#but then the narration attributes it to the human within the monster

[daydreamerdrew]

excerpt from The Incredible Hulk by Peter David, based on the screenplay by Edward Norton and Zak Penn

[candys-writing-blog]

Notes

Just gonna jot down some notes for things I want to include in the Story.

World: Terran, AKA Planet O-2496, AKA New Earth.

Celestial attributes: Orbits a Binary Star System. A Red Giant and a Blue Giant orbiting each other. The planet has three moons,

Date: Undecided. Hundreds of Thousands of Years into our Future.

Calendar: 36 hours in a day, 10 days in a week, 10 weeks in a season, 4 seasons in a year.

Wildlife: Similar creatures and environments to Earth, with the exception of added monsters.

Inhabitants: Terranians. Anthropomorphic creatures. Half human, half animal. Furries.

Hybrids: A combination of two different Terranian Races, created through the use of Magic. Example: Dog/Cat, Fox/Eagle, Hampster/Frog, etc.

Chimera: An advanced form of Hybridization. Same principle, but with 3 or more Races. Sometimes dangerous/unstable. Often seen as untrustworthy. Commonly ostracized from society.

Monsters: Many different kinds of Monsters. Kobolds, Dragons, Slimes, etc. Some intelligent, some Feral.

Continents: 5 separate land masses, split up into Kingdoms by the dominating Races. Smaller Islands surround them, both inhabited and uninhabited.

Kingdoms: Ruled by a specific race. Lupine, Ursine, Vulpine, Lapine, Leonine, etc. Not all Races have a Kingdom. Some have smaller regions within a ruling race's Kingdom.

Main Character: Krystal Woods. A young Hybrid girl, Rabbit/Lion with minor shapeshifting abilities. Throughout her youth, she would shift between the male and female sexes interchangeably, before eventually settling as female. Once settled, she did not shift again for many years, eventually forgetting she even had the ability. The next time she shifts will occur near the beginning of the story, when she is in a fight. This is when she will discover that she has two different forms, passive and aggressive. When in her passive form, she has more Lapine (rabbit) features present, while in her aggressive form, she has more Leonine (lion) traits present.

Narrator: The Eternal One. An immortal being who lives in a floating castle in the sky. They are known around the globe as an amazing storyteller. Some call them the Watcher, or the Collector, because they spend their days collecting stories and observing the world, documenting what they see, and filling thousands of journals. In their castle, a massive library full of stories both Factual and fictional. The Eternal One has been alive for Eons. So long, in fact, that they don't even remember how old they are, where they came from, or what their name was. They were once the last living human. At the very center of their floating castle, is the old space station, where they and the other members of their science team lived while seeding and terraforming the planet. They found the planet after leaving the Milky Way and heading for the Andromeda Galaxy where they found what they called New Earth or Planet O-2496. created the Terranians as a way to preserve intelligence, since humanity was actively going extinct.

The extinction of the human race: The downfall began in the Earth year of 6072. At this point, humanity had spread out among the stars, colonizing many different planets throughout the galaxy. One day, an accident occurred at the warp gate of the planet Agrocier. The warp gate had a quantum detonation that blew a massive chunk out of the planet's moon, which fell to the planet's surface, making it uninhabitable. Bits and pieces of the moon still fall as meteorites to this day. Before this tragedy occurred, Agrocier was the Galaxy's largest export of food. Without its necessary resources, famine began to spread throughout the colonized planets. Because of this lack of vital resources, people began to fight each other for scraps. War was brewing, and the high council of the Galaxy assembled to find a solution. They eventually settled on a plan of randomized culling via a genetically modified disease.

The Virus: The virus that would wipe out humanity began in a lab with scientists intending to create a disease that would infect 1/3 of the population, and kill anyone it infected. Unfortunately, the virus escaped containment before it was ready, mutating and beginning to kill everyone with a 100% infection and death rate. The way the virus worked was especially malicious. It could stay in one's system for weeks without showing any symptoms, and then shut down your organs in a day, long after you had infected everyone you came into contact with. It spread like wildfire, killing billions seemingly overnight, wiping entire planets off the map in waves. A small team of scientists from Earth saw the impending extinction coming, and decided to leave, in order to create a new race of intelligent beings who would be immune to the virus.

The creation of Terran: The planet was seeded and terraformed by the scientists using plants and animals from Earth which they grew using DNA samples. The Terranians were created by splicing that same animal DNA with that of Humans, since animals (excluding that of chimps and other close relatives to humans) are immune to the virus.

The Creation of Monsters: Monsters evolved naturally on Terran as a result of the large amounts of magic emanating from the Planet's core. This is how a simple puddle of sludge could gain consciousness, how a Terranian lizard could evolve into a kobold, how a panther could evolve into a displacer beast, and how a common fly trap could become a giant man-eating plant.

Magic system on Terran and the wider universe: Magic in this future of ours can be explained through science. What is something that would be considered magical in our world today? You might not be able to think of much, but there are a few things if we take cursed objects into account. Think about an orb that any who get too close are drained of their life force, and are cursed to die a slow and painful death. Think about a cursed piece of jewelry that causes wounds that never heal. These are real things that exist in our world today. That orb is more commonly known as the Demon Core. That jewelry had paint with trace amounts of Radium in it. Curses are simply radiation. But then, so is light, and so is heat, so who's to say that magic, the kind of magic that has not been seen on Earth for centuries, is not just another type of Radiation?

The discovery of Draconium: The element that is responsible for magic in our universe was discovered in the Earth year of 2578, at the IO particle accelerator. It was discovered by Dr. Markus Draco and his team after experimentation with collisions of the heaviest of elements. The single atom that was created existed in our universe for only five seconds before decaying, and when it decayed it emitted a new kind of energy. A form of radiation never before seen, which had mysterious and strange effects on the surrounding landscape. In a ten mile radius around the facility, a new breed of never-before seen flowers began growing over everything in sight. The element was named Draconium, after the scientist who discovered it, and the energy, which was found to fit ancient descriptions of magical energy known as Mana, was name "Manalistic Radiation". It was found that this element may once have been present in Earth's core, from which the energy would radiate out, allowing people to manipulate it and shape the reality around them. This element, which could only be forged in the mightiest of star deaths would not be able to exist unless under extreme pressure constantly. while all of Earth's Draconium decayed long ago, Terran is uniquely abundant in the element, and so is the perfect place to mess with the genomes of creatures. After all, radiation is great at fucking up our DNA and creating cancers. Who's to say Manalistic radiation wouldn't be helpful in splicing the DNA of other creatures?

[fatehbaz]

By the fin de siecle, literary depictions of the spider produced uneasy messages about the precise nature of arachnid horror. Spidery forms were distinctive in narratives of imperial encounter, expressing fears of invasion, concerns about the morality of colonialism, and suspicions about the alien other in the corners of empire. [...]

By the 1850s, the representation of the spider in Victorian natural history was beginning to change. No longer associated solely with ingenuity and industry, the spider took on more disturbing connotations in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Unable to pin down the creature's precise rhetorical and metaphorical function, naturalists could not decide whether the spider ought to be loved or feared [...] in popular fiction. [...] In the Gothic empire fiction of Bertram Mitford and H.G. Wells, the spider takes on the role of the harbinger of death on both sides of the colonial encounter. [...]

---

[T]he eighteenth-century spider was viewed in a positive light in natural philosophy [...]. [W]riting also praised the spider's character for its skill and creativity [...] [and] the ‘industry’ of its nest-building abilities. Celebrating its intelligence and good judgement [...], clever engineering. [...] Within a hundred years, however, the metaphorical associations of the spider had changed significantly. By the 1860s [...] its ingenuity had become cunning and the sense of industriousness had come to be seen as working against the well-being of humankind. [...] Although British spiders were relatively harmless as far as humans were concerned [...] [t]he spider took on a sinister rhetorical function, as the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse's popular Life in Its Lower, Intermediate, and Higher Forms (1857) showed. [...]

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Conversely, children's educational literature about the natural world attempted to challenge, if not overturn, Gosse's opinion of arachnids.

G.L.M.'s Spider Spinnings, or Adventures in Insect-Land (1870), told from the perspective of a spider, constructs a fictional world in which spiders and other insects have the capacity for human feeling, while humanity is portrayed as ‘the ungainly two-legged monster called man’ and the human is a ‘treacherous and bloodthirsty monster’. In the introductory chapter the spider narrator - the significantly foreign-named Ranio - openly attacks Gosse's description of spiders in Life.

‘Even some naturalists’, he asserts indignantly, ‘who ought to know better, instead of trying to combat this absurd prejudice, have joined in the vulgar outcry against us’.

---

Yet despite Ranio's vexation, Victorian naturalists collectively agreed with Gosse and his spider theory. In 1901, for instance, Grant Allen, the Canadian-born novelist and science writer, described the grass-spider as a sly and scheming creature [...]. The spider, then, was becoming a phobic object partly because it was seen to have a merciless nature, as Gosse and Allen pointed out. Naturalists' descriptions of spiders proved them to be territorial, possessive, and intelligent in ordering their dominion, highlighting the exact attributes required to be the imperial and colonial aggressors that Mitford and Wells would later describe in their fin-de-siecle fiction. [...] Allen was also quick to point out the insalubrious features of foreign species in his description of the Brazilian spider [...]. The sheer number of species that were found to exist beyond British shores [...] was constructed as excess in much Victorian natural history. [...]

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Traditionally, the spider has, nevertheless, been difficult to define in terms of its cultural meanings. [...] Although naturalists had to admit that there was nothing particularly frightening for humans about the British spider, when located in far-off lands, it became a compelling cultural symbol of the imperial world ‘gone wrong’ and nature working to humankind's downfall. Distinguishing between English and foreign spiders in British Spiders: An Introduction to the Aracheidae of Great Britain and Ireland (1866), E.F. Staveley argued that although spiders are ‘ferocious in their habits’, there is ‘no English species capable of inflicting on man a poisoned wound of any severity’. However, there are ‘some foreign species of which the poison is very virulent, their bite being sometimes followed by death’. Calling attention to this disparity between English spiders, which are harmless, and foreign ones, which clearly are not, reveals a tension between what is perceived to be ‘out there’ and therefore dangerous, and what is located on British shores, and therefore safe, even if this was a factual as well as conceptual difference. [...]

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the spider was imagined as domestic and alien, harmless and dangerous, intelligent and evil and these seemingly oppositional categorizations led to it becoming a [...] symbol of anxiety [...].

---

All text above by: Claire Charlotte McKechnie. “Spiders, Horror, and Animal Others in Late Victorian Empire Fiction.” Journal of Victorian Culture Volume 17, Issue 4, December 2012, pages 505-516. At: doi dot org slash 10.1080/13555502.2012.733065. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[breathingwysteria]

Hyperbole & A Half; Illustrated Novels as Gateways to More Traditional Comics

Hyperbole and a Half, autobiographical webcomic blog, turned illustrated novel; One! Hundred! Demons!, autobiographical comic compilation of personal “demons;” both detail the funny, heartwarming, and often ugly parts of the human experience as they unfold for each author as an individual. Both are told in short story form, with an intra-homodiagetic narrator (the author serves as both narrator and active character), accompanied by illustrated panels that invoke a sense of physical and emotional movement that the reader can easily conceptualize. With so many major similarities, why does each work receive such different classifications? What makes a comic a comic and not an illustrated novel? How do these seemingly disparate definitions affect the way we read them? Can illustrated novels be considered gateway materials to comics? I think so. Before we jump into that exact why, let’s look at the defining characteristics of comics.

Text, images, and some semblance of sequential flow in time and space are the most major markers of comics, utilized throughout history, found in ancient work like Egyptian tomb paintings all the way up to modern comics and manga. Speech bubbles erupt from the mouths of static character images, narration is often delineated by straight-lined boxes and a change in tone, real movement through space and time happens in the empty “gutters” between panels. Although illustrated novels and comics are constructed differently, they are still processed in the brain in fundamentally the same way. Children’s literacy researcher, Evelyn Arizpe, notes that when reading illustrated stories, regardless of form (comics or traditional storybooks), “the eye moves between one part of the picture and another, piecing together the image like a puzzle.” If picture books and comics are processed in the brain in the same way, why are they considered different mediums? Linguist and cognitive scientist, Neil Cohn, applies his academic specialties to comics, attributing the difference to things like panel placement and what he calls “navigational structure,” the direction our eyes track when piecing images in a comic together to create a sense of coherence when reading.

Traditional storybooks, unlike comics, typically utilize one image per page to convey everything from character relationships to arrested motion; comics achieve a more fluid and nuanced version of this by using panels as snapshots or windows into character worlds. Where then does the illustrated novel fall between these two states, and where does Hyperbole and a Half land? Illustrated novels rely more heavily on the text narrative of the story and the readers imagination, associated images usually only serve to enhance the story world or solidify ideas and images that would otherwise be difficult to conceptualize or to emphasize an exciting or emotional moment in the narrative. Hyperbole and a Half leans more heavily toward the multiple-panel style of comics to help amplify the narrative. Perhaps this stems from the novel’s genesis as a blog-turned-book. In 2009, Hyperbole and a Half author, Allie Brosh began a blog of the same name, where she chronicled events from her personal life, like the adoption of one of her two dogs; illustrated pet peeves, like the internet usage of “alot,” a misspelling of “a lot,” personified as a shaggy, fang-toothed monster; or her fear of spiders, captured by an image of an oval with spindly appendages replete with strapped-on knives, guns, and a swastika tattooed above the eyes. Brosh’s book maintains the same familiar tone, regularly interspersing images meticulously drawn by the author herself. Her use of illustrated images that convey character motion, emotional state, and even dialogue exchanges are reminiscent of both regular comics and contemporary memes.

In Brosh’s chapter titled “Motivation,” she chronicles her own struggle with self-starting and follow-through. She illustrates a frequent conversation she has between the “her” who knows she must complete a task, and the “her” who continues to procrastinate for no conceivable reason. Instead of floating thought bubbles, she makes this conversation concrete by utilizing a kind of split screen effect,where both versions of herself take up space within the same panel, as does their dialogue.

Most of Brosh’s panels behave in the same way, providing the reader with concrete examples of often abstract concepts, like internal monologue and discussions with oneself.

One! Hundred! Demons!author, Lynda Barry, achieves this same concept by forcefully changing the reader’s perspective. As she reveals the story of her struggle with impostor syndrome as an author and her childhood tendency to let her imagination run away with the descriptions in the Classified section of the newspaper, the reader follows her through her childhood musings and is dropped into the middle of one of her fantastical plots.

Only when Barry transitions back to a narrative focused on her own more present-tense position as a narrator do we as readers get dragged back into the present-past-tense of her childhood self.

Brosh maintains a slightly smoother sense of temporal immediacy by clumping her panels in “Motivation” together, as one “Motivation Game.” Readers are taken along the same journey, into and back out of, the author’s imagination and altered psychological state, but Barry’s follows tactics familiar to comic readers, while Brosh blurs those lines a bit for readers unused to comics.

This difference in delivery of the protagonist’s inner-world carries over into the way dialogue is associated with each character as well. In the above examples, from One! Hundred! Demons!, Barry uses the classic speech bubbles historically associated with comics; Brosh, on the other hand, utilizes both classic speech bubbles as well as free-floating text that the reader infers to be audible speech through context clues.

In the chapter “The Helper Dog is an Asshole,” Brosh retells the story of her and her partner’s adoption of a second issue-riddled shelter dog. She uses both dialogue vehicles on one page, in succession, the traditional speech bubbles allow each character in the top panel to convey separate thoughts, while the speech in the middle panel is only spoken by Brosh’s caricature of herself, as she is the only character “facing” the audience.

Brosh utilizes a similarly comic-style tactic when expressing active motion or a change in mental or emotional state. In “The God of Cake,” she recounts a childhood obsession with conquering her mothers demands that she not decimate her grandfather’s homemade birthday cake with her youthful inability to control her own sugar intake. She masterfully illustrates this rapid descent into the kind of one-track-minded madness only children ever master with a four-page sequence of successively blurry panels.

No, that’s not a mistake of my scanner, it’s printed that way in the book; while a little difficult to read, I think it conveys an emotional whirlwind with an immediacy that helps the reader understand just how much untamed tenacity is bubbling beneath the surface for this child character through the remainder of this chapter.

Another tactic that Brosh employs, that seems like a holdover from her work’s origin as an online blog, is her use of a colored filter over a panel to illustrate distress or another intense emotion. In the same chapter retelling her story of the “helper dog,” Brosh lists the myriad and often confounding behavior issues the new dog frequently displays, like her visceral and adverse reaction to other dogs. Brosh posits that the new dog must simply be unable to comprehend or abide by the fundamental existence of other dogs in the world. To depict the abrupt and unpredictable change in this dog’s mental state, Brosh uses a red tinted filter, along with grumpy-looking smiley faces and hand-written text over her base illustration of her new dog lunging toward another dog in the distance, teeth bared.

You can almost hear the Kill Bill sirens going off in the background.

While Brosh’s artistic approach is reminiscent of internet memes, it also resembles the cartoon-y illustrated style of altered mental states in comics. In One! Hundred! Demons!, Barry juxtaposes alternating bright contrasting colors with radiating squiggly lines in a few of her panels to symbolize the acid trip she and her truncated crush are having on their roam through China Town and Skid Row.

Instead of giving the audience a sense of almost seeing through the perspective of her dog’s psyche, like Brosh does, Barry’s interpretation of her own childhood experience makes the reader feel a little like a sober friend along for the ride, understanding what’s happening, but not able to reach quite the same level of empathy.

Although comics are typically regarded as a reading material relegated to childhood hobbies, books that fall between the borders of comics and illustrated novels, like Hyperbole and a Half, prove their usefulness as a narrative medium, and for readers afraid of being seen reading a full-blown comic—or have never even attempted it, can consider them the shallow end of the comics pool, a lighter commitment than the image-heavy ocean of traditional comics.

Brosh, Allie. Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened. Gallery Books, 2019.

ISBN: 978-1-4767-6459-7

[dweemeister]

Marona’s Fantastic Tale (2019, France)

Before delving into the thick of this review, I have a few personal biases to reveal. First, I am not a “dog person”, let alone a “pet person”. I understand why people adore dogs, but I have long been uncomfortable around them – small, energetic ones especially. In addition, I tend to view the subgenre of animal movies (dogs, cats, horses, etc.) as littered with saccharine, but nevertheless watchable, dreck. Reading back those last few sentences, you may conclude that I am describing a heartless monster that should not be trusted with living things. So be it.

Anca Damian’s Marona’s Fantastic Tale, also known by its original French title L'extraordinaire Voyage de Marona, avoids the common traps of this subgenre. It, too, happens to be an animated film. Damian, a Romanian-French filmmaker, has previously only directed two animated features, both documentaries: Crulic – The Path to Beyond (2011, Romania/Poland) and The Magic Mountain (2015, Romania/Poland/France). She is, foremost, a dramatist concerned with humanist ideas and values. Damian and screenwriter Anghel Damian (her son) treat the title character – also called three other names – as maturely as any human character in this film, where other filmmakers in this subgenre might only do so superficially, to elicit obligatory “awws”. Marona’s Fantastic Tale artfully depicts the perspective of its canine star through the chapters of her life. These life chapters are laden with ambiguous resolutions and important conversations and decisions withheld from the viewer – moments where love, responsibility, and survival intertwine or clash.

The film begins with the female dog’s death. She (voiced by Lizzie Brocheré) has been hit by a car, and narrates the rest of the film, framed as a recollection of her most potent memories. Her first given name is “Nine”, as she is the last of nine puppies between a mixed-breed dog and a purebred Dogo Argentino. Nine is shortly adopted and immediately abandoned. As a stray, she is adopted by a struggling acrobat named Manole, and given the name “Ana”. Happy though their initial time together may be, Ana recognizes she is an impediment to his financial situation, and runs away. Slumbering at a construction site, she is grateful for the warmth of architect Istvan, who always brings her food. Istvan, who calls her “Sara”, eventually brings her home to his manipulative wife who abhors Sara. Lastly, our protagonist will be adopted by a little girl named Solange, who names her “Marona” (from the French word marron, meaning brown; I will refer to the protagonist by her final name for the remainder of this review). Solange’s overworked single mother and irascible grandfather oppose the impromptu adoption for differing reasons, but eventually accept the new addition to their household.

I may not know much French, but Lizzie Brocheré (The Magic Mountain, 2017′s Rings) is a wonderful narrator. At least half of the film’s lines come from Marona narrating her unfolding life. In her voice, Brocheré captures numerous emotions: joy, regret, indignity, confusion, yearning. Marona, whose understanding of the world is similar to that of a young child, is devoid of enmity – even when faced with humans showing little concern or dismissive of her well-being. The film keeps Marona’s narration to a certain register, leaving the greatest narrative subjectivity to the film’s visuals and not Marona herself. Marona’s narration reveals how she interprets the world around her:

[Dogs] want things to stay exactly as they are... Humans always want what they don't have. They call it dreaming. I call it not knowing how to be happy.

Marona’s Fantastic Tale employs various animation styles in ways that may not feel sensible at first. Humans do not look like humans. They come in all colors of skin (blue, green, incomplete black crayon upon white construction paper etc.) and impossible figures (Manole, the acrobat drawn in yellow and red stripes, has stretchable, tubular limbs that any real-life acrobat would envy; other characters appear anything but humanoid). The most conventionally “human”-drawn characters in Damian’s film are those closest to Marona during her life – namely Istvan, Solange, and Solange’s mother. Marona, and the viewer, find comfort in these familiarly-shaped humans. Istvan’s predominant blue skin is a cool color, contrasting against his wife’s vaguely ostrich-like yellow-and-black appearance – attributes shared by her gossiping and materialistic lady friends, all of whom may need to see the doctor for possible jaundice. Like any animation director, Damian uses the character animation in this film to code viewers’ perceptions on a character. But the abstraction of Marona’s Fantastic Tale means she and her animators can further exaggerate characters’ physical aspects and experiment with color. The film’s backgrounds are a mesmerizing interplay of hand-drawn and CGI animation. Depending on where the camera is approaching, the apparently 2D backgrounds might unfold into layers of CGI, and vice versa.

These effects are bewildering. They appear as one might imagine a small dog might understand humanity’s vastness of appearance and personality, as well as the sprawling natural and man-made world they occupy.

Even more abstract through Marona’s eyes are the concepts of memory and time. On occasion, Damian has Marona reminisce about her past – an abstract flashback within a larger flashback. That past is filled with heartache – of being separated from her litter, her multiple abandonments. But in the confusion of understanding human motivation, Marona’s unconditional love for her mother and siblings and those who have taken care of her shines through. Hers is a melancholic loyalty, abiding despite abandonment. Time’s passage in the film is linear but inconsistent, leaving the viewer to make inferences for themselves. As a being with a short life, Marona has little time to find the most fulfilling, profound moments of her life in things that a human might deem mundane (in an occasionally funny piece of narration, she says, “A good sense of smell is worth a thousand words.”)

Every human in Marona’s Fantastic Tale is beset with character flaws and, with the exception of Manole, difficult familial lives. Their flaws may manifest themselves towards Marona, other humans, or both. Marona observes human frustration, jealousy, and pettiness and can always sense the unspoken tension that precedes a fateful action. Here, the film plays out not only as a simple flashback, but as a sort of dying wish. Marona, who we know is dying or is en route to what happens after death, appeals to the viewers without so much directly addressing them. It is an appeal for understanding: to realize our personal faults and to exemplify the consideration and goodwill that makes living worthwhile. 

Some Western viewers might be irked that Marona dies in the film and that her death does overhang the proceedings. (They may be too accustomed to the excessively manipulative and stereotypical death fake-out so common in dog movies. Picture, if you will: a dog is shown to be in peril, the human characters hang their hands down acknowledging the likelihood of a dog’s death, but there is sudden uplift when, against all odds, the dog protagonist comes over the hill or rounds the corner and leaps into the arms of his caretakers.) But Anca and Anghel Damian have taken care to ensure that Marona’s death is handled as non-sensationally and abstractly as the rest of the film. Morbid it is not. That is no easy feat for any filmmaker, whether working in a live-action or animated format.

Marona’s Fantastic Tale does assume some life experience and contains presumed moments of cruelty, so I would hesitate to show the film to very young children. But the film should play well to slightly older children and, of course, open-minded adults. Marona’s Fantastic Tale is a film concerned about how time claims all, how dogs and humans might leave behind an example of love that sustains even in our darkest moments. That it does so convincingly through Marona drives this film’s beauty.

My rating: 8.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

[obsidianarchives]

Body Shaming in 'Harry Potter'

Re-reading the beginning of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I’m surprised by how much I sympathize with the Dursleys. I don’t particularly like them in the general sense, but considering the scene where the Weasleys come to pick up Harry from their perspective, and Dudley’s perspective in particular, it becomes incredibly difficult to imagine a world in which they weren’t deeply skeptical and suspicious of magic. Magic, for the Dursleys, is scary and destructive, and for Dudley, in particular, has enacted much violence upon his body.

It is no secret that I have been a long-time fan of the Harry Potter series, as something that I have held near and dear to my heart for a long time, and at certain points in my life it has filled the religious and spiritual void that I felt within myself. And yet, as much as I often treat the series as a sacred text, there are a great many failings, and nowhere do I feel that is more clear than in the vicious attacks that are made against those who do not fit into the conventional molds of body image. The narration of the text uses the description of the body as a weapon, and a proxy for how we are meant to feel about a given character.

This is not uncommon in storytelling, and not unique to Harry Potter. The common narrative that society tells us is that pretty people are good and ugly people are bad, and society also tends to have pretty strict and nasty ways of describing who fits into either of those categories. The Harry Potter series is one in which there are very few characters where their race is explicitly stated, which is good because it means that there is room for interpretation. But one thing that is often explicitly stated in the text is when a character is being described negatively, they are given a value judgment based on their appearance and how they achieved that appearance. And nowhere is that more clear than with Dudley Dursley.

From the moment that we are introduced to Dudley, we are given the impression that he is a misbehaving child — the first word his says is either “shan’t” or “won’t” depending on your edition and he is described as “kicking and screaming for sweets.” He’s called a “beach ball” and a “pig in a wig.” Again and again the reader is hit over the head with the fact that Dudley — who is bad — is fat, while Harry — who is good — is skinny. Dudley is spoiled and petulant, and yes, he’s a bit of a horrible kid, but also he has really horrible parents. Dumbledore is not wrong in book six when he says that Vernon and Petunia have done a disservice to Dudley in treating him the way that they have. But Dudley is also mistreated by wizards. Hagrid gives Dudley a pig’s tail — was intending to turn him into a pig completely — and knows that he cannot reverse that. He never does reverse it, and by telling Harry not to tell anyone (protecting his own interests since Hagrid is not supposed to use magic) Hagrid dooms Dudley to needing to get the tail surgically removed by Muggle means, which was no doubt expensive, humiliating, and painful.

The ton-tongue toffee incident, which is what prompted me to ruminate on all this again, I found to be just so cruel. Because Dudley is on this incredibly forced and restrictive diet, being taunted by Harry — who is not following it at all — and is basically going cold turkey on all the foods he has normally had. His whole worldview has shifted when his version of normal (although it was anything but) changed. He’s not actually starving, but he probably feels like it, because it is such an abrupt shift in his eating habits. And here are the first sweets he has seen in probably months, and they cause this horribly, physically, and psychologically painful incident.

Then, only a year later Dudley has the experience with the dementor, a monster that almost sucked out his soul. This is often remarked upon as the turning point, where Dudley starts to evaluate his actions and change his ways. And yet this change is due to a real violence by magic, and as a whole magic has not been kind to Dudley. Nonetheless, at the start of the seventh book he was able to make an effort to reach out to Harry. The problem is that it’s framed as though Dudley only gets to make this transformation into a better person once he has matured enough to start getting into a “better” physical shape. Once he takes up boxing, and becomes athletic, his bulk is attributed to muscle rather than fat. Only then is he allowed to be something akin to a better person.

All over the Harry Potter canon we see unpleasant people described as being ugly. Pansy pug-faced Parkinson. Umbridge the toad. These are the people we are clearly supposed to dislike, and these traits are not assigned to antagonists as a way to set them apart. But the way it works with fatness is a bit different, because for all that Vernon and Dudley are called out for their weight, the characters we are supposed to like, even if they share a somewhat similar physical shape, don’t get this treatment. Neville, for example, is simply called a “round-faced boy.” But the actors who play Neville and Dudley looked so similar to each other when I watched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for the first time at age five that I got confused and thought Dudley had somehow ended up at Hogwarts. And Mrs. Weasley is described as being “plump.” Ludo Bagman, who is a character we are meant to both dislike and sympathize with, is described in middling terms.

“He had the look of a powerfully built man gone slightly to seed; the robes were stretched tightly across a large belly he surely had not had in the days when he had played Quidditch for England. His nose was squashed (probably broken by a stray Bludger, Harry thought), but his round blue eyes, short blond hair and rosy complexion made him look like a very overgrown schoolboy.” — Chapter Seven ‘Bagman and Crouch.’

These small moments in the way characters are introduced make the characters memorable, but they are also slightly insidious, and not at all kind when the narrator doesn’t want to be.

All told, fitting the conventional mold is not a universally bad thing, but the way this is portrayed is problematic because the way in which certain characters but not others are shamed for their weight/appearance seems to promote the idea that being treated with respect regarding one's body is a privilege that can be revoked in response to bad behavior, rather than the basic human right that it should be. This falls into a pattern of privilege where some privileges, like how Dudley is spoiled by Vernon and Petunia, are things that no one should have, whereas the privilege of being afforded basic respect regardless of one’s body type is a privilege that everyone should have.

There are also many slights against people who are perceived as thinner too. Petunia, for example, is often contrasted against Vernon as being quite thin. In their first introduction, they are compared as having “hardly any neck” and “nearly twice the usual amount of neck” respectively. The critique of Petunia’s size is on the opposite side of the spectrum, but it’s there, and it shows that the body-shaming in the series is across all body types, and in particular, directly correlated with a character’s likeability.

I’m not capable of cancelling in its entirety something so fundamental to my worldview as the Harry Potter series. But the more often I return to the text as an adult, the more flaws I find. In a way, that is almost a good thing, because in finding the parts of Harry Potter that don’t hold up to scrutiny, I am able to hold a mirror to the ways society as a whole does not hold up to scrutiny. At the same time, I can’t say that in good faith, because Harry Potter is a book series targeted at children, who can through the lens of these books (as well as the rest of society’s pressures) internalize the idea that it’s OK to make value judgments about someone based on their body, which is simply not true. We must imagine people complexly. And I guess that means we have to imagine books complexly too.

Header image via Wizarding World

[the-desolated-quill]

BBC’s The War Of The Worlds blog - Episode 3

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

You know, people often ask me why I get so angry when I’m reviewing BBC shows. I mean yes I give Disney and Marvel a hard time too, but they don’t get nearly as much bile and venom as I give the BBC. Well that’s because, unlike Disney and Marvel, BBC shows are funded by the British taxpayer through our TV licence fees. I’m effectively paying for them to make this crap. That’s what pisses me off more than anything.

Yes we mercifully come to the end of this... this. Episode 1 was a slow, plodding and utterly tedious affair that was about as exciting as an Amish bachelor party. Episode 2 was even worse thanks to its poor narrative structure, terrible characterisation and less than subtle allegories. Now Harness has come to hammer the final nail in the coffin with Episode 3. Is it bad?

...

You’re right, that’s a stupid question. A more apt question would be how bad is it. Very, very bad is the answer. Very, very bad indeed.

Lets start with the obvious problem. The non-linear narrative introduced in the previous episode. The stupid early reveal that the Martians ultimately lose and that Amy survives completely destroyed any and all tension and suspense thanks to Peter Harness desperately trying to outwit the audience instead of just telling a story. Now, bizarrely, he tries to reintroduce tension by having the characters umming and arghing about what killed the Martians off and whether this could help stop the Earth from terraforming. One teeny, tiny problem with this though. The audience already know! Even those that never read the original book know how it ended! And even if you didn’t, the episode drops enough hints like great fucking boulders. The prevalence of typhoid throughout the episode and its correlation with the Martians stumbling around like a drunken prom date isn’t exactly hard to miss. Harness’ writing is still as unsubtle as ever. But worse still, he completely undermines and misses the point of the ending to War Of The Worlds.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people (mostly Americans) criticise the end of the original book for being a deus ex machina. I mean the Martians get killed off by the common cold. How stupid, right? Except it’s not because those people (mostly Americans) are looking at it the wrong way. Your main takeaway shouldn’t be that the Martians were easily killed off by bacteria. Rather that we failed to stop them. The reason humanity prevails in the end is more down to luck than anything else. The narrator even attributes this to being an act of God. But here’s the thing. We didn’t stand a chance against the Martians. We didn’t beat them. They lost because they just happened to catch a cold. Now it’s not hard to imagine a society as scientifically advanced as their’s to be able to find some kind of cure or vaccine for it. And if and when they do, what then? We’d be fucked, wouldn’t we? Should the Martians ever return to finish what they started, the human race would be well and truly doomed. It’s not a deus ex machina. It’s a dire warning of what’s to come. A brief respite before the inevitable. That’s what makes the ending so effective.

The BBC series however completely misunderstands this, changing the story so that Ogilvy (an astronomer, don’t forget) somehow manages to weaponize typhoid in order to kill the red weed, which is presented as some kind of victory, when in reality it’s quite an insulting deviation from the source material. If only the Commonwealth could shake off the remnants of British colonialism as easily as these guys dealt with the red weed. Not to mention it just makes the Martians look really stupid. So they come to Earth, drink our blood, keel over and then... what, they just give up? Are they just waiting for humanity to die by itself? What happens when Mars HQ realises the red weed hasn’t worked? What then? Are they just going to shrug it off? It doesn’t make any sense.

Which brings us to the Martians themselves. The picture above comes from the Jeff Wayne musical version and is without a doubt the most accurate depiction of the Martians from the book. Most of the other adaptations have wildly different interpretations, which isn’t a problem in and of itself provided it works within the context of that particular narrative. However the reason I bring up the original design is so I can talk about what H.G. Wells intended when he came up with them. See, while the Martians are highly intelligent, they’re also presented as being quite vestigial. They’re sluggish thanks to Earth’s heavier gravity, rendered practically deaf thanks to Earth’s dense atmosphere and apparently have no organs with which to digest their food, hence their need to inject human blood directly into themselves for sustenance. The Martians represent what humanity could become as we become more and more reliant on technology. The Industrial Revolution brought about a lot of societal fears and concerns at the time, and the Martians are those fears manifested. Heartless creatures reduced to being simple brains, unable to properly interact with the world around them.

The BBC series goes a very different route. Instead of the giant brains, we instead get giant brown crabs, which, again, isn’t necessarily a problem provided it works in context. And that’s the problem. It doesn’t. The original Wells design told us what we needed to know about their biology, their motivations and their society. What do we learn about the BBC Martians? They’re big, generic monsters that look like rejects from Stranger Things. They don’t even inject blood into themselves. They feed off of us directly, leechlike. They’re more like animals. Not the vast, cold, unsympathetic intellects they were described to be. At no point do you buy that these creatures would be capable of building the Tripods or colonising the Earth. They just exist for some cheap jump scares and horror movie cliches.

What’s worse is that by changing the Martians’ design so drastically, any subtextual allegory gets chucked in the bin. The Martians from the book are meant to represent the British Empire at the height of its power. Merciless tyrants stomping all over the lives and cultures of the so called ‘lesser races,’ changing the environment to suit them rather than adapting to the existing environment. It’s Darwinism crossed with arrogance. And yet, ironically, the oppressors (the Martians) are technically inferior to the natives (the humans) as they are incapable of surviving without the aid of technology. The BBC series is unable to make this allegory, so Harness has to resort to straight up telling the audience the allegory. In by far the clunkiest scene in the entire series, we see George argue with his brother about how the Martians are no different from the Brits in their colonial ways. Not only does this break the ‘show, don’t tell’ rule and stands as a perfect example of bad storytelling, Harness doesn’t even bother to do anything with this other than just making the comparison. It’s been previously established that Amy was born and raised in India. You’d think she’d have something to say about all this, but nope. At the end, she wistfully describes India to her son in the most patronising and insulting way possible. It’s really quite disgusting. I mean H.G. Wells was quite patronising towards the Tasmanians in the book, but in his defence, he was a privileged white man from the 1800s. What’s Peter Harness’ excuse?! Ostensibly he pays lip service to the idea that the Martians are no different from the Brits, but he doesn’t want to really explore it or get us to actually think about it. Probably because it’s all a bit too complicated to get into, but if he’s not confident about exploring such topics, why the fuck is he adapting War Of The Worlds in the first bloody place?! Write something else!

In fact I think this is the root of all the problems with this adaptation. Harness clearly isn’t capable of exploring the complex themes of the source material, so instead he either introduces irrelevant social issues that aren’t nearly as complicated (women’s rights, empires are bad and so on) as a token show of progressiveness, or he goes as far as to uncomplicate themes and ideas to an almost offensive degree. In the book, the narrator is trapped in a church with a priest who is going through a major existential crisis and risks giving away their hiding spot to the Martians, who are busy terraforming the planet. So he resorts to knocking the priest unconscious and watching as the Martians drag his body away. In the BBC series, we see the old woman and the kid get killed off for no reason other than shock value and the characters have nothing to do with their demise, so they’re morally in the clear. The priest meanwhile doesn’t even appear in the scene, instead being relegated to the shitty flash forwards where his faith remains very much intact and even protests against the idea that it’s humanity’s illness that stopped the Martians rather than an act of God (brief side note, would Ogilvy really be this open about not believing in God? At the time of the book’s publication, the scene with the priest losing faith was considered extremely controversial, so this just seems utterly wrong). Plus there’s no tension in wondering what the Martians are doing and whether they’re going to find the characters. In fact there’s no tension whatsoever because we know the Martians have fallen ill and the characters are just hanging around, waiting for the fuckers to die. I cannot stress enough how atrociously awful the writing is in this show. We know the Martians are dying and the episode is about the characters waiting for them to die.

Jesus fucking Christ!

The Artilleryman from the previous episode was the same. In the book he was a deluded crackpot who willingly bought into imperialist dogma, believing that humanity could rebuild underground and eventually rise up and defeat the Martians. In the BBC series, he was a scared, innocent little waif being forced to fight in a war he wants no part of. It’s an incredibly shallow and uninteresting reinterpretation of the source material.

But the worst, the absolute worst, is what Harness does with George.

To be clear, no I’m not upset he gets killed off. I’ve made my views on him quite clear. He cheated on his wife because she was infertile and ran off to make whoopie with some redhead. The bastard deserves everything he gets, frankly. Plus I’ve had enough of Rafe Spall’s gormless acting to last a lifetime, thank you. What I am upset by is the way he gets killed off.

One of the most interesting parts of the original book is the fact that there are no heroes in War Of The Worlds. The Artilleryman is a young, impressionable, nationalist fool, the Priest descends into a pit of nihilistic despair, and the narrator survives only by his cowardice. He even goes as far as to attempt suicide, throwing himself in front of the unbeknownst to him dead Tripod because he cannot bear the idea of living in a world like this. It’s extremely dark and very cynical. The BBC series goes a very different route. We see George slowly become delirious as a result of the typhoid infection he got by drinking the poisoned cup of water in the previous episode (so all that stuff about the Martian terraforming was a load of bollocks) before, realising that he is becoming a burden to Amy, deciding to make the supreme sacrifice and facing the lone Martian alone while she makes a run for it. Not only does this open up a major plot hole - who the fuck was Amy expecting to arrive from the North if George is dead? They try to dismiss this as memory suppression, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t apply to losing a loved one to a fucking alien - it also completely stands at odds with the themes of the book. When facing annihilation at the hands of a higher power, the arrogant Brits, who previously lived a life of privilege on the backs of millions of subjugated, reveal themselves for who they truly are at their core. The BBC series says yeah, we were a bunch of racist tosspots with delusions of grandeur, but we weren’t all bad. The main takeaway I got from this despicable, badly written series was a three hour pity party about how all those selfish POCs don’t consider the feelings of white people and asking why can’t we all just get along.

Peter Harness’ bastardisation of War Of The Worlds is without a doubt one of the worst adaptations I’ve ever seen. In fact it’s quite possibly one of the worst TV shows I’ve ever seen, period. It’s not just the sheer disregard for the source material that upsets me. It’s also the absolute amateurish nature of the whole fucking thing. This series fails in some of the most basic ways. His writing is truly terrible, somehow getting steadily worse and worse with each episode. It’s not just upsetting to see someone get the fundamental elements of storytelling so spectacularly wrong, it honestly makes me sick to my fucking stomach. Peter Harness, please, for your own sake and my sanity, stop fucking writing. You’re clearly not good at it and I don’t want to see my money go to someone who obviously hasn’t the faintest fucking idea what they’re doing. Enough is enough.

So it would seem that Jeff Wayne’s musical version remains the best adaptation of War Of The Worlds. In fact can we just have a movie adaptation of that please?

[mst3kproject]

Daughter of Dr. Jekyll

John Agar’s in this.  So, for that matter, is Gloria Talbott from Girls Town and The Leech Woman, and it was directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, who brought us The Amazing Transparent Man.  It was released on a double-bill with The Cyclops, which I’ve already reviewed, and while all that seems to promise us an utter crapfest, the premise at least sounded intriguing.  Then I actually pressed play, and was greeted by an opening consisting of gray fog, theremin music, and a bored narrator.  Oh, yeah.  This is gonna suck.

Said opening narration very (and I mean very) quickly introduces us to the tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which a distinguished scientist used a strange potion to turn himself into a werewolf!  Wait… that’s not what happened in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at all.  Wasn’t it a story about how every person has the capacity for evil and that’s part of what makes us human, and… aw, fuck it, this is a John Agar movie.  Okay, sure, a werewolf.  Whatever you say, Portentous 50’s Narrator.  Moving on.

Janet Smith and her fiancé George Hastings arrive at her family’s palatial home, which she will inherit on her upcoming twenty-first birthday.  That’s not all that’s come down the family line, though.  Janet’s last name is not Smith, but Jekyll, and she was born after his experiments in lycanthropy had begun.  Might she pass it on to her children?  Or might Janet herself not be affected?  Or is her father’s old friend Dr. Lomas an evil hypnotist using her for his own ends?  Wait… what?

After sitting through crap like The Incredible Petrified World and Creatures from the Abyss, I kind of want to give extra points to Daughter of Dr. Jekyll.  It’s actually fairly well-constructed for the most part, it’s rarely boring, and the sets representing the Jekyll family estate are very nice.  There’s a plot I can follow, I know who the characters are, and so forth… my standards have dropped so low, that’s actually kind of impressive.  The creepy delivery guy who hangs around whittling stakes and sowing discontent is pretty effective, himself, even though he’s a very one-dimensional character.

There’s still plenty of badness to be had, of course. The movie appears to be set in the first decade of the twentieth century, but it’s not very committed to that. The sound is frequently weird, from the absolute cacophony of frogs at the opening to musical cues that I swear were stolen from Robot Monster.  There’s a random cameo from a very 50’s pin-up girl who appears, gets killed, and vanishes without us ever even learning her name.  The climactic fight between George and the werewolf is extremely shatnery and the werewolf makeup is even lamer than in Werewolf in a Girl’s Dormitory.

Even worse, there’s an entire subplot that kind of doesn’t even bother happening.  Most movies that are going to involve angry villagers have some scenes in a local pub or something to show the rabble being roused – even The Giant Spider Invasion had that.  In Daughter of Dr. Jekyll we hear about angry villagers from a couple of different people but never actually see them until the pitchfork-toting crowd appears out of nowhere at the end.  It’s like an angry flash mob.  All we needed was a few thirty-second scenes, but I guess this movie couldn’t afford villagers.  The whole climax is obscured by fog that makes it very hard to tell who’s who and what’s going on.

As usual, we’re confused about who our main character is supposed to be.  The person whose eyes we see the story through is Janet.  It’s Janet whose arc we follow, and Janet who we learn the most about, but she’s a very frustrating character because she is entirely without agency.  The only choice she appears to make in the entire film is agreeing to marry George, before this story begins.  Otherwise, she’s letting him or Lomas tell her what to do, completely incapable of making her own decisions (she even says as much, when George asks her if she’d like to go to London and elope).  When the action occurs, she’s drugged with sleeping pills or in Lomas’ hypnotic thrall.

Even the very premise strips Janet of control over her own fate.  She is not the heir to a scientific legacy (as other descendants of Henry Jekyll in other movies have been) but to a genetic one.  Tanya in Lady Frankenstein chose to continue and improve on her father’s work.  She might not have.  Janet, on the other hand, cannot opt out of the family’s potentially tainted DNA. This lack of control is reinforced through smaller events as well: George won’t let Janet change her mind about marrying him, and when the young couple tells Lomas they don’t want his money or estate, he reveals that both were actually Janet’s the whole time.  Like Eddie in The Beatniks, Janet is basically a victim even when good things are happening – they always happen to her rather than because of her.

The character who actually tries to take control of the situation, and who I think we’re supposed to see as the ‘hero’, is George – but we know nothing about George.  He loves Janet and he has terrible fashion sense, and that’s really it. It’s her family we learn about, and her mental disintegration that follows.  George spends most of the movie just hovering on the sidelines watching, and even at the end he doesn’t do very much.  He explains what’s really going on to Janet and the audience (though we’ve already figured it out) and gets his ass kicked by a geriatric werewolf.  The monster is actually killed by the mob of villagers, while George just stands there with Janet sobbing into his shirt.  The movie probably wouldn’t have been much different without him.

The thing that really takes the viewer out of the movie, however, and does so repeatedly for its entire seventy-minute running time, is that it can’t make up its mind what its monster is supposed to be. I already mentioned the narrator’s conviction that Mr. Hyde was a werewolf, but it gets way weirder and more confusing than that.

The servants at the Jekyll house also talk about werewolves, and tell Janet and George in threatening voices that they know how to deal with such creatures.  On the other hand, when Dr. Lomas himself tells them what happened, he tells the story we’re familiar with: Dr. Jekyll wanted to separate the good and evil parts of a person, and ended up giving the evil in himself a free agency of its own.  This made me think maybe the servants were just a bunch of superstitious peasants? Maybe they called Mr. Hyde a werewolf because they didn’t know what else to call him?  That almost started to make sense… but then George picks up a book about werewolves, and in its pages he reads that a werewolf leaves its tomb on the night of the full moon so it can drink blood, and can only be killed by a wooden stake through the heart.

Wait.  What?

That… that’s not werewolves!  Werewolves are killed by silver bullets!  Stakes through the heart are vampires!  Werewolves don’t have tombs!  What is going on here?

By the time the climax rolls around, we’ve already figured out Dr. Lomas’ evil plan, and sure enough, it turns out he’s hypnotizing Janet into believing she’s a werewolf so she will commit suicide and he can have her family’s money.   That makes sense in a Scooby-Doo kind of way, I guess, and I can accept it for the sake of the movie… but then he actually turns into a werewolf and goes out to suck blood!  What?  What?  How did that happen?  Was he playing with Jekyll’s formula?  But Jekyll turned into Hyde when he took the drug, not at the full moon!  What the fuck?

The movie never explains itself.  We’re just supposed to take this bizarre conflation for granted.  But vampires, werewolves, and Mr. Hyde are three totally different types of monster! Vampires are undead corpses who avoid decay and death by sucking blood.  Werewolves are living people who transform under the full moon and kill out of animalistic rage.  Mr. Hyde was Dr. Jekyll’s repressed evil side given form.  You could probably argue that all three have the same root, in our need to conform to certain standards in order to make society work, but Daughter of Dr. Jekyll doesn’t try to do that.  It just mixes and matches story bits at all, combining conflicting mythologies and leaving very visible seams.  In fact, we may as well consider this a Frankenstein movie, too!

I can only imagine the fun Mike and the Bots would have had with this confusion.  I’m picturing a game show in which they must match the weapon with the monster, and if they lose, they get eaten.  Tom would have figured out that you survive by picking what ought to be the wrong answer.  Crow would not.

The opening narration of Daughter of Dr. Jekyll notes that Robert Louis Stephenson’s book is a classic, and it is so for good reason.  It’s an exploration of the evil within us all, the intrusive thoughts and secret desires we would rather attribute to an alter ego than ever admit to anyone, and the fact that the sinner is as much a part of each of us as the saint.  Daughter of Dr. Jekyll throws all that out the window by equating its villain with a vampire/werewolf, making him a sort of mindless monster. It’s confusing and annoying, and its compelling source material deserved far better.  

[latetotherant]

The Contention of Voice: Alan Moore’s Reshaping of Mr. Hyde’s Monstrosity ••• By Lissa Heineman

Having now completed The League of Extraordinary Gentleman’s fourth volume, it is possible comic culture’s favorite uncle, Alan Moore, is officially retiring from comics. The graphic novel series is celebrated for its gallery of famous characters from literary history, acting as a new-age compendium for Industrial Revolution-centric anachronisms. It’s both a Lit Degree-er’s nightmare and playground, remixing themes and characteristics from different classic works together. One such example is Moore’s take on the OG, 1800′s Hulk, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published in 1886, a time in which the debate around science and religion was intense. Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species had been released in 1859 and made the Victorians begin to question their ‘infallible’ faith in God’s unlimited control, but also be wary of metaphysical sciences — a phenomena that studies the fundamental nature of reality. The book used its main characters to generate discourse about morality, reasoning, science, and faith, while reflecting upon the growing uncertainties that came with fin-de-siecle, or end-of-the-century, culture. To the modern reader, the basic message of Stevenson’s novel is clear: Hyde wasn’t simply a monster, and consequence of metaphysical practices, but a manifestation of Dr. Jekyll’s repressed self. However, this leaves a question of how human Hyde is in comparison to Dr. Jekyll, if they are one in the same. What is Mr. Hyde’s personhood? It is through the introduction of Alan Moore’s take on the character(s), that Mr. Hyde’s own character takes shape. By integrating characteristics of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murder in the Rue Morgue into Hyde’s storyline, Moore argues for Hyde’s personhood and agency, not allowing him to simply be a figure of the Victorian’s metaphysical anxieties.

In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jekyll is described as having become “too fanciful… [and going] wrong in mind,” practicing “unscientific balderdash” (Stevenson 12).  Jekyll is framed as immoral, particularly in comparison to the book’s protagonists. His ‘science’ is described as “transcendental medicine” (Stevenson 52), ie: metaphysical inquiries. Jekyll’s research, and his addiction to his own chemicals, code him as a heretic. Stevenson indicates that Jekyll, himself, is problematic. Yes, Hyde is young and brutish with more physical capabilities than the older, deteriorating Dr. Jekyll, but he certainly isn’t the degenerative juggernaut illustrated in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Rather, Mr. Hyde is described as “troglodytic” (Stevenson 16), “ape-like” (Stevenson 20), and “a monkey” (Stevenson 39). These descriptions of Mr. Hyde allude to the backwards progression of man’s evolution, as chronicled by Charles Darwin and the likes of Thomas Henry Huxley, reaffirming Jekyll as representative of a bastardization of London’s moral ideals of the time.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen clearly takes some creative liberties with its depiction of Mr. Hyde. In Issue 1, Hyde is seen easily holding Quatermain feet above the ground, close to the ceiling, easily in one hand, fangs barred and tendons and veins practically bursting across his collar and face. Across the same two-page spread, Auguste Dupin attempts to defend himself and Mina Murray from Hyde, shooting the monster in the face. Part of Hyde’s ear is blown off, which only increases Hyde’s anger, emphasized by the all-capitalized dialogue bubbles. Not only does Hyde retain the apishness described in Stevenson’s novel, but it is intensified, as seen via the fangs, flared nostrils, incredible muscle definition, and the overall brownishness of his complexion. He towers over all the other characters dramatically, alluding more to King Kong than how earlier adaptations had illustrated the character, which often emphasized “neanderthal” over “monkey”. Hyde was popularly depicted as an unkempt, twisted, and hunching man across films and drawings. There can be many reasons for this deviation within the comic’s universe, but one of the most obvious links is in how this Hyde is adapted not only from Stevenson’s work, but also Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue. The murders attributed to Hyde by Dupin in The League are ones that were committed by the Ourang-Outang in Poe’s short story. Even the way that Hyde’s anger increases when Dupin shoots him mirrors how the Ourang-Outang becomes agitated enough to murder the two women, which occured only when one of the women provoked it by screaming (Poe 35). Moore masterfully blends together Hyde and the Ourang-Outang to display the animalistic qualities of the former character.

However, what is most interesting regarding Hyde in The League is his communication -- his literal ability to speak. Never at a single point in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde does Mr. Hyde speak; we only hear Dr. Jekyll himself talk. A large part of Poe’s Rue Morgue mystery is based in “voices in... contention” (first on Poe 11). Witnesses heard the then-mysterious “arguing” of the deep-voiced French sailor and the shrill shrieking of the Ourang-Outang, and found the ape’s voice to be unidentifiable in gender and nationality. Dupin notes that: 

"the voices of madmen, even in their wildest paroxysms, are never found to tally with that peculiar voice heard upon the stairs. Madmen are of some nation, and their language, however incoherent in its words, has always the coherence of syllabification” (Poe 28-29). 

Poe introduces the idea that language is a characteristic of a nation, and therefore language being linked to personhood. It is this argument that leads to Dupin’s logical deduction that the murderer couldn’t have been human at all, as he didn’t have language or nation, and it is this language that brings us to question the boundaries between both Stevenson and Moore’s version of Jekyll, Hyde, and their divide.

Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde is a ‘mask’ for Dr. Jekyll; we never engage in Mr. Hyde’s perspective, and while Dr. Jekyll uses the potion to maintain control over both himself and his alternate-persona, we are never given evidence that Hyde himself has his own perspective. Hyde’s activities across the novel are described as bouts of rage that mirror the kind of blind activity that the Ourang-Outang perform: they are mindless performances of heated passion and emotion. On the other hand, Dr. Jekyll’s role is indisputable. In his confession of the murders in Stevenson’s novel he admits that he “mauled the unresisting body” (Stevenson 60), rather than referring to himself as Mr. Hyde, which would relieve himself of blame or control. This reaffirms Hyde as a costume for Jekyll’s depravities. Even in the final chapter, “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case”, where Dr. Hyde’s body is “in control”, the character still refers to himself exclusively as Dr. Jekyll. Dr. Hyde is never autonomous, and he is never a singular being. These facts create a gap in how to read Mr. Hyde at all, because despite his own embodiment, he is very much just Dr. Jekyll. 

Despite performing similar brutalities to Poe’s monster, Hyde/Jekyll is very human. However, when he’s offered a voice by Moore, Hyde becomes separate. Jekyll isn’t speaking through Hyde, and Moore’s Hyde becomes a near-replica of the dynamics that Marvel’s Bruce Banner and the Hulk engage with, as well as that of Poe’s Ourang-Outang and the Frenchman, who feared being accused as guilty for the crimes of the ape. Such dynamics are further displayed by Moore in Champion Bond’s explanation of Jekyll/Hyde. He describes Dr. Jekyll as “a highly moral individual” who “become(s) Hyde” whenever he is stressed (Moore Vol. 1). Moore and Stevenson’s characters here are distinctly separated. Moore’s choice to depict Hyde and Jekyll as split shifts the blame of Jekyll/Hyde’s actions away from Stevenson’s intended perpetrator: Jekyll, and onto Hyde, transforming Jekyll into a victim. Jekyll even offers a warning to the League as they approach the Limehouse District. With sweat beading across his forehead he admits “sometimes I’m not myself. I’m not sure I can always be relied on.” Stevenson’s writing posed a message that playing with science can drive a man mad and immoral. With Moore’s Hyde having his own distinctive personhood, Stevenson’s message is removed from the Jekyll/Hyde mythos. 

Alan Moore offers an alternative take on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Departing from Stevenson’s classic allegory for the anxieties of scientific advancement, Moore uses the classic Poe story to explore Hyde as a separate force. Monstrosity, in the 19th century, was linked to the degradation of character and religion. However, Moore’s transferral of power over to Mr. Hyde, as suggested by both literal narration and the gift of speech, allows Hyde to take up the true mantle as a monster. Moore points to how this form of remix encourages reshaping perceptions of the familiar. This variation on Jekyll/Hyde can easily parallel the Ourang-Outang and the Frenchmen, Bruce Banner and the Hulk, and even deviating examples of both Frankenstein and his monster and The Fly’s Seth Brundle and Brundlefly, who both exemplify monsters with their own senses of personhood and creators who fall victim to their creations. One can see that Moore’s recharacterization of Hyde makes a classic work feel more approachable and non-other.

__

Works Cited:

Moore, Alan and Kevin O’Neill. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Volume One. California: America’s Best Comics, 2000. Print.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Murder in Rue Morgue. Feedbooks, 1841. Online. http://www.feedbooks.com/book/795/the-murders-in-the-rue-morgue

Stevenson, Robert Louis., and Roger Luckhurst. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Other Tales (Oxford world's classics). N.p.: Oxford U Press, 2006. Print.

[drkandraz]

Why Hirohiko Araki Is a Great Writer

Note: add writing saying “I am only going to be addressing JoJo because 1) I have not read his older works, 2) His works before and including Phantom Blood lack what I am talking about here and 3)  I include JoJo spin-off manga under the “JoJo” moniker”

 As the man behind one of the most influential manga of all time, Hirohiko Araki is already a highly praised writer and artist. However, I believe what lies at the heart of Araki-sensei’s writing style is not explored often enough. What I think are the most important factors in the writing of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure are the extremes to which the author takes his creative freedom and his skill in writing relationships between people.

Phantom Blood is the most conventional part of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. It has a structure very similar to other shounen manga at the time: hero has a rivalry, rival becomes obscenely powerful, hero learns martial art to defeat rival, ally dies, other ally narrates, hero wins etc. Phantom Blood’s writing only succeeds in the outlandish concepts introduced throughout: vampires appearing as a consequence of mayan blood rituals with magical stone masks, vampires somehow sucking blood by introducing their fingers inside a human’s skin, the power of the sun channeled (or created) by breathing, medieval warrior zombies, people being cleft in half by chains… frog punching. What also comes out here is a hint of the strategic battles the series will come to be known for, with Dio’s defeat at the hands of a burning sword.

A lot of the quality of the writing comes in the relationship between Jonathan and Dio, two characters who could not be more polar opposites who supposedly die together. While Jonathan is a typical nice guy shounen protagonist, Dio is a somewhat complex villain; he is irredeemably evil, but not unjustifiably so.

The decision to change protagonists was in itself an unheard of prospect at the time, each part bringing its own atmosphere and self-contained storyline, facts which allow Araki-sensei to explore all of them at length.

In comparison, Battle Tendency goes completely off the rails. If Phantom Blood is a cautious dip into the water, then Battle Tendency is a cannonball jump right into the deep end. This is where JoJo starts going from typical shounen manga to a manga characterized by battles of wits and skill rather than of pure brawn; and this change is reflected in its protagonist. Where Jonathan was the perfect gentleman who would never face his enemy anything less than head-on, Joseph likes to screw with his opponents’ heads. To show this change in character, his first major fight is against an enemy comparable to Dio, who is taken out a lot more easily thanks to Joseph’s fighting style. The insanity present in Phantom Blood is taken up to 11: the vampires are mere distractions to the new Pillar Men, Nazis are turned into Cyborgs and Hamon now apparently works on bubbles.

The relationship built between Joseph and Caesar is perhaps the most natural growth displayed in the series until this point. Their friendship grows gradually and culminates not with perfect teamwork, but with a realistic ideological fight between the two, one that Joseph would come to regret for many years to come. Caesar’s death is one of the most natural and powerful scenes in manga history, from the desperate dedication he displays even in his final moments, to Wamuu’s respect for him and to Joseph’s desperate cry for his best friend.

Stardust Crusaders is the start of Araki-sensei’s complete creative control. Stands now allow him to explore any fun and interesting idea he has in battles and to make stands that fit with their characters. The change of the format from single story to monster of the week supports the author’s writing style of throwing ideas at the wall and expanding them to his heart’s content. However, the clunkiness of his inexperience with such creative control is obvious. He is obviously pressured to come up with cool designs and powers for the stands (some of which he will later forget). In the second half of Part 3, getting used to the concept of stands, he starts writing interesting and fun ideas for his battles, like the D’Arby Brothers and Vanilla Ice. The insanity is punctuated by the increasing number of musical references (from Captain Tennille to Oingo Boingo).

Sadly, the characters take a backseat for the duration of this Part. Except for certain minor moments between the Crusaders, the characters don’t really have arcs (except for perhaps Iggy and Polnareff). For this reason, Jotaro, Kakyoin and Avdol are often criticized for having little to no character, which is a fair point. Jotaro himself is more of a superpowered version of the most barebone characteristics of Sherlock Holmes.

Dio’s return recontextualizes Part One as a tragedy rather than a story of sacrifice for the greater good, as well as making Part Three more of a culmination of generations of fighting rather than another story about saving the world. Jotaro vs Dio is still one of the best battles in shounen history because of the weight behind every single action the characters take feeling like the climax of the story.

Diamond is Unbreakable, in contrast to its predecessor, is not in the least an epic story about cleansing evil. It is, for the most Part, a slice of life. Therefore, its stand users have abilities more suited to everyday life (Bad Company notwithstanding), or rather their own special needs. The town of Morioh truly feels like a real (albeit bizarre) place, with a community comprised of people with their own personal goals. The advantage of Part 4 in Araki-sensei’s writing style consists of the fact that the author is no longer chained by the needs of the lengthy story structure that plagued Part 3. He himself pointed out in an interview that he could always go back to continue Part 4 if he wanted to (I could not find the interview again, sorry. If you can find it or correct me, it would be most appreciated).

The character’s relationships in DiU are quite evidently better defined than in Part 3. The main crew of Part 4 is smaller and it never feels restrained to keep everyone around at every point in the story (like Part 3 was somewhat forced to). In this way, characterization and character relationships are better crafted within stories that emphasize only those characters and relationships. Jousuke is never forced to be the main character of an episode; rather, he only is when the story demands it, making for a much better experience. Of note are Koichi, whose growth is signaled within his stand’s abilities, Rohan, whose growth is exhibited throughout the series and within his spin-off series, Joseph, whose appearance is bittersweet to old fans, as the sneaky and crafty Joseph becomes senile and unable to do anything worthwhile and Kira, whose chillingly normal demeanor doesn’t betray his dark tendencies.

After Part 4’s gleeful atmosphere, Part 5 dives right back into the horror-inspired roots of JoJo. Giorno Giovanna, Dio’s son, is a far more dark and cunning figure than Jousuke. Indeed, Giorno and the rebellious cell of Passione he becomes part of are a reflexion of past characters painted in a new, more sinister light, fitting with the new Mafia theme. They are a family, led by Bruno Bucciarati just as the Part 4 gang was led by Jotaro, but because of their jobs, they live in a world almost completely devoid of the fun antics of DiU. However, their relationships are just as well developed: Abbachio and Giorno’s one-sided rivalry is resolved organically, Bucciarati and Giorno’s hatred of immorality is what binds them together and Fugo’s “betrayal” is completely in character for him etc. As a villain, Diavolo is well written insofar as we recognize that his main attribute is his megalomania and his relationship with Doppio is magnificently fucked up in the best way possible.

The fights in Part 5 are brutal bouts for survival. The enemy stand users are trained assassins who will stop at nothing to get their revenge on The Boss. What makes this change even more effective is their motive for chasing the gang, the murder of their “family members” at the hands of Diavolo. Therefore, each ability is more valuable than each of the ones in Stardust Crusaders, since there are just a lot less of them. Each stand is that much more developed and consistent in its use (with the exception of King Crimson, but I’m not going on that rant right now) On the other hand, the concepts introduced for them are just that much more insane: a turtle in which one can enter by putting a key in a hole in its back, a stand that dehydrates everything at long range, a stand that can put zippers on anything etc.

Part 6 is a much more plot focused arc. The whole part focuses on Jolyne’s search for her father’s memory and stand discs with the help of Stone Ocean’s gang of reluctant helpers. This gang feels less like a pseudo-family, more like a bunch of people chasing their own goals and helping each other along the way. This, by the end of the story, is what will bring their demise at the hands of Pucci, Dio’s best friend. Despite this, I can’t say they are not well-written characters. Foo Fighters’, Weather Report’s and Pucci’s characters and arcs particularly are very compelling.

Within this story driven part, the villain of the week format just does not fit anymore. This is why, despite their great ideas and executions, a lot of villains from Stone Ocean are made forgettable especially by the ending, which left almost no hope for a direct continuation to be made. In many ways, it can be said that one of Araki-sensei’s strong points eclipsed the other one completely.  The creative freedom which used to be a leading factor in why the series was so great was now taken to too many extremes (Looking at you, Heavy Weather and Bohemian Rhapsody) which detracted from the story more than they added.

On the other hand, the reboot Part 7 brought was exactly what JoJo needed, in my opinion. Now that stands had been grounded as more akin to abilities than the ghosts they were originally, there was no need to keep them as anything more than representations of the user’s skills. The bizarre nature of JoJo was also given almost complete freedom with the abolishment of continuity and concepts like stand arrows. Instead, Araki-sensei introduces pseudo-scientific and pseudo-philosophical concepts that fit in perfectly with JoJo. To explain the level of insanity, I will summarize the premise of SBR in one sentence: two men, one crippled and the other with the power of ball hamon, compete in a cross-country horse race in 1880s USA, while fighting dinosaurs and the president using powers granted by Jesus Christ. While the stand battles in the middle section are almost as forgettable as Part 6’s, it matters less because the most important aspect is the development of our two main characters.

The characterization in Part 7 is the best it’s ever been in JoJo. Johnny’s hopeful nihilism contrasts perfectly with Gyro’s playful jackassery. The main cast – now smaller than any that came before it – only consists of two characters (if we don’t include the very well written reccuring side characters). Every character gives a feeling of having their own agenda, while also each contributing to one side of the battle between Johnny and Gyro and President Valentine. Interestingly, Funny Valentine is probably right from an ideological stand point, which is an unexpected turn out from a mostly childish manga up to this point.

Part 8 brings Steel Ball Run’s ideological musings into the 21st century with a return to Morioh. Araki’s style has retained its mature edge, but shifted them into science-fiction territory. The characters retain the moral ambiguity found in Part 7. Jousuke would do anything for Yasuho, even torture somebody. Yet the familial aspect that had long been missing from JoJo returned in full force with the Higashikatas and their rival pseudo-family, the divided Rock Humans. This makes Joubin a perfect antagonist despite his seemingly underpowered ability.

The bizarre atmosphere of JoJo’s fourth part returns with the Shakedown Road and the Milagro Man arcs which have almost nothing to do with the overarching plot of the series, but enhance the sense of a world existing beyond the characters. The battles in JoJolion are realistic and brutal to the extent not even Vento Aureo was willing to go, despite the relative bizarreness of the enemies’ stands.

This is how Hirohiko Araki’s writing style changed over the years from simple and restrained to bold, philosophical, dark and bizarre. The overall mundanity of Hamon was slowly replaced by stands and other special abilities, allowing the author to indulge in outlandish ideas that complimented the intelligent, consistent and thoughtful structure of his battles. To conclude, I believe Hirohiko Araki is a great writer because of the balance between his strange, out there ideas and his calm and logical understanding of his concepts (with a few exceptions), combined with his ability for writing strong and believable arcs and relationships for characters.

Edit: If you want more details about the first four parts of JoJo, I wholeheartedly recommend Super Eyepatch Wolf’s videos on the subject, as he can go into much more detail in those.

[rubberduckyrye]

minawakitten replied to your post “Sorry for Undertale-ing on main but I’e been listening to songs that...”

yall gonna have to go into more detail about that because that gremlin child did not give me many good impressions [ especially when asriel goes into detail about the time they were as one being ]

Sorry I was really focused on drawing this:

Now that I got some of my feels out of my system I’ll tell you about Chara, or at least, the story I had for her.

Spoilers under the cut, because I still want to write this damn story one day gdi

Okay so Yeah I get why you’d think Chara is an absolute gremlin. TBH I thought the same when I started developing the original AU where this specific interpretation of Chara comes from, but the story developed beyond that and she became the protagonist.

But first: Have you ever heard of the Narrator Chara Theory?

I’m not sure how popular the theory is now, but it was kind of popular when I was in the undertale fandom. The idea is simple: Chara is the narrator. This explains some strange things, like why the narrator is addressed as “Chara” by Flowey when you open the game after a pacifist run to RESET it, and other bits and bobs. A lot of people use the flavor text like “No Chocolate” or “Where are the Knives” from the genocide route to point out that this is Chara and Chara is evil--except that flavor text is narration. You can’t just say some narration is Chara while others aren’t. It’s all or nothing, and there’s hints that depending on how the player plays the game determines what kind of personality Chara gets at the end. When you do a genocide run, Chara wants to destroy the world because Chara saw Frisk kill all of monster kind and decided that the whole world should be erased. If you think about it, they are said to hate humans--and why wouldn’t they hate humans more after seeing Frisk massacre the entire monster race? What motivation would Chara have to want this world to live if the species they grew fond of was obliterated?

It’s also implied that the player’s/Frisk’s actions makes Chara “Good” or “Evil” depending on what you do. Notice how the narration changes in the different routes? That implies that the narrator themselves is a character being affected by Frisk’s actions. Chara may or may not also feel bitterness at monster kind in the afterlife, because of the declaration of war Asgore had, which is why Chara may have been enthusiastic about the genocide run as well as the pacifist run.

Once you consider Chara to be the narrator Chara’s character expands beyond what Asriel gives you and the hints you get about them in the game. Asriel’s claim that they weren’t a good person almost becomes kind of cruel, and before you say Asriel is a sweet baby child that can do no harm, let’s not forget that Asriel is also Flowey and Flowey is just Asriel’s personality without much empathy/sympathy/unable to feel emotions. 

I’d like to point out that Chara... literally gave their life to try to save monster kind. They had no point of reference to what would happen to them after they died and Asriel took their soul, there was no real way for them to have known they weren’t going to just cease existing afterwards. Them taking their body up to the surface? That was probably Chara wanting to give closure to any family, or in a more bitter tone, bring their body up to the surface to show what the humans what they had done--killed them. 

It’s implied heavily that Chara was abused, which is where they get their hatred of humanity from. Them wanting to kill all the humans on the surface, while still morally wrong, was probably a sort of revenge for what they did to them. They were hurt and abused, and they have an intense hatred for humanity that they probably wanted to wipe most of humanity out because of their past abuse. That is especially amplified with how it was monster kind that gave them a good home, food, love and care where as humanity remained ugly and horrid. There were no positive human influences on Chara, and seeing how such a kind and loving race was trapped under ground probably fueled the fire even more.

Either way, they did sacrifice themselves to try to free human kind, regardless of interpretations and speculation. 

Now in comes my specific girl here.

My interpretation of Chara didn’t just have the above conflicts weighing on her mind, but also pressure accidentally put onto her and Asriel. Asgore, Toriel, and all of monster kind calling them their “hope” and... you know? That’s actually a lot of pressure to put on two kids, especially when one of them was abused like Chara was.

Chara sort of cracked under the pressure, feeling like she had to do something to save all of monster kind, and it lead her to mixing the poisonous buttercup flowers with milk chocolate to make poisonous chocolate bars Asriel could sneak to her without Asgore or Toriel noticing. Because she felt like she wasn’t worth anything, and hated herself for being human, she chose to sacrifice herself.

Asriel absorbed her soul, and she took her body to the surface to give closure to her brother, Marcus. Marcus is an OC who is also the soul of INTEGRITY. Yes, the ballet dancer soul is a boy in this story, and that actually kind of comes into play as to why Chara and her brother were heavily abused and eventually kicked out and living as starving children in a village. Marcus immediately recognizes his sister, and of course, thinks Asriel killed her. This causes a riot within the town and Chara wanted to fight them, kill them and collect their souls to free monster kind from the underground, but Asriel refused to fight. This ends up getting them both killed like in the canon.

In this AU/Story, Chara actually had a yellow soul of JUSTICE rather than a red soul. However she died with a red soul--how? Well in this AU, a RED soul isn’t actually a naturally occurring soul color, but rather represents the soul being overtaken by DETERMINATION. Being DETERMINED to save monster kind turned her soul red, but she couldn’t perform the RESET trick Frisk can. Why? 

Marcus.

Marcus, being a blue soul, was filled with DETERMINATION to the point where his soul was red. The implications here is that yellow is easier to make red than blue is, so Marcus was filled with more DETERMINATION than Chara. In a fit of rage, he tracked Asriel to the underground carrying Chara’s body back with him, to show the monsters what hey had done to his sister and why they were being massacred by him.

His DETERMINATION wore thin, however, as he couldn’t kill Asgore, so his soul returned to blue and his soul was taken as the first soul. Enter the first glitch RESET.

You see, in this story, Chara wasn’t supposed to die like she did. She was supposed to free monsters peacefully after her brother found her, but because she died like she did, the world’s code was glitched, and it tried to rectify itself by trying to recreate the peaceful scenario. This is why there was a drought of humans not even coming near the underground and then suddenly, six humans fell in succession. 

Meanwhile, Chara was put in the LOADING SCREEN, basically a dark room with no light aside from green lines of code flickering on the wall. She eventually realizes she can manipulate the code, and spends a very long time learning how to manipulate it to build a console, a machine that allowed her to see what was going on in the outside world.

Before she was able to finally make the console, however, six humans had fallen and killed. Asgore, not wanting to kill humans anymore, sent the six souls to Gaster (yes he has a role in this) and his lab assistants, Sans and Alphys, to try to figure out a better solution.

The DETERMINATION machine was created as a result, and extracted all of the DETERMINATION from the six souls. However, at a sort of celebration party for the success of the machine, Goner Kid was left unattended and accidentally pushed some buttons on the machine’s control panel, causing a severe malfunction.

Sans was only able to teleport himself and Alphys out of the lab before the machine exploded, obliterating all of their coworkers into space and time, including Gaster. The DETERMINATION plus explosion also forced another glitch RESET, creating the timeline where Gaster and all of those who perished in the lab never existed, and creating the situation with Alphys and Flowey.

Chara develops her console quite a bit after Flowey’s conception, and by this point Flowey’s been killing and RESETTING and abusing his powers. 

After realizing who Flowey was, this naturally upset Chara. She eventually pieced together what happened by observing, and found that she remembers through the glitch RESETS. So she basically watches Flowey turn everyone’s lives into his play things until, you guessed it, the DETERMINATION from the previous timeline with Gaster manifests itself as Frisk, the first and only pure RED soul with no base attributes.

Frisk’s DETERMINATION surpasses Flowey’s, and Frisk takes over the timeline.

In this story, Frisk is initially a coward who runs away from all fights, but soon they start to realize their power and they become a bit more kinder. Chara is also guiding them as the “narrator” and helping them through the underground.

They do a pacifist run. Everyone’s got their happy ending.

But then... they RESET. 

Frisk is the only human Chara can itneract with, so she immediately questions what Frisk was thinking, and Frisk says that they want to save both Chara and Asriel from their fate. Seeing nothing wrong with this, Chara lets them try to save her and Asriel.

RESET after RESET, and nothing is working. Chara tells Frisk to give up, but Frisk gets an idea. They decide to kill--after all, they could just RESET to bring them back, and it might lead to a clue as to how to save Chara and Asriel. Chara reluctantly agrees to it.

This is the beginning of hell.

Frisk goes through RESET after RESET trying to figure out how to save Asriel and Chara, but nothing they do is working. Not even killing. So they get desperate, and start trying to kill everyone.

That’s when a “glitch” happens in Chara’s code.

As Frisk attempts a genocide run, both their and Chara’s LOVE goes up. However, Frisk aborts the first genocide run after killing Mettaton and they RESET, thinking that there had to be a better way... except the damage has been done.

Because Chara exists outside of the RESETS, Chara’s LOVE never RESET either, and this turned her cold. Hateful. She decided that Frisk’s attempts to save her and Asriel weren’t just a waste of time--it was a form of torture.

Chara decided then, “If this is a world of ‘kill or be killed’... wouldn’t it be better off dead?”

From there, Chara devised a plan to force Frisk into completing a genocide run. She started forcing Frisk into RESETS and claimed that she had no idea what had happened. After a while, she lied to Frisk and told them that the world was ending and Frisk needed to complete a genocide run in order ti fix it. Frisk refused at first, but all Chara had to do was be patient, and Frisk finally gave in and went to attempt a genocide run.

Cue glitch two.

As they were fighting Sans, it was Sans’ code that glitched, making him remember the tale of monsters being able to absorb a human soul. Thinking that there was no other way to stop Frisk from completing a Genocide run, he forces his soul and Frisk’s to fuse.

This also causes a RESET, and Chara’s LOVE is finally back down to LV 1. However, Frisk is now unavailable for her to talk to, because now Frisk and Sans are both neither human nor monster. Sans looks the same, except for his soul, which looked like this:

The problem is, like Asriel and Chara, Sans had no way of knowing that Frisk would still have control over his body, and this causes a new kind of hell to be born as Frisk tries to complete the genocide run with Sans’s body and magic.

However, because Frisk cannot kill Sans without killing themselves and resetting, the genocide run cannot be completed at all. Sans also has a tendency to fight back for control before Frisk is able to get close to realizing this, so they are locked in an endless hell of Frisk trying to “save the world from the glitch they made” and Sans fighting to stop the from completing a genocide run.

And Chara could do nothing but watch. 

She couldn’t contact Frisk anymore and tell them it was a lie, so she’s basically forced to watch their struggles with the guilt heavy on her shoulders that she caused this. 

Cue the next Glitch.

Upon a RESET, Chara’s yellow soul was restored and Chara becomes the “eighth” human to fall into the underground, though she has no memories of who she is or everything that had happened. She is also wearing Frisk’s clothing, and only remembers the name “Frisk” at first, so she thinks she is Frisk. She eventually meets Sans and has to rely on him to make “Save points” but notices that he seems really bitter and pissed off at her for some reason when his eyes are white, and when they are red, he’s much kinder. She goes through the underground with her yellow soul and eventually uncovers all of what I mentioned before, and realizes that Frisk and Sans are still fused, and Frisk hasn’t gone on another Genocide run because of Chara’s appearance.

Despite Frisk refusing to kill, Sans refuses to give up their soul, paranoid that once he does they’ll just ruin everything all over again, and he blames Chara for their actions. 

However the story is designed to be a series of mistakes and unfortunate events that no one person can be blamed for--Frisk’s first unprompted attempt at a genocide run corrupted Chara, Chara lied to Frisk in a plot to end the world, and Sans refuses to let Frisk’s soul go not just to keep them from hurting others, but to keep some control. None of these characters in this story are good or evil.

Anyway, Chara decides to complete a pacifist run, and it’s mostly the same from that point until just before Flowey turns into Asriel. Flowey knows Sans has Frisk’s soul, and tries to rip their souls apart--but Sans refusing to let go, makes it so Frisk’s soul and his split in half.

Frisk’s half-soul is enough to transform Flowey into Asriel, and then Chara finds her own DETERMINATION to overpower Asriel and complete the pacifist run. She gives her body to Frisk’s half-soul so they could live in their happy ending, and she and Asriel move on to the afterlife after the barrier is finally destroyed and humans and monsters can have their hopeful future once again.

Of course, Chara’s more than just this story however. She’s a break dancer, where as her brother was a ballet dancer, and their non gender-conforming interests is what gets them abused to begin with. However Chara also can play the violin and is an excellent programmer thanks to her being trapped in the LOADING SCREEN. However she’s also severely touch repulsed from living there for so long by herself. She’s also suuuper awkward and can be prickly to talk to. She’s cold, but she doesn’t really know how to be more social as her social skills are entirely wrecked at that point. 

She actually hates all chocolate except white chocolate. Milk and Dark chocolate especially make her sick upon association with the poisoned chocolate bars she originally used to try to sacrifice herself to save everyone.

Anyway that’s my info=dump on my Chara from my one story and I love my daughter.

[timespakistan]

Fire in the soil | Art & Culture | thenews.com.pk Untitled 1. Like Robert Louise Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, fire is both virtuous and wicked, helpful and harmful. It burns some to death, but also preserves living beings in harsh conditions. This duplicity, like two sides of every coin, is mentioned in myths, represented in arts, and experienced in real life. Fire is significant in many religions and rituals, too. In the three Abrahamic faiths, fire embodies evil and imbibes holy; i.e., demons consist of fire, and angels are made of light (an attribute of fire). In traditional miniature painting, angels are portrayed with wings of noor (light), while flames of fire erupt from demons’ tongues. All that can be observed in the illustrations of Shahnameh, the tenth-century Persian epic by Ferdowsi. In miniatures, made to accompany this poem, winged figures and monsters often appear in picture plain. Khadim Ali, heir to this tradition – of illustrating a text in miniature painting, and familiar with Persian language and poetry – has been incorporating symbols derived from Shahnameh in his work. Artists, like Ali, who have learnt traditional miniature painting, particularly at the National College of Arts, Lahore, start their training by copying examples of historic paintings. This segment of formal instruction inculcates a post-modernistic approach in their later works, as they are inclined to assimilate old forms, past imagery and forgotten techniques. However, Khadim Ali has opted for something big and beyond a pictorial adjustment. Being part of the persecuted Hazara community (both in Afghanistan and Pakistan), he identifies strands of ethnic/sectarian hatred, and addressees it in a language related to historical accounts and contemporary realities. His solo exhibition, What Now My Friend?, curated by Salima Hashmi at Aicon Gallery, New York (December 17–January 23) denotes the perpetual saga of strife between the oppressors and the oppressed. Employing the metaphor of Rustom and Sohrab from the illustrations of Shahnameh Ali narrates the current political, racial and religious contradictions. In the exhibition, his large-scale tapestries portray the presence of power and map the conflict between countries, besides describing the latest calamities, such as Covid-19. As Ali draws inspiration from a historic text (Book of Kings), the format of his large-scale tapestry What Now My Friend? (786×243 cm) reminds one of a small page of the Persian text. The change of size, from a manageable sheet of paper, to a piece of fabric installed on a gallery wall and coming down to floor, conveys the shifts/and possibilities of miniature painting. Here, a reader is not holding a book-page, but is directed/dominated by the enlarged image. The story unfolding in traditional miniature revolves around the heroic protagonist, Rostam and his fights; but Khadim Ali translates initial content to match the contemporary crisis. In the tapestry, the past and the present blend strangely (actually they hardly mix). Inside the picture you come across medieval warriors on horseback, advancing in a mountainous landscape, to confront modern-day soldiers in fatigues and with their guns behind the sandbag barriers. At places army-men ride on stallions (of historic miniature paintings), or tents of Persian entourage are covered in the pattern of the US flag. The tale, like the Chines script, is told from top to bottom, including figures from our surroundings stalled next to their ancient ancestors, while some “people are burning American and European flags outside the court of Baysunghur Mirza in Herat”. The complexity of political situation of Khadim Ali’s native land (his family, belonging to the Hazara minority, fled Afghanistan “to escape Taliban persecution”) is apparent through how Ali composes a snakes and ladders game (It Was Not Like This Ever) in the context of Afghan politics. Past breathes into present in other tapestries, too. In This Is How It Was, Khadim Ali constructs a binary scenario between good and evil in the background of the pandemic. Fearsome spiky spheres on entangled threads are held by a many headed (clown) character wearing an English suit. Two angels are clasping oxygen cylinders, along with stuff to combat Covid-19 (disinfectant sprays, bottles of hand sanitisers, tissue paper rolls and medicines) spread under them. The orange backdrop of the entire image and intertwined whitish lines (like necklaces carrying beads of Covid-19) suggest the turmoil that all of us have faced in the solitude of our soul. The outer oppression is also rendered in his other tapestries. Like in Tell Us, You Tell Us, a winged figure is holding two bearded heads of archaic soldiers spitting fire from their mouths, above the Taliban fighters raising arms amid poppy flowers. Next to them there are a number of protestors in jeans and T-shirts, and one of them is putting the American flag to flames. The complexity of political situation of Khadim Ali’s native land (his family, belonging to the Hazara minority, fled Afghanistan “to escape Taliban persecution”) is apparent through how Ali composes a snakes and ladders game (It Was Not Like This Ever) in the context of Afghan politics. Flags of countries (interested, involved, abhorred) occupy the border of the board game. The chequered area is laid with the face of Osama Bin Laden, an aeroplane (alluding to 9/11), a US military man in helmet, hands casting votes as well as offering banknotes, and the hammer of law. You also notice a demon, an octopus like creature, a roaring lion, and chess pieces – and flames at the lower parts of the frame. The work communicates the current political content with all usable references and symbols. And that is the problem because a viewer feels that the artist is employing a vocabulary not only too direct, but almost flowing to the brim. Like a recipe of delicious dish, you get all ingredients – to savour your views on the Al Qaeda and Taliban, the US invasion, international interference, and the feeble state of political and social structures in the newly-restored Republic of Afghanistan. Here one must check one’s habit of interacting with art; because a message that is remote, indirect, layered and diffused may appeal to the sensibility of a person, who is detached – artistically and emotionally. He/she prefers a hint, a clue, a suggestion, because it empowers him/her to decode the narrative and to become its master. In the conventional art of miniature painting, details of a court, an expedition, a hunt, an intimate space were depicted. However, today when we see them, we forgo the immediate content and find something else to connect within these miniatures. In the same lieu, one looks at Ali’s tapestries, and while appreciating their ‘message’, still looks for some hidden meaning. Khadim Ali, however, has created a number of digital drawings, in which demons and fire-emitting figures are drawn next to layers of intestine like forms. Similar monsters and sections of human organs are surrounded by Buddha statues. Probably, this is a reference to the demolition of the Bamiyan Buddha in 2001. In these works, though executed mechanically, one cherishes a painterly quality. A label not about putting amount of colour on a surface, but an attempt to embellish reality under a load of artistic material/technique/excellence. These digital pieces are kosher for the art audience, but one feels that the tapestries from the Aicon exhibition are as complex and problematic as the issues Khadim Ali is negotiating with in his art. What is happening or is about to take place in Afghanistan, can be measured in his work, because it is a war between locals and invaders; between the pious and infidels; and between the past and the present. It is a war without a winner. The writer is an art critic based in Lahore https://timespakistan.com/fire-in-the-soil-art-culture-thenews-com-pk/9088/

[slaaneshfic]

Smeared into The Environment: Queer Horror games and The Ahuman

Smeared into The Environment: Queer Horror games and The Ahuman

Ralph Dorey

Presented as a work in progress paper at

“Don’t Look: Representations of Horror in the 21st Century”

University of Edinburgh, 28th April 2018 http://www.dontlook.llc.ed.ac.uk/

This paper is about a contemporary aspect of horror read through contemporary philosophy. This isn’t to say that either the horror or the philosophy did not exist before the contemporary moment, but that something about current trends in the use of “horror” in contemporary art practice will hopefully be made clear in this paper.

The work being examined is by Porpentine Charity Heartscape, who’s biography lists her as;

“a writer, game designer, and dead swamp milf in Oakland. Her work includes xenofemme scifi/fantasy, cursed videogames, and globe-spanning sentient slime molds” (Heartscape, n.d.).

The particular work which I am going to talk about today is one of her collaborations with the artist, game designer and musician Rook. This collaboration takes the form of the first of a series of self produced, episodic video games called “No World Dreamers: Sticky Zeitgeist Episode 1, HYPERSLIME” (Heartscape & Rook, 2017). My analysis of this artwork will be done through the philosophical tools of post-human feminism, and in particular those of philosopher Patricia MacCormack as presented in her book chapter “Lovecraft’s Cosmic Ethics” (MacCormack, 2016). It is in this chapter that MacCormack proposes the “use” of Lovecraft within the post-human feminist project. Lovecraft’s supposed “aversion to the carnal” combined with his stories frequent encounters with overwhelming, fleshy, or cosmic imanense allows them to be brought into the unlikely company of philosopher Luce Irigaray (MacCormack,2016). MacCormack ask’s not for a revision, but a “use” of Lovecraft, queering his writing into an “ethical erotics of alterity” (MacCormack, 2016). I speculate that under this, Lovecraft’s writing remains within the sphere of “horror”, though this sphere becomes more heterogeneous. This reading of Lovecraft has precedent in the work of philosopher Gille Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari who see within his work a “becoming animal”, which is to say breaking open the law of what is a human into a “becomings-elementary, -cellular, -molecular, and even Becomings-imperceptible” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). What Deleuze and Guattari celebrate here is the replacing of a singular, molar self with a “pack”, or in the words of Lovecraft’s Carter “to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings” (Lovecraft, 2014). If becoming animal, merging and re-configuring other forms of being, kinship and sensation are not pushed back in phobic disgust, the question must be asked “horror for who?” (MacCormack, 2016).  

The word “horror” itself becomes slippery under these conditions. I use it to refer to the genre, the signifiers, and indeed some of the sensations felt by actors within such narratives as well as our own observing them. However the thing that I bracket out from horror is the assumed ethical position which might privilege order, the majoritarian and the phallogocentric above difference, speculation, affect.

It is my proposal that Sticky Zeitgeist represents a similar horror which denies the human, and displays the same difference-celebrating, erotic possibilities which MacCormack pulls from Lovecraft. I argue that Sticky Zeitgeist is horror but that the majoritarian subject,the one who should be horrified, is absent. It is not a fan-fiction reversal which pulls a monsters into the foreground, making them sympathetic by conforming to Majoritarian structures of power, value and morality, anthropomorphising them. Rather, Sticky Zeitgeist just doesn’t care about about those structures, and forges its own.   

Firstly we are going to establish some of the key concepts used by MacCormack and then trace them through the world of Sticky Zeitgeist. The first of these is the “Ahuman”, and while this term has many applications I start with a extract from MacCormack’s own recent definition, in Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova’s 2018 “Posthuman Glossary” (Braidotti & Hlavajova, 2018);

“Ahuman theory promotes catalysing becoming- other from the majoritarian or all human privilege and renouncing the benefits of the Anthropocene. [Methods for which include] the use of all manifestations of art to form new terrains of apprehension of the world and encourage new ethical relations between entities” (MacCormack, 2018).

In this definition, the Ahuman is positioned within a radical animal rights discourse of abolitionism, which seeks to avoid what is sees as the anthropocentric raising of animal to human equivalence. Rather than bringing the nonhuman into the human ethical sphere, which MacCormack considers both impossible and nessecerally nonconsensual, the abolitionist position bases nonhuman rights upon the fact “that it is” rather than “what it is” (MacCormack, 2018). More importantly for the subject of this paper, “Abolitionists are activists against all use of animals, acknowledging communication is fatally human, so we can never know modes of nonhuman communication and to do so is both hubris and materially detrimental to nonhumans” (MacCormack, 2018). This is perhaps the most crucial aspect of the Ahuman for our purposes, difference is to exist on its own terms, and the capturing action of communication is not required to acknowledge this difference.

Now it is time to approach “No World Dreamers: Sticky Zeitgeist. Episode 1  HYPERSLIME”, which importantly begins with a flurry of difference, including characters which might point to are never captured by the myths of either “animal” or “human”. After the opening theme song, the episode is epigraphed with a quote;

“Make a 150-lb self-contained, 3-D person into a square-mile thin pancake and you’ve got a slimey veneer of organic matter of no use to you or the observer puzzled by the thin, gooey-drip man. Suburbias and exurbias are promoters of slime.”

This quote is attributed to italian architect Paolo Soleri who’s concept of arcology, low-waste, high population density, self sufficient vertical urban structures runs, though mainly as a mutant form, throughout this narrative. Our story’s first protagonist “Ever”, considers the quote and posits that they themselves are are even further dispersed, trapped in a room and glued to a screen they are “Hyperslime”. Ever’s response to this realisation is to get high, masturbate and surf the internet, something which is itself one action as under the glow of her network terminal, Ever pokes the drug “girl chunks” into their arsehole. Ever comments on the impossibility of describing this drug-data-sex experience, “if i wasn’t experiencing this, i couldn’t describe it and i can’t remember when i’m not experiencing it what i’m not experiencing hypersucrose on my frontal lobe like-” before be interrupted by a call from work (Heartscape & Rook, 2017).

The impossibility of language, which has already been brought up in the Ahuman’s relation to the nonhuman as posited by abolitionist animal rights activists, surfaces repeatedly in MacCormacks discussion of Ahumanity and Lovecraft’s horror where we are shown “what is possible, while managing to show that it is also unnameable” (MacCormack, 2016). For MacCormack human language is the “great annihilator of the the potentialization of expressivity and affect of entities that are not counted by the majoritarian human” (MacCormack, 2016), but in the world of Lovecraft such language is demonstrably powerless. Encounters are beyond description, are left as such. The ethical turn which is executed upon Lovecraft demonstrates the inadequacy of the word “horror” to account for such experience. “Horror for some, the very opening of the world to others” (MacCormack, 2016). Or as articulated by Lovecraft himself, “Fright became pure awe, and what had seemed blasphemously abnormal now only ineffably majestic” (Lovecraft, 2014).  

Returning to Sticky Zeitgeist the collapsing of self, sex and connection is ecstatic. The message demanding she travels to work is the cue for Ever’s horror. The world outside her room, which she describes as the “Goblin’s pit” is loaded with signs, both literally in the form of adverts for jobs, bands and lost fast food establishments but in the fixed overlay of time, behaviour, social relations etc. Ever’s chance to pass invisibly into order relies on her getting her bus to work while in constant fear of the drugs and saliva leaking from her underwear. The bus is late, she is going to be late, and she falls into a panic attack. The panic attack itself is represented as the game descends into a gross, nonsense parody of the call and response rhythm game “PaRappa the Rapper”. “You snooze, you oooze! Then you lose! Control of your holes!” (Heartscape & Rook, 2017).

The abject, what Julia Kristeva describes as “the place where meaning collapses” is not simply the girl chunks leaking from Ever, but also Ever herself (Kristeva, 1984). When she first sets out on this trip to work she narrates “i exit from the back of the house like shit” (Heartscape & Rook, 2017). Ever is the remainder and excess who themselves cannot either hold the outside in or keep it out but is in a constant asignified flow which because impossible and traumatic only within the unaccommodating and regimented parts of the world.

As we continue to play the game focused initially on the narrative of Ever, more signs of horror perpetuate. The first of these is the User Interface that frames the game space, cables and visera weave into one another frame a screen and text/hyperlink area bringing to mind the mid 90s point and click horror adventure Dark Seed with graphics by H.R. Geiger. At the top, a ribbon cable is plugged in through a smashed secondary screen or logo area, leaving only a few letters of the game’s title readable. In Sticky Zeitgeist, as in much of Heartscape’s other work, trash pervades. Everything is a remainder, including characters. Everything is an improvised hack, survival mixed with abandonment and most importantly not fully namable. This extends to the characters themselves, Ever is only described as a girl, her ears and nose suggest a dog or maybe a goat. It’s implied that she is trans, but none of this is cause of elaboration to the audience. Other characters display equal fluidity, maybe becoming robots, maybe becoming moths. Gender is explicit though, all are referred to with female pronouns. They are “she”, “her” and “sisters”.

The remainder, to be in excess of or less than names and categories runs through Lovecraftian horror. The folks of Innsmouth, the mercurial Old Ones themselves or various landscapes and objects and experiences. MacCormack quotes Luce Irigaray, “Already constructed theoretical language does not speak of the mucous. The mucous remains a remainder, producer of delirium, of dereliction, of wounds, sometimes of exhaustion” (Irigaray, 2017). This connectivity, abjection, transgression is the stuff of horror, but it is also the stuff of erotics and kinship. The two robot sisters in Sticky Zeitgeist sit together on a train, one, Agate leaning against the other who narrates,

“She’s in sleep mode. She spends most of her time there. Our brains make a lot of connections at super fast high frequency. Hard to shut out the bad connections. Everything reminds you of something else. Contaminated with information”  (Heartscape & Rook, 2017).

The default state is porosity, leaky bodies. The sister blocks out the connection of thought and meaning but retains that of touch. Later the sleeping sister will visit a 7-11 and watch the rotating “honk dogs”, remarking “how nice to be rotated”, an empathetic encounter with convenience food (Heartscape & Rook, 2017). The characters in Sticky Zeitgeist are nonhuman, but they are not fixed as one kind of nonhuman. Any encounter is a “becoming animal” as everything holds an affective charge, or is a biological contaminant (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). As the player of the game we are often unsure who “we” are. The first person narrative flickers between characters often without indication of who is speaking. We have to assume that we are all of the pack, while acknowledging that this pack is constantly in flux. What stands out is that the four characters are not presented as an isolationist group as with the majority of narratives on survival. Their job is to travel out into a lushus swamp and salvage broken parts of downed satellites and one character comments “I like to rub my face on the debris to make sure the radiation is getting the most direct access to my brain” (Heartscape & Rook, 2017). The group is open and loving with one another in their fluidity while also being open to difference in the world around them, to be changed by it through drugs, radioactivity, hormone replacement therapy or the beautiful leaky swamp they eventually head out into.

In 2012’s “Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory” MacCormack states that “The art encounter elucidates the new horror and wonder of being in the asignifed world as a new state of constant ecstasy” (MacCormack, 2012). Engaging with art including, or perhaps especially, with horror, is not simply about representing alterity but an affective encounter which breaks open the category of human. This is the argument MacCormack makes for the ecstatic experiences of the characters in Lovecraft’s works, as well as the readers experience of these work of art. As we find ourselves adrift in asignification we are becoming Ahuman. I conclude that Sticky Zeitgeist presents the ethical plurality that arguably the works of Lovecraft must be made to extract. Sticky Zeitgeist represents a kind of horror which is not. Bodily, cognitive and social difference, are not presented as needing hygienic eradication but simply are. Character’s might experience violent trauma and live in a world of unpredictable trash but there is neither a call for order, nor dialectic refusal of order. What is valuable about this kind of horror, is it neither exoticises difference nor pulls it to the ethics of the human. MacCormack states that “The ethics of the art-encounter shows becoming ahuman is viable and necessary for new ways of thinking alterity in the realities of life for oppressed (sub) human subjects” (MacCormack, 2012). Sticky Zeitgeist does exactly this, a queering of horror to remove the human entirely.

MacCormack, P. (2018). Ahuman, The. In Posthuman Glossary (1st ed., pp. 20–21). London Oxford New York New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Heartscape, P. C. (n.d.). CV - Porpentine Charity Heartscape. Retrieved 24 April 2018, from http://slimedaughter.com/cv.html

Heartscape, P. C., & Rook. (2017). No World Dreamers: Sticky Zeitgeist. english.

Irigaray, L. (1993). An ethics of sexual difference. Cornell University Press.

Irigaray, L. (2017). To Speak is Never Neutral. Retrieved from https://nls.ldls.org.uk/welcome.html?ark:/81055/vdc_100049157992.0x000001

Lovecraft, H. P. (2014). The new annotated H. P. Lovecraft. (L. S. Klinger, Ed.) (First edition). New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.

MacCormack, P. (2012). Posthuman ethics: embodiment and cultural theory. Farnham, Surrey, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

MacCormack, P. (2016). Lovecaft’s Cosmic Ethics. In R. Campbell (Ed.), The Age of Lovecraft (pp. 199–214). University of Minnesota Press. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1b9x1f3.15

[syrupwit]

Letter for Trick or Treat Exchange 2020

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Hello there, and welcome to my letter for Trick or Treat Exchange 2020! I appreciate that you’ve taken the time to read this letter. I hope that it will provide you with clarification, inspiration, or at the very least a bit of entertainment.

Although I’ve written more for some sections and less for others, rest assured that I would be super excited to receive a gift for any of my requested fandoms, characters, or fanwork types.

Please see the table of contents below:

Likes

Do Not Want (DNW)

Fandom: The Bureau d'Echange de Maux - Lord Dunsany

Fandom: Carnacki the Ghost-Finder - William Hope Hodgson

Fandom: Invader Zim

Fandom: The Magnus Archives

Fandom: Stellar Firma

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LIKES

For Treats, some general things I like are:

Silly, clever, or situation-based humor

Surreality and weirdness

Lore and worldbuilding

Stories-within-a-story

Slice of life, especially light moments for darker canons

Unusual team-ups

Dramatic rescues

First times

Seasonal and holiday-related tropes -- autumn weather, changing leaves, spooky foods, candy, friendly ghosts, haunted houses, horror movies, costume parties

For Tricks, some general things I like are:

Dark comedy, gallows humor, horror comedy

Psychological, paranormal, and cosmic horror

Creepy lore and worldbuilding

Unreliable narrators

A lingering sense of unease

Examining darker aspects of canon

Obsessive, love-hate relationships between adversaries or people who are in conflict over something

Corruption

Dubcon where a third party or outside force is responsible for the situation, or where the dubconned party enjoys it

I have a very long list of fic likes here.

Please see my Multifandom Horror Exchange letter for more about my horror likes.

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DO NOT WANT (DNW)

Characters under age 16 involved in sexual situations

Sex without mutual attraction

Hate speech

Harm to animals (the existence of ghost animals is OK, but I don’t want to hear about injury, abuse, or death of animals)

Fandom-Specific DNW Exception for TMA: Mention of canonical, character-motivation-significant cat death is fine.

Bestiality

Scat

Necrophilia (sexual activity involving ghosts is OK, just not corpses or remains)

Sexual activity involving worms / spiders / insects

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THE BUREAU D’ECHANGE DE MAUX - LORD DUNSANY

Fanwork Types Requested: Treat - Fic, Trick - Fic 

Characters Requested: Shop Owner

This short story can be read online for free here. CW for brief antisemitism (it’s one line/mention, but it caught me off guard, so).

I actually hadn’t read this story before seeing it in the tagset, but what an intriguing premise! I’d love to hear more about the shop owner’s business and the bargains his customers make. The trades in the story seem intuitively equal -- life for death, troubling intelligence for happy ignorance, a phobia for a phobia -- but what more unusual types of trades might occur? Has anyone ever tried to rob the shop owner? What strange or ordinary-seeming locales has his shop traveled to, and how does he feel about them? I’m interested in Trick and Treat takes on all of these questions.

I really like Lord Dunsany’s style and would enjoy anything in that tone. If you wanted to bring in some of his other short story characters, like Nuth or the bad old woman in black, that would be great. I’m also open to crossovers for this fandom with all fandoms I’ve requested in this exchange or any previous one.

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CARNACKI THE GHOST-FINDER - WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON

Fanwork Types Requested: Treat - Fic, Trick - Fic 

Characters Requested: Thomas Carnacki

The original nine short stories about Carnacki can be read online for free here. Project Gutenberg also has the first six stories.

Among fictional occult detectives of the early twentieth century, Carnacki has a special place in my heart. He gets scared, he makes mistakes, he does weird things with colored lights and electricity, and sometimes he figures out that the haunting was a hoax. While the supernatural cases that Carnacki investigates are (in my opinion) genuinely scary, those occurrences that turn out to have a mundane explanation are just as suspenseful.

Hodgson’s cosmic horror worldbuilding, as well, is inventive and unusual. My favorite Carnacki story, “The Hog,” concerns a malevolent extra-dimensional pig that attempts to manifest in the world by tormenting a frightened dreamer. Other adversaries include a ghost horse, a cursed ancient dagger, and a giant pair of whistling lips.

For Treats, I’d like to see Carnacki tackle a lighter-hearted problem or deal with an antagonist that’s more silly than sinister. The stories’ conceit is that Carnacki calls his four closest friends to dinner every so often and makes them wait until the meal is finished to recount his latest case. I’d also enjoy something about his relationships with them, maybe a situation where his personal and professional lives clash or he acquires a new quirk after an odd case.

For Tricks, I want ghost pigs and ghost pigs only. Just kidding! I’d really like to hear more about the creatures and lore of this universe, as well as the beings, texts, and rituals that Carnacki references or uses in his work. More mistakes, near misses, and terrifying encounters are always welcome.

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INVADER ZIM

Fanwork Types Requested: Treat - Fic, Trick - Fic 

Characters Requested: Dib, Zim

Apparently one of my forever fandoms. To re-use my own words: There’s something irresistible to me about the blend of snappy comedy, unapologetic pessimism, and hints of a more complicated universe that we just get to see. I’m not up to date on the comics yet, but please feel free to include canon from comics, show, or movie.

Dib

I love Dib’s obsessiveness, his alienation, and his frantic pursuit of approval from a community and society that couldn’t care less about him. He wants to be the hero, but his actions are selfishly motivated and often result in catastrophe. I’m really endeared by his devotion to the paranormal and the ridiculous situations he’s drawn into. 

Dib/Zim is my OTP, but I also enjoy them interacting as enemies or frenemies. (I would prefer any sexual content be set when Dib is 16 or older.) For gen, I’m interested in Dib’s family relationship with Gaz, potential friendship with Tak, and encounters with aliens, cryptids, monsters, ghosts, and other paranormal investigator types.

Zim

Zim is a total disaster, and that’s what I love about him. Like Dib, he’s stuck in a futile quest for validation from leaders and peers who would prefer he not exist. I like that he’s gullible and easily scared -- cf. “Germs,” his meltdown over the VHS copyright notice in “FBI Warning of Doom” -- yet unusually chaotic and dangerous even among his species. He also has a subconscious layer of... neediness, I think? that could be really interesting to explore.

Again, Dib/Zim is my OTP. For gen interactions, I like Zim’s relationships with GIR, Ms. Bitters, the Tallest, and any other invaders, as well as random hapless humans and experiments and so on.

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THE MAGNUS ARCHIVES

Fanwork Types Requested: Treat - Fic, Trick - Fic  

Characters Requested: The Buried, The Vast, Adelard Dekker, Jurgen Leitner, Peter Lukas, Gertrude Robinson

My favorite horror podcast! I may be obsessed at the moment. I love the tone and worldbuilding of TMA -- the entropy and hopelessness, the way the monsters don’t play fair, the semi-religious devotion of avatars to their patrons.  I also love characters figuring out the magnitude of the awfulness they’re dealing with, and fighting against overwhelming odds.

The Buried

A fascinating fear! I’m really attracted to the Buried’s mix of attributes -- not just dirt, asphyxiation, and the subterranean, but also pressure, metaphysical weight, oppressive circumstances and hopeless struggle.

This entity’s particular aspects of denial, and of accepting increasingly adverse or strange conditions -- the pit, the statement giver from “Dig,” Karolina Górka considering a nap on the Underground -- both unsettle and delight me.

I feel that both the Buried and the Corruption have this compelling theme of like... suffocating, boundary-crushing love, that takes a person’s identity, will, and outside connections but leaves them a sense of belonging or importance. Then, on the other hand, the Buried can also belittle as it isolates. I thought Hezekiah Wakely’s identification of the Buried with rest and peace, and the Sunken Sky’s evocation as a mercy, were very interesting as well.

For prompts: I really love archaeology and ancient history, so I’d love anything about the Buried in connection to that. An anon on FFA brought up the Kola Superdeep Borehole as a potential hook for the Buried, and that idea is quite  interesting to me. I’d also love to hear about any of the statement givers from canon, the coffin’s other victims, or any main or original characters encountering this entity.

The Vast

Heights are one of my most visceral fears in real life, despite not being something I’m conceptually afraid of. I am requesting the Vast because I would like to be conceptually afraid of it!

Elements of this entity that intrigue me: the image of the Falling Titan, nihilism (and finding freedom in it), insignificance, call of the void, oceans / storms / cliffs, space, scales of size so large they’re not humanly comprehensible, Simon Fairchild’s love for the sky, delineation from the Lonely, opposition to the Buried, unusual manifestations.

As with the Buried, I really love the justifications that avatars give for their devotion to a power -- something exploring that, the choice to serve and the benefits that someone either gains or rationalizes after the fact, would be amazing. As stated above, unusual manifestations of fears are my jam, especially things that start out looking like one power but turn out to have a different affiliation.

I’d be interested in hearing about any canonical statement givers, avatars, main characters, or original characters encountering the Vast, or perhaps just a record of a past manifestation. I love stuff that’s grounded in a place, time, or feeling, so something super-specific or historical would be awesome. But, again, I really just want to be scared.

Adelard Dekker

Such an interesting character, and with depths yet to be explored! I enjoy his pragmatism, sense of humor, and relationship with his faith. I’m intrigued by the question of his allegiance and motivations, as well.

I’d love to hear more about Dekker’s pursuit of the Extinction -- perhaps the incident or incidents that first made him suspect its existence? accidental Extinction!Dekker? -- and his apparently far-flung contact network. I ship him both romantically and platonically with Gertrude, and I’d be interested to hear about their first meeting or other cases they collaborated on. Additionally, Dekker/Tim is a rarepair that intrigues me -- perhaps they meet in an AU where Tim becomes Dekker’s apprentice, and they take down Nikola together? I’d be open to seeing him interact with any character you think might be interesting, whether in a gen or shippy way.

Jurgen Leitner

I just want to know about the cataloging system he uses. Alternately, MORE LEITNERS. Alternately, ohh, the hubris! Leitner’s motivations for starting his library, vs. what he actually ends up effecting... aiii. I’m interested in what role the Eye played there, or how others may have manipulated him.

I don’t have any ships for Leitner, but for gen I would be interested to see him interact with Gertrude, his assistant, or Gerard Keay. Elias or Peter Lukas could also be interesting -- potentially funny, potentially sad or ominous.

Peter Lukas

On the one hand, a sinister sea captain and the heir of a frightening legacy; on the other, an annoying boss who refuses to learn basic computer skills and says things like “You and me, the dynamic duo!” I enjoy how petty and human Peter seems, at the same time that he’s this remote and gleeful monster.

I ship Peter/Martin super hard, but I also enjoy gen Peter & Martin and both gen and shippy interactions involving Elias. Additionally, I’m really interested in what happened for Peter to transport Gertrude to Sannikov Land, given their animosity. (Peter and Gertrude interacting seems like it could be hilarious.) For a fish-out-of-water scenario, I’d also like to see something where Peter feels out of control or threatened -- like, perhaps he’s caught in another avatar’s trap, or forced to be around other people for a bet or some strange purpose.

Re: Peter/Martin: I would prefer for Martin to gain the upper hand, even if it’s just in principle. I really like the idea of Peter going along thinking he’s in control, he’s seduced Martin to the Lonely, his plan is moving along -- and then he’s suddenly hit with all these feelings that he doesn’t know what to do with, because he’s never been in this situation before. On Martin’s part, I like it when he’s sort of reluctantly allured, but also contemptuous and focused on his own plan. And I would absolutely love some weird monster courting rituals -- Peter trying to impress Martin, but not quite pulling off “human” or “not disturbing.” I’m not married to these sorts of dynamics, though -- if there’s one you like better, please write it.

Gertrude Robinson

My favorite character! I love her practicality, dry wit, and self-control, but I also love stuff exploring her weaknesses, blind spots, regrets. I like that she can be smug and sometimes cruel, but not to the point where she violates her own principles (or, at least, not in her own opinion). I like that her backstory is so simple. I just really like Gertrude, in general.

For solo Gertrude, I’d like to learn more about her early days at the Institute -- maybe some of those heroic ideas she mentions she had, or their gradual dispelling. I’m also interested in seeing her solve problems, travel to unusual (or totally mundane) places, and face all kinds of supernatural nonsense. How did she get so unflappable? Is it mostly temperament, or was it a process?

For Gertrude ships, I could be convinced to ship her with pretty much anyone, but especially Agnes, Adelard Dekker, Emma Harvey, and Mary or Gerry Keay. For gen, I like her with everyone. I just want to see Gertrude interact with people!

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STELLAR FIRMA

Fanwork Types Requested: Treat - Fic, Trick - Fic 

Characters Requested: Hartro Piltz, Trexel Geistman, David 7, IMOGEN

I love this podcast so much it’s ridiculous. If I recall correctly, it’s been described as a cross between Brazil and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; this strikes me as accurate. I love how the tone is at once silly and exuberant, but also dark and messed-up, in an absurd way that doesn’t try to hammer listeners over the head with its irony. (Please feel free to explore that darkness in a Trick.) Also, it’s funny.

Hartro Piltz

I fell head over heels for Hartro’s character somewhere between her first appearance and the Executive Quarterly mini-episode where she reveals that her alarm clock launches her headfirst at the floor every morning (“I like to really smack awake”). She’s such a fun villain, and her attempts at team bonding with David and Trexel are oddly endearing. I like that it’s made clear that she’s as much at the mercy of Stellar Firma as everyone else, just with more perks.

For ships, I’m really into Hartro/Trexel, and I could get behind some Hartro/Trexel/David 7 as well. (If foot stuff is opt-in, consider me opted in.) For gen interactions, I like Hartro with anyone -- not just the other main three, but Standards, Sigmund Shankeray, and other members of her team or clients.

Trexel Geistman

Trexel is the worst, and I adore that about him. I love how thoroughly the show demonstrates his jackassery, and how it’s still possible to sympathize with him and see how he got where he is at the same time that you (I) just want to shake him.  His responsibility-abnegating, depression, and alcoholism seem weirdly realistic, or at least reality-informed, and they weight his character in a way that I find compelling. I love his songs and weird shticks (Detectives and Detonations <3), and lapses into grandiosity and fantasy.

For ships, I like Trexel with Hartro or David 7 or both. Bathin/Trexel and Percy/Trexel, as well. Broom/Trexel, ehh. For gen interactions, I’m interested in seeing him interact with just about anyone -- but I’m especially curious what he did to Space Gertrude’s space tug (from Episode 25, one of the character witnesses from the trial). For seasonal-themed prompts, I am amused by the idea of Trexel as a horror host -- thanks, FFA -- or something else along the lines of the TMA crossover mini-episode.

David 7

Poor, sweet, innocent, possibly-doomed David 7. I love his rage, his affinity for crafts, and the bits where he gets swept up in the excitement of planet-designing (or planet-selling, or problem-solving) and can’t contain his enthusiasm. And I love his progression, over the first two seasons, from timid and cautious to just plain fed up.

For ships, I like David/Trexel, David/Bathin, David/Bathin/Trexel, and David/Trexel/Hartro. David and IMOGEN are interesting to me both platonically and romantically. For gen, I am again interested in seeing him interact with just about anyone.

IMOGEN

How much power does IMOGEN have, exactly? At some point, I hope we find out. I love her chipper sarcasm and barely-hidden dark side, and I hope that she eventually gets a vacation.

I don’t really ship IMOGEN with anyone, though the idea of David/IMOGEN is interesting. Her dynamic with David seems to have an unusual tension built into it, where they get along well and he trusts her but she can’t stop herself from threatening him with gun walls and there’s some murkiness about everyone’s motivations. Oh! IMOGEN and the Board, IMOGEN and the senior executives -- what’s going on there? IMOGEN and the station, IMOGEN and near-omnipotence -- there are a lot of fascinating things to explore about her as an AI.

[baobinhuadep-blog]

Lord from the Travels Fictional Research Essay or dissertation Essay

As observed in these penetration, a narrator transports Ralf’s ideas which have been in finally individual: Book Review Adept Of your Travels Spoiler Review Head of the family With the Jigs Spoiler Twins, who will be working at the flame, view it and cost prestashop, screaming in regards to the huge, overstated simply by dark in addition to their fear. Greed And Electrical power Throughout Head of the family With the Lures By way of Invoice Golding Another interpretation in the title is actually “the energy corruption” (master is short for strength and also goes depict decompose).

Their capabilities with searching as well as rhetoric succeed them this loyalty associated with most people. Some sort of conch receives a symbol of energy, plus the one who keeps it may talk without interruption via any individual yet Rob. As soon as the children will be getting stuck about the region, they can be left to their personal gadgets and it’s also definitely not up until the novel’s finish that grown-up seems to be recovery these folks. Quickly a few of the males tend to be shocked by way of unearthly wailing – it’s Percival, exactly who went to sleep now had awaken to uncover themselves on it’s own. Lord with the Flies is packed with spiritual individual references, beginning from this identify, which is a language translation with the brand with Beelzebub, a emporer from the challenges.

Boys’ Tendencies while in the Our god of your Jigs by Invoice Golding

Composition Paper Most effective Paper Ever Composed Our god Lures Ap Dialect And Make up Rhetorical Investigation Essays Another important theme is abuse. However, eventually, it’s a wild fire in which translates into a relief of your left over children. Jack port gets an excessive amount of the thirst intended for electric power; this specific testifies dangerous. The item commences with the particular boys’ arrival within the island. Argument Influential Essay or dissertation Topicsargument Conviction Article Matters Influential Composition School Worry In College Lifestyle Paper Spanish Your person not been as successful frontward, out of cash this ring and lost his balance across the difficult edge of the actual rock for the sand from the drinking water.

Boys’ Tendencies while in the Our god of your Jigs by Invoice Golding

To accessibility ultius.world wide web you need to comprehensive the CAPTCHA obstacle over. The nasty of man’s instinct usually shows the inner night of which can be found within just individuals. If the guys attain the climaxing in their savagery they begin worshipping your Monster in addition to attributing inhuman characteristics, for example shape-shifting, into it, in addition to their savagery boosts until they will obliterate an innocent young man. But boys and girls decide to election and elevate connected with hands delivers wining for you to Ralph. Piggy is not able to understand others’ purposes in addition to inner thoughts, and it’s certain everyone ought to imagine similar to him: as an example, through the Jack’s raid your dog assumes they will came to rob a conch, whilst information a lot more simple savages came to get some losing twigs. For example, for the first pig’s passing, the author functions dashes to develop stress. They displays the delicate side of human in addition to has the position of your democratic chief.

Boys’ Tendencies while in the Our god of your Jigs by Invoice Golding

It had become because Ron held the conch spend. conch, it’s pretty useful the other involving their close friends used it to be a trumpet and many others and many others. Golding, together with his trend make use of this myth construction, offers your pet a description that nearly complements Romeo by a few fairy tale, yet this argumentative essay writing service “prince” in only 14 yrs . Faithful for you to myth framework, Golding experienced recognized yet one more notable persona, Simon, which represents spiritual techniques.

The various readers with Lord of your Flies can be stunned moreover in which the boys’ individually plus with each other turn out to be crazy. People suppose that somebody else might have lived through the autumn, and so sensible Piggy demands that they can most really should have a meeting making set of bands. Created: 15/04/99 Current: 15/ 08/ 00 © Trademark 1998-1999 Ur. He / she indicates the subtle part of person as well as has the situation of a democratic chief.

Write the analytic article that you talk about your a symbol importance of grownups with the males. These thoughts obviously lead him to weighting odds of shelter, that are really low now. Ralph’s make an effort to emphasize everybody concerning the really need to keep flame does not work out. Ralph, annoyed, diverts everyone’s awareness of the actual fact they are creating a actual adventure. Essays Interface Master Flies But you will find something regarding the book that is definitely pending and also indeterminate: how are you affected towards the young boys if they go back home? Will they reintegrate to some regular, stable community along with readjust? This kind of article immediate necessitates a few inventive speculation where you take on the function in the writer. Create a strong paper in places you explain a character associated with power inside Lord on the Flies.

Twins, who are present at the shoot, find it in addition https://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2011/08/03/licenses-prices-fair-use-and-gsu/ to set you back the woking platform, ranting around the person, understand that by simply dark along with their fearfulness. The examination party actually gets to it’s purpose in the evening. But little ones decide to political election and uncomplicated raise involving hands and fingers produces success to help Ralph. Simon has a serious comprehension of dynamics of things, but, becoming a child plus a types of experienced, can’t look for the words and phrases to share his / her awareness. They signify this workout with mind along with scientific discipline, because it is using them the fact that young boys are able to find a flame.

Additionally, he tells this beast came to Adventure Rock around hide and is also capable of alter their overall look; this kind of rests these individuals decrease a bit, diverting their particular feelings from your fact they slaughtered one among their particular variety. Famous Invoice Golding’s fresh Lord of your Flies seemed to be printed in 1954. The policeman scorns Rob, flattened on his foot, among others, reminding these folks that they are United kingdom young boys. But youngsters attempt to political election as well as simple elevate of arms gives wining to be able to Ron.

They’re body fat, shortsighted plus is affected with bronchial asthma, thus additional kids really feel safe and sound for you to mock them as they wish. He or she is pompous plenty of to be able to propose themselves as a primary, while kids choose to get one, simply because he’s any go young man, an instalment chorister and might sing out throughout H pointed. A very good starting place for about this essay is always to examine the enhancement along with inevitable dissolution of the administration along with tentative society in “Lord of your Flies” (here is a bit more details on of which topic) It’s possible you’ll prefer to present you with a in close proximity studying of a single or even more passages that handle the function or understanding of parents specifically just for this dissertation. \ Cover ended up being much better than some sort of tree because this is a chance of revealing the set if you are observed.\ Obscure, then.” (Golding 217). A previous institution teacher, Invoice Golding seemed to be familiar with quite a few annoying areas inside habits with well-educated youngsters. For example, for the primary pig’s death, this author uses dashes to create stress. Lord On the Jigs Articles In Symbolism

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[jpechacek]

Eldritch Princesses: Jasmine

Previous design posts here and here.

Hoo boy.

The danger with Jasmine is that, unlike the others, she comes from a non-Western culture and it would be very, very easy to do something accidentally offensive or disrespectful. In a way, much of cosmic horror itself originates in a fundamental act of offense: Lovecraft was famously a giant freaking racist, and his famous Necronomicon was attributed to a “mad Arab”, whose otherness allowed Lovecraft do whatever he wanted and keep white civilization free of guilt. (Interestingly, the Necronomicon and other fictional manuscripts are frequently seen as a corrupting influence on Western white men; there are entire master’s theses here that I don’t have space to get into.) I don’t want to carry on the racist legacy of the genre, which for me means that if a princess is not white and/or comes from a culture not even close to me own, I need to do research. 

A lot of horror, intentionally or not, relies on choosing a trait of the Other and making it a threat. This is especially true of older stuff, like, again, ol’ Luvvie himself, but it’s still seen nowadays in subtler forms. Whatever kind of monster Jasmine is supposed to be, she can’t be something that carries on common negative stereotypes of Middle Eastern people. Since none of these monsters is particularly human, that’s not always going to be a danger, but there are certain things I specifically wanted to avoid. For instance, you can get a lot of horror out of a bizarrely sexual monster, but the West has a long history of sexualizing women of the Middle East. I did consider having her be some giant thing brooding behind screens and curtains, but realized that began to call up stereotypical notions of Islamic oppression of women (”the hijab is anti-feminist!”), harems, odalisques, etc.

And you know what didn’t help? As written, Jasmine is a pretty bland character. She wants to get out of the palace, and then...what? She meets a nice guy and that’s pretty much it. (And then she is sexy to distract the villain, which, okay, but that’s not a personality.) And she ends up staying in the palace anyway. Her tiger has more personality than she does.

So Jasmine became a void.

Here’s the rough. Jasmine, mostly void, partially stone, skulking in the ruins of a palace. I like stories where a creature lurks in deserted places, and things like ghouls are said to do so. And I really wanted to draw some intricate architecture and stretch myself.

Which brings me to another pitfall. A lot of Western media set in non-Western cultures has a tendency to mix and match aesthetic elements from different time periods, areas, even entirely separate cultures, just as long as it looks foreign enough. (Aladdin itself does this, mashing Persian, Moghul, Arabian, Syrian, and other Near Eastern styles together to arrive at its fantasy city of Agrabah.) This isn’t something I wanted to do. It’s disrespectful and assumes a monolith where none exists. Of course, there are broad similarities within a sphere of cultural influence, but that’s no justification.

The original Aladdin story is from the One Thousand and One Nights, which, evidence suggests, is ultimately of Persian origin. (Okay, sort of. The collection has been around for centuries and accumulated stories from many different cultures, but some important core stories and Scheherazade’s framing narration are Persian.) The story itself is allegedly set in China, probably just to make it seem exotic, but the trappings are clearly not Chinese, so I didn’t even bother pretending and just went with Persian. The specific model for the arch is the west iwan of the Jāmeh Mosque of Isfahān; however, since She’s not occupying any specific city, I didn’t copy the iwan exactly. The background architecture in the final piece below is from an older period than the mosque; whenever She took over the city, it was right after the iwan was built.

The final:

There She is.

Her companions are actually outgrowths of Her, as are the creeping pools of corruption in the ruined courtyard. (If you’re wondering, the lack of weeds/insects/other living things is very intentional.) I put a process video on Instagram if you want a brief glimpse into the detail work here; suffice it to say there’s a lot. All in all, I’m pretty happy with the finished piece; aside from some minor flaws, I don’t have any regrets.

Coming up next: Merida.