reality!!!)

“Westworld” remains a fun cyberpunk action series that can hold your attention span for an hour, and I think it’ll maintain that energy consistently going forward, but it might’ve been best left where it was when Dolores put a bullet in Ford’s brain.

I do hope it can regain some of its original spark at some point but until then…it doesn’t look like anything (deep) to me.

VERDICT:

3.5 out of 5

You said it, Marshawn...

[incarnateirony]

i think destiel has been intentionally written in starting around like season 8 and getting more overt as time goes on, but a part of me still cant accept it unless its explicit. in these kinds of situations, with Any show or media, i always feel like im on the verge of being tricked or told that i Was just making it all up. i know queer media had always lived in subtext and ambiguity and that history is important, but is it so much to want a kiss? even a handhold? (1/2)

i dont have any goalposts for canon and d/c are definitely canon in some sense but im honestly feeling a little hurt that we get a het kiss after barely any buildup (not a slight i love saileen lol) and im expected to stay satisfied with no actual touch for the gay ship. im just So tired of having to dig around in subtext. i just want them to be allowed to touch each other. ill be happy with an ambiguous ending but the way I love is not ambiguous and im tired of it being seen that way (2/2)

No, it’s absolutely not too much to want those things. We all want those things. I want those things. The difference is making sure you don’t stampede over the other valid canon content, created by queer people, for queer people, in your pursuit of those things. This fandom has a terrible habit of trying to invalidate the representation people are already resonating with because their personal validation of the presentation, form, or delivery they want hasn’t happened, regardless of the efforts around it or the cause-and-effect, or even if they’re teh actual target represented demographic (in this case middle aged LGBT male) and that’s the problem I’m always addressing.

This also isn’t just a het thing, recently someone – I think it was @thecoffeebrain-blog – pointed out a list of situations even in het where the secondary, less important pairing got a kiss and the primary, central pairing didn’t, but instead got a wide exposition of their feelings, which the other pairing only got by borrowing words and sealing the rest silently in a kiss. Sound familiar?

It’s definitely fair to want more of those explicit moments. But at some point this fandom signed on to the idea that explicit is the only form of valid, and it does great damage to our representation and media discussion over time. 

This fandom’s obsession with “kiss pics or it didn’t happen” or choking down the ways to express love not only specifically to “I love you” but specifically like “I love you. Like, you and only you. Just you. And in a gay way. Specifically.” as character dialogue to “textualize” it “so nobody can ever argue” while flushing all the other texts is purely birthed by this stupid competitive ship conversation when there’s minor league teams wanting to play against the Red Sox. And, quite frankly, it’s FUCKING toxic.

We can get mad at the unlevel playing field. That doesn’t remove the value of the existing canon content though. We can and should be mad that corporate is even an issue. That’s WHY THERE IS A REP FIGHT THOUGH. So yes. Go be mad at corporations. Don’t stomp over what activists are currently giving you. No amount of “BUT WE DESERVE” changes that. Yes, we fucking do. Again, THAT IS WHY THERE IS A FIGHT. It’s called a FIGHT. Not a twitter trend. Not tumblr stanitis. It’s a fucking fight that long predates this show and will continue long after it. But the content made by gays, for gays, still remains. We’re living in Trump’s America right now, don’t sit there selling yourself that this should be an “easy choice” for the market. Markets don’t work on ethics, not really. They’ll virtue signal, but that’s what it is to get your money. It’s always about the money.

Since when do we get what we deserve? So maybe we can’t kill or cage corporate god, but we can find another way. We can subvert it. And hell, maybe with a perfect roll of the dice in this whole WB Merger Collapse/CEO void we really will be able to address that Lucky Elephant spinning in the room overseeing the cast down officiation of a sacred marriage ceremony for the mark but HEY sure.

Welcome to the circus. We’re all clowns, grab some spare shoes, the ringmaster is writing the show, we’ll just see if dumbo gets to fly.

I get wanting more. I, like you, want more. That’s natural in any story, whether about gay shit or rights or… just personal flavors of story.  Just make sure that completely manufactured competitive dialogue hasn’t stripped you of your ability to enjoy the content.

Anyway here’s to clowning forward.

For the record, any cussing isn’t @ you, Nonnie, it’s just at frustration at the toxic bullshit that has been allowed to fester in this fandom hidden in masks of activism or socially conscious dialogue, thoroughly misappropriated and designed to pit intersectional marginalized group points against each other for benefit (eg pretending Eileen is “just a plaything” for Sam now, rather than a full character who just happens to be with Sam, or that it’s anti-feminist to connect Rowena to a mother arc despite all her textualized grief over Crowley). It’s gone on and been welcomed and even encouraged as “opinion”, inserting outright phobic dialogues and trying to pit marginalized groups against each other through the veil of “just fiction” that at some point years ago people lost sight of what and where the rep battle started in this show much less any actual LGBT media history understanding. 

90% of this fandom yelling about representation couldn’t tell you shit beyond google-fu about the Hayes Codes’ impact or the impact of the AIDS epidemic or anything else and yet here we fucking are with them fursuiting activism and attacking a queer author en route. Hell, most of them couldn’t tell you the history of Gay Rage in this show beyond a few key markers because they just picked up and ran with the Rage Torch and then refused to read up on the full spread of events.

[bisexual-medal-alex]

HOMESTUCK 2: WHAT IS THE POINT

So Homestuck 2 has been out for around a quarter of a year now and despite my reluctance I have been keeping up with it and reading the main updates as they’re coming out. I’ll admit that there’s things that I like such as the new kids, Davekat and Roxy. But it’s not clicking with me the original Homestuck did and there’s a lot of in story reasons (and some meta reasons too) but there’s a big fundamental flaw of this project that everything wrong about this story revolves around, at least in my eyes. I’m having a hard time understanding what the point of Homestuck 2 is.

That is to say I’m having a hard time just grasping what’s at stake and why I should feel invested in it. On the surface I have a basic comprehension of the plot; Dirk gets so high on his own ego that he basically kidnaps and brainwashes Rose so that he can give the story a villain. And also Terezi joins him for whatever reason, a bunch of good guys and a ghost from another timeline are traveling to stop them and in an alternate timeline Jane is making a fascist takeover of their home while all of this is happening. That’s the basic summary of the story without trying to untangle all of the alternate timeline bullshit that is quite honestly harder to follow than anything in the original comic.

Don’t get me wrong Homestuck Classic is dense and hard to follow if you’re not paying attention. But I do feel like it had a point or at least a narrative structure that enhanced the story. Homestuck was ultimately a story about kids playing a game and it used adventure game tropes and conventions to not only make the world more cohesive but also to comment on said tropes and conventions. All of the kids struggled to meet the expectations thrown on them by the game, they all handled it in different ways from passively accepting their lack of agency to trying to wildly rebel against their fate and even then in some weird twist it always turned out that even their rebellion was predetermined by some higher power. I feel like the point of the original Homestuck beyond just being a silly story making fun of video games was a commentary on growing up and feeling like you have no control over anything in your life. Whether or not the ending was a satisfying way to end such a ambitious narrative like that is another debate entirely but for all of its faults the original Homestuck has a purpose.

Hell I’ll even go so far as to say I understood the point of the Epilogues and what they were trying to do. It was trying to be a commentary on the metafictional implications of continuing a story past “happily ever after” using the framework of a dark fan fiction. It makes sense to do it like this, trying to build on the themes of agency and choice that the original Homestuck started and having the characters feel lost and without purpose now that the “story” is over so while they’re still trying to settle into adulthood there’s also the existential threat of ceasing to exist without a plotline. And again like the original Homestuck they’re dealing with this existential stress in different ways either trying to live peacefully and explore their own identity or trying to be as disruptive as possible in an attempt to stay relevant. It’s supposed to be a story about how happy endings don’t exist and life still continues even after you close the book.

Putting aside for a moment whether or not the Epilogues succeeded in conveying those themes well, I think Homestuck 2, being a direct continuation of the Epilogues, is trying to build on those themes. The trouble is, again just speaking personally, I don’t understand how it’s trying to do it and it just seems pointless at best and like overly indulgent naval-gazing at worst. It comes down to A. Dirk’s role as the “bad guy” and B. How disconnected the story feels.

So in the Epilogues one version of Dirk becomes so self-absorbed after tapping into his highest potential that his god-tier powers grant him that he’s able to assume control of the narrative and as a result he decides that the best way to take advantage of this new power is to give the story a point by becoming a villain himself. I can accept all of that especially knowing that of all the human kids in the original Homestuck he was the most emotionally unstable and he always seemed to be stuck in his own ego. He always had that kind of narcissistic self-loathing where he hated himself but he also saw himself as the only person who could save the day and y’know despite fans not wanting Dirk to become a self proclaimed “bad guy” I can see why he was in a position where he would look at the possibility of ceasing to exist, see it as a problem to fix himself and think that the best way to do it would be to just embrace his most toxic personality traits and step into a new villainous role to drive the “plot” forward.

With aaaaaaaaallllllllll of that being said I do not understand his plan or why he’s doing any of the things he’s doing. I don’t understand why he needed to kidnap Rose and turn her into a hollow metal husk of her former self, I don’t understand why he roped Terezi along for the ride, I don’t understand why he’s taking a spaceship out into the middle of space, I don’t understand why he wants to play Spore and create two competing races of aliens on an uninhabited planet. I can guess and hypothesize why he’s doing these things, like maybe he took Rose and manipulated her into going along with his plans just so he’d have an intellectual equal and Terezi is in the best position to stop him so convincing her to come along is a good way to ensure she can’t help the heroes and frankly the whole alien thing coupled with the brief re-opening of the suggestion box feels like he’s trying to relive the glory days of Sburb like a middle aged dad trying to live vicariously through his son making him join the sports club even though he might not have any interest in doing so.

But I don’t understand the core drive behind any of these things and it feels like a hollow attempt to keep the story going even though it feels like everyone involved has already moved on. Maybe that is the point and I’m drastically overthinking Dirk’s role as a villain, he’s just doing all of this because he’s bored and doesn’t know how to continue the story in any meaningful way. It still makes the story feel hollow and it’s Hussie trying to be tongue-in-cheek about the fact that he wants to keep writing Homestuck but he doesn’t have any ideas on what to do with it.

Which is pretty obvious when you look at the B plot involving Jane becoming a fascist and having to deal with an uprising against her rule over Earth C. Hussie really wrote himself into a corner with the Epilogues focusing on two timelines; it might seem like an arbitrary choice to have a story where literary infinite possibilities coexist but then only focus on two of said possibilities but it did work in context of the Epilogues because it showed how profoundly your life can change just from making one choice over the other and it worked with the meta-narrative about stories and the theme of whether or not the characters have control over their lives now that they’re free from the “story”. But now the writers have to deal with the fallout of that decision and manage not only the plot with Dirk dicking around in space and a bunch of the characters coming to stop him, now they have to deal with the story of Jane holding onto her empire in TWO different timelines (well only if you’re paying for it but we’ll get to that).

I know Homestuck is famous for juggling multiple plot lines at once but the thing about that is that all of those plot lines were important for the overall story and that’s not the vibe I get here. It’s honestly not that interesting and feels like a distraction from what the story should be about. Nobody in this side of the story except maybe original flavor Vriska is aware of what’s going on in the other side of the story and the stakes are much less personal. I care more about Dave, Karkat, Roxy, Kanaya and Calliope/Jade trying to rescuer Rose and stop Dirk than I do Vriska dragging Gamzee’s corpse with a bunch of teenagers while Jane gets turned into a Donald Trump analogue.

And like honestly the fact that there’s updates hidden behind a paywall really bugs me. I understand that with the nature of crowdfunding you need some substantial incentives to get people to donate, I’m not shitting on crowdfunding as a way to fund your story and truthfully I don’t see anything wrong with having some bonus content exclusive to those who are willing to pay a little extra (trying my best not to sound like an EA or Activision executive here). But with a story like Homestuck, where the reader has been conditioned into seeing every update with every innocuous detail as something important that will later advance the story, having some updates be exclusive to backers feels wrong because you’re either saying that said updates aren’t going to impact the story so they’re just pointless fluff or you’re keeping critical story details hidden from people that can’t afford it so they’re missing out and really neither of those possibilities are a good look for your story.

And really the fact that Homestuck 2 used the Epilogues as it’s foundation is not a good idea because that’s a really rocky foundation. I know I spent a good chunk of this essay actually defending the Epilogues and their themes in a way but just because I think a story has some hidden depth like that doesn’t mean I think it’s good. It’s still needlessly grim with a lot of poorly handled character development the excuse from the creators of this being just a possible canon outcome for the series feels like a cop-out since this may as well be the main canon since nothing else for the series featuring these characters is advancing their story (unless you count Pesterquest which to be blunt feels like an extended apology for the Epilogues). Truthfully I don’t know if the Epilogues or HS2 have anything more profound to say about continuing a story past the happy ending than Into The Woods or a straight-to-DVD Disney sequel (not that I’m comparing an award-winning Broadway play to a Disney sequel in terms of quality I’m just saying I get more enjoyment and intellectual stimulation from the meta-narrative of Lion King 1 1/2 than Homestuck at this point).

Maybe I’m being too harsh to judge Homestuck 2 when it seems to have only barely just gotten started. It’s going to continue whether or not I enjoy it or not and maybe over time it will validate itself. But right now to me personally it just feels like a hollow imitation of what we used to enjoy about Homestuck.

[tothedarkdarkseas]

Last question on Murdoc's genderfuckery, but do you think his play on gender roles comes from a place of bigotry/sexism? He obviously likes to be submissive and degraded, do you think acting/dressing like a "girl" gives him that feeling?

Hey, I really appreciate it! I missed the questions, and I do love Murdoc’s genderfuckery, but I want to toe the line a bit as I know it’s a serious subject.

Absolutely. It’s a complex issue, but to say that isn’t a facet would be, for me, putting too pretty of a bow on it. See, this is something that can be tough to talk about candidly regarding Murdoc or Stu’s characters, but... I don’t think it should have to be. It’s simply something that seems likely. I think when you consider their environments and their age, consider the common conversations (or lack thereof) around gender, the humor and laws of their days, and frankly just comments the characters themselves have made in canon... it’s not unrealistic to suggest either man is sexist, was sexist, or has that capacity in him. It’s not unheard of to internalize things you’re socialized to think, regardless of how much you grow from them, or what conflicting conscious thoughts you have. (See: Murdoc having a dominatrix, speaking well of Kelly, Murdoc and others stating he’s attracted to powerful women and presumably not characterizing womanhood as weak... but also craving emasculation and seemingly associating “feminizing” things with being fetishistic and degrading.) I don’t want to hurt feelings by painting them with a bigoted brush-- and in that last answer I still reflexively tried to downplay that, haha-- but at the same time this isn’t a real person, and because he is fictional, it isn’t really unfair to analyze these things as if they’re telling about “who he is,” as his recorded behavior is really the only behavior that “exists.” Of course it’s interesting to dive into who they both are outside of that, but that’s sort of just the point of fandom, taking what is known and making sense of who they might be beyond it-- and I think that’s a completely fair thing to consider in Murdoc’s development. The man expresses some bigotry. I think the argument that Murdoc’s upbringing instilled some “bad mentalities” in him (and not just in ways that reflect sympathetically on him) is not hard to make, it’s just that there’s some reluctance to make it from fans because we find these things so damning to our own sensibilities, and because they’re said by genuine Murdoc detractors with a lot more, uh, oomph.

Foot fully in mouth now... but yes, cards on the table, I think there’s truth to that. I do think Murdoc views many women in his life as very powerful and very much in control of their (sexual or professional) relationship, but in his own expression of gender I do think there’s a lot of conflating the “feminine things” with the emasculation and the degradation he desires. It’s not necessarily that Murdoc is consciously thinking Women Are Subservient, quite the opposite, but I do imagine his ideal of himself as genderfuckery allows is very... er, very wrapped up in sexual gratification. I think it’s hard to separate the two. To be blunt, whether Stu or Murdoc would ever go on the telly and basically say hate speech about Murdoc’s gender expression or not (not, they definitely Would Not), when someone calls Murdoc “a girl” or belittles his lack of manhood, there’s a very intentional suggestion of misogyny to it, and I do think that in the “right kind” of degrading context that does something for Murdoc.

[yeswevegotavideo]

Support AO3, or don't, but leave it the fuck alone

(I wrote this rant quite a while ago and never posted it, but seeing as people are On That Bullshit again, I figured it was time.) 

I feel like people (you know which) who bitch about AO3 holding fundraisers to support their business, even though said business hosts content they don't approve of, are rather analogous to anti-vaxxers, or anti-unionists.

The online fanfiction world before OTW/AO3 was much more dangerous and much less regulated and much harder to control, and innocent people were getting hurt all over the place.

Content creators could destroy other people's work with impunity under "copyright infringement" claims that weren't even valid. Web hosts could discover that a fic writer was posting written erotica or fanfiction in general (see copyright infringement above), on their servers (usually after being alerted to it by someone with a grudge) and respond by taking down their website, deleting their work, and banning their IP. They didn't even have to tell you if they did this, you could discover it by accident. And this happened a lot, because companies were skittish about anything even potentially legally problematic, so they erred on the side of enormous banhammers.

And on the fan creation side, there were no real content standards. There was no way to know whether what you were reading was potentially triggering. Tagging wasn't a thing. Warnings weren't standardized. There was no system, no way of either protecting yourself OR your work. And trying to find things you wanted to see was sometimes even harder, and involved associating with people you might not want to. I entered fandom (at 17, I might add) at a time when the primary way to get fanfic was through Yahoo!groups. Message boards. I had no control over who I did and didn't have contact with. I honestly don't even remember if there WAS a way to block people. And there were definitely some creeps. There were definitely some people I would never want to associate with.

When the OTW was created, it set out to fix both of these problems at once. The legal side dealt with the fair use and transformative aspects of fanwork, and AO3 dealt with the content moderation aspect. And I think they've done a damn good job with both. Of course it's not perfect, nothing is perfect, but the fact that I can go to AO3 right now and filter out just about anything I don't want to see with extremely good results tells me that they've achieved what they set out to achieve.

But people who weren't here for the before don't see the former world. Anti-vaxxers don't think of disease as a threat because they haven't been exposed to it. Anti-unionists think unions are worthless because they weren't there for life before the 40 hour work week and child labor laws. They only see what they can criticize now.

And beyond that, they come to their criticism with misinformed, ignorant, and harmful ideas about how the whole thing works. Like anti-vaxxers and their autism myth, and anti-unionists and their worship of capitalism, these people have a worldview that, frankly, scares the shit out of me.

They seem genuinely convinced that writing about something means fully endorsing it. That only the sick and twisted and perverted would ever, could ever, write offensive or gross things, write about characters who enjoy those things, explore scenarios that would be horrific in reality. That fiction not only influences and is influenced by society, but creates reality, IS reality. That abstract concepts in a story are, themselves, crimes against humanity equivalent to rape and murder. That these things ARE rape and murder. That writing a story that doesn’t explicitly condemn rape or abuse is not only endorsement but incitement. As if fiction writers were causing these things to happen in real life, to real people. They’ve said as much. If you write rape fantasies, you’re a rapist. If you write incest, you’re a pedophile. Period, end-of, no gray area, no exceptions. Though of course, the only writers for whom this is true are fanfiction writers.

Funny how they’re not going after the published authors like this. Is anyone seriously going around calling Stephen King a pedophile because IT has a weird, uncomfortable and frankly unnecessary child orgy in it? Because it totally does, for some weird fucking reason. (Coke. The reason was lots, and lots, of coke. Also the 70s.) He made thousands of dollars off of that story, he will collect royalties on it for the rest of his life. But no, he’s fine, we can leave his career alone, his book can stay on the shelf. We should definitely instead destroy the unpaid passion project of some 40-year-old housewife who writes out her fantasies to feel just a little less alone, some 16-year-old abuse victim trying to make sense of the things currently happening to her, some 25-year-old receptionist whose only escape from her soul-crushing job is exploring the inner workings of human dynamics through the characters she most resonates with, or finds the most fascinating, or most inspire her to write. These are the real villains, am I right?

AO3 protects ALL OF FANDOM and yes, this includes the unsavory and the distasteful, because it must. Because content censorship is creative death. Once an authority is allowed to decide what is and isn’t acceptable subject matter, it’s a matter of time before those subjective, arbitrary decisions start affecting people it shouldn’t. What happens when one of the decision makers goes power-mad? When they get into a disagreement with a writer and decide, oops, all their shit is banned, and anyone who commented positive things on their stories is banned, too. When somebody gets hired to do the job, and you know what they really find inappropriate and gross? Interracial dating. When somebody decides to erase all the stories involving the “wrong” kind of trans person. Or all trans people. It’s not remotely farfetched to imagine something like this happening. One trip to Fanlore and you can find dozens of incidents like it in the past. Over, and over, and over.

And the thing is, once these tools are put into place, they are never, ever only used as intended. They are never, ever only used to the benefit of the “good guys”. We don’t want censorship on AO3 for the same reason we don’t want a leftist president with unlimited power - because the people in charge today might not be the people in charge tomorrow. Because no one should be allowed that kind of authority, even people we agree with. Because humans are fallible and make mistakes and make bad choices, and we have no choice but to let them, but we sure as hell can prevent them from doing too much damage.

Writing down a rape fantasy that someone is already fucking having because they are among the most common sexual fantasies on the fucking planet does not cause tangible harm. Destroying someone’s creative outlet? Tangible fucking harm.

These people want to take away the only bastion against the wider world that fandom has, because a small percentage of it contains upsetting, triggering ideas. Not calls for action, not instruction manuals, not advocations - just ideas, put together to make stories. The site HAS self-censoring mechanisms, that's one of the reasons for its existence, but the ability to actively avoid the content they don’t want to see isn’t enough for them. That scares me, and it should scare you, too. Because once they decide you’re “problematic”, you’re next.

Because they are advocating for authoritarianism, and authoritarianism is not your friend.

[hollywayblog]

How “The Umbrella Academy” Surprised Me

In many ways, good and bad.

This is a spoiler-free review of season one of The Umbrella Academy

I remember when The Umbrella Academy comics came out. It was 2007 and I was a broke thirteen-year-old living in suburban Australia (a cultural wasteland!) so I never actually read them, but as a rabidly obsessed My Chemical Romance/Gerard Way fan, I managed to fold The Umbrella Academy into my identity anyway. I’m not sure exactly how that works, but hey. Adolescents are powerful creatures.

As a distinguished almost-twenty-five-year-old (I’d like to acknowledge that I took a small break here to have an existential crisis) my walls are free of band posters and my eyes are no longer encircled with that thick black eyeliner that always managed to look three days old and slept in, but I still got kind of a thrill when I learned that The Umbrella Academy was being adapted into a Netflix show. It was something I had always assumed I would end up reading, back in the depths of my emo phase (which is probably more accurately defined as a My Chemical Romance phase) but then just kind of forgot about. So, great, I’m simultaneously being reminded that this thing exists, and freed of the nostalgic obligation to go seek out the comic and read it. As much as I love reading, comics have just never been my thing.

Then the trailer came out. Honestly, it kind of killed my enthusiasm. It just looked kind of generic. Apocalypse. Superpowers. Bold characters. Lots of action. My takeaway was a big ol’ “Meh.” Frankly, without my pre-existing attachment to Gerard Way and the very idea of The Umbrella Academy, I highly doubt I would have given it a chance - not because it looked inherently bad, but just because I’m a hard sell on the kind of show it appeared to be.

But it’s Gerard Way, man. I had to watch at least one episode.

The Umbrella Academy centres around the famous-yet-mysterious Hargreeves family. The seven children - six of whom have special powers - were adopted by Reginald Hargreeves, a cold and severe patriarch who didn’t even deign to name them. He made them into “The Umbrella Adademy,” a crime-fighting squad of tiny children who would later dissolve after a tragic incident. Now they’re grown up, and Dad’s dead. His spare and tense memorial is what brings the adult Umbrella Academy back together, and this is where the show kicks off.

We’re treated to a rather clumsy beginning; a gripping opening scene followed by an unimaginative montage. We get a glimpse of each of the Hargreeves’ regular lives, leading up to and including them learning of their father’s death. It’s a heavy-handed introductory roll-call, complete with on-screen name cards. It’s a baffling waste of time, considering we don’t learn anything in this montage that isn’t later reiterated through dialogue or behaviour. We don’t need to see Klaus leaving rehab to know he’s an addict. We don’t need to see Allison on the red carpet to know she’s a movie star. It dragged, even on a first watch not knowing that the whole thing would be ultimately pointless, and I’m surprised no one thought to cut it and let us go in cold with everyone arriving at the mansion for the memorial - an opening that would have both set the tone and let us get to know the characters much more naturally. Maybe it feels like I’m focusing too much on this, and that’s only because it gave me a bad first impression - and I want anyone who reacts the same way I did to stick with it. It really does get better.

The further we got from the montage the less gimmicky it felt, and I started to sense some sort of something that I liked about this show. Stylistically it was interesting, and there seemed to be an underlying depth; room for these characters to be more than brooding ex-vigilantes with daddy issues. I was intrigued enough by the end of episode one to keep watching, and was gratified as the series went on and truly delved into those depths. There was a memorable turning point for me around episode five, where Klaus (the wonderful Robert Sheehan) was given space in the runtime to visibly, viscerally feel the effects of something he had just been through. It sounds so obvious, and so simple, but it’s something that is frustratingly glossed over so often in fiction. You know. Fallout. Feelings.

It wasn’t just that moment, though. Prior episodes laid the groundwork, developing not just Klaus but all the Hargreeves. Each character feels real and grounded, each of them uniquely good, uniquely bad, uniquely damaged by their upbringing. It’s this last point I particularly appreciate, this subtle realism in the show’s execution of abused characters. We see how siblings growing up with the same parents does not necessarily mean they got the same childhood, endured the same abuse, or that their trauma will manifest in the same ways. And certainly, it’s important to see the different coping mechanisms each of them have developed. Furthermore, there is a lot more to each of these characters than just their trauma. There are seven distinct personalities going on, and I have to applaud the writers for this commitment to character. It was largely this that kept me hooked (I’m such a sucker for good characters), and to my own surprise very invested in the way things unfolded.

I love the tone, which found a cool rhythm after the pilot. The pacing was decent and the character development balanced well against the plot. I like the little quirks that remind you of the show’s comic book roots, like Pogo, the talking ape and Five, the grouchy old man in a teenager’s body.

Weirdly, I like the apocalypse stuff, which they managed to put their own spin on despite it being such a played-out trope at this point. I like that the show found small ways to go in unexpected directions, even if the overarching plot and big twists weren’t all that surprising. And most of all I love that in a world saturated with forgettable media, I woke up today still thinking about this show.

Even if not all of my thoughts were so generous.

See, for everything I love about this show, there are also quite a few things that rubbed me up the wrong way. I can’t list them all without going into spoilers, but I think it needs to be said that there are like, a fair few problematic elements in this show. I couldn’t help but notice that while women and people of colour are the minority in this cast, they also seem to cop the worst abuse. Only two of the Hargreeves siblings are female. One of them has no powers and the other’s power is influence (a non-physical power). Their “Mom” is literally a robot created for the sole purpose of caregiving; she dresses and acts like the epitome of a submissive 50s housewife. The Hargreeves sisters are also the ones most likely to be left out or ignored when it comes to making decisions, with one of them even literally losing her voice at one point (yikes!). Beyond that we have some truly disturbing imagery of violence being inflicted on women of colour almost exclusively by white men, and the fact that the only asian character is um… well, he’s literally dead. Before the show even starts.

Overall the problem is not just insufficient diversity, with white men taking up most of the screen time, dialogue and leadership actions, but the way that the few female and non-white characters are depicted.

These are all depictions that, in a vacuum, would be innocuous. I mean, just looking at the root of many of the show’s problems exemplifies that - the root being that all of these characters were white in the source material (uh, a problem in itself, obviously). It wasn’t a problem, for example, when Dead Ben was not the only Asian character but just another white Hargreeves sibling. And wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in a world where you could race or gender-swap any character and have everything mean - or not mean - the same thing. But life is more complicated than that. Art is more complicated than that.

Honestly, I’m not sure if we should give props to the developers of The Umbrella Academy for diversifying their cast when the fact is they did so - and I say this gently - ignorantly and lazily. Race-swapping willy-nilly and leaving it at that ignores a lot of complex issues surrounding the nuances of portraying minorities in fiction, and leaves room for these kinds of harmful and hurtful tropes to carelessly manifest. So many storytellers don’t want to hear it, but let me tell you writer to writer that it does matter if the person being choked is white or black, male or female, trans or cis. It does matter who’s doing the choking. Camera angles matter. Dialogue matters. It’s all a language that conveys a message - about power and dominance and vulnerability in the real world. Because art doesn’t exist inside a vacuum, as inconvenient as that might be. Having the empathy to recognise that will actually make us better storytellers.

In shedding light on these issues, I am not dragging this show. I am not condemning it. And although it is problematic in itself, I’m not even saying it’s problematic to enjoy it. I’m pulling apart the lasagne, looking at the layers, poking and prodding at the individual ingredients and saying, “Hey, the chef probably should have known better than to put pineapple in here. Maybe let’s not do that next time.” I’m also saying, “When I get a mouthful with pineapple in it, I don’t enjoy that. It’s jarring and unpleasant. But it doesn’t ruin the whole meal for me.”

I’m getting better at allowing myself to dislike something on the basis of its shitty themes. To not have to justify myself when something is problematic in a way that just makes it too uncomfortable for me to watch. That wasn’t the case here. I won’t lie; the bad stuff was no afterthought for me. That kind of thing really gets to me. It does ruin a lot for me. But in this case, the show redeemed itself in other ways; mostly by just being a compelling story with characters I liked. I’m trying not to justify that too hard either.

So I liked The Umbrella Academy, and I hope it gets a second season. I also hope that the creators will listen to people like me who want to be able to enjoy their show even more and create more consciously in the future.

And please let Vanya be a lesbian.

The Umbrella Academy is out now on Netflix

Watch this show if you like: witty characters, iconic characters, complex characters, mysteries,  dark themes, superpowers, vigilantes, comics, dark humour, epic stories, shows about families, stylistic TV shows, ensemble casts, character dynamics, dramedies

Possible triggers (don’t read if you care about spoilers): suicide, child abuse, claustrophobia, addiction, violence, violence against women, violence against women of colour, death, torture, incest, self-harm, pregnancy/childbirth, kidnapping/abduction, blood, mental illness, medication/themes of medication necessity, blood, manipulation/gaslighting, homicide, forced captivity, guns, hospitalisation, medical procedures, needles, PTSD, prison rape reference (1).

Please feel free to message me if I failed to include a relevant trigger warning and I’ll include it.

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #375

Top Ten Games That Could be Films

Well. Sonic. That’s a thing, yeah? The last couple of weeks, when not consumed with Avengers-related news and emotions, have seen people on t’net talking about Sonic, and his weird human legs and nice set of teeth. It’s certainly an odd design, although I sympathise with the creatives involved, even the executives who (I’m presuming) were the driving force behind Sonic’s movie look, okaying what the artists and animators were producing and steering them towards something that, I’m sure, they thought would sell. It’s a tough business and, to paraphrase William Goldman, nobody really knows that much when you think about it.

Among the many think-pieces that have sprung up, however, there is one point I disagree with: that it’s pointless to adapt a game into a movie at all. Certainly there should be no attempt to “legitimise” a gaming property with a film adaptation; games are great and will always be great, as games. But there are games with an iconography, storyline, or set of characters that could translate into movies. As it happens, Sonic the Hedgehog is one such game. He’s instantly familiar both to old farts like myself who remember the nineties, and also to the young folk who will be the film’s target audience. As it happens, I think the rough plot of the film – Sonic and Robotnik enter the “real world” – is probably the best storyline to tell, rather than adapting the game’s plot; it gives us a recognisable world, allows for some A-list casting (Jim Carrey as Robotnik, James Marsden as Sonic’s human pal), and following on from the likes of Alvin and the Chipmunks, The Smurfs, Christopher Robin, et al, the notion of CGI characters interacting with humans is a familiar movie trope, so much so that it’s practically a sub-genre of kids’ films (and can end up getting lampooned in adult-oriented films such as Paul or Ted).

No, I think a much worse decision is to try to adapt a game’s plot; to straight-up cart it across from console to movie screen (or, if you’re watching it on DVD, from, er, Xbox to Xbox, I guess). The first generation of game adaptations were especially guilty of this, often trying to graft a more realistic plotline, with character motivations and whatnot, onto games where “story” should really be read as “objective”: Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Super Mario Bros, Doom, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Whilst some of those films still retain a goofy charm (I will go to bat for Street Fighter being an absolute camp delight), they’re not good, not really. Far better, in my opinion, to take an existing world, one with deep and familiar iconography, and tell stories within it: sort of what the Sonic movie is doing, which we can almost assume is in continuity with the previous games. The best example of this, I think, is Halo; there have been a number of shorts and TV series based on the Halo games, set in the same world, often serving as prequels to the games themselves. And whilst they rarely go beyond a spot of pulpy fun, they do feel of a part with the games themselves. What they don’t do is re-tell the story of the games, and in that, they succeed where other game adaptations have fallen down.

There are examples of games with strong storylines that could be adapted, I think, but they would need care and attention, and should avoid being straight-up ports of the games. Use the storylines, if strong enough, but feel free to chop and change to make it work on film.

Another thing that some games have going for them, that makes them difficult to translate into movies, is that they’re really just film adaptations anyway. I think this is why the Doom and Tomb Raider movies have been less successful than perhaps you’d think; Doom is a sci-fi horror film, not too far away from Aliens (and especially quite close, even though it pre-dated it, to Event Horizon); Tomb Raider is basically Indiana Jones with a woman. The same is true for Red Dead Redemption, which I’m sure has Hollywood types arranging meetings as we speak; it’s a blockbuster, a game with instant name-recognition, a built-in audience, and strong iconography. The problem is that iconography is adapted from dozens of Westerns from The Searchers to Unforgiven to Deadwood to Bone Tomahawk. Quite frankly, we’ve seen that before.

Anyway: here are ten games (or game franchises, I suppose) that I think could stand to be adapted. Some of them are strong stories, some of them are great worlds. Hollywood, feel free to get in touch.

The Secret of Monkey Island (1990): despite banging on about adapting worlds not stories, Monkey Island has a story worth adapting. Sure, it needs adapting, but it has characters, a beginning, middle, and end, and a world that could be seen on the big screen. Pirates of the Caribbean probably stole a bit of its thunder, but that franchise looks like it’s sinking at the moment (no pun intended), so doing a much wackier, almost ZAZ-style take on the pirate movie could be really good fun. My advice would be to put Guybrush and Elaine together for much of the narrative and give them some screwball dialogue.

Command and Conquer (1995): hear me out… the C&C games have a seam of mythology richer than a source of Tiberium, and could lend themselves to a sci-fi war epic. There are characters in there worth adapting – well, Kane, at least – and whilst the risk of it turning into a GI JOE movie is great, if they keep their tongue slightly in their cheek it could be a really good, fun action movie that harks back to ‘80s genre classics. I mean, the C&C cut-scenes are famously hammy, and whilst I don’t think they should quite dial it up to eleven, maybe keeping it a good seven or eight would be good fun. Also: Red Alert, which arguably is funnier (and funner, if that’s a word), but at the moment “comedy Russian bad guys” isn’t quite so benign a concept.

The Legend of Zelda (1986): either as an animation or live-action, I could definitely see a Zelda movie working. For a start, every game is sort of a reboot, a brand new story but still set in the same world as tropes, characters, and events repeat themselves. That means you could tell a story right from the start, drawing on the best plot elements and pieces of iconography from across multiple Zelda games, but it could still be in-continuity with the game series itself. A sprawling fantasy epic but skewing younger than the likes of Lord of the Rings, it could be an absolute winner. Like Monkey Island, I’d keep Link and Zelda together for much of the narrative, however.

Mass Effect (2007): this one might be cheating a bit, because I think there actually is a film in the works (I mean, there’s probably a film in the works for half of these games…). Also it might be cheating a bit because in this case, I don’t think you’d adapt it into a film, but rather a TV series. I’d adapt the story, roughly, but give it a direct narrative thrust. I think if it was a film you’d have to cut too much; it’d feel too propulsive, and risk becoming just another sci-fi action movie. But a series – maybe a 12-episode Netflix affair or something, with a big budget – could allow room to linger, to have the odd episode go off on a tangent to explore the Geth or Rachni or whatever. I’d also look at both men and women for the lead, and cast whoever was best, in a nod to the gender choices of the game itself.

Fable (2004): this is one where I think it’s the world rather than the plot that’s worth adapting: a fun, almost Python-esque version of a fictional fairy-tale Britain. A new recruit to the Hero Academy who is trying to prove themselves whilst also battling Jack of Blades. I’d keep the humour and the bawdy tone, and add in characters from across the Fable series, making it much more of an ensemble. Arguably it’s the gameplay and the emergent storytelling that’s part of Fable’s charm, but I do really think there’s enough there to hang an adult comedy fantasy film on.

Duke Nukem 3D (1996): this is one that could go very badly, but I still think there’s potential. Duke Nukem as a character is a boor, an oaf, a misogynistic pig, a relic of a bygone age worth forgetting. Whilst I think exploring this character in a contemporary setting would be more interesting in a game (especially as you could explore the twenty-year-old gameplay differences, too), you could use Duke as an avatar of the ‘80s, almost, to critique action cinema of years gone by. A washed-up sexist dinosaur who has to be pulled out of retirement, I’d cast an older actor with some comedy chops but also a solid physical pedigree: maybe even Arnie?! You’d have to be careful that if you had a redemption arc for him you didn’t end up justifying the crassness of the original game, however.

Another World (1991): this is one where it’s the world and the style that’s the key, although there’s a vague enough story there to adapt. A scientist is transported to, literally, another world, and has to survive, ending up joining a slave rebellion. The game is all funky graphics and cool gameplay (by 1991 standards, at least), but with the right director you could transfer that brilliantly to the screen, and it allows enough room to explore the psychological effects on Lester Chaykin. One of the things I really like about the game, is that unlike other human-transported-to-alien-world storylines, Lester is way out of his depth; he’s not a superhero, not a revolutionary. He is battered by the elements, hunted by animals, imprisoned, beaten, and ultimately (spoiler alert) saved by one of the aliens. You’d have to keep this element of the game to avoid it feeling like too much of a cliché.

BioShock (2007): this one might be a bit more conventional, and risk being another Doom-style adaptation of a game, trying to follow a story that’s more about gameplay than literary flourish. But there is something there, I think; for one, there’s the steampunk aesthetic of a decaying underwater 1940s utopia, all art-deco and brass, the outside world rushing in and laying waste to such finery. There’s the philosophical discussion at the heart of BioShock, giving filmmakers something interesting to hang it all on. There’s the horror element: the creepy Little Sisters, the shock-horror Splicers, the terrifying Big Daddies. Finally, there’s the twist, which – I’m gonna be honest here – would not work anywhere near as well in a film, but all the same, it’s a twist. It is, perhaps, the most vanilla of the options I’ve laid out here, but I’d still like to see it.

Jet Set Willy (1984): there are quite a few relatively obscure (compared to, say, God of War) 1980s games that could make good films. The first Maniac Miner; Skool Daze; Dizzy. But I’ve plumped for the surrealism of Jet Set Willy. Picture it: cast someone who broke through in the ‘80s – Pierce Brosnan, Richard E. Grant, Adrian Edmondson – and get someone like Danny Boyle or Edgar Wright to direct. The tale of a drunken gone-to-seed former celebrity who starts out trying to clean himself up after one party too many – possibly in some vain attempt at a comeback – only for the film to just get crazier and crazier as he ventures deeper into his bizarre stately home, discovering hidden treasures, secret rooms, occult shenanigans, and much more. Is it “real”? Is he losing his mind? A freakish, twisty, deeply surreal black comedy ensues. It’d probably make no money but be a cult classic!

Worms (1995): most of these I’ve imagined as being live-action, often big-budget affairs; Hollywood blockbusters. But who’s to say we can’t adapt a game into a cartoon? Certainly, it’s been done before, and with degrees of success: obviously on TV, but there’s also the Angry Birds movie, which I’ve not seen and which doesn’t strike me as being overly impressive, but which was clearly a big enough deal to warrant a sequel. There’s an animated Mario movie in the works, animated Pokémon has been a staple for twenty years, and there are those who’d argue that animation was a better route for Sonic, too. So why not apply that logic to Worms, a great British success story? There could be different clans of Worms warring over a piece of land (perhaps a garden that, from their view, is an epic battlefield); that would allow the different Worm voices to come into play. But something means they have to unite for a common cause. Inject it with a dose of British humour, a splash of surrealism, and a some satirical social commentary, and you’re onto a winner.

There you are. Seemingly-obvious suggestions like Metal Gear, Gears of War, or Half-Life I have quietly shifted to one side, and other adventure games with good stories (Grim Fandango, Thimbleweed Park, Life is Strange) I sort of feel had their box ticked by Monkey Island. But somewhere in this list I’m convinced there’s at least one great, great film. In the meantime, I’m off to see Detective Pikachu. Who knows? Perhaps that will be the film that breaks videogaming’s cinematic duck (or at least Psyduck).

[sparklyjojos]

Some final commentary on Cosmic

which turned into yet another analysis of JDC, Tsukumojuku and Jorge Joestar because I have zero self-restraint. Half this post is searching for overarching themes and wacky theories, have fun with my ramblings I guess

[big spoilers for Cosmic and Tsukumojuku, not really for Jorge Joestar]

While I decided to finish Cosmic first, the recommended reading order is Cosmic (1st half) -> Joker -> Cosmic (2nd half). I guess this better ties both books together and helps avoid some Joker spoilers that are in Cosmic. The new edition even encourages it by labeling the tomes of Cosmic with Ryu and Sui, and Joker with Sei and Ryo. So you’re supposed to read “Seiryo in Ryusui” *rimshot* The cover art is also meant to be put together in that order (notice that the last cover also connects to the first though, and you can try putting the shorter edges together too):

On the book’s theme, and some meta:

I’m actually glad I’ve read Tsukumojuku before this, as it gave me a solid grip on the meta and the ridiculous detectiving. It made me LOVE the very ending, especially the “walking towards the end of the story with this tiny last moment lasting forever” part -- in hindsight of Tsukumojuku’s ending I almost cried at this point. The meaning’s a bit different, of course: Tsukumojuku has the triplets realize they should leave their daydream, and so it was both a sad and joyful ending, with them trying to stretch their last moments being ‘Tsukumojuku’. Cosmic has Juku and Yasha being a little apprehensive but determined to reach ‘the end of the story’, and at the end, they’re happy and joking around while (wittingly or not?) walking into eternity as the book ends, and with it their existence (...which doesn’t sound nearly as dramatic when you know there's a sequel).

Adding to that, I believe the last words imply the author (=the heavens forever watching over the characters) is joyful about the end (’the heavens themselves laughing’). Note that when Juku (or is it?) first appears in the book, in that post office scene, right after the 19 consecutive tragedies we just had to read through, we learn that ‘the heavens have been crying, but now it was as if they started laughing’, and Juku looks up at the sky and smiles. The end of the epilogue has the second-person someone (the reader?) be sad about the book coming to an end, with statements like ‘just two paragraphs remain until the end’ (and there really are only two short paragraphs in the book left after this!), and describing the heavy rain that starts in those two paragraphs as ‘the heavens crying’ (so... the sadness of both the reader and the author?). Finishing a good book, whether as a writer or a reader, is indeed both a joyful and a sad event. Similarly, the detectives are all happy and inexplicably sad when Juku claims the case has been solved. (There’s an echo of this theme even in Jorge Joestar, when with mere 15 pages left until the end of the book Jorge cries because ‘this adventure’s almost over’.)

I love the reccurring existential theme having to do with being a fictional character. It wasn’t as in-your-face as in Tsukumojuku, but it was there. While I skipped that in recaps, one of the locked room stories features a delusional man who believes he’s just a character in a novel. While scary, this belief is somewhat comforting too, and he notes it’d be nice to have a role to fulfill; to die with the sense you achieved all that you were meant to do, that The Author loved and appreciated you for who you were, and that you’re going to live eternally through a novel. (Jorge Joestar has Tsukumojuku mention how having a role to fulfill under Beyond’s care gave him comfort -- same thing, really.) But the character understands that all stories will eventually undergo destruction, and dreads it. Of course, the final message of the book, strengthened by the final events (the cult’s failure, Shiranui dying right after Juku’s birthday, and even --the book itself ending--), is that we have to accept that nothing can last forever, and the old will be replaced by the new, stories included.

When Juku and Yasha revealed the culprit’s initials, I honestly thought that he’d turn out to be the author, and the reason why they got different initials was that Juku saw the pen name (Seiryoin Ryusui) and Yasha the real name (Kanai Hidetaka). Since Yasha seemed shocked that Juku said ‘S’, I thought it meant that Yasha saw a full name but neither of the initials was ‘S’. I also thought Otohime’s advice -- to ‘look at the events from a distance’, to ‘withdraw yourself from events’ -- actually meant you have to look at the story from a distance... that is, lean back and look at the book you’re holding, which has the author’s name on the cover. Later, the sudden fourth wall break during the press conference scene, with the author prompting the reader to think carefully about who the Locked Room Lord may be, and writing his signature right under that question, only made me more sure. And there were a bunch of scenes before the Big Reveal in which other JDC characters reacted to the solution with feeling as if their world was destroyed, or getting drunk, or stressing out rather hard, so I expected they got hit with existential crisis upon learning The Truth, and that Juku will just go full meta and say that the culprit is the author: the one who really designed and 'committed’ the murders. Though with the book ending as it did, it’s not a stretch to say that Seiryoin really IS confirmed to be the true Locked Room Lord. In a way.

Other random comments:

This book is positively untranslatable. It features stuff like extensive kanji wordplays; messages in Caesar cipher but using the dictionary order of hiragana; deciphering a number as if it was an old-fashioned pager message; or reading the final message by putting the first syllable of the last kanji of the victims’ names together. And that damn Matsuo Bashou pun. All the name puns, really.

The language is rather hard, definitely harder than Maijo’s works. I think I’ll take some time to get better Japanese skills before going for Joker. (The JDC book I expect to enjoy the most is The Simons’ Case, though -- young Ajiro dadding over solving a case with kid Juku sounds amazing, and it’s a lot of fans’ fave)

For some reason, the main characters sure like to have the ‘castle’ kanji (城) in their names, like 鴉城 蒼司 (Ajiro Souji), 龍宮 城之介 (Ryuuguu Jounosuke), and  天城 漂馬 (Amagi Hyouma). ...I can’t help but notice that a certain 城字 ジョースター (Jouji/Jorge Joestar) would fit right in, lol. He pretty much is a meta-detective already, what with all the confidence and insight he gets from his Beyond.

I live for Ajiro’s and Juku’s relations. LOVE this stressed detective dad being proud of his ridiculously kind detective son.

Unexpectedly I also loved the friendship between Juku and Yasha. (With added tears because, y’know. Inugami Yasha. Investigating with Tsukumo Juku. Being friends and stuff.)

I like Ryuuguu Jounosuke quite a lot, both because of his character / reasoning skills, and because he’s as canonically aroace as he can be in a 90s book. not that you’d know that with all the Hikimiya/Ryuuguu yaoi fanart on pixiv

Unfortunately, I can’t praise Seiryoin for good rep as he’s miserable with other representation. The locked room chapters feature the depraved rapist bisexual trope, then a Bury Your Lesbians trope, and then this weird thing where a young guy has a gay crush and concludes that he must have become gay because he was abused by his mother (???)... but as it later turns out, in reality (ie. not in the manuscript) the object of the crush was a woman, so the gay part didn’t even happen. The fuq? Also there’s a one-scene-only black woman officer who’s only there so we can be told how physically strong and intimidating she is and I’m not sure how I should feel about that. I’m also pissed off that when a male detective uses vague reasoning out of nowhere, more a supernatural feeling than anything else, he gets called a meta-detective and is oh ah so elite and amazing!, but when Nemu does it it gets called ‘woman’s intuition’ and ‘fuzzy reasoning’ and she’s not considered a meta-detective, fucking really? (Maybe it is a little different, idk, she wasn’t detectiving a lot in this so we didn’t really see what she’s capable of)

On the other hand, I liked that the way Juku encouraged Nemu to become a detective involved using his connections to arrange meetings with other disabled detectives, so she could talk frankly with them and get a feel for how high-tier detectiving while disabled (esp. in terms of sight-related disabilities) is like. That’s a nice detail.

Speaking of him... Tsukumo Juku is pretty Mary Sue-ish in this, which I don’t mind (and I would be more surprised if it didn’t turn out to be intentional later), but I can imagine other readers not really liking him that much. I’ve read that Juku unfortunately doesn’t really get deeper characterization until the Carnival books, where we learn fun little stuff about him, eg. he’s horrible at cooking, and his ringtone is the opening for Manga Nippon Mukashi Banashi (an old anime introducing little kids to folktales). (I’m wondering whether or not the Kintaro thing in Jorge Joestar is related to this somehow? I don’t have many spoilers for Carnival, maybe there’s more folktales references... aside from the Ryuuguu family’s names referencing Urashima Taro, that is. And now I wonder why Jorge gets a folktale-related kids song stuck in his head so easily hmmm)

It was never explained who sent the manuscript to JDC. So far, judging by the scene with the beautiful androgynous person at the post office, and retroactively by the entire Story-sending mess in Tsukumojuku, I’d say it was Juku himself, somehow. A time-travelling Juku from the future, maybe? I don’t know anymore, man, but I’ve read that previous cases of the series come together in Carnival, so here’s hoping it gets explained better than as “a ghost did it maybe”.

For the longest time I kept wondering where the personality dissonance between this Juku and the Detective God in Tsukumojuku came from. Why would this ever gentle, kind and forgiving character be written as some vore murderer monster dude? So, here’s my current Reaching Theory TM. We know the Detective God really is ‘an Angel’ as he claimed, since in the Seventh Story, Tsukumojuku realizes that he himself is actually not ‘the Angel’ but ‘the Beast’ (he thinks about it during that, er... awkward chest pipe moment, if you remember). Now, canon Juku actually is compared to ‘an angel or a god’ in Cosmic, and it’s a good descriptor: he’s kind and forgiving, but has the sorta detached, not-quite-human air; he’s androgynous, unnervingly perfectly beautiful, and one shouldn’t look directly at him for too long. The Detective God, on the other hand, is an Angel in the same way those demons from Jacob’s Ladder are: only when you stop holding onto mortal life (the imaginary world in Beyonds’ case) and accept your death (accept you have to go ‘outside’), you may notice they’re actually angels who have been trying to help you realize the truth. Through brutal means, but still. I guess the Detective God was created by the part of the Beyonds’ subconscious that understands they have to accept the reality, or something. He’s a bit like Silent Hill monsters in this way. Note that the person the Detective God mainly attacks (and possibly talks with him off-screen earlier) is the Original. And the Story it happens in, Fourth (II), is the point after which the Original probably started thinking about the plan involving killing everything they hold dear to make them face reality. It was really Detective God who first made the Original and the Second One aware of ‘God’ -- even if indirectly: getting them to think about ‘God’ by making them refute the claim that Seiryoin is their God, getting them to think about what the presence of ‘the canon Tsukumo Juku’ before them means for their own existence. Or Maijo just likes to write hard vore and i’m thinking too much

[thepinkseat-askthemoonbunny]

That’s right boys and girls, this sums up the character hate that one Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore of Harry Potter fame experiences in a nutshell. 

And quite frankly, it’s sickening.

Albus Dumbledore is, in my opinion the most disrespected, maltreated, shat on and pissed on character in the entire fandom and history of Harry Potter, and I have plenty of evidence to back this claim up. On Tumblr and LiveJournal, it is the WORST I have ever had the misfortune of experiencing. 

Now yes, every character gets love and gets hate. It’s all a matter of taste or personal opinion. It’s just a basic part of fandom life, of course everyone isn’t going to hate the character that you love. It’s natural. HOWEVER, when it comes to Dumbledore, nope. Dumbledore hate is UNNATURAL and terrifying to behold. It’s sad, and it’s sick, and it breaks my heart.

“But Bunny!” I hear you cry. “Everybody gets hate!”

Of course, everybody does get hate. Except Albus Dumbledore. Dumbledore isn’t hated my friends, the man is completely and utterly loathed. Loathed, as in beyond Voldemort loathed. If Dumbledore were simply hated, I could probably be cool with that. But he isn’t. There is not ONE. SINGLE. CHARACTER in this ENTIRE FANDOM that is treated the way that Dumbledore is treated. Even Voldemort doesn’t get shat on so much by everyone. Don’t believe me, look at the list of names they call him. Voldy doesn’t even get insulted to his degree.

. Rancid stain of camel piss

. The White Voldemort

.  Dumb-as-a-door, 

   Pubic louse

  Scumbledore

   Scummywhore

   Dummybore

  Dumbassdore

  Dumbledork,   Dumbledoor, Headbastard, Goat Fucker, Goat buggerer,, Bumblewhore, the Spider, the goat, the Dark Lord Dumbledore, the Light Lord, Dumb-Old-Bore, Dumb-to-the-core, Bumblemore, Bumblebore, Dumblewhore, Dumbfuck, Dumblefuck, Doubledork, Dumbledoof (German for "Dumbledumb") or "M.O.B" (abbreviation for "manipulative old bastard").

The hate that Dumbledore gets surpasses anything that the vilest, nastiest, evilest and most reprehensible characters in the books ever received tenfold. The grudge that most of this fandom holds against Dumbledore is almost personal in nature, as if he fucking DID something to them personally! Now, there are canon reasons to dislike Dumbledore, you don’t have to make shit up just because you are so sadistic and hateful toward a man who exists in words on a page. But most characters who are worse than him are forgiven. They’re forgiven and they have a loyal following. However, Dumbledore is the one that this fandom cannot forgive whatsoever. In fact, they get pissed off that Harry forgives him! Harry, the one who should have all this beef with Dumbledore but doesn’t, he lets it go! But everyone else, can’t let it go. He can’t just be a human being, he has to be lower than Voldemort. He has to be less than a stain of piss on the floor. Nowhere ever have I ever seen the amount of hatred, death threats, revenge fics, torture, suffering, and all manner of evil and loathsome things wished upon or written on this man. Nobody else, not even Bellatrix Lestrange herself has ever been so reviled.

And that’s fucked up.

Why? Why does Dumbledore not allowed to have feelings?! He is LITERALLY not allowed to be redeemed or have feelings! When he tries to help people, he’s being manipulative. When he lets people make their own choices (aka, NOT being manipulative), he’s evil and sadistic. When he shows human emotion, he’s faking. When he tries to keep them in check, he’s cold and psychopathic. I mean he cannot win for losing! Dumbledore can’t even take a piss without somebody trying to accuse him of poisoning the water supply “for the greater good.”

That brings me to another point. The FUCKING Greater Good:

Fandom takes the Greater Good waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too far! It’s only used in every single anti Dumbledore post on this damn hellsite, and for no reason! Dumbledore literally never uses this phrase in the books. Never. He wrote it one time in a hundred year old letter that’s mentioned once in the end book, but fandom once again lost their fucking minds. They are taking Grindelwald’s version of the Greater Good and applying it to Dumbledore. They shout that it’s only Dumbledore’s Greater Good, that the greater good is more power and fame or political clout for himself. When in reality, it’s obvious to anybody with a quarter of a functioning brain that the greater good is saving the world from a genocidal monster, you know the REAL Dark Lord? Remember him? Yeah, that’s what the greater good is. Not any of this bullshit that these rabid haters are pulling out of their ass. Speaking of pulling stuff out of their ass, Dumbledore is the ONLY character to get blamed for literally EVERYTHING.

“Voldemort is evil?! Fuck you Dumbledore!” “Umbridge is a teacher?! Damn you Dumbledore!” “Sirius /The Potters/random people are dead?! Dumbledore did it!” What’s next, did Dumbledore invent AIDS and cancer too? I bet he probably caused the war in Syria too because he was bored. Also he made Russia hack our election! It’s all Dumbledore’s fault! *FACEPALM*

It is so horrible to the point where every time I see a post accusing Dumbledore of something he obviously didn’t do, has no evidence from canon to back it up, hundreds of thousands of notes will reblog shouting hate and death on Dumbledore’s head  and saying “this is why I have trust issues, this is why Dumbledick is an asshole” like this is canon fact. No matter how dubious, no matter how impossible, no matter how asinine, no matter how weird, no matter how ridiculous. If there is a post accusing Dumbledore of sinister motives, people will flock to it. Like, Dumbledore withholding information that you could be your own SK from the Potters so that they’d die. I know, it’s retarded and unprovable but people believe it. Now, nobody knows for sure why Dumbledore is the most loathed and despised character in HP, but he is. Like, beyond Ron levels of hate. If Dumbledore could save everyone’s lives on Earth today, people would sooner burn him at the stake rather than give him a chance. 

“DUMBLEDORE’S VICTIMZ, OMG!” FUCK that! If anything, Dumbledore is the victim here. He is a victim of a special breed of hate that would tear him to pieces if they ever met him in real life, they would chop this man and feed his body to wild dogs and they have never met him. All this vitriol toward a fictional character who has done nothing to them. He can’t hurt you, he never has hurt you, he never will hurt you, it’s not that serious to make death threats to somebody who was never even alive to begin with. Not a fictional character in my twenty one years of living have I ever seen this level of just...such immense loathing to somebody who can never cause you harm. Like what did he do?! What did he do, did he come to life one night and murder your entire family?! Poor Dumbledore, and you wonder why JKR goes so hard for him? He NEEDS somebody to go hard for him, when you have people sympathizing with Wizard Hitler and claiming JKR was cruel to HIM or claiming he has a mental illness, but declaring Dumbledore some sort of monster. Nobody deserves this, people say that they hate James Potter because he’s one of those bullies that drive people to suicide? Well if Dumbledore were a real man, the bullying he receives (and fandom BULLIES him) would drive anybody to suicide. Dumbledore haters however don’t get called James Potters. Now, if somebody can be so hateful and loathing and despise a fictional creation so much, I really do fear for the flesh and blood people that these people dislike. It’s not that serious, it never has been. Dumbledore doesn’t deserve this, I can think of very few people who do deserve this.

.

[serenagaywaterford]

Are you a little annoyed with all the Serena joy comparisons when it comes to literally just about any woman in the trump administration? The latest one, is Ivanka, again... I mean, I don’t blame people for making that connection really, it’s all justified. Life imitating art, or vise versa, but as a Serena stan, it doesn’t make me feel great. I wonder what Yvonne thinks of all this.

I’m gonna be real, anon... I don’t pay any attention to THT discourse anymore. So many bad/uninformed/misogynistic/flat out ignorant opinions. I literally couldn’t care less what anybody says anymore about Serena--unless it’s Yvonne tbh lol. I used to care and argue, and occasionally there were fascinating and accurate criticisms and analysis, but by and large, it’s pointless and irritating -- especially within THT social media fandom itself. (Holy misogyny, Batman!) I got so sick and tired of it all so now I just don’t bother. I unfollowed all THT things on insta, never go on FB/twitter anyway, and never go into the tags here on tumblr. Everytime I do, I find 5 more people to block. So, I just... don’t. I’m here to have fun in fandom not argue ceaselessly in circles with people who are either incapable of understanding or refusing to listen to anything but their own narrow ideology/concepts.

While obviously there are comparisons to be made between her character and those of various conservative women throughout history (cos she was inspired by actual women who existed), I think people who just compare her to every single alt-right female pundit or rich white christian conservative woman... It’s just tiresome. Because it’s too reactionary and too simplistic. Not every white neocon woman is Serena Joy. Not to mention, we don’t actually know the full extent on Serena’s politics beyond the “traditionalist feminism” stance of “housewives are best!”. She has expressed in canon the disbelief she has about the system, and it was clear those were not her intentions. (Her complete lack of foresight/blind faith in men of power is an obvious problem if she didn’t want Gilead. Just the same as, for example, Shlafly. Idiots. And traitors, yes.) But to say she’s the same as Ivanka, who afaik has never espoused that all women should stay at home and be nothing but wives and mothers, is just so off the mark. Does Ivanka believe Serena’s most central tenet? Who knows. (Or maybe she does. Quite frankly, I’ve refused to engage with melodramatic mass media-fuelled American pseudo-politics for a year now cos it was too much trash.)

I think the thing about being a Serena fan, and the core thing to cope with, is that Serena’s ideology is explicitly anti-feminist (if not downright fascist). On just about every level, most likely, in the same tone deaf way many tradfems have and always have been. She harms other women, and herself, with her politics and beliefs (and actions), even under teh guise of protecting them. Serena is a villain, (dark) anti-villain, grey villain, or dark anti-hero, depending on your position. And stanning a character on the ��villain” spectrum, requires us to feel bad lol. Unless you’re a villain yourself. I mean, when I see women in reality that echo my fictional character’s bad ways/thoughts, it’s difficult cos irl I have no such soft spot. (I do think there’s something to be said with trying to understand why such women exist, and how to shift those toxic ideologies, and where the root of all this internalised misogyny/rabid upkeep of the patriarchy comes from.) But generally? I’m not interested in Le Pen, Schlafly, Phelps-Roper, Weidel, Thatcher, Meloni, Bryant, Coulter, Morgan, or Lahren, etc. as people. I find their politics and ideology severely hypocritical and/or downright disgusting. I don’t have the same sympathies for them because they’re real--but I do recognise the larger social/political/psychological forces at work that create this sort of scenario and these sorts of zealots and woman-hating women. Serena Joy is fictional and dramatised, and it’s a totally different thing than actual real people causing harm. And it’s not as if Serena is painted as a good person, idol, or anything other than an occasionally mildly-sympathetic villain. But her being fictional, we can ascribe a lot more space for her to be more complex/change.  As for what Yvonne thinks, I mean, she probably doesn’t give a shit lol. Let’s be honest, she’s a privileged Hollywood actress playing a character. She gets her paycheque and gets to do her job no matter what. While she is probably the biggest Serena fan as a character, I don’t think she would really concern herself about random people saying random things about her fictional role. I doubt she would even see those opinions. Actors are really not as plugged into politics and nuance as the general public seems to believe. Every single one of them in Hollywood with any sort of legit success lives in a bubble of privilege and ego, even the ones that seem the most down to earth on their Instas and interviews. Meh. I would suspect that Yvonne doesn’t know, and even if she did, she doesn’t care. Hell, she’d probably agree lol. It’s not exactly wrong. She knows she’s playing a shitty, difficult, unlikable character, heh. I just think for us, this is the cost of finding villains in fiction interesting/hot/etc. When you face the reality of people like them who actually exist, it isn’t pleasant lol. Cos ya hate ‘em in real life, but like the fictional versions, so it’s a contradiction and there isn’t really any solution to that! We just gotta live with the fact we stan a character that is in direct opposition to our personal, real life beliefs--and if she were real, we would dislike immensely. That’s just what fiction does. You just gotta keep it separate. When someone says Ivanka is Serena Joy, whether or not that is even accurate, I mean... as long as you don’t start going, “Well, they’re right, now I stan Ivanka!”... Loads of people are fans of villains, and as long as your fictional interests don’t morph into joining some alt-right anti-feminist group, I think you’ll be just fine. You can be a fan of evil/bad characters and not be a scumbag in real life and it doesn’t have to reflect you as a person at all. :)

[notanicequeen-blog]

Greetings, And Controversy

I think it'd be best to just start by saying, "Hello." I'm Elsa, and I am not an ice queen. I'm a 24 year old freelance writer--primarily ghostwriting--and if that didn't clue you in, I enjoy writing. In various different forms, really. Original fiction, text-based role-playing, fanfiction, I write all of them whenever it strikes my fancy.

And I also enjoy writing about…well, writing. That's what the point of all this is. In my adventures to write what I'm paid to write and to get my brain to calm down long enough to write what I'm not being paid to write, I like to take time out and jot down my observations on the writing process and everything around it. No matter how tenuous the connection sometimes is.

A lot of these blog entries were posted on a different blog a few years back, but they've been re-written and I'm re-posting them here, on a platform that doesn't require me to jump through quite as many hoops to stay ~*~relevant.~*~

That's all the introductory stuff out of the way, so I guess now it's time to move onto the meat of this baby. To kick things off, let's look at a…slightly controversial topic among a lot of writers.

I'm going to talk about Mary Sues, because why shouldn't I? It's the first entry and it sounds like fun.

Is there anyone here who doesn't know what a Mary Sue is? I'm going to assume you've all at least heard the term, but let's get into a bit more detail than just that.

Despite the name, a Mary Sue doesn't have to be a female, though for males the term is frequently changed to Gary Stu, Gary Sue, Marty Stu, you get the point. Cute, isn't it? However! Because of the hoops female characters need to jump through to be considered good characters, people tend to fixate more on Mary Sues than they do on Gary Stus.

Assuming they aren't just using it as a catch-all term to describe a character they don't like, a lot of people bastardize the definition to 'a character that is overly perfect,' but that's not quite right. A closer definition would be more along the lines of 'a character whose existence bends the world so that everything centers around them.' Like I said, gender doesn't particularly matter, but people are more likely to flip the table and scream, "That's so unrealistic!" about female characters doing this.

(As for where the term actually came from, I regret to inform you that it did not just fall out of the aether to give all of us nerds some shared terminology. Instead, allow me to direct you towards the Star Trek fandom. A satirical fanfiction--a very old fanfiction--was poking fun at the concept with a teenage ship captain named Mary Sue.)

Unfortunately for anyone looking to identify a Sue out in the wild, there is no one set of traits or characteristics that makes up a Mary Sue. There are some made of sweetness, rainbows, and turtledove shit, and they fix all conflicts just by walking into a room. There are some who are completely unrepentant jerks to everyone around them (especially a love interest) and they chew everyone out for the slightest mistake, but of course everyone loves them for their spunk and their ~*~attitude.~*~ Or maybe they're miserable and every tragedy in the world finds them, and the entire population is divided evenly into people who want to hurt them or protect them (have you read Oliver Twist? then you know what I'm talking about).

They can be everyday people, famous people, warriors of distant lands, beautiful but tragic broken birds, or anything else you can think of, so long as the world revolves around them in a way that strains suspension of disbelief.

But why are Mary Sues problematic?

…You wanna know a secret? It's a doozy. You might not be able to take it.

You see, they aren't problematic. Or at least not always. While it's true that some writers are going to start pulling their pigtails and throwing a tanty at the mere mention of a Mary Sue, in reality everything has a place. If someone is truly writing just because it's what they want to write, then you're free to simply not read it and no one is any the worse for wear.

As with many things, it also depends on the audience and the type of writing.

For instance, let's look at original fiction. Here, it depends entirely upon the audience. Sometimes it can just be nice to feel like the world revolves around you for a change. Oh, sure, that's not everyone's cup of tea, but if someone doesn't want that sort of story, I would like to know when it became their business to tell other people what they should or shouldn't like to read.

In fanfiction, the line is a little clearer. More often than not, a Mary Sue in a fanfic is an original character that the author has made up and injected into the world of the story, and the lives of the characters from the source material revolve around the author's original character. In general, that's frowned upon. People are free to write it, and more power to them, but most people who seek out fanfiction are looking for the characters of the source material, not a new character they've never heard of and thus are not pre-invested in. (Especially in cases where the source characters wind up warped and twisted out of their original shape so they can accommodate the new character.)

However! I can think of fanfic right off the top of my head where the source material's main character was written as a raging Gary Stu, but the writing itself and the characterization were brilliant and I loved the fic. So it would be disingenuous to say there's no ambiguity here. 

(Besides, if the author is having fun, then there’s no harm coming out of it anyway.)

There is one situation, though, where there is very little ambiguity, and that is role-playing. For those that don't know what it is (or those who are perpetually stuck in the gutter), I'm talking about a collaborative story telling game (my preferred form is text-based, but there are various types). Each person has a character (or several) and they're in charge of the thoughts, words, and actions only for the characters that belong to them.

In a role-playing game, Mary Sues are very frequently obnoxious. Because the game is collaborative, most players want to get their own time in the spotlight. Everyone wants to feel important to the story. What this means is that one player constantly trying to make the story focus around their character is going to be incredibly annoying, whether it comes in the form of constantly fixing everyone's problems, constantly being dumped on by the world, or something else. Odds are the player of a Mary Sue is either going to get a stern talking to or kicked out of the group, because no role-player wants every conflict solved immediately or for their own character's drama to be stolen or overshadowed.

However, I did say very little ambiguity, not no ambiguity. Because you know what can be fun sometimes? Complete and utter over the top, self-indulgent bullshittery where every character is equally as ludicrously special and amazing. Where nothing makes sense, nothing is remotely plausible, ‘down to earth’ is a foreign phrase, and everything is explosions, be they literal or metaphorical. Because when you get down to it, it’s about having fun. (Side note: you should all go look up The Ballad of Edgardo.)

But what about me? What do I, personally, think of Mary Sues?

Frankly, I tend to prefer more realistic characters, but I'm not going to pretend I've never read and enjoyed stories about Mary Sues. It's fun to be the center of the universe now and then.

Beyond that, I think they're a phase that every writer goes through. I certainly did. If you're a writer and you're reading this, you did, too. Every writer wants their characters to be awesome, and it can take time to refine your personal definition of awesome. Criticism and advice are fine--maybe even encouraged, depending on the writer--but being a jerk about it just makes you a hypocrite. After all, you've done it, too.

[theboeingdriver-blog]

LAST NIGHT I watched the Denzel Washington movie, ”Flight” with my girl, thinking that maybe it wouldn’t bother me as much as it did the first time I heard about it.

A nice idea since I can date my girl and at the same time, work on my analysis, but the movie was even more aggravating than the hearsay. I’m not sure who gets the bigger screw-job here: viewers, who are being lied to, but who may or may not care; airline pilots, whose profession is unrealistically portrayed; or nervous flyers, whose fears this movie will only compound.

First things first: this isn’t a movie review. I’ll leave that to the professional critics. I’m not Anthony Lane, and any attempts I make at dissecting “Flight” on its deeper cinematic merits, if there are any, are bound to fall short. I’m more than happy, however, to judge the film on its technical aspects: its cockpit scenes and its portrayal of airline pilots. And what I saw gets a firm thumbs-down.

I watched the movie online with an open mind. Really, I did. I long ago accepted that when it comes to planes and pilots, Hollywood never gets it right, and I was not expecting anything different this time. There’s a point, however, where you just can’t let things go. There is nothing funny about “Flight”, but should you hear howls of laughter coming from the back of the theater when you watched it back then, chances are there’s a pilot in the audience. Laughter, if not tears, is the only fair response to much of what the movie shows.

Above all else there’s the matter of Denzel Washington’s character, “Whip” Whitaker. Whip is a hotshot, sauced-up captain whose substance-abuse habit crash-lands him, quite literally, into a whole heap of trouble. Our anti-Sully is a guy who flies on the heels of a coke binge and pours his own cocktails in the galley. Whip is a cartoon, but the problem is that too many people watching this movie will take him seriously. The idea that such a reckless pilot might actually exist out there is hardwired into the imagination of the traveling public and unfortunately reinforced by rare but high-profile reports of commercial pilots who’ve been caught while under the influence.

Any number of pilots have indeed battled substance-abuse problems — as have professionals in every line of work — and over the years a much smaller number have been arrested after failing a Breathalyzer or blood-alcohol test. Incidents like these have nurtured a certain apocryphal stereotype: the pilot as hard-drinking renegade, with crow’s-feet flanking his eyes and a whisky-tempered drawl, a flask tucked into his luggage. When the image is so quick to form, it’s tempting to jump to conclusions: for every pilot who’s caught, there must be a dozen others out there getting away with it. Right?

Well, quite frankly, no. Intoxication isn’t something pilots play fast and loose with. Why would we, with our careers on the line? Violators are subject to immediate revocation of their pilot certificates, not to mention potential prison time. I will remind you that pilots are subject to random drug and alcohol testing, and I should also note that simply because a pilot is battling a substance-abuse problem, that does not mean he is flying while drunk or high. And he certainly isn’t mixing drinks in the galley. That is a huge and critical distinction. Passengers worry about all sorts of things, rational and otherwise, but trust me on this one: there’s no Whip Whitaker in the cockpit.

Why not? The rest of us wouldn’t tolerate such a dangerous colleague in our midst, for one thing. Neither would any pilot take the skies with somebody he or she knew to be under the influence. At one point, Whitaker’s copilot admits from his post-crash hospital bed to having known that his captain was drunk and high even before they’d taken off. Where’s a bucket of tomatoes when you need one?

In other words, a real-life Whitaker wouldn’t survive two minutes at an airline, and all commercial pilots — including, if not especially, those who’ve dealt with drug or alcohol addiction — should feel slandered by his ugly caricature.

The Federal Aviation Administration blood-alcohol limit for airline pilots is 0.04 percent, and we are banned from consuming alcohol within eight hours of reporting for duty. We must also comply with our employers’ in-house policies, which are usually stricter. Drug and alcohol tests are unannounced and common. Air carriers and unions like the Air Line Pilots Association have been very successful with proactive counseling programs that encourage pilots to seek treatment.

HIMS has treated more than 4,000 pilots, with only 10 percent to 12 percent of participants suffering relapse. It has kept alcohol out of the cockpit and has helped prevent the issue from being driven underground, where it’s more likely to be a safety problem.

But back to the movie…

The workplace dynamic between Whip Whitaker and his copilot, Ken Evans (Brian Geraghty), is another problem. In the cockpit, Whitaker is flip, arrogant, and condescending; Evans is meek and at times frightened and clueless. This is not how actual pilots behave and interact. Further, such a botched depiction only reinforces one of flying’s most irritating myths: the idea of the copilot as a sort of apprentice pilot who is on hand merely to help out and assist the captain.

Copilots are not trainees. They perform just as many takeoffs and landings as captains do, and they are fully certified to operate the aircraft in all phases of flight. In fact, due to the peculiarities of the seniority bidding that determines almost everything in a pilot’s professional life, it’s not terribly uncommon for the copilot to be older and more experienced than the captain sitting next to him.

The cockpit scenes otherwise range from borderline realistic to preposterous. The checklists, the procedural callouts, the chatter with air-traffic control, etc., are occasionally rendered correctly, if a bit over the top. But mostly they’re peculiar, and at times they are outright silly.

The early-on segment where Whitaker and Evans are battling through a storm is particularly egregious. I cannot begin to describe how wrong it is, from the absurd idea that you would actually increase to maximum flying speed to race between storm cells to Whitaker’s impetuous descent, which for some inexplicable reason he believes will help lead them safely through the weather — all without permission from air-traffic control. Are you kidding?

Minutes later we see the jet, its pitch controls jammed, nose diving unstoppably toward the ground. Whip saves the day by turning the plane upside down, then rolling it right side up again in time for a semi-successful crash landing in a field. The aerobatic magic here is something that escapes me, but what do I know? I’m just an airline pilot. The sequence is based loosely on the crash of Alaska Airlines flight 261 in January, 2000, when a jammed stabilizer jackscrew forced the McDonnell Douglas MD-83 into an unrecoverable dive. (Whitaker’s jet is a fictionalized version of the same plane, with some digitalized winglets attached.) The crew of Alaska 261 briefly attempted to regain control by flying inverted. Whatever aerobatic and aerodynamic possibilities exist here aren’t anything I can vouch for. If they do exist, surely “Flight” has overextended them.

I can let that one go, but I loved it when Whitaker, seconds away from impact, actually radios air-traffic control with the news: “We are in a dive!”

Thanks, Whip. I can only imagine a perplexed controller staring haplessly into a radar screen, not really sure what to say or do, wondering if perhaps he ought to have called in sick that day. In the real world, pilots in the throes of such an emergency wouldn’t be all that worried about what ATC has to say, and such a radio call would be about the last thing on their minds. For most of the film I was too mortified to actually laugh out loud, but that one got a cackle from me.

Presumably, the filmmakers worked with one or more consultants, who must have at least attempted to encourage accuracy. Wikipedia tells us that the late Lyle Shelton, a former stunt pilot, worked as a technical adviser. Perhaps Shelton could have told us more about that upside-down business, but he wasn’t an airline pilot, and it’s the cockpit details — the dramatization of airline SOP — where things fall short. I almost hate to say it, but even Airport ’75 — one of the quintessential air-disaster movies, in which Charlton Heston is helicoptered through a hole in a crippled 747 — did it better.

I’ll be told, perhaps, that I need to relax, and that the movie ought be judged beyond its technical shortcomings. Normally I would agree, and for the average lay viewer it will hardly matter at all. I’m happy to allow a little artistic license. We should expect it, and some light fudging of the facts can be necessary, to a degree, for a film like this to work. Honestly, I’m not that much of a fussbudget. The trouble with “Flight” is that the filmmakers seem to have hardly tried.

And why not? Would it really have been that difficult? Would it really have diminished the picture’s storyline or its gravity? I think not.