#fun comparison times between the murderous children :3 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

adarlingmess · 4 years

Text

Butch DeLoria [Fallout 3 Companion Perks, Quest, Romance and Endings HCs]

Companion Perk: Tunnel Snakes Rule! - That’s us, and we rule! By bringing Butch as a companion, you now bring the Tunnel Snakes’ name and reputation with you. Having Butch in your party grants +15 Speech and unlocks special dialogue with certain NPCs when wearing the Tunnel Snakes outfit.

Example of unique dialogue: You can convince Mayor MacCready to give you entry in Little Lamplight by bringing Butch while wearing the Tunnel Snakes outfit and bragging about the gang.

Companion Quest: Tunnel Snakes Forever

You’re now a honorary member of the Tunnel Snakes. Help Butch define the Tunnel Snakes’ reputation to gain more members to become a permanent member.

You can either convince him to take on a more heroic reputation by gaining Good Karma while he is a companion, or convince him to take a more villainous reputation by gaining Evil Karma. However, Butch will leave the party if you gain Evil Karma from acts that aren’t stealing or intimidation, such as murdering someone in cold blood, or blowing up Megaton.

Butch’s dialogue will change depending on the karma loss or gain.

When enough karma is gained (+300 or -300 depending on your choice), Butch will prompt a dialogue with the player and lock the option in.

Finishing the quest will spawn Tunnel Snakes gang members in the Muddy Rudder in Rivet City. NPC idle dialogue will also change to reflect their presence and depends on whether Butch was convinced to do good or bad.

Residents will praise The Tunnel Snakes as “nice young folks” and call Butch “a handsome and helpful fellow” if the Good Karma route is taken, and security will applaud them for helping keep the peace. James Hargrave will start hanging out with them and his behavior improves. His mother Tammy will thank the player and the Tunnel Snakes for keeping him on the straight and narrow, wishing she had done a better job raising him, and will give the player a random food item, which the player can refuse for Good Karma.

Residents will express their disdain for the Tunnel Snakes if the Evil Karma route is taken, calling them “troublemakers” and “petty criminals”, while security will make idle comments about arresting them if they go too far. James Hargrave will start hanging out with them, his behavior gets worse, and starts bullying his friend CJ Young. His mother Tammy will curse the player out for being a worse influence on her kid and will claim that she disowned him.

Reward Perks:

Do-Gooder: Permanently increases Butch’s damage with pistols and unarmed attacks by 20%. Player receives the same effects as long as Butch is in the party. (Butch receives this perk when his personal quest is done in favor of a heroic reputation.)

Venomous: Permanently increases Butch’s fire rate with pistols and unarmed attack speed by 20%. Player receives the same effects as long as Butch is in the party. (Butch receives this perk when his personal quest is done in favor of a villainous reputation.)

Romance: Childhood Friends (unmarked quest)

Butch is available to be romanced after completing personal quest and maintaining the corresponding Karma chosen. A new dialogue option will show up where the player can reminisce with Butch about their childhood in Vault 101. Butch will confess to the player that he had a crush on them, apologizing for his bullying to get them to notice him (if Good route is taken) or telling the player that they’re finally badass enough to be his girl/man (if Evil route is taken). The player can reject his advances and he will tell them that while he’s heartbroken, he’s still glad to have the player in the gang, or the player can accept his feelings. Butch will start calling the player “baby” or “babe”.

Lover’s Embrace Dialogue:

Morning, gorgeous/handsome/beautiful.

Ugh, baby, do we have to get up?

Damn babe, if I only knew you’re that freaky, we should’ve done this a long time ago.

-yawns- There’s my favorite person.

Er... so, did you enjoy that real Tunnel Snake last night babe? -chuckles nervously-

Note: After completing his personal quest, he will warn the player if their Karma drops too low (if his quest is completed with Good Karma) or goes too high (if his quest is completed with Bad Karma). If the player’s Karma doesn’t change within 3 in-game days, Butch will leave the party. If romanced, he will break up with the player. He will be not recruitable or romanceable again until the required Karma level is attained. Alternatively, with a difficult speech check, you can convince Butch to reverse the Karma requirement, but this can only be done once. The player cannot make the Tunnel Snakes flip-flop between Heroic or Villainous reputations.

Ending:

If done in favor of a heroic reputation:

After a rough start in Vault 101, Butch’s gang gained renown in the Capital Wasteland. The Tunnel Snakes becomes a household name, idolized by children and teenagers who wants to protect the weak and do something good. Weak and timid youths gain their nerve to stand up for themselves and their loved ones, while former bullies like Butch himself turn a new leaf, channeling their venom into keeping their communities safe.

(if just friends) Butch and the Lone Wanderer remained brothers-in-arms, their friendship giving awe and inspiration to the people, bringing good wherever they go.

(if romanced) Butch and the Lone Wanderer remained sweethearts, a power couple that people looked up to and tried to emulate, bringing good wherever they go.

If done in favor of a villainous reputation:

After a rough start in Vault 101, Butch’s gang gained infamy in the Capital Wasteland. The Tunnel Snakes becomes a dreaded gang, attracting ne’er do wells and bullies to spread mayhem. Chaos spreads in DC as these ruffians steal, destroy, and assault unfortunate travelers. Soon after, they begin an extortion racket, intimidating people into paying them for protection, or else they slither into their homes and give them a taste of their venom.

(if just friends) Butch and the Lone Wanderer remained partners-in-crime, their presence rousing panic among the wastelanders, bringing chaos and mayhem wherever they go.

(if romanced) Butch and the Lone Wanderer remained the Wasteland’s Bonnie and Clyde, romanticized by rebellious teenagers, bringing chaos and mayhem wherever they go.

If Butch dies:

After a rough start in Vault 101, Butch’s gang finally fell apart in the Capital Wasteland. Butch perished to the harsh world outside, and along with him any memory of the Tunnel Snakes. Without Butch’s leadership, members scattered like dust in the wind.

Author’s Notes: See below.

The companions in Fallout 3 had so much potential, so it saddens me that they fall flat in comparison to the companions in F:NV and FO4. If I had modding experience, I would’ve made my own companion quests for the game. So, instead, I decided to write these fan-made headcanons and might use them in my future fanfiction on my AO3 account A_Darling_Writes. If you have modding experience and would like to adapt or draw inspiration from my writings, by all means do! Just credit me as adarlingmess or adarlingwrites.

I imagine that when Butch arrives to the Muddy Rudder, he’ll try to expand the Tunnel Snakes but doesn’t really know what direction the gang is going for. I imagine the player can convince him to be pillars of the community like The Kings in F:NV, or he can be convinced to go back to his bullying ways. I tried to incorporate Fallout 3′s Karma restrictions but made them a little more flexible.

Also, I had too much fun writing the Lover’s Embrace dialogues lmaooo. I HC Butch as playful and flirty but a little insecure in his relationship with the LW because he isn’t sure if he is what they deserve.

I hope you guys enjoyed this, Charon’s sheet is coming up soon!

#butch deloria #fallout 3 #fallout #fallout butch #fanfiction #headcanon #hcs #fo3 hcs #adarlingmess #adarlingwrites

213 notes · View notes

traincat · 4 years

Note

Hi traincat! Hope you're doing well. I figured since you have an extensive knowledge on all things Spider-Man, you would know your way around his rogues! I wanted to ask if you have a favorite or one that you find most compelling and why. Thanks a million!

I think my answers for which rogues are my favorites and which I find most compelling and which are widely viewed as the best and why are all pretty wildly different. I do think the popular assessment that Spider-Man has one of the best rogues galleries in Marvel canon is true. Like, I think the absolute best Spider-Main villain story -- the one that gives you the best sense of the villain as a character and also the one that works best at uniting villain and is Kraven’s Last Hunt, which is just incredible on every level. (Content warning for suicide.)

(Web of Spider-Man #32) Also, like, in terms of design, Kraven is great. Love a big Russian game hunter perpetually bare chested and wearing leopard print cropped leggings. That’s not something you get sick of. Only Kraven Sr. for me, though -- I’m less fond of his son, although I think the whole family affairs in Grim Hunt and Scarlet Spider v2 are pretty fun.

On the other hand, though, I think that some of the biggest villains in Spider-Man’s gallery, namely Norman Osborn and Doc Ock, are overused, although I know why they’re overused and it’s because they’re really good villains. (But also you can only make people pay for the same story so many times with only minor variations before it starts to get old.) I think Norman and Peter are pretty perfect opposites, whereas Otto and Peter are mirror images -- although I think generally Norman stories pull off that opposite nature better than Otto stories reveal him as a mirrored image of Peter.

I think it’s interesting that Otto is kind of the first “big” villain Peter encounters -- he makes his debut in ASM #3, so there are villains that come before him, but they’re like, the Vulture and the Chameleon. And there are great Vulture stories -- love that flying octogenarian -- but like, I would not put the Vulture in the absolute top tier Spider-Man villains. And the Chameleon is a freak.

Same, girl. (Web of Spider-Man #65)

More villain talk beneath the cut.

By comparison, Otto is the first villain to actually serve Peter a real defeat, the first one to humble him. So I think it’s interesting that they come from very similar backgrounds -- both geniuses, both lonely as children, both people who were in danger of becoming very solitary, isolated adults, which Otto did and which Peter did not. They had a mother figure who verged on at times or was actually smothering in her affections, and a salt of the earth type father figure. And Otto gains his powers after suffering an accident with radiation much the same way Peter does. It’s one of the things that disappoints me about Superior Spider-Man, because I don’t think it plays into the idea of Otto and Peter as mirrored images of each other nearly as much as it could have. Even Otto’s Parker Industries originally showed up in a “bad” version of Peter’s life, where he never got bit by the spider and instead becomes a CEO:

(Sensational Spider-Man #41) “You prove yourself to everyone -- except yourself.” Which is what Otto is continually trying to do, and which is what he always falls short of. So it’s interesting that there’s kind of all this set up here and that the actual comics sort of continually fall short of it.

Green Goblin stories live up to their rep a little better, in my opinion, and they’re better at playing into those parallels. Norman and Peter are both self-made men, but Norman is rich and Peter is not. Peter accepts responsibility and fault; Norman does not. Norman’s life is devoid of women, while Peter’s is full of it. If Norman and Peter are both studies in masculinity, then Norman’s is toxic and Peter’s is not. Peter is capable of growth; Norman is entrenched in this role he’s made for himself -- he is not capable of sustained growth beyond the role he’s made for himself. There’s a reason I think Norman gets used so much and it’s because it’s a heady dynamic to kind of play into -- especially when you go with the relatively more recent angle of things where Norman kind of views Peter as the perfect heir, worthy where Harry is not. Honestly, it’s a good time whenever you’re involving Harry in the mix at all, as someone caught between these two very powerful figures and how the tug-of-war there for ownership of him is just completely soul destroying.

(Spectacular Spider-Man #180)

But I do think Norman is overused, and it’s gotten a point where in Amazing Spider-Man #800 it was like -- oh, what, he’s going to kill Flash? He’s going to kill someone else Peter loves? He’s killed like half the main-main cast at this point. He’s behind the murder of Peter and Mary Jane’s baby, he’s responsible for Ben Reilly’s death, he killed Gwen Stacy, Harry’s death goes directly back to him, he’s kidnapped May and Mary Jane and Flash and blah blah blah it’s JUST TOO MUCH. It can’t always be this one guy! You can’t just bring him back every 50 issues like “this time Norman Osborn’s gone too far” when he went too far in the ‘70s. Everything since then has just been trying to recapture the moment he threw Gwen Stacy off the bridge. It’s exhausting. I’m begging Spider-Man, as it starts hyping up yet another Norman story for ASM #850, to do something new.

In comparison to Norman, I think Harry’s run as the Green Goblin is fairly flawlessly executed as far as villain stories go, especially in its final hour. Spectacular Spider-Man #200 is really one of my favorite single issues of all time. Harry has the pathos that Norman really never does -- you can feel for Harry in a way that you can’t feel for Norman. And it’s because Harry loves Peter -- really, truly loves him -- that his acts of villainy take on that special edge of cruelty. It doesn’t just hurt Peter that these things are being done; it hurts Peter that these are being done and that it’s Harry doing them and that, in a lot of ways, they both blame Peter for why Harry is doing them, even if at the end of the day it’s in no way Peter’s fault. And then there’s the utterly perfect moment as Harry dies in Spectacular Spider-Man #200, that his act of triumph is that he can’t bring himself to kill Peter, because he loves him too much. It’s perfect. I live in fear they’re going to make Harry a villain again and try to replicate it only to fall painfully short.

I think the Jackal is actually underutilized because he is in my honest opinion the scariest Spider-Man villain, or at the very least the creepiest. Where Norman can only dream of remaking Spider-Man in his own image, the Jackal actually does that with Ben Reilly -- and, to a lesser extent, with Kaine, his first damaged clone. He’s a good lurker, too, less show-y than either Otto or Norman. He lurked in the background for a while. And in a series where I think you can pick a lot of the villains apart as men who take advantage of their power, having the Jackal be a college professor whose villainous career stems from his obsession with one of his students fits right in. And he’s just creepy. He’s upsetting! The things he does to the clones -- both the Peter and Gwen clones, although I think the comics are not so great at letting the Gwen clones shine as individual characters, which is something I wish someone would actually do something about -- are very upsetting, especially since you can extrapolate from a lot of Kaine’s stories and the things we know bother him and how he’s consistently paralleled against Janine Godbe, that both Kaine and the Gwen clones were sexually abused by the Jackal. (Spider-Man’s not typically shy about examining darker subjects, and while we can only extrapolate from canon with Kaine, it’s extremely there on the surface with the Gwen clones. I mean, he married one.) And honestly, the villain who’s whole schtick is cloning makes more sense as someone who can repeatedly come back from anything than Norman’s deal of Corrupt Businessman Surprisingly Hard To Kill. I’ve said before that Peter appears to have a bit of a loophole in his personal moral code when it comes to violence that either has no consequences or lessened consequences, like when he cuts loose against Wolverine, someone who has a healing factor, or when he buried the Juggernaut, supposedly indestructible, in concrete. The Jackal as someone who could and has clone himself repeatedly opens up similar doorways -- what’s to stop Peter from cutting loose if the Jackal isn’t confined to this one body? There’s a lot to play with there and a lot more interesting spaces to go than, say, having to invent increasingly poor excuses for why Peter hasn’t taken more permanent action with Norman if Norman is always going to return to do harm to someone beloved to Peter.

Finally, I’m in a weird spot with personal favorite villains because honestly my instinct is to say the Lizard. And that’s an issue because of one fairly recent storyline and everything that’s spun out from it: Shed (Amazing Spider-Man #630-633), the storyline where Curt Connors loses all control over the Lizard, kills, and partially devours his son Billy. Like, I LIKE grim dark Spider-Man comics, and Shed is honestly too much for me -- not because of the Lizard’s actions, but because in the story Peter fails to save Billy. And I say not because of the Lizard’s actions because I think, as fun as a giant lizard man in purple pants and a lab coat can be, I think Curt Connors makes for one hell of a supervillain metaphor for domestic violence.

(ASM #365)

(Spectacular Spider-Man v2 #13) And it’s very compelling. There’s a lot of things to explore down that alley. But once you actually go as far as having the Lizard kill his son, you can’t take that back. And the problem is, that’s what Spider-Man comics have tried to do post-Shed. It feels weird and deeply out of character to have writers assume that Peter could forgive the murder of any child, let alone a child he knew, and have him continue his relationship with Curt Connors. It’s a weird message to go “yeah, he ate his kid, but he wasn’t in control, and he made up for it via cloning, so we’re all good now.” Like imagine trying to spin that in any horror movie. It doesn’t work -- that your villain kills his kid and then clones him and pretends everything is okay now would be the plot of the horror movie. Spider-Man is a series fundamentally built on the fact that actions have consequences, and sometimes those consequences are utterly unfixable. Peter can’t go back and intercept the burglar to prevent Uncle Ben’s death. He can’t clone Uncle Ben and wipe that incident out of history. So to have a story like Shed in continuity as something that doesn’t alter Peter’s perception of Curt Connors forever doesn’t work.

Anyway that’s why my favorite villain is the Shocker. Love that quilted bastard.

#traincat talks comics #*replies #long post/

38 notes · View notes

disappearinginq · 4 years

Note

If you're still doing these: Top 5 fictional characters? Top 5 books?

I like avoiding chores, so yes - definitely still answering asks:

Top 5 Fictional Characters:

1. Sherlock Holmes - I will admit, the more recent versions of this character with Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Downey Jr. are probably my favorite versions of Holmes, but I will read or watch pretty much anything about this man. I have even Young Sherlock and Moriarty sitting on my shelves, and even House of Silk (when I get the time). I just...I like characters that are the smartest in the room, and while I appreciate the surprise of a humble smart character, I am much closer to Sherlock and his “you can’t really be this dumb...oh. Shit. You are.”

2. Robin Hood - again, I will read or watch pretty much anything about this character, though I will always love Kevin Costner’s Prince of Thieves - and I actually did like Taron Edgerton’s portrayal in the most recent one, even though both versions were absolutely panned by critics. Probably because I wholeheartedly subscribe to taxation is theft, but also because I like any character who rips off people who have it coming to them.

3. Merlin - I should say the mythology of King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table and anyone associated with it. But anyone who knows me likes a bit of subtle magic and either snarky secret wizards or cantankerous old wizards, and to this day, Sword in the Stone is my favorite iteration of this storyline.

4. Tony Stark - Probably for the same reason I like Sherlock Holmes, I like Tony Stark, especially in the MCU. It’s one of the few times that someone is shown with a relatively not pretty version of CPTSD, and how it can alter your brain chemistry to the point of making wildly poor decisions because in your mind, it seems perfectly rational. (Do I like how Steve and everyone else just compacts the problem by complaining that Tony tries to control everything but also that everything is Tony’s fault? No - but that, in a way, is also accurate). Tony is also one of the few characters that witnesses fallout to his decisions, and learns from them. Again, not always the right lesson, but his character does learn.

5. Aliena of Shiring from Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett - I will admit, I added her after wondering why I had no women fictional characters, but I realized most of it has to do with the terrible way that women characters are written. Aliena manages to be what I would call unconquerable. The amount of crap that woman puts up with for 1000 pages and still manages to not break, keep strong, think and out maneuver life is truly awe inspiring. I love her character so much.

Top 5 Books.

Hmm. Well, we already said I would read anything about Sherlock, Robin and Merlin, so...let’s branch out.

1. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. Follett primarily wrote spy and action novels, so this historical epic about cathedral building in a small town in England in the 12th century. It has epic everything. The characters are fantastic - True Good and True Evil, there’s a nun who places a curse on the bad guys and becomes a witch who lives in the woods. It has everything that is good about the church and everything that is bad about the church. It deals with the every day peoples’ dealings with the constant change between rulers (Empress Matilda and Stephen of Blois were going at it in a civil war after the death of Henry’s only legit son). It has a literally epic love story between Jack and Aliena, to whom every love story will forever pale in comparison, and Aliena legit walked across all of Christendom to find her True Love. Movie counterparts are Eddie Redmayne and Hayley Atwell. Everyone who is good gets a Happy Ending. Everyone who is evil gets their goddamn comeuppance in the most horrible of ways and they fucking deserve that shit.

2. Okay, so on the heels of “the most epic story of all time”, I present to you a “It’s not the greatest but I love it anyway” - Rise of Renegade X, by Chelsea Campbell, which is in fact a series, and I love the second and third installment the most, but it’s about a made up city where there are superheroes and supervillains and that’s just how life goes. Heroes are marked with an H on their thumb when they turn 16, villains with a V (it’s a plot point to explain why, but it’s a genetic thing, like a finger print), and on the main character’s 16th birthday, he expects a V and instead gets an X. He eventually tracks down his super hero dad who didn’t know that he existed, and convinces the kid to come live with his family - where he has three other children, and a wife who was permanently crippled by a supervillain. As it goes along, the series deals more and more with prejudice, racism, classism, Good versus Evil compared to Right versus Wrong, and the MC, Damien is the first person narrative, so you get all of his snarky sarcasm first hand.

3. Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. 100% because of the world building, the fact that it is a fantasy version of Ocean’s Eleven, but also because I truly and deeply adore Kaz Brekker. One of the few characters with no particular power, he’s perfectly human, and absolutely terrifying. And while he has a character arc that I adore, it does not fundamentally hinge on him changing who he is. At the end, Kaz is still a fucking cold hearted, brilliant and scheming bastard, but the audience has an insight to him that maybe Kaz doesn’t even have himself. His issues don’t magically go away. He doesn’t have a Scrooge moment. He has his own set of principles and he stays by them, and what is so lovely is that the love interest accepts that.

4. Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater. Murder horses based on Irish/Scottish Mythology, and a horse race with said murder ponies. Need I say more?

5. Book of Lost Things by John Connolly. This is going to sound weird as a recommendation, but this book is the book of fucking nightmares. I read it for a class on Ireland because we had to pick either a story about Ireland, takes place in Ireland, or was written by an Irish person. I read this in I think an afternoon and I didn’t sleep that night. Despite the main character being like 11 years old, I would never let a kid read it. It’s a dark, true-to-Grimms’-source fairy tale that is like the twisted version of the Chronicles of Narnia, and a psychological trip and a half. I loved it. It is a true fairy tale - the kid, David, mom dies in the first chapter, and David feels like he failed her because he’d developed this SEVERE OCD ritual that he believed would keep his mother alive (it obviously doesn’t), and his dad, months later, remarries and has a second child, whom David hates. The baby cries all the time, the young mother is preoccupied with a baby and no husband (he’s off fighting in WWII), and David is left to occupy himself most of the time. They move out of London because of the Blitz, to David’s mother’s family estate. It’s old, and creepy, and the garden seems like something is calling to him, that sets a dread in the pit of his stomach when he goes near it. Enter the Crooked Man, a man who offers to give David everything he wants if David tells him his brother’s name. David refuses, and that night, a German plane crashes in the garden, and it turns out, that’s the portal/wardrobe to another world, and David gets dragged into it. And it just goes from there.

Thanks for the asks! They’re always fun!

10 notes · View notes

forestwater87 · 5 years

Text

Cutting Myself on all this Edge

This post has no reason to exist, except that I keep bothering my friends with literally dozens of messages making fun of this and I need a place to keep it all.

What is “this”? Oh, just some people having some Fucking Strong Opinions about how Harry Potter is the Pied Piper (they use that comparison multiple times. It gets old fast) leading our children into the End Times with its pro-illuminati Satan-worshiping witchcraft lessons. You know, the usual.

And no, this isn’t a battle of Forest vs. the Crazy Christians; I’m like 94% sure I’m not working through any sort of religious trauma, partly because I never went deep into this kind of mentality but mostly because I’m just delighted by The Cutting Edge, a website for a very specific type of Christian (no, not you, Catholics. You’re specifically not invited to the Cutting Edge club because you worship demons) interested in the New World Order, the evils of public schools, and Satan’s favorite color.

No, really.

Satan’s favorite color is green. They don’t . . . really explain why.

This site still exists and is the best thing I’ve ever seen. Hours of fun for the whole family. I mean, look at their logo:

And look at their illustration that goes along with their particular Harry Potter series:

Are you not entertained?!

I cannot stop reading these amazing essays -- which delve surprisingly deep into Potter lore, considering they say that there is no sufficient reason for a Christian to ever read a single page of these books -- and I can’t keep harassing my friends with thousands of notifications, so here we are.

Starting small, let’s read the book review for Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s/Philosopher’s Stone. Or, as they prefer to call it:

This book chronicles Harry's first year at the Hogwart's School of Wizardry and Witchcraft. Prepare to be shocked for the bold, blatant, and bodacious raw Satanism that underlines this story! Since "proper"Drug Use is essential in opening the centres of vision and achieving higher consciousness, we should not be surprised that First-Year students learn Drug Use, Drug creation, in a way that makes Drug use seem glorious! You will be shocked to see '666 ' in the story line, and symbols of Antichrist receiving a "fatal wound"!

That’s the entire subtitle. That’s just how they roll on

THE CUTTING EDGE

Part 1: The . . . Plot? I Guess?

This story introduces us to Harry Potter, an orphaned boy sent to live with his "horrible" Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia, and their fat, obnoxious son, Dudley.

I feel very comfortable with the fact that Cutting Edge has chosen to put scare quotes around the word “horrible,” like that’s up for debate. Combined with the very normal and sane opinions expressed elsewhere on the site, this really bodes well for their ideas about parenting and childcare in general.

all through this book, any non-witch folk -- like Vernon and Petunia -- are depicting in disgusting language.

Typo is theirs, as is the apparent offense they take to the fictional depiction of people who are very much not real. While there hasn’t been any exciting formatting going on yet in this essay, I will replicate it as much as possible, and any changes made will be clearly indicated through square brackets and ellipses.

Non-witch people are known as Muggles , and they are depicting as being "dumber than a box of rocks", of being physically obscene, and of living the most boring, unimaginative lives possible.

I was going to argue that this isn’t true, but I suppose we don’t really meet any cool Muggles in the first book. I guess I have to give them this, but I don’t feel good about it.

Witches, on the other hand, are depicted as being very smart, very "with it", of being physically normal, and of living wonderfully exciting lives

It bears repeating:

a flashback scene to the time 10 years earlier when Harry's Mom and Dad were psychically murdered by evil Lord Voldemort

Okay. Now I’m no Potterologist, and so I’m hoping any true believers will correct me if I misinterpret the holy texts,* but I don’t think Harry’s parents were psychically murdered by anyone. I’m pretty sure they were quite literally, physically made dead. Just because it’s a beam of magic doesn’t mean it’s not physical anymore, does it? Voldy didn’t Professor-X Harry’s parents and they died of three D10 psychic damage or anything; he just fucking killed them with a wizard gun. Am I wrong here?

*By which I obviously mean Harry Potter. It teaches children how to become Satanists; we’re clearly dealing with a book of immense spiritual relevance.

Skipping a little bit of plot summary, which is a combination of, well, summary of the plot, although Cutting Edge is determined to get Hogwarts’ name wrong, and a little bit of baffling End-Times(?) nonsense thrown in for funsies --

Of course, a Christian would be immediately alerted to this turn of events [in which Harry defeats Voldemort and is scarred] because soon a supernaturally powerful global leader will demand everyone on earth take some sort of a mark in exactly this place on the body.

What?

-- and there’s some weird formatting things going on that I think are supposed to imply something sinister but really just come off as goofy:

They have Harry on a boat headed for nowhere and they had every intention of keeping Harry from ever attending Hogwarts School. However, Harry receives supernatural assistance.

(It’s not letting me do colors on desktop, which is stupid, but that “supernatural” is supposed to be both bold and red)

There’s a long description about the difference between the Real and Fantasy worlds, which apparently Satanists try to live in both of (and so does Harry, making him also a Satanist. This is actually one of the less-stupid arguments Cutting Edge has for Harry’s Satanism, so just go with it) that’s honestly more boring than funny so I’m skipping it. Then we get to a much more fun section: why Rowling’s descriptions of Muggles are . . . teaching children to hate Jesus?

Part 2: Rowling Hates Muggles

Rowling consistently depicts people who do not practice Witchcraft in most obnoxious terms. They are depicted as being really, really dumb, boring, and living a life not worth living . We share these examples, below, with you so you can appreciate the truth of this statement. Uncle Vernon was also the only Muggle quoted in the book as being really opposed to Witchcraft; therefore, when readers see how stupid, ugly, and boring Vernon is, they get the idea that all people who are opposed to Witchcraft must be as stupid, ugly, and boring as Vernon is.

... Are all people opposed to Witchcraft cowardly bullies?

I mean, you are the one going after a children’s book for daring to entertain children, so if the shoe fits . . .

"Harry was glad school was over, but there was no escaping Dudley's gang ... Piers, Dennis, Malcolm, and Gordon were all big and stupid, but as Dudley was the biggest and stupidest of the lot, he was the leader." [p. 31] How do you know your own child does not think of you in these terms? After all, you are a non-magical Muggle.

I actually can’t complain, because this is just accurate. I 100% hate my parents and think they’re stupid because they’re not literally witches/wizards. Our relationship has never fully recovered.

"Uncle Vernon made another funny noise, like a mouse being trodden on." [p. 47] Remember Adolf Hitler, the most famous Black Magick wizard in modern history? He depicted Jews as Rats in his Propaganda Machinery, convincing the Germans they should extermination the "vermin".

GODWIN’S LAW HAS LANDED!

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN AND EVERYTHING OUTSIDE OR IN-BETWEEN, WE HAVE OFFICIALLY COMPARED HARRY POTTER TO HITLER!

We find it highly interesting that, later in the book, when the Evil Lord Voldemort is supposedly killing the unicorn in the Forbidden Forest, the color of the blood of the unicorn is silver!

Okay, but like . . . why? I mean, it immediately follows a description of the Bloody Baron, who is depicted with silvery blood because he’s, like, a ghost, but I’m not sure what that has to do with unicorns or with Satan. Are unicorns associated with Satan? Is silver associated with Satan?

Is everything Satan? Am I Satan?

There’s a lot of rage at a gentleman named Chuck Colson throughout this section, who apparently made the grave error of telling parents it was okay for their children to read Harry Potter because it doesn’t involve contact with the supernatural. And I’ll admit, that seems like a pretty bad defense of the books, because if you define “supernatural” as ghosts, poltergeists, or whatever the hell Voldemort is, then there is absolutely a metric buttload of supernatural stuff in here.

Arguably, a better defense of why it’s okay for children to read these children’s books is that they are books made for children, but YMMV on that one. Probably depends on whether or not you think children are sitting in the giant metaphorical (or literal? Not sure Cutting Edge gets metaphors) lap of the Antichrist every time they pick up the books.

(A visual reminder.)

Part 3: Basically Part 2, But This Time There Are Colors

The next section is on colors, which are very important to Cutting Edge. As linked back in the very beginning of this post, there is an entire essay devoted to the demonic colors used in the Harry Potter books, but we get just a taste of it here:

Rowling makes use of vivid colors in her story line. Some of these colors are consistent with the colors preferred by Satan and his followers in the Occult. Rowling's use of such vivid colors also enables her to paint the Fantasy Reality of Witchcraft as THE most exciting place to live. Wizard of Oz uses the same technique: when Dorothy is in her real world in Kansas, the color is black and white, but when she steps into her Fantasy Reality, the scene explodes in the most wonderful color.

Interesting interpretation. An alternative view is that Rowling needs to use more descriptors for things within the Wizarding World, because her readers won’t have the same frame of reference to draw from that they do with real-life objects and events in the Muggle World, and one can assume that these lovely descriptions are part of her being a, y’know, good and evocative writer, and the colors are just related to how she pictured the world she was creating.

But I mean, yours is good, too.

Actually, the citations provided by Cutting Edge don’t depict anything especially vivid; it’s not like she’s throwing massive amounts of purple prose at the descriptions of the Satanic green of Harry’s eyes. In fact, the only enhancer used is “emerald” at one point. For the most part, this essayist is just . . . noticing when the word “green” appears in the text and calling it a siren song to entice good Christian children out of the colorless world of reality and goodness and into the technicolor dreamland of magic and mayhem.

Also, please remember that Satan has a favorite color, and it’s green. For all birthdays and Christmases (or wait, whatever the Satanic version of Christmas is! Halloween?), please make sure all gifts are green or green-adjacent.

Even though Harry is nearly as powerful as a Black Magick practitioner, and could easily have decided to go over to that side, he declines to go over to the Dark Arts. Dumbledore assures Harry that he is not evil as Lord Voldemort. However, as a symbol of the Black Arts he could perform, Rowling makes Harry's eyes green.

This observation -- and I use the term loosely -- implies that every single Slytherin and villain of the Harry Potter series would have green eyes, to demonstrate their capacity for evil. The fact that this is obviously not the case must just be a red herring.

Part . . . 4, I think?: Drugs, Magic, and Magic Drugs

Harry and his friends learn how to makedrugs, and the glory of taking them.

The fact that they don’t actually take any in this book is entirely irrelevant. (”Drugs” should also be red as well as bolded. It’s very serious business.)

The plant, wormwood, contains thujone, an hypnotic drug, banned by the FDA since 1915 [Christian News, "Latest Potter Book Meets Cautionary Response From Christians, July 17, 2000] ; further, wormwood is used to make Absinthe, a hallucinogenic liquor. Therefore, the drug to which Rowling makes reference is very real, and is so dangerous the FDA has banned it -- to this day, it is banned!

While thujone was illegal at the time of this essay in the United States, it was actually never banned in the UK . . . you know, where these books take place and were written? I don’t think Rowling gives a solitary fuck about our FDA standards. Also, I don’t know if you could just straight-up buy wormwood on whatever the equivalent of Amazon was in 1998 (was it just Amazon?), but you sure can now. Can’t be all that scary.

You can hardly get a better description of drug use, and drug glorification than this!

I wonder why they keep using red to emphasize all these evil things . . . you’d think they’d go with Satan’s favorite color/the sign that Harry is the Antichrist to really jazz up all of the evil.

"The drug message in this book is clear. To reach your goals in life like Harry Potter, you need to know how to make drugs and take drugs in just the right way or else you are a 'dunderhead' and will never succeed." [http://www.fflibraries.org/Book_Reports/HarryPotter ; written by a physician and father who asked to remain anonymous].

The fact that this URL doesn’t lead me to that review is one of the saddest things I’ve faced all month.

The sections on spellcasting are far less interesting, reiterating a pretty simple refrain: all magic is bad, because the books say some magic is good then the books are bad, it’s all teaching children about Satanism. Rinse and repeat.

During final exams, teachers passed out special quills with which to write; these quills had been "bewitched with an Anti-Cheating spell". The reason none of the teachers felt they could trust the honor of the students to not cheat is obvious enough; in Witchcraft, no Absolute Good and Evil exists. All objective, eternal standards of conduct and morality have been rejected. Therefore, teachers knew full well that all the students would cheat on their final exams if they thought they could get away with it. It is a sad commentary that teachers had to place an Anti-Cheating spell on the quills to prevent exams cheating. Christian parent, is this the "morality" you want your students to learn?

Now, it might just be my obvious Satanist addiction to witchcraft talking, but doesn’t it seem more likely that there’s an anti-cheating spell because sometimes . . . children cheat? And no amount of Good Wholesome Christian Teaching is going to completely eradicate the desire to cheat on a test, because of course it isn’t.

It’s not because the school has taught the students that cheating is okay and cool and sexy or whatever -- in fact, if you want evidence that there is an absolute moral standard against cheating, it would be that the teachers are actively taking steps to prevent it! If witchcraft really was all about how there’s no such thing as good and evil . . . well, for one thing they wouldn’t teach Defense against the motherfucking Dark Arts, but they also wouldn’t care if their students cheated enough to provide anti-cheating quills, because they wouldn’t consider cheating a bad thing, because they wouldn’t consider anything a bad thing!

Also, I’m not sure what listing all of the spells in the book and what they do really says about Satanism, except that . . . spells exist, and are used? Which I feel like you should really expect from the book about magic and wizards; if that’s an alarming surprise, then you’ve made a wrong turn somewhere way earlier down the road.

Part whatever: Seriously, Rowling is just ALL ABOUT Satan

This entire section is basically about how JKR must be a Satanist, because she apparently depicts the world of magic and the occult with perfect accuracy, and how could she do that except through being an active practicing witch herself?

Mirrors are believed to be a portal to another dimension, including Time. Occultists believe they can go forward or backward in Time with a mirror being one of the Dimensional Portals. Harry encounters a mirror, "magnificent ... as high as the ceiling, with an ornate gold frame, standing on two clawed feet ... Harry stepped in front of it. He had to clasp his hand to his mouth to stop himself from screaming ... for he had seen, not only himself in the mirror but a whole crowd of people standing right behind him ... 'Mom?', he whispered. 'Dad?' They just looked at him, smiling ... Harry was looking at his family, for the first time in his life." [p. 208-9]

Intriguing theory, except of course for the fact that the mirror isn’t a portal to jack shit; unless you count the weird trick where he can get the stone (and only the stone) through wishes or whatever the fuck these idiots do, and all it does is show someone what they want. It’s not actually reaching into the past to find Harry’s parents or whatever, just like it’s not actually reaching into a parallel dimension future where Ron is the king of everything. It’s just . . . idk, reading their subconscious and throwing up a neat visual or something. With magic. It’s complex, but it’s definitely not what Cutting Edge says it is.

Not pictured: a portal to another physical, metaphysical or temporal dimension. It’s literally . . . just a mirror, but a mirror that reflects your insides instead of your outsides. It’s clever or something.

Do you realize Rowling has just made the creator of the Sorcerer's Stone 666 years old? Do you realize what this means? Since the number, '666', is a symbol of Antichrist and his Mark of the Beast [Revelation 13:18] and since Rowling ties this number to the Elixir of Life, Harry Potter is teaching children that the way to achieve eternal life [Elixir of Life] is to obey the Antichrist and take his Mark of the Beast!

Fucking. Yes. I don’t even have witty commentary for this, I’m just delighted by every word in that section. I’m smiling so much.

This is a gift and we’re reading it for free!

Wonderful! We have the forbidden practice of drinking blood in this Potter book, forbidden in Scripture [Genesis 9:4-5] but practiced regularly in Satanism. I wonder if Chuck Colson, Focus On The Family, and Christianity Today ever told their Christian followers about this? Have they even read this book, before they issued their acceptance of Potter?

Don’t you dare try to employ sarcasm. People who believe in the Illuminati and New World Order are not allowed to be sarcastic -- even if the thought of this faceless stranger typing that little clever “Wonderful!” and smirking to themselves about how witty they are is a very, very good mental image.

Also, what the fuck did unicorns do to deserve being associated with the Antichrist? I mean, I get the color green; it’s the color of nature and the outdoors, and that shit fucking sucks. (Fuck you, trees!) But unicorns?

Unicorns have never done anything to anyone, ever. Unicorns couldn’t be Satanists if they tried.

This means evil Lord Voldemort -- whose killing curse upon Harry, his Mom, and his Dad had rebounded against him when Harry did not die -- is near death, and is seeking to drink the Unicorn's blood to stay alive long enough to finally achieve eternal life through drinking the '666' Elixir of Life.

Yes, that is -- sort of -- the plot of this book.

This is the specific New Age doctrine being taught here: people will have to draw their temporary spiritual life from The Christ until the time comes when their individual consciousness will have been raised so much they will achieve their personal godhood, and live forever!

This concept is genuine New Age, is consistent with prophecy, and Rowling depicts it very well!

Christian parents, do you want your child to be taught this New Age doctrine? Can you see Harry Potter playing the Pied Piper and leading your children straight to the Mark of the Beast?

Pied Piper count: 1 (that’s not a lot so far, but it’s used in like every essay. It’ll come back)

I don’t know how to tackle this, because I’m not sure Cutting Edge really understands that Voldemort is the bad guy in these books. Children aren’t going to read this book and then go, “Cool! I’m gonna go stab a unicorn and drink its essence because my favorite role model You-Know-Who told me to!”

The unicorn blood thing is unilaterally portrayed as a pretty bad move. Voldemort’s goals in general are pretty obviously not great ideas. I know Cutting Edge doesn’t have the benefit of hindsight here, but Voldemort’s quest for immortality and how bad and wrong and fucked-up that is, is kind of one of the major through-lines of the entire story. It could be argued that it’s not Voldy’s desire to live forever that’s wrong so much as his whole, like, genocide thing, which is legit . . . except that all the methods to attain immortality involve killing someone, or stealing something, or otherwise being Not a Good Dude.

Voldemort is Not a Good Dude, and I don’t know how to communicate that any clearer than the books written for third graders already did.

Part 6: I don’t really know, I just wanted a chance to break this endless essay up and this seemed like a good place to do it. So let’s talk about spells some more

Many spells require both the taking of drugs and demonic possession, so it is a matter of gravest importance that Harry is actually going to learn to cast spells. When Chuck Colson dismisses the casting of spells as innocent and of no real importance, did he know this fact?

I seem to have missed the part where Harry goes off his ass on LSD and gets possessed by B’aal. Was that in the Silmarillion?

whenever a witch changes the physical characteristics of something, he or she is practicing very high-level witchcraft, has a high level of demonic possession, and has had to carry out human sacrifice themselves or have someone else do it for them.

“It’s fiction” is often a bullshit excuse to justify bad framing, but I feel like it applies here, because maybe in the “real” world spellcasting requires you to trip balls and summon demons, but it’s extremely obvious that it doesn’t work like that in Harry Potter! You can’t just say that’s what the books are teaching when the books aren’t actually teaching anything even close to that!

(I’m starting to feel like my emphasis italics are having a similar effect to Cutting Edge’s red bolded letters. Fuck if I’m gonna stop using them, though.)

If Harry and his pals were wearing goat heads and putting virgins into a giant blender or something I think you might have an argument here, but when the people reading your essay have eyes and can see that the things you’re describing aren’t anywhere in the books, you’re just lying. And it’s very obvious, and I still love you, Cutting Edge, but you’re being disingenuous and it’s starting to kill my joy-boner to constantly have to point out the ways you’re misunderstanding a children’s book, especially when I think you’re kinda doing it on purpose. So how about you chill just a little bit and we’ll all read some Harry Potter together.

Magical Drafts and Potions , by Arsenius Jigger. Some of the potions are very real, very deadly.

Wait, did Rowling publish this one, too? How do you know what’s in the book? Does the book list some real potions and how to make them, or is this another thing that’s only available in the Cutting Edge’s copy of the books?

Students were told they could also "bring an owl OR a cat OR a toad." [p. 67] These three creatures are important to an occultists. Satanists have always revered the cat because of its reputed "nine lives", which is a symbol of reincarnation. Cats are also symbols of a witch's familiar spirit.

They have revered the frog because his prominent bulging eyes represent the All-seeing nature of Lucifer. Frogs are also consistently used in many of the potions witches concoct. They revere owls as a symbol of occult wisdom and omniscience -- again because of their eyes.

So fuck cats, I guess. They’re being pretty unfair to owls and frogs too -- especially insulting their poor eyes. They can’t help it! -- but I’m a crazy cat lady and I’m not feeling this slander.

Actually . . . my cat looks pretty high right now. Maybe she is channeling Satan.

Okay, never mind. Fuck all these animals. They’re all evil. This article is entirely right, and I renounce all of my previous statements.

McGonagall has obviously mastered her Craft because she was the tabby cat seen by Uncle Vernon reading a map, back in chapter one. Remember that any time a witch or wizard practices transfiguration, they need expert spell-casting, and demonic possession. I bet no one ever told you that little fact, did they?

No, they didn’t, because it’s not even remotely relevant to the fictional book written for children.

Like, I’m trying very hard to not question anyone’s religious beliefs, so if you believe in the occult and magic and all that then more power to you, and maybe it’s totally valid to think that real-life magic spells requires demonic possession. That doesn’t make it true in the books, though! Stop making shit up!

Potions Class -- taught in one of the dungeons [p. 136] How disgusting must the atmosphere for this class, and others, taught in a dungeon, which was built to torture people to death?

If only the classroom, teacher, and overall environment for the Potions classes was meant to be as viscerally unpleasant as possible. Then putting them in the dungeons would be a really good idea, to reflect the Slytherins’ backwards beliefs and the misery of their intolerance.

Like, JKR isn’t this subtle. When you name one of your antagonists “Bad Dragon,” you’re not aiming for this subconscious-symbolism bullshit.

Part 7: Did you think this book had a good moral? Fuck you!

The fundamental occult/Communist philosophy

Well, I guess we’re talking about Communism now! Because if there’s anything Harry Potter is interested in above all else, it’s Communism.

My favorite things about these essays is how they will pull in other social ills -- abortion, public schools, communism -- and slap them into their argument regardless of if it makes any semblance of sense.

Anyway, Cutting Edge actually has a legitimate argument here, although they take it about 50 steps too far:

the "Ends Justify The Means" permeates this entire book. To achieve a goal deemed good, Harry and his friends consistently break rules, steal, and use Witchcraft against others.

It is true that Harry and his friends break the rules, lie, and otherwise do “bad” things in the service of an ultimate good, and that they suffer relatively few consequences for it. This is a legitimate point, and actual people who know things agree.

I’ve been struck speechless by this article before, but this is the first time it’s because I think they might have an actual point.

Hermione was very mildly punished [for her lie to the professors about why they were fighting the troll], but her lie cemented a friendship with Ron and Harry, leading a child to conclude that her lie served an excellent purpose, and could not be considered 'wrong'.

I mean . . . yeah? I don’t think it’s entirely reasonable to assume that children will take that lesson away, but I read it as a child and I certainly didn’t think Hermione was wrong to lie -- nor do I now, which I suppose proves just how powerful the Satanic conditioning was.

Professor Quirrell told Harry, "There is no good or evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it ." [p. 291] This is standard Witchcraft, and standard Illuminist doctrine. This doctrine is the guiding light to those Illuminists who are driving the world into the Kingdom of Antichrist. This doctrine is very seductive to those immature children trying to grow up in our current culture; since a child's inherent nature is evil, he will find such philosophy more appealing than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Christian parents, beware!

Oh thank God Satan, we’re back to the bullshit. I was getting seriously weirded out by the idea that they had good points buried in here somewhere, but now we’re just faced with the argument that the bad guy says . . . bad things . . . and is defeated because his bad ideas are obviously bad and wrong . . . and this proves that the book is teaching children to believe the bad things?

No one reads these books and wants to be the bad guys, Cutting Edge. Kids aren’t buying Harry Potter wands and robes to pretend that they’re Quirrell, trying to keep people from finding out they have a Dark Lord on the back of their head. (Though now that I’ve mentioned it, that sounds like a very fun game.)

Depicting bad things in a way that makes it clear -- to children, I must reiterate -- that they’re bad isn’t the same thing as romanticizing or promoting those bad things. This is basic stuff, CE.

Revenge Motive : "Hagrid almost had to drag Harry away from Curses and Countercurses (Bewitch Your Friends and Befuddle Your Enemies with the Latest Revenges: Hair Loss, Jelly-Legs, Tongue-Tying, and Much, Much More , by Vindictus Viridian." [p. 80] Throughout these books, seeking revenge and attacking your enemies is high on the priority list of Harry, his friends, and other students. Do you want your children to adopt this most Satanic attitude? Notice the first name of the author of this revenge book, above, is named "Vindictus, i.e., Vindictive".

Students are taught to depend upon Witchcraft for every part of their lives . All food is conjured up rather than prepared, all the dishes are conjured clean, and even the hospital depends upon Witchcraft to get students well [p. 156]. Neville Longbottom, one of the more clumsy students, received a crystal ball from his grandmother called a Remembrall . The ball glows scarlet if you have forgotten something you should have done. [p. 145]

That’s . . . fuck, that’s actually kind of another good point. Stop kinda making sense, goddamn it!

A lot of the criticism is just that the things wizards do are cool, which will make kids want to become witches/wizards in order to do those cool things, too. And to be fair, the stuff Harry et. al. does are cool, and I did want to be a witch when I grew up. Fortunately, I was in third grade, and so my options for witchcraft were relatively limited; by the time I was old enough to pursue the endeavor properly, I was also old enough to know that it was actually nothing like Harry Potter. If magic actually was anything like those books make it seem, we’d have a lot more witches running around, zapping shit.

Possible reference to homosexuality . When I was first researching Harry Potter, I examined several pro-Potter websites. The author of one of the articles said that one of the probable developments she felt would occur in the latter books was the advent of homosexuality in the story theme. She said such activity was only hinted at in the first books.

Oh dear god, Cutting Edge found the shippers. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.

(I wonder if this means they’ve also read the Draco Trilogy.)

I do have to take issue with one last point in this bit about morals, where they talk about how scarring it might be to a child to see Voldemort possessing the back of Quirrell’s head:

Rowling could not have created a better description of demonic possession by a dark and powerful demon! Christian parent, is this the type of thing you want your child to bring into their minds?

Thing is, I’ve been in a lot of Christian circles for most of my life, and this sounds exactly like the kind of dark, traumatizing thing many religious parents would be happy to put into their children’s minds.

Part Almost Done: Definitely Intentional Satanic Symbols, Really

Hey, did you know the number 11 was occultist? I didn’t, and when I Googled it, 4 of the front-page results were Christian or conspiracy groups making this claim, 2 were unclear, and 3 actually seemed to indicate some level of belief in the power of the number 11. Though I might’ve stacked the deck with the word “occult”; when I changed my search term to “magic,” I found almost exclusively positive articles about the symbolic power of the number 11, so . . . Cutting Edge isn’t necessarily wrong.

But boy, did you know how many times the number 11 shows up in Sorcerer's Stone? Not very much, but if we stretch our credibility a little bit, we might see something spooky!

Harry was eleven (11) when he was admitted to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The number eleven is considered sacred to the occultist, as it is the first primary number. Occultists will also add up numbers to get an occult number that is sacred; thus, I was highly interested when the bank vault maintained for Harry by his Mom and Dad before their death was numbered '713' [p. 73]. When you add '7 + 1 + 3 = 11'. Then, we learn that, in the money of the Fantasy Reality, "twenty-nine Knuts to a Sickle". When you add 2 + 9 = 11.

When Harry found the wand that was meant for him, it turned out to be 11 inches long! [p. 84]

The Hogwarts Express Train left at 11 o'clock from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. [p. 91]

Oh man, that’s some convincing evidence. Evidence of what, I have no idea, but it uses math and I’m sure it’s very alarming!

" Sorcerer's Stone " is also called the "Philosopher's Stone", and is very, very Satanic! Rosicrucianism teaches that an Initiate will pass through five stages to become the highest Adept possible, to be most proficient in exercising the power of Satanism. They call this process the "Five Stages In The Transmutation of the Soul". The final stage is depicted by the Phoenix Bird; the Adept is then said to have achieved the "Sorcerer's Stone". Thus, the fact that the term, "Sorcerer's Stone" is in the title of this book suggests that the ultimate goal of all students at Hogwarts is to achieve the Sorcerer's Stone.

Wow, that sure is an interesting interpretation of the rock that shows up in the book for like 6 pages and then is immediately destroyed! Alternate theory, if you’re open to it: It’s a rock, named the Philosopher’s Stone because the Philosopher’s Stone is historically the name of a rock, called the philosopher's stone, and it's literally just a rock and doesn't mean anything Satanist because it's a fucking ROCK.

(Pictured: A rock)

There’s a really odd part right after the long discussion about how alchemy and unicorns and whatnot are Satanic Illuminati symbols, where CE just takes a moment to explain the game of Quidditch. No commentary beyond a sassy little “[Even the Quidditch balls are 'enchanted'].” Just . . . sort of letting you know how the game is played.

To be fair, this is quite a valuable service, since I don’t think anyone actually understands how Quidditch works, but I’m not sure what it’s doing sandwiched between two declarations of Harry Potter’s obvious evil.

PART THE LAST THANK GOD: WHO THE FUCK NEEDS A SUBTITLE IT’S ALMOST OVER

The first few paragraphs are standard boilerplate conclusion stuff, reiterating the rest of the story, continued misunderstanding that bad things are done by the bad guys, no there really are drugs and Illuminati propaganda in here I promise, yadda yadda. Nothing noteworthy except for the fact that I found this sentence absolutely hilarious:

But, most horribly, we see depictions of Satanism that are truly End of the Age. We see the symbol of Antichrist, the Unicorn.

And so I leave you with this one final thought, because it’s all I can fit into the saggy mush that was once my brain:

From Genesis through Revelation, God demands His people separate themselves from the evil around them! SEPARATE! SEPARATE! SEPARATE!

S E P A R A T E

#harry potter #hp #rowling #jkr #this doesn't really count as fandom history does it?#i did discover this amazing site through f_w #tagging this as Christianity would be mean i think #but i'm ignoring the wank mostly and sticking to the FACTS #'facts' like 'harry potter's eyes are the color of satan'#WAKE UP SHEEPLE #this is the world's longest post and i'm not sure it's interesting to anyone except me #i got very tired at the end of this can you tell #i refuse to even consider editing this #you will take my thoughts as i have them #if the 'read more' doesn't show up IT IS NOT MY FAULT I FUCKING PUT IT THERE I SWEAR IT #quotes aren't showing up on mobile #can't do red text or fun fonts on desktop #this post is a goddamn disaster and it's what both i and this essay deserve

12 notes · View notes

raeynbowboi · 5 years

Text

Top 10 Disney Villains

10. King Candy Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

Although he’s newer to the villain roster, King Candy was a well-written villain who served as a perfect blend of humorous and genuinely threatening. He also tied very nicely into the themes of the film, which makes him stand out in my memory as a good villain, because I take more than just personality and actions into account when judging characters, but also role in the narrative, and how they support the themes and ideas of the story. King Candy is the perfect villain for a story like this, which is why I consider him good enough to be on this list, even if as a villain himself, he might not be the most memorable among the Disney canon.

9. Gaston Beauty and the Beast (1991)

Perhaps the Disney villain we’re most likely to meet in real life, Gaston is the perfect example of toxic masculinity on full display. He’s a great anthithesis to the Beast, though I never saw him all that handsome, which sort of detracts just a little bit from the story. But in a story about how looks don’t matter, but actions do, he’s a great foil to the love interest. He’s a selfish hateful man who is handed everything he wants, and when he doesn’t get his way, he strongarms people until they meet his demands. Yet, despite his personality, he retains a legion of followers who are more-so admirers than actual friends. He never once considers anyone to be his equal or of sufficient worth unless it was helpful in his own endeavors. And anyone who has ever had a friend who basically used them and then ditched them at the soonest convenience can probably recognize that kind of so-called “friend” in Gaston. He’s a great villain to dissect as an analysis of our current culture, but I don’t want to write a five page essay on Gaston for a top 10 list.

8. Yzma Emperor’s New Groove (2000)

Inarguably Disney’s best comedic villain (not counting her henchman Kronk), Yzma is a brilliantly funny character whose exaggurated appearance and over-the-top personality blend well with the fast-paced slapstick comedy that fills the movie. Yet, despite being a funny villainess, she avoids a major pitfall of many comedic villains by also being legitimately threatening and dangerous to our heroes. That, combined with the excellent writing in the movie makes Yzma so memorable and likable.

7. Mother Gothel Tangled (2010)

Although her actual villainous actions in the movie are surprsingly few and far between, I genuinely love Mother Gothel as a villainess. Her motivations are well-established, and she’s the sole reason the story has any plot at all. Comparisons have been made to the living conditions of both Quasimodo and Rapunzel, and I would genuinely agree that Mother Gothel is akin to a diet version of Frollo without all the genocide and religious superiority. She has to be more discreet and pretend to be kind in order to keep her little flower content to remain obedient locked away from the outside world. It makes total sense the way she treats Rapunzel, and her entire character, personality, and role all fit together to enhance the narrative of the story.

6. Long John Silver Treasure Planet (2002)

Arguably one of the most human villains from Disney, Silver is a beautiful complexity as he juggles the duality of being a father-figure to the impressionable young Jim, while also betraying Jim’s trust. Since Jim’s father left when he was a child, Jim closes himself off from people and seems adrift in the world. Silver, who has no need to trick the boy for his mutiny to succeed, still takes the time to take Jim under his wing, nurture the boy’s abilities, and form a bond. Heck, with how relatively apathetic Jim was, he could have manipulated Jim into hating being on the ship, and thus have him be happy when the mutiny sets him free. But instead, he chose to teach the boy and boost his confidence. In the end, Silver is a compelling Anti-Villain where it’s hard to really define him as a good or wicked person. That is honestly more interesting than just being a straight deceitful villain.

5. Bill Sykes Oliver & Company (1988)

Perhaps the most surprising choice on my list, Sykes was a villain from Oliver & Company, a retelling of Oliver Twist with stray dogs and a kitten. However, despite Disney’s family friendly brand, Sykes is a surprisingly menacing character. A loan shark and a cut-throat business man, he spends most of the movie threatening to kill Fagin which is far darker than Disney tends to get. While many Disney villains want to kill people, those desires were driven by personal grievances with that person or people. With Sykes, it’s cold, ruthless business. He doesn’t care about Fagin’s life. All he cares about is getting his money, and Fagin’s life just happens to be the collateral. It’s the purest form of cold-blooded murder, and that’s not a common thing among Disney villains.

4. Ursula The Little Mermaid (1989)

There’s a good reason Ursula is one of the flagship villains of this franchise. She has a strong personality, is a great antagonist, and directly plays off the protagonist’s weaknesses to win. Second only to Scar, and possibly Jafar, Ursula is the classic hand-drawn animated Disney villain to get closest to winning. The fact that she’s based on a drag queen is kind of perfect, since the fairytale was written by Hans Christian Andersen to express his love for Edvard Collin discreetly. He intended to give it to Edvard as a wedding gift, but Edvard and his wife purposefully “forgot” to tell him when the wedding was out of fear that he’d make a scene or announce his love for Edvard in front of everyone. Thus, the mermaid’s taboo love of someone she shouldn��t who comes from an entirely different way of living is a direct parallel to Hans’ feelings for the young Gentleman, and the mermaid being unable to speak and suffering greatly to be near her love is a clear metaphor for Hans’ own feelings of torture. So the inclusion of a drag queen in a movie adaptation of a covert metaphorical gay romantic tragedy is just deliciously fitting.

3. The Horned King The Black Cauldron (1984)

Sykes got a place on this list for being genuinely intimidating, but this villain is living nightmare fuel. One of the best things a genuinely threatening villain can do is successfully scare you, and this villain scared the living daylights out of me as a child. In fact, he was the only Disney villain to truly and completely scare me as a child. The rest of the villains were pretty much just bad characters, but the Horned King was far more terrifying than anything else I’d seen as a kid. Though his movie bombed and the story itself was a bit lacking, the Horned King was a genuinely horrifying presence, and to this day, I can’t think Disney Villains without this guy clawing his way into my mind. Maybe as a villain himself, he’s a bit flat, but he’s a horrific undead murderous monster trying to snuff out all life. He doesn’t need to be that complex for what he is, and that works with the type of villain that he was created to be.

2. Claude Frollo The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1996)

If Sykes made it to number 5 for the cold-blooded attempt at murder on one person, Frollo strolls into 2nd place for his cold-blooded successful mass racial/ethnic genocide of multiple people over a long reign of tyranny. Although we don’t see his treats on-screen, he very verbally implies that he has been executing people one by one for at least twenty years as he crushes ants. We even see him barricade a family with children inside of their house and then proceed to burn it down. This man is not messing around, and I love it. When it coems to dark, twisted, and messed up villains, Frollo takes the cake. He is hands down one of the greatest and most horrible villains out there. And the fact that he does this all in the name of God is a hauntingly dark reminder of the true cruelty of the medieval Christian church. Frollo was written in the original book to be a deliberate critique of the Catholic church, and I for one am grateful that Disney decided to be faithful to Frollo’s horrible nature when adapting to film.

1. Maleficent Sleeping Beauty (1959)

Finally, we reach the leader of the Disney Villains. How could I not put her at the top of this list? She literally fights with all the powers of Hell. But what I like most about her is what you can piece together from the narrative. Out of all the fairies, only Fauna thinks that Maleficent could be reasoned with, and she feels sad at the idea that Maleficent may not even grasp the concept of happiness, or what it feels like to be loved. This opens Maleficent up to being a product of abuse, abandonment, and bitterness. Her hatred for the world and her actions of spite and envy come into a new light with the idea that it’s kindled from neglect and exclusion from others. It offers the question of what would happen if someone did try to just talk to her, and offers a possibly sympathetic reading of her character. But, the true crux of what Maleficent stands for is that she’s evil, and she takes great pleasure in her evil ways. She cursed a baby because she wasn’t invited to a party. When it comes to pure, unfiltered evil, Maleficent has that in spades. So, Maleficent is a perfect character no matter which type you prefer as a villain: the tormented outcast lashing out, or the heartless monster lighting the world on fire for fun. No matter what kind of villain you prefer, there’s a way of reading her narrative to satisfy you.

326 notes · View notes

sternerstufftoys · 5 years

Text

They tried to sell me vulcanised nails, but I said galvanised, galvanised, galvanised

Let's talk about Decepticons for a moment. While the Autobots have really only ever had two leaders, and Rodimus Prime was quickly shuffled away and replaced with Optimus Prime again because of the tears of children, the Decepticon leadership has always been more fluid, and many different characters have taken on the mantle from time to time. The Watsonian explanation is that the Decepticon ranks are full of ambitious, power-hungry warlords all climbing on top of each other to claim power, but a more sober Doylist view is that the original leader Megatron was never quite the smash hit that his Autobot counterpart was. An awkward toy that very quickly became difficult to sell thanks to its realistic gun mode, and none of the Robo-Dad charms that Prime held, meant that Megatron's time in the limelight was limited.

All of which means that the Decepticons ended up with a far more interesting roster of lead characters than the Autobots ever managed. Let's start with the first major replacement for Megatron... Galvatron, aka Megatron-but-with-a-crown.

I think that the G1 cartoon failed Galvatron. Introduced in the 1986 movie with Leonard Nimoy's growliest of growl-voices and a mean streak half a parsec wide, he was a definite step up from Megatron in terms of ability and raw power. But when season 3 rolled around at the end of the year it was felt he needed to be taken down a peg or two, so his power was tempered with utter batshit insanity. Suddenly Galvatron wasn't quite as compelling a villain, as he constantly carried the potential to derail his own plans with a moment of manic screeching and shooting his own lackeys in a fit of rage. He fared better in the Marvel comic, where the insanity-ball was passed back and forth between him and Megatron, ultimately being a far more intimidating villain over its run. I get the feeling that Simon Furman hadn't really watched season 3 in any great detail, as his 2006-characters all seemed more in line with their movie portrayals than the series itself.

I never owned the Universe Galvatron mould, and confess I'm somewhat bemused by the bad reputation it's garnered over the years. It doesn't look bad at all in pictures, but even so, the Titans Return version was clearly going to be the definitive Galvatron for the ages... right?

Titans Return Galvatron is a great toy, the best Galvatron we've ever had from Hasbro, and a failure. That's a fascinating brew of good and bad all thrown into one, and somehow just adds to the underlying charm. The greatest sin is undoubtably the terrible attempt at Galvatron's three-spiked helmet design, relegated into an utterly hopeless pop-up mask. It looks awful from any angle other than straight on, and barely turns at all. It's all made worse by the poorly-hidden revelation that the original design featured a separate helmet that fit much more snugly. There's a bunch of options to rectify this, including 3D printed helmets from Shapeways and a more solid job from Toyhax. I've got my Galvatron modelling a G1-based Shapeways helmet, and it makes for a far, far greater look. As in, Galvatron can now look around.

The second problem is the perennial misunderstanding over where the arm-cannon should be placed. Takara, Hasbro, once and for all can you please make it a rule that arm guns should be in line with the back of the hand, not the thumb? The latter, which is TR Galvatron's default look, never looks anything other than utterly dorky. It's all because the G1 toy had the cannon in the same place (as with Megatron), but as soon as the animation teams got on it they quickly decided it had to go on the outside of the arm for the characters' dignity. Anyway, another Shapeways add-on fixes this, giving a new port for the cannon in the right place.

And it certainly is a mighty cannon. You can well argue that the original G1 toy's gun was a little bit on the skinny side, so TR goes all out making it a huge, day-glow murder-cigar. Any bigger and it would look absurd, but it just about stays on the right side of bonkers to work. Just. Either way, the cannon becomes the unavoidable key feature of the entire figure, dominating the look in every single mode. Along with the triple-horned crown, it's how you can tell that this is Galvatron.

So yeah, two key features of the character, and they managed to bork them both up. That's a failure right there, a failure on its own terms of engagement. It's like making a Hot Rod and forgetting to put any flame decals on there. Still, it's good to know that they can be fixed, and when you do... you get one hell of a toy. Galvatron is just so much more alive than his predecessor. Megatron looks like some tired, down-on-his luck colonel by comparison, but Galvatron gets a friggin' great crown. Much respect for the first real Emperor of Destruction.

The alt modes are about as good as you'd expect, i.e. they're fine. The space-artillery cannon mode is the traditional one, and does a good job of beefing up his firepower by making his entire body part of the weapon. It was always a more dependable alt mode than a tiny little handgun, but perhaps doesn't have the same pizzazz for the kids as artillery guns aren't exactly as in-vogue like they were in 1917, and Galvatron didn't look that much like one in the first place. But it's still fun. Along with this the handgun has been swapped out for a sort of space fighter thingy. It's not the best, essentially being Galvatron's legs being arranged funny and a cockpit swinging up over his shoulders, but thank god it exists. It's no good that your Deceptileader needs to constantly rely on his underlings to ferry him around, and means that Cyclonus doesn't have to grow to 10x the size every time his boss wants to climb inside to nip down to the shops. Get your own groceries, Galvatron! Anything that manages to do away with mass-shifting is a win in my book.

Like with Rodimus Prime, I do wish that the G1 cartoon had built up the confidence to really go for Galvatron and give him the arc he deserved. Imagine what would happen if in the first episode of a full season 4 Galvatron rocks up with his sanity fully restored, and the Autobots utterly bricking it. Instead he just faded away again, and never quite fulfilled his true potential as a character. We lost so much with the collapse of the cartoon at the end of season 3. At least we'll always have Marvel, Galvy.

#transformers #maccadam #toy review #galvatron #titans return #decepticon leaders

7 notes · View notes

muchymozzarella · 5 years

Text

Ranking the Overwatch Cinematic Shorts (so far)

I’m gonna be ranking each short based on storytelling quality (since, let’s be real, all the animation is amazing) and the way it affected me personally, as well as the relevance of each short to their primary character or characters.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Junkertown: The Plan

I’m not putting this in my main list because it was animated differently from the rest, and mainly for a map rather than characters, even if it did a little bit of storytelling. However, the expressions in this were amazing, as was the comedy writing. Still an excellent piece, though I’m not putting it in my main rankings.

Doomfist Origin Story

Though technically counting among all the other origin stories, because this was fully animated, I felt it needed mentioning. This 2D style is fantastic, exciting, and Sahr Ngaujah’s Doomfist has me in CHILLS every time I watch it. I’d rank it mid-high on my list if it were being ranked, but since it doesn’t count among the cinematic shorts, I’m excluding it. I need this anime in my life, tho.

NOW FOR THE MAIN RANKINGS!

#11 - Reunion

Reunion was... disappointing. It was still beautifully animated, still exciting and fun, but as a character piece it felt more like a vehicle for Ashe and Echo than any real story. McCree wasn’t given the attention or character depth they gave him in his comic, or even in the Retribution.

Still good, but the most disappointing of the lot.

#10 - Overwatch Cinematic Trailer

The OG! The first look that made us excited about Overwatch. It does what it needs to well, but being one of Overwatch’s earliest works, it has a lot of outdated elements, such as the subtle changes in Tracer and Widow’s design, and the more flat portrayals of characters that were much nuanced later on.

Still excellent, though, and a good way of portraying what Overwatch was meant to be as a game, as a concept, and as its own universe.

#9 - Shooting Star

Now this was an excellent character piece. I dearly appreciated the look it gave us into D.Va’s real personality underneath all the propaganda/media persona, and her anxieties and pressures and fears. It, however, didn’t affect me very much on first viewing, especially in comparison to the rest, and it isn’t the most memorable to me, so it’s lower on the list. Still quality, though.

#8 - Rise and Shine

This would be higher on the list, but I wasn’t affected until maybe my third or fourth viewing. Something about the way the emotions played out seemed not to develop as well as the rest. However, this is still an emotional, touching, and surprisingly LONG short about Mei, and it really delves into her character and drive, while also giving us significant backstory on Overwatch’s role and situation in-universe. The music was lovely, and Mei as a character is just amazing, and so very compelling. Elise Zhang did a wonderful job, especially since she sometimes struggles with English, especially a fully English piece like this. And it is GORGEOUS. All of them are, but this one in particular captured something great in the lighting and setting.

#7 - Infiltration

Now this is where I’m starting to have trouble picking between titles :P This one grappled with #6 for the higher spot, but I’m putting this here because the other one’s thematically stronger. This one, however, was about everything you’d want in a short. It’s exciting, it’s got deep and interesting, moving plot, it has multiple characters but shows us exactly what Sombra is about and gives her such PERSONALITY. The animation is great, the storytelling is great, and it plays out the way the best superhero animated series from the 90s and early 2000s played out. One of my favourites. But still not as high on the list as the next ones.

#6 - Hero

I think what made this so impressive and memorable was actually the soundtrack. The mood was set so perfectly in this short alone, but also it was thematically stronger from start to finish with the idea that old heroes could still be heroes, and that new ones could arise as a result of the old ones. It was exciting, the action was excellent, and the world of Dorado just pops.

But definitely the music. Who could forget that guitar at the end?

#5 Alive

So they, uh... straight up MURDERED SOMEBODY???

Seriously though, this short, despite having the action and excitement of both Infiltration and Hero, rises above because of how it revealed the stakes of Overwatch. It revealed that they weren’t afraid to go there, to show the othering of sentient people with the omnic rights protests led by an omnic religious leader mirroring past tensions between an oppressed group and a majority, and to show someone who is both a major religious figure AND a political figurehead being straight up assassinated for the goals of a shadow organisation.

This was an action-packed, exciting, visual treat with a terrifying and skilful villain who was a real threat, but above all else, it showed us that Overwatch wasn’t going to baby its audience.

#4 - Recall

Winston is such an excellent character, let me just say. As far as we, the audience, are concerned, he is Overwatch - at least, the new form of it, and the best form of it - and the way this short presents his desire to see the world be better, mixing in some deep universe lore and more action showing the threat that Talon is, this short is one of the most important just in terms of Overwatch’s story. It’s got action, it’s got some surprisingly effective humour, and it centres on a great character and his wants and decisions.

NOW WE’RE IN THE HOME STRETCH - AKA THE PLACE WHERE I COULD NOT DECIDE WHERE TO PUT THESE TITLES.

BUT I HAD TO RANK THEM. SO HERE THEY ARE. BUT ASSUME THEY ARE ALL EQUALLY AMAZING BECAUSE THESE ARE THE THREE BEST OVERWATCH CINEMATIC SHORTS SO FAR.

# 3 - The Last Bastion

This was a masterpiece. Without dialogue, it conveyed emotion, it was a feast for the eyes, the music and sound design were on point, and it was honestly just... amazing. Really, it was perfect. The only reason it’s #3 is because #2 and #1 hit me harder in the emotions on first, second, third, and subsequent hundred viewings. But this short about a PTSD-ridden robot and their path to healing is just... beautiful. Heartwrenchingly beautiful, sweet without being saccharine, and way more real than we expected a short about a singing robot and their bird best friend to be about.

If you were ever to teach a masterclass in short form animated storytelling? You’d use this as an example. That’s why it won an award for Best Writing in Film & Video.

#2 - Dragons

God, this was hard. This was actually my favourite of ALL the cinematics, in fact, it STILL IS MY FAVOURITE. It’s the first thing I show people to get them hyped for Overwatch, when they still haven’t checked it out. It’s just amazing. The storytelling is masterful and exciting, and the way it tells two intertwined stories is both stylistically amazing and beautifully plotted out.

It’s a visual treat, with excellent music, and the narration by Papa Shimada really sets the tone. The action is great, the characters are great - it’s all just great, and gets my heart pumping every time. And the art for the children’s story? Utterly amazing.

And the only reason it doesn’t get top billing is because the last of these just makes me cry every single time I watch it, without fail. It just... it’s too much, guys.

#1 - Honor and Glory

Dammit. I hate this. I love it. The timeless themes, the mix of old epic warriors and sci-fi battles, the perfect line that bookends the start and finish of this short. THE MUSIC, HOLY SHIT. Every time I watch this, I cry. It’s never failed me. It’s just so earnest and painful, and brings to tears even the most stoic people.

It has the emotions of The Last Bastion and the same themes of old battles, but has this added tinge of tragedy with a character who is just so... worn down, that seeing him in the prime of his life just makes it even more tragic.

This is my #1, top Cinematic Short out of Overwatch. And I need to watch it a thousandth time, because I’m still not over it.

#overwatch #cinematic shorts #ranking #list

140 notes · View notes

shinvcho · 5 years

Note

I heard you were talking about this fandom being salty and toxic? What is the problem people have in it? I'm really curious.

// First of all, I do not speak of the fandom as a whole. - not even the rp side of things. However, one thing people call the b.nha fandom is toxic - at last, it looks like tho a person outside of this fandom

Why?Because this fandom is filled with sjw - who will complain about everything.And why - cause we western simply can’t make a clear difference between fiction and reality. And I’m not talking about anime/manga fans only, how many news are there that say that shooter will turn uns into mass murderer.

Well anyway -

1. You aren’t allowed to like certain fictional characters.E.ndevor, O.verhaul is a good example, like one of these two and you will be called an abuser. Oh the same counts for Bakugou, even if he is the most popular character in the show. And btw. I have been bullied FOR YEARS, so don’t even try to call me out on this. This guy changed, I really dod not like him in S1 either but I really started liking him in S3.

I never have seen this in any fandom, that you straight up are forbidden to like problematic character’s- just because you like them doesn’t mean you agree with their action. I personally agree En.davor is a shit dad and abusive character but I still find him as character and fuel for the story rather interesting. Also, let’s ignore the fact that liking Shigaraki - a guy who was ready to kill children is totally okay (nothing against Shigaraki, I like him too this just a comparison liking him is okay but E.ndavor isn’t)

2. You aren’t allowed to like a certain ship’s.Same as above, and I’m not talking about student/teacher ships, but certain ships between the student character. What happened with the mentally of - if you do not like a ship just scroll over it?

And before anybody says anything, I’m not talking about rp who have in their rules they do not want to interact with this as it makes them uncomfortable - that is not the same as what I’m talking about here.

There is seriously a trend within this fandom who they put banner under their artwork forbidding people from interacting with you if you like this and that and like…I just find that extremely rude, just let people enjoy your art without making them feel like shit. In 90% of the time you won’t interact with people who like/reblog your art anyway…

This also mentally unhealthy btw, you know how shitty I feel when I read people do not like Shinsou? How I seriously feel bad for liking him? Not only him, but also other characters I enjoy or ships.

So, good job for making people feel completely unwelcome here

3. Momo’s outfit.I agree it doesn’t look good but the among of complaints are tiering - especially within the manga, you bearly see her chest, the anime adds booty shots - not hori. Also by this complain I question if any of you saw any anime before. Cause there is worse fanservice out there. (Na.mi and R.obin from O.nePiece are after the time skip worse than any Midnight and Mount Lady fanservice, just saying. And I love O.nePiece still)

This is the argument people outside of the fandom see the most and are tired off - cause they know there is also the side in this fandom who likes lewd fanart of the male character as ship or not. And that their people who complain about Momo and like the other side of things isn’t as farfetched.

4. A good chucking of Kiri.baku shippers harassing the creator to make their ship canon even started a petition.While I question you guys want Hori to do that given this guy does obviously not know how to write romance this is just…idk, every fandom does that these days like have you guys nothing better to do?Not to mention, their now other shippers who are sorry for their behavior, I feel sorry for all of them.Leave the shipping to the fandom.

5: Changin a Characters desgin and claming it to better.listen, redesign a character for fun, or cause you think it looks better? Totally fine! I do myself as artists this too all the time, giving it my own touch. However, going around and be seriously like ‘The creator is a coward for not doing this and that’ (there might be reason he can’t do that, remember their editors and others who have the final word) but this not solely bnha, a lot of fans from jap stuff love to redesign things and be like ‘ haha hire me!!’ not as a joke but being serious

respectless much? I understand when their design who suck, but it is still tiring and you're not being taken seriously but the creators like this.

Oh and fun fact, there serious people who will hate on you if you draw a character with their canon skin color, this the main problem here - if you like it and prefer drawing them like this? totally fine, have fun. But don’t force your hc/fanon onto others

7. Taking jokes a WAY to serious, you guys never have seen cartoons or other animes/mangas before?Like, b.nha jokes are harmless in comparison to some. And the joke I’m talking about is where Aizawa choked Shinsou - I still can’t believe their people who complained about this, besides he didn’t even choke him, there was actually a post explaining he didn’t as Shinsou mask was in the way, I might reblog that later actually.

6. Have any of you ever watched anime before?Like serious, some complains are like…in every anime fandom ever that it really makes you question if people are not tired asking the same things over and over.

B.nha isn’t perfect and I have arcs too, I do not enjoy. I’m not a fan either that he gives Deku so many quirks but the League gets quirks upgrades too as it seems like. His writing isn’t perfect, no story is. But I enjoy the characters and the story anyway?

And I did like to continue doing so without feeling bad for liking certain characters or ship dynamics.

#Anonymous #// btw I'm not talkign about specefic perosn #but more groups and things #I see when scrolling throug the bnha tag #that really kills my joy for this fandom more often then not #this also not a rant I guess I try to aviod such people by now

23 notes · View notes

tarmairons · 5 years

Text

aaaaaaand here’s part 2 of the extensive (book & netflix) masterpost of all my fave eslaf moments!!!! again, fair warning, this is a very long post

[part 1]

i wish i could have done all this in one part but i hit a size limit oops

NOW ONTO SEASON 3!!! which was a nightmare but i’ll try to pretend it wasn’t for the sake of this post

to begin: the constant endearments in the book (and the show... “darling dearest dreamboat” damn esmé) have me losing my wholeass mind like

next up we have the indisputable fact that they f*cked in the tent on mount fraught. my proof is that they shared a tent and it was cold and so they had to generate heat. thank you

and then another instance of their shared brain cell evaporating

olaf being super proud of scoring the world’s hottest girlfriend and bragging to his parental figures is surprisingly wholesome

aaaand their brain cell is still missing in action

it’s very very cute how olaf obviously has zero artistic talent but esmé is always out there looking at him putting on a show like he’s the most amazing actor alive

and next on the list of scenes we were robbed of: p h y s i c a l a f f e c t i o n

but at least the most important line, that is:

was included:

so i won’t torch netflix hq just yet!!!! oh but WAIT they cut this next part, so i might change my mind about the arson after all

and also this line ???? ugh they’re disgusting i love them

and then this whole entire scene of olaf being so proud of his murderous gf was. beautiful. spectacular. legendary

and then someone pointed out that their hug looks like that draco/voldemort hug and it’s TRUE but i’m still gonna include it bc netflix is eslafphobic and i’m clinging to scraps here

this next line isn’t an eslaf scene but the phrasing is sending me shddhhdjsh

ok submarine time!!!! aka netflix making the sugar bowl esmé’s priority whereas in the book it is olaf’s as well AND netflix making it look like olaf was against carmelita joining them whereas it was his idea in the book… so basically all the reasons they fight in the show are unsubstantiated but go off i guess

very grateful for this Old Married Couple Bickering tho

and i know this whole scene is very problematic and talked about profusely on tumblr dot com but i’m including this screencap bc it’s soft how esmé considers them all a family

and Oh Wait olaf does too i’m melting

it’s like in TPP they wrote him bitching about “pretending to be a family” but he didn’t have any issues with it earlier, he just ran with it when esmé called carmelita their daughter

and was like “i know” ok netflix so why have him complain about it later on smh… he’s clearly not THAT mad about it, like:

next up!!! i’m a big fan of them disagreeing over something…

…and then 0.5 seconds later they’re getting along again:

^ that is the essence of their relationship

and now back to the topic of olaf not being annoyed at esmé’s Fashion Diva moments:

see he’s lowkey impressed ok

i’m now realizing that 99% of my alleged fave eslaf scenes from s3 are just me complaining about how the books are superior but ok

anyway this next scene deserves an emmy. give lucy an emmy for the delivery of “BUT DARLING”

and this is also soft bc olaf is like :/ and then esmé says something and he turns to her and is like :) so that always has me on the floor in tears

out of context this sentence is wild but like… netflix back at it again with robbing us of all the affectionate scenes huh

and here’s another instance of Couples Scheming being a fun activity to do together

and then we have their joint brain cell screaming for help but it’s adorable so

and then they go off to f*ck again

next up this whole beach scene is just more old married couple behavior and i absolutely adore it

and then we have Bonding Over Arson ~just couple things~

the fact that as the series progresses they go from “count olaf’s gf” to “esmé squalor’s bf” is legendary

and now this isn’t really a fave scene per se BUT considering the mess netflix made of the breakup i have to give a shoutout to the book version bc in comparison to the show version it’s.. beautiful how Mutual Agreement it is

but yeah lucy is spectacular here and it adds fuel to the Esmé Did Have Feelings For Olaf Because Otherwise She Wouldn’t Be Crying fire, which is great for me bc i love my otps with a side of angst

and of course netflix confirmed that esmé squalor, the city’s sixth most important financial advisor, has a daddy kink, so that’s incredible

you may think i’m done bc they broke up but no

here we have them a millisecond away from murdering each other but they’ll still take time out of their busy schedules to menacingly glare at children together. a spiritual bond that no breakup can destroy

but the real gem is the massive horny on main energy in the opera flashback (which was awful, but horny, so i have mixed feelings)

subtle, esmé

you too olaf, good job

and ofc it’s [luciana voice] imperative to remember that in the book esmé was out there trying to stop the premeditated murder of olaf’s parents so that’s nice of her

and last but not least the only valid s3 scene aside from esmé menacing the kids in the burned vfd headquarters:

sexy noir aesthetic fire escape rendezvous that ignited a revenge scheme spanning decades. if that’s not peak romance idk what is

and not to be controversial but i’m gonna drop this here anyway

ever since i read the end a billion years ago i always used to think olaf meant kit in this scene but like ?????? over the past few months i’ve been thinking, what if he meant esmé?? i mean, nothing directly negates that possibility, the books are so ambiguous and so open to interpretation that i might as well twist them to fit my headcanons, as we all do, so why tf not

and i’m gonna add some final Thoughts and Opinions in case i get more anons asking why i ship eslaf even though they’re constantly bickering &/or about to Snap and kill each other:

i’m hopelessly weak for villainous ‘us against the world’ power couples and it’s like.. even though in the series they ultimately have different end goals, they have a great time being awful people together along the way and that’s all that matters, that familiarity and mutual understanding between them. neither of them ever tried to change the other, they’re both garbage people and that’s why they get along, and what makes them so compatible

and while i’m still hesitant to use the word ‘love’ in regard to their relationship bc it just doesn’t feel Right to me (i know there’s people out there who feel otherwise but i’m still meh about it), i don’t doubt that they had feelings for each other deep down, even if they didn’t always outwardly express them

so that’s my massive essay with so much source evidence that tumblr made me divide it into 2 separate posts thank you for your attention i need a vacation from tumblr now bc this took me HOURS

#a series of unfortunate events #asoue #eslaf

55 notes · View notes

steve0discusses · 5 years

Text

Yugioh S3 Ep 12: Seto Discovers Hostile Takeover Tactics

For April Fools, I’m actually going to update this blog. I know, right? It’s been a little while.

I’ll have you know that, if I had more time, you were *this close* to getting a recap of this hot mess movie.

Buuuut it turns out that movie is a lot longer than I thought. Soooo many bad wigs. Maybe another April Fools.

Anyway, back to Yugioh, are you ready for MORE BUSINESS?

Cuz if you wanted to watch a kid’s show with stocks in it well, I had no idea it would be the one about the playing cards. Really didn’t see that one coming. Stocks are going to be traded in a little bit, but currently, all we have to worry about is that Tristan is a monkey and Kaiba’s about to die.

He seems cool with it, both with being “dead” (still unsure if Tristan can be human ever again) and watching Kaiba become dead.

This is some high level freaky sci fi thing just stuffed into a side plot? Like...what purpose is the weird monkey robot?

(read more under the cut)

Joey has completely run out of his thimble full of patience, and he’s taken over the part of Den Mother in lieu of Tristan being too horny/monkey to manage it himself. Watching Joey slowly become more and more too frustrated to Even Deal With This Right Now has been his character growth this entire arc.

And the team’s somewhat amusement and concern that one of their best friends--who they saw...pretty much die--and is now a very horny monkey is like how you would notice that your engine light is on. Like they just have so many other problems right now. They’ve decided they will get around to deciding what to do about this...later.

They’re definitely going to deal with the monkey later. Eventually. So they just tied him to the truck and continue driving.

Like that’s what they actually did, they actually just tied him to the truck and kept driving.

Eventually, they do make it to the scene of the Kaiba card crime in their 3 wheel pickup truck, but unfortunately, so does the weird satellite laser, so once again our team does not make it in time to really make any difference. The Yugi team is consistently like...3 minutes too late. Should be their team motto.

So Noah’s big plan is to make Mokuba watch Leichter--the hard to spell Big 5 with the very Dixie accent--explain in great detail all the ways Seto screwed Mokuba. And it was...something that I don’t think most kids would get. Last week it was a .com analogy, this week we’re straight up jumping into hostile takeovers. Seto decided to use the Big 5 to buy up a majority of the stock and fire his Father, but realized that Gozaburo would absolutely not let that happen.

So, Seto set up a whole plan to make it appear like he was losing the stock race, by leaking the whole plan that they were secretly buying allll the stock straight to Gozaburo but while pretending to be Mokuba (I assume by pinching his nose while shouting through a telephone) and then driving Mokuba to Gozaburo by attacking him point blank.

Did any children watching this show understand this? Did any of you?

Anyway, for some reason Mokuba is shocked that this happened.

And then we get a flashback to remind us that yes, Mokuba was here when this happened. Maybe didn’t understand it at the time, but overall, should know by now that like...this happened. Noah revealing this to him really shouldn’t have been such a shocker, right?

Mokuba describes it as “the worst day in his life” which is kind of a lot since two seasons ago Mokuba was chained in a castle cell for several days (possibly weeks), turned into a playing card while his body was a zombie that did dishes for Pegasus, died in a VR game because his brother couldn’t play nice, then last season, got abducted and then was suspended from the bottom of a flying helicopter by one single rope tied around his waist, was imprisoned in a box warehouse where he barely escaped, found out one of his good friends is pretty sure he’s an Egyptian Pharaoh dont-think-about-it, only to find all of his other friends were now attached to torture devices and about to be drowned in the bottom of the sea or squashed by a couple tons of cargo container. And then the next day, 3 people got sent to the hospital during the tourney he’s the manager of and only one of those people isn’t still in a coma, and now there’s at least one serial murderer on board his blimp and there’s nothing he can do about it.

But sure Moki, this is your worst day.

Convinced that Gozaburo (I will never spell his name right, PS, my apologies) thinks Moki is on his side, Kaiba decides to do the deed. In his school clothes. Not entirely positive that baby Kaiba has any other outfit than his school clothes and that purple coat.

Like did Seto get off school early to go and do this, or did he honestly clock in at 8 AM, harass Joey and Yugi for a bit, maybe take a test, turn in his diorama of mitochondria that he made out of twizzlers or whatever, eat lunch while making fun of the skater kids who botch it on the stairs, scribble some art in art class until 3 PM, and then take the bus back home to do THIS?

And so although the Big 5 were still majority shareholders, they couldn’t really control Seto Kaiba--which leads me to think that at some point he managed to get their stocks away from them...somehlow...probably more insider trading, he seems really into that.

Anyways, long story short the Big 5 really screwed it on this one. I mean the company has to be run by a Kaiba per the Kaiba rule that we learned in S1 (kind of a weird rule this family enforces, when all of the Kaibas are SO BAD at romantic relationships that they can only date trading cards, or can’t stop getting abducted long enough to even go on a date with a real human ((Reminder that Mokuba and Serenity are the same age, but he’s 1/millionth as horny as any of these High School Juniors that are into Serenity)))

Leichter (who is the light purple font here, I uh...forgot to cap Leichter’s face so it’s somewhat confusing) decided to just continue explaining, mostly for Mokuba, I assume, because...everyone here already knows what’s happening.

And at this point he reveals that he does have a Blue Eyes.

Again, very surprised Noah gave him that card but youknow...the power of...whatever the hell is going on there between Kaiba and that paper card.

Anyways, the Blue Eyes gives him a win, so I guess he’s figured out somewhat how to use this card? Like it’s significantly less bad than it was in the previous seasons. Maybe that separation between him and the paper card in S2 was good for him. Got his relationship back on track.

So like, something that is kind of vogue right now in more adult TV is this tendency to try and make all your characters relatable by making them realize and obsess over how they messed up to the point that they can no longer make any moral choices.

And that was the thing I was worried about in this arc, I was worried that the one guy on the writing staff who SUPER stans Seto Kaiba would make Seto into some sort of Bojack Horseman, who becomes so obsessed with his guilt that he kind of becomes a victim of what society did to him rather than a guy who ever made a choice. And Bojack’s not a bad show or anything, I did watch all of it, and it’s supposed to be more about society than the characters. But, as his problems from his youth compounded, he loses all of his agency as a character. If you are forced to be an ass then...well you can’t be one, by nature of what it means to be an ass.

Does that make sense? I see that more and more in shows these days, just a constantly apology fest whenever writers do a villain background episode.

But yes, Seto was trained to be a shark, but he was already a shark from day 1. He was always like this from the moment he was put in that orphanage. No apologies on behalf of the writing staff are needed and I’m glad they didn’t make any. It was somewhat refreshing that Seto never once apologized during this entire episode. He is awful, and he is completely fine with that.

And like, Bro hates it when you do this type of parallel comparisons between characters, but I freakin love it because he might be an English major but he majored in technical writing, and I was minoring in film for a hot minute so I love analyzing stuff and he can just deal. So lets dive in. We just came off of a whole arc talking about Marik’s tragic backstory and it’s really interesting that Seto’s tragic backstory mirrors Marik’s a great deal (especially since Kaiba was the one who was supposed to inherit the magic rod) but the two of them have a very different response to it.

Marik’s background gave him absolutely no agency. Even when he did lash out against his father--that was the rod rather than Marik himself. He lost his nut because he got tortured by his Father and lived a very shelted life underground, there was no choice there. He even has a brother that he threw into the coals (well, stroke of lightning) for his own ambitions.

Seto, on the other hand, was also tortured by his Father, but lived a shelted life so far above everyone else, that he never really left that lifestyle. But, unlike Marik, when he got the chance to make a choice, instead of getting out of the Kaiba house to save his Brother, he decided to freakin destroy it, even if it involved torturing Mokuba (momentarily) in the process.

Both are destroying their Father’s legacy while also trying to rule the world at the same time, two different villains, two different ways, one isn’t necessarily better written than the other, but it does feel like Seto has a lot more control of his own life than Marik, who is currently bumming around in Tea’s brain.

But I dunno, maybe Seto will have a big moment where he will feel an ounce of guilt and we’ll find out that everything he did was secretly a good thing or The Only Way something. I might eat my words later and be somewhat disappointed. We’ll see.

If you just got here, this is a link to read these recaps from S1 Ep1, in case you felt like reading a novel’s worth of Yugioh, since we are on S3.

20 notes · View notes

melissatreglia · 5 years

Text

Darkiplier in 2017: An In-Depth Look (Part 4)

(Memory a little rusty? Read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 before going forward.)

"Well, I've got a news flash for you, brain trust. That's not how it works. You die, and a demon sets up shop in your old house, and it walks, and it talks, and it remembers your life... but it's not you."

- Buffy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2x07: "Lie to Me")

So, here it is: the long-awaited final installment of my Darkiplier in 2017 essay.

Remember when I said anything could happen for the remainder of 2017? Well, it basically did. The final quarter of the year brought with it an explosive finale... that is to say, a fascinating origin story.

But we'll get to that in a moment.

Prior to the events of October and following in the wake of the Darkiplier vs. Antisepticeye vid, we were given quite a few bits, bobs and teasers of the horror to come.

In the second Try Not to Smile Challenge, our favourite Youtuber remarked that "I've turned my heart into a stone-cold ice cube of death. All joy has been purged from me in every way possible, and I have no smiles left for anybody." Then he added, with his usual sardonic humour, "It's #smilenever up in this bitch." He promptly spent the remainder of the video looking like he was in agonizing pain from the human experiences he was observing (and intermittently groaning and growling from his frustrated attempts at self-restraint).

A deceptively simple game titled V appeared on Mark's channel in September, and included a seizure warning as a result of its visual style... a style reminiscent of Dark's attention-grabbing, almost painful aura. Chook and Sosig: A Case of Murder is a quirky little diversion that follows a ghost chicken and a noodly-limbed cat as they solve the mysterious death of a popular entertainer (a writer, in this case). Another strange little vid, this time an animation of Mark's Firewatch playthrough, was also released. Though the dialogue is actually taken from a game that had been played a year prior, Forrest Byrnes' lines about death lying in wait and being unable to leave are also oddly fitting.

The artistic black-and-white game I woke up next to you again. contained themes that, upon reflection, are consistent with the overall narrative of Darkiplier's character. Its story is of an attractive, enigmatic stranger (whose appearance is occasionally marred by a subtle glitch effect) seduces you, slowly drains you of your life and ambitions, until you are left an obsessive and hollow husk of yourself. Interpretations vary on what the story of "I woke up..." means (including that it might be a metaphor for drug addiction), but the real meaning is left intentionally vague by the programmer. The being your character is faced with might very well be a soul-devouring demon, for all one knows... especially given that the "girl" in question doesn't appear in the picture you show of her to a friend.

Following the events in early October, Mark joked during his play-through of The Evil Within 2 that the force-feeding mother was "speaking in multiple voices... a clear sign that that might be Darkiplier over there. I think she turned grey when the lighting changed..." (a clear reference to the insanity the fandom was gripped by earlier in the month). In a later episode, Mark eyeballs the rather dapper villain Stefano bathed in dim, moody lighting and quips, "Friggin' Darkiplier up in here."

The rather silly nyoom vid, created to promote Mark's new merch line of holographic M shirts, features the same distorted RGB effect we've become familiar with in Dark's appearances... although this time, it's all a bit of harmless fun with Chica set to a dubstep soundtrack. In Constellation, Mark jokes to "run away!" from the 3D effect the game offers, before conjuring what he dubs a "Darkiplier teapot".

During the Emily Wants To Play Too livestream, Mark comments that the "Let Her In :)" note left on the dry erase board is "some Darkiplier-level shit," adding that everyone now knows what happened with Damien and Celine, and later jokes that the tall stranger looks "dapper... in his suit... y'know that guy's lookin' a little grey. His skin turns grey; I think it's Darkiplier." He's unable to contain his mirth, however, and giggles a bit as he talks.

The vid ...Bonbon Loves You... offers an unsettling description of its events, where the bunny-shaped demonic imaginary friend provides his constant companionship... for a price. "You can never escape! You'll never need to escape! YOU'LL ALWAYS HAVE A FRIEND FOREVER!!" Prison Island likewise has a chilling description of its own, of a mystery that's been covered up and that "something terrible has been going on in the shadows and it's come back to haunt you..." The title for the vid of the game Deathlike Awakening also warns us "Don't move... don't breathe..."

There was also the short song “The Man With No Shadow”, a brief acoustic piece which had strange and surreal lyrics in honour of the solar eclipse.

My personal favourite of these teasers, however, has to be the easter egg contained in the finale of Mark's Popgoes play-through. Mark appears distracted as he hears a disturbance in his IRL vicinity, and he removes his headphones to stare out to his left (presumably where the door is). A voice that sounds similar to Wilford Warfstache declares offscreen, "Don't you worry!" Another voice, sounding suspiciously like Darkiplier Himself sneers in a somewhat muted rejoinder, "I'll get you." Mark stands motionless as the webcam view briefly warps, before the recording continues as if absolutely nothing happened.

But of course, this all pales in comparison to Who Killed Markiplier?, the four-part miniseries Mark created on a limited budget that's arguably his magnum opus. There's a reason it took me more than a year to write this part of the essay, and this taut 43-minute film is the reason why. It made me love characters I'd never met before, and even though I had a sickening feeling in my stomach as to their fates. Even knowing the monster Damien would become, and how broken William's psyche would be... I was still woefully unprepared for the onslaught of emotion I felt by the finale.

WKM has been analysed from every angle by the fandom at large, so I'm going to focus on providing a brief recap here.

We, as the viewpoint character of the District Attorney, are invited to Markiplier Manor for poker night. We're greeted by the Colonel and hand our invitation over to the Butler, before having a brief conversation with Damien, the newly-elected mayor. The chef warns us to stay out of his kitchen as the butler offers us a drink. Markiplier (well, this universe's version of him, anyway) descends the staircase and the night of drunken revelry begins.

The following morning, we're offered a seltzer with cocaine as a hangover aid by the butler (cocaine was a fairly common ingredient in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including in children's cough medicine), and Damien greets us. We wander aimlessly around the house, and are startled by the falling body of the newly deceased Markiplier. The detective, who'd also been invited the night before, proceeds to question the party-goers and examine the body. The mayor enters the scene and, showing his capabilities as a calming influence, asks for any information that can be gleaned. Damien then exits, ostensibly to talk to the Colonel, and clearly more disturbed by the events than he's previously let on.

The DA is drafted in as the detective's partner, and we overhear an argument between the Mayor and the Colonel. Damien angrily storms out, and we take the opportunity to discuss the matter with the Colonel. He promptly tells us a story about what he thinks happened, laying it on rather thick in the process and leaving no question as to his hostility towards their deceased host.

The Butler leads us down into the wine cellar, before having a nervous breakdown about a broken bottle in the middle of the otherwise pristine floor. We go back up the stairs an are confronted by the Chef who, after some tough talk, offers some recorded (FNAF-style) footage of Markiplier and the Detective discussing the house's employees some nights prior. We then exit the house, and talk to Damien some more about his confrontation with the Colonel. Damien feels lost amid these events at the moment and has retreated to ponder matters for himself. We're soon called back in by the Detective to discover that Mark's body has now vanished.

The cast of characters reconvene in the room where the body was to discuss this turn of events, and the Colonel points out that there's a "storm" coming. The Butler and the Chef resolve to lock the building down, with no one getting in or out, until the matter is resolved. The Detective takes us up, down and around the inside of the house until we eventually get to the master bedroom.

The bedroom is a mess, but we find three pictures of Mark, Damien, the Colonel... and Mark's ex-wife, Celine. The Colonel talks with us about his relationship with Damien (which is more positive than his relationship with Mark). Damien briefly pops in looking for the Colonel, but just misses him... twice. Damien then pulls us aside, saying that he'd "stake [his] life" on the Colonel's innocence, and that he suspects that there's another "guest" in the house no one knows about.

There's a sudden round of gunfire, and we rush in with Damien to find that the Detective and the Colonel are at a standoff. Then Celine barges in.

Everyone quickly catches her up on the events that have occurred thus far, and Celine points out that the lightning strikes indicate something supernatural is afoot. Celine proposes a séance to talk with the deceased Mark. After Damien reaches out in concern for her dabbling in witchcraft and she rebuffs him, Celine takes us with her to a quieter room where she reads the tarot and reveals that there are "dark forces" at work inside the manor. Her magickal influence enables us to go through time, seeing alternate events and getting a hint of what's to come.

But the answers we find aren't enough to satisfy her, and she grows angry with us, demanding that we "go back" into our visions. Damien and the Detective interrupt, with Damien putting a stop to the séance and the Detective dragging us away as Damien and Celine argue. The Detective shows the picture we've drawn to the Butler and the Chef, and it's revealed that the Groundskeeper (who hasn't set foot inside the house in over a decade) might know something.

Damien goes with Celine back into the séance room, while the Butler goes to find the Colonel. We, the Detective and the Chef go to talk to the Groundskeeper. The Groundskeeper resolves not to go in the house unless there's one specific "incident, one manifestation" that comes to pass.

There's a flash of light and the sound of thunder, and everyone rushes back into the house to reveal that Damien is gone and Celine is now possessed by a demon... the demon who's been lurking in the house the entire time, and who's aura is a familiar red and blue hue.

Most of the group decides to exit the house while they still can, with the exceptions of the Detective, the Colonel and the DA (ie. us). The Detective and the Colonel vanish and we're pulled into a darker, shadow version of the house that seems frozen in time and is echoing with the voices of those who fled. The demon of the house releases us from its grip, and we stumble upon the Detective's study... replete with the papers and evidence we weren't privy to before. The Colonel happens upon us in the study and becomes furious, thinking the Detective framed he and his friends.

The two are in a standoff once again, before the Colonel's gun goes off twice... purely by accident. One shot hits Abe. The other hits the DA (us) and we fall over the banister and crash to the floor.

In the space between life and death, we see the images of Damien and Celine. She's glowing red, and he's a soft blue. "Damien" is angry and lost, blaming Mark for what happened. "Celine" concurs, also blaming Mark for the events that transpired... and together they hatch a plan to release themselves from the void and back into the world. (All the while, a deep and demonic voice mockingly echoes their words, as if they are mere puppets.)

Damien then says these fateful words:

"Honestly, I don't know what the fuck is going on. But I know that I trust Celine. And if you trust us... just let me in. We can fix this. Together."

Celine then adds:

"I won't force this on you. You have a choice here. Just know this is the only way that you can escape."

And because we, the DA, have no real choice in the matter (as if death is a choice!), we agree. The images of Damien and Celine recede as we're driven back to our body. We get up, confused and disoriented with the daylight streaming in, and find the Colonel holding onto Damien's cane like a security blanket during a vigil near our body. And we watch, with growing horror and sadness, as the Colonel's mental state deteriorates. He hobbles away, calling out to the friends who will not and cannot answer him, leaving Damien's cane behind.

We reach out to the cane, with a small feminine hand which changes form into a man's larger hand. Our perspective tilts and it appears to be Damien in the mirror, looking bedraggled and exhausted as he contemplates his cane. He cracks his (broken from the fall) neck and we're thrown into the mirror, it cracking with the force and he storms away, leaving us behind without looking back.

Damien, if that was indeed him at all, is not the man we knew. Not anymore. He's long gone. What remains is made of demonic energy and rage; the demon of the house won. That being is now the one we call Darkiplier.

To lighten the lugubrious mood of the mini-series, Mark simultaneously released four "Jim News" shorts, featuring the Jims wandering through the house in an attempt at investigative reporting (ie. Mark goofing off on set, between takes). The legit bop that is "Fly Like a Butterfly" is another form of relief, that features in its music video scenes from Markiplier Manor and, of course, the handsome as always Darkiplier adorned with massive butterfly wings.

Hints at the expanded universe were also laid during Mark's play-throughs of Doki Doki Literature Club, specifically in the descriptions, which featured poetry based on the lives of the characters in Who Killed Markiplier?. Part 1 features a poem of Wilford Warfstache (hinting at his transformation from the Colonel), the District Attorney in Part 2, the alternate Markiplier in Parts 3 through 5... and what may be the Detective in Part 6 (though Monika's trapping the player in her world and the thumbnail of Sayori with a cracked/broken neck are both reminiscent of Darkiplier).

Likewise, Mark in the description of Party Hard Tycoon hopes to "party hard and hope no murderers show up!" In The Silent House, he says "this house is nothing but pain and suffering and also it can't talk..." The setting of The Sexy Brutale involves time travel to stop a murder at a gathering in a luxurious home. Sleeping Dawn's thumbnail is a dead body with a toe tag of "Y/N" (the typical reader insert fic's notation to insert your name, and the same notation provided on the invitation for the DA).

Markiplier also jokes that the channel isn't real and about being a paid actor during the 7th episode of his Slime Rancher Let's Play. In the otherwise adorable platform game I may die!, he plays a character whose house is surrounded by an empty void... that he promptly falls into.

Arguably however, the linchpin among the latter portion of the year’s hints is the HD Renovation of Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion, where a familiar resonant and echoing voice narrates:

"For as long as you can remember, legends have been told about the derelict mansion upon the hill that casts a blanket of darkness over the town. The history of the house itself is virtually unknown, and even the town’s oldest residents cannot remember the mansion’s origin. Being an avid history enthusiast, you embark up the mountain to visit the manor. Hoping to shed some light on the backstory of this crumbling fortress of darkness."

Sounds familiar, in more ways than one, doesn’t it?

But it doesn't even end there.

Only a few short weeks after the release of the final chapter of Who Killed Markiplier?, Mark released his Van Vlogs. One of these, the World's First Pop-Up Haunted House vlog, hinted that there was something more going on in the beginning, with some ominous music and the static on the van's TV growing louder. What was hinted at finally came to fruition in November. Another van video was released, titled Don't remember. In it, the viewer character has dozed off in the empty van and is woken in the dead of night.

A deep voice faintly says "Do you remember? I said we were going to do great things together. Go back to sleep."

Of course, it was Damien who had hoped that the prospect of working with the DA (the viewer character from Who Killed Markiplier?) would mean great things for the city he was elected to represent. In DoomVR, Mark finds himself trapped between life and death, before reviving and going forth to battle demons. Something which, in light of the events of WKM, doesn't seem too far-fetched now. Additionally, the ending to Part 5 of FNAF's Pizzeria Simulator spells out the words "S-A-V-E H-I-M". In light of possibilities yet to come, it could mean we have to try to save Damien himself.

But that is, as they say, a story for another time.

The description of the finale for Unforgiving: A Northern Hymn asks "Is it the end we really want? Is there a way to prevent the inevitable?" The ending, of course, is a leap of faith followed by the disappointing reality of having been deceived by a demonic trickster, and forced to live through the same events over and over again. It is a revelation reminiscent of the muddled timeline throughout the origin stories of Wilford Warfstache and Darkiplier, two characters who were born years before on the channel, but whose origins did not come to light until the events of Who Killed Markiplier?.

But, I believe, Mark saved the best for last with two sadly coincidental questions on the light-hearted game Would You Rather?. Two days before the end of the year episode 11 of this game was released and, among the game's queries, two particularly heart-wrenching questions were asked.

The first was "Would you rather lose your mind or lose your significant other?" Many have pointed out that both happened to Wilford Warfstache, having lost his mind in the wake of the bloodbath of Who Killed Markiplier? along with his beloved Celine becoming merged with Damien and the demonic entity to become Darkiplier. Mark answers, after weighing the cost of both options, that he’d rather lose his mind than someone he loves.

The second, which he leaves for us, is "Would you rather be stalked by a ghost for the rest of your life, or be stalked by a demon for three days then die?" Of course, the latter actually happened in Who Killed Markiplier?. After the first three episodes, released from October 10th to the 12th, our character (the DA) was shot and fell from a banister on Friday the 13th.

Like in Who Killed Markiplier? itself, we’re left with a question that’s difficult to answer. The biggest of the all the questions anyone can conceive being simply this:

So, what happens now?

#darkiplier #damien the mayor #celine the seer #markiplier fandom #analysis #fan review #darkiplier in 2017 essay #vid: who killed markiplier?#vid: don't remember

10 notes · View notes

popculturespiritwow · 5 years

Text

THE WICKED + THE DIVINE #27: OB-SESSION

After many months, I’m back! Sorry for the long silence. Life=Crazy=Sorry.

I’m planning over the next couple weeks to post summaries of the rest of Imperial Phase I & II and then hopefully I’ll catch up soon after that. It’s hard to believe there’s only a few more issues left. (Nooooooooooo.)

I’ve actually held off reading the most recent couples issues until I’ve gotten back onto this, so if as we go you’re wondering how it is I don’t already know this or that, that is how. I think the last issue I read had all kinds of crazy reveals about Baal. Speaking of which...

BAALER (I Hate Myself for this Title But There You Are)

The big reveal of issue 27 is that Baal has some kind of magic super secret voodoo he can use to stop the Great Darkness. It builds on last issue, where we learned he’d not only been previously briefed on the GD by Ananke but seen his father murdered by it. It’s also the beginning of another shoe dropping, except we don’t really know what gets squished beneath it for another eight issues and two specials and like a year of reading time so it doesn’t seem like a shoe so much as a hmm, that’s mysterious, I’m sure it’s fine, shall we rave then?

I love the visual structure of this page, the way it uses repetition to express the passage of time and also distance to simultaneously demonstrate our own distance as readers from whatever horrible nightmare things are going on and to minimize those events. (It’s so small; whatever it is, it couldn’t be that bad, could it?)

(Baal, what have you done...)

I also like how Baal’s “reassurance” to Mini repeats his mother’s words from last issue--“It is what it is,” but then adds on in a way that sounds like the sort of ‘steel yourself for nightmares’ mantra learned from everyone’s favorite grandmonster. Even as it gives Baal an adult-sounding stoicism, it also makes him sound like a little boy.

And speaking of Baal’s complicated relationships with children: Had we been told before now that Mini ascended just a month after him? It strikes me as a brilliant move on Ananke’s part. Right from the start she’s set up her replacement self as a little sister for Baal to protect.

Two issues in a row we’ve got Mini as the seeming target of the Great Darkness bug fiesta. Is that because it knows who she really is/will be? Is the GD somehow in league with Ananke, and the attacks on Mini are just another way of keeping everyone thinking of her as Everybody’s Favorite Divine Lil Sis? Or does this, too, have something to do with Baal? Could it be that it’s actually Baal and not Laura that is well and truly cursed?

TOPOGRAPHICAL FLUIDITY

The heart of issue 27 is the five double-page spreads in which the standard left to right, up to down of Western comic storytelling slowly breaks down. On the first splash we’ve got a Laura/Sakhmet story riding the top, then the lower three quarters of each page telling their own stories (though really it’s the continuation of Baal’s story from page one to two). The second spread flips the structural arrangement, but now the left and the runner are continuing a story while on the right page we’re with Laura and Baph and Laura’s sister and ow oh God that hurts to read.

The pages continue to shift and change from there, with one section always following Laura, at least one following Dio/Cass at the rave, and the other one or two checking in on what other characters are up to.

The thing I love about the approach is how it speaks to the disintegration within the group that Laura ordained with her choice of “Anarchy” last issue. We’re not in complete collapse by any means, we can definitely follow the narratives, but the idea that these characters are starting to go in different directions is literally demonstrated in the structure of the page.

And also in the way the pages alter the visual language of Dio’s earlier rave (from issue 8). We’ve got the same 16 block grid structure, but it’s twice as dense; now every block contains an actual story panel, as compared to half for most of 8, with the other half used for the ongoing rave 1-2-3-4 countdowns.

Whereas issue 8′s dance pages had a sort of expansiveness, a sense of the rave as the overriding context that the story panels are just a part of, in 27 we’ve lost all that. In fact the rave is only one small part of what’s going on, even as its grid and color frames remain. (It’s interesting to see the rave visual style used as well for what precedes and follows it; it’s like the energy of the rave is starting to bleed out beyond the confines in which it makes sense.)

It’s also worth noting the rave in issue 8 ends with different members of the Pantheon one after another finishing Dionysius’ sentence, as though all one person. Another great contrast with the never-united narratives of issue 27.

But you know, even seeing how issue 27 offers an intensifying deterioration of the rave joy feel of issue 8, I still easily get lost in the visual dance of its two page spreads. I think it’s those bright frames; they just read to me as “fun”. (Apparently I’d be all good living in a prison camp as long it was decorated with Christmas lights.)

One moment does really snap me out of it, though:

No matter how bad things have gotten, Drunk Child Star Mini feels very unexpected. Plus who is she talking to? The camera team? Herself? Ananke Within?

(Actually, going back to issue 8 I realize we get a similar moment where out of the blue the story cuts to Minerva, talking directly to the camera with that same combination of ‘Don’t mind me.” and “Life sucks.”

So she’s almost certainly talking to their documentary squad.)

Mini drinking is not the worst thing we see in these pages by any means.

Ow. Ow. Oh God, Oh God it hurts.

But somehow that Mini moment (that mini Mini?) (#sorrynotsorry) is the moment I find most off key.

ONE MORE ONE MORE TIME

Hmm. That comparison between the two Mini moments has got me thinking...

You know, give me a second...

*time passes*

So hey, I’m back. I just went back through the rave in issue 8. Here are some of its major beats:

Dio tries to help Laura let go.

Laura becomes a part of everything going on.

Laura talks about her family and sketches them in light.

Cassandra cannot connect.

Sakhmet and Laura look each over and then start dancing together.

Woden watches.

Mini is left out.

The Morrigan warns Laura about getting too into Baphomet.

Everyone unites around Dio’s thought of making people’s lives better, because the end is coming soon.

Each of those beats is returned to issue 27.

Dio tries to help Cassandra let go.

Laura tries to disconnect from everything that’s happened.

Laura thinks about when she got Baphomet to create an illusion of her family.

Cassandra finally connects, saying “You’re full of stars”, which is what Laura said to her at the rave in issue 8. But then she rejects the connection.

Laura, now with Sakhmet, wonders what’s the worst thing she could do to her.

Woden watches. (Jamie uses the very same image.)

Mini is still left out, and now drinking.

Laura gets too into Baphomet, and now Baphomet is locked away with the Morrigan.

Cassandra rejects the connection.

There’s a little more in each rave than that (Woden plotting, Woden calling for a hook up, Baal and Inanna), but you gotta love the way the parallels show those stories having progressed (and not for the better).

(Also, I know Dio is on life support at this point, but man it feels like there should be one more cast rave, doesn’t it? Jonesing for my rule of threes.)

LOCK STEP

In the final pages we shift to two pages of a sort of call and response; on the left side we get David telling us what’s “really going on”, aka in year two the gods lose it, and on the right we cut back to each god in their own version of doing that, and ending on the punch line of Cassandra.

She’s the one god who seems to have her head well and truly on straight, the adult in the room, but here she is just staring silently at what has been her white whale the whole issue, Ananke’s Murderous Mystery Machine.

Gillen’s notes on this moment are familiar, chilling and wonderful:

Comrade Rossignol, my old partner in crime, game developer and co-writer on The Ludocrats, and I have a line we tend to quote to one another. It’s a paraphrase of a quote from Ballard: ‘My advice to anyone in any field is to be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker.’

We quote it as: ‘Stay true to your obsessions and your obsessions will be true to you.’

It’s basically been our respective careers’ magnetic north, but there’s certainly times when I wonder how good it’s proved for us as human beings.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

You could easily go from Cassandra staring silently up to the spooky final full page spread of her white whale itself. But instead Gillen gives us an extra six panel page first. It seems puzzling; we don’t really need to have David ask “Are you okay?” We already know that Cass isn’t, and that she doesn’t know it.

But for me what makes that page so important is that it gives the other Norns the chance to ask David about their own fate. Imperial Phase I has taken Skuld and Verdandi from silent back-up singers to real emotional partners with Cass, indeed the dominants to her submissive. By presenting us with the question of their fate we’re reminded of the fullness of their humanity; their lives are just as valuable as that of Cass.

Their question also plays very much to Gillen’s comment about the destructive impacts of artistic obsession. These gods don’t just hurt themselves; they put their families, their fans, their friends at risk. What will Skuld and Verdandi do when those dangers come for them, one wonders...?

#wicdiv #kieron gillen #jamie mckelvie #Hoping for a Skuld and Verdandi sitcom spinoff #matt wilson is the god of colors

3 notes · View notes

sparklyjojos · 6 years

Text

Let’s Read & Suffer: Tsukumojuku by Maijō Ōtarō [part 27]

Today`s recap: It’s raining heads, hallelujah! [tw gore, child death]

STORY 7 PART 2

Upon learning about the other “him’s” crime, Tsukumojuku decided that the mother-in-law should take the kids and run away from Chofu, and he’d go and find Yuuki (who wasn’t answering her phone again).

“Don't stop and absolutely do not leave the car,” he instructed the mother-in-law as she and the kids got in her red Alfa Romeo. “When I call you, I’ll let your phone ring for a second and quit the call, then repeat it once, then the third time I’ll let the call come through and we can talk. Don’t pick up otherwise, even if you see my number. Alright?"

“Alright. Do you know where Yuuki is now?”

“No... but I'm going to think about it hard.”

“Ah, so you're finally using your head, Mr. Tsutomu. I've been waiting for it. Well, take care of yourself.”

“You watch out for yourself too, mom.”

“It’s gonna be a dangerous day, huh? I could use a thrill or two. Anything more interesting than fixing tatami all the time is fine with me, haha.”

“Personally, I find fixing tatami to be quite fun.” He laughed a little too.

“Oh well, that's the difference in our values. You know, I’m glad that Yuuki found such a good man. A handsome one, too. Mr. Tsutomu, could you take off the sunglasses and show me your face?”

He did. Like always, the mother-in-law didn't faint. She just swallowed heavily and put her head on the wheel to calm down, shuddered for some time, and finally let out a long breath. “Oof! That got my chest allll warmed up, alright.”

“Mom, please...”

“You're just too pretty, Mr. Tsutomu. It's a little scary.”

“...Thanks.”

“Well then, we’re off. Good luck searching for Yuuki.” She drove off, the triplets waving him goodbye through the rear window.

- - -

Alright. Now to find Yuuki. He turned around to return to the house.

There was a head on the ground.

His own head, gushing blood, with eyes staring vacantly into space. Rope had been wrapped three times around its top part, as if making a crown. What the hell? Obviously he was still alive, so... did that head belong to another “him”?

He looked up. Thick dark clouds were gathering over Chofu, forming a slowly moving whirlpool. (He knew that other “hims” had been sent to various times and places by that whirlpool. If someone would arrive here, would they protect him and Yuuki, or try to kill them?...)

As he moved towards Keiou-Tamagawa station, he saw even more heads on both sides of the road, all similarly wrapped in rope. He eventually arrived at the crossroads. On the road in front of him was a head, on the road to his left -- another head, on the right -- nothing. Huh. He understood now. The heads must be “Guiding Stones” that would show him the way, just like the stepping stones in Tea Gardens tell the customers where to go.

The owner of this world must have been guiding him towards Yuuki.

He moved forward, ignoring the pedestrians screaming because of all the heads. Suddenly a woman was hit by something falling from the sky and fell dead where she stood. The mysterious object was yet another head tied three times with rope, and when Tsukumojuku looked up, he saw a lot of them in the sky, falling all over the city.

It looked like somebody was trying to make him lose his way by adding those “fake” heads into the mix, so he wouldn’t be able to differentiate between them and the real Guiding Stones. (Just like they say, hide a tree in the forest, hide a head in... a mountain of heads.) It seemed the heads were flying in from one direction, so he ran that way.

He found the source in the school grounds of Chofu's Second High School: a medieval ballista. It had been equipped with a small engine that made it work without anyone around, so it could launch heads into the city like a very morbid batting machine. There was a considerable pile of heads, and bodies, piled up next to it.

(Like a mass killing upon him. Commited by whom? By “him”.)

The ballista eventually ran out of the previously loaded ammunition, though Tsukumojuku still had to cut the engine’s belt to completely stop it. From far away, he constantly heard yelling of shocked and surprised citizens.

Looking at the pile of corpses, he got lost in thoughts.

The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water— the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter.

He entered the school, found a lighter and bug spray, returned to the courtyard, and with a makeshift flamethrower started burning the bodies. This would be “wormwood”. [I guess it’s because a bug spray kills worms? Idk.] Soon fire was “blazing like a torch”. He heard horrified screams, and he didn't know whether they came from the high school students observing him from afar, or from the burning pile. (He didn't know. He really didn't need to know, or think about it too hard.)

The subsequent arrival of the firefighters who started spraying the fire with water was mitate for Wormwood taking the world’s water, and it was probable that the water would become bitter and toxic after coming in contact with the bodies.

The mitate had been fulfilled.

STORY 6 PART 3

[Once again we have jumping narration.]

Meanwhile, “Tsukumojuku” found Satou Emiko and killed her. He ripped out her organs, put her three children inside the body, and stitched the opening closed. (“Satou Emiko's children hadn't been born yet.” “Satou Emiko's children have returned to the womb”. The opposite to what he, Seshiru and Serika did in Nishi Akatsuki.)

His beloved Satou Emiko. Emiko who told him, You are cursed. Crops don't grow from your soil. You will wander around the earth. But for those who kill you, it will he avenged sevenfold. She was right. A person who says such a correct thing must love the one she's telling it to. (He certainly couldn't make anything of value. He just wandered through the world. He was cursed.)

- - -

Then “Tsukumojuku” went to Chofu and killed Umi by hitting her with one of the fallen heads. (”Hide a tree in the forest, hide the person murdered with a head among people accidentally killed with them.”)

(When so many die, one's death is not special. You could say that every death is special, yes, but if it's invisible, that specialness remains hidden. Though regardless of the way it happens, one's death is always special for them, whether it's privileged or not.)

Tsukumojuku's beloved Umi. He'd do anything for Umi, would be scared of nothing, would give up anything without hesitation. Would light up the entire world for her. Without her, he'd be lonely, sad, in agony. He really would die.

“Tsukumojuku” then ate Umi’s children. (Blood next to blood, meat next to meat, bone next to bone. An union of father and children, of bodies and souls. Three in one. A perfect Trinity.)

- - -

Rie was crying, yelling, trying to run away. He cried too. Rie. His everything. Rie, who gave him, the empty him, meaning. He loved her. He was able to feel joy living together with her. It was a miracle. But that miraculous Rie “he” now caught, beat unconscious, and dragged to Umi's house, where he burned the bodies of both women.

The second angel sounded his trumpet, and something like a huge mountain, all ablaze, was thrown into the sea. [”umi” = sea]

He missed Rie terribly.

He baked the children on the fire and ate them.

STORY 6 PART 4

[Back to normal narration.]

As Tsukumojuku was searching for Rie, many of other “hims” called him on the phone, all screaming and crying.

I wish you've never been born! You should have died a long time ago!

I don't understand... What are you trying to do with this world? Killing those you love, losing them forever? Why? How can you do this?

Everything’s gone! There's no hope left for me! Why can I kill others, but not myself? Please kill me! I don't want to live in this world anymore! Everything that was important to me no longer exists in this world! Please kill me! Me, and me, and me, and me, and all of us, please kill us!

Say something! Answer!

Tsukumojuku didn't answer. He had to hurry. All the people he had loved in the Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth Story were already dead... next would be the Sixth Story’s Morimoto Yuuki.

Following the Guiding Stones, he finally found Yuuki: she was standing by the south entrance of the Chofu station.

“Yuuki!” He tried to approach her, but she ran away at his sight. She had probably seen the news and realized that all the women from the Stories were being killed one by one. She must have thought he had come to kill her. “Yuuki, it's me! You don’t have to run! It's me, your Tsutomu!”

He followed her down the stairs to the station’s underpass. As he was turning the corner, something hit him square in the face so hard that he fell down on the ground, his consciousness rapidly fading.

Yuuki knelt next to him, worried, and next to her he saw another girl and a man. That man looked exactly like him.

“Are you alright?” Yuuki asked. “Mrs. Tsushima, you really didn’t have to be that brutal!”

Tsushima?... Tsushima Takako... the man was keeping very close to her, so this must have been the “him” from the Seventh Story, who had gotten here from the Cross House through the tornado, and apparently found this world’s Takako. The Seventh Story’s “him”... funny... didn't seem to have three heads...

Before he lost consciousness, he could smell guava from somewhere. What a sweet smell...

- - -

IMPRESSIONS:

Maijo Otaro On Drugs: The Chapter.

I have to awkwardly cut Story 7 Part 4 here for now, as it’s really long. Since we’re entering the last stretch of the book, I think I’ll post the rest of the recaps at once as a two- or three-parter finale once I’m done editing. ...Which may take a few days.

I love that Tea Garden stepping stones comparison for two reasons. One: it’s a thematic return to the First Story, in which Tsukumojuku saw the Kato house’s garden for the first time, marveled at the stepping stones, and later explained the concept of mitate using that garden as an example. Two: the purpose of the stepping stones in Tea Gardens is to make the guests slow down, enter a meditatie mindset, and have time to mentally prepare for the Tea Ceremony -- this is imo a very good choice to show that we’re approaching the “mental journey” kind of a finale.

The thing with the “rope” wrapped three times around each head sounded familiar, so I checked that Beyond illustration in Jorge Joestar and... well, I have no clue whether this is intentional or a coincidence, nevertheless it’s really interesting in hindsight.

>>>NEXT PART>>>

#sparkly reads tsukumojuku #long post #maijo and jdc stuff

4 notes · View notes

aion-rsa · 3 years

Text

The Best Horror Movies of 2020

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

2020 has been a tough year for cinema with theaters forced to close and release dates delayed. It’s a real rough break for filmmakers whose work was due to get a wide theatrical release and instead launched on PVOD or streaming services.

A double shame for horror since 2020 has been an excellent year for the genre in terms of quality, including a handful of exceptional debut films that in any other year would have been lauded in the same way as Hereditary, It Follows or The Babadook.

Den of Geek staff and contributors voted on their favorite horror movies of 2020 to produce this list – each is a gem worth seeking out.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

10. The Mortuary Collection

The problem with most horror anthology movies is there’s usually at least one segment that pales in comparison to the others, which tends to dampen your enjoyment of the whole thing somewhat, but The Mortuary Collection truly avoids suffering from the same malady.

In this debut feature from writer-director Ryan Spindell, beloved Highlander and Carnivale star Clancy Brown plays an eccentric mortician called Montgomery Dark who encounters a pretty young drifter looking for work. As Dark guides her through the strange inner workings of his mortuary, he decides to recount several unique and grisly tales that have all culminated in the need for his post-mortem services. Of course, all is not what it seems.

The Mortuary Collection immediately caught the eye of genre vet Sam Raimi, who poached Spindell for this year’s 50 States of Fright series over on the now-defunct Quibi streaming service, and it’s easy to see why: these macabre tales are all immaculately created to give horror fans the best anthology experience they’ll have had in years. – KH

9. The Wolf of Snow Hollow

Some might say that there’s only so much you can do with werewolf movies these days. Someone gets bitten, they get cursed, they’re doomed to kill innocents, and they’re mercifully done in by someone they love. Roll the credits. But Jim Cummings’ The Wolf of Snow Hollow breaks from that formula effectively while still remaining true to the spirit of the genre.

Cummings, who wrote and directed the film, also stars as a cop in a ski town overrun with a rash of brutal murders. A recovering alcoholic with anger issues, Cummings’ John Marshall is the son of the town’s ailing sheriff (the wonderfully warm Robert Forster in his final role), and John finds himself trying to come to terms with the fact that there may or may not be a werewolf in their midst.

The film’s oddball approach and deadpan humor can be a little jarring, especially when contrasted with the truly grisly aftermath of the werewolf attacks. But The Wolf of Snow Hollow paints such a sympathetic picture of its characters, and effectively builds its tension through them rather than an over-reliance on werewolf tropes, that it’s a must for anyone who needs a little more lycanthropy in their life. – MC

8. Freaky

The Friday the 13th franchise has been dormant for more than a decade. Which is just fine if we can get movies like Freaky, the best horror slasher we’ve ever seen set on that date. Stuffed with loving homages to both the Jason Voorhees franchise, as well as Disney’s own classic Freaky Friday brand, Christopher Landon’s Freaky is a wild genre mashup every bit as whacky as his previous Blumhouse high concept, Happy Death Day. Except just so, so much gorier.

Filled with slapstick kills and splatter, the movie’s real life blood comes from the dual performances by Vince Vaughn as the Blissfield Butcher and Kathryn Newton as Millie, the shy teenager he accidentally swaps bodies with. Both actors have a lot of fun playing very against type, but Vaughn’s commitment to depicting a neurotic teenage girl is especially satisfying because he so earnestly leans into it. A winking throwback with teeth, it gives new meaning to the phrase ‘gut-buster’. – DC

7. Synchronic

Synchronic is the fourth feature film from the directing/writing/producing (and sometimes acting) team of Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson. It’s also their most ambitious yet in terms of the scope, genre, and the pair’s working with bankable Hollywood names.

Anthony Mackie stars as Steve, a single, alcoholic New Orleans paramedic who learns he has six weeks to live just as he and his partner Dennis (Jamie Dornan) respond to a series of bizarre deaths linked to a new designer drug called Synchronic. Where Synchronic comes from, what it does, and how it affects these friends propel them on a reality-shattering journey.

The two chief aspects of Synchronic that make it work so well are the overall correctness of the story at hand and the compassion that flows throughout the tale and its characters. Moorhead and Benson have addressed the themes of addiction and time in all three of their previous features, but here they mesh them together seamlessly. In some ways, the eerie Synchronic is a transitional film for Moorhead and Benson: working with Hollywood talent and more resources than they’ve had before, it may also be their most easily accessible and mainstream film to date. – DK

6. The Lodge

As a movie that’s been unfairly overlooked, even before the pandemic, Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s The Lodge is one of 2020’s hidden gems. The follow-up to the directors’ Goodnight Mommy, The Lodge is the rare horror movie where you don’t know where it’s going, and if you can trust anything or anyone you see.

The film works as both generational conflict between stepmother-to-be Grace (Riley Keough) and the new children in her life (Jaeden Martell and Lia McHugh), and as something of a ghost story. Once they’re snowed into a cabin, and one strange disaster follows another, the gnawing realization grows that more than one party could be unwell, and that nightmares from the past walk among them. The cataclysmic ending is rhapsodic in its despair. – DC

5. Relic

This very personal story about three generations of women is the debut of Australia-Japanese filmmaker Natalie Erika James. It’s story about dementia turned into a supernatural body horror and haunted house movie with a very distinct visual style.

Emily Mortimer stars as Kay, a woman returning to her childhood home with her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) when her mother Edna (Robyn Nevin) goes missing for several days and can’t recall where she was. Edna flips between indignant independence and vulnerable confusion – the true horror of the film is in the idea of watching someone you love lose their sense of self. However this is very much a horror and not just a drama and the third act takes us into very dark territory turning the house into a labyrinth and dazzling us with some deeply unsettling imagery.

Relic is compassionate and very female horror which has things in common with The Babadook, not least the emphasis on production design – it’s a gorgeous looking movie peppered with horrific moments, with a shocking but tender conclusion. – RF

4. Host

The defining movie of 2020 is a horror that runs under an hour set entirely during a Zoom chat. This feature debut from Brit director Rob Savage is absolutely one for the archives. Made in just 12 weeks from inception to its Shudder release, starring actor friends of Savage who were already close mates, Host follows a group of pals who undertake a seance via Zoom. As hokey as that might sound, the film really isn’t. In fact it’s very scary and employs some ambitious stunt work, though the heart of the movie is in the performances. Semi-improvised and extremely naturalistic, the group already has a shorthand in place so that bits of backstory can be drip fed or implied without exposition. These are people you’d want to hang out with.

A lockdown movie (rather than a pandemic movie) of the moment, details like face masks and elbow touches make this the epitome of 2020 in film form. Savage and writers Jed Shepherd and Gemma Hurley have already inked a multi-picture deal with Blumhouse and production on their next project has already begun. A rare and well deserved good news story for the year. – RF

3. His House

Ghost stories can be scary. More often though they’re thrilling; a bit of escapist camp about what goes bump in the night. Not so in Remi Weekes’ directorial debut, His House. There is a supernatural presence in the dilapidated public housing that refugees Bol and Rial Major (Sope Dirisu and Wunmi Mosaku) are crammed into. But long before the ghosts go bump, the terror of the refugee trail between Sudan and the United Kingdom is made manifest.

Technically Bol and Rial are two of the lucky ones, a pair of Sudanese survivors who crossed the Mediterranean by boat. Yet memories linger. As does the cruelty and judgment of a strange land that begrudgingly welcomes them, but also threatens to deport them if there are any complaints about their home—and there are. How can there not be when the ghosts they left behind whisper between their floorboards?

It’s a somber parable that couches real world nightmares into a genre one, teasing out that the greatest horror doesn’t need spirits to be haunting. – DC

2. Saint Maud

One of the best films of the year of any genre is this feature debut from Brit director Rose Glass. In it, newly pious young palliative care nurse Maud (Morfydd Clark), comes to believe saving the soul of her dying patient Amanda (Jennifer Ehle) is her divine calling. Set against the faded glamour and squalor of a seaside town Saint Maud is social realism through a religio-horror lens, with some truly terrifying images, not least the utter gut punch of the final shot which will leave you reeling.

This is an extraordinarily confident debut which explores the disconnects between the mind, body and soul. Ehle is terrific as the glamorous former dancer whose body is letting her down in illness, but this is Clark’s movie. Buttoned up and prim, with a fierce temper underneath, Maud believes she is on a mission from a God who talks directly to her, but glimpses of her past suggest something more troubling is going on.

Part body horror, part possession movie, part psychological thriller and part mental health drama, Saint Maud is beautiful, scary and sad and puts Glass on the map as one of the most exciting filmmakers to watch going forward. – RF

1. The Invisible Man

It’s been more than 70 years since the original cycle of Universal Monsters ended. And it feels like almost as long since Universal Pictures first began attempting to reimagine the creatures. The last decade alone saw three false starts at reboots. But that all changed with The Invisible Man. Writer-director Leigh Whannell, alongside producer Jason Blum, had the novel idea to lean into the horrific aspect of H.G. Wells’ original 1897 text, and in so doing make it terrifying for a new age.

By reworking that novel’s concept, as well as James Whale’s 1933 classic, the film pivots from following a mad scientist turned invisible to instead focusing on the woman he wants to possess. In the process, the dread of staring into the film’s deep focus corners and margins becomes overwhelming, and the concept lends itself eerily to our post-#MeToo moment.

Elisabeth Moss is devastating as protagonist Cecilia Kass, who begins the movie escaping her tech CEO boyfriend (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) by the skin of her teeth. She then must look over shoulder the rest of the film. Experiencing as much a reimagining of Gaslight as The Invisible Man, Cecilia knows she’s being stalked by her supposedly dead ex, and when no one will believe her, she’s left to take extreme measures to finally break free. It’s a harrowing showcase for Moss, and a brilliant cover of an old standard.

It revives centuries-old nightmares and finds they look exactly like our modern demons. – DC

The post The Best Horror Movies of 2020 appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/2IWAtbt

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

0 notes