#even the supposed angst-fest of 10 is actually very funny

[the-hype-dragon]

just been replaying FF7 and thinking how disappointed I was that it didn't just get a straight remake, haven't played the remake simply because it's a bait and switch AU

but anyway idk why but this particular boss battle amused me so much, when I was younger I swear this game wasn't so funny but in spite of the dark tone it takes a lot of the time FF7 is probably the funniest 3D entry, here's our techno-soldier, our R&D guys asked themselves, what would happen if you crossed the Terminator with a toilet?

(the 90s were very weird)

maybe I'll take more screenshots later but the only way I could really enjoy this game was with Yuffie and Cid as Cloud's backup dancers, holy crap they just turn it into a completely different game. FF7 has this reputation as being very serious and emo but it really wasn't, at all lmao. I wish more games were like that, where EVERY scene changes depending on who's in the party. I had such a blast, I kind of kick myself for hating this game for so long, I just didn't know how to play it lmao

[dangermousie]

Heelo mousie! Love your blog! Do you mind recommending some of your favourite Chinese BL novels or shows?

I've seen the untamed and read it. I'm currently reading heaven's official blessing and I saw the donghua. Anything other than these two?

Awww, thank you!

Novels: I am gonna be lazy and literally copy/paste the entire danmei section of my top 10 web novels post (except MXTX’s stuff since you are already reading it.) Let me know if you need help finding any of these.

Lord Seventh - I am only partway through this so far, but it’s already on the list because it’s smart and somehow intense AND laid-back (not sure how this works, but it does) and is honestly just a really really solid and smart period novel, with the OTP a cherry on top of a narrative sundae. Plus, I love the concept of MC deciding he is not going for his supposedly fated love - he’s tried for six lifetimes, always with disaster, and he’s just plain done and tired. When he opens his life in his seventh reincarnation and sees the person he would have given up the world for, he genuinely feels nothing at all. (Spoiler - his OTP is actually a barbarian shaman this time around, thank you Lord!)

Golden Stage - my perfect comfort novel. Probably the least angsty of any danmei novel on this list (which still means plenty angsty :P) It also has a dedicated, smart OTP that is an OTP for the bulk of the book - I think you will notice that in most of the novels in this list, I go for “OTP against the world” trope - I can’t stand love triangles and the same. Anyway, Fu Shen, is a famous general whose fame is making the emperor   antsy. When he gets injured and can’t walk any more, the emperor gladly recalls him and marries him off to his most faithful court lackey, the head of sort of secret police, Yan Xiaohan. The emperor intends it both  as a check on the general and a general spite move since the two men   always clash in court whenever they meet. But not all is at is seems. They used to be  friends a long time ago, had a falling out, and one of the loveliest  parts of the novel is them finding their way to each other, but there is  also finding the middle path between their two very different  philosophies and ways of being, not to mention solving a conspiracy or  dozen, and putting a new dynasty on the throne, among other things. It always makes me think, a little, of “if Mei Changsu x Jingyan were canon.”

Sha Po Lang - if you like a lot of fantasy politics and world-building and steampunk with your novels, this one is for you. This one is VERY plot-heavy with smart, dedicated characters and a deconstruction of many traditional virtues - our protagonist Chang Geng, a long-lost son of the Emperor, is someone who wants to modernize the country but also take down the current emperor his brother for progress’ sake and the person he’s in love with is the general who saved him when he was a kid who is nominally his foster father. Anyway, the romance is mainly a garnish in this one, not even a big side dish, but the relationship between two smart, dedicated, deadly individuals with very different concepts of duty is fascinating long before it turns romantic. And if you like angst, while overall it’s not as angsty as e.g., Meatbun stuff, Chang Geng’s childhood is the stuff of nightmares and probably freaks me out more than anything else in any novel on this list, 2ha included.

To Rule In a Turbulent World (LSWW) - gay Minglan. No seriously. This is how I think of it. it’s a slice of life period novel with fascinating characters and  setting that happens to have a gay OTP, not a romance in a period  setting per se and I always prefer stories where the romance is not the only thing that is going on. It’s meticulously written and smart and deals with  character development and somehow makes daily minutia fascinating. Our   protagonist, You Miao, is the son of a fabulously wealthy merchant,   sent to the capital to make connections and study. As the story starts, he sees his friend’s  servants beating someone to death, feels bad, and buys him because, as  we discover gradually and organically, You Miao may be wealthy and  occasionally immature but he is a genuinely good person. The person he buys is a barbarian from beyond the wall, named   Li Zhifeng. It’s touch and go if the man will survive but eventually he does and You Miao, who by then has to return home, gives him his papers  and lets him go. However, LZF decides to stick with You Miao instead, both  out of sense of debt for YM saving his life and because he genuinely  likes him (and yet, there is no instalove on either of their parts, their bodies have fun a lot quicker than their souls.) Anyway, the two  take up farming, get involved in  the imperial exams and it’s the life of prosperity and peace, until an invasion happens and things go rapidly to hell. This is so nuanced, so smart (smart people in this actually ARE!) and has secondary characters who are just as complex as the mains (for example, I ended up adoring YM’s friend, the one who starts the plot by almost beating LZF to death for no reason) because the novel never forgets that few people are all villain. There is a lovely character arc or two - watching YM grow up and LZF thaw - there is the fact that You Miao is a unicorn in web novels being laid back and calm. This whole thing is a masterpiece.

Stains of Filth (Yuwu) - want the emotional hit of 2ha but want to read something half its length? Well, the author of 2ha is here to eviscerate you in a shorter amount of time. This has the beautiful world-building, plot twists that all make sense and, at the center of it all, an intense and all-consuming and gloriously painful relationship between two generals - one aristocratic loner Mo Xi, and the other gregarious former slave general Gu Mang. Once they were best friends and lovers, but when the novel starts, Gu Mang has long turned traitor and went to serve the enemy kingdom and has now been returned and Mo Xi, who now commands the remnants of his slave army, has to cope with the fact that he has never been able to get over the man who stabbed him through the heart. Literally. This novel has a gorgeously looping structure, with flashbacks interwoven into present storyline. There is so much love and longing and sacrifice in this that I am tearing up a bit just thinking of it. If you don’t love Mo Xi and Gu Mang, separately and together, by the end of it, you have no soul.

The Dumb Husky and His White Cat Shizun (2ha/erha) - if you’ve been following my tumblr for more than a hot second, you know my obsession with this novel. Honestly, even if I were to make a list of my top 10 novels of any kind, not just webnovels, this would be on the list. It has everything I want - a complicated, intricate plot with an insane amount of plot twists, all of which are both unexpected and make total sense, a rich and large cast of characters, a truly epic OTP that makes me bawl, emotional intensity that sometimes maxes even me out and so much character nuance and growth. Also, Moran is my favorite web novel character ever, hands down.

Anyway, the plot (or at least the way it first appears) is that the evil emperor of the cultivation world, Taxian Jun, kills himself at 32 and wakes up in the body of his 16 year old self, birth name Moran. Excited to get a redo, Moran wants to save his supposed true love Shimei, whose death the last go-around pushed him towards evil. He also wants to avoid entanglement with Chu Wanning, his shizun and sworn enemy in past life. And that’s all you are best off knowing, trust me. The only hint I am going to give is oooh boy the mother of all unreliable narrators has arrived!

The novel starts light and funny on boil the frog principle - if someone told me I would be full bawling multiple times with this novel, I’d have thought they were insane, but i swear my eyes hurt by the end of it. I started out being amused and/or disliking the mains and by the end I would die for either of them.

The Wife is First - OK, this one did not make my top 10 web novels but it’s a sweet, fun gay cottagecore fest. Our ML, a royal prince, and his spouse, a smart if delicate aristocrat, keep house, eat noodles, play with their pet tiger, make out and spoil each other rotten, while occasionally fighting battles and outwitting their court enemies. It’s so very mellow. That couple redefines low drama - they are both nice and functional and use their brains. It’s as if a nice jock and a nice nerd got together and then proceeded to be wholesome all over the place.

I mean, the set up could be dramatic - our ML the prince, lost his fight for the throne and is about to be killed. The only person who stayed loyal to him is his arranged husband the aristocrat guy who ML never treated nicely since he resented marrying him (marrying a man in that world is done to remove someone from the ability to inherit the throne.) And yet the husband stood by him not out of love but beliefs in loyalty blah blah. Anyway, he transmigrates back into the past right after their wedding night and is all “I got a second chance OMG! I don’t want the throne what is even the point? I want to live a good long life and treat the only person who stood by me really well!” And he proceeds to do so to the shock of the aristocrat who had a very unpleasant wedding night and generally can tell the man he just married would rather eat nails than be married to him. But soon enough (no seriously, it’s not many chapters at all) he believes the prince is sincere blah blah and then  they get together and they pretty much become cottagecore goals.

In terms of dramas, I only do period dramas (or novels) so I am not the person to be able to recommend any modern BLs. There is a flood of upcoming (hopefully) period BL dramas but it’s relatively thin on the ground now. The two I will recommend is Word of Honor (which is AMAZING) and Winter Begonia (which I just started watching but which owns me already.) I have a tag for both - the one for the former is huge and I cannot recommend either strongly enough. I’ve heard good things about The Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty, but I am not big on mysteries so haven’t watched it for myself.

In terms of the upcoming BLs, the ones I am most looking forward to are Immortality and Winner Is King, but The Society of the Four Leaves also looks promising.

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #443

Top Ten American High School Movies

So this week the kids are going back to school after their summer break, which is always a moment fraught with emotion (for us, not for them, they love school). However it’s even more of an angst-fest than usual this year, because notwithstanding ongoing and genuine concerns over just how safe school is and will remain, there’s also the fact that they’ve been at home all the time since March. This is probably the single greatest period of time all four of us has been in the house together. It’s madness, but it’s also glorious. Weirdly, I’m finding myself getting nostalgic for the beginning of lockdown; there’s a part of me that’ll miss organising their lessons every night and imposing a rough-hewn sense of order and schedule to the working day, the pair of them sat at the kitchen table doing printed-off worksheets or playing educational games from the BBC or wherever. As well as spending time together there was also a frisson of newness, a sense of shared learning and the feeling that, even if my work had dried up in lockdown and we were stuck at home, everyone was in the same boat so it didn’t really matter. We felt relatively safe in our little bubble, every wary step outside an adventure. They drew a mountain of pictures. I still didn’t finish my book. We bought a big monitor so it was easier for my wife to work from home. Good times, unless you turned on the news.

Anyway, they’re going back, notwithstanding further catastrophic spikes in infection rates. Everything’s going to keep being different, but in a different way. I’ll have to get used to dealing with pick-ups and drop-offs and I’ll probably always be worrying about what – and who – they’ve touched. But hopefully we’ll get used to it, hopefully no one will get sick, and it’s unquestionably beneficial for them to be in school with their teachers and friends and all that jazz.

So! School. I don’t wanna get maudlin or angsty about it, so I’m looking at schools through a prism of fun. And what’s more fun than a vaguely fantastical simulacrum of school life, filtered through a gauze of foreign motifs? American high school movies have been a mainstay of cinema all my life, and the tropes and trappings of their school life are almost as familiar as my own schooling. The same but different, the world of lockers in the corridor, gym class, jocks and nerds, cheerleaders, kids in cars, spelling bees and science fairs, all felt like a wish-fulfilment dream of a better, more grown-up school life. To turn the TV on for a second, the likes of Grange Hill paled in comparison to Saved by the Bell as far as I was concerned. Like Hogwarts, an American school was a cool school, a school you’d wish to go to, but that you knew didn’t really exist. I’m sure real high school life is not very much like it is in Clueless, for instance.

But – hey! – that’s all fine. Hospitals aren’t much like Grey’s Anatomy either, and I bet space is bugger all like Star Trek.

Anyway. Here are my favourite American high school movies. Enjoy.

10 Things I Hate About You (1999): using the weight of Shakespeare helps give the story strength and heft, but it succeeds in having one of those glorious teen casts of future greats. Perfectly pitched comedy as we unravel some teen archetypes, and at least one moment of stand-our brauvora spectacle as Heath Ledger serenades Julia Stiles. One of those scenes where you watch an unknown become a movie star in real time.

Clueless (1995): another teen film smartly utilising the classics, this gives us an even more stylised world in which to unpick those stereotypes, as seemingly vapid but good-natured Cher looks beyond her preconceptions. Gentle satire gives way to a cute romance, and in Dan Hedaya it boasts the best teen movie dad of all time.

Heathers (1988): a very dark but very funny look at high school life, as the supposed “it crowd” of glamorous girls and studly boys are, well, murdered by put upon outsiders. A satire on American exceptionalism but also a peek into the mindset of fundamentalism as their campaign continues to escalate to frightening extremes.

Brick (2005): using the tropes and trappings of a high school to present an alternative version of a classic mystery noir, this is less about examining existing stereotypes and cultures than twisting them to serve its plot and style. Invents its own teen slang, Clueless-style, but does so with a thirties gangster vibe, and expertly meshes these two worlds in a way that seems obvious.

The Faculty (1998): “the teachers are evil” is a common high school trope, here rendered literal by its funky millennial take on Invasion of the Body-Snatchers. As the school is taken over, a bunch of kids from – yep – different social sub-groups band together, put enmities aside, to basically kill their teachers. Fun horror comedy that, if you were a teen in 1998, felt smartly relevant.

The Breakfast Club (1985): John Hughes films are often considered teen-movie landmarks, even if they’ve often not aged well. Breakfast is probably the best at dealing specifically with high school, as its disparate heroes (again, each representing a different archetype) reveal depths beneath their surface personae. Angsty and on-the-nose but well-acted and with plenty of charm.

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017): Spider-Man is the best teen hero (sorry, Robin) because he’s navigating a traditional teenage high school life as well as being a superhero. No film has handled that better than Homecoming, where he deals with his secret identity, a date with his dream girl, and how being a superhero impacts his education.

Back to the Future (1985): I did consider whether this qualifies as a proper high school movie, but I think the school setting is actually pivotal; it juxtaposes the 1980s high school with its 1950s version, and is able to show how much has changed but the teenagers stay basically the same. And, of course, the climactic dance is the cornerstone of the plot. Finally, BTTF is one of the best-written films of all time and a masterpiece, only this low on the list because it’s not quite as high school-y as other films.

Carrie (1976): high school as horror film, obviously, but whilst there’s plenty of terror to be mined from Carrie’s powers and her mum’s fire-and-brimstone fundamentalism, it’s the petty cruelty and viciousness of school that feels darkest and yet most real. Carrie is horrendously bullied for stepping outside of her lane, and that is very high school.

Grease (1978): certainly not the best or most realistic examination of fifties high school life, but iconic enough to deserve its place. The lines between the various sub-groups are broadly drawn, as are the teachers (mostly fools), and the central struggle of the plot – tough guy, nice girl – is timeworn. But, of course, it’s carried off in oodles of style and some classic songs.

Incidentally, there were a few films that I excluded because whilst I think they’re excellent films about teenagers – Rebel Without a Cause, say – they’re not really about high school life. And, of course, I was focussing on American high schools, so no Harry Potter. Just in case you were wondering. And sadly I couldn’t find out how to stick Teen Titans Go! To the Movies in there somewhere.