#hes still very silly in the 2 movie adaptations of his source but the book version is a specific BRAND of silly ok.

[scaredstupid]

what if i had a crush on specifically the book version of a character from a classic movie

[love-takes-work]

Steven Universe: End of an Era: Outline & Review

I wrote this review in October but never got around to posting it here

Steven Universe: End of an Era is far more than an art book–it’s also a collection of behind-the-scenes material, stories about the experience of working on the show, planning documents and associated background info, and both older versions of developed concepts AND concepts that never made it into the show. It's a huge fusion of all those elements, and it's definitely an experience!

Some low-quality images are included with my review just to give you an idea of what’s there--it’s not a good substitute for getting your own copy, but here’s a tour!

Like the previous concept art book, Art and Origins, I'll be giving you a description of the structure and overview, while also collecting notable information for fans. Obviously just about everything is "notable" once again, but I'll aim for unique insight or perspective on the main source material, keeping the screaming about everything new to a minimum so you can also enjoy something for yourself if you pick it up. My low-quality photos should prevent people from feeling like I'm reproducing the book in any capacity. Please grab one while you can and have your own experience!

[SU Book and Comic Reviews]

OVERVIEW

The book is titled "End of an Era" for a couple reasons--obviously because it is released after the show has wrapped, but also because Gem history recently ended its "Era 2" and began Era 3--an age of prosperity and peace. The author--the person in charge of adapting all of this information into this slick, readable package--is Chris McDonnell, whose work was previously applied on the Art and Origins book.

The foreword is by N.K. Jemisin, a well-known science fiction author who's a huge fan of the show (and wrote a really excellent series that also has a weird geological connection, by the way).

And the cover, like its predecessor, is shiny and decorated with a beach scene featuring minimalistic characters--this time it's the Gems at night in front of the Temple, and on the back cover is a big pink leg ship in a cross-legged pose.

The interior covers are decorated with tons of amazing sketches of Steven and Connie on the front, and a bunch of Gem sketches on the back. Every interior page that most would leave blank is highlighted with some kind of sketch art or character exercise--it's so much to look at, so much to absorb.

The book is dedicated "For Eddie."

Its organization is different from the previous book in that it shares applicable work in chunks associated with groups of episodes rather than pertaining to different aspects of building the show.

FOREWORD

N.K. Jemisin gives us such a great introduction to the book--apparently understanding very well that the audience of this book is full of animation enthusiasts and adult fans more than it is full of kids, and explaining that bewildering journey some adults had from blowing this show off as a silly kid thing to falling in love with it hard and fast.

The important thing, Jemisin says, is being able to trust a storyteller with your heart. And it was clear to her that Rebecca Sugar knew what she was talking about and was saying important things about identity and the radical power that comes with accepting it and demanding respect.

Important also is how we handle heroes and who gets to be one in fantasy. That's part of the reason Steven Universe speaks to so many--because we see ourselves here, and know stories can be about us. Acknowledging the power we all have to MAKE THINGS BETTER with what we fight for is so important--especially if we're going to speaking to the next generation about it.

Highlighting Rose Quartz as a "born leader" who failed and Steven as a relatable scamp who did what she couldn't, Jemisin asserts that we can save the world.

1. END OF AN ERA

We start with an appeal to the audience to think about identity and the formative parts of our childhood--and how different it is if who you are and who you become is restricted, mocked, erased, or Not Allowed. Most people, if not ALL people, can relate to this, but for those of us with a special relationship with Steven Universe because of queer identity, this hits hard.

But it doesn't have to be anything grand to be something we respect--this show's authenticity comes largely from how personal everything is, drawn from real-life experiences and incidental truths from each artist's perspective, leaning hard on childhood and formative experiences.

Rebecca Sugar offers some interview bits to discuss writing philosophy and why "writing female characters" was difficult for a nonbinary person who'd been socialized as a girl and a woman. Rebecca has spoken before about how frustrating it is that marketing for cartoons was SO gendered when she was growing up (and to some extent still is).

The Gems in the story are all "she/her," but on their planet they're defined by their work, not by emotion or relationships (unlike women in our society), so having them be socialized opposite to how she was and be able to claim those emotions through choice and NOT as just an expectation "as women" was revolutionary. Rebecca wants her show to tell all marginalized people that they don't deserve to be in the margins.

Weighing in on other aspects of the show were Ian Jones-Quartey, Joe Johnston, and Miki Brewster. Ian describes feeling like at first doing SU was a thrill ride that meant they'd finally get to do all the cool stuff, but it quickly became a responsibility that he took very seriously--the need to tell a good story now that he'd been given a megaphone.

Promotional art, planning documents, character sketches, and concept art from the lighthearted to the stone serious is included, along with some very cool (sort of famous) timeline charts that track major characters' developments. It's emphasized by Rebecca that the developmental materials ARE NOT CANON (and especially are not MORE canon) compared the final show.

There are concept sketches alongside final art for Aquamarine and Topaz in "Wanted" (with Topaz labeled "Imperial Topaz"), the Zircons in "The Trial," Blue and Yellow Diamond, and the Off Colors (including Pink Lars).

And there's also a spread of "the two sides of Steven's life: Gem Magic and Rock N Roll" featuring Sadie Killer and the Suspects (referred to as "Buck's band")--as well as a cool "Crew Cameos" key and some concepts for short-haired Connie.

And then there's some more "finished" art with stills alongside concepts, including some background art, revision, and really cool "fairytale" art from some of the shadowplay storytelling bits. We get "Lars of the Stars," "Jungle Moon," and "Can't Go Back."

2. THE BEGINNING OF THE END: A SINGLE PALE ROSE

In discussing the huge reveals and Gem mysteries in the show, the pacing is examined, and emphasis is put on the intended "slow burn." One of the most difficult things in the show was to strategize so that every piece that was needed to support another piece in the future was placed properly to seed what it was supposed to.

Some of the ideas they developed were more of a group effort and were fit together collaboratively (like Amethyst's being younger than the other Gems and Jasper being from Earth), while others were intended from the beginning based on Rebecca's vision (the fundamental idea of Pink Diamond's true identity, for instance, as well as Obsidian's design and sword and our Pearl not being Pink's first).

The writing process gets a great deep dive here, including fun tidbits like how the orb in the moon base was inserted by Joe Johnston and they literally had no idea what it was for when they wrote the episode. They repurposed it when they figured out what they needed.

Rebecca credits her detailed timelines for helping keep the order straight, and discusses how other artists are sometimes flabbergasted that a storyboard-driven show can have this much detail and continuity and yet not get wrecked by the free non-scripted boarding process. But Rebecca and the Crew valued that approach and loved the way fresh eyes would handle an idea, making it come back alive, entertaining, vivid.

Several Crew members weigh in on the writing process. Lauren Hecht refers to making lots of incorrect guesses despite being on the inside. Joe Johnston recalled getting briefed on his first day and getting so excited to start working on this massive project.

Miki Brewster remembered being told Rose Quartz is Pink Diamond and being shocked--and also confused about why Ruby and Sapphire would need to be married if they're already basically married. Drew Green talks about being brought in late and getting to watch unaired episodes and a rough of the movie while eating cereal.

Ian Jones-Quartey complains about Pink Diamond's real jester-like form being leaked to the internet through a Hot Topic shirt. Rebecca piggybacks on that and says it was upsetting that the wedding was leaked because of toy fair keychains featuring Ruby and Sapphire in wedding attire. They'd always be worried about leaks, and sometimes Rebecca struggled not to talk about the reality of Pink Diamond before the reveal because she knew it would make so much more sense once the truth was out. And everything associated with Rose makes more sense once you know she's Pink--especially what happened with Bismuth, considering what we know about how Pink Diamond has a habit of treating anyone who no longer serves her interests.

When it comes to visual cues, Rebecca also talks about intentional designs to create a feeling of unity between concepts, like the flower shapes on Pink Diamond's palanquin lining up with the poofs of Steven's hair and the star imagery of the series. Steven Sugar and Mary Nash discuss how the Human Zoo incorporated this imagery, trying to look like Homeworld with a Pink Diamond touch.

Steven Sugar, as a game nerd, liked to throw in video game references from old and modern stuff to feel like he's inserting what he's enjoying and who he is from moment to moment, while Mary Nash, who related to Sadie as a basement-dwelling young person with cult interests, liked to include stuff from MST3K and cult movies. Pearl's hand gestures get a spotlight too--her reflex to cover her mouth when Pink Diamond was being discussed was analyzed here.

A "Top Secret Visual Timeline" from 2016 is included which tells us some Diamond history. It has an earlier version of Pink Pearl's fate and does not include Spinel since the movie hadn't been greenlit. The timeline includes the birth of the Diamonds, the emergence and major story beats for each major character, and some philosophy of the driving force behind each.

We're told that Pink Diamond straightened up, behavior-wise, after she lost her first Pearl, and that Yellow and Blue wanted to give her a planet but White only agreed to it to prove she would fail at managing a colony. Pearl, meanwhile, is so confused to have a Diamond who keeps asking her what she thinks when she doesn't believe she should have opinions.

And when Pink moonlighted as Rose to start conflict, she found herself leading an army to fight Pink's troops--then Yellow's, and eventually Blue's too. Lapis is said to be waiting for the conflict to end on Earth so she can terraform, but she gets trapped instead.

Pearl's love story with Rose is described as "an endless honeymoon" where she's free to love her, while Rose's is more like "I'm now the head of the family and I'm going to give everyone what they never had, so everyone is super special!"

Jasper is described as "adopted" into Yellow's army as the only successful Beta Quartz. And White Diamond knew that Pink Diamond was not dead--she thought she was just running away from home like a brat and would eventually be back.

3. THE HEART OF THE CRYSTAL GEMS

Now we discuss Rose Quartz--the original Pink Diamond. How she was selfish and selfless, never enough and always too much, and how Greg was her first partner who "challenged her" to be an equal. Rebecca describes Rose as being delighted by the idea that both she and Greg reinvented themselves, but when that leads her to want to share her past, Greg isn't interested--he only wants to know who she is now, and doesn't consider the old her to be her.

Rebecca likes Carl Jung's concept of "enantiodromia," which is the idea that extremes lead to their extreme opposite. This is demonstrated in all of the Diamonds. This narrative is interspersed with drawings of Greg and Rose being cute.

But another "heart" of the Crystal Gems is its relationships--particularly, Garnet, the fairy tale romance embodied. More psychological theories are discussed with regard to differentiation in a relationship making the relationship stronger, and how they made sure that happened for Garnet during the appropriate arc. Rebecca has struggled with the idea that she, like Ruby, went straight from a "family" group to a living-with-others situation and never lived by herself. But she also learned that you can in fact develop as a person in the context of a relationship--you don't have to be alone to do it. Ruby learned that too, and chose on her own terms to be with Sapphire.

The wedding made so much sense to Rebecca and the crew that they couldn't imagine a wholesome couple like Ruby and Sapphire not having a wedding episode. They wanted it for years: The wedding concepts always included the tuxedo for Sapphire and the wedding dress for Ruby.

But pushback (often blamed on the conservative standards of the international market) led to negotiations trying to keep Ruby and Sapphire's relationship from being explicit. Rebecca and the Crew were very tired of this double standard, and they were especially irritated by attempts to claim a wedding wouldn't be well received by a core demographic or wouldn't make sense for Steven's character. But other shows had done weddings and Steven had been established to love weddings already.

Rebecca kept adding more elements to the wedding episode to answer all the concerns, but she didn't want to back down from explicit marriage between these characters. They deserved it. And the audience deserved to see this as wholesome, like any other cartoon wedding. Eventually they got their way and were allowed to have the wedding. But the ordered episodes were also coming to a close without promise of more, so Rebecca had to request more episodes to be able to wrap up the storyline!

And of course, there is Steven, the true heart of the team. A very interesting aside discusses Garnet's leadership and how the network pushed the Crewniverse to acknowledge Steven as the leader. This was successfully resisted throughout as well--because Garnet is the leader (unless she's incapacitated, of course). It's fantastic that this concept was preserved because too often a young male chosen one is elevated above people with more experience and knowledge because of that chosen one tradition, so it's really nice to have a show acknowledge that team leadership is more appropriate for an adult.

4. ERA 3

Beginning with a discussion of the Diamonds, this chapter deconstructs the dysfunctional "family" of the Diamonds (who are said to be based on tropes about evil stepmothers and stepsisters), with the thread of dysfunction originating with White Diamond.

Yellow is physical, Blue is emotional, White is judgmental, and Pink is impulsive. Some philosophy on why Pink is naturally manipulative and why she clashes so much with White is offered.

White believes her identity is to be imposed on all because she is the pinnacle of what should be--and therefore, she has the right to make decisions and statements about and on behalf of everyone. But her secret is that she can't do what the others do--act or feel or want. In trying to be everyone, she is no one.

And this becomes very important when she confronts Steven about his identity and turns out to be wrong. The triumph of Steven being totally, fully himself is a beautiful, simple revelation that's described as far more satisfying than the theories about Pink living inside him or Rose returning from his Gem.

Also discussed is Gem architecture. A lot went into this idea, and Steven Sugar weighs in to say he had to think of what it would mean for a world to have buildings but serve no human needs. That's why it's mostly focused on transport and storage. Even the broken planet is meant to indicate a place stripped for its resources, and everything serves a function that is meant to avoid looking like the human equivalents.

And there's another layer, too: a difference between Era 1 and Era 2. Era 2 became more functional to hide Era 1's broken bits, and older Homeworld buildings still have some "ornate and ancient" feel to them. And the fact that props, tools, and even walls and doors could be living was taken from a concept Rebecca thought was horrible from old Busby Berkeley movies, where people were inanimate objects and it was portrayed as lovely. Tom Herpich helped conceptualize these living objects.

Steven dealing with "princess tropes" is discussed here too. The Pebbles (worked on with Pendleton Ward) were sort of his Cinderella's mice, and all the locked-in-a-tower, having supportive tiny friends help you, getting princess clothes made, attending a ball, having to mind your manners stuff was intentionally related to fairy tales.

The point of doing that (besides fun) was to easily invoke the feeling that Steven was being made to be someone he's not, and that he was being treated like THIS is who he really is when it isn't. White Diamond as the "evil stepmother" is discussed with regard to her detailed features and massive scale. They generally didn't put fingernails and eyelashes on characters (especially not to indicate that they were women or girls!), but they decided White would get all of these feminine markers for tradition's sake.

Rebecca also invokes several other references that were included and describes the princess tropes as "chipping away at his integrity" setting him up for the final challenge with White.

There is again tons of concept art: Homeworld architecture, Pebbles, Diamond diagrams, background Jades and Lemon Jade Fusion, Comby, Diamond extraction chambers, and White Diamond.

5. CHANGE YOUR MIND

Now we finally begin to discuss Steven's identity. The "Perfect Steven," discussed in several interviews before this book's release, was an idea back in 2013; the "ultimate Steven," beefed up and shonen-looking, was far from perfect because OUR Steven is perfect, while this alpha hero Steven idea (used in Steven Universe Future) didn't belong being idolized in such a show.

They thought about having Steven fall apart into organic half and Gem half early in the show (during "Giant Woman" after a successful fusion and unfusion, even!), but they didn't try the concept until the last episode. They didn't want the "Pink" Steven to be portrayed as "better" even though he would be more powerful, so they decided he isn't whole without his organic self and he's just as much of a shell as the organic half. They absolutely did not want any ending that required Rose to be inside him or waiting to come back. But the debates were fierce--what DOES it mean to have Rose's Gem?

Ian Jones-Quartey brings in an anecdote about his own family to emphasize some of the immigrant themes that inspired aspects of the show. He had a brother who reinvented himself elsewhere away from family without resolving issues, and all the ramifications of that were explored in the show through Rose Quartz. (He is careful to say he doesn't think his immigrant experience is like being from another planet!) But he did say you can hurt your old family even if they were toxic or didn't know the real you, and you can hurt your new family by hiding your past. The Pizza family of course was also a more direct reference to Ian's Ghanaian family.

In talking about the new Fusions from this episode, Sunstone is largely described by Miki, who also got to board the Sunstone section. Sunstone was described as a cool 1990s character and the evolution just continued into making them a fourth-wall-breaking PSA dispenser. Obsidian is also discussed, with their sword being an early concept. Steven Sugar said they totally knew it would be forged in action. Obsidian being similar to the Temple design is of course another very early detail.

The story of how James Baxter got involved with one of the final scenes (Organic Steven and Pink Steven fusing in front of White Diamond) was shared. His family was fans of the show and Rebecca Sugar took the time to drive to a birthday party for his daughter and give her a drawing. He then owed her a favor, and this was it.

Concept art is again included, this time with sample boards, promo images, a Diamond fight concept, costume design changes for the Gems, new Fusions, the so-called "Mega Diamond" ship conglomerate, some scenes from the White Diamond confrontation, Pink Steven, multiple pages of James Baxter animation, corrupted Gems and their healed selves, and photos from the "Change Your Mind" premiere and some awards. The show has won one design-related Emmy, a Peabody Award, and a GLAAD award.

6. STEVEN UNIVERSE FUTURE

The book doesn't cover the movie because it got its own book, but dives right into Future. Ian Jones-Quartey emphasizes that the movie and Future are separate and different from the original show, which ENDED. After all, after that, Steven has a neck!

Some new names are invoked now: new writers Kate Tsang, Jack Pendarvis, and Taneka Stotts. They were excited to have Steven make HIS OWN mistakes instead of trying to clean up someone else's! Now, instead of doing the usual shonen anime thing and having the final battle be a big physical rumble, Steven has to make peace with himself and take an active role in coping with what all the fighting has done to him and what effect it's had on who he is (and who he wants to be). There is no sudden "I love myself!" answer, either. It's always a process.

Drew Green and Maya Petersen, who came on board as storyboarders officially in Future, also weighed in on writing for a "mature" show, how to deal with Steven being a "moral compass" while being sort of unreliable, and what they learned as Crew that they didn't know as fans. Drew didn't know Garnet never asks questions. Jack didn't realize the show never deviated from Steven's point of view. Taneka was nervous but excited to collaborate. Kate was worried about how established the show was and what to do as a new writer to contribute appropriately.

Maya was on the old Crew but not as a storyboarder, so felt like some of the "old" ideas ended up not being appropriate for the "new" Future in an embarrassing way--and dreaded the idea of dealing with Steven's emotional problems when they were similar to stuff she'd been through. She also was personally behind the idea of Steven wanting to dump his problems by becoming Stevonnie, and got to work with Etienne Guignard on inventing the Pearl creation backstory with Volleyball.

There's some discussion of "depression hobbies," stress, and the show's pacing. And they say Etienne was entertaining at pitches. There's even some discussion of how Greg is taken off a bit of a pedestal because his terrible restrictive life in the suburbs sounded wholesome to Steven and Greg presented it negatively.

And then there is some information about how the Crew felt behind the scenes due to fan reactions and negative press. Ian discusses feeling offended when the Black characters are described as bad examples, as if their cartoonized but realistic-in-context features are automatically caricatures.

Rebecca Sugar felt beaten down by some of these narratives and began to access mental health services, inspiring some of the content of "Mindful Education." A long reflection from Rebecca discusses people's infighting about her show and what she had a responsibility to show or not show in the story. She learned a lot about bullying from Cartoon Network's anti-bullying program and learned that bullies thrive on whatever attention you give them--unless it is made clear to them by a peer group that no one is impressed by their cruel actions. Also, not all negative feedback is bullying. Constructive criticism is different. Self-awareness can help you avoid internalizing what bullies might do or say to you.

Segueing from the discussion of how people are affected by and connect with the show, we then discuss how they chose as a team what should be covered as the show came to a close. They didn't have time to do quite a few stories they wanted time for, like a Rhodonite story, a Lars side story, and Diamond "prehistory" and religion; all of it was put aside for the main arc with Steven.

They thought people would find those stories about Homeworld and Off Color history very interesting, but so much of the show had been about Steven's Gem adventures, so keeping him mostly on Earth seemed appropriate. The acknowledgment of his battle damage, of his trauma, was necessary and real, and helpful in an important way to the core audience.

Oh, and there was some stuff about a cheeseburger tree. Don't ask.

In discussing the "reverse escapism" of the original show (Gem aliens are intrigued by everyday human culture, and realism is necessary), Rebecca says her views have changed on escapism and gets why some people want a soothing feel-better show. She acknowledged also that her own escapist dreams-come-true fulfilled in the show didn't feel like escapism because they were givens to the majority of mainstream culture, but were never guaranteed to marginalized people.

Rebecca ties in her several-times-told story about "Love Like You" and how the middle bit was when she didn't feel she was worth looking up to, and the realizations she had to tie the beginning to the end. Feeling like someone will like you less if they know you more is terrible. So sometimes a show like this can be helpful in telling people that they belong when their fantasies are things like "I want to be loved" and "I want to know I exist."

In Future, Steven has to connect to who he is and love that person--and understand that person enough to finally feel that even if he's not fixing their problems or saving their world right this second, Steven deserves his family's love and support, and they WANT to give it to him.

There's a huge amount of supplemental material in this section so there's no way I could name it all. The charts for Future's timeline are pretty straightforward, though a few episodes like "A Very Special Episode," "Why So Blue," "In Dreams," and "Bismuth Casual" aren't specifically represented and a couple are in a different order ("Prickly Pair" was conceived as happening after "Fragments" and "Homeworld Bound").

Steven feeling like a monster, having intrusive thoughts, having not forgiven the Diamonds, and getting help/moving on--it's all there.

We have keys, color scripts, and boards for the new opening and some various backgrounds and storyboard art from episodes. Model sheets for Shep, Nice Lapis and Mean Lapis, Jasper, Steven Tag Gems, Pink Steven Powers, Monster Steven. New house concepts, Era 3 Homeworld concept art for the Diamond environments, and background art for the Reef.

New Connie and Greg designs. Concepts for Mega Pearl, the Rose Quartzes, Bluebird, and Morganite (who didn't get used). And there are some photos from recording and the conference room. There are even some extras from "Crossover Nexus," the crossover with OK K.O.!--including an unused cut scene that included Ruby and Sapphire fighting. The rest of the book is a bunch of adorable Crewniverse art--extras, blog drawings, promos, and gifts to each other.

NOTABLE

1.

The first timeline chart in the book features a cool sketch of the original Off Colors, which at the time this planning document was drafted included unused Off Colors Flint and Chert.

We knew of their existence already because of an episode of the podcast, but these two unexpectedly appeared as incidental characters in the Steven Universe Future episode "Homeworld Bound," identified only in the credits. Sad to think that instead of banding with the Off Colors, these two were probably shattered for their crime (being Quartzes who don't want to fight) and that's why we see them being repaired in this episode. Later, there's some brainstorming for types of Off Colors and "a Ruby that wants to wear limb enhancers" is mentioned as well.

2. 

It looks like there was also originally more juice to the story of tracking down the events of the war culminating in Pink Diamond's assassination.

One of the timelines talks about Steven thinking it makes sense that Pearl can't talk about her involvement because she might have been a double agent, explaining why Rose Quartz always knew what Pink Diamond was doing. It seems like that bit was supposed to be included in Garnet's version of the story she believed in "Your Mother and Mine." Seems like they originally conceived Garnet's story to inspire the Off Colors to become pirates and freedom fighters, though in the show's canon this storytelling happened after Lars had already reinvented himself the way he did.

Sadie was also supposed to be sending letters to Lars via Steven, which is funny since the "Letters to Lars" episode is just a montage Steven letter. And of course it's specified that Steven was supposed to get Pink Diamond flashbacks by going to the Palace on Homeworld.

3. 

The second chart in the book makes references to Sadie's reinvention of herself as a parallel to Lars, Greg, and Pink Diamond all doing the same thing, and how positive it is to embrace such a thing--a version of yourself that YOU create.

I love that Yellow Diamond's arm ship arm-wrestling the Cluster was always part of the plan.

There's some more explicit direction to have Connie help Steven understand the Diamonds as "strict parents," and a lot more emphasis on everyone realizing Rose had been inspired by THEM rather than them all following her.

White Diamond is presented here as if she thinks of Pink Diamond as a "daughter" (whom she now understands she has "lost"). There are notes on how the Diamonds have a responsibility to their children and should attend to it before just continuing to make more.

4.

One of the concept art images for the Off Colors features Rhodonite crouching by Padparadscha saying "Don't worry, I won't let them hurt you." It's very interesting because she DOES seem to protect Padparadscha in the show, but doesn't seem confident about it in her final version, even though it does seem like she'd be "programmed" to guard aristocratic Gems because of her Ruby and Pearl makeup. Cool.

5.

A "Crew Cameos" spread was included, which is of great interest to some of us who loved seeing the Crew insert themselves into the show. Not every SU Crew person who's been represented in a crowd was there, but this crowd included Amish Kumar, Kat Morris, Amanda Winterstein, Angie Wang, Lamar Abrams, Emily Walus, Mary Nash, Joe Johnston, Christy Cohen, Danny Cragg, Hilary Florido, Danny Hynes, Matt Burnett, Ben Levin, Elle Michalka.

6.

The official national flower of South Korea, Hibiscus syriacus, is the name of Pink Diamond's flower.

7.

One of Steven Sugar's comments about the silhouette difference between humans and Gems points out that humans have ears. This seems to be pretty good confirmation that they are not supposed to have ears, despite that sometimes we'll see ears drawn on them in some frames.

8.

Rose Quartz/Pink Diamond is characterized in this book as "self-hating" in a really interesting way, saying that because she believed she was not capable of compassion, she practically worshiped those who demonstrated that ability and thought they were so much better than her--which is described as "intoxicating" and resulted in others being drawn to her. How interesting is that!

9.

Timelines reveal that early plans for Pink Diamond's first Pearl originally had her getting destroyed by Pink during  a game, and then her destruction was rewritten as a punishment from the Diamonds after Pink Pearl defended Pink Diamond to the other Diamonds. They went back to the idea of her getting hurt by Pink for the final version, though the cracked face and control by White Diamond was not on the agenda until they started writing "Change Your Mind."

10.

The approximate ages of the major characters, based on emergence, are revealed on these timelines. It begins with a cracked-planet-looking graphic depicting four tiny Diamonds emerging at 20,000 years ago. Some suspicious "blacked out" redacting surrounds a long timeline tail that goes back before that, which may mean there are secrets they still don't want to reveal. But the dates go like this:

20,000 years ago: The Diamonds emerge.

11,000 years ago: Pearl is custom-made for Pink Diamond.

8,000 years ago: Sapphire emerges (on Homeworld).

6,000 years ago: Ruby emerges (on a colony).

5,750 years ago: Garnet is formed.

5,600 years ago: Lapis is poofed and put in the mirror.

5,200 years ago: Jasper emerges (on Earth).

5,050 years ago: The Cluster is planted.

5,000 years ago: Amethyst emerges (on Earth).

4,500 years ago: The Crystal Gems found Amethyst.

3,000 years ago: Peridot emerges (on Homeworld).

40 years ago: Pearl found Lapis's mirror at the Galaxy Warp.

And of course we know 14 years ago Steven is born!

11.

Originally the Diamonds were based on a quartet of themes: Love, Fear, Pride, and Sorrow. It got too complicated to keep and it was abandoned, with Pink's identification of "love" being described as "particularly outdated."

12.

Notes on a sketch say that Pearl was inspired to become bold and unashamed because Pink's questions drove her to have opinions, and it's said that Rose "fell in love" with her boldness.

13.

Rebecca tells the story of driving off a ridge and getting stuck in the desert, comparing this to Ruby's tumble during her Wild West adventure and using it as inspiration. She's told this story before but here it is in print. She also included the story about using the flowers from a friend's wedding to put in Ruby's hair.

14.

Rebecca describes having to "fight" notes she was given when it had to do with Ruby and Sapphire's relationship. One she describes as NOT fighting was for a signing card depicting Ruby and Sapphire dancing. It was called "too romantic" and she decided not to worry about it since it wasn't the actual show content.

She was also scolded over her book The Answer because the powers that be expected her to downplay that relationship. She always argued that queer youth deserved these things.

15.

Tom Herpich describes being inspired to name Blue Diamond's comb "Comby" because he was watching the news about Comey getting fired from the FBI. It's also a mineral-related term and I always assumed that reference was intentional, but maybe it's not and this is the only intended significance to Comby's name?

16.

Rainbow Quartz 2.0's design is not discussed, though the other two new Fusions from "Change Your Mind" (Sunstone and Obsidian) were. RQ2 has some sketches included, but no accompanying narrative in the text.

17.

A sheet of corrupted Gems and their healed selves is offered, though it doesn't appear to be final. The obelisk in "Serious Steven" is labeled Albite. The unnamed Worm Monster, Desert Glass, and Watermelon Tourmaline are included. An unnamed birdlike Gem represents the Big Bird monster from "Giant Woman." The crab monster from "Arcade Mania" is labeled Blue Chalcedony. The Tongue Monster is drawn uncorrupted but not named. The Flower Monster from "Back to the Kindergarten" is labeled Grossular Diopside or Titanite. The invisible monster from "Island Adventure" is labeled Moonstone. The Lighthouse Gem is labeled White Topaz. A form for Larimar that was used in "Change Your Mind" but changed in Future is there. The Slinker is listed as Chrysocolla. And the Crab Monster is listed as Aventurine.

On the next page, this is changed to Bixbite (as it was in Steven Universe Future), and we then also have Lace Amethyst, Blue Lace Agate, Crazy Lace Agate (Fusion), Ocean Jasper, the Mother Centipeetle Nephrite (Facet 413 Cabochon 12) and three other Nephrites, Angel Aura Quartz, a hooded Jasper, Zebra Jasper, Biggs Jasper, Watermelon Tourmaline (labeled as Fusion of Gem * Onion--huh?), Snowflake Obsidian, "Little" Larimar, and Orange Spodumene (who was the Worm).

18.

The Rhodonite side story would have been about the love story of a Ruby and a Pearl working for Morganite. Images of Morganite and her servants, unfused, are in the book. We do not get this additional information, but Rebecca said in a panel shortly before the book's release that Rhodonite's story would have been about finding out that she had been Rejuvenated 17 times because her components kept falling in love and needing to be reset.

19.

Referring to the Diamonds on one of the charts, Steven's perspective is "I can't believe I helped these" and then there's a censor bar. Welp.

20.

Some included art by Hilary Florido features Kevin with a souped-up Koala Princess car and another where Kevin is staring at himself in the mirror in front of an altar to himself.

21.

Rebecca's sweater collection is included in the Crew art.

[SU Book and Comic Reviews]

[latter-day-saint-nick]

I heard that the BBC Dracula adaptation written by Stephen Moffat was really bad, and it made me curious to see just how bad it was, so I decided to watch it for myself. It was not one of my smarter decisions.

But in order that my suffering won’t have been completely in vain, I’ll recap it here for those who are curious as well, to spare you the pain of actually having to watch it. You’re welcome!

Let me describe the viewing experience as best I can.

I have a BBC iPlayer account, so I could watch the show legally. My wife tells me to pirate it instead to avoid giving Moffat the views. She is right. I click on the first episode.

Episode 1

We start with a framing device of a severely ill Jonathan Harker in a Hungarian monastery, telling his story to two nuns. I do not hate this framing device. The original novel was told through diary entries, newspaper articles and letters, so having different characters tell the story of what happened to them to others is a neat way to adapt this type of literary device. The dialogue quickly takes a turn for the ridiculous, though, when one of the nuns, Sister Agatha, asks Jonathan in a silly accent if he had sexual intercourse with Count Dracula. Because queerbaiting? Is vampirism an STD now?

Still, the show tricks us into thinking that it’s going to be a fairly straightforward adaptation of the story as Jonathan recounts how he arrived at the castle, met the Count and became his prisoner. Later, this will turn out to be a sweet, sweet lie, but I don’t know that yet. At first, Dracula looks about a hundred years old and has a bad Romanian accent, but the more he feeds on Jonathan, the younger he gets, and the more refined and posh his British accent. Because this Dracula does not just absorb his victims’ lifeforce but also their knowledge. I find that stupid.

Dracula says the famous “I do not drink... wine” line. Badly. Still, the reference is mildly cute the first time. He repeats the line several times throughout the show, and it gets progressively less funny each time.

Jonathan reads a letter from his fiancee, Mina. In it, she jokes about how she’s going to sleep with all the cute men in the neighbourhood while he’s gone, as well as the adorable bar maiden, if she needs some variety. I sigh as I realize that this is probably what Moffat considers good queer representation.

At one point Jonathan talks about falling asleep, and Sister Agatha proceeds to ask him if he had dirty dreams about his fiancee. She persists with the question, even after Jonathan tells her that that’s private. It doesn’t seem like a pertinent question, but I guess Sister Agatha is just a pervert. Or maybe Moffat is.

Jonathan finishes his story about how he escaped from the castle. He bemoans that he can’t go home to England, because he is such a changed man and he can’t even remember his fiancee’s face. Sister Agatha reveals that the other nun with her is actually Mina. What a tweest! Apparently even before Jonathan told his story, Sister Agatha managed to figure out that he is English, tracked him down, found his fiancee and had her brought over to Budapest. The show is clearly hoping that the unexpectedness of this twist is going to distract us from the fact that it makes no damn sense at all.

It also turns out that Jonathan has become a vampire, and the sight of blood nearly makes him attack Mina. Of course, being one of the main heroes, he was never turned in the novel, not that that matters.

At this point Dracula shows up at the gates of the monastery in the form of a wolf. And I don’t mean that he shapeshifts like an Animorph. He is literally inside the wolf’s body, and he claws his way out of it, emerging at the gates naked and covered in wolf blood. I really don’t know why.

He and Sister Agatha proceed to have a sass-off. My wife makes fun of the dialogue by saying that it’s basically this:

“I’m a badass sister!” “Yeah, but I’m Dracula!” “Yeah, but I’m a badass sister!” “Yeah, but I’m Dracula!” “Yeah, but I’m a badass sister!” “Yeah, but I’m Dracula!” “Yeah, but I’m a badass sister!” “Yeah, but I’m Dracula!”

By the time my wife has finished the joke, the banter is still going on. It feels like it’s never going to end.

The Mother Superior tells the nuns to arm themselves. My wife starts wondering if we’re actually watching a Mel Brooks movie. Also, Sister Agatha is revealed to be Van Helsing. This is not as meaningful as the show seems to think it is, as she and Dracula haven’t had any past encounters. So it’s really just, “Oh, she’s actually a gender-swapped character from the book. That’s cool, I guess.

Finally, Dracula slinks off because he can’t get inside the monastery without being invited. He manages to find Jonathan, now fully a vampire, at a window and gets him to invite him in. You’d think this would be the end of the stupidity, but clearly I haven’t suffered enough yet.

Jonathan finds Mina and Sister Agatha. Sister Agatha tries to fend him off, since he’s, you know, a vampire and tried to feed off of Mina earlier. Mina, however, believes that the power of love can save him, so she approaches him. I point out that in the book, Mina was characterized as being very intelligent, not that that matters. As it turns out, it wasn’t Jonathan at all, but Dracula, wearing Jonathan’s skin, which he rips off, like something out of Hellraiser. He never uses this power again in the rest of the series.

The episode ends with him attacking the two women. Against my better judgement, I decide to watch the next episode, because while this was bad, it was bad in a fascinating way. Almost like something Tommy Wiseau would make. Okay, maybe not. Tommy Wiseau as Dracula would have been a lot more entertaining.

I click on the next episode.

Episode 2

We start with another framing device. This time Dracula is telling the story of his voyage to London to Sister Agatha while they’re playing chess. See, it’s symbolic, because they’re having a game of wits where they’re trying to outsmart each other! Okay, to be honest, I have no idea what Sister Agatha is trying to do. I guess Moffat is too clever for me.

Sister Agatha asks Dracula how he got to England. He tells her that he went on a ship. Inexplicably, this is not the end of that, but he proceeds to tell her about everything that happened on the ship, including conversations between characters that he wasn’t there for. Maybe he was listening at their doors.

I sense impending doom when I realize that this boat journey is going to take up the entire episode. In the book, it only took up a few pages, not that that matters.

Rather than staying in his coffin in the hold during the day, as he does in the book (not that that matters), Dracula mingles with the passengers. When Sister Agatha expresses surprises at that, he comments on how stupid it would be to stay in his coffin in the hold. You know, more adaptations should have lines about how stupid the source material is. It makes you look so smart.

How does Dracula avoid the sunlight during the day, though? Never fear, he simply spits out a pall of fog that surrounds the ship at all times and blocks out the sunlight, because I guess that’s a power he has. Like his wearing of other creatures’ skin, it’s not one he ever uses again, though. He tells Sister Agatha, “Everywhere you go, always take the weather with you.” Because referencing songs from a hundred years in the future is apparently also a power that he has.

We are introduced to the other passengers, who are a surprisingly diverse bunch. I can’t get too excited about this, however, as I know that they are all going to die. One of the passengers is an Indian doctor who has encountered the undead in the past. That would probably make for a more interesting story than this one, but then again, I don’t really want Moffat to tell it, so I don’t know why I’m complaining.

Dracula starts killing off crew and passengers one by one. I keep expecting the show to cut back to the chess game, with him telling Sister Agatha, “To make a long story short, I killed them all.”

The passengers begin to fear a killer on board, but never seem to suspect Dracula, who plays them against each other. They also discover that they’re all travelling to England at the behest of the same mysterious benefactor, who of course is Dracula, using a pseudonym. Because he hand-picked all of them for the special qualities he would gain from drinking their blood or something. It is way more convoluted than it needs to be. Is Moffat capable of writing a protagonist who is not an arrogant white man too clever for everyone around him? We may never know...

Throughout the episode there’s references to an unseen invalid staying in cabin 9. It turns out to be Sister Agatha, whom Dracula has been steadily draining. The chess game is just a hallucination that he induces in her while he drinks her blood. What a tweest!

Just like in the previous episode, the framing device is dropped about two-thirds through and we are now seeing the story in present tense. Dracula frames Sister Agatha as being the mystery killer, but she manages to reveal that he is a vampire just as she is about to get hanged by the crew. They manage to fend him off, but not before a few more characters die by being incredibly stupid.

One of the characters is a young English lord who just got married to a rich heiress, but is secretly having an affair with an African man pretending to be his servant. I can never remember his name, so I call him Gaylord (I’m allowed to make jokes like this). Gaylord is Dracula’s new business partner and he betrays the rest of the humans, because he thinks Dracula is his BFF and values his skills as a businessman. As it turns out, Dracula only chose Gaylord because of his wife’s wealth. Now that he has killed her, her money goes to Gaylord, and by draining Gaylord, it goes to Dracula. I was unaware that being someone’s business partner entitles you to inherit all their money after their death, so I assume that Dracula acquires people’s money by drinking their blood, just like he acquires their skills and attributes.

Sister Agatha assumes command over the ship, using her divine nun powers, I guess, and she prepares for Dracula to return and finish off the rest of the humans. I get bored and finish a chapter in a book I was reading earlier.

Eventually Sister Agatha blows up the ship to prevent Dracula from ever reaching England, which they keep referring to as “the New World”. That’s not what that term means, but who cares at this point? Dracula, encased in one of his boxes, sinks to the bottom of the ocean, only to break out and walk the rest of the way to England along the ocean floor. There he is greeted by cars and helicopters and someone who looks like Sister Agatha, but wearing modern clothes. What a tweest!  Did it take him a hundred years to break out of his casket, or is this like The Village, where we were in modern times all along? The episode ends here, so I guess I’ll have to watch the next one to find out.

I am curious to see this stupidity unfold, but not sure I can take any more right now. But my wife applies some peer pressure, and I put on the final episode. Pray for me!

Episode 3

The previous two episodes were pretty bad, yes, but mostly in a way I can handle and even laugh at. They have not at all prepared me for what I am about to witness.

This episode doesn’t have a framing device, which makes me wonder why we bothered with those in the other two.

The Sister Agatha clone turns out to be her great-grandniece, Zoe. So it’s like Back to the Future where people keep having relatives who look exactly like them. Except Back to the Future is a comedy, and this is meant to be taken seriously.

Dracula escapes from the Anti-Dracula Brigade on the beach and breaks into some poor woman’s home after killing her husband and stuffing him in the fridge. I’m not sure if this is meant to be funny or scary. It ends up being neither. Dracula kills the woman as well, after lecturing her for taking all her modern-day luxuries for granted. Social commentary, I guess?

We are introduced to Seward, a young medical student who makes up for his lack of personality with a creepy obsession with his friend, a vapid, selfish party girl. Yes, this is Lucy Westenra. I found her a likable character in the novel. Not that that matters. I call this Lucy a slut, only for Lucy to make a comment on slut-shaming, which makes me feel bad. The irony is that I’m pretty sure we’re meant to see Lucy as slutty and shallow.

We’re also introduced to Quincey. He’s a douchebag. In the novel he was kind, brave and heroic. Not that that... whatever.

Seward is contacted by the Anti-Dracula Brigade, which is actually called the Jonathan Harker Foundation, but I prefer Anti-Dracula Brigade. It was formed by Sister Agatha’s relatives and Mina Murray with the goal to find Dracula and then to keep him alive to study him. I honestly would have thought that Mina would want Dracula dead, after he terrorized her and murdered her fiance, rather than sticking him in a cage for science, but it’s not like character motivations have to make sense. After all, this is Moffat, bitch!

Van Helsing explains to her students that Dracula was in suspended animation for over a hundred years at the bottom of the ocean until she accidentally woke him by sticking her fingers in his mouth, which allowed him to draw blood and be renewed. She doesn’t explain why her Anti-Dracula Brigade consists of medical students, rather than experts in their fields. She also doesn’t explain why he didn’t grow old again, like he was at the start of episode 1, after not having had anything to eat for over 120 years.

Dracula has been caught and is contained in a cell at the Brigade’s headquarters. I honestly don’t remember how that happened. Did they forget to show us that or did I just black out? Both seem like likely options. The cell contains what I assume is a Kindle, to keep Dracula occupied. Van Helsing comes to talk to him, and he scoffs at the idea of a woman being in charge. She tells him that he slept through the women’s rights movement. I am paralyzed with fear that Moffat is going to attempt to explain women’s rights to me. Why would God test me like this? My relief knows no bounds when the characters change the subject immediately. God is good after all.

This reprieve doesn’t last long. My faith is once again tested when I am forced to witness one of the most idiotic scenes I have ever had the misfortune to watch on screen. It begins when Renfield is brought in. I know that a Dracula adaptation turning silly when Renfield is introduced is not unusual, but Moffat always strives to exceed expectations of ridiculousness. In this version Renfield is Dracula’s lawyer, working for the same firm that he hired 120 years ago when Jonathan was their representative. They have been Skyping, using what I thought was a Kindle, but turns out to be a proper tablet. It wasn’t supposed to be connected to the internet, but all Dracula had to do was guess the WiFi password. Which was his own name.

I cannot deal with this. This scene has broken me. I am a broken man. I cry out in anguish and despair, for what else can I do? My wife, who has gone to the kitchen to get herself a drink, comes to see if I am okay. I am not. I may never be okay again. Moffat has marred my soul forever.

Renfield argues that the Anti-Dracula Brigade is keeping Dracula against his will and that he hasn’t actually done anything illegal, so they are forced to set him free. On the way out, Dracula finds Seward’s phone and uses it to meet up with Lucy. There’s also something about Van Helsing having cancer and drinking some of Dracula’s blood in the hopes that it will cure her. I don’t really care about this, but it’s important to the plot.

There’s a time-skip of a few months. Lucy is engaged to Quincey, but still sneaks off regularly for dates with Dracula where she lets him feed off her. I suspect that this is Moffat’s attempt at making the character more feminist. You see, instead of just passively being attacked by Dracula in her sleep at night, she actively goes out to find him and chooses to be drained by him! This does not make her a better character. Really, it just makes her seem stupid as well as callous, since she doesn’t give a damn about any of Dracula’s other victims who don’t give him consent to drink their blood.

There is a very annoying reference to the novel when a vampire child calls Lucy “Bloofer Lady”. Like the wine line, it sounds more stupid every time the show repeats it. Also, the vampire kid shows up in one more scene before Dracula kills him. Glad he served a point.

Dracula finally drains Lucy. Her family holds a funeral, thinking that she’s dead. But as she’s been infected with vampirism, she is fully conscious while she is being cremated. So we get to watch her burn alive, screaming in pain all the while. Hey, did I mention that Lucy is played by a black actress? Remember in season 10 of Doctor Who when something terrible would happen to Bill Potts every other episode, like having a hole shot through her chest or being turned into a Cyberman? Now, I’m not saying that Moffat enjoys having horrifying things happen to his black female characters... but I’m not not saying it either.

Lucy escapes from her coffin and takes revenge on the crematorium workers. During this scene we only see her reflection, in which she looks normal, which makes it painfully obvious that this is only how she sees herself, and in reality she’s going to be revealed to be horribly burned. The show plays coy with this for an annoyingly long time.

Van Helsing, still dying of cancer, breaks out of the hospital with help from Seward and they go visit Dracula in his flat. Yes, Dracula has a flat. It’s not hidden or anything. It’s even listed in the phone book. Look, it’s almost over, so who cares?

Lucy shows up as well and after more pointless build-up, we finally get to see her real appearance, which, surprise, surprise, is horribly burned. She is oblivious to this, because vampires’ reflections are weird in a way that is never really explained. Dracula sees himself in the mirror as old and decaying, whereas Lucy sees herself as being still pretty. I don’t know what it means, apart from that Moffat doesn’t understand vampire mythology and feels that it needs to be made more interesting.

Seward encourages Lucy to take a selfie, which reveals her true face. Why the rules for cameras are different from the rules for mirrors is not explained either. Lucy breaks down crying because being ugly is a fate worse than death. Seward tells her that he still wants to kiss her, because I guess this was meant to be the message? Something about true love? She begs him for death. They kiss and he mercy-kills her. In the book the people who loved Lucy had to kill her to save her immortal soul and to protect the world from the monster she had become, which has a bit more emotional resonance than saving her from having to be ugly for eternity. But, you know. NOT THAT THAT MATTERS.

Van Helsing sends Seward away for her final confrontation with Dracula, because she has him figured out. Having the memories of her great-aunt Agatha within her, which she gained from drinking Dracula’s blood, which he gained from drinking Agatha’s blood, she exposits that Dracula isn’t actually harmed by sunlight or crosses. He just fears death more than anything and so he doesn’t like the sight of the cross which represents someone being willing to die. Okay, but that doesn’t explain his aversion to sunlight! What does that have to do with death? She also spouts off some nonsense about how his fear of death originated from being the weakest in a family of noblemen and soldiers. Um, Moffat? You do realize that Dracula is based on Vlad the Impaler, right? Someone who was known for, well, impaling his enemies? But, again, it’s almost over, so let’s just get on with it!

Van Helsing tells Dracula that because she is dying of cancer, she is accomplishing the one thing he is afraid of doing, which somehow convinces him to kill himself by drinking her cancerous blood, which is poison to him. To make this experience painless for her, he creates an illusion for her where they’re, um, tenderly making love? What the hell? Is that what all their previous scenes were leading up to? Okay, if you say so.

Wait, is that the real reason why Moffat made Van Helsing a woman? Screw you, Moffat! Screw you so much!

Credits roll. This ends one of the worst television viewing experiences I’ve ever had. I go on YouTube to rewatch Sherlock Is Garbage, and Here’s Why. It is deeply cathartic.

[shlabam]

TOP TEN COMICS BOOK VILLAINS WE PROBABLY WON’T SEE IN THE MOVIES

Superhero media is the hottest thing going right now. It was true ten years ago when the MCU was in its adolescence, and it’s even truer now. Even with film production on lockdown, Marvel and DC are still planning on literally dozens of their characters entering their respective cinematic universes. However, for the fans of the source material, things can be contentious. For every memorable Tony Stark quip, there’s Superman destroying an entire city because he’s, frankly, kind of dumb now. A major point of contention is how the various popular villains are utilized. Making an intimidating and potent villain in a comic book is very different than in a film. In comics, you have months to establish motive, powers, and backstory before the villain even makes their first move. In films, that all has to be compressed and spilled out in the scarce few minutes when Captain America and Bucky aren’t making bambi eyes at each other. To be concise, some villains adapt perfectly, and some, no matter how good they are in the comics, just don’t. And to be clear, this list is of popular villains who have the possibility of appearing in a big-budget film, so no, you won’t be seeing Ten Eyed Man or Big Wheel in there. Their powers are, respectively, having ten eyes, and being very good in business. (That’s a lie, he’s just a huge wheel who chases Spider-Man.)

10: Mr. Mxyzptlk:

Cool, let’s get this one out of the way. Despite being one of Superman’s oldest, longest-lasting, and most popular enemies from all the way back in the Golden Age, there’s no way in hell he will be in a movie. For the uninformed. Mr. Mxyzptlk is a 5th dimensional wizard-genie who appears every ninety days to torment Superman with his reality-altering antics, and can only be sent back to his home dimension if Superman tricks him into saying his own name backwards. Yes, it would be very dazzling, as Mr. Mxyzptlk’s powers in a movie would basically look like if Christopher Nolan directed Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but he’s a little too silly to fit in with the current “everything is gloomy and also a bummer” tone of the Superman films. This silly tone has lent itself perfectly to the Supergirl series, where he’s made a handful of appearances. Besides, if we get Mxyzptlk in a Superman movie before Brainiac, I’ll lose my entire freaking mind.

9: Hobgoblin:

There have been eight Spider-Man movies so far, and of those eight, four of them have, in some capacity, featured the Green Goblin. And that makes sense, right? The Green Goblin is easily Spider-Man’s most memorable and reoccurring nemesis, with Doctor Octopus and Venom close behind, and Peter Parker’s link with Norman and Harry Osbourn makes their tragic story perfect for film adaptation. On the other hand, we have the Hobgoblin, who is essentially Green Goblin with all the gimmicks, none of the Parker-adjacent backstory, and an orange and blue color scheme, likely tying him to the Denver Broncos [citation needed]. Still, in those four cinematic attempts at tackling the Goblin, none of them have quite gotten him right, and I can’t imagine this character, who is, even in canon, an intentional Green Goblin rip-off, would fare any better.

8: Starro:

Brave and the Bold #28 from 1960 featured the first story with the Justice League, and this story put them up against a very unique new villain: Starro the Conqueror, a giant telepathic starfish who can release tiny versions of himself. If these tiny starfish latch onto your head, you’re under his control and obey his commands. The Justice League have battled him fairly regularly over the last fifty years, and he’s a distinct and powerful enemy that the fans generally appreciate, leading to him being referenced occasionally in Smallville, Arrow, and Flash. Why won’t he ever be in a movie? Because if you’re a Hollywood producer, you stopped paying attention at “giant telepathic starfish”. Sorry. Maybe Shuma-Gorath will pop up in the next Doctor Strange movie, and he’ll set off a Twilight-esque wave of starfish monster movies! Then again, almost absolutely not.

7: Puppet Master:

Speaking of mind control, what’s scarier than that? For my money, nothing. Having your body and will taken away from you by an unseen force is a terror greater than death. How could you possibly make a villain based around such a chilling concept and have him not be scary? Well, maybe if it’s an old bald man in an apron playing with dolls. The Puppet Master is an ongoing threat for the Fantastic Four who is just that: he makes models of his foes out of radioactive clay, and makes them punch themselves and dance around and kiss each other, because he’s, y’know, a weird old man. Why is he such a consistent threat who hasn’t fallen into obscurity like other dumb gimmick-based villains? His stepdaughter, Alicia Masters, is the Thing’s longtime girlfriend. As long as she keeps appearing in movies (including being played by… Kerry Washington? That can’t be right), there’s always a chance he’ll pop up, but I don’t think any movie studio is that stupid, despite the quality of every Fantastic Four movie blatantly defying that prediction.

6: Bizarro:

Superman has always suffered in the villains department. When you’re essentially a god, what can they throw at you? As it turns out, Lex Luthor, almost always. But why not another Superman? Bizarro is essentially that, an imperfect clone of Superman who speaks in opposite speak - “Bizarro am good! Me not punch you until you live!” - and features the same abilities as the Man of Steel. Sounds great, right? Putting a hero against a villain with their same powers has worked for nearly every Marvel movie (shots fired). So why won’t we see him grace our silver screens any time soon? Because they’ve never really figured him out. Is he funny? Is he lethal? Does Kryptonite work on him? If he does everything the opposite of Superman, why does he wear clothes? Isn’t being naked the opposite of being clothed? Bizarro is a major Superman side-character and has made appearances in Smallville and Supergirl, but the idea of him being the Big Bad going toe-to-toe with Henry Cavill doesn’t sound like it would generate a lot of views.

5: Impossible Man:

You remember what I said about Mr. Mxyzptlk? Remember? So take that bit, but everywhere I say Superman, have it say Fantastic Four instead… yeah, that should do it.

4: The Wrecking Crew:

Thor has a unique quirk of having a very cinematic rogues gallery. Sure, most of the movies have pitted him against Loki, but if they were to run him up against the Enchantress, or the Absorbing Man, or Ulik the Troll, or Kurse, or even the Stone Men from Saturn, that’s not a bad movie! However, in one of the attempts to give Thor more of a mortal nemesis, they put him up against the Wrecker, who has an… enchanted… indestructible… crowbar. Yeah. Incredibly, the Wrecker and his Wrecking Crew have become very present characters throughout the Marvel Universe, essentially serving as “jobbers”, being rolled out to get beaten up by the new top hero or villain, but that may not work in a movie, where villains have to be seen as having some level of potency before being struck down. That means we’d need at least a short scene where it seems like Thor might lose to a guy whose power is “crowbar”, and that’s about as likely as an Edward Norton cameo in the next Avengers. Ho boy, they did NOT part on good terms!

3: Clayface:

When the movie-going public goes to see a Batman movie, they generally want something a bit more grounded than your typical superhero fare. After all, Batman has no powers, and therefore the most supernatural thing that should happen in these movies is a gas that makes you smile, or a different gas that makes you think your dead parents are back and disappointed in you. Might wanna put a mouth covering on that mask, Bruce! The one and only they’ve made a movie where Batman fights people with real, off-the-wall super powers (Batman and Robin), it did not go great. And those guys pale in comparison to Clayface, who is, yes, made of clay. In the comics and cartoons, Clayface looks awesome, turning his limbs into weapons and being very challenging to incapacitate, but in a live-action, realistic Batman adventure, we wouldn’t want to see the Dark Knight fight a poop-colored version of the T-1000, especially if it’s got the same chemical composition of a little dreidel that I made.

2: Red Hood:

A relative newcomer to the Batman universe, Red Hood is the revived body of Jason Todd, the second Robin, who was brutally killed by the Joker in one of the most controversial storylines DC Comics ever produced. Literally, fans called a 900 number to tell the writers to kill him off. A 900 number. That’s how much they hated the little turd. Anyway, Jason Todd, whom Batman and the rest of the world believed was dead, was revived by Ra’s al Ghul and became a ruthless villain. Since then, he’s gravitated more to the side of the hero, though one a bit more willing to spill blood than his mentors. Why won’t we see him in the darker, edgier Batman films? Because… that’s Bucky. It’s the same thing that happened in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Teen sidekick killed in controversial manner, revived by super villain to be a thorn in said hero’s side, later changes his mind and becomes a good guy again, though with enough PTSD to fill a PTSD super store. The two storylines even occurred in the comics in the same year, 2005, to much fanfare and across-the-board declarations of one company ripping off the other, reminding the world of the great Aquaman-Namor debates of the 1940s. Considering that DC’s films have criminally underperformed compared to Marvel’s, the last thing they want to do is be accused of lazy plagiarism, so Jason Todd will likely remain a permanent fixture in the afterlife, hanging out with Batman’s parents and, at the rate that people are coming back from the dead, literally no one else. (Plus, if they can’t even get Robin right, how are they gonna do this?)

1: Mister Sinister:

Yes, he was teased at the end of X-Men Apocalypse, but ignoring that the film underperformed both critically and commercially, Mister Sinister is never going to be in a movie. It would make sense for him to appear, though, right? He’s one of the most present and potent X-Men villains, he’s played crucial roles in many memorable storylines, he’s got a sick cape, but… something a lot of comic book fans tend to overlook is his murky backstory, powers, and motivations. He was a biologist in Victorian London who did genetic experiments on homeless people in the hopes of finding clues about the oncoming threat of mutants. In this time, he unearthed the long-dormant En Sabah Nur, whom you plebeians may know as Apocalypse, and Apocalypse gifted him with great abilities. What abilities you ask? HA HA, good question! At various times, Sinister has displayed: telepathy, telekinesis, energy projection, shape-shifting, regeneration, and teleportation, but these powers will mysteriously disappear whenever they want him to get sliced up real good by Wolverine. Additionally, it has never been made very clear what Sinister wants. Does he seek perfect mastery of the human genome? Does he live to torment Cyclops? Is he a blind follower of Apocalypse? Is he just running through all the different kinds of goatee? Of course, in adaptation, the writers would pick and choose the aspects they’d want to use, but I doubt they’d want to untangle the Christmas lights mess that is Mister Sinister, especially when they’ve got a perfectly good villain whose power is just “magnets”.

[sevenincubistolemyheart]

Tainting Purity Chapter 2

vann

Au: Demon

Tag list: @bangtans-apollo @xsunnyhoseokx @wilhelminalucinda @xsmilebitesx @okgoogul @mariacorbi @spiritualotaku @littlekitten8590 @felic-ci @saturated-pink @fckyouartclass @saraisthoughts @godrics @theshiningmoonsblog @winterseoul @nomimits7 @miss-delacour @apphiaasensio20 @novakitten0901 @thatonebibabe @2seokkyo @marvelkatwoman @vannilacake @books-are-way-better-than-movies @bluespidergirl56 

Rating: M

Potential Triggers: Gets pretty smutty in this chapter, Kinks in this chapter include bondage and degradation, mentions of orgasm denial, edging, and forced orgasms, as well as a lot of marking.  Check the masterlist as I update for all the triggers in the series up to that point.

Pairing: BTS x Reader/OT7 x Reader

Genre: Supernatural, Drama, Romance, Angst, Fluff, Hurt & Comfort

Length: 7.5k (Ya’ll are being FED)

You frowned as you looked over your naked form in the full-length mirror located in the bathroom, gently running your fingers over the small, but vibrant purple mark now decorating your neck. Jimin had really not been shy with his mouth and it had apparently ended up with a lovebite on your neck. At least your ears were safe somehow, despite Taehyung being especially rough. Your eyes lowered and widened as they took in the large bruise right in the center of your stomach where the man had punched you, a vibrant, angry red on the expanse of your skin. You winced as you gently tried to apply pressure, deeming it tender, but not unbearable. Your scalp on the other hand still stung a bit. You reached a hand up to massage the area, turning to examine the area over your shoulder. You sighed in relief as you didn’t notice much difference, besides being a little red. Thank goodness. Your father hadn’t pulled out nearly as much as you'd initially thought. It was actually just a few strands, even though it hurt like a bitch.

Your eyes saddened at the thought of your family before you shook your head and moved away from the mirror and to the shower. A quick turn of the knobs and a check of the temperature later and you were in and finally fully calm once again. You’d always been very easy to get wet, ever since you’d hit puberty. It'd always been a source of shame for you in your youth, and you’d been worried enough to ask your doctor if it was normal. A few tests later and it was easily found out that it was indeed 100% normal and just how your body was.

You grew used to it eventually and accepted it of course, but now that you would be living with 7 demons who could tell at the drop of a hat how horny you were, it was only natural to feel a bit nervous. It’s not as if it would be hard to exploit your over-sensitivity after all. Not to mention, sometimes, it wasn’t even because you were horny, it just happened! You sighed quietly, making sure to wash extra well and get rid of any remaining stickiness between your thighs. You’d have time to talk over all this with them over lunch. After your refreshing shower, you stepped out and wrapped yourself in a towel, glancing at the small hickey still adorning your neck. It hadn't faded even a little, of course, though the bruise on your stomach did look a little less inflamed thankfully. You exited the bathroom and spotted a white t-shirt, black sweatpants and a pair of boxers. Hopefully, Namjoon’s collar would cover the hickey fully. It seemed low enough that it could be if you positioned it right.

You hummed quietly as you got changed, fiddling with the collar and smirking triumphantly as you managed to make it hide Jimin’s mark. The boxers were surprisingly comfortable and the sweat pants slipped on with ease. You pulled the string on top to tighten it so they wouldn’t fall right off you, smiling a bit as you realized Namjoon had taken your much smaller frame into consideration. The thought of the fourth oldest made your cheeks color as you abruptly recalled his brazen actions prior to your shower but you quickly shook it off, heading back into the bathroom to take a quick look at yourself. It was...odd, to see yourself in boys clothes. You’d always imagined doing something cute like this after you got close to a guy you liked, but you couldn’t deny a part of you liked being in his clothes. It was definitely just that they were so comfortable. Yeah, that had to be it. You’d just met these boys after all, despite how intimate you’d become with some of them.

You jumped at the sound of the door opening and rushed out of the bathroom to meet whoever had entered, hearing Namjoon before you saw him.

“You alright in the-”

Namjoon suddenly cut off as he caught the sight of you, making you look down at yourself, suddenly self-conscious. Had you put something on wrong somehow? Or maybe he’d decided he didn’t like you in his clothes after all?

He coughed awkwardly and when you looked up again he looked...embarrassed? It was an odd look on him, especially after he’d become so serious earlier. You found yourself smiling at the cute picture he made before you began walking towards the door, turning to look at him over your shoulder, suddenly feeling much more confident over making someone so typically put together flustered.

“The others are waiting, right? Come on!”

You turned and continued down the hall, though this time you heard his footsteps following after you as you made your way to the lobby you’d first entered from.

Namjoon huffed a laugh when you turned to look back at him, a small cocky smirk letting you know that he was back to being himself as he quirked a knowing eyebrow your way.

“Oh did someone finally realize they have no idea where they’re going~?”

You blushed and laughed sheepishly as he took to leading you this time, noticing he had a spring in his step now that he had control over you again. Though you were suddenly taken aback by the realization that he’d teased you. Hm. You smiled a bit. It may not have seemed like much, but it showed he was growing comfortable with you. Maybe it was a good thing that you’d called him out earlier after all.

The walk to the dining room wasn’t long at all, but it became much longer as you began exchanging in witty banter. Namjoon was quite smart, and it was fun to spar with him mentally. You finally reached the dining room as you finished off your little debate, a silly grin on both your faces.

“I’m telling you, water cannot be wet, it makes other things wet, it can’t make itself wet!”

Your voice held a laugh in it as you voiced your opinion. Namjoon shook his head, rolling his eyes at you playfully. "But water, in itself, is wet! Think about it! The liquid is wet, otherwise, it wouldn’t be able to make other objects wet at all!”  You shook your head with a giggle, opening your mouth to retort again when Yoongi’s voice spoke before you could, with a surprising amount of bitterness.

“Well, don’t you two seem close? Did something happen that the rest of us don’t know about?”

You looked up in surprise, as you’d somehow not even realized that there were 6 other demons in the room with you now in addition to Namjoon. You’d never been a good liar, in fact, you were downright horrible if really pressed, so thankfully, Namjoon answered for both of you as he walked towards the others. It was a simple action, just walking away from you to join his friends.

So why did it feel like the brief bond you’d just had was wrecked beyond repair?

“You’re so funny Yoongi. Could you be any more paranoid?” Namjoon’s voice was clipped and when you looked at him, he looked at the table instead, he was so intent to not look at you.

Suddenly, you wished you could run out of the dining room and hide in the bathroom again.

There was a brief silence before Seokjin stepped forward with a loud clap of his hands. “Alright then! Who’s ready to eat?” His voice was happy, but a close look at his eyes told you he was trying to stop this before it escalated. “I made grilled cheese and tomato soup since I know everyone likes it...I hope that’s alright with you.” His eyes met yours and you forced a grin as you nodded, walking to the table to sit down between Hoseok and Taehyung. “Of course! Grilled cheese is actually a favorite of mine! I can help you cook next time if you’d like. I’m surprised you even know how to, considering you’re a demon and all. Do you guys even eat?”

Seokjin chuckled at your question. “Where we came from, no we didn’t. But ever since we’ve come here, since our bodies naturally adapt to take on the demands expected of its native inhabitants, we do.” You nodded in response before turning your attention to Hoseok as he spoke up hesitantly. “So...about those rules you mentioned?” He wasn’t looking at you, instead choosing to stir his soup.

You smiled, a bit nervous as you tried to put it off, not wanting to make them uncomfortable. “There’s no rush! Why don’t we all eat first? After we’re done, then we can talk it over, okay?” Your voice was gentle, as a quick look around the table showed that they were all very on edge. “Yes, that’s a great idea.” Namjoon chimed in, and he started chatting with Seokjin as he sat across from him after making sure everyone had food in front of them. This started a chain reaction and soon everyone was chatting and back to their usual selves. You sighed in relief and began eating, smiling at how good it was.

You looked up at the sound of your name, seeing Taehyung smiling fondly at you as he motioned to the corner of your mouth. “You have some soup right…” You blushed a bit and reached up to wipe it with your napkin, only for Yoongi to interrupt as he appeared behind you, apparently having gotten up to put his dishes in the sink. “I got it.” You turned to look at him in surprise and in that brief second he’d bent down, and licked it off the corner of your mouth, smirking devilishly at you as he gave a hum at the delicious taste, before walking off like nothing happened. You quickly ducked your head in embarrassment, laughing nervously as you tried to brush it off, even as your heart was beating a mile a minute and the intensity of his gaze felt burned in your mind.

“Ready to talk rules now angel?”

Jungkook’s voice made you turn to look at him and the smirk on his face didn’t help your flustered state in the least, though you forced yourself to nod, noticing the others attention had all turned to you.

Jimin stood up and was pulling you out of your own seat at that, suddenly very excited for a reason you didn’t understand. Weren’t they nervous about this before you’d began eating? You grew a bit suspicious. Clearly, something had changed that you weren’t aware of. “Wait! The dish-” You turned, wanting to help but Seokjin waved his hand with a light laugh. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll do them after we talk. It’s better to let them soak anyway.” He reassured. You managed a brief nod before Jimin was dragging you, finally ending up in a living room with a couch he quickly sat you down on before he snuggled in beside you. The others all filed in and made themselves comfortable. Hoseok and Namjoon took the cute loveseat diagonal from you, while Yoongi took the seat beside you and Seokjin sat on the other side of Jimin. Jungkook and Taehyung took a recliner each, at the opposite angle to the loveseat.

The positioning of the chairs made you feel like you were performing on stage or something. You looked down, fidgeting with your fingers as you began to speak.

“So...um...I guess the first thing I wanna say is that I’m setting these rules and boundaries not because I don’t trust you guys because I totally do, I just feel a little apprehensive is all. I mean, I’ve never lived with anyone besides my parents before now, and in addition to you being boys, there’s the whole added dimension of you all being demons, and incubi at that.”

You realized you were rambling a bit and grew quiet, shyly observing the boys reactions as you looked up. They didn’t seem offended so that was good but...there was an odd cheerfulness in their expressions that you didn’t particularly like. Your suspicions were confirmed when Namjoon spoke up. “We’re totally fine with that...but for every rule you make, we either get to have one too or negotiate on the one you make.” He sounded awful proud of himself and you took a moment to mull it over.

It really wasn’t that bad a deal. It seemed fair, to both of you, and so you nodded.

“Alright, fine. But there are certain things that are hard stops for me that you’re going to need to respect with no room for negotiation. To be fair, I’ll only have 3. Alright?”

Namjoon’s eyes darkened and a smirk twitched at his lips as he hid his irritation behind it.

“Who’s the one being business-like now?”

You cleared your throat, suddenly very aware of how red his little comment had made you and ignored his cheeky ass grin. Bastard.

“A-Anyway, my first rule is that you can’t just...come onto me like you did in the car. It was too much for me and I wasn’t prepared at all. You all know very well I’m a virgin, so please, go easy on me.” Your voice grew a bit quieter as you looked down at your hands again until Yoongi raised your chin to meet his cool gaze.

“...Not a chance.”

You stared at him for a moment before you fully processed his words but when you did, your cheeks heated from outrage rather than in embarrassment for once. “W-Why not!?”

Hoseok spoke up with a serious tone while you basically had a staring contest with Yoongi. “Did you not see how you affected all of us? There’s no way we’re going to be able to hold ourselves back from ravishing you, especially your virgin body.” You finally looked away from Yoongi as he released your chin and felt your cheeks heat as you saw Hoseok lick his lips hungrily while staring you down.

“W-Well...never in public then!”

“...Not even with your exhibition kink?”

Your head whipped around so fast to glare at Jungkook you swear you got whiplash, even though you heard Yoongi snort in amusement. “Do not even go there Jeon Jungkook. We are so far from being there right now!”

He merely smirked back at you and leaned back into the couch, leaning his head on his arms comfortably as he spread his legs, further showing his confidence. His smirk grew into a bunny smile as he no doubt realized his dominant posture got you going all over again. “Why not? You seemed to like it plenty when you noticed my hyungs were watching you fall apart under our touch.”

You scrambled for words, before huffing. “That’s not the point! I don’t know you guys! Not really!” You took a deep breath to further calm yourself before continuing. “Just because I have kinks in my mind that you know of doesn’t give you the right to use them on me as you please. I’ve never done any of this kinda stuff before and it’s important to me for it to have meaning!”

Taehyung finally spoke up, playing mediator. “Alright, so how about this? We can mess with you in public as we please to a fair extent, and we won’t take it too far. Keep in mind we can tell when you get close, or when it’s getting to be too much for you so we’ll stop before you get to that point. And, if we’re in public, we’ll warn you beforehand with a whisper or a hand on your thigh or something. But, in return, that means when we get you alone back here you're at our mercy. Fair?”

You thought it over and reluctantly nodded. “...Okay. But Go-” You caught yourself before the holy being’s name could slip fully from your lips and swallow before continuing. “Don’t take it too far or the rule gets stricter. Got it?” At their nods, you sighed. “Alright. And what about going easy on me?”

Seokjin snorted so suddenly that you looked at him in surprise but his expression wasn’t amused. It was stone cold dominance. “You don’t really want that, do you?” The words themselves were innocent but the dark, sultry tone he delivered them in had you shivering, too scared of what would happen if you looked away to break his intense gaze. “...N-No.” You admitted, voice meek. He gave a hum of approval at your answer and you crossed your legs at his praise to hide your growing arousal. “Good girl.”  

Damn them all, weren’t you supposed to be the one in control right now!?

From then on, it became a tug of war between you and the others. You hard stop rules were all agreed to so far. The stoplight system was your first one since while the boys knew your body and desires intimately, they didn’t know how much you could take mentally. So, when you said yellow they had to slow down whatever they were doing, and if you said red, they had to stop immediately. Simple enough. The second one was even simpler. If you said stop when they started doing something or were about to, they had to listen, because sometimes, you just weren’t in the mood, or you’d become wet despite not being aroused in the least.

They added a rule of their own when you said they couldn’t bring any people they wanted to feed off of, saying you, in turn, couldn’t bring any guys you liked, either. They wouldn’t elaborate on why, but you gave in, figuring it was important thanks to how serious they’d become. You doubted other guys would be an issue anyway with your previous track record so it wasn’t a big deal to you.

“My final hard stop rule is that I just want to know more about your kind.” You rushed to correct yourself as you saw some of them grow defensive, while others tensed, or outright glared at you. You're pretty sure you even heard Hoesok growl at you before Namjoon put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “I don’t need to know everything, I just want to know what you're capable of, and what I should look out for from others of your kind. I’m an uneducated Human and I read that demons are getting more brazen, and starting to pick up Humans for the human trafficking industry, in retaliation for all the demons going missing thanks to others of my kind doing the same to yours. I just want to be safe.”

“I know you said no negotiation, but there needs to be on this one. Some of our abilities will be used on you and we want to surprise you with them. Besides that, while we won’t tell you the abilities of the other types, out of respect, we will tell you what to stay away from when it comes up. You really won’t have to worry about staying safe. We’ll be with you when you go to demon parties and clubs with us, and we’ll be sure to make it known to the others that you belong to us.”

Jimin smirked before you could even open your mouth to retaliate. “Don’t get offended over that belong to us comment Taehyung made. It’s merely how we view Mortals in Demon society. You’ll grow used to it, and you like it anyway, so there’s no need to pretend you don’t.” His voice was sweet but the words themselves made you blush, and also a little confused. You weren’t physically aroused from that comment, you’d merely thought it was a hot concept.

You nodded though, pushing it to the back of your mind for now as you gave in to the compromise.

Hoseok spoke up next, a smirk reminding you that he wasn’t just the sweet boy he appeared to be and that he was indeed just as despicable as the others. “Fine. Our rule is that we still get to use suggestion, and any other abilities we want on you, if it’ll bring you more pleasure, and isn’t taking advantage. Fair?”

You nodded again after a moment’s thought. Honestly, you had the feeling that if you declined, they’d just do it anyway and hide it better. Plus, the other rules you’d set meant you could stop them if you needed.

You opened your mouth to continue when Taehyung squinted at you suddenly and leaned forward in an attempt to see better. “Is that what I think it is?” His voice was a low, predatory growl that made your eyes widen as you rushed to look at what he was talking about. You looked down and winced, noticing Namjoon’s collar had fallen a bit causing the hickey to peek out. Shit.

“It’s really nothing, don’t worry about it!!!” Your voice was higher pitched than normal as you waved your hands but they all saw through you easily. Yoongi grabbed the collar and pulled it down with ease despite you trying to struggle, actually growling like a dog when he saw Jimin’s mark on you. “...Which one of them did it?” Seokjin’s voice broke the now very tension-filled room.

“Oh, I mean...I-I don’t remember!” You stumbled over your words, feeling like you needed to protect Jimin from the others as you saw how angry they all looked.

Yoongi suddenly roughly pulled you to your feet, pulling you after him and ignoring your protests. “Yoongi stop! Where are we going? We’re not done talking yet!”

“We are now. Until you’re ready to tell us who gave you that fucking hickey, no rule is going to protect you from what we do to you angel.” Namjoon’s voice at your ear made you shiver subconsciously.

“It’s just a small hickey! It’s not even that bad, you guys are overreacting! I’m sure it was just a mistake!”

You yelped as Hoseok suddenly pulled you away from Yoongi’s grip, slamming his hands next to your face as you were cornered against a door. “You said you wanted to learn more about our kind, didn’t you? Well, now we’re going to teach you, first hand. By marking you like that, he’s created a connection between himself and you on a very intimate level. He can now hear some of your thoughts, feel some of your emotions, and on top of that, he’s even more in touch with your arousal. We’re incubi, masters of bringing Humans pleasure and you think it was a mistake?” He chuckled darkly, and you gasped quietly as you saw his eyes turn a dark, nearly hypnotic shade of red.

“Lay off her Hoseok. I know it’s been a long time since you last fed, but you need to stay calm.” Namjoon’s voice was quiet but serious. He merely continued glaring down at you with his strangely beautiful eyes, gritting his teeth and clenching his fists. “Back off. Now, Hobi.” Seokjin’s voice gave him the push he needed as he huffed before taking a few steps away from you, looking away to collect himself.

“W-Why are his eyes red? I thought you all had black eyes, like Yoongi’s.” 

Said male whirled to look at you and chuckled darkly. “Perceptive little thing, aren’t you? There’s a lot you don’t understand yet, but I suppose we can tell you a bit, to appease your Mortal curiosity.” 

You quickly grew irritated, not taking well to being patronized and talked down to. “I’m not a child, stop treating me like one!” You snapped, although you were quickly cut off by Yoongi, as he cornered you, just as quickly as Hoseok had moments before. He smirked, smugly, and gently caressed your face. “You are to us. We’ve been around for a very long time, in many different forms. Maybe we ought to teach you how to respect your elders. What do you think?” He questioned turning to look at the makeshift leader who'd been almost entirely silent save for scolding Hoseok. 

He seemed to contemplate Yoongi’s offer, eyes searching yours, expression blank, before he smirked, causing ice to shoot through your veins. “Mm. Fine. But let's not take it too far. She-”

You didn't hear Namjoon's last words as you were entirely distracted by Yoongi’s lips roughly assaulting your own, full of passion as you nervously fumbled to kiss back, surprised but not wanting your first kiss to go to waste. You felt Yoongi smirk against your lips at your clumsy attempt though he pulled back after a few more seconds, leaving you dazed. 

“The fuck Yoongi!? You know she's never kissed anyone before you should've checked with the rest of us!!!” Seokjin seethed, clenching his fists. 

Yoongi merely shrugged. “Sorry.” The smug grin tugging at his lips, however, showed he was anything but and he found himself shoved aside by Seokjin. 

“Hey-”

“I'm fine, don't worry.” He waved off Namjoon and his eyes were indeed their typical honey brown unlike Hoseok’s. He loomed over you and you gasped as he abruptly pinned your hands above your head, causing heat to immediately flood your core. He sensed your arousal and smirked as you looked behind him, noticing the others’ eyes had darkened. 

“Just want to whet my appetite a bit. I'm the most experienced out of all of us anyway. Yoongi only took her first kiss…there's still so many more firsts we can take~”

Your voice and will were weak. 

“Don't I get a say in this?”

Seokjin purred in response. “Come now darling, no need to lie to us. We don't judge. Now then, you were wondering about our eyes earlier, correct?”

He kept talking casually, all the while keeping you pinned easily, even as you instinctively tried to get free when the other demons approached you. 

“Well, it’s actually very simple. See, when we haven’t fed in a good while, our eyes may turn red if we get angry, or smell a potential food source. Sometimes it’ll happen even if we just spot easy prey. In addition, our red eyes enhance our other abilities, so it’s easier for us to get food, much like when you Humans have a sudden burst of adrenaline in stressful situations.” As he continued speaking, the other 3 reached out and began idly letting their fingers trace across your pinned body. Yoongi dwelled at your neck and collarbone, as Namjoon traced your torso while Hoseok let one of his hands run through your hair, and the other traced the other side of your midsection. “As for our black eyes-” He moved your wrists to one of his large hands and held you with ease, raising your chin to force you to meet his gaze so abruptly you gasped. You hadn’t even realized he’d moved and you watched in fascination as his caramel pools were taken over by an inky black that also covered the whites of his eyes. “These are just our natural color. You Mortals seem to fear it innately most likely due to the media's portrayal of us, and so, as I mentioned briefly during lunch, our bodies naturally adapt to our environment, including the way our eyes look so we can blend in better.”

Seokjin’s words made sense but you found yourself getting distracted as Hoseok began teasing your waistline, ever so slowly creeping lower and the other two demons touch only enhanced everything you were feeling. Their featherlight touch was starting to drive you mad, and you attempted to squirm in Jin’s grip again, though he merely smiled kindly and held you firmer against the door. Namjoon’s breath tickled your ear as he whispered, huskily. “...We’ll be more than happy to help you out, right after you tell us who gave you that mark.” 

You huffed at that, only to squeak as Hoseok squeezed your hip in warning, sending heat straight to your core as he grumbled his warning, voice somewhat playful, though his eyes held the promise that he would follow through. “Don’t be difficult, c'mon, baby. You’re not the only one who’s frustrated and the longer you make me wait by being stubborn, the meaner I’m gonna be to you…” 

You swallowed back your moan with difficulty, your breathing slowly growing heavier despite your best efforts to stay calm. Yoongi’s observant gaze immediately caught sight of you trying to clench your thighs together for friction and he clucked his tongue, causing Seokjin and him to switch places before you could so much as blink. You couldn’t help the frustrated glare you sent his way if you tried as he forced your legs to spread with his own, keeping you helpless and unable to get even the tiniest bit of relief unless they gave it to you. He merely chuckled at your ire cheekily. 

“Glare at me all you want, you’re the one that’s being stubborn.”

You fought as best you could, and lasted quite a long time considering you were against 4 incubi so you were impressed with your own resilience. It was only when Seokjin and Namjoon began double teaming your neck and one of Hoseok’s fingers brushed across your clothed core that you stifled a moan and gave in. “Hnn...f-fine, fine just, please! It was Jimin!” You shouted out, before succumbing to panting as Jin released you, catching your breath and waiting for you flushed cheeks to die down as they gave you a bit of space to collect yourself somewhat. 

As you fully recovered you finally tuned in to what they were saying. Namjoon chuckled. “It’s a good thing Jimin doesn’t know how to properly Mark her. Their bond is weak, nothing like what it could be.” Yoongi snorted. “Jimin? I’d be more worried about Jungkook. With how possessive he is with his prey? Forget it, poor girl would never leave the house without a proper Mark if he had anything to say about it.” Seokjin shook his head, rolling his eyes at their banter. “Well, we don’t need to worry. All 7 of us are needed, so he wouldn’t be able to do something so drastic without the rest of us...we’ll only use it whenever we take her to Void’s for now.” They all nodded at that and you felt curiosity and confusion bubble up within you. 

A mark that needed all 7 of them? Void’s? You were tempted to ask but thought better of it and instead pretended you didn’t hear anything. Better to keep the ace in your pocket as they say. Plus...you were admittedly still horny behind belief and desperately were craving some relief. You turned, about to make your way to your room when someone whirled you around and tugged you through the very same door they’d been holding you against not 10 minutes earlier. 

“Where do you think you’re going cutie? Don’t tell me you forgot about our agreement. We’re both frustrated...why not help each other~? I’ll just feed off of you if you masturbate alone anyway.” 

You flushed crimson as you looked up at Hoseok, and Yoongi who’d silently slipped in behind him.

“Was I really that obvious?” 

Yoongi smirked before he responded bluntly.

“Sweetheart, you’re basically Niagara Falls down there right now. The fact that you thought we’d ever let you pleasure yourself in solitude is an adorable notion. I’m sure Jungkook, Taehyung, and Jimin were all going to pounce on you if we didn’t tug you in here first. Hell, the way Namjoon was looking at you at lunch earlier, I’m sure even he would’ve pushed his pride aside for a piece of you right now.” His eyes darkened as he talked about Namjoon and you found yourself backing away from him as he approached you, causing you to stumble back onto the bed. 

You looked behind you in surprise and Hoseok took the opportunity to pounce, eyes melting to their usual black out of habit as he pressed his mouth to yours, stifling your surprised cry with ease as Yoongi joined you both on the bed after a few moments. You kissed back with a bit more confidence this time, testing the waters, and Hobi softened at this, reluctantly letting you take control for a moment so you could properly experiment if you wanted to. When you went to pull away though, feeling shy, he grabbed the back of your neck to guide your lips back to his own before tenderly running his tongue across your lower lip, meeting your eyes as you opened them in surprise. The black was gone now, as he forced himself to calm. He was too used to taking his aggression out on his usual victims of fetishists and terrorizers of their kind it seemed. 

He’d need to take it slower with you, he had to remind himself you weren’t experienced with this yet and he wanted to bring you as much pleasure as he possibly could. 

You felt something soft encircle your ankles you realized in a daze and it was only when you attempted to wrap your hands around Hoseok’s neck that you realized you couldn’t move any father as your legs wouldn't move any further. You frowned, pulling away from Hoseok and looking to the foot of the bed only to realize you'd been restrained with silk. Sure, you’d always been interested in bondage, and you knew they would innately know that as well, but before you continued you needed to make sure.

Despite your mounting desire, you pulled away again as Hoseok attempted to kiss you once again forcing yourself to mumble. “S-Stop for a sec.” Immediately both compiled and sat in front of you. Hoseok looked vaguely annoyed but Yoongi was nothing but quiet, waiting patiently until you calmed down enough to speak properly. 

“...I…” you hesitated. “You know I’m a-” Yoongi cut you off, but his voice was gentle for once instead of harsh. “We won’t penetrate you until you’re ready, and ask us to. Even us incubi have standards. None of us will go that far until you explicitly ask for it.”

You sighed in relief and smiled, nodding. “Then...that’s fine. You guys can continue...i-if you want I mean.” You suddenly felt shy as you blushed, and looked away nervously, though Hoseok guided your face to meet his gaze. “Trust me, we always want to angel. Now, let’s have some more fun yeah?” He smirked against your cheek and moved further upwards, switching roles with Yoongi, who easily pulled you into a kiss. You found he used more tongue than Hoseok had and that he was quite skilled with it. It wasn’t long until you were moaning into his mouth, embarrassment long forgotten. Hoseok tapped your wrists in gentle warning before your arms were pulled apart and tied to the bedposts, leaving you tied spread eagle and vulnerable.

Yoongi’s mouth moved to your neck and you winced as his lips brushed across Jimin’s hickey though it quickly turned to pleasure as he began to suck and nip at the sensitive skin on the other side. 

Hoseok meanwhile, snickered at your ear, his fingers idly pulling Namjoon’s shirt over your head with Yoongi’s help and undoing the clasp on your bra. “It’s a good thing you like being marked pretty girl because you’re going to be absolutely covered in them by the end of tonight.” 

You could only mewl in response, so wet you couldn’t move without feeling how soaked you were. You’d have to do Namjoon’s laundry to make it up to him. 

True to their word your mind was soon hazy with want as you whined, desperate as they teased you with lingering touches that only made you crave more. Being restrained as you were definitely enhanced your sensitivity but it was even better than you’d imagined honestly. Every touch they graced your helpless body with made you want to simultaneously beg them to stop, though you somehow still wanted more. 

“You guys are so cruel, making her moan like that when you know I can feel her getting more and more aroused. C’mon let me join!” You looked up in fearful surprise at first at the sudden voice, having not even heard the door open but relaxed once you saw it was just Jimin. 

Yoongi hummed, idly letting his fingers tap along your inner thighs, making you tremble. “I don’t know if we should. It was pretty fucked up of you to try and mark her when you know damn well we prefer marking in a group so we’re all even.” 

Jimin opened his mouth to retaliate but stiffened as Hoseok took over. “If it was your solo pick for a night that’s one thing. But you overstepped, and you deserve to be punished. Why don’t you have a seat?” He cocked his head to the side, and his eyes flashed black as the chair seemed to drag itself across the floor until it was within Jimin’s reach. He grabbed it and hesitated before sitting down after closing the door, the look in Hoseok’s eyes finally convincing him, even though he was dying to touch you. 

Hoseok smirked at his compliance before he turned his attention back to you, letting his hands go back to what they’d been doing previously; playing with your breasts. You squeaked as Yoongi’s fingers teased your covered private area, just the smallest brush of his fingers sending a rush of arousal through you that had both you and Jimin whimpering. 

“Hell, you look perfect like this babe. Stretched out and at our mercy, begging us for more stimulation as we tease you. Mm...this should be your job.” Hobi breathed into your ear, his fingers pinching your nipples in a way that had you hissing in pleasure. 

Yoongi easily took over the dirty talk, tsk’ing as he felt your thighs tense from trying to rub together and picking up his pace, running first one, and then two fingers up and down your clothed core, stopping to rub circles into your clit every now and again to make you gasp. “Horny little slut’d probably love that, wouldn’t you? All you’d get to do was stay here, we’d all come in when we wanted and do as we wished, whether that be edging you for hours…” He slowed his pace, grinning sadistically as you cried out. “Or making you scream till you’re hoarse.” He emphasized his words by picking up his pace further, steadily rubbing circles into your sensitive love button now as Hoseok attacked your ear with his tongue and teeth both, all while his hands continued their merciless rubbing and pinching.

Soon, you were a moaning mess, feeling a familiar warmth building in your stomach that you raced towards with their help. Your first orgasm washed over you and it was everything you’d ever heard about and more. Jesus, was it legal to feel this good? The waves of pleasure slowly ebbed away and it was then that you realized there was pressure on your throat.

You coughed lightly, and looked up at Jimin in surprise, feeling your pussy clench at the dangerous look in his eyes as well as his fingers lightly curled around your throat. 

“What did we say about mentioning those kinds of names hm?”

You rolled your eyes at him and scoffed as he pulled away to let you respond properly. “I didn’t even say it out loud, chill out! You’re the one that wanted to be in my head so bad, don’t blame me for not liking what you hear!”  You snapped back. 

You heard Yoongi suck air in through his teeth hard and even Hoseok tensed behind you as you talked back brazenly but Jimin only smiled, nodded, and walked out of the room with a wave. His parting words made your heart lurch. 

 “Fine. Be a brat if you want. But be warned that every single one of are master brat tamers kitten, and you talking back like that? It won’t last.” 

You laughed nervously at that and asked the two demons as they were untying you and helping you up. “He won’t follow through on that, right? He was just saying it to scare me into submission?” You clarified, a little nervous. You hadn’t even really been thinking when you’d retorted honestly, you were just peeved that he wouldn’t let you come down from your high in peace. 

Yoongi chuckled. “Sweetheart, we all can be pretty scary when we’re angry, but Jimin is the type to hold grudges and he doesn’t forget little slights like this. I’d be careful if I were you.” 

Hoseok further explained at your confused look, handing you a glass of water which you drank thankfully. “Jimin is one of the most giving incubi I’ve ever met...until someone pisses him off badly enough. He once kept a girl who’d broken Taehyung’s nose on the edge for a full week until she was begging him for mercy. Then he forced so many orgasms out of her she couldn’t even put her underwear back on without his help, she was that sensitive. Jimin can be up there with the cruelest of us, we all can, so don’t test us if you know what’s good for you, and be a good girl for us, alright?” Hoseok pecked your cheek before walking out with his typical pep and Yoongi hummed as he patted your head. 

“Don’t let Hobi scare you, Jimin and the rest of us would never be that mean, but we can make it feel like we are, especially because you’re so sensitive and easy to rile up. Jimin plays dirty despite his cute facade, so just be on your guard.” He began making his way to the door though he stopped with a quiet “oh!” of remembrance and turned to face you again. “Try not to let Kook see that bruise on your stomach by the way. He’d feel awful if he knew you got hurt because of him. We’re heading out to get you some of your own clothes in a bit, so get yourself together and meet us in the main hall alright? It’s getting pretty late already.”

With that, he was gone and you were left with your thoughts as you made your way back to Namjoon’s room. You opened the door and walked in, still taken aback from Jimin’s threat, if it could be considered such and was met with the smooth expanse of Namjoon’s bare back making you flush and turn your own back to him. “I’m so sorry, I totally forgot to knock!”

Namjoon merely snickered at your reaction, turning you around with a wink. “No need to knock. You’re more than welcome to look cutie, I was just getting changed for our outing.” He pursed his lips as he took in your hastily reassembled form, a coy smirk touching his lips as he caught the lingering scent of your release. “Looks like you need a new change of clothes hm? Here.” He dug around his closet for a moment and came back to hand you another change of clothes, making you bow your head in sheepish thanks as you made your way to the bathroom to change. 

“Next time, it won’t be Hoseok and Yoongi who punish you. It’ll be me, and I can promise you that if you think Jimin is scary, you don’t want to see how I act if you try and hide a mark like that from me again. Are we clear?” 

You blushed at the clear dominance in his tone and nodded furiously, turning to look back and him and flinching as you realized he was right behind you now, towering over you and still shirtless though you forced yourself to look nowhere but at his eyes. “Y-Yes yes, of course!” He smirked at your response and leaned down. You thought he was going to kiss you but instead, his lips went to your neck. “It’s not fair that Yoongi, Hoseok, and Jimin all got to mark you. I think I deserve a bond with you too...don’t you babygirl?” At your eager nod, you felt his smirk widen against your skin and then the feel of teeth made you yelp and instinctively struggle.

This wasn’t a nibble, lick, or suck like with the others. This was a bite. And fuck if it didn’t make you hot and bothered all over again. It was over way too soon for your liking, but once he was done you were sure his was the biggest mark, a message to the others who would probably want to mark you as well now. Your eyes widened as you saw blood-your blood- dribble from his lips. 

His tongue darted out and licked it into his mouth, causing his eyes to flash red before he turned away from you abruptly, muttering in a strangled voice. “You should go get ready.” 

It was only when he heard the bathroom door shut and fabric hitting the floor that he let his eyes close in ecstasy. 

Another thing that triggered red eyes?

Blood.

A/N: And that’s a wrap on Chapter 2 of Tainting Purity! I very much hope it lives up the hype since I rewrote this like 3 times lol. 

We’ve got some juicy stuff going on now so that’s exciting! 

If any of you guys are bored and really likes this series, having a beta reader to bounce ideas off of/help me edit would be super helpful if anyone is interested! Just message me or shoot me an ask, maybe I’ll make a Discord or something if enough people want to! 

Also, fun idea...send me asks for any of the boys in this series if you want and I'll answer in character! Just be sure to specify, and know in advance that I’ll dance around spoiler questions, though I may through the occasional hint in. We’ll see.

As always, any and all feedback makes me inspired and also feeds my praise kink so please do tell me whatcha thought, or just come and rant incoherently! I love it all! 

Okay, love you guys, thanks so much for reading!

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Psycho Analysis: Lord Voldemort

(WARNING! This analysis contains SPOILERS!)

Evil overlords are a dime a dozen, as are evil wizards. It really takes a special someone to make something so trite and overdone into an interesting character, and once upon a time, J.K. Rowling was that special someone.

Lord Voldemort was a truly terrifying look at a loveless monster, a man so hell-bent on escaping his own mortality and so devoid of anything resembling love in his life he callously killed his way through wizards and muggles alike in a desperate attempt to remain eternal and powerful, playing into racist and supremacist ideology to attract a following of like-minded individuals he could bend to his will. He was an utterly terrifying and unsympathetic monster, but a fascinatingly complex one that the story goes out of its way to explain while at the same time showing his tragedies do not make him worthy of sympathy, but rather pity that such a miserable creature could ever exist.

Then along came the movies.

The movies certainly did not skimp on portraying Voldemort as a terrifying force, but they did unfortunately cut a lot of what made him a truly interesting character, instead settling in to making him a more straightforward evil wizard. With all that said, is there enough to redeem him and make him engaging in the films?

Actor: Ralph Fiennes is no stranger to playing Nazis, as he played the monstrous Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List; really, there was no actor more perfect to play what amounts to Wizard Hitler. From Goblet of Fire onwards, Fiennes was the face of the Dark Lord, and he managed to make every minute he was onscreen engaging and intense. Fiennes took the watered down Voldemort of the movies and with his acting managed to elevate him to be something akin to a Darth Vader for a younger generation.

Motivation/Goals: In the books, Rowling meticulously showcased the progression of Voldemort from The child Tom Riddle to the monster he is in the present. His destiny was basically wired into him from conception: he was the product of magical date rape, and of course his muggle father wanted nothing to do with him when his mother revealed the truth. Born from lust amd cruelty rather than love, the young Riddle had a miserable childhood that twisted him into an utter sociopath, and when he was finally brought to Hogwarts he began asking around and found out the truth of creating horcruxes, which led him down a dark path of murder and splitting of his soul in a never ending flight from death (as the name he chose for himself literally means).

The movie version… only uses bits and pieces. A lot of this comes from the fact the adaptation of Half-Blood Prince is a mess that slices a lot of relevant information and interesting character scenes out (Which was a problem that plagued a lot of the later Potter films), leading to just about everything but the horcrux stuff being left out, as the plot literally could not function without that information. This does lead to movie Voldermort coming off as a bit more generic than he should have given his prestigious literary version, basically assuming the viewer is familiar with the source material so that you can assume the bits they leave out.

At the very least the movie version of Voldemort is still an evil sorcerous lich, who is desperately trying to kill Harry to try and avoid the fate he was dictated to befall by prophecy and to rid himself of a boy who is a constant thorn in his side. For what he is, he’s still probably good as far as evil wizards go, though it is a shame all that they left out.

Personality: Voldemort’s personality is where he truly shines. Fiennes’ plays Voldemort as the hammiest, creepiest, most sinister freakshow to ever walk the earth. He can’t help himself from being so over-the-top in anything he does, be it his movements or the casting of his favorite spell: “AVADA KEDAVRA!”

More intriguing to me are moments like his infamous hug from Draco or that incredibly bizarre laugh he does in The Deathly Hallows: Part 2. Both moments are incredibly awkward, uncomfortable, and even a bit weird and silly, but I think they actually fit the character perfectly and only serve to make Voldemort even creepier. Consider for a moment that Voldemort can hardly be considered human anymore; he has shattered his soul into seven pieces in his quest for immortality to the point where he looks more like a snake or a zombie than any living man. Also consider that Voldemort is, at this point, utterly incapable of understanding or feeling love, something made explicit even if his backstory isn’t as detailed as in the book. Is it any wonder he can’t laugh or hug the way a normal human would? What he’s doing is merely affecting what he sees as the appropriate action in the moment, and that is horribly unsettling. Voldemort is a monster who no longer knows how to act like the man he once was.

Final Fate: If there’s one thing the movie does far better than the book, it’s give a satisfying end to Voldemort. After a long, intense duel, Harry is finally able to backfire his own spell on him and cause Voldemort to crumble into ash, with Lily’s leitmotif playing as if to subtly indicate that one again the love of Harry’s mother has helped destroy the Dark Lord. It’s really beatiful and poetic, and far better than Harry casting a single Expelliarmus and ragdolling Voldemort.

Best Scene: As lackluster and messy as Goblet of Fire is, one thing Is for sure: they did not drop the ball on having Voldemort take the stage. The Dark Lord’s rebirth, taunting and tormenting of Harry, and first proper duel with The Boy Who Lived, all as Harry desperately struggles to grab the Triwizard Cup and Cedric’s corpse so he can return are some of the most fantastic moments in the franchise and certainly help Voldemort live up to all of the hype.

Best Quote: Behold! A philosophy as delusional and insane as Thanos’, and no less quotable: “There is no good and evil. There is only power, and those too weak to seek it.”

Final Thoughts & Score: Voldemort seems like a very mixed bag, but ultimately I do think he manages to live up to the book version in his own way. While I do bemoan the lack of complexity the movie version has, he makes up for it with sheer bombast, just the sort of hammy evil I love to see in fantasy villains. Fiennes’ performance really does wonders, what with all of the odd mannerisms, inflections, and odd vocal choices he gives him.

And it’s not like the complexity is entirely gone, either; even watered down, Voldemort is still Voldemort, and the core concept – that he is a monster made from a lack of love and who can never experience love, and thus can only be defeated by love – is still established fairly well and utilized in key areas, such as the climax of the first film, his resurrection in the fourth film, and of course his ultimate defeat in the eighth. You could also make arguments for love helping defeat him in the second movie, with Harry’s blossoming love for Ginny bursting forth to allow him to slay the basilisk and destroy the journal… though even I’ll admit that one’s a bit of a stretch.

I think that movie Voldemort gets a high 9/10, almost a perfect score but I think that leaving out bits and pieces from the book that help flesh him out holds him back just a little bit. He is otherwise a fantastically performed and utterly terrifying villain, one of the best of our time, and certainly the gold standard to which all other evil wizards ought to be held to.

[starberry-cupcake]

Overall thoughts on Les Mis BBC

I decided, after all those summaries I made, to write what I hope can be a more coherent opinion on what I thought of the adaptation as a whole. I wanted to make sure to state that my critical reactions weren’t for entertainment purposes only or exaggerated for the fun of it but based on real concerns I’ll expand in this post. This is like the “serious companion”, if you will. 

I don’t know if anyone cares about it at this point, but I feel that even though my summaries helped me go through the immediate frustrations in a (mostly) lighthearted way, it’s the distance from having watched it all what gave me a little bit more clarity to order my thoughts. 

I’ve established my opinion isn’t worth a damn, I’m not smart or knowledgeable enough for this fandom and, needless to say, these are all my personal opinions, take them with a grain of salt or a bathtub of it. I’m a worthless nobody and my words have no value, but the internet is still (sort of) free, so here I go.  

Introduction: the initial news, Andrew Davies & the PR mess

BBC announced the adaptations of 2 media phenomenons which started as books that I love so much I’m considering tattoos of both. And, for both of them, my main concerns were on the person adapting the script. 

On the one hand, there’s His Dark Materials, a book series that made me the person I am today, pretty much. One of the directors is none other than Tom Hooper (what are the odds) and the script adaptation was in the hands of Jack Thorne. Cursed Child Jack Thorne. Yeah, not thrilled about that. 

Surprisingly enough, His Dark Materials was given a projection of 3 possible seasons, rather than just one, the 3rd hasn’t been yet confirmed but the fact that the script was made thinking on one season per major book on the series, and that each season has 8 episodes planned, at least gives me a bit of hope, even if the person adapting it isn’t in my favorites list. 

Les Mis, on the other hand, went to the hands of Andrew Davies, another person I don’t trust. 

I’m one of those folk who was never too fond of the ‘95 version of Pride and Prejudice, mainly because of how Darcy was made into a sort of sex symbol, where his flaws were seen as “attractive marks of broody character” rather than vulnerability and with gratuitous sexualizing fanservice. I know a lot of people love it for that and that’s cool, you do you, but it’s not for me. 

Then, when he adapted War and Peace, he talked about adding more sex to it and had the Kuragin siblings shown explicitly sleeping together from the get-go in episode 1 and that’s when I stopped watching (there were other things I didn’t like but that one was my limit). 

To make matters worse, it made me weary that Les Mis was getting an overall amount of only 6 episodes whereas HDM was getting a potential 24-ish. That was an odd choice. 

So, as you can guess, I knew coming in that Davies writing the script, a script with a limited time-frame for the story, was a huge risk. 

But, on the other hand, as the cast was announced, I got excited. Especially for people like Archie Madekwe, Turlough Convery, Erin Kellyman and some famous actors like David Oyelowo. Their filming logs on social media, how nice they all were and how much fun they had filming made me happy. I felt that maybe these great folks could turn around whatever the scrip had to disappoint me. 

But then came all the PR stuff. 

The more I read Davies & co. talking about the show, the less hope I had for it. Talking very badly about the musical and the 2012 movie, calling female characters “not complicated”, insulting Cosette, saying that Javert’s lack of explicit heterosexual sex in the brick was reason enough to push a homosexual narrative centered on an unhealthy behavior, patting themselves on the back for having a diverse cast as if no other adaptation of Les Mis had ever done it before...even their talks about Fantine’s make up made me weary. And, let’s not forget their ridiculous insistence on not having songs. 

By the time the show premiered, my hopes had dwindled. The excitement I had upon knowing there would be another Les Mis adaptation so soon, a BBC one at that, and with a cast I had hopes for, was blurred by all the nonsense of PR and I was more afraid than hopeful. 

In the end, after having watched it completely, and as you can see for my summaries, I was heavily disappointed. I’ll try to list some of my biggest concerns, in no particular order. 

I can’t be super extensive about it, because there are a lot of points to go over, but there are a lot of amazing opinion pieces out there about specific issues, so you don’t need me for that. 

Anyway, let’s delve into some of my biggest problems with BBC Les Mis.

Problem #1: The portrayal of femininity

Solely by the fact that Davies stated that women on Les Mis “are not terribly complicated” you know that things are not going to go all too well on that front. 

I’m going to pick 3 characters to showcase how badly women were portrayed in this: Fantine, Cosette and Éponine. I’ll leave other characters for another section. 

1. Fantine

I’ve talked about Fantine before, upon receiving some questions on my summaries, but I’ll try to explain it all in a more understandable way. 

The lens in which Fantine was seen was sexist from the get-go. The way in which the story was framed made the audience complicit in the choices she was making, choices that were negatively regarded by the narrative perspective alone. Her “fall to disgrace” was framed as her own decisions being incorrect, silly mistakes that were easily avoidable, and never regarded as the result of living in a society that was unable to contain her and see her as a valid human being. But we’ll get to that when we talk about the politics (or lack thereof) on this show. 

Like I said in my response before, the way in which Fantine is portrayed, even in the musical itself, varies greatly performance to performance. Patti LuPone performing I Dreamed a Dream after Fantine gets dismissed isn’t like Anne Hathaway performing it after she has become a prostitute and neither carry the same implications as Allison Blackwell in the Liesl Tommy’s Dallas modern production, influenced by her experience in apartheid South Africa. 

Still, the key element to developing Fantine’s portrayal, when it comes to sexism and the showcasing of her environment, has two layers: the actual oppression showcased in the source material and the contemporary interpretation or lens in which an adaptation will view it. 

In this version, Fantine’s character was toned down in her attitude. She was less reactive than in the brick, a lot more passive, a lot more of a tragic figure, which paired up with the fact that this adaptation covered her entire “fall to ruin”, from meeting Tholomyès onward, made her a victim of everything that happened to her. 

A victim of her own bad decisions, though, not of a social context that was failing her. 

But the worst part is in how the focus of the show is placed. You can have Fantine being a summarized version of herself, with less spunk, and still showcase through her that the circumstances she was in were permeated by an escalating force of social disadvantage and oppression. 

This adaptation made, like I said, the audience complicit in Fantine’s decisions as if she was a princess in a movie, unaware of the threats she was getting herself into by her own naive foolishness. 

Tholomyès is blatantly shady, clearly dishonest, not at all charming or in any way trustworthy and Fantine gets a “voice of reason” on a friend who tells her various times that he will eventually leave. There are a lot of red flags, blatant for the audience, that Fantine chooses to dismiss. The show focuses less on why Fantine trusted Tholomyès and more on her making a clear bad choice we all knew was doomed from the start. 

This becomes a problem once again when she chooses to leave Cosette with the Thénardiers. They are very clearly shady, very blatantly aggressive and ready to take advantage of her, visibly manhandling Cosette in front of her and asking for more money on the spot, and Fantine again naively ignores all of this. 

They do it again when she enters employment in Montreuil. She talks to Valjean himself in this version, and is asked repeatedly and with kindness if she has a family. The scene makes it seem as if she could have easily told the truth, especially because we were previously given a scene in which Fantine hears a speech talking about how Valjean is the Best Person Ever and could potentially help her. Still, she chooses to repeatedly lie and the show makes it seem less for necessity and more for a sense of pride of some sort. 

(Also, as a foreshadowing of creepy Valjean to come, there are some insinuations from her co-workers that she could seduce Valjean, which is confusingly placed and awkwardly added where it is.)

Then, after she’s dismissed, there’s a man in a post office who asks her, after receiving letters from the Thénardiers (to which she reacts a lot more passively than in the brick), why she doesn’t bring Cosette to live with her, in a condescending tone, as if he was stating the obvious. Fantine responds again as if she was doing it out of pride. The same man is the one to suggest her to start selling her body and then tell her she should have done it before selling her hair and teeth because “nobody would pay for her after that”. 

Every turn we’re met with ways in which Fantine’s decisions are seen as foolish in the eyes of the viewer. It’s like Blue’s Clues or Dora the Explorer when they ask stuff to the audience for the kids to say they shouldn’t do something. It’s patronizing as fuck, is what it is. And, yes, sexist. 

These narrative choices are sexist because they erase most of the social and political situation which made Fantine vulnerable in the first place, to push the tragic drama as if she was a victim of being “too naive”. It’s sexist because it makes the audience know from the get go that what Fantine is doing is a “bad choice”, easily avoidable mistakes that whoever writes is smart enough to sense are bad but poor naive Fantine can’t understand. 

It isn’t just that she’s called a whore a lot of times, that she’s smashed against walls and the ground hard enough that Lily Collins was actually hurt, that she’s shown explicitly being used by a patron on the street. It’s that all of it is done with the added layer of her having “chosen wrong”. That everything is framed as the consequences of actions that the narrative voice, as well as the audience, are smart enough to know are wrong, but poor little Fantine can’t handle.

Like many things in this adaptation we’ll see later, Fantine’s journey is framed more like the tragic end of a woman who didn’t know how to choose right and was punished for said choices rather than the result of an unfair society which didn’t allow women any freedom to choose and didn’t see them as worthy human beings. 

2. Cosette

When Andrew Davies called Cosette a “pretty nauseating character” in need of change, I knew I was up against one of those people. 

Cosette is probably one of the most underestimated female characters in literature, and adaptations tend to do her dirty very often. I’m not even fond of her interpretation in the musical all that much, which goes in tow with the interpretation of Éponine. I’ve seen my fair share of men on youtube claiming Gavroche should be the face of Les Mis rather than Cosette, I’ve received my fair amount of messages claiming she’s The Worst, I’ve seen it all. 

This adaptation does with Cosette something that, out of context, I would have thought impossible. They manage to somehow attempt to make her more “active” (they would call it “strong” but I have problems with that denomination) while making her even more of a helpless victim. It’s a pretty impressive oxymoron. 

Let’s begin with little Cosette. 

This adaptation does something very weird in that it only showcases Cosette’s storyline as a child when it serves other characters, but then intends to build upon the abuse by mentioning it or making it clear that adult Cosette remembers it well. 

So we see Cosette when she’s important to Fantine’s storyline, the Thénardiers’s storyline or Valjean’s storyline, but not much about her on her own, aside from one time she’s looking at dolls and another time when she’s being beaten up by Madame Thénardier, which could be also a moment for the Thénardiers and not solely for Cosette’s narrative. 

What I mean with this is that the view on her is reduced to a side character rather than a main one and, with that, her perspective on her own abuse isn’t taken into account. You don’t know how Cosette feels about things, you don’t see her perspective on it, you only see what others do to her but never get to see her side of it. For all the musical erases of her narrative, at least they give her Castle on a Cloud. 

It’s with little Cosette where we start to see this weird sense of sexually charged perception towards her relationship with Valjean. 

For some inexplicable and highly alarming reason, it’s implied by various witnesses in different occasions that Valjean’s intentions with Cosette may be inappropriate, and I would have let it slide as just people thinking The Worst out of living in a social context in which The Worst is most often the truth, hadn’t that perception carried throughout the series and mixed with Valjean’s erratic and possessive characterization. 

When Cosette grows up, she gains a bit more focus, but she also starts to be charged a lot more sexually. 

Both Cosette and Éponine are sexualized and objectivized in this adaptation. This will be addressed later, but most often than not this sexualization acts as an accessory to a narrative about masculinity. 

Cosette’s virtue, beauty and body are talked about and even exposed in various moments. They tell her she can’t be a nun because that would be “a waste of her beauty”. In that dreadful scene in the dress shop I talked about in summary 4, the shop assistant again implies that Cosette is Valjean’s lover and lets him see her in undergarments through the curtain, with clear intentions. Valjean’s erratic persona is intent on separating her from Marius, explicitly telling her he’s worried that she will be taken advantage of by men, bringing up Fantine’s history to her with that in mind, while putting her in danger and in the company of the Thénardiers again, in more than one occasion. 

Adult Cosette has visible signs of the trauma she suffered, which is an interesting direction to go. I haven’t seen an adaptation taking such a big route on her remembering her past abuse, and is a change that worked in performance, Ellie did some great visible responses like covering herself when Valjean wakes her up or going fight or flight every time she sees Thénardier. She is visibly upset when Marius gives him money and looks both angry yet still hesitant when she sees the man for the last time. 

But all that kind of loses its importance when the men around her not only don’t give a shit but also do their worst. 

Valjean manhandles her, harms her even, pushes her to the limits of her emotional state by taking her to see the prisoners intentionally after she mentioned prison, acting more possessive than caring and more erratically violent than conflicted and concerned. 

Marius has a somewhat wet dream about her and then again dreams with her in confusing ways when he’s out of the barricade, with his grandfather talking about her as if she’s a piece of meat even after he meets her and she’s right in front of him. 

They tried to make Cosette more aggressive, I think, more reactive, which in some moments worked. But when the lens in which she’s viewed is objectivizing, when she’s being commented on, offered and treated as an object, then it isn’t enough. It makes it worse, actually. 

I’m sorry for Ellie, though, she did good. 

3. Éponine

Much like Cosette, Éponine’s childhood was all but a few cameos. It’s very often that adaptations try to “tone down” Éponine in order to pull a narrative of her as an underdog in a love triangle, the “friendzoned” girl who tragically dies. The musical does that, for example. 

Some of Éponine’s most controversial actions in the brick tend to be most often deleted or changed, except for adaptations in which she’s an “enemy” to Cosette’s narrative of a classic heroine. 

It isn’t easy to find adaptations that are able to make Éponine showcase the complexity of her canon character not as a problem but as what makes her character so good and important in the overall story. Hey, even fandom sometimes tends to romanticize Éponine as if she had to be “redeemed” in order to be seen as a worthy character (but that happens a lot with female characters in general). 

Éponine doesn’t exist for Marius’s narrative, as the other girl in a love triangle, or for Cosette’s narrative, as an enemy, she’s her own character with her own reason for existing and complex human dynamics that are extremely permeated by the social circumstances she’s immersed in and represents. 

I’d say this adaptation is on the group that uses her for Marius’s storyline.

Added to that, it’s one of the worst I’ve seen on that case, because in this one, Marius is complicit of Éponine’s intentions, which are sexualized to a degree I don’t feel comfortable with. 

We’ll talk a bit more about the Marius side of things later, but for Éponine, it meant she was reduced to a character that exists to sexually awaken Marius rather than a tragic figure on her own or even a piece of a love triangle. So, basically, this is the worst I’ve seen in a while. 

This is clearly seen in that interview when Davies explained why he added that “wet dream” scene, saying:

“One of the best things Hugo does is to have Eponine tease Marius with her sexiness because he is a bit of a prig. So I have introduced a scene where Marius, even though he is in love with Cosette, has a wet dream about Eponine and feels rather guilty about it. I think it fits into the psychology of the book.” Source

Let’s leave out the part where he considers that to be “one of the best things Hugo does” because I cannot deal with that right now. Let’s focus on the other bit.

Like this quote suggests and I said before, Éponine was rather reduced to a tool for Marius’s sexual awakening. In this version, it isn’t only the “wet dream” which precedes more crucial interactions between Marius and Éponine, there’s also a scene where she strips for him through the hole in the wall and another where Courfeyrac is commenting on her and Azelma as Marius moves into the building for the first time. 

By the time Marius gives her his money and any sort of bond can occur, it’s evidently clear in this version that Éponine has been teasing Marius and he is fully aware of it. He looks at her through the peep hole licking his lips and then has that disturbing dream where she’s kind of forcing him onto her in a very questionable way. 

So, this Marius is by no means unaware of the fact that Éponine was attracted to him in some capacity and has played along her seduction, which makes his dismissal of her and his request for her to find Cosette a lot like he is using her for his own gain and replacing her for another girl. 

Éponine’s attitude, much like Cosette’s, tries to be more active at times. She’s confrontational to her parents, seems protective of Azelma and is pleased to see her mother stuck in jail. 

However, much like with Cosette, any kind of agency is compromised for having her narrative be serving a male character’s development rather than her own. Her involvement in the barricade is also somewhat modified but, by that time, her journey has already been substantially affected. 

Much like Ellie, Erin was a very good Éponine when she was allowed to perform at her best and I wish she had been involved in an adaptation that was able to portray Éponine with more justice. 

I’ll talk a bit more about women on the show in general in problem #3 but, for now, let’s move on. 

Problem #2: The portrayal of masculinity

1. Javert

I am not the best person to write an essay on Javert, there are a lot of people more capable than me for that, and I may be called out for this and mess everything up, but I can’t write overall opinions without mentioning my issues with his characterization, at least summarized. 

Javert is a complicated character. He is, as much as everyone else, affected by the circumstances and a man who goes through a huge emotional impact and sees his values questioned and compromised. His and Valjean’s journeys have a lot in common, in different ways and with different outcomes. 

Sadly, Javert tends to be seen as a villain in a lot of adaptations. It’s a way to simplify the plot in the way movies tend to do: something is defined by what the other isn’t, if Valjean is the protagonist, then Javert must be his antagonist. I was worried that this version was going to fall into that trap, because of time restraint and Davies’s tendencies of simplifying complex characters. 

Javert’s characterization was erratic, much like Valjean’s. His attitude was blurred by fits of rage and moments of confusing violence, followed by charged pauses in strange cadences which tended to fluctuate. I don’t think his attitude was as all-over-the-place as Valjean’s, but it was certainly not as well defined as other Javerts I’ve seen through the years. 

This Javert, however, had a choice made for him that separates him from other versions: 

Over tea in central London, Davies tells me that he was surprised to discover that, in Hugo’s 1862 novel, neither character [Javert or Valjean] mentions any sort of sexual experience, leaving the 82-year-old screenwriter wondering, at least in the case of Javert, whether it was indicative of a latent homosexuality. Source 

There is a lot to unpack there. 

First, there’s this idea of masculinity in which the lack of explicit heterosexual intercourse in canon is directly representative of homosexuality. I’m not gonna delve a lot in the brick but there are a good bunch of characters you can easily read as gay. Hell, there’s that whole thing going on with comparing Enjolras and Grantaire to greek couples. And if you want to write Javert as gay, go ahead, there’s a lot of fanfiction out there who is with you on that and I’m here for all interpretations, no problem at all.   

But if you’re going to take that route, you need to be careful with your optics. 

This Javert is, at the end of the day, in this adaptation, a gay man of color. He is also explicitly obsessed with Valjean in a way that exceeds his sense of justice. He looks at him undress in prison, is all over his personal space while he’s in chains and later interrogates him believing Marius is his lover, clearly attempting Valjean to confess to him if he was. He receives a lot of comments from an officer who touches him and looks at him strangely in the last episode, prompting an immediate rejection from him. 

Everything points to Javert’s homosexuality being in the plot only as a further motivator for his need to capture Valjean, which makes for both a problematic portrayal of predatory homosexuality and a subsequent narrative of police abuse, both very problematic aspects to portray through a gay man of color. The way he acts and the way in which people act around him make it seem like his obsession with capturing him is fueled by the fact that Valjean represents his closeted feelings and that is all kinds of messed up. 

He is also clearly not as involved in other aspects of the law as he is in capturing Valjean, since Thénardier ends up being a secondary worry to him, even explicitly knowing he has been mistreating and abusing a child, and he also explicitly doesn’t care about his achievements or the ones of his other officers as long as Valjean is on the loose. He lets Thénardier escape prison on his watch and doesn’t take care of it himself, prioritizing Valjean. 

It isn’t about what happens in canon or not but in how all of this, in this version, is framed under this idea that Javert is also gay and has an obsession with Valjean that seems predatory in part, rather than fueled by his beliefs. And that is a dangerous optic to write a gay character under. Especially a police officer who is also a man of color. 

I’m not the one to talk about that, it’s not my experience to tell and I’m not going to speak over those whose experience this is, but as a content creator, I’d question if my need to diversify is stepping over the lines of problematic aspects that may ill represent the identities I’m trying to integrate. Just saying.

David’s performance hits some very good moments, especially when Javert starts contemplating suicide. That is a very important scene in every adaptation and a very amazing chapter in canon and David does well in performing the turmoil in Javert’s decision. They also add, as a voice in off, the notes he left to improve the service, which is a great touch. 

But, much like the other characters I mentioned, his performance is blurred by these writing choices in which Javert has been added this sort of predatory sense in which Valjean in jail symbolizes also keeping his identity hidden away. Davies would probably say his “desires” because that’s the kind of guy he is. 

I hope my opinion isn’t overstepping anyone’s voice and I’ll leave the further of this discussion to someone more appropriate, but I felt it was an important matter to include and something we all, as media consumers, must pay attention to. 

2. Marius

I had higher hopes for this boy, I really did. 

The good thing this adaptation does for Marius is give him a bit more room than others do. They touch more on his relationship with his father and his grandfather, they bring up the Thénardier connection to his dad, they introduce Mabeuf, and they bring him on as a kid in the beginning, which even though questionable in comparison to him having more development as a child than Cosette and Éponine, at least helped to introduce him as another key character of the whole story. 

I had hopes that this earlier introduction, albeit unfairly unbalanced with Cosette’s and Éponine’s, would allow for his character to develop more strongly, especially since politics were very present in his conversations with his grandfather and the ideals of his dad. I thought that by introducing politics through Marius that would allow his connection to Les Amis de l’ABC be more profound when the moment for revolution came. 

Yeah, no, that didn’t happen. 

Les Mis is a book where people are the heart and soul of it. With that in mind, characters aren’t like each other, they aren’t repetitions of the other’s attitude, they are diverse reflections of the complexity of humanity. The portrayal of masculinity in characters like Javert, Valjean, Gavroche or each individual member of Les Amis aren’t the same between each other, and neither are the same as Marius’s. 

Marius represents a very wide emotional spectrum. He’s sensitive and vulnerable, passionate and driven, but at the same time can take action into his own hands when he has to and fight, even at the cost of his own life. There are layers in Marius. Like a Rogel cake. 

I don’t want to generalize but a problem I have often with older male writers is that they see emotional complexity as weakness, especially when it comes to the portrayal of masculinity. There’s this idea in which something that is undefined or conflicting isn’t “strong” enough and therefore requires forcing. 

Remember that quote I brought up for Éponine’s characterization? we’re going back to that. To Davies calling Marius “a prig” in need of being seduced. 

Like I said, this version made Marius complicit in Éponine’s advances and aware of her sexually charged intentions, and this was made in an attempt to “upgrade” Marius’s masculinity and make him “less of a prig”. Because in order to be a Man, Marius needs to objectivize women. Apparently.  

Like I mentioned, the gesture of Marius giving Éponine the little money he had ended up being a lot less effective by the fact that he had already fantasized about her more than once, and with her knowing that. He is taken to a brothel by Courfeyrac and Grantaire in which women pretty much throw themselves at him while he looks for Cosette. The “wet dream” he has is a very eerie combination of idealization and assault, in which Éponine, taking Cosette’s place, forces him onto her (much like Davies is forcing this onto Marius).

It isn’t about sex or eroticism being introduced to Marius’s storyline, is that they appear forced and almost violently thrust upon him in order to validate him in this idea of masculinity the adaptation seems to have, which seems to be very narrow. 

And, with that in mind, we’ll move on to the last bit of this section.

3. Valjean

I am unable to write a piece about how many layers of wrong this Valjean embodied. 

There are a lot of good tumblr scholars and Les Mis experts talking about it already, they can explain better than I ever could, but we need to, at least, try to glimpse at the mess this was, because this is a post on problems and this was a major one. 

There are a lot of interpretations of Valjean, some of which are astronomically awful. He’s a character that can be easily fucked up, maybe because he also represents a very complex range of emotions, a very wide spectrum of masculinity, and is inserted in a wide variety of social contexts and spheres during his lifetime, which permeate his way of living as well as his agency to do things. 

Any adaptation of Les Mis from the get go starts with the challenge of representing all of this in a limited time frame and with a limited perspective. It’s very difficult to translate not only all of this complexity but also all the thoughts the narrator can rely, all the feelings and conflicts and internal turmoil that we can get from the book because it’s written. 

The musical, in that sense, has some elements from its medium that help, like the soliloquies, the changes of key, the ability for characters to bear their souls through song without interrupting the believability of the story. 

Representing Valjean without a medium that allows a peek inside his head is a big challenge. He is a character whose turmoil is most often interior, so showcasing that externally poses difficulty. 

Still, you can’t fuck up this much, my dude.  

I’ve seen bad Valjeans in my life, this one is...complicated. He’s not good, don’t get me wrong, but he isn’t as clear-cut godawful as others I’ve seen, he’s too erratic to be easily described. 

I think this adaptation tried to showcase complexity through visible emotional distress and physical violence. Instead of having a soliloquy or symbolism, we have Valjean shouting or screaming or burning his hand with a coin and staring at it for a while or shouting at nuns or carrying Cosette by force so hard her arm is in pain. 

Everything gets even more confusing when everyone around him treats him weirdly. 

You get years of exposition clumsily thrown at you via a speech Fantine hears when she arrives at Montreuil and he’s been elected. You get girls looking at him naughtily and suggesting Fantine to try to seduce him. You get inkeepers and Thénardier suggesting his intentions with child Cosette aren’t appropriate. You get women in dress shops thinking his intentions with young adult Cosette aren’t appropriate. You get Javert thinking his intentions with Marius aren’t appropriate. Everyone wants to talk about Valjean’s sex life or something, I don’t know. 

His attitude towards Cosette is also muddled by this erratic behavior and the very strange way in which he sees her and Fantine. 

He is visibly more worried about men taking advantage of her, of “defiling” her, than other dangers she could be in, like his identity being found out by the police or her falling in the hands of the Thénardiers again. He forcibly removes her from Marius’s presence and has a fight with her about it that ends on him taking her to see the prisoners. He knows she still, as an adult, visibly flinches when she’s approached harshly yet manhandles her when he wants to keep her locked up. 

There’s something possessive about this Valjean that ties in to how Cosette is portrayed as an object. He talks about Cosette as if she was something he needs to keep, says Marius will “rob” her, not because he wants to be a good father or see her happy but because she is his to have. 

This Valjean feels as if Cosette was his attempt to get rid of the guilt he feels for having failed Fantine more so than anything else. She’s less of a person and more an object he needs to keep for himself like a third candlestick. That’s the impression I got of their relationship with his characterization. 

By the time the series ended, I felt upset with Valjean. 

I didn’t care if he died, I didn’t care if he suffered. And that’s pretty shitty for a Les Mis adaptation to prompt. He made me feel uncomfortable, uneasy, as if he was the last person I would trust to take care of a young girl. And whatever internal journey he was going on wasn’t developed well enough to understand any of these choices. 

I don’t know, like I said, I’m not an expert of the subject of Jean Valjean, but I’m pretty sure this is not how you adapt him. 

Problem #3: Diversity without optics

This show hadn’t even started and it was already patting itself on the back for being diverse. 

Now, if you haven’t been in the world of Les Mis for too long, let me tell you there are a lot of adaptations which are diverse, and not only of the musical. In itself, it wasn’t a pioneer move, but I was nonetheless happy that they were going to pay attention to that. At the end of the day, Les Mis is about society, about oppression, and adaptations of it should represent the diversity of the social landscape of the time and place they’re created in. 

That being said, diversity in a highly political storyline needs to be carefully worked through, because without optics you can make questionable choices. And, you guessed it, questionable choices were made here. 

I can’t and won’t go over all of the issues with this that there are, but I can give a few examples. 

There is, of course, the always present argument of casting Fantine and Cosette white and the majority of the Thénardiers and Éponine as poc. And of casting the majority of Les Amis as white and the majority or most visible part of Patron Minette as poc. People have discussed this at length so I won’t go over that. 

There is also how constantly woc were cast in roles of service, some of which were questionable given the context. Simplice, for example, is cast this way, which I overlooked at the time but as it kept escalating with other characters like Matelote and eventually Toussaint, it grew a bit more complex. 

Toussaint was...a very problematic choice. 

When you present the character of a “housekeeper” in a period series which is meant to represent France in the 1800s, and she is a woman of color, some alarms start ringing. I don’t specialize in French history, but my instincts were proven correct when I checked various sources on dates, after seeing the episode, and I’m quoting wiki for easier access here: 

Slavery was first abolished by the French Republic in 1794, but Napoleon revoked that decree in 1802. In 1815, the Republic abolished the slave trade but the decree did not come into effect until 1826. France re-abolished slavery in her colonies in 1848 with a general and unconditional emancipation.

This series has a weirdly set timeline in comparison to the book but, for all intents and purposes, we’re in the early 1830s at the time she’s first introduced, correct? There was still an unstable situation regarding abolition at the time. The general emancipation hadn’t been yet stated in the colonies and the decree had just been starting to hold effect. 

I know this show is casting in a general way as a suspension of disbelief of some historical facts and I’m all for diversity in casting in period dramas, regardless of anything else, if it’s allowing for representation in media. 

But, at the same time, you need to be careful with your optics. She could have been cast as anyone else.

I don’t wanna go over this a lot because I don’t know enough about these parts of French history nor is it my story to tell, but the problem is in the erasure of conflicts or racism altogether as a way to prompt a shallow sense of diversity in a story that is directly linked with the subject of oppression. 

Let’s continue with another similar optics problem involving “diversity” to exemplify this issue further, so that I can clarify. 

This barricade had women on it and didn’t have Combeferre. 

Now, here is the thing about that. In the barricade my man Combeferre gives an amazing speech about women and children. 

In case you weren’t aware, the 1800s were the moment when European women and children barely started to be seen as separate members of society and not only “men but worse” and “men but small”. There are a lot of good articles about that, including one by Martyn Lyons about the new readers of the 19th Century, which changed the course of the editorial market, those being women, children and working class men, who didn’t have access to literature or literacy before that. The idea of childhood as we know it started then, and the later editions of the Grimm fairy tales was one of the first published books of fairy tales explicitly aimed at children’s education. And since a lot of us, in other places of the world that aren’t Europe, were colonized af or barely getting free from colonial governments in the 1800s, we kinda had to go with the flow, regardless of the social structure of native peoples, because colonialism sucks. 

But you all came here for Les Mis so, let’s get back to that. 

As this terrible and summarized dive into history implies, women and children were vulnerable to the fucked up state of social strife. Education was scarce and only accessible to some, employment was scarce and only accessible to some, food was scarce and only accessible to some. Most often than not, “some” did not include women and children. 

In comes the the sun to my moon, Combeferre, with his speech. 

He talks about all of this. Basically he talks to men who are the main providers of families, providers of women and children who depend on them and goes (I’ll paraphrase) “it’s our fault as a society that women can’t be here now, it’s our fault they don’t have the same possibilities and education we do, so at least do them a solid and don’t die today here if they depend on you to live, because the only possibility they have without your support is prostitution”. It was a fucking power move to include that on Les Mis. I mean, the entire book is a call out to the social and political situation, but damn. 

So yes, there aren’t women there but the reason for it is that patriarchy sucks and the consequences would be disastrous for them. 

Davies & co. pretty much didn’t give a shit about this. But, at this point, considering Problem #1, who’s surprised. 

They removed Combeferre, his speech and placed random women on the barricade, as if nothing of that was going on and the patriarchy didn’t exist. Because ~diversity~. 

The fact that they thought more woke to put some random women there on the barricade to die fighting instead of acknowledging the existence of sexism altogether pretty much sums up what this whole show thought diversity was. 

For them, diversity wasn’t a political and social standpoint born from reality, a way to represent the dynamics of oppression that are at stake even on this day, but an aesthetic. 

And, talking about speeches, let’s move on to the next bit. 

Problem #4: Where are the politics?

1. The social and political landscape

Les Mis adaptations have a fluctuating balance with politics and social conflicts. 

That is, at the end of the day, the very core of the existence of this story, the reason why still, to this very day, it is relevant and quoted, adapted and regarded is the fact that we still need it. 

All of us, as human beings living as members of society, are always immersed in political decisions. It’s not only unavoidable, it’s part of our lives as people living together. 

In the same way, the personal narratives of the characters of Les Mis are intrinsically linked to this landscape. They are set in different places of the social spectrum and hold different power dynamics and actions that relate to political standpoints. 

Adaptations tend to work this in very different ways. 

Some focus less on the politics and more on the social strife, with a greater focus on the characters. Others re-insert the characters in other different historical moments with the same levels of social and political strife. Others just copy-paste the situations and put them in another context, without really explaining what revolution it is, what they’re fighting for and why they’re being killed. The focus varies. 

It seems, for how this adaptation starts, with Waterloo and a subsequent argument between Gillenormand and Baron Pontmercy about Napoleon, that politics are going to be important. This doesn’t last very long. 

My biggest issue with the introduction of these circumstances is that they don’t bother on them but then attempt to use them for gratuitous self righteousness. It isn’t that they abandon them altogether, they overlook them but then attempt to use them for shock value. 

There is a constant use of exaggerated, almost cartoon-y, stagings of social depiction: 

- You have Gillenormand dining with his boys, in a luxurious and incredibly flamboyant scenery, while dissing political views in an almost comical fashion 

- You have beggars downright assaulting Valjean and Cosette on the street right outside the convent, as a means of shock to Cosette’s expectations of the world outside of it

- You have Fantine’s entire sequences as a prostitute with higher and higher degrees of abuse 

- You have the streets before the barricades, in some sort of confusing clamor that loses focus in favor of Valjean’s storyline 

- You have a god awful last scene which attempts to say something socially compromising by showcasing the kids Gavroche was helping (I don’t think they’re siblings in this version), as a means to say “the revolution wasn’t successful and social strife will always continue” I guess, I don’t know, because it’s not like they gave a shit about it all before, so this kind of Perrault-ish moral of the story at the end makes no goddamn sense

They are exaggerated snippets of things without context, with very little exposition, that are used more as props to shock than they are to actually take a stand on what the original story is trying to tell. 

Even the reality Fantine has to suffer is blurred by the fact that the social situation isn’t seen as much as a reality in itself but a combination of Fantine’s “choices” and Valjean’s “guilt”. 

But, in order to delve more into the non-political aspect of this adaptation, let’s focus on some specific characters. 

2. Enjolras

Well, I’ve seen a lot of Enjolrai in my life (is that be the plural of Enjolras? yes? no? can it be?). 

Enjolras has very different characterizations, even within fandom itself, but we can all agree that he’s a) highly political, b) highly committed to the cause and c) extremely charismatic. 

And when I say “charismatic” I mean it in the sense that his speeches are so beautifully crafted, so certain and commanding, that you just wanna listen to what he has to say, regardless of your views. They’re political discourse but also very poetic, which is a very interesting literary opposite to Grantaire’s voice, but I digress. 

Still, Enjolras doesn’t stand on his own. 

He represents a part of a whole, an important part, but a part nonetheless. Les Amis are a very diverse mixture of individuals, and the main triumvirate represents different stances on the same political action that coexist together. 

Without others to stand with, Enjolras loses context. Not because he can’t support himself as a character, but because his biggest value is within other people. 

This Enjolras is confusing, angry and loses a lot of steam when most of the people who should be around him aren’t really paying attention. 

Courfeyrac, although performed really well, doesn’t really get a chance to show his political ideas without Enjolras around, and that makes it seem like he’s being convinced to participate rather than doing it for his own reasons and being one key part of the group. 

In the barricade, Enjolras acts as if he doesn’t know what he’s doing half the time, and the other half he doesn’t give a shit about killing soldiers, smiling and laughing while shooting people. 

It isn’t just that the scene with Le Cabuc doesn’t exist, Enjolras doesn’t seem to have empathy, which is all given to Grantaire instead. 

By taking away Enjolras’s vulnerability, his complexity, they make him seem more shallow overall, and in tow, make his cause lose importance. 

And without a clear political standpoint, because his expositions about the situation are very shout-y and unclear, and his speeches are summarized with some actual quotes but without their meaning and true feeling, he seems to be fighting just because, rather than having strong ideals. 

Enjolras in the brick is eloquent enough, humane enough, that you understand what he’s doing and why. This Enjolras is a mess that I couldn’t understand at all. 

I don’t think people who have never seen, read or heard of Les Mis before will understand Enjolras as a character through this. He’s just a very angry student with weird facial hair (why?) who rants in a cafe while his friends are playing games and making jokes, who is friends with some workers and is the leader because he shouts the loudest but doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing. 

And, worst of all, doesn’t seem to care for human life. Which brings me to the next bit...

3. Grantaire

Man, was I excited with this casting choice. 

When I heard Turlough was playing Grantaire, I was delighted. And, at the end of the day, his performance was very good, but for a character who wasn’t quite Grantaire at times. 

I mean, he wasn’t as off as Enjolras, but he was also so erratically written. 

They decided to make Grantaire hesitant rather than a cynic. He didn’t get to express his cynicism or his attachment to his friends (what friends though? only Bossuet had a name other than Courfeyrac and Enjolras) and his involvement with the fight was shown as insecure rather than questioning of ideals. 

He is shown conflicted when he decides to fight with them, he doesn’t have any of his long speeches, the Barrière du Maine scene or anything of the sort. He is just...hesitant about death, I guess. About dying and killing people. That’s his conflict. 

This has, to me, two big problems attached to it. 

First, it’s a simplification of the entirety of Grantaire’s thoughts. It’s taking the cornucopia of drunken philosophy that Grantaire’s voice in the brick represents and replacing it with a single fear, which while very valid doesn’t reflect Grantaire’s true extensive complexities. 

Second, it takes away from Enjolras’s humanity. Enjolras is showcased as an indiscriminate machine of shooting soldiers while Grantaire is conflicted about having to do this and, in tow, makes Enjolras’s rejection of him when he leaves and gets drunk like a jerk move of an insensitive asshole. 

There isn’t a clear instance of Enjolras giving Grantaire a chance to do something before the barricade and Grantaire failing at it, with all the dominoes symbolism and all the stuff it implies. There isn’t a complementary set of complexities between each other. Grantaire seems to care about human life more than Enjolras does in this version, at the end of the day, because Enjolras’s speeches, even if carrying canon quotes, are inserted in a context in which he laughs while shooting people, knowingly sends Gavroche into danger and chastises Grantaire for being conflicted about human lives at stake.  

So, instead of representing Grantaire’s true complexity as a character, they chose to give him something else that they think makes him more dimensional, when, in reality, takes away from his (and Enjolras’s) worth as a character. 

All of this is very weirdly intersected with drunken jokes. Sometimes, the jokes and the behavior pays off and is inserted in good moments, sometimes they just don’t know when to stop and they kind of ruin their death scene with them, which is even worse considering it’s one of the few where they’re actually holding hands. 

Overall, I think this was a simplification of Grantaire, in a way, a simplification which falls apart without a solid context to exist in. And it’s a pity, because Turlough was good. 

4. Gavroche 

The only reason I’d want an immediate new adaptation of Les Mis is so we can cast this same Gavroche in a decent one. He’s one of the best Gavroches I’ve ever seen, hands down. 

In this case, the problem isn’t with his interpretation or how he was written, necessarily, and all time frame and socio-political simplifications aside, the problem is in how the context reacts to him. 

A lot of Gavroche’s agency is deleted in this version. 

For starters, his age is kind of all over the place at the beginning. He’s fine by the time of the barricade, but before it’s kind of a mess. As a result, he lives with his parents for a bit longer than necessary and the few times we see him on his own, being his independent self, are in conflict with how his involvement in the main events come to happen. 

It feels as if he’s been used in the barricade. When he’s off to find bullets, only Marius tries to get him back to safety, while the rest cheer him and laugh. 

His character is well performed and we get to see his personality and his situation when he’s allowed to act on his own, but within the context he’s inserted in, he seems more like a prop than a character. 

This makes it so that when he dies, you’re upset more so than sad. It doesn’t feel like a tragic circumstance born out of a lot of layers of social strife which culminate in a dead end for a kid who deserved a better life. It feels like every adult around him, every person he encounters, either neglects him, mistreats him or sends him into danger. It feels, much like with Fantine, like an easily avoidable situation. 

And things get worse with this guy:

Like I said in my summary, this David Harbour-ish soldier is the one who is shown to mercilessly kill both Gavroche and execute Enjolras and Grantaire. 

This is another layer in the modus operandi of an adaptation who uses social oppression and political strife as shock value rather than commentary and discourse. 

By personalizing “evil” in one stern, mean, unreasonable, power-hungry soldier, they’re villanizing (and trivializing) the social context as a whole. It isn’t about how Gavroche got to that point, how we as a society failed so hard that he has to die in that way. It’s just one bad guy. 

But then, they try to be fake deep about it, by doing that last scene with his brothers or by placing him alongside Mabeuf and Éponine but not explaining what that means, why those juxtapositions are socially relevant and important to the plot (maybe they don’t know why). 

Overall, this was such a waste of a great Gavroche that I just feel really bad. Reece deserved so much better. 

5. The barricade

Needless to say, this barricade was more of a mess than you would have expected. 

The lack of proper introduction to the political landscape, the clumsy exposition, the out of context shout-y speeches and the erratic behavior of its characters, paired together with the fact that it ends about 1/4 into the last episode, giving more time to personal drama than any of what happens in it, makes it one confusing mess. 

It’s also in the barricade where it’s super clear how visually similar this series is to the 2012 movie. A lot of visual choices are extremely similar, even when they didn’t need to be (Fantine’s and Cosette’s hair choices? the shots in the hulks? the scaled down yet very similar camera angles and movements during the entire fight? the color schemes of some particular scenes?), and it’s pretty heightened in this barricade. 

Which I wouldn’t care about hadn’t they talked crap about the movie during their entire PR campaign. 

Like I said, there were so many issues within the people involved in the barricade. With the women, with the characters, with the soldiers. There was also a very strangely set line between workers and students that they were very clumsy about setting yet didn’t get to do much aside from having the leader of the working class men leave when Enjolras prompted it. 

By the way, Enjolras was a lot less convinced about the whole ordeal in this version, which made his characterization even more confusing. 

The barricade had a lot of messed up ingredients and not enough time to even simmer. At least the musical, which doesn’t have a lot of time dedicated to the students either, has Drink With Me, which doesn’t only serve as a way to characterize different students and their beliefs and personalities (“Is your life just one more lie?”) but also brings some melancholic change of pace, a pause between the action. 

The highlight of this barricade, though, is Marius going apeshit with the torch. 

But, all in all, there’s no much we can expect from a barricade born of confused ideas and even more confusing characterizations. This barricade feels less like a climax and more like a thing they had to do because it was in the book. 

And don’t even make me talk about how they butchered my favorite speech. I’d rather not have it there at all, tbh. 

Conclusion: A writer’s ego

We arrive to the end of this long and boring trip through my thoughts. If you’re reached this point, thank you for your time. 

All in all, I feel like a lot of the issues of this adaptation stem from the fact that Davies thinks he’s better than everyone else and other men around him agree so much that they let him do as he pleases, without questioning anything. 

I can’t really understand how you’re going through the script of this and see some of these choices (like the dress shop scene, the carriage scene and let’s not even mention the peeing in the park scene) and you go, and I’m quoting Shankland here:

“Andrew’s scripts made these characters feel modern. That was nothing to do with having them speak in a very modern way or changing their behaviour, he just found the humanity and earthiness of it,” Shankland says, recalling a scene in which Fantine and her companions urinate in a Paris park. “I thought, ‘Oh god, they’re going to pee in Les Misérables, that’s exciting.’” Source

That just sums it all up, doesn’t it? 

After I watched this, I let some time pass. I watched all 3 fanmade adaptations that are currently out at this moment (back to back), revisited some of the ones I had seen before, read fics, read people’s articles and rants, looked into other adaptations on stage, from the classic ones to the more interpretative versions, and other current tv adaptations being done in other countries. 

All of those things are vastly different. Some are more similar to each other, some are widely different, but they’re all different points of view on the same canon. 

This is a canon that has some of the wildest possible interpretations coexisting. You can have a play centered on one specific character told through the songs of a specific album, a tv drama in modern times with a lawyer Valjean, a coffee shop au starring Les Amis, a parody comedy set in 1832, all happening at the same exact time. 

And that’s great. That’s fascinating. That means this book is still alive because we need it still today. 

Some days you’re in the mood for a heavily political adaptation which gives you goosebumps for setting canon in a context that is closer to your everyday reality, other days you just want all the Amis to live and have movie marathons cuddled together. It’s all valid. 

But what all of those adaptations have in common is that they aren’t trying to be more than they are. They aren’t acting brand new, they aren’t pretending they’re re-inventing the wheel or that they are smarter than Victor Hugo himself because what Hugo didn’t know he needed in the “psychology of the book” was a soulmate au or a documentary series. 

This adaptation, through what they said and how it was written, acted as if it was going to be the ultimate Les Mis adaptation to end them all. It presented itself as smarter than us all, as holding the keys to the meaning of Victor Hugo’s thoughts, as being able to fix his “mistakes”, fix other adaptation’s “mistakes” and deliver the best interpretation of canon possible. 

And it managed to be a sexist, socially insensitive, problematic, un-political, homophobic mess. 

Which, is a problem in itself, but even more so when the canon you’re adapting should be, first and foremost, against all that. It isn’t about how many brick quotes you use, it’s about channeling the soul of the story. 

[supercultshow]

Howdy all you Supercultists out there on the interwebz! I’m Bad Movie Professor Cameron Coker (BS in “Bat Nipples” with a minor in “Ice Puns”) and I’ll be posting my hype-tacular speeches every week along with some long lost speeches from past Supercult Shows!

This week winter has come at last to Supercult in the form of one of the greatest cinematic blunders in all of history: Batman and Robin!

Batman and Robin are back in the fourth film in the Batman superhero series and the second film in the series directed by Joel Schumacher. George Clooney stars as Bruce Wayne/Batman while Chris O’Donnell and Michael Gough return as Dick Grayson/Robin and Alfred Pennyworth, respectively. The dynamic duo are back to protect Gotham City from villainy, but when the cold-hearted Mr. Freeze and the enticingly toxic Poison Ivy attack tensions rise between the two heroes. Can the Dark Knight and the Boy Wonder resolve their differences and save the city from certain destruction? Strength Now. Courage Always. Family, Above All. Batman & Robin!

As of 2019, this is the first and only appearance of Batgirl in a live-action Batman feature film.

According to a makeup artist, Arnold had potentially deadly costume effects. The battery for the LED lights in his mouth would start to dissolve in his saliva and leak battery acid into his mouth.

“Curses!” -an actual line from this already silly film.

Michael Gough: one of the only person to survive all 4 original Batman films (the other being Pat Hingle who played Commissioner Gordon). What a bad ass.

Someone please tell me how all these diamonds somehow combine into a fuel source for a freeze laser.

George Clooney and his stunt doubles went through 50 rubber Batsuits.

After the film’s negative reception, plans for Tim Burton’s “Superman Lives” have been shut down. The movie would’ve been a first attempt to have a shared universe between Batman and Superman, with George Clooney reprising his role as Batman, and with Nicolas Cage as Superman.

Is this a miniature? Is this an overly indulgent set? Does the audience care?? Do the ACTORS??

You want to have plants take over the earth and I want to freeze the planet. Sounds like we should work together!

Two Words: Bat Nips.

This gang is apparently called the Golums, but we all know they’re really called the ‘We Love Neon and Blacklight Club’.

The Batman costume was a 50 lbs. (22.6 kg.) rubber body suit with a 40 lb. rubber cape attached to the headpiece. Batgirl’s and Robin’s costumes weighed 50 lbs each. Mr. Freeze’s weighed 75 lbs.

Oh Bane…it would take 15 years before films did you justice.

I mean, yeah, this movie is bad. But Arnold looks pretty snazzy in his polar bear slippers.

Did we mention that Coolio is in this film? Well…he is. It doesn’t make the film any better or worse. It’s just…a thing that is.

From the opening frames of this film you know it’s going to be a treat. The foam latex laden suit-up scene seems to linger just a bit too long on expertly modeled bird buttocks, bat nipples, and caped crusader cod pieces. The opening would fit just as well in a high-budget Batman burlesque show. Oh, how optimistic the 90s were. The original Batman directed by Tim Burton seemed like such a long shot and paid off spectacularly. Burton discarded the camp of the 1960s Adam West TV series and adapted the atmospheric gothic noir of the 1940s…which is apparently an era when Batman couldn’t turn his head and has no problem with just straight up murdering people. Tim Burton’s version of batman was so iconic that it defined the tone, color, music, and even dialogue choices for the entire character for the next 2 decades. The next three sequels, Batman Returns and Batman Forever, stuck to the formula of the 1989 original for the most part. In each the level of camp was slowly cranked up:

Batman Returns: Let’s take up half the Warner Brothers lot with expansive water-filled Gotham City sets! Let’s focus even more on the villains and really hammer home the tragedy and the childhood pain festering into megalomania! Not only that, let’s have TWO villains instead of just one! Let’s get a combination of real penguins, actors in fiberglass penguin suits, and puppets for the villain’s evil missile-toting penguin army! DID I MENTION THE PENGUIN ARMY??

Batman Forever: They liked the two-villain thing, so let’s do that again. We’ll get another two actors at the top of their game to play ridiculous, over-the-top, gothic cartoon characters! Let’s go with Tommy Lee Jones, still riding off the high of his starring role in the Fugitive, and then Jim Carrey at his comedic height just a year after the release of not one but three of his most iconic films: Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber! Oh yeah and let’s swap out the director, the lead, the love interest, and paint the whole film in neon. These things aren’t meant to be dark, gritty, adult films! They’re comic book films for god’s sakes! We gotta sell toys to kids!

But here’s the thing Supercultists: If you’re going to be this campy you have to be either funny or endearing. Carrey carried Batman Forever and killed it as a genuinely funny and threatening adaptation of the Riddler. Danny DeVito, in his own gruesome way, made us feel for a Batman villain in a way that the batman animated series later sought to emulate with their reimagining of Mr. Freeze and the creation of Harley Quinn.

So, what happened? Was it overindulgence? Sure, scenes are campier and there are now not 2 but 3 villains: Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy, and a neutered version of Bane who serves as a glorified mook for Ivy. Perhaps the concept of pushing the art style even further strained the bounds of reality? Sure, Gotham was larger than life in 19889, but the 1997 version has gigantic futurist statues holding up the buildings as if Gotham was constructed on the corpses of a race of colossi. Perhaps the film lost some of the comedic charm of its predecessors. At last count Mr. Freeze utters something like 27 ice puns throughout the film and at times it can be difficult to discern whether or not the film is being ridiculous on purpose. The opening fight scene looks like Batman on Ice with the heroes literally clicking their heels together to activate ice skate boots.

Perhaps the problem is higher up than that… Was it the studio pressure to make the film more “toyetic”? The film’s design seems catered to the toy market with every character having a wacky light-up vehicle, set piece, or gadget that could function as an action figure. Batman’s new car features a transparent hood so that audiences can see the colorful spinning bat-engine as if hypnotizing children and adults alike into emptying their wallets at the nearest department store this Christmas. For crying out loud Poison Ivy even has a line “I’m a lover, not a fighter That’s why every Poison Ivy action figure comes complete with him!” *points to Bane* Perhaps it was simply cost? In their bid to get even more top-billed Hollywood names for the latest and greatest (read: only, unless you count things like Spawn) comic book film, Arnold Schwarzenegger was reputed to have earned $25 million for his approximate 25 minute on-screen role as Mr. Freeze, basically a million a minute. Not to mention Uma Thurman, the poster girl for Pulp Fiction, and the, at the time, up and coming George Clooney.

The whole film cost an estimated $125 million and was a modest commercial success but was a spectacular critical flop. With a 3.7 on IMDB and an 11% on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s no surprise that the film killed the batman film series and nearly killed the entire superhero film genre. The film was voted #1 in Empire magazine’s “50 Worst Movies Ever”, #5 in Entertainment Weekly’s Top 25 Worst Sequels Ever Made, and won a Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actress for Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl (as well as 10 other Razzie nominations for everything from Worst Picture and Worst Director to Worst Screen Couple and Worst Original Song). Not Joel Schumacher or George Clooney defend the film anymore. When filming was over, George Clooney reportedly quipped, “I think we just killed the series.” He’s even been known to refund people who saw the film and has called the film a “waste of money” in spite of his admittance that it was the biggest break he ever had as a then TV star making the jump to Hollywood.

But we here at Supercult know it’s not the worst film (we’ve seen A LOT worse). At the very least it’s entertaining at times, hilarious at others, and always a feast for the eyes. Even now we can see the 90s superhero film influence on modern pop culture. The next few superhero films such as Sam Rami’s Spider-Man series still attempted to recreate the earnest wackiness of Tim Burton’s series while attempting to avoid the cautionary tale of Batman and Robin. Grittier remakes of batman still pay homage to Tim Burton’s Batman in their aesthetics, their music, and their tone.

Batman and Robin may be the worst batman film ever, but that makes it the best Supercult Batman film ever, bat nipples and all.

This is why Superman works alone! The Supercult show is proud to present Batman and Robin!

    Batman & Robin Howdy all you Supercultists out there on the interwebz! I’m Bad Movie Professor Cameron Coker (BS in “Bat Nipples” with a minor in “Ice Puns”) and I’ll be posting my hype-tacular speeches every week along with some long lost speeches from past Supercult Shows!

[babycharmander]

I finished reading the unofficial novelization of Grim Fandango last night. (I’d link it, but then Tumblr wouldn’t let this post show up in the tags--just google “grim fandango novel” and it’ll be the first result). It’s a full novelization of the entire game, and not the kind of novelization that just copy-pastes the dialogue and writes out word-for-word what happens.

It’s over 200 pages long, though the last 10 pages or so are two short stories (one amusing one featuring Manny and Glottis getting drunk during New Years between year 2 and 3, and one from Domino’s perspective that fills in some of the gaps at the beginning of the book). If you’re a fan of the game, it’s definitely worth checking out.

You can read my review under the cut.

Quick disclaimer: I don’t know if the author of this novel is still ‘round the intarwebz, but I understand that this novel was written nearly 10 years ago. My criticisms in this review are toward the story itself, not necessarily to the author, whose skills as a writer have doubtlessly improved since he wrote this story.

I’ve been reading fics for 20 years now, and I’ve read my fair share of (attempted) novelizations, both official and unofficial. Of what I’ve read, most novelizations have the same problem: they very stiffly try to stick to the script, resulting in very wooden writing that leaves the reader wondering why they’re reading the novelization instead of watching/playing the source material.

This novelization did not leave me with that feeling.

Not to say that the writing isn’t stiff (more on that later) but the writer adapted the game in such a way that it does not at all read as a direct copy-paste of the game’s script that was clumsily edited into novel form. Rather than trying to add each conversation and write out every puzzle, the author took the whole game as more of a rough outline for his book. Some scenes and conversations are adapted more directly than others, but for the most part, the author does a pretty good job of keeping the story flowing more naturally than a direct, word-for-word adaptation of the game would.

One of the things I liked most about this novelization is the way different parts of the story were fleshed out. We see a lot more of what Manny’s time in the Eighth Underworld was like before the events of the game, how he came to terms with his own death (which is not pretty), what Manny and Glottis’s trip to Rubacava was like, and nearly everything leading up to Year 2. An enormous chunk of the book is spent in Rubacava, as you would imagine.

The author spends a lot of time detailing the specifics of what life is like in El Marrow and Rubacava, Manny getting his casino started, his relationships with Carla and Lola, winning over other souls to the cause of the LSA, and so on. A lot of this is really fascinating to read. But some of it is... not.

Here’s a quote from the website that currently hosts the novel:

Now, a thorough revision of the novel has been completed to be hosted here. Many plot points are developed more fully and the entire text has been tweaked to become more textured, more adult. If the game was intended to reflect film noir, then the novel is meant to key off of the writings of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald.

I have to admit, I do not know a lot about the noir genre. I had little interest in it before playing Grim Fandango (though Who Framed Roger Rabbit is one of my favorite movies, if that counts for anything?), and I’ve never read a novel written in the noir style. Perhaps the style the book was written in is closer to the noir style--I don’t know.

But I have to say, if you’ll excuse the pun, the book is dry as a bone.

I prefer character-focused stories, and while the novel does give some good insight into Manny and the other characters and their feelings at times, other times it feels like the author was more caught up in the plot, the schemes, the worldbuilding, and the politics. There were times when I really, really wished I could see more of what the characters were feeling or thinking, but the author was more concerned about showing the impact this or that event had on the Underworld as a whole--which is still interesting to see, but not what I was hoping to read. Sometimes you get a good character-driven scene (there’s some nice moments between Manny and Meche, and Lola’s death is as shocking as it should be), and that’s one of the main things that kept me reading.

The website pointed out that this version of the novel is a revision, which makes me wonder how much of the original was revised. Given how the novel seems to inconsistently go from more character-driven scenes to dry-as-a-desert exposition, my guess is that the more character-driven stuff came later, and I wish the whole novel was written that way.

I’ve mentioned I’ve read other novelizations, both official and unofficial, before, and another thing I’ve noticed with them is that you can usually tell what parts and what characters the author liked the most. The same holds true for the Grim Fandango novelization. While no major characters are really skipped over, to my memory, the novel really skips over a lot with Velasco, Lupe, the sea bees, and Pugsy and Bibi, which was a bit disappointing, since I like all of those characters. And, bizarrely enough, it spends a lot of time with the communists in Olivia’s bar. (In fact, a huge part of the Rubacava portion is dedicated to Manny and those guys talking about communism.)

While some scenes from the game were elaborated more, others were cut entirely. We don’t see Glottis getting smashed at the cat track, for example--that whole subplot is nixed. Some of the more humorous scenes are cut as well--for example, I was disappointed to find the scene where Manny walks into the fog and falls into the ocean was absent, which makes Velasco’s “are you going to make this a tradition?” line a bit nonsensical. The thing that shocked me a lot though was that, of all the dialogue that was cut or altered, Manny’s character-defining quote--”Love? Love is for the living”--is gone.

I feel this is a good time to point out that Manny in this novel is a bit different from Manny in the game. In the game, Manny goes from “I’m getting out of here even if I have to STEAL a lead and break all the rules” to “I’m not leaving this world until I can save EVERYONE.”

In the novel? He starts as the latter.

I’m not really sure what the purpose of this was. I didn’t really notice the difference in Manny’s character until he got to Rubacava and was already talking about bringing Hector to justice and saving all the lost souls. Maybe this was an attempt at making Manny more sympathetic, but it felt the opposite for me. It makes scenes that would have been more character-developing and emotional more frustrating than anything. I don’t like the “oh woe is me, I’m ruining everyone’s lives even though I didn’t actually do anything wrong” shtick, especially since the game avoided that because Manny is a jerk in the game. 

Some of the other characters got a weird treatment as well. Velasco somehow comes off as even more harsh and mean than he is in the game (or maybe that’s just me?). I think next to Manny though, Glottis is the one who got changed the most. As I mentioned before, a lot of the humorous stuff from the game was cut (probably in an attempt to make the novel more “adult”), which necessitated a change in Glottis’s character. As a result, he reads as more mature and responsible than he is in the game, which makes him feel more bland than anything. Lines kept from the game that make him seem silly tend to be reinterpreted as sarcasm. He does, however, get some character development in one scene that was drastically altered from the game, and I won’t spoil that for you. Unfortunately while there is a buildup to this part of Glottis’s character development, it’s mostly dropped a little after that scene, which makes the scene feel more like it was added for shock value.

Not all characters got this treatment, fortunately. Salvador, Eva, Meche, Carla, Olivia, and Lola were written pretty well from what I remember (I read through this slowly and I’m still feeling kinda messed up due to unrelated stuff so I can’t remember everything right now), and I don’t really remember having any objections to the way the villains were written (other than wishing I could have seen a bit more of them).

Among other criticisms, I will say that I feel the novel has a bit too much swearing. There’s language in the game, yes, and that would have been fine, but characters drop the f-bomb with more frequency than necessary in the book. While there’s some suggestive stuff here and there in the game, it’s taken a little bit further in the novel (including one weird scene where Olivia gets a bit closer to Manny than is necessary, and a few alarming comments from Domino in his bonus chapter). It’s not too much like the language is, but the added stuff does feel a little weird.

While yes, I have a lot of criticisms for the book, I didn’t feel like it was a waste of my time. It was interesting to see a different look at the story (even if I disagreed with the author’s interpretation of some scenes and characters), and some of the ways the author interpreted and expanded on the story were genuinely cool and interesting.

If you’re willing to put up with the dryness of a lot of the writing and willing to put up with a very different interpretation of Manny and Glottis, I feel it’s worth a read.

[tobiasmasonpark]

    So, what I initially believed to be a genius original statement about Pet Sematary—that the movie should have stayed buried—turned out to be the title of, like, half a dozen movie reviews. And, now that I think about it, I probably stole it from Cinemasins’ review of the original 1989 movie…

    My point is I was pretty disappointed by Pet Sematary.

    Maybe it was my fault. Maybe I psyched myself out in the weeks leading up to the movie. Maybe I was disappointed because there were changes from the book? Or, maybe it really was just a bleh sort of adaptation to a Stephen King novel I really enjoyed.

    Anyway, here are some things that bothered me, and a few things I liked.

    Cue the original Ramones’ tune.

Source: https://www.joblo.com/movie-posters/2019/pet-sematary/image-35124    

    Naturally adaptations can be tricky. There’s always going to be guys and gals like me complaining that they changed too much from the book, or that they didn’t change enough about it. And there are times when things need to be cut because, realistically, only so much of a text can fit into a 2-hour run time while keeping the interest of its fickle audience.

    But I’m not against the idea of changes in adaptations. It—the 2017 version-- for example, was a great adaptation of a Stephen King work. It remained mostly faithful to the first half of the book while making some changes. They left out the giant space turtle that spewed out the universe after a sore tummy, the hotboxing the kids do in their fort that shows them the monster’s origin story, and—thankfully—the train the boys run on Beverley in the tunnels.

    I didn’t care that left out that stuff. It really doesn’t change the premise of the story or the personality of the characters. The fact that they changed the time period from the 50s to the 80s, for example, barely alters anything aside from at whom to direct the nostalgia. Basically, any town in a Stephen King work can be translated into whatever decade you want. Middle America, from what I hear, doesn’t change all that much.

    What bothers me is when changes are made just for the sake of change, because they think they’ll wow the audience, because their movie needs jump scares like all the other horror movies out there, or because they want to be like M. Knight, and throw in some Shyamalan-style twists.

    Take those creepy kids from the trailer:

Source: https://www.nme.com/news/watch-creepy-new-trailer-stephen-kings-pet-sematary-released-2388664                    

    Sure, aesthetically, that’s some spooky imagery. It’s not in the books, but that’s fine. They looked creepy, with their masks, walking in a funeral procession, banging that drum. Great stuff for a trailer. But they don’t do anything with it, save for Ellie wearing a similar mask in the climax. There’s no point of it being in the movie at all. If the kids weren’t in it, we’d still have the Pet Sematary itself. We’d know that kids buried their pets there. Nothing would change other than the number of people to add to the end credits.

    Someone could argue, oh, maybe it implies that these creepy kids were also buried? There is that highway they keep open for some reason. Maybe they were also run over by trucks? Maybe they came back wrong?

    And I would totally love that as a concept. It would definitely help with this movie’s ending. A town that eventually gets over-run with zombies, and the last few humans must hunt them down?

Source: https://waxworkrecords.com/collections/vinyl/products/salems-lot              

    Oh wait…that’s the plot to ‘Salem’s Lot…

    Unfortunately, for maybe the first time ever in a Stephen King movie—save for the Shining and Gerald’s Game, which were more character pieces anyway—we never really meet anyone else in the town, save for Jud. So, I can only assume that the kids are unaware of the real evil burial ground behind the Pet Sematary, and just like to dress up when burying their dead pets.

    Plus, we see Church and Ellie are constantly dirty after they’re resurrected. These kids are clean, especially for kids. So, we can rule out them being anything other than the subjects of the next Killer Kids.

    Sure, the kids are creepy. But it does nothing for the movie in the long run. The isolation of the Creeds among the woods can provide the chills and thrills we seek without relying on creepy children we never see again…

    They also change which Creed child gets hit by the truck. I’ll be honest, I didn’t see the trailer. I wanted to go in fresh. So, I had no idea Ellie was featured as the main zombie in this…

    In the book, Gage dies. This was, I hear, inspired by a close call Stephen King had with his own son. The premise of the book came from the what-if that plagued him. And it’s because Gage is so young, a little boy no older than 2 or 3, with his whole life ahead of him, that makes his demise so tragic.

    Granted, Ellie is only nine, so it’s still incredibly tragic. So, I’m not upset by the decision to change it. I mean, I saw the original movie from 1989. The special effects they use for evil Gage were…not very good. And even in the book, some of the things that come out of the dead boy’s mouth are a tad silly—even for King, who, again, wrote a scene in which eleven-year-old boys take turns having sex with their one girl friend to escape the monster’s tunnel, despite having defeated, at least for the time being, the monster. I completely understand the decision to avoid something like this from happening again:

Source: https://www.express.co.uk/celebrity-news/726081/Stephen-King-Pet-Sematary-kid-Gage-Creed-looks-like-now-Miko-Hughes          

    But I think that’s only half the reason they changed it to Ellie. I really think they just wanted to throw a twist at those of us who read the book. And that’s something I don’t like. Twists for the sake of twists aren’t cool. Trust me, I wasn’t bored when little Gage Creed started running over to the highway with glee. I knew what was coming and was still uncomfortable. The fact Ellie got hit instead was more of an “oh…I guess they’re going that way? Makes sense…”

    But all of that I’d give a pass, if not for the jump scares—and this movie probably has more fake out jump scares than people in the movie—I won’t count Rachel’s parents, since they have no lines, or Zelda, who is more of a tool, or the cat because it is a cat.

    Jump scares aren’t scary to me. If I jolt in my seat, it’s because my ears are being assaulted by sudden noise, and my body is reacting to it. The pounding in my chest is not because I expect Ellie to be hiding under the bed, or behind the door. It’s because I’m waiting for that dumb sound. It’s not going to keep me up at night, thinking about the creepy things I saw in the movie. It just makes me regret seeing it at all. Its cheap, and so many horror movies use them—even the good ones.

    Rachel’s sister’s affliction with spinal meningitis, and her death, was, for me, the best part of the book and both the 1989 movie, and this adaptation. I grew up with a sibling who dealt with ailments all her life, and she passed away because of them, so Zelda’s demise is the only part of the movie and a major part of the book that made me squirm in my seat. I don’t know about anyone else who watched the movie, but someone who is ill is plenty scary, and for many reasons: the visual of it, seeing the person in so much pain and being unable to help, but also the guilt you feel because you don’t have to go through it. And, worst of all, that part of you is glad when their pain finally stops.

    It’s a powerful image, and the movie got points from me for it.

    But there are some issues, still. They change the way Zelda dies. In the book, she chokes to death, and Rachel hears her suffering, but doesn’t do anything because she doesn’t like interacting with her sister anymore. In the movie, they have Rachel send the food up to Zelda through a dumb-waiter, and Zelda falls attempting to grab the food for herself.

    It seems like a silly thing to gripe about, given the conclusion is the same: Zelda dies, and Rachel is scarred by it. But they changed it, I think, because visually it looked scarier than the book and they couldn’t figure out how to add a jump scare to a motionless teenager. Again, I don’t know if anyone else has experienced it, but watching someone go that way—i.e., slow and painfully-- is terrifying. And it would have served the movie better because stuff like that happens.

    Also, there’s the fact that Rachel herself says Zelda was bed-ridden and couldn’t move around much. So, I doubt that Zelda climbed out of bed herself and fell down a dumb-waiter.

    Now, is the movie bad because not everyone in the audience had the misfortune of watching a loved one die? No. People are scared by different things, as we see in all of King’s works—clowns, vampires, werewolves, creepy shop owners, getting left in handcuffs in your cottage miles away from civilization because your husband took too many blue pills and got a heart attack when you kicked him, because he wouldn’t take no for an answer, and then a dog eats him, and there’s something about a killer on the lose…The usual stuff.

    But I do think that what we got was not nearly as creepy as the book.

    They keep Victor Pascow in the movie, which could have been left out. I wasn’t super into the ghost concept in the book to begin with. It’s not necessary. They establish early on that the burial ground calls to its victims. Jud could have been the one to try to warn Louis and Rachel to stay away. And the barriers still would have been there to keep Rachel from getting to Louis on time. There, the movie stays pretty much the same with some minor tweaks.

    The movie clearly gets tired of Victor, however, because he stops showing up after he gets Gage’s attention and Rachel decides to go see Louis. In the book, Victor is a semi-regular presence once they come across the Pet Sematary. After Gage dies, Victor warns Louis not to give into the pull of the burial grounds. Then, when that doesn’t work, Pascow tries contacting Ellie—who did not get hit by a truck in the novel—who tells Rachel, who recognizes the name from earlier, and then goes—on her own—to see Louis. It was actually pretty silly for her to bring her baby along with her if she thought there was something to be worried about…But I guess we wouldn’t have this movie’s ending if she did the reasonable thing…

    On the way home, a series of events take place that hinder Rachel from arriving on time, implying the burial ground’s magic works beyond the town in which its situated.

    Now, this plays out pretty much the same way in the movie, but differently. We know that the burial grounds have a pull to them, but it’s done…more quickly. As if they realized, oh, we’ve reached the climax of the film and haven’t used our creepy murder kid to murder people yet. Better do that.

    I also was not a fan of the way Ellie physically changes to look like Zelda to taunt Rachel, nor the way Rachel imagines herself in a bed with her spine twisting. To be honest, I don’t recall whether it was like this in the book. If it was, I would have preferred they didn’t add that to the movie at all. The movie is creepy with its main premise.

    Also--and again, maybe this is an issue that was also present in the book—why would Rachel go back to her parent’s house, when she spent the entire movie talking about how she could hear Zelda in the walls? She’s there a whole day and then she goes through that illusion. I know she didn’t want to be in the new house after Ellie died. But couldn’t they have written that Rachel went to stay with her parents in a different, non-Zelda haunted house?

    Ah, but then we wouldn’t get the creepy scene with Rachel’s spine twisting, with jump scares…Bleh.

    OH! And then there’s this one line in the movie that bugged the crap out of me.

    OK, so, in the book, Ellie is asking her parents about death—like she does in the movie—and she asks why God couldn’t just take his own cat.

    Well, this line is altered and given to Louis in the movie. Rachel asks why Louis brought Ellie back, and he says something along the lines of God can kill his own kid.

    Louis Creed may not be very well versed in Christianity. He professes to not believe in an afterlife. No worries. I don’t expect everyone to know everything about the religion—I certainly am not an expert. But how could he not know that’s exactly the story of Jesus, one of the most well-known religious figures on the planet? I’m talking just the basic stuff someone who went to a high school or college or watched a movie or read a book would know. God sent Jesus down to earth to die for the sins of humanity… It’s a small gripe, I guess. Maybe someone in real life would say that—probably in response to the old funeral favourite: it’s God’s plan. People say all sorts of things when grieving. Maybe the extent of Louis’ knowledge about religion is limited to Judaism, where Jesus isn’t a major figure.

    But it just sounded like a dumb line in a movie I already wanted to be over.

    Pet Sematary is a very quiet sort of horror novel. I mean, Louis burns down his house, and shoots both his dead son and the evil cat. But aside from that, the terror comes from the book’s main theme: coping with death, specifically young people. It’s about the unfairness of the people or things we love leaving us so soon. Louis’ temptation to bury Gage/Ellie is heart wrenching, because who among us wouldn’t have considered it? The burial ground doesn’t need a magic pull. Knowing of its existence would be enough. Because it’s human for that temptation to be there. And it’s made even more difficult to read about/watch when Louis does it all again after burying his wife—right after shooting his little boy.

    But we don’t get any of that in this movie. Louis gets killed by his resurrected wife and is also buried. The movie ends with the dead family—Church included—closing in on young Gage Creed, who was put in the family car for safety by Louis.

    Cue a cover of the Ramones song.

    Maybe if I never read the book, this would have been a cooler ending. I really didn’t want to keep comparing the movie to the novel. I wanted to give it a fair chance to stand on its own. But it’s difficult not to compare. I honestly think the book is better—by a long shot.

    The movie had good moments, though. The burial grounds themselves look amazing—far better than how I imagined it while reading the book. Although, I swear the symbol on the trees used to ward off people looks exactly like the symbol of the Kokiri stone from Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I couldn’t find a still from the movie on google, but I can’t be the only one to see it, right?

Source: https://zelda.fandom.com/wiki/Deku_Shield        

    Now that I think about it…the Kokiri are children…and they become Koroks, who wear weird masks…Could Legend of Zelda and Pet Sematary share a universe?!

    We don’t see the Wendigo much in the movie, but we didn’t get a good look at it in the novel either. Less may have been more in this case. And the cast is great. The Creed family is sweet together. And John Lithgow is always fantastic.

    But the movie just didn’t do it for me.

    At the very least, it got me to want to read the book again.

[oncethrown]

Shadowhunters is Finally Getting Good: A Writer’s Perspective

This is going to get long, so basically this is where I’m going:

1. Shadowhunters is still finding itself, similar to how Buffy the Vampire Slayer kinda sucked until it grabbed onto its “Monsters as Life Metaphors” structure halfway through Season 2.

2. Because The Mortal Instruments series is such a catastrophic narrative failure, Shadowhunters doesn’t have compelling plot points to string their own original story between, the way True Blood was able to do with their own sub-par source material.

3. The strong character writing is just starting to free the show from the restrictions of its source material.

Where We Are Now

-The company that owns the rights to The Mortal Instruments is using Shadowhunters to return on a damaged investment. They bought the rights to a popular book series, and made a movie that bombed so hard that when the numbers came in, they stopped production on the sequel within weeks. They lost a shit ton of money on what should have been a good investment, and were unwilling to throw too much good money after bad, which is why there wasn’t much investment in the first season. The first season’s low budget affects more than the special effects. It plays into who they can hire, how long they have to rehearse, how long they have to shoot, every element of production.

-The source material is shit, and it’s an albatross around the show’s neck. The movie sucked so hard because it was a pretty faithful adaption of the books, which are torturously long, and full of one note characters who only exist to spout faux-clever dialogue, or facilitate CC’s incest fantasies. They are driven by entirely by plot, not character, which makes for flat fiction.

-The first season had to be, to an extent, experimental. They had to figure out the right mix between what they had to keep to engage book fans, and what they had to add to make it possible for it to be a TV show, because the book doesn’t have enough material to be a couple seasons of TV.

-The first season worked to clear the very low bar of of being less racist, tokenist, slut-shaming, girl-hating, bi-phobic, and all around disgusting than the books. They succeeded. Yay.

-Successfully moving past the tragedy of the movie into an expanded episode order and expanded budget mean that season two is essentially a brand new show.

- That season is trying to fight its way free of what it had to be in the first season, and the failure of the movie, and the ball and chain of the books.

The Problems

1. The Show Has Turned Every Pointless, Cardboard Dialogue Spouter from the Books into a Compelling, Nuanced Character, and Now There Are Too Many

The book characters have interesting things on their character sheets, but never become interesting. The show has recomposited characters out of the character elements used in the books, and created complex, compelling, nuanced characters, who have ties and relationships to eachother, who are impacted by the world around them, and who make decisions and affect the world around them and eachother, instead of just waiting around for Clary to discover her special rune magic, or for Magnus to portal them somewhere.

Unfortunately, a bunch of cardboard cutouts creating obstacles to, and eventually enabling brother-sister fucking don’t suck up too much plot time, but 11 suddenly worth-while characters (Clary, Simon, Alec, Isabelle, Jace, Maryse, Jocelyn, Luke, Raphael, Maia, Magnus) plus a few new additions we are invested in to some degree (Lydia, Aldertree, Iris), and a few random additions that don’t seem to do much but create more dialogue and scoot plots along (Valentine, Meliorn, Raj, Max, Dot, Gretel, Suspiciously Important Girl With Glasses) all end up battling for screen time, to the detriment of each other.

For every charming interaction between Maia and Simon, we don’t get to see Luke dealing with Jocelyn’s death. When we get a glimpse into the tenderness of Magnus and Raphael’s relationship, there’s less time to see Magnus and Alec learn where they cross and divide. When we see that Alec and Maryse still love each other, even if the have so much shit left to work through , that takes potential minutes away from someone trying to talk to Jace about being abducted and tortured. There is so much potential, and it’s not possible to turn all of it into plot when there are only 45 minutes a week to work with.

1A. Except Valentine, Who is A Spectacularly Shitty Villain

Valentine is one long HHHHHHHZZZZZZMMMMMMMHHHHHhhzzzzmmmmhhhh on an evil kazoo.

A good villain is the hero of their own story, but they have to be more than that. A good villain has to taunt you with the possibility that they could be the hero of your story. They have to want something in a way that you can understand the wanting, even if what they want isn’t something you would want.

Kylo Ren is a good villain. He wants to be a super powerful Jedi and big deal leader in the Empire and the movie shows you that he wants that because he’s actually a pathetic little snot streak, drowning in his inability to live up to the standards of toxic masculinity around him, while wearing a silly helmet. The desire makes sense.

Spider-Man Villains are good villains. They are typically super smart scientists trying to solve a problem, but their science gives them some sort of mutation that casts them out of the society they were trying to improve.

Magneto is a great villain. A holocaust survivor who believes he sees the writing on the wall and won’t let history repeat itself.  

(Quick fact about Oncethrown: I went to go see the Johnny Depp version of Sweeny Todd in theaters in college and didn’t realize he was the villain until the very last scene. (The last last scene. Even after he throws Mrs. Lovett in the oven) Because he was unfairly jailed by a man who wanted him gone so that he could rape Sweeny todd’s wife to be raped into insanity and leave her out on the street to rot, and I was totally onboard with the quest for vengeance up until the moment the blood started pouring out if his neck.)

Valentine is just generically evil. He was born into the most powerful class in his world, was annoyed that his society wouldn’t let him become even more powerful, and now is experimenting on a class he already could kill with little to no repercussions, and working to eradicate them… because he can?

He doesn’t love or care about anyone either. There’s nothing to hold onto about Valentine. He’s just an opposing force. He could be a block of wood with angry eyebrows and the effect on the plot would be about the same.

1B. Except Aldertree, Who We Were Promised Would Be And Interesting Villain is Just A Random Force For Bad.

Aldertree came in to bring the erratic New York Institute back under Clave control. And he started out doing that. He threw the downworlders out of the Institute, he left Jace to rot in jail because he wouldn’t swear total fealty to the Clave, he nearly let Alec die because he threatened very important Shadowhunter traditions by refusing to marry a suitable woman in order to date a man, and a downworlder.

The yin-fen plot line originally was in this same functional but boring vein, until the last episode (spoilers) where he was clearly trying to get Izzy to trade sex for drugs (end spoilers). Generic Rapist Evil not interesting either. All he ended up doing was giving Alec a “Reclaiming the Institute Plotline” which would have been a really, really good piece in that whole “Effects of Institutionalizing Discrimination” theme… if any time had been devoted to it at all this season. Like… Alec originally ceded his authority to Lydia. The way he came for Aldertree just wasn’t given the building blocks to be satisfying.

2. The Books Didn’t Have Layers, and the Show is Trying to Graft an Interesting Theme Onto the Book’s Pocked and Diseased Foundation

The books are just an excuse for incest. The show is attempting to develop a narrative about institutionalized discrimination and oppression, and how characters are influenced by the way that affects their societies, upbringings, relationships and lives.

There is a really underdeveloped attempt at this in the books which more or less boils down to “Shadowhunters are mean to downworlders, and it’s not totally fair, but they are still the heroes, because they are all described as sexually attractive.”

The show is running into a lot of complications as they try to smoosh this theme onto the source material they have to work with.

-The main plot of “Evil McEvil is a Racist Who Wants To Start A Genocide Because Of Evil and Overt Racism”is sucking up all the air in the room for more compelling and important elements of the show,  such as every idea presented in Maia and Simon’s conversation about how Shadowhunters pretend that everyone is on the same team, but don’t understand what the daily existence of downworlders is really like in a world that Shadowhunters essentially rule.

Or Alec’s struggle to be both a Shadowhunter and a gay man falling in love with a downworlder.

Or Isabelle and Lydia’s season one speaking out about Law vs. Justice in the Shadowhunter world.

Or Clary’s 10 minute plot about not being trained well enough to be a real shadowhunter, but knowing too much to ever be a mundane again

The adherence to the main plot of book one and two is one of the things turning Clary into a mess of a white savior who doesn’t learn from her mistakes. She’s the entry point character, she’s bringing us into this world, and she’s the hero of the story. So... she’s white and straight with magic powers, trying to solve racism and homophobia in a story where the whole society she enters into is built around it, and has been for centuries.

3. The Clusterfuck of Potential We Are Working Out Of Now

So 2.08 and 2.09 I think prove that we are watching a show that is just about to get there. Both of these episodes had insular plots solved within the confines of the episode while also having consequences in the season stretching story.

Good characters are interacting with each other in interesting ways. (Except Lydia. Where is Lydia? I love her and I want her back) There are some growing pain failures (everything Izzy has said and done all season), some serious fuck ups (the lack of consent before the lack of malec sex scene) and a lot of unfortunate leaning on shitty and easy tropes (Izzy and Raphael fall into a drug fueled affair, Alec pushes Magnus into sex in a 3 minute side plot, Valentine exists and we have to watch him) But they are setting up more and more really solid pieces with places to go and I’m excited to see it happen.

4. The Things They Need to Fix (this is mostly rambling)

-Give fewer characters better plots per episode instead of trying to give everyone a couple minutes of screen time.

-Give characters goal and personality and development driven season arcs that create plots instead of having them constantly reacting to plot elements that are not character driven (purely from a writing standpoint, this is the biggest flaw with Isabelle’s plot line. The addiction drives her plot, not her personality, and Aldertree doesn’t have a character based reason to give her the drug to being with. “Just because I’m an asshole” isn’t really good enough. That’s why Alec is the best part of season 1. Everything he says and does is driven by a couple easily defined elements of his character.)

-If you are going to sell the diversity aspect of your show, be aware of the full context of the plot lines you are assigning your actors. It’s not great that there are 4 latinx actors, and the two of them with accents are in a drug dealing/addiction/sex for drugs plot line. It’s great that your only canon couple is a gay interracial couple. It’s great that they got a really sweet build up, and they have great communication scenes and they are really building a strong relationship. It’s not great that they do not touch while a lot of totally gratuitous sex is happening around them.

-Figure out who you really need, and jettison the dead weight. -Why is Raj still on this show? All he does is say nasty shit about women. He’s disgusting, he’s boring, and he’s pointless. Literally every single time he’s on screen he could be replaced by someone we care about and it would tighten the episode. -We ditched Robert because as far as the impact on the main characters goes, he’s a redundancy on Maryse’s storyline, and she has all the good elements. -Aldertree is pointless. Maryse could have had Aldertree’s “WE ARE REALLY FUCKING GOING WITH WHAT THE CLAVE SAYS” storyline and it would have been a lot more interesting with the rest of the plot.Lydia could have had that plot too. “You fucked up at the wedding, reign in this nonsense or we are shipping you our to wrangle island”

[chicagoindiecritics]

New from Jeff York on The Establishing Shot: “IT: CHAPTER TWO” BETTERS THE FIRST FILM YET MAKES TOO MANY SIMILAR MISTAKES

If ever there was a horror film tailor-made for a sequel, IT was, well, it, as the source material book by Stephen King is bisected into two parts. The first half of the story tells of seven children in the small town of Derry, Maine battling an evil entity in 1957 that not only kills children but preys upon their fears as well, creating hallucinatory nightmares that lure them to their deaths. The second half of the story moves the period forward to 1984, where the same seven, now grown adults, must return to their hometown to battle the same entity that has returned. In 2017, the adaptation of the children’s story became a runaway box office hit. 

Now, in 2019, comes this obvious sequel entitled IT: CHAPTER  TWO. This new film improves upon some of the shortcomings of the first one, eliminating narrative confusion and raising the performances of the younger actors who perform here in new scenes filmed as flashbacks. It also doesn’t let Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard) overstay his welcome this time. He’s a good villain, but there was too much of him in the first film. This one also delivers much bigger scares, and the adult leads make a real difference in grounding the stakes and making it all play believably. 

Still, there is an issue with the consistency of tone throughout, and indeed, that is always the issue in adapting Stephen King for the big or small screen. King writes earnestly, no matter how outlandish the scenario is, and some films and miniseries have been better at conveying that than others. John Carpenter ensured that a killer ‘58 Plymouth Fury seemed all too real in 1983’s CHRISTINE, whereas Stephen King himself failed to make trucks feel the same when he directed MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE just three years later. When this film remains earnest, it works well, treating all of the visions coming to life as legitimate and lethal. The film loses its grip on some of the seriousness in the last 30 minutes, which is shocking considering the previous two hours did a credible and sincere job of addressing King’s themes of sexism, racism, homophobia, and small-town isolationism. 

Things start off promisingly at the start; however, with an intense scene that would devastate in any drama, let alone a horror/fantasy like this one. The second chapter starts with a hate crime, just like King did in the novel. Two gay men are beaten up outside the Derry town carnival by three bigoted, bullying teens. Watching these innocent men get pummeled in the streets is absolutely horrifying. Then, one of the gay men gets tossed off the bridge into the river by the thugs, and as they race away, the evil clown Pennywise shows up to retrieve their victim. The evil entity ends up feasting on the gay man’s midsection, killing him, and it is an all-too painful reminder of how the first film began with six-year-old Georgie dying from Pennywise’s similar attack in the storm drain. 

For a while, this second chapter embraces such darkness full throttle. Its psychological terror continues too with the “loser’s club” members now all struggling with being adults. Their traumas from the past have not been erased, even if they’ve tried to put Pennywise, the entity, and the vicious murders in Derry out of their mind. Bill (James McAvoy) may be a successful novelist, but he’s fighting for the artistic integrity of his work as his books get made into movies. Jokester Richie (Bill Hader) has turned into a bitter and selfish asshole of a stand-up, one who loathes himself even more than the audiences he performs for. Ben (Jay Ryan) may be a successful architect, but he still harbors a lot of the insecurities he carried as an overweight child. Eddie (James Ransmore) is a successful financier, but you’d never know it from his ‘woe is me’ persona. And Beverly (Jessica Chastain) is married to a rich man who beats her routinely.  

Mike (Isiah Mustafa), the narrator of the story, stayed in Derry, but he’s still haunted by small-town myopia and the history of Pennywise. He gets by, managing the library, and living in the ramshackle apartment in the attic atop the building. Mike knows it’s Pennywise’s handiwork when that gay man is murdered, so he summons the others back to honor their vow to fight the entity should “It” ever return. Only one of the seven fails to show up in Derry a few days later. The cowardly Stanley (Andy Bean) was so freaked out by Mike’s call, he slits his wrists to bleed out in the bathtub. 

So now, the remaining six must wrestle with not only the murdering supernatural forces coursing through Derry once again but with their own damaged lives as well. It makes for a psychological thriller with a lot at stake, and the filmmakers give the material their all. Occasionally, screenwriter Gary Dauberman and director Any Muschietti over-emphasize points that are clear as a bell, but their earnestness is admirable, as well as all the detail they put into almost every scene. The adult cast is terrific and never condescend to the pulpy parts of the material. Special kudos should go to Hader for ensuring we buy all the silliness of the scene where he’s chased by a giant Paul Bunyan statue run amuck. He makes it believable and exciting, not to mention wholly terrifying.  

Even better is the scene where Beverly revisits her apartment and has a run-in with the entity masquerading as a kindly old lady living there. When Beverly is distracted, Muschietti shows the old woman shaking uncontrollably in the background, and at one point, crossing into another room stark naked. It’s cheekily humorous and eerie as hell. And then when the entity suddenly emerges from the kitchen as a 10-foot graying monster grabbing for Beverly, it provides one of the very best jump-scares in a film in years. 

All of the actors, particularly Chastain, Mustafa, and McAvoy play it perfectly. Their commitment to the melodrama works keeps us invested even when the CGI goes over the top. Unfortunately, everything pretty much does during the last 30 minutes. It becomes bigger, sillier, and loses a lot of the earnest goodwill it’s built up till then. Richie and Eddie start quipping back and forth, spitting out bad lines like they’re in an Arnold Schwarzenegger actioner. Blood, sand, and comic cameos overwhelm the emotions at play. Even one character vamps Jack Nicholson’s “Here’s Johnny!” line from THE SHINING. 

When one major character gets stabbed in the face, and another in the chest, and yet they act like they are mere flesh wounds, the credibility of it all starts to seriously wane. Worse yet, the climax goes on and on and on, overstaying its welcome and going off in too many tangents including having too many characters have run-ins with their childhood counterparts. 

There are other missteps too. While all the characters are developed well, the town itself is mostly inert. It played a much more significant part in the book and the first film, but here it’s relegated to the background. Would a run-down movie theater still be standing? And why is the dilapidated old house still standing when it was already a real estate eyesore 27 years ago? There never seem to be any other townsfolk around, or police nearby, even with a mental patient on the loose. Indeed, some judicious editing should have been supplied to the adaptation starting with the elimination of the Henry Bowers B-storyline from the book.  

IT: CHAPTER 2 looks like money and will probably make a fortune. It has more genuine scares than most horror entries these days, and the serious themes kept intact from the book make for something deeper and richer compared to most frighteners. If only the earnest approach, and some genuine discipline, remained onscreen and off in the third act. Unfortunately, such mistakes truly hinder the final takeaway. This could have been truly something, but this isn’t quite (ahem) it.

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[horrorfictionreviews-blog]

The Meg, Revisited

by Mark Lorenzana

This was a fanboy post that I published in Facebook when the first The Meg trailer was released, roughly three months before the movie hit cinemas:

OK, as a huge Steve Alten fan, someone who’s read all the books in his Meg series, all the books in his Loch series, and all the books in his Mayan Domain trilogy, finally seeing a trailer of the movie adaptation of his 1997 novel (after languishing in developmental hell for 21 years—21 years!) has got me stoked. So please indulge me and allow me to go into fanboy mode here. Warning: Minor spoilers ahead, as I nitpick on a couple of the differences between the novel and the upcoming film based on a two-minute trailer. LOL

1. In the book, the megalodon that deep-sea diver Dr. Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) discovers in the Marianas Trench is albino-white and blind, owing to an evolutionary adaptation of deep-sea creatures that live in pitch-black darkness. Of course, originally, megalodons weren’t albino and blind, and they didn’t live in deep-sea trenches either, but the megalodons in the book survived extinction over a period of 23 million years (thus even outliving the dinosaurs in the process) by gradually moving deeper and deeper, escaping the frigid surface waters of the ice age and finding a home in the abyssal waters heated by undersea thermal vents or black smokers that spew chemicals from the earth’s interior. We see in the trailer that the megalodon is an olive-green color, and that’s cool too (although we don’t really know the actual skin color of megs because all that paleontologists have found are their fossilized teeth and jaws—a shark’s skeleton is made up entirely of cartilage), but it would have been awesome to see the original glow-in-the-dark meg.

2. Finally seeing Dr. Jonas Taylor in the flesh still feels strange to me, especially since the actor cast to play the role is Jason Statham. I imagine Jonas Taylor, as he is described in the book, as more of an academic type—imagine Dr. Robert Langdon in Dan Brown’s novels (which is why I could see Tom Hanks–or Hugh Grant, or Edward Norton, or even Pierce Brosnan—definitely owning a Jonas Taylor portrayal). I guess the people behind the movie wanted someone more badass, though, and I’m willing to give Mr. Statham the benefit of the doubt.

Silly, mindless summer flick coming your way, folks. Let’s not take this seriously and just enjoy the ride, shall we? As the novel’s original blurb says: Jurassic Shark! :)

I finally saw the movie last month. My verdict? It did a pretty good job of porting over a horror novel full of blood and guts (what can you expect from a novel about a giant prehistoric shark that’s unleashed on the general public?) to the big screen as a PG-13 flick. The result was a mindlessly fun movie with, well, less blood and guts, which apparently disappointed Jason Statham but got the desired effect of raking in approximately 500 million in the box office.

It goes without saying here that I read Steve Alten’s original novel more than two decades ago, and I absolutely loved it. As a kid I was an animal freak, and I loved (still love, by the way) sharks especially, and it’s no surprise that all these years I still reread Alten’s Meg series as well as Peter Benchley’s novels Jaws and White Shark.

Currently I’m reading Alten’s newest book in the Meg series, Meg: Generations (the sixth in the series), and before I finish it I’d like to write a book review of each of the previous five novels that came before. But right now, inspired by that fanboy post I made on Facebook, please indulge me as I dedicate this post to discussing more of the differences between the novel and the movie (major spoilers below).

1. Jonas Taylor, both in the book and in the film, is  a Navy deep-sea diver who, for many years, has had to live with his guilt after accidentally killing two of his colleagues when he piloted a submersible to the Marianas Trench only to panic after seeing what he believed was a megalodon that was about to attack them. He is dismissed from the Navy as a result. In the book, Jonas, in an attempt to try to convince himself and the others around him that he is not crazy, devotes himself to the study of megalodons, even earning himself a PhD along the way. In the movie, he retreats to Thailand and drowns his sorrows in beer (thus never earning his PhD, what a waste).

2. In the novel the marine research team is headed by Masao Tanaka, of Japanese descent, and his research facility is situated off Monterey Bay, California. In the movie they decided to change Masao’s character into a Chinese guy and move the research facility from the United States to Asia, which was a good move actually because the movie raked in millions from the Chinese audience. Cha-ching.

3. In the novel Jonas’s best friend, James "Mac" Mackreides, is an alcoholic helicopter pilot with a taste for prostitutes, while in the movie he’s one of the smart guys, a crew at the research station. (I still love the whoring Mac in the novel, by the way.)

4. In the novel, DJ is the only son of Masao Tanaka. He is also an expert at doing deep-sea dives and piloting the submersibles; in the movie DJ is a black guy who’s a source of comedic entertainment. And no, movie-version DJ doesn’t die first.

5. In the novel, Jonas’s ex-wife is a slut that deserved to die, but in the movie Jonas’s ex-wife is pretty cool and doesn’t deserve to die.

6. The movie is funnier; it embraces its campy tone wholeheartedly, which is why even if a lot of  the stuff that’s happening is unbelievable, the film can actually get away with it. The novel takes itself more seriously, sometimes way too seriously, but as a whole the novel has more action, is more violent and intense, and has way more gore. With that said, I hope they show an uncut version of the movie (*crosses fingers*).

7. In the movie’s climax, Statham’s Jonas did a very badass Statham thing: he first split open the megalodon from snout to tail by using the submersible he was piloting, then he actually got out of the submersible with a spear gun in hand, grabbed on to one of the giant shark’s gill slits, and as the animal breached the surface of the water, Jonas pierced the meg’s eye and drove home the spear into the animal’s brain, killing it. This would be so fucking awesome if not for the fact that in the novel Jonas did a very badass Chuck Norris thing: he intentionally piloted his one-man submersible into the meg’s open mouth and parked it in the shark’s stomach and, while Jonas breathed through an oxygen mask, made his way to the animal’s giant heart and sawed it off using a fossilized meg tooth that he kept with him at all times as a souvenir (Movie Jonas: 0 Novel Jonas: 1). 

I’ll keep adding to this list as a I remember more details. Meanwhile, I’ll keep on reading through  Meg: Generations as my schedule allows, and will post a book review once done. Ciao for now.

[njawaidofficial]

23 Book-To-Movie Adaptations That Seriously Infuriated People

https://styleveryday.com/2018/02/24/23-book-to-movie-adaptations-that-seriously-infuriated-people/

23 Book-To-Movie Adaptations That Seriously Infuriated People

“I could write a book about what a horrible job they did with this movie but I’m afraid they would try to turn that book into a movie and butcher it too.”

The Percy Jackson series (2010, 2013)

“A goddamn travesty, especially compared to the source material. They changed so much, including the characters’ ages and the fact that the gods couldn’t talk to their demigod children for…reasons? So much dumb shit happened, especially at the end, that my brain just kind of shut down to protect itself from the stupidity.” —Aniela Krajewska, Facebook

20th Century Fox

Columbia Pictures

The Girl on the Train (2016)

“They didn’t do a good job of just explaining anything. If I hadn’t read the book it would have flown right over me that Rachel got cheated on, and that Anna was the other woman. I could write a book about what a horrible job they did with this movie but I’m afraid they would try to turn that book into a movie and butcher it too.” —amandan4979829b3

Universal Pictures

The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009)

“The novel was dark, often quite bleak, fairly sexy, with characters who are written to be a little bit ‘alternative’. The film adaptation captured none of that and ended up being a very boring, straightforward romance/drama.” —primavolta

“Instead of a beautiful love story that existed outside of normal space and time, we got a steaming pile of garbage.” —e493bebd14

New Line Cinema

Paper Towns (2015)

“They managed to take all the deep and serious parts out and turned it into a cheerful road-trip movie. In the book the group was in a rush to get to New York because they thought Margo was going to kill herself, not because they didn’t want to miss prom! It makes the whole thing seem like a silly teen movie.” —halseydelrey

20th Century Fox

Beautiful Creatures (2013)

“It’s been five years and I am still suppressing my rage. First of all, instead of featuring the two strong, powerful WOC characters from the book, Amma and Marian, the movie condensed them into one person! Not to mention that the rest of the characters were barely recognizable and the plot seemed to use the book as a light suggestion. So. Much. RAGE!” —emilybatsont

Warner Bros.

Eragon (2006)

“They took the main points of the story — boy finds dragon egg, goes on adventure, meets people, fights battles — and kept nothing else. They changed so much of the plot that it barely resembled the book, draining all of the emotion and wonder out of the story.” —emilyk81

20th Century Fox

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

“No S.P.E.W., no school uniforms, and they changed the entire layout of the school grounds (Hagrid’s hut, as an example). I still skip it when I have a HP marathon.” —katief4f35922ac

Warner Bros.

The Lovely Bones (2009)

“That book means so much to me and helped me understand my beliefs — and they changed damn near everything!” —snl8387

Paramount Pictures

Ella Enchanted (2004)

“The book was about an amazing young girl who refuses to be anything but herself, who doesn’t need a handsome prince to save her — she actually ends up saving him on multiple occasions. The book taught me to love my weirdness and be brave. The movie teaches you that if you are in trouble, just wait and a MAN will come save you. Not exactly the message I was hoping to share with my niece.” —colleeno4542d5e7f

Miramax

My Sister’s Keeper (2009)

“The whole point of the book is how fragile life is, so you go through the book thinking, ‘ok the sister with cancer will die’ — but the HEALTHY sister dies and then the sister with cancer lives for many more years. In the movie, nah — the sister with cancer just dies, making the movie just another run-of-the-mill, only-made-to-make-you-cry movie. So upsetting because it’s probably one of the best books I’ve ever read, but they ruined it.” —cs613

New Line Cinema

Vampire Academy (2014)

“The book series deals with really complex mental health issues and touches on inequality and racism and some really complicated issues, and this just made it another bad teen movie. It infuriates me.” —meganmariec3

The Weinstein Company

The Maze Runner (2014)

“They changed so much about the core details of the book. I know you can’t expect every detail of a book to make it into the movie, but even the most important things — like the maze itself, and how the two main characters interact with one another — were changed and were nothing like they were in the book.” —rebecca0815

20th Century Fox

The Hobbit (2012, 2013, 2014)

“Talk about a piece-of-shit movie. To see the way they destroyed the story was absolutely shocking and saddening. The over-the-top CGI, the addition of unnecessary characters, and the fact that they made it into three films all contributed to its horrendous shittiness.” —mrsh810

New Line Cinema

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)

“Everything about the Tri-wizard Tournament was so wrong. Incredibly frustrating.” —sarad489fb8598

Warner Bros.

A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004)

“Cramming three books into one movie? They completely changed the ending to the first book. Prepubescent me was very disappointed, and very glad they never finished it up.” —allysonrutledger

Paramount Pictures

Inferno (2016)

“The book was amazing and thought provoking, and the movie took everything good out of it. This was the worst book-to-movie adaptation I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something.” —nataliem43ff5cd3e

Columbia Pictures

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (2011)

“It still makes me want to cry over how badly they handled the death of Voldemort. The entire point of destroying the Horcruxes was to ensure that he died a normal, boring, HUMAN death. It was also important that many of the most powerful people in the wizarding world witnessed his death. But no, it was not to be. It is just horrible.” —micheller464323ed8

Warner Bros.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016)

“They switched all the kids’ ages and powers around to force unnecessary romantic subplots on us and basically made Emma, the most badass in the book, rely on Jacob for safety. They had great potential for a franchise and totally blew it.” —kendallboj

20th Century Fox

The Shining (1980)

“I felt it completely missed the point of the book. There are some really moving moments in the book where Jack struggles against the hotel trying to get him to kill his son so the hotel can have him. Instead we get crazy Jack, deleting those wonderful moments with his son, and that fucking maze scene.” —marthaj9

Warner Bros.

The Notebook (2004)

“The constant fighting between Allie and Noah in the movie is not even close to how it went down in the book. Just typing this makes me so angry about the movie.” —meganm4d0ba64ef

New Line Cinema

Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.

[geek-gem]

It 2017

8:21 pm okay had to click in the description thing three times. Yet also I wanted to put the time because been at home for a while.

But I'll get to this. Yes I've seen the film I saw it with my Nana, brother, and his friend who's a very close neighbor of ours on our street.

I'll just get to it I liked it quite a bit or a lot. Basically I enjoyed it. Will say it did frightened me quite a bit.

But I'll put that there and I wanna say some stuff first. I'm gonna say okay I missed OK KO and I noticed when we got back in my Nana's car it was 7:01 pm meaning I missed the second showing. Felt disappointed or sad. Honestly hoping tomorrow or some time this week that new episode is showcased. Including I don't usually record shows because to...keep my interests hidden at times.

Yet seeing this film honestly quite a good time. I'm gonna speak a bit about well not just the film yet other stuff. I've never seen the original mini series but I've seen Nostalgia Critic's review of it. Despite I'm not the biggest fan of his anymore and that was years ago. Also I was surprised it was a mini series also Canadian because Canadians make some good shit. Despite yeah I know it's based upon this novel.

Including last night was seeing a bit of clips from the original where Tim Curry is playing Pennywise seriously lovely actor this is Nigel Thornberry and other characters.

Also I haven't had the most exposure to the character of Pennywise but mainly if you don't mind me calling you friend @bakhtaks-blog who's a horror fan and likes Pennywise but honestly over the years the character and story has been around for quite a long time.

I don't wanna sound stupid yet I'm seriously surprised by the amount of interest this film had. I'm worried I'm sounding a bit hypocritical but it's maybe because I think horror fans don't get much interest because well their horror films almost left fans. So I'm honestly sounding stupid but it amazes me how much this film generated interest in the public.

It's probably because of some reasons. Including just... really it's in a way not a remake or reboot. But a official movie adaptation or part 1 since it's not the whole book. I kind of feel Pennywise being part of pop culture I'm sorry I'm just surprised by so many people wanting to see this. Because to me I hardly see people get excited for anything horror related or that's just me.

Yet I was interested despite.....I keep having this mindset of horror related remakes reboots being considered the worst of the worst and seeing many. I was surprised at first people being excited for it. Yet I'm sounding stupid their must be a whole lot of other reasons that would make sense. Also advertising that's a big thing that generates interest at times.

Also I saw Jeremy Jahns review on Wednesday and I enjoy his content one of my favorite reviewers. I was surprised and seeing the Rotten Tomatos score last time I saw was a 90 percent. While I make my own opinions I was surprised by that.

Along with reading mainly found this in a comment that the director read the book five times I guess to get this film right. Yesterday on Rotten Tomatos I said that's dedication because that amazes me. Including the effort put into the film I'm just wow. Also the comment months ago that Stephen King himself said the movie was good.

Anyway I'm sorry I got off topic I'll start talking about the movie I honestly liked it. Including just seems like a stupid critical thing of me it starts kind of slow yet just really as the movie goes on it gets really good.

I'm gonna say this as well I honestly liked the characters mainly well the Loser's Club where it's these kids. Really all the kids act very well. Including at times their were moments that were really funny that eases off the stress of some parts. In fact including Jeremy Jahns mentioned this and the Rotten Tomatos score this film has quite some heart. Which I don't wanna sound stupid I kind of rarely see in horror related stuff basically movies. Theirs some character development and some sad moments that make you honestly care about what's going on.

I was quite interested on what's going on and the finale seriously the way it goes down I saw people actually clapping in my theater when this finale was going down. Because if seriously felt very full filling and seeing these characters after all the shit they've gone through you feel like your very happy.

That's something I now talked about now let's talked about Pennywise seriously the actor who plays him does such a good job. I feel his performance as the character I felt this fear and just the way he acted and moved. I thought it was very well done.

Including I'm gonna say seriously even my brother honestly he was just...meh to me he was bothersome yet going to this movie was his idea and before that me and my Nana talked about it possibly. Seriously ether it's just me not seeing horror movies in some time at times. Also new ones I'm kind of a pussy. Just like with Annabelle Creation I seriously had my right hand up at times. Including my brothers saying who's 5 years younger then me that it's okay or something. Including before seeing this movie he said he doesn't like scary movies and... I remembered I guess it was cause of a friend he said who read it and I guess he wanted to see it.

Yet really at times I felt frightened. But yeah their are certain jump scares and this is my first time seeing the film. But their are at times mainly it's with the characters I'm worried of just what's gonna pop up. I seem to sound stupid. But I wanted to talk about that.

In fact adding to that and well the film is quite brutal. In fact adding to this you actually see well in a way children dying on screen or facing certain stuff. Basically the film isn't holding back. Honestly from what I can think it wouldn't be the first film to do this. One film I can count is Aliens Vs Predator 2 Requiem yet let's just say well I hate that film very fucking much because of how fucking horrible it is.

But really also other horror films yet.... really teenagers are still considered children. Yet the way it's handled where it adds to it being disturbing and makes you feel uncomfortable. Because basically just seeing certain images and just the film doesn't hold back. Or that's just me it might yet okay maybe it didn't went all out all I don't know. I'm saying that because I feel someone might have a different opinion then me. Yet seriously it's brutal.

Also I kind of question well I'm a fan of a franchise FNAF where the lore includes murdered children.

Honestly just a lot of the film was good. Also the score and just...I liked it quite a bit. Including before that well mainly yesterday I read a comment and saw a thumbnail I thought I might of been spoiled. Yet I feel the ending wasn't spoiled for me because it was another scene.

Including will say along with the brutal quite gruesome I don't wanna sound stupid yet I'm warning you if you wanna see it beware of that. Their are certain scenes that might disturb you. Yet that's kind of the point of a horror film. Almost put yet again but I'm surprised just seriously the heart and develop

Well was kind of scared when honestly my bros friend and my bro just came into my room. Just his friend also he's my friend as well opened the door slowly. They were just looking yeah long ago my bro used my room to film something. Then they left I closed the door I'm getting off topic.

Really I enjoyed the film a lot. Including gonna spoil well it is the ending but also it happens before the credits start. So be warned but it's nothing huge yet just saying it's basically before the credits just informing audiences.

Before I saw the movie like the past few or two days or yeah few days. I found out this is the first part in a duoilgy of movies. With this film focusing on the view point of the characters as children. With the 2nd I'm gonna expect yeah it being focused on them as adults.

Including this made me think and reading from a comment that the book is huge even told my Nana after the movie. Also it made me think of Stephen King liking the film and it's not a simple remake reboot or...it's something else it some what is a remake reboot whatever but a more faithful to the source material and a lot of people seem to be happy.

If the book is that huge it's great the director and everyone else decided to do that. Including it helps out with the development of characters.

When the film ended it shows the title and then shows the words in front of the title chapter one. Then a guy that was some what in front of us to the right on some seats down said oh shit or something like that yeah he said oh shit. Not loudly but a simple oh shit it was silly and it seemed to be those words.

Also I remember now what I was gonna say in a interview I haven't seen the interview yet. But the actors I saw these words on Rotten Tomatos decided to choose actors for their older selves. Seems like something funny. I'm guessing maybe they might said some outrageous casting choices lol.

Other then that I had a good time almost left the word food ha. Really it's been quite a long time while I enjoyed Annabelle Creation and really interested in the Conjuring franchise. Seeing this film just it reminded me of other certain horror films that are considered masterpieces in some sorts. Basically ones that are very good.

Because I was seriously surprised by how well done it was because no offense probably because of certain films I watch I'm so used to some regular bullshit. Not all of them are bad. Yet really just....I think I shouldn't compare some slasher films to this. Yet the Universal Monsters films their originals seem amazing haven't watched them all yet. Remember seeing much of the original Frankenstein in high school but never finished the film.

Also slasher film their was a new Leatherface trailer before the film looks quite nice. Yet... probably because no offense my interest in slasher films including ones starting my favorite characters from films I generally liked it. Yet it could be good or enjoyable like actually good because this year has been quite good with horror films. Unless I've missed something.

So let me say this when I got home said hi to family a bit said the film was good or just I liked it a lot I think the 2nd part is more likely oh stomach, said it frightened me and agreed it was scary. Took a shower, and just was hanging out with family my cousin T and his girlfriend and their baby girl were here. I didn't wanna be awkward and not be around. Which is why I didn't make this sooner. The baby girl spit or yeah throw up on my mom behind her back before I could ask if I could hold her again. Including my mom was closing the blinds. Luckly it was all cleaned up. Then to hold the baby was nervous and she touched my beard....I was surprised. Yet was nervous and even said I thought I was strangling her but wasn't including my cousin T telling me how to hold her in some ways.

Also went through two shirts just...also washed my beard and...don't like my shirts being touched by people ha.

I think that's mostly all ha. Was thinking just ha almost left must but forget the tag just...ticks. Now almost left get just....I enjoyed the film and wanted to tell you. That's my reaction review shit ha must chill just ticks ha 9:19 edit 9:20 just mtv 1 on just and remote won't work again g just...oh dare to live is on just ticks ha

[caredogstips]

The 6 Most Ludicrous Superhero Movies We Almost Got

At first glance, it seems like we’ve run out of superhero movies to oblige. We’ve rebooted certain series so many times that you could do an Expendables made up exclusively of former Batmen. They’re making a freaking Gambit movie. It almost stimulates you wonder, “How insane does a superhero mind need to be for Hollywood not to make it? ” We’re very glad you asked. This insane TAGEND

# 6. Michael Jackson’s X-Men

We live in a macrocosm of amazements and sorcery, but it’s nothing compared to the world we nearly lived in — one in which Michael Jackson played Professor Xavier in an X-Men movie. The King of Pop actually lobbied for the area, but seemed to know he was a long shot. And we don’t symbolize the X-Man Longshot.

Though we guess he would have been a passable Morph ?

Jackson was so eager to play the character that he tried to buy Marvel. He figured if he owned the company, who could say no? As if anyone in their right mind would say no to a squealing, dancing Professor X conducting a unit of ten-year-olds and a chimpanzee, which almost certainly would have been his first and final thought. The spot is, Michael Jackson’s X-Men would have been so transcendent that every time Professor X rose from his wheelchair to curve slip, so too would each hampered party watching.

“Breaking bulletin: Doctors stupefied as millions of paraplegics worldwide have retrieved the ability to moonwalk.”

Jackson’s deal to buy Marvel undoubtedly never went through, which is a mistake time travelers will hopefully repair, because he wasn’t merely looking to tally the role of a super-persuasive male surrounded by supernatural brats. He was also hoping to play Peter Parker, the Amazing Spider-Man.

It seems vaguely foolish( in the best acces ), but he wasn’t without his supporters. When asked about it, Stan Lee himself said that he supposed Jackson would’ve been a great Spider-Man. How superb would that have been? Do you remember that situation in Spider-Man 3 where Tobey Maguire switched evil and delivered into our world cinema’s worst dance number?

You damn well supposed to do now .

If Michael Jackson was Spider-Man, they would have invented a new category of Academy Award to present to that panorama. Or maybe it would have resulted in the martyrdom of cinema itself. We’ll never know.

# 5. We Almost Got Quentin Tarantino’s Silver Surfer ( Among Others)

The Silver Surfer has always been a bit of a weird reputation. He saved his planet by volunteering to work for Galactus as a “herald.” A herald’s enterprise is to run through cavity and find planets for Galactus to eat. After years of convicting billions, maybe trillions, of beings to extinction, he decided to quit and use the “power cosmic” to become a hero. At health risks of oversimplifying acts, the power cosmic can totally do anything. So … how do you manufacture that into a movie?

Okay , now how do you move that into a good movie ?

It’s not exactly clear, but many people have tried. They approached George Lucas in 1990 to discuss a Surfer movie, but it was decided that the silver guy engineering wasn’t quite there. One studio tried painting a soul with mineral petroleum, but it seemed less cosmic and more “buns calendar.”

After Reservoir Dogs , Quentin Tarantino showed interest in making a Silver Surfer movie, and this idea rebounded around until it got to Fox, who hired John Turman to write a write. In it, the Surfer came to Earth, met a 12 -year-old prostitute, fallen in love with a waitress, and got was transformed into an everyday , non-silver human by an evil general.

He would also inexplicably use the N-word a lot . Yes, their meaning was to make a movie about a silver-tongued seat god and alter him into a regular human for most of it. And even after all that, they decided that the cinema would be too expensive. The Silver Surfer finally presented up as a corroborating globule of CGI in 2007 ‘s Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer . Before its handout, schemes were already in the works for a solo Silver Surfer movie. There was an exclusively new script from comics writer J. Michael Straczynski, and rumors surfaced that The Rock or Vin Diesel might play him. And then the world discovered the Rise Of The Silver Surfer . It couldn’t have been worse for the Silver Surfer’s movie busines if they had announced it Fantastic Four: All Ticket Holders Are Automatically Registered As Sex Offenders . So after nearly 30 years of Hollywood’s most powerful filmmakers trying to make it happen, we are still no closer to a Silver Surfer movie.

# 4. We Almost Had Joel Schumacher’s Very Serious The Dark Knight Returns … With Nicolas Cage

Remember when Joel Schumacher realized his image of the Dark Knight in Batman& Robin ?

An unrelated photo of knockoff war representations sold in Hong Kong for the purposes of the mention “ULTRA STEELTITS AND RACCOON DOUCHE.”

The movie was a campy calamity. It was a frantic, nipply assault at a Batman movie that missed so hard that it roughly killed the dealership eternally. Nonetheless, had the movie not miscarried so miserably, there was another Schumacher Batman film scheduled. The project was to adapt/ devastate Frank Miller’s gritty The Dark Knight Returns — arguably best available Batman journal ever written, and the story on which the upcoming Batman V. Superman movie is based. Seems like a simple thought, right? Well, it altogether wasn’t.

The plot of the thankfully-never-made cinema travelled in a strange tack from different sources textile. It began with Batman being doused with Scarecrow’s fear serum and hallucinating all his past rogues — Catwoman, Two-Face, and Joker, who was to be played again by Jack Nicholson. They even had plans to introduce Joker’s daughter … Harley Quinn. Batman followers might recognize her as the woman who is absolutely not Joker’s daughter, and she was to be played by freaking Courtney Love. Joker’s girlfriend becomes his daughter becomes Courtney Love? If Schumacher was so determined to destroy children’s glee, why didn’t he just go door-to-door with a body be demonstrating he had killed Santa Claus?

Wait , no, this is scarier .

The only shining place in this waste tube of an idea was who Schumacher wanted for the Scarecrow. Fresh off the failed Superman Lives , he was looking to throw Nicolas Cage as the rascal. That’s the kind of decision that could have transformed this dogshit stockpile of nonsense into the good various kinds of crazy.

Are YOU fuckin’ scared , Batman !? HUH !?

And while we’re on the subject …

# 3. We Almost Had A Tim Burton Catwoman Spinoff

It’s hard to overestimate how immense the 1989 Tim Burton Batman movie was and how beloved it remains today. The sequel … not quite as much. Chiefly because Penguin vs. Batman has gone down as not only the saddest Batman fight, but possibly the saddest movie oppose of all time. After posing no physical menace to the hero, Penguin strolled off to flop to his death and get carried away by adorable penguin pallbearers.

That everything happened .

So Danny Devito’s Penguin wasn’t precisely something that needed to be revisited. Michele Pfeiffer’s Catwoman, on the other handwriting …

She’s something we could do with more of .

If you don’t remember, her persona was a perfect mixture of hot, unnerving, and absurd. She was a mousy secretary whose assassinated person was brought back to life by the strength of felines. It was the kind of origin narrative that really leaned into its not-giving-of-fucks. Burton moved on from Batman, but not from Catwoman. Before Batman Forever came and sagged a nuke-sized deuce on the legacy of the Dark Knight, there was going to be a Catwoman movie that would’ve cleared Batman Returns seem sane.

The plan was a Catwoman film set in Oasisburg — a Vegas-like city run by superheroes. It would’ve been written by the same scribe behind Batman Returns . In other statements, a confirmed nutbag. The script involved Catwoman “losing ones” retention( again) and battling against all the superheroes who were privately crooks. Michele Pfeiffer had signed on to return, and Burton was gearing up to make it.

Pfeiffer’s fuzz also expressed serious stake .

So what happened? The dialogue was finished and changed in on the opening day of Batman Forever . It had a silly kiddie tint and shining rainbow colorings, and it constructed channel, style more coin than Returns . The film’s fiscal success persuasion WB administrations that big-hearted and stupid was the future of superhero movies , not dark and bizarre. So instead of an unhinged, seductive Catwoman opposing a city of superpowered criminals, we got, sigh, Batman& Robin . As if someone necessary another reason to dislike that damn movie.

# 2. We Almost Had Oliver Stone’s Elektra

Oliver Stone is a contentious chairman. His movies are aggressive, aesthetic, and often politically polarizing. To this day, Natural Born Killers is still the most anti-establishment course to provoke an epileptic seizure. And it was right around the time he finished NBK that Stone was set to realize his first comic book movie. It was going to be a viciou, violent modification of Frank Miller’s Elektra .

Now , non-nerds may exclusively know Elektra from Ben Affleck’s Daredevil movie — or worse, from her own movie. If so, you probably repute Elektra is nothing but a roundabout way of telling your Netflix algorithm it was able to relax because you will watch fucking anything . But you should know that the character is more dreadful and breathtaking than Jennifer Garner portrayed her. So while it’s difficult to word-painting Oliver Stone doing a superhero movie, Elektra was less a typical superhero and more a murdery ninja. And the comic looked like this TAGEND Which looks like an Oliver Stone movie posting already .

The film was going to feature Elektra battling against the endless ninjas of The Hand, and would have probably been amazing, but the rights to the character were sold to 20 th Century Fox before it was finished. Why the new studio decided to make four hours of sweaty garbage instead of Oliver Stone’s Every Goddamn Thing Is Ninjas is a whodunit we are able to never solve.

Unless … shit, did Elektra kill JFK ?

# 1. We Almost Had A Horrid, Awful Sandman Movie

Neil Gaiman is a geek god with an eclectic body of work, but he’s better known for his Sandman succession. It’s one of the most popular non-superhero graphic novels of all time. It follows Morpheus, the King of Dreams, on his adventures across all of epoch, space, and reveries. It’s deeper and more emotional than your average comic book, but you’d never know it from the film adaptation they virtually made.

At first, the movie was in good shape. It was scripted by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio( they wrote Aladdin and the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies ), who purified 70 issues of comic story into a single two-hour movie. It seems a bit impossible, but Gaiman was apparently joyous with it.

This is Gaiman’s joyous look .

Then along arrived Jon Peters.

You might remember Jon Peters from our last article about Crazy-Ass Superhero movies. He’s the hairdresser swerved self-proclaimed street fight champ returned movie executive who wanted Superman to fight a stupendous spider. Among various interesting thing incorrect with him, he had a odd obsession with monstrous spiders. He eventually got his monstrous spider wishing in Wild Wild West , but Sandman was in product before Wild Wild West . You might witness where this is going.

“You get what anybody get. You get a shit-ton of giant spiders.”

Peters hired a screenwriter to tweak the write. Most importantly, he made sure the King of All Dreams had a fist fighting against a big-ass spider. As he placed it, possibly to anyone who listened to him talk for longer than a second, “Did you know spiders are the fiercest mortals in the animal kingdom !? “

After the latter are done spider-fucking it, Gaiman announced it is not simply an horrid Sandman write, ” but very easily the worst dialogue I’ve ever spoke . ” And, thankfully, he stopped make before it could go any further.

Giant spider historians had to settle on this . Man, clearly Hollywood has no dances, because it turns out there’s a lot of crazy shit that we almost had. Recognize which is something we aim in 3 Insane Spider-Man Movies You Won’t Believe Almost Got Made and 5 Superhero Movies You Won’t Believe Almost Got Made .

Read more: www.cracked.com

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