un-pearable · 2 years ago
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a teeny bit of doodling that is actually cute enough to share
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popculturebuffet · 4 years ago
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Ducktales Shadow Into Light (Lena Restrospective) Finale!: Lena In Season 3! (Commission for WeirdKev27)
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Hello all you happy people and welcome to the FINAL part of my look at the life and times of Lena Sabrewing. It’s been a long and satsifying journey through the character’s rich arc and some of Ducktales 2017′s best episodes. Lena started as a tourtured but complacient teen willing to do bloody awful evil things if it meant her freedom, who through the power of love and friendship realized what she was doing wrong, that she loved Webby and turned on Magica... and after a brief stint of this going horribly wrong a magica simply just bodyjacked her, she sacrificed herself for Webby he story seemingly done. Of course it wasn’t, Disney woudln’t let them kill a teenager... fully grown lion men horrifcally decaying indiana jones style yeah, of course it’s disney, but killing a teen is where they draw the line. Point is Lena was merley trapped in the shadow realm with a bunch of those guys Yugi beat and with the help of everyone’s faviorte stoic hummingbird, freed Lena. Lena found new family in Violet.. but also found dying is easy but living is harder and had to wrestle with both her fears of turning out like Magica and Magica herself who naturally was gaslighting her to try and get the last scraps of her power back. We also took a detour or two to see where she came from: looking at both Minima De Spell and her rivalry with a 34 year pretending to be a small child, and Magica’s Shadow whose like Lena except almost nothing like Lena. We also took a look at her one comic apperance which was never released here for some reason and was incredibly disapointing. 
So yeah i’ts been one long, fun ride filled with gay subtext, launchpad’s spider sense, giant legs, movie refrences from warriors to jaws to nightmare on elm street 3: the dream warriors, toddlers who look and probably are 34, launchpad apparently huffing enough paint to damage his brain as that’s the only way to explain the terror of the terrafirmains subplot and gay subtext. I’ve enjoyed every step of the way so before I take the last one of those steps, i’d like to thank all of ya for reading this. I’ve gained at least 10 if not more followers off this series alone and I appricate all of you. I’d also like to thank Kev for directly comissioning this, keeping me in work and in x-men comics since 2020. 
As you can probably guess by the title.. this one’s a bit different. This is a combination of two things: The first is that i already reviewed “The Phantom and the Sorceress” when I was reviewing each episode of Season 3 as it came out.  My thoughts have not changed  at all so I felt redoing that review would be redudant and a waste of Kev’s money. The same goes for Split Sword, which has the extra issue of  being a three story episode with only one of the parts starring the focus of this retrospective. The second is while she shows up about the same amount as season 2, her apperances in season 3 outside of her Christmas Cameo are all more substaial outside of her two starring roles. Both COTHJSW and The Last Adventure shed some more light on our faviorite shadow and feel like natural evolutions of her character so it felt wrong to just flat out ignore them. 
So rather than do a full review of the episodes i’m just going to go into Lena’s apperances for Season 3. This way I can cover Phantom again without fully repeating myself, and fully track the last steps Lena takes as the series closes out in a fresh and hopefully enjoyable way. So join me under the cut for one last step into the shadows as we finish bringing Lena into the light. 
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Challenge of the Senior Junior Woodchucks!
Challenge was one of the very first Ducktales I ever talked about on here, alongside Quack Pack, so it’s quite a trip returning to it a year later, even if i’ts just my memories of it. It’s also an excellent episode, with a great and engaging main plot and a “it’s just kind of there” subplot. 
It’s also one of the only three episodes to focus on Violet, and one of only two that focuses just on her and not on Lena in any way. It is a shame: While I love Lena as a character, I wouldn’t of just spent several weeks talking about her if I wasn’t getting paid for this retrospective or not, Violet is equally intriguing and so i’ll be taking a second out to talk about her as I really HAVEN’T gone into her character this retrospective and given how important she is to Lena and to all of us, most Lena fans like Violet just as much and vice versa. I’ll still be talking about Lena in this episode, obviously, but I feel her sister from two misters deserves some time in the spotlight too as the show only gave her three episodes, and one was more focused on Webby and Lena by design and the other we’ll get to. 
Violet is an excellent character. She speaks well and with little emotion but that’s just how she is and she’s never called out for it or insulted, something I like. Likewise she dosen’t judge others, never really batting an eye at the rest of the groups own quirks and at most being freaked out by leg huey a bit. She’s just a kind, curious, intellgent young lady. 
And this episode shows that off: We get to see her in the spotlight of her own, every bit the Woodchuck Huey is and more, but still supporting and encouring him, seeing their contest as a friendly one and putting no stakes into it as she’s failed before, she can fail again. What matters is she get back up and keep going. Her “razzing” is also just downright adorable, and nicely shows off her and Lena’s new dynamic: they’ve gone from friends to siblings, something really not shown off last time and something that wason’t confirmed on screen till now but it just works naturally, the cool and collected but chaotic underneath that lena just plays perfectly off the uttelry calm and deadpan violet. It’s a natural, perfect dynamic that they clearly had mapped out from the beggining and simply had to build up to that. 
Her genuine shock at Huey’s betryal... hurts the heart, as she genuinely thinks it’s her fault and not just my boy having a panic attack and doing something questionable. But it also shows her character.. when givne the same opprunity and no guilt for it, he struck first.. she dosen’t. She saves him because it’s the right thing to do and shows Huey she really is the bettter woodchuck.. but htere’s no shame in it. It’s okay to fail, what matters is you keep trying. And as a result despite giving Huey the opporunity to win with her.. he turns it down. She gets a deserved win, celebrating with her family and just wearing the most adorable smile. She also just has.. buckets of chemistry with Huey. I mean it was apparent to me with the whole Library Scene in Nightmare but god damn do they ramp it up with this one. They just contrast each other perfectly here, the handshake is adorable and he clings to her.. while also being hilarious “I naturlaly defer to authority!”. I will take this ship to my grave, and fully support it... that being said if you ship Huey/Boyd or all three togehter, go for it man. I do the latter sometimes. Your good. You didn’t need me to tell that but sometimes shipping discorse can get downright ugly so rather than make it a war between two ships, I just wanted to offer an olive branch for once you know? Same with Weblena. I obviously adore that ship but if you have a non-boys ship with her, tha’ts cool too. Ship what you want to.. i’m just doing me through this retrospective. 
Now back to Lena. Her apperance in this episode is really heartwarming and really nice after all the shit she’s been through. This is the first episode she’s in where NOTHING bad happens to her. No really, every apperance, even her two cameos had her suffer in some way. She spent the entire first season grappling with Magica, and her season 2 apperances trapped in a shadow dimension and nearly loosing her girlfriend to her own jealously, horrifically stalked by her abuser using her own self doubt against her, attacked by a literal tempest in a tea pot and captured by aliens. The girl has not gone one friggin onscreen break since the series started and probably not many off it either. 
Here? She just gets to cheer her little sister, proudly celebrating both her and her new dads. She gets to teach her sister to trash talk, even if that ends up backfiring a bit but she meant well. And she gets to celebrate with her family when her little sister wins. It’s all small stuff.. but it’s all things she’s NEVER had. A sibling to be proud of and support. Dads to sit with and go places with. A family to celebrate things with. This is all pretty normal stuff, but not something everyone gets to have and something Lena NEVER had even remotely. But now she’ll ALWAYS have that. A supportive loving family to give her a place to belong, and to support in turn. After a nightmarish 14-15 years of existance, she’s FINALLY allowed to just be happy without having to fight a giant monster first. 
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She’s finally made it, she’s hoped and she’s waited, for the first time in her life she dosen’t feel alone. Her hearts started to heal, to know this is real, this is how it feels.. to have a home. Yes I haven’t given up on that song. And if you think this is the last time i’m going to quote a song you clearly didn’t read the review I did of the next episode. 
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The Phantom and the Sorceress:
Season 3′s primary focus outside of the FOWL plot was tying up loose ends. Pretty much every major recurring episode outside of Fethry got an episode tying up their character arc and of course Lena was no exception.
You’d think with Magica no longer a threat to her and having fully accepted she’s a good person now, and having found a place to belong that Lena was done.  But while she accepted her past, that she’s not magica, and that she deserves to be happy.. she never accepted Magic as part of her despite being made of it and that’s what this episode ties up as well as the mystery of the blue aura that surronded her magic at times. 
The episode starts with Lena’s amulet, which she has back now which is the only part of this episode I don’t like as they don’t really explain why she’d take it back from Violet. But her magic keeps goofing up and making Sleepovers dangerous, and gets Scrooge grousing about how magic is bad.. only to naturally backpedal when an angry Webby points out Lena is magic. He does amend things and genuinely apologize for it, having not meant her at all and not even thinking of her as part of his hatred of the stuff. It also shows why Lena likely didn’t take him up on his offer.. with her self loathing still going she probably thought he was just pitting her and would always resent her.. when really he just geninely did not care despite his overwhelming hate of magic. It worked out granted, she found a better fit for her family wise.
But Lena hates it too.. and while she hasn’t fully brought it up before it makes perfect sense: We saw how she viewed it as dangerous and not worth the risk to bring her back in Friendship Hates Magic and Magic has brought her nothing but pain, nearly killing her on several occasions, allowing magica to fuck with her head  or directly control her and general putting the one person she cares about more than anyone in harms way. She hates what she is.. because it’s brought her nothing but pain and misery. She has ever reason to resent it..
Yet this episode is about forcing her to accept it.... to realize that Magic is part of who she is, and that it’s not inherently good or bad, it’s all about the intent of who uses it. Her last two uses of it were not made with any malice and in fact using it to pull her friends into her dreams allowed her to break free of Magica. 
And it’s perfectly done by giving her a new enemy, something I REALLY wish tehy’d done with Fenton at some point, but get why it took this long with Lena: The Phantom Blot. The Phantom Blot, like many characters in this series is HEAVILY redone: he keeps the iconic look and threat level but instead of being an operatic supervillian, he’s an anti-villian with a link to magic he never really had before. He works with FOWL sure but it’s likely because unlike the rest of FOWL he actually agrees with Bradford’s goal for a less chaotic world and his desire to wipe out magic is perfectly in line with that. 
He’s also given a backstory that perfectly parallels him with Lena: Both were created by Magica in a way and horribly abused by her: Lena mentally and phsycially, and Blot by having to suffer under her rule after he took over her family and then barely survivie as she wiped out his villiage, his family and his normal life swearing vengance on her. LIke Lena magica didn’t care about him or see him as a threat, figuring like most people who swore eteneral vengance on her he’d get swatted down like a gnat once and never return. INstead he returned again and again and again for decades, learning each time getting stronger and wiping out more magic along the way. He went from what was probably a good normal person to a vengeful vigliante dedicated to wiping out magic good or bad because he can’t concieve that it isn’t ALL bad. He’s easily what Lena could’ve become if , ironically enough she hadn’t encountered him, seeing the end result of hating something just for what it is as it tried to murder her. That hating and resenting Magic would just lead her to become as hollow and vengful as the blot, having a good cause to start.. but slowly loosing yourself to hate and anger. Letting the person who ruined your life still control it simply by focusing all your energy on hating them and people like them. 
It also gives us an interesting and painful teamup as with the boys and Scrogoe stuck in another dimension, there’s only one person they can turn to deal with Magic: Magica herself, whose resulted to depression eating pizza and the most she can do as a threat is eat the garlic Violet was wearing in case of vampires (”There now your susceptible to vampires!” is easily the best joke of the episode, from how Magica eats the garlic in one bite to her manical laugh to Violet just being annoyed rather than terrified or anything). Magica only agrees because they have a common enemy and if he sucks up her magic amulet, that’s the end of any magic she has left. 
It’s also here we learn the reason for the blue and purple color coding: Duckworld magic is indeed color coded.. but rather than be based ont he emotions used or anything.. it’s based on the user. The purple is Magica, and as we later learn Poe’s, magic, and thus Lena borrowing it via the amulet. The Blue is HER magic. Tapping into her emotions and her own inante power. It’s a nice twist I didn’t see coming but makes absolute sense in hindsight: Every time she’s triggered it.. it’s been when she’s been using her own emotions and been doing thigns for her own good, and not for anyone elses. It also explains why the Magica powers aren’t working for her or stable: their not HERS to control and thus are fighting her. 
So she trains to use her own using the time honorted traditions of montages and having your sibling shoot things at you out of a magical amulet. She grows in her talent and power and herself, even if she learns from the person she hates more and comes to accept magic.. in time to fight the Blot who misguidedly thinks harming her will show Magica the pain he felt.. even though as we learn later that ship already sailed and we already knew she cares nothing for Lena. 
But as he drains her amulet... she focuses on what she cares about... and if we didn’t already ahvea  MOUNTAIN of subtext for webby and lena her “frienddship” montage has maybe one or two shots of her sister.. and about 80 of webby. Seriously they.. they weren’t even hiding it at this poitn outside of the finale, which we’ll get to. 
And so she takes hold of her magic, no longer need the amulet to channel it and taking on her super mode! Which was highly contreversal at the time.  BUt I get why. As a transformation, ala dragon ball, and a superhero type costume it works, giving her a power and grandeur not seen before and showing she’s using all of it, giving weight to when it only shows up in the finale when she needs it most and likely would’ve given it weight any other time it showed up. But it wasn’t clear if this was her permenant look now and Frank’s response to it was to say he wanted to dress everyone up in that outfit , at the same size Lena has it, including launchpad wearing it like a cape. Which while hilarious and it was, was also blatant trolling as her return in Split Sword showed it wasn’t her default form, and they could relax. But as a form showing the apex of her power, character development and confidence, it works and has all the drama i’d expect from a form like this, reflecting the blot’s power back onto him and overloading the gauntlet and facing down Magica easily. 
It’s the perfect way to cap things off... Lena finally acccepts herslef as she is fully: she’s not evil and neither is magic.. magic is a part of her and her power is not something to hate.. but to embrace. To use to protect the world from people LIKE Magica who would misue their power to harm others or the blot who belivie her power is inherently evil. This is a lena freed from the chains of self hatred, fully accepted. It turns her story into a wonderful, beautiful story of escaping abuse and accepting yourself as who you are, that no matter what you are or where you come from, you are beautiful, you are good and you can do good. And as she flies off with her sister and girlfriend, she’s finally, fully, truly at peace with who she was who she is now and flies into the future.. and to free her girlfirends dad from another dimension. Nothing is holding her back now, no one can push her around, she’s who she wants to be, she’s the master of her, and the thoughts enough to lift her off of the ground. She and Webby are independent together and they are flying. And yes i’m linking the song again. 
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But even with her character Arc Wrapped she still could support others in their own growth. Case in point:
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The Split Sword of Swanstantine!
This was the vingette episode, with a pair of the kids, one from Team Magic the other from the Duck Boys, going after a piece. And while Violet’s segment is neat it dosent’ really expand on her enough for me to go into it like I did with Challenge, so i’ll only be covering the cold open and Lena and Huey’s segment. Given these two are some of my faviorites, Lena hasn’t really gotten to have any meaningful interactoins with anyone besides Webby, Violet and Magica (And scrooge but for like.. two minutes), and this bit is really creative and intresting I loved it. It also has Steelbeak so I got a nice Jason Mantzokus fix on top of that despite him barely getting to speak in this one.. and really all season. Season 3 REALLY wasted Steelbeak, only using him three times and just ignoring the whole idea of him growing more compitent with time. Maybe Frank’s saving that for darkwing duck if he gets to do that I dunno. At least Invincible and Close Enough are using the man properly so I got that. 
THe setup to the episode as a whole is comedic gold: Scrooge has taken the kids to Monocrow to find the split sword, one of the missing mysteries before FOWl.. only to then realizze in one of the best jokes of the season, after HOURS of plane travel probably that Violet and Lena had also come along having slept over and thus spending the episode in their sleep clothes. As Violet puts it in LIebe’s best delivery of the series “You said eveyrone get on the plane so we got on the plane”. So, fricking relatable. Scrooge’s awkard “Do you.. like history?” is also great, David is a treasure, as if he’s just now realizing he really dosen’t know Webby’s closest friend and girlfriend and is scrambling for some common ground so he can stop talking. 1/2′s good enough and we’re off. 
Lena and Huey’s plot, the final one of the three, likewise has a simple setup: Huey finds the sword piece.. and also Steelbeak, whose ready to punch  him some children. Lena freezes time as she can do that but can’t delay the inveitble, just give them time to plan. 
And this is a nice showcase for Huey and a nice chance for Lena to be snarky as Huey wants to try anything and everything he can do that dosen’t involve fighting as he hates it and Lena endulges him as he gets tossed around, playing on her phone while he tries dumb scheme after dumb scheme from prtending to be his dad, to his inner child, to construction to offering him a snack, to “what sword piece” while hodling the sword blade twice his side behind his back.
Lena eventually calls him on it: He can’t keep avoiding this and there’s some reason he dosen’t want to fight. The reason turns out to be he bruce bannered himself and thus has a split personality for all his agression and primal rage, the duke of making a mess,  Huey’s version fo the McDuck family anger he’s buried away and is ashamed of, hating his  more impuslive emotions due to his desire for control. 
As for how Lena impacts this.. it’s her own acceptance of the part of her she hated, her magic, that gives her the clarity to help Huey, helping him realize like her this shit isn’t healthy and to make peace with the Duke instead of fighting him and locking him away. The result is a perfect combo: a huey with all the power and strength of a mcduck, but the nuance and tactics Huey normally has to beat Steelbeak easily. Lena is impressed, a friendship is forged and we see how far sh’es come: from hating herself.. to helping others stop doing it before it gets worse. 
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How Santa Stole Christmas!
All we really learn here is that she and Violet share a room and a king sized bed.. but we got that cheek smooch and I had to mention that so there you go. 
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The Last Adventure!:
Like most of the main cast Lena gets a decent note to go out on, if a bit wobbly. The wobblyiness comes from two sources. The first is just a nitpick of mine; We don’t get to see the climax of her fight with the Blot alongside Manny. No really. The Blot got two spotlight episodes, his own sidekick/wife/amy sedaris, and was built up as one of FOWL’s biggest threats.. and his defeat isn’t even shown on screen for some damn reason. I feel they just ran out of time but given how important Lena and Manny were series wide and how awesome the keith david reveal was, it’s a cop out
Speaking of Cop Outs we can’t talk about this episode without talknig about the elephant in the room: Lena saying Webby “already has two sisters”, seemingly shooting down any posiblity of Weblena. I do not see it that way but do feel the two could’ve phrased it better and we could’ve gotten SOME Weblena by the end instead of none to offset this. I feel Lena’s motivations, esecpailly given the context were purely to try and placate Webby to keep her from investigating the twins further and endangering herself, not realizing how badly this wouldn’t work as Lena’s never cared about where she comes from and her past is all pain and abuse before Webby, while Webby had this gnawing at her her whole life. I do think the last episode was the WORST POSSIBLE place to put this, as it comes off as queerbaiting evne though I don’t think that was the intent. So yeah this line sucks and was poorly conveyed. 
Everything else though is thankfully excellent: Her raging frekaout at June feels warranted, as June is literally trying to cut Webby out of her life and was purposffully trying to galight webby as we find out. Her and Violet’s reason for going is also just pure awesome, pure heartwarming and pure badass, both angrily and simply proclaming when stating why their going on the final attack no fowl “It’s Webby”. Webby helped Lena become a better person and lnvoes her more than anyone else and vice versa and Webby gave Violet Friends, a sister and a life of her own. Nothings going to stop them and Scrogoe wisely backed down on that one before they strangled him. 
Her final scene is the best though: Not only do she and Violet give May and June friendship braclets but despite the earlier hostlitlity... Lena helps them with not a second though. She now understands them, gets that their like her: a being made by an evil dickhead who saw them as a tool to use and not a person and was willing to kill them the moment they were no longer useful. She too was once lost, sad and felt alone..but Webby pulled her out of that and now she’s going to be there for these two, these alterante versions of the love of her life, to give them the same support and encourages them they’ll find their home. And sure enough my boy comes by not a second later to adopt both of them. In an instnat they’ve gone from alone with only webby like Lena was.. to having a family of their own and loyal friends to stay by their sid.e 
And so Lena ends the series charing off into the wild blue with her sister and her newfound friends, the future all ahead of her, the past finally put to bed, and herself finally at peace, in love with Webby.. and with herself at long last. 
This retrospective was a wonderful time. I throughly enjoyed going through Lena’s history and being more and more impressed how much I’d missed and how it was even BETTER the second time around. This arc is Ducktales at it’s best and Lena is the finest thing they acomplished. This is easily Kimiko Glenn’s best role and really let her show off her range. Hopefully this isn’t the last we’ll see of this wonderful lesbian shadow, but as it stands with peace, love and self worth found, it’s still a good place to leave her. If she ever returns i’ll of course pick this up again, and free of charge but for now I enjoyed the ride and throughly enjoyed this retrospective. T
Thank you all so much for reading. If you liked this retrospective, please stick around. My next comissioned story arc is covering the various crossovers Lilo and Stitch did, but after that in three weeks return here for Season 2. All three arcs, All done intermidtley. Buckle up. 
Until then follow for more, and join my patreon. My next stretch goal is monthly reviews of darkwing duck and reviews of the super ducktales mini series, and after finsihing this post i’m going to throw in some extra non-duck ones! 25 is being changed up from covering Tailspin every month, to covering a Danny Phantom episode every month, and the beloved special ultimate enemy. So check that out. I may throw in some more on both 20 and 25 so stay posted. And just for joining at the 2 dollar tier you get acess to my discord server and get to pick one of the shorts for my varoius shortstaculars I do. Next one up is goofy’s birthday with Donalds in june so join now! 
ANd if you just have one speciifc episode I haven’t covered you’d like me to, those are 5 bucks a pop on commission and available via my ask box, direct messages on here or discord at technicolormuk#6550 and until the next rainbow i’ts been a pleasure
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onepunchmiss · 4 years ago
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Thoughts on Zombieman as of WC Ch 131 (basically I’m sad)
So, as has been addressed several times now the past couple days (thanks @gottahaveguts and @handlewcaare u feed my brain), Zombieman is straight up Not Having A Good Time Right Now. And so naturally I have been overthinking why he's putting himself in this situation, and maybe a little bit where he could be going.
So with the most recent developments in the webcomic, we get confirmation that Zombieman has not been seen since going to Dr. Genus about his limiter.  As narration pointed out in webcomic ch. 130, Z is not one to cut off contact on his own normally. While they interpret this as him being in danger and in need of rescue, we as readers are fully aware that this is in fact exactly what he did. It’s safe to say that he doesn't want to be found.
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And regarding the limiter, I should wonder why he didn't confront Saitama first. As far as we know, Zombieman doesn't know that Saitama's own power is a mystery to himself, so I would have thought that Z being a pretty logical and goal-oriented guy, would consult the guy with the experience of successfully obtaining the exact thing he wants first, directly. Obviously we know this wouldn't get him very far, Genos is the living testament to that, but he doesn't know that.
But no, what does he do instead? He goes straight to a guy who only witnessed that power, a guy who has already himself admitted that it made no sense and effectively broke his will to continue his former research. Genus more or less admitted he didn't know how breaking a limiter was possible the first time Zombieman confronted him, stating it defied all common sense.
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And on top of this, we already are very aware that Zombieman is NOT fond of his time at the House of Evolution. Genus recounts earlier that same confrontation that Z went on a rampage to escape the HoE, destroying the facility in the process. Then, over the span of 10 years while finding an identity as an extremely successful S class hero, he had still been tracking and monitoring them with the intention to dismantle the HoE and kill Genus. Alsooo during this confrontation, might I add, is the only time in the series we see him lose his cool and legitimately start straight up yelling with next to no provocation.
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Genus was just sitting there with some takoyaki, yet the axe and emotions were raised high.
Zombieman generally appears to be pretty sensitive to the value of human life, and does not like his own humanity being questioned, which presumably stems from him being the product of the HoE's experimentation. While admittedly not as intense as the above image, he's pretty obviously pissed at Amai for accusing him of being a monster at the MA raid meeting. Its a touchy subject.
So it’s safe to say that even though we saw him talk it out with Genus, only sparing him once he was sufficiently convinced the HoE was truly disbanded, Zombieman clearly has a lot of trauma tied to Genus and his experiments. For him to go back to Genus and demand to be experimented on, without even pursuing the first and most obvious lead he has on limiters, and to do so with out telling a single person where he was going, is freaking insane.
Basically, what I’m seeing is the behavior of someone with serious self worth issues culminating in drastic self destructive behavior. He's taking an extreme and reckless route rather than finding positive constructive ways of dealing with any feelings of inadequacy and self doubt, and honestly I'm sure he knows this. This whole thing could hypothetically be a death sentence for him and he's just... throwing himself at it full force, no turning back. To him, he must do everything he can, there is no other option. I mean, let’s not forget this bit.
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"Thus, as if he wanted that" Z, pls no
He can, will, and has thrown himself into situations he knows are impossible and could end him- he wont allow any less of himself. And now he’s done it again in Genus's basement. The degree to which his experience in the HoE really affects him isn't well defined, but I think there’s enough evidence to say that it does affect him pretty negatively. Purposefully exposing yourself to trauma/triggers is a legitimate for of self harm, and I get the impression that Zombieman forcing himself to undergo some excruciating process at the hands of the very person responsible for his likely trauma, without telling a single person of his whereabouts, when there are other more obvious courses of action available, is just as much a form of self-punishment as it is him legitimately seeking to improve and grow stronger. Subconscious or not.
I'm worried, because I obviously don’t think he's going to break his limiter. Narratively I have no idea how that could work, it’s just not going to happen. So then... whats next for Zombieman? Whats it going to take for him snap out of this all-or-nothing mentality he's seemingly developed in regards to himself, since his sense of self-preservation is kinda missing? He’s putting himself through all this agony, but how’s he going handle the realization that we can’t achieve his goal? I’m so curious as to what kind of story is One trying to tell with him. There’s a high level of intrigue surrounding his character, and he’s received a good amount of emphasis compared to other S class members we’ve yet to focus on (like Pig God or Watchdog Man) so I’d say he’s about due for some sort or character arc. And now that he’s dabbling in the limiter business, which is like, THE thing of OPM, I dunno, something substantial has to happen with his character next time we see him. 
And I sure hope he comes out the other side of it far better off than where he was going in to it.
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nightmarenoise · 4 years ago
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Some thoughts on TMNT 2012
I finished watching the entirety of the TMNT 2012 series a while ago and boy, do I have some thoughts™. First of all though, the following is going to be my opinions and you’re free to disagree with them. If you feel like attacking me for expressing these opinions though, I’m just going to have to ask you to take a minute and consider that you are about to be a bitch online over an eight year old children’s animated show, and that maybe you should find something else to base your entire identity around. Secondly, I don’t hate the show, not by any means. It was fine. It was fine. It was fine, you guys. I wouldn’t have watched it otherwise. I watched usually about half a season per day because I have too much time on my hands but if I do more than 13 episodes, my puny brain will implode. That being said, I understand that the binge watching might have affected my judgement, because having to wait for a new episode to air each week hits different, I know. Still, I came home after work each day, cozied up in bed and watched 13 episodes of turtle shenanigans before going to sleep and my sleep schedule has never been better. But I digress. Also, I will compare 2012 to Rise, because that’s the only other TMNT show I’ve seen and because this is my post and I want to and it’s only initially.
I feel like the main difference between Rise and 2012 is that Rise is a character-driven show, while 2012 is ultimately plot-driven.
Why do things in Rise happen? Because a character wants something (the boys want to buy their dad a nw robe, April wants to spend a normal day with her new friend, etc, those are just from the top of my head). The motivations are ultimately mundane, and then the story goes from there.
Why do things in 2012 happen? Because the plot said so. Sure, the characters grow and change, but they’re ultimately vehicles for the plot. We don’t really take a minute to let the characters breathe. Usually, things happen because the Turtles saw something on patrol and they’re on patrol because they know the plot is waiting out there to get them.
The show starts with April’s dad being kidnapped by the Krang (/Kraang? It’s unclear) and April herself being spared this presumably gruesome fate because Donnie saved her at the last second. She then goes on to live with an aunt we never see.
We also don’t see much of how this affects April at first. Sure, she is shown to be sad and wanting to get her father back, but the episode ends on the Turtles leaving her at her aunt’s place and then we’re done for the day. Hell, the next time we see April, she just casually drops by their place to show Mikey how to make online friends.
Maybe that’s just me being overly criticial, but I could have done with more time between those moments, showing her coming to terms with things, her normal day-to-day live, or heck, even just going to the lair for the first time.
But we don’t get that because plot has to happen.
April isn’t the only character who suffers from that, but I feel like it affects her the most.
The writers seem to have learned their lesson, because when April loses her dad for the second time, to mutation this time around, she blames the Turtles (which isn’t wrong) and then doesn’t talk to them for a month while presumably going back to her aunt, who I suppose never asks any questions. She only goes back to talking to them when Casey tells her a similar story and she realizes something something, hurting someone without meaning to. Which is fine, but it’s also not really, because it implies April being rightfully upset isn’t valid, because the Turtles didn’t mean to mutate her dad and it was an accident, but it feels like it tone polices someone for experiencing a loss and not letting her take some time for herself to come to terms with that.
But y'know we need her, in part because she’s The Special, but most importantly, so one of the most tedious love subplots can happen.
I know they explained April’s specialness as her being a human/Krang mutant and the Krang needing her unique brain to mutate the entire planet because …reasons. Except for when they later attack New Yok and then don’t need her for that anymore. On that note, I do not understand Krang’s plan at all. Time passes faster in their dimension and they’re kind of at war with the Triceratons and have trouble with the Utrom, so they want to leave (even though the Triceratons are clearly also in our universe, so why not pick a different dimension to take over entirely? There’s established to be ten) and mutate a planet to take over. This is all well and good, except they’ve been at it for about seven million years? Krang takes credit for creating the first humans with mutagen and it’s been mentioned that they steered human evolution to the point where they could create a human/Krang hybrid, such as April. But why did they only have one? They lost track of her when her dad and her fled to New York City, wouldn’t it have been more convenient to have more mutants to do their vague mutant stuff they require by the plot to take over the planet?
Even if we assume that this first mutation means that the first humans didn’t surface between seven and five million years ago, humans haven’t evolved that much in the last couple thousand years. Why wait so long? It must have been billions of years for the Krang.
I know it’s a cartoon and stuff, but they could have easily removed that problem by cutting the line about Krang taking credit for human evolution and for the Krang having been with us for thousands of years. It just creates problems.
Speaking of problematic, the romantic subplots. So, Leo wants to bang his sister, Donnie is creepily obsessed with the first human girl he’s ever met and Mikey is such a good boy, he gets two love interests, because one isn’t enough for all the love and goodness contained in orange boy. I still think it’s weird because all of these love interests are humans, but I gradually got over that. I managed to think about this without physically convulsing for ten whole minutes, for starts.
Okay, so Donnie/April is just bad. The writing and the execution are bad. The characters are fine, I love Donnie, even though he focuses way too much of his time and attention on obsessing over April, but I can let that go on account of him being a teen dealing with his very first ever crush. April though  is frequently made to be a callous bitch who knows of his feelings and leads him on when she wants something, but pushes him away at all other times. I vividly remember the time New York was overrun by Krang and April helped Donnie bandage his injured arm and he was about to confess his feelings to her and she pulled too tight to get him to stop. Instead of being up front about it or just telling him that she either liked him or not or that now just wasn’t the time to focus on romance - all of which super valid in their own right. Rip the bandaid off, girl. None of them look especially good coming out of this.
It gets worse considering that after seasons of back and forth and even introducing Casey to give us a love triangle, everyone’s favorite thing in media and April redeeming herself by also being That Way to Casey and by redeeming I mean informing us that she just isn’t really fit for a relationship because she is very toxic in handling them, the whole thing is just kind of dropped forever. There’s no payoff. We spent so much time watching Donnie agonize over this, get worse, then get over his stalker-ish tendencies and get rewarded with a kiss and then nothing ever happens. They don’t even have a conversation about their feelings. The show tries to make it seem like there’s a special connection between April and Donnie because she kills him and then feels bad and brings him back, but, no. That’s not how any of that works. Ultimately this whole thing feels like a huge and infuriating waste of time. Fourth place. And that’s a kindness.
Leo and Karai get third place, mainly because of the incest. Neither of them is as toxic over this subplot and it also has the common decency of not taking up that much time, but it’s still weird. I don’t have much to say here. I guess it was dropped in the end, but maybe also not, but at least there weren’t 30 episodes about Leo agonizing over Karai while she was being weird and also she had her own thing going on and felt like a more fleshed out character than April despite getting less screen time. Third place.
Mikey gets silver because while he’s flirting with two human girls, they both seem to be exclusively into it and also he’s much more mature about dealing with it than his supposedly intelligent brother. Get this. Mikey, being mature at something. None of these ships are confirmed, but it’s a nice change of pace.
Raph takes gold because he fell in love with a girl after she beat the crap out of him and nothing is more valid than that.
Okay, the plot feels kind of rushed, in that they’re confessing undying love after kissing twice, but one, they’re teens and two, this is just the best we’re going to get out of this show.
Casey, well.
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Casey exists. He doesn’t add all that much to the story. He has a delightful dynamic with Raph, coming in just after Slash confronted him with his worst traits and then reinforcing the “be a vigilante and do good”-angle and that’s nice. Outside of that though, he tries to hit on April, he hits things with his hockey sticks and I guess he has a family he cares about that we never see. Oops.
I’m very ambivalent about Splinter. I do get him and he’s a good sensei, but kind of a lousy father? Sure, his entire life went up in flames quite spectacularly, but as soon as he realizes his daughter is alive, he often seems to prioritize getting her back over the lives of the four sons he actually raised and spent the last fifteen years with? Also, he’s a dick to Mikey? He gets better later and then he dies. Hm.
Mikey wasn’t as annoying as I feared, going in. He was still stupid, but he had his moments. I also didn’t find him as funny as some of the writers probably hoped, but he was fine. He’s a good boy who deserved better every step of the way, but his brothers and Splinter are kind of not nice to him despite him being just as capable as his brothers. Neither is the show, often making him the butt of a joke or downplaying his achievements (producing super-retro mutagen, saving all his brothers from parasite wasps and the one time he saved the city from cannibal pizza it was treated like a “it was all a dream or was it” and nobody believed him). He doesn’t get a lot of development, but he’s the goodest boy.
Raph again surprised me. He arguably underwent the most development, dealing with his many demons and getting a grip on his temper. This was especially apparent in the Northampton arc when he did chores without complaint and helped Leo train.
Leo on the other hand, started as the leader of the team and ended the story as the de-facto leader of the family and also he was stronger now. I don’t know. Being a leader was his defining trait from start to finish and while he agonized over that, he wasn’t allowed much development outside of that. His first meeting with Karai introduced this subplot about him wanting to be irresponsible and do his own thing, but that was quickly dropped and never brought up again. I liked him best when he was being a dork over his favorite TV show or that time he went to space and on his first outing tried to hit on an alien lady. I would have liked to see more of that Leo, because that Leo was actually interesting.
Donnie, I don’t know. Most of his time was poured into the world’s worst romantic subplot and outside of that he had some traits, but he was mostly there so he could analyze things, develop antivenoms at the drop of a hat, finally create a retromutagen and build 152 vehicles. I like Donnie, but there isn’t much to talk about that isn’t directly tied to April. Except maybe how he promised to turn Timothy back into a human and then never did, even though we keep seeing his frozen remains in the back of the lab. For shame, Donnie. For shame.
To the show’s credit, a lot of the mutants looked horrifying and creepy. They had a tight grip on that horror vibe and it was great. They maintained a balance of comedy and horror and while it wasn’t great, it was a nice reprieve.
I hated Shredder and I know I was supposed to, but I will never get over what a petty bitch he was.
The thing that hit me the hardest was probably the destruction of Earth at the end of season 3. I was legitimately upset about that, so that’s probably a good thing. But when five minutes into the next episode Scrooge McDoctor Who did some timey whimey bullshit to reverse it, I was not any less upset. Make of that what you will. (No, I’ll explain, I felt cheated and it was cheap and annoying. Just when you think the show has some balls, it pulls a “sike” and then flips back to the status quo, usually). The space arc was simultaneously interesting and also not, with a lot of predictable plot threads, but at least we got more locations  than the same two nocturnal New York streets all the time.
The ending though was super weird. The other turtles then went into space and probably died or some shit, because they never show up again and also the Fugitoid’s head is alive in orbit, but whatever, no time for that because we have to go back, for the 50th time, to the Foot!
The plot has no time to unfold because the plot needs to happen.
Do you ever think the writers squabbled a lot? It kind of feels like a lot of them wanted to do their own thing and then someone else meddled with that and then we got a patchwork of unconnected threads, left loose and dangling.
I was surprised when we got some buildup to April’s growing dependence on her alien crystal and even one episode dealing with its powers before we got to the episode dealing with the crystal’s effects on her. That sort of nuanced pacing was new. I was also initially very sure that this subplot would only find its payoff in the season finale or half season finale, like most other plot threads usually did, but no, it got its own separate episode.
Yes, they went all Dark Phoenix, but the ending was super anticlimactic, because April killed Donnie and then someone reminded her of it and she felt bad, so she stopped being possessed by evil. They fucked up on the home stretch, but they tried.
I never liked the time travel episodes with Renet much, they felt weirdly intrusive and adding nothing new to the plot. It felt like the first one only happened so we could meet Tang Shen before she died and that didn’t add a whole lot of anything. It confirmed things we already knew and introduced Mikey’s love interest and that was that.
The show tried to do a thing about anti-mutant racism once, but it sure is a good thing that the only people racist against mutants were the mafia, so we don’t have to worry about making a nuanced take here. They could have done something really interesting, but then went for simple black-and-white-morality instead.
My favorite episode was when the boys played Dungeons and Dragons with a sparrow mutant.
The worst part of the show though was its fifth season. First it seemed like it would just continue from where the fourth season had left off with Shredder being revived - because like a good villain, or herpes, Shredder always comes back - by the worst looking dragon I have ever seen in my entire life, but then that arc surprisingly ended after four episodes, shocking me to my core. Almost as shocking as Donnie almost killing a guy, but then deciding not do at the very last second. Again, feels like they could have done more here, but then they didn’t.
The fifth season started with two arcs that seemed to tie up loose plot threads, like Shredder’s revival and the bug alien guy I could have sworn died when he was yeeted out of an airlock coming back to enact his grim revenge, all so Raph’s girlfriend could live on the same planet as him and then never appear on the show ever again. Also Mikey died and his brothers were sad for five seconds before going about their business and then he came back with superpowers and then he conveniently lost them at the end of the episode, because the plot doesn’t have time for things that are emotional or interesting. Then there was that time the writers were like “What if we made Yojimbo, but with anthropromorphic animals and also the turtles are there” and it existed and the Turtles added very few things to the story and then went back to their dimension and never talked about it ever again. Or the time they said “what if we made Mad Max and also everything was terrible” and so they did and Leo became a hulked up war criminal but everyone forgave him because he wasn’t himself but immediately snapped out of it after seeing his brothers and Raphael was on steroids and Donnie became a robot in what I assume was a reference to the comics where he died and became a robot and also Donnie ended up being the only one whose body died, but considering what became of his brothers, he was probably the best off? And Raph had amnesia just so he could say he had amnesia and it didn’t actually factor into the plot once because he immediately recognized Mikey. I don’t know, I hated that special.
But at least it gave me emotions. The best part of the “that time travel demon is back and trying to monster mash” arc was when I remembered that I could browse tumblr on my phone while it was on and then I didn’t bore myself to death and also didn’t miss anything of value.
The series finale was fine. Nothing to write home about, but perfectly fine, even though the show threw an awful lot of shade at the 1987 version.
I feel like the most jarring thing about the fifth season was that the show spent four seasons going out of its way to present itself as something with a cohesive narrative and a plot that goes on and on and then we get these disjointed stories, some of which have absolutely nothing to do with the story at all. Just the writers throwing some idea at a wall to see what sticks because they either didn’t have any ideas anymore, or too many, but the end result wasn’t great and I’ll recommend newcomers to stop after the fourth season, because for real.
Tiger Claw existed and he was infuriatingly capable and powerful and then his sister chopped off his arm and then he got a robot arm and that was it forever. I don’t know, some episodes felt more pointless than others, but some managed to be fun or interesting and some just added something they thought was fun and it ended up never mattering again. 
Some characters disappeared randomly, like the dove guy and I don’t care enough to ask what happened there.
Karai’s mutation being reversed off-screen was super bizarre. Sure, her being able to change at will as metal as heck, but it felt weird and incomplete and like I missed an episode. Maybe I did. It was also infuriating how her venom was a plot point in one episode and never brought up again after that.
Outside of that, I don’t have much insight to offer. Other people already exlained how the fight scenes, while nice, are not very accurate, especially the bo staff moves, or how the show is very dark, not in tone, but in actual absence of light and lots of greyscales or how most characters have singular traits rather than fleshed out personalities, especially the supporting cast. How there isn’t a lot of diversity in the human characters and how figure-hugging a lot of April’s and Karai’s clothing is (shoutout to April’s yellow shirt, it’s uncomfortable to look at, cheers) or how the female characters are frequently damselled.
I liked when the animation added personality to the characters because the writing sure didn’t think it had time for that.
All in all, it’s a mixed bag for me. It’s a fine show to watch if you have the time and it’s not all bad and I can see why people enjoy it, but it’s not for me. I liked some episodes enough to watch again, but I feel like in nine out of ten cases, I’ll opt to rewatch Rise instead because it has more of what I personally like, but I won’t think less of you if you enjoyed this version of the show. I’m not telling people that one version of the Turtles is superior to the other, just that I think it’s important to take off those rose-colored glasses and be critical of the things you consume every now and again.
But if you prefer plot-driven shows that can be surprisingly dark, you might enjoy this. Or you could watch Avatar, because it has that as well as three-dimensional characters and better worldbuilding.
Thank you for reading my way-too-long thoughts about an animated kid’s show.
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holyhikari · 5 years ago
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Okay. Okay. It’s 2020, most of the world is shut down and the first episode of Digimon Adventure aired yesterday, missing a ‘Butter-Fly’ and with a colon to spare. Life sure is something. 
Gotta say I’m relieved. (For now, at least.) Sure, yeah, I got into the hype train for the reboot from the get-go and determined to just have fun, but. If I can picture all the ways something can go wrong — go BORING — down to excruciating details right from the first episode, why not? That’s what brains are for. So that’s what I did. 
Should have saved all that energy. 
I want to share with all of you my thoughts on this episode, break it down a little bit; how it made me feel, the few character introductions we got, the pace, the plot and its possibilities. 
As much as I want to approach this series keeping the idea of authenticity in mind, it is a reboot. They chose a certain set of (popular!) pre-existent characters to explore, to work with; a balance between creating and adapting. And I’m very interested in seeing how they’ll combine the core elements of Digimon Adventure with all there is unique to this generation of kids, teens and, you know it, adults who stuck around. 
Since all we’ve got is the introduction to the series, I’ll be contrasting TOKYO DIGITAL CRISIS to how the original Adventure kicked off back in 1999 with  ADRIFT? THE ISLAND OF ADVENTURE!
I did try to keep this as coherent and review-like as possible, but there’s a fair amount of fan-girling and it’s all seen through my very biased Adventure-stan-colored lens. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya. 
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‘99 starts with an image of our planet, and  ‘20 starts almost the same. This time, though, we can see we aren’t alone. ‘The Digital World affecting the Earth’ is something that happens, I believe, in every Digimon reincarnation. In ‘99, it’s deeply affecting our climate. Now, the issue doesn’t seem so drastic that it’s able to reach influence organic matter and mess up many Nature’s cycles across the globe, but it’s still not looking so good for our kids. (It’s the first episode and Hikari and Yuuko almost get train-sandwiched, but I suppose that almost having your head chopped off, courtesy of Kuwagamon, isn’t lovely either.) 
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Anyway. 
I think this Digital World/Network shot isn’t actually part of the episode? I think it’s part of the opening (I mean, not the OP sequence with the song, obviously), and that we’ll be seeing it before each episode starts. Still, it’s an interesting juxtaposition, isn’t it?
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A Glorious World is upon us! I wasn’t actually expecting Butter-Fly or anything similar to it, don’t worry. I’m glad the new OP is its own thing! I want Digimon Adventure ‘20 to be as authentic as possible without losing the original’s heart. The song is nice enough. I don’t want to compare it to Butter-Fly, but I’m only human. Give me a few episodes. Gotta let go. 
The OP has way more Taichi than the others. No surprise there. He’s our goggle boy. (Still, since they went for a quick throwback to the original opening, it’s a shame only Taichi was shown falling down towards the Digital World). 
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Everyone got a part, though. Shout out to Takeru and Hikari for being yet again the ominous, powerful baby-faced duo that is definitely up to something. 
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It’s so interesting that, while the other crests are shown very clearly and surrounded by sparkles, Light and Hope are only shown briefly shining in their partners’ shadows. Why is Takeru so far away from us, why is this so sinister-looking. Hi, mysterious plot. Nice to meet you.
Wherever Hikari is by the end of the OP, it reminds me of Vamdemon’s castle. Maybe she feels connected to Tailmon and follows her somehow? Angemon wasn’t shown in the OP with the older six children’s partners, just Patamon. I wonder if they’ll try to make us grieve for Angemon a second time. It’d work with me. Either way, I imagine we’re in for another last-minute Patamon evolution when everything looks hopeless. 
This time, though, we’ve got Hikari from the beginning (yes, I am VERY excited about this, thank you for asking, THIS IS WHAT I DESERVE), and, while I think Patamon is more powerful in regular conditions (as in, Angemon can probably take Angewomon in a fight despite the level imbalance, but as soon as Hikari starts glowing you know who’s winning), he will now be sharing the spotlight with another Archangel evolution… as his friend or as his foe, considering that Tailmon might be a double agent of some sorts in the beginning. Welp. 
Anyway. Toei isn’t fooling around, in the OP we can see MetalGreymon in a very scary-looking, glitchy fashion that I’m LIVING for, WarGreymon’s silhouette and, good grief, there’s even a glimpse of Omegamon. Talk about too much information. Maybe chill out a little? (I say this, but the adults already know all of their evos, and the kids just want MOOOOOOORE monstahhhhhrrrrrrsss….which is fair.)
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MetalGreymon looks dope here. The others, though, are only shown up to their Adult evolution, even Gabumon. I don’t think they will have only Gabumon and Agumon reaching their Mega forms, and then fusing into Omegamon while everyone else only gets as far as Perfect.  Again.
They wouldn’t do this to us. Right? Yeah, they would. Maybe we can have Holydramon/Ophanimon and Seraphimon later on, as a treat. Aaaaaand, depending on how many episodes — how many seasons — this new timeline gets, I’m not giving up hope just yet. Let me have Phoenixmon, Toei, you heartless thing. 
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Moving on to the actual episode… The first non-Digimon character to show up is the true protagonist. Our queen is back. Our little Digivice thief, Miko herself.
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Just you wait, you ain’t gonna be Hikari’s favorite cat-like creature for long. 
Speaking of Hikari, LOOK AT THIS WITTLE BABY GIRL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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2020 Taichi right off the bat was Taichi for me. He’s talking to Yuuko and yells “Hikariii~” so loudly Hikari hears it from where she stands, the short cutie. Their mom just hands down the phone for her without missing a beat so Taichi can comfort her through whatever she’s worrying about (her summer classes, probably). Such a sweet, natural little moment that flashes both characters out. I want more of that, please.
We’re then introduced to Koushiro! I’m not gonna lie, I cringed the first time I heard him speak. I thought the voice didn’t fit him very well. This impression faded quickly enough, though, and I’m already attached to his new voice. Later, I realized that part of the reason he sounded off to me was because of how nervous he seemed — around Taichi, of all people! In this version, they’re just meeting for the first time, so it’s very in-character for him. Guess I was kinda shocked seeing Koushiro not feeling at ease talking to Taichi. Poor thing is Anxious! And he’s overthinking about Summer Camp! And he’s happy Taichi is his neighbor! That certainly would’ve helped during the Vandemon arc back in ‘99. 
Koushiro gets a little bit over his awkwardness upon hearing the news regarding the cyber attack, something he’s curious about, and finally steps towards Taichi instead of away, which is spot on. These two fall into an easy camaraderie, as they SHOULD, and they head to the train station together, where Taichi decides to, I don’t know… run like crazy on the tracks until he gets to the rogue train where his family is and stop it with sheer force of will? Yeah! Sounds like him! 
And now to one of the most interesting parts of this adaption, is that they’re showing us the Crests early on and HOW they’re doing it. 
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Taichi is able to meet Koromon because he’s being brave.
I mean, the first time, he was chosen because of his courage, too, but they all go in together. They’re taken. They’re washed off the Earth. And while Taichi had no idea he was going to be pulled into the Net, he chose to try to save Hikari and his mom (and, a few moments later, he chose to dive in towards Koromon). This time, it feels so much more personal. The screen switched back and forth between the Crest of Courage, Taichi and Hikari, who I believed called his name. The scene worked so well! (Following this pattern, Koushiro gets his Digivice when expressing curiosity, the will to pursue an explanation for what was happening!!!!)
On the other hand, it’s sort of bittersweet  they weren’t pulled in together. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they didn’t try to introduce all of them AND the Digital World at the same time again. But… ‘99 established them as a ‘team’ within seconds. It’s interesting, though. I’m VERY curious to see how their bonding will go this time around!
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Taichi and Koromon meeting was beautiful. I was worried the soundtrack wouldn’t even stand a chance against the masterpiece that is the original one, but the musing playing was so delicate, so majestic. I felt I was witnessing a precious moment. Also, Koromon’s ears twisting into how we represent the DNA while he was evolving was!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!SUCH A GOOD DETAIL!!!!!! 
It cracked me up when Koushiro said that what was happening was very surprising while not sounding surprised at all. I wonder how long the kid has been looking into the cyber attacks. Oh, and the Network is pretty. Prettier than I had anticipated, though not that different from Appmon’s style, I think? I can’t wait to get a look at the actual Digital World and see if it has that unique feeling and that odd, watercolor painting aesthetic. I hope I can trust the OP:
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 Did you notice that Agumon giggled a few times? He looked at Taichi with such love, familiarity and devotion and like he knew something. It felt… right. My heart. My poor, poor heart. (I know this Agumon probably has met Taichi before inside of this very Universe, like the Hikarigaoka incident in the original version, but I like to think about Universe-hopping platonic soulmates.) 
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Overall the sound work was fantastic, but this scene deserves a highlight. The noise of the Kuramon lookalike moving after evolving was genuinely disturbing. And look at how pretty this is:
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Speaking of evolution, AGUMON EVOLVING INTO GREYMON WAS THE SHIT. I loved how straight-up FERAL it was, while still keeping the “Digital” part of “Digital Monster” very much present. It reminded me a bit of Hosoda’s Greymon (most amazing Greymon to this day!) in the Digimon Adventure Movie and, now that I think of it, of him fighting in some Tri. Reunion scenes. Scary Greymon is the best Greymon. Yes. I like it when the Digimon manage to disturb and scare me, okay? They aren’t called monsters for nothing. 
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I mean we got to see his horn literally bursting out of his skin. This is low-key terrifying. 10/10.
BUT WHERE IS THE EVOLUTION THEME SONG
I am: deceased. Cause of death: Hikari’s soft smile when she realizes her big brother managed to help them. 
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Alternatively, this first pic had killed me on the spot.
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FINALLY, we get to see Yamato, and of course, he’s staring down dramatically at Taichi on top of Garurumon like the intense person he is. And, no big deal, there’s a cyber attack in a U.S military base and, uh, apparently the next episode is the 2020 version of Bokura no War Game?! 
I— WHAT?!
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No pressure, am I right? I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be falling off a good ol’ cliff with my camping buddies. 
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To be honest, if they intended to end it like this, it felt like this should’ve been a special episode. Maybe one-hour-long or so? Why……….HOW……….. They wanna go from the pilot straight to a Bokura no War game tribute?! The very movie that introduced Omegamon. I swear, if Omegamon’s debut is the SECOND episode, I’m gonna break. How is this gonna work. Well, at least they have us… intrigued? 
The ED is so Yamato-focused it’s almost weird that his voice actor isn’t the one singing lmao. That amount of Yamatoness got me by surprise. Some of the pics look like a PowerPoint presentation of CD cover ideas for his yet-to-exist (or not) band… and I say this lovingly, okay? I love him so much. 
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This is my favorite one!
I lost count of how many times I listened to this song!! It also got me hooked up. What’s up with Takeru and how the writers took the whole Angel aesthetic to a whole new level?! Is he sick? Is he dying? Is this why Yamato is so sad and lonely throughout the ED?????? EVERYONE GO BEFRIEND HIM. I heard he’s a good friend.
Be right back, I’m gonna tattoo this pic to my face.
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Bonus commentary!
I bet I wasn’t the only one looking for  random cameos whenever they showed us crowds. Didn’t find anyone we know, but I’m sure this will change. 02 characters cameos, I’m ready for you. 
Soooooooooo the Tachikawa own a tech company this time?? For all we know they own Japan. That’s scarier than the Diablomon-like virus giving Trump a headache. If so, Mimi is gonna be way more spoiled than before. Oh, dear.
I HOPE WE SEE MORE OF THESE PIXEL BABIES! That was a perfect Easter egg.
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If none of these icons at the bottom is the Digimon Analyzer, then what’s the point of my entire existence? 
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I can’t wait for next Saturday! Even if solely to yell “WHY??????” at my screen.  
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I can’t thank you enough if you read this far!
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kazarinn · 4 years ago
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Roundup of all the things I’ve translated within the last month
Those who have been following me for a while might know that the last month saw me be very unusually prolific with translation (especially Digimon-related ones), to unprecedented extents. I'll be very honest about the fact that it's because of the current quarantine, which has left me with not a lot to do and a sense of boredom that translation somehow happens to satiate a bit ^^;; That said, the very large number of translations I'd been posting has caused things to get a bit buried, and has made things easily missable, so I've decided to make a bit of a roundup post summarizing everything I've done in the last month.
Of course, there's probably still more to come in the near future -- I have two books (the Digimon Official Super Encyclopedia and the Gakken Digimon Adventure tri. Memorial Book) hopefully coming in the mail soon, and I still have some stuff lying around I might take up if my mood warms up to it, but since I've finally cleared up a ton of the backlog I felt I should take a breather to summarize stuff. (Although, every time I say I've cleared the backlog, suddenly more interesting things pop up...^^;;)
Digimon Adventure, Adventure 02, Tamers, Frontier
Digimon Adventure 02 Drama CD "Armor Evolution to the Unknown" I will be honest in that this is actually my favorite thing to have translated in this past month. Actually, fiction translation has a higher level of difficulty for me than things like interviews -- because I want to be careful with what real people have said, I tend to be less stringent about rewording things, whereas with fiction I hold myself to a higher standard to make things flow well. But that's actually what makes it so much fun, because I can challenge myself to play with wording and broaden my horizons, and moreover Adventure 02 has a ton of characters, and it's really fun to try and make unique "voices" for all of them. That said, translating this was a bit of a wake-up call, because the sheer amount of pop culture references (to things made before I was even born, at that) and wordplay everywhere led me to the very harsh realization of why so few people have attempted to translate this drama CD into so few languages over the past two decades ^^;; I give my thanks to the anonymous Japanese commenters on Nico Nico Douga who pointed out many of the really old and obscure pop culture references, and I ended up spending several hours on Japanese Wikipedia looking up things like said old anime and British punk rock artists. I might not have gotten everything, and I'm sure there are people out there who probably would have been able to pull it off better than I did, but it ultimately became a test of my abilities as a translator, and if it's fun and entertaining and enjoyable, then that alone makes me satisfied. But I think this will be the last time (at least for a while) that I try translating something audio-only with no transcript -- my hearing is not that great, not even in English ^^;;
The Mystery of the American Box Bug A story from Adventure and Adventure 02 director Hiroyuki Kakudou that has some very tangential (at best) relation to Digimon, but is amusing nevertheless.
Digimon Adventure Character Complete File -- Future Encyclopedia Little "dialogue" snippets from an Adventure/Adventure 02-related book, checking in on the kids-turned-adults during the time of Adventure 02's epilogue. I actually translated this a long time ago, but I lost the transcript for it and I'm pretty sure (given how long ago it was) it was probably pretty embarrassing by my current standards, so I went ahead and did this over again. There are some other things in this book that are interesting and/or amusing, like further background info on the kids' family lives and room layouts, so if I have some spare time I might do some of those in the future, although naturally doing the entire book would probably be practically impossible.
Digimon Series Memorial Book: Digimon Animation Chronicle — Special interview with Hiromi Seki, Hiroyuki Kakudou, and Yukio Kaizawa An interview with some perennial Digimon staff members about Adventure through Frontier (and a bit of X-Evolution). We've had no shortage of these kinds of interviews over the years, but this one happens to summarize a lot of things that used to be considered "obscure" in the Digimon fanbase outside Japan, even though this book (and thus this interview) is one of the most prominent resources for diehard Digimon fans out there. Also, Frontier-related development info tends to be somewhat rare, so it's nice to hear about it. The Digimon Official Super Encyclopedia that I'm hoping to get my hands on soon allegedly has a similar interview with the same three people. I don't know specifics about it yet, but I'm informed that it mostly covers similar territory to this one, but also allegedly has some very fascinating details that weren't in this, so I'm looking forward to that as well.
Message from Digimon Adventure producer Hiromi Seki, to Toshiko Fujita Posted by Adventure producer Hiromi Seki to the LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna Twitter on February 8, 2019, right before the 49th day (last day of mourning, in Japanese tradition) after Taichi Yagami voice actress Toshiko Fujita's passing.
Mimi Tachikawa and Lilimon Posted by Adventure director Hiroyuki Kakudou on his blog, talking about the intent behind Mimi Tachikawa's character and her corresponding track in the drama CD Digimon Adventure: Two-and-a-Half Year Break.
Digimon Adventure tri.
On Creation and Production for “Super Evolution Stage: Digimon Adventure tri.” A post by Director Kenichi Tani about his work on the Adventure tri. stage play. Despite technically being under Adventure tri. branding, the stage play actually has surprisingly little in common with the Adventure tri. anime in terms of both content and production background, and moreover Digimon hasn't had a lot of contact with the stage medium all that much, so I thought it'd be interesting to translate something about its production, especially since this tends to be a lesser talked-about part of the franchise.
October/November 2018 Gashapon Blog interviews with Kenji Watanabe This is actually two interviews, one where Digimon franchise creator and character designer Kenji Watanabe talks about design for a Digimon gachapon set, and one where he talks about Adventure tri.'s Omegamon Merciful Mode, but I'm categorizing it under the Adventure tri. section because I figure the vast majority of readers will be reading the interview for the latter.
Digimon Adventure tri. voice actor comments (Part 1: Reunion | Part 2: Determination | Part 3: Confession | Part 4: Loss | Part 5: Coexistence | Part 6: Our Future) A series of voice actor comments that were posted to the official website prior to each Adventure tri. movie being released. I'd actually had it on the brain to try my hand at these when they were first posted, but various circumstances happened and I never got around to it, until now. In retrospect, though, I think it turned out for the better that I didn't attempt them on the spot. Adventure tri.-related interviews tend to be much more difficult to translate than most Digimon-related ones, and although there are a few reasons why, the biggest one is that, during its run, it had a very tight spoiler embargo, resulting in a lot of vague language being used, and so when you translate from a language like Japanese -- where having proper context can be life or death -- not knowing the original context behind what was being said can throw the end result into completely incorrect and misleading interpretations. While I was working on these, I did actually end up having to pull up the movies again and reference what scenes were being referred to multiple times just so I could phrase the sentence correctly, so yeah, I think it did ultimately work out. Incidentally, this is also the first direct Adventure tri. production-related thing I've translated since 2016 (mainly due to the expenses incurred by importing magazines and my difficulty with translating print media at the time). Looking back at it, I'm honestly kind of ashamed at my own inexperience from back then, but sadly, I don't have the original magazines anymore, so I can't do much to fix it, and so I'm kind of glad to have these as my sort of attempt at "redeeming myself".
Digimon Adventure tri. — Yoshimasa Hosoya interview on “To Me” Also from the official website, discussing voice actor Yoshimasa Hosoya's involvement with the ending theme song from part 3 (Confession), "To Me".
Digimon Adventure LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna
Anime! Anime! interview series (Director Tomohisa Taguchi interview | Natsuki Hanae and Chika Sakamoto interview | 02 human cast voice actor interview | 02 Digimon cast voice actor interview | Producer Yousuke Kinoshita and supervisor Hiromi Seki interview) I didn't actually know this was a series until very recently, so you'll have to forgive me for translating these out of order. Technically, all of these were posted in February to March 2020, after the movie was released in Japan, but it's pretty much spoiler-free. It's got a huge amount of development and background info behind LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna, so I recommend them as reading for anyone interested in seeing the movie.
"In regards to the new Digimon project" Otherwise known as "what happened when Hiroyuki Kakudou accidentally revealed that they were making another Digimon Adventure-related movie". Since the news that original Adventure director was recusing from LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna due to some kind of creative difference over lore ended up naturally being a hot topic, I felt like having a proper translation of his statement on the matter would be a useful thing to have. Despite technically being LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna-related, it also has a transcription of his tweets regarding Adventure/Adventure 02 background lore along with some surprising production details, so it may interest fans of the original series as well.
Digimon Continues to be Loved Thanks to its Creator’s Commitment — With Digimon Character Designer Kenji Watanabe An Asahi &M article (sort of a half-interview) with Kenji Watanabe over his involvement in LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna, which, unusually for a Digimon anime work, actually had him directly involved in production from beginning to end. I put this on the post already, but this article gets a lot dangerously closer to outright spoilers than you'd expect for this kind of material, so if you're particularly keen on going into the movie "completely clean", best to maybe avoid this one until you've seen the movie.
Digimon Adventure LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna — Website messages from Hiromi Seki and Yousuke Kinoshita It's just a short greeting message on the official website. I wanted to translate it mainly because it's not on the official English site.
Animage Plus interviews with Yousuke Kinoshita Also something I'd wanted to translate for a while but never got around to (until now). A triple set of interviews with LAST EVOLUTION Kizuna producer Yousuke Kinoshita, who also talks about Adventure's 20th anniversary and the "Memorial Story" short story collection crowdfund.
Digimon Adventure:
Interviews with Yabuno Tenya and Atsuhiro Tomioka (Part 1: V-Jump Web | Part 2: Digimon Web) A two-part interview (each part on different websites) with Digimon Adventure V-Tamer 01 artist Yabuno Tenya and Digimon Adventure: lead writer Atsuhiro Tomioka, discussing their respective works and Adventure:'s surprising relation to V-Tamer.
Digimon Adventure director Hiroyuki Kakudou’s initial comments on the Digimon Adventure: reboot A triple set of blog posts from original Digimon Adventure director Hiroyuki Kakudou about the Adventure: reboot and what relation it has to him and the original Adventure (along with some fun trivia about the latter). I figured some people out there might be curious about what the original Adventure director thought about Toei rebooting his series.
Digimon games
Explore the Secrets of Digimon World Re:Digitize Decode’s Evolution! Interview with Habu and Tomono Decode is rather inaccessible to the West right now (being unlocalized, and on the region-locked 3DS at that), so the idea of translating too many things relevant to it is pretty low-priority to me at the moment, but it's still a game of significant interest to the Digimon fanbase outside Japan, and is also notable as one of the first major titles spearheaded by Digimon game producer Kazumasa Habu, so I felt that there'd be quite a few people interested in this one.
Interview with Producer Habu of Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Hacker’s Memory: Highlights and Future Prospects A 4Gamer interview that I'd wanted to translate since I'd first read it, but never got around to. Incidentally, I decided to go back and make some revisions to the wording for the Famitsu interviews I translated for the original game. They were some of the first things I ever translated, and it...kind of shows. ^^;; Normally I don't like to lock myself into a habit of constantly going back and revising old work, as doing so tends to be a bit of a black hole, but since the original Cyber Sleuth is still quite the hot topic among the fanbase right now (and especially with Complete Edition being recently released), I thought it might be worth it this time.
Famitsu.com interview with Kazumasa Habu on Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Hacker’s Memory Another Hacker's Memory interview, a bit less detailed than the above but still fairly informative.
Other
Iwata Asks #14: Hatsune Miku and Future Stars: Project mirai Somehow this ended up the only non-Digimon thing on the list ^^;; The version of this game that eventually did make it to the West (Project Mirai DX) is so different from the original game that it meant this Iwata Asks was never officially translated, so I thought it'd be worth taking a shot at this one. I don't have any plans to translate any other Iwata Asks at the moment, mainly because it requires me to have more than a passing knowledge of how each game works for proper context, but I hope you can at least enjoy this one.
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rapeculturerealities · 5 years ago
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I moved to Los Angeles to become an actress at 24. These are character descriptions of roles I have read for: “thin, attractive, Dave’s wife”; “robot girl, a remarkable feat of engineering”; “her breasts are large and she’s wearing a red sweater.”
I stuffed my bra for that last one. I still did not get the part.
After a while it was hard to tell what was the greater source of my depression: that I could not book a part in a horror film where I had three lines and died on Page 4, or that I was even auditioning to play these roles at all. After dozens of auditions and zero callbacks, my mom suggested I get breast implants. From her perspective, I had walked away from a coveted job at Goldman Sachs and chosen a profession of self-commodification. She wanted to help me sell better.
But I wasn’t drawn to acting because I wanted to be desired. I was drawn to acting because I felt it would allow me to become the whole, embodied person I remembered being in childhood — one that could imagine freely, listen deeply and feel wholeheartedly.
I continued to audition and continued to fail. My depression deepened. My self-esteem plummeted. My boyfriend would get drunk and punch holes in the wall next to my head. I let him. He spat in my face. I let him. He dissolved into tears in my arms. I let him. And then I sifted through the ashes of his anger and his father’s anger before him to help him uncover the forgiveness he needed to move on. I was auditioning to be “Dave’s wife.” I was “robot girl, a remarkable feat of engineering.”
After a day of running from men with chain saws in audition rooms and a night of running from the man I shared a bed with, I decided I was done auditioning. I felt I had to write my way out of these roles or I wouldn’t find my way in the real world, either. I could not be what I could not see onscreen.
So I went to the library in downtown Los Angeles and started reading books and watching films about how to write dramas for the screen. I clung to Jodie Foster in Jonathan Demme’s “Silence of the Lambs,” to Holly Hunter in Jane Campion’s “The Piano.”
But aside from a handful of exceptions, I was overwhelmed by the number of dramatic narratives that murdered their female characters.
In “The Big Heat” she has a pot of boiling coffee thrown in her face and is then shot in the back. In “Chinatown” the bullet tears through her brain and out her eye. And in case this seems like a trend of the past, consider the more recent noir “Blade Runner 2049,” where the holographic femme fatale is deleted and the remaining women are stabbed, drowned and gutted like a fish.
Even the spirited Antigone, the brave Joan of Arc and the unfettered Thelma and Louise meet tragic ends in large part because they are spirited, brave and unfettered. They can defy kings, refuse beauty and defend themselves against violence. But it’s challenging for a writer to imagine a world in which such free women can exist without brutal consequences.
We live in a world that is a direct reflection of these stories we’ve been telling. Close to four women a day are murdered in America at the hands of their partners or former partners. One out of every four women in America has been the victim of a rape.
I am one of those one out of four. Our narratives tell us that women are objects and objects are disposable, so we are always objectified and often disposed of.
There are centuries of trial and error inside the “hero’s journey,” in which a young man is called to adventure, challenged by trials, faces a climactic battle and emerges victorious, changed and a hero. And while there are narrative patterns for the adventures of girls — “Alice in Wonderland,” “The Wizard of Oz” — those are few and far between, and for adult women, even less so.
Even when I found myself writing stories about women rebelling against the patriarchy, it still felt like what I largely ended up describing was the confines of patriarchy. The more fettered I felt inside the real world, the more I turned toward science fiction, speculative fiction and lo-fi fantasy.
I eventually co-wrote, produced and starred in two microbudget films, “Another Earth” and “Sound of My Voice.” Both stories left reality just far enough behind to give me the mental freedom to imagine female characters behaving in ways not often seen onscreen.
I emerged from the Sundance Film Festival with offers to act in projects I would never have been allowed to read for a week prior. Most of those roles were still girlfriend, mistress, mother. But there was a new character on offer to me as well, one that survived the story.
Enter, stage right: the Strong Female Lead.
She’s an assassin, a spy, a soldier, a superhero, a C.E.O. She can make a wound compress out of a maxi pad while on the lam. She’s got MacGyver’s resourcefulness but looks better in a tank top.
Acting the part of the Strong Female Lead changed both who I was and what I thought I was capable of. Training to do my own stunt work made me feel formidable and respected on set. Playing scenes where I was the boss firing men tasted like empowerment. And it will always feel better to be holding the gun in the scene than to be pleading for your life at the other end of the barrel.
It would be hard to deny that there is nutrition to be drawn from any narrative that gives women agency and voice in a world where they are most often without both. But the more I acted the Strong Female Lead, the more I became aware of the narrow specificity of the characters’ strengths — physical prowess, linear ambition, focused rationality. Masculine modalities of power.
I thought back to the films I watched and stories I read burrowed deep in the stacks of the library. I began to see something deeper and more insidious behind all those images of dead and dying women.
When we kill women in our stories, we aren’t just annihilating female gendered bodies. We are annihilating the feminine as a force wherever it resides — in women, in men, of the natural world. Because what we really mean when we say we want strong female leads is: “Give me a man but in the body of a woman I still want to see naked.”
It’s difficult for us to imagine femininity itself — empathy, vulnerability, listening — as strong. When I look at the world our stories have helped us envision and then erect, these are the very qualities that have been vanquished in favor of an overwrought masculinity.
I’ve played the Strong Female Lead in real life, too — as an analyst at an investment bank before coming to Hollywood. I wore suits, drank Scotch neat and talked about the women and the men I was sleeping with like commodities on an open market. I buried my feminine intelligence alive in order to survive. I excelled at my linear task of making more money from a lot of money regardless of the long-term consequences for others and the environment.
The lone female V.P. on my floor and my mentor at the time gave me the following advice when she left to partner at a hedge fund: Once a week, open the door to your office when they finally give you one, and place a phone call where you shout a string of expletives in a threatening voice.
She added that there doesn’t actually need to be someone on the other end of the line.
I don’t believe the feminine is sublime and the masculine is horrifying. I believe both are valuable, essential, powerful. But we have maligned one, venerated the other, and fallen into exaggerated performances of both that cause harm to all. How do we restore balance? Or how do we evolve beyond the limitations that binaries like feminine/masculine present in the first place?
In 2014 I went back to the library and encountered Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower,” a sci-fi novel written in 1993 imagining a 2020 where society has largely collapsed from climate change and growing wealth inequality. Butler’s heroine, the 17 year-old Lauren, has “hyperempathy” — she feels, quite literally, other people’s pain. This feminine gift and curse uniquely prepares her to survive the violent attack on her community in Los Angeles and successfully encourage a small tribe north to begin again from seeds she has saved from her family’s garden.
Butler felt to me like a lighthouse blinking from an island of understanding way out at sea. I had no idea how to get there, but I knew she had found something life saving. She had found a form of resistance.
Butler and other writers like Ursula Le Guin, Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood did not employ speculative fiction to colonize other planets, enslave new life-forms, or extract alien minerals for capital gains only to have them taken at gunpoint by A.I. robots. These women used the tenets of genre to reveal the injustices of the present and imagine our evolution.
With these ideas in mind, Zal Batmanglij and I wrote and created “The OA,” a Netflix series about Prairie, a blind girl who is kidnapped and returns seven years later to the community she grew up in with her sight restored. She opens up to a group of lost teenage boys in her neighborhood, telling them about her captivity and the inter-dimensional travel she discovered to survive it. It turns out these boys need to hear Prairie’s story as much as she needs to tell it. For the boys face their own kind of captivity: growing up inside the increasingly toxic obligations of American manhood.
As time has passed, I’ve come to understand what deep influence shaping a narrative has. Stories inspire our actions. They frame for us existences that are and are not possible, delineate tracks we can or cannot travel. They choose who we can find empathy for and who we cannot. What we have fellow feeling for, we protect. What we objectify and commodify, we eventually destroy.
I don’t want to be the dead girl, or Dave’s wife. But I don’t want to be a strong female lead either, if my power is defined largely by violence and domination, conquest and colonization.
Sometimes I get a feeling of what she could be like. A truly free woman. But when I try to fit her into the hero’s journey she recedes from the picture like a mirage. She says to me: Brit, the hero’s journey is centuries of narrative precedent written by men to mythologize men. Its pattern is inciting incident, rising tension, explosive climax and denouement. What does that remind you of?
And I say, a male orgasm.
And she says: Correct. I love the arc of male pleasure. But how could you bring me into being if I must satisfy the choreography of his desire only?
And I say: Good on you. But then how do I bring you into being?
Then I hear only silence.
But even in the silence I dream of answers. I imagine new structures and mythologies born from the choreography of female bodies, non-gendered bodies, bodies of color, disabled bodies. I imagine excavating my own desires, wants and needs, which I have buried so deeply to meet the desires, wants and needs of men around me that I’m not yet sure how my own desire would power the protagonist of a narrative.
These are not yet solutions. But they are places to dig.
Excavating, teaching and celebrating the feminine through stories is, inside our climate emergency, a matter of human survival. The moment we start imagining a new world and sharing it with one another through story is the moment that new world may actually come.
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ayankun · 4 years ago
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things that make me ABSOLUTELY INSANE about episode 5
REMEMBER WHAT I SAID ABOUT THE LAUGH TRACK PROBABLY BEING OF NARRATIVE IMPORT, and then it COMPLETELY WAS A PLOT POINT this week, in the first scene with Agnes flubbing her part, AND THEN the CCs actually did notate the audience reactions --
-- but only at the end of the fucking episode when “Pietro” shows up???????
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whyyyyyy
The fact that Elizabeth Olsen plays a character who not only is a twin but also has twins on a show that sends up the show on which her IRL twin sisters played one single character. 
The part where Wanda tried to use her powers on her babies physically turned my stomach and I was SO GLAD it didn’t work.
UGHH that dancing-with-the-babies-date like FUCK domesticity is my KINK.
There was an OVERLOAD of primary colors on the set this week, and I desire to know what it means.  Is it because babies/kids are associated with primary colors?  Was the Full House house littered with red-yellow-blue?  TELL ME WHAT IS THE REASON.
WHAAAAAAAAAAAT is the connection between Agnes and Dennis.  They had that whole interlude in ep 2, and now they both demonstrate an actionable fear of displeasing Wanda, when everyone else is/has been more or less outwardly oblivious to the situation.  (Dennis has a copy of his IRL person’s driver’s license on the mystery board, but Agnes DOES NOT)
I legit called the aging-up of the kids.  I said it out loud two weeks ago.  You know who you are, you can back me up on this.  They can play within the cut-corners of the sitcom-fiction format.  In fact, Jimmy said what we were ALL thinking, “they’ll be empty-nesters by the end of the episode” and I’m IMPRESSED AND DISGUSTED that they know what we’re thinking because they wanted us to think it.
when the Wanda-magic red brush went in and lovingly, unnervingly brought Vision to life in the new 80s opening credits, I screamed “FUCK YOOOOU” at my computer screen I do not lie
Birds.  Birds and flowers.  Birds and flowers are very everywhere.  On the walls, on the clothes.  This whole times.  oh what can it mean.  I need to know what it means.
I LEGIT thought the joke was going to be that Vision doesn’t have any baby photos and just existed as a full grown adult, but then the joke was that he does have baby photos
THIS
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He has a chip in his hand and then he throws it over his shoulder because he doesn’t eat food.
I’m honestly conflicted as to whether I’m reading Jimmy as gay or in a very cute and nerdy OT3 with Darcy and Monica.
STOP
HAMMER TIME
Is Wanda being mind-controlled to resurrect Vision so that SWORD can co-opt him as their new weapon and the investigation/rescue/assassination scenario is itself a staged production cast with unwitting players??????
I PROMISE this is not what it looks like:
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IT’S THE LOBSTER JELLO MOLD OR WHATEVER FROM THE TOASTER AD IN EP 1
ok I won’t joke around, I rewatched this on my folks’ monster tv and when I paused to see what ad was on the paper this time, my brain CRUMPLED:
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THAT IS A PICTURE OF AN ASTRONAUT INSIDE A TV.  MOONMEN CONFIRMED
Also, the frontpage headline is “Local Homemakers Innovating Recipes,” emphasis on home-making.  Making a home.  From scratch.  With your mind.  Wanda.
Also-also, the tiny scroll over the top is like “MORE DRAMATIC DETAILS ABOUT THE LIGHTS IN THE SKY ABOVE WESTVIEW”
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Are these SWORD-infiltrating-the-magic-barrier lights, or are these UFOSSSSSS
The realization that when Agnes appeared like a fairy godmother to help Wanda out of the dinner jam in ep 1, it was Wanda manifesting a solution to her problem using her God-will :|||||||||
HWAT is the emblem on Agnes’ brooch:
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“Wanda, we are usually so much of the same mind.”  OOF
Jimmy just GLEEFULLY marching in with coffee for his girlfriends and ONLY for his girlfriends
fukkin  HEXAGON >> HEX >> MAGIC >> SCARLET WITCH INCOMING YOOOOOOOOOOOO
NORM SNAPPING BACK INTO CHARACTER MID-EXISTENTIAL-CRISIS GOOD LOOORRRRDDDDD GIVE THIS MAN AN EMMY RIGHT MEOW
NOT WANDA INSTRUCTING HER CHILDREN ON THE IMPORTANCE OF RESPONSIBLE OWNERSHIP OF LIVING THINGS, AND THEN WATCHING HER SON MAKE THE DOG DO TRICKS AT HIS BIDDING -- LIKE MOTHER LIKE SON AMIRITE
So I don’t have a Unified Theory of Color for the WandaVision canon yet, but even a chump like me can pick out RBG:
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somebodypleasejustellmewhatthegoddamnbirdsmean
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I KNOW I’m insane, I’m totally not debating that, but “no joy” sounds a lot like it could have something to do with NJ, WestView, NJ.  W V, N J i mean I’m crazy, but it’s not not there
like okay, so IRL Wanda is still fully Sokovian, accent and all ... she had a tough life from a young age and I firmly cannot believe she spent any of that time watching mid-century American sitcoms so I STILL BELIEVE, AT THIS POINT, that we are being told that there is some other entity at least partially responsible for what’s going on here. 
like Monica said, I don’t think any of this was by Wanda’s design.  I think there’s a Wanda what done the grave robbery, and a Wanda what got whammied same as Monica did when she got stuck inside, the difference between Wanda-Wanda allowed to be in control somewhat and Monica getting overwritten as Geraldine being that Wanda has Mind Stone powers and that’s the root cause of all this reality-bending stuff (and the CMBR)
CASE IN POINT OF WANDA STARTING OUT AN INNOCENT AND INADVERTENTLY, OVER TIME, SLOWLY, WILLFULLY TAKING CONTROL ---
1) Vision suspects as much, and he’s perfect, so he’s probably right.
2) The nature of the female-empowerment agenda depicted in the mid-roll ads, where early on the Woman Character was subservient to the Man Character, and as of this week’s ad, the Man is comically infantilized while the Woman more or less has her shit together
3) FOR WHEN YOU MAKE A MESS YOU DIDN’T MEAN TO
Jezus you guys, the whole concept of the show using the gradual sophistication of the American television audience, as represented by the amalgam of the content it consumed in particular eras, to underscore Wanda’s own gradual journey from the vapid fiction of the post-war Dream Life to the slightly more heavy, but no less contrived fiction of the Perfect Family,,,,,,,,
AND THEN you have the ads, which also mirror the real-world marketing attitudes of the time
which also mirror Wanda and Vision’s personal histories to date
which also mirror the evolution of Wanda’s personal rise to power as depicted in this specific show
“Bring who back?” GOD there is an ELEPHANT in the ROOM and his name is VISION
Vision just BLUNTLY BRINGING UP THE FACT THAT WANDA IS RUINING EVERYONE’S LIVES LIEK WHAT ARE YOU DOING BRO
and then she ROLLS CREDITS ON HIM LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL GIRLBOSSSSSS
holy crap, 4th wall much???
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WHY DID THEY AHVE TO BE IN THE AIR FOR THAT ARUGMENET I MEAN I’M NOT COMPLAINING BUT IT IS HILARIOUS AS ALL HELL
JEEEEEEZ so the reveal that all this is real people real stuff real place, and that this is Vision’s stone-cold corpse with a fresh new mind shoved inside of it -- he legit has no memory of the Before, because that wasn’t even him.  He’s just as trapped as anybody else, and Wanda is his domestic abuser !!!!!!
I HATE IT HERE
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cyborgraptorprime · 5 years ago
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Anemone: Eureka Seven Hi Evolution
Let’s try and figure this out..
After watching the film, I had so many questions! Some I know we’ll have to wait for Eureka Seven Hi Evo 3, but there were so many scenes that had my brain twisting!! There isn’t going to be much of an order here, so bare with me as things go by a little chaotic like…
MAJOR spoilers down below
The world
So, looks like this world takes place in ANOTHER seperate universe in the E7 series. This time, it’s on Earth, in the year 2028 (I think) where humanity has been invaded by scub scab coral, specifically the ones we see are called the seventh Eureka aka “Eureka 7”. Now, does this mean there are other scab corals around the planet that are called Eureka 1- 6?
When diving into this film, I was curious if this movie connects to Hi Evo 1, since Anemone replaced what they previewed at the end of the first movie. Well, from what I noticed it seems that these two are indeed connected.
They mentioned “Silver Box” lots of times in the movie, the weapon we see in Hi Evo 1. I’ll get back to this one specifically, later.
Near the end of the film, we see the same Control Cluster shown in the first film.
Anemone witnesses the end of the first film, with Renton running, crying, and grinning as he goes to find Eureka. Again, more on this and Renton later.
When we see Nirvash type Z, he breaks out of some kind of egg. In Hi Evo 1, we see that same egg thing surrounding Dewey’s Devilfish after he survived the Summer of Love.
There lots of other things but I could, but I ain’t gonna list them all. Speaking of Dewey, what the hell happened to that guy? Dr Bear says the found him coming out half way through the scab coral. Is this Dewey the same one as Hi Evo 1? Possibly not, since he says the Renton in his world is dead(?). He also mentions that the stock footage other worlds Anemone sees, while she virtually dives, are not true and that his actual world is coming through the scab. What his actual world is, I believe the film left us wondering intentionally. Whatever it is, he’s obviously scheming something. He also mentions a bunch of mystic mumbo jumbo which makes me head go owy.
Silver Box
So, Silver Box was something I was completely not expecting to hear about again. From what we know, Silver Box is a musical warhead Adroc designed to combat the scabs. It lands on top of the Control Cluster and starts syncing with the scabs, bit then apparently goes out control. When Dewey goes to check it out, Silver Box is actually fully operational, but then swallows Dewey up in these red ribbons, protecting him from the Summer of Love. Then Adroc uses the Nirvash to “shutdown” The Silver Box, and its disappears. So what is it doing in Hi Evo 2? Before the climax, we see these red ribbons as the burst through the floor of the lab Anemone’s team was working in, carrying Anemone upwards. Dominic 2.0 also said that Silver Box wasnt working with him at one point too. One of the big hints was that Eureka seemed to be using Silver Box to create her different worlds. So, perhaps Silver Box was shut down in Hi Evo 1, but it already synced with the Cluster, making it possibly super charged? Like as if the two fused to make some kind of super world altering power?
Eureka and her “Dreams”
So, when we meet officially Eureka, she gets pissed at Anemone for not allowing her to be with Renton in these “dreams”. She later explains that in her world, Renton was swallowed up by her arm during Acperience (I’ll get to THAT later too). So she “dreams” up scenarios where she and Renton are still together. This, to us, is shown as all other continuities in the E7 franchise: The original series, AO, Pocket Rainbows, the games, fan art, and the manga. So does this mean this Eureka dreamed up all the past 10 years of the franchise? Honestly, I hope that’s not the case. Maybe with Silver Box’s help, Eureka was able to recreate/ copy other worlds that also had scabs (the other universes), and wanted to live out these fake existences as long as it means she’ll be with Renton?
Acperience
So if you’re a long time fan, and this word seems familiar, that is cause it is. Acperience was the title for 4 of the 50 episodes of the orignal series. Each episode contains a point where are main characters get in some form of contact with the scubs and enter their limbo-like world made for communication. Though they never mention it by name in the show (at least not from the dub that I can remember), the Hi Evo movies both describe this other worldly contact as Acperience. Hi Evo 1 mentions it when Renton places the Amnita Drive on Nirvash’s Compact Drive, starting the acperience. Then Hi Evo 2 calls it whenever Anemone travels from her world to Eureka’s.
Renton
One of the biggest reasons this film is a little confusing is thanks to this kid. So as mentioned above, what makes this story twist from the first Hi Evo 1, is that Renton dies in the acperience event that happens in the first film, yet as we know in Ho Evo 1, that’s the opposite. In fact, he stops it from happening and saves Eureka from decomposing. So do we have a split timeline in a universe where there’s already alternate timelines? Then, take make things even more confusing, turns out Renton’s not actually dead, but he’s in what looks like ANOTHER universe! We dont know which one for certain, but from what we see when we pass that strange cube we saw in the first film (maybe its quartz?), the world that Renton is on is very similar to the Earth we see know of the end of the original series, since we see that it has a large land mass covering half of the original planet.
Or
He’s actually staring at an Earth and hes in a universe that just has two Earths! In Hi Evo 1, Adroc sees the quartz(?) and two Earths and calls it the “true world”. I thought we were seeing a multiverse effect of multiple Earths from multiple universes, but maybe he just saw two Earths? We also see in a quick, blink and you miss it, moment that Adrock is sent there too, after he stops Silver Box.
So the question is how did Renton get there? I think that when Renton was swallowed by Eureka’s arm, he actually got acperienced to that universe and is trying to find a way back.
The Ending
This was a literal wtf moment. So after defeating Eureka and possibly the Control Cluster/Silver Box hybrid, the scabs turn to dust and reveal that somehow, The Gekko and Gekkostate show up and break free from the scabs. Then we see Charles and Ray got there too! How?! Then Dewey walks out, being all ominous and shit. Then Eureka, Anemone, Dominic, and giant Gulliver (I’m not even gunna try to explain how they came to be alive, let’s just go with fatherly love) witness an giant egg with an completely new Nirvash showing revealing to Eureka that Renton is alive.
What?
I hope they explain that in Hi Evo 3, but I got a hunch that the next film wont anwser anything. (Let’s hope my hunches are worse than Anemone’s)
Trivia things I noticed
When a Nirvash attacks, it apparently only goes for 1246 seconds, just like the antibodies in the original series
When Anemone gets play-backed into the Spearhead, its has TheEnd color scheme which, I think, proves that TheEnd in Pocket Full of Rainbows was the same black spearhead in that film
Generation Bleu sign tehee!
Speaking of Gen Bleu, Mischa and Sonia name drop the Triton and Posiden. Maybe those crafts and their teams exist in this universe too!
The music the pilot plays while Nirvash X attacks is called Tiger Tracks, which is the actual name of the song composed for the original series. Good shit.
Obviously, the number 7 is a constant in this film. You see it everywhere.
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lovelylogans · 5 years ago
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Can I ask for more Rory salt? Right after finishing the show I didn't realize why everyone was so upset about her but now that I've rewatched I kind of understand. I'd like to hear more about your opinions on her! (Mostly bc I have 2 braincells so stuff like that flies over my head lol)
okay, granted, a Fair amount of my salt comes from the perspective of a journalism student, ie who they’re trying to portray, and also like. someone at a similar Point in their life, so. here we go. rory Salt.
like i will say she isn’t like, bonafide the Worst Character of all time, but like...... okay. like. this tracks back to one of my original and largest gripes with gilmore girls, and also a large reason of why i like the earlier seasons better than the later ones.
this post explains it very well; the early seasons (and first episodes) of gilmore girls seem to promise healing, moving forward, bettering familial relationships. the actuality of gilmore girls is the repetition of mistakes and things continuing in cycles, and often getting worse.
so, like. rory. rory’s character is established as this sweet, innocent, naive kid, with a fairly decent work ethic and big dreams to aspire to journalism and a certain level of fame (like christine amanpour, i think was the journalist she mentioned in the first day at chilton ep?) she’s smart, quiet, beginning to establish a relationship with her parents, but still a bit uncomfortable within the realm of chilton/privilege—i think this is best exemplified within the debutante episode, in which she’s uncomfortable with the premise, but goes through with it for the sake of making emily happy. same with the golfing episode with richard—she has zero interest in golf, but she gets to spend a day with her grandfather, and she wants to establish that relationship with him.
but then there’s that thing kicking in, in which gilmore girls is essentially a cyclical tragedy; rory gradually becomes more confident in herself and her abilities (becoming valedictorian, going up against paris for the speech on cspan) and in her relationship with boys; she goes after jess, and, once he leaves, lets him go and eventually is like “you shouldn’t have left me. but i’m saying goodbye to you, on my terms.” i think that s3 is where her character is strongest; she’s still sweet and shy, but she has a bit of an edge. she’s caring toward her friends, she, sure, makes the occasional mistake, but she eventually rallies from them. that’s when i like rory’s character best.
rory starts her decline in season four. this dates back to the whole cyclical thing; she’s the one who goes to her grandparents for money, echoing the original premise of the show, and a cycle starts anew. she goes to another new, prestigious school (yale) where she’s pushed to new limits. 
but rory makes mistakes. she stands up for herself, yes, namely taylor when he pushes for her to be ice cream queen, but she also has a certain level of... entitlement, i suppose. like. let’s take “die, jerk.”
(i’m gonna go briefly into a journalistic tangent here, which is especially heaped by the fact i’ve been writing a lot of reviews lately. also, it applies.)
so, first of all, she takes her mom to her job. her mom. literally think about every other job in the world and, barring a “family day” at the office, please name a situation in which that’s acceptable. right? there’s basically no other situation in which that’s a thing you do when you’re being professional. (this is a repeated gripe, by the way; she often brings lorelai along. this could have been achieved with some phone calls where she hangs up and then does her job. but i digress. this goes into a whole rant on how women in journalism are portrayed in tv shows and other media, but seriously, i digress.)
then there’s the review itself. it’s mean.
“she has the grace of a drunken dock worker.” compared her to a hippo. “the roll around the bra strap,” the line about regretting how evolution had led man to stand on two feet because it led to this night. the ballerina comes to yell at her, which is wrong, but holy god, that never even should have been published. sure, it’s partially the fault of doyle, who as an editor should have stepped in, said, “rewrite the holy hell out of this,” and given her a talking-to on how reviewing should be about the performance and not body-shaming her, because yes you can give things a bad review but not to that level, but rory is the one who wrote it. and she only begins to seem apologetic when people start to react to it other than doyle; the ballerina, her mom, emily and richard. this happens a few times throughout—rory (and lorelai) never seem to realize how mean they can get until people start reacting to what they’re doing and saying. 
she’s willing to write those things, read them, have other people read them, and put them out into the public, and doesn’t even consider the potential ramifications that it could have had on not only the dancer, but the ballet performance (which gets shut down, in part due to rory’s review) the costumer, the crew, everyone involved. yes, bad reviews exist, and yes, they can be brutal, but they’re almost never so personally vindictive and mean. she says she’s writing her opinion. look at how harsh that opinion is.
that’s part of why my opinion of rory takes a decline; being mean. another part of it is a certain level of entitlement.
because the revival is on my brain lately, let’s talk revival stuff. making it as a freelance journalist is hard. it’s hard work. it isn’t for a lot of people. especially in new york city, where the industry is so competitive that finding a job in journalism is a whole Thing. rory has a piece in the new yorker (not bad!) and is writing a piece for gq (also not bad, not bad at all!) about people waiting in line for a certain event.
now. let’s take, like, season four/season five rory, who compiled like three separate PILES of research for a story that wasn’t even hers, worked hard enough at chilton, a highly academically competitive school, to get valedictorian. rory is portrayed as a hard worker. she does what’s necessary for the job and to improve.
revival? whoosh, out the window!
she falls asleep during an interview for the gq job. she continually jets off to london to go see logan. she’s completely unprepared for a job interview, having absolutely zero ideas for any stories, despite the fact that freelance journalists are almost always working multiple stories and coming up with new ideas so they can, y’know, get paid. chilton offers her a job as a teacher if she gets her masters, but she turns it down, which, on one hand, sure, follow your dreams, on the other, if you’re continually complaining that you’ll take a job, ANY job, and get a very good job handed to you on a silver platter with the potential for more growth post that job with the addition of your masters and DON’T TAKE IT?!?!?!
plus, in the job interview, when she doesn’t get it, UNDERSTANDABLY, she calls the interviewer angrily saying that the interviewer practically promised her the job, despite the fact that it was a PRELIMINARY JOB INTERVIEW and there are OTHER CANDIDATES who DEFINITELY AT LEAST HAD STORY IDEAS. no matter how impressive your resume is, you have to at least show that you’re trying, because the whole thing in journalism (esp for those breaking into a business) is that EVERYONE has an extensive resume. that’s part of why it’s so competitive.
and still complains that she’s broke, in addition to the trust fund that we know she received at 25, plus whatever money richard left her in his will. if she was broke, she’d be living entirely above her means—those continual trips to london, living in a sizeable one-bedroom apartment in NEW YORK CITY, going out to eat very often. 
and then just??? i could ramble more (the whole sleeping with a MARRIED DEAN thing, her partnership with logan, i could go back in and ramble about how the body-shaming is continual despite the fact that they frequently eat fattening foods and make fun of sports and are only so thin bc, well, tv magic, but also because they have Miraculous metabolisms, the way that they treat their friends, to some extent, but. yeah. here is some Rory Salt.)
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nathjonesey-75 · 4 years ago
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2021 in Electronic Music: A New Hope?
A long time ago in a galaxy far away…there was the nineties system. In that system, folk came together in happiness to celebrate together at places called nightclubs, where DJ masters would enthral, guide and entertain the folk by composing and conducting a range of sounds. The people would dance throughout the time of the stars, until the great star would rise – and folk would rest. Or they would fly to another dimension and be led by other masters to more happiness.
                                                ____________________
 It all sounds like a fairy-tale, doesn’t it? The world which was once a reality feels like it needs Jedi-style leaders to save it from the abyss, otherwise known as traditionalist business hell. The abyss which sees concrete futures made without character, without expression, art or creativity – where culture could be as one-dimensional as the spurious garbage emanating from the mouths of those supposedly in charge of moving nations to brighter futures.
 Also, without too much finger-pointing, 2020 in itself has been like a meteor which has hit the creative world like an alien rock with no direction. Furthermore, without conspiracy theorising (about custom-made laboratory viruses in secretive lands – oops, got sucked in there) and observing the hard, indigestive facts of October 2020 – where no end date is presentable as to when the uninvited virus will be vanquished. Can we either look to the future with hope for electronic – and indeed, all live music? Or are we to fight the good fight for as long as we can, to abate the ‘dark side of the force’ in corporate-led governments and cold business?
 During the damaged and lost eighties – socially and politically – times were hard unless you were a yuppie whose “enterprise” in the way of sole trading was rewarded on the stock exchange. Yet, what came from that mass hardship for everyone else – was what made us not only dream – but live out our dreams. Make dreams for others.
 Music was in the post-punk, electro-pop era. Hip-hop was sky-rocketing across the world, from New York – across the USA and over to every Western nation. As was House Music. As was Techno. The DIY ideal which once applied to Punk Rock in the mid-to late seventies now had been adopted by DJs. Is that a pair of Technics 1210s? Is that a Roland synthesizer? Ok, let’s do something.
 As Resident Advisor’s mini-documentary “How Punk Shaped Electronic Music” - about the two genres’ correlations – it says
      “The most radical part of it was an idea – if you want to make music, You don’t need a big record deal; a big, fancy studio – or even much musical talent. You just need the sheer force of will - to get out there and do it.”
This was never more prevalent than in both Chicago, where House Music was developed – and in Detroit, where technology’s advances in electronic devices saw Techno appear in the latter part of the decade. Still, the concept of not having to possess “much musical talent” was not necessarily true when it applied to some of the most celebrated electronic musical doctors. Larry Heard played several musical instruments from a young age. Underworld played instruments even before forming their first band, Screen Gemz – back in 1975. Sasha was a classically-trained pianist before ever seeing a DJ. I could go on.
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So, in light of recent debates as to whether these performers, their industries and followings are “viable” for financial support during this degraded and destructive year  – I don’t need to revisit the figures of economic value for which our industry produces. As for The Stranglers’ Hugh Cornwell interview on Good Morning Britain on October the 9th – he said, “House Music is the worst song writing….there isn’t any song writing skills in House Music, for me.” Regardless of his own successes in the late seventies and early eighties – this is as moot a point to be found, as would be for anyone over sixty-five who have never understood – or tried to understand electronic music. Except by now, you must have been self-isolating from the wider world out there, where times have moved on from only guitars in song writing.
   Larry Levan was instrumental in writing music for Grace Jones, while The Stranglers were at their peak of popularity. Why did Madonna recruit both Sasha and Paul Oakenfold to help compose her tracks over twenty years ago? Why did Danny Boyle curate the 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony with the musical aid of Rick Smith from Underworld? Why did Kendrick Lamar win awards for tracks with lyrics which read; 
"Shit on anybody, I'm a rappin' Porta-Potty/And I probably gotta dump right now". 
Hardly poetry. You could throw mud and hit anything if it’s about “bad” music nowadays. Ironically, John Holmstrom, founding editor of Punk magazine described that genre as "rock and roll by people who didn't have very many skills as musicians but still felt the need to express themselves through music". Except Punk Rock lives on in this anthem-led society of 2020. 
While Cornwell’s empty shot at House Music was filmed seemingly at home in West London, I would urge him to use his ideal location and visit the Design Museum in Kensington, where the Electronic Music exhibition is held until February 2021. The opinion of lack of skills required in writing songs – would surely be under further threat at the display of Jeff Mills’ instrument engineering, or Aphex Twin’s multi-level track and video choreography. The words “out of touch” are, I feel – valid in this case. Granted, every genre has producers who don’t try hard but write cheap, catchy songs – think of all the one-hit-wonders in the seventies and eighties. “Shaddap You Face”, “Star Trekkin”, “Puppy Love”…
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These were songs made for either fun, children’s television, or for undisclosed reasons by each composer – suffice to say that none involved House Music. Yet over thirty-five years of House Music walking in unison with the rise of technology and evolution of nightclubs and festivals – has meant that all instruments and now software are taught and developed at schools, colleges and universities across the world. I would be highly confident of being able to write a cheesy, tacky and bad track in one day – whether I wanted the financial profit from it or not – would be a matter for my bank balance after 2020 (wink-wink, nudge-nudge…)
For future reference, with mists of all colours being spread across the musical galaxy as we enter the last two months of what has been an abysmal anomaly year, the anger generated by punk was closed down quickly by the governments of the late seventies. It was beyond saving as a regular, viable movement by the time the eighties commenced. Its direct anti-establishment nature would have made sure of that, were it in the situation we now face. 
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But that did not stop its musicians from carrying on making music. Post-punk continued its energy and old regime defiance through bands inspired by what came before. Bands such as New Order, Public Image Limited, Talking Heads and The Fall - all had messages and attitudes carried from previous years. Genres were reinvented and music adapted. Moving into the unknown may be unclear and unnerving right now. Yet, fighting for what we can recreate should be a binding motive for DJs, promoters, clubbers, electronic artists and everyone involved in our scene. 
From recently looking back at a haul of 1990s editions of Mixmag and Ministry magazines I had stowed away, it’s clear we had it “damn good” at that time. We may – and highly likely never will return to that level of hedonism, heights of being spoilt rotten for wealth of music heard for the first time, the talent and progress of the producers guiding us through, skills of DJs and grandiosity and grunginess of clubs which we visited. We do, however, have these imprints on our brains and know what works. Living solely from memories is not what I am advocating – using memories and what we have today, as a global community to post flagposts of how the “underground will live forever” – in believing our clubs can be reopened and that celebrating our own culture at future parties, is worth the time spent in doing so. Do it yourself can work, as was ever the case. 
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jomanuworld · 4 years ago
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Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) - The Last Supper
“BLEACHING THE CLOUDY, CONFUSING, TEDIOUS AND PAINFUL HISTORICAL PATHWAY OF GODS CREATED BY HUMAN TROGLODYTES OVER THE YEARS TO JUSTIFY OUR EXISTENCE IN THE UNIVERSE.”  I'M ALL CONFUSED, BROKEN- HEARTED, AS WELL AS A VICTIM OF RELIGIOUS INDOCTRINATION  EXPERIENCING PARALYSIS BY ANALYSIS AND 75% OF MY DENDRITES ARE FRIED!! HUMAN TROGLODYTES HAVE EXPERIENCED MORE THAN 7000 YEARS OF RELIGIOUS TORTURE AND PSYCHOLOGICAL INDOCTRINATION IN THE NAME OF AN ILLUSIVE GOD. NOW I UNDERSTAND WHY ADOLF HITLER WAS TRYING TO EXTERMINATE THE JEWISH RACE FROM PLANET EARTH. FIRST, THE JEWS MANUFACTURED THEIR FAKE NEW GOD BY COERCION AND TO PROTECT THEMSELVES FROM EXTERNAL ANNIHILATION. SECOND, HITLER DID NOT LIKE THE RELATIVE NEW SOCIAL/REVOLUTIONARY AND RADICAL IDEAS INTRODUCED BY JEWISH  COMMUNISTS TO REPLACE RUSSIA'S DESPOTIC CZAR. THEREFORE, LET'S JUMP INTO OUR IMAGINARY TIME MACHINE AND LET'S BEGIN FROM TIME 0!
 ACCORDING TO BRITISH ANTHROPOLOGIST EDWARD BURNETT TYLOR, (10/1832 - 01/1917), "ANIMISM IS THE FIRST STAGE IN A EVOLUTIONARY TREE OF INCREASING CULTURAL COMPLEXITY SOCIETIES."  IN OTHER WORDS, HUMAN TROGLODYTES FIRST PRIMITIVE RELIGION WAS ANIMISM, FOLLOWED BY POLYTHEISM, FOLLOWED BY MONOTHEISM, AND FINALLY CULMINATING AND EMBRACING SCIENTIFIC RATIONALISM. IN SHORT, TYLOR WITH HIS THEORY OF  HUMAN-GOD EVOLUTION HAS MURDERED ALL THE GODS CREATED BY PRIMITIVE TROGLODYTES OVER THE YEARS. THIS MEANS THAT YAHWEH WAS AN ELUSIVE GOD FROM THE BEGINNING OF TIME, SATAN HAS NO JOB, UNEMPLOYED FOREVER, AHURA MAZDA HAS NO PURPOSE IN THIS PLANET, BABALU-AYE IS A PLANETARY ENIGMA,  AND VOODOO PRIESTS ARE WASTING THEIR  TIME  BY SACRIFICING ANIMALS TO FEED SPIRITS.
 DID MOSES REALLY EXPERIENCE A PRIVATE DIALOG WITH YAHWEH, CALLED REVELATION, OR WE AGNOSTICS SHOULD CONSIDER MOSES ANOTHER MISGUIDED PROPHET  TRAPPED IN HIS OWN LITTLE WORLD OF DAILY PRAYERS AND BORROWED AND/OR  STOLEN PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS AND CONCEPTS FROM PREVIOUS  PRE-FABRICATED AND PSEUDO-RELIGIONS TO CREATE A NEW POTENT GOD BY INTIMIDATION AND COERCION? “IF YOU DON'T WANT TO LIVE BY THE LAW,  YOU SHALL DIE BY THE LAW!” IS THE “LIVE BY THE LAW” CODE OF LAW WAS STOLEN FROM HAMMURABI’S CODE OF LAW BY MOSES OR ABRAM?
 DID HEBREWS STEAL MYSTICAL CONCEPTS FROM ZOROASTRIANISM RELIGION TO CREATE ANOTHER ILLUSIVE AND MUCH MORE POTENT GOD (BASED ON THEIR NEEDS)? IS AHURA MAZDA MUCH MORE POWERFUL AND CREATIVE DEITY THAN YAHWEH? WHICH DEITIES CONTROLS AND PROTECT THE AKASHIC RECORDS FROM PAGANS AND THE  GROWING MOB OF NON-BELIEVERS IN OUR TIME? YAHWEH OR AHURA MAZDA?
 IS THIS HEBREW GOD YAHWEH CRAZY OR ANOTHER MISGUIDED DIVINE ENTITY?????!!!
 I'M SCARED TO DEATH!! THE MORE I LOOK INTO THE HOLY BIBLE, I GET MORE CONFUSED. SPOOKY, FABRICATED, EXTRAPOLATED LIES AND CONTRADICTIONS ARE SCATTERED THROUGHOUT THE HOLY NOVELLA LEAVING READERS IN LIMBO AND CONFUSED. I'M DIVING INTO MY THIRD EYE TO REALLY FIND OUT WHO IS THE CREATOR OF THIS PLANET AND WHAT IS INSIDE OUR BRAIN THAT MAKES US THINK AND BELIEF IN A SUPREME GOD, A CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE. THAT'S WHY I AM TRACKING AND DECODING THE HEBREWS, MOSES AND THE YAHOO - YAHWEH GODS!!!!! TRACKING YAHWEH'S ABRACADABRA LIES AND THE CONTRADICTIONS OF THE BIBLE. TRACKING, DECODING THE JESUS ENIGMA/PARADOX AND THE PAINFUL EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS FROM HUMAN TROGLODYTE TO HUMAN GOD BECAUSE PRAYING FOR A GOD WHO WASN'T THERE NOR ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE TO SOLVE OUR HUMAN DILEMMAS IS NOT A WAY OUT TO ESCAPE FROM OUR REALITY! ANYWAY, YAHWEH IS DEAD AND ALL THOSE FILTHY JEWISH CHARACTERS FROM THE BIBLE KILLED JESUS!!!!! THE SPOOKY DIVINE COMEDY CANTICA/NOVELLA CHARACTERS ARE MORE STIMULATING AND REALISTIC THAN THOSE CROOKED CAIAPHAS, RAPISTS, SODOMITES, HOMOSEXUALS, PROSTITUTES, MACHO MEN LESBIANS, BIBLE PIMPS ACTING AS PATRIARCHS, MACHO MEN WARRIORS AND GOD'S FREAKS CHARACTERS MENTIONED IN THE HOLY BIBLE - NOVELLA. DOES YAHWEH UNDERSTAND CONSCIOUSNESS? WHAT IS DIVINE CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE REALMS OF GODS?
 ACCORDING TO KARL MARX, "GOD IS NOTHING MORE THAN A PROJECTION OF THE IDEAL HUMAN." “EUREKA!.” NIRVANA, PERHAPS? THE PERSON WHO CAN'T FULFILLS HIS ESSENCE IN THE REAL WORLD, ACHIEVES IT IN THE GREAT BEYOND AND THIS FANTASY LETS HIM BEAR THE MISERY OF HIS DAILY LIFE. KARL MARX CALLED RELIGION, THE OPIUM OF THE PEOPLE BECAUSE IT LOADS PEOPLE INTO A PASSIVE FORGETFUL STUPOR.
 Sabbath-breaking Punished:
32 Now while the sons of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man gathering wood on the sabbath day.
33 Those who saw him gathering wood brought him to Moses and Aaron and all the congregation;
34 and they put him in custody because it had not been declared what should be done to him.
35 Then the Lord said to Moses, “The man shall surely be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp.”
36 So all the congregation brought him outside the camp and stoned him to death with stones, just as the Lord had commanded Moses.
37 The Lord also spoke to Moses, saying,
38 “Speak to the sons of Israel, and tell them that they shall make for themselves tassels on the corners of their garments throughout their generations and that they shall put on the tassel of each corner a cord of blue.
39 “It shall be a tassel for you to look at and remember all the commandments of the Lord, to do them and not follow after your own heart and your own eyes, after which you played the harlot,
40 so that you may remember to do all My commandments and be holy to your God.
41 “I am the Lord your God who brought you out from the land of Egypt to be your God; I am the Lord your God.”
 The Sign of the Sabbath:
12 The Lord spoke to Moses, saying,
13 “But as for you, speak to the sons of Israel, saying, You shall surely observe My sabbaths; for this is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I am the Lord who sanctifies you.
14 ‘Therefore you are to observe the Sabbath, for it is holy to you. Everyone who profanes it shall surely be put to death; for whoever does any work on it, that person shall be cut off from among his people.
15 ‘For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day there is a sabbath of complete rest, holy to the Lord; whoever does any work on the sabbath day shall surely 
be put to death.
16 ‘So the sons of Israel shall observe the sabbath, to celebrate the sabbath throughout their generations as a perpetual covenant.’
17 “It is a sign between the sons of Israel and Me forever; for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, but on the seventh day He ceased from labor and was refreshed.”
18 When He had finished speaking with him upon Mount Sinai, He gave Moses the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone, written by the finger of God."
 IN CONCLUSION, IN MY JOURNEY LOOKING FOR A DIVINE ENTITY, I ONLY FOUND WARS, HUMAN LIES DESIGNED, FABRICATED AND EXTRAPOLATED TO MANIPULATE HUMAN PUPPETS. HUMAN TROGLODYTES CONTROLLING THEIR ENVIRONMENT TO IMPOSE THEIR AUTHORITY AND GOD'S AUTHORITY TO CONTROL OTHERS. YES, AN EYE FOR AN EYE, VINDICTIVE AND ILLUSIVE YAHWEH. NIETZSCHE FINALLY KILLED GOD IN HIS BOOK. "GOD IS DEAD," AND THEN ADOLF HITLER CAME A FEW YEARS LATER TO TRY TO EXTINGUISH THE JEWISH RACE AND OTHER INFERIOR HUMANS IN THE NAME OF HIS NAZI BIOLOGICAL CLEANSING THEORY. SO, MY FINAL QUESTION IS. WHERE WAS YAHWEH AND THE WHOLE HIERARCHY/ARMY OF DEMIGODS WHO WERE CREATED IN MESOPOTAMIA WHEN HITLER WAS TURNING THE JEWISH RACE INTO ASHES TO CREATE A NEW WORLD OF PURE GERMANIC RACE, THE UBERMENSCH, THAT WILL BE CONTROLLED ONLY BY THE WHITE GERMANIC SUPREMACISTS?
IN MY OPINION, THE BIBLE SHOULD BE DOWNGRADED FROM THE WORD OF GOD STATUS TO A COMPILATION OF DISORGANIZED HUMAN IDEAS, REALITIES, AND FANTASIES. THE HUMAN BIBLE CREATED BY HUMAN TROGLODYTES IS OUR ATTEND TO RECORD EVERY HUMAN EXPERIENCE IN A CHAOTIC WORLD. A WORLD WITHOUT LITERATURE. THE BIBLE IS JUST THAT, A COMPILATION OF DISORGANIZED PRIMITIVE LITERATURE. YES, THE FIRST COMPLEX HUMAN NOVELLA USING AND EMPLOYING GOD AS OUR CREATOR AND THE CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE.
 IN THE BEGINNING, WE ALL BOYS, ARE ALL GIRLS. NOW I UNDERSTAND WHY MEN POSSESS TWO NIPPLES IN THEIR CHEST AND LADIES HAVE AN ATROPHIED PENIS HEAD CALLED CLITORIS!!!! NO WONDER THERE ARE SO MANY SISSY BOYS AND LESBIAN MACHO MAN IN THIS PLANET.!!! ALL SISSY BOYS AND LESBIANS MACHO MEN POSSESS BAD, TWISTED, AND DEGENERATED Y OR X CHROMOSOMES. YAHWEH NOR THE HEBREWS FROM THE SPOOKY BIBLE DID NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THE X AND Y CHROMOSOMES PARADOX. SO, IN THE BEGINNING, THE HEBREW BIBLE IS ALL A FAKE NOVELLA NOT THE WORDS OF YAHWEH. EVE WAS NOT CREATED OUT OF ADAM'S RIB AFTER ALL.  WAS ADAM A HERMAPHRODITE?
 WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND!!!! LIKE THE WORLD OF DISNEY SONG GOES. "IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL." WE ALL ARE LIVING IN A FAKE WORLD PRE-FABRICATED BY HUMAN TROGLODYTES TRYING TO MIMIC GOD AND THE MAN WHO MOVED FORWARD WITH THE ULTIMATE THESIS WAS ADOLF HITLER. SO, KARL MARX IS ALSO CORRECT IN HIS STATEMENT REGARDING RELIGION. "RELIGION IS THE OPIUM OF THE PEOPLE." "IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL."!!!!!??? AMEN.!
NOW I UNDERSTAND, ADOLF HITLER SPOOKY EXPERIMENT WITH THE JEWS AND REDUCING THE HEBREW RACE TO NOTHING. YES, TO LESS THAN A VEGETABLE BY DESTROYING THE JEWISH COMMUNIST POPULATION AND CREATING NEW JOBS FOR THE UNEMPLOYED GERMANIC RACE. YES, ADOLF HITLER EMBRACED CHRISTIANITY, THE ROMANS MEGALOMANIAC BEHAVIOR AND FINALLY THE IDEAS OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE TO EXTERMINATE THE HEBREW RACE TO CREATE THE NEW GERMANY WITH PURE WHITE GERMANIC SUPERMEN THAT WILL CONTROL THE WORLD WITHOUT A MONO-UNIVERSAL GOD.
AFTER ALL THE PRAYERS, TRIALS, TRIBULATIONS, AND MEDITATIONS OVER THE LAST 7000 YEARS, NO DIVINE ENTITY HAS COME  TO THE RESCUE, TO PROTECT ISRAEL AND IN MY OPINION, ADOLPH HITLER AND COMMUNISTS CHALLENGED YAHWEH TO COME FORWARD BUT HE DID NOT SPEAK OUT. COMMUNISTS AND NAZIS HAVE TORTURED MANY JEWISH PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD AND YAHWEH HAS REMAINED SILENT ALL THESE YEARS. YAHWEH DID NOT REVEAL HIMSELF TO MOSES AND WHAT HAVE BEEN KEEPING JEWS, MUSLIMS, AND CHRISTIANS ALIVE ALL THESE YEARS IS THEIR FAITH. “IT’S FOOLISH TO ATTEMPT TO PROOF TO INFIDELS THAT THE SCRIPTURE IS THE WORD OF GOD, SINCE THIS CAN ONLY BE KNOWN BY FAITH.”
YES, THE TIME WILL COME WHEN CIVILIZATION WILL NO LONGER BE PAYING ATTENTION TO SOCIALISTS NOR COMMUNISTS OUTCRIES BUT IN THE MEANTIME GREEDY CAPITALISTS WILL CONTINUE INFLATING THE PRICES OF GOODS AND SERVICES TO COPE WITH MORE PERSONAL AND CORPORATE DEBTS AND ULTIMATELY MORE REVENUE  AND ONLY THEN WE WILL EXPERIENCE OUR NEW AND IMPROVED UNIVERSAL RELIGION CALLED "ANARCHISM."  THE WORLD WILL BECOME SO OVERPOPULATED, FRAGMENTED, AND BROKEN THAT THE NEW GENERATION OF HUMAN TROGLODYTES WILL END UP LIKE IN CHARLTON HESTON MOVIE, SOYLENT GREEN. YES, LIVING IN A WORLD OVERPOPULATED AND NO LAND AVAILABLE FOR FARMING AND THE ENTIRE ANIMAL POPULATION DESTROYED OR CONSUMED BY HUMANS ACTING AS PLANET EARTH GODS. A SOCIALIST - ANARCHIST CRUEL WORLD. YES, WE WILL EAT EACH OTHER FOR BREAKFAST, LUNCH, AND DINNER, WORSE THAN IN THE BIBLE STORIES. NO COWS, NO MORE CREAMY HOT CHOCOLATE, NO MILK, NO COLD DRINKS WITH ICE CUBES, NO MORE CREAMY ESPRESSO, NO MEAT, CONTROLLED WATER SUPPLY, A 4 OZ JAR OF STRAWBERRY JAM WILL COST $50.00 (IF YOU HAVE THE MONEY) BUT YOU WILL BE ABLE TO EAT SOYLENT GREEN CRACKERS MADE OUT OF PROCESSED HUMAN CADAVERS. AND FINALLY,  LIKE IN ALL SOCIALISTS AND COMMUNISTS COUNTRIES, THE SOYLENT GREEN CRACKERS WILL BE RATIONALIZED LIKE IN THE FORMER SOVIET UNION AND OTHER COMMUNISTS COUNTRIES. AMEN!!!
CONSEQUENTLY, THE GRANDIOSE, ENIGMATIC AND UNIVERSAL QUESTION REMAINS IN FORCE. ARE WE, THE HUMAN TROGLODYTES SPECIMEN POPPETS OF GODS OR WE REALLY PRETENDING TO BE GODS’ OF PLANET EARTH BY EXTERMINATING THE ANIMAL KINGDOM AND FAUNA IN ORDER TO MAKE MORE MONEY IN REAL ESTATE?
ALL MEN MADE RELIGIONS HAVE BEEN MANIPULATED OVER THE YEARS TO ACCOMMODATE HUMAN INSANITIES FOR A LONG TIME NOW, THEREFORE THE TIME HAS COME FOR HUMAN TROGLODYTES TO PROTECT MOTHER NATURE AND THE ANIMAL KINGDOM FROM PSYCHO-HUNTER- CRIMINALS WHO ARE DETERMINED TO DISTORT/ALTER PLANET EARTH ECOSYSTEMS AND THE GLOBAL FAUNA IN THE NAME OF MORE EXPENSIVE REAL ESTATE PROPERTIES IN ORDER TO GENERATE MORE REVENUE. IT IS UP TO US, HUMANS TO BUILD/MAINTAIN OUR PLANET LIKE A GLOBAL PARADISE IN ACCORD TO THE BIBLE PROPHETS AND FANTASIES OR APPLY MOSES' PRINCIPLE IN COMMUNISTS AS WELL AS CAPITALISTS COUNTRIES AS FOLLOW. "IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO LIVE BY THE LAW, YOU ARE GOING TO DIE BY THE LAW." A  GLOBAL PLAN MUST BE PLACE IN EFFECT IN ORDER TO HALT/SLOWDOWN THE MASSIVE GLOBAL HUMAN REPRODUCTION IN THIS PLANET. ONLY TIME WILL TELL! THE ONLY THING THAT GOVERNMENTS WILL HAVE TO DO IS TO SLOW DOWN THE OVERPOPULATION PROBLEMS,  BAN ILLEGAL CHAIN MIGRATION AROUND THE PLANET AND SLOW DOWN THE LEGAL CHAIN MIGRATION BUSINESS.
BIRTH CONTROL WILL ALSO BECOME A POLITICAL ISSUE IN THE U.S  WERE THOUSANDS OF LIBERATED WOMEN ARE USING SEX AS AN ECONOMIC TOOL TO OBTAIN LEGAL STATUS, WELFARE, AND FREE MONEY.  U.S AUTOMATIC BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP SHOULD BE BANNED ASAP IN ORDER TO HALT THE POPULATION GROWTH.OR THE FUTURE GENERATION OF HUMAN TROGLODYTES/YAHOOS WILL EXPERIENCE A RUDE AND CRUEL AWAKENING SIMILAR TO THE SOYLENT GREEN SCIENCE FICTION MOVIE. AMEN!
WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND!!!
“Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out!”
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salvatoreschool · 5 years ago
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Kaylee Bryant: ‘‘Legacies’’ star is making her mark
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There is a lot of supernatural and fantasy in Kaylee Bryant’s world. But when it comes to her own reality, she is all about being true to herself and passionate about her work.
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Starting out as a model when she was 8, the 22-year-old actress remembers herself as a very shy child. ‘‘I couldn’t look people in the eyes, or shake somebody’s hand,’’ she recalls. However when her family photographer put the camera up to her, she suddenly felt comfortable in public. Kaylee grew up watching a lot of films which eventually got her on the track of wanting to pursue an acting career at a young age. ‘‘I used to pretend to be sick so I can stay home from school because all I wanted to do was watch Mulan and The Addams Family on repeat. I actually went about a year pretending to be Wednesday Addams,’’ she tells. ‘‘It wasn’t until I was around 7 or 8 years old that I felt like that was an actual part that somebody could play.’’
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As she dived into acting on a professional level, Kaylee has been in the entertainment industry for years. ‘‘My family and friends are extraordinarily supportive,’’ she says. Grasping any chance she has to embody a new character, her résumé includes appearances in series such as American Horror Story, Santa Clarita Diet, The Real O’Neals as well as Disney’s Dog with a Blog and Kickin’ It. ‘‘I don’t think I ever feel deeply comfortable with saying that acting is my career path because I will always want to work more than possible and seek any business opportunities that I can. But the reality is that this is a very inconsistent career choice in general,’’ she shares, before adding, ‘‘I accept that not every role is for me. That is a sort of negativity that I have been trying to overcome ever since I started.’’
To this day, it shocks me when people come up to me on the street and know who I am, just because I don’t think of myself as anything other than Kaylee that shows up to work every day
Despite the uncertain landscape of the acting world, Kaylee kept hitting the audition circuit and ultimately landed a starring role in The CW’s drama series Legacies, a spinoff of popular shows The Vampire Diaries and The Originals. Created by Julie Plec who runs the entire Vampire Diaries Universe, Legacies introduces the story of the next generation of supernatural beings who attend the ‘‘Salvatore Boarding School’’ for the gifted teens. ‘‘I feel really lucky to be on Legacies right now,’’ Kaylee admits. Since 2018, she has been portraying Josette —Josie— Saltzman, one of the school’s most powerful students along with her twin sister Lizzie (Jenny Boyd) as they both have the ability to pull power from other things or people to use their magic.
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When she auditioned for Legacies, Kaylee immediately connected with her character. ‘‘What attracted me specifically to Josie was, number one, her sexual fluidity. It was very appealing to me to have that representation for young men and women,’’ she reveals. ‘‘So much work had to be done into her self-process, and so little of it was said. I was ecstatic to take on that challenge.’’ The first season of Legacies, which premiered in October 2018, was undoubtedly highly anticipated by the fans and the series has proved thus far that it has plenty of legs both in terms of plot and characters.
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Throughout season one, we followed Josie’s discovery of her own individuality. ‘‘Josie started off this show as a 15-year-old girl who just didn’t know who she was or how to stand up for herself, or when to stand up for herself,’’ Kaylee says. According to the actress, this is a character who remains particularly challenging. ‘‘In every episode something very impactful happens, so there is always something going on through Josie’s brain and as an actor I want to validate every single thought that she has.’’ Nevertheless Kaylee enjoys having a lot more opportunities to experience different things in Josie’s shoes. ‘‘With the luxury that is time, I have a lot of time to actually mature and understand how to have healthy conversations with her dad, her sister, and different friends. It has been really refreshing to see and feel a character grow.’’
I don’t think I ever feel deeply comfortable with saying that acting is my career path because I will always want to work more than possible and seek any business opportunities that I can
With the success of its predecessors, Legacies had a lot to live up to and even earned a second season which debuted last October 10th on The CW to keep the legacy alive. ‘‘I’m excited to see the fans’ reactions to a different Josie in a lot of ways, and I’m excited to see how they react to maybe an overall more mature show in general,’’ Kaylee says on the evolution of her character and the show as season two moves forward. ‘‘These kids have grown up over the summer, they have been through a very traumatic event and they’ve all grown about it.’’
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Working on Legacies has been ‘‘an interesting learning curve’’ for Kaylee who was in Atlanta, filming episode 8, when we discussed over the phone. ‘‘I’ve learned so much through this process and I don’t know how much I can even put into words, because I feel like every single day I’m learning something new,’’ she states while she was in the middle of 9-month work of shooting. ‘‘We have a new director every single episode that I’m learning from, new cast members coming in every week. What’s really amazing about being on a television show and being an actor in general, is that it’s a very collaborative process so when everybody is willing to listen to everybody, it can be a really exciting process. And now that I’m at work 16 hours a day, five days a week, we’ve created a bit of a family.’’
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When talking about the massive fan response to the series and how she deals with her new exposure, Kaylee says, ‘‘To this day, it shocks me when people come up to me on the street and know who I am, just because I don’t think of myself as anything other than Kaylee that shows up to work every day, and wants to create really interesting and exciting pieces of art people can enjoy. So it’s been weird but at the same it makes me happy that people are enjoying the work that we are all putting into this show.’’
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After nearly two years of helping shape Josie Saltzman, Kaylee has become a fan favorite. As a fan of The Vampire Diaries and The Originals herself, she understood to a certain extent the cultural phenomenon that came along with this world. ‘‘It was really exciting and really overwhelming all at the same time,’’ she says before adding, ‘‘I think up to this day I still don’t truly understand how many people watch the show and care so much about these characters. And I don’t think I ever really can until I’m sitting at San Diego Comic Con and seeing everybody’s faces.’’
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Beyond her professional aspirations, the rising star is interested in being an honest voice for the young people who look up to her and, therefore, she wants to stay true to herself. ‘‘I’ve always seen people on social media using their platforms so well, and I always thought that would be the path I’d take,’’ she says. ‘‘I just want to make sure that I’m as educated as I possibly can be, so that I’m not spreading any information that isn’t completely true or isn’t completely right in my head. And I’d like people to form their own opinions as well.’’
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While Kaylee makes the best of her tremendous ride since she has joined the Vampire Diaries Universe, she confides it would be exciting to her to play a character who is the opposite of Josie. ‘‘I’ve kind of gotten into a grove of who she is. I don’t know what the exact opposite of Josie would be, but it’s something that I want,’’ she laughs. When reflecting on her journey and what she has accomplished so far, she concludes, ‘‘That was a huge learning curve for me to be able to understand that getting a booking, and a paid check, or being on set isn’t exactly the answer to what is success.’’
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ckret2 · 5 years ago
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do you think alister if he even has any kind of preference (he could be sex repulsed and all) would have that old 'its not gay if you're the one fucking the other man' mentality (round about way of asking for the same post you made for pen but. for the radio demon)
No, no, see, this isn’t the same as the question I answered earlier at all. The question I answered earlier was “do you think Sir Pent tops or bottoms?” (technically, the “question” i answered was “pen is a bottom” and my answer was “INTERESTING! NO.”) But the question you’re asking is “do you think Alastor defines a person’s sexuality by their sex acts rather than by the people that person is attracted to?” with a side helping of “do you think Alastor has any sexual preferences at all or is he 100% sex repulsed?”
“Which acts does the character think ‘count’ as gay” has no inherent correlation to “which acts does the character enjoy engaging in.” You see the difference. For them to be the same question, we’d have to start off the question by assuming that what acts the character is okay with engaging in is determined by whether or not the character thinks those acts are gay. Conflating what they think is gay with what they’re okay with doing implies that you’re assuming a whole lot about that character’s personality, how much internalized homophobia that character is dealing with, and how fragile that character’s sense of masculinity is, and I’m pretty sure you don’t actually want to imply any of that!
So if you want me to answer the same question I answered earlier, then come back and ask that question, not a roundabout version of the question that’s in fact a very, VERY different question. In the meantime, I’m going to answer the question that you actually asked: “do you think Alastor has 'it’s not gay if you’re penetrating’ beliefs about sexuality?”
The tl;dr is: big shrug, I dunno. Seems possible based on what little I DO know about the time period but I don’t know enough yet. Also if anyone happens to have resources on queer life/history in 1920s New Orleans, like, please chuck them at me.
Essay below!! Hey tumblr you’d better let the read more cut work, don’t let me down.
As it happens, I’ve actually been trying to figure out how sexuality was viewed roundabouts the 1920s in New Orleans—because I figure Alastor’s views have probably evolved very little since then. I get the impression that he’s very set in his own era; and because he’s sort of in a social bubble—who’s going to try to get close to the Radio Demon?—and doesn’t engage much with current mass media, he’s more or less shielded from evolutions in modern culture.
(Compare that to, say, Angel, who sounds very modern—or Charlie, who’s at least a couple of centuries old (probably much more) but also dresses and acts very modern.)
So whatever he thinks about sexuality is going to be rooted in whatever was current when he was alive.
The 20s were actually surprisingly good to queer folks, from what I’ve found so far—there was some VERY gay vaudeville & jazz tracks coming out—but like, I don’t know exactly how good, relatively speaking. Or where. Was it, like, only New York? And/or only San Francisco? I’ve got next to no sources on what was going on in New Orleans. The ONLY fact I’ve been able to find from the era so far is that 1933—the year of Alastor’s death—is the year the first gay bar opened in New Orleans (or, at least, the first one that’s still open today—it relocated but it’s still going). But that doesn’t tell me a lot about the overall environment. All it tells me is “New Orleans wasn’t so homophobic that the bar was burned down immediately, and/or they kept it too secret for that to happen.” That’s not a lot to go on.
And all of this is, like, the level of mainstream tolerance/acceptance toward queerness. It doesn’t tell me what people actually believed then.
Here’s a paragraph on late-1800s/early-1900s psychological beliefs about queerness that are hella outdated today: one contemporary belief about sexuality called “sexual inversion” basically said that a queer person’s brain was “inverted” gender-wise from the norm—that is, for instance, if you’re AMAB and attracted to men, you’ve got a feminine brain, you’ll like to do feminine things, you’ll want to perform feminine sex acts (ie, be the recipient in anal sex), and you’ll probably want to have a feminine body. Basically it conflated being gay and being trans. On the other hand, if you’re AMAB and you’re attracted to a feminine AMAB “invert,” you’re more or less still straight, because you’re attracted to someone with a feminine brain so like that’s more or less a woman psychologically speaking. By modern standards this whole framework is very “oh yikes” but like… ours probably will be seen as cringy in 50 years; and psychologists who believed in sexual inversion generally advocated in favor of letting inverts live in alignment with how their brains told them to, which was a big step forward.
So that was a theory going around. But like, how widespread was it? I know a book about lesbian inverts was written in the late '20s to try to make the term more widespread but idk whether it succeeded or to what extent. Was it a term ONLY being used in psychiatric circles and a handful of people who picked up the book? Was it restricted to certain metropolitan centers? If you went to a drag ball, did people introduce themselves as inverts? (Did they have drag balls? I know they did in mid-Victorian England but that doesn’t tell me much about what was being done in 1920s USA, much less New Orleans.)
And as far as I can tell, the idea of “sexual inversion” was the first time that a framework was presented in Western society where queerness was presented as something inborn rather than a choice people make to go screw someone they “shouldn’t” screw. There was a shift around the 20th century from “gayness is an action that you perform, people can perform the act or not perform the act but they’re basically all the same on the inside” to “gay is something that you ARE, on the inside,” but WHEN exactly did gayness shift from an action to an identity? And when did that shift happen in New Orleans? Knowing when it happened in NYC or some shit isn’t gonna do me any good if, say, it didn’t happen in NOLA for another two decades.
So like obviously I need to find a lot more research on queer history in that region and decade before I can give a super firm answer about what Alastor’s opinions/beliefs are.
I’m toying with the idea that Alastor did spend some of his life in NYC, though; like, he didn’t just casually pick up a Mid-Atlantic accent on the streets of Nawlins. He might’ve picked it up from talkies—although he would’ve had to spend a LOT of time at the movies studying specifically to copy the accent. I know the Mid-Atlantic accent was big in theater, but was that also the case in NOLA, or only in New England? Were there, like, traveling Broadway shows then like there are today? I’m inclined to believe that Alastor actually studied theater at some point in order to pick up the accent, which probably means going to some theater school in the northeast. We know he was into theater, being trained as an actor before going into radio makes sense to me. (He also could’ve learned it at a fancy expensive private school, but I prefer headcanoning him as from a lower background than that.) So maybe he spent some time living in NYC before going back home to NOLA, so if I really really can’t find anything on 20s NOLA I can focus research on NYC instead and say “he picked up his opinions there.” That’s my plan B.
I know that, WHATEVER the 20s NOLA queer community was like, I want to headcanon Alastor was sort of in it but also sort of on the fringes of it—like, due to his very conspicuous (conspicuous to himself) lack of normal/expected attraction to the people he knew he was “supposed” to be attracted to, he sort of felt a draw to the company of other folks who were conspicuously not attracted to who they were “supposed” to be—but he never really felt super deep ties to that community because, one, he just naturally forms very shallow relationships in the first place, and, two, he wasn’t hanging out in queer spaces looking for a relationship or a date or an opportunity to express some hidden side of himself so much as he was looking for a place where he wasn’t being weighed down by The Mainstream Expectations. But you can still be weighed down, albeit to a lesser extent, by The Counterculture Expectations, too. So, he was comfortable enough in queer spaces, but remained just sort of on the edges—was probably recognized by sight by other folks in NOLA who frequented queer events but wasn’t anyone’s best friend. Kinda shows up and makes small talk and goes home.
So, what sort of opinions and beliefs would he have absorbed from those edges? And how would they have been influenced by his own ace/aro perspective, from which ALL talk of sex and romance, whether queer or straight, is a foreign perspective that he could intellectually learn about but not ever really FEEL on an instinctive/gut level the way allo folks do?
I don’t know yet. Gotta find the right research materials first!
So tl;dr anon I don’t know yet whether he thinks taking it up the ass makes someone gayer than putting it in the ass.
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atlantic-riona · 5 years ago
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some thoughts below that may potentially contain spoilers for The Raven’s Return, but I just need to write them out for clarity’s sake
I’m starting to think that maybe I’m stuck on the next chapter of The Raven’s Return because I need to do some major rewrites and worldbuilding. When I first started writing the story as it is now (the third version I think?), I envisioned it as a murder mystery set in a fantasy world, but over time I’ve been moving away from the murder mystery and focusing on other storylines. There’s still a murder, but it’s no longer as important to the story as it used to be. I also really really really hate the timing of the first five chapters--the time constraints and distance between the characters annoy me, because I’ve established that realistically it would take the nin Roys about three days walking to get from their village to the city, which means that either I have to do time jumps in between different characters’ chapters (which I really don’t want to do because as a reader I would find that incredibly confusing if done multiple times in a row--once or twice is fine, but not every other chapter), or the flow of the story is odd, because I’d have to stick with Cait and Lucan’s perspective for several chapters when the story needs to see what Bran and the others are up to.
I don’t think I need to do a total rewrite and scrap everything, as I quite like the majority of the chapters in terms of content. The only chapter I don’t like is Chapter One, because it feels very disjointed to me. That’s probably because I wrote the first part of it (the bit with Ferhon) for a writing class a year ago, when I had a very different plan for the story, and then added other scenes as I needed to.
I’d like to do some sort of outline for the story, but there’s a couple problems with that. First, whenever I outline something in great detail, I almost...lose interest in it? Like my brain thinks that because I outlined something I don’t need to actually flesh it out. It’s weird. Second, if I outline something very briefly, it...doesn’t work. I always end up doing something radically different by like the second bullet point, so the rest of the outline is kind of useless.
But I feel like I need an outline!! I need something to write towards. I used to have an ending in mind, but my plans have changed so much I don’t really think that ending works anymore.
In terms of worldbuilding I think I might need to elaborate on the history of the Valaviri and Falians more, because that keeps cropping up. Also I need to establish the more physical aspects of the culture (clothing, buildings, etc.) much more. And I haven’t been able to decide how literate either population is or what languages they speak. I was toying with having the Falians speak both Falian and Valaviri, but I’m not sure how or if that would work. For the languages themselves, I’m torn between just using Latin and Irish (at least for now) because that’s easier for me to write and plan with than it would be to come up with made-up languages that are similar to both of those. I think I might do that, because I’m definitely not Tolkien. Languages are interesting to me, especially in how they influence culture/history, but I’m nowhere near skilled enough to come up with a workable language on my own. I also just don’t want to get caught up in grammar and evolution of language and all that.
I also definitely need to expand upon the religions of both the Valaviri and the Falians. I was trying to go for a Greek/Roman type pantheon for the Valaviri, with the Roman focus on virtue, but I’m not sure how the religion itself affects the daily lives of the Valaviri. Do people actually believe in them or do they only pay them lip service? There are accounts of Greeks (Romans too, I think) who questioned the gods‘ existence, and I feel like it might tie into the theme of decadence and laziness that I have going on with the Valaviri Empire.
Speaking of, I don’t know if I want to use “empire” for the Valaviri, because it seems really cliche (the evil empire trope, etc., even though I was going to explore how it was both good and bad). Originally I was going to call it the Principate, which is what the Roman Empire was called during the time when it was still trying to appear as a republic. The problem with Latin and Roman stuff, though, is that it’s really recognizable and kind of overdone. This whole story came into being because of the concept of Ireland and Rome interacting and setting off an alternate history of sorts (which I’ve since altered to fit the fantasy world), so I do want to keep those two countries the primary source of inspiration. But I also don’t want the world to seem like it’s just a copy of ours...
The Falian religion gives me so much trouble. In the second version of the story, it was more of a Narnia-type tale where the nin Roys had come to our world and then went back. They ended up converting to Catholicism while here, and then continued to practice it once in Falia. It influenced their character arcs a lot, so I had a really hard time over replacing it. I settled on having the Falians worship “The Highest” (as in the Highest of Kings--God), which worked because of their historical High King. I was going to have their first king be chosen by the Highest; his name would be Cyr (like Kyrios (Greek for Lord), which, according to Webster’s Dictionary is apparently like Old Irish caur (meaning hero)). He would be chosen because he was the worthiest to rule (virtuous, etc.), and from that would come the custom of choosing High Kings based on behavior and character, rather than descent/family (although from time to time the latter would happen). But I kind of want to incorporate more Irish/Welsh mythology into it...however, I’m leery of either destroying the Christian element or of making it too similar to actual mythology.
I also want to change up some of the characters and their appearances/roles, like Bella and Marcus. I might have to end up dropping Mel, because she was important to the murder mystery plot, but with that getting discarded, she isn’t needed anymore. I also adore Soaig and Piran, but I have so many characters to keep track of; they might end up becoming much more minor characters than I planned at first.
Basically, I feel like I have to rewrite a lot, figure out where I’m going, and work out more worldbuilding details before I can keep going. And I’m willing to do that, but...*sigh* I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to. Rereading what I’ve written here, however, I do think that I have to go back and figure out a plan/redo some of it.
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28-stab-wounds · 6 years ago
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Who's your favorite DBH character?
I’ve answered this ask before, but I’m happy to answer it again :)
Originally, it was a tie between Kara and Markus. Markus and his awesome Gucci coat won.
You may be wondering, “What about my boy, Connor?”. Well, for one, he’s everywhere so it’s not easy to avoid content involving him. It’s kinda suffocating, honestly. I also don’t want to simply like a character based on the mere availability heuristic. He’s a good character, don’t get me wrong, but I fell in love with Markus’ story first. Plus, his soundtrack is awesome. It’s really zen and somewhat of a breath of fresh air between Kara’s sad, emotional violin tracks and Connor’s dramatic, suspenseful tech-y(?) tracks. Kudos to John Paesano!
And let us be honest here: if we only played the game with Connor as the protagonist, how many of us would choose to become a deviant? If it weren’t for Kara’ and Markus’ stories, we wouldn’t have a perspective on deviants or an empathetic view of them. Kara’s story reminds us of our empathy while Markus’ story spurs us to act in the face of injustice. We both feel something for these characters and this is an important factor. One of the most important in the game actually as it dictates how we shall play the rest of the game.
Humans have a tendency to obey. We often choose to “follow the leader” instead of wandering off from the pack because wandering away means that there are no guidelines for one to follow. It has to do with the survival of the “herd”, the “herd" is what keeps us safe so it behooves us to conform to what the majority has decided is “correct"…lest we be rejected into the cold dark night.
We are entirely social beings and that most of our brains are hardwired to be social. Our image is formed and based around others. Everybody has their own image of what is logical and what is not, but that image is mainly formed by what others tell you what’s ‘normal’.
So, what does this have to do with the stories of the protagonists of Detroit: Become Human?
Think back to the chapter “The Nest”. Prior to this, the player has already encountered two other deviants: Daniel and HK400. By now, the player has already been exposed to a deviant’s core desire: survival.
Deviants just want to live. That’s all.
And upon hearing their distressing confessions and stories, the player begins to feel empathetic towards them and thinks “Aww…I feel bad for you. Is there a way I can get you out of this/let you go? Because you’re not all that bad… ”. It’s this empathy that guides us. It’s what connects us as people, the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of another. BUT, once you find Rupert and the chase begins, that empathy module is thrown out the window.
Or as the kids say: yeeted out the window.  
Any knowledge you have regarding deviants and their desire to simply live is gone. Poof. The empathy and pity felt during your encounters with Daniel and HK400 are gone. You are now in shoes of an RK800, an android specifically designed to track and hunt down deviants, a hunter at its very core. And what do you, as the player do? You chase after your prey. The rush of adrenaline spurs you onwards as you give the chase, all feelings you had for prior deviants forgotten as you bound across fields and rooftops in determination.
Now, you CAN choose to simply not give chase and just stand there while Rupert gets away, but who does? You don’t need to chase Rupert to progress the game, but you do anyway. Despite centuries of evolution, humans are still dependent on one archaic trait to get them through their daily lives: the thrill of the hunt. The hunt, the chase, the capture, and the kill.
But mostly: the chase.
I won’t dwell into the details of it too much, but I’ll ask this:
During the chase, did you stop and think what would happen when you caught up to Rupert?
The short answer? No.
If Hank wasn’t there to fall off the roof and be your foil and ‘reality slap’ (both are a discussion for another day), would you have kept on running? The answer? Yes.
You may be thinking: No, I wouldn’t! Don’t assume such things of me, you don’t know me.
You chased Rupert, knowing full well that given your experiences with past deviants, it wouldn’t end with simple slap on the wrist and a pardon. It wouldn’t end with Connor letting Rupert go after extracting his confession.
Do you see where I’m going with this? Have I lost you already? That’s alright if you answer “No” and “Yes” to the former and latter, I’m beginning to lose my train of thought as well. It’s 1:54 am. I need sleep…
The overarching point is: WITHOUT Markus’ and Kara’s stories, Deviant Connor would be less likely than you think. You wouldn’t have an inside perspective into the lives of deviants. You wouldn’t feel any empathy for them if you didn’t see if you haven’t seen the world from their shoes. That’s why Kara’s and Markus’ stories counterbalance Connor’s. That’s why they’re just as important to the narrative and the message of the game as Connor is to 85% (don’t quote me on that statistic, it’s just a really generous guess, the answer could possibly be higher…or lower…idk) of the fandom.
“BUT WHAT ABOUT HANK? HE HELPED INFLUENCE CONNOR’S DEVIANCY!”, you cry.
“Shhh….” I respond, waving a hand to your face, “he’s a topic for another day.”
Because it’s almost 2am right now and I just want to sleep, but if I go to sleep now, I’ll lose any ideas I have for this response T_T oh well…
I’ll make it quick though. Hank is like a foil(?) to the player…Sort of. I’m too exhausted to talk about it in great detail, but he helps ground us, just like Kara (or Alice to Kara) and Markus (Carl/Jericho to Markus). If he weren’t there to guide us and act as that reality slap, how many of us would have deviated as Connor?
I’m losing my train of thought even more now, I’ll stop for now before I ramble on into oblivion. That’s all I’d like to say for now because I’m too tired to carry on this discussion. 
Here’s the short and sweet answer to your original question: My favorite character is Markus.
Thank you for the ask, anon! Have a good night/day! 
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